18,721 karma · joined November 3, 2017
People do, and after Snowden revelation, they wonder why they should care.
The population was forced to accept the fact that they are constantly spied on 10 years ago.
Decisions have consequences.
If tomorrow China becomes a global beacon of high-quality and affordable healthcare, maybe US will actually feel some pressure to fix its issues.
You do realise that, should US allies apply this principle themselves, US companies will suffer? Most UK media is foreign owned at this point. As is our water supply, transport and energy
And Elon’s rampant disrespect and general behaviour are inviting that day.
Practically necessarily trumps concerns of fictitious and imaginary constructs
You take so much for granted.
If these markets produce their version of 2008, building renewables and no storage, and then we have blackouts - will you stand by those words if the power grid collapses and people freeze to death?
With the ‘markets’ not ask for government intervention and bailouts at my expense?
Even interns have to go through training on how accepting on $30 gift might be inappropriate and sway their terribly important judgement..
Do you also believe you should not need a driving license, or an electrician should not have any certification?
Because an average person can watch a YouTube video and wire a circuit, or learn to drive by themselves, but their chances of making explosives without posing a danger for themselves or others are far, far lower.
This should be a licensed activity where you need to demonstrate at least basic competence and mental stability.
This is totally wrong. It takes 5 years to get planning approval in UK, it takes 1 year in France. Tunnelling costs are 3x higher in Uk than in europe. Building a tram takes 3 times less. Lower Thames crossing has been in planning for 15 years and we have spent 300 million on lawyers, more than Norway has spent on building an actual tonnel of comparable size.
If UK has economy of France but infrastructure worse than Poland, maybe we are doing something dumb.
If USA has expensive insulin and poor Bulgaria has cheap insulin and it works just as well, maybe you are doing something dumb.
You can expand supply of housing in UK without damaging other sectors of economy: introduce statutory right to add an extra story on your op if your house. Remove green belt protections, introduce 1 month limit on review of any planning application, after which it is automatically granted if valid objection is not found.
Introduce a single planning portal and standardise software for planning applications across the whole country instead of every Shropshire and Wolverhampton having their own practices. Purchase perpetual license for such software as a country and make it freely available to every citizen.
Introduce favourable mortgages for self-building.
Produce detailed, pre-approved designs for standardised homes and bulk purchase materials or modular components for them.
Organise mass production of high-speed trams and make them available to local government with favourable, pre approved finance terms, so that larger areas of housing are accessible by high speed transport.
All of the above is implemented in different countries around the world, whether it’s France, China or someone else.
References:
https://www.britainremade.co.uk/building_transport_in_britai...
https://www.samdumitriu.com/p/britains-infrastructure-is-too...
This is logic of post-2008 fail-capitalism instead of 1970’s and China’s aspirational, problem solving capitalism.
You don’t address shortages of healthcare, housing or food with an elegant and fair system to decide who starves and dies.
You expand supply to make sure no one has to. You examine supply chain and figure out the bottlenecks.
For example China has started mass producing MRI machines, that’s one way you adress a problem.
This sounds like total Copium. It is also remarkably anti-market, suggesting that negotiating well is actually bad.
I could invent similar argument for why it is people in the global south that deserve credit for democracy in the west. Or for anything really:
The problem with western democracy is that it is contingent on the Global south being totalitarian and penniless. Without cheap raw materials from the non-west, western governments can’t maintain the high standards of living required for a stable democracy.
I saw this as an immigrant to UK from a developing country, who only recently understood what he signed up for
This -somehow the insurance industry does whatever it wants. If I get paid but refuse to provide service, multiple times, I will be a wanted man.
This is preposterous.
It is actually. Former employees are free to learn new skills or do charity instead of being busy surviving a game they can’t win.
You are also subsidising an economically wasteful activity that cannot cover its own true costs - if fast food joint can’t pay a wage, it does not cover the negative externalities from extra traffic on the road, carbon emissions and people getting fat.
Business will be forced to innovate and invest in automation
I think this is the wrong question and it’s not our job to solve that.
Example - suppose I have a diamond mine, I can hire anyone with zero skill - homeless, drug addicts, criminals - pay them $5 an hour and they will dig up $1,000 of diamonds a day. What is the answer your own question - how much value is the business getting?
What we should consider instead is this - there is a certain cost for civilisation to continue. Workers must be born, educated, and then create the new generation. If they are not paid enough to continue the cycle, we will not let the country collapse, will we?
I as a taxpayer will end up picking up the tab in one way or another - whether it’s through food stamps, or in immigration or something else.
These jobs could be a total net loss once you account for carbon emissions and other externalities.
I would rather get these people to do charity work or plant trees instead.
Good, a job that cannot support biological needs should not exist. It’s not a viable business.
Why should I pay a stealth subsidy to whatever business it is.
> Do you want Big Tech to be American companies, or foreign companies?
This excuse was used to start wars, trample civil rights and employment rights. It basically means we must become like China to beat China. What would be the point?
do at least some basic reading on the subject.
And imattwr is at the end of a tech tree that we have not started
You are the one making incorrect assumptions, specifically that food production is a steady and constant process like producing iPhones.
In the real world, crops fail due to seasonal weather all the time and it affects global food prices.
Research predicts multiple famines due to simultaneous crop failures in global bread baskets. That’s why responsible countries like Norway started stockpiling food.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-07-05/global...
The point is not even that - economists are simply not qualified to assess accuracy of their base assumptions.
now I have to debate people who claim we should not address climate change because worst case is 1% damage to GDP.
What are the report margins on that? Suppose there is a 10% chance that the drop is higher, like 30%/35% and does cause a famine specifically concentrated in the US, or nuclear armed Pakistan, and Global GDP falls by 40%.
Have you seen them report finds the n a way that accounts for, however small; possibility of total disaster?
At least you can see their questionable method upfront, and can disagree with it.
Economics is worse: it has become completely quantitative, with sophisticated mathematics. I’ve heard the approach referred to as ‘physics envy’
It appears unapproachable to a non-expert and authoritative. But it’s not like physics
It’s conclusions are often catastrophically wrong because all the mathematics relies on shaky qualitative assumptions: people are perfectly rational, etc.
For example we have published economic research that forecasts that severe climate change will only damage global GDP by 1%.
They conclude that farming productivity will be reduced by 25% and farming is 4% of global GDP, so it’s 1%. Then they model some effect on the consumer because food prices go up.
It does not occur to the authors to model impact of physical result of that, which is, famine and political instability that comes with it.
But that is always the case, and the "productivity=security" environment is artificial and unnatural.
The large forces beyond your control dominate the world, and the whole companies get hit by redundancies because the market changed, AI ate some section of the market, or the banks were too busy playing with mortgages and collapsed the whole global economy.
My experience indicates that it's more important to be working on the right thing, than to be super productive working on the wrong thing.
Especially certain someone that’s worth a billion dollars, is 100 years old and their name ends with inc.
Also ICC has issues a warrant for arrest of Putin, and he never signed up to ICC either.
Can’t have it both ways