fennecfoxen

> Something has to break this cycle.

This "something" is unlikely to be protectionism.

Inspection of the game source code

This is why I default to TOML for these sorts of lists of things.

They have other Torsus buses that are basically the same vehicle, I'm sure you can find some.

> How is a small child, someone not particularly agile, or even someone later in life going to board (climbing?) or exit (jump?) this thing? Especially with cargo?

"With assistance and some modest level of risk", I'd imagine.

I'm not against your idea, but your arguments are a little wobbly.

> It is the growth companies who don't own factories yet, who are raising money today that get hurt by inflation.

Yep. They, too, compete with opportunities like bonds and savings account.

> But the factory loans that Apple bought 5 or 10 years ago are in 2010 dollars and will remain so.

Lots of companies have issued bonds at very good interest rates. They're not mostly for factories. Apple's been borrowing money at rock-bottom rates to do share buybacks, because the money's basically-free.

> It is the growth companies who don't own factories yet, who are raising money today that get hurt by inflation.

So how many growth stocks are investing big into building massive manufacturing operations, Elon? I can think of around one, but certainly not Apple.

This example is bad because few companies have fixed potential like earning $200M in nominal dollars. More companies will be able to earn $200M (real year-0 dollars).

The real change you see is with interest rates rising, the cost of capital also rises (fewer big investors investing borrowed money or using leverage) and safe alternatives become much more readily available (if a bond or savings account pays money it is safe and you earn a return - as opposed to all the 0% real returns you had in the past).

100%.

And if the manager is competent and actually does this, then he probably will end up managing something more important than Amazon warehouses. Don’t underestimate the mediocrity and pettiness of the people who end up in charge of petty things.

> Employees of local producers are great too, the theory I always hear is that people getting paid in an area stimulate more economic activity. So I mean you should take that idea apart more as it is pretty much established wisdom.

The "established wisdom" you cite is a long-lived natural propaganda campaign. It begins with politicians, people who succeed or fail based mostly on their image, not on the quality of their governance. Why would they do the hard work seeking out the causes of prosperity, help organize that prosperity, and seek ways that collective action can make things better? That's a sucker's game. If you rip off the population at large — just a little bit at a time, mind you — then you gain political allies in the industry who benefits. Of course they'll market you as the champion of prosperity: you've made their success possible. It's not strictly cynical; it's quite easy to believe, if you're not the person paying for it, and motivated reasoning is strong. It's a win/win deal, because you ignore the people who actually pay for things. Welcome to public-choice theory. It likely won't ever change. Hooray!

It should be painfully obvious to anyone who thinks about the facts of the matter that having access to nearly-free clothes — not the obnoxious piles of waste or anything, just the bales of clothing the article laments being imported into South Africa — having access is strictly better than not having this access. These people, after all, are always free to buy different clothes. It's not hard: Americans have access to similar, and can buy stupidly cheap clothes at an American thrift store, but in practice, they mostly don't even look at such an establishment. So why don't the people of South Africa buy locally made clothes right now? Because given their income, they much prefer the nearly-free clothes.

Common sense does work here! As an individual, you don't become prosperous by looking for ways to do things that are more expensive. As a society, the same principle applies. Yes, yes, someone will conjure many promises: if everyone just spends more money, we'll have more money! But you know, if you spend less money on clothes you can spend more money on literally anything else which you'd rather have. It's like a perpetual motion machine: the energy does actually come from somewhere, you just might not be looking at it. The prosperity they propose society will gain from protecting garment industry is stolen from everyone who buys clothes, and everything that they would have bought instead, and you lose some of the prosperity in the process, because you expend effort and capital and materials.

> As it stands, lax customs enforcement — along with spotty infrastructure and the prevalence of cheap Asian imports — has made it difficult for Africa to develop a garment industry of its own.

Local producers are great, but they're outnumbered ten thousand to one by local consumers. How the world would be any better if some of the world's poorest were forced by their governments to pay extra money to buy inferior clothes, while some small-time politically-connected tycoon profited from it? That's not really how prosperity works.

Scale back your consumption here in the US, go ahead, that's fine, but let's not pretend that the bales of clothing smuggled over the border into South Africa are harming anyone but the comfortable.

Hello! Urea fertilizer has jumped from $400/ton to $1100/ton in a year. This is not consistent with the price jump being caused by inflation, which remains at much more modest rates.

The prices are higher due energy prices rising in Europe and China, natural gas supply disruptions in Texas due to hurricanes and floods, and sanctions on Belarus. They are a driver of inflation, not caused by inflation.

How readily would this be deployed to coffee farms in Brazil, staple foods in sub-Saharan Africa, watermelon farms in Colombia, coconut groves in Sumatra, palm oil in Malaysia, and rice paddies in the Ivory Coast? (All examples from the article.)

Hello! The causes of the current crisis include:

- the energy situation in China, suffering coal shortages, leading to shortfalls in the production of fertilizer, and

- hurricanes in Texas which shut down natural gas production, leading to shortages of ammonia and urea as inputs to fertilizer production, and

- all sorts of COVID stuff impacting production in lots of ways, and

- sanctions against Belarus, a major potash producer, and

- yes, the energy situation in Europe, where the renewables had a few problems and weren't quite cutting it yet, such that gas is in short supply, while Russia is saber-rattling.

It's a one-among-many thing.

One possibly better form of this argument would be to suggest this threat to global food security is a representative of the situation which would occur if activists' stated goals were met, but in this case an argument that does not clearly state words to this effect is an argument that is undermined by the fact this is much more coincidence rather than design.

How actionable do you think this is to a farmer growing staple crops in sub-Saharan africa?

The phrase "no such thing as a free lunch" comes from economics — the study of making choices when your resources are finite. The insight conveyed by this phrase is that there's always some opportunity cost (the cost of the next-best-thing you could be doing, instead of eating the free lunch).

If you are not using it in that context, it loses its insight value. There is presumably some energy cost to the cell actually manufacturing the protein, but it's entirely possible that's the whole cost of the "lunch", and it is a price readily paid. Or it might not! That's really up to biology now, as you say.

And orbiting a black hole is just like orbiting any other object, except the surface is much closer to the center of mass.

To be fair, for most types of pollution, moving it "elsewhere" solves your problem.

I think the general problem is that if so much is going to hinge on this, it should be much easier to tell whether or not you know what you're doing. Undefined behavior really wouldn't be a problem if you could spot it reliably (possibly using tools, like the compiler toolchain itself).

This loose mapping between four optimization levels and a variety of obscure language situations is invisible and situated only in a handful of top engineers' memories. That's not a great way to run a language if you actually care about the correctness of programs written in that language.

It's more than a few pennies! They're pinching multiple dollars. Tariffs on shoes are a big deal like that.

That's not what it's measuring, that's how it's used.

Writing good utopian works is really hard!

The Los Angeles district attorney's office, under the leadership of George Gascon, has circulated a list of crimes it will not prosecute. You can read about it in the Grey Lady, if you are picky with your news sources like that.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/17/magazine/george-gascon-lo...

Do not persist in your unbelief, but believe!

I guess the general premise is that any national ID number, SSN or otherwise, is liable to be used in all the wrong ways by untrustworthy institutions both inside and outside the government, damaging privacy and opening you up to exciting forms of fraud against your name (/ ID number); it is often treated as a secret, but it is not a secret at all.

— Unfortunately, with enough computers and enough tracking information, bad actors can often do the same thing without a number, anyway, and you can get different kinds of fraud.

This is interesting but...

how does it remind you of that? i don't follow in the slightest

Won't do much good if no one's taking them to court, which seems to be an issue at the heart of the complaint.

Let's be specific about what UP is complaining, then:

"But even with these expanded resources and closer partnerships with local law enforcement, we find ourselves coming back to the same results with the Los Angeles County criminal justice system. Criminals are caught and arrested, turned over to local authorities for booking, arraigned before the local courts, charges are reduced to a misdemeanor or petty offense, and the criminal is released after paying a nominal fine. These individuals are generally caught and released back onto the streets in less than twenty-four hours. Even with all the arrests made, the no-cash bail policy and extended timeframe for suspects to appear in court is causing re-victimization to UP by these same criminals. In fact, criminals boast to our officers that charges will be pled down to simple trespassing – which bears no serious consequence."

You are perfectly correct in the pedantic sense, but the spirit of their complaint is much closer to the GP's post than to what you represent.

Fun fact — contract work as railway police was one of the original lines of business for the notorious Pinkerton Detective Agency.

+ photo gallery attached to the LA Times coverage of the same: the train tracks are just littered with piles of torn-open shipping boxes

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-01-15/photos-r...

> UP has insurance, and, I'm sure treats a small percentage of thefts as the cost of doing business.

And the revenues from shipping — just revenues, let alone the profits — are a fraction of the value of the cargo. If, say, a container full of new MacBooks gets broken into and looted, that is going eat the profits they'd earn from a lot of other containers. While they have insurance, they pay for that insurance, and unless the insurer is (a) stupid or (b) a charity, they pay at least as much as the amount of the losses, and probably more.

UP and their customers seem to be uninterested in simply shrugging, saying "insurance", and eating that cost.

Oh, and then there's the risk to employees who may occasionally be attacked or held at gunpoint. It doesn't take a lot of that before the impact on your personnel becomes a drain, too, and hiring is tight enough in this economy even without asking for people to risk life and limb.

> UP can increase their investment in securing their trains and property. The alternative is the taxpayer spending a lot of money on police and incarceration.

It looks like they propose to secure their trains and property by doing business in places that are not Los Angeles.

Better locks only help until the point where it's easier to mangle the shipping container itself, bypassing the lock entirely, and impenetrable containers are needlessly expensive.

> Is this damage more then the cost of prosecuting and punishing the thieves? If not, it's not worth it.

It's not a question of whether this damage is more, it's a question of whether the prosecution would reduce the total amount of future-damage that occurs as well. People who are in a jail are not stealing. People who expect significant risk of significant jail time are also not stealing, while those who expect minimal risk might be.

These factors easily outweigh the cost of any single theft.