nickik

I think the potential for cost reduction in nuclear is far bigger.

There is no inherent reason why a small reactor couldn't be mass produced. In a perfect world you would have a factory spitting out finished nuclear reactor every day.

Transport it to a site, drop it into a concrete hole, connect the salt loop and plug in the refiling pipe.

It really shouldn't need much operation other then planning how much to refuel.

We have gotten used to thinking of nuclear reactors as these civil engineering projects with large costume one of designs, but there is no inherent reason why you can't produce them at comparable to speeds other items of that size are built. Really once you have the material qualified a nuclear reactor is in some ways simple then a rocket engine or an airplane.

The problem in days world is that you need to get threw regulation (in the US factually not possible, and requires complex engagement with every countries regulatory scheme) and then you need enough costumers that you can actually invest in the assembly line.

As for why nobody is building them. I would just point out that nobody is really building full solar with storage either.

That is starting but barley happening.

Utilities need to hit install some renewables and setting up some solar is easy. There likely is already a gas peaker somewhere so no need for storage.

I have not studied CSP in any detail so I can't say, but the reality is rational market actor in the current system does not optimize now for what the theoretical best solution is in 2040. They just need to hit their renewable quotas right now.

Flow battery are fantasy right now. No company is actually close.

Liquid Air or Liquid Metal batteries maybe.

However I would argue LFP based Li battery will likely win the cost battle for quite a while. And we are getting to a point in their scale where they are actually quite relevant for large storage.

Li production capacity has come a long way since Tesla battery in Australia.

The companies doing serious work on molten salt right now, are mostly in Canada because of regulatory structure. They had to develop their project with very limited funds and totally uninterested governments (until recently in Canada).

Yes they are not available now but they could be available in this decade and by the 2040 you can build 100s if you really actually put some resources behind it.

These designs are infinity easier to scale then what France did.

Of course that kind of planning is not really how the US does things but at least they could seriously get behind a few prove of concept projects. Currently its not even possible to get a non PWR reactor regulated at all.

This is not a great way to look at it. Modern nuclear wouldn't use the kind of steam turbines that are currently used. It would either use the same turbines gas plants. Some concepts use even more modern turbines but those are not commercially proven.

However if there was serious commitment to nuclear, these things would be sensible to develop also.

Your overall point is well taken, nuclear is better when running at full capacity, even if I would argue that with a modern reactor with less operational cost this would be less of an issue.

That however is exactly why many nuclear plants in planning today will actually heat up molten salt and use that to drive the turbine. So there is basically a built in flexible heat battery.

The idea of most modern approaches is actually to have more generation power then the reactor actually provides, and have a heat battery containing in between. This makes sense as you have to have a salt loop anyways, so adding a larger tank isn't really a big extra cost.

Additionally it means that the nuclear build of your project is actually a smaller % of the cost with everything outside of the nuclear boundary being pretty standard salt loops and turbines. So you might build a 500MW nuclear plant with 1.5GW turbines plus a big tank full of salt. All the turbines and the salt tank have essentially nothing to do with nuclear or nuclear regulation.

However if we had started to seriously consider this in the 60s/70s/80s, establishing wind and solar would never even have made any sense outside of some niches. You build nuclear plants that can load follow without issue and accept the capacity problem. Clever engineers and business people would have soon realized that the salt loop can double as a heat battery.

The problem is simply that all these issues were not seriously considered in the past. Basically the Navy wanted PWR for submarines, because those got so much development the largest contractors and the government picked it up for civilian power. Once all the large nuclear companies had bought in to that, they no longer want lots of research on other types of reactors, so not even the nuclear industry advocated for such projects. Combine that with the general turning against nuclear and you basically get massive stagnation.

Unfortunately all the Molten Salt based nuclear work was done in Tennessee, a place that was not very relevant politically. There is even a famous call where Nixon basically says, moves all that potential money to projects in California.

The reason it sticks around in the popular mind has almost nothing to do with all of this great economic work. For 1000s of years overall global population and economic output was more or less flat, and then, something happened, and in the blink of an eye, historically speaking, you literally have a guy standing on the moon.

Not just flying, literally standing on the fucking moon.

There is no other way to explain how this can happen, then industrial revolution. No other term captures the spirit of that change. That why it will always stick around popularly.

And in world historic political terms, it also lead in to essentially control of the world by 6 small West European nations.

Overall very interesting article. Reading about that time is really fascinating and something I want to do more of. Not just the statistical, but lives of the people that lived during that change.

> Those local elites would have even more power if they were independent

No they wouldn't. Because they would face both their internal rivals and external rivals most importantly the empire itself.

> and imperial protection didn't mean much during the decades of civil wars

There was not as much civil war as you think and not in most regions even if there was.

During a civil war local elites had to pick sides. Often those choices happened above their heads.

> People tolerated Roman rule for centuries, during good times and bad, because they recognized that quality of life was better under the Romans.

Very questionable. Quality of life has little do with it. People for the most part didn't have much say in it, rather the elites. Their standard of life might get better because they get imperial titles, trade monopolies and things like that.

Maybe your point is true for the late imperial period around the med, but its certainty not generally true.

> However in late antiquity Rome stagnated, infrastructure projects weren't being built anymore and various tribes were no longer being effectively assimilated into the empire.

Yes, but what matters is the integration not the infrastructure. In fact, if you really track this, the falling apart of infrastructure does not at all correlate with the Fall of the Western Empire. Much of the infrastructure had already been having issues since the 3rd century.

> Rome's military was still very large, and the elites were more powerful than ever, but the empire fell because those elites and armies were no worse off setting themselves up as independent rulers of small kingdoms.

The elites with actual power (not just money) were no longer centralized or unified. If you actually look at trade pattern and urbanization they don't actually decline until much later. For the most part the Fall of the formal empire is a non-event.

The collapse of the Roman Med economy and the de-urbanization of Italy mostly happens later.

> Agree to most of the point, but note that AQI predates the 2003 Iraqi war (founded in late 90s)

That might be true but there is difference you could drive a container ship threw between the AOI of the 90s and the power they gained in the Civil War and eventually when they grew even further in Syria. The major reason they (and Al-Nusra and friends) were able to grow in Syria is because the US (pushed by the Usual Suspects) with additional money from the Usual Suspects Country Edition flowed billions in weapons to the 'kind, humanist, democracy loving rebels'.

Thankfully ISIS turned back to Iraq and forced the US to switch sides.

> Also agreed, for good or bad (I would say mainly good)

If you think massive weapons export is mainly good then we have to disagree on principle.

I'm sure the genocide enacted on Yemen by US weapons, supported by US engineers and pilots is doing a lot of good. We should sell them more weapons as soon as possible.

Trump literally had the Saudi prince hold up pictures of US weapon system he would buy like he was TV commercial. It was the most embracing and sad statement about US policy that I have seen in one image. No clear message then we don't care about illegal war and mass civilian murder and starvation as long as you buy the new Over-9000 super people shreder.

> That goes both ways, Israel is one of our main partners in defense (and related) research, they are also the US's main ally in the Middle East, Allies trade is nothing new?

I would argue the alliance with Israel is a hindrance to the US goals. When US wanted to get involved military in 1991 Israel did nothing, because if they had been involved everybody else wouldn't have wanted to be.

Israel also stole nuclear secretes and is a rough nuclear power that hasn't signed the NPT. Its incredibly funny how the US has spend 30 years claiming the Iran wants to be a rough nuclear power when their ally in the region is one.

Israel repeatably get the US into trouble and does damn near everything imaginable to insure that the US contains the countries it didn't like. Israel has major ongoing efforts for 25 at least to attempted to push the US into a war with Iran. According to Israel Iran has been '1 year away from nuclear weapons' for almost 25 years now. They produce manufactured evidence to attempt to lie the US into war.

We can of course go further and point out that Israel massacre against civilians in Lebanon was the direct trigger for the 9/11 bombers to join AQ.

We could go on, but sorry I don't buy the 'its a two sided partnership where both parties profit equally' thing.

And even among allies, the relationship between the two counties is way beyond a normal ally. Israel has managed a level of integration that is beyond pretty much any other ally. I don't remember all the details but its far from normal.

> Yep, there is a certain culture in those companies that tends to... encourage that behavior.

Its not a culture in my opinion its explicit operation and continued consolidation has made that pretty much all contract go to the same few companies no matter how bad they are.

In a recent interesting episode at NASA (that I follow more closely then the military) a long term military guy took over Head of Human space flight. In the first major bid, he realized that Boeing bid was utter trash and went against NASA protocol to call Boeing to tell them that they were losing and should adjust their bid. This was found out and he quickly resigned and but people got the story. Sadly he is not in prison.

The excuse seem to have basically been 'well if we don't give the money to Boeing their lobbying will prevent the program from happening'.

If this happens at NASA and was for once uncovered, I don't even want to know what the last 50 years of military contract hide in sins.

Eisenhower speech about the Military-Industrial complex has been used and abused every possible way by people but the core of what he said and the context of why he said it was actually spot on. He wanted to call it the Congress-Military-Industrial complex but that was removed from the speech.

> Applying that critical lens to only defense contractors (not that you are doing right now) is a bit disingenuous

I'm not sure where you get that point. Its certainty not only defense contracts. But I would say the potential for harm is bigger then most.

Not sure if you are just doing a joke reference, but this doesn't really hold up. In the Imperial period most infrastructure was build the empire didn't grow all that much anymore.

Binding of territories to the Roman state worked primarily by co-opting local elites by giving them a fair bit of local power and protection from their enemies.

The knowledge of space-race ear rockets wasn't lost, the money to build them was no longer available or going into other projects.

For the cost of shuttle NASA could have recreated the J-2 and F-1.

We unfortunate don't have good data on Roman private and public infrastructure spending detailed enough to really make a god case for how it changed over time.

Yes, fine, lets research that. However here is the thing. We figured out that fission thing in the 50s and still fail to use it.

This is complete nonsense. Fear mongering about Peak-this or Peak that is has proven wrong in pretty much every single case for 250 years.

If fuel were serious concern for cost, real searching for it would find much more.

And even with current technologies and reactors there are many ways to extend this, if you are willing to mix in some more highly enriched materials.

Eating up the absurd amount of nukes the US still has for example would be helpful.

And of course no society that actually bet on nuclear would still be using that fuel cycle in any serious way.

This is just the typical fear mongering that people use for all technologies they don't like, "Not enough lithium for EV".

> Idiotic reasons such as that nuke always turned out, on examination, to cost much more than alternatives.

Nonsense. In the 60 they literally developed 100 of different types of nuclear reactor often for a tiny amounts of money. Any coherent strategy over the last 50 years clearly shows that if would been cheaper to reach basically zero carbon and it could have been done far earlier and earlier with nuclear.

Navy ships in lifetime analysis show that over the ship lifetime its very cost effective. Not to mention that you can do many things you simply couldn't do otherwise.

Real private innovation and capital were never unleashed for nuclear innovation after the early explosion in the 60s. The extreme restrictions on the materials, government picking winners early and shutting out everything else. At least at that point some research was still going on, but no real effort to go beyond. After the government lost interest in the technology almost every single project was shut down and a nuclear became basically no-go when asking for funding inside the government.

And of course if you have incredibly low volume systems, with a tiny base of educated people, based on technology that is essentially from the 60s you are not gone have an effective system.

Like everything else, nuclear plants, even incredibly sub-optimal PWR designs when built in large numbers will get significantly cheaper. This is clearly evident in any analysis on nuclear economics. If you can build essentially the same reactor with many of the same project leader and teams over and again the costs go down massively. Even outside the actual parts production getting cheaper.

The cost per reactor that France achieved during their expansion is actually very low and they did it with pretty old technology that was really not at all optimized to be effectively built.

There is a gigantic design space that has not been explored that could massively reduce both the build cost and the operation cost and even decommissioning cost. Alternative reactor designs can be far smaller, far safer and require less human operation in fact a properly built reactor should have almost no human interaction ever.

This was all known in the 60s and the foundations were clear put down. In the 70s some amazing stuff was shown but at that point budget had already gone down government had already picked the commercial winners.

Check out this picture:

https://i.cbc.ca/1.5764415.1602802493!/fileImage/httpImage/s...

A design of that size would have been possible with 70 technology. Had they actually tried to innovate on technology and attempted different designs or had given real advantages to CO2 free technology at the time and let private investors take care of it, designed like this would have happened.

These main reactor vessels are literally not much bigger then a tiny ship, and could easily be manufactured in a single factory on a assembly line, transported to location and dropped into a hole filled with concrete.

Current cost actually are a result of the massively complex large civil engineering, more then the actual nuclear part themselves. That is high cost construction over a long period that has major disadvantage in financing. Having 10x smaller vessels with 100x simpler cooling system absolutely would make building reactors far cheaper and if you build many of them and have teams that are not doing for the very first time there is no reason why a nuclear plant can be build at cheaper rates then coal plant, more comparable to modern gas plants.

If you have an energy source that has that much advantage in energy density. Not taking advantage of such a dense and easy to obtain energy source is insane. Thorium mining for the whole US could have been done in one small mine for all US needs for the next 100 years or thorium extract Throium from the waste product of other mining operations. The reactor above could run on thorium that was dissolved very simply, you don't even need complex fuel production (not that that fuel production currently matters that much for overall cost of plant operation).

So you have basically zero cost of fuel, basically zero CO2, almost no mining, could have been done in the 70s, for sure in the 80s and 90s.

This is what I am talking about when I say its a missed opportunity. Even the incredibly sub-optimal route France took, lead to results that were far, far better then the route anybody else took and France did the world a huge service.

Defense companies also spend millions in lobbying both directly and threw a whole network of think tanks and people. People with very strong association with those very defense companies both inside and outside of government were very strong driver in lying the US into war in Iraq in the first place and made ISIS possible in the first place.

They have a significant part in lobbying for war, for weapons export, for more spending on military spending and so on.

Defense companies also strongly coordinate with Israel and the Israel lobby to make sure continuous money flows to Israel and Israel can be a first class buyer of US weapons.

They have strong ties to government and make absurd amount of money on many of these projects despite routinely going over budget by absolutely insane amounts.

Yes, companies that build weapons to some extend need to exist but the defense contractors are not ethical in the least and I would not work for them. Maybe in the civilian part of the company, possibly but even that would require a lot of thinking.

Google has done a lot of effort in that direction. The first ever chips have already been produced that are fully open source from the tools used to make to the complete tool chain need to manufacture them.

There is a huge amount of great stuff going on this this area.

Tim Ansell - Skywater PDK: Fully open source manufacturable PDK for a 130nm process

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EczW2IWdnOM

This is nonsense. Germany was not 'asked to pay for WW1'. To cost imposed on Germany would only just cover repairing Northern France and Belgium. Even just including pentions for French war widows was not fully paid for.

And they of course never paid for the utter deforestation they forced on much of Eastern Europe.

And this debt payment was not the reason for WW2. By the time Hitler came to power Versailles was a dead document. The financial terms had been revised multiple times and in those negotiations Germany got a pretty good deal and a number of additional benefits and access to a gigantic amount of US loans and trade deals.

And after WW2 Germany still had to pay some debt but because of financial restructuring after WW2 those were not as large. Part of why this was possible however was because the US actually promised a great deal to nations who accepted debt restructuring. Including economic and military aid, and trade deals.

> made little impact on the Japanese military

The military capability being broken was not the goal, and it also not what decided the war.

> made little impact on the Japanese military

That would matter if the goal of the bomb or impact had been about 'material' but it wasn't, and its not how the war was decided.

> the Japanese position was hopeless even before the first atomic bomb fell, because the Japanese had lost control of their own air

Again, that doesn't matter. Their position was hopeless literally the second they started the war. They literally started the war knowing they couldn't win.

The bomb was not there for military impact as militarily japan had already been beaten along every possible measure of such things. Japan was surrounded, had no food import its navy and air force were done.

> It doesn't seem like dropping the bombs served any military purpose.

The military purpose was ending the war. And in fact it did exactly that. You can actually go read about the highest level of Japan decision making. This is well researched now. Not a single member of the high highest decision council was for ending the war or even negotiation. Literally nobody. Despite starvation, fire bombings and military defeat.

After first bomb fell the they were starting to have meeting where they discussed the situation and the waste majority of them still were absolutely against ending the war.

After the second bomb the mood shifted, multiple members changed there position and with support from the emperor managed to overrule the still considerable opposition to peace from many of the military leaders.

The idea that this would have been possible without the bomb is simply not historical. Some people claim the Soviet invasion was the deciding factor, but just like losing territory to the East and South, losing territory in the West would not have changed them.

Here are the alternative options:

- Surround Japan for extended period of time

- Full invasion of Japan

The first option would have been essentially a 10+ year genocide of much of Japans population and transforming it back into an agricultural society. The government would simply not have given up, they knew about the starvation that would happen in Japan and they were perfectly willing to endure that.

The second would have cost the US 10s to 100s of men, and the Japanese likely 10x as much.

There were 1000s of civilians suicides even in some of the outer islands, and 10-100s of soldiers who essentially committed suicide by attack. What do you think would happen when a US army went from village to village, city by city threw Japan following a retreating Japanese army and government north right across all of Japan.

The Japanese army was willing to turn every city int Stalingrad. Endless bonsi charges where US soldiers would have to basically mass execute 1000s of Japanese soldiers who had run out of ammo.

So what would your solution have been?

Its more like 'if debt is treated like anything other then non-enumerated social glue' slavery and imperialism are the inevitable result.

And it is incredibly unannounced because that is very clearly his view.

I disagree. It the same principle as sending something to the outer solar system. Many of the scientist who propose those things and work on the instruments and so on have long left the field by the time the missions arrive and many will soon after. Before the mission ends, a whole new group of people are working on it.

This is the same idea, you send a new an improved probe every 10-20 years and eventually you get data back and over time you have constant data stream from all kinds of different places.

WE already did that. Its called nuclear power. Fission energy can do almost everything fusion can do. The difference in energy density between fission and fusion is not that large compared to the energy sources we have.

With all the investment in solar and wind we could easily have built a fission based economy. The French proved that in the 70/80s and had a green grid ever since.

Had we done that collectively global warming would be a far lesser issue.

It would also help us understand neutronics and material science so we can eventually switch to fusion.

The same basic technology could also be used for space travel in the solar system and would have advanced space travel by a lot.

But of course for idiotic reasons society went away from that.

> Because people (for the most part) aren't fools, especially on here.

But even if it were true and those revenues wouldn't exists and Tesla would have 0 profit, it wouldn't actually change that much about the overall position.

If you want to make the argument that Tesla is not worth 600B then just make that argument. Rather then endlessly trying to make an incredibly marginal argument about Quarter to Quarter possibility.

Literally nobody that owns Tesla stock believes this Quarter profits are what gives the shares the value.

> They all earned their significance by touching so many lives

No they don't. In fact most people don't have a clue about what Salesforce is or how IBM touches their lives.

They are valued because of their financial data, predictions about and predictions about future potential data.

> Musk has been able to answer to such question up to now with:

At this point you are just making things up. Musk has not said any of these things and seemingly isn't very interested in answer that question.

> People are more and more asking questions though, and he keeps answering with postponements and future deadlines, while Teslas are still less common than Porsches

No in fact people are asking less and less questions. The FUD about Tesla was 100x larger a few years ago.

Also, even a 14 old should figure out that a product that has 20-30 year utility will be more common then a competitors product of a company that started less then 20 years ago and didn't even growth to any relevant size until less then 5 years ago.

Maybe we don't disagree, but it just seems to me that is a very strange way of looking of analyzing things. There is so much talk about confidence and who believes what, both the state itself and the people and media.

You point at some things the media believes and that is of course a different question compared to what the government itself believes.

> The French I think have a much more accurate understanding of their abilities.

Funny then that they thought they can overthrow Gadafi only then to literally begged the US to intervene as they totally failed.

>The reversals they suffer have been far fewer and less disastrous than those the Americans face.

Well if you try far less you can lose less. But of course also if you have far less, even those much smaller loses are just as big a deal as the much larger loses for the US.

I must admit I am not all that informed on the details of French wars in different African countries. So I can not speak on those details.

My point was not that anthropologies don't have good data, rather I was referring to some of the specific examples in the book for witch we don't have.

> Beyond that, I don't see how the Carl Menger quote you cited is proof that economists have a robust understanding of gift economies - and indeed it really doesn't.

Its not the primary study of economists and not what they are primarily interested in and there is nothing wrong with that. Its also just one example, you can find other references to such things from Smith on.

However, Graeber consistent accusation is that economists had no understanding of its existence and therefore they are fundamentally wrong everything as the whole discipline is built on false foundation.

In fact, I would argue Graeber critic is basically built on a moral judgment. He seems to be unable to accept that even while knowing of these things, people would not consider it very relevant. Because for him it lays the foundation for everything about how the world today SHOULD work.

> Graeber is correct that mainstream economics pretty much only cares about market economies

This is pretty clearly wrong. You can go back to even Adam Smith, if you look at his 2 relevant books, one is pretty clearly not about market economics.

Economists have pretty much always been interested in institutions as well. In fact, when the discipline started 'Political Economy' was the term and that included a mix of economics and political science.

And even after those were split, Political Economy, Economics&Law, Institutional Economics and other were all still within the discipline. Now of course if you simple define 'mainstream' as excluding all of that is just an incredibly narrow definition and view of economics.

But of course if we accept that the definition of discipline as an explicit critic then I not sure what the counter argument is. Its basically just saying "I don't like what these people do because I think markets are evil, therefore if you study them you are evil.

> and he is correct that modern economics is a highly ideological discipline where schools that did not align with imperialism

I disagree that its highly ideological. This is of course hard to measure. However if we just look at political divide you will see that inside of economics you have people from all over the political spectrum while some other social disciplines are far more left, some almost exclusively so.

Honestly common from people like Graeber, the accusation of other disciplines being ideological is highly unconvincing.

I'm not sure what the second part of sentence means? Are you trying to say people who were against imperialism got removed from economics? Because that would be very wrong.

> Yes, though I can tell you I never heard of Carl Menger by name until I already had a pretty solid understanding of marginal utility theory.

Its pretty much universally accepted that there were 3 economists who lead the marginal revolution in economics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginal_utility#Marginal_Revo...

- William Stanley Jevons

- Carl Menger

- Marie-Esprit-Léon Walras

They are mentioned in any history of economic thought class.

I understand that in general economics education doesn't put much interest in history of economic thought and so I do not fault people for not knowing. It is only surprising in one who implies he is an expert in history of economic thought and seeks to fundamentally critic it.

> Most importantly, is that a solid argument against the core thesis of the book? No. And yes, economics as a discipline is incredibly politically charged and has very poor predictive ability, assumes way too much, and is largely unaware of its issues.

Anthropology is less politically charged because most people are not interested in it and they don't try to make any predictions. Nor are they asked to make accurate predictions years in advanced in a world of 8 billion people.

I would argue the attack against economics as a social science is incredibly unfair, no social science in the complex real world can accurately predict, even if you assume perfect models, you wouldn't have the access to the needed data in real time.

There is a large difference between economics as a discipline and the reality that social scientists (most often economist) have been used by states and are forced to come up with recommendation. Jet somehow in economics such mistakes are seen as a reflection of economics as discipline itself.

Saying things like economist as displine failed to predict 2008 is about as useful as saying sociologist failed to predict the opcode epidemic. You can argue that Political Scientists failed to predict the Arab Spring. And we can play these games for all disciplines. Now you can likely go back and find individuals working in these discipline pointing at warning signs but that's not the same thing.

You seem to follow the popular outside economics view of economics where they as dispine are all totally arrogant and fundamentally un-reflective, rather then what most actual economists actually write and believe in.

I really just pointed at one example of a problem in the book. The book also ignores a whole bunch of very important questions that are very relevant in order to tell a very tight narrative about the things he wants to talk about. Most of all his conclusion about how these 'facts' should inform the world today.

The book is so wide range and meta narrative with a bunch of really specific examples. Some of those have been addressed but nobody seem to want to address the book as a whole.

The basic idea of the book is very old and not original. Social science and philosophy has been arguing about the definition/meaning/origin of debt, money, property right for a long time. He takes a very clear position on it that is clearly based in his ideological believes and then does a running narration of 5000 years of history that all proves his point crossing every social science in the process.

From my perspective as somebody that knows economics, its blatantly clear that he has no respect for economist and has not bothered with history of economic thought beyond finding a few quotes to slander. At the same time its totally clear he has never seriously read the works he seems to despise. It seems that it is his serious believe that economist and apparently the whole history of economics is simply justification for imperialism and slavery.

Not to mention that he is incredibly rude and response with personal attack when people point out that he made some very basic factual errors.

Some of his claims are so incredibly wrong that even somebody who only did the simplest online '101 History of Economic Thought' should not make.

Let me give you an example. Consider this text:

> Voluntary as well as compulsory unilateral transfers of assets (that is, transfers arising neither from a ‘reciprocal contract’ in general nor from an exchange transaction in particular, although occasionally based on tacitly recognized reciprocity), are among the oldest forms of human relationships as far as we can go back in the history of man’s economizing. Long before the exchange of goods appears in history, or becomes of more than negligible importance…we already find a variety of unilateral transfers: voluntary gifts and gifts made more or less under compulsion, compulsory contributions, damages or fines, compensation for killing someone, unilateral transfers within families, etc.*

This was written by an economist in 1892 who according to Graeber only improved on Adam Smith work "by adding various mathematical equations".

The text above was from Carl Menger, one of the most well known economist of the century and one of the founders of modern economics. Not just that, even on that wrote precisely on many of the questions Graeber book addresses. So exactly the kind of person Graeber seems to be wanting to debate and dismiss. The perfect pillar of modern (as in Post-Marginal) economics to shoot down.

Why then would Graeber claim that he only "adding various mathematical equations"? I seems that the only explanation is that he look up the wrong person on wikipedia, as there is another person with the same name who was a mathematician. Nobody who read even an introduction to modern history of economic thought would make that mistake.

He clearly doesn't have a clue who Carl Menger was and clearly has hasn't read his works. He clearly didn't actually study history of economic thought when writing his book. Rather he had preconceived notion and all he needed was a few selective Adam Smith references and dismiss the rest.

At the same time he proudly reference the 1925 'The Gift', to prove how much smarter anthropologists are as they understood the importance of the Gift economy. Compared to economist who according to him only believe in the "Mythical Land of Barter".

He speaks with equal authority about some almost unknown tribal societies, 5000 year old city states that we only have very basic data on and 2000s century politics and modern central banking (that he has borderline no understanding off). Given his very clear and explicit bias and he evident willingness to do selective reading and misinterpretation I much rather read on these topics from actual experts without such a clear bias and explicit political message.

The US is not leaving Afghanistan because of 'loss in confidence' but rather because they are finally admitting what has been clear for more then a decade now (arguable for 1000 years). Its incredibly idiotic and nonsensical to occupy Afghanistan. I would prefer to call it 'accepting reality' and that seems a good thing.

And the problem in Mali is in large part because of totally idiotic over-confidence just a few years ago.

Why are people so obsessed with picking some parts Tesla revenue and claim that what makes it profitable. What makes them profitable is all the ways that make revenue and all the ways they spend money.

Bitcoin was relevant for 1 Quarter. And trading in fuel credits has been a thing in the automotive industry for decades and are simply a normal part of the business.

You might as well point to specific spending and say 'they are only not more profitable because of XY'.

They have a ~20% unit margin excluding credits so clearly they are making a massive amount of money selling cars. If they weren't selling credits they would likely spend differently and still show moderate profitability. Their goal is not maximum profitability but maximum growth while showing consistent profitability.

$1B? That gone last a year tops.

> Tesla has had the past couple quarters be profitable

They have been profitable for almost 1.5 years.

> (though amusingly more on bets on Bitcoin than actual car sales)

That is simply false.

I would not really recommend Debt: The First 5000 Years by David Graeber as a good source.

While there are sometimes good historical nuggets, it mostly concerns itself with interpreting ever possible situation in the last 5000 years according to Graebers ideology and confirming that it is correct while constantly claiming anybody else that worked on these same topics and didn't share his interpretations are idiots (while often not actually seeming to know what they actually wrote).

This is just state policy if they don't like other states. Its just legal justification for states to do what they want to do. States have found a billion way to justify hostile action against other states. Claiming reparations of one kind or another is very common for a very long time.

Even had they been able to pay that money, its very questionable if that would have changed the disposition of the other stats towards it. Cartage managed to pay Rome back in full, and Rome then decide to destroy it anyway.

They might just have a different excuse for the same policy.

In Switzerland the President has is just one of the 7 chief ministers who are in control of departments like military, justice, finance, The Federal Council.

The person who is president get 2x the vote in case a vote is tied (abstention is permitted). Also the high honer of being the first to shake hands with foreign presidents when they arrive.

The Federal Council is both head of state and head of government.

Seems to be a pretty good system, the idea is to actually share this between different parties at all times. It always seems strange to me when in countries like the US there is the constant massive power shift back and forth every couple years.