snrplfth

> Early tractors didn't do much for underdeveloped nations. Mainframe computers didn't either. The default state of capital-intensive technology is to improve productivity, but not to bring capital and work into underdeveloped nations. Whatever benefits accrue there are the diffuse rewards of expanding global production.

When early tractors were being deployed, all regions and countries were quite undeveloped in agricultural mechanization, compared to today. Likewise, when early computers were being created, all countries had primitive infomation technology. The default state of capital intensive technology is to be deployed first where capital is relatively cheap and labour is relatively expensive. The "diffuse rewards" of expanding global production are pretty much the whole point, since the magnitude of those rewards are huge.

The recent economic boom of much of the less-industrialized world was characterized by (compared to the industrialized world) labour-intensive production, true - however, it was much less labor intensive than had been the case before. It was absolutely characterized by people adopting more mechanization, more automation, more technology. So this is why it doesn't make sense to me to think that a high-productivity technology will stall growth. If a t-shirt robot is more expensive than a Bangladeshi textile worker's wage, then we'll see continued high use of human labour in that industry. If the robot becomes cheaper, then the Bangladeshi textile workers will shift to other industries (as they mostly did when they went from being farmers and handcraft workers to being textile workers, over the last few decades.)

You could say that about basically every labour-saving device though. Tractors, earth-moving equipment, container ships, whatever. And even textiles are almost wholly automated now - lots of textiles are grown or spun, woven, dyed and printed almost entirely by automated machines - robots, in effect. Final assembly is in many cases the first time a given piece of textile has been touched by human hands. So why is the automation of this final step going to be the thing that prevents countries from climbing the "development ladder"?

When cellphones became affordable, it didn't mean that countries without decent landline networks couldn't "move up the ladder". They just jumped straight to the more advanced technology. If higher-productivity technologies are available, and are cheaper than using scarce human labour, then you use it. More productivity is not somehow a bad thing.

The proportion of fragments that would have their orbits boosted, through multiple collisions, to an orbit higher than the upper atmosphere, is trivial. Nearly every angle of collision between two objects in orbit lowers their periapses. The risk of Kessler Syndrome doesn't come from objects in upper-atmosphere orbits somehow getting boosted out through collision chains, it comes from collisions between objects already in higher orbits not strongly affected by atmospheric drag (>600km).

Not how orbits work. A collision can't cause, for example, an object with a circular orbit at 400km (passive reentry regime) to become fragments with a circular orbit at, say, 2000km (non-passive reentry regime.) Like snaily said, all fragments originating from a collision will still pass through the point of collision, which, if it is still in the upper atmosphere, will lead to reentry. Orbital debris is actually very dissimilar to gas escape.

Firstly, why have any official languages at all? Aside from government documents and the like (which are routinely translated into 10+ languages anyways), why does any language need to be "the official one"?

Also, what does it actually mean "can't even understand each other"? Understand the actual words? Understand as people? Sympathize with?

And I'd like to see how the status quo is supposed to be transformed into "two countries with each their own language". Will you slice off chunks of Eastern Ontario? Have enclaves on Montreal Island? Balkanize New Brunswick?

To be fair, given the neighbours, Thailand seems pretty mild on the issue of "ridiculous laws wielded for obviously political purposes."

"Eyyy buddy, you wanna buy this car? Classic 1991 Honda Civic, only 100k miles on it, and most of the doors still open. I'll give you a deal, $10 000."

"Yeah, I don't think it's worth that much. A hundred dollars, tops."

"Did you just appraise this car? Oh, you done messed up."

muffled sound of approaching police sirens

EDIT: Hah, didn't see you'd used the exact same analogy elsewhere.

Forget about the Loonie, look at the yen - one US Dollar is worth an incredible 114 yen! Quick everybody, throw all your investment at Japan!

Sure, but the vast majority of the funds from tickets go to the city - that's who it's really a "cash cow" for. And the municipalities are the ones actually making the rules that govern the tickets themselves. Why "slimy companies", and not "slimy City Halls"?

> "And now, turning right on a red light is just a cash cow for the slimy red light camera companies."

Hm? I'm pretty sure that revenues from red light camera tickets generally go to municipalities, not the companies that make the cameras themselves.

When trains run in tunnels, or even when on aboveground rights-of-way, the rails are generally spaced very close together. A 3-platform station therefore requires the tracks to turn away from each other to make room for the central platform.

They don't usually have to be that sharp, but they tend to be noticeably sharper than the turns in the route.

It's not as commonly done because it's considerably more expensive to build triple platforms, and the bends required to make it work slow the train down and cause wear. It's good for high-capacity stations though.

It also tends to reduce distance travelled because left turns are often done to get onto faster roads - if you right-turn it all the way, you're often on slower roads, so you're not going as fast, but you're saving actual travel distance.

Okay, I assumed the implication was software "typical" for commercial/delivery/collection vehicle routing. Even a business with a dozen vehicles would generally have this sort of software.

Google Maps does not, the last time I checked, preferentially weight left turns beyond expected stoplight delay time. However, Waze does, apparently. (But this is just a comparative observation, the algorithms are not public.)

And in Quebec, you still see people turning right on red lights while looking solely to the right, instead of looking for oncoming traffic from the left.

If your navigation software doesn't permit weighting different turns, it's not really worth using for a business/organization of any substantial size. Usually there's also cost assignment/weighting for things like traffic time, stoplights-vs-all-way-stops, effective speed limits, time-vs-distance balancing, and all the zonal assignments that come up when breaking up a bunch of stops into different vehicles' routes for the day.

This is an impressive result, but not exactly a UPS exclusive. Pretty much any vehicle routing software worth using has offside-turn-minimization options, usually as one of several 'weighting factors'. For example, almost every garbage collection service of any size minimizes its offside turns.

Libertarians tend, by and large, to be amenable to taxing externalities like pollution.

That's the trouble with a lot of people who think of themselves as Jacobs fans. They like the sorts of outcomes that she liked, but then they ignore almost the whole of her analysis and basically come up with ideas for Master-Planning the Jane Jacobs City.

Ironically, David Attenborough is an 'overpopulation' alarmist and misanthrope of the exact type that Hans Rosling was always arguing against.

>Like I said, I don't actually care how rational it all might be in economic terms. I'm not willing to allow rich people to pay for more privileges than they already have, even if we might all be better off as a result.

Cool, we'll just do envy-based policy then. That'll work.

The point is that if you try to prevent pricing of goods, you get a) pricing by other means, often more inflexible, b) underinvestment and underproduction, c) departure of the wealthy through other markets.

The problem with road pricing is usually not the pricing per se, but rather, that the government bodies doing the pricing just apply the revenues to something totally unrelated, breaking the connection between services and revenue. Road pricing can work if it is actually used for maintaining and building the road network - a genuine pay-for-service model.

I've read it, and it seems to be the same kind of mercantilist thinking that I'm criticizing. It's more of this "take an accounting identity, ignore the effects of one-half of it, bemoan the 'imbalance' of the other half."

I mean, you could solve the US 'trade imbalance' by making it extremely hard for foreigners to invest capital in the US. But of course this would have knock-on effects that make it harder for companies and workers in the US to access investment capital. Or you could shut out foreign goods - and ignore the costs of more expensive domestic goods for US consumers. None of this actually benefits people.

I see nothing in this article to distinguish it from the historically-always-wrong mercantilism that just kept drawing boundaries around areas and then yelled and shouted whenever more of one particular class of good went in than came out.

The rich just move closer to work, then.

Oh hello, San Francisco.

>We have very intense cheating detection, perceived inequality, unfairness or injustice will piss us off.

True - although it's often a very mono-directional detector. Anyone higher up on the ladder, or taking advantage of cheats we didn't see, gets the full focus of our attention, while anyone lower down or slow on the take is clearly just a sucker.

Pretty bad heuristic, unfortunately.

Agreed. One of the big problems in perception, I think, is the fact that, since a market economy can support a fairly substantial non-market fraction (socialized housing, roads, etc.) people imagine that you can just indefinitely extend the non-market system to encompass the whole economy. But you can't - and if you try, you end up not having enough of anything that you want. But it seems so simple, so people keep trying to do it.

Private and public debt bubbles? There's no actual debt or deficit being incurred - it's just using money to pay for goods. We might as well worry that we have a trade deficit with the corner store, or our employer might worry that they have a trade deficit with us. "Trade deficits" are orthogonal to actual debt.

And they don't cause unemployment, they just change the composition of employment. Now, if a country resolutely insists on hampering its own economy with cartels and bizarre regulation, then yes, "trade deficits" can reveal some of those weaknesses more prominently, but they were already there.

Trade deficits are just a mercantilist phantom, conjured up by counting physical goods crossing a border, carefully not counting services and capital investment, and then claiming that wealth is being "drained". It's like measuring evaporation from a lake (exports), ignoring any and all precipitation (payment for exports), and then claiming that the lake is running dry, without actually measuring the water level (per capita income).

"Trade deficits" pretty much always comes down to "foreigners sell us things at a low price, therefore we need to fight them/restrict investment in our economy/make things more expensive for our own consumers". It's never been an actual problem.

In fact, I think the grocery store has been manipulating their prices down, giving them an unfair advantage. Obviously you should insist that they stop selling such cheap food.

Man, we'll be rich in no time if we keep this up.

Trade deficits aren't subsidies. All it means is that there's a greater volume of home-currency-denominated investment in the "deficit" country than there are home-currency-denominated exports. So, in the case of the US, there's a net positive capital inflow - dollar-denominated investment. Dollar payments balance, as they must: https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-ahpWrFO8WFM/TZkyZmhwGLI/AAAAAAAAP...

Trade deficits are a meaningless thing to worry about. They're not actual deficits of any kind, and they don't even accurately measure trade, since they generally don't include services or the chains of value-adding.

I think it's actually because the USA has 0.8 cars per person. Why would people carpool or rideshare in a rural area when they've more-than-likely got their own cars?