1. How to make America great again.
2. “We want to give the impression of every aspect of dinosaur life.”
3. “Habitual sub eater may move lunch spot because of Tonawanda resident’s gripe.”
4. Church of England fund is top world performer (FT).
5. Pittsburgh is no longer so thrilled with Uber driverless cars (NYT).
6. The forthcoming sand shortage? (New Yorker).
The war on sand has already come near here:
http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/05/16/california-cracks-down-on-last-beachfront-sand-mining-operation-in-u-s/
6. “If the government took over the Sahara Desert in five years, there would be a shortage of sand.” Dr. Milton Friedman.
1. Represents a yuge achievement. The writer author is wrong on almost all counts. For instance, the Fed does not need to be more free-thinking/innovative. It needs to be abolished. ” . . the Fed has attained an unprecedented prominence – precisely because of its past policy failures.” See Dr. Henry Kaufman’s new book. And, truly what America’s working households need additional tax burdens and higher energy costs . . .
If Saudi Arabia wants to start up a chip foundry, could Trump end up selling sand to an Arab as part of his business trip?
PS I don’t like sand
#5: so basically, Peduto & Co.’s complaints boils down to the following complaints: Uber wouldn’t cough up $25 million to the city, didn’t hire people from Hazelwood (not a great area, so this is not terribly surprising, as I can’t imagine there’s a ton of underutilized engineering talent there), didn’t share traffic data, and didn’t provide enough free rides. Sounds like city politicians wanted a bunch of free stuff from Uber in exchange for…well, what, excactly? And they didn’t get it and now they’re mad.
Pittsburgh is granting Uber the use of their city as a training area for Uber’s autonomous vehicles. This is useful to Uber, and much easier for Uber than building an equivalent facility of their own. Pittsburgh is definitely offering something here. It’s less clear who’s at fault over the different terms Uber and Pittsburgh each think they agreed to.
Can’t Uber find some city that would welcome their activities without shaking them down for loot?
Pittsburgh has about 300,000 people. There are about 80 US cities with >= 250,000 people, but Uber’s Advanced Technology Group (their R+D division, I guess?) has offices in only San Francisco, Pittsburgh, and Toronto. Pittsburgh has leverage.
So what? It’s the government job to use “leverage” to coerce private entities into providing public benefits? Is the right to use public roads contingent on how much money you can cough up ? Is the right to operate private business contingent on making deals with the government?
You think that’s perfectly normal and fair?
What exactly is Uber doing that should be prohibited or negotiated over. If they have a right to open a business and use roads, why the fuck should the government hold out it’s hand and demand special payment, just from them?
Once my local government required a developer not only to guarantee a % of below-market apartments, but to provide music lessons on the ground floor. That deal fell apart, though, the day the music died.
This is the essence of everything that’s wrong with local governments today. It’s all legalized payola.
You have to basically bribe the city government to be allowed to run a business. Bribes to be paid in the form of below-market rate apartments and music lessons.
@Hazel Meade: Maybe I’m wrong, but I assume driverless cars aren’t on sound legal footing from the get-go. As nice as it is to refashion Pittsburgh as a tech hub with driverless cars, it’s less clear that voters are enthusiastic about being part of the experiment. Uber’s imposing unusual costs beyond a “normal” company.
What exactly are those costs? And why should compensation for them come in such arbitrary fashion? If there are additional risks associated with driverless cars (I bet one could prove the opposite statistically already), then why not just charge them more for auto insurance. Why demand such particular and unique compensations?
What is Pittsburgh offering that isn’t available for free to every legal resident?
They’re using roads. So is everyone else.
Using roads is a privilege, not a right.
Is the right to use public roads contingent on how much money you can cough up ? .
Uh, yes. Unless you can avoid the pesky fuel tax. I will not mention registration fees or (ugh) insurance If you can’t cough these up, good luck.
So basically Uber should register it’s driverless cars and get them insured, just like everyone else.
Done.
So why is Pittsburgh demanding they cough up a bunch of additional money and services ?
I should revise my question – is the amount of money you have to cough up dependent on who you are and how much the city thinks it can squeeze out of you?
Is every legal resident free to test their own self-driving car around the city? (I’m actually not clear on the legality of this.)
Why not? As long as you are behind the wheel and are legally liable for everything that happens with the car, why should the government interfere?
All Uber driverless cars actually still have human drivers in them. The car is doing the driving, but the human driver must still monitor performance and intervene if the car makes a mistake, or (more likely) the car alerts the driver to a situation it doesn’t know how to handle.
Uber has also been criticized for “hir[ing] away” researchers and robotics experts from Carnegie Mellon. So, if Uber provides (high-wage) jobs for researchers and robotics experts, that’s bad. But, if Uber doesn’t “hire away” other locals from Hazelwood, then that’s also bad.
The best, by which I mean worst, criticism is that Uber might affect parking fees long term. Yes, it would be terrible if fewer people drove cars and reduced demand for parking.
The concept that those employees are the property of CMU that Uber is somehow stealing jumped out at me, too.
Why the hell would Pittsburgh want robotics researchers who graduate from CMU to find jobs in Pittsburgh instead of moving away? I don’t understand it. Upper quintile earners are supposed to leave! The city is for working class people, not yuppies and bobos!
Basically correct.
Uber didn’t play ball and grease the right palms.
Peduto “Pittsburgh has a certain way of doing business”. He might have well have been rubbing his fingers together when he said that.
This is the problem with the whole rustbelt. It is run by Democratic “machine” politics and they expect a certain kind of payola. Sure, they couch it in language about labor traditions and so forth, but they basically mean “gimme some cheddar”.
Yep, Uber didn’t grease palms and now they are stuck with an R&D division in the wrong city.
They need to target a state that supports free enterprise. They should also, likely, target some states with decent weather since the technology will (for some period of time) have issues in inclement weather.
Tennessee, South Carolina, Nevada, perhaps Arizona all seem to fit the bill.
Well Pittsburgh is a great test city because it has really fucked up roads.
Arizona is terrible. Grid cities. Not hard enough to actually test the technology. You gotta have places where traffic patterns change on a block by block basis. If you just have a grid the robot can find it’s way around too easily.
Haha, the bright side of inept government. Btw I share your general apoplexy in this thread. That people think this sort of extortion is normal or good makes me mental.
Well, the talent inside and coming out of Carnegie Mellon has been a big draw, though, for companies like Uber. And Peduto is probably just pulling a Big Lebowski routine here, too (“he yelled at me a lot, but he didn’t do anything”), so I wouldn’t count on Uber packing off to Reno just yet.
Mild weather is not an advantage for developing and testing autonomous cars — well, at least not unless you want autonomous cars that don’t work in rain and snow.
Not enough goodies for inner city Blacks, Pittsburgh edition. I love this line:
“Tim Smith, a pastor at the Center of Life church and the head of a neighborhood group, said he had given Uber a list of job candidates, including a mapping engineer and technicians.” The Black hustlers are always the pastors, every time.
Why is Uber under an obligation to hire specific people? You bring high earners into an area and they add to the tax base.
“In January, Mr. Peduto was also surprised to get billed for a ride home in an Uber autonomous vehicle. ‘Travis Kalanick had told me the rides would be free and a service for the public,’ he said. Uber said it had always intended to charge for driverless rides.”
So Peduto is saying this was an oral agreement? Seems like it might have been better to get it in writing,
1. He just can’t let go of that prior, can he? I’m starting to wonder if this is getting personal, like it’s painful for him to admit that the empirical research largely doesn’t support the 101ist conclusion. Although it would be more or less redundant if you have a generous EITC with limited restrictions.
5. Good, because Uber’s been a toxic guest by all accounts.
5. Really? How exactly? Did it dump toxic waste in the city? Are it’s cars running people over? Exactly what is toxic about it?
All accounts meaning cab companies, driver unions, occupational licensing fetishists, and a press who love them. Outside those accounts, Uber is fantastic.
1. Horrible ideas. He wants to “encourage work” but also wants 4 million immigrants a year, that won’t do ANYTHING to discourage it. And those immigrants need to receive a “very largely expanded” EITC too, what, are the companies supposed to pay the workers an American wage? Pish posh, no, you will. Probably the most delusional thing in that article is when he recommends “city-based visas to try to help places struggling with population loss become gateways for skilled immigrant communities.” He’s the kind of cuck who would say we can’t possibly police our border, but we will somehow force immigrants to stay in specific cities.
I wonder if people like this realize how immediately and thoroughly they discredit themselves when they use the word “cuck”?
It triggers all the right people, and it’s fitting, which is why it’s triggering.
All it triggers is an immediate “ignore this comment” response
Good. We hate you.
LOL talk about triggered. Buncha snowflakes.
Don’t you get any kind of perverse glee out of seeing conservatives, libertarians, and other members of the right insult each other in this way? Was there anything better in the last US electoral campaign than watching Trump shame and utterly humiliate Jeb Bush with insults like these?
I oppose increasing immigration to 4 million/year.
I also despise people who go around calling everyone they hate a “cuck” and a “snowflake”.
Congrats, Alain, you just lost a potential ally.
Hie to.your fainting couch, cuck. Your future is being sold.and you whine about vocabulary; no one will miss you as an ally.
Also, I can’t fail to mention Trump’s insinuations that Ted Cruz’s father was an accomplice of Lee Harvey Oswald. Trump was the Don Rickles of conservative politicians. I would love to see his followers and sympathizers carry on that tradition.
Why would it be discrediting? It is used against people who think it’s morally virtuous to deny that they have a stake in their ethnic demographic future just like cuckolds deny that they have a stake in who their wife sleeps with. It’s a perfectly apt word.
Must everything be reduced to a crude sexual analogy?
The word ‘cuck’ shows that one’s mind generally resides in the gutter.
If that’s all you have to say about it, you’re irrelevant.
But you and your anonymous pixels on some blog message board are at the absolute center of power LOL
It’s the alt right equivalent to “racist”. Both are used as insults but they do aptly characterize their speakers’ conceptualization of the other side. So I guess it’s better than using the nondescript “motherf*****” or “ass licker”.
In the one case, the speakers’ conceptualizaton of the other side is rendered in terms of the content of their intellectual thought processes. In the other, it’s rendered in terms of their supposed lack of sexual dominance over their women.
I’ve never used the term in a political context and generally think its users are probably not that bright. But the logic of a cultural cuckoldry isn’t insane.
The more apt analogy is the cuckoo bird. Citizens of a Nation impressed into raising the children of another Nation.
This phenomenon is likewise known as cuckoldry.
According to Hazel Meade, being in a relationship wherein the wife is not allowed to have sex with strangers and be impregnated by them is “sexual dominance”. Get the f*** out of here with your bs, Hazel. If you really believe that (you probably don’t, but made that post to defend your own vacuous use of the term racist) you have a deeply unhealthy view on marriage.
According to the implied assumption behind the term ‘cuck’, being in a relationship where the wife IS allowed to have sex with other men (I.e an open marriage), means the husband is a weakling. The clear assumption is that no man worthy of respect would be in an open marriage, that the only respectable relationship with a women is one where the man has the sole and exclusive right to have sex with her, with or without her agreement. Yes, that’s a kind of male-dominant sexual relationship – considering that the possibility of having an agreed mutual right to have sex with other people is de-facto considered evidence of the man’s inferiority as a male.
“It is used against people who think it’s morally virtuous to deny that they have a stake in their ethnic demographic future”
It is refreshing to see someone admit that it is an inherently racist term.
One famous case where an anti-racist came very close to explicit sexualized imagery was Charles Sumner’s denunciation of Andrew Butler. “The senator from South Carolina has read many books of chivalry, and believes himself a chivalrous knight with sentiments of honor and courage. Of course he has chosen a mistress to whom he has made his vows, and who, though ugly to others, is always lovely to him; though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight—I mean the harlot, slavery. For her his tongue is always profuse in words. Let her be impeached in character, or any proposition made to shut her out from the extension of her wantonness, and no extravagance of manner or hardihood of assertion is then too great for this senator.”
People who throw around “cuck” look like a bunch of illiterate vulgarians by contrast.
““It is used against people who think it’s morally virtuous to deny that they have a stake in their ethnic demographic future”
It is refreshing to see someone admit that it is an inherently racist term.”
This coming from the type of person for whom articles titled “The end of white America”, “The Browning of America”, and “Hillary doesn’t need white males!” are written. When whites become a minority in this country, will you stand by their right to vote for race-based spoils, say 98% of white people voting Republican, or will you continue your anti-white hatred and racism because you are just a scumbag through and through?
When whites become a minority in this country, maybe they will finally stop thinking they own the whole place and it’s culture and that nobody else can ever be a “real American”, even if their ancestors were brought here 300 years ago on a slave ship.
I will demonstrate my moderate pragmatism. While the ideas at #1 are not the ones I would author, they are not far off. They are a rational attempt at problem solving.
The best answer IMO, if you can’t support these, is not to attack (even more intelligently.)
Name better, more concrete and pragmatic solutions.
Cut corporate taxes to 12%.
Maybe link to something that convinces me this is pragmatic, because right now I am fairly convinced that superstar firms take the profit, while producing relatively few jobs. That is, the invisible hand is favoring Amazon over main street. The trend is further concentration. How does a corporate tax cut change that?
“link to something that convinces me this is pragmatic”
Here:
Shareblue.com
“Cut corporate taxes to 12%.”
So, increasing the cost to profits from the current 65% (that was increased from 50% or less before Reagan) to 88% for hiring and paying each worker will make America great again by increasing unemployment toward Hoover levels?
Corporate taxes apply only to money not paid workers, so you seem to want to promote eliminating all workers to drive profits to 100% of corporate revenue.
Circa 1970, Milton Friedman complained that the high corporate tax rates on profits had caused managers to hire too many workers and pay them too much. With 50% Federal rates and 10% rates by States and local governments, paying more workers more, cut tax payments faster than profits were cut, and profits went to people who had no idea what was going on. And by paying workers more, the managers ended up being paid more as long as the revenues exceeded total labor costs. And with all managers paying more, workers had more money to spend to buy more units and pay higher prices.
He argued for lower tax rates to cut consumer spending and increase tax revenue as a share of the smaller economy. Lower rates would cut worker pay, increasing profits, increasing taxes paid.
Cut the regulatory costs by 80%.
You Canadians go first, and we can A-B the outcome.
Meanwhile https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2017/05/16/epa-asked-the-public-which-regulations-to-gut-and-got-an-earful-about-leaving-them-alone/
Actually we are already there. I deal with the EPA requirements from time to time, and essentially told my customers to stuff it, I am not taking on the costs of doing that nonsense.
One set of regulations that the EPA has promulgated, not sure if it was one that has been cancelled by congress, would in my estimation put 1/3 of the food service industry out of business. We would be forced to deal with it because the products and equipment we use come from the US for the most part, although the Asians would gain market share hopefully.
OK, I’ll ask. Why would the EPA of all people shut down 1/3 of all food service?
Your mean an EPA regulation would force Americans to eat only as much as they are eating in the African war and drought ravaged areas dependent on free food dropped in only from the EU after Trump cuts off food aid.
Why do you think lower food costs are good for workers producing Food? Will cutting food costs 20% by cutting their incomes in half thus increasing food as a share of living costs to 30% from 10% while cutting your share from 6% to 5% of income “make America great again”?
Why is it that back when “America was great”, food cost a lot more than today in both real terms and in share of income?
“OK, I’ll ask. Why would the EPA of all people shut down 1/3 of all food service?”
Look at the bias of this “pragmatic moderate”: “EPA *of all people*. How many organizations exist that would be more likely to shutter businesses than the EPA, pragmatic moderate, and definitely not pro-regulation-almost-always, anon?
Cut employment regulation, at least. If I want to hire someone, it should be as easy as going to a BLS or DOL website, typing in the other party’s handler that they gave me, and saying “I’m hiring them for 10 hours of work.”
I have to wonder about that city idea.
Sure, it seems like benevolence to shrinking towns in the heartland…but it also could be a way to make them vote Blue.
Even if Ozimek is pure of heart, those implementing this policy may not be.
This is beyond the crazy idea that you could prevent immigrants from moving to their preferred city once they are forced to arrive at Des Moines.
Some of his other ideas seem very parochial – more economics conferences!
But overall, not an objectionable fantasy list.
The linked list at least targets cities needing growth. There are other ways to do that. A new set of technical universities? Or technical junior colleges?
Relocate all 190 federal agencies to different cities. That’ll cut down the crazy effects the feds have around the DC area. Expensive because all the fed dollars floating around here. Any more people will see how their tax money is spent.
Many more could be efficiently distributed, and that would be fine.
Actually, Des Moines is a bit of a boomtown. Update your priors.
@Whatley:
What is an “American wage”?
What about Detroit as a Paul Romer charter city?
Pie in the sky idea that will never happen. And I agree with you. Charter cities would be a boon with no downside. Let a thousand flowers bloom, and let people vote with their feet.
Unfortunately, there is no possible way you can sell this to rent seekers. Hey guys, would you like to reduce your rents? Not get to live off taxpayers? Have to be held accountable for productivity?
Democrats and rent seeking republicans would never agree to this in a million years.
Think about it this way, the only time this has happened in the past was when we discovered another half of the planet.
#6 is typical of the New Yorker. Too long and too larded up with irrelevant details.
I usually like articles in the New Yorker, but this one is mediocre at best. You are correct that it has lots of useless cruft, but also the author also seems to lack a basic knowledge of his subject matter. Glass is not silica, any more than a cake is wheat flour. At the temperature which makes glass begin to flow freely, silica is a solid. Silica is the major ingredient for making glass, but you need lots of other stuff too.
This is the kind of article I find most irritating, when a hack writer spends the minimum amount of time studying a subject so he can write an article that just barely clears the editorial bar. It was a failure on the part of the New Yorker editor to publish it.
#1: Immigrants want a job, not citizenship.
And their main asset is working for less than citizens do.
No, they earn more than their fellow citizens. Many put out of work by subsidized US food exports.
Opposition to immigration wouldn’t be as strong in the US if it weren’t for birthright citizenship and universal suffrage. Saudi Arabia has many foreign residents, but none of them get citizenship.
Birthright citizenship came into existance only when Republicans were blind to the meaning of citizenship in the Constitution in 1868.
The 14th Amendment granted citizenship to persons who could never be citizens. How could an infant merely vote, much less hold public office or any position of public trust?
In so poorly drafting the 14th Amendment, Republicans totally corrupted the Constitutional meaning of citizenship such that citizenship could be denied to two-thirds of people who we today one might think are “persons” equal under the law: non-white or non-Protestant or non-male persons.
The drafters of the 14th excluded all but men from consideration when writing it. But given they excluded, by original intent and meaning, women and children, for example, excluding Asians, Jews, became easy. And then, excluding the illiterate.
The US was founded on open borders. Founded on growth by immigration.
Only government was limited to the elites granted the privilege of citizenship. Until Republicans messed things up in 1865.
Saudi Arabia doesn’t have any native workers.
I usually select a far corner of a large parking lot (supermarkets, larger strip malls, some bank branches, etc.) so that I blend in more when I eat in my car. If there are hedges along the margin of the lot, I tend to favor parking next to those as well.
Right. You don’t want to be at the park because they will call the cops on you there, too.
In NYC if you eat your lunch in a children’s playground and you are not accompanied by a child you will be ticketed. Men and women.
As well they should. You’re committing a pre-crime.
4 million immigrants a year. Hilarious, and diabolical. I guess that dovetails with his plan to tax all the new arrivals as their carbon production increases to US levels.
According to this
http://www.immigrationeis.org/eis-documents/us-demographic-projections-future
Annual net immigration of 2M/yr (the highest they consider) would increase the population to 449M by 2050 and 629M by 2100.
4 million immigrants a year?? NO THANKS
By the end of the century, we’d have well over a billion people living in America. We’d suffer enormous environmental stresses.
Terrible idea.
3. Ah, the perils of sub-urbia.
NIMFY!!
I grew up, graduated high school in Tonawanda. The article nailed the culture. People are funny (and sometimes annoying) about parking in front of their homes. I’ve been asked to move on my parents’ street.
It’s actually worse in nearby Kenmore, a small, but highly policed village. Years back, the Kenmore PD cuffed, arrested, and booked a CA lady for a minor traffic infraction.
There was a bit of a kerfuffle when the lady’s CA department made critical remarks about this procedure. The Kenmore police chief doubled down, writing that “everybody in the East knows that all California guys are named Lance, Rock, Tab, Chad or Tiffany.”
http://www.nytimes.com/1993/11/01/nyregion/town-s-justice-is-swift-but-is-it-fair-arrest-prompts-outcry.html
4. Worst idea on the list is connecting self-driving cars to the internet (“When road repairs, major accidents, or other traffic changes happen the government should automatically and quickly upload this info to mapping software.”). How much will the hackers charge to ransom my car and traffic grid?
5. The lesson here is that public-private partnerships are almost always doomed to failure due to the inherent conflict in the parties’ objectives: the public believes the partnership is intended to achieve a public purpose, in this case transit, more efficiently in partnership with a private party, while the private party believes the partnership is intended to achieve a private purpose, profits, by leveraging, or exploiting, the power and resources of the public. Medicare Advantage is a good example. The public believes the intent is to increase efficiency in the delivery of health care to seniors while the private believes it’s a means of bilking the public for billions. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/19/business/dealbook/unitedhealth-sued-medicare-overbilling.html With respect to autonomous vehicles, Uber and the other private parties know they need the public to provide (i.e., pay for) the right of way that is needed for autonomous vehicles to operate safely and, most importantly, profitably. The objective of maximizing profits conflicts the objective of achieving a public purpose. I’m all in favor of autonomous vehicles, but ignoring the very high cost of providing the necessary right of way will doom the entire effort to conflict and disappointment.
What public resources is Uber using?
They’re driving on roads. Whoop-de-do. So is everyone else.
1. His first recommendation in making American great again is to drastically increase the number of brown people coming in. I like seeing you guys double down on this stuff, especially this early in the game. It antagonises people and brings out the underlying differences in assumptions. We’ll see what everyone’s made of as the stakes increase. Fun times ahead!
Excuse me, if they are brown can we really say they are people? Asking for a friend.
That is so Racism 1.0, we’ve evolved.
The version may have been upgraded, but the software still sucks.
Reading comprehension:
firingline: This plan implies brown > white
msgkings: You are racist if you disagree with this plan, which supposes brown > white
I don’t care what flavor they are, just that hey can pull their own weight.
5. They’re not thrilled that Uber expects to be free to operate a business without having to provide special favors to the state. OMG. That’s JUST TERRIBLE. Everyone knows that private enterprise is an evil evil thing that should beg to be allowed to merely exist.
Presumably you need some kind of agreement with local authorities to operate driverless vehicles when driverless vehicles are a brand-new concept. I can’t put my own robots on the road just ’cause.
My priors are that I trust neither Uber nor city government officials, btw.
All of Uber’s driverless cars still have human drivers behind the wheel. Those drivers are still responsible for making sure the car doesn’t hit people.
Then I got nothing.
1. “I would enact a carbon tax and use that to fund a very very large expansion in the Earned Income Tax Credit and some sort of child tax credit. I’d also set the federal minimum wage to zero. Yes, I would do that.”
Let’s see, by taxing burning fossil carbon, less and less fossil carbon will be burned producing less and less tax revenue to subsidize employer labor costs with government paying larger and larger shares of worker wages.
Classic free lunch economics.
Economies are zero sum. TANSTAAFL
Why don’t adherents to the Laffer curve believe it? An effective carbon tax generates zero tax revenue. Just like an effective tax on tobacco products generates zero tax revenue.
Further, he sees the problem that got Trump the win as workers being paid TOO MUCH. Wages paid to workers building infrastructure must not be high enough to live where the construction is being done, so he wants to promote transitory workers, workers paid lower wages that get sent and spent outside the areas where the work is being done, and paid for. In other works, making America Great means sucking money out of the economy to reduce consumer spending.
Economies are zero sum. TANSTAAFL
Why don’t adherents to the Laffer curve believe it? An effective carbon tax generates zero tax revenue.
This strikes me as incorrect. The Laffer curve does not directly apply to excise taxes, but those ideas still work, so lets pretend we extend it to excise taxes.
The Laffer curve is a curve, not step function. It is very easy to imagine a tax on carbon that both reduces carbon dioxide emissions (and hence is “effective” by any definition) and produces revenue. Cigarette taxes are effective at reducing cigarette consumption (vape anyone?) and they also produce revenue.
Economies are zero sum. TANSTAAFL
Agree that TANSTAAFL as a rule of thumb, but mostly disagree that economies are zero sum. I take it as self evident that economies grow. Zero sum things don’t grow (or shrink), by definition.
Actually, real economies are positive sum. If you believe in money, real economies have central banks or gold mines that increase the quantity of money. Even if you recognize that the value of money is based on some non-monetary value, there are farms that literally extract value from thin air as CO2 gets converted to carbohydrates, and mines that extract value out of the ground, and solar and wind power plants that pull more value out of the sky. The rest of the economy is superstructure, but even that superstructure creates value by turning raw resources into goods & services that are worthwhile to you and me. It’s only financial speculation that is zero or negative sum. Even at geological scales, ecological and economic systems aren’t closed, and the inputs and outputs don’t have to sum to zero.
If the Church of England’s investments have been doing well there’s a market crash in the offing.
Presumably the devil is in the details.
The Church of England has done pretty well over some long time frames, such as 597-1534. Then a hostile takeover made it harder to compare results.
#6 Florida is all sand, hard to see us running out.
The problem is the cost of transportation.
#1…Apparently, to the extent that calling a country great makes any sense, I’m the only person who thinks we have a great country. Trump’s statements concerning this are offensive and asinine. We’ll be fine even after electing a horse’s ass like Trump. We have in this country a plodding resilience.
1. If I had a dollar for every time……..
2. Bizarre. Will our ancestors degrade us in the same way?
3. “Nobody bothers you in a cemetery.” (Horror films excluded) Hilarious.
6. Could we possibly engineer a way to not use sand? Problem solved.
#6 Here’s a much better article: https://www.wired.com/2015/03/illegal-sand-mining/
Yes, that is a good article. It follows one thread effectively, without packing in useless facts you’ll forget almost instantly. Some parts of the introduction seemed a little familiar.
You want an economic boom? Get rid of all personal tax deductions. Cut tax rates 50%. Exempt first 40000 of income.
Cut corporate tax rate to at least 20%.
How about getting rid of the differential tax treatment of capital gains? Why isn’t it taxed just like income from labor? It’s a form of income too.
And why the one-year holding period before a gain in a stock receives capital gains treatment vs. ordinary income? What purpose is served by that? Get rid of it, and prices will seek their true value much faster because you won’t have as many players holding on to a position for tax purposes when they would otherwise sell.
https://www.fastcompany.com/3068045/why-this-tech-giants-banking-on-blockchain
3. Idiots. The first time he parks and eats, you notice. When he does it week after week, you should lose your suspicion, not increase it. When doing the frivolous bidding of people with too little to think about, sensible cops should consider the damage to their professional reputation.
Suspicious people creep me out. Burglar bars on houses in pleasant neighborhoods similarly annoy me. It’s like announcing, I was robbed once twenty years ago, so I decided it would be good for the collective value of our homes to announce that to everyone who ever comes house-shopping here. Also, I’m really ancient and my electronics aren’t worth stealing.
Best series of links I’ve seen. Excellent post.