No, you just don't understand externalities and the necessary role of government in internalizing them.

Absolutely. We should just apply carbon taxes (and tariffs) to internalize the externality, so the playing field is level, and let the market work.

This is why carbon taxes must be accompanied by carbon tariffs. That also incentivizes the foreign seller to reduce their own emissions (or fake it -- enforcement wouldn't always work, but it only needs to work most of the time).

LOL. I just posted this (about how supermarkets find managing cash painful): https://news.slashdot.org/comm...

I spent some time working on a cash management system for a grocery store chain. It treated cash as inventory so the stores could track movement between registers and back rooms, and could help automate the interaction with the banks to deliver cash to the bank and purchase cash from the banks. Between what retailers euphemistically call "shrinkage" (i.e. theft), the fees paid to the bank for pickup and delivery, the cost of management overhead to try to minimize shrinkage and the opportunity cost of having so much money tied up in stacks of paper and rolls of coins, the stores considered cash not the cheapest way to do business but the most expensive. If it weren't for the fact that refusing cash would alienate a non-trivial minority of their customer base, they'd do it.

Part of the reason for the cash management system was to eliminate that "opportunity cost" bit. They had a lender that was willing to lend them money cheaply using the cash they had sitting in 200 stores as collateral, as long as they had accurate real-time reports of how much cash was held so they could prove their minimum cash inventory (which across so many stores was several million dollars). The intention was then to invest the cheap money in various was to generate ROI. This wouldn't address all the other costs of using cash, but it would at least mitigate the concern that they had millions of dollars in capital just sitting completely idle every day.

That makes no sense.

Let's look at it from first principles. We as a society have decided that it's in everyone's interest to educate children, so much so that we tax everyone to raise money to spend on education. How does giving parents a choice of which school to send their kids to (assuming the schools are of equal -- or better! -- quality) undermine that societal interest, especially if the voucher amount is less than what the public school system would have spent on the same children?

I have a bias here: My oldest son is neuroatypical and was badly failed by the public school system, even after all of the help that my wife and I could provide. I actually spent a good chunk of his second grade year sitting in the back of his classroom working on my laptop (because I had a job where I could do that) so I could be ready to provide the teacher the support she needed to deal with him. She appreciated it, but I couldn't be there all the time, and in the end it just didn't work.

So, we started looking for alternatives. What we found was a small private school founded and run by a couple of parents who'd had a child in a similar situation. Classes were tiny (no more than 8 children per teacher) and it was staffed with experienced teachers who were frustrated with public school bureaucracy. Probably a third of the kids there were like my son, in that they just couldn't fit into the public school system, the rest were kids of two working parents who appreciated the school's other benefits, primarily "latch key time". The school allowed students to be dropped off as early as 7:30 AM and to stay as late as 5:30 PM (though not both) and the school provided supervision and educational entertainment. The cost (in 1998) was $3000 per year, which covered tuition, fees, meals (two hot meals per day, breakfast and lunch, plus afternoon snacks) and school supplies. At the time our state (Utah) spent about $5000 per student per year, but that didn't include meals or supplies.

My son loved the school, and flourished there. He caught back up and surpassed grade level in all subjects and became an avid reader. Interestingly, the school did not believe in assigning homework to grade-school children, all work was done at school. You might think that was educationally limiting, but the school gave all students the same standardized tests as the public schools every year and consistently outperformed the public schools by a large, large margin.

We didn't need the latch-key time (my wife was a stay-at-home mom and my job gave me flexibility), but we let him stay late a couple days per week because he begged us to.

This private school was better than the public schools in every possible way. Cheaper, academically superior, provided better food and more flexibility for parents (though no buses).

In what world would it not be better to expand that sort of option through vouchers? Had the state offered a $2500 voucher (half of what they spent on public school students), it would have make the private school accessible to many more parents, doing a better job of achieving the social goal of educating children. There actually was a voucher law passed by Utah in that time, but it was struck down by the courts.

What actually happened, though not until after my son had spent three years there, third grade through sixth (they didn't do Junior High), was that the US Air Force and the city forced them to relocate because they were just past the end of an active runway and there was concern that a military jet could crash into the school. But they were operating on razor-thin margins and could not afford to relocate without increasing their fees by 30%, which most of their customers couldn't afford. Vouchers, even at 50% of the public school cost, would have made that affordable. So instead, they closed their doors and the area lost an incredible resource.

I'm not, of course, claiming that my son's school was typical of private schools. But does that really matter? If the state can verify that the schools are doing a good job (standardized testing plus occasional inspections should be sufficient), and if parents prefer them for whatever reason, why not? What is bad about offering a choice? What is bad about giving public schools some competition, hopefully forcing them to provide better services and be more efficient?

What's really sad is that they're doing this specifically to avoid doing something else... and it's none of those potentially-useful things, it's the Epstein files. Trump wants to ignore Epstein, so the GOP leadership wants to ignore Epstein but they've fed their base a steady diet of conspiracy theories and that's what their base now demands. So, we get Epstein, UFOs, Autism from Tylenol, etc.

If they actually believed their theories, there is one they really ought to be focused on: election reform. Not that I believe that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, but if they (including Trump) really believed it they should be laser-focused on fixing this most fundamental and allegedly broken element of our Republic. But everyone knows there's nothing actually wrong with the electoral system except that it's gerrymandered to hell and the Electoral College is a weird outcome of an old compromise that no longer makes any sense, and various states have enacted laws that suppress minority votes. And as for those things, the first two favor the GOP and the third one used to heavily favor the GOP and they haven't quite figured out that it's not as beneficial for them any more. In other words, the actual flaws in the electoral system favor them, so they definitely don't want to fix those.

The truth is that the GOP has completely lost interest in attempting to govern. It's all bread and circuses, doing whatever they can to feed their voter base and please their rich donors. Even the ICE raids are mostly performative, to buttress and feed the "illegal alien invasion" conspiracy theory. About the only real "governing" Trump is doing is his war on trade, about which he is incredibly clueless but utterly convinced of his own brilliance. Luckily he's a coward and chickens out.

There are cases where that works, but they're actually pretty rare. Regulatory capture is mostly useful to maintain a dominant position once it's achieved, but it rarely helps you build a successful business to begin with.

FTFY.

The pre-modern era had plenty of dangerous substances, too. Probably the deadliest was woodsmoke (way worse than microplastics in practice, though it doesn't accumulate the same way), but there were plenty of others. The modern era has added variety and subtlety, but that latter point is mostly just because we've gotten good at recognizing and mitigating the acute and/or obvious harms.

There are brokerages that allow you to buy and sell fractional shares now, sometimes called "slices". Obviously you can't actually sell a tenth of a share to another investor, but the brokerages handle the bundling and unbundling and retain the fractional differences themselves.

Hasn't everyone maxed their karma? I just mean that "Insightful" is more accurate than "Funny".

A lot of it is because older companies pay dividends, in part because they're old enough that their history goes back to when every profitable publicly-traded company paid dividends. Some new companies held off on paying dividends while they reinvested profits to establish themselves, and some established companies temporarily decided to cut their dividends (sometimes to zero) if they had a massive growth opportunity and needed to aggressively reinvest, but the idea that a company might plan never to pay dividends wasn't a thing.

Doesn't matter. The ban still affects interstate commerce, and still serves (ostensibly) to protect Texas cattle.

But state protectionism is unconstitutional. It is a legitimate role, but it's a role the Constitution gave to Congress, not state legislatures.

Also, the lab-grown meat bans really aren't about protecting economic interests or consumer health, they're about culture warring. The state legislatures who banned lab-grown meat were almost certainly warned by their legal counsel about the unconstitutionality, but they didn't care because (a) passing the bans was primarily about signalling, not doing anything, and the signal is made even more effective if the state has to fight for it in court and (b) there's an outside chance that five Supreme Court justices will find a way to reaffirm the signal, even if it means overturning 201 years of Supreme Court precedents.

FTFY.

The lab-grown meat bans are primarily about culture wars, "sticking it to the libs", who are presumably all queer vegan cucks who want to force everyone to eat lab-grown meat laced with estrogen. Not that protecting the cattle industry hasn't been used in arguments, but they're not the real reason. The states with law-grown meat bans and their cattle-production rankings are: Alabama (#26), Florida (#18), Indiana (#32), Mississippi (#33), Montana (#12), Nebraska (#2) and Texas (#1). Texas and Nebraska could, theoretically, be aiming to defend a prominent state industry, but the others really aren't, and there are a bunch of blue states that produce a lot more cattle than most of those ban states, including California which is #4.

That said, banning another state's products only for the purpose of protecting your state's industry is unconstitutional. This doctrine is well-established law, called the Dormant Commerce Clause Doctrine. This doctrine was elucidated by John C. Marshall himself, in 1824, and has been upheld and applied in many, many rulings since, so... even with the current Supreme Court's lack of deference to stare decisis, I think the state is probably better off arguing that lab-grown meat may be unsafe. They have no evidence that it's unsafe, of course, but they just might be able to slyly imply that eating lab-grown meat would turn a red-blooded conservative American into a liberal pansy, which would guarantee them at least four votes at 1 First Street.