The Chinese introduced Special Economic Zones that embrace Capitalist principles, to avoid the Soviet Union's fate. It worked, and those zones are funding their entire system.

The real issue is Corruption. Any time you see both Republicans and Democrats coming together on something, such as this, if you dig around enough, you'll find some industry that's going to rake in a ton of money because of it. Pay attention to the few who dissent, though. Some subset of them aren't yet corrupt, and they're trying to fix things.

If you think you don't like beer, that just means you haven't found the right beer, yet. Like Chocolate? American Porter, Milk Stout, White Stout. Like sour candy? Fruited Lambics. Like red wine? Flanders Red Ale. That's just the tip of the ice berg. The variety is enormous.

Loeb isn't claiming that aliens reached here. The reporting on this whole thing has been a disaster. It's the journalists that are hung up on the aliens part. Loeb believes the meteor came from outside of our solar system, and wants to see if the metals within occur naturally, or if they're artificially made alloys that humans aren't making. If he finds metals that occur naturally, then it was just a meteor. If he finds metals that humans are currently making, then maybe what he obtained from the ocean floor didn't come from deep space. If he finds that it's some weird alloy that definitely doesn't occur on accident, which people aren't making, then that's a strong implication that the meteor was some (now destroyed) construct that got away from some aliens. The entire reason it's a candidate, is because the US Military told him it likely didn't come from our solar system.

The whole thing is rational, if you look passed the sensationalist reporting. The only thing that upsets me is that there's the question hanging out there about what the bits of metal that he did find, turned out to be. No one is reporting on that. It's the biggest question of the whole damned thing, and it's just hanging over the story, unanswered. This article seems to imply that Loeb was unsatisfied with the results, which could mean that they were mundane bits of metal, or it could mean that the sample size was too small to render a conclusion. Again, we're not being informed, because it's much more fun to shout, "Aliens!" and "Look at the dumb Harvard Professor who believes in aliens!"

There are people who accept it as payment. That's what gives any currency value. In the case of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, value is founded on Ransomware gangs accepting it as payment. People are motivated to obtain it, because they need it to pay ransom. It's not a coincidence that Bitcoin took off in 2017, at the same time that Ransomware really started getting notice.

When you read the headline, did you infer that their Cryptocurrency investments were substantial, or trivial?

The cycle you discuss only happens when Capitalism isn't regulated to prevent monopolies and ensure competition. If monopolies are allowed to emerge, the system eventually becomes Oligarchy, which isn't the worst way to live as the prices can be quite low (you don't need a high profit margin if you have an industry's entire profit), however, with no competition to incentivize improvement, everything stagnates and no progress is made. We don't like that.
Capitalism (on the condition that it is regulated to ensure competition in the market) is the only economic system we have, which incentivizes removing human labor from the process of making the things we need. If you look at the last 150 years, Capitalism has reduced the labor that goes into everything by a great deal. Advancements in Manufacturing lead to reducing to a 5 Day / 40 Hour work week about 100 years ago, and with advancements in Information Technology, it seems like a 4 Day / 32 Hour, or maybe even a 3 Day work week should be reasonable, if not ideal, now. We might even be more productive, this way. AI looks like the next break through that's going to substantially reduce the need for human labor. Eventually, so little human labor will go into the things you need, that it will stop making sense to charge money for it. At that point, we've obtained Post-Scarcity, and we'll have to figure out a new economic system, because Capitalism will be broken. With outcomes separated from quality and quantity of a person's work, something that looks like Socialism will probably be fine. You just need to understand that Socialism can never get us there.

Your view of the issue is rather skewed. They actually profit more from the shorter work week, and you and I both know that there's plenty of evidence for this. The problem is that the people making decisions have been doing it since a time when we didn't get so much done in so short a time. They're accustomed to the longer work week, and don't trust the idea that a person can be more productive in fewer hours. It's the same line of reasoning that requires a person who's more productive at home, to return to the office. It's not the Profit that's the issue here, it's the perception of control.

As a California resident... I got tired of my garage and the trunk of my car being covered in plastic bags at all times, and when I realized that paying $1.20 for 12 bags to put my $300 worth of groceries into was trivial and not worth caring about, I stopped keeping the plastic bags. Evidently, I'm not the only Californian who worked this out. Paper bags are an option, and sometimes we have to use them because our supermarket ran out of plastic bags. They suck. They hold less, and they break easily. It's for good reason that we prefer plastic.

I enjoy food quite a bit, and I've got the belly to prove it. You just don't grind your best cuts into ground beef. Ground beef is the best use for the tough meat, and the worst use for the tender meat. The whole point of the grinding process is that the meat is effectively pre-chewed for you, so whether the meat was tough or tender, you end up with about the same consistency. Flavor may vary a bit from cow to cow, but at the end of the day, beef is beef.

Nobody is going to be replicating the exact flavor of Coca-Cola until other companies are also permitted to import the Coca plant to flavor it. They may not get to keep the cocaine from their import (that goes to a pharmaceutical company), but it's still that exotic ingredient that's literally impossible for anyone else to obtain. It would be just as difficult to replicate the flavor of a cow's meat, if a ranch's industry secret was raising it on cocaine, even if you had the same breed and similar conditions.

Cultivated meat will do fine when used as ground beef; that style of beef is ideal for any cut of beef that may not be naturally preferred, due to its quality. Doesn't matter if you put Angus or dairy cow through there, it comes out more or less the same. The thing is though, that cultivators will, in time, have very precise control over the conditions and development of the meat. It may not be there yet, but in time, it may come to pass that the tenderest, juiciest Prime Rib you've ever had came from a cultivating plant. Granted, we may still be 100 years away from that, but that's the direction of it.

Am I the only one who read that this guy said only the video was AI? Dude wrote and voiced it himself, and said as much, somewhere. He only used AI to create the video.

People have this weird idea that the world is an organized system with clearly defined rules. That's really not the case. The concept that a person should have a single employer, and that employer is the sole determiner of their wages is an exceptionally weird one. Waiters and Waitresses don't serve their employer. They serve their customer. The restaurant owner and customer engage in a joint employment of the waiter or waitress, and it's incumbent on the customer to contribute their portion of the server's wage, which may indeed be a larger portion than the restaurant owner's. This system incentivizes the waiter or waitress to prefer their customer's favor over that of the restaurant owner, insuring a higher quality of service for the customer, while simultaneously not encouraging the server to screw over their employer for the customer's benefit. It also establishes a lowerbound on the server's pay, while entirely removing the upperbound. It's really not a bad system, but we have to remember two things: First, for most, this is going to be a part-time job, that they do while they should be pursuing knowledge and skills relevant to the career they're trying to do-- if you really want waiting to be your career, that's possible, but it's not going to be at Denny's. Second, people follow their incentives. They don't do a thing because its they're job, they do a thing because they think the outcome will be an improvement.

I'm inclined to deposit my money into a bank that prioritizes issuing loans to people they can expect to reliably pay them back with interest, rather than a bank which limits their lending based on arbitrary measurements. This is what happened to Silicon Valley Bank. Too many risky investments, not enough reliable investments. If you want to lose your money, deposit it in a bank that refuses to lend money to people who will pay it back.

I understand where you're coming from, and while you could frame it like that, the reality is that banks add to the M1 Money Supply by incurring debt to their depositors when issuing loans. It doesn't change the M0 supply, and some of the money supplied to the loan may even have been part of the M1 supply, already. It's a complicated knot, but it actually can be unraveled if you have access to enough information.