Comment Re:A brief closure. (Score 1) 49
No; since Twitter is unable to handle more than 280 characters, he gave his resignation as a screenshot of gmail! I suppose we're lucky he didn't print it out to take a photograph of it...
I'm bemused how often I hear Sparta brought up as something to admire. That effing 300 comic book and movie have a lot to answer for.
Xenophon was busy doing that long before 300:
It occurred to me one day that Sparta, though among the most thinly populated of states, was evidently the most powerful and most celebrated city in Greece; and I fell to wondering how this could have happened. But when I considered the institutions of the Spartans, I wondered no longer.
Lycurgus, who gave them the laws that they obey, and to which they owe their prosperity, I do regard with wonder; and I think that he reached the utmost limit of wisdom. For it was not by imitating other states, but by devising a system utterly different from that of most others, that he made his country pre-eminently prosperous.
In particular, the United States earlier this year imposed extremely high “trade remedy” duties on imports of truck chassis (which are used to haul containerized merchandise around the country) originating in China – by far the largest producer of such products. The duties resulted from antidumping (AD) and countervailing duty (CVD) investigations launched last year by the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) and Department of Commerce (DOC), the latter of which calculated for chassis produced by China International Marine Chassis (CIMC), the world’s largest chassis manufacturer, combined final duty of 221.37 percent (177.05 percent AD and 44.32 percent CVD). These estimated AD/CVD measures now apply to any Chinese chassis imports that have entered the from March 4 on. And they apply on top of the 25 percent tariffs that President Trump imposed on a wide range of Chinese imports in a separate “Section 301” case back in 2018.
There's a third option: polluter pays.
Why are the fossil fuel industries that are by-and-large causing this problem allowed to externalize their waste outputs at the cost of downwinders' health, and now the entire planet's ecosystem changing? Why are they allowed to be some of the biggest and richest companies on the planet while taxpayers have to pay to clean up the shit they spew into our air?
Surely the polluters here are power generation and vehicles, not the fossil fuel industries? Unless you're including fossil fuel power generation in 'fossil fuel industries', but the inclusion of 'biggest and richest' seems to imply the fossil fuel extraction industry.
Science might model me as an empty mechanism responding predictably to stimulus, but from "in here" I can say with confidence that I experience qualia.
That's exactly what a philosophical zombie would be programmed to say!
Thanks for the thoughtful reply. For third parties, yes - disposal may be high. But for first party items, at least, I know clothing is commonly resold, and 'Amazon Warehouse' is selling their repackaged returns. I don't know volumes.
Regardless, surely all these disposal costs are factored in to the price? Unless you're claiming that Amazon is preying on 3rd party sellers who are unaware of the potential return rates and costs of disposal, and they lose money by selling on Amazon.
It's reasonable to dislike disposal of perfectly good products or foods, but is that really such a concern in modern society? If you think of goods purely from a human-effort perspective, the disposal of functional items is minimal compared to further distribution, and the effort 'wasted' is small compared to many other 'wasted' efforts in society. These disposed goods are also often not intrinsically useful or necessary - see the popular complaint about "cheap junk" from Amazon - and so disposal is not depriving anyone of important functionality.
Food, particularly in first-world countries (and especially the US), is too abundant, leading to the current obesity epidemic. The food supply in even the poorest countries has improved enormously over the last 30 years, leading to significantly reduced famine, and is mostly a distribution problem, not a food supply problem. Over longer scale, the improvement is even more enormous. Given that it's a distribution problem, throwing away grocery store food is not harming anyone.
- nickersonm
He has not acquired a fortune; the fortune has acquired him. -- Bion
