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Comment Services, Light industry and consumer products (Score 1) 344

Building planes and ships and fast cars always seems sexy but how many car companies are profitable for decades without subsidies, government bailouts, tariffs, special tax breaks and the ability to externalize costs like pollution? If we look at the path to becoming a high income country, heavy industry is not the path. Services, software, toys, appliances, luxury items, computers, are the path. The old communist countries were making almost as much steel, ships and planes as the west and their incomes were a fraction of what we have. My kids want walkable cities. They don't want to spend 20% of their disposable income on buying, maintaining and insuring a car. The sooner we stop politically choosing industries to protect and let market forces decided what to make the better.

Comment The President was always king (Score 2) 377

Americans just didn't know it. There are no consequence to the US president violating the constitution. The US constitution isn't a legal document in the sense that it doesn't clearly state rules and consequences for breaking them. Most of it reads like campaign promises. The US congress has always been useless and corrupt. The concept of a nation state wasn't invented (reinvented) until Napoleon. The USA was at its founding a union of 13 independent countries. The slogans, er, constitution never worked. The American civil war was a lie, it was a conquest by one group of countries over another. The US congress was useless as the executive of the government so the full time presidency was invented, and then given all the power to run a government that the US constitution never envisioned. So the President became the sole controller of the armed forces and the executive of the government. Almost all US federal government workers answer to the President. The President can tell those workers to do anything he wants and there are no guards against it. So even if the President violates the rules, if the majority of congress let him, there is no other mechanism to stop him.

Comment Was it worth what we gave up? (Score 1) 78

We jail punish people to
1. deter others,
2. to protect society from criminals
3. to reform criminals

I very much doubt jailing this man will do any of these three things. In the mean time we have given up our privacy and allowed the government yet another powerful way to track us.
So, other than revenge, can anyone say society is better off because of this new power to solve old crimes?

Comment Just tax green house gas emissions (Score 1) 141

And let the free market decide the best way to solve global warming. Full buses are so much more environmentally friendly you could run them on coal and be better for the environment than all the cars they replace, even if those cars were electric. Cities should only be deciding what busses are the cheapest to run. They shouldn't be betting on technologies or virtue signaling with their purchases.

Comment Everyone wants the taxes and the service (Score 1) 24

Everyone wants the services the data centers provide. They want their data in their country, they want facebook, slashdot...and but those all need ads as well. People want to work from home and their companies don't want to host their own data. Oh and voters want the taxes, the construction jobs and the good pay jobs running the data center. The electric grid wants a large, paying customer that has a predictable electricity that doesn't have a peak at the same time as the rest of the gird. So everyone wants the data center just no one wants it near them. Kind of like landfills, homeless shelters and new housing. NIMBY

Comment USA is 75% of the market - rest not enough (Score -1, Troll) 247

Americans are 5% of the worlds population but pay for 75% of the commercialization of new drugs and procedures. As much as the rest of the world criticizes US healthcare we are fine leaching off it and accepting the new drugs it produces. In fact of the remaining 25% of bringing new stuff to market the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation has been responsible for some of it. They don't spend a lot in global terms but they are very effective in what they do spend on.

Comment Re:Do people know what makes labour valuable? (Score 1) 97

You're right. The labor of a lot of people isn't valuable. Does that mean as the cost of living rises above the value of their labor they should be left to rot in the streets?

You can have a social safety net. Tax those who consume more on themselves and divert that consumption to those who can't consume as much.
But don't distort the labor market to force some companies to pay more than the market value. That stifles innovation and the creation of better paying jobs.
Until 50 years ago the easiest way to earn more was to move to an area with better employment opportunities. Unfortunately there are many high paying jobs in places like California or New York that people can't take because of another market distortion called rent controls. These young people can't take a good job because there is no where for them to live.

Comment That's communisim (Score 1) 97

Public ownership of the means of production is communism. Do you really think you could run a company? Do you think you could, along with your fellow citizens, elect someone among you to run a company? Also it doesn't matter who owns means of production. What matters is consumption. How much you get to consume. When farming efficiency massively increased did the extra farmers starve because they were out of work? No the price of food fell and the extra workers were freed to make other things. It's just that with regulations and rent controls human labor is less flexible than it was 500 years ago but we can fix that.
Also back to your public ownership idea. The poor spend everything they make and then some, the middle class invests a tiny bit, the super rich reinvest almost everything they make. Your government acts like the poorest of the poor, consuming more than they take in. Almost every democratic government would pull a Venezuela, not reinvest any profits and run their businesses into the ground.

Comment Do people know what makes labour valuable? (Score 1) 97

Looking at the comments so far, a lot of people think they are entitled to a high paying job.
The most anyone, without coercion, will pay you is the marginal value you add to their product.
If you make something that can be used many times or by many people you are more valuable than someone who makes a single product. So a software developer who's code can run on many computers and be sold many times, or Taylor Swift who can write a single song that is listened to billions of times, is more valuable than someone does one off things like planting a tree.
If you make others more productive. Leaders make more because them being 1% more effective makes many people 1% more effective.
If you control capital you are more valuable. Accountants, bankers and stock brokers who move tens of millions a year are valuable because being just slightly better at these jobs can mean millions of gains.
If machinery, or automation has significantly changed your job recently then you are more valuable than you were before.
If none of those are true then don't expect the value of your labour to have increase.

Comment Capital is productive - this is good (Score 1) 97

Workers haven't been getting more productive but the value added by our machines has. When we first industrialized machines made humans more productive and the demand for human labour increased significantly. We moved most of the population from rural areas to cities so the workers could be concentrated around the machines. Even today, machines continue to make some workers extremely valuable. Software coders can write a piece of code and have it run trillions of times on millions of computers. Football players can be watched by hundreds of millions of people with disposable income. However most workers have seen their productivity plateau. House construction workers have seen their productivity decrease over the last 55 years. So it should be no surprise that companies that have very expensive machines that make very valuable products are profitable and don't spend a lot on labour.

Comment Never Hydrogen (Score 2) 68

Hydrogen is very difficult to use and extremely dangerous.
At between 18.3% and 59% hydrogen in air the mix is explosive. No other flammable substance has that broad of a range of explosive mix. Hydrogen is extremely easy to ignite compared to even gasoline vapor.
Hydrogen requires either cryogenic or extreme pressure to store any meaning full amounts.
Hydrogen makes metals brittle and can leach through all but the best seals.
Hydrogen is a nightmare to transport and to transfer

Consider the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... - It gets exponentially harder to change your delta and hydrogen gives the best impulse. SpaceX, the most successful rocket company ever, has chosen not to use hydrogen. It's storage is that difficult that it doesn't make sense in the most advanced rockets. There's no way it makes sense in a car.

Comment This is bad for the environment (Score 0) 72

Trains, even if they run on coal are so much more efficient at moving people than individual cars that anything that makes them less useful will lead to more cars being used. A full train can hold hundreds of people. If a fraction of those people choose to use cars instead because the battery train is too expensive or there are few of them then the reduction in pollution by using batteries over a fossil fuel is lost. Heck, even if the other cars are battery cars, over the lifetime the diesel train is better for the environment.

Comment I'm torn (Score 2) 21

On the one hand, all crypto currencies are a scam (even the ones I contributed to)
On the other is banks lending out my money and paying me almost nothing

On the third hand is the stock brokerage firms lending out my game stop shares, paying me exactly zero interest and not letting me take my shares out.

I might actually have to side with the open scam.

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