USA should continue its manifest destiny, build a new artificial island off the coast of California or in the Gulf of Mexico, found an entire new state with a city designed for the modern era for the ground up.
To be fair, a lot of things are the way they are not for any great reason, but because of historical baggage. Things are the way they are because that's how they were before.
We could just invade Canada - I think it’s been long enough that we should give it another shot. Without the British they don’t stand a chance this time around and we've got the fracking technology to exploit the land.
We can probably send the first Marine regiment over as undercover immigrants escaping the possibility of a second Trump regime and gain control of their weaponized maple syrup reserves before they even know what’s happening.
If the US goes for an invasion, I think we'd be way better off invading Baja California. Spice must flow! That is, we must keep up with demand from the Alameda-Weehawken burrito tunnel [0]?
> gain control of their weaponized maple syrup reserves before they even know what’s happening.
Not sure if the BBC is implicit in psyops, but they report the reserves are very low [1]. On the one side, that means the spoils of war are low, on the other side, it means they won't be able to mobilize their unique units.
i don't think so, if it looks like the new state is going to trend blue then the red states are not going to admit it to the union. If it looks like it's going to go red then the blue states are not going to admit it either. If it goes perfectly "purple" or in between then neither side will vote to allow it because it dilutes funding. I don't see a new state joining the union ever.. same goes for one state splitting into multiple or multiple states consolidating into one.
At the end of the day if you’re not a plane-need who is motivated by building cool planes, you’re not going to be interested in making cool planes. Boeing got taken over by people who wanted to make money, not make cool planes.
Sure.
But there are plenty of "Carnivore", or "Keto" sites that do not publish studies showing the benefits of fiber or vegetables. It goes both ways, the plant people aren't more biased.
If a study comes out saying meat is great, "keto" sites promote it.
If a study comes out saying plants are great, "plant" sites promote it.
I don't think a site called 'plantbasednews' is hiding their bias.
I think the point is, that the study itself was fine, you can't discount it because you don't like the sites that report on it. The site that is 'biased' is reporting on a study that backs up what they want to promote, but that doesn't invalidate the underlying study. They didn't fund this study, and put pressure on skewing the results, they are just writing an article about it.
Is it really such a stretch to imagine that maybe some people really don’t correlate those things? People aren’t research papers, we have multiple cognitive distortions working all the time obfusticating the truth, but tech like this can help bypass them
The issue is wealth inequality - DINK households with 2 six figure incomes massively dwarf what’s possible for a regular American family (one breadwinner, 2.4 kids) - they’re the top 5% which isn’t Elon Musk territory, but as a group it’s distorting housing way more than a tiny amount of billionaires would
Fwiw I don’t think there’s anything inherently “wrong” with it, the market is a brutal mistress
And ultimately, the only way to let the regular American family buy a house is to build more houses. A desirable location, low density, and low cost. You get to pick two.
Storm in a teacup, 99% of users will never notice as they scroll past anyway. This story is getting pushed cause someone is mad they’re getting bypassed.
Inflation encourages investment because if you just sit on your money it gets eaten away by inflation. Once you’re Oprah-rich inflation is the rate at which you’re losing net worth. This is my non-economist understanding.
Inflation affects the value of currency, not assets. Oprah isn’t sitting on billions in cash, presumably. Those billions are invested in assets, which typically inflate at a rate similar to inflation. This is why one of the best hedges against inflation is owning things like real estate and equities. The value is separate from any currency you can denominate it in.
The benefit of mild inflation, to phrase what you wrote a little differently, is that it encourages people to create assets with substantial intrinsic value as a way to dispose of currency. Everyone wants to own as little currency as possible. There are many positive externalities to asset creation.
> Inflation encourages investment because if you just sit on your money it gets eaten away by inflation.
People shouldn't be penalised for saving money.
"Oh, but just invest it!"
With investment comes risk. Why shouldn't people be allowed to save without risk or having their savings melted by lost purchasing power through inflation?
Inflation is a hidden tax and theft of those furthest from the newly "minted" money to benefit those that are closest to the source i.e. banks and large borrowers.
I do wonder if this conventional wisdom is actually true, though. Somewhat relatedly, there was once an idea that if you lower taxes for rich people, they'll invest more, and those tax savings will trickle down to the middle and lower classes and be a boon for them. But we know it doesn't actually work like that.
Yes anyone who doesn’t have the knowledge/time/motivation/cynicism to prevent themselves getting taken advantage of is basically asking for it, nay “deserves” it.
Yeah, and if you did not read T&S and now going to become a part of human centipede, that’s on you. I mean, how hard can it be to read a 22 page legalese, before going through a sign up flow, that was heavily optimized to increase conversion?
anyone who thinks there is anybody in the universe other than themselves that is going to take responsibility for their safety, security, happiness, etc. absolutely "deserves" what they get.
i didn't say they did! i said they need to take responsibility for their own safety/security or suffer the consequences. whether they should be expected to... is totally irrelevant. i'm not stating a preference, i'm stating a fundamental law of nature.
and not knowing even that simple fact is what makes it "deservedly" so.
Regulation can remove those consequences for any chosen safety/security feature by making every choice have it. Fundamental law of nature? You're deluding yourself.
(And if you say you mean outside of regulation, that people need to be responsible in general for other aspects of life, then your argument is no longer connected to the original comment you replied to.)
regulation is part of the universe. to expect that it protects you exactly when you'd want it to, but does not inhibit you want you'd not want it to is stupid. trying to offload your responsibility onto some "them" is not a fix.
i'm definitely not deluding myself. that is life. you need to have both the freedom and the inclination to take care of yourself, if you don't have both you'll suffer.
I do not need the freedom to buy a defective lock.
Mandating basic safety and security features is not always going to protect me, but it will mostly protect me. It's not stupid to want that tradeoff. I don't care if you define "fix" as 100% so therefore it's not a fix. I want the 95%. I want defense in depth, regulation on top of personal investigation.
you are right. you do NOT need the freedom to buy a defective lock.
you need the right to decide for yourself if the lock is defective or not.
if you give that away, you will instantly be given the "freedom" to buy a lock that is defective-by-design. perhaps the lock designer's brother is a friend of the govt. perhaps the govt. agency does not want bad publicity, whatever.
the point is "defense-in-depth" (cliche) or not, you are ultimately responsible for you. there can be no other way.
> you are right. you do NOT need the freedom to buy a defective lock.
> you need the right to decide for yourself if the lock is defective or not.
This sounds like you agree with me. This kind of regulation sets a minimum, not a maximum.
We don't need freedom to buy very bad locks. We do need freedom to buy the best lock we want to buy.
But the rest of your post implies that regulation will change both minimum and maximum and mandate a specific lock. I disagree with that premise.
> (cliche)
Are you trying to imply something there?
> you are ultimately responsible for you. there can be no other way.
I am "ultimately" responsible, but product makers should have responsibilities too. If I fail at something, I should not be 0% safe. The baseline should be pretty high before I apply my own efforts.
My own father, who is in his 60s, has said blatantly to me that he will be dead before the real problems hit, so he would rather not give up his cruises, large cars and international flights - he just doesn’t even care that his grandchildren will suffer, since he personally won’t be around for it. Completely dispicable, but ultimately, asking people to do the right thing out of altruism is never going to work. Democracy will not work either because these people vote.
At least he can admit he’s being selfish I guess. I think most climate deniers, especially the older ones, simply can’t face the idea they might be responsible for terrible things happening, and don’t want to change now, so the brain latches on to any explanation that spares them that psychological pain. Thus arguing facts is pointless with these people because it’s about feelings not actual truth (as many things are with our species). The solution is to hack peoples psyche to make them “feel good” about climate change, somehow…
I see literally no issues whatsoever with that outlook unless he's the CEO of a multinational company.
Personal responsibility is pointless for climate change. The only thing that you can do - that actually impacts the climate - is to not have children. Everything else isn't even going to be a rounding error. Even if aggregated with thousands of other people abstaining as well.
The whole thing is just purely virtue signaling so people can tell themselves that they're doing something and it's the other people's fault that it keeps getting worse.
Even if everyone in your city stopped doing $whatever you're taking issue with, the climate will not be impacted.
Climate change is a global problem, nothing besides global regulation that's actually enforced will have a meaningful impact. It's just too profitable to ignore climate impact for this to change.
What you're doing is just lying to yourself if you honestly think your actions (even if aggregated to hundreds of thousands of people doing the same), will be a meaningful contribution on the issue.
And just to be clear, pollution is another story entirely. That's primarily a local issue and can be significantly improved (not solved!) through personal responsibility.
Most people don't apply your reasoning to any other moral question. Nobody thinks that killing a child is OK because it has little impact on the grand total of child deaths. They don't rationalize that some warlord in Africa will keep killing, even if they don't.
How is this any different? You are either part of the solution or part of the problem, and accountable for your actions.
My point is that the contribution to climate change is exactly proportional to your personal emissions devised by the the total.
You talk about policy Solutions, but how is that any different than personal action?
Killing is heinous act giving unparalleled suffering to others, that starts right at the moment, to many related person. Not same as one person doing nothing to reduce climate change. You are comparing apples to sky.
That firmly establishes that killing is very bad and faster. What it doesn't do is make an argument it is moral to emit large amounts of carbon that will also hurt people (but more slowly) just because other people are doing it too.
But that was the point: a person flying around the globe every week will not impact the climate significantly, even if thousands of people did the same. You're not going to achieve anything without global regulation, so trying to shame individuals is just pointless.
Agreed, though for children there’s an argument that you could have a descendent that solves climate change with some technical achievement or discovery. Seems like a long-shot though, so I wouldn’t take that bet.
To reiterate, there’s “no one simple trick” you can personally do to affect climate change. No mainstream action is worth a damn. That’s kind of the definition of a systemic issue.
Democracy will work, it's the only thing that's ever worked. Mass movements achieved pretty much anything you can think of, like better working hours, better rights for women, civil rights, end of slavery ...
Literally every (correct) example you gave is a case of people voting in their own short-term self interests, a dynamic which does not exist with global warming.
In the case of slavery, democracy didn't end this. Southern states literally seceded, and we had the bloodiest war in American history, to end slavery. And the dynamics there were that the economic systems of Northern states didn't rely on slavery, so they had little problem opposing it on moral grounds. The entire economic system of the South was built around the plantation system and slavery and so it's not surprising democracy didn't end slavery there.
The end of slavery in the United States was achieved by killing enough people who politically supported slavery in a war, that they surrendered and accepted the _de jure_ end of slavery. However, they then spent a century in a a low intensity conflict / rebellion (Reconstruction, Jim Crow, etc) against it, with significant success (unfortunately).
Democracy is not the cure all that you make it out to be.
