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ProfessorCurly posted:So, anyway. I saw the book was out of stock in amazon, does anyone know if it is still being printed/they will have more in at some point? This is the 21st century, popular books don't go out of print. Anyway it's available on Kindle.
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May 3, 2014 05:25
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Kindle Reader, by the way, can run on basically anything now. So even if you don't have a Kindle device you could read it on your phone/PC most likely. I know that might not be the way you're used to reading a book, but it might be worth a shot.
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May 3, 2014 05:43
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Yeah I've been reading the Kindle version on my android, it's pretty nice. One problem I have with it is that since you can resize the text (which is awesome), I can't seem to find a way to figure out what page I'm on exactly so it's difficult to quote stuff. There's probably a way to do this, I just haven't found it yet. One of the points that Piketty raises in the book, that I don't think I've seen much if any discussion about, is that the rate of return on capital is not equal. That is, the larger the starting fortune, the higher the rate of return on it. One of his specific examples is American university endowments (which is a great source because, one, lots of variation in size, and two, very well documented). A school like Harvard or Yale consistently gets returns of around 10 percent, whereas a school with a smaller starting endowment might get a return between 6 and 7 percent. (Piketty's table on it here (pdf); note that the returns are net of both inflation and administrative&management fees) I feel like that is a pretty important point, because it seems like a strong amplifying effect on the concentration of wealth; not only are the biggest fortunes growing the fastest in absolute terms, but also relative terms, making the game of catch-up almost impossible. This also has troubling implications for the meritocracy argument for inequality as well, because the return on fortunes like these (once you've hit a certain size threshold) doesn't rely on the "merit" of the owner in question; someone who inherits 10 billion dollars is going to make a killing just by paying experts to make money for them.
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May 3, 2014 06:46
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As someone with a background in investments/finance, I thought Piketty's point on university endowments was interesting. He's essentially arguing that the excess returns of larger endowments over smaller endowments can be explained by the former's access to higher return alternative investment strategies (e.g., private equity). These strategies are illiquid, volatile, require large minimum investments, and frequently have a long lock-up period. Smaller endowments aren't likely to be able to invest in them. I pulled the following data from an industry group study. Notice how allocations for alt. strategies go up as the size of the endowments go up? http://www.nacubo.org/Documents/EndowmentFiles/2013NCSEPressReleaseFinal.pdf (page 6)  As a side note, it's also helpful to compare endowment returns with that of the S&P over the same period. A quick Google shows an annualized real return of 9.16% for 1980-2010. In other words, outside of HYP, the average endowment regardless of size performed worse than a passive fund tracking the S&P. Obviously the S&P return doesn't take into account administrative and misc. expenses, but it's safe to guess that would/should be on the order of low double digit basis points at most.
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May 3, 2014 11:12
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shrike82 posted:In other words, outside of HYP, the average endowment regardless of size performed worse than a passive fund tracking the S&P. Isn't that true of almost all managed funds?
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May 3, 2014 13:05
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Yes, active funds tend to underperform their benchmarks after expenses. There's a reason why Buffett says that he'd like the trustee of his personal investment portfolio to be invested 90% passively in equities and 10% in fixed income after his death. Interestingly though, endowments the size of Harvard (i.e., 30 billion) have the advantage of wrangling lower expense fees for externally managed money and lower administrative costs for internally managed money due to economies of scale. The other point, which is more controversial, is that alternative investments offer excess returns at lower volatility and low correlations to other asset classes due to their illiquid nature and inaccessibility to mainstream investors. The "low correlation" feature is iffy given how for example, Harvard blew a tire in 2008 - I think it went down 30% that year. The "lower volatility" feature is also iffy given the nature of alternative investment performance reporting. Also, look up the "Yale Model" for a historical view of where the big endowments evolved from. shrike82 fucked around with this message at 13:41 on May 3, 2014 |
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May 3, 2014 13:35
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shrike82 posted:These strategies are illiquid, volatile, require large minimum investments, and frequently have a long lock-up period. While I believe that's true generally, the volatility aspect can be significantly reduced (apparently, according to Piketty) when you can afford to spend tens of millions of dollars per year paying people to identify the best investments: Piketty posted:It is interesting to note that the year-to-year volatility of these returns does not seem to be any greater for the largest endowments than for the smaller ones: the returns obtained by Harvard and Yale vary around their mean but not much more so than the returns of smaller institutions, and if one averages over several years, the mean returns of the largest institutions are systematically higher than those of the smaller ones, with a gap that remains fairly constant over time. In other words, the higher returns of the largest endowments are not due primarily to greater risk taking but to a more sophisticated invest strategy that consistently produces better results. I would also venture to guess (though I admit to not having any sources to back this up) that university endowments attempt to stay relatively safe in their investments—no one wants to be the guy that destroyed the Princeton endowment—so a private investor with a similar magnitude of funds could probably turn a slightly higher profit. I guess maybe the more important point to take home though is that the average rate of return for smaller investors is so relatively low, which combines with their relatively lower savings rate to hasten the growing of the wealth gap between the "middle class" (defined as people not in the top 10% of wealth ownership but still with something) and the top decile. I suppose that's hardly more than a footnote in the grander view of things, but one I found interesting.
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May 3, 2014 13:55
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The statement about alt strats being lower vol is not one that Piketty makes on his own or with any evidence (I looked through his Excel spreadsheets and source data for table 12.2), it's a portfolio management 101 truism which as I mentioned earlier is controversial. Also, larger endowments actually have bigger appetites for risk and volatility. To explain why, larger endowments will be drawing down a smaller percentage of their money to fund university operational expenses. Think about a 30 billion endowment with 500 million of set annual expenses versus a 5 billion endowment with the same level of expenses. The former will have the ability to take on greater levels of volatility and illiquidity in exchange for higher returns. On top of that, endowments will have higher risk appetites than pension funds and individuals because their investment time horizon is much longer term (in perpetuity).
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May 3, 2014 14:08
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shrike82 posted:The statement about alt strats being lower vol is not one that Piketty makes on his own or with any evidence (I looked through his Excel spreadsheets and source data for table 12.2), it's a portfolio management 101 truism which as I mentioned earlier is controversial. I have little background in finance and none in portfolio management so I will gladly defer to you on that first point. And I entirely agree on the second point, which I think is the main thrust of this: that larger investors can more afford to take the risks and play the waiting game to get the better returns, and thus will come out ahead of the "little guy" (going back to the point in my last post). I hadn't thought about your third point regarding the time horizon, though it makes sense. I'm not sure how much it applies versus "individuals" with similarly sized portfolios to the endowments, who obviously will never be able to spend even a fraction of that wealth anyway, rather than pension funds and small-scale individuals saving for retirement—but again I don't really know jack about this subject so I should probably just keep my mouth shut.
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May 3, 2014 14:30
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ProfessorCurly posted:So, anyway. I saw the book was out of stock in amazon, does anyone know if it is still being printed/they will have more in at some point? My copy was originally just delayed with an estimated May 2nd shipping date, now it's completely out of stock with no projected date at all. (I don't want to read an ebook edition because charts).
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May 3, 2014 15:03
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:My copy was originally just delayed with an estimated May 2nd shipping date, now it's completely out of stock with no projected date at all. (I don't want to read an ebook edition because charts). I can sympathize with not wanting to read it as an ebook, but I don't really understand why having charts comes into it? Also that sucks I hope it ships soon  .
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May 3, 2014 15:30
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z0glin Warchief posted:I can sympathize with not wanting to read it as an ebook, but I don't really understand why having charts comes into it? Also that sucks I hope it ships soon I don't like reading anything with charts, graphs, or other large images on my kindle. Small screen.
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May 3, 2014 15:31
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shrike82 posted:Yes, active funds tend to underperform their benchmarks after expenses. There's a reason why Buffett says that he'd like the trustee of his personal investment portfolio to be invested 90% passively in equities and 10% in fixed income after his death. Interestingly though, endowments the size of Harvard (i.e., 30 billion) have the advantage of wrangling lower expense fees for externally managed money and lower administrative costs for internally managed money due to economies of scale. This is not an economy of scale. This is simply a very large investor throwing its weight around to get a better deal. 'Economy of scale' would mean more participants in that particular economy, but you are talking about a single institution.
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May 3, 2014 15:36
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MickeyFinn posted:This is not an economy of scale. This is simply a very large investor throwing its weight around to get a better deal. 'Economy of scale' would mean more participants in that particular economy, but you are talking about a single institution. Eh. Economies of scale can refer to a single entity. It typically means that the fixed costs are spread across more units, in this case dollars under management.
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May 3, 2014 15:46
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:I don't like reading anything with charts, graphs, or other large images on my kindle. Small screen. I haven't started this book yet (Raising Steam comes first  ) but I read The Spirit Level on my Kindle and the charts in that were pretty easy to read on my Kindle.
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May 3, 2014 16:12
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rscott posted:I haven't started this book yet (Raising Steam comes first I read it on my phone and didn't have any issues with the charts. Why is totaling up the valuations of things the best way to count capital? I feel like it's unclear what Piketty is measuring and the fact that he uses valuations to total up the capital stock complicates the analysis. For instance, if your house doubles in value you don't have more capital. You have the same house. If you're renting that house your income on that asset doesn't double because the valuation doubles, and that applies to capital in general. So it's not clear why a change in the capital/income ratio constructed using valuations should imply the change in income share between capital and labor that Piketty assumes as an accounting entity. That is to say, if valuations increase faster than new physical capital can be created through economic growth, it's not clear why we should expect the rate of return on capital to remain constant (generating a shift in income share to capital from labor) instead of decreasing (generating an ambiguous change in income share). edit to add: I think Galbraith's review of Capital is worth reading. wateroverfire fucked around with this message at 17:44 on May 3, 2014 |
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May 3, 2014 16:46
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James Galbraith is the Randy Robitaille of Galbraiths.
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May 5, 2014 14:04
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Grand Theft Autobot posted:James Galbraith is the Randy Robitaille of Galbraiths. Haha. That doesn't make him wrong in his critique, though, does it?
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May 5, 2014 14:09
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wateroverfire posted:Haha. It's an interesting critique but I'll have to reserve detailed comment until my copy of Piketty arrives, whenever that is. I am a little hesitant to sign off on his assertion that payroll tax records are just as good a survey of historical income trends as tax records; if nothing else, payroll tax records would exclude all those people who don't pay payroll taxes, i.e., the unemployed, and all income not in the form of wages, i.e., returns on capital investments. I also have the impression, at least so far, that Piketty's proposal for an 80% top income tax rate is meant as a bit of a stalking horse / overton-window-shifter, rather than an actual immediate policy proposal.
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May 5, 2014 14:29
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wateroverfire posted:I read it on my phone and didn't have any issues with the charts. You do have more capital, though. Valued assets get used as collateral for things like loans. If the asset doubles in value then you can borrow against it again for, theoretically, double the amount of the initial loan you might have taken out against it. This means that your access to capital via the asset has doubled, and he's taking the valuation of the asset to be used as collateral as a proxy for that access to capital. There's also not a real good way to assess non-liquid capital other than a valuation. It seems like you're saying that if valuations are overinflated then it could lead to an inflated sense of capital. That's true, but good luck sorting out a bubble from regular economic activity without that bubble already having burst.
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May 5, 2014 14:46
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wateroverfire posted:Haha. I disagree with the main thrust of the critique, yes. I do in fact think that using price measurements of the capital stock is a perfectly valid approach, and Piketty explains his methodology in much greater detail, and with many of the caveats that Galbraith brings up. I tend to agree with Galbraith that the New Deal owned all the bones, and that Cambridge carried the Capital Controversy, but I don't think that is the majority viewpoint. Galbraith is criticizing Piketty for acknowledging that the CCC was ultimately deemed unimportant by mainstream economists, and MIT essentially won the long run battle in terms of academic support. I also agree that Piketty's global wealth tax is far fetched, but I agree with the rest of Piketty's policy solutions, just as Galbraith does. Mostly though, i think Galbraith is unfair in his critique of methodology. Obviously he could and should write a much longer and more detailed critique. This review, like all reviews, is much too narrow and devoid of detail relative to Piketty's book, and I think Piketty more than justifies his methodological decisions. He does so at multiple points, and he also explicitly states where the return to capital comes from. Honestly, this critique is not very strong.
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May 5, 2014 15:10
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:It's an interesting critique but I'll have to reserve detailed comment until my copy of Piketty arrives, whenever that is. I am a little hesitant to sign off on his assertion that payroll tax records are just as good a survey of historical income trends as tax records; if nothing else, payroll tax records would exclude all those people who don't pay payroll taxes, i.e., the unemployed, and all income not in the form of wages, i.e., returns on capital investments. That part of the critique came across a little peckish to me, honestly. Like Galbraith was kind of pissed that Piketty's work garnered so much more attention than his. Hieronymous Alloy posted:I also have the impression, at least so far, that Piketty's proposal for an 80% top income tax rate is meant as a bit of a stalking horse / overton-window-shifter, rather than an actual immediate policy proposal. That's not actually Piketty's proposal though he does discuss it. Piketty proposes a graduated wealth tax that starts at maybe 0.5% on fortunes less than 1 million euros, growing to maybe 10% for fortunes of many billions of euros. The actual schedule seems like a place holder to illustrate the concept and not a specific proposal for a tax scheme. Ultimately the policy section feels like ideological red meat. Piketty doesn't have a way to distinguish between socially useful fortunes that are engaged in entrepreneurial production or financing useful projects, and pure rentier activity that is dead weight - he acknowledges that problem and then goes full speed ahead anyway. He asserts that large fortunes are not useful but doesn't attempt to demonstrate it and focuses instead on the technical and political challenges to implementing the policy. There are all sorts of factors to consider. For instance, as Justin Fox observes in this older Harvard Business Review blog post, rates of return are not uniform throughout the economy. A wealth tax based on the assumption of accumulation associated with a constant rate of return is going to cause problems for industries in which the realized rate of return is less, or when short term fluctuations cause returns to be less.
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May 5, 2014 15:16
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ErIog posted:You do have more capital, though. Valued assets get used as collateral for things like loans. If the asset doubles in value then you can borrow against it again for, theoretically, double the amount of the initial loan you might have taken out against it. This means that your access to capital via the asset has doubled, and he's taking the valuation of the asset to be used as collateral as a proxy for that access to capital. You haven't created any capital in that case. You've gained an asset worth the amount of the loan that is mirrored by a liability for you. Your net capital with respect to the loan is zero. Piketty uses that same logic when describing net public capital - it's public capital minus public debt. ErIog posted:There's also not a real good way to assess non-liquid capital other than a valuation. It seems like you're saying that if valuations are overinflated then it could lead to an inflated sense of capital. That's true, but good luck sorting out a bubble from regular economic activity without that bubble already having burst. Yeah, basically. I agree it's really hard to figure out what values to use. Grand Theft Autobot posted:I disagree with the main thrust of the critique, yes. I do in fact think that using price measurements of the capital stock is a perfectly valid approach, and Piketty explains his methodology in much greater detail, and with many of the caveats that Galbraith brings up. He explains his methodology but where does he disarm that criticism?
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May 5, 2014 16:09
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wateroverfire posted:You haven't created any capital in that case. You've gained an asset worth the amount of the loan that is mirrored by a liability for you. Your net capital with respect to the loan is zero. Piketty uses that same logic when describing net public capital - it's public capital minus public debt.
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May 5, 2014 16:34
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wateroverfire posted:He explains his methodology but where does he disarm that criticism? It is disarmed in the sense that Piketty provides substantial answers to the questions raised by the criticism. Lancelot posted:He's not saying that taking out the loan increases your capital — it clearly doesn't — but that an asset doubling in market value since you purchased it represents a real increase your capital, measured in this case by lenders being more willing to lend you more against that asset. There are other easy examples: if I hold shares in a company with a gold mine, and the price of gold doubles, the company's capital doubles (and so does the capital represented by my share ownership), regardless of whether the company's actually mined and sold the gold or I've actually sold the shares. It's the reason accountants value assets in a company at their market value, rather than at cost — an increase in market value generally means a real increase in the company's capital measured in any number of ways. And, yes, this is part of Piketty's justification for his methodology. Grand Theft Autobot fucked around with this message at 17:44 on May 5, 2014 |
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May 5, 2014 17:41
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edit: dammit quote
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May 5, 2014 17:43
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Lancelot posted:He's not saying that taking out the loan increases your capital — it clearly doesn't — but that an asset doubling in market value since you purchased it represents a real increase your capital, measured in this case by lenders being more willing to lend you more against that asset. We're talking about aggregating capital - taking the value by totaling it all up. We have to consider when transactions net out. If I loan you money against your capital, our net capital position hasn't changed. The valuation of the asset is irrelevant. If you sell your asset to me then you swap your asset for my money, and again the valuation is irrelevant to the aggregation of the capital because your gain is my expenditure. Exchanges of capital can't themselves create capital so it's profoundly strange to say that capital has increased because valuations have increased. Lancelot posted:There are other easy examples: if I hold shares in a company with a gold mine, and the price of gold doubles, the company's capital doubles (and so does the capital represented by my share ownership), regardless of whether the company's actually mined and sold the gold or I've actually sold the shares. None of this is really accurate, though. Consider two real investments. The blue line is the Sprott Physical Gold Trust - an investment that basically buys gold bars and holds them. The red line is the iShares S&P TSX Global Gold Index ETF - an investment that holds stocks in gold producers. If you invested in both on March 5, 2010 and held them through today you would have extremely divergent performance because the easy relationship you're proposing doesn't hold. The value of the investments is determined by the supply and demand for each instrument and while those probably...in some way, sort of, at times, or eventually...incorporate the fundamentals there is too much noise to suss out that relationship let alone call it simple. edit: IMO, this analysis needs a way to measure the physical growth of capital (addition of new houses, factories, etc) and the accumulation of money independent of valuations. wateroverfire fucked around with this message at 16:27 on May 7, 2014 |
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May 7, 2014 16:00
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Grand Theft Autobot posted:It is disarmed in the sense that Piketty provides substantial answers to the questions raised by the criticism. Galbraith is saying he doesn't. I'm saying he doesn't. Can you point to where he does?
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May 7, 2014 16:29
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wateroverfire posted:We're talking about aggregating capital - taking the value by totaling it all up. We have to consider when transactions net out. If I loan you money against your capital, our net capital position hasn't changed. The valuation of the asset is irrelevant. If you sell your asset to me then you swap your asset for my money, and again the valuation is irrelevant to the aggregation of the capital because your gain is my expenditure. Exchanges of capital can't themselves create capital so it's profoundly strange to say that capital has increased because valuations have increased. Are you disagreeing that higher valuations lead to increased access to capital? That contradicts reality pretty clearly. Home equity lines of credit during the housing bubble would like to have a word with you, and that's on like a micro scale. The question is how to represent that increased access to capital in a model. Counting it as a basic increase in capital makes a lot of logical sense. Functionally, because of the way the world actually works, increased valuations do lead to increased access to capital. It requires the person holding the asset to opt in to receive/use the capital, but that is theoretical capital that exists that is available to that person via the asset. By your pedantry here you could also argue that any asset that isn't cash shouldn't be considered capital because accessing the capital requires liquidation. That seems very silly to me, and doesn't actually seem to mirror the way capital works or is measured in the actual economy. People use assets they own in lots of different ways for the purposes of using the capital contained within them.
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May 7, 2014 16:32
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ErIog posted:Are you disagreeing that higher valuations lead to increased access to capital? I'm saying that valuations are irrelevant when you're totaling up capital, because a change in valuation only implies that someone can swap whatever piece of capital with someone else's piece of capital at a different rate. After they swap the total amount of capital is the same. Therefore the rate at which they swap (valuation) is not relevant to the total amount of capital accumulated, which is what Piketty is concerned about.
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May 7, 2014 16:56
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It's the relative value of capital income versus other forms of income in the economy that should matter for the sake of wealth inequality. So I can see how value would be a valid metric here. Like there is no intrinsic measure of value, so generally I don't see what else we would fall back on. If people love houses in Las Vegas suburbs and drive up their price, that represents a real transfer of income to Las Vegas home owners regardless of whether it makes any sense or not.
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May 7, 2014 17:47
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Philip Mause, who is smarter and more patient than I am, has written a thoughtful critique on SeekingAlpha. Registration required to read the whole thing but it's free. He disagrees with me about valuation and raises other points.quote:1. The First Fundamental Law of Capitalism
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May 7, 2014 20:37
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wateroverfire posted:I'm saying that valuations are irrelevant when you're totaling up capital, because a change in valuation only implies that someone can swap whatever piece of capital with someone else's piece of capital at a different rate. After they swap the total amount of capital is the same. Therefore the rate at which they swap (valuation) is not relevant to the total amount of capital accumulated, which is what Piketty is concerned about. I'm glad you agree with UK Cambridge in the capital debates, now I just hope you never rely on production function concepts like elasticity of substitution of "capital" with labour
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May 7, 2014 22:09
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For those of you wondering about purchasing the book, I ordered mine directly from the Harvard University Press website on April 29, and it arrived yesterday, May 7. I had to pay full price, plus shipping, but I thought it was worth it. I get to start reading tonight. Before ordering it, I went to a Barnes & Noble to try to find it. Their computer said they had two in stock but, they weren't on the shelf. I asked a guy at the help desk; he said, "I've never heard of it, did you see it advertised somewhere?". Oh how the mighty have fallen. I mourn the death of real book stores. Here's an article from AlterNet that I ran across today; America Is Declining at the Same Warp Speed That's Minting Billionaires and Destroying the Middle Class. It's not a very good article; it rambles, has no real focus and is just a bad piece of journalism but, it made this statement that caught my attention: quote:America has the most billionaires in the world, but not a single U.S. city ranks among the world’s most livable cities. Not a single U.S. airport is among the top 100 airports in the world. Our bridges, roads and rails are falling apart, and our middle class is being gutted out thanks to three decades of stagnant wages, while the top 1 percent enjoys 95 percent of all economic gains. This was kind of startling to me so I started searching online. So the thing about billionaires in the U.S. is probably true. The statement about most livable cities is also true, if you're talking about top 10. Note that one of those surveys listed in that Wiki article uses New York city as its baseline for most livable. The statement regarding top 100 airports is just bullshit, if not an intentional lie. Even considering this error, the idea that the U.S. ranks so poorly in infrastructure is amazing to me. It shows horrible judgment in priorities. radical meme fucked around with this message at 19:45 on May 8, 2014 |
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May 8, 2014 19:18
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I think the US' air infrastructure is pretty tolerable, in that our planes never seem to go plummeting into the ocean. I think most comparisons of the US are taking into account how much better things could obviously be here. Anything that casts the place as a waking nightmare is written by someone who has never visited, or by someone who lives here but has traveled, and knows how underwhelming our quality of life is compared to most of western Europe's or Oceania's. The nightmares here are somewhat isolated and removed from the experience of a slim majority of Americans: medicine (a big loving one), poverty, surveillance, a basic disrespect for most working people. And of course having to get your wallet out eighty times a day because everything important has been privatized. Even most rich guys can't stand the feeling of being tolled and shaken down constantly, just to go about their daily business. But it's a really ordered and predictable place considering our potential for disorder, given our guns and levels of crazies. We talk a lot here about how much better things could be. But if you accept one of our forum's conclusions: that the right exerts an outsized level of influence over American society, you start to wonder why things are not way the gently caress worse. I think the US takes a hit in some rankings, because of people's incredible frustration with the fact that almost all of our problems are political ones and could be solved in a fortnight. And yet are still regarded as impossible and intractable.
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May 8, 2014 19:41
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radical meme posted:Even considering this error, the idea that the U.S. ranks so poorly in infrastructure is amazing to me. It shows horrible judgment in priorities. Some of that is that things are often used until they fail entirely. There are bulk cargo terminals in the states where gravity fed spouts are controlled by longshoreman gangs pulling on ropes, the foreman yells at them and they pull together to move the spout. That's the way they did it a hundred years ago.
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May 8, 2014 19:44
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agarjogger posted:I think the US' air infrastructure is pretty tolerable, in that our planes never seem to go plummeting into the ocean. Isolated? From a bare majority, or maybe 40% at most. Life is very hard out there for a lot of people, it just isn't presented to us that way by the media. Besides, you're considered a loser if you think and talk about how bad your situation is in a systemic sense--get out there and start a company, find work, make your boots the strappiest, etc. All problems are individual, and require individual solutions, goes the thinking. agarjogger posted:And of course having to get your wallet out eighty times a day because everything important has been privatized. Even most rich guys can't stand the feeling of being tolled and shaken down constantly, just to go about their daily business. But it's a really ordered and predictable place considering our potential for disorder, given our guns and levels of crazies. We talk a lot here about how much better things could be. But if you accept one of our forum's conclusions: that the right exerts an outsized level of influence over American society, you start to wonder why things are not way the gently caress worse. That's the thing, we are living the 'worse'. Our idea of normal is so skewed that most people can't see this. We're not living in the worst, but we are miles away from where we could be, if governed by sane, rational policies. We still allow the death penalty for gently caress's sake, how's that for rightwing influence? And we can't even pass any national legislation on climate change, which due to our position as a world leader may be helping to doom the planet and drive us to extinction. Yet it's considered settled and ok because, as you note earlier, so few people get out and see how much better it could be. "That's just the way life is, I guess." e: added URL to climate change opinions e2: death penalty correction rockopete fucked around with this message at 01:41 on May 9, 2014 |
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May 8, 2014 19:59
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BrandorKP posted:Some of that is that things are often used until they fail entirely. There are bulk cargo terminals in the states where gravity fed spouts are controlled by longshoreman gangs pulling on ropes, the foreman yells at them and they pull together to move the spout. That's the way they did it a hundred years ago. Granted, the alternative is descending into the Canadian hell where we demolish and shoddily rebuild any infrastructure over fifty years old, regardless of cost, and are losing heritage buildings at a horrific pace to be replaced by generic condominium developments. It amazed me when I went to Portland and the court house fence had a sign saying not to lean on it because it was put up in 1820. There needs to be a middle ground.
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May 9, 2014 01:27
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Rime posted:Granted, the alternative is descending into the Canadian hell where we demolish and shoddily rebuild any infrastructure over fifty years old, regardless of cost, and are losing heritage buildings at a horrific pace to be replaced by generic condominium developments. It amazed me when I went to Portland and the court house fence had a sign saying not to lean on it because it was put up in 1820. That is not the alternative. A real alternative is that we spend money where its needed, maintaining existing infrastructure, investing in new infrastructure, and also preserving culturally important landmarks. Right now, we don't really do any of this unless some jerk can make 10 points on it annually.
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May 9, 2014 01:57
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anonumos posted:That is not the alternative. A real alternative is that we spend money where its needed, maintaining existing infrastructure, investing in new infrastructure, and also preserving culturally important landmarks. Right now, we don't really do any of this unless some jerk can make 10 points on it annually. He's specifically addressing Brandor's thing about how something that works perfectly fine is also very old. (Incidentally it's a thing kept by labor unions wanting to preserve a certain job)
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May 9, 2014 02:09
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