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GlassEye-Boy posted:Have you seen the American response to covid? They can't even be bothered to wear a mask and stay away from restaurants even with the risk of death. I regret the truth of this statement. Even in left leaning California, something is very wrong.
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Sep 16, 2020 19:30
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Aren't they just making it official now after already firing almost all the UK based staff a few months ago?
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Sep 16, 2020 20:18
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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silence_kit posted:I think any American politician who suggests doing something like this in a non-trivial way would get crucified. Americans like things like hot water, air conditioning, heating, cheap air travel, constant availability of any type of consumer good imaginable with free two-day shipping, single-family houses, personal automobiles, constant availability of almost any kind of fresh produce, even in the winter, etc. yeah but chances are america will only turn into mad max world after i'm dead so get the gently caress off my lawn or i'll stand my ground right here and now :boomersay:
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Sep 16, 2020 20:19
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silence_kit posted:Americans like things like hot water, air conditioning, heating, cheap air travel, constant availability of any type of consumer good imaginable with free two-day shipping, single-family houses, personal automobiles, constant availability of almost any kind of fresh produce, even in the winter, etc. The implication that it's Americans that like these things, and that the French, the British, the Germans, the Japanese, the Kenyans, the South Africans, the Brazilians, the Paraguayans, the Vietnamese, etc. don't, is hilarious. The implication that the Chinese don't want them and aren't pursuing them as hard as they possibly can is *ridiculous*. Some of the other things all these groups like are non-crowded living conditions, fresh water, food, clothing, and for their kids not to die as infants or as kids working on the farm. Here, let's go back a bit. Taffer posted:This is a really big strawman. Firstly, capitalism doesn't just "produce stuff people want", it manufactures desires and then creates products to fulfill those artificial desires. The elitism, the self-importance, the sheer *arrogance* of this statement is mindblowing. It is a thing which could only be uttered by someone who has never worked a single day of backbreaking labor in his life (much like the claim that a medieval agricultural economy was so pleasant is something that could never be uttered by a person who has worked a single day at subsistence farming, let alone pre-mechanized subsistence farming). It's Bernie Sanders thinking that capitalism means 17 different kinds of deodorant, and not, say, an enormous reduction in the number of people who live in absolute poverty and enormous improvements in quality of life. It's literally Marx, who believed that there was no such thing as human nature and people are lumps of clay who can always be molded as his masters see fit. (Here's but one example of how pleasant pre-industrial societies were: https://imgur.com/a/6b9LrP0) quote:it's entirely to do with their security in access to food, housing, and healthcare, all things that capitalism is uniquely bad at providing to people who are experiencing poverty. This is, to put it lightly, a pile of horseshit. No other economic system has proven itself as unique good at lifting people out of the poverty you decry. 30 years ago, more than half of the global population lived in abject poverty. More than half. That has dropped *enormously*, and it's not command economies that made it happen, it's allowing people to set their own economic priorities and decide what they want to do with their labor and their resources. India and China are the two biggest arguments against what you just said there. China didn't start to get wealthy until it abandoned agricultural collectivization, price controls, restrictions on capital investment, nationalization of industries, etc. Seriously, you can look at the Great Leap Forward and claim that capitalism is "uniquely bad" at *feeding people*? The loving Soviet Union relied on grain exports from the west to avoid famine. Jesus Christ, put down the Howard Zinn and read another book.  And then the amazing, the really amazing thing is that right after talking about how people are mindless dupes, mere robots who do not have wants, desires, goals of their own but are merely cogs in a consumption machine who buy things like clothes, food, soccer balls, airline tickets, central heating systems, and quadraphonic Blaupunkts because some guy in a suit with an MBA told them to buy those things, you turn around and say this: Taffer posted:This is a really important point, and one I tried to capture (maybe poorly) in a previous post. There's a lot of hand-wringing and finger-wagging done at countries like China or India or other rapidly industrializing countries about how much they're polluting by the "first world", but on a per-capita level even these perceived horrible polluters are far below the US, Canada, UK, Germany, etc. Not only that, but these countries have a right to pull themselves out of poverty, they have a right to bootstrap their industry and resources to a point where they can transition to more sustainable things. Right after you just got done saying they'd be happier living in poverty, and that they don't really want the things they're pursuing, they've just been duped into thinking they do. Taffer posted:I'm really, really baffled how you and other posters seem incapable of imagining any economic system that isn't either maximum capitalism, maximum command economy, or medieval feudalism. You do know that there are other means of organizing economic activity... right? I think it's pretty obvious that there are other means of organizing economic activity than maximum capitalism and maximum command economy. When you said "Capitalism is the primary cause of the mess we're in," which system were you referring to? Because "maximum capitalism" is not something we have and not a system that anyone has operated under on a nation-state scale. So perhaps you meant something very different than I interpreted you as meaning. Maybe it would be better to have this discussion without actually using the word "capitalism." So okay, what did you mean when you used the word? Phanatic fucked around with this message at 21:05 on Sep 16, 2020 |
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Sep 16, 2020 20:54
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Phanatic posted:The elitism, the self-importance, the sheer *arrogance* of this statement is mindblowing. It is a thing which could only be uttered by someone who has never worked a single day of backbreaking labor in his life (much like the claim that a medieval agricultural economy was so pleasant is something that could never be uttered by a person who has worked a single day at subsistence farming, let alone pre-mechanized subsistence farming). It's Bernie Sanders thinking that capitalism means 17 different kinds of deodorant, and not, say, an enormous reduction in the number of people who live in absolute poverty and enormous improvements in quality of life. It's literally Marx, who believed that there was no such thing as human nature and people are lumps of clay who can always be molded as his masters see fit. Dude, this is elitism, too. Bernie Sanders isn't wrong. And that Marx quote is double  because that's literally what the Capitalism for All, Socialism for the Elite of the United States demands of people. The reality is Capitalism IS by and large responsible for massive portions of Climate change.The idea that we should improve people's lives doesn't counter that we need to do so more responsibly because the end result of improving people's lives at the cost of the environment is a total collapse in the ability of the environment to now support those people's improved lives. And given that we are on the very edge of a blooming climate disaster, how much more improvements you think reckless energy policies are going to result in before the crashing environment wipes out any benefit? Take for example, say, burning down the Brazilian Rainforest, oh sure it'll improve someone's life for a short period....afterwords the net negative of destroying the lungs of the loving planet will make that short improvement seem like a waking dream before a ecological nightmare. CommieGIR fucked around with this message at 21:07 on Sep 16, 2020 |
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Sep 16, 2020 21:01
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Ahahahaha posting the poverty chart in 2020 what a card, go back to the 90's Francis
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Sep 16, 2020 21:03
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When you have definitely read Marx and Sanders
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Sep 16, 2020 21:03
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CommieGIR posted:Dude, this is elitism, too. Bernie Sanders isn't wrong. And that Marx quote is double 1. It wasn't a quote, it was a summation. If you want me to quote his 1845 theses, I can. 2. "Capitalism for All, Socialism for the Elite" is also an abomination. quote:The reality is Capitalism IS by and large responsible for massive portions of Climate change. This is a content-free statement. Non-capitalism is also by an large responsible for massive portions of climate change. quote:The idea that we should improve people's lives doesn't counter that we need to do so more responsibly because the end result of improving people's lives at the cost of the environment is a total collapse in the ability of the environment to now support those people's improved lives. Serious question: If we can improve peoples' lives today, but this would cause trouble further down the road, would you argue that we should not improve peoples' lives today? Like, for example, if we could reduce poverty in Kraplachistan by burning natural gas, would you argue to the people in Kraplachistan "Sorry, folks, we don't want more CO2 in our air so you should keep living in the mud?" Wouldn't that make Norman Borlaug history's greatest monster, then? In point of fact, "improve peoples' lives today" and "prevent economic collapse' are not mutually exclusive choices, which is really what frustrates so much about this debate. Anthropogenic climate change is a real actual thing, but even if it were not, *we should be doing the same things*. There's enough abundance on this planet to make everyone wealthy enough that they stop having so many kids and reach first-world level of comfort. quote:And given that we are on the very edge of a blooming climate disaster, how much more improvements you think reckless energy policies are going to result in before the crashing environment wipes out any benefit? What reckless energy policies do you believe I support? quote:Take for example, say, burning down the Brazilian Rainforest, oh sure it'll improve someone's life for a short period....afterwords the net negative of destroying the lungs of the loving planet will make that short improvement seem like a waking dream before a ecological nightmare. The Brazilian rainforests are not the "lungs of the loving planet" and every bit of oxygen they release into the air is then consumed by the Brazilian rainforests. Their net impact on atmospheric oxygen is about zero, and the value of the Brazilian rainforest is not the oxygen it produces. https://www.factcheck.org/2019/09/amazon-doesnt-produce-20-of-earths-oxygen/ You do this a lot: you attack others for ignoring the science but you really just repeat things you've heard that you half-understand and don't have any regard for the science yourself. And then when the science tells you something you don't like (like when you make claims like "billions dead unless we eliminate all fossil fuels in a couple of decades") that greatly exceed what "the science" currently sells us, you kick science to the curb and just go with your gut. Your fervor is religious in nature.
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Sep 16, 2020 21:29
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Phanatic posted:The Brazilian rainforests are not the "lungs of the loving planet" and every bit of oxygen they release into the air is then consumed by the Brazilian rainforests. Their net impact on atmospheric oxygen is about zero, and the value of the Brazilian rainforest is not the oxygen it produces. Carbon. Not Oxygen. Carbon. But given you are spending most of your time lashing out at people because they insulted your favorite economic system, apparently, I kinda figured you'd misunderstand that. You openly made an assumption and it was completely wrong. https://phys.org/news/2019-11-forests-amazon-important-carbon.html Phanatic posted:You do this a lot: you attack others for ignoring the science but you really just repeat things you've heard that you half-understand and don't have any regard for the science yourself. And then when the science tells you something you don't like (like when you make claims like "billions dead unless we eliminate all fossil fuels in a couple of decades") that greatly exceed what "the science" currently sells us, you kick science to the curb and just go with your gut. Your fervor is religious in nature. So do you, and here we are with you throwing a temper tantrum about socialism, to the point you made a loving pathetic statement about Bernie Sanders. For one willing to slander everyone who questions them, you are really bad about it yourself. Phanatic posted:Serious question: If we can improve peoples' lives today, but this would cause trouble further down the road, would you argue that we should not improve peoples' lives today? Like, for example, if we could reduce poverty in Kraplachistan by burning natural gas, would you argue to the people in Kraplachistan "Sorry, folks, we don't want more CO2 in our air so you should keep living in the mud?" So, just so we're clear: Overpopulation is a myth, you know that right? Having less kids isn't actually going to solve the climate issue, because the vast majority of emissions are driving by the top 10% of wealth, not the lower 90%. But how the gently caress you intend to lift these people out of poverty while also ignoring that them leaving poverty means actually providing an environment and ecosystem that actually functions is outright baffling. "Hey, your not in poverty anymore, sure we had to basically destroy the environment to make it happen, and it will inevitably increase suffering overall as the climate worsens, but enjoy your brief reprieve." There's no loving economy on a dead planet. Lifting people out of poverty is a noble goal, but its incredibly short sighted to pretend we have the luxury of just accepting any method to do that given how close we are to the edge. CommieGIR fucked around with this message at 21:44 on Sep 16, 2020 |
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Sep 16, 2020 21:31
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Phanatic posted:The implication that it's Americans that like these things, and that the French, the British, the Germans, the Japanese, the Kenyans, the South Africans, the Brazilians, the Paraguayans, the Vietnamese, etc. don't, is hilarious. The implication that the Chinese don't want them and aren't pursuing them as hard as they possibly can is *ridiculous*. Some of the other things all these groups like are non-crowded living conditions, fresh water, food, clothing, and for their kids not to die as infants or as kids working on the farm. I'm not making that implication. I agree with the above quoted statement, and am suspicious of the claim that Americans (and others) have been brainwashed into believing that they should like the following things: silence_kit posted:hot water, air conditioning, heating, cheap air travel, constant availability of any type of consumer good imaginable with free two-day shipping, single-family houses, personal automobiles, constant availability of almost any kind of fresh produce, even in the winter, etc.
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Sep 16, 2020 22:05
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Air travel, cars, and detached single-family housing really are stupid luxuries nobody needs to be fair, and Americans are uniquely into them even among other first world nations
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Sep 16, 2020 22:13
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Crazycryodude posted:Air travel, cars, and detached single-family housing really are stupid luxuries nobody needs to be fair, and Americans are uniquely into them even among other first world nations Single-family zoning laws are definitely a thing that needs to be done away with.
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Sep 16, 2020 22:19
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Phanatic posted:Single-family zoning laws are definitely a thing that needs to be done away with. This will most probably never happen in our lifetime.
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Sep 16, 2020 22:20
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Phanatic posted:The elitism, the self-importance, the sheer *arrogance* of this statement is mindblowing. It is a thing which could only be uttered by someone who has never worked a single day of backbreaking labor in his life (much like the claim that a medieval agricultural economy was so pleasant is something that could never be uttered by a person who has worked a single day at subsistence farming, let alone pre-mechanized subsistence farming). It's Bernie Sanders thinking that capitalism means 17 different kinds of deodorant, and not, say, an enormous reduction in the number of people who live in absolute poverty and enormous improvements in quality of life. It's literally Marx, who believed that there was no such thing as human nature and people are lumps of clay who can always be molded as his masters see fit. Do you think I'm saying that people are tricked into wanting food and healthcare? lol I'm saying capitalism overproduces beyond natural needs and wants because it has a requirement to ceaselessly grow, so it manufactures desires for things to that people would normally not care about. Phanatic posted:This is, to put it lightly, a pile of horseshit. No other economic system has proven itself as unique good at lifting people out of the poverty you decry. 30 years ago, more than half of the global population lived in abject poverty. More than half. That has dropped *enormously*, and it's not command economies that made it happen, it's allowing people to set their own economic priorities and decide what they want to do with their labor and their resources. India and China are the two biggest arguments against what you just said there. China didn't start to get wealthy until it abandoned agricultural collectivization, price controls, restrictions on capital investment, nationalization of industries, etc. Most poverty stats are completely BS, using horrible stat massaging and bad indicators. And some of the biggest reductions in poverty that happened around the world were in explicitly non-capitalist places, like post-revolutionary Russia and China. I've never read Howard Zinn  , but this is a very interesting topic that Jason Hickel talks a lot about.Phanatic posted:And then the amazing, the really amazing thing is that right after talking about how people are mindless dupes, mere robots who do not have wants, desires, goals of their own but are merely cogs in a consumption machine who buy things like clothes, food, soccer balls, airline tickets, central heating systems, and quadraphonic Blaupunkts because some guy in a suit with an MBA told them to buy those things, you turn around and say this: Are you suggesting that people aren't influenced by media and advertising? umm, okay  Phanatic posted:I think it's pretty obvious that there are other means of organizing economic activity than maximum capitalism and maximum command economy. When you said "Capitalism is the primary cause of the mess we're in," which system were you referring to? Because "maximum capitalism" is not something we have and not a system that anyone has operated under on a nation-state scale. So perhaps you meant something very different than I interpreted you as meaning. Maybe it would be better to have this discussion without actually using the word "capitalism." So okay, what did you mean when you used the word? You know exactly what I meant, don't be pedantic. I meant the system we live under, neoliberalism. Heavily state-protected capital that is highly concentrated in an upper class.
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Sep 16, 2020 22:36
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Taffer posted:Do you think I'm saying that people are tricked into wanting food and healthcare? lol I'm saying that there is a set of material things that you consider desire for to be legitimate, and a set of material things that you consider desire for to be illegitimate, and that if people want things in the second set you think that's because they're dummies who have been duped and not because they actually want those things. quote:Are you suggesting that people aren't influenced by media and advertising? umm, okay Are you saying that all you meant when you said "Capitalism doesn't just produce things people want, it manufactures desires and then creates products to fulfill those artificial desires" is that "people are influenced by media and advertising"? Because those are two very different statements. quote:You know exactly what I meant, don't be pedantic. I meant the system we live under, neoliberalism. Heavily state-protected capital that is highly concentrated in an upper class. Neoliberalism is also a word that has a bunch of different meanings. On one set, I detest neoliberalism. On another set, neoliberalism is good. "State-protected capital" can mean "If you invest in the market and lose the state will bail you out," which is detestable, or it can mean "the cops will protect your factory from thieves and arsonists," which is literally one of the most fundamental and legitimate functions of a state. Can you define what you mean using descriptions instead of vague labels? It's very possible I agree with you in at least some of the sense that you mean.
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Sep 16, 2020 23:01
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Harold Fjord posted:Yeah. Nuclear has the least impact for energy in every measure we should give a poo poo about It would help the PR situation if the industry didn't break operating plants and then store the waste near a beach. (San Onofre).
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Sep 16, 2020 23:05
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Solvent posted:You know, now that I’m writing that out, has anybody heard of these tiny spent fuel reactors I’m thinking of? They can't find a place that will take and/or they don't want to spend the $$$.  I'm friends with a fellow who worked construction on this and frankly it sounded like a real poo poo-show. Lots of sloppy mistakes.
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Sep 16, 2020 23:10
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Solvent posted:Wait, so it IS possible to just set a breeder reactor up at San Onofre? Safe Salt reactor fueled by the waste might make sense.
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Sep 16, 2020 23:13
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Nobody needs 27 brands of toothpaste, I promise you the Colgate vs. Crest vs. Pepsodent vs. Oral-B split has nothing to do with an actual human need that can't be met by 1/10th as many kinds of toothpaste. That's what manufacturing demand means. Go ahead and tell me to read someone besides Zinn (lol who the gently caress reads Howard Zinn and/or thinks they're some kind of leading light on the left) if you want I'm a very powerful poster who can take it.
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Sep 16, 2020 23:17
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Crazycryodude posted:Lol if you think the US is a democracy, lol if you think the US isn't a command economy run by a dozen billionaires and their lobbyists, lol if you think China going from "agrarian backwater intentionally gutted and kept down by the empires of the time" to "modern world superpower" in a single human lifetime while also unfucking their environment at the same time is somehow an indictment of their economic policy. Yes, they hosed their environment pretty bad, so did we, over the course of centuries, far worse than they ever could hope to, but that was before any of us were born and now that they have the GALL to demand "hey why can't we have nice things too" they're the evil ones? At least they're making an attempt to mitigate and fix the damage industrialization inherently causes, we're just slamming the throttle to full emergency power and riding this poo poo into the ground. OVER 1/2 the CO2 emitted has been emitted since the release of the documentary "An Inconvenient Truth." When you think about that, it's rather recursive.
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Sep 16, 2020 23:19
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Bitcoin is maybe the quintessential example of how capitalism doesn't give a gently caress about the environment. It's a system that has essentially no value but generates massive CO2 emissions from lonely nerds chasing a buck in a system that is literally designed to waste resources. And I really do mean "literally"; the whole point of proof of work is to be wasteful, that's not a side effect it's the design goal. People are wrecking the environment with entire warehouses full of servers doing pointless work because it is profitable to do so. It is an example capitalism doing the opposite of allocating resources efficiently
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Sep 16, 2020 23:22
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Wasting more electricity than the entire nation of Ireland consumes so I can trade Sudokus for drugs on the internet This is a very efficient and sustainable system go read a book sweaty Crazycryodude fucked around with this message at 23:26 on Sep 16, 2020 |
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Sep 16, 2020 23:23
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Crazycryodude posted:Nobody needs 27 brands of toothpaste, I promise you The point isn't that people need 27 different brands of toothpaste. The point is that some set of planners have no idea how much toothpaste people want and no idea how to make toothpaste efficiently. That kind of knowledge comes through market signals which includes things like prices, and if you want the 5-Year Subcommittee on Mouthwash, Toothpaste, and Dentrifices to specify the production of exactly the right number of brands of toothpaste you're going to distort those market signals into unintelligibility and depriving themselves of exactly the information they need to make the correct decision and they're going to get it wrong. You're going to end up with a toothpaste shortage that has peoples teeth rotting out of their skull or you're going to wind up with a massive overabundance of toothpaste that tastes like chalk mixed with dogshit and doesn't have any actual fluoride in it anyway. Or, if you do things the "neoliberal" way, you're going to license toothpaste manufacturers so you don't want up with 27 different brands of toothpaste and then the people who write the toothpaste manufacturing licenses are going to be issuing those licenses to their former fraternity brothers and wind up with sweet VP jobs in toothpaste companies when they leave government service. QuarkJets posted:Bitcoin is maybe the quintessential example of how capitalism doesn't give a gently caress about the environment. It's a system that has essentially no value but generates massive CO2 emissions from lonely nerds chasing a buck in a system that is literally designed to waste resources. And I really do mean "literally"; the whole point of proof of work is to be wasteful, that's not a side effect it's the design goal. People are wrecking the environment with entire warehouses full of servers doing pointless work because it is profitable to do so. No, it isn't, and economists would tell you that markets work efficiently when the costs of a product/behavior/service/whatever are paid by the people who use them. Which is why we should have a carbon tax, so that the cost of burning the coal to power your GPUs is something you actually pay when you get your electricity bill at the end of the month, and not a cost you avoid paying by foisting it off on people all over the world. Phanatic fucked around with this message at 23:37 on Sep 16, 2020 |
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Sep 16, 2020 23:34
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80 years ago when the most complex administrative tools were telegraph lines and slide rules maybe, but these days WalMart and Amazon know exactly how much toothpaste every part of the planet they have a presence in consumes and have vast centrally planned planet-wide logistical networks to acquire and transport just the right amounts to just the right places. Large sections of the planetary economy and logistics are centrally planned already, the benefits just go to the like three private companies that got to that point first instead of being planned to maximize human welfare.
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Sep 16, 2020 23:40
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Crazycryodude posted:80 years ago when the most complex administrative tools were telegraph lines and slide rules maybe, but these days WalMart and Amazon know exactly how much toothpaste every part of the planet they have a presence in consumes . Walmart and Amazon have no idea how to make toothpaste. Walmart and Amazon don't even know how to make the cap on the end of the toothpaste tube. Your argument here can't possibly be "let Amazon determine how much toothpaste people get and from what brand."
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Sep 16, 2020 23:41
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They already do that, it's just currently they've decided that "people with X amount of money" get toothpaste instead of "people with X amount of teeth" get toothpaste
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Sep 16, 2020 23:51
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Phanatic posted:No, it isn't, and economists would tell you that markets work efficiently when the costs of a product/behavior/service/whatever are paid by the people who use them. Which is why we should have a carbon tax, so that the cost of burning the coal to power your GPUs is something you actually pay when you get your electricity bill at the end of the month, and not a cost you avoid paying by foisting it off on people all over the world. Yes it would be great to have a worldwide carbon tax that can internalize those costs. The fact that capitalism permits those kinds of externalities is a massive shortcoming. This shortcoming is why breathtakingly wasteful systems like bitcoin exist When economists tell you that markets work more efficiently when there are no externalities they are not saying that capitalism is somehow free of this flaw. Rather, they are recommending policies that can cover these kinds of known shortcomings. They are explicitly acknowledging this flaw.
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Sep 17, 2020 00:38
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Phanatic posted:No, it isn't, and economists would tell you that markets work efficiently when the costs of a product/behavior/service/whatever are paid by the people who use them. Markets do not create efficiency. This has been well known since the dawn of capitalism, it blows my mind that people still believe this. They are easily manipulated make-believe that exist solely to maximize the profit of the owners of the means of production. That's it. Letting 5 toothpaste companies compete does not give you the most efficiently produced product, it gives you the most well marketed product made by the most ruthless company who will stop at nothing to crush their competitors. This is not a process that makes things cheap, it's a process that makes things expensive. Also, without rigid constraints (that are being dismantled at a horrifying pace right now) there's a very high chance the toothpaste will have meth in it, because it makes you feel good. To believe that a deviation from this system will result in quote:if you want the 5-Year Subcommittee on Mouthwash, Toothpaste, and Dentrifices to specify the production of exactly the right number of brands of toothpaste you're going to distort those market signals into unintelligibility and depriving themselves of exactly the information they need to make the correct decision and they're going to get it wrong. You're going to end up with a toothpaste shortage that has peoples teeth rotting out of their skull or you're going to wind up with a massive overabundance of toothpaste that tastes like chalk mixed with dogshit and doesn't have any actual fluoride in it anyway Again I ask, why can you not imagine a system besides current capitalism and command economies? e: and that whole thought experiment assumes there ARE competitors. So much of our current corporate landscape is dominated by monopolies, which can be as inefficient as they drat well please, because no new company can pose a threat to them. Taffer fucked around with this message at 01:02 on Sep 17, 2020 |
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Sep 17, 2020 00:58
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Btw a lot of the decline in poverty in during the later Cold War and more recently happened under economies that were fairly centralized state capitalist regimes anyway. Also, the failures/shortages in central planning in specifically the Soviet Union were usually far more complex than they appear (and probably would require their own thread). It isn't that the Soviets didn't know how to make toothpaste (for example) is that often the state would only devote some many resources to producing it compared to other products (or just a lot of tanks).
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Sep 17, 2020 01:29
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I feel like how many toothpaste brands are available in a store is not pertinent to the actual issue at hand, as to whether increased electricity demand on a per capita basis constitutes 'manufactured demand' or not. There are two aspects here that could be in question. One is whether things like AC, refrigeration, water heating and laundry machines count as essentials or not. The other is the extent to which these uses as opposed to fancy widescreen TVs or Alexas or what have you is driving increases in per capita load, possibly allowing for taking into account manufacturing or data centers as opposed to pure direct residential load.
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Sep 17, 2020 03:02
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FreeKillB posted:I feel like how many toothpaste brands are available in a store is not pertinent to the actual issue at hand, as to whether increased electricity demand on a per capita basis constitutes 'manufactured demand' or not. Was there a recorded drop in Co2 output or electricity use over the past few months of the pandemic? Travel and other expenditures must have been way down. As well as restaurants and manufacturing sites being shut down.
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Sep 17, 2020 03:44
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Crazycryodude posted:Nobody needs 27 brands of toothpaste, I promise you the Colgate vs. Crest vs. Pepsodent vs. Oral-B split has nothing to do with an actual human need that can't be met by 1/10th as many kinds of toothpaste. That's what manufacturing demand means. Go ahead and tell me to read someone besides Zinn (lol who the gently caress reads Howard Zinn and/or thinks they're some kind of leading light on the left) if you want I'm a very powerful poster who can take it. I'm not sure this is a good example for why it is bad for private business to manufacture demand. It seems to me that manufacturing demand for oral hygiene products is a undeniable good, because it supports the mission of improving public health. If the economy is already producing sufficient toothpaste it's not like there's any point in making more. Better to spend resources finding people who for whatever reason aren't using it, and get it to them. Or creating mouthwash and educating people as to its benefits. Does having a million different slight variants on toothbrush shape or toothpaste flavour help convince that stubborn 5% of people who hate being told what to do to start brushing? These are practical questions, not merely theoretical.
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Sep 17, 2020 03:49
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Bitcoin is loving worthless. It should be easily priced out if we ever pretended to give a poo poo about carbon. Meanwhile I support banning it.
Harold Fjord fucked around with this message at 03:54 on Sep 17, 2020 |
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Sep 17, 2020 03:52
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"efficiency" is an unfortunately overloaded word. "Market Efficiency" in the academic sense means efficiency in incorporating information, not efficiency of actual production. That is, how rapidly (and accurately) do prices in the market reflect the reality of its inputs; it has nothing to do with how cheaply you can manufacture product X. Theories of market efficiency want to show that it is very good at incorporating and acting correctly on changing information - more efficient, proponents will say, than a centrally planned non-market economy. Efficiency of manufacturing is the more commonly understood use of the term, where "efficient" is synonymous with "low overhead". Market proponents will suggest that competition provides natural incentive to lower manufacturing costs. This is obviously true; competition also provides incentive for fraud, marketing, regulatory capture, theft, sabotage, collusion, and other unsavory things which are readily ignored by market proponents. However, it's basically impossible to argue that someone won't be rewarded in a market economy if a cheaper manufacturing process is invented (though the rewardee may not ultimately be the inventor). The odd thing that's been pointed out is that, when looking at the overall economy, competition should also result in duplicating efforts and creating waste, thus leading to possibly higher overheads in the economy in total. Market proponents will argue, on the other hand, that this duplication is short-lived and that the market rapidly picks the most cost-effective process, whereas a non-market economy provides little-to-no motivation to lower prices in this particular way, because the rewards for doing so are too abstract for the individual innovator. Thus, they argue that the market economy is far more overhead efficient in the long run. So, in order to be more "efficient" in terms of manufacturing, any central economy is going to want a good way to focus its R&D where it will have impact and actually lower costs over time. In order to be more "efficient" in the information sense of the word, the central economy is going to need a good way to gather and compute all information rapidly and regularly. I don't have a specific answer for production efficiency, but its not hard to imagine possibilities for this. As for information efficiency, while I'll buy the argument that central computation which was previously impossible is now eminently possible, I don't think there's a better way to gather preference information from consumers than the basic trading in a market.
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Sep 17, 2020 04:18
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Phanatic posted:Single-family zoning laws are definitely a thing that needs to be done away with. GlassEye-Boy posted:This will most probably never happen in our lifetime. Minneapolis and Portland eliminated single family zoning this year. It keeps getting brought up in California but eventually some kind of bill will eventually pass.
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Sep 17, 2020 05:09
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QuarkJets posted:Yes it would be great to have a worldwide carbon tax that can internalize those costs. The fact that capitalism permits those kinds of externalities is a massive shortcoming. Other economics systems don't somehow automatically measure carbon emissions or even other forms of pollution.
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Sep 17, 2020 05:12
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Big News, BP published their Energy Outlook. This is a huge change compared to a few years ago.  Energy Outlook. Gucci Loafers fucked around with this message at 05:38 on Sep 17, 2020 |
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Sep 17, 2020 05:22
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Gabriel S. posted:Other economics systems don't somehow automatically measure carbon emissions or even other forms of pollution. So? The point is that we must enact policy to ensure that this kind of shortcoming is handled. People who believe that the market will solve global warming all on its own are living in denial And the executives and politicians who actively work against enacting this kind of policy should all be launched into the sun
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Sep 17, 2020 05:31
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QuarkJets posted:So? The point is that we must enact policy to ensure that this kind of shortcoming is handled. People who believe that the market will solve global warming all on its own are living in denial. The point is that anyone screaming that the cause of our environmental woes is capitalism is wrong and should also be launched into the sun.
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Sep 17, 2020 05:36
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~130 EJ a year from oil gas and coal in a 'net-zero' scenario huh? do they explain that? is it the typical "a magic BECCS will appear" ?
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Sep 17, 2020 05:37
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