brc

50 ms·

481.
by brc 12y ago
For the record I appreciated your comment but can't reply there. It shows a willingness to consider a position. I'm guessing you're probably young, and young people have a torrent of "the end of the world is nigh"
482.
by brc 12y ago
This is merely recycling the argument ad infinitum. All these predictions are wrong. They are all wrong because of an unexpected development. The OP says Malthus was right, but for the discovery of cheap energy. Maybe an Ehrlich suppor
483.
by brc 12y ago
>Thomas Robert Malthus has not been proven wrong yet. Ah, yes he has, and so has Ehrlich and every other 'the world is ending' doomsayer that ever walked. Does the human race have problems? Well, obviously. deep seated religio
484.
by brc 12y ago
Of course the very idea of it is ridiculous. Elevating humans to the scale of geological forces is vanity in the extreme.
485.
by brc 12y ago
The Pacific Ocean is finite, but if I try and empty it with a bucket or even a fire truck, it might as well be infinite. Most explanations of 'peak' hydrocarbons make two errors - the first is that they don't understand what
486.
by brc 12y ago
It is a fallacy because most consumption can only be postponed for an indefinite amount of time. If I need a fridge because my old one is broken or I just moved house, then I need a fridge. I'm not going to go without for 6 months be
487.
by brc 12y ago
I stopped believing when nobody could provide me with an economy that collapsed due to deflationary spiral, but dead economies from inflationary spirals happen several times per century, right up until the current day. There is, however, ev
488.
by brc 12y ago
Wages are already falling in real terms in many cases. There is a certain part of human psychology that locks onto numbers (I was paid x, therefore I should continue to be paid x) which perhaps explains the aversion to deflation. I think p
489.
by brc 12y ago
While the Quattro has gone up in value, so has every other classic car worth buying, especially rare homologation specials. So it's not necessarily the market rediscovering the Quattro (which has never been 'lost') but QE mo
490.
by brc 12y ago
That's the sound of a long bow being drawn.
491.
by brc 12y ago
If you think formula 1 cars are identical, you're not really paying attention. They look the same in the way a Lenovo and an Apple look the same. There are rules on track and wheelbase, crash structure and aero wing size that tend to d
492.
by brc 12y ago
English is an open source language. It gets extended as needed. Schadenfreude is a word with no equivalent in English, so a big number of English people use schadenfreude as a direct way of expressing the concept. As long as the language
493.
by brc 12y ago
Catching up to London in the 1930s...or was it 1950s? Burning lots of coal in dated power stations next to a city is a bad idea for the residents health.
494.
by brc 12y ago
It would be great to have this in interview transcript form, like the Founders at Work book. I push that onto all sorts of people. Founders at Work 2.0 is definitely a must-do project, even if it's just a blog series and not a dead-t
495.
by brc 12y ago
I have a friend who is a senior pilot with a large airline, and the drinking/hazing/partying stories he told me from his younger years were eye-widening. They generally all try and stay sober for the pre-flight period, but outsid
496.
by brc 12y ago
The issue with that is that the pilot can be tortured/blackmailed until they give up the password/code. The point with the designs now is that once they are locked, they stay locked, and no amount of killing hostages gets it opene
497.
by brc 12y ago
Nobody considered a terrorist suicide by flying the plane into a building until it happened. So they made the doors lockable so that nothing passengers did could get them into the cockpit. During that they obviously didn't think that
498.
by brc 12y ago
The Egyptair flight had the crashing pilot saying prayers to Allah all the way down, captured on the voice recorder. The engines were shut off and the other officer was fighting the stick all the way down. There is zero doubt as to what hap
499.
by brc 12y ago
Why do you think serving is an undeserving job? Each person being paid to do some type of task has a job. That is better than being unemployed. It's wrong to make value judgements on the way people make money in an honest job. A per
500.
by brc 12y ago
This is essentially the 'too many of you, just enough of me' argument. If you want to cap populations on cities, then do so explicitly and not through back-door means. Otherwise you have to let them ebb and flow as people desire.
501.
by brc 12y ago
Real poverty rate- measured by cost of essentials to income. The static list measures by income - assuming that costs are the same across areas. Which isn't true.
502.
by brc 12y ago
Not really. Walt Disney bought up a pile of unwanted swamp and made a company town. It doesn't even go close to 'cornering the market'. They just own a big chunk of land.
503.
by brc 12y ago
No, they wouldn't. They couldn't. Nobody has enough money. Besides, you can you have a constrained space in a free market? I'm dissapointed this type of thinking still pops up. The whole point of this article is to discuss
504.
by brc 12y ago
Sensible market release would cause markets to stagnate while new supply was introduced. It would be impossible to build enough supply to overwhelm demand anyway if it is done realistically.
505.
by brc 12y ago
No. There isn't anyone with enough money. Just to by a simple suburban street takes millions and millions. Even someone with the cash resources of Apple could maybe get one or two suburbs of San Francisco before the prices started risi
506.
by brc 12y ago
For a property owning corporation, it might not be the best thing. However, in a free market, there wouldn't be anything they could do about it. Competition is supposed to reduce the profits of any industry over time. Barriers to
507.
by brc 12y ago
Correlation does not equal causation. Technology multipliers are the cause of income disparity.
508.
by brc 12y ago
Don't forget this one : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concorde
509.
by brc 12y ago
That is the number 1 reason for the interstate system. It's also why Germany built the autobahn. The peacetime/domestic benefits were considered secondary.
510.
by brc 12y ago
I don't care about up-votes or down votes. I hope 1 person reads my comments and thinks. Look at the parent comment - it uses name calling and labels to advance the argument. That is not science. The entire topic was raised as possi

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