gottorf

55 ms·

871.
by gottorf 3y ago
Nice article. I would like to add another germane point to these discussions that the article didn't mention: > back-of-the-envelope math suggests that the cost of giving each American household a battery wall unit, conservatively p
872.
by gottorf 3y ago
> Most of Kansas is probably in the latter group, and various other states like Mississippi and Alabama. Is this just a "those backwards rednecks" crack, or do you have some evidence to back this up? "Well-run" Massac
873.
by gottorf 3y ago
One current presidential hopeful has a policy position of undoing that, by having the dollar become a stable unit of measurement against real commodities. It's an interesting idea, and perhaps one more realistic than going back to the
874.
by gottorf 3y ago
> it was a military autocracy until the 1980s, at which point it made an incredible shift towards democracy and the economic growth story was one of the world’s most amazing The economic growth, or at least the seeds thereof, largely cam
875.
by gottorf 3y ago
This is why America was conceived to be a country where the central government can only exercise enumerated powers; because the framers knew that every organization eventually becomes run (at one point or all subsequent points) by corrupt,
876.
by gottorf 3y ago
> Quite a racket. No arguments from me there. Trust-busting and clamping down on anticompetitive behavior has not been a forte of the federal government in decades.
877.
by gottorf 3y ago
Hazing is the term.
878.
by gottorf 3y ago
> "yall doin okay?" Speaking as a Southerner, this sentence is so on point.
879.
by gottorf 3y ago
> The question is almost never about the cost of laying fiber vs laying copper, it's about laying a new line (fiber) or laying nothing (use existing copper). Yep, exactly. 99.99% of the cost of laying anything (underground, above gr
880.
by gottorf 3y ago
Yeah, there's a good argument to be made that the wire (be it fiber, coax, or whatever) itself should be treated as a public utility, since it is a natural monopoly. Several countries do operate like that.
881.
by gottorf 3y ago
> That restricts my possible relocation options You're underselling the problem! That would limit you to a handful (or a fistful, if we're being generous) of municipalities in the whole country. I've lived in places where
882.
by gottorf 3y ago
Management by perkele!
883.
by gottorf 3y ago
Even a libertarian would agree that some small level of taxation is necessary to fund the apparatus of the state that would enforce property rights and contracts, safeguard the border from invasion, and whatnot. One can only dream of a time
884.
by gottorf 3y ago
> as capitalism only benefits, those who own A rising tide lifts all boats, and that is what has borne out by historical fact for capitalism. The easiest way to see how it benefits everyone, even the poorest, is to look at the median per
885.
by gottorf 3y ago
> Nobody can actually believe this in good faith. Let's steelman GP's argument, which obviously was hyperbolic. But it's true that positive rights (or entitlements) are always paid for by the labor of others. K-12 public s
886.
by gottorf 3y ago
If we're talking about housing for workers specifically, Hawaii ranks near dead-last on land-use freedom[0] among the fifty states; meaning that the state as a whole is like the San Francisco Bay Area, being very difficult to build hou
887.
by gottorf 3y ago
Just because it's written on a document titled "Human Rights" doesn't make it so. The UN UDHR is really just a wish list of things that would be nice to have in any country. It is emphatically not a well thought-out lega
888.
by gottorf 3y ago
It's important to distinguish negative rights (the state cannot do X to you) from positive rights (the state is required to have X happen for you). There is a school of thought that says the latter is not really valid, since it may (or
889.
by gottorf 3y ago
> A bot pretending to be a human for the purposes of political persuasion is a crime in California. I've never heard of this. I assume the actual crime is in a human being setting up such a bot, since a bot cannot commit a crime?
890.
by gottorf 3y ago
I wish I had the time to delve a bit deeper into those case of voting restrictions, because they're both more interesting than the surface level reported by the media (which is approximately that "GOP only wants landowning white m
891.
by gottorf 3y ago
> Conservative ideology is often advocating for change > the incrementalist praxis you describe can be found in ideologies that are very far from conservatism If your argument is that conservative politics in practice aren't very
892.
by gottorf 3y ago
I've said this before and I'll say this again: computing total market capitalization by simply multiplying the last traded price by the number of shares is nonsensical, because it doesn't take into account the fact that the s
893.
by gottorf 3y ago
> Conservatism has always been opposed to democracy Conservatism distilled to its essence can probably be summarized as Chesterton's fence: to not make rash moves changing the status quo without fully understanding both the reason t
894.
by gottorf 3y ago
I may have misunderstood, but I think GP's point is that the ideal number of jobs for any productive endeavor is zero, i.e. "fully automated luxury gay space communism". If technology advances to the point where it's the
895.
by gottorf 3y ago
Consumers by and large won't consume such a product. There is a vanishingly small market for a $600 printer that doesn't suck, does its job, and respects your rights as a consumer and doesn't pull bullshit like all the other
896.
by gottorf 3y ago
Not every retailer that sits between the manufacturer and the consumer is a middleman. That is, it is literally a middleman, but not in the sense that it necessarily has to take on a rent-seeking, economically harmful role. Most manufacture
897.
by gottorf 3y ago
> The main reason the war was "good" for the economy is because of the massive debt funded stimulus Clarification: massive debt-funded stimulus that went into productive capacity is good for the economy, once you stop blowing u
898.
by gottorf 3y ago
Not comparable either qualitatively or quantitatively. The US isn't sending people to Gitmo for ethnic cleansing reasons; and Gitmo has ever had under a thousand people, whereas over a million Uyghurs are estimated to be detained.
899.
by gottorf 3y ago
> The Federal Aviation Administration said in June that it would start mandatory monthly safety training sessions for air-traffic controllers across the U.S. after a spike in near misses. > In the first two months of the year, eight i
900.
by gottorf 3y ago
I use Firefox everywhere I can, warts and all, just to avoid the Chromium monopoly. It was actually a huge bummer for me when Edge gave in and switched to Chromium; having a giant like Microsoft support a third browser engine would really h

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