makomk

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331.
by makomk 4y ago
To the kind of left-wing populist involved in things like Occupy Wall Street, reducing wealth and income inequality is the tangible goal that they believe achieves the outcomes they want. Their thinking seems to be roughly like this: there
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by makomk 4y ago
This doesn't work when the economy is already close to full employment, full consumption of available energy, and full capacity on critical parts like ICs which it's hard to expand the production of. Without any excess slack to in
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by makomk 4y ago
There is no such place. American gun control advocates like to point to the UK, where we completely banned (certain kinds of) gun after a major school shooting and haven't had any since, but there's been enough near-misses where s
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by makomk 4y ago
The thick, heavily reinforced roads with stabilized foundations generally have much nicer surfaces to cycle on than narrow cycle paths though, at least around here. Probably because a lot of the deterioration is caused by weather rather tha
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by makomk 4y ago
Pretty sure that argument doesn't actually work, though the reason why is a little subtle. Sure, the money doesn't stop at its first use, but whatever goods or services the money is spent on by consumers do. That is, if this tax r
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by makomk 4y ago
I probably ought to have mentioned this in my original comment - China allowed companies to set up certain kinds of Chinese operations, such as manufacturing, by partnering with a local company and setting up a joint operation but they&#x27
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by makomk 4y ago
Debunking also doesn't undo the original damage because most people will never see the debunking. For example, a while ago a paper about the oceans supposedly heating up much more than previously estimated hit a lot of news sites and H
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by makomk 4y ago
One of the first, most important rules Chinese companies have to follow in order to access this Chinese market is "be a Chinese company". I'm not exaggerating here, and if I remember rightly this is even an actual official, s
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by makomk 4y ago
None of the media coverage I've seen or can find seems to mention this supposed paycut due to more hours at the same pay, including in really sympathetic outlets like the Guardian which describes their demands as being exactly what I c
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by makomk 4y ago
It makes perfect sense that all of this would be caused by the war in Ukraine though. Fossil fuel production was already tight prior to that happening, and Russia's invasion and the resulting sanctions cut off a bunch of supply on top
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by makomk 4y ago
Yeah, and I don't think it would be terribly unusual for 50% markups to translate to low-single-digit profit margins in cost-competitive retail sectors - those both seem like about the right ballpark overall. Retail has a lot of costs
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by makomk 4y ago
The gaps do give some amount of play. The trouble is that once the temperature exceeds the design maximum the gaps close up completely and all that expansion force is directed into hard metal-on-metal contact, at which point something has t
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by makomk 4y ago
For context, a bunch of UK rail staff have been striking lately and one of their demands is no efficiency improvements or compulsory redundances. (They also want a substantial pay increase of course.)
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by makomk 4y ago
Any kind of retirement future is fundamentally built on the labour of the still-active workforce, and will be for as long as labour is still required in order to produce goods and services. That's just inherent to the concept of retire
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by makomk 4y ago
The trouble with that argument is that you haven't justified why it should only cause downward pressure on prices when companies have to increase pay due to unions demanding more cash. The exact same process should drive down prices an
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by makomk 4y ago
It's a bad thing if the people signing the card or filling out the form do no, in fact, want the union to represent them. In fact, if you look at those signs they pretty much all have one thing in common: the people they'd convinc
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by makomk 4y ago
Devemoped countries have underinvested in natural gas infrastructure compared to its importance in keeping their shiny new renewable-heavy grids actually operating though - and in particular ESG campaigners have been very successful at bloc
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by makomk 4y ago
There's literally no way to get gas from those terminals to Germany on a large enough scale. They really went all-in on dependence on Russian natural gas and their politicians seem to have been richly rewarded for it.
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by makomk 4y ago
Extremely straightforward, yes. What I don't think a lot of Americans get is just how utterly, terrifyingly destructive the wars of conquest that preceded the current era of peace were for Europe - especially the two world wars. Large
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by makomk 4y ago
Yeah, and the thing that got Huawei in trouble was using a secret subsidiary to smuggle US-produced tech from US companies into Iran in violation of sanctions, not simply doing business with Iran themselves.
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by makomk 4y ago
If the new renewable energy sources were really as good as advertised - not only cleaner than fossil fuels, but also so much cheaper as well - then this would indeed be both obvious and inevitable. China in particular has a lot of the world
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by makomk 4y ago
Byline Times is, uh, very much the "stop voting evil lizard people into power" kind of news outlet rather than thr "global warming is not even happening" kind.
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by makomk 4y ago
It absolutely does have to do with USD. Other than actual physical dollar bills, which do not scale and are not practical to use for long-distance international transactions, the only form that real redeemable USD can exist in is deposits w
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by makomk 4y ago
As people have pointed out this means that the US or wherever can print money and controls your monetary policy, but that's actually the least of the problems. Euros and US Dollars in large quantities, and digitally transferrable versi
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by makomk 4y ago
I'm pretty sure the point of the comment that you're replying to is that, even in the non-European parts of the world where things like this were discovered, those discoveries were lost and forgotten and the significance of those
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by makomk 4y ago
Argentina quite reliably defaults on its bonds much more often than once a decade.
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by makomk 4y ago
Forgot to mention the best part - as far as I could tell, the package maintainer basically was upstream at the time. (I think both might have been maintained by Poettering himself, but it was a long time ago.) So in order for patches not to
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by makomk 4y ago
The "upstream first" way that Red Hat-employed developers worked mostly seemed to involve pushing all the buggy bleeding-edge stuff upstream so that they didn't have to deal with rebasing it, whilst keeping the work of cherry
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by makomk 4y ago
Enabling software audio mixing with ALSA required copying and pasting a small handful of lines into your ALSA config file and just worked. Most of PulseAudio's hardware problems were caused by it having weird and unnecessary expectatio
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by makomk 4y ago
EU commissioners are not, in fact, voted in by party blocs in the EU parliament - they're picked by the President of the EU, who is selected by an opaque and dubious process behind closed doors. The description of it in the comment cha

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