snrplfth

24 ms·

151.
by snrplfth 10y ago
Unfortunately, Malthusianism was never abandoned at all. I graduated from high school only ten years ago, and Malthus is accurate, up-to-the-minute doctrine as far as my high school and university courses were concerned.
152.
by snrplfth 10y ago
Well, a modern economy is pretty thoroughly different from the premodern one. When it took 90% of the population working in agriculture to feed the whole population (nonfarmer/farmer ratio of 1:9), and food transportation costs were ex
153.
by snrplfth 10y ago
Well, most of that food waste is at the consumer/household level. The distribution chain up to that point wastes very little (indeed, when it comes to things like meat scraps and produce trimmings, it's almost too thrifty.) A bi
154.
by snrplfth 10y ago
Yep, it's amazing how long things like that go on. Of course, when the objective is "establish guidelines for the One Best Way to Eat", it's sort of a futile venture from the start.
155.
by snrplfth 10y ago
Yes, that also does not help. Even in stable times, though, transportation costs are surprisingly higher than most people think - especially if they've grown up surrounded by ubiquitous high-quality roads and rail everywhere.
156.
by snrplfth 10y ago
Especially lower child mortality rates. When people are reasonably confident of seeing all of their children grow to adulthood, they just have fewer of them.
157.
by snrplfth 10y ago
Basic foodstuffs are remarkably cheap. Unmilled commodity wheat is usually only $100 to $150 per metric tonne. But that's what it can cost to transport that tonne for only a few dozen miles overland in a place with few or no paved road
158.
by snrplfth 10y ago
> As an aside, did you see the article posted here yesterday about how the FDA just redacted their long-standing advice about cholesterol? The government is operating almost as ascientifically as the general public, making laws and decla
159.
by snrplfth 10y ago
By 2050, we'll have AI Luddites, who'll be able to predict that this time, no really this time for real you guys , automation is going to put everybody out of work and crash the economy.
160.
by snrplfth 10y ago
Extreme poverty is defined as total consumption of goods and services of less than $1.90 per day per person, adjusted for inflation and local purchasing power. Not terribly difficult to compare.
161.
by snrplfth 10y ago
But they don't think of themselves that way, often because it's easy to smuggle in an indefinite number of rules under the cloak of good intentions. "It's dangerous to allow buildings that are fire hazards, since fires s
162.
by snrplfth 10y ago
The Shuttle Solid Rocket Boosters were mainly built in Utah, and many people assert that this choice of location was due to political patronage. The fact that these boosters were built inland, far from barge-capable waterways and distant fr
163.
by snrplfth 10y ago
Well, generally the game-theoretic proposals are for some kind of direct compensation for impacts - developers pay the residents directly for new impositions like shadows or traffic. But this really throws the whole notion of "master p
164.
by snrplfth 10y ago
Sure, the idea at least of Section 37 is effectively "local compensation". Too often it's "councillor's goodies for constituents money", and it's not much help when the Section 37 park gets built a kilomet
165.
by snrplfth 10y ago
Well, they have Faygo.
166.
by snrplfth 10y ago
And mostly, new construction is not for low-income people, just because it's new. Low-income people tend to live in older buildings that have depreciated.
167.
by snrplfth 10y ago
I live in Toronto and this is pretty much how it goes. (The city works in spite of planning, not because of it, generally.) Planners come up with some grand region- or city-wide objectives, with lots of criteria and performance metrics, and
168.
by snrplfth 10y ago
Okay, fair enough. "ultimately, though, the state is still made up of the people it rules." Well, that's one reason why it can be so dangerous. It's made of humans! :)
169.
by snrplfth 10y ago
Of course there's degrees of endorsement, there always is. I'm just responding to the notion of yours that "in a republic, the state is the citizenry." Well, no, it's not, and it doesn't need to be - and inde
170.
by snrplfth 10y ago
Poor William Jevons. "You guys! It's not a 'paradox', it's just mildly counter-intuitive causality! Come on!"
171.
by snrplfth 10y ago
Yep. People frequently have a strong aversion to paying directly for things, unfortunately. It's the same way with parking - people feel like they're getting all these huge quantities of available parking for free, but they&#x27
172.
by snrplfth 10y ago
The good I am referring to is the service provided by the extra freeway space. Imagine an auto-body shop decided it would give a free engine oil top-up to anyone who drove up. You'd still need a car to take advantage of the deal, but i
173.
by snrplfth 10y ago
So if "the citizens", or some subset thereof, are unable to change the system, then they're assume, as a group, to be endorsing the system and its actions? And to be genuinely represented, indeed manifested, by its official
174.
by snrplfth 10y ago
Well, when you increase the supply of a valuable good, and price it at $0, an increase in consumption is pretty much what you would expect.
175.
by snrplfth 10y ago
So...apparently for Apocryphon, the American citizenry is Trump? Interesting.
176.
by snrplfth 10y ago
Of course, that money is redeployed, which is good. The point is that, in the case of something like chronic pain, it is very difficult to measure the level of pain, but easy to measure the money spent on it. So, it can be challenging to co
177.
by snrplfth 10y ago
Oh, I'm not trying to commit the broken window fallacy. I'm just saying that, for example, if there was a disease that caused a lot of pain, and it was suddenly cured, the reduction in measured economic activity associated with
178.
by snrplfth 10y ago
Well, you could say that the internet was not a totally unique thing in itself, but just another (big) forward step in the ever-improving telecommunications sector, which had already seen the expansion of telegraphs, radio, telephones, and
179.
by snrplfth 10y ago
One must also ask, how much of it is consumer surplus. In just the same way as a disease going away reduces the economic activity associated with managing that disease, information technology and the internet have done away with many previo
180.
by snrplfth 10y ago
One of the big problems with people's expectations was, perhaps, a sense that technological progress would involve ever-greater energies, sizes, velocities. This certainly would have made sense in 1967, but what's been done since

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