zopa

11 ms·

61.
by zopa 4y ago
> So "consumers" are always said to "pay" as companies "pass through" increased costs due to goods, regulations, etc. It isn’t always said, because it isn’t always true. If the business you’re looking at has
62.
by zopa 4y ago
By Monday morning? With protections in place against fraud or double-dipping? It wouldn’t be as easy as you think. (And for the nth time, SVB isn’t being propped up. The owners are losing their whole stake.)
63.
by zopa 4y ago
> If these statements are true, can someone explain how it's possible that despositors are fully protected, far beyond what FDIC insures, without the taxpayer bearing any of the burden? No one can tell you what will happen because t
64.
by zopa 4y ago
> The "heads you win tails we lose" deal we give to bankers, which we don't give to anyone else, is fundamentally evil, and we have to stop bowing to their terroristic threats that if you don't give us this deal you&#
65.
by zopa 4y ago
If a bank loans you money and you use it to build a house, or start a restaurant, then in due course there will be: - new money, created by the loan; and - a new, valuable asset — the house or restaurant — worth very roughly that amou
66.
by zopa 4y ago
> and that's exactly what we see in the article, right? I think we see the opposite! We start with a naive and non-hierarchical view of relatedness: trees are tall woody things, fish live in the water and have fins. And the piece ar
67.
by zopa 4y ago
The solar panels would shade out all the photosynthetic plankton below, no? Nothing large-scale on Earth is zero impact.
68.
by zopa 4y ago
I’m not yet persuaded this is relevant, at all. This isn’t a case where hierarchy fails us: we have a perfectly good and natural hierarchical model of speciation based on descent from common ancestors. That model doesn’t give us the common-
69.
by zopa 4y ago
> it's not particularly callous to want to feed your family Callous is callous regardless of your motive. It might be justifiable to be callous if that's what your business circumstances demand, but that doesn't change the
70.
by zopa 4y ago
A bit of a difference in motivation between a hobbyist and a VC.
71.
by zopa 4y ago
> The problem is not that companies are able to increase prices and improve their margins. That's good! That's going a bit too far. Under perfect competition there aren't any profit margins: everything sells at marginal co
72.
by zopa 4y ago
Sure, but it’s wildly counterproductive. The result is free-floating negativity about all the possible solutions. Until we’re meeting the scale of the problem, we should all be focusing on “yes, and”
73.
by zopa 4y ago
If thorium is cheap, there should be plenty of funding to go around. If it’s expensive, what’s the point? I’d also be interested to hear roughly how much public funding you think is implied by the article. My takeaway was that it suggested:
74.
by zopa 4y ago
So many people here cheering for their preferred carbon-free energy source like it’s a sports team. It’s bizarre. We’re going to need to do lots of different things. There’s no need to fight about it; everybody’s favorite will have a chanc
75.
by zopa 4y ago
Wind and solar are a great source of electricity, but not everything is easy to electrify right now. Also —- we have massive amounts of human and physical capital invested in digging flammable stuff out of the ground. If we can redirect som
76.
by zopa 4y ago
You’re saying we should judge things on their substance as a whole, and not by superficial details? Persuasive! I wonder if we could apply that insight to any other field of endeavor…
77.
by zopa 4y ago
Yes, and as I don’t want metaphorical chemotherapy for the country I’d prefer we chose a different metaphor. An analogy shouldn’t just be some strained parallels, it should lead us in useful and not destructive directions.
78.
by zopa 4y ago
A bad one. What's the insight here? If a body were a nation-state, it'd be a totalitarian hellscape where life is cheap, individuals exist only to support the collective and some populations are invaders to be exterminated.
79.
by zopa 4y ago
If we’re just doing literary criticism, sure, fair enough. In actual practice, as here, ‘vote with your wallet’ stands in for “people are choosing this, nothing to be done.” And ‘voting’ stands for collective action to change the choices on
80.
by zopa 4y ago
Of course not, but that's a pretty naive view of how politics works. (Naive and cynical at the same time is a nice trick.) On second- and third-tier issues, politicians take their cues from friendly activists and interest groups, for w
81.
by zopa 4y ago
I think we vote when we vote. The relative prices of true ownership and subscriptions aren’t random: they’re set by companies trying to shape a market where they can extract recurring revenue. Normal cash-constrained people are going to do
82.
by zopa 4y ago
The trouble with the aliens is that it’s too good an explanation. Inscrutable beings with tech we don’t don’t understand works as an explanation of just about anything, so if we allow that in our explanatory toolbox we’ll end up crying “ali
83.
by zopa 4y ago
> While that's true, i think crimea and the associated warm water port (sevastopol) is of strategic value. Russia already had naval basing rights is Sevastopol, before the invasion of Crimea. I don’t think the strategic explanations
84.
by zopa 4y ago
It’s not only the balloon you have to worry about, it’s the missles you shoot at it.
85.
by zopa 4y ago
It’s not an “attitude”, it’s an objective fact about how capital project go in the US right now. I’ve got theories, but I don’t really know what the best way is to fix that. We probably need to try a bunch of things, and I’m all for that. B
86.
by zopa 4y ago
I don’t think the risk/reward works out here. Lots of people had knowledge of the search; if any one of them goes to the press, then a minor public embarrassment becomes a career-ender, at best. Public agencies leak too much for this s
87.
by zopa 4y ago
Roundabouts and public transit improvements cost millions or billions and take years or decades to roll out. They’re great, and we should build them, but there’s a lot to be said for quicker, cheaper solutions in the mean time.
88.
by zopa 4y ago
Sure, but what about all the students with mediocre and/or overworked teachers? If our plan assumes the best-case scenario, we're going to have problems.
89.
by zopa 4y ago
0.5 atmospheres isn’t a problem: that’s about what Everest Base Camp is. The sulphuric acid might be a bit unpleasant though.
90.
by zopa 4y ago
Set it in Universe N+1 of a multiverse and mix in a tiny dusting of metals and such from Universe N. Or maybe it’s a synthetic population III star, made for unknown purposes by a now-vanished civilization. You’re allowed to make up whatever

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