Noob question but how does archive get a screenshot past the paywall of these articles? Doesn't that cause any legal issues for the company or there is an agreed time after which the article is old enough to be archived?
Lessons from America’s astonishing economic record
301–310 of 528 posts
Re: Lessons from America’s astonishing economic record
#302Earlier quoted context omitted.
Utilities in general even. Nobody wants municipal water supplies failing quickly. But for core commercial actives it seems like a fair observation.
No... but having them spend two decades failing slowly isn't the answer, either. I agree that utilities are a special case. The main point is that you don't want them to fail at all, ever. If they do fail, well, there aren't any good ways for that to happen.
We could let utilities fail if we had a special receivership and continuity process for infrastructure. Think FDIC takeover teams.
Re: Lessons from America’s astonishing economic record
#303Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I will export millions of dollars in products that I produced here, or I will die trying Why? Really. Maybe I’m in a midlife crises but I care about money less and less. I used to get a a lot of satisfaction from the simple fact of seeing the number on my bank account increase. Not so much in the past decade. My computer, phone, speaker, camera and other tech toys are amazing and not that expensive. Great food and…
Let me answer you honestly and in depth: Why? Why not? If I am alive, I may as well make an effort, since I have a finite time to do so. It's fun. It's a challenge. I know a couple of men in their 50s, one is relatively wealthy (some tens of millions of dollars), and I have often seen him on top of a machine with a wrench in his hand at 6am. Sometimes it's 3am. He starts a new company every year or two and adds it to…
You're describing so many things wrong with humans as a species, or at least modern humans. We shouldn't change things just because we can. We shouldn't assume that if we're able to extract natural resources its also our right to use them without question until they're completely depleted.
Why should we assume that every invention, every technology, everything we call "progress" is actually advancing in a good direction?
There's a balance to everything. We wouldn't be human without the ability to invent, to use tools, or to contemplate the future. We need to respect that power though, not lean into the shiny objects and power we can buy with a currency that itself is an entirely man-made system designed to feed a system of taxes and perpetual "growth".
Re: Lessons from America’s astonishing economic record
#304Earlier quoted context omitted.
The definition of richness in food is generally heavy in natural fats in proteins, high in butter and cream of a high quality. American butter and cream is ludicrously bad. There is just enough taste to it to make the stuff inedible. Sushi is not a rich food. Sauces with a lot of butter and fats in them are 'rich', pastries can be rich, depending mainly on the fattiness of the cream and butter. on edit: French cuisin…
In this case, the parent comment used "richness" as a synonym for being diverse and high quality.
OK sort of like if I used the word distributed in a technical discussion to mean a lot of people in different countries are using our application.
on edit: just seems a weird word to use when that has a precise meaning for food, if they had said a richer selection of food I would understand. But as the discussion was about what makes Americans unhealthy with shorter lifespans, and the unhealthiness of Americans is often synonymous with being overweight, saying it's because Americans eat rich food just doesn't seem to make any sense if what they mean is Americans have a wide selection of food to choose from.
Re: Lessons from America’s astonishing economic record
#305Earlier quoted context omitted.
Consider Japan: (fact) a single market with a single language (fact) geographically isolated (fact) not much space (fact) burned to the ground in WW2 and yet for a while it was an economic powerhouse on the world stage. Taiwan, Hong Kong and S Korea, similar stories. So what is the common thread? Free markets.
Interestingly, among the Asian Tiger economies, their massive growth first unlocked during a period where they were not meaningfully democracies and their governments intervened heavily to pick winners. The proximate success of their economies was export oriented industry, but the industries and the companies within them were more or less hand picked by the ruling regimes. The remarkable thing is that Korea, Taiwan,…
And of course the biggest (in scale) economic success story of our time is China the last couple decades - which is not a democracy at all as well as having massive government intervention and ownership.
Re: Lessons from America’s astonishing economic record
#306Earlier quoted context omitted.
The European approach makes a lot of sense in other stable industries (Automobile/Steel). But in a fast moving quick changing (e.g. Tech) industries, all it does is prevent new risky companies from starting and making it harder for them to adapt. Maybe it is a good thing. But only time can tell that. So far to me it seems like the American approach is winning economy wise.
I think “winning” really depends on your criteria for success. Maybe it’s winning on overall metrics like GDP, but on an individual level, the story is far less clear. Like, is it winning to have the option of starting a company that produces generational wealth for yourself, while living in a city unable to solve its homelessness problem? Is it winning to be a 1%-er but have no safety net so that you're always preca…
Your perspective sounds overly mired in tech and San Francisco issues. For most of the country geographically, it’s good to be able to make a business because you can make money doing something useful for other people, create jobs for others. By doing so you improve and create further opportunities for your community, and your taxes pay for the safety nets (that do exist) and decent schools, and you and your employees can be philanthropic on top of that, which is fairly common.
Building quickly and creating good, reliable jobs don’t have to conflict.
Re: Lessons from America’s astonishing economic record
#307Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think your point about USA benefiting from a single big market is a strong one. Consider for contrast Canada, also a single language market, also geographically isolated, and sharing many of the inherent benefits of NA that America has. Canada though, not often considered a real economic dynamo in the same way as the USA. Well one big difference is that Canada is a relatively small population spread thin over an en…
Canada isn’t a single language market.
It's an embarrassing example of how insanely big (and thus regionalized) Canada is and how untravelled that most Canadians are that in writing this post I apparently briefly forgot about the existence of Quebec and New Brunswick. lmao.
I haven't been to Quebec for probably 20 years. If it was dramatically cheaper and easier to travel in this country maybe I wouldn't (even briefly) forget that millions of Canadians speak French as their first language.
But interesting point in that it underlines the problems that a Canadian company would have in diversifying across its own nation. A successful Ontarian company would induce significant cost in expanding to Quebec, a remarkably different jurisdiction with important language regulation that needs to be respected, while the same sort of company in Vermont would have less barriers expanding to all its surrounding states.
(Also for completeness sake, one should point out that there are areas of Canada where indigenous languages are significantly spoken (eg. Nunavut) but they are quite small in population)
Re: Lessons from America’s astonishing economic record
#308Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think your point about USA benefiting from a single big market is a strong one. Consider for contrast Canada, also a single language market, also geographically isolated, and sharing many of the inherent benefits of NA that America has. Canada though, not often considered a real economic dynamo in the same way as the USA. Well one big difference is that Canada is a relatively small population spread thin over an en…
It's even worse than that because we didn't have a commerce-clause the way you do. Canada actually has trade tariffs between it's own provinces. It was only in 2017 that the provinces signed a free trade agreement with each other, and even then it was a very limited agreement with enforcement issues.
Along these lines, recently Alberta and BC got in a fight about oil pipelines and Alberta threatened to have its province owned liquor distributor monopoly stop buying BC wine lolol.
Re: Lessons from America’s astonishing economic record
#309Earlier quoted context omitted.
You still get better and prompter health care when you pay more money in pretty much every country.
Like most things, it depends. There’s no money you can pay to get a donated organ faster in most decent countries. There are treatments too expensive for even the best health plans and are only available through government sponsored systems. You couldn’t buy yourself a vaccine ahead of anyone else for any price during the covid peak, etc. Health is as much a collective issue as it is an individual one.
Those things are all available to the ultra-wealthy.
For your last example: https://www.statnews.com/2020/12/03/how-rich-and-privileged-...
Re: Lessons from America’s astonishing economic record
#310Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are shooting yourself in the foot if you are comparing a US state to say, eh, Moldova. The countries you named are only European by geography. They are on par or worse than North Africa. That being said, life expectancy is a very bad measure in my opinion. Americans consume a shit-ton of junk food.
Is there another way to be European than by geography?
You can compare the US to the EU (political entity vs political entity). If you're comparing to Azerbaijan you should also put Mexican states on the American side, being that it's also in the same continent.