Re:Capitalism doesn't _produce_ free markets
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The Web We Lost
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· Score: 1
You have an incorrect view of Standard Oil, and monopolies. The ruling from the breakup states
"The evidence is, in fact, absolutely conclusive that the Standard Oil Company charges altogether excessive prices where it meets no competition, and particularly where there is little likelihood of competitors entering the field, and that, on the other hand, where competition is active, it frequently cuts prices to a point which leaves even the Standard little or no profit, and which more often leaves no profit to the competitor, whose costs are ordinarily somewhat higher."
There are countless stories of Standard Oil buying up wells and refineries in an area and once they controlled the market rates would skyrocket. They would use these profits to buy wells and refineries in another area and repeat the jacking of rates.
IQ tests are designed to have a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15. They have to reformulate them every so often to rebalance to this standard. For the last hundred years or so raw IQ scores have been increasing by about 3 points per decade, a phenomenon called the Flynn effect
There are various theories about why this happens, such as nutrition, and there is some evidence that the trend is weakening, but your gut instinct about this is not accurate.
It sure seems like stealing. The cayman islands don't offer a tax haven for free. The corporation has to pay an annual license fee, based on the amount of capital. They also have to pay a bank or financial services company for various items. Many officers will visit the cayman islands partly for business, partly for pleasure.
All in all, financial services provide the bulk of the cayman islands economy. The primary reason corporations do business there is to avoid their tax where the money was earned or the corporation is truly based.
Since the governments where the corporation is earning money or based out of provide services such as roads, law enforcement, courts, etc. that make this income possible it is reasonable to assume that the regular tax is owed. The shell corporation is reducing or eliminating this tax, and a smaller amount is funneled to the cayman islands in the form of fees and so forth, much like a bribe to avoid paying tax.
You are ignoring the huge and lucrative gray area of avoision which is the fuzzy area between legal tax avoidance and illegal tax evasion.
Literally thousands of tax attorneys spend their entire careers coming up with borderline schemes whose legality is undefined and is constantly being determined and redefined by the courts.
I don't know about respect. I've got compassion for anyone who is starving to death. People in that situation will eat anything: grass, bark, dirt, rocks, rotten things, people, etc. You can be certain that people have eaten anything they can get their hands on. Most things that turn out to not kill you ends up in our regular diet, subject to cultural preferences.
A traffic engineer told me that many lights have this behavior for safety. There may be intermittent power and lights out nearby and this helps make drivers more aware. There are few things as dangerous as a high speed intersection with traffic lights out at night.
There are companies that offer a free product and free support. There are other ways to make money. Mozilla makes $300m/year from search royalties for example.
My end-of-days relatives buy physical gold they put in an actual bunker. Tens of thousands of rounds of ammo, years worth of food. Apparently it is a thing.
Your math seems odd. You are talking about a house that is 40,000 square feet and 30 feet tall. Sounds more like a concert venue. Kitchen math seems reasonable.
The outdoor leaks aren't really related to any of the math, though. They tend to be underground and migrate through the soil, resulting in seepage over a potentially large area. Its outside, with air movement, so a fairly large leak could not result in high concentrations most places most of the time.
Global leakage is 3 trillion cubic feet/year which is a lot of wasted gas no matter how big your house is.
Bullets are just terrible firecrackers unless there is a barrel to channel the energy. I've set off bullets in a pan on the stove, they just make a loud bang and the case will shoot out of the pan with enough force to make it halfway across the kitchen. Bullet is usually left in the pan since it has more mass.
You can clear a space by the campfire by throwing some bullets in it, too. They won't make it back out, although the shell sometimes does. The explosion will send embers everywhere and sometimes will blow out the fire!
A bullet detonating close to a human won't hurt them. The shell might do some damage if it hit the eye, the noise might hurt the ear, and powder burns are no fun, so wear hearing protection, gloves, and safety glasses when playing with bullets.
That's overly simplistic. Here are the wrecks I've seen, none of them offer clear 100% fault.
1. puddle of water turned out to be a deep pothole. Ate the wheel, car went sliding into adjacent lane, striking another vehicle.
2. slowed down suddenly for a pedestrian who walked without looking. Driver behind me couldn't quite stop in time and bent my fender.
3. driving slow (35 in a 45) in very heavy rain. Probably should have pulled over or at least turned on hazards. Rammed by driver going 45 (this one is 90% her fault IMHO)
It is pretty easy to come up with scenarios that offer shared blame. Somebody should have kept the intersection clear, other driver should have paid better attention. This comes up with accident investigation, there is the concept of a percentage share of liability If you are 90% responsible for an accident you can still file suit against the other driver for their 10% liability.
There are hundreds of thousands of helmet cam videos on youtube that are have passable video quality. Between faster sensors and image stabilization new cameras do quite well with a head mount.
There are two such things as centrifugal force. One is an apparent, or fictitious force, and the other is a reactive force. There is a good article on wikipedia
If you want to experience the reactive centrifugal force, spin a heavy object around on a string. The object will experience a centripetal force and you will experience the reactive centrifugal force.
You didn't address the challenge. The claim was these low unemployment states have low wages and quality of life. I don't know about that, glancing at the list didn't see my least favorite states having super low unemployment. I will tell you one thing, I wouldn't want to live in the dakotas right now no matter how low their unemployment is. The cost of living there is staggering, and there is a huge imbalance in the ratio of men to women.
It's sad you can't see the potential here. I am doing poor man's vertical farming at my house. I don't have a lot of room to garden, but I have a big south facing wall with few windows. I installed some shelves to grow vegetables and enjoy the harvest. Nice side effect, my AC bill has been lower since I started doing this. In the winter I take the shelves down and still benefit from solar heating.
I'm looking into some other vertical gardening, such as growing hops on a rope and pulley, doing tomatoes in a hanging bag, maybe something experimental. I've seen some pretty cool stuff with straw bales, drums, there are a lot of possibilities.
One cool thing about vertical farming is the fact that we already have lots of vertical surfaces that are just wasting that sunlight. We can convert existing vertical surfaces to create food with unused sunlight.
You're looking at this backwards. Right now we have flu spreading relatively unchecked to billions of people every year, mutating wildly, giving all kinds of chances for it to mutate into something truly dangerous. If we cut down on the success of the flu virus it will drastically reduce the chances of a horrible flu.
Flu doesn't know if we're trying to fight it or not. If we don't fight it it doesn't stop trying to mutate. The more successful it is the more it can mutate.
That article had some basic errors that made me doubt its overall claims. It ignores the presence of mercury in nearly all seafood, despite the clear health benefits of consuming seafood. If you want to remove something from your mouth without swallowing or inhaling any of it a dental dam would be far more effective than cotton balls. The article ends with a glaringly nonscientific rant against Hexafluorosilicic acid, seems to be against fluoride use unless it is natural fluoride, whatever that could possibly mean.
You are a horrible pedant. Good pedants are correct when they attempt to correct somebody. You are being pedantic about something that isn't settled definitively. Disc and Disk are interchangeable for DVD and CDs, according to this
That sounds promising. It doesn't have to be a municipal sewer plant, though. New Belgium brewery treats their own wastewater, which saves them money on their sewer bill, generates electricity from the methane produced, and gives them environmental bragging rights. From what I've heard the system already paid for itself and now reduces their operating costs every year.
I used to think along the same lines, but now I've seen too many children that grew up gnawing on computers. They could start their favorite game and play it before they could talk reliably. Many of them have zero interest in how or why things work, just like most kids of any era. I've seen one teenager try to fix his broken phone by dropping it from the same place it initially fell, thinking that the innards would be jostled the right amount to make it go again. Most of them think when a computer gets slow or stops working your only option is to throw it in the garbage and buy a new one. About 5% are nerds which is about the same percentage as when I grew up.
Oh, and there are new kids now who aren't going to know what disks are. They'll have never seen one.
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Citation
"The evidence is, in fact, absolutely conclusive that the Standard Oil Company charges altogether excessive prices where it meets no competition, and particularly where there is little likelihood of competitors entering the field, and that, on the other hand, where competition is active, it frequently cuts prices to a point which leaves even the Standard little or no profit, and which more often leaves no profit to the competitor, whose costs are ordinarily somewhat higher."
There are countless stories of Standard Oil buying up wells and refineries in an area and once they controlled the market rates would skyrocket. They would use these profits to buy wells and refineries in another area and repeat the jacking of rates.
IQ tests are designed to have a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15. They have to reformulate them every so often to rebalance to this standard. For the last hundred years or so raw IQ scores have been increasing by about 3 points per decade, a phenomenon called the Flynn effect
There are various theories about why this happens, such as nutrition, and there is some evidence that the trend is weakening, but your gut instinct about this is not accurate.
It sure seems like stealing. The cayman islands don't offer a tax haven for free. The corporation has to pay an annual license fee, based on the amount of capital. They also have to pay a bank or financial services company for various items. Many officers will visit the cayman islands partly for business, partly for pleasure.
All in all, financial services provide the bulk of the cayman islands economy. The primary reason corporations do business there is to avoid their tax where the money was earned or the corporation is truly based.
Since the governments where the corporation is earning money or based out of provide services such as roads, law enforcement, courts, etc. that make this income possible it is reasonable to assume that the regular tax is owed. The shell corporation is reducing or eliminating this tax, and a smaller amount is funneled to the cayman islands in the form of fees and so forth, much like a bribe to avoid paying tax.
You are ignoring the huge and lucrative gray area of avoision which is the fuzzy area between legal tax avoidance and illegal tax evasion.
Literally thousands of tax attorneys spend their entire careers coming up with borderline schemes whose legality is undefined and is constantly being determined and redefined by the courts.
I don't know about respect. I've got compassion for anyone who is starving to death. People in that situation will eat anything: grass, bark, dirt, rocks, rotten things, people, etc. You can be certain that people have eaten anything they can get their hands on. Most things that turn out to not kill you ends up in our regular diet, subject to cultural preferences.
The loss of herd immunity affects everyone, even if you are vaccinated. Vaccines need to be nearly universal in order to have the full effect.
A traffic engineer told me that many lights have this behavior for safety. There may be intermittent power and lights out nearby and this helps make drivers more aware. There are few things as dangerous as a high speed intersection with traffic lights out at night.
There are companies that offer a free product and free support. There are other ways to make money. Mozilla makes $300m/year from search royalties for example.
My end-of-days relatives buy physical gold they put in an actual bunker. Tens of thousands of rounds of ammo, years worth of food. Apparently it is a thing.
Your math seems odd. You are talking about a house that is 40,000 square feet and 30 feet tall. Sounds more like a concert venue. Kitchen math seems reasonable.
The outdoor leaks aren't really related to any of the math, though. They tend to be underground and migrate through the soil, resulting in seepage over a potentially large area. Its outside, with air movement, so a fairly large leak could not result in high concentrations most places most of the time.
Global leakage is 3 trillion cubic feet/year which is a lot of wasted gas no matter how big your house is.
Bullets are just terrible firecrackers unless there is a barrel to channel the energy. I've set off bullets in a pan on the stove, they just make a loud bang and the case will shoot out of the pan with enough force to make it halfway across the kitchen. Bullet is usually left in the pan since it has more mass.
You can clear a space by the campfire by throwing some bullets in it, too. They won't make it back out, although the shell sometimes does. The explosion will send embers everywhere and sometimes will blow out the fire!
A bullet detonating close to a human won't hurt them. The shell might do some damage if it hit the eye, the noise might hurt the ear, and powder burns are no fun, so wear hearing protection, gloves, and safety glasses when playing with bullets.
That's overly simplistic. Here are the wrecks I've seen, none of them offer clear 100% fault.
1. puddle of water turned out to be a deep pothole. Ate the wheel, car went sliding into adjacent lane, striking another vehicle.
2. slowed down suddenly for a pedestrian who walked without looking. Driver behind me couldn't quite stop in time and bent my fender.
3. driving slow (35 in a 45) in very heavy rain. Probably should have pulled over or at least turned on hazards. Rammed by driver going 45 (this one is 90% her fault IMHO)
It is pretty easy to come up with scenarios that offer shared blame. Somebody should have kept the intersection clear, other driver should have paid better attention. This comes up with accident investigation, there is the concept of a percentage share of liability If you are 90% responsible for an accident you can still file suit against the other driver for their 10% liability.
There are hundreds of thousands of helmet cam videos on youtube that are have passable video quality. Between faster sensors and image stabilization new cameras do quite well with a head mount.
There are two such things as centrifugal force. One is an apparent, or fictitious force, and the other is a reactive force. There is a good article on wikipedia
If you want to experience the reactive centrifugal force, spin a heavy object around on a string. The object will experience a centripetal force and you will experience the reactive centrifugal force.
You didn't address the challenge. The claim was these low unemployment states have low wages and quality of life. I don't know about that, glancing at the list didn't see my least favorite states having super low unemployment. I will tell you one thing, I wouldn't want to live in the dakotas right now no matter how low their unemployment is. The cost of living there is staggering, and there is a huge imbalance in the ratio of men to women.
It's sad you can't see the potential here. I am doing poor man's vertical farming at my house. I don't have a lot of room to garden, but I have a big south facing wall with few windows. I installed some shelves to grow vegetables and enjoy the harvest. Nice side effect, my AC bill has been lower since I started doing this. In the winter I take the shelves down and still benefit from solar heating.
I'm looking into some other vertical gardening, such as growing hops on a rope and pulley, doing tomatoes in a hanging bag, maybe something experimental. I've seen some pretty cool stuff with straw bales, drums, there are a lot of possibilities.
One cool thing about vertical farming is the fact that we already have lots of vertical surfaces that are just wasting that sunlight. We can convert existing vertical surfaces to create food with unused sunlight.
You're looking at this backwards. Right now we have flu spreading relatively unchecked to billions of people every year, mutating wildly, giving all kinds of chances for it to mutate into something truly dangerous. If we cut down on the success of the flu virus it will drastically reduce the chances of a horrible flu.
Flu doesn't know if we're trying to fight it or not. If we don't fight it it doesn't stop trying to mutate. The more successful it is the more it can mutate.
That article had some basic errors that made me doubt its overall claims. It ignores the presence of mercury in nearly all seafood, despite the clear health benefits of consuming seafood. If you want to remove something from your mouth without swallowing or inhaling any of it a dental dam would be far more effective than cotton balls. The article ends with a glaringly nonscientific rant against Hexafluorosilicic acid, seems to be against fluoride use unless it is natural fluoride, whatever that could possibly mean.
I'd feel like never seeing such comments. I'd go here and give foes a -5 and add this user to my foes list.
You are a horrible pedant. Good pedants are correct when they attempt to correct somebody. You are being pedantic about something that isn't settled definitively. Disc and Disk are interchangeable for DVD and CDs, according to this
That sounds promising. It doesn't have to be a municipal sewer plant, though. New Belgium brewery treats their own wastewater, which saves them money on their sewer bill, generates electricity from the methane produced, and gives them environmental bragging rights. From what I've heard the system already paid for itself and now reduces their operating costs every year.
Brilliant! We're creating massive dead zones all around the world at river outlets, we could use the algae for something beneficial.
I used to think along the same lines, but now I've seen too many children that grew up gnawing on computers. They could start their favorite game and play it before they could talk reliably. Many of them have zero interest in how or why things work, just like most kids of any era. I've seen one teenager try to fix his broken phone by dropping it from the same place it initially fell, thinking that the innards would be jostled the right amount to make it go again. Most of them think when a computer gets slow or stops working your only option is to throw it in the garbage and buy a new one. About 5% are nerds which is about the same percentage as when I grew up.
Oh, and there are new kids now who aren't going to know what disks are. They'll have never seen one.