I guess it will depend on the details. If it has the necessary power for doing real work and has a good TCO, I could easily see contractors getting interested in them.
Actually, it is not a bad introduction, though it does presupposed libertarianism, which is more of a philosophical construct then an economic one in this day and age.
I have yet to find any good solid analysis of what impact it would really have in the US. Though it should be noted that Sweden has a significantly lower rate of meat consumption then the US, only a slightly lower standard of living, and a higher cost of living. It is not a question of if one can build a food supply that is not dependent on antibiotics, that is pretty trivial. The question is how dependent is the current US industry and how quickly could it (and our culture) adapt? For that matter, given the amount the US population consumes, what would be the space impact since antibiotics are used to cram animals into smaller and more disease ridden buildings. This would mean that in order to keep up current consumption rates the land usage for meat production would probably skyrocket, and there are already significant political conflicts between ranchers and other groups, esp when it comes to water usage and land prices.
It is worth then 'no good', it is pretty much guaranteed to have this type of result. Any time you have a situation where, within an industry, it is in any one particular company's interest to have all the OTHER companies behave in a more responsible way, they will all race to the bottom. Pure free markets actively punish players that behave in a way that benefits the entire system. It is one of the reasons that successful economies moved away from free markets nearly a century ago since everyone looses in them.
Not a market victory, but a classic game theory problem.
With antibiotics in industry, it is in any individual company's best interest to have everyone else move away from it. If a company uses lots of antibiotics while others do not, not only does it make their own product cheaper and fattier, but they will get more time out of the antibiotics. So no company (outside luxury brands) has an interest in being the one or group of ones to stop the practice since all it will do is help some competitor who does not play along. Same goes in health care unfortunately.
I would not call it hypocritical. Regardless of how it got started, our food supply is now dependent on its continued application, so if the antibiotics stop working then that will have significant impact on price and availability.
That is another part of the problem. Sensationalism and fiction have warped our world view so much that big problems do not seem all that major since they do not live up to their fictionalized versions. If it is not fast and movie-style dramatically devastating it does not really register for a lot of people.
Which is a bit ironic since on the other end all sorts of relatively minor things with small effects get hyped up into 'OMG' deals, like terrorism.
No, private currencies did not make that more difficult, nor did commodity based trading.. They were, however, unstable and tended to retard economic growth.
Not really. The ACA changed a lot of fiddly regulatory details, but did not turn it into any more of a planned market then it already was.
Every year plans change, people loose coverage and have to get new plans. Most of the time these details are hidden behind HR since they do a lot of the leg work, but insurance companies are constantly creating and removing plans, switching which hospital systems they are linked to and which they are not.
And now the market is doing what it always does. The rules have changed, insurance companies are adjusting their offerings to get the most value for their share holders and least value possible for their customers. Hospitals are deciding which insurance carriers they will play ball with and which they will not allow. Same as it has been for decades, it is just getting more attention now since it has a high profile political element that can be blamed for what is essentially SOP.
'Viable' is a relative term. There are plenty of toy systems that are viable on the small scale that do not handle broader adoption or moving outside their niche very well.
There is also the question of will BTC settle at all? One of the classic problems with commodity backed currencies (which BTC behaves like) is that they are notoriously unstable and thus unattractive for long term planning.
Well, keep in mind, civilization has been down the government-less currency trail before, so that is not exactly unexplored territory. One thing that remains to be seen is how many of the problems that resulted in the creation of state currencies will be problems for BTC, or if the abundance of state currencies already in operation are enough to mitigate it.
Yeah, they share some traits with both of the examples, which I guess makes sense since they are both a system AND the tokens the system uses.
One thing that will be interesting to see play out is how well the original tuning scales. BTC depends on both the idea that the market will auto-adjust AND the scaling built in to the original design will be appropriate. In a way it is 'big design up front' and the hope that natural forces will do the corrections from there. If BTC does survive long term it will be interesting to compare its stability to fiat currencies and see how much value there really is in the explicit adjustments that states periodically make.
The jury is still out on long term viability. BTC is just barely starting to make the transition from tech elite plaything to something a wider audience finds utility in. There is a lot of hype and a lot of fiat money being poured into BTC right now, but telling if something is ramping up or a bubble is difficult. After all, tulips were a great investment too, till they crashed. On the other hand, things like credit cards, where people were skeptical that they would ever be mainstream and anything other then a passing fad have found a permeant and profitable place in the economy.
That is just it. While it is true that brain scans have shown differences in people who have trouble with violence, specifically in impulse control, these people only make up a certain group within crime, mostly people who are in and out of jail their entire life.
What makes sexual assault such an uncomfortable crime for people to ponder is most of those who do it have normal brain scans and do not even think they did anything wrong.
So yep, sick minds are different, but having a sick mind is not the dividing line between those who do these things and those who do not.
Eh, it is a pretty classic response. Often people are extremely uncomfortable with the idea that they are not that dissimilar to people who do awful things and that there must be some fundamental difference between 'us' and 'them'.
The primary difference between a person who has raped another and one who has not is that one person has raped another while the other did not.
The actual science generally supports this. It is kinda like the 'violent video game' issue, the studied reality is that most people find such games cathartic, but they are painted as increasing violence.
What disturbs me is that there are people who claim kiddy porn increases abuse rates and then are aghast at the idea pornography increases rape rates.
Even at the time, the plastic guns they were trying to prevent from gaining wider acceptance still had quite a bit of metal in them beyond the firing pin and bullets and were thus easily detected.
While the law is technologically pointless, the idea is to have an little prevention in place by making it difficult to obtain fire arms that would be able to bypass security in places that do not want guns present. If I recall correctly the fear at the time was of mass produced plastic guns that anyone could wander down to the local shop and pick up, thus presenting a very low barrier to bypassing metal detectors. The fear was not valid, but if it had been the law would have made sense even though actual use of a gun within such a space was already illegal.
True, if you go far back enough there was some point in history when there were no people on an area of land, but we are talking tens of thousands of years ago and, also rather importantly, those people were essentially small governments claiming land. Even then you generally had nomadic groups who settled rather asymmetrically and there were usually conflicts when one settled and another did not.
That being said, homesteading can be shoehorned into ancient humans yes, but as a philosophy and legal framework it did not exist until LONG after that point and was part of a larger moral framework for transferring land from one group to another.
Slashdot Mirror
When someone comes out with a price competitive stationwagon EV, I am going to be hooked. But right now wagons are not considered a `sexy` market.
I guess it will depend on the details. If it has the necessary power for doing real work and has a good TCO, I could easily see contractors getting interested in them.
So read this armchair economist instead.....
Actually, it is not a bad introduction, though it does presupposed libertarianism, which is more of a philosophical construct then an economic one in this day and age.
I have yet to find any good solid analysis of what impact it would really have in the US. Though it should be noted that Sweden has a significantly lower rate of meat consumption then the US, only a slightly lower standard of living, and a higher cost of living. It is not a question of if one can build a food supply that is not dependent on antibiotics, that is pretty trivial. The question is how dependent is the current US industry and how quickly could it (and our culture) adapt? For that matter, given the amount the US population consumes, what would be the space impact since antibiotics are used to cram animals into smaller and more disease ridden buildings. This would mean that in order to keep up current consumption rates the land usage for meat production would probably skyrocket, and there are already significant political conflicts between ranchers and other groups, esp when it comes to water usage and land prices.
It is worth then 'no good', it is pretty much guaranteed to have this type of result. Any time you have a situation where, within an industry, it is in any one particular company's interest to have all the OTHER companies behave in a more responsible way, they will all race to the bottom. Pure free markets actively punish players that behave in a way that benefits the entire system. It is one of the reasons that successful economies moved away from free markets nearly a century ago since everyone looses in them.
Not a market victory, but a classic game theory problem.
With antibiotics in industry, it is in any individual company's best interest to have everyone else move away from it. If a company uses lots of antibiotics while others do not, not only does it make their own product cheaper and fattier, but they will get more time out of the antibiotics. So no company (outside luxury brands) has an interest in being the one or group of ones to stop the practice since all it will do is help some competitor who does not play along. Same goes in health care unfortunately.
I would not call it hypocritical. Regardless of how it got started, our food supply is now dependent on its continued application, so if the antibiotics stop working then that will have significant impact on price and availability.
Not only that, but if you drop a crate of it on someone's head it will seriously injure them.
That is another part of the problem. Sensationalism and fiction have warped our world view so much that big problems do not seem all that major since they do not live up to their fictionalized versions. If it is not fast and movie-style dramatically devastating it does not really register for a lot of people.
Which is a bit ironic since on the other end all sorts of relatively minor things with small effects get hyped up into 'OMG' deals, like terrorism.
No, private currencies did not make that more difficult, nor did commodity based trading.. They were, however, unstable and tended to retard economic growth.
Not really. The ACA changed a lot of fiddly regulatory details, but did not turn it into any more of a planned market then it already was.
Every year plans change, people loose coverage and have to get new plans. Most of the time these details are hidden behind HR since they do a lot of the leg work, but insurance companies are constantly creating and removing plans, switching which hospital systems they are linked to and which they are not.
And now the market is doing what it always does. The rules have changed, insurance companies are adjusting their offerings to get the most value for their share holders and least value possible for their customers. Hospitals are deciding which insurance carriers they will play ball with and which they will not allow. Same as it has been for decades, it is just getting more attention now since it has a high profile political element that can be blamed for what is essentially SOP.
'Viable' is a relative term. There are plenty of toy systems that are viable on the small scale that do not handle broader adoption or moving outside their niche very well.
There is also the question of will BTC settle at all? One of the classic problems with commodity backed currencies (which BTC behaves like) is that they are notoriously unstable and thus unattractive for long term planning.
Well, keep in mind, civilization has been down the government-less currency trail before, so that is not exactly unexplored territory. One thing that remains to be seen is how many of the problems that resulted in the creation of state currencies will be problems for BTC, or if the abundance of state currencies already in operation are enough to mitigate it.
Yeah, they share some traits with both of the examples, which I guess makes sense since they are both a system AND the tokens the system uses.
One thing that will be interesting to see play out is how well the original tuning scales. BTC depends on both the idea that the market will auto-adjust AND the scaling built in to the original design will be appropriate. In a way it is 'big design up front' and the hope that natural forces will do the corrections from there. If BTC does survive long term it will be interesting to compare its stability to fiat currencies and see how much value there really is in the explicit adjustments that states periodically make.
Well, that is the free market at work.
The jury is still out on long term viability. BTC is just barely starting to make the transition from tech elite plaything to something a wider audience finds utility in. There is a lot of hype and a lot of fiat money being poured into BTC right now, but telling if something is ramping up or a bubble is difficult. After all, tulips were a great investment too, till they crashed. On the other hand, things like credit cards, where people were skeptical that they would ever be mainstream and anything other then a passing fad have found a permeant and profitable place in the economy.
So still too soon to tell.
That is just it. While it is true that brain scans have shown differences in people who have trouble with violence, specifically in impulse control, these people only make up a certain group within crime, mostly people who are in and out of jail their entire life.
What makes sexual assault such an uncomfortable crime for people to ponder is most of those who do it have normal brain scans and do not even think they did anything wrong.
So yep, sick minds are different, but having a sick mind is not the dividing line between those who do these things and those who do not.
Eh, it is a pretty classic response. Often people are extremely uncomfortable with the idea that they are not that dissimilar to people who do awful things and that there must be some fundamental difference between 'us' and 'them'.
The primary difference between a person who has raped another and one who has not is that one person has raped another while the other did not.
The actual science generally supports this. It is kinda like the 'violent video game' issue, the studied reality is that most people find such games cathartic, but they are painted as increasing violence.
What disturbs me is that there are people who claim kiddy porn increases abuse rates and then are aghast at the idea pornography increases rape rates.
Historically, 'filter out kiddy porn' has been the foot in the door to start up other wide ranging filter types.
Even at the time, the plastic guns they were trying to prevent from gaining wider acceptance still had quite a bit of metal in them beyond the firing pin and bullets and were thus easily detected.
While the law is technologically pointless, the idea is to have an little prevention in place by making it difficult to obtain fire arms that would be able to bypass security in places that do not want guns present. If I recall correctly the fear at the time was of mass produced plastic guns that anyone could wander down to the local shop and pick up, thus presenting a very low barrier to bypassing metal detectors. The fear was not valid, but if it had been the law would have made sense even though actual use of a gun within such a space was already illegal.
In this case, puritanism has nothing to do with it. This is simple power politics.
Like the rest of NJ`s gaming regulation, it is whatever the commissioner and his industry buddies feel like at the time.
True, if you go far back enough there was some point in history when there were no people on an area of land, but we are talking tens of thousands of years ago and, also rather importantly, those people were essentially small governments claiming land. Even then you generally had nomadic groups who settled rather asymmetrically and there were usually conflicts when one settled and another did not.
That being said, homesteading can be shoehorned into ancient humans yes, but as a philosophy and legal framework it did not exist until LONG after that point and was part of a larger moral framework for transferring land from one group to another.