> I'm sorry. Did you just claim that getting 1000€ would improve the quality of life of Jeff Bezos, you and me, and a beggar on the street, by an equal amount?
Jeff Bezos does not buy bread with every incremental thousand dollars. He builds institutions that provide bread for a cent cheaper to millions of people.
The assumption that you can equate these utilities is exactly the fallacy that caused so many to starve in Russia and China. Markets coordinate capital for the betterment of people at large.
Jeff Bezos does not buy bread with every incremental thousand dollars, he spends $42million of them on a monumental clock. But perhaps it is more allocatively efficient to ensure that the beggar, lacking the funds to buy bread from Whole Foods, dies of starvation.
The assumption that because someone has more money, they would make better decisions on how to coordinate it was also what caused so many people to starve to death under feudalism.
Jeff Bezos does not buy anything with every incremental thousand dollars. In some important sense, it's not even money that can be spent. When people talk about Bezos' wealth being $200 billion dollars, almost all of that is just the last trade price of Amazon stock times his shareholding. (In some sense, it represents the value of an institution that supplies people with stuff more efficiently.)
Suppose we take that $200 billion from Bezos, who only spends a tiny fraction of that on actual things for his personal use that use actual resources like land, materials, workers' time, etc, and instead try and spend all of it on stuff that uses those actual resources like food, healthcare, etc. The only way to do that is to find people who'll do the reverse trade - who'll take hundreds of billions of dollars they'd otherwise have spent on things made with actual resources that'd make their lives better, and instead buy shares of Amazon with them. This actual money that represents an actual claim on limited resources cannot come out of the pockets of Bezos or other billionares, because they don't have that much - it has to come out of ordinary people's pockets. Same with the shuttering of businesses during coronavirus; it's ordinary people who'll have to feel the consequences of all the goods not produced and services not provided, because they're the ones who consume them.
The approach where people like Bezos become billionaires through coming up with ways to supply goods and services to people more efficiently doesn't have this problem, because it works by making the pie bigger for everyone rather than just trying to change the size of people's slices. And I'd personally trust Bezos to do this much more than all the people who seem ideologically opposed to the idea such a thing is even possible...
> Jeff Bezos does not buy anything with every incremental thousand dollars. In some important sense, it's not even money that can be spent.
Luckily, nobody in the discussion has claimed this. What they have claimed is that it is possible a hungry person who died of starvation may have needed an incremental dollar more than someone who spent $42 million of their incremental dollars on a project to build a clock with no expectation of any return on it (or even a person of comparatively modest means who never has to look at the right hand side of a menu) and as such, diminishing returns to disposable wealth may exist.
Clearly actually addressing this claim is a lot harder than demolishing straw men and accusing everyone that suggests that diminishing marginal returns to money are a thing of being a communist.
Personally I'd trust people whose belief that markets are useful in generating wealth (again, not in dispute here) stops short of assuming that if people don't have money they probably don't need to survive as much as others need to conspicuously consume.
The problem with that argument is that $42 million is a lot, lot less than $200 billion dollars, especially when divided across even just the population of the USA. Not even enough for a dollar per person - in fact, when you consider that's over something like a decade, it's probably more like a cent per person per year.
By comparison, the National Endowment for the Arts apparently has a budget of $162 million per year. I'm sure there are plenty of hungry people who have much more need for that money, so by your argument maybe we should shut that down and give the money to them. It'd certainly provide them with a lot more funding than just the money from Bezos' clock...
The problem is that again you are attacking an argument I did not make. At no point have I suggested "maybe we should shut that down and give the money to them" or that we could feed the entire population of the world using Bezos' clock budget, never mind enthused about US arts funding. At no point in this thread have I made any public policy recommendations at all.
I simply observed that it seems unreasonable to argue that a person saved from starvation by a marginal dollar doesn't feel more benefit from that marginal dollar than someone who wouldn't stoop to pick one off the street feels from marginal dollars that accrue to their bank accounts anyway. So some, but not all, redistribution can be positive sum.
Acknowledging the marginal utility of a [disposable] dollar to Bezos might be lower than that of someone earning less than subsistence seems both fairly obvious and not at all close to communism as the user I originally responded to suggests (Funnily enough, denying the validity of any sort of interpersonal utility comparison whatsoever actually does makes it impossible to make inefficiency arguments against communism or any other sort of government waste. Obviously millions of people behind the former Iron Curtain are wealthier today, but who's to say the Politburo members losing control over resources didn't suffer more?! I mean, that's silly, but so's arguing Bezos cares about loose change at least as much as the average poor person). Arguments against the idea that public might need education less than the wealthy needed to keep those dollars were pretty critical to there being a viable market and workforce for the Amazons of this world too.
If we actually want to discuss the efficiency and inefficiency of different forms of government and private [non]intervention it's much easier to do so without the unsupported and vaguely feudal assumption that no improvement on a status quo can be observed.
> Jeff Bezos does not buy bread with every incremental thousand dollars. He builds institutions that provide bread for a cent cheaper to millions of people.
Or possibly builds rockets and other vanity projects. Or bribes politicians. Whereas if that money was used to buy bread, it would definitely end up at a bread making company.
> The assumption that you can equate these utilities is exactly the fallacy that caused so many to starve in Russia and China.
In a discussion about economics, the probability that someone will bring up the Eastern Block and ascribe all its ills to whatever happens to be the not orthodoxly capitalist position being discussed somehow even exceeds the probability of someone bringing up Hitler.
> Which is a very dismissive viewpoint that America can simply wash its hands of everything outside its borders. Surely anyone who knew about the Holocaust saw our involvement in WWII as a moral
This is nonsense we allied with one murderous dictator and fought another, our involvement in that war was in no way righteous.
> I'd also argue that there's a huge fallacy in his premise. Yes, war is profitable for many industries. I think it's inarguable that peace is vastly more profitable for even more industries. Friendly international relations, stable supply lines and prosperous consumers are far more valuable than anything else.
His point is that it is vastly profitable for a _few_ people, and also implicitly that what you are saying is true because he wants peace.
That's pretty cynical. Yes we had to enlist Stalin but I don't think anyone foresaw how bad he would be. Only that the current situation was dire. And we probably saved more people than we condemned.
And my point isn't that he wants peace. My point is the wealthy industrialists and plutocrats also want peace. Some of them make money off of war and would lobby for more war, but 100X as many make money off of peace and would oppose war.
The real root of the problem is that there are so many products under its purview that the FDA cannot possibly thoroughly vet them all. Doing serious, in-depth, independent analysis of every product would be fantastically expensive. So instead, the FDA and other agencies (like the FAA) establish standards for the processes manufacturers must follow and they primarily audit the processes rather than the products themselves.
Do you seriously think that we'd have fewer of these issues if companies could shop around for the cheapest & most lax regulator?
If you believe that, please explain to me why the BBB exists, and what positive social purpose it serves. It is the poster child for a toothless opt-in 'regulator', and it is worse than useless at dealing with malfeasance by its members. (But it's pretty good at collecting membership dues.)
Given that the FDA is a product of a democratically elected government that is ultimately accountable to the people, while the BBB is a 'non-profit' corporation, accountable to nobody, I think you missed one other important difference.
If I don't like the FDA, I can vote for someone who will fix it. I happen to think that they have, overall, done a far better job than most examples of industry self-regulation.
The head of the BBB doesn't have a monopoly guaranteed by men with rifles and cages.
Do you have any evidence to back up your claim that if you dislike the FDA you can vote someone in who will fix it? I provided pretty compelling evidence that suggests you cannot.
We're all responding to a story of the FDA allowing a big megacorp give us all cancer for literally decades. I think we have a very different definition of the word "good." You can't vote in a better FDA, but you can fire the BBB by simply ignoring them. No system will be perfect, but a better system is one in which you can choose to ignore an unreliable source of information and aren't forced to fund their production of unreliable information.
All the work involved in capturing the FDA demonstrates that the FDA is not a "mandatory BBB", if they really had no teeth there would be no need to devote all these resources to dupe/intimidate/capture them.
Of course the FDA has teeth. But the teeth are only sharp enough to hurt the little fish. The big fish keep on swimming while the FDA takes out the little fish, just like the big fish like it. The FDA and the big fish are partners. Notice how nobody in this situation is partners with you and me.
"Sure, I'll consider abandoning all priorities (i.e. social life) and/or putting off others (kids) -- and maybe even take minor risks on my health -- if you you're able to appropriate compensation."
Guess what, though? In the vast majority of cases -- even when we're talking about the bulge-bracket FAANG salaries occasionally gloated about in these and other parts -- simply don't come anywhere close enough to providing that level of compensation.
An interest rate is a price for a specific commodity (time preference on lent money)... it is nothing like taxes.
Interest rates (when controlled by a market) are a signal of how receptive a market is to investment in new capital or business, lower rates encouraging expansion and higher rates put on the brakes.
So for instance if the market is already growing at a healthy clip and a bank could invest money in existing business and get a higher return, they will not lend to you at a lower rate, unless your expected innovation or business can exceed the existing marketplace yield... which would cause you to accept a higher interest rate.
Taxes merely move buying power by edict to other enterprises. There is no tacit communication of any information, there is no price, and the only information used is the whims of the few individuals redirecting the spending.
Let's say you are a small startup owner, and you have enough cash on hand to hire 6 male devs.
You then realize you could hire 7 equally competent female devs at the exact same price, all this while still offering more money than their supposed current employer who is underpaying them.
If all of this were true the price would shift over time on these margins, and this "gap" would disappear.
Why is it that we must constantly slice up society on demographic lines, point out a statistical in-congruency with some ideal (non-extant) world, and then claim some third party is culpable for causing this?
If women were malevolently directed away from a field by educators, families, or traditions, why is it now an employer's responsibility to calculate said deficit in interest for a field and allocate resources sub-optimally in one direction or another for the sake of aligning statistics on some dubious spreadsheet?
Don't tell women no, encourage them in what they want to do in life, and if in the end they don't choose the path that aligns with your macroeconomic utopia... get over it.
Let's say you are a small startup owner, and you have enough cash on hand to hire 6 male devs.
You then realize you could hire 7 equally competent female devs at the exact same price
In reality, the likely outcome is that the 7 women would end up working at Google, who can and will gladly way out-compete you on salaries, and you end up hiring 7 quirky men, then firing a few of them.
Where do you find the 7 equally competent female devs, remembering that retention rate in the market is pretty low thanks to the salary gaps. The women look at the market and see they can get more money for other work, and there’s much less brogrammer culture to contend with, and leave the market.
I know a guy who lives in a town 70 miles away from the city where all the large stores are. And 110 miles from the nearest major city with an airport.
There is one gas station in his town, the gas is way overpriced so everyone fills up during their weekly shopping trip and then drives back home. That puts a constraint on them. It's 70 miles home. Then a week later another 70 miles to get to the cheap gas station in the city. So 140 miles out of 300-350 on a tank of gas. Thus the local gas station is sort of immaterial to them since they don't use it if they can help it.
I asked him if he could deal with an electric car with 150 miles of range and he said, oh god yes. He knows that he's spending $300/month just to drive to go shopping. And with an electric he can start his shopping trip with a full charge. Come back and plug the car in and have full range again the next day.
> I live in a city, I have no garage, an EV is impractical for me.
Here's my heuristic. What are the places your car usually spends parked at, and do these places have at least a power outlet you can plug into(a proper charging stations is better of course)? For most city-dwellers, that's either their home, their workplace, or any other place they spend some time on (supermarkets?). Do any of these places, or places nearby, provide a way for you to charge? If yes, you should be fine.
Failing that, it starts to become less practical, as you'll have to rely on quick-charging (if it is even available).
Honestly, this isn't much of a concern medium term. Yes, it's problem now. But, as the EV fleet increases, so will the market pressures for a proper charging infrastructure. It costs much less than creating a gas infrastructure. Most places have electricity, they may require some upgrades, but that's relatively cheap (compare that to adding more gas stations).
Walking to friends that own EV's one metric really is how many days can you go between charges. And the ratio of miles driven vs charging opportunities.
And old lady that drives 1500 miles a year to go shopping might well find all of her charging needs are satisfied by plugging the car in while shopping Petco and Walmart. Because at that rate she only needs the car plugged in for an hour a week.
1500miles/52weeks -> 30 miles/week / 30 miles range per charging hour -> 1hr/week.
What city do you live in where EVs are impractical?
Even the small cities where I live are starting to make ICE vehicles feel a bit less convenient. Right now it's barely noticeable, but you can certainly see where it's headed.
Just as an example, things like going to the city for groceries, pulling into a parking space, and realizing that it is for EVs only. That was last year. This year, at the good grocery store anyway, a second bank of spaces were made EV only.
Point is, I can kind of see where this is all going. So if even small cities here in bass ackwards Wisconsin are doing this kind of thing, I'd have thought it would be rampant in the large cities?
If you own a car in NYC, you have a toy, not a necessary transportation device. I would think NYC would be a step ahead of everyone else in this regard. ie - I would think they would be actively discouraging use of motor vehicles at all. Especially ICE vehicles.
I think of NYC as being more like Paris in that regard than Houston or Minneapolis. If you want to own any car in the future, I think living in NYC is not the place for you. I really do believe they are out to reduce the number of cars in NYC. (Or more precisely, I believe they are out to reduce the number of personally owned vehicles.) So it's not surprising to me that you don't see this sort of infrastructure in NYC.
This isn't necessarily the case in NYC the further out you go, and really many of the older parts of the north east. Tons of streetcar suburbs only really have street parking.
Barely. Modern parking meters, there's one per side of the street, folks walk up and down to retrieve receipts. That model isn't going to work with power cables.
And parking meters don't even exist in most of Brooklyn and Queens (or even a huge amount of Manhattan). That's a massive amount of infrastructure.
(Don't interpret this as an anti-electric-car argument, I just personally think it's better and maybe more likely that personally-owned-cars in general are what fade from NYC)
It is expected that some places are better positioned for an EV switch than others. That's ok.
One thing of note: dense cities like NYC are less amenable to cars in general. And at the same time, driving distances tend to be less, and there is congestion, all of which benefit EVs(engine is not turning if you are not moving, draw from other systems is negligible). If you don't drive as much as someone commuting in the bay area, then you might be able to get away with topping off whenever you go to a mall or something like that. Chargers are appearing at public parking buildings too. Also do you park you car in the street at your workplace? If they have their own parking, that could also eventually be a charging location (as it is in many workplaces elsewhere).
As we speak, my car is charging at my employer's parking garage (it's actually shared between several buildings, but you get the picture). By the time I end my shift I'll just disconnect and go home. I haven't charged at home in more than one year(although I have the ability). In fact, Chargepoint tells me it's already charged.
This means that I don't have to take time off my schedule to go to a gas station, all because of my employer. Given the proximity, I only have to charge once a week or less.
If you also have to park in the street at your workplace, then it won't be as convenient. But then again, I think finding a parking spot should already be stressful enough as it is :)
Hold on for a while. Cities will adapt, they will have no choice.
Many towns and cities in Europe are installing electric car charging points to on-street parking.
It's certainly not enough to rely on to charge a personal car, but it's increasing. I usually see the pay-per-minute rental cars parked in the spaces.
It might help that 220-240V is the standard voltage, it's a bit more worthwhile than 115V would be, but for more than a couple of points the existing wiring (streetlights etc) probably needs to be upgraded anyway.
Markets and bubbles crash because of a mismatch between a price and actual comparable value (which, in their large form, are usually caused by artificial market levers or _regulations_).
Stop with this mysticism inspired "greed is bad and therefore actions inspired by greed are inherently bad so we need even more powerful people who are of course not influenced by greed to set rules for the greedy" nonsense.
This exactly, the rules around usage do nothing to curb actual usage and only to prevent anyone else from making cigarettes. This increases prices and hurts cigarette consumers.
The only outcome here is that well-meaning therapeutic e-cig / nicotine quitting businesses will likely be stomped.
