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The impotence of the long-distance trillionaire

(In other news, I finally send off the novel manuscript I've been working on for the past 18 months. Taking a couple of days off before getting back to work on a novella I started in 2014 ...)

(Disclaimer: money is a proxy for control or power. I'm focussing on money rather than political leverage only because it's quantifiable.)

To you and me, a billion dollars sounds like a lot of money. It's on the order of what I (at peak earning capacity) would earn in 10,000 years. Give me just $10M and I could comfortably retire and live off interest and some judicious siphoning of capital for the rest of my life.

So are there any valid reasons to put up with billionaires?

There's a very fertile field of what I can only describe as capitalist apologetics, wherein economists and others try to justify the existence of billionaires in terms of social utility. Crude arguments that "greed is good" are all very well, but it begs the question of what positive good billionaires contribute to the commonweal—beyond a certain point the diminishing marginal utility of money means that every extra million or billion dollars changes nothing significant in the recipient's life.

For example, Steve Jobs had pancreatic cancer, as a result of which his liver was failing (after he underwent a pancreaticoduodenectomy ). As a very rich man, he could afford the best healthcare. As a billionaire, he could do more than that: he reputedly kept a business jet on 24x7 standby to whisk him to any hospital in the United States where a histocompatible liver for transplant surgery became available. (Livers are notoriously short-lived outside the donor body. Most liver transplant recipients are only able to register in one state within the USA; Jobs was registered in two or three.) But at that point, it did not matter how many billions he had: once you've got the jet and are registered with every major transplant centre within flight range, no extra amount of money is going to improve your chances of survival. In other words, in personal terms the marginal utility of money diminishes all the way to zero.

So, personal wealth has an upper bound beyond which the numbers are meaningless. Which leads to the second common argument for tolerating billionaires: that they have the resources to undertake tasks that governments decline to address. For example, there's the Gates Foundation's much-touted goal of eliminating childhood diseases of poverty in South-East Asia (which I haven't heard much about since COVID19 hit—or, for that matter, since the allegations of a Gates-Epstein surfaced in the press). Or Elon Musk's avowed goal of colonizing Mars.

Contra which, I would argue that in planetary terms a billion dollars is peanuts.

Gross planetary GDP (GWP—gross world product) is on the order of $85Tn— that is, $100,000 billion—a year. It's hard to pin it down because it's distributed among multiple currencies with varying PPP, so it could be anywhere from $70Tn to $100Tn.

Anyway. Those insanely rich guys, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos? Each of them is worth less than the growth of GWP during 2019. The richest billionaires are barely visible when you look at wealth on the scale of GWP. Collectively, along with Gates, the Waltons, Putin, et al, they represent only about 1% of GWP.

They can fund lobbying groups and politicians, rant about colonizing Mars, and buy midlife crisis toys like Twitter or weekend getaways on a space station, but their scope for effecting real change is actually tiny on a global scale. Even Putin and Xi, who are at the state-level actor end of the scale (individually they're multi-billionaires: but they also control nuclear weapons, armies, and populations in 8-9 digits) have little global leverage. Putin's catastrophic adventure in Ukraine has revealed how threadbare the emperor's suit is: all the current gassing in the Russian media about using nuclear weapons if he doesn't get his way actually does is to demonstrate the uselessness of those nuclear weapons for achieving political/diplomatic objectives.

So I conclude that they probably feel about as helpless in the face of revolutions, climate change, and economic upheaval as you and I.

Which in turn suggests something about the psychopathology of billionaires. They're accustomed to having their every whim granted, merely for the asking, as long as it exists within the enormous buffet of necessities and luxuries that are available in our global economic sphere. But they're all going to grow old and die. They can't really avoid the threat of creeping disablement within their own body, although they can buy the most careful attendants and luxurious bedpans and wheelchairs. They can't insulate themselves from objective reality, although they can pretend it doesn't exist and buy their very own luxury apocalypse bunker in New Zealand.

So they're likely to succumb to brutal cognitive dissonance at some point.

Elon Musk turns 50 this year. He's probably finally realized that he is not going to have a luxurious retirement on Mars. If the Mars colony isn't established within 20 years, he'll probably be too old to make the trip there (and I'm betting 20 years isn't long enough for what he'd want).

Vladimir Putin turns 70 this year. He's been treated for thyroid cancer, and may well be quite ill. Only one former Russian or Soviet leader lived past 80 in the past 400 years, and that's Mikhail Gorbachev (who was out of office, and insulated from its premature ageing effects, after only 5 or 6 years). My read on the situation is that Putin hadn't been impacted by external reality for decades before his Ukraine "peacekeeping operation"; his 70th birthday present to himself, intended to secure his legacy by re-establishing the Russian empire, has turned into a nightmare.

Jeff Bezos is 58; keep an eye on him in January 2024, that's when he's due to turn 60. (He seems to be saner than Musk and Putin, but his classic midlife crisis year falls around the start of a presidential election campaign in the US and he might succumb to the impulse to make a grand gesture, like Mike Bloomberg's abortive run on the presidence.)

More to the point?

Granting individuals enormous leverage can sometimes be socially useful. But before you point at Musk and Tesla or SpaceX, I need to remind you that he didn't found Tesla, he merely bought into it then took over: SpaceX's focus on reusability is good, but we had reusable space launchers before—the only really new angle is that it's a cost-reduction measure. Starlink isn't an original, it's merely a modern, bigger, faster version of 1990's Teledesic (which fell victim to over-ambitious technology goals and the dot-com bust). Meanwhile, billionaires can do immense damage: the Koch network has largely bankrolled climate change denial, Musk's Mars colony plan is fatally flawed, and so on. We inevitably run into the question of accountability. And when one person holds the purse-strings, we lose that.

I can't see any good reason to let any individual claim ownership over more than a billion dollars of assets—even $100M is pushing it.

Can you?

1740 Comments

1:

Administrative note:

You are not a billionaire.

You will never be a billionaire. You're more likely to be struck by lightning.

Arguments of the form "but muh freedumb!!!" will be mocked -- or, more likely, simply unpublished, especially if you're a drive-by commenter without a track record here.

This is not a capitalism-friendly site. It's not specifically hostile, it's just that we don't worship Mammon here.

2:

The only good answer I see is that the cost (politically, economically) of preventing them from getting beyond 100 million / a billion is higher than the price of having them.

3:

Seems like the argument you make lays out their utility - they are paths for inflicting extreme damage on a state. The Kochs and Epstein and Sheldon Adelson do a lot of damage to America and the American hegemony, but that takes as a given that your goals don't align with theirs and that you don't also want to do harm to the given hegemony. No reason to take that as the case though.

I've seen writers describe America's corruption problem from it's billionaires described as "the sick man of the world" noting that the ability for billionaires and international groups to buy influence (and correspondingly, blackmail of the corruption) makes it so the modern regime is destabilized and locked from things like addressing climate change or pandemic response,or anything but be beholden to the billionaires.

I mean it doesn't take a lot of looking to see where the influence of billionaires drives the stars to doing intensely damaging things to their benefit - the Bush administration and Iraq War for example.

So they would be an effective weapon against another state in the modern world. It's just a matter of getting a handle on them, either through ideology or other means (eg Epstein's ties to intelligence agencies)

4:

There’s the Marxist argument that workers should be entitled to receive the value of their work. Steve Jobs’s work was worth at least $100 billion to Apple; why should Apple’s other shareholders get all of that value and not him?

5:

I don't buy that argument because Steve Jobs' work would have been worthless without the willing cooperation of everyone else at Apple, who followed his lead.

He was certainly worth a lot extra to Apple, but only as the leader of a team effort.

(Also, he's a bad example to pick on because at the time he died, Apple hadn't completed its growth spurt to become the world's highest-valued corporation by market cap.)

((Also-also, the way we value corporations by market cap is fucked. I mean, right now Tesla is valued higher than VW, Toyota, and Ford combined: really? Markets are largely irrational and I don't think they can be reformed.))

6:

Seems like the argument you make lays out their utility - they are paths for inflicting extreme damage on a state.

Putin would also be an example. While OGH is obviously correct to say that "Putin's catastrophic adventure in Ukraine has revealed how threadbare the emperor's suit is", Putin has succeeded in demonstrating his ability to cause great harm. Primarily to Russia and Ukraine, but all the economic turmoil is causing a lot of damage (i.e., food prices becoming unaffordable for folks with less money) further afield.

7:

Putin has killed tens of thousands, exiled millions, and caused a global food price spike that will kill at least tens of thousands and possibly millions.

This is before we get into actual war crimes territory ...

8:

A hard cut off is undesirable. What there should be is an increasing tax burden that has as a result that being a billionaire is expensive. With NO exceptions. It's the exceptions in the tax policy that are the real problem.

Of course, as long as "money is speech", lobbyists will prevent this from happening, but it's the way it needs to be addressed. Even then you'll get collections of the extremely wealthy gathering together to collaborate on things that benefit only the extremely wealthy, but I can't think of a way to prevent that that isn't worse than not doing anything about it. Anti-trust law is about as close as we can come (and that needs to be enforced more rigorously).

HOWEVER, I suspect that "Corporate greed" is worse than the whims of individual billionaires. (Antitrust law addresses part of that.)

9:

Putin has succeeded in demonstrating his ability to cause great harm.

Tossing a grenade through the door is always easier than building a house.

10:

"markets are irrational" -- certainly in the short term, markets are moved by emotion, but in the long term, a market with a large enough number of participants will come up with a pretty good estimate of what the price of something should be. It just takes a lot of computation to figure this stuff out.

I think billionaires (and dictators) are a special case of the Socialist Calculation Problem. A single individual human just doesn't have the computational capacity to determine how to effectively use all of that money. If you spread the money around, then you recruit more brains into deciding exactly how it should be spent, and the hive mind will tend to come up with better solutions that do more to improve human weal. This implies that we should have universal free education, universal basic income, and unabridged access to accurate information (freedom of speech and robust journalism, but sans liars polluting the information space for personal benefit, e.g. Murdoch, Qanon, et cetera).

11:

For reasons along the lines of what's discussed here I have long been in favor of confiscatory taxes on income over a certain amount. The number I picked for Americans would be income in the neighborhood of $30M/yr: once you're making that much, your next dollar goes 100% to income taxes. Historical evidence seems to point in the direction that basically nobody will bother with income-producing activity that gets taxed at 80+%.

For a long time, I felt less urgency about the existing great fortunes. I figured that with a decently structured death tax and a confiscatory income tax they would eventually evaporate via regression to the mean.

I don't have any good suggestions about how to prevent the accumulation of fortunes like Gates' and Jobs' and Musk's, which they got basically by increasing the valuation of something they already owned.

12:

I don't see that there is a huge difference between a personal billionaire, someone who has effective control over an organisation worth 10 billion, or someone who has effective control over a country worth 100 billion. Yes, the latter two temd to be temporary appointments, but that's all.

However, personal billionaires have a slightly better record as charitable patrons, especially for less popular purposes. It's a marginal benefit, but matches your request.

13:

I don't know much about most of the ultra-wealthy but most of them have appeared to be worse than useless and to positively do harm. I do have a soft spot for Tesla and SpaceX and hence for Elon Musk's achievements. In his favour he does not do the conspicuous consumption thing, (but is Twitter an exception?) but on the other hand many of his public comments are very easy to dislike. Would SpaceX have made the progress that it has without Elon's wealth?

Beyond a certain point of wealth the only thing you can do with it is to drive vast projects or just sit on it. A few of these projects are probably worthwhile but most are either evil, pure virtue-signalling, wasteful or are just window-dressing. It seems to me that the people who do manage to successfully play the trillionaire game do not generally know what to do with it.

14:

Tying together a few items.

When my daughter did a year of schooling in Germany back in 2009-2010 (17-18 years old) her friends would talk about how they could be successful in Germany but to get rich they would need to move to the US. Which struck my daughter and myself as odd. This was a group about to graduate from the German Gymnasium system into college/university.

This weekend I listened to an US Public Radio News story about Germany's auto industry. How the major auto (and industrial) firms are wildly rich but tend to ride under the daily consciousness of Germans. (I have no idea how true this is.) But apparently there's a lot of white washing of the Nazi past of all of these companies by their owners/founders. And not being out front about just how much money these family firms have.

15:

However, personal billionaires have a slightly better record as charitable patrons, especially for less popular purposes. It's a marginal benefit, but matches your request.

2nd (or was it 3rd) generation Rockefellers yes. Much involved in public service. Next generation just faded into the background of rich folks living the easy life.

Sackler family and Amway folks, not so much.

16:

Let's be clear about what a billionaire represents - a potential systemic economic and political threat to the millions of individuals in the general population and the economy they foster.

The political elites of the world's major governments have, over the last forty years, all demonstrated themselves to be vulnerable, via the disease vectors of lobbying and political donations, to the influence of dark money. While this has not been exclusively driven by super-rich individuals, much of it has - Russia's various gangsters, the Koch's, the Mercer family, Murdoch and his spawn. Many of the major social and political problems of today, across the Western world, can be directly attributed to their influence.

We've deliberately "opened up" our economies (to use the accepted parlance) to a class of hyper-wealthy neo-aristocrats, whose wealth-induced sociopathy has been plain for us all to see. Doing so has set in motion a self-perpetuating cycle - a process I've termed in the past "Libertarian Rot".

Imagine a parasitic infestation rotting away the structure of its host economy. The very first thing a parasite typically tries to do when invading its host is to disable or co-opt the host's immune system, so the first vector of infection is typically the media of a country. Next follows regulatory capture and infiltration of institutions.

The final stage, as with many parasitic infections, affects the hosts executive functions - altering it's behaviour in a way that benefits the parasite, even if it negatively affects the host. So, you foster a ideological cult within the political elite of the country via a long term process of radicalisation through "think tanks", and electoral manipulation, through legitimate funding and open corruption, to weed out obstacles and generate a particular culture.

Added bonus - when the host starts to 'sicken' as a result of the parasite, you use the co-opted immune system to encourage the host to attack the wrong organ. Pick a scapegoat.

I'm sure there are billionaires that have wonderful qualities, although I'll be sceptical as to the proportion that do, given that numerous studies have shown that increased wealth typically leads to decreased empathy. But even if 95% of billionaires were saintly, that would still represent too much of a threat to the general population. A billionaire is a disease vector, a loaded gun, a big flashing red button in a nuclear reactor. All it takes is a small proportion of the super-wealthy using said wealth to subvert our nation-states, and history has shown that they will wreak havoc. They will collectively rot away our economies, infiltrate and subvert our institutions, and pit us against one another.

We simply can't afford them.

17:

Tossing a grenade through the door is always easier than building a house.

Stephen Jay Gould spun this thought out into an entire essay.

18:

Paras 1&2 - I was just about to type almost exactly that; Seconded should do it.

19:

I have long been in favor of confiscatory taxes on income over a certain amount.

Personally, I prefer wealth taxes. The problem with both, of course, is that when you provide billionaires with an incentive for hiding (or legally shielding) their income/wealth, they're gonna hire folks who are very, very good at it.

20:

From what I can tell, the argument for extreme wealth eventually rests on humanity's social hierarchy wiring. We have to give a hand full of people the power to end all life on Earth because social status unlike wealth or happiness, is a zero sum game. The people in the middle of the social ladder who scream whenever anyone talks about curbing the power of the ultra rich feel threatened by anything that restrains the privilege of those above them or seeks to better the plight of those they see as below them because they are insecure about their own social status. It's not that they think they might be billionaires themselves, it's that they are terrified that Those People are coming from below to steal their status, and that they are terrified of the idea that punching can go in any direction but down. That those with higher social status can abuse those with lower status is so fundamental to the understanding of how the world works that any general increase in common wellbeing is a threat.

(This is me trying to sum up both Innuendo Studios' Always a Bigger Fish video and Altemeyer's The Authoritarians)

How can we either find a way for the status-driven to get their status fix without giving them so much power over others, or correct for the status-seeking cognitive bias? There's also numerous studies showing that wealth imbalance induces sociopathic behaviour in the wealthy (elite panic etc.) so if we're re-wiring brains, maybe we can hit that one while we're at it?

I am wary of a political solution to wealth/power concentration because people with power change the rules to allow them to accrue more power. If we take as given that we're operating in a capitalist democracy, where more capitalism means less democracy and vice versa, then we'll always have to keep fighting to try to make sure the pendulum swings towards democracy at least occasionally.

If we put a wealth limit on, that's a moving target - how much power can you wield with $999 million and how can you use that power to get more power?

I think the primary argument for billionaires is that someone has to be at the top, and once you accept that power imbalance we're just quibbling over degree.

21:

However, personal billionaires have a slightly better record as charitable patrons, especially for less popular purposes. It's a marginal benefit, but matches your request.

This is like saying the Oaxaca Cartel has a net benefit because their money laundering operations provide liquid capital to small businesses.

Further, billionaires do not have a better record as charitable patrons. A regular person gives a much higher percentage of their wealth to charity than any billionaire does, and the collective efforts of regular people - democratically enacted social programs - completely dwarf the contributions by billionaires.

Never mind that most billionaire "charity" is in fact purchasing power and control eg Bill Gates to WHO and it playing to his goals on intellectual property rights

22:

Ecologist here. Parasites are both a central example of what billionaires tend to do, AND a dangerously misleading metaphor for how they should be treated.

We tend to abhor parasites, but nature doesn't. About 70% of species on this planet, probably more if we include prokaryotes and viruses, are parasites and pathogens. The critical thing to realize is that this in itself isn't bad, especially on the ecosystem level. Diverse systems tend to be full of parasites and pathogens. This isn't a feature or a bug, it's a central function. As an article in Hakai magazine pointed out a month ago, loss of parasites can be a really bad thing. The article's about the Puget Sound area, where the diversity of fish parasites has dropped by 90%, both the ecosystem and the fishery suffered, because the few remaining parasites exploded in number, making some fish unmarketable, and also because parasites modify nutrient flows. They can cause their hosts to die young or get eaten faster, thereby speeding up nutrient cycling through a system (nutrients flow by things getting eaten). This favors different species and sometimes more diversity, since organisms do different things when they don't get sick and die young.

In human civilization, there are two ways to mimic the roles of parasites in ecosystems. One way is to use bureaucracies to regulate things and collect taxes. When billionaires complain that the tax men are parasites who should be exterminated (all tax is theft), from the perspective of their money, they're right, their fortunes are being eaten alive. From the perspective of the societal ecosystem, that theft is essential, because it changes the way money circulates through society in ways that ideally prevent other problems. Taxing billionaires to provide free services to the poor may be essential.

The other way to regulate an economy without rules is through theft and violence, where you get held up and pay protection money instead of paying fees and taxes. Normally, people favor regulation backed by a powerful regulatory system of some sort, rather than threatened or actual violence. But both taxes and robbers redistribute societal resources in ways that mimic nutrient flows in ecosystems.

So yes, billionaires are parasites, to the extent that they skim money off and return nothing for it. The key question is what Charlie asked: "Do billionaires do anything good by existing?"

Turns out (surprise!) that's hard to answer with an affirmative. Is that because they are useless, or because we're not looking closely enough? This is where we need to follow the example of the parasitologists (the few, the proud). They're still mostly in the business of fighting parasitic infections, but they've accidentally learned over the years (as have the ecologists working with them) that parasites may be bad for their victims but essential at a systemic level.

So we also need to ask the ecologist's question: "What happens when you remove billionaires from a system?" We don't really have good worked examples of this, but I'd advise thinking about it quite seriously. Do billionaires backstop things on which global civilization depends? I'm here thinking of international shipping, the internet, and communications and weather satellites. Venture capital may be another key billionaire service, to the degree that VC ever produces genuinely useful companies. A few buy ranches and turn them into parks or conservancies, or fund research facilities and hospitals. Do they do this better than governments do?

Now the answer may well be that removing billionaires actually makes things better, as dispersing their fortunes allows others to make better use of their money and power than they do. If so, the only reason we have them (per Martin S above) is that, like the feudal lords of old, laying siege to their financial systems costs more than we'd get from them.

Or billionaires may turn out to be essential for civilization as parasites that regulate the movement of resources in ways that ultimately benefit most of us. I think they're mostly useless, but I don't know. Both Charlie's version and this counterfactual version do need to be asked, I think.

23:

In his favour he does not do the conspicuous consumption thing

I dunno. What about flying a private jet 31 miles rather than driving that distance?

Tesla chief Elon Musk’s corporate jet flew more than 150,000 miles last year, or more than six times around the Earth…

…Some of the flights were recreational getaways for Musk or his family, while others involved moving the plane from one side of Los Angeles to the other to help Musk shorten his commutes…

… In September, a few days after calling fossil fuels “the dumbest experiment in human history,” his plane burned thousands of pounds of jet fuel flying 300 miles from L.A. to Oakland so Musk could view a competitive video-gaming event…

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/elon-musks-highflying-2018-what-150000-miles-in-a-private-jet-reveal-about-his-excruciating-year/2019/01/29/83b5604e-20ee-11e9-8b59-0a28f2191131_story.html

The flight left San Jose, California Friday morning and landed in San Francisco just 9 minutes later, according to the automated public flight information software powering the account. Followers on social media were quick to criticize Musk for what many said is a wasteful trip that flies in the face of the billionaire’s supposed goals.

https://futurism.com/the-byte/elon-musk-private-jet-elonjet-twitter-miles

24:

I mean, right now Tesla is valued higher than VW, Toyota, and Ford combined: really?

Yes, really.

Electric cars are mechanically simpler than ICE ones, and cost 1/3 the labor to assemble, so Tesla has a much leaner workforce and will never incur the same crushing pension liabilities the legacy car makers have, that are deducted from their enterprise value to yield their market cap.

Furthermore, Tesla is at least 5 years ahead of the competition and accelerating because of the complacency of the legacy carmakers, along with their inability to master software because it is scattered across an ecosystem of suppliers. It's not just the electric powertrain, just look at how they have been revolutionizing the way chassis are built with their casting machines and bespoke alloys. Who thought metal-bashing still had innovations left in 2022?

25:

"Income" doesn't exist, over a certain threshold: billionaires structure their assets to that they have control, but it's all through trusts and shares in shell companies and many of them are hosted offshore.

To end the billionaire caste without violence you need:

a) A global tax regime with teeth

b) A progressive wealth tax, not income tax

c) Mandatory declaration of indirect holdings so that they can't hide behind cut-outs/shells/trusts

d) Auditing/accounting standards with teeth so that weaseling out of paying the tax is more expensive than coughing up

e) A global ban on opaque cash-driven political lobbying (ha. ha. ha.)

The EU made very tentative steps towards (a) and (d) and Brexit was the consequence. I doubt we can get (b), (c), and (e) short of a world government.

26:

I do have a soft spot for Tesla and SpaceX

Just noting that Tesla allegedly has a horrific racism problem at some of their manufacturing plants.

Musk grew up in white South Africa under apartheid, and corporate culture tends to propagate from the top down, so I have a nasty feeling these things might be connected.

27:

Electric cars are mechanically simpler than ICE ones, and cost 1/3 the labor to assemble, so Tesla has a much leaner workforce and will never incur the same crushing pension liabilities the legacy car makers have, that are deducted from their enterprise value to yield their market cap.

To which I reply, all three of the firms I mentioned are transitioning to EVs now. And their pension liabilities are a significant social good -- if they didn't show on the balance sheet of the employers, who'd be paying those workers' pensions? (Answer: most likely, the state -- or they'd be doomed to penury in their old age, while the shareholders/owners would be riding high on the hog at the workers' expense.)

As for Tesla being five years ahead ... I'll grant you that it looks that way, and their software/systems integration is light years ahead of the incumbents, but by the same token, Tesla is going to be stuck with a boatload of crufty legacy products to support in 5-10 years time, cars they no longer want to support because they're moving on to the newest and best stuff. Whereas Ford, VW, Toyota et al are already there. That competitive edge at Tesla is simply down to them moving on a market niche first. Whether they can sustain it is an open question -- and it's certainly not indicative that a relatively small car manufacturer should have a market cap exceeding firms that make orders of magnitude more vehicles globally.

28:

Also worth pointing out that with billionaires, the person and the corporate person aren't precisely the same thing.

For example, with Musk buying Twitter, a lot of text has been spilled about Musk ego-tripping and blah blah blah. There have also been quieter notes that financially, he may be making his fortune less volatile than it was before, because of the way Twitter stock performs.

Both might be true. While it's possible that Musk is a real-life Bruce Wayne, masquerading as a socially awkward, playboy billionaire while being a secret financial and technical wizard who's remaking the world to right some wrongs, it's more likely that he's a socially awkward billionaire (his physical persona) who has collected a team of really good technical and financial advisers (his corporate persona), and he's smart and knowledgeable enough to work with them at a sophisticated level. In the later case, most of the talent that makes him so formidable isn't in his head. But he can use it.

This becomes a critical point, because heirs typically are less smart than their parents. They may inherit the corporate personae that go with managing billions, but if they're not smart enough to work with their financial and other managers at any sophisticated level, they may not do very well. Musk may do okay. But his children?

29:

“Just noting that Tesla allegedly has a horrific racism problem at some of their manufacturing plants.”

I used to (‘91-‘04) live a few miles south of the NUMMI plant that Tesla bought as their original factory, which is the one I’ve seen complaints about. It’s not on the SF peninsula but what is called ‘the east bay’ and is very much the working class area (remember, British, so using terms in that sense and not the somewhat twisted US form) of the region.

Whilst I don’t recall seeing actual swastikas there very often, confederate flags on pickups are/were common. Racially base assault was pretty common in the news. Anybody thinking that SJW-woke-siliconvalley-leftism means it’s all harmony needs a reality check. I don’t find it at all hard to imagine shop floor level workers, supervisors and line managers being prone to both ignoring and taking part in racist behaviour, whether or not any higher management is involved.

Is it Musk’s responsibility? In the sense of him being the boss, of course. In the sense of causing it? I suspect not, not because I think he’s a wonderfully nice guy but because it is inefficient and wastes effort in pursuing the dream; which appears to be an obsession.

30:

The main edge that Tesla seems to have other than a bit of a name as the big mover in the field, is that special Tesla charging network.

If I were in the market for an EV right now, as a car the current lot of options all seem ok to some extent and Tesla isn't necessarily that far ahead, but I would be stupid to not consider them for their much better charging coverage. (Especially given no charging capability at home.)

31:

I think the ecological viewpoint, or maybe more fundamentally an evolutionary viewpoint, is a good kind of lens for this.

However, I think it is wrong to limit the discussion to only human individuals who are billionaires, because organizations who are billionaires are found in the same ecological niche.

There may be a pattern where the organizational billionaires tend to do more good, but not necessarily less damage, than individual billionaires.

Take for instance AT&T's Bell Labs, which carried out a shitload of fundamental research, paid for by the 2% "Telephone Tax".

That may also be a better lens to use: Does the accused entity effectively have "taxing power" ?

The list of examples is too long to repeat here, but here are a few of the most egregious examples, to outline the problem space:

  • The price of the F-35 fighter, and it's lack of competition.

  • The price of insulin in USA

  • The "Microsoft Tax"

  • The "PayPal Tax"

  • The impossibility of escaping total electronic surveillance by Amazon/FaceBook/Google and their ilk.

If one believes that prevention is better than curing, then the thing to talk about is "market power" rather than the wealth it is abused to build.

In many ways "market power" is worse, because it paves the road to corrupting things like IETF protocol standards, something which would be comparatively hard to do with money.

(I totally fail to understand, how a single billionaire taking Twitter private, is not illegal under anti-trust laws.)

But one way or another, what's missing is negative feedback on the steep part of the growth curve, so let us add that to Capitalism-2.0:

In any organization under which there exist more than 50.000 paying customers or where more than 10.000 peoples personal information is processed, at least 60% of the governing board, by voting strength, must be democratically elected by and from the affected customers and persons.

It's far from perfect, but it will do a lot of needed damage to the "exponential startup religion"

32:

As for Mammon worship, if money's a god in global capitalism (akin to Inari Okami in Shinto, perhaps?) then billionaires are the saints of Mammonism.

I'm pointing to Inari, because the question "who/what is Inari" really has a lot of similarities to he question of "what is money?" Rather than derail this post into a discussion of "You [deleted], money is [whatever] for [reasons]," followed by endless rounds of "No, you're wrong, because [argument]," I'll just point out that the nature of money is multifaceted and ambiguous, and some of its nature does overlap with how some polytheistic systems treat their gods.

This doesn't make sense? Let's try a more concrete example: is water a god? Try living without it. Since you depend on water for life, if you were a polytheist, you might regard water as a god. And I'd actually suggest that treating clean water as sacred is one of the smarter things you can do, but that's beside the point. Try living without money. Not only is this hard, thinking about things without attaching monetary values to them takes more practice than you'd think.

Money is, in some ways, a god in our current civilization, incarnated as dollars, euros, gold, cryptocurrencies, and many other forms. And those who are greatly favored by Money? Billionaires. And if you practice that whole system for the purpose of manifesting Money more in every aspect of your life, you're practicing Mammonism.

Remember, we can argue about the nature of money once we pass post 300, and I think Charlie would be happier if we did. So back to the original topic: what are billionaires good for, outside of being Mammonic cult heroes?

33:

I have not heard about Tesla racism. For sure Musk is a very mixed human being.

I think Tesla has significantly advanced progress towards electric vehicles, and SpaceX has significantly advanced rocketry. I regard both of these as good things. And Tesla and SpaceX would not be where they are without Elon Musk.

As I understand it most of Musk's trillions come from his Tesla incentive deal being triggered by the sky-high Tesla share price. I suspect that similar progress would have been made with a much less generous incentive deal - in other words Musks trillions do not actually have a good reason for existing.

34:

Excess corporate Jet use maybe: but no Yachts or expensive houses or football clubs or private islands or ...

35:

Disagree somewhat: I think it's the battery factories.

But it's hard to be sure. One thing Musk's companies get very right is that they try to create vertically integrated technology stacks, if not monopolies. Tesla make their own batteries, for example: SpaceX make their own rocket motors and payload fairings. Compare with Ford or GM, and with ULA. Outsourcing taken too far becomes a disease and the big market incumbents all got a surfeit of it between roughly 1980 and 2020.

36:

Given that Musk lives in the vicinity of south-central CA, I'm surprised he doesn't also have a helicopter for getting around. Cheaper to buy and operate than an executive jet, and much more suitable for stuff like hopping between cities. Yes it's significantly slower at top speed, but it can also go center-to-center rather than stopping at an out-of-town runway.

37:

I think there is a potential utility for very large amounts of personal wealth, which is that you can choose to do things with it which are very high risk / very high benefit which governments generally can't do because the risk of failure is too awful to contemplate.

As an example, Jobs could have chosen to throw all of his wealth at some approach to curing or ameliorating whatever specific cancer he had. In the unlikely event that this paid of he might have been left merely wealthy but, on the other hand, alive, and as a side effect many other people might have been saved. If it didn't pay off, well, he doesn't need to care because he's then dead in any case.

You could argue that that's what Musk is doing with Mars, but I don't think it is: he might think it is but I think that's because he's not understood that science fiction is in fact fiction. For such a thing to qualify it has to have some chance of doing something actually useful, and I don't think either landing some people briefly on Mars and declaring victory, or watching a colony slowly die there is useful.

And a stronger argument against this is that governments can in fact do the same thing: they can't do it with all their money the way a person can, but they can spend as much money as a very rich individual can spend on each of many individual high-risk high-benefit projects, of which enough will succeed to make it worth it. That's kind of what DARPA did (does?) I think.

And the sort of people who become very rich are almost always the sort of people who have some defect in their mind which makes it impossible to stop once they have all the money they could possibly ever need: that same defect also probably makes it impossible for them to make good decisions about this sort of project, which governments perhaps can do.

So I think I'm wrong: there's a theoretical case, but it is probably not a real one.

38:

One thing Musk's companies get very right is that they try to create vertically integrated technology stacks

It seems to be feature of driven companies led big a very strong "brilliant" single person.

Ford (River Rouge Complex), Apple's Jobs and Now Cook not farming out much of anything but things they just can't do better. Heck, American Airlines under Robert Crandall transformed the world's airlines (for good or bad)

The problem with all of these things (harking back to an earlier comment) is when control gets diffused these companies seem to coast at the top for a while then start falling behind. Some course correct. Some don't.

LockMark. NASA. IBM. General Electric. Sun. DEC. Etc...

When the corporate offices get taken over by a board with financials as the main factor, things tend to go south. Sometimes it takes a while and at times it happens in a hurry.

Oh, most billionaires don't take much of a salary. Too many tax issues. They funnel their stocks and other assets into trusts, retirement accounts, and companies then borrow against those assets and live off those borrowed funds.

39:

As an example, Jobs could have chosen to throw all of his wealth at some approach to curing or ameliorating whatever specific cancer he had.

Problem: cancer is a diagnosis. It turns out that it's a label we stick on a whole bunch of conditions which show similar symptoms but may actually be the result of radically different mutations in the genetics of the cancerous cell line. (Which is why we know of a whole bunch of genes that indicate elevated risk of "breast cancer", for example -- they're actually different malfunctions that manifest in the same manner, as aggressive replication and de-differentiation with loss of contact inhibition in breast tissue. Twenty different cancers flying in very close formation.)

You can sometimes get results by throwing money at a medical problem, if the problem is well-defined. Look how long it took to develop vaccines against COVID19 -- once they had the genetic sequence development was ridiculously fast, and most of the delay was due to the requirement for clinical trials (however abbreviated they were compared to business as usual). Again, the recent finding that Epstein-Barr Virus is a major contributing factor to Multiple Sclerosis suggests that suddenly a whole bunch of new pathways to MS treatment may open up, from antiviral meds to vaccines.

But the pathway to rolling out any medical treatment involves numerous critical path bottlenecks, due to the need to avoid harming large numbers of people (for why we do this, see also: Thalidomide).

40:

The problem with all of these things (harking back to an earlier comment) is when control gets diffused these companies seem to coast at the top for a while then start falling behind.

Clayton Christensen anatomized this in The Innovator's Dilemma. Steve Jobs' peculiar brilliance -- for which he's earned a long-term niche in the B-school studies -- is that when he went back to Apple he repeatedly disrupted his own company rather than letting some outsider eat his lunch first. The iPod and iPhone were ballsy enough moves: the iPad threatened to cannibalize the entire Mac market -- but Jobs didn't balk at it (and they successfully extended Apple's reach, down into cheaper computing devices without forcing them to enter a cost/quality death spiral with the high-end Mac kit).

41:

The wealth of the current crop of multibillionaires is predicated on a perceived 'value' of the shares they own in various companies. Musk owns X shares in Tesla, Tesla shares sell for $Y ~ Musk is 'worth' X * Y. If Musk were to sell more than a tiny fraction of those shares, their price would drop precipitously and his 'worth' would also crash.

The same applies to most of the other billionaires, at least those who are not also rulers. The wealth of the Houses of Saud or Windsor are fundamentally different from the wealth of a Bezos or Gates. The older wealth tends to be hidden and quiet, though they show up here and there (i.e. Anderson Cooper is a Vanderbilt).

I am not sure how much of an answer there is to the billionaire infestation we are currently dealing with. The impetus to start new things and create companies that innovate can be a very positive thing for the world - I have zero doubt that if Musk and Tesla had not forced EV development the legacy car companies would be continuing to delay and ignore as long as possible. Thew prospect of profit from investing in innovation is a strong motivator, and the general success rate (low) of such investments mean that a lot of wealth gets transferred from people with too much (Angel & Venture Capitalists) to people working on new things. The occasional huge payoff is a side effect of the overall development of new things.

I think for the discussion to be useful there must be a separation between billions acquired through the creation of new things, and billions acquired through an accident of birth. For better or worse, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs facilitated the rise of the personal computer. Their children had no role in that, their grandchildren even less. An inheritance tax of close to 100% would be just fine with me.

42:

Does it even make sense to think of these people as billionaires in the sense that they have access to that much wealth? They don't. Very few of them (Putin and the state-level actors might be the exception) have access to even tiny fractions of their net worth in anything liquid form. This doesn't make them poor of course, far from it, but if Bezos could put his hands on even $5 million in cash in less than a weeks time I'd be surprised.

When they buy their $100 million mansions and their $200 million yachts, or even just some $1 million sports car, my understanding is that this is all financed out the wazoo. A bank hands them the cash, as a loan, and they go get what they want. And what bank wouldn't? They're good for it, and they'll pay it back with interest.

Thus, at this level of wealth, their net worth doesn't really indicate how much money they have access to but instead how much control over various corporate entities out there in the world (and, to whatever political influence that control provides).

I don't think this is a meaningless distinction either. If this money is so virtual that it doesn't really exist (except as power/control), it has effectively become untaxable. How do you confiscate Musk's money, if it's just shares of stock in Tesla and SpaceX, and what would it mean to confiscate those shares? Does the IRS now control those companies, are they in charge of all the decisions Musk used to make?

Whether or not I agree with the wealth taxes discussed in this thread or not, I don't think there's a practical way to attempt them and that there hasn't been for a long while.

43:

Yes. My wife has worked in this area all my life, and a HELL of a lot of time and effort goes into finding a treatment for one cancer, that works on some people but not others. Very rarely the researchers strike lucky and find a near-cure; sometimes they find something that works to some extent; sometimes they simply fail; that's research for you. Get landed with the one I have, where a few tens of people get it every year in the USA, probably ten or fewer in the UK, and it's currently impractical to do more than "it's a bit like X - let's treat it like that."

44:

Given that Musk lives in the vicinity of south-central CA, I'm surprised he doesn't also have a helicopter for getting around.

I would think that helicopters would get an extra 10-15 minutes just for clearance... don't big corporate jets still need to wait for a runway to take off from, or to land on another? Or do they get to pre-empt commercial flights?

Hell, he could board the helicopter right outside of the building he's currently in, rather than having a driver shuttle him off to the private terminal at the airport, so maybe more than 15 minutes bonus on that.

45:

Given that Musk lives in the vicinity of south-central CA, I'm surprised he doesn't also have a helicopter for getting around. Cheaper to buy and operate than an executive jet, and much more suitable for stuff like hopping between cities. Yes it's significantly slower at top speed, but it can also go center-to-center rather than stopping at an out-of-town runway.

Um, not any more, if ever. Musk's current permanent residence is a $50k mini-house near the Space X facility in south Texas. He claims he doesn't own a home, merely couch surfs at friend's houses. And he might.

South-Central LA, by the way, is the land of Compton and Watts. Beverly Hills is the west side, Palos Verdes is the south coast, and Pasadena's in the east-center of the County only because LA County goes over the San Gabriel Mountains (largely vacant because they're effing steep. Pasadena's at the foot of the mountains), and into the Mojave desert at Lancaster and Palmdale.

Geography aside, the LA basin is dotted with small airports. There's one in Compton, for instance. Most of them serve private planes and helicopters. However, a helicopter has a range of ca. 250 kilometers, so even coptering from LA to Vegas (236 miles, plus going up to 10,000' over the San Gabriels) is pushing it a bit. San Francisco is about 400 miles away. So if, like Musk, you've got business in the Bay Area and South Texas, you need a plane, not a copter.

46:

Problem: cancer is a diagnosis

Yes, I really did mean whatever specific thing he had: whatever the specific underlying thing was, not the symptom. It would be astonishing if there turns out to be 'a cure for cancer', but there might be a cure for whatever killed Jobs. Of course it may not have been known what the underlying thing was for the cancer which was killing him, but still 'here is x billion dollars for you to find out what it is and spend on curing it' had some non-zero chance of succeeding I think and if it had (or even if it had failed in its immediate target of keeping him alive) it might well have helped many other people either directly or via other results of the research.

More generally my argument is just that this kind of moonshot thing is something very, very rich people could choose to do. (ut, well, the US government did actually do a moonshot thing, and they knew that they could afford for it to fail, which is one of the reasons I think my argument is wrong.

47:

Bill Gates and Steve Jobs facilitated the rise of the personal computer. Their children had no role in that, their grandchildren even less. An inheritance tax of close to 100% would be just fine with me.

B&M Gates said a while back that while their kids would have no issues with money (unless they become very stupid) most of their wealth will not go to them.

48:

"I would think that helicopters would get an extra 10-15 minutes just for clearance... don't big corporate jets still need to wait for a runway to take off from, or to land on another?"

It's complicated...

Helicopters are generally not very welcome in the airspace near large busy airports, so they are heavily discouraged by regulatory means, one of which is a very sharp focus on the "where you come down rule": The pilot of a plane with lifting surfaces has a lot of time to pick his crash-site, whereas rotor craft just fall down where they fail.

For airports limited by runway capacity, corporate jet traffic causes a hit to their 'passengers delayed' metrics, so service-fees for non-schedule flights tend to be very high, in order to discourage them.

That will never stop rich assholes, but it does keep the more mundane kind of corporate jets and personal planes away.

Many metropolises will have one or more small airports specializing in non-route flights, and because the passenger density is nearly nothing, they can be as small indeed: Just a runway, parking area, and a fence. Tower services may be provided remotely.

49:

Answer: most likely, the state -- or they'd be doomed to penury in their old age

Probably the latter.

In many American states, the education system deals with pension obligations by firing teachers before their pensions vest. A teacher can go from award-winning to fired-for-incompetence in a single year, if its a year or two before their pension vests.

This is praised in Republican circles for reducing the burden on the taxpayer.

50:

Yes, I really did mean whatever specific thing he had: whatever the specific underlying thing was, not the symptom. It would be astonishing if there turns out to be 'a cure for cancer', but there might be a cure for whatever killed Jobs.

Jobs had pancreatic cancer for which the outcomes are terrible compared to most others. Which in themselves are terrible.

51:

However, I think it is wrong to limit the discussion to only human individuals who are billionaires, because organizations who are billionaires are found in the same ecological niche. There may be a pattern where the organizational billionaires tend to do more good, but not necessarily less damage, than individual billionaires.

I quite agree. Billionaires, possibly with the exception of Gates, are business entities. Whether they own a company or merely run it may be a less relevant question.

As for taxes versus money flow versus charging rents, they're variations on a theme of who moves money from whom, to where, for what purpose, and how fast.

But who controls it? Remember that Trump was legally elected in the US, and Republicans are doing a skillful job of hanging onto power by manipulating elections. Democratically electing the heads of powerful companies sounds like a good idea, but in practice it's far from perfect.

To be clear, I don't think there's a theoretical optimum. Bill Gates, for all his sins, arguably does a better job of managing the Gates Foundation than Donald Trump ever would, so one can't argue that billionaires are automatically the optimal solution for philanthropies. Some co-ops (like Costco) do very well in many equity measurements. Others are cautionary tales that unfold slowly and painfully for all involved. I think it optimal control structure does depend on circumstances, and the best possible control structure for a particular corporate entity really is contingent on what you have to work with and what problems you have to solve to get it going. Sometimes, as the old Roman Republic demonstrated successfully for a couple of centuries, you need to appoint a dictator to solve a problem that democracy can't solve, even when democracy normally works better.

One thing billionaires can do that democratically-run corporations struggle with is responding rapidly to changing situations. Even pre-dating capitalism, Muslim merchants put a huge store in reputation and honor, because their reputation for back-stopping deals by putting their wealth on the line to honor their commitments made their trading possible by reducing risks. Similarly, a billionaire will not have all their fortune liquid and ready to spend, but they can manage and backstop deals in the billions, because they have the capacity to mobilize the resources if things go bad. Unfortunately, both bureaucracies and democracies take much more time to do the same thing, due to required processes, due diligence, and coalition building. While I agree that a group process often leads to a better outcome, it is slower, and sometimes that matters.

52:

Very interesting analysis... which leads me to this idea: they really want the US to lean whichever way they want... because the ultrawealthy are their own nation-state, and the US, controlled by them, is its military fist. One superpower is so much easier to deal with than multiple ones, who might fight each other.

53:

Tesla, worth more than Ford, VW, and Toyota, really?
Agreed. I did the kind of things most folks in arguments don't... I just looked it up. This is worldwide production of vehicles:
VW, 2021, around 8.3M
Ford " 3.9M
Toyota 7.6M

Tesla 930,422
In what possible way is it worth more? In the shell game of stocks, not in the realm of actual profits.

54:

But, Charlie, what the hell is "corporate greed"? Is it some big building, with their logo on it, being desirous of more buildings?

No. It's the execs who want larger bonuses (which, btw, are not taxed the same way as salary in the US), and more stock options?

And if you think I'm exaggerating, I remember a column back in the nineties, commenting on the fad of downsizing, "which CEOs will keep doing until the market stops rewarding them for doing it." Notice there is *no corporate good in there.

55:

How much of that is hard-wiring, and how much social training over the last 10k years? From what I've read, a lot of "primitive societies" don't have permanent wealthy leaders, giving out gold rings to their followers.

56:

Just a couple of notes. There are (thousands? Tens of thousands?) of cancer types, a few of which are even contagious.

Pancreatic cancers can be treated if caught. The problem is, due to the nature of the organ, it's difficult to catch them in early stages, and once they're symptomatic, they're difficult to impossible to treat. Alzheimer's works the same way.

The Koch Brothers, ironically, did it better than Jobs did. David Koch dumped $100 million into NY Presbyterian hospital. This is actually a normal thing for billionaires to do: fund medical centers. Irwin Jacobs chunked $75 million for a new hospital at UCSD to house oncology, Ob-Gyn-Ped, and advanced surgery. All this comes under the principle of "the life you save might be your own."

Yes, this is part of the screwed-up US health care system, and public money really should fund hospitals. However, this is one example of billionaires doing stuff that, in the US at least, government really struggles to do well.

57:

I don't see any reason beyond - ok, I've been debating myself as between $20M/yr and $50M/yr. Once you've got platinum-plated titanium toilet fixtures, and hot and cold running prostitutes every night of the year, what do you do with the money? The US cut taxes on "job creators"... with the result that they moved jobs overseas, where they could have sweatshops again, with more ROI.

58:

I think you may be missing what I was trying to say. A cure for cancer is like a cure for dying: it's not going to happen (I think). But a cure for whatever killed Jobs, while still very unlikely (at least soon enough to save him), is less absurd. And even if it failed, just doing the research might have spinoff benefits.

Jobs could probably have funded a project on the scale of the Human Genome Project ($3 billion), and it's hard to see such a thing not having some side benefits.

59:

Charles H
YES
Gradualism is the way to go, but it must be as loophole-proof as possible.
As Charlie & others have said, it's not what you "OWN" or how much "Money I have", but what you CONTROL. - Oops - see Charlie @ 25!
Putin must be the extreme poster-boy for that nasty little quirk.

daniel r
"Libertarian rot" - Classic example in the UK:
The Water-supply industry & it's disposal. This has been bought out ( "Privatisation" ) followed by total regulatory capture ( OFWAT is utterly toothless ) - & what do we have now?
Rivers & beaches literally full of shit, whilst the owners make vast piles, of not-brown stuff.
It's actually got so bad that even our current corrupt guvmint are showing signs of concern, though I doubt if they will actually DO anything.

LAvery
"Wealth Taxes" ...
1: Do NOT work - there's always a work-around.
2: They, all too often catch the wrong people, because a "wealth tax" almost always includes real property, such as someone's "Principal Private Residence" - err, no, let's not go there?

H
"What happens when you remove billionaires from a system?" - Answer: Stalin, or Pol Pot?

David L & Charlie
"Vertically Integrated companies" - this is how the late C-19th really big boys, the Railway companies, operated,
As much as possible was taken in-house, for better control & lower costs, whilst producing an acceptable standard for the customers.
Yes there were specialist outside contractors, who supplied "stuff" for overload periods, usually Locomotive builders & Carriage suppliers, but, even so, as much as possible was "in-house" their own hotels, their own shipping lines, their own road "last-mile" distribution services, etc.
Outsourcing everything is a disaster.

60:

Disagree. For one, many "startup" are not created by someone with money, they're bought, and the person who buys them becomes the Big Deal.

For another, the humanitarian contributions they make? For one, all the others scream that they don't want to spend their money on poor people, and so the state can't use tax money to help. And then there's the other side of the "humanitarian aid": think of all the money they're putting into research, etc! Yes, let's. How much are they putting in every single year? As a matter of fact, as of several years ago, the US' NIH's budget was coming up to $30B EVERY SINGLE YEAR, and something like 60% or more of ALL basic medical research in the US - we're not talking about creating variants of existing drugs because the patent's about to run out - is either done by the NIH or is funded by grants from them.

How many billions were donated last year by private individuals for that?

61:

Oh, an income tax would be nice. But in the US, ALL income should be taxed at the same rate, not special lower rates to capital gains and dividends and interest.

But also... decades ago, artists and authors got hit with a new tax for what they had in stock, not sold. So... let's tax stock options at the median rate for the year since they were given. And I'm talking top brackets of 72%... except when the value was over $1B, 95%.

62:

Your governing board is a lot like my "if a single company is more than 25% of the economy, voting shares are part of their taxes.

63:

Vertically-integrated. I see, like most US companies used to be... before the MBA got big, and the Big Idea was "outsource", so we can kill unions, and make each divisions a profit source, and there should be no profit sinks (sort of like 3rd form normalization of a d/b).

64:

How much of that is hard-wiring, and how much social training over the last 10k years? From what I've read, a lot of "primitive societies" don't have permanent wealthy leaders, giving out gold rings to their followers.

Quite agreed. A fair number of societies apparently believe that the cure for sociopathic greed lies in a club to the back of the head or similar.

Even in highly stratified societies like Republican Rome, after dumping their last king they deliberately designed a system that made it as hard as possible for one person to permanently seize power. Two censors, two consuls, senate, dictators only empowered to deal with specific crises like fighting a war, and so on. It took over 200 years before things fell apart so badly that Pompey and then Caesar were able to corrupt the dictatorship system and seize power.

So yeah, it's not hardwired. What is "hardwired" is authoritarian leaders paying historians and artists to immortalize them, so that we get this distorted notion that authoritarian rule is normal because it leaves behind the most historically and archaeologically visible evidence. Historians and archaeologists are becoming wise to this dodge, incidentally, so don't believe the old books as much.

65:

Perhaps a limit to control. No organization can control over, say, $50B without public elected control as a majority.

66:

Bill Gates, for all his sins, arguably does a better job of managing the Gates Foundation than Donald Trump ever would,

As far as I can recall the Gates Foundation is not managed by Bill and Melinda Gates, it's run by professionals who understand how such an operation works at all levels. Bill and Melinda Gates provide an ongoing cash stream to fund the Foundation's operations and do grip-and-grin promotional work as well as some judicious arm-twisting to get other well-heeled philanthropic billionaires to contribute too (like Warren Buffett, IIRC). They may promote particular operations the Foundation funds and supports but the day-to-day administration is, like most things, best left to people who have experience and knowledge of tax law, money, research funding, academia etc.

Some folks think the Gates Foundation is some kind of tax dodge on Bill's part, maybe because he keeps on getting richer year by year despite giving away billions of dollars to Good Causes. I think it's more that he had a bucket when it was raining money in the computer biz a while ago and unlike a lot of company owners back then he has kept hold of the bucket to this day.

67:

Fair enough re: Gates.

I think the original point, that it's dangerous to treat billionaires as a class of managerial geniuses, still stands. Ditto democracies. There's no one perfect system.

68:

I really hope Graydon shows to weigh in here, as his take on wealth and societies is compelling in ways I am still working to grasp. I frequently think his Commonweal series very slyly uses 'magic power' as a stand-in for monetary power.

The second sentence of OGH's original post states that 'money is a proxy for control or power'. That is the core of our problem - if we start talking about money alone we are missing the point.

How do we tax power and control? A better question would be how do we create systems to constrain power and control, or better yet direct it to positive ends. It isn't by fiddling with money, which the discussion here and elsewhere has shown is largely imaginary, a shared consensual delusion that can change in an instant and often does. Our day to day lives are structured around acquiring, using and distributing money, and yet its value changes hourly relative to everything around us.

Military power is a form of control, but even that is imaginary to a great degree. The most powerful military in the history of the world was unable to successfully effect meaningful change in one of the least developed 'countries' in the world (Afghanistan). That failure was only the most recent example of the weakness of attempts to use military might to impose anything at all aside from death. I can think of no way to tax military power - the notion is absurd.

Legal power is another form of control, which works as long as everyone agrees the legal structure is legitimate (and it has proven to be quite resilient despite a massive industry dedicated almost entirely to subverting it for personal or corporate gain). I have no idea how to tax legal power.

The billionaires have a grip on some forms of power and control, and enough money to minimize the grip of other forms on them. Musk routinely has legal troubles that would bankrupt most humans, ditto many of the others (Trump). They are not immune, and even while Trump was president of the most powerful country in the world he was constantly bedevilled by legal problems - his endless fear and ranting about them are evidence enough.

69:

"Historians and archaeologists are becoming wise to this dodge, incidentally, so don't believe the old books as much."

The Indus Civilization lasted for over a millenium and had no evidence of large palaces or temples, and apparently a lot of evidence of large public structures for common use. This was over 1000 towns and cities with a shared legal system, shared weights and measures, and shared language.

70:

That makes a BIG difference; even if it is caught early, treatment is not always successful, and there are multiple types of pancreatic cancer, too. It's a notoriously hard cancer to treat.

71:

As far as I can recall the Gates Foundation is not managed by Bill and Melinda Gates, it's run by professionals who understand how such an operation works at all levels.

Not really. Day to day the pros get things done. But Bill decides what will be done at a high level. And the reports that leak out say he does it with an iron fist.

72:

You should read what I post before responding. I shall not respond to your ridiculous comparison.

I was comparing them with megacorporations and superstates, and they DO have a better track record than those. If you think that their money would end up in the pockets of the public if they were abolished, I suggest that you study some history. Also, if you study the harm done by individual billionaires and multi-billion corporations, you may get a shock.

Even if compared to the public, they are a better bet for less popular charities, unfortunately; those that have tried going to the public have usually ended up spending more on collection than their purpose, even in the absence of corruption and gross incompetence.

No, they aren't good, but they ARE better than some of the alternatives. God help us all.

73:

Whole genome sequencing is increasingly used for cancer diagnosis in the most advanced locations.

74:

Wrt. the water cos in the UK -- you may have missed that in Scotland the water boards are still in public ownership.

And provide better service than in England, for a lower price (yes, it's loaded on top of council tax so the household bill is higher, but overall we pay less).

75:

But in the US, ALL income should be taxed at the same rate

Wrong, that's a regressive tax. Ideally you want income tax to be progressive, banded so that above a certain threshold you pay a greater percentage of your income in tax.

I'd like to see the top marginal rate of tax go to 90% or higher: that's where it used to be, and it didn't seem to demotivate entrepreneurs but it did reduce income inequality within a society.

76:

Does it even make sense to think of these people as billionaires in the sense that they have access to that much wealth? They don't.

Here is a fun take on this question: https://medium.com/@squarelyrooted/on-becoming-a-trillionaire-in-2022-962791d31a1

77:

"the "where you come down rule": The pilot of a plane with lifting surfaces has a lot of time to pick his crash-site, whereas rotor craft just fall down where they fail."

That's not entirely accurate. I'm not familiar (nor is Google) with the "where you come down rule" but I know the "land clear" rule, as stated in UK legislation at least (YMMV):

An aircraft shall not be flown below such height as would enable it to make an emergency landing without causing danger to persons or property on the surface in the event of a power unit failure.
  • and:
An aircraft flying over a congested area of a city, town or settlement shall not fly below such height as would permit the aircraft to land clear of the congested area in the event of a power unit failure.
  • but:
Any helicopter flying over a congested area shall be exempt from the land clear rule.

Thanks to autorotation, if the power unit or tail rotor fails, the engine can be disconnected from the rotor system, which continues to rotate and provide lift, so the helicopter can be safely landed. Unlike fixed-wing aircraft it doesn't need several hundred metres of runway to land, so it can be put down in quite a small space.

78:

"Any helicopter flying over a congested area shall be exempt from the land clear rule."

I'm not the least surprised that the worlds most criminal tax-shelter has gotten helicopters permitted :-)

Other capitals not so much.

79:

Charlie @ 74
WHAT a GIANT SURPRISE! ( Not actually, of course.... )
... & @ 75 ... Top rate of about 70% - BUT it must be strictly enforced - that last is always the difficult bit.

80:

which continues to rotate and provide lift, so the helicopter can be safely landed. Unlike fixed-wing aircraft it doesn't need several hundred metres of runway to land, so it can be put down in quite a small space.

Not quite. In auto rotate you disengage the transmission then adjust the rotor blades so as you fall they pick up spin speed. Then just before you hit you reverse the pitch so the angular inertia provides enough rotational speed to give you enough lift to live. A good pilot in reasonable conditions (altitude is a big deal here) can do a nice soft landing. I know folks in the US Army who have lived but the copter wasn't in that good of shape afterwards.

81:

The difference is that it is entirely plausible that Ford/VW/etc will have essentially the same sales next year, but Tesla may well triple. The stock market has a real thing for anticipation of growth. And even more so for anticipation of anticipation of growth.

82:

But not anticipation of anticipation of anticipation of growth. That would just be silly.

83:

Charlie, you misunderstood me. In the US, interest and dividends, and capital gains, are taxed separately, and at a much lower rate - they're in a separate bucket. (See Romney's defense in '12 that he was paying about 14%, while his secretary was paying about 38%). I mean all of those rolled into the bucket called "income", and then taxed, per bracket, at the same rate as every other form of income. That means someone who makes $10M a year, and has $100M in capital gains, gets the top tax rate, while someone with $60k gets far lower.

84:
a grand gesture, like Mike Bloomberg's abortive run on the Presidency

My belief as to Bloomberg's "run" for President is that he was being a dog in the manger to avoid any sort of win by Bernie Sanders. Bloomberg spent about $500M on the run. If Sanders had won the Oval Office, the tax consequences for what Sanders was advocating would have cost Bloomberg about $4B the first year.

History of US federal tax rates.

A first step towards eliminating billionaires would be to restore the 70% top tax bracket. A more effective step would be eliminating (or at minimum, having a phase-out if your income is too high) the capital gains tax. Far too many of the ultra-rich keep their wealth in stocks and other assets (like paintings) and then borrowing money with the stocks/paintings as collateral. This is part of Musk's attempt to finance his purchase of Twitter. A tax on transactions would be a much more effective method for de-fanging Wall Street.

In most states, teachers are responsible for their own pensions. The 403(b) system is the public employment version of the 401(k) defined contribution retirement scheme. When teachers "retire" the lump sum in their 403(b) accounts are supposed to go towards purchasing annuities. Fancy presentations and high fees tends to plunder both the 403(b) and 401(k) accounts. This is why the financial industry constantly tries to get Congress to "privatize" the Social Security system - so that the financial industry gets to charge $50-100 per person per year fees. When you multiply that by about a hundred million workers per year, you start talking big money just in annual fees. 401(k) & 403(b) plans have to file annual reports (which are publicly viewable) with the Department of Labor and it would be a smart thing for workers to take a little time to learn how to read the reports. For most companies' plans, the fees that employees get charged are hidden from the employees and only by reading the annual Form 5500 can you figure them out. This is also how you find out if your pension plan has been loaning money to shady organizations.

Disclaimer: I used to work in the pension reporting industry as a software developer. Our company wrote software for filing 5500 reports as well as an annual manual for accountants on how to report the data.

[[ retrieved from the spam folder - mod ]]

85:

One thing Musk's companies get very right is that they try to create vertically integrated technology stacks

It seems to be feature of driven companies led big a very strong "brilliant" single person.

Ford (River Rouge Complex), Apple's Jobs and (n)ow Cook not farming out much of anything but things they just can't do better.

Lemme tell you a story, passed on from my late daddy, an Iowa farm boy and colonel's son, who worked his way through the University of Michigan. He read for the law, passing the Ohio Bar so he could be a bag man for Standard Oil, carrying black bags of cash to Columbus to the Ohio Legislature, and carrying empty promises back to Rockefeller's minions in Cleveland.

While at Uni, he had occasion to visit The Rouge; saw boxes of batteries for the Model T come in. Unlike other boxes of parts which were roughly taken apart, the battery shipping boxes were very carefully dismantled by journeymen carpenters, and carefully stacked on wheeled carts. The wood pieces were also not the typical packing pine, but were made of hardwood, and unusually well finished.

Being a quite curious lad, he followed one of those carts, to find the hardwood box boards fitted into the chassis of Model T trucks to become its floorboards.

Stealth outsourcing. The battery makers had no idea why Ford had been so exacting in the specifications for the shipping boxes, but when Ford spoke, you listened.

86:

David L @ 15:

However, personal billionaires have a slightly better record as charitable patrons, especially for less popular purposes. It's a marginal benefit, but matches your request.

2nd (or was it 3rd) generation Rockefellers yes. Much involved in public service. Next generation just faded into the background of rich folks living the easy life.

Sackler family and Amway folks, not so much.

Third generation according to Wikipedia, but you have to consider INCOME Tax Rates were much higher then (up to 90% marginal rate) and the rules on what you could claim as capital gains were much stricter then. So there was a lot more tax PRESSURE for Millionaires to be charitable.

The Sacklers & their ilk are not facing that kind of tax pressure. The parts of their income & wealth they can't hide in some off-shore tax haven can be catagorized in ways to make their tax liability lower ... so much lower as to be non-existent.

I'd favor a tax law that treats ALL income the same. You could have much lower rates for most everyone, but I also favor a steeply progressive tax on incomes/wealth as you get towards the top 1%. And if "corporations are persons" they should have to pay the same tax rates as natural persons and none of this shifting profits off-shore to avoid taxes. I believe those who benefit the most from our system should be paying more to support that system.

87:

I would think that helicopters would get an extra 10-15 minutes just for clearance... don't big corporate jets still need to wait for a runway to take off from, or to land on another? Or do they get to pre-empt commercial flights?

Musk does not have to deal with SFO and does not have to queue up for scarce runway slots.

Corporate jets don't often use major airports, but instead nest in small corporate jetports. Look at the Intel Air Shuttle, which does not fly from PDX like us plebes, but instead from HIO in its daily trips to Chandler, Arizona, and San Jose, California.

88:

And in the UK. It's a disgrace - and I benefit from it (slightly). We have a lot of experience that very high marginal rates have serious social downsides, but a progressive tax scheme that strongly encouraged charitable donations allows a somewhat higher effective rate before the reaction sets in.

89:

Charity... no. Billionaire charity donations sound great. Then you look... and ten years ago, the charities such as food banks, etc, were screaming in the US that they were overwhelmed. Only taxing the rich, and the government, can take care of people who need help. The rest, take off your cap and tug your forelock, thank'ee, sir, for the crumbs.

90:

Charlie Stross @ 36: Given that Musk lives in the vicinity of south-central CA, I'm surprised he doesn't also have a helicopter for getting around. Cheaper to buy and operate than an executive jet, and much more suitable for stuff like hopping between cities. Yes it's significantly slower at top speed, but it can also go center-to-center rather than stopping at an out-of-town runway.

Does he need to own a helicopter or just have one available any time he wants to go somewhere in it? Which I'd bet he has.

I'd say the same applies to the corporate jet. He doesn't need to own one, although it might serve the company to have one that he can use whenever he wants to. And I'd bet both are LEASED by Tesla, rather than owned by Musk.

91:

Thank you for saying it so clearly and so well!

92:

A friend of mine is a professional artist, the kind of person who's work you've seen in major advertising campaigns, and he decided that his most economic work platform was an Ipad with 128 gigabytes of memory, so YAY DISRUPTION (or something.) But Jobs definitely got it right!

93:

I think an important counterpoint to that is: nearly all of that utterly vast GWP is hand-to-mouth. It achieves a lot, but that "a lot" looks like a steady state of "people get fed, trade moves around and infrastructure exists". You can't spend it on a Mars colony, flawed or otherwise, there'd be famine. Not that that excuses billionaires - it makes them worse, they control a really egregious slice of the world's disposable income and they direct it towards whatever cockamamie vanity projects they wish, without the vast majority of humanity having any choice in the matter.

94:

You want a progressive tax, but you also need a minimum tax that's also progressive, i.e. if you make a million dollars this year you pay a minimum of thirty-percent, if you make a billion dollars this year, you make a minimum of sixty-percent. Figure out where you want billionaires to spend their money and make it really difficult to actually achieve the minimum, so bragging rights are involved.

95:

@68 Rocketpjs:

I really hope Graydon shows to weigh in here, as his take on wealth and societies is compelling in ways I am still working to grasp. I frequently think his Commonweal series very slyly uses 'magic power' as a stand-in for monetary power.

Sometimes it doesn't bother with the metaphor. The series occasionally refers to the fact that, in the Commonweal legal system, being rich is a capital crime. If you're that much better off than your neighbors, your existence reduces them to a state of serfdom. Doesn't matter whether you intended it; that's how wealth operates. Slavery is illegal so off with your head.

Yes, I think about that too. Much of our economy operates the way Jeff Bezos wants because he found a rule-breaking strategy and pumped it for twenty years. Musk isn't at that level but he can turn a popular commercial product into his personal playground at whim. Nobody else gets a meaningful vote. (Twitter's board and major shareholders get votes but it sure looks like money dictates the result.) That's some kind of autocracy.

@42 John Oyler:

if Bezos could put his hands on even $5 million in cash in less than a weeks time I'd be surprised.

We're seeing that play out in real time with Musk, right? He couldn't put his hands on the necessary money in a week's time -- but he did line up $21 billion in cash in less than a month. He could have gotten more if he'd been willing to damage Tesla more. Now he's in the process of syndicating that $21G bill off to other folks (Saudis!) before the actual sale.

It is fiscally possible to tax these people. The problem is measuring the wealth when they're not flashing it around, which is what Charlie was getting at in @25.

96:

I mean, right now Tesla is valued higher than VW, Toyota, and Ford combined: really?

FWIW, the NFT bubble popped a while ago - sales down 92% since September. All the people who got into it and didn't unload in time to suckers are SOL.

Tesla, unlike NFTs, actually produces something of demonstrable value. It's just that their market valuation may be bubbled as well.

97:

He doesn't appear to have a helicopter. The three executive jets are owned by a company called "Falcon Landing" and are also used to move SpaceX employees between the various sites in California, Texas and Florida.

Note that SpaceX had to get special permission for the Falcon-9 on display outside their Hawthorne headquarters due to being right alongside Hawthorne Municipal Airport.

98:

Get landed with the one I have, where a few tens of people get it every year in the USA, probably ten or fewer in the UK, and it's currently impractical to do more than "it's a bit like X - let's treat it like that."

For what it's worth, you have my sympathies. I was around people suffering from rare diseases for about half my life.

99:

I think it fairly likely "Tesla is highly overvalued" is what the twitter purchase is actually about. If Musk sold Tesla stock to buy index funds with the money, the market would take that as proof positive that the valuation is a bubble, and it would crash. But a purchase he can pretend is just him being political? Far less of a hit, which means more of the nominal value diversified.

The question about what to do about all the tax evasion.. Most of the tax havens are tiny places of no significance other than their tax schemes. If there is a political consensus to break the system of havens and trusts, they break. Heck, they break if there merely is a consensus to not actively defend them.

If the Cayman Islands holding the stolen wealth of the misgoverned lands of the world meant they would actually have to worry about the coast guard of "Color Revolution Republic of xxx" showing up and asking for their taxes back at gunpoint... well, they would give up that game right damn quick. Because they would not be able to repel them.

100:

it's possible that Musk is a real-life Bruce Wayne

A violent thug who went round brutalising innocent people and destroying public property to fulfill a weird vigilante fantasy?

I was actually thinking about him in the context of "even a billionaire can't meaningfully reduce crime in a single city" but then I thought... well, not that way. But a series of comic strips about working with city government to implement anti-poverty programmes wouldn't have quite the same BIFF! POW! SHAZAM! to it.

101:

RE OGH's comment "...although they can pretend it doesn't exist and buy their very own luxury apocalypse bunker in New Zealand."

See https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/property/128522034/peter-thiels-luxury-wnaka-lodge-idea-rejected-by-council-planner - not saying their own luxury apocalypse bunker hasn't happened, but...

102:

Tesla seems to have other than a bit of a name as the big mover in the field, is that special Tesla charging network.

Which according to one EV-using fan is a big problem. In Australia at least a lot of Tesla owners also want cheap electric cars, or an electric van, or something else that Tesla doesn't make. So they're buying a non-Tesla as well, sometimes more than one. Then they rock up to their usual public EV charger and they're in exactly the right position to observe that while their Tesla gets 20kW out of the "universal" charger, their BYD gets 6kW.

Apparently there are a lot of chats over the charger, and more than a few grumpy Tesla owners who think it's bullshit and are actively looking for something, anything, else.

The other thing that's happening is VTL and VTG being built in to basically everything. The new BYD van doesn't apparently advertise it as a feature, but it comes with a plug-and-powerstrip so you can run a couple of kilowatts of AC appliances off the vehicle battery. Or, you know, with a smart enough charger and some setting up, you can feed your house (with proper net feed setup) or the grid off the vehicle as well as charging (at least in countries other than Australia, because here you need to pay through the nose to be allowed to feed from batteries to the grid. Yes, we're fucked in the head)

103:

a stronger argument against this is that governments can in fact do the same thing: they can't do it with all their money the way a person can, but they can spend as much money as a very rich individual can spend on each of many individual high-risk high-benefit projects,

That's half of it. The other half is, per OGH, that billionaires ain't all that. While Musk could implement a UBI in the USA, he couldn't make it large enough for long enough to be useful. Likewise he can't implement public health-care, or even a congestion tax, and we all remember his foray into public transport. And I'm only talking about the money side, the force majeure side is yet another way that just having a bit of money doesn't really help.

When billionaires push those kinds of things they often fall flat because the billionaire and minions don't have the experience, or the reach, to deal with the actual problems that prevent whatever they want from working. Like Bill Gates "fixing" public education... by privatising it in a particularly brutal and short-sighted way. That not only didn't work, it can't work, at least not as public education. It can sort of work, for a while, as a disruptive influence that might help prod public education to improve... but as implemented it steals resources from public schools to enrich the few and if we're being charitable we have to assume that's exactly the opposite of what Gates wants.

104:

Fixing public education is very simple: Require everyone to attend a government school and choose within a ten-mile radius by lot.

105:

worldwide production of vehicles: VW, 2021, around 8.3M Ford " 3.9M Toyota 7.6M ... Tesla 930,422

As mentioned, one easy measure is worldwide liability to provide warranty now and parts+service later. Tesla: fuck all of nearly no cars ever made. Everyone else: millions of cars all over the world are still under warranty.

This is already a problem for Tesla, they are improving rapidly but as I understand it, it's often cheaper to give someone a whole new recently-made Tesla than to try taking apart their old one to fix whatever the hell is wrong with it this time.

106:

How exactly would Bill Gates do that? He can't pass laws directly, let alone amend the constitution.

107:

a progressive tax scheme that strongly encouraged charitable donations allows a somewhat higher effective rate before the reaction sets in.

What shocks me in Australia where our peak marginal rate is only about 40% is the people who whine about the high taxes but don't do anything at all to mitigate them. The employer-takes-tax-out people whose tax amount is carefully calculated so that if they claim the mandatory deductions ("work related expenses, claim up to $250 without receipts") they are very close to zero net at the end of the year... who every year have to pay a few hundred dollars to the tax office. Meanwhile I donate a few thousand dollars to charity and get ~1/3 of that back as a refund.

I was surprised when I first moved to Australia and discovered that I could "salary sacrifice" into compulsory superannuation* as much as I wanted. Salary being progressively taxed so my overall rate was over 30%, and super being taxed at 15% on the way in and 0-15% on the way out. So for a few years I got paid about $50k while my super balance went a bit mental. A taxable income of ~2/3 the median full time income pays fuck all tax and by some twist of bureaucratic stupidity qualifies for a bunch of low income support.

Admittedly if I'd bought a house that would probably be worth more than my super, but it would also have involved a lot of lying to get the mortgage and other pissing about. Superannuation is very fire and forget.

(* there's a mandatory percentage you have to put in, was 8% and rising to 12% over decades. You can put in extra, but now I think they've capped the total low-tax contribution at $25k/year. Not so much to stop povo scum like me, but to address the few dozen people with tens of millions in super)

108:

I would like to add into the mix one of the more toxic products of billionairedom, perhaps the most toxic product, that is their children. The poster child for this is Donald Trump. The Kock brothers are also descendants of a family fortune.

The children of those making a fortune are often neglected by their parents as the parents are too busy making money/social climbing. Instead of love and attention, they have money thrown at them. Often staff are humiliated in front of the children teaching the children that you don't have to respect the little people. Parents also use their influence/money to get their children off the hook or to buy advantage for them teaching them that they are above the rules. Also, very little is denied them so they have an absolute sense of entitlement. It's a rare parent in this category that has the moral integrity, discipline and fortitude to teach their children humility and gratitude for their position in life.

The result is a little sociopath whose main concern in life is wealth and status. Now, we have lots of sociopaths concerned only with wealth and status, but they can't weld the influence that the children of the wealthy can.

109:

I have a relative who was the head of a private school for the progeny of the very wealthy. He had endless troubles with parents who thought they could solve everything their little shits did by throwing money at it.

Because they were staff, their kids also attended, and despite the truly top notch education, the primary thing my cousins picked up was that it is essential to be a big shot. One still lives with the folks in her mid 30s, the other is barely further away.

110:

parents who thought they could solve everything their little shits did by throwing money at it.

That is to a large extent socially determined, though. A country doesn't have to go the full Norway on this and fine people a week's income, just build a society where buying your way in or out of trouble isn't acceptable.

I grew up around a couple of people who were unreasonably wealthy and while the kids knew it, they also knew that the personal price they would pay for needing to be bought out of trouble was not worth it. Not worth it in all caps with exclamation marks.

One woman dented her parents car when out doing the usual high schooler stuff. Yes, she was being somewhat silly. And no, it was not a particularly expensive car. But she faced at least the same consequences as the rest of us did. With bonus "explain to granddad what you did". Sure, via the private jet taking her to Auckland but TBH I'll take not having to do that any day. I've met her granddad...

Sadly it was the "slightly richer" kids that were the problem. My mother has accepted that I call one kid I grew up with "Richard the rapist" because she has learned enough about him to agree that at best it's likely he's a rapist. She's thinking of different events than the one that led me to describe him that way. His parents are "own a couple of supermarkets" rich, rather than "have a private jet" rich. And he's grown up knowing that he's better than other people (his parents are also sexist as fuck, which is one reason why his older sister is a former lawyer, former anorexic, now stay-at-parents-home mother). Would Richard-the-rapist be as bad with the wealth but without the sexism? Probably, but in a different way. Parents definitely have the entitlement going on, put it that way.

111:

This is my thinking exactly. (One of the things I've worked out carefully for the books I'm writing is how my nobility makes sure this kind of stuff doesn't happen to their kids.)

112:

How we apply that social pressure to billionaires is a difficult question, and that's where the "mammonite society" is more of a problem than the apparent question. Billionaires are a symptom, in other words. I look at the East India Company and think... was it better because it wasn't owned by a single individual? Would it necessarily have been worse if it was?

Looking at some of the longer lasting civilisations around the world, for what little I know of history, I get the impression that individualism, wealth and mammonism are inversely correlated with durability.

You don't have to be naked savages roaming an empty land... but it helps :) This ties back to previous discussions about producing and storing surplus food (etc), where in a selfish society that immediately requires security, generally force, and soon you've transitioned through libertarianism or feudalism into fascism or monarchy. Or you can go the other way, and say "we're a guest in our land, and when you visit so are you" and emphasise hospitality and kindness. Put your political efforts into finding ways to solve disputes before they escalate past "I don't like you, so there". I'm no expert but as I understand it one of those approaches has produced multi-millennia cultures and one hasn't.

113:

Just as a complete goof, here's the kind of semi-violent thing that could be (humorously and unrealistically) used to rein in some billionaires.

Upon his ascension to the throne the newly crowned King Charles 3 (Horta) decides to rebuild the financial situation in the UK. Since the armed forces declare their loyalty to him, he uses the apparent influence of foreign and disloyal wealth upon British politics to declare military occupations of various UK territories, to wit the City of London, Turks and Caicos, Cayman Islands, Channel Islands, and Bermuda. The raiders are there to confiscate property of financial managers in these islands and to take local parliaments into temporary custody while the finances that run through the island are thoroughly investigated.

Any financial instrument found that isn't run by and for people who are actual citizens residing in the territories is acquired by the British Crown (e.g. C3H's property, not the state), and appropriate taxes are paid on all these acquisitions. If anyone complains, that's fine, but they have to prove direct ownership of the property in question, they have to take ownership of it in the UK, and they have to pay taxes on it to get it out of the UK as part of any settlement deal. Once all the cases are over, the Crown divests the assets with extreme prejudice and turns the proceeds over to the UK for charity use.

Meanwhile, C3H rolls out model constitutions for the territories that no longer allow elaborate financial tools to be legal. To sweeten the deal, C3H donates substantial royal lands to be settled by any islanders wishing to immigrate, on the modern equivalent of 40 acres and a mule, but under 99 year lease, not ownership.

When the dust settles, control of assets in these offshore financial centers has been stripped, as has political control of these centers by billionaires. Illegal takings are slowly working through the courts, in ways that turn chains of control into chains of taxable ownership, and islanders who are threatened by climate change have a land stake in the UK, but one they can only live on, not one they can use as a financial tool.

Obviously this is silly and simplistic, but no one need die. The soldiers are there to keep order and prevent mercenaries or other paid coercives from stopping the redistribution of assets.

On a more serious note, any attempt to billionaires of their assets needs substantial resources behind it. Like those of the Windsors, for instance.

114:

any attempt to strip billionaires of their assets needs substantial resources behind it. Like those of the Windsors

Ah yes... "I offer myself as sacrifice". Can't see Charlie doing it, even if the alternative is being used as decoration on someone's pike.

More likely a US president would declare Murdoch an agent of foreign influence and "sanction" him the way the US has sanctioned Russia, Iran and Venezuela. "we haven't stolen your money, we've frozen it. And we're spending it".

115:

I think it's interesting that when El*n did his two big, and at least arguably good, things; that is investing in AC Propulsion and founding SpaceX, he wasn't a billionaire. Perhaps that supports OGH's point.

116:

Sadly it was the "slightly richer" kids that were the problem.

Too true...

The Army is ironically a good class mixer [1]; it meant that I have a friend who is rich, as in "inherited several thousand acres in the rural south of England". He's a nice bloke, works hard, spent the years before his inheritance as a regular officer (Commando course[2], a war or two). He's got nothing to prove to anyone; and AFAICT reacts to people according to personality, not wealth. Drives a battered old Volvo around the estate [3], there's a couple of VW Polos outside the big house. These days, works his arse off trying to make sure the estate remains viable for the next generation (the family has been there for a couple of hundred years, IIRC).

Meanwhile, like yourself I've met plenty of snobs who were nowhere near as wealthy; for them, status was "slightly richer than you" as expressed by a flashy car / flashy clothes - both military and civilian.

[1] Even in the reputedly-snobbish regiments of the Household Division, the measure of whether you're a "good officer" is whether you take effective care of your soldiers; at lower levels, it can be quite a socialist environment, as in "from each according to their ability, to each according to their need" (pay packet excepted)... for an insight, read George Macdonald Fraser's "The General Danced at Dawn".

[2] AIUI, the regiments who supply most Special Forces officers are the Parachute Regiment (very egalitarian) and the Brigade of Guards (not as class-bound as you'd think).

[3] The commissioning course at Sandhurst is merit based. You don't get a commission because Daddy commands a Regiment; if you aren't good enough, you don't pass. Yes, that applies to royalty too ;) The advantage comes from understanding how the system works - not different from the rate at which lawyers' kids become lawyers, or doctors' kids become doctors...

117:

"I think Tesla has significantly advanced progress towards electric vehicles, and SpaceX has significantly advanced rocketry. I regard both of these as good things. And Tesla and SpaceX would not be where they are without Elon Musk."

Disagree. (Not with the final sentence, of course, but with the rest of it.)

Heteromeles (I think) a few threads back excoriated SpaceX for encouraging and facilitating the blowing of massive wads of energy to no good purpose, which is the sort of thing this present world can well do without, and recommended ceasing to engage in any form of space travel apart from maybe a few weather satellites. I take much the same view - although I would also except unmanned scientific research launches such as interplanetary probes, which after all are pretty rare things - and certainly agree that commercial space launches should cease to happen entirely. Advances in rocketry may be a good thing as an isolated abstraction, but things which are good as isolated abstractions do not necessarily remain good as part of a real-world context.

Nor do I agree that electric Lamborghinis are a wonderful thing as far as electric vehicles in general are concerned. What is needed there is a repetition of what happened at the opposite end of the scale with petrol vehicles: we need the electric Model T Ford, something that's cheap enough for "everyone" to have one and still good enough for "everyone" to want one.

Moreover, it also needs to be durable enough that once you do have one you don't need to buy another one. Simple enough for "everyone" to maintain it and absolutely without the built-in-obsolescence shite that Charlie mentioned above. The environmental impact of cars isn't just a matter of them burning fossil fuels; a matter of comparable significance is the continual unnecessary remanufacturing of endless new ones because people regard a 20-year-old car as horrifically ancient instead of regarding a 50-year-old one as just nicely run in. This means that you have to accept that you can only sell a lot of them until everyone's got one and after that you only sell a few of them and some spare parts. Which is the kind of thing people with more money than a small country could do... but they don't.

118:

... because heirs typically are less smart than their parents.

Whether this is true or not, I don't know. But I'll bet kids that grow up with a silver (or gold) spoon in their mouth have a lot less motivation than their parents.

119:

Yes, and indeed Charlie "demonstrated" that a while back by posting an entry where he hypothetically "gave" us a typical billionaire's wad with the restriction that we couldn't spend it on ourselves, and invited suggestions on what we could usefully do with it instead. Different people came up with very different ideas depending on how much they think like a breadhead, but the one thing that stood out as a common factor was that the scope of what you can manage is well short of the usual brilliant ideas people have, and you have to settle for something more kind of local or niche.

120:

(I totally fail to understand, how a single billionaire taking Twitter private, is not illegal under anti-trust laws.)

There are anti-trust laws on the books. But the Federal Trade Commission is notorious for its reluctance to enforce them. Probably another example of regulatory-capture by giant industries... :-/

121:

Yes it's significantly slower at top speed, but it can also go center-to-center rather than stopping at an out-of-town runway.

Gotta watch out for pilots like the one Kobe Bryant had, though.

122:

The pilot of a plane with lifting surfaces has a lot of time to pick his crash-site, whereas rotor craft just fall down where they fail.

Not true. If the helicopter has enough speed and height, it can easily transition into autorotation and make a dead-stick landing. In fact, it's better at a power-off landing than conventional aircraft, as it will touch down at a lower speed. YouTube has videos of this.

Of course, if the helicopter is low and slow (most likely during takeoffs and landings), it probably gets stuck in a ‘dead man’s curve’ and crashes. But note that conventional aircraft have this problem too.

123:

In what possible way is it [Tesla] worth more? In the shell game of stocks, not in the realm of actual profits.

In the same way Amazon is worth more than its competitors, despite not making profits for many, many years while Bezos focused on undercutting his competition. It's all about future expectations.

Traditional auto makers face a tough transition to electric vehicles, and the stock market has doubtless factored this into their pricing.

124:

we need the electric Model T Ford

Tata make those but they're not road legal outside India. I believe there are Chinese equivalents.

There's even a youtube thing where some US toober buys one "it's so cheap, unbelievably cheap" and discovers that it's basically a golf cart dressed up as a van, complete with IIRC 24V lead batteries.

The electric kei vans have been around way longer and are even road legal in Australia. A mate has one and it's brilliant. Battery is down to ~70% of rated capacity so the range is only 50km or so, top speed ~60kph. But for pootling round the industrial side of town to carry heavy things it's brilliant. Just very slightly not set up to carry a full sheet of timber (2.4x1.2m ... will go on roof, but now you have a 200kg vehicle with 100kg of load on the roof)

BYD are now selling their vans in Australia, and they're way more a proper motor vehicle, and priced like it. Which is about the same as the fossil fuelled version so you end up doing maths (ew!) to work out whether it's cheaper overall than the species suicide special. Same mate with the kei van also has one of these, apparently he ordered it more than a year ago and got it this month. But for him it's magic, with the slow charger it runs off the solar on his roof at home or work, takes a few days to fully charge then does his weekly long trip quite happily.

Best thing: the BYD has 240V AC output so he can use it to recharge the kei van if he has to. So now he's more willing to push the range envelope with the kei. Vague numbers are 45kWh in the BYD, 8kWh in the kei (x70% - 5.6kWh, presumably)

125:

"Oh, most billionaires don't take much of a salary. Too many tax issues. They funnel their stocks and other assets into trusts, retirement accounts, and companies then borrow against those assets and live off those borrowed funds."

Yes, there's another thing that needs to be knocked on the head. They are still getting the income, so they can bloody well still be taxed on it, whether they call it "salary" or "borrowed funds" or anything else.

This is one of the reasons I think income tax is done wrong. It should be rearranged in such a way that for any given employer/employee pair, the amount the employer pays out remains the same, the amount the employee gets to keep remains the same, the amount of tax the government gets remains the same, and the actual giving of money to the government continues to be done by the employer handing over one lump to the government and another lump to the employee; but the bit about pretending the whole lot has been handed to the employee and the tax lump then grabbed back off them stops happening.

(Note that stuff like the practical complexities of changing to such a system, or whether the tax rates themselves also need adjusting regardless of system, are not the point.)

The main reason I favour this is because it stops giving everyone a reason to be personally pissed off at the government every single time they get a wage slip, and stops people viewing income tax policy as the most personally important thing in a party's manifesto. The reason I favour it in this kind of case is that it destroys the basis of the scam you describe. The option to be paid in some way that doesn't get taxed because it isn't called "salary" ceases to exist, because it's no longer down to the person being paid to decide whether or not to pay the tax, instead it's down to the person paying them and they have no reason to be allowed to affect it. It also means they can't just fuck off to some other country (or pretend to) and dodge it that way.

126:

You're right about the motivation more or less, but there are a couple of other things.

One is that humans don't breed true any more than apples do, so it's unusual for the child of a genius to be a genius. One examples is that, AFAIK, only one astronaut who ever flew was the son of an astronaut (actually cosmonaut--they're Russian). This is out of over 550 people who've been at least 50 miles into the sky. You can similarly look for second generation star athletes.

This is a normal, known problem with keeping wealth in wealthy families, where ideally you want an heir who's as fascinated with finance as the founder was, and it's rare to get it. This leads to things like the Cayman Island STAR Trusts, aka dynastic trusts, where the founder of the trust tries to anticipate what their descendants will do and be, and create trust rules for them accordingly (e.g., no more money until the trust beneficiary has a son and heir. If he's gay, why should the trust founder care? The money should be incentive enough for him to perform well enough). A STAR trust basically seems to be a way to rephrase the old rules of aristocracy into the wield of wealth management.

Another problem is that keeping wealth is a different problem from gaining wealth, so a kid who's born wealthy not only doesn't know poverty, they're not well understood by their rags to riches parents. This and the previous problem often combine to lead to a family that's rich for two or three generations and loses it all through mismanagement or neglect.

The third problem is that most people really do prefer to spend money and not practice the austere disciplines of Mammonism. Simply put, it's quite normal for humans to give away a fortune to promote social ties. Being miserly is much less normal, but it's a required mindset for staying rich. For example, one should be charitable and give them appearance of being a philanthropist. However, giving all one can afford to give is simply not done, because it makes the others of your social class look bad and leads to dissipation of fortunes in competition. I'm actually not joking, this is a social norm, and giving more than a few percent of one's fortune is frowned upon.

127:

John Oyler @ #42 writes: "Whether or not I agree with the wealth taxes discussed in this thread or not, I don't think there's a practical way to attempt them and that there hasn't been for a long while."

Piketty and Saez did some research on this question, and as a result recommend a one percent annual wealth tax for the largest fortunes. Suppose Bezos is worth a hundred billion, could he arrange to liquidate a percent of that over a year's time to prepare for his upcoming wealth tax settlement? No question he could do it easily, his fund managers probably trade him in and out of Amazon stock more than that on a monthly basis. Not even an interesting question for examples like him or Gates, Buffett, Musk, Page, Brin, Ellison, Zuckerberg, Starbuck Schultz or Google Schultz, the Waltons, Bloomberg, or any of the other thousands of tycoons enriched by publicly traded stock. Where it gets more interesting would be privately held fortunes like the Mars candy heirs, but if the choice was put to them as pay this amount or a commensurate proportion of your company ownership reverts to government control, they'd find a way to do it, just like borrowing cash for a car, plane or house. No problem, same as taking on debt to fight off a hostile takeover, where there's a will there's a way. And they'd still just keep on getting richer. The real ball-and-chain on social development types, the anchors dragging behind the march of progress, they might see their inherited trust funds slowly dwindle away, but they'll be a hundred years old by the time it really gets small so why worry.

128:

I can't see any good reason to let any individual claim ownership over more than a billion dollars of assets—even $100M is pushing it.

So first off there's ownership, and then there's control. You don't need ownership of something to control it, a strategy commonly used by the wealthy to avoid taxes/etc. E.g. https://www.libertymundo.com/index.php/2021/09/18/use-the-wealth-preservation-strategies-of-the-wealthy-own-nothing-and-control-everything-in-2021/.

But let's assume you also meant control. Now the problem becomes how do you prevent people engineering around using a double Irish belgian waffle tax lasagna or whatever the strategy du jour is called?

We can't just outlaw large companies, and how do you prevent a large (billion dollar+) corporation having a single person ultimately in control of it? You can't not have billion dollar+ corporations, some problems require so much capital and long term investment there's no real solution(*).

And perhaps that is where we should be looking more, how do we build corporate structures to handle these large projects (e.g. TSMC, Intel, etc.) that requires tens of billions of dollars and long term thinking using smaller organizations. But this still runs into the problem of rich people engineering around laws/etc.

Also it's wild to me that people will kill each other over a few hundred dollars, but we think that billionaires with health problems are all going to play by the rules and source a replacement organ ethically. I'm kind of shocked He didn't just pay some poor person a million bucks for a needed body part, a lot of people would happily take that deal to set their families, heck their entire communities up for life.

129:

The most powerful military in the history of the world was unable to successfully effect meaningful change in one of the least developed 'countries' in the world (Afghanistan).

Yup. Now if the Shrub had decided to spend $3 trillion on gifts to all Afghans (not just the leaders) instead of funding the U.S. military-industrial complex, the results might have been quite different.

130:

Wrong, that's a regressive tax. Ideally you want income tax to be progressive, banded so that above a certain threshold you pay a greater percentage of your income in tax.

I think what whitroth was referring to was that some kinds of income in the U.S. (such as long-term capital gains) are taxed at a lower rate than ordinary income. Another tax break for our wealthy Americans... :-/

131:

Look at the Intel Air Shuttle, which does not fly from PDX like us plebes, but instead from HIO...

Do you perhaps mean Nike? Their giant Air Hanger 1 in the Hillsboro, Oregon, airport (KHIO) has an entire wall of glass on the Brookwood Parkway side, and as I bike past it - only a hundred feet away - I usually see two medium-sized corporate jets (estimated at about a 40-passenger capacity) inside. Lots of money there...

132:

... he decided that his most economic work platform was an Ipad with 128 gigabytes of memory...

And a GPU that cost the down payment for a house, most likely...

133:

Parents also use their influence/money to get their children off the hook or to buy advantage for them teaching them that they are above the rules.

Thus the rumors that Fred Trump bought Donald his degree from Wharton School... :-)

134:

One is that humans don't breed true any more than apples do, so it's unusual for the child of a genius to be a genius.

True, but is there a strong correlation between intelligence and success in business? I'd think motivation and drive-to-succeed would be a stronger factor than just being smart.

135:

Only if you allow it to cost less to avoid than to pay.

As a thought experiment, if you had a law that wealth was taxed at 1% annually without exception. Anyone who finds hidden untaxed wealth gets to keep 99% and pays the 1%. There is now no purely financial circumstance where it is cheaper to pay someone clever to hide your wealth than to pay.

Allowing very clever people to find loopholes is a choice.

136:

AFAIK, only one astronaut who ever flew was the son of an astronaut

At least three pairs, Alexander and Sergei Volkov, Owen and Richard Garriott and Yuri and Roman Romanenko. The Soviet/Russian cosmonaut corps also has Aleksandr Skvortsov senior and junior, senior trained but was never allocated to a flight, junior has flown twice.

137:

Yup. Now if the Shrub had decided to spend $3 trillion on gifts to all Afghans (not just the leaders) instead of funding the U.S. military-industrial complex, the results might have been quite different.

Nope. Money was not the issue. Culture was/is. Money just lubricated the desired of those who got it. It didn't (and mostly never will) change the culture in anything short of generations. If that.

138:

My own theory is that Steve Jobs got his new liver by inserting an organ harvesting clause in to the Apple End User License Agreement. Some poor person with a tissue match didn't read it all, because no one does, before clicking "Accept". A big price to pay for being able to sync the music on their IPod. :)

139:

I'm pretty sure that was the premise of a South Park episode.

140:

Sure. But the aerodynamics of helicopter flight don't vary according to which jurisdiction you're in :-)

141:

But I'll bet kids that grow up with a silver (or gold) spoon in their mouth have a lot less motivation than their parents.

I rather suspect that it depends on the parents (whether they own a silver spoon, or just stainless steel). I do wonder whether the rate of "trust fund idlers" is similar to the rate of "dole idlers" (i.e. a convenient meme for tabloids to screech about / TV shows to obsess over, blown out of proportion to their actual existence)

That friend of mine, who I used @115 as an example? Silver spoon - you don't pass the Commando course without motivation, you don't command a parachute-trained sub-unit without motivation, you don't attempt special forces selection (twice) without serious motivation. Granted, his dad was SAS in the 1960s/70s... Borneo Campaign and Op CLARET, apparently.

(Note that Prince Charles passed all the P Company physical tests - although AIUI he didn't do the milling...)

142:

There was a Monty Python sketch about that, someone signed an organ donor card and then one day there was a knock on their door...

143:

121 - Depends on the helicopter. A Bell Long Ranger can make an auto-rotate landing and still have enough energy in the rotor head to follow that with a dead stick take-off. OTOH, a Robinson R22 needs to be in auto-rotate at the "B" in "Bang" or it will crash.

123 - So does Citroen (the new Ami), at least as long as you can deal with a 2 seater that has a range of about 50km, and a top speed of 50 km/h. Which is where it fails to meet my use case:-
1 It could have got to Stobhill AGH, but to be sure of getting back here in it I'd have needed to charge the battery whilst there, and there are no chargers there.
2 I needed to do about 8 miles on roads with 110 and 80 km/h speed limits, and I get uncomfortable diving that much slower than everyone else.

144:

No Milling? Can't allow the heir to take that chance?

145:

Heteromeles (I think) a few threads back excoriated SpaceX for encouraging and facilitating the blowing of massive wads of energy to no good purpose,

That was me, acksherly.

I've been a space fan from before Apollo, still am, but human use of energy is why we've got climate change and fixing that is a better purpose to expend energy and wealth than Starlink and Tesla in Spaaaace! and another deep space probe to a comet and so on. If the human race ever goes on to a real war footing to stop burning fossil fuels and start actively decarbonising the atmosphere then fripperies such as space exploration get shunted way down the priority list -- if we (the human "we") can afford to launch a rocket we can better spend that effort, energy and wealth in building some form of non-fossil-fuelled energy source, whether it's renewables, hydro or nuclear.

146:

an Ipad with 128 gigabytes of memory

There is no such thing.

If you want an M1 iPad Pro you can get one with 8Gb of RAM (storage capacity up to 512Gb of SSD), or 16Gb of RAM (the 1Tb and 2Tb storage models).

16Gb of memory is the absolute maximum you can buy in an iPad for the foreseeable future (even with an M1Max setup in a Mac, you won't get more than 64Gb of RAM ... until whatever Apple are planning to replace the Intel Mac Pro comes to light).

They might have bought a low-spec M1 iPad Pro with only 128Gb of storage in the past year; if so, it only has 8Gb of RAM and I'd call that buying decision "unwise" if they're doing serious work.

The 13" iPad Pro is a very potent artist's drafting board, though -- think of it as a really high spec pressure-sensitive digitizer pad. (They've really eaten Wacom's lunch in the creative arts sector.)

147:

The 13" iPad Pro is a very potent artist's drafting board, though -- think of it as a really high spec pressure-sensitive digitizer pad. (They've really eaten Wacom's lunch in the creative arts sector.)

Ummm, no. The Wacom digitising system is waaaaay better than the compromised Apple touch system -- the Apple can't detect rotation of the digitising pen and only just manages angle sensitivity since it only has one position sensor (the higher-end Wacom pens have two transponders). There's also that 13" display limitation from Apple whereas the pros can get a 24" or 32" 4k tablet from Wacom. Apple laptops and desktops are not touch-enabled and have no integral digitiser but the Wacoms will work with them as an add-on device. The MS Studio devices are touch-enabled and digitiser-capable out-of-the-box.

148:

There are anti-trust laws on the books. But the Federal Trade Commission is notorious for its reluctance to enforce them. Probably another example of regulatory-capture by giant industries... :-/

Yeah, well, those same anti-trust laws were more frequently used to bust unions, and are still being used that way.

For more than a decade after its passage, the Sherman Act was invoked only rarely against industrial monopolies, and then not successfully, chiefly because of narrow judicial interpretations of what constitutes trade or commerce among states. Its only effective use was against trade unions, which were held by the courts to be illegal combinations.

https://www.britannica.com/event/Sherman-Antitrust-Act

Is that regulatory capture, judicial activism, or carefully written laws to accomplish one thing despite rhetoric to accomplish another? I'll let someone more familiar with American history like Foxessa weigh in on that.

It is apparently still happening, though. There is now a carve-out for employees, but if you are a gig worker you are apparently still subject to them.

Workers classified as “employees” under federal law enjoy an antitrust exemption and can therefore bargain collectively through unions. But workers classified – or misclassified – as “independent contractors” cannot claim the same legal protection. Twenty million Americans, and growing, fall into that category.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/commentisfree/2018/jun/29/america-insidious-union-buster-government

149:

Also it's wild to me that people will kill each other over a few hundred dollars, but we think that billionaires with health problems are all going to play by the rules and source a replacement organ ethically.

I don't think you fully understand the diminishing marginal utility of money.

The folks killing one another for a few hundred dollars are generally poor. To them, a few hundred dollars represents a roof over their head for a month, or being able to eat and feed their dependents for a week, or to pay off the loan shark whose heavies will otherwise break their legs.

The billionaires can simply register for a transplant in several states and pay the pilots of their private jet overtime to be on standby 24x7 ... because keeping the jet on standby represents a smaller proportion of their wealth as a hundred dollars does to a mugger.

150:

If the human race ever goes on to a real war footing to stop burning fossil fuels and start actively decarbonising the atmosphere then fripperies such as space exploration get shunted way down the priority list

Reminder that a Falcon 9 launch burns as much kerosene as a single 747-400 shuttling between the UK and Australia five times (that is, five returns at 100 tonnes of fuel in each direction). That's about a week of flying time. Yes, a Falcon 9 burns roughly a thousand tonnes of fuel. And they're launching one a week this year so far. But that's the same fuel consumption as a single 747 or A380 class wide-body (of the thousands in service). And that accounts for roughly half the planetary launch capacity.

Oh, and air travel is a low single-digit percentage of our fuel burn for transportation, compared to shipping, trains, automobiles ...

Now, Musk's more megalomaniacal proposals for Starship aka Mars Colony Transporter envisaged two million flights over a 20 year period. That's a roughly 10 gigaton fuel/oxidizer burn (roughly 1:2 by molar weight as it runs on CH4/O2) so 150 million tonnes of methane per year. Turns out that we release about 360 million tonnes of methane a year as wastage (one may assume a methalox-cycle rocket tries to release as little unburned fuel into the atmosphere as possible).

TLDR is the space program is a minute issue, and even if we push it to "let's colonize Mars in a generation!!!" levels of batshittery it's not going to be a major driver of, well, anything.

Whereas the benefits of earth resources satellites, weather satellites, low-latency comsat clusters, and a modicum of science missions (NASA only fly about a dozen a year) are out of all proportion to the cost in planetary terms.

151:

I'm having trouble with this.

Billionaires are obviously evil. (at least on average) The Koch brothers alone pull the average far into the evil side.

So getting rid of billionaires should eliminate all the evil...

Yet I see corporations, with thousands of shareholders being every bit, or more evil. I won't name the most evil corporations, but baby formula companies, tobacco companies, oil companies. They're owned essentially by what our American cousins call Mom and Pop. Is a company worth 300 billion dollars more evil when owned by 1,000,000 investors that average $300,000 each, or controlled by one investor that has 151 billion?

AGL didn't have any investors with more than 10% holdings, yet it's fighting tooth and nail to keep burning coal. One billionaire guy turned up and wanted to take it over to stop it burning coal, and they broke the law in order to stop the takeover (to which the government regulator turned a blind eye).

So we wave a magic wand and no one can control more than say a million dollars in assets. What does this get us as a society? A diffusion of responsibility for evil deeds? A requirement for me to sell my house to a corporation and then rent it back from them. Is the world a better place if I no longer want to maintain my house? Is the world better for having corporations in charge of every moral choice?

Maybe it is, but I'm not seeing how it would be given the abysmal record of corporate behaviour.

Eat the rich by all means, but are they nutritious?

152:

That is misleading, to the point of being more false than true. As with apples and most plant and animal characteristics, there is a significant genetic component; no, I won't get into an argument over how much. More significantly, there are significant inter-uterine and early development components, and that leads to Lamarckian inheritance. The result is that there IS a significant inherited component to intelligence and even genius; there are enough examples from history to show that.

'Making' money is a separate matter, however, and there is a hell of a lot of luck involved.

153:

Billionaires are obviously evil. (at least on average) ... So getting rid of billionaires should eliminate all the evil.

Sadly, billionaires do not have a monopoly on evil.

To eliminate evil you'd have to exterminate humanity, and quite probably a bunch of other species -- say, anything with a central nervous system.

I'm reasonably sure plants aren't evil, although arguably Ophiocordyceps unilateralis sensu lato is pretty evil (but if deprived of a host with a central nervous system it's probably both harmless and, shortly, extinct).

154:

It's possible I misunderstood what he told me, but it wasn't the usual Mac you'd expect for such work.

155:

Thus supporting your point about Jobs and disruption

156:

You're a fair bit out on the Falcon 9 fuel usage. There is around 500 tonnes of propellant on board at lift-off, but rather more than two thirds of it is liquid oxygen. There's ~125t of kerosene on the first stage and ~33t on the second. The non stop flight between Heathrow and Sydney by a Qantas 747 in 1989 used 183.5t of fuel on its journey.

157:

But before you point at Musk and Tesla or SpaceX, I need to remind you that he didn't found Tesla, he merely bought into it then took over

While true, this is a bit misleading. Everything of any significance that Tesla has ever done, has been done with Musk in charge.

He bought in, and became chairman of the board, in 2004 when Tesla had existed for less than a year. At that point Eberhard and Tarpenning had nothing but a few ideas (and memories of a test drive in a tzero). Musk's first "master plan" was mid-2006, when he was personally working on the Roadster engineering. He's been CEO since 2008, round about the time the first Roadster (built on a Lotus Elise glider) rolled out of the factory.

He's annoying as hell, and obviously a pretty nasty person, and the fanbois are the worst since Jobs. But he's not the silver-spoon incompetent wannabe that some people like to pretend.

158:

An iMac (Intel 27" model, discontinued a couple of months ago in favour of the M1Pro/M1Max Mac Studio) could well have 128Gb of RAM -- the one I'm typing this on does. (If you're willing to cough up £2500 for a Mac, adding another £600 for the RAM -- third party: Apple wanted about £2000 for it -- makes sense, especially if you're amortizing it as a business expense over about five years.)

A Mac Pro could also have 128Gb, easily. (It maxes out at 1.5Tb of RAM. No idea what the M-series version coming in the next few months will be, but most likely it'll have 64Gb of on-die RAM per CPU and multiple CPU options.)

iPads, though ... they're cheap portables with a sufficient battery life for a day of work on the road. They're particularly good for showing other people your graphic design concepts and making quick sketches. But as a primary working tool they're not terribly high-spec.

159:

"War footing" -- the world's airlines are gutted with unnecessary flights for tourism and business and Thanksgiving and Chinese New Year etc. being forbidden by law. If someone has to fly for some reason, like being a top-ranked surgeon needed to carry out a brain transplant, fine but otherwise do your business via Zoom or email and go sight-seeing on Youtube. Boeing and Airbus take a bath commercially speaking with their engineering efforts and production facilities for people-mover planes going into wind turbine construction and control systems for nuclear reactors. There may be some air freight services, but only essential stuff that's time-critical and no, that doesn't mean fresh strawberries from Israel destined for New York restaurant tables. The rest can travel by electric-traction trains, EV trucks and wind-powered ships and accept that they'll get to their destination eventually. New Silk Route FTW.

Fossil fuel sales are rationed too, no "let's sunbird to Florida this summer in an eight miles per gallon RV!" with every drop of oil and gas extracted and burned requiring a dozen pages of sign-offs and approvals by the Climate Stasi. Biofuels or synthetics are used for aircraft and some other transport operations such as agriculture and launching weather and earth observation satellites. The various national militaries either return to medieval ox-cart standards of movement and logistics or they simply disband, I don't care which, but no more zoom-boom fighters, no more C-5 Galaxy flights, no more non-nuclear warships. Maybe they'll recommission HMS Victory...

When we get to 15TW of DELIVERABLE non-fossil electricity generation worldwide then maybe we can ease up, until then there's a war on.

160:

So getting rid of billionaires should eliminate all the evil...

Why?

It's not like billionaires have a monopoly on evil.

Socrates is an Athenian, so if we kill Socrates we've killed all Athenians. Someone with better training in rhetoric than me can name that logical fallacy — I just know it is one.

161:

TLDR is the space program is a minute issue, and even if we push it to "let's colonize Mars in a generation!!!" levels of batshittery it's not going to be a major driver of, well, anything.

Yes. To me going after space launches is akin to the F1 talking about carbon neutral race cars.

The cars don't matter. What matters is the hundreds of people flying around the world to take part in, manage, watch, go to parties, etc... Plus what has to be a huge number of cargo plane capacity to transport those mobile garages and tech centers PLUS THE CARS around the world every week or so.

Carbon neutral cars is a joke in racing.

162:

Right, well, that makes my point even better: the commercial space launch business that lofts more than half the world's surface-to-orbit freight today consumes in a year about as much fuel as a single 747 servicing the London/Sydney route for a month.

(Even if we count the LOX as weight-equivalent to the RP-1 -- it doesn't liquefy itself, you know -- it's not much worse.)

163:

If someone has to fly for some reason, like being a top-ranked surgeon needed to carry out a brain transplant, fine

If you shut down air travel to the extent you say, there will not be enough infrastructure to support the surgeon's flights.

164:

A few years back there was a company that was making sort-of Hackintosh machines for graphical designers, integrating a Wacom digitiser with Apple laptop hardware for designers who wanted Wacom capability on Apple kit without it being an assembly of parts cabled together on a desktop. It was not cheap (ca. 9,000 bucks fully specced) but it worked and since it was based on genuine Apple hardware it wasn't really a Hackintosh. That may have been what Troutwaxer's acquaintance was using with the laptop-donor's RAM maxed out to 128GB.

Around the same time I caught a thread in a Hackintosh blog about a music composer who had been using a maxed-out Mac Pro (pre-dustbin model, I think) and he had switched to a Hackintosh based on a quad-Xeon CPU rack server with 512GB of RAM to improve his productivity. His comment was that it had paid for itself with the first two contracts he completed with it in terms of time saved (he kept about 300GB of sound samples in RAM at any given time).

165:

To eliminate evil you'd have to exterminate humanity, and quite probably a bunch of other species -- say, anything with a central nervous system.

I'm reasonably sure plants aren't evil

Now we need to define evil. As they say, the devil is in the details. GDRFC

166:

Mibbae aye, mibbae nae. I have flown by Air Ambulance exactly once. The itinerary was:-
1 Paramedic ambulance from hospital to airport, and out onto apron to meet aeroplane (no trip to or through the "security" theatre). (No terrorists, drugs mules or hijackers on the flight either)
2 Flight from local airport to GLA. Short approach that cut us inside the usual air lanes
3 Short landing leaving 05 on a taxiway that took us direct to Gama Aviation
4 Ambulance pickup at Gama taking me direct to QE with no need to pass through baggage reclaim.

Now, why shouldn't our consultant brain surgeon receive service like that?

167:

I tend to define evil as somewhere in the area of malignant narcissism, which I think is largely, but not uniquely, human. Since I think phylogenetic bracketing is a useful exercise, I tend to think that human-like mental traits show up in other, closely-related vertebrate species as well. Cephalopods also demonstrate that human-like problem solving shows up as a result of convergent evolution as well, and that might apply to the problem of evil as defined above.

As for natural evil, I think most theologians have a bad case of CRIS, because they're mistaking problems with scale for evil. Earthquakes and volcanoes are absolutely essential for maintaining all eukaryotic life on Earth, because plate tectonics is what recycles elements that would otherwise get trapped in ocean sediments and become unavailable on the rest of the planet. The oxygen atmosphere that multicellular eukaryotes requires inevitably means we will have wildfires. Having an atmosphere thick enough to block lethal radiation from space inevitably means we're going to regularly have huge storms. Having a big enough planet to do plate tectonics inevitably means we're going to have gravity causing things to fall destructively.

These are enormous forces at play. A hurricane packs the energy of a medium-scale nuclear war. So do large earthquakes and tsunamis. So do large wildfires. Of course people will die if they get caught in the path of these things. They're powerful enough to kill thousands of people.

But without these titanic forces, there is no human life. An earthquake is not evil, it's just part of the necessary movements that keep Earth habitable for us.

But making money by building unsafe buildings around an earthquake fault, while knowing the risk, and not telling the buyers or residents? That's evil. Blaming such actions on an earthquake being divine will or natural evil is also questionable, especially if it's done knowingly.

As an aside, I don't think plants can evil. Some are massively dangerous and/or destructive in some very unsettling ways, but that's not the result of malignant narcissism on their part, any more than you pulling a weed is malignant narcissism on your part.

The nasty questions are whether societies can be evil in some regards, and what to do if you belong to a society that espouses malignant narcissism, and you want to belong without embodying that particular dysfunction yourself. That might be worth thinking about.

Finally, I'll note a particular issue that keeps popping up here. If a billionaire is evil, should he be killed? My general response is the Christian asymmetry, although, again, I'm not Christian. Christ said, straight up, do not oppose evil with evil. I happen to agree, because symmetric struggles tend to be more difficult and more damaging than asymmetric struggles are. It's the difference between pitched battle between equal forces and a raid that hits them where they're weakest. So oppose malignant narcissism with other things that the person is vulnerable, but do not fight their evil with your own.

If at all possible, I think billionaires should not be killed, judicially or otherwise, because the expectation of lethal force entitles them to act likewise. Stripped of assets and made into average people? That's more necessary. Then made to answer for the illegal consequences of their actions, without the insulation of money? Also a good thing. Declaring war on the rich? That's probably a really destructive choice, even if they are smaller than the biggest nation states. Leave that as a very last resort.

168:

No question he could do it easily, his fund managers probably trade him in and out of Amazon stock more than that on a monthly basis. Not even an interesting question for examples like him or Gates, Buffett, Musk, Page, Brin, Ellison, Zuckerberg, Starbuck Schultz or Google Schultz, the Waltons, Bloomberg, or any of the other thousands of tycoons enriched by publicly traded stock. Where it gets more interesting would be privately held fortunes like the Mars candy heirs, but if the choice was put to them as pay this amount or a commensurate proportion of your company ownership reverts to government control, they'd find a way to do it, just like borrowing cash for a car, plane or house. No problem, same as taking on debt to fight off a hostile takeover,

Maybe I'm not clever enough to see it, but this just sounds like the government threatening to burn those businesses down to nothing, out of spite. Whatever tax revenue is gained via this method, surely more is lost due to the long term economic hit. Unless one believes that the government that runs the VA will competently run Mars candy, competently enough anyway that it won't end up dead and thousands unemployed.

Similarly with Amazon. While I think Bezos is a turd and not even necessarily the smartest person who might run it, this just accelerates the decline of such companies that (otherwise) require decades to stagnate and fall apart. Forcing him to sell it off piecemeal inevitably results in more people having it who care only about short term stock price rises so they can cash out. There doesn't seem to be any other type. (It's notable that there is an exception in that, one remarkable specifically because he bucks that trend).

If this is the entire point, to just blow those companies up to spite billionaires, there are easier ways to do it, simpler ways. And that might even be a worthy goal, I dunno.

It just bugs me that some people seem to believe that they'll somehow siphon a bunch of cash out of it, when they'll at bets manage a trickle that dries up much more quickly than they'd believe.

169:

Your situation is making use of infrastructure that is amortized over 1,000s of flights per day. Airport runways, flight controllers, fuel delivery systems, sat tracking, all of it is a shared cost. If you eliminate 98% of the entities feeding into the shared costs the costs for those remaining tend to go up.

170:

Here's a critique on Vox of Bill Gates's new book: The major blind spot in Bill Gates’s pandemic prevention plan/The billionaire’s new book shows why we can’t expect the 1% to come up with solutions for the rest of us.

https://www.vox.com/recode/2022/5/10/23064197/bill-gates-pandemic-prevention-covid

171:

We can't just outlaw large companies, and how do you prevent a large (billion dollar+) corporation

The funny thing is large companies can't even exist without being created by laws. In the United States, most are governed by Delaware state law (since that is where they tend to incorporate). They're sort of blessed into existence by the state department of business.

Now, not all companies that incorporate go on to grow to gigantic sizes. But none that fail to incorporate will ever be anything more than tiny little sole proprietorships. Furthermore, I suspect strongly that companies that didn't incorporate would have to choose between size (what we'd call now medium-sized, at most) and longevity. Corporations have to make no such choice, they can be gigantic and effectively immortal both.

The various shields against liability, the ease of transfer of responsibility from one pseudo-owner (manager/controller) to another, etc. these are all the things that make these companies gigantic.

So you talk about how you can't outlaw them, and I sit here wondering how no one recognizes that they wouldn't even exist without the law allowing them to be created in the first place.

As a libertarian, I wonder how the government (of Delaware, no less!) has the legitimate power to bless these companies into existence, and how it ever came to be that this power was granted without so much as anyone even talking about it in some philosophy textbook.

It feels like this point won't ever be acknowledged because, fundamentally, everyone wants gigantic companies to exist, instead they merely hope/demand that their political faction be in charge of them.

172:

Under this sort of war-footing to fight climate change, a flight to transport a special person or piece of equipment is going to cost, in terms of money and infrastructure, as much as a sub-orbital tourist flight does today. The planes will be small, sub-737 sized large bizjets flying out of secondary "bush" strips rather than major hubs like ATL or LHR which are closed and mothballed for the duration of the Emergency. Since there's little else flying, air traffic control will be minimal to non-existent with the pilots mostly flying VFR point-to-point. There's a war on, after all.

ObManga: Kabu no Isaki.

173:

You're still going to be looking at vastly increased costs. Which tends to make those "fly a doc to where needed" harder to justify.

But in general we disagree. Again.

174:

Various strains of entirely mainstream economics argue that the marginal utility of money doesn't in fact diminish as people get richer. That an extra dollar has exactly the same worth to a billionaire and an unemployed person, because they can buy the same amount of stuff with it.

This is obvious bullshit, for the reasons Charlie has outlined, and because it may mean the difference between skipping a meal or not for the unemployed.

But any argument for policy change based on diminishing marginal utility of money will be howled down by an assortment of Very Serious People because it violates economic theory developed and promulgated to serve wealth.

175:

Maybe I'm not clever enough to see it, but this just sounds like the government threatening to burn those businesses down to nothing, out of spite. Whatever tax revenue is gained via this method, surely more is lost due to the long term economic hit. Unless one believes that the government that runs the VA will competently run Mars candy, competently enough anyway that it won't end up dead and thousands unemployed.

I'm not Keith, but in general, I'm trying to get the businesses taxed, which they mostly are not now. Many billionaires believe "all tax is theft," so these elaborate offshore shell games are designed to keep their assets from being assessed and taxed. The whole point of ownership versus control is that ownership can be taxed, while control cannot be, so billionaires normally control their fortunes, rather than own them, as a basic defensive step.

So I'm not talking about burning the companies down, I'm talking about dismantling the structures that keep them from being taxed. That almost certainly involves nationalization as a first step, but in the US, failed banks get nationalized as a first step. Then the financial pros go through to salvage what they can, and what remains gets rapidly sold back onto the market, usually to another bank. I'd suggest a similar process here: short term nationalization, followed by the company or its parts being spun back in a form that pays taxes.

We're in a situation where we need massive flows of resources going to getting carbon out of the air, and we've got similarly massive flows of resources going to empowering billionaires, resources that do not appear to be available for getting carbon out of the air. As a thought experiment (aka fiction), I'd suggested what we figure out how to get those billionaire resources into a form that helps sequester carbon, or helps pay to sequester carbon. That divests the billionaires from controlling their untaxed fortunes, and it might help save the rest of us.

Charlie's getting at a related point by asking if the billionaires are actually doing anything useful, such that divesting them of their fortunes will cause more harm than good.

176:

Actually it isn't; there are 5 (five) scheduled return flights a day, and a similar number of non-scheduled flights from the regional airport I discussed. Oh, and how much are you valuing a human life at?

177:

Absolutely, it's going to cost much MUCH more to fly anyone anywhere, assuming they have permission to travel that way under the Climate Change War rules. The special talent isn't just a "doc", they're an artist who is the best at what they do on the planet pretty much and the job they are needed on-site for right now is really important. Everyone else makes do with telemedicine and the local hospital, even Steve Jobs and other billionaires, or they take electric forms of transport[1] powered by non-fossil-derived fuels. There's a war on.

[1] Some of the new high-speed rail networks in China have routes such as the 2700km-long Beijing-Kunming connection that can take up to thirteen hours, covering about 2700 kilometres. Most people today making that journey end-to-end would opt to fly which takes less than four hours and costs a similar amount for tickets.

178:

Charlie noted (about flat tax rates): "Wrong, that's a regressive tax. Ideally you want income tax to be progressive, banded so that above a certain threshold you pay a greater percentage of your income in tax."

It doesn't have to be regressive. The point of such a tax could be to eliminate tax deductions for everyone -- which means the wealthy will finally pay their fair share. At tax time, you declare your gross income (all forms included), and pay tax equal to (say) 10% of that gross: your tax return has only 2 lines: income and 10% of income. Then the government reallocates the tax income to those who need the money most (e.g., by creating a universal basic income). This is nominally what democratic governments should be doing already, although most aren't.*

  • It shouldn't be hard to calculate a tax rate that harvests as much money as the current system harvests (i.e., total current tax revenue divided by total earned income), then increase that rate to bring in enough money to fund poverty alleviation programs.

** The problem, of course, is that the rich can still indulge in regulatory capture and persuade the government that the rich really need the money more than the poor. Not sure how we solve that problem. But it's probably not worse than the current state of affairs.

The usual reason such taxes are regressive is because it's assumed the money goes into the common pot of government spending, which generally means an insufficient share goes to the poor. To make the tax non-regressive, you must reallocate the money to those who need the money most. How to achieve that goal is a problem for any tax system; the flat tax is just a bit harder to avoid.

Of course, this would suck if you're a tax lawyer, but that doesn't bother me in the least.

179:

Here's what I don't get:

About 12,000 organs were sold on the black market, and while the majority of those exchanges involved kidneys, 654 hearts and 2,615 livers were sold for up to $394,000 each.

From 2018: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-12-04/human-organ-black-market-illegal-trafficking/10579738

I get that money has marginally decreasing value, but if ~$1 million all in to get your liver swapped out with some dodgy sourcing sure, but you get to live... why didn't Jobs just do that rather than wait and hope? I'm pretty sure at that pricepoint you can "ethically" source the donor and have them smiling on camera "yes I happily consent to this!"

180:

Quite. As I pointed out in comment #12. Also, the proponents of punitive taxes refuse to even face up to the fact that, whenever they have been used, they have caused social, often cultural and sometimes ecological, harm out of all proportion to any benefit. Yes, everybody and every corporation should be taxed above a certain level, but going above roughly 50% is counter-productive. Inter alia, that means treading on off-shoring, which COULD be done without harm.

The key point is that the concentration of power in the hands of a few people, or corporations or indeed countries, needs to be controlled. But none of this thread has indicated a viable method that wouldn't be at least as bad as not doing so.

181:

The asterisks used as footnotes seem to have been swallowed. The first footnote, which became a bullet, should be tied to the 10% tax rate; the second should be tied to "most aren't".

182:

Well, one reason is that it wouldn't have helped him.

183:

Most people today making that journey end-to-end would opt to fly which takes less than four hours and costs a similar amount for tickets.

I can fly free to most of the US (with planning) and cheaply around much of the world. And yet I don't like to fly if DOOR to DOOR it's 5 hours. Because I can drive in the same time to usually the same distance. And be in much better shape when I get there with much more control over my schedule, things, and life in general.

But some think I'm weird that way.

184:

Expanding on my observation @173:

All those right wing/ Randian/ neo-liberal arguments in favour of tax cuts for billionaires and against redistributive policies ultimately rest on a denial of the diminishing marginal utility of money. They even implicitly argue that, by some alchemical process, a dollar given to a billionaire has more value than a dollar given to the poors. That the billionaire's thrusting entrepreneurialism will magically result in that money being wisely, productively invested and trickled down rather than squandered on drink and drugs by the underclass.

Again, bullshit. But that's the argument. It's conventional wisdom on the right, and barely controversial in the Blairite centre.

185:

Whereas the one story I've written where a noble was the protagonist explicitly notes that her parents were the exception that proves the rule (that nobility AIN'T).

186:

Troutwaxer @ 91: A friend of mine is a professional artist, the kind of person who's work you've seen in major advertising campaigns, and he decided that his most economic work platform was an Ipad with 128 gigabytes of memory, so YAY DISRUPTION (or something.) But Jobs definitely got it right!

I'd say he got it right for SOME PEOPLE. Others may find different solutions more congenial.

More power to those who do find it the right solution, and more power to those who don't.

187:

Ideas like "Drug War" and "War On Terrorism" (neatly abbreviated "WOT?!") just seem like really bad propaganda. It may damage the meaning of the word, "war", but to no apparent advantage other than making a bad idea sound important.

At this point, I'd half-jokingly hope that the US launches an official "War on Sanity" and a "War on Common Sense." Those might be our best hopes for common sense and sanity winning. Unfortunately, it would take a trillion dollars each and 20 years per war...

188:

Or perhaps a real antitrust law, that no corporate control more than three deep - that is, no corporation can own beyond a corporation that owns a corporation (or real property). That, for example, would put a stop to that apartment building I read about in NYC where the maintenance co had no idea who owned the building, when the city inspectors came after them.

189:

I get that money has marginally decreasing value, but if ~$1 million all in to get your liver swapped out with some dodgy sourcing sure, but you get to live... why didn't Jobs just do that rather than wait and hope? I'm pretty sure at that pricepoint you can "ethically" source the donor and have them smiling on camera "yes I happily consent to this!"

I think the "it wouldn't have helped" is correct.

To expand on that, my wife was just studying the pharmaceutical side of organ transplants and leaving the video lessons on so we could both hear. To make a scarily complex story short, most organs in the transplant chain are some shade of dodgy, and quite often they're unusable for a variety of reasons*. The ways a liver transplant can go wrong are rather horrifying, the additional operations you might need on your GI tract to keep the organ working are similarly complicated, again verging on high-mortality scary (remember, the liver drains into the small intestine), and that's in a normal transplant where everything's aboveboard. I don't know what's going on with the 12,000 black market organs, but that's another level of problems on top of all the other problems that normally have to be managed.

*Two common problems are that whatever killed the donor rendered an organ unusable, and the organ was too long outside a body and no longer viable. The window for getting them from body to body really needs to be as short as possible.

190:

In "MessUp" ;-), asterisk characters are used to start and end text emphasis, such as, say, boldface.

191:

Sort of useless. You think people would not still be unhappy with taxes? Let's look at my phone/Internet bill: um, from memory, open access tax, tax for this, tax for that, yeah, we pay your taxes, Verizon.

What I do agree on is that all income is all income. Toss it all in one bucket, and tax that bucket. You get stock options? The value of those options go into that bucket. You get a $20M 'bonus' (even if your company's going down the tubes?) - that goes into that bucket. You use arbitrage, and held those stocks for .1 microseconds, then sold, that value goes into that bucket. And the bucket gets the income tax on it.

192:

On the other hand, his accountants would change a lot of things if they, and he, knew it would all get taxed. What point is there in trying to cover it up, when the net worth is what's being taxed?

193:

For what little it's worth, I keep an eye on what the economists who study the "value of money" have to say about it - current thinking is that one problem with money is that the value of money is logarithmic, not linear, while accrual is linear or exponential.

First, to make the relationship between money and happiness appear, you need to translate everything to income, not capital - simply owning capital assets isn't going to change your happiness. Second, you need a fairly expansive view of income, which should include not just what the tax man calls income, but also money that you have control over (and thus that will be spent to your benefit). Then, when studied in a large enough study, with rigorous methodology to avoid participants lying, there's three things that appear to be true about human responses to money:

  • There's a minimum amount of income you need to allow money to make you happy at all - you need enough that "predictable" problems like your home heating failing do not need you to cut back on essentials like food to cover the repair bills. If you're below this minimum, money doesn't make you happy, it just goes into covering debt, or building up savings to cover predictable problems.
  • Once you exceed that minimum, you will become comfortable at whatever income level you have, given a reasonable amount of time to adjust; if you increase your income permanently, the happiness gain from that increase is temporary, while if you decrease it but remain above the minimum, the happiness loss from that decrease is also temporary. Note that reasonable is only fuzzily defined here, AFAICT.
  • The change in happiness from a particular change in income is proportional not to the absolute amount of change, but to what %age change it makes to your income above the minimum. If the minimum to allow money to make you happy is $80,000/year (about what one study found for Manhattan dwellers), then the change from $81,000 to $82,000 is the same as the change from $82,000 to $84,000 rather than the same as the change from $82,000 to $83,000.
  • The mathematicians among us spot the fun that point 3 leads to - if my income is $240,000/year (making the "surplus" $160,000/year), then to have the same impact on my happiness as $1,000/year does to someone on $81,000/year, I need to get an extra $160,000/year. This means that to have noticeable impact on the happiness of someone whose income equivalent is $1,000,000/year (under a tenth of a billionaire), you need to be dealing with millions.

    This, in turn, leads to our system producing billionaires as an emergent effect; if I am skilled at increasing my wealth (by the "money that I control for my benefit" definition), and I go from $1,000/year over my minimum to $2,000/year over my minimum in my first year working on increasing my wealth, I'm going to want to keep doubling my increment to my wealth each year in order to get the same happiness fix each time. Practically, therefore, everyone hits their limit at some point - and once you're in the billionaire game, the "happiness maximising" thing to do is to spend that money and reduce yourself to a mere tens of millions, and then rebuild to being a billionaire again.

    Of course, people aren't rational happiness maximisers; there's three outcomes you would expect to see from billionaires, in varying proportions depending on who society permits to exist:

  • I reach a level of wealth that leads to my happiness being good enough, and I accept the decay in money-related happiness over time as long as I remain comfortable. These people hold steady - they hoard what they have, but they neither aim to accrue more wealth, nor spend it at any significant rate - and thus take wealth out of the system, but don't have a strong impact on the rest of us.
  • I am not willing to take any hit to my happiness, so I constantly search for ways to get the same happiness increment I did on my way up. These people are dangerous, because you need to double your wealth to get the same happiness increment as you did on the previous doubling - and the nature of exponentials like that is that you end up trying to accrue everything in the entire world. Worse, when they reach the extremely wealthy end of things, it becomes very hard to keep getting the same money-related happiness hit, and they perceive this as oppression, not as the natural end state of owning most of a planet.
  • I am aiming to maximise my lifetime overall happiness, so I will take a short-term significant hit to happiness to put me back in a position where I can reasonably repeat the happiness gains I had during accrual the first time round, since I'm now trying to go from $250,000 to $500,000, not from $250,000,000 to $500,000,000. These people are not a problem for society, since every time they get rid of a large amount of money, they spend it on interesting risks (think Dolly Parton here).
  • Trickle-down economics relies on the assertion that the very rich are all outcome 3 types, and the other two types are negligible; if the very rich really were outcome 3 types, then their reaction to becoming richer would be to take the hit to happiness that spending everything triggers, and rebuild with what's left after the risky spends don't pay off. If this were true, we wouldn't have billionaires - they'd be spending their way down to "comfortable multi-millionaire" on high-risk, high-gain investments like curing diabetes or decarbonising travel instead.

    Feudal systems appear, from what I can find, to permit outcome 1 types to exist indefinitely in the nobility, and outcome 3 types everywhere in society, but to require outcome 2 types to risk their own lives to keep growing their wealth - and then hope that eventually, the outcome 2 types you do produce die trying to conquer the universe.

    Revolutionary systems tend to execute all outcome 1 and 2 types every time inequality triggers a revolution. Outcome 3 types can, if they see the way the wind is blowing, take the appearance of a revolution as a prompt to take the happiness hit now and thus not get executed, then rebuild once the violent phase is over to be back in a good place.

    One of the deficiencies of our system is that it doesn't have a good way to eliminate outcome 2. We don't execute people, or require them to lead armies, or otherwise take personal risks to increase your wealth, which means that the only limit is your ability to claim more of the world's resources. If you were an outcome 3 type, this wouldn't be so bad, because every so often, you'd have a funk, spend almost everything, and rebuild; if you were an outcome 1 type, it's not great, but it's survivable for society as a whole, since you don't have the tendency needed to try to accrue everything over time. Outcome 2 types, however, are "take over everything" types, and will do whatever it takes to accrue more.

    194:

    You seem to have skipped over a number of posts by several people, including Charlie and me. I mentioned I was debating that wealth stops at between $20M and $50M (2022 value). Above that, we the people take it away.

    You want reasons? Sure: what did that one person do to make that money? They said, "dig a ditch there, to protect the development of housing I built from being flooded." So, the guys who dig the ditch are only worth minimum wage? Didn't they just add a billion dollars to the value of those houses, by fixing it that they won't be flooded?

    There's an old story about the factory that shuts down, and they call in a plumber, who gets walked around and showed the problem, then whacks a pipe at one spot, and everything's good again. Charges $1000. The owner demands an itemized bill for just whacking a pipe. That reads, "whacking pipe, $5. Knowing where to whack the pipe, $995."

    But you don't see him asking $10,000,000 for whacking the pipe. You don't see all his former bosses who yelled at him for not whacking where they told him to. Or his apprentice masters, or his teachers at the vocational school.... The developer, above, said "build me a development"... he didn't do the architecture or the engineering, or...

    Am I approaching Marx's labor value theory? Well... hell, yes.

    195:

    Gasdive, you need to step back a bit. The corporations... "owned" by thousands of people. How many of them have voting shares, and how many DO NOT? And how many people own so many shares that they have 12% or 20%... and effectively, complete control? Those are the billionaires we're talking about.

    196:

    Thanks for admitting to being a libertarian up front.

    You're asserting, as you people do, that the government cannot ever do anything right. Tell me, how many companies have you worked for? You want "companies do it right?" really? I can go on for pages about a Fortune 500 company I worked for, which I have referred to ever since as the Scummy Mortgage Co., and I have literally pages of examples of why, if they were small, they'd have gone out of business in no time.

    You're also saying that the US gov't couldn't fight WWII, or have NASA get us to the Moon. Or hold the national parks, keeping them from, oh, say, Rio Tinto, who blew up caves with native paintings from tens of thousands of years ago.

    And then there was Frank Lorenzo, who hated unions so much that he bought control of Eastern Airlines in the eighties, and literally bankrupted the company to break their union.

    But, as I said to a friend/co-worker who was a libertarian 30 years ago, "so, how do we get from here to this Wonderful World of yours? Do we take everything away from everyone, and divvy it up, like the beginning of (the game) Monopoly, or do we just start from here, with Bill Gates with tens of billions, and you and me with zip?"
    His response was, "we're still talking about that down at the club".
    30 years have passed, and we all see the answer.

    Btw, when has any libertarian, since you apparently now blame it all on corporations, ever tried to outlaw corporations, and only allow companies?

    197:

    Troutwaxer @ 93: You want a progressive tax, but you also need a minimum tax that's also progressive, i.e. if you make a million dollars this year you pay a minimum of thirty-percent, if you make a billion dollars this year, you make a minimum of sixty-percent. Figure out where you want billionaires to spend their money and make it really difficult to actually achieve the minimum, so bragging rights are involved.

    You should look at the HISTORY of taxation in the U.S. There was a short lived income tax during and after the War of the Rebellion, but income taxes only really date to 1913 with the ratification of the 16th Amendment.

    The original income tax (after ratification of the 16th Amendment), the "Revenue Act of 1913" imposed a 1% tax on NET incomes over $3,000 single ($4,000 married), rising to 6% on NET incomes over $500,000. $3,000 in 1913 compares to $87,122.42 in 2022.

    I was unable to locate an income breakdown (quintiles, median, average ...) for 1913, but in 1910 income by
    Occupation:

    • Average of all Industries - $574/year
    • State and Local Government Workers - $699/year
    • Public School Teacher - $492/year
    • Building Trades - 52¢/hour [Working week: 45.2 h.] {$1,170 for 50 weeks?}
    • Medical/Health Services Worker - $338/year

    From Facts & Figures: Income and Prices 1900 - 1999 U.S. Diplomatic Mission to Germany "About the USA".

    According to PBS "Newshour" (Apr 15, 2013 - TAX DAY on the 100th anniversary of the Income Tax):

    The bottom line: At least 60 percent or so of Americans were exempt from the income tax when it was first introduced. But that’s the most conservative possible estimate.
    If you convert 1913 dollars to dollars today using the highest measure of equivalence — how much was a dollar worth back then as a percentage of the overall economy, compared with today — $3,000 was worth more than $1 million.
    If you read the 1913 form, you’ll see that the tax brackets went up progressively from there: above $20,000 (today’s half a million dollars, at the very least), $50,000 (more than a million) and so on up to the top marginal rate $500,000 1913 dollars, which would be at least $10 million today.
    So clearly, the income tax was designed at the start to be a tax on the wealthy, a way to “soak the rich.”
    --Emphasis Added

    It was always intended to tax the wealthy with the majority of workers (bottom 60% of incomes) exempt from taxation. Those who benefit most from "America" should pay, and those who benefit the MOST of the most should pay MORE.

    198:

    In the UK, most have voting shares. The problem is the large blocks of shares owned by other corporations (often insurance companies and similar). Yes, we should tackle the problem, but simplistic solutions will not work.

    199:

    Vulch @ 96: He doesn't appear to have a helicopter. The three executive jets are owned by a company called "Falcon Landing" and are also used to move SpaceX employees between the various sites in California, Texas and Florida."

    Note that SpaceX had to get special permission for the Falcon-9 on display outside their Hawthorne headquarters due to being right alongside Hawthorne Municipal Airport.

    Falcon Landing LLC appears to be Delaware Corp owned by SpaceX. Musk probably doesn't own the jets personally because of the way multi-billion dollar fortunes are structured for tax avoidance, but he ultimately has control of the jets and gets to use it anytime he wants.

    With SpaceX HQ located at the airport, Musk wouldn't NEED a helicopter to get from HQ to the hanger where the jets are located ... but again, I'm sure he has a helicopter ready & waiting any time he NEEDS one ... even if it's only a rental.

    200:

    I find it bizarre how many people think the megarich got that way solely through talent.

    Imagine this thought experiment - we'll do some magical SF cloning of a member of the megarich - Bezos, or Gates, or Musk. They'll have all their skills and knowledge except for specifically what happens in the future. The clones will be the same age as they were when they first started building their fortunes.

    Now stick the clones in a time machine that sends them backwards or forwards in time by a decade or twp. This time machine will also send them to a parallel world where they never existed (so no name recognition).

    I would suspect that in almost every case, the clones would never reach the wealth of the original. They may do well and reach some level of wealth, but without being in the right place, at the right time, with the right abilities, they aren't going to become the megarich.

    As for if their wealth is beneficial to society, I'd argue that a billionaire with $1B is probably less beneficial to society than a thousand people with $1M each, or 10,000 people with $100k each. If billionaires were the driving force behind a society's success, then places like Russia should be similar to places like the UK (both Russia and UK seems to have roughly the same number of billionaires per capita).

    201:

    I think what that probably indicates is that the US has an unusually large problem with whacking people in the face with taxes. I've sort of vaguely picked up that they do this every time you go shopping, although it's a bit unclear because it's from odd words and phrases in novels that never get explained because the author assumes every reader knows it all anyway, only I don't because whatever is happening doesn't happen in Britain.

    It sounds like what's happening is that your prices marked on things are not the full story because they don't include sales tax, so when you take your purchases to the till, the cashier tots it all up and says "that will be 3 dollars 20 cents plus tax", and then works out what extra you have to pay on top for the tax. Possibly also they do this by some arcane formula such that the customer doesn't know how much it will be until they are told, although this might just be the customers being characters who are shit at mental arithmetic.

    That doesn't happen here. The prices marked on things in British shops have our sales tax (though we don't call it that, we call it by a stupid name instead, but I'll call it "sales tax" anyway because it is) already included, so you can just add the prices up in your head as you go round the shop and know that that figure is equal to the total amount you will have to hand over when you get to the till. Nobody mentions tax at all, and the cashier doesn't have to add on any mysterious extra amounts.

    (There are some exceptions such as builders' merchants which mostly sell stuff to other businesses instead of to people, which do mark the prices without tax because the tax only applies when you are selling to people. But absolutely none of the ordinary everyday kind of shops are like that.)

    Similarly with utilities and stuff - the prices advertised for ordinary people have the sales tax included. There is usually an entry on the bill saying how much it is, but you don't pay any extra, you only pay the figure they told you when you signed up for it. Again, the utility prices for businesses don't include it, but prices for people do.

    Your comment sounds like you sign up for a service that they tell you costs 20 dollars a month (for example), but when you get the actual bill you find you have to pay 20 dollars and a bunch extra for several different taxes on top of that. That's not how it works here (except for businesses); if you are a person and you sign up to a service for people that they tell you costs 20 pounds a month, then 20 pounds a month is all you pay, and that covers the (one) sales tax as well as the service.

    In Britain the two taxes they bash you in the face with are income tax and (even more so) council tax (effectively a fucked-up kind of local income tax). There is a sales tax on nearly everything you buy (except food) and other extra taxes on particular things like road vehicle fuel, but they're all included in the prices they tell you you're going to have to pay, and you basically don't notice them unless you look them up and work out how much they come to. I am getting the feeling that in the US most or all taxes are implemented in a manner that bashes you in the face, which possibly might explain why tax appears to be an even bigger political distraction than it is here.

    202:

    Troutwaxer @ 103: Fixing public education is very simple: Require everyone to attend a government school and choose within a ten-mile radius by lot.

    I don't think "require" would be Constitutional in the U.S. (1st Amendment). But they could provide free public schools** and NOT subsidize private (particularly private religious) schools.

    If you want to spend your money sending your kids to private schools, that's fine by me. But you still have to pay the taxes that support the schools for the rest of the kids.

    ** Up through at least two years of public college AVAILABLE to everyone, since a High School Diploma doesn't seem to be enough nowadays.

    203:

    Dave Moore @ 107: I would like to add into the mix one of the more toxic products of billionairedom, perhaps the most toxic product, that is their children. The poster child for this is Donald Trump. The Kock brothers are also descendants of a family fortune.

    Cheatolini iL Douchebag in particular, because he's the sociopath son of a sociopath who's "raising" a bunch of little sociopaths (and the daughter married another).

    OTOH, although DJT claims to be a billionaire, I see little or no evidence that is so.

    He's a grifter spending other people's money. Someday there MIGHT be an accounting, but I don't think it's going to add up to a billion dollars ... even if he's forced to disclose BOTH sets of books (all three sets of books?).

    204:

    Troutwaxer @ 110: This is my thinking exactly. (One of the things I've worked out carefully for the books I'm writing is how my nobility makes sure this kind of stuff doesn't happen to their kids.)

    That's gonna' be a tough row to hoe, 'cause I don't think there IS any way to make sure. Parents can do EVERYTHING right and the kids still turn out wrong. OTOH, sometimes parents do everything WRONG, and somehow the kids turn out all right. Go figure!

    I've seen it happen both ways and it wasn't always "rich" people's kids, although I think wealthy families sometimes have a harder time turning out good, NOT SPOILED kids ... especially when family wealth is multi-generational.

    205:

    I find it bizarre how many people think the megarich got that way solely through talent.

    Maybe find where those people hang out and ask them why they think that?

    I suspect everyone here is assuming that it's a combination of starting slightly rich, getting luck and having talent (even if that's only a talent for making money). But really, running a business is hard and it's something an awful lot of people will choose not to do if they can. You just have to look at all the "entrepreneurs" and "small businesses" who are trying to unionise and force their suppliers to pay them minimum wage to see that.

    206:

    "Slightly"? People forget Bill Gates, who "started M$ in his garage (yeah, right), got a $20,000 loan from his parents.

    Mid-late seventies. In '72? '73? I bought my first house for $11,500. In late seventies, I had a good job as a library page, and was making $9200/yr in '79.

    Gates' parents were millionaires.

    207:

    Yep. Food does not tend to be taxed (except maybe prepared food, inc. restaurants), but everything else - the stores want to sound lower than it is, and to hit up in the face with taxes. That's part of the plan.

    208:

    "I find it bizarre how many people think the megarich got that way solely through talent."

    I don't. It's standard propaganda that's shoved down everyone's throats from the moment they're old enough to notice that some people have more money than others: "do well at school and pass all your exams and then work really hard and you can be like Bezos/Musk/(insert wanker of choice) if you want". External circumstances don't matter, and there's never even a mention of any other kinds of personal attributes; supposedly there's room for everyone at the top of the pyramid if they were only to exert themselves to climb there, and the lower levels only exist because most people don't so exert themselves (nothing to do with the way the whole lot would fall down if the lower levels weren't there).

    Everyone is taught to think of themselves as a potential Bezusk, they vote for policies that favour the rich and shit on the poor because they still think they'll be rich one day, and eventually they end up knackered and not rich and pissed off at the government because they think it's their fault (which I suppose it is in a way, only not for holding them back as they believe, but for being part of the feeding them bullshit). And yet all too often they are still only too ready to mock comments like "all anyone ever got from hard work is blisters" or "there's a much better expectation of gain from playing the lottery". I don't find it bizarre that so many people swallow the crap to begin with, since it's so pervasive, but I do find it depressing that they are so reluctant to notice that it is crap.

    It's definitely another item on the list of reasons for getting rid of Bezusks, partly because their existence allows them to be held up as examples, and partly because some of them actively participate in the propaganda and hold themselves up as examples.

    "Now stick the clones in a time machine that sends them backwards or forwards in time by a decade or twp. This time machine will also send them to a parallel world where they never existed (so no name recognition).

    I would suspect that in almost every case, the clones would never reach the wealth of the original. They may do well and reach some level of wealth, but without being in the right place, at the right time, with the right abilities, they aren't going to become the megarich."

    Sure. Because when they emerge from the time machine, they're twp.

    (Sorry, couldn't resist that...)

    209:

    AlanD2 @ 120:

    Yes it's significantly slower at top speed, but it can also go center-to-center rather than stopping at an out-of-town runway.

    Gotta watch out for pilots like the one Kobe Bryant had, though.

    It's ALWAYS the pilot's fault.

    OTOH, How much pressure was the pilot under to fly that day despite the deteriorating weather?

    Could he have refused to fly because of the bad weather (and kept his job)? There's no way to know whether a different pilot could have done any better given the conditions when the flight started. The company that employed the pilot and even Bryant himself bear some of the responsibility for that flight going forward.

    210:

    Auto-rotations notwithstanding:

    The thing is, helicopters are different from airplanes. An airplane by its nature wants to fly and, if not interfered with too strongly by unusual events or by a deliberately incompetent pilot, it will fly. A helicopter does not want to fly. It is maintained in the air by a variety of forces and controls working in opposition to each other, and if there is any disturbance in the delicate balance, the helicopter stops flying, immediately and disastrously. There is no such thing as a gliding helicopter.
    This is why a helicopter pilot is so different a being from an airplane pilot, and why in general, airplane pilots are open, clear-eyed, buoyant extroverts, and helicopter pilots are brooders, introspective anticipators of trouble. They know if anything bad has not happened, it is about to.

    Harry Reasoner
    Approach magazine, November 1973

    211:

    Do you need that much RAM in an iMac? I keep meaning to upgrade our 27" iMac from 2020 with more than its 8 GB of RAM, but just using it for internet and a bit of photo editing, we never seem to have any slowdowns. I wouldn't even try to book up a Windows machine with less than 16GB in it, but 128 GB seems like quite a lot unless you're rendering HD video or something else resource intensive.

    212:

    Someone I know used to be a helicopter mechanic for the Army. He had a couple of sayings about how helicopters operated -- one was that they didn't fly, they beat the air into submission. The other was that they only stayed up because they were so ugly the Earth rejected them.

    213:

    It's ALWAYS the pilot's fault.

    Was that sarcasm?

    Because it's often not the pilot's fault. Unless "not adequately coping with the emergency" is a fault.

    I've been binging on Transportation Safety Board reports lately, and one thing that stands out is that most 'accidents' have multiple causes — a concatenation of things that went wrong, any of which by itself wouldn't have been a problem, because the system has checks and backups. Reason's swiss cheese model in action.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_cheese_model

    214:

    Do you need that much RAM in an iMac?

    Possibly. When I went from 8 GB to 16 GB to 32 GB I noticed that my performance increased substantially. I'm stitching and editing large panoramas and 32 GB means I can edit panoramas that I couldn't before.

    If I was editing 4k video I'd probably want more memory.

    215:

    EC @ 180
    You too have noticed this ... but still, various "idiots" - including large numbers of correspondents to this blog STILL DON'T GET IT!
    Any tax over about 60% will be cheated on - it's not worth it.

    Rbt Prior
    Try reading a few "RAIB" reports! { Rail Accident Investigation Board }

    216:

    Charlie Stross @ 145:

    an Ipad with 128 gigabytes of memory

    There is no such thing.

    He was probably quoting Apple Marketing speak. Apple calls (called?) iPad storage "memory", so, yes you CAN have an iPad with 128GB of "memory".

    It's an iPad with 128GB of RAM that doesn't exist.

    217:

    Try reading a few "RAIB" reports! { Rail Accident Investigation Board }

    I'm not that kind of engineer! :-)

    218:

    kurtseifried @ 179: Here's what I don't get:

    About 12,000 organs were sold on the black market, and while the majority of those exchanges involved kidneys, 654 hearts and 2,615 livers were sold for up to $394,000 each.

    From 2018: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-12-04/human-organ-black-market-illegal-trafficking/10579738

    I get that money has marginally decreasing value, but if ~$1 million all in to get your liver swapped out with some dodgy sourcing sure, but you get to live... why didn't Jobs just do that rather than wait and hope? I'm pretty sure at that pricepoint you can "ethically" source the donor and have them smiling on camera "yes I happily consent to this!"

    One consideration is "There is no honor among thieves." The black markets are run by criminals. How do you know that black-market liver didn't come from some junkie with Hepatitis A thru Zed? Or that he actually signed the donor card, or that THEY waited until he died from natural causes before extracting it?

    ... or a slaughterhouse liver taken from a pig with HIV?

    Criminals will rip you off if they can. For a rich person trying to extend their life against some terminal disease, a black-market liver doesn't seem to offer good ROI.

    219:

    Geoff Hart said The point of such a tax could be to eliminate tax deductions for everyone -- which means the wealthy will finally pay their fair share. At tax time, you declare your gross income (all forms included), and pay tax equal to (say) 10% of that gross: your tax return has only 2 lines: income and 10% of income.

    Makes it tough to build anything or trade anything.

    You've invented VAT without VAT input credits. Every transaction gets a 10% charge to the government rather than just the final user being charged 10%.

    Farmer sells wheat to the mill, the fuel, tractors harvesters, fieldworkers, not tax deductibles. 10% tax on gross. The haulage fees to the mill are not tax deductible. Mill sells wheat to bulk wholesaler, 10% tax on the flour plus 10% on the taxes paid so far. The bulk wholesaler sells to the packaging company, 10% tax. The packaging company sells to the importer, 10% tax. The importer sells to the food wholesaler, 10% tax. The food wholesaler sells to the supermarket franchise, 10%. The franchise sells to the franchisee 10%. The franchisee sells to you, 10%.

    Similar things happen to all the materials if you say decide to build affordable housing. If the builder can't claim the cost of the workers and the materials as tax deductions, the price they charge has to go up.

    It means people like company directors who have no inputs pay 10% tax on the money that goes in their pocket, while a builder would pay 99% of the money that goes in their pocket as tax. People who simply control assets don't pay any tax.

    220:

    That is misleading, to the point of being more false than true. As with apples and most plant and animal characteristics, there is a significant genetic component; no, I won't get into an argument over how much. More significantly, there are significant inter-uterine and early development components, and that leads to Lamarckian inheritance. The result is that there IS a significant inherited component to intelligence and even genius; there are enough examples from history to show that. 'Making' money is a separate matter, however, and there is a hell of a lot of luck involved.

    Missed this on the first go-round, sorry.

    I disagree. One ground is that I very carefully did not specify the mode of inheritance, whether it was genetic or cultural. In my opinion, it's both. Billionaires like Gates and Musk grew up in wealthy homes, and fairly obviously learned business acumen from their parents. Similarly, Tiger Woods the golfer has a father who's an avid amateur golfer who nurtured his son's talents. In these cases and more, the prodigy child was better than the parents, whatever portion of it turned out to be genetic and whatever portion of it turned out to be family memetic inheritance.

    The astronaut example works because it's a pool on the scale of billionaires, around 550 people globally, but despite 60+ years of space flight, only three astronaut children have followed their fathers into space, this despite having both the genes and culture in their favor.

    Rather more billionaires are the offspring of billionaires, because, unlike genius, wealth can be inherited. I'd just argue that there's probably a 1% chance that the heirs are financial geniuses on the level of their progenitors, even though they have every cultural and genetic channel to help them inherit the talent. That's something the wealthy and the wealth management industry make a very big deal out of, based on their own experience, so I'm pretty sure it's a good inference using other sources. Heck, I suspect you can even think of a Monty Python skit that makes much the same point.

    Finally, I agree with those, like you, who note that becoming a billionaire is a classic black swan event. It involves not just great talent but great luck. In most cases, a new industry will make some people rich, but in classic black swan fashion, it's impossible to predict at the beginning who will become super-rich and how much they will control when the dust starts to settle.

    221:

    Whitroth said: Gasdive, you need to step back a bit. The corporations... "owned" by thousands of people. How many of them have voting shares, and how many DO NOT? And how many people own so many shares that they have 12% or 20%... and effectively, complete control? Those are the billionaires we're talking about.

    The example I used, the largest carbon emitter in Australia, AGL, had zero people or nonhuman persons who owned 12% or 20%. None, nada, zip.

    See also my comment http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2022/04/holding-pattern-2022.html#comment-2146157

    The billionaire in that story tried and failed to take control of AGL. In later developments, last week they've bought 11% of shares on the open market, making them the largest shareholder.

    AGL is a well known (at least in Australia) large publicly listed company and lots of people have a few shares, and even more have ownership through their pension fund.

    That doesn't stop it being a planet killing monster. Nor does it stop it fucking with our political system. Which was my point. Before we go billionaire hunting, shouldn't there be some strong evidence that what we replace them with is better?

    Heteromeles thinks that taking them over (if they're owned by a billionaire), giving them a good solid restructuring, right up the bottom line, and then selling them off to thousands of shareholders means that they'll learn their lesson and be good corporate citizens from now on. I have grave doubts that would work. Simply because I'm not seeing much in the way of public companies that are acting in the interests of the public (and future generations) over the interests of the shareholders as perceived by the board.

    222:

    Robert Prior @ 213:

    It's ALWAYS the pilot's fault.

    It wasn't really intended as such, just a statement of how a broken "system" for establishing fault works ... sort of:
    Rule #1 - it's ALWAYS the Pilot's fault
    Rule #2 - IF it's NOT the Pilot's fault refer to Rule #1.

    That's why I asked whether the pilot had any real choice to make the flight or not? And whether another pilot would/could have done better under the circumstances?

    Because it's often not the pilot's fault. Unless "not adequately coping with the emergency" is a fault.

    I've been binging on Transportation Safety Board reports lately, and one thing that stands out is that most 'accidents' have multiple causes — a concatenation of things that went wrong, any of which by itself wouldn't have been a problem, because the system has checks and backups. Reason's swiss cheese model in action.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_cheese_model

    The way accident investigations are set up it's the pilot's "fault" if he doesn't recognize the holes in the cheese in time to prevent the accident.

    I've mentioned before I became the Safety NCO for the Brigade when we deployed to Iraq (a job complicated by the Safety Officer turning up non-deployable less than a week before we deployed).

    The last incident I dealt with was a Class A Aviation Accident ($450K damage to a $500K drone). No injuries, just damage to equipment. But because of the $$ involved it required an accident investigation board, and I was promoted to expert on how to conduct an accident investigation board (fortunately there was a manual to tell me what to do step by step).

    The "board" identified a chain of circumstances, including lack of proper equipment for communicating between the launch site & the remote site that was operating the drone and a flaw in the design of the onboard recovery system (a small parachute).

    The remote site made a mistake during hand-off back to launch site that caused the aircraft to shut down during flight, which in turn caused the onboard recovery parachute to deploy - except that the parachute didn't deploy properly (known problem) and instead of gently lowering the aircraft to the ground protecting the optical & electronics packages, the aircraft took a nose dive from 2,000 ft. SPLAT!!!

    After determining what really happened and how the crash had occurred, I was required to write the final report for the board to sign. Who was at fault?

    Answer: Pilot error (directed finding, came down from Division) - the pilot at the launch site was supposed to take control of the aircraft. But he didn't (because it crashed before he could complete the steps required to assume control after the remote site had shut the aircraft down in mid-air) ... but it was still his fault even though he had no control over the event.

    223:

    Robert Prior @ 217:

    Try reading a few "RAIB" reports! { Rail Accident Investigation Board }

    I'm not that kind of engineer! :-)

    Yeah?

    "Let the damn thing jump the track
    And see who catches hell"
    224:

    Unless one believes that the government that runs the VA will competently run Mars candy, competently enough anyway that it won't end up dead and thousands unemployed.

    As a veteran who gets most of his health care through the Veterans Administration, I suggest your implication that the VA is incompetent is generally wrong. Studies show that veterans prefer the VA to private health providers.

    Not only that, but veterans get better health care according to a 2018 RAND Corp study:

    Key Results

    VA hospitals performed on average the same as or significantly better than non-VA hospitals on all six measures of inpatient safety, all three inpatient mortality measures, and 12 inpatient effectiveness measures, but significantly worse than non-VA hospitals on three readmission measures and two effectiveness measures. The performance of VA facilities was significantly better than commercial HMOs and Medicaid HMOs for all 16 outpatient effectiveness measures and for Medicare HMOs, it was significantly better for 14 measures and did not differ for two measures. High variation across VA facilities in the performance of some quality measures was observed, although variation was even greater among non-VA facilities.

    Conclusions

    The VA system performed similarly or better than the non-VA system on most of the nationally recognized measures of inpatient and outpatient care quality, but high variation across VA facilities indicates a need for targeted quality improvement.

    225:

    It looks like I should have been responding to #167, John Oyler.

    226:

    As someone who has recently studied healthcare systems at a postgrad level, I'll second these remarks. The VA is currently one of the few success stories in US healthcare, outperforming pretty much every other US-based healthcare organisation by a significant margin. It started from a poor base with a bad reputation in the early 90s and since then has invested heavily into its own organisational infrastructure, enterprise architecture and service delivery models and has become a model for what a really large healthcare organisation delivering excellent outcomes should look like, world-wide. It's what a US NHS would look like, if it were allowed to be run properly.

    227:

    It's ALWAYS the pilot's fault.

    Unfortunately, it's OFTEN the pilot's fault. Humans have a bad record when things start to go wrong and they suddenly need to do 20 different things in the next 30 seconds to survive - and all 20 things have to be done perfectly. I watch lots of YouTube videos of aircraft accidents (Mentor Pilot in particular), and I'm impressed by how few commercial aviation accidents there are given the pressures on pilots. General aviation, on the other hand, has a worse outcome, as private pilots don't have the ongoing training that commercial pilots do.

    OTOH, How much pressure was the pilot under to fly that day despite the deteriorating weather?

    Lots. But it's the pilot's job to resist passenger / company / his own internal pressure to get the job done, no matter what the possible consequences are.

    228:

    There is no such thing as a gliding helicopter.

    If this were true, there would be no such thing as a successful dead-stick landing in a helicopter.

    229:

    Re Helicopters don't glide/helicopters are always damaged after an autorotation.

    My first lesson I landed an R22 dead stick. The instructor had his hands and feet on the controls (and was looking after the collective and torque pedals) and was ready to take over, so it wasn't totally mad. Really I more followed along as he landed it, but I got the feel. It's very very like landing a hang glider (which I was very current on at the time), just everything happens at twice the speed.

    They glide just fine. I flew the undamaged helicopter away from the landing spot.

    Stay out of the dead man's corner of the speed altitude chart, only fly close to the edges of the air when you can see the edge, do the maintenence as per the factory and they're pretty safe.

    The danger comes from people watching too many movies and thinking that's what helicopters do, and pressuring people to do that. Which killed a different helicopter instructor I had. He got talked into flying low and slow. Tail rotor gearbox failure at 200ft or so while in hover.

    230:

    the prodigy child was better than the parents, whatever portion of it turned out to be genetic and whatever portion of it turned out to be family memetic inheritance.

    I think one of the biggest issues with our claims around genetic inheritance is about difference versus commonality. For instance, even if there were a single genetic coding for, say, playing piano, there are still environmental prerequisites that need to be met before that coding can be expressed. Not just seeing. a piano and working out what the keys do, or even hearing music and being aware of what it is. More what totally apparently unrelated conditions need to happen before that gene can turn on in the first place? Did the subject stop getting mother's milk 2 days later than needed to make it work, or was the ambient temperature just so in the 2nd trimester? I'm making up unlikely things, but you get the point. Some environmental factors approach randomness, but even some apparently random factors have "class solidarity" as it were. And then it is entirely possible that the gene itself is actually very widespread, more interesting for its commonality across the species than for its uniqueness or as a point of difference. But because there are some semi-random and totally class related factors involved in expressing it, it's hard to tell the difference between these cases.

    How about size as an analogy? We know that mostly there isn't a gene for height, rather there is a gene for growth and of the factors that control when the growth gene switches on and off, some may be entirely genetic, some are definitely environmental and some of the environmental factors can be epigenetic and pass through a couple of generations. In humans it seems to be the case that maternal grandmother's nutrition is one of those factors, though I'm sure it's a lot more complicated than that.

    231:

    Speaking as someone who's currently putting off filing sixty pages of tax paperwork (the latest reforms and simplifications added another eight pages, atop the four that were added in the last round of simplification), your proposed tax system sounds downright utopian.

    However, in practice I don't think it'd work well. The UBI solves the problem of "what if we're taxing someone who genuinely can't afford it?", but most worthwhile businesses need to pay wages and buy materials. Right now they deduct wages and materials from gross income to calculate taxable income.

    At the same time, it worsens the original problem of the super-rich having outsize influence: since each time money changes ownership, it's taxed at 10%, megacorps that control all aspects of the supply chain wind up with a lot less tax baked into the retail price of a product than smaller manufacturers do.

    If the flat rate is low enough that it compares favorably to the costs of money laundering, rational money-motivated tax evaders will probably take it legit (if they don't have other reasons to hide the income), but it's not actually HARDER to avoid tax in a flat tax regime.

    My taxes definitely need to be simplified, but your plan is TOO simple. (Shades of a Foundation prequel where, if I recall correctly, the Empire's demise was hastened by Seldon planting a subtle hint in the Emperor's ear that the citizens would prefer the simplest possible tax...)

    This plan also doesn't cover the definition of income (do you include bank loans? Unrealized capital gains? People would, understandably, argue that it's insane to tax unrealized capital gains if you can't offset them with capital losses in future years...)

    gasdive@219: I suspect the most common resolution to the tax situation you describe is some variant on "Facemazon Foods buys the grain, Facemazon ships its grain to the mill, Facemazon ships its flour to the packager, Facemazon ships its packaged flour to its franchisee, the franchisee sells it, Facemazon gives them a commission." (at least during growth phase. Once they have an effective monopoly they'll make the franchisee buy it and let prices jack upwards).

    232:

    My thoughts on the OP, for what they are worth, start out around the idea that, while in some circles it is still controversial whether inequality is bad or good, and some people earnestly believe it's required as a driver for @things, there is actually an empirical answer on this and it's definitely better to have less inequality according to almost every scale we have for measuring things that are good and bad about society. I think quite a bit of discussion about what billionaires are good for is actually subsumed in that, or at least has a different focus, a different relationship of onus and a different concept of "good".

    233:

    The way accident investigations are set up it's the pilot's "fault" if he doesn't recognize the holes in the cheese in time to prevent the accident.

    Not necessarily. NTSB reports are focussed more on prevention than finding someone to blame. Basically "what went wrong" and "how can that be prevented in the future".

    I'm sorry your army experience wasn't the same. "Directed finding" sounds dodgy, frankly. Someone outside the investigation decided what the conclusion was going to be? (And there weren't expert investigators? Not to cast aspersions at you, but an 'expert' who is following a manual step-by-step because they've never done it before doesn't sound like an expert.)

    234:

    Spiky said: I suspect the most common resolution to the tax situation you describe is some variant on "Facemazon Foods buys the grain, Facemazon ships its grain to the mill, Facemazon ships its flour to the packager, Facemazon ships its packaged flour to its franchisee, the franchisee sells it, Facemazon gives them a commission."

    I think you're right, with a side order of buying up the land the grain is grown on. Again, it naturally gives giant tax breaks to corporations, the more monopolistic and vertically integrated the better, and the people who control them.

    235:

    whitroth said: This is worldwide production of vehicles: VW, 2021, around 8.3M Ford " 3.9M Toyota 7.6M Tesla 930,422 In what possible way is it worth more? In the shell game of stocks, not in the realm of actual profits.

    The bare figure of cars sold don't tell the whole story.

    Toyota sells a lot of low cost, low margin cars and has no wait lists to speak of.

    If Tesla makes 10 times the margin per unit, (we don't know, I don't think either company gives out that information) and is making 1/10th the number of units... That puts them on a much more even footing.

    There's also the issue of how much of a "unit" is manufactured. If Toyota buys in 90% of the finished car from outside suppliers (which is possible, Japanese manufacturers rely very much on hundreds of cottage industries to supply everything from wiring looms to indicator lenses) the "manufacture" of 7.6 million units, is really the assembly, and they're only adding a small amount of work. If you decide to "buy Toyota" you're only buying a small percentage of the factories, machines and expertise that builds the cars.

    Tesla has a hard on for vertical integration. Their stated goal is raw materials in one door, cars out the other. Building a million cars a year is much more valuable than assembly of 8 million.

    SpaceX is similar after getting badly burned by an outside supplier shipping struts that hadn't been manufactured or tested correctly that lost a Falcon and satellite. They're bringing everything in house that they can, even down to the cameras mounted on the rocket.

    236:

    My thoughts on the OP, for what they are worth, start out around the idea that, while in some circles it is still controversial whether inequality is bad or good, and some people earnestly believe it's required as a driver for @things, there is actually an empirical answer on this and it's definitely better to have less inequality according to almost every scale we have for measuring things that are good and bad about society. I think quite a bit of discussion about what billionaires are good for is actually subsumed in that, or at least has a different focus, a different relationship of onus and a different concept of "good".

    I happen to agree, with some caveats.

    One of those caveats is that it's not clear to me at least whether there's nothing a billionaire can do that can't be done by someone else. The only candidate I've seen for this is someone stepping in with an absolutely enormous credit line to rapidly (key here) backstop a transaction, to reduce the risk of default to where people are comfortable doing it. I don't think only a billionaire can do this (or that most of them will do it), but it does get at Gasdive's example of a billionaire trying to steer a power company in a better direction by buying control of it.

    Thing is, I'm not sure a billionaire can do this faster than a company can. One good global example of a company is The Nature Conservancy. One of their core functions is to rapidly buy up land for conservation, then sell it to a government entity that turns it into a park. What's going on behind the scenes is that, at least in the US (and probably elsewhere) it takes an legislative act to approve large expenditures to buy land, and as well all know, those take time. TNC and the government (at the conservation bureaucracy level) may (often do) start off in agreement that a parcel should be bought up and turned into parkland. It may take the government years to process this through and make it happen. Meanwhile, TNC can move in months to purchase the land before someone else gets it.

    A billionaire could theoretically do it faster, but if they have any brains, they have a whole staff looking at the appraisal and doing the financials. At the end, it's likely that they can't move much faster than a company doing the same job.

    This isn't to say that billionaires can't do good. The critical question is whether there are global good deeds that only they can perform, that justify having the whole class of them around, or whether the resources they control would be better spun off into less autocratic control systems.

    I don't have an answer to that. I will note, though, that it's akin to the little governance question we're dealing with, whether authoritarian systems are better-adapted to the 21st Century than are democracies. I know where I fall on that, but I'm very far from an unbiased analyst.

    237:

    @167 writes: "this just sounds like the government threatening to burn those businesses down to nothing, out of spite."

    Some of the ultrarich have been decent, exemplary human beings, the Kennedy clan and the Roosevelts come to mind. But their personal virtue or lack of it isn't the issue at all, what's dangerous is just the over-concentration of resources and power in the hands of a small minority.

    Wealth gets concentrated as a built in emergent property of free enterprise, because interest rates tend to exceed growth rates over time, but that doesn't mean we can't modify excesses to fix it. It could even be necessary to reverse wealth concentration just to prolong the viability of capitalism.

    How much concentration is too much is naturally on a sliding scale, reasonable people can disagree, but a preponderant majority of both Democrats and Republicans agree thar now it's gone too far and that the trend needs to be reversed. So a one percent annual tax on mega estates, again open to discussion but I'd say any over a hundred million, would gradually reduce the over-concentration without wrecking the whole system. Churn would definitely increase in the rankings of the ultrarich, but why is that a bad thing. Spite shouldn't enter the argument at all

    238:

    "If Tesla makes 10 times the margin per unit"

    Last I looked, Tesla's actual car-production turned a loss, which was more than offset by the sale of electric car credits to other car manufacturers.

    In other words: Fossil vehicle manufacturers pay "electric car tax" to Tesla, because they all, in unison, proclaimed "electrical cars will never be a thing" and were proven wrong.

    239:

    Now, not all companies that incorporate go on to grow to gigantic sizes. But none that fail to incorporate will ever be anything more than tiny little sole proprietorships. Furthermore, I suspect strongly that companies that didn't incorporate would have to choose between size (what we'd call now medium-sized, at most) and longevity. Corporations have to make no such choice, they can be gigantic and effectively immortal both.

    Well, there's this tiny little Swedish company called IKEA that's still privately owned, has branches in over 40 countries and was founded in 1943…

    240:

    akin to the little governance question we're dealing with

    Well it's more an extension of the governance question. I like the idea that non-government entities with a degree of autonomy can act as key civil institutions. The question is how much protection do they need from elected governments to avoid Trumpian interference, and how does that work with the ability to curtail them if they turn rogue, or at least take off in a trajectory that is clearly not serving any public good.

    Western style democracy has that with the courts in the doctrine of separation of powers and the common law. Common law generally moves along a trajectory, at times this diverges from societal standards and can be corrected by legislation. But legislators don't get to implement and interpret the law, the courts are the designated institutions that do that. While the TNC you describe is clearly fully non-governmental, still it's performing a role that is like an institution for performing certain functions that would be more cumbersome for a governmental institution. What other sorts of functions could be handled effectively by similar non-government institutions, do they need enabling legislation or just funding, how do these various questions work with each other, etc?

    QANGOs typically report to a board rather than directly to officials (elected or otherwise), and that's the basis for their claim to autonomy, but are vulnerable to interference via funding arrangements and board appointments. If the entire board can be replaced at whim (cf supreme courts) then the autonomy is clearly very attenuated. But if you take away the "Q" (quasi, apologies, it's a common term in UK/Aus) and establish organisations with their own sources of revenue and full autonomy, how do you protect against capture or rogue actions?

    And as you say that turns directly back to our discussions about governance. Maybe it's just safer to keep it under the control of governments, even at a bit of a remove and with some mechanisms of autonomy included for form but also as a bit of a buffer, but ultimately trust democracy to deliver a sensible outcome over time. I'm really not sure I'm convinced that's a reasonable expectation, but I do think turning from democratic governance is fraught.

    We talked about technocracy before, and while it's not something I propose in any way at all, I am interested in hypothetically exploring versions of limited franchise based on educational qualifications, given the required training is accessible and free. I think this is still extremely vulnerable to capture, for instance, and other failure modes. But these are the very reason one might explore straw-man type models for things.

    241:

    Are you thinking of LEGO, a little Danish toy company that last I looked the most profit-making toy company in the world? Still privately owned and family members are still part of the day to day.

    242:

    You haven't looked for a while, but that's not the measure I'm talking about.

    I'm talking about the marginal cost to build a car vs what they sell a car for. The number you're looking at includes the cost to build more factories (they plan another 16 gigantic factories before 2030) and product development, batteries, interest on loans and so on.

    243:

    I am interested in hypothetically exploring versions of limited franchise based on educational qualifications,

    You mean beyond literacy, and in many countries "able to afford suitable ID" (where the afford part is often not just financial).

    I like Nick Gruen's fixation on citizen's juries, and also I enjoy poking him about how they're basically the "pub test" dressed up in academic language :)

    (Australian media like to pretend they're somehow linked to the common person in the pub other just just using them as a target, so we have the "would the average bloke in the pub believe that" is a regular topic.And yes, it's always a man, always a stereotype, and almost never involves anyone actually in a pub giving their actual opinion. At best it's a carefully selected soundbite response to a leading question)

    244:

    Since the subject is billionaires, a splendid hatchet job on Bill Gates

    245:

    I'm thinking more along the lines of the MOAR D'MOCRACY participation model they have in the USA with relatively (by our standards) low level stuff going to vote and to committees and stuff. It would be more along the lines that certain responsibilities devolve to direct vote by those with some sort of relevant qualification, or committees made up of such folks, perhaps elected by a broader franchise. It could relate to parliamentary committee systems and fill itself out under some sort of responsible government model, or it could be that these committees are governing boards across larger NGOs that have responsibilities to do certain things, and not an arm of executive government at all. There are lots of models. And also lots of failure modes, some of which are possibly show stoppers hence the hypothetical.

    246:

    But by participation measures the US is barely playing the game. They're lucky to find a winner who got 25% of the represented population behind them.

    My experience in the land of the long white committee meeting was that it takes a lot more time and energy than most people have just to select representatives appropriately, let alone to actually join the committee. Health boards and school boards being prime examples.

    Who would be a good person to be on what amounts to the Board of Directors for a school or regional health authority?

    How the fuck would I know, I've got no experience with either of those things even though I'm very privileged in many other areas. Is popularity even a relevant characteristic for those people? Is wealth, or spare time, or being white? I dunno, what does the job even entail?

    This gets back to one of the problems with citizen's juries, and incidentally also with electing random nincompoops to parliament. Getting people up to speed takes time and effort on both sides, and some people are going to take a lot of both, while a smaller group just won't ever be able to do it (intellectually disabled people, although many mentally ill people do just fine (and not just sociopaths))

    247:

    So participation itself is one of the failure modes, leading to the dictatorship of the people who get involved. The question becomes how do you get more participation, or how to you make what you get representative, or how else could it work? Also, when I said participation above I probably misphrased a bit, I meant more the other side, the number of things that have a ballot process. And I'm not sure exactly what that might open up, really. US elections are already fiendishly complicated as a result, so maybe it's already in a failure mode?

    248:

    I was talking more about 'genius', which I don't actually believe is a major factor in becoming megarich. Luck and sociopathy count for far more.

    249:

    To make the tax non-regressive, you must reallocate the money to those who need the money most. How to achieve that goal is a problem for any tax system;

    People have studied such issues ad infinitum. Politicians seem to be unable to allocate taxes as you describe on any kind of permanent basis. Basically taxes are fungible and will be allocated to where the politicians want them to go no matter what the original intent.

    250:

    Quite a few car companies and hopeful start-ups have been working on electrical vehicles, including personal cars for over a century. They were never successful, the ones brought to market failed, the test vehicles similarly were not practical and the reasons were (mostly) the balance of battery weight and range per charge (big enough batteries for good range were very heavy, light battery packs were too short-ranged). Once lithium-ion batteries became safe enough[1] and cheap enough then the balance shifted to the point where various commercial car manufacturers have started producing useable profitable electric cars, hybrids as well as pure EVs. Basically it's steam-engine time, but for electric vehicles. The advances in electric motor design and control systems have been a big help too.

    [1] Someone on a mailing list both Charlie and I are on used to work on lithium-chemistry rechargeable batteries in the early days of their development. He told of test batteries under charge lighting off on the bench and shooting across the lab like little SpaceX rockets. This doesn't happen too often these days.

    251:

    Two common problems are that whatever killed the donor rendered an organ unusable, and the organ was too long outside a body and no longer viable.

    I will note that the major source of black market transplant organs is China, where executions are carried out by a bullet to the head, thereby leaving the abdominal organs mostly undamaged. There are anecdotal reports of questionable reliability that suggest some corrupt officials will execute healthy prisoners to order for harvesting of histocompatible organs, and there are mobile operating theatres/ambulances that travel to execution sites to get the bodies broken up for spares as promptly as possible.

    Organ recipient pays up then checks into a hospital in the same city. Right before the execution they get wheeled into the theater under general anaesthesia: organ arrives by the back door an hour or so later, a couple of days later one rich foreigner (or party member) checks out with a mysteriously high quality donor organ.

    Whether the prisoners were guilty of whatever they were arrested for is left to the imagination: as everywhere, it sucks to be poor, especially in a corrupt state.

    252:

    Tesla's automotive gross margin is around 30% (32.9% in 2022Q1 - the most recent quarter - but it bobs up and down around there). That's the proportion of automotive revenues (what they sell cars for) which is not spent on producing those cars. Other expenditure (R&D, building factories, loan interest, etc) comes under other headings, but this gross margin is a useful number, and important for investors to know, so it's one of the numbers they publish in their quarterly financial reports.

    FWIW, in that same quarter 2022Q1 they made a net profit (after cost of sales, operating expenses, capital investment, etc etc) of around $3bn, and only received about $600mn of regulatory credits. The idea that they have a loss-making business propped-up by these credits is several years out of date (and was only true very briefly).

    Also for some time now they have been in overall net profit territory: that is, the total of their recent and increasing quarterly profits is considerably larger than the accumulated losses earlier in the history of the company.

    TL;DR: financially, the company is doing extremely well, and continues on a path of rapid growth. This is in stark contrast to other large automotive companies. The shares are over-valued, but it's not completely nuts (and it's not a total scam like, say, Uber).

    253:

    Do you need that much RAM in an iMac? I keep meaning to upgrade our 27" iMac from 2020 with more than its 8 GB of RAM, but just using it for internet and a bit of photo editing, we never seem to have any slowdowns.

    It all depends. I just did a Cmd-Tab on my Mac and there are 12 applications up and active. Which is a bit low for me as I did a restart yesterday late for some reason or another. I'm also a bit weird in that I have Chrome up with 4 or 5 windows with maybe 100 tabs total and Firefox up with 10+ windows and maybe 200 tabs.

    And I'm not even into video editing.

    My 2018 MBPro has 32 gig and once or twice a month complains about low memory.

    Charlie used 3rd party memory to do his upgrade. £600 for the total bump. £2500 for the iMac before that bump. So to only add half that amount of memory would have made his total £2800 or so instead of £3100. I'd have made the same decision.

    Not having enough ram can really mess you up when it happens. £300 or so to be able to ignore the issue for years sounds like a deal to me and, again, I'd have made the same choice.

    254:

    Do you need that much RAM in an iMac?

    Depends on what you're running. Photoshop and video editing, sure. In my case ... it was a cheap-enough way to deal with web browsers leaking memory incontinently (and I wish I was making that up).

    You can run a Mac with 8Gb of RAM these days, but if you like to keep a bunch of heavy applications in play you probably want at least 16Gb.

    255:

    32.9%

    Geeezus

    That's huge!

    I read somewhere that the industry average was 5%.

    256:

    Well, there's this tiny little Swedish company called IKEA that's still privately owned, has branches in over 40 countries and was founded in 1943…

    I don't know the specifics of IKEA or European Corp law but in the US you can be a corporation and be privately owned. The corp is just the legal structure. Being privately owned means the ownership of concentrated in a small group.

    In the US for all kinds of reasons, most businesses become an LLC or other form of corp after revenue gets above a few $100K or even much less. It resolves all kinds of legal issues. So the carpet cleaning business in the little store nearby very likely uses a corporate structure very similar to a large $200Bil a year business.

    257:

    There is a much more basic issue in this case. Pancreatic cancer is invasive and metastatic, Jobs's had already done both, to get transplants accepted the patient is filled full of immunosuppressants, whereupon the cancer's spread speeds up. It would get into the new organ, of course, but probably kill the patient some other way first.

    258:

    as everywhere, it sucks to be poor, especially in a corrupt state.

    Or rich but in the disfavor of those currently in charge.

    259:

    The mess of US sales tax vs UK/EU VAT taxes at the register.

    To be blunt, to a large degree it is what you are used to dealing with.

    And as a second point, sales taxes in the US are much more local than in the UK/EU. (My imperfect knowledge says they are national but I'm not sure.)

    So in the US the sales tax rate can vary by state, country , or even city/town/village.

    But the way it works is what we grew up with so dealing with it is automatic. No crazy, "OMG I'm 7.5% short" at the register.

    And some areas have absolutely no sales taxes. But their local roads and such tend to be falling apart while they brag about low taxes. But that's a debate for a different thread.

    I think my local rate is 7.5% but its a bit cheaper in most of North Carolina. Here in Wake country we have an extra 1/2% or 1%. And we have a special extra 7.5% or so that "tourists" pay that goes to public things like sports arenas and similar. (Don't get me started.) What is a "tourist" tax? Hotel rooms, rental cars, etc...

    261:

    207 - At least in the UK, depends what it is. Steak and salmon (and turbot...) are untaxed when bought in a grocery; snacks like "crisps" (aka chips) and nachos attract a 20% sales tax.

    212 - 3rd one - Helicopters don't fly; they shout at the Earth until it goes away.

    222 - "safety NCO". That's a tough job, even if everyone follows procedures, and I know they don't always for various reasons.

    228 - Agreed.

    233 - That sort of thing does happen in the military, Ok, there was a war on at the time, but see reports on HMS Dasher (D37).

    262:

    Btw, when has any libertarian, since you apparently now blame it all on corporations, ever tried to outlaw corporations, and only allow companies?

  • The first time a libertarian ever gets elected to a meaningful office, I'll be sure to hold them to account.
  • You don't have to outlaw them. That's sort of my point. You just have to stop in-lawing them, so to speak. They (or anything resembling them) don't and can't exist without the laws that allow the government to illegitimately bless them into existence.
  • 263:

    That's the thing about imaginary experiments though. You can imagine the results to be whatever you want them to be... and someone else is free to imagine entirely different results.

    I would suspect that someone with the attitude and personality of a Musk or Bezos would be out there hustling because they actually believe that they can do more than rot in some section 8 housing project. Maybe only 1 time in 1000, of course, will such a person be anything more than modestly successful (but in this case, even modest success has them being some single digit millionaire a few decades later)...

    And if we compare that to some random clone of a welfare recipient, they will have succeeded to one degree or another much more often than that welfare recipient.

    Did talent make any difference? No. Just attitudes and culture.

    264:

    "so, how do we get from here to this Wonderful World of yours? Do we take everything away from everyone, and divvy it up, like the beginning of (the game) Monopoly, or do we just start from here, with Bill Gates with tens of billions, and you and me with zip?"

    In my experience, over last few years Libertarians have been concentrating on the "Non-Aggression Principle", meaning nobody initiates force against anyone else. (Which obviously includes forcible taxation.) They are fine with Bill Gates having his tens of billions, as long as he does not use them to force anyone to do anything against their will.

    That one can "force" someone without resorting to threats of bodily harm, removal of possessions or restrain of travel, they prefer not to think about.

    265:

    "Did talent make any difference? No. Just attitudes and culture."

    That is "talent". (At least, attitude is. Not so sure about "culture" since so many of the interpretations seem to end up being offensive, as is the "welfare recipient" reference.) Characteristics of one's personality that confer the potential for success in some given endeavour. Having sufficient intellect to understand it, by conscious analysis or by "innate skill" or whatever, is one form of talent; having the right sort of mentality to engage in it without going bonkers from how shit it is is another; having the kind of idea of a good time that makes you think the expected results will justify engaging in it is another. The proportions of course will vary from person to person, but you need elements of all of those things plus a bunch more that I cba to try and list.

    This is one of the things that is so silly about the custom of programming people with the idea that "everyone can do it" from early childhood onwards. It's based entirely around considering intellectual ability as the sole and only factor, with the subsidiary notion that even if you don't have that ability you can still acquire it. The importance of all the other necessary factors is not just ignored, but actively trivialised and denied, and painted as something that confirms you as a subnormal and inadequate human being if you do consider it important.

    266:

    That is "talent". (At least, attitude is. Not so sure about "culture" since so many of the interpretations seem to end up being offensive, as is the "welfare recipient" reference.) Characteristics of one's personality that confer the potential for success in some given endeavour.

    Thank you, beat me to it.

    I'd point out that one of the proper purposes of a university education is to expose students to a wide variety of fields. It's sort of the reverse of how vaccinations work: the students get exposed to a wide variety of different thoughts. Most they get intellectually immunized against, and they find some infectious. That's talent in its basic growth phase, recognizing you're good at something and going for it. For esoteric fields like botany (or esoteric specialties in botany, like mycorrhizology), the only way they're populated is by people finding they have a talent for it, pretty much by accident. This is speaking from experience here.

    It's also why everyone who wants things to work does aptitude testing, rather than hiring people at random, yelling at them to have a better attitude, and paying for 10,000 hours of apprenticeship to make them acceptably skilled at a job.

    267:

    or a slaughterhouse liver taken from a pig with HIV?

    I feel like if you have a transplant surgeon who can't tell a liver is not human, you have bigger problems than the organ source...

    268:

    Umnnh...a "progressive wealth tax"? I'm not sure. I think that the "long term capital gains" tax should be progressive, but lower the longer you held the capital, and that it shouldn't be taxed while you held it.

    I'm not certain that this is correct, but I think it is. The problem is that I'm thinking of corporate shares here, but I'm not sure how it would work with "real property". Certainly it shouldn't apply to your domicile. If you live in a place it shouldn't count as an investment. But corporations should value long term gains rather than "the next quarter". SOME way needs to be found to encourage this.

    269:

    I own a corporation largely for liability reasons. If something goes wrong with our business I'd like not to lose our home as a result. Limited liability is an important legal structure for a lot of reasons - I would not have bought or built up my business without that protection.

    I'm definitely open to other structures, and I am of the strong opinion that corporations are not 'persons', nor should they be immortal. The oldest company (per Wikipedia) is the "Japanese construction company Kongō Gumi, founded in 578 C.E is the oldest existing company worldwide, and has operated for around 1443 years." It is an exercise for the reader to determine if that is a 'good' or 'bad' thing.

    270:

    gasdive noted a problem in my suggestion: "Makes it tough to build anything or trade anything."

    My bad for not being specific. I wrote "income tax" by which I meant "personal (human) income tax". I don't consider corporations to be people (U.S. supreme court notwithstanding) because they can't do jail time if they sin, unlike us poor mortals. My suggestion would be difficult/impossible to implement in the U.S. because corporations have been declared to be legal persons. I hope the "citizen's united" precedent will be overturned, but it's not going to happen any time soon if the Democrats don't manage to appoint more new justices.

    Note that I wrote "all sources of income", by which I include stock options, paid junkets, interest-free loans, etc. It would take a bit of thought to list "all sources", since that's a moving target. There will always be efforts to avoid taxation through such dodges, but the tax code can list the more obvious ones and the code can be updated periodically as loopholes are discovered.

    Gasdive: "You've invented VAT without VAT input credits. Every transaction gets a 10% charge to the government rather than just the final user being charged 10%."

    No, because VAT is applied to corporate sales, not to human income. But you're right about this being problematic for corporate investment. There are a few possible solutions. The most obvious is that corporations can be taxed on income after deducting expenses, as they are now. It's primarily the owners of the corporation who receive benefits (salary, shares, whatever) that we're trying to tax so they pay their fair share. Before you ask, ordinary stockholders like me and thee would also be taxed on capital gains. Income's income.

    Spiky noted "your proposed tax system sounds downright utopian."

    Admittedly. And it would eventually be gamed and regulatory-captured. The goal is to make it fairer right now, with full knowledge that it won't stay fair forever and that the system will need to be revised periodically.

    Spiky: "However, in practice I don't think it'd work well."

    I'm willing to try it if you are.

    Spiky: "The UBI solves the problem of "what if we're taxing someone who genuinely can't afford it?", but most worthwhile businesses need to pay wages and buy materials."

    As noted above, I had intended to focus on humans, not corporations, and it would be reasonable to grant corporations deductions for legitimate expenses (i.e., expenses their tax lawywers can persuade the government to allow). The government could certainly go beyond UBI programs, such as paying for higher education for those who can't afford it (as I understand it, German universities don't charge undergraduate tuition). There's lots of room for ways to ethically fund companies to promote things like research and development or adoption of green technologies (e.g., government loans rather than no-strings grants, exchanging stock shares equal to the value of the loans so taxpayers receive a direct return on their investment in the company).

    Spiky: "At the same time, it worsens the original problem of the super-rich having outsize influence"

    Yes, but that's not a problem I'm trying to solve. I'm just talking about taxation. There have been other replies that suggested ways to deal with excessive influence.

    Spiky: "This plan also doesn't cover the definition of income"

    I admit to cheating by writing "all forms of income". But a list of transactions that count as income could be incorporated in the revised tax code. Most tax codes already list these forms. Of course, you'll have a hard fight to include the forms of income dearest to the ultrarich. As I noted, the rich will always find ways to game the system, such as the way the U.S. IRS was crippled by being forced to focus on the poorest citizens (who are easier to audit) rather than the richest (who lawyer-up to create long and expensive audits). That's one reason why we revise tax codes, but we also have to be vigilant about the games.

    271:

    And as a second point, sales taxes in the US are much more local than in the UK/EU. (My imperfect knowledge says they are national but I'm not sure.)

    Nope, US sales taxes are determined by the states. Here in Oregon, we don't have any sales tax. But in Washington state, they do. Which is why lots of people in Vancouver, WA, come to Portland, OR, to buy their stuff... :-)

    272:

    This is a pretty intelligent analysis, but your Type One, Type Two, and Type Threes all need useful/interesting names for it to be possible to follow your ideas.

    273:

    Sorry. I wasn't clear. I meant that I think UK/EU were determined nationally. North Carolina has a state wide tax, a few counties and cities also have a smaller bit they tack on.

    274:

    Sorry David, I thought you were talking about national US sales taxes - not UK/EU.

    275:

    No arguments at all. I think where I break from the conventional wisdom is the idea of a minimum tax payment for each income group, regardless of deductions (particularly for those that make more than a million dollars a year.)

    And of course the rich should pay taxes on both the things they own and the things they control.

    276:

    The base assumption that billionaires have some extraordinary hustle is one that needs to be examined.

    "I work sixteen hours a day, seven days a week" or whatever is a different animal when your work is talking to people and letting other people do the hard thinking, and you don't have to, say, cook, wash clothes, and what not.

    Assuming that what looks like hustle (and to begin with, it's taking them at face value about said hustle) applies when you don't have the advantages of wealth is...not a wise a assumption.

    And I don't mean billionaire wealth. 'Just' upper middle class changes the equation a great deal.

    But then that post had a lot of dogwhistles in it.

    277:

    Yes, 32.9% is pretty high (I think some other big players - Ford, Toyota, etc? - are in the 15-20% band, which is not negligible, but those companies have proportionally much larger operating expenses etc, so their overall position is not so good). One consequence is that Tesla can afford a lot of capital investment without having to borrow (or issue stock) for it. Which is important for their intended 50% compounded growth for the next decade: exponentially increasing numbers of big Tesla factories cost a lot of money.

    Their big margins also give them some scope for competing on price. At the moment they have a long waiting list - they sell every new car they can make six months or so before it rolls out of the factory - so there's no reason for them to cut prices. But if a credible competitor puts a dent in Tesla demand (by mass-producing a better car at a lower price) then they could respond by dropping prices. For now, everyone is waiting for any major player to come out with a really desirable cheap electric car (say $25K USD). Tesla won't do it until they are saturating the demand for their model 3 and model Y and so have factory capacity to spare (because the profit on a cheap car is decidedly less). I'm sure they have the designs ready to go, though.

    278:

    In my books it works like this (and the system will change, negatively, as it ages:)

    “Tell us, Bunny, what is it like to govern a nation of Orcs?”

    “As difficult as you might imagine. If you don’t give Orcs really, really good government, with an obvious and firm hierarchy they will, being Orcs, replace the government very quickly and with some degree of violence. This means that Orcish nobles must be trained very carefully to both understand the needs of their vassals, and also trained to very high levels of fighting skill in case someone decides that a recently made law doesn’t suit them. What that meant for me is that I was trained in arms from a very early age, and also that I was fostered out, both to local families who farmed or ran businesses and to a couple foreign countries where I dwelt in one of their noble houses for a year, spending most of my time in their courts so as to learn their system of governance.”

    “So you’ve butchered hogs and planted carrots?” asked Master Donvald.

    “I wasn’t fostered to a butcher,” said Bunny. “Orcs take too much pleasure in doing their own butchering for anyone to give up that chore – even nobles kill their own food whenever they can – but I’ve planted seeds and harvested crops, milked goats and helped birth their kids – as you’ll recall from the Sagas, Sogg-Modke Shire was Goat-Tribe country when the Seven Bards passed through – and I was also fostered to the family of a seamstress, the owners of a restaurant, a smithy, and an Elven law-bard, and I spent a summer with Sogg-Modke’s Customs Patrol, because the smuggling routes are also useful militarily if we must defend our shire from Elven aggression.”

    “So you’re a jack-of-all trades,” said Master Rankin. He’d raised his eyebrows at the mention of “Elven aggression,” and some of the other men at the table also seemed shocked, but nobody said anything.

    “Not remotely,” Bunny took a sip of her beer. “I certainly couldn’t remember, for example, what order the dinner dishes at a tavern must be washed in, or how to trim a goat’s hooves, but I do remember being yelled at when I washed things out of order and how exhausted I was at the end of every night, or how the goat kicked me when I got it wrong. The important thing was that the children of the families to which I was fostered got to live in my father’s castle while I lived with their parents, and we all saw something of a world with which we were unfamiliar, and everyone went home a little wiser.” She took another sip of beer, “or so our parents hoped.”

    In addition, there is a tradition of preventing unsuitable heirs from inheriting familial wealth or power, which doesn't seem to be the case in the U.S.

    279:

    This is a pretty intelligent analysis, but your Type One, Type Two, and Type Threes all need useful/interesting names for it to be possible to follow your ideas

    I like it too, although (being the negative person I am), I haven't chewed on it enough to figure out whether it's more than just a cool idea. And hopefully it IS more than just a cool idea!

    As for names, I'd suggest something like

    Type One: Old fashioned capitalists, who manage their capital and live off the profits. I'm not so negative about such people, because they're not hoarding money in a mattress. I'd even suggest that traditional Aboriginal culture works this way, if you can stomach treating Country as capital. More generally, it's taking care of your life support structures. If everyone did this with the world, we'd be sustainable.

    Type Two: Dragons is my preference, followed by power addicts and cancers on society. Growth at all costs is a natural phenomenon. In organisms it's called cancer and fought by immune systems, while in ecosystems they're weeds (if uncontrolled) or pioneer species (if subject to predators, pathogens, and parasites).

    Type Three: Old-fashioned human beings, who are willing to sacrifice at present for a better future. I agree that an ethic of generosity and sharing is a normal safety net, especially among the poor, so along with Type One-style resource management, it's a good basis for a sustainable society.

    The general problem, as with cancers, is that it's normal for any living thing that escapes control to try for exponential growth, so there's a need for effective regulatory controls (a la the immune system) or predation on them (parasitic robbers, basically, a la an ecosystem).

    280:

    You still don't understand. 11% can be a controlling amount, if no single other person has that much.

    Oh, about your "nada"? Really? What about the pension fund managers?

    281:

    Um, nope. They make everything? Really? They have chip fab plants, and make motherboards?

    Now you're being silly. And just because they jumped down the throats of their outside suppliers doesn't mean it won't happen again.

    True story about 8-9 years ago, at work, I came out onto the loading dock... and there were a dozen or more people standing there at soldering stations with the loading doors open for ventilation. Seems that HP had sold the NIH 2800 or so extreme high-end servers (to make up biowulf, which has been in the top 100 supercomputers on the planet), and they started getting failures. It turned out that some subcontractor of their Chinese subcontractor who built the motherboards had substituted a resistor? capacitor? of lower standards, and they were burning out. HP decided the cheapest way to fix it was send a team replace those parts on all 2800-whatever motherboards in all those servers.

    And, btw, the woman manager for biowulf was a friend. so I know that this is the true story.

    282:

    Or adjust the rate of the VAT to deal with the lack of deductions...

    283:

    Billionaires. Mostly CEO's. Around 1996, Robert Reich, for a time Clinton's Sec. of Labor, had a commentary on NPR. On one, he asked a question I've never heard anyone answer: what does a CEO do that he gets paid 10 times what the company president does?

    284:

    No, thanks. Do not like Mitsubishi.

    The first minivan we had was a '89 Chrysler Grand Caravan. In '03, I replaced it with a '97. I have never had so much take-it-to-the-shop maintenance as that vehicle, including needing a head job. In '09, I was talking to a friend's father, and mentioned it - he worked in the auto industry, engineer - and he started ranting. A couple years after '89, Chrysler went from their own engine to a Mitsubishi-built one, and he told me how badly designed and manufactured they were.

    285:

    Rand Paul, US Sen. Self-proclaimed Libertarian. And I don't care what you think, he calls himself that, so why should I accept your definition, and not his?

    And you're still under the delusion that a company, rather than a corporation, would not be evil. Like, say, some of the railroads in the US. Or the plantations of the Old South.

    Go on, ask the folks from the UK what it was like for the 90% in the early 1800s.

    Sorry, but it's always "well, that's because we didn't do this", rather than "maybe it doesn't work".

    286:

    In addition, there is a tradition of preventing unsuitable heirs from inheriting familial wealth or power, which doesn't seem to be the case in the U.S.

    The Windsors try to raise their children that way, with the results on display. There's also the normal thing of the owners having their kids do all jobs in the family business before taking over. The problems of kids being found unsuitable after suffering for years in scut work is not unknown as a source of drama. And legal action.

    For the ultra-rich, this can also morph into something like Paris Hilton's The Simple Life reality TV show, which ran for five seasons and made her a star.

    One thing I do disagree on is that unsuitable heirs are a global phenomenon which often seem to result in the ends of fortunes and dynasties. Ways to counter it can get fairly gruesome, sometimes devolving into civil wars among heirs for the throne, which IIRC was not unheard of for the Ottoman Empire. Or see how inheritance of power works in North Korea...

    287:

    You've got that right. Gee, I want a job... and you tell me I have to use M$ products, or I can't get hired. Oh, the Internet's free... oh, sorry, there is one, and only one company in this area offering it, it gobbled up all the others (e.g. Comcast)

    And I have great difficulty believing that if Walmart was owned only by the Walton family, it would be less evil.

    288:

    Corps not doing jail time - what I want is if a company is found guilty of crime that is not civil (such as the gas explosion in India, years back), all the chief execs go to jail, full term for that crime. They led the company, they told it was was acceptable and what wasn't, so it's their responsibility.

    I don't believe that this stack of corporate incorporation papers, or that building with their logo on it, committed the crime, it was the PEOPLE WHO RUN IT.

    289:

    whitroth noted: "Corps not doing jail time - what I want is if a company is found guilty of crime that is not civil (such as the gas explosion in India, years back), all the chief execs go to jail, full term for that crime. They led the company, they told it was was acceptable and what wasn't, so it's their responsibility."

    Fully agree, but I was trying only to be radical by scrapping the whole tax system, not extremely radical by guillotining the guilty. (grin) In the U.S., it's called "piercing the corporate veil" and it's difficult to do. The legal principle originally made sense; if something beyond management's control leads to a catastrophe, and management could not plausibly have prevented the problem, they should not be held responsible. Doubly so when they really did make heroic efforts to create a good corporate citizen.

    Of course, this has long since been weaponized as "I the leader can get away with literal murder, and although the court-imposed fines will bankrupt the company and put 10K people out of work, I'll walk away with millions in severance pay."

    How to reconcile the two extremes? You got me.

    290:

    On the other hand, most people can get the basics (and need to get them.) Most of us can't be mathematical geniuses, but all of us need to know how to add, subtract, multiply and divide, along with some of the mathematical laws to make sure we don't make mistakes (do the stuff inside the parenthices first, for example.)

    And so on where reading, writing, etc. are concerned.

    291:

    Well, for one, if a company goes into bankruptcy, all golden parachutes are null and void, as are all stock options.

    292:

    Well, I think the basic problem might be the legal notion that only people can sign contracts, and engage in other legal activities. That notion was used to argue that corporations are people.

    Perhaps we need to separate out the notion of what is a person and what can sign contracts. Just playing with ideas, I would suggest the idea of using "liability" in place of person as part of a definition for what can enter into legal relationships such as contracts. Being a person would include the property of being liable, that entities such as corporations could be held liable without having the property of being a person. Expanding the slightly, if a person has no liability for the outcome of an action, they should not have a say, such as a vote, in deciding whether to act on something.

    I am quite sure there are very good reasons why this would not work. This is just playing outside the box a bit see if something else might work a little bit better. One of the nice things about "liability" is that we already have limited liability corporations and other uses for the term liability. Perhaps we could expand on this concept as the basis for what we now call legal personhood, rather than trying to shoehorn too many functions into the legal concept of what a person is.

    293:

    Ok, folks. For the novel I'm currently trying to sell, the trillionaires get theirs. I'm considering, if they let me, adding this - have I missed something? Something impossible? (oh, yeah - I'm using company and corporation interchangeably, which I shouldn't.

    note that all explicit monetary values are in 2022 US dollars


    1. 100% tax on all income over $50M/yr, 90% on all income over $20M/yr.
    2. All income includes bonuses, stock options (at the median value over the previous year)
    3. Any company that is the source of over 25% of the income for a given locality (locality is defined as city/county/state/nation-state) pays progressive tax of voting share (that is, more shares as the percentage goes up) in addition to taxes. There will be an elected board to control those shares.
    4. Corporations may not issue non-voting shares.
    5. Any corporation that is convicted of a felony, the sentencing shall be applied to the chief executives.
    6. Any corporation going into bankruptcy shall pay employees first, suppliers and other creditors second, bond holders third, and stockholders, should there be any remaining moneys. All "golden parachutes" are null and void.
    7. Withholding of existing goods, such as keeping tankers in the ocean, rather than delivering them to refineries, for the purpose of raising or keeping prices higher is price gouging, and all who engage in it shall be charged with that crime.
    8. Planned obsolescence is illegal.
    9. All users have a right to repair, which may not be obfuscated by the manufacturer.

    294:

    You missed a couple of extras:

  • It is illegal for a corporation to employ prison labour or slave labour, or to subcontract labour to another corporation or shell company (if somebody performs work at your instruction, then you are their employer and they have all the employments rights that go with that). If a corporation employs someone in a jurisdiction outsider the state its incorporated in, then their pay and conditions must be the same as, or higher, than the mandatory minimum wage in the state of incorporation (no offshoring for cheap labour!)

  • It is illegal for a corporation to directly or indirectly donate money to legislators ("indirectly" = no political lobbyists or think-tanks)

  • Corporations do not have the civil rights of natural people, in particular they do not collectively have privacy or free speech rights -- for example, advertising can be regulated for factual accuracy and public safety, non-disclosure agreements may be challenged in court on the basis that disclosure is in the public interest

  • corporations may not litigate against natural persons, period (no SLAPP suits): they make criminal complaints, but if such a complaint is not upheld then making false allegations should leave them open to criminal prosecution (and see point 5)

  • binding arbitration agreements cannot be enforced as a condition of trade/purchase; in event of a dispute either party always has recourse to a court of law which can override the arbitration agreement

  • ... Want me to go on?

    295:

    Sure, but as I said, that's a subsidiary matter - it's a requirement for preaching "everyone can do it" from an intellectual ability text to people whether they have it or not, and it has truth values along a continuum rather than the universal binary one as is touted, but that discrepancy is only a sub-problem; the real problem is the promotion of intellectual ability as a sufficient condition for "doing it". It doesn't matter whether that's ability of the "I paid attention in school instead of pissing around and now I've got lots of money" school-learnt type or of the "I pissed around in school and left without qualifications but it didn't stop me working out what to do myself" self-taught variety - those variations are just choosing the ammunition to suit the target - what does matter is that the universality of intellectual ability, whether innate or acquired and regardless of how true that universality actually is, is portrayed as the sole significant factor and thus used to justify the "everyone" part of "everyone can do it", when really it's only one of a whole fuck load of important factors and rarely even the most important one.

    I got this all the way through school right from the start or even before; I believed it implicitly at first and never did really doubt it much, partly because it was such a constant part of the background, but partly also because in the restricted school environment it was actually true: any other relevant factors having been pre-selected out of consideration by the simple fact that we were at the school at all, intellectual ability was the only thing that mattered, and most of the school day was taken up by a succession of reinforcements. With that kind of conditioning it's pretty unfeasible not to end up leaving school with the more or less unquestioned assumption that intellectual ability will continue to be the only thing that matters, and it's also pretty unfeasible to root it out thoroughly enough to not still retain some degree of belief in it even after decades of demonstration in later life that in all but a few specialised sets of circumstances it mostly doesn't matter a wank.

    296:

    A couple things - this was just what we do to end trillionairedom, not control the corps, but I could add something after that...

    YES, please, do go on. This was why I posted. As I used to say when I worked at Ameritech, "I know I don't know all the questions, much less all the answers."

    297:

    It is illegal for a corporation to employ prison labour or slave labour, or to subcontract labour to another corporation or shell company (if somebody performs work at your instruction, then you are their employer and they have all the employments rights that go with that)

    Now write up a law or laws that make illegal sharecropping (or the factory equivalent) or company towns. I've looked into this a very little bit and it's hard to define unless you use the porn definition. "I know it when I see it." Or at least what is porn "to me".

    298:

    corporations may not litigate against natural persons, period (no SLAPP suits): they make criminal complaints, but if such a complaint is not upheld then making false allegations should leave them open to criminal prosecution (and see point 5)

    There are some fascinating problems here, but this is a big one. The problem in the US is that civil law and criminal law are two different things. For instance, environmental laws are enforced through civil action, not criminal action. This means that the non-profit corporation I work for cannot litigate to stop a development. I would have to do that on my own, at $100k plus per lawsuit.

    It gets even more fun from there with all sorts of breach of contract. The end result would be that corporations will refuse to make contracts with people, because they cannot legally enforce the contract. Only people can contract with people, and as Rocketjps noted above, this means all their personal assets are liable to seizure in legal actions over breach of contract.

    Say for example that you want internet service. There's no corporation who will contract with you to provide it, so you've got to contract with Jimmy The Geek, who's part of the Geek network who make internet work in your area. Then, when Jimmy loses everything in a lawsuit to someone else and goes out of business (because he can't spin his internet business of as a separate limited liability corporation), you lose your internet service.

    This is what corporations are good for, unfortunately.

    Also, SLAPP suits are fairly easy to legislate against. California's had an anti-SLAPP law for decades.

    This is why I was noodling around with the concept of liability above. If a contract can only be made with a legal entity that can be held liable for damages if things go wrong, it doesn't matter whether that entity is a person or a corporation. If a person can't be held liable, they can't be contracted with. The interesting bit is that this gets at control, especially if control becomes a central part of the concept of liability. In this concept, if you control something, you are liable for its actions and even its condition. Trusts can still exist, but you cannot be both a beneficiary and control the trust without being held liable for it.

    299:

    It sounds like what's happening is that your prices marked on things are not the full story because they don't include sales tax, so when you take your purchases to the till, the cashier tots it all up and says "that will be 3 dollars 20 cents plus tax", and then works out what extra you have to pay on top for the tax.

    With all due respect, good sir, The States are not all United on this.

    Oregon, along with Montana and New Hampshire, have no retail sales tax, no VAT-like levy on everyday purchases.

    When I lived in states which did have a retail sales tax, the formula was mentally embedded. For example, the 5% sales I grew up with in Florida was easy to calculate. The 5.5% tax (5% for Ohio, 0.5% for Cuyahoga, Lucas, and Wood counties) I learned when I went to uni less so, but still very clear.

    There's no Federal tax on retail purchases, and Federal taxes on retail services (e.g., mobile phone service) are sometimes paid by the carrier, a powerful incentive for those providers.

    States do also levy taxes on real estate, earned and unearned income, but it all varies from state to state.

    300:

    whitroth said: Um, nope. They make everything? Really? They have chip fab plants, and make motherboards?

    No, they don't make everything (and that's not what I said), but that's their stated goal.

    And yes, they do have their own chip fab.

    https://www.forbes.com/sites/arielcohen/2021/09/22/tesla-flexes-innovative-muscle-by-manufacturing-own-chips-during-supply-crunch/?sh=743d50011618

    I don't think you're getting what Tesla is all about. Some people (me included) are accused of being Tesla fanbois, ie, irrational... If you think Tesla is just like any other manufacturer, but with added personality cult, then that's a reasonable assumption.

    Tesla is not like any other manufacturer. It's literally unimaginably different. Note that you couldn't imagine Tesla makes their own chips. You trotted that out as an example without even bothering to Google it first because you literally couldn't even imagine it.

    301:

    Motherboards? All the other pieces parts?

    302:

    RE: Tesla and its growth.

    It's useful to think of absolute growth rate (percent growth rate) and relative growth rate (percent growth rate/size). Tesla's got a high relative growth rate, which is normal for small companies. The big auto companies have larger absolute growth rates, because they're much bigger than Tesla, and even a small growth on their part dwarfs Tesla's efforts.

    Financial investors look for high relative growth rates, because that's where they can make lots of money.

    People doing things like carbon sequestration look at absolute growth rates, because the rate changes matter a lot less (especially when not much is being done), compared with how much carbon is being sequestered.

    Where we're getting stuck in this conversation is assuming that market capitalization has anything much to do with carbon sequestration-related issues. It doesn't. I'm fine with people chasing profits with Tesla, but until they get to the size of a major auto company, they're not having as big an impact. And I bet that, once they get there, their stock value will be lower than it is now, because they won't be growing as fast due to their size.

    303:

    Motherboards? All the other pieces parts?

    I can right now take my arbitrarily complex electronic gizmo prototype, work up a 4-layer PCB design of it in a CAD tool and submit it to one of several local businesses to make the PCB, either as a once off or in runs of dozens or hundreds, all done locally in Brisbane where labour costs just could not compete with almost anywhere, then I don't think a large corporation would even slow down if creating the same capability in house turned out to be in its interest. The same firms will manufacture the board complete with all the SMDs soldered in, too. Might be cheaper to go to China for large production runs, but again it's possible and these businesses obviously make money. Brisbane isn't special, I'm sure the same is true of any large city in the USA or Europe.

    304:

    Apparently 1000kg, with 350kg payload. I suspect the older ones are lighter due to fewer safety features, but 200kg is an exaggeration.

    It just doesn't feel that way when I'm in it. Not only is it built for midgets (I have to slump to fit and I'm only 1.8m tall), everything feels kinda thin and light.

    305:

    How to reconcile the two extremes? You got me.

    A good starting point would be reordering the claims debtors have in the event of bankruptcy.

    Put pensions and wages first, starting with the lowest-paid and working up. Limit severance packages and bonuses, possibly to no more than double the average yearly income in the company, no matter what the contract states. Have clawback clauses for executive compensation over-and-above salary, such as anything paid within a year of declaring bankruptcy, to limit looting before filing — clawed-back money going to pensions etc.

    Anything left can go to paying other debts.

    Doubt this will happen (limits to executives), but putting obligations to workers first rather than last could easily be done.

    306:

    Well, I think the basic problem might be the legal notion that only people can sign contracts, and engage in other legal activities. That notion was used to argue that corporations are people.

    Why can there not be a limited personhood for corporations, or a new legal entity that has some (but not all) of the attributes of a human person? Laws are human constructs.

    I mean, the GOP seems quite happy with different levels of personhood already — why do corporations have to be cis white men?

    307:

    Compare Morris Minor freight versions, 760kg-odd with 300kg or 400kg payload. So it may be a midget but it's still eaten all the pies.

    308:

    I'd be wary about suggesting ways to weed out unsuitable heirs, if I was you.

    70% of wealthy families lose their wealth in the 2nd generation - that ramps up to almost all of them in their third. That's probably a good thing for the human race in general.

    Consider that even in modern times, the 'investor' class of a country typically does its best to install inheritance-tax averse politicians, to say nothing of the behaviour of wealthy families before modern times. All things considered, I'm rather glad that humanity's nepotistic urges lead to generational wealth redistribution.

    309:

    Why can there not be a limited personhood for corporations, or a new legal entity that has some (but not all) of the attributes of a human person? Laws are human constructs. I mean, the GOP seems quite happy with different levels of personhood already — why do corporations have to be cis white men?

    Possibly so that corporations don't get god-level rights?

    You're right, any answer will likely involve making more categories of personhood for various beings to be slotted into. The lesson of Roe is that those categories can always be reshuffled, depending on who is in power.

    The reason I used "liability" as a term ("agency" would be another) is to try to get human rights associated with personhood, while various legal necessities for making civilization work get separated out as "liability," "agency," or something else. I agree this isn't a better solution that creating categories of personhood, but if all we're doing is talking about alternatives, at least having different terms for different alternatives makes it easier to talk about them without getting too confused.

    I'd finally point out an interesting angle. What if citizenship conferred liability for the Country in which one became a citizen, as a condition for getting to vote? Doesn't that imply that, if you're liable, you should be theoretically voting to keep your Country going, rather than trash it? I know, silliness, but if we want sustainable countries, how else are we going to do it?

    310:

    With this thread being on the topic it is, I find it an amusing coincidence to have just come across this:

    http://www.gutenberg.org/files/12826/12826-h/12826-h.htm

    It seems to be a bit crap so far, but it's highly appropriate.

    311:

    I'm not sure it is totally silly. It sounds more or less like an expansion of the much narrower version of the same idea that some countries express in their military conscription regulations, especially the ones that do the military-or-some-civilian-public-service variety.

    312:

    I'm not sure it is totally silly. It sounds more or less like an expansion of the much narrower version of the same idea that some countries express in their military conscription regulations, especially the ones that do the military-or-some-civilian-public-service variety.

    Yes. I should also point out that I capitalized Country as a gesture towards Australian aboriginal ideas about Country. In capitalist terms, I'm suggesting we treat our Country (land, ecosystems, technosystems, wherever we live) as our working capital, which we preserve and grow the productivity of*, while we live off the profits generated by proper use of that capital. That's a slightly over-simplistic view of sustainability. The advantage is that it does make some sense in a capitalist system, and it has been used in discussions of "natural capital."

    *Productivity doesn't mean alienating resources, but actually caring for what we have so that they provide us better lives. Like good business owners are supposed to do.

    313:

    Yeah, that's also why I'm cautious about saying the older one I've been in is the same weight as the modern one I could find a weight for. The new ones have cockpit decorations and some even have air conditioning.

    It's similar to the difference between the old Landrovers that are all boxy and have exposed metal on the inside; and the new smoothed-off urban things called "Landrover" that have air conditioning and airbags and wotnot. Those don't even have the vent flaps under the windscreen for sampling the insect population as you drive along.

    314:

    "Before you point at Musk and Tesla or SpaceX, I need to remind you that he didn't found Tesla, he merely bought into it then took over: SpaceX's focus on reusability is good, but we had reusable space launchers before—the only really new angle is that it's a cost-reduction measure. "

    I would argue that Musk's achievement at SpaceX is more important than just a moderate cost reduction enabled by reusability. By reducing the cost by orders of magnitude, especially if he's successful in building the Starship in the airline-comparable numbers he anticipates, he shifts the whole basis for access to space, and enables entirely new use of space beyond what we presently do there. The existing price regime maximally limits what can be lofted, and pushes every conceivable feature that can possibly be done so groundside. Any gear that makes it into space then is correspondingly limited and expensive.

    A costing scheme made possible by a working Starship system inverts that, and allows whole new classes of activity spaceside, things that have never been previously possible. A Starship system might well be the key to a workable solar power transmission system, for instance, or provide access to robotically-retrieved asteroid-derived industrial materials. Work towards either of these goals would drive the establishment of orbit-side industrial capacity, and if well executed, provide ever increasing income streams to Elon. As a side product, the people moving into near-Earth space to operate such industry would go a long way towards implementing Elon's purported goal of getting humans off Earth and out of range of Earth-bound civilization-threatening disasters.

    Indeed, it does so well at this that I've begun to question Elon's story explaining his interest in the Mars option. While a city on Mars would be a wonderful thing, in my mind it's way, way down the list of important things the Starship system would enable. Even Elon's explanation that putting humans on Mars confers extra protection to the species by spreading us to a new environment beyond Earth seems weak to me in one respect - could not that same protection be true for a population in near-Earth space, say at the Lagrangian points, or just outside of Earth's gravity well, but still in the neighborhood to the resources they're going to require for decades, but without the year long delay hit one takes in being located at Mars' remove from the mother civilization? And while a near-Earth orbital civilization would not have the same safety in separation Mars offers, it is a much better choice in several important respects. Proximity to Earth presents several important opportunities that Mars lacks simply because it is so far beyond the markets of Earth.

    But if one thinks back to Elon's mindset at the outset of this whole operation, one might begin to believe that this was the point of the operation to begin with. At that time, he faced any number of strong competitors who might challenge him were his actual goals too obvious. He had no way of knowing that Bezos would ultimately prove (comparably) incompetent at the space access game, or that none of the space-access incumbents would decide to play catch up to SpaceX should they figure out his actual endgame and steal his now-proven reusability secret sauce. But, what if he spun a story of cities on Mars that supplied potential rivals with an explanation allowing them to ultimately dismiss his efforts? Is the whole cities-on-Mars this century nothing more than a solar system-sized red herring, designed to throw the competition off the scent of Musk's long range plans?

    Either way, if Musk can effectively make the 'jump to light speed' in getting mankind off the planet, and set us on the path to an off-earth civilization, then this would be one of the greatest achievements of all time, and well worth the money he has acquired. At the same time, having watched his actions in the public eye, or how he treats people in his engineering organizations, I do not believe I'd want to have to live in a society controlled by and/or designed by him - I have no faith for him in those regards. Perhaps a taxation schema that allowed great civilization-supporting projects like Starship would be appropriate?

    315:

    Hetero said: It's useful to think of absolute growth rate (percent growth rate) and relative growth rate (percent growth rate/size). Tesla's got a high relative growth rate, which is normal for small companies. The big auto companies have larger absolute growth rates, because they're much bigger than Tesla, and even a small growth on their part dwarfs Tesla's efforts.

    Crystal ball broken, and even Musk thinks Tesla is overvalued, so possibly right. When it matures as a car company, then yeah. If it was just a car company. It's not just a car company though.

    Which I'll get to in a second, but first, growth.

    Tesla car sales

    Model S,X / Model 3,Y

    Q1 2022, 14,724 / 295,324

    Q4 2021, 11,750 / 296,850

    Q3 2021, 9,275 / 232,025

    Q2 2021, 1,890 / 199,360

    Q1 2021, 2,020 / 182,780

    Q4 2020, 18,966 / 161,701 

    Q3 2020, 15,275 / 124,318

    Q2 2020, 10,614 / 80,277

    Q1 2020, 12,230 / 76,266

    Toyota sales (all vehicles, cars, trucks, buses, Lexus, Hino and Daihatsu)

    2011, 7,948,957

    2012,  9,747,771

    2013,  9,980,091

    2014,  10,230,929

    2015,  10,151,083

    2016,  10,174,580

    2017,  10,385,902

    2018,  10,593,698

    2019,  10,742,122

    2020,  9,528,438

    2021,  10,495,549

    So Toyota increased sales by 2 million in the 2 years 2013 over 2011, which dwarfs Tesla's 200,000 per year increase. 5 times more. However that timeline starts in the year of the Japan Earthquake. So that period is really just getting back to normal. Since then the average growth is less than what Tesla is growing. In number of cars out the door terms, not just percentage. Toyota is averaging about 80,000 vehicles per year growth. Tesla will double the number of gigafactories this year, with Gigaberlin and Gigatexas coming on line (500,000/yr capacity each), and Gigashanghi expansion happening this year as well. If they don't increase production by 500,000 units this year over last year, something very very strange has happened. Q1, before rampup for either of the new factories, is nearly a 1/3rd of a million cars. They're on track to build over 1.2 million cars this year, even without the 2 new factories. That's ~600,000 cars more than last year. Many times more actual cars made increase than the market leader. With the new factories we could see Q4 2022 hit 500,000 cars. Note that Elon said yesterday that all the production slots for Gigatexas are filled for the next 3 years with deposits taken.

    But that's a small part of Tesla. They're planning on going into trucks, and when they sell the trucks, they're also going to be selling the electricity to power the trucks. They make solar panels. A grid level solar farm selling into the grid gets about 3 cents per kWh these days while making a profit, and that's only going to go down as solar panels get cheaper and the market for daytime solar electricity is further depressed. They've said they'll sell at 7c/kWh to trucks via the Megachargers. So they'll make double what any other solar farm makes, plus they'll be paying the cost to build the panels rather than the cost to buy the panels. All the while undercutting any truck competitors by 20-30c/kWh (40-60c/mile). This is huge. They make the trucks, they sell direct, they make the fuel, they sell direct. US trucks cover about 80 billion miles a year on interstate highways. At 14 cents per mile, that's a 12 billon dollar market. Just in the USA. There's a lot of "oh, but truckers won't want to wait to charge". At 14 cents per mile vs 1 dollar per mile, no diesel fueled truck will be able to compete on price. It will kill the diesel truck. No electric truck that doesn't have access to Megachargers will be able to compete on price. The entire fleet will switch exactly as fast as Tesla can roll the trucks out the door.

    They're opening their superchargers to all electric cars with CCS. Same deal, except they're charging ~30c/kWh and still undercutting the competition.

    SpaceX is committed to getting the Sabatier process working at scale. It seems unlikely that wouldn't cross pollinate with Tesla's solar panel factories. That's the natural gas market sown up right there.

    Then there's the grid scale battery market. Australia is proving out the idea that its cheaper to put a battery at the end of a long line than it is to scale the long line to meet peak demand. That's a multi billion dollar market.

    And if they get the self driving working (which is looking more likely every day) then you will be able to send your Tesla off to work during the 90% of the day when most cars do nothing. Why would anyone buy a Toyota at that point? If you're unable to afford the upfront cost of a Tesla, you can get one to come to your house and take you exactly where you want to go for less than the cost of petrol in a Toyota, and if you can afford one, it will pay for itself unlike a Toyota that just sits.

    Thinking about Tesla as a small niche car company with added cult is missing the point.

    316:

    They've said they'll sell at 7c/kWh to trucks via the Megachargers. So they'll make double what any other solar farm makes

    Have they mentioned a delivery charge, or will the 7c rate only apply to trucks who pick up locally? Grid costs can exceed generation costs on some places.

    They're opening their superchargers to all electric cars with CCS

    There is apparently a gap between the service levels available to Tesla cars and povo scum, though. Which irritates the shit out of people whose other car is not a Tesla.

    if they get the self driving working then you will be able to send your Tesla off to work

    There's a gap between "the owner can be a passenger" and "paying customers" that is bigger than you might think just from the scale of Uber's losses. OTOH I suspect quite a few of us would be willing to pay a small price for the chance to shit in a self-driving car.

    317:

    Moz said: OTOH I suspect quite a few of us would be willing to pay a small price for the chance to shit in a self-driving car.

    Well, if that side of things doesn't work out, the Tesla owners will just have to console themselves with being 10 times safer (which is about the difference between a motorcycle and a car) and not ever having to pay parking fees (because the car can drive itself out of the city, all the way home if needed and park for free there).

    Doug G said: I would argue that...

    This. Yes this. There's a perception out there that currently it costs 10 billion and 2 decades to build something for space, and 200 million to launch it, for a total cost of 10.2 billion. When launching costs 2 million the total cost will be 10.002 billon. This neatly explains why that's not the case at all.

    318:

    Moz said: Have they mentioned a delivery charge, or will the 7c rate only apply to trucks who pick up locally? Grid costs can exceed generation costs on some places.

    I don't know. The onstage announcement was simply "7 cents per kWh" [and there was much rejoicing]. (see also the discussion of USA lucky dip pricing)

    What would I do? If I was in charge I'd buy some bit of worthless ground far outside any towns, put up a bunch of ground mounted solar panels. Add some big batteries and never connect it to the grid at all. Grid connection can be half the cost or more of the solar farm. Just don't go there.

    Then I would put up some Megachargers, some superchargers, and build some shops and rent them out to fast food outlets to pay for the security and grounds staff.

    I might even add a CO2 capture and sabatier plant to sop up any excess electricity production if they can be scaled down economically.

    I'm sure that Tesla is smarter than me though, so I'd consider that the baseline, and expect their solution to be significantly better.

    319:

    Worth noting that Tesla's battery factories are joint ventures with Panasonic. The tech in each individual little battery cell is essentially all panasonic's IP. Tesla was genuinely innovative in figuring out how to glom a bunch of those cells together without them catching fire on a regular basis. But they'd have to reinvent the battery from the ground up if they want to break away from panasonic. Or perhaps just buy Panasonic, or its IP.

    Which arguably would make more sense than buying twitter.

    320:

    (because the car can drive itself out of the city, all the way home if needed and park for free there)

    That is the threat that Tesla can use to persuade unruly lawmakers to do its bidding, yes. Most of the damage done by cars is simply from driving them, so until Elon invents steel wheels on steel rails in dedicated corridors the threat to just keep his cars driving around is a serious one.

    The safety argument is currently a furphy. Automated cars might kill fewer people directly than human-driven ones in the future, but right now they don't exist. At least human-driven electric cars are COTS right now, even if in limited numbers.

    And I can't see any way they'll ever be safer than trams, let alone trains. Again, until Elon invents "TeslaTrains" that run autonomously in dedicated tunnels ... I'm sure it can be done, the people who make them seem pretty convincing to me. No doubt someone is sweating in a design office somewhere working out how to attach Tesla branding to them.

    Adam Something has an amusing rant about electric buses if you feel that way inclined. The same argument applies to electric cars, but obviously magnified by the capacity difference between the two. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqHsXv7Umvw (there's a response from EEVBlog and a followup from Adam as well)

    321:

    WreRite said: Worth noting that Tesla's battery factories are joint ventures with Panasonic.

    No. Not for years. In 2019 Tesla bought Maxwell Technologies. It's their cell technology that they're using and it's far beyond anything Panasonic has. Google Tesla dry cell technology. The gigafactories after Nevada have cell lines that are Tesla design and IP.

    322:

    I'm not arguing that cars are better than trains or trolley buses. Nor an I saying that doubling the distance cars drive each day is a good thing.

    We were taking about the crazy value of Tesla. It's going to be selling cars that do things the other cars don't. It's a bigger step change than selling cars that do things horses don't. It changes everything and most people will want one.

    This is the killer app. This is what the cool kids will be using. This is the "go to sleep in the back of your car, wake up at your weekend house, it's just as good as a Niven transfer booth" game changer.

    Like I want to go see my daughter in Sydney, I get in the car at my normal bed time and wake up outside her unit in Sydney. When I am tired after the day out, I don't need a hotel, I get back in the car and go to sleep, waking up in my driveway the next morning.

    Trains might be better, but I can't buy one. I can't make the tracks go where I want, I can't adjust the schedule to suit my sleeping patterns and I can't have one to myself.

    323:

    They're not my ideas - I'm just summarising what I see in various branches of economics research. And the three archetypes keeping reappearing, it's just that no-one's named them formally in the literature yet - mostly because the researchers tend to dismiss the happiness maximisers (type three, Heteromeles's "Old-fashioned human beings") and the steady state capitalists (type 1, Heteromeles's "Old fashioned capitalists") because they quickly establish that in both their data and their models of the world, these people aren't a risk to the population at large.

    That leaves the money maximisers (type 2, Heteromeles's "Dragons", "power addicts", "cancers on society") as the interesting lot to examine; why do most long-lasting forms of social organisation have a way to handle them, and why doesn't USA + EU style capitalism have a way to handle them? What's going to go wrong if we don't handle them (the theme seems to be that something probably goes wrong, else why do long-lasting social layouts get rid of them), and how do we handle them in a less terminal manner than is historically the norm?

    324:

    I'm inclined to think that billionaires are just a symptom of a more fundamental problem - that companies' purpose is to make money. Some companies produce a useful product or service, but that is just a side effect. As their purpose is to make money, they will still try to get people to buy more than they need. Many companies produce stuff that is useless or harmful, but they will use advertising to create a market. So how do we restructure our society so that any organisation or enterprise has the purpose of doing something useful, and improving the world? Any money made beyond the costs incurred and paying its employees a fair salary would be used to improve the product or service (and that could be by getting people to use less of it - e.g. power producers really working for power economy - encouraging insulation, efficient heating, home solar.

    325:

    companies' purpose is to make money -
    Wrong. A company's first purpose is to survive. Making a net profit is simply one of the means it uses to survive.

    326:

    Wrong. A company's first purpose is to survive. Making a net profit is simply one of the means it uses to survive.

    Well, that depends. In Finland, there's a law for joint-stock companies. This law states explicitly that the purpose of joint-stock companies is to make profit for the stock owners, unless the articles of association (I think this is the term) define otherwise.

    Of course, in practice it usually is easier to generate profit, especially in the long term, if the company survives, but this is only an implicit purpose, not explicit.

    This creates sometimes funny situations. Some years ago, there was a stretch of metro (subway) being built here. This being a large public transport project, all the buyers were basically municipal level public entities (here, the cities of Helsinki and Espoo). The cities jointly owned a joint-stock company created to handle all the building stuff, so digging tunnels, building stations and all that stuff. This company was a small one, obviously subcontracting all the actual work.

    However, when creating the company, the cities didn't write anything about the purpose of this company into its paperwork. Because it was a privately owned joint-stock company, the law took priority and so its purpose was to make its owners money instead of, perhaps, building the metro infrastructure. (I did pay a couple of Euros for the public paperwork, and checked this.)

    Of course there were problems with schedules and going over the budget. The investigations were somewhat difficult from the public side as the company was a private company and therefore much of its internal paperwork was declared trade secrets and was not available. I'm not sure if it really made any money, however, and I think that the purpose was not fulfilled. Of course nobody cared but I still think this was one case where the joint-stock company might have had some other purpose than what was written in the law, or even survival.

    Funnily when all the problems with money and schedules started to surface, the CEO of the company said that he doesn't know anything about the problems. There were maybe ten people directly employed by the company and its reason was to keep track of a) money b) schedules in the project, so there was some discussion whether the CEO was lying, not doing his work, or just incompetent. (He left the company almost a year later, so apparently this was not a problem for the owners... I mean the cities.)

    The next extension to the Helsinki area metro line was funded and organized differently.

    327:

    Brief point-of-order comment:

    For some reason, fanbois like to first-name their heroes, and this annoying habit rubs off on the rest of us and spreads like a nasty rash. It was icky with "Steve" and it's still icky with "Elon". Billionaires are not your friends and never will be. Can we agree to call him "Musk"?

    Same for "Boris", of course.

    328:

    IKEA is a BV. Closest translation into American is LLC.

    I.E. IKEA is incorporated.

    Nothing unusual about being a privately owned corporation.

    329:

    327 - I was talking about general economics, not Finnish corporate law. It's still an interesting point though.

    328 - And if I refer to "Alexander Boris de Falafel Johnson" as "Bozo"? It's intended as mockery, not matyness.

    330:

    I don't like your name for type 3 (the build it up, drop back to "comfortable multi-millionaire", build it up again people). Elon Musk is a commonly used example of this archetype for billionaires: if you look at his history, he starts out rich due to an inheritance, risks it on Zip2 which succeeds, repeats the process with X.com (which becomes PayPal, and then succeeds), and repeats the cycle with SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink, Solar City, and The Boring Company.

    In each case, he's spent most of his fortune leaving him with just enough to be comfortable (by normal standards) if all his risks fizzle. And he's now reached the point where he has multiple risks on the go, which can all collapse and leave him merely comfortably off (luxury car, large house in expensive area like SF, passive income from investments meets his needs), but where at least one of them is likely to pay off.

    And it's worth noting that people can move between archetypes; Gates up until the US Federal Government took on Microsoft was a type 2 ("Dragon", acquire the universe type), and has transitioned to being a type 1 ("old fashioned capitalist", hold steady but don't try to grow).

    Indeed, it's entirely possible that what we're seeing with Musk looking to take over Twitter is him moving archetype - and if that's the case, which one he's going to become is unknown.

    331:

    Colonising space (Lagrange points, say) seems to me to be markedly harder than colonising Mars. Where do these space habitats get their propellants and other volatiles?

    332:

    Oh! Thanks. I had no idea Tesla had dry cell (Maxwell, 4680) tech up and running in (limited) mass production. I think I'd assumed it was just Elon bullshitting about some limited, iterative improvement. But no, it's a moderately big deal.

    They are still partnering with panasonic, but seemingly just as an outside supplier building Tesla tech under licence while tesla ramps up its own production over the next decade: https://electrek.co/2022/05/11/tesla-asks-panasonic-speed-up-development-4680-battery-cell/

    333:

    Nick Barnes @328: Just saw your comment after posting. I am not remotely an Elon/ Musk fanboi. I tend to use first names because (a) it's one of many tics Australians use to pretend we don't have a class system, and (b) using surnames alone reminds me of the culture of my private school. Which I hated about as much as Charlie did.

    334:

    Here in Oregon, we don't have any sales tax. But in Washington state, they do. Which is why lots of people in Vancouver, WA, come to Portland, OR, to buy their stuff... :-)

    And a side note to the side note, for the rest of the world: While sales taxes are levied by the states, and different states set different percentages, that isn't the end of the story.

    A quick visit to Google will tell you that Washington state sales tax is 6.5% so does an example Vancouver person pay 6.5%? No; they're in Vancouver, so they also pay another 2% city sales tax for a total 8.5% tax.

    If you were to fly into Seatac International Airport and buy something, that would have a (6.5% state + 3.6% city) 10.1% tax. A few miles up the road in Seattle the same purchase would be subject to (6.5% + 3.75%) 10.25% tax.

    Yes, this is a flaming pain in the lower anatomy. Pretty much everyone wants stores to mark prices in what customers actually pay, yet this does not happen.

    335:

    It turned out that some subcontractor of their Chinese subcontractor who built the motherboards had substituted a resistor? capacitor? of lower standards, and they were burning out.

    Heh. Some years back one of my housemates worked quality control for a well known chip manufacturer (there's a good chance you have one of their products within a meter of you right now). His group had a fault finding quota - with the result that every chip testing station had a secret stash of bad chips, so that at the end of the day workers would be able to show that they'd found an acceptable number of bad chips.

    What you measure becomes what you get...

    336:

    Yeah, from what I can figure out from the cryptic hints that Musk drops, the dry cell manufacture is "working" but not yet ramped up. (much bug hunting). They've released video that shows them making fat cells in Texas. They look like dry cells in the video.

    They're also buying cells from Panasonic, building cells in partnership with Panasonic, inventing their own cobolt free cells, and I think buying CATL cells, BYD blade cells and I suspect, anything they can lay their hands on.

    The lack of cells is the stated reason for the truck delay (though who knows). Could be, if one truck uses the cells that would make 10 cars and they're cell constrained.

    337:

    Yes, this is a flaming pain in the lower anatomy. Pretty much everyone wants stores to mark prices in what customers actually pay, yet this does not happen.

    It seems to me that even if stores would like to do this, no one store will in their right mind do it: their prices would seem to be higher than other stores', so people would not prefer to shop there. Even if the real, paid price would be the same.

    It might even be difficult to advertise this. People often don't look at any signs.

    338:

    WreRite said: Worth noting that Tesla's battery factories are joint ventures with Panasonic.

    No. Not for years. In 2019 Tesla bought Maxwell Technologies. It's their cell technology that they're using and it's far beyond anything Panasonic has. Google Tesla dry cell technology. The gigafactories after Nevada have cell lines that are Tesla design and IP.

    Current Tesla vehicles almost all have batteries made by Panasonic, CATL, and (I believe) LG Chem. Since March, apparently a very few (solely from the Austin factory) are equipped with the new Tesla 4680 cells. Over the next few years there will be an increasing number of the latter, but the planned vehicle production growth rate is such that there's no prospect of equipping every new vehicle with the Tesla 4680 cells, not for many years to come. At least one of their battery partners (Panasonic IIRC) is also now making 4680 cells for Tesla vehicles, although whether their 4680s are just a new form-factor or also incorporate other Tesla battery technology is unclear.

    Furthermore, Tesla and their various battery partners, especially Panasonic, are in various very long-term contracts to increase cell supply, in various form factors, and have various arrangements to cross-license patents and otherwise share technology. I expect all of those companies to be making Tesla-designed 4680 cells in due course, if the design works out well and the yield problems can be fully resolved.

    Tesla management are rightly focused on that 50% production growth target, aiming for 20 million vehicles annually before 2030. Cell supply is absolutely essential to that. They're not going to bet that farm on their newer cell designs and production techniques, and doubtless have plans for getting there even if they can't put many of those cells into those vehicles.

    339:

    Well, be aware that this habit is also widely exhibited by fanbois - it's a bit of a red flag, especially when discussing tech billionaires. Twenty years ago you could sort Apple commentators into normal vs deluded, fairly reliably, by whether they spoke of "Jobs" or "Steve".

    You've piqued my interest, though. Does the Australian norm extend to politicians? Do news anchors talk about "Tony" or "Scott", without a surname? Or "Jacinda", or "Emmanuel"? How about "Vladimir", or "Volodomyr"?

    Some politicians (and others) encourage the habit. "Call me Tony", "Boris", etc. Others avoided it (nobody referred to our most recent ex-PM as just "Theresa"). But I see no reason to pander to their focus-group preferences.

    340:

    I think the solution to the 'taxes not included in the advertised price' would just be to make it mandatory to do it that way, that is, change the law.

    Here we have also rules for comparable prices, for example price per kilogram or per unit, for most grocery store stuff (uh, phone contracts and the like are a completely different thing). It makes it easier to compare prices of different sized packages.

    It also makes it easier to see that the smaller package is sometimes the cheaper one, which doesn't make much sense to me, but whatever, I can buy the cheaper one.

    341:

    in personal terms the marginal utility of money diminishes all the way to zero

    Of course that depends on the personal utility function. In the long run we are all dead, but living longer is not the sine qua non for everyone. Jobs wanted to live longer, and spent some resources on trying to make that happen, but not everyone is so much bothered by that.

    Some people have goals which extend beyond their own lifespans, and make plans in the knowledge that they will not come to fruition until long after their deaths. I don't know whether there are any in the "zotta" category at the moment (handy Doctorow short-hand for the ultra-rich), but any such might well allocate their immense money (/power) to projects which will long survive them. As previously observed here and in other posts, we have mechanisms in our society (trusts, corporations, etc) which would enable that.

    342:

    Ahem: I prefer to refer to the PM as "Clownshoes Churchill". It's descriptive, OK?

    (And the Home Secretary is "Desi Himmler". Also descriptive.)

    343:

    It seems to me that even if stores would like to do this, no one store will in their right mind do it... It might even be difficult to advertise this. People often don't look at any signs.

    One exception, such as they exist, is micro-vendors such as convention sales booths. There are enough people from out of the area, and limitations in both competition and time, that merchants seem to be able to get away with telling prospective customers what things actually cost. It's also advantageous to a small mobile vendor to have all sales in round dollar amounts - if all transactions are in some number of dollars they don't need to arse around with any coins.

    344:

    1 I find that highly insulting to Winston Churchill
    2 The Home Secretary is a male Cuban-American!? (look up Desi Arnaz)

    345:

    (1) It's meant to indicate that Boris is a clownish Churchill cosplayer. (Which he is.)

    (2) Desi is a Hindustani word. Seems to be little known in the US.

    346:

    paws & Charlie
    Bo Jon-Sun to compare him with another megalomaniac & also because he's a vicious little shit

    347:

    1 Bozo is most assuredly a clown. I prefer to not even suggest that his delusion of being an orator to match Winston Churchill has the least foundation in fact.
    2 When I see the word "Desi", I immediately think of the Cuban-American actors Desi Arnaz and Desi Arnaz Junior (of "I Love Lucy" and "Desilu Studios" fame). I am not USian!

    348:

    BoJo is actually a reasonably good speaker -- or was before the brain eater got him. (And Churchill is over-rated: a bloody-handed reactionary imperialist murderer and thug, it took a Hitler to make him look good in contrast.)

    349:

    The research shows that separating out components of a price tag like this is a good way to get people to oppose the components of price tag that they don't perceive as valuable. In this instance (sales taxes), it helps to drive sales taxes down and push the tax burden elsewhere.

    If people were fully rational, you would consider only the price you pay, and would consider $0.99 as 1% less than $1. We're not that rational, so the irrationality needs to be accounted for.

    When you separate out a price into components, even if all components are compulsory, the human tendency is to object to the components you don't think you need, and to push for those components to be reduced. Only being allowed to quote a combined price avoids this particular bit of irrationality, because the extra effort to notice the taxes isn't something most people bother with - and thus only the anti-tax nutcases really shout about the tax rate.

    It's worse for taxes that cover externalities. If burning tyres costs $0.01 per tyre, but attracts a $9.99 per tyre "air pollution" tax, while fully recycling them costs $9 per tyre, seeing them separated has people ask "why I am pay $9.99 in taxes when the vendor is willing to do the work for $0.01?". If you can only quote a combined price, then people simply see that burning the tyre is $10, recycling it is $9, and thus it's cheaper to recycle. Fewer people will argue, because most people won't bother to look into it, and a significant fraction of those who do bother will realise that the point of the $9.99 in taxes is to make it more expensive to burn the tyre and pollute the air when you can fully recycle it.

    350:

    I'll second the Desi Arnaz comment. As the one-time husband of Lucille Ball, he's the "Desi" all of us are familiar with here in the US (perhaps you've heard of "I Love Lucy"?). I didn't know the UK use of "Desi" until you popped up "Desi Himmler" and I had to look it up.

    351:

    I think the solution to the 'taxes not included in the advertised price' would just be to make it mandatory to do it that way, that is, change the law.

    The problem in the US is that sales taxes are assessed by state, county, city, etc.

    Here's the California version:

    "The statewide tax rate is 7.25%. In most areas of California, local jurisdictions have added district taxes that increase the tax owed by a seller. Those district tax rates range from 0.10% to 1.00%. Some areas may have more than one district tax in effect. Sellers are required to report and pay the applicable district taxes for their taxable sales and purchases.

    "If you need help identifying the correct rate, you may look up the rate by address, contact our Customer Service Center at 1-800-400-7115 (TTY: 711), or call the local CDTFA office closest to you for assistance."

    And yes, it's a pain.

    The bottom line is that, if a chain store is having a sale across all its stores, posting the price with tax is going to make the campaign cost prohibitive, because that price likely will be different in each store. Conversely, someone going across the street to comparison-shop will be paying the same tax, so why bother?

    Democracy in action, not limiting taxation to the feds.

    352:

    I can't find an on-line copy :-( but there is a cartoon of Boris Johnson meeting Volodymyr Oleksandrovych Zelenskyy, actioned and captioned something like this:- Volodymyr is triggering the intercom and saying "I need a translator now. No, I do speak English but I don't speak whatever this clown is using, maybe Latin?"

    353:

    I have never seen "I Love Lucy" -- only heard it mentioned. Still don't have any concrete idea what it was about.

    354:

    Indeed, it's entirely possible that what we're seeing with Musk looking to take over Twitter is him moving archetype - and if that's the case, which one he's going to become is unknown.

    Re: the Type 3 name. I think you've got two cases. What you're describing is to me simple risk aversion (or Taleb's "dog bone" investment strategy), and you'll see it in your Type One people too. When they get a windfall, they'll risk it, but they won't risk their core capital. Knowing your level of risk and sticking within it is what everyone should do, if possible, and it's very old-fashioned.

    To me, Type 3 is more that, when you have a surplus you don't need, you return it to the community, through charity, throwing a huge party, etc., and convert financial capital to social or political capital. This ranges from bread and circuses to philanthropy to monster parties. It's also a very ancient strategy too. It may or may not blend with Type One behavior, but the key point is that they don't directly get money back on their "investment," they get better reputation, better infrastructure, or more educated public and workers.

    The interesting conflict is that the super-rich are pressured not to be too giving, quite possibly as a mark of class solidarity, because it makes greed look bad.

    Now yes, I acknowledge that we're using different definitions for Type 3. However, as a environmental activist, this version of Type 3 is what I deal with all the time, whether it's encouraging people to put their money back into the planet rather than extracting resources, or dealing with rich developers (like IQ45) who convert part of their fortune into a hunt for political power. It's common enough behavior that it really deserves its own typology.

    If you want to call it something else, though, be my guest. I prefer pithy titles for such things (like "dragons") just to make them more memorable.

    355:

    Of course that depends on the personal utility function. In the long run we are all dead, but living longer is not the sine qua non for everyone. Jobs wanted to live longer, and spent some resources on trying to make that happen, but not everyone is so much bothered by that.

    It's worth remembering that John Maynard Keynes didn't have children, perhaps? I know you make a similar point, but this triggered a rant. My apologies.

    The point isn't to diss Keynes, because apparently he wanted kids. The bigger point is that "in the long run we are all dead" is one of the stupider things economists and people with pretensions to intelligentsia have ever latched onto, right up there with "tragedy of the commons."

    Being dead in the long run is the reason you invest in children, not an excuse to piss everything away in an orgy of selfishness. Unfortunately, "is it worth having children" is something that shows up in pop economics fairly frequently (e.g. here). As a media topic, it looks fairly innocuous, until you start to realize that it's the current crop of elders who are really driving climate change and other problems, primarily with our collective greed. "Why save it for the kids? Spend it on yourself" is an advertising meme I'm seeing more and more. Unfortunately, Keynes off-the-cuff remark seems to have become a convenient excuse for greed and short-term thinking, and in that regard, it's doing more harm than good, at least in my humble opinion.

    Here's the soapbox if you want it.

    356:

    I have never seen "I Love Lucy" -- only heard it mentioned. Still don't have any concrete idea what it was about.

    Wikipedia will help. The things to realize are that it pioneered the "shot in front of a live studio audience" sitcom format, it was the most popular show in the US for quite a long time, even after it ceased production, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz pioneered syndication, which is why it stayed on the air for decades in reruns (and also made them quite wealthy). Oh, and Lucille Ball continued to innovate and pushed and paid for innovative TV programs. One of the TV shows that wouldn't have aired without her help is a little thing called Star Trek. Maybe you've heard of it?

    357:

    I grew up (mostly) in Canada, and to me desi has always meant East Indian, used mostly by people of that background.

    Nowadays East Indian has been replaced with South Asian, just as Oriental has been replaced by Asian (as compared to my childhood). I understand in the UK the usages are Asian and East Asian respectively, but that's gathered from context reading the Guardian and BBC.

    358:

    “I didn't know the UK use of "Desi" until you popped up "Desi Himmler" and I had to look it up.”

    A useful reminder that words do not mean the same in every place, in every context. And over the years I’ve found it very annoying how often commenters on blogs etc insist on their own interpretation of a word as the only possible one. It becomes a form of imperial subjugation, and given the nature of the internet, generally American imperialism.

    359:

    (CW: brief reference to rape)

    If the word which follows "Elon" is "bullshitting", then I think it's pretty clear I'm not an unalloyed fanboi. I largely agree with your objection to the aw-shucks-just-regular-folks performance of the ultra-elite, and the problematic nature of the para-friendship encouraged by celebrity culture. (I say, having just casually referred to our host as Charlie and comparing my childhood to his a few posts back, never having met him IRL).

    As I hinted @334, Australian informality, which I like and prefer to the starchy alternative, is partly a self-deluding pretence. Class and status war is pursued by other means. It's also something which has evolved over time. The upper class of the 1940's at least aspired to a British, RP accent, U and non-U snobbery, and the formality which went with that, the working class had broad australian accents and informality, and the middle class were, well, in between. Over time, those distinctions have been flattened out. But not eliminated. Australians are as attuned to subtleties of speech as clues to class and education as anyone else. When billionaires talk like truck drivers there's often a little dance of what school did you go to/ what suburb do you live in/ well OK you're the boss but don't imagine you're better than me, boss. A reaction against Anglophilia and the fable of a classless society were central to cultural nationalism (across the political spectrum) in the 60's - 70's. Everyone's ya mate. Supposedly. (But note the default assumption that everyone is male). Nothing is worse than acting like you're better than someone.

    I remember being fascinated and little appalled by the yes ma'am no ma'am deference shown by a couple of backpacking English plasterers to my mother when my parents were doing some renovations in the 80's. But 20 years ago I might still have asked someone much older and than me if they minded being called John rather than Mr. Smith, because some of the older generation might still have expected that. These days, outside of some sort of very formal scenarios (including a lot of customer service, interestingly), first name is the default. In a social setting, if I know you're John but I call you Mr. Smith, I'm either grovelling, or i'm being jovial, or I think you're a dickhead.

    Workplaces are trickier though. Mostly informal, but there are exceptions. The PM was recently called out for referring to a parliamentary staffer who'd allegedly* been raped in parliament, then put through the wringer of a cover up and a cover up of the cover up by his office, as [First name] rather than Ms. [Surname]. It was seen both as insensitive, and as a gaslighting attempt to portray a friendly supportive relationship which definitely doesn't exist, and disrespectful. There's an argument that female polititians tend to be referred to by their first name more often, rather than their title or full name, as a diminishing, belittling tactic. Julia Gillard was notoriously referred to as Ju-Liar by the right.

    Australian politicians mostly like being called by their first name for the same reason Boris or Tony do. We're all equals here, I'm just like you, I'm relatable, I don't regard you as gullible scum. But the dream for our pollies is the nickname. Or at least an abbreviation. Deeply weird PM Scott Morrison has assiduously cultivated an everyman persona which has led him to embrace ScoMo. Opposition leader Anthony Albanese is Albo. (As an aside the government parties are running excruciating ads rhyming "e" sounds with Albanese. "Albanese won't be easy" Presumably there's a demographic of aging bigots out there who need to be reminded he's italian, ooh, scary). First name basis means we're equals. A nickname means I'm a mate you can share a beer with.

    I can't really answer your question about newsreaders, because I haven't really watched TV news in 15 years. But it seems to be an archaic format for an aging audience which both pretends to be a friend in your living room, while being considerably more formal than the society it (mis)represents. The basics of evening news haven't really evolved since the 1980s, and even then it was only a slightly relaxed version of the RP accents of the 1950s broadcasts. Certainly the breakfast "news" shows have embraced first names/ nicknames in a big way.

    *Currently before the courts, so I'm being careful.

    360:

    One of the reasons Amazon, Apple and other online retailers have been eating the lunch of local retailers is that they just haven't bothered to pay local or state sales taxes.

    The national governments seem to have gotten wise to this, at least in some places. Here in Canada if I order something from Amazon I get charged the GST (a federal tax) but rarely or never the PST (Provincial tax). I assume it is because the feds have the teeth and capacity to force Amazon to do that.

    The upshot is that local retailers are at a significant disadvantage to online merchants. On top of carrying storefront costs, they also have to charge local taxes that the big online operators simply ignore.

    361:

    I would agree that this type needs splitting by motivations. It's just that the economics papers I've read don't do that, by and large - they only seem to split by outcome in terms of change in wealth.

    Some do consider behaviour as well, but not all.

    That said, it's still useful as a starting point - it divides the ultra-risk into a group you don't need to worry about too much, a group that's an existential threat if they get their own way, and a group that might or might not be a threat depending on how they handle the "I have too much wealth to get my happiness fix" stage.

    Given that it's only outcome 2 - your "Dragons" - that are a significant and hard to address danger, maybe we only need to name that group? The other two appear in the literature, but usually in comparison to the Dragons, and only to establish that they're "harmless" parasites on society, where the Dragons are a threat.

    362:

    Nothing unusual about being a privately owned corporation.

    Yes. I agree. Others up thread seemed to be conflating that being a corporation meant you were publicly owned.

    When my mother died my other two brothers and I became owners in her house. Sort of. When the brother/executor when to file I insisted very strongly (there were multiple phone calls back and forth) that we form an LLC to own the property. My point, which I finally got through to him, was that if any of us got into a lawsuit (independent of the house) as common law partners in the ownership, our sale of the house could be tied up for years.

    363:

    Pretty much everyone wants stores to mark prices in what customers actually pay, yet this does not happen.

    The biggest issue is with stores or restaurants with multiple locations or even a regional or national presence. The can't put prices which include the local sales tax unless they have more footnotes on a document than actual sales information.

    364:

    that merchants seem to be able to get away with telling prospective customers what things actually cost.

    They don't "get away" with it. It is a feature of a single locaion selling things which are no pre-packaged by someone else.

    Every time I've looked into how you collect and remit such sales taxes in the US it is up to the seller to decide how to do it. Then apply the math so the government gets their cut.

    The problem, as I and others have said is the very very very local variation of the taxable amounts. But a food truck on the street can just collect $10 for a sandwich. Then do the math.

    365:

    Given that it's only outcome 2 - your "Dragons" - that are a significant and hard to address danger, maybe we only need to name that group? The other two appear in the literature, but usually in comparison to the Dragons, and only to establish that they're "harmless" parasites on society, where the Dragons are a threat.

    Alas, the people who turn wealth into power also include everyone from Bill Gates and Dolly Parton to Donald Trump and David Koch. Unfortunately, they're not harmless.

    I do agree with the problem of seeing them only in economic terms, though.

    Hmmm. I'll see if anything pithy term boils out of my subconscious.

    366:

    Desi is a Hindustani word. Seems to be little known in the US.

    We all have Desi Arnaz imprinted in the national consciousness. Who was Cuban. If this doesn't register look up Lucille Ball.

    367:

    Unfortunately, Keynes off-the-cuff remark seems to have become a convenient excuse for greed and short-term thinking, and in that regard, it's doing more harm than good, at least in my humble opinion.

    Interesting. I've not noticed it being used in that way (ick), although I see (e.g. here) that this has been going on for some time. What Keynes actually wrote was "The long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is past the ocean is flat again," which is a plea for more study and better understanding of short-term situations, but not for a neglect of long-term goals.

    On the subject of long-term vs short-term, Keynes apparently didn't say "Markets can remain irrational a lot longer than you and I can remain solvent" - which was coined long after he died - although it is the sort of pithy true thing he might have said.

    368:

    One of the reasons Amazon, Apple and other online retailers have been eating the lunch of local retailers is that they just haven't bothered to pay local or state sales taxes.

    You're both wrong and a decade out of date.

    Apple has ALWAYS collected sales tax in their online store as far as anything I've bought for years.

    Amazon has been collecting US local sales taxes for well over a decade. Their big argument was there was no way for them to accurately calculate the tax for a very long time. No matter how much handwaivium the politicians talked about. Now most all states have a data base where you feed in an address and they give you the rate. If it's wrong it's the locality's problem, not the seller's.

    Apple, I think, just tried and dealt with the errors back in the day.

    369:

    Further surfing reveals that this abuse of Keynes started with Hayek. Not really surprising, Hayek was a foul lying scumbag who can plausibly be blamed for as much suffering and pain as any of the twentieth centuries other great villains.

    370:

    Wikipedia will help. The things to realize are that it pioneered the "shot in front of a live studio audience" sitcom format,

    They did all kinds of technical firsts. Down to matching paint schemes to B&W TV.

    Also some of the things talked about here in the last month that some UK TV shows started they started doing in 1951. A big driver was back in the early 50s most TV was done on the east coast, specifically New York. Shown live in the eastern and central time zones, then a Kinescope shown out west a week later. Which sucked for those out west. And for long term archiving of any show.

    ILL shot each show with 3 film cameras then edited the to the final show. It was show on the same day coast to coast a week later. (Issues which don't occur in skinny (east to west) countries.)

    What I find interesting is the way Wikipedia ignores the cultural aspects of the show. It starts off in 1951 with them living in a sort of run down apartment in an older NYC building. Owned by their friends and neighbors. Each year of the show the apartment gets nicer and nicer then for the last two years they moved to the suburbs in Connecticut. Agree with it or not it was a mirror on the life many in the US wanted to have coming out of the depression and WWII.

    It matched in many ways most of my friends parents' life in the 50s. Even in rural Kentucky.

    It struck a nerve in the US in so many ways.

    371:

    I should include the XKCD cartoon with the guy holding up the sign that reads, "Citation, please". I can point to a lot of companies/families where this is not the case... the Gates' and the Waltons to start with.

    372:

    You wrote: "Perhaps a taxation schema that allowed great civilization-supporting projects like Starship would be appropriate?"

    Oh, but then, for the US, you'd have to get the GOP to give up their hatred of civilian manned space programs (because JFK and the Moon), and FUND NASA, and for NASA to order, from the top down, you will make this happen.

    As opposed to what my late wife, who was an engineer at the Cape for 17 years told me, that a lot of the upper (and non-tech managers) were time-servers, and afraid to put their signature on something that would cost a lot of money and could fail....

    373:

    And I have posted, repeatedly, that speaking as a computer professional, I do NOT see "self-driving cars" as suitable for anywhere but limited access highways, and I've posted links to pics on google maps showing one road near me that zero "self-driving cars" would be able to handle.

    374:

    "You're both wrong and a decade out of date.

    Apple has ALWAYS collected sales tax in their online store as far as anything I've bought for years."

    I'm not wrong. To my knowledge Apple STILL does not collect provincial sales tax here in BC. They only started collecting federal sales tax a few years ago. The one time I bought an Apple device the clear preference was online BECAUSE there was no sales tax applied.

    Through my work I just bought something from Amazon this week. GST (federal) was charged, PST (provincial) was not. I do not pay PST for my Netflix account either.

    I think a more accurate description is that Apple, Amazon, Netflix and every other online merchant charges sales tax where and when they have no choice. In jurisdictions that force them to charge it, they do. If they can't or won't force them, they don't charge it or pay it. If they are bothering with the granularity of city or town level sales taxes I will be impressed.

    In most cases they use the dodge that 'local sales taxes are the responsibility of the consumer'. Which is true, but largely untrackable and unenforceable - and they know it.

    375:

    I agree with him, not you. For a company/corp to "survive", it requires people (it really isn't a big building with a logo on it, having desires). And the people's goal is to make money.

    20 years or so ago, I came up with the ultimate corp (esp. American): I print out a bunch of really pretty stock certificates, and sell them. And any time they're resold, I get a cut. The company is pre-downsized (just the president and CEO, which is me), fully amortized, and has zero costs.

    376:

    JC Penney, a large department store chain, had a CEO who thought it was a great idea, and ran a campaign, "no sales, these are our everyday low prices". It failed. He left, and they went back to higher prices, and sales on items....

    377:

    I'd like Adolf Trump and Rupert Goebbels, please. Yeah, I know, it should be Benito Trump, but no one knows Mussolini's first name.

    378:

    I disagree. I saw first or second run of the show when I was little and stayed home sick from school, and I don't think of them. Btw, desi, I gather, is frequently used in pr0n to refer to Indians.

    379:

    Just to be clear. That was only one of a dozen or more really bad ideas that guy had on how to transform the company. Isn't he the one who came from Apple retail and tried to mac JCPenny into a similar look and feel. [impossibly huge eyeroll]

    380:

    I'd prefer something else... speaking as a dragon (my badge, at cons, reads mark, the Silverdragon, thankyouverrymuch, and has since time immemorial.)

    381:

    Just to add to the confusion, US Southern usage is to refer to someone as Mr. . Now, if you note that this is almost identical to medieval usage for younger son of nobility, you're dead on.

    382:

    "Nowadays East Indian has been replaced with South Asian, just as Oriental has been replaced by Asian (as compared to my childhood). I understand in the UK the usages are Asian and East Asian respectively, but that's gathered from context reading the Guardian and BBC. "

    UK usages: (The following is not in any way definitive, just my impression of the man on the Clapham omnibus might.)

    South Asia denotes what used to be "the Indian subcontinent". East Asia would include Chinas, Japan, Koreas. South-east Asia is roughly Thailand plus all the countries it borders, plus Vietnam and Singapore.

    "East India" or "East Indian" just sounds strange to my ear: "West India" doesn't exist, the "West Indies" notwithstanding, so there's no reason to stress India's east-ness. "If they're from India, they're Indian, dammit."

    384:

    Wow, that was an education. Thank you!

    385:

    "When I see the word "Desi", I immediately think of the Cuban-American actors Desi Arnaz and Desi Arnaz Junior (of "I Love Lucy" and "Desilu Studios" fame). I am not USian!"

    I think you are unusual.

    This came up before (when Charlie wanted to double-check that "Desi Himmler" wouldn't be considered offensive). Like Charlie, I have heard of "I Love Lucy", to the extent of being aware that it was a popular US TV show in the black-and-white era, but I don't know (or care) about anything to do with it beyond that bare fact. I had definitely never heard a whisper of the kind of Desi you cite until all the US commentators got going last time this came up.

    The Indian kind of Desi is a part of everyday life which has been in common use since 200x at least. It crops up in daily newspapers and on shop and restaurant signs and other such public things. It also appears frequently on the internet, for reasons like Indian people talking to each other in English on Indian web sites. (I can't read Indian scripts.) By contrast the US kind ceased to be of current relevance before a lot of people were born, and never did have any relevance in Britain even when it was current in the US, so I'd definitely expect anyone British to be far more likely to interpret the word in the Indian sense (with "uh?" as the next most likely response).

    386:

    I know you think you've established that Desi is not a racial slur in itself, and that may well be the case. But I'm pretty sure if the Daily Mail started calling, idk, Diane Abbott "Black Beria" the commentariat here would rightly be calling it racism.

    387:

    ""East India" or "East Indian" just sounds strange to my ear: "West India" doesn't exist, the "West Indies" notwithstanding, so there's no reason to stress India's east-ness. "If they're from India, they're Indian, dammit."

    That runs into large scale trouble here in North America, for cultural and historical reasons.

    Indigenous folk here were referred to as 'Indians' for about 500 years by the settlers/invaders/genocidaires. The evolution of the etymology is a bit different in the US, but here in Canada using the word 'Indian' to refer to an Indigenous person is ethically and socially on par with the 'N-word'. If I were to refer to any of my indigenous coworkers and friends as 'Indians' I would be rightly and vehemently chastised as using a racist term invented by genocidal invaders.

    Of course, as with the n-word some people have 'reclaimed' it within the oppressed culture. That is not the same as making it 'ok' for whitey to use.

    People with heritage from the Indian subcontinent might also be identified as Indians (this time a bit more correctly), but given that >75 years ago 'India' began dividing into Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Myanmar and so on it isn't particularly correct to place them all under the 'Indian' umbrella because they all happened to be subjugated under the same colonialist Empire. Particularly if you herald from that same colonialist Empire, which exploited that region for a couple of centuries amidst several thousand years of rich history.

    'South Asian' has the advantage of being factually correct as well as not imposing an outdated Colonial categorization and further avoiding confusion with the outdated Colonial description of North American Indigenous persons (or First Nations).

    It turns out that not being unconsciously racist or colonial in the way we talk to and about people takes some ongoing effort and thought. There are no circumstances where I would be comfortable identifying someone as 'Indian'.

    388:

    AlanD2 @ 225: As a veteran who gets most of his health care through the Veterans Administration, I suggest your implication that the VA is incompetent is generally wrong. Studies show that veterans prefer the VA to private health providers.

    My complaint with the VA isn't about the Quality of the health care I get, but about the QUANTITY.

    And that's not the VA's fault. It's Bush/Cheney arbitrarily deciding to fuck over the National Guard soldiers who served in Iraq. I earned FULL 100% VA Medical Benefits with 20 years service in 1995.

    BENEFITS FULLY VESTED I got my "20 Year Letter" in 1995, before serving an additional 12 years after that. During my tour in Iraq Bush/Cheney CUT medical benefits for mobilized National Guard Soldiers ... including career soldiers like me who were already vested for lifetime benefits.

    389:

    "The national governments seem to have gotten wise to this, at least in some places."

    In other places Amazon don't pay national taxes either. Like Europe. If I buy something on Amazon I buy it off the .co.uk site, with prices in pounds, I pay for it by handing over British currency in exchange for an Amazon gift card in a British shop, it's dispatched from a warehouse in Britain, it travels through the British postal service to a British address, and even whoever Amazon originally got it from is often in Britain (a recent example was in the next county). The entire doings is totally British, and apart from the actual Bezos not being British no other country has anything to do with it.

    But they don't pay British taxes because they come up with some stupid bullshit about pretending the whole bloody lot is being done in some garden shed in Luxembourg so they only have to pay Luxembourg taxes, which are peanuts. And the government lets them get away with it.

    They chose Luxembourg because it has lower taxes than anywhere in the EU and it made it easy for them to do the same scam to all the countries in the EU. Somehow it still works in Britain as well even though Britain isn't in the EU any more.

    390:

    I have to agree, for different reasons. Dragons are Welsh, and Heteromeles is risking having the ghost of Owain Glyndwr haunting him.

    391:

    Completely agree. Even the useful stuff comes out fucked up because actually being good stuff isn't the first priority but takes second place at best, and as for the rest...

    392:

    And I have posted, repeatedly, that speaking as a computer professional, I do NOT see "self-driving cars" as suitable for anywhere but limited access highways...

    In the last 80 years, we have gone from no computers to something that is almost good enough to autonomously drive a car. I refer you to Clarke's first law:

    When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, they are almost certainly right. When they state that something is impossible, they are very probably wrong.

    393:

    Amazon do pay some British taxes, despite the Luxembourg stunt.

    The Luxembourg stunt lets Amazon avoid British Corporation Tax (and, IMO, is a loophole that should be closed) - because the profit is generated in Luxembourg, at least on paper, Amazon pay Luxembourg CT and not British CT.

    However, the goods are supplied in the UK from a UK warehouse, and thus Amazon has to pay UK VAT on the goods when sold; VAT accounting is net, not gross, so it gets to reclaim the UK VAT it paid getting the goods into the warehouse, and when goods cross a border for a business, you're allowed to reclaim the VAT paid on one side of the border and pay the appropriate VAT on the other side.

    As well as VAT, Amazon also pays Employer's National Insurance, and business rates. It's just CT that it avoids.

    394:

    During my tour in Iraq Bush/Cheney CUT medical benefits for mobilized National Guard Soldiers ... including career soldiers like me who were already vested for lifetime benefits.

    Sorry. Sounds like the Shrub really did a number on you.

    Today, Florida Senator Rick Scott is out to get me (and a lot of other Americans too). Page 19 in his infamous 11-point plan to “rescue America” says: “All federal legislation sunsets in 5 years. If a law is worth keeping, Congress can pass it again.”

    Given Congress's inability to pass anything these days, this would mean the end of Social Security (among other things) - and the end of my sole source of income... :-/

    395:

    Here in Canada if I order something from Amazon I get charged the GST (a federal tax) but rarely or never the PST (Provincial tax).

    I used to order camera gear from a shop in Alberta (rather than wait to buy it there on vacation) because they only charged GST, not PST. That stopped when Ontario joined the feds and now any orders shipped to Ontario get charged HST (Harmonized Sales Tax) which is a combination of GST and provincial sales tax.

    When I order from Amazon I likewise get charged HST (13% rather than just the GST (5%).

    I think that in order to get the provincial taxes bundled with federal the province needs to harmonize the categories (ie. no differences to GST). Could be wrong about that.

    396:

    Speaking of Keynes and Hayek, an upcoming story: Hart, G. 2022. Barbarians at the Gates: a Parable of Dueling Philosophies. Sci Phi Journal (date TBD).

    Without questioning Charlie's original proposition, a counterpoint to "even trillionnaires" have limited power:

    https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/18/tech/elon-musk-world-hunger-wfp-donation/index.html

    TL;DR: Musk claimed he'd donate $6 billion to solve world hunger if the World Food Programme could tell him precisely how they'd spend the money. They did; he didn't. Whether or not you believe the estimated cost, you could multiply it 10-fold and he could still easily afford the cost if he gave up on owning Twitter. You can see the sociopathy in his choice of where to spend the money.

    Still, I have to ask: Could we get 10 billionnaires together to each donate 10% of that amount? One problem solved, move on to the next one? Could we persuade the world's developed nations to use their much greater economic and political power to accomplish that same end? Probably no. But reframe the question as "how could we..." and interesting possibilities open up. Nationalizing the assets of all billionnaires is a start; mobilizing the nations is better.

    397:

    To be brutally Frank with you, it's easier for you to change your 'nym than it is for me to change my given name. At least you don't have to deal with sharing a name with every fifth psychopath, drug dealer, murder victim, or humorous incompetent that Hollywood sees fit to churn out. My count may be biased, but then again, how often does your name or 'nym get used for an overpriced sausage-adjacent product sold at ball games? And do they ever do your name to stamps?

    398:

    "East India" or "East Indian" just sounds strange to my ear: "West India" doesn't exist, the "West Indies" notwithstanding, so there's no reason to stress India's east-ness. "If they're from India, they're Indian, dammit."

    Don't forget that Indigenous peoples were called "Indians" over here. "Cowboys and Indians" wasn't a game kids played with Kipling-esque characters from the subcontinent…

    Indeed, "Indian" without qualifier was likely to mean "Indigenous" — because they were the most common example. So Indian Schools, Department of Indian and Northern Affairs, Indian Agent, etc…

    399:

    The problem with self driving cars is liability. Not speculating, this has even made it into Wikipedia.

    Basically, if you program a solution to a Trolley Problem into a car, such that the car kills its passenger(s) when faced with a greater number of deaths if it does not do so---you are liable for what the car did.

    And when a car gets hacked, is the company that made the cybersystems liable for the vulnerability? Or not?

    These aren't cheap questions to answer. It's also worth noting that the autonomous car will be programmed to drive in a way that minimizes costs and liability for its maker. Your comfort, safety, and convenience are only relevant to the degree to which they contribute to this goal.

    Comforting, isn't it?

    400:

    ""East India" or "East Indian" just sounds strange to my ear: "West India" doesn't exist, the "West Indies" notwithstanding, so there's no reason to stress India's east-ness."

    Indeed, if you do stress it, it ends up sounding like you're not referring to actual India: "East Indian" signifies "from the East Indies", ie. those places further on round in the direction of Japan that are all lots of islands and long thin peninsulas and oppressive tropical humidity and occasionally some of them go bang.

    401:

    374 - My proposal for testing "self-driving" cars; we put the coders in the vehicles under test, and have their supervisors act as the "obstacles" to be avoided.

    386 - Unusual; maybe, but then I don't consider that an insult anyway.
    My point about "Desi" is that extracting a specific meaning for the name requires knowledge that you can't actually rely on 2 people living all of 50 miles apart having.

    393 - I presume we can add you to the pool of test obstacles referenced above!

    402:

    Robert Prior @ 234:

    The way accident investigations are set up it's the pilot's "fault" if he doesn't recognize the holes in the cheese in time to prevent the accident.

    Not necessarily. NTSB reports are focussed more on prevention than finding someone to blame. Basically "what went wrong" and "how can that be prevented in the future".

    I'm sorry your army experience wasn't the same. "Directed finding" sounds dodgy, frankly. Someone outside the investigation decided what the conclusion was going to be? (And there weren't expert investigators? Not to cast aspersions at you, but an 'expert' who is following a manual step-by-step because they've never done it before doesn't sound like an expert.)

    Yeah, that's the way I saw it too. But "befehl ist befehl" ... as long as THEY are not ordering you to commit war crimes, you DO have to obey orders.

    The Army does things their own way. If some Iraqi insurgent had done us the courtesy of shooting at the damn thing there wouldn't even have been an investigation. If there had been even one, tiny little bullet hole it would have been written off as a "combat loss".

    The only reason there had to be a formal investigation was the little airplane cost so damn much (just slightly over half-a-million) and it didn't get shot down, it crashed.

    403:

    These aren't cheap questions to answer.

    Of course not. But this kind of question applies to most software these days, unfortunately. When sophisticated programs use hundreds of free / commercial components, rely on the operating systems they run on, use data from other programs and the internet, etc., etc., who's to blame when something goes wrong and people die? As usual, we'll likely muddle through it in the courts on a case-by-case basis, with governments stepping in when (un?)necessary.

    404:

    PS: "Directed finding: may be a bit harsh. The Division Safety Officer told me what I needed to write in the report for the "Accident Board" to sign, so the report would conform with Army Regs.

    405:

    I presume we can add you to the pool of test obstacles referenced above!

    See my comment in #404. We are all in the pool of test obstacles these days. (Unless you live isolated in a cave somewhere, of course.) I will happily serve the programming community! :-)

    406:

    You are indeed wrong. I have records of all my purchases from Apple (tax stuff) and every one of them has the appropriate taxes listed; separate GST & PST or combined HST from that short period when BC worked that way.

    And just checking, I see The Bay, llbean, and even Amazon do it too.

    407:

    chuk-g @ 268:

    or a slaughterhouse liver taken from a pig with HIV?

    I feel like if you have a transplant surgeon who can't tell a liver is not human, you have bigger problems than the organ source...

    Well, I was just being Sarky, but recent news articles ...

    Pig Kidneys Transplanted to Human in Milestone Experiment [Scientific American, 20 Jan 2022

    First pig-to-human heart transplant: what can scientists learn? [Nature, 14 Jan 2022]

    UAB announces first clinical-grade transplant of gene-edited pig kidneys into brain-dead human [University of Alabama at Birmingham, 20 Jan 2022]

    Does seem like there's some "research" going on in the field.

    408:

    On the other hand, the discovery of a pig with HIV (or even SIV) would cause major ructions in the biomedical world (and some interest from the police!) There are plenty of porcine viruses to worry about, but HIV is not one of them.

    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5585927/

    https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12934944/

    409:

    Sigh, markup. That should have been Mr. (first name).

    410:

    I bought a laptop online from Apple in 2021 and was charged PST in BC. That may be because I picked it up from a local store, I guess. And the last time I bought something from Amazon.ca I was also charged PST. For amazon.com it's all put together in the 'import fees deposit' line.

    411:

    And I have a Welsh flag hanging in my living room, on the left side of the patio door...

    412:

    Does the Australian norm extend to politicians?

    Yes, kinda. The Prime Munster (at time of writing) is called Scott by his mother but Slomo, Scummo, Scotty from Marketing, and various other things by his employers. His predecessors include Toned Abs (Tony Abbott) and Mal Turncoat. For the most part Jacindamania didn't make it to Australia although she was our preferred prime minister for a while.

    In Aotearoa the first name thing isn't quite so popular, but see Jacindamania and the famous "aunty cindy" video :) Also Helengrad, because Helen Clarke comes across as quite formidable. Before that Ruthenasia and Rogernomics, after the people who spearheaded the imposition of neoliberal economics. But in casual use it's as likely to be full names or last names from what I've seen.

    Also, Australia runs hard on sexism, so the few female politicians get a kicking from a separate direction. Like the USA Australia is not ready for female leadership and that doesn't seem likely to change. But change can happen veru rapidly when it does, it's not entirely out of the question that Albo could become prime minister then have an unfortunate accident and be replaced by Penny Wong (which would give us a queer, female, ethic-asian PM and probably kill Murdoch from apoplexy)

    413:

    So, you think I'm an old computer scientist, eh?

    On the other hand, feel free to find the link I posted a while back (weeks), and tell me how soon a self-driving car is going to handle three narrow lanes, with a car parked on one side, and a bus coming at you. I, as a good human driver, can pass the bus and the parked car. No, there are no lines in the road.

    414:

    If there had been even one, tiny little bullet hole it would have been written off as a "combat loss".

    Surely that could have been arranged, in a war zone…

    415:

    I thought I had your email, but I can't find it. Otherwise, I'd send you a pic with me wearing the large silver dragon cloak pin I made back before St. Ronnie, so that's not going to change.

    On the other hand, thanks - in writing, I always hit a roadblock when I need to name someone. So, next Western (as opposed to European, or Asian, or...) character I need to name, you're it.

    416:

    From Anglonesia the whole "asian" thing just seems weird. We're kind of used to "SE Asia" being the bits north of us, but calling people from Pakistan "Asian" seems as odd as calling people from Russia "Asian". Why are people from Mongolia Asian but not people from Siberia? It's not so much that they often look the same, they often are the same (and not just in the "descended from Genghis Khan" sense).

    A fun direction-related thing yesterday: builder I was talking to kept saying "the left side of the property" and similar things, and it took me a while to work out that he usually regarded North as the correct direction to face but in many contexts was facing West instead because that's the "from the street" direction or something. Meanwhile I use compass directions rounded off because the property is aligned about 10 degrees off an E-W axis. "the west facing room" isn't ambiguous the same way "the front room" is.

    417:

    whitroth said: And I have posted, repeatedly, that speaking as a computer professional, I do NOT see "self-driving cars" as suitable for anywhere but limited access highways

    We were discussing the reasons why investors think Tesla is worth a lot more than people on this blog think it's worth.

    I'd say that few of them have been privileged enough to have benefitted from your careful analysis and so are forced to rely on just getting in the car, accepting the on screen warning that self driving is in beta test and the car must be supervised, and then sitting in the driver's seat and watching the car navigate any US city or highway, negotiate with other drivers, position itself correctly on the road for up coming turns, follow the rules, cope with other drivers and pedestrians not following the rules, during the day, the night, all weathers and do it all while not jiggling the passengers too much.

    Sadly this gives the clearly false impression that Tesla is getting close to having this worked out, and so they're probably thinking the company is worth investing in.

    418:

    And on a related note I recall reading a newspaper report of an inquest into a woman who died of cancer acquired via a transplant organ in the UK. It was a tragic accident: it's forbidden to transplant organs from cancer patients, but this was an undiagnosed cancer of an unrelated tissue -- some cells had migrated into the donor organ, and when it got into a new immunosuppressed body they spread rapidly and killed her. (Discontinuing the immunosuppressants necessitated removing the organ but still didn't get rid of the invasive cancer.)

    419:

    406 - You can, of course, cite the relevant statutes that allow the operation of driverless road vehicles (actually driverless; "platooned" trucks on an autobahn are under the control of "the platoon driver". It is still illegal to operate an Alset not under the control of a human although the automated features will cut in sometimes...) on your national roads network? I can't because driverless and platooned vehicles are still illegal in the UK (Maybe I'm wrong there because an Australian says so? ;-) ) (other than remote piloted vehicles and military units using missiles).

    414 - Thanks; that is just one of the test scenarios I'd like to use. Of course, in this scenario one of my test obstacles may or may not step out from in front of the bus and/or the car...

    417 - Someone from, say, Omsk or Tomsk is definitely Asian; OTOH someone from Mockba or St Petersburg is equally definitely European. And yet they are both Russian.

    420:

    So, you think I'm an old computer scientist, eh?

    Not at all. It's a general comment on the nature of scientists (and people in general). Didn't someone once say scientific progress is made by the death of one venerated scientist at a time? (Paraphrased, of course.)

    But if the shoe fits, feel free to wear it. :-)

    On the other hand, feel free to find the link I posted a while back (weeks), and tell me how soon a self-driving car is going to handle three narrow lanes, with a car parked on one side, and a bus coming at you.

    I'm not particularly interested in today's software problems. We've only been writing computer programs for about 80 years. My guess is that 80 years from now, we wouldn't recognize things - for better or for worse...

    421:

    This is the soft boundary where asian shades into eurasian shades into european? And indo-european languages shade from indo to european?

    422:

    whitroth said: tell me how soon a self-driving car is going to handle three narrow lanes, with a car parked on one side, and a bus coming at you. I, as a good human driver, can pass the bus and the parked car. No, there are no lines in the road.

    This is three narrow lanes, with a car coming at the Tesla, no lanes marked, cars parked on both sides, and the sqeeze was tight enough to need the Tesla to fold its mirrors to fit. So I'm thinking "when" was at least 2 months ago when this video was published?

    See 40 seconds in.

    https://youtu.be/HjJce4jZjEI

    423:

    Y'know, when I got to talk to Vint Cerf, when he gave a talk on campus where I was working, and was the official cheering squad for google, he said that the best results they had were when they took the steering wheel and pedals completely out of the vehicle.

    424:

    Three lanes - more or less, the lane against the hillside where people park is barely wide enough for a car, and there are zero street markings... and a city bus is coming at you.

    I saw what you were talking about. Yep, and so it stops traffic. Which human drivers don't, except for the occasional person who shouldn't have a driver's license, due to lack of judgement.

    425:

    Which human drivers don't, except for the occasional person who shouldn't have a driver's license, due to lack of judgement.

    Judging by the number of auto accidents and deaths in just the U.S., there are lots of people in this "occasional" category... :-(

    426:

    San Francisco police are using autonomous vehicles as mobile surveillance cameras.

    https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/05/surveillance-by-driverless-car.html

    That's quickly becoming less special than it sounds, with aftermarket dash cams supplementing the various built in ones and "black box" recording being ubiquitous.

    Whether that's good or bad depends to a very large extent on how it's used, so for those not convinced that government and corporations have our best interests at heart it's somewhat concerning. This is where a "right to privacy" can be useful, but realistically that often just amounts to "we're not going to tell you how we found out".

    David Brin's obsession with transparency seems like the more useful response in many ways. Acknowledge that surveillance is everywhere all the time and only increasing, but apply it to the people collecting the data as well, then publicise that. If Elon Musk doesn't want his every move tracked in real time let him come up with a way to prevent that and force him to tell everyone exactly how he proposes to do it.

    427:

    there are lots of people in this "occasional" category

    And there are lots more who emphatically agree with their government that "some of you will die and that is a price I am willing to pay", whether the killing is done by cars, guns, covid or police officers.

    Driving is one of those things that is often done badly even by highly trained professionals. Sure, they're better on the whole than amateurs, but they're still terrible compared to people like train drivers. Not least because there's often no good action to take when an emergency arises (the trolley problems besetting AI drivers).

    428:

    To be brutally Frank with you

    I see what you did there, Mr. Landis.

    429:

    "I don't consider that an insult anyway."

    Good. It wasn't intended that you should.

    430:

    And there are lots more who emphatically agree with their government that "some of you will die and that is a price I am willing to pay", whether the killing is done by cars, guns, covid or police officers.

    Sad but true... :-(

    431: 417: The one like that that drives me nuts is people going on about rivers having "left banks" and "right banks" when in fact they've got two of each at the same time and neither as well. So much clearer and less confusing to call them east/west sides, or French/German sides, or some other obvious and appropriate differentiator. 428: I'm not sure it's even possible to meaningfully compare car drivers and train drivers. Aside from the trivial "makes the vehicle go" aspect, the two activities have so little in common that it's arguable that one or other of them should not be called "driving", in the same way that making a sailing boat go isn't (an activity which is about as different from either as they are from each other).
    432:

    I thought I had your email, but I can't find it. Otherwise, I'd send you a pic with me wearing the large silver dragon cloak pin I made back before St. Ronnie, so that's not going to change. On the other hand, thanks - in writing, I always hit a roadblock when I need to name someone. So, next Western (as opposed to European, or Asian, or...) character I need to name, you're it.

    You can always reach me at my pseudonym at gmail.

    As for the tuckerization, I'm awed and thrilled. Thank you! I can but hope that my namesake advances the story in a frankly appropriate way.

    433:

    I think the correct solution to Trolley problem: Drive in a way which never presents such dilemma to begin with. I am rather amazed how aware my Tesla is of the nearby objects, and how it adjusts speed (when in self-driving mode) so it always has room to come to a stop. Sometimes it means my Tesla suddenly slows down for no apparent reason; then I realize there is a person walking on the shoulder.

    Did “kill myself or the pedestrian” dilemma ever happen to a driver who stayed within speed limit, and was fully aware of every pedestrian and every car around? Even if a pedestrian suddenly wanders off onto road, drivers like that do not hit them, nor kill themselves. At worst, they get rear-ended.

    434:

    So far as direction-finding goes, my favorite local form was used by the Indians of Northwestern California (Hupa, Yurok, Karuk) who lived along the Klamath, Eel, and other rivers.

    Their language has two directions: upstream and downstream. The thing about the Klamath ranges and the whole northern coastal mountains is that they're quite rugged (one book about the area is called The Klamath Knot), so rivers don't run straight. It's often overcast, and there are lots of big trees. Direction-finding from the sky is kind of a waste of time (heck mountains block GPS reasonably well in places). And if you head straight in any direction, you're eventually going to have to detour around something and go in some other direction.

    In this environment, following streams up or down really is the easiest way to navigate, on the ground level at least. I don't know what they did when they got to the ocean and had to turn left or right, but in normal life, you could sit on someone's upstream side, walk to the house at the downstream end of the village, and so forth.

    It's a fun contrast between that and Australian aboriginal languages that build compass direction in as part of each active verb. Country does make a big difference.

    435:

    I'm regularly reminded that a lot of this is about communication. You need common referents.

    As when I lived with an alcoholic who operated on the premise that since there's a pub every 500m in Sydney the obvious way to navigate was from pub to pub. "Go to the Fox and Chicken, turn left then go down past the Drunk Politician and it's just before the Three Bangles". Somehow we never managed to share directions with each other.

    For me it's about my almost complete freedom from street names. Which in Australia makes a certain amount of sense due to a combination of every suburb having the same 10 street names, and even when it's the same street with the same name they restart the numbering in every suburb. Forget number 12,345 King Street, let's have 24 different "number 12, King Street" just in Sydney. And then add in that street signs are expensive so they're often one of the cost-saving measures on bike paths which means they're not there even if I cared about them.

    Part of talking to others is using language they understand, ideally in a compatible way to you.

    436:

    I think the correct solution to Trolley problem: Drive in a way which never presents such dilemma to begin with.

    This sounds good, but I sadly have to doubt if it's possible in the real world. Sure - it helps. But will it prevent every possible accident?

    Even if a pedestrian suddenly wanders off onto road, drivers like that do not hit them, nor kill themselves.

    If a young kid runs at full speed from between two parked cars and winds up 5 feet in front of your legal-speed vehicle, I think you and / or the kid are in trouble. I doubt this is the only reasonable counter-example people could come up with...

    437:

    Hayek was a foul lying scumbag who can plausibly be blamed for as much suffering and pain as any of the twentieth centuries other great villains.

    I'm pleased to see this expression of my own thoughts about Hayek coming out in someone else's words.

    438:

    I'm not sure it's even possible to meaningfully compare car drivers and train drivers.

    But a lot of the reason for that is design decisions that make one task impossible to do well. Where we see train lines running down streets we also see a lot more crashes, it's just that since it's obvious (to most of us) that the train/tram driver can't swerve around obstacles people are more likely to blame the other vehicle.

    I'm not saying that stops people driving into trains, or especially trams, as the multitudinous videos on youtube attest.

    The meaningful comparison, IMO, is "deaths per million ton-kilometres or passenger-kilometres" (acknowledging that the car driver is often a passenger (and not just in the sarcastic "the car hit a tree"... "what were you doing at the time?" way))

    439:

    If a young kid runs at full speed from between two parked cars and winds up 5 feet in front of your legal-speed vehicle, I think you and / or the kid are in trouble. I doubt this is the only reasonable counter-example people could come up with...

    True, it is not the only reasonable counter-argument, but it shares one property with all such counter-arguments -- no human driver would handle it any better. It is disingenuous to argue against autonomous cars on the basis of situations no human could possibly solve.

    440:

    Also, at least some self-driving cars have sonar and can "see" a child between parked cars, which human drivers cannot.

    441:

    Hetero said: It's a fun contrast between that and Australian aboriginal languages that build compass direction in as part of each active verb. Country does make a big difference.

    Didn't know that. Another Australian Aboriginal thing I'm clueless about. (which is pretty typical of an Australian occupier)

    I was surpised to find that the Eastern Polynesian languages don't seem to differentiate between "coming" and "going". It's just a word for moving. "Haere" in te reo Māori. Thinking about direction verbs and Country, a language based on small islands, that makes more sense.

    442:

    Whitroth said: I saw what you were talking about. Yep, and so it stops traffic. Which human drivers don't, except for the occasional person who shouldn't have a driver's license, due to lack of judgement.

    I'm very definitely that occasional person who shouldn't have a driver's license. I'm ashamed to admit that when I'm squeezing through a gap between an oncoming vehicle and a parked car, and the gap is narrow enough to need to fold the mirrors in so I can fit... (it pains me to admit my failings in public like this) I slow down and I stop traffic.

    There I said it. I feel a bit better for having got that terrible shame off my chest.

    443:

    These days I call the U.S. Supreme Court the "Supreme Clown Posse."

    444:

    Also, at least some self-driving cars have sonar and can "see" a child between parked cars, which human drivers cannot.

    And a lot of human drivers are so inattentive (or distracted) that they wouldn't see the child even if the kid were visible to them.

    445:

    There I said it. I feel a bit better for having got that terrible shame off my chest.

    I detect certain amount of sarcasm in your post...

    446:

    Awful show about a ditzy woman, put on by some of the most awesome performers ever to grace a screen, the effect kinda like watching Pavorati singing the latest awful top-forty dance hit.

    Also, Lucille Ball is one of the people responsible for the original Star Trek, which was filmed at Desilu* Studios.

    • Desi and Lucy
    447:

    *I was surpised to find that the Eastern Polynesian languages don't seem to differentiate between "coming" and "going". It's just a word for moving. "Haere" in te reo Māori. Thinking about direction verbs and Country, a language based on small islands, that makes more sense. *

    It's "hele" in Hawaiian, but while come and go are "hele", move is "ne'e."

    Hawaiian also has this useful set of directions that have passed into Island English: mauka: uphill (towards the mountain) and makai: towards the sea, downhill. On relatively small volcanic islands, these directions work pretty well, and they get used regularly on the evening news.

    448:

    It's the lowest form of humour, so a perfect fit for me.

    449:

    Move is neke in te reo Māori, but I'm not quite sure what context you'd apply it. The ' often gets swapped for k and the l often gets swapped for r. So ne'e = neke.

    My reo is barely beyond "hello" and "goodbye" so I don't know the corresponding words for uphill direction or downhill direction but I bet they exist.

    450:

    That's excellent. Reminds me rather of the "up" and "down" convention on British railways, since both are used for the same kind of navigation - basically it doesn't matter a toss what the actual directions on the ground may be, all that matters is what sequence of places you get to if you start off going that route. I think there's at least one river somewhere around that area which goes round in a spiral, and not many other systems would handle that so well.

    451:

    Did “kill myself or the pedestrian” dilemma ever happen to a driver who stayed within speed limit, and was fully aware of every pedestrian and every car around?

    It has happened to truck drivers when faced with badly-driven vehicles.

    Decades ago my brother told me of an acquaintance who drove a logging truck over a cliff. A family had parked in the emergency lane for a picnic. He and his truck would have been OK plowing through the family, but he didn't…

    (Can't find the incident online, but here's similar stupidity with a happier ending.)

    https://www.drive.com.au/news/driver-parks-car-in-truck-emergency-lane-to-walk-dog-fined-272/

    Last decade there was a big accident near me — street racers cut off a trucker, who chose to roll his trailer into the ditch (which killed him) rather than plow through the guardrail into oncoming traffic.

    https://www.ihsa.ca/pdfs/magazine/volume_14_Issue_1/David-Virgoes-Story.pdf

    452:

    And a lot of human drivers are so inattentive (or distracted)

    So true. If only we had laws about driving while using a cell phone… :-/

    As a pedestrian I really dislike tinted glass, because it can be impossible to see if the driver is actually looking at the road or is obsessed with their lap*.

    *Or possibly having a quick nap.

    453:
    a trucker, who chose to roll his trailer into the ditch (which killed him) rather than plow through the guardrail into oncoming traffic.

    That person was a hero.

    A business park I used to work in was usually deserted after dark - nobody lived there, no businesses were open, etc. So naturally, the local youth used it as a speedway after dark.

    One morning I was driving in to work and there was detritus on the road and a pole down, moved to the side of the road. The cause? It turned out some kid lost control of his car and hit the pole with great force.

    He was celebrating his 18th birthday.

    454:

    Well, I cheated, because Google has a Hawaiian translator. It's a bit crap, because makai apparently also means police.

    Have fun.

    455:

    That's not my perception Mr. Barnes. Colonizing at a distance accessible in a matter of days, or maybe weeks, is at least an order of magnitude less difficult (probably several orders) than at a range requiring months of travel. In Earth-range space, one can (a) get emergency parts delivered in a short time, rather than requiring planning and shipping on a years-long cycle, and (b) a colony in this range can begin as a part-time effort, whereas a Martian colony is almost certainly a matter of permanent continuous residency, i.e. requiring robust and permanent support from gear currently on hand.

    I understand the comment about volatiles, but putting on my system engineering hat, and postulating the existence of a Starship fleet of the size proposed by Musk, I'd much rather be tasked with implementing a robotic volatiles retrieval operation (to fetch light elements from old cometary cores, the pole craters of the Moon, or carbonaceous asteroids) than I would the assignment of building a self-maintaining continuous presence on the surface of Mars. To begin with, a Martian colony requires almost the same capability in element collection that the Lagrangian colony needs, albeit with a (perhaps) easier scoop-it-up piece of the puzzle, but the requirements build from there in a dizzying, almost endless stack. The prospect of managing that degree of complexity and interdependence gives me the willies.

    456:

    Musk asked how they would use $6billion to help solve world hunger. The answer he got was to give $6billion worth of food and vouchers to people.

    My take was that Musk was looking for how they would invest $6billion to provide a more permanent solution than just a one-time gift of food.

    457:

    I suggested a project run from taxation only as a thought exercise. I've watched/worked with NASA for too many years to believe they'd have a remote chance in hell in succeeding in such an endeavor. I could, perhaps, be convinced that this is primarily a feature of how NASA was implemented, and that by starting over with a clean sheet of paper might result in a better chance, but I don't really believe that either. Nor do I think it is purely a matter of money; if it were, I think Bezos would be demonstrating better results in his effort to achieve more or less the same ends that Musk professes. Say what you will about Musk as a human being granted the powers conferred by immense, concentrated riches (and I actually think that he's demonstrated himself to be a huge untrustworthy creep on multiple fronts as far as that goes), but he has demonstrated some special refined talent as (for want of a better term) a man with a superpower in project engineering. Presuming he can field Starship with the degree of success he's already demonstrated with Falcon 9, then he will enable a human capability approaching the significance of other evolutionary milestones in terms of continuing human existence; climbing out of the oceans, opposable thumbs, or language. And since no one else has come even close to this achievement, I'm forced to wonder if there is some sort of utility of a system that bestow fractional chunks of the world's wealth at the command of a single, motivated/fixated individual. Sure, I'd like to see it happen in a more humanistic process, but what we have so far hadn't led us to this point, so I'll take the one that did, even if I must simultaneously bemoan its drawbacks.

    458:

    The US convention is in some ways not dissimilar: railways run either north/south or east/west, throughout their entire length. The choice of directions usually seems to bear at least some relation to the geographical situation, but not always, so you see terms such as "railroad north".

    In particular, the Southern Pacific used the convention that "west" meant "the shortest way to San Francisco", whichever compass direction that actually was, which I suppose is similar to the Midland deciding that "up" was "the shortest way to Derby".

    459:

    The whole $6bn/Musk/WFP thing was prompted by some idiots claiming that $BILLIONAIRE (may or may not have been Musk, can't remember) could end world hunger for $6bn. I don't remember who started it, but it was a talking point for a few weeks. $6bn is nearly 2 orders of magnitude less than the lowest plausible estimates for that job. Then Musk tweeted "If WFP can describe on this Twitter thread exactly how $6B will solve world hunger, I will sell Tesla stock right now." The responses were broadly along the lines of "here are ways to spend $6bn to help reduce world hunger". Which isn't the same thing at all.

    For the record, it would of course be an excellent idea to end world hunger, and to tax the zottas for the funds to do that.

    [[ fixed broken link - mod ]]

    460:

    I don't follow. What's wrong with "left bank" and "right bank"? For example, the left bank of the Thames in London is the one with St Pauls, the Houses of Parliament, etc - broadly the northern bank. The left bank of the Seine in Paris is the one with the Eiffel Tower - broadly the SW bank.

    Rivers have a preferred direction of flow. Face downstream and the left bank is on your left.

    461:

    CharlesW noted: "Musk asked how they would use $6billion to help solve world hunger. The answer he got was to give $6billion worth of food and vouchers to people. My take was that Musk was looking for how they would invest $6billion to provide a more permanent solution than just a one-time gift of food."

    Fair enough. But don't forget that that one-time gift potentially lets the recipient store that food against future need or consume it immediately if their diet is inadequate and thereby avoid or delay a nutrient deficiency illness.

    The larger point is that $6 billion would buy an awful lot of solutions that would be long-term benefits: pumps for water, help establishing permaculture, teaching people to compost manure and crop residues for use as fertilizer, buying a shared mechanized plow, building usable roads so farmers can bring food to market, building secure/rat-proof/water-proof storage facilities, etc. etc. The phrase "gifts that keep giving" comes to mind.

    Musk wouldn't ever notice the money had gone missing.

    462:

    Nick Barnes wondered: "I don't follow. What's wrong with "left bank" and "right bank"?

    It relies on the assumption of shared context that isn't necessarily shared. If I'm facing upstream and you're facing downstream, the meanings we infer from left and right are completely different. You're assuming the direction refers to "facing downstream", following the flow, which is plausible -- but an equal plausible interpretation (at least to a non-hydrologist) is facing upstream towards the source. Where the difference is meaningful, it's better to err on the side of clarity.

    I deal with this kind of issue (the assumption of shared assumptions) a lot in my work, since I edit scientific manuscripts for people who don't have English as their native tongue. For example, a lot of my Chinese authors include Taiwan as just another Chinese province, presumably because treating it as an independent nation would land them in hot water with the government.

    463:

    " There are no circumstances where I would be comfortable identifying someone as 'Indian'."

    Then how do you refer to the billion-plus citizens of the Republic of India?

    464:

    My first thought was that if you've tied up on a pile mooring, you're always facing into the current, which is always upstream, if you're above the reach of tides to influence currents (like the Thames above Teddington Weir). Of course, if you're drifting in a coracle, Nick's version makes perfect sense. So it's definitely a matter of convention, which is another word for the shared assumptions you describe.

    465:

    It has the same ambiguity as "left" and "right" onboard a ship - is it "left" and "right" when facing upstream or downstream? For ships, we resolved that in English with larboard (later port) and starboard, which are not the normal English direction words, and thus people are aware that they have special definitions (larboard/port is left when facing the bow, starboard is right when facing the bow).

    466:

    "For ships, we resolved that in English with larboard (later port) and starboard"

    No you didn't, you just imported the vocabulary of somebody who had a boat :-)

    "Starboard" comes from norse "stjórnborði" meaning "Steering board", the side of the boat with the rudder(-oar).

    The other side was called "bakborði", "Behind board", the side where you saw the backside of the ruddersman.

    467:

    "so you see terms such as "railroad north"."

    AT&T long lines had a similar convention for their facilities such as toll-lines and microwave-links: Everything in a particular facility would be labeled E/W or N/S depending on the main direction of the entire facility, even if individual parts at times had very different directions.

    468:

    Interesting And very hopeful news from Russia - because it's a "Special military operation" & cough not a war cough so that RU-soldiers can go "Can't, shan't, won't" & it appears to be spreading.
    Causes other, interesting, logistical & troop-supply issues as well.
    What fun!

    469:

    That was implied by "resolved in English" - we have always stolen words from other languages in preference to inventing our own :-)

    470:

    I was about to say, surely for a river it makes more sense to refer to "port bank" and "starboard bank". That way you end up with a huge pile of boats at the head of the river and the problem is obvious to everyone :)

    471:

    432 - It's quite simple; when moving downstream the left bank is on your left...

    434 - Here's a fictional version - Phantom 309

    I was out on the West Coast, tryin' to make a buck
    And things didn't work out, I was down on my luck
    Got tired a-roamin' and bummin' around
    So I started thumbin' back East, toward my home town.

    Made a lot of miles, the first two days
    And I figured I'd be home in week, if my luck held out this way
    But, the third night I got stranded, way out of town
    At a cold, lonely crossroads, rain was pourin' down.

    I was hungry and freezin', done caught a chill
    When the lights of a big semi topped the hill.
    Lord, I sure was glad to hear them air brakes come on
    And I climbed in that cab, where I knew it'd be warm.

    At the wheel sit a big man, he weighed about two-ten
    He stuck out his hand and said with a grin
    "Big Joe's the name", I told him mine
    And he said: "The name of my rig is Phantom 309."

    I asked him why he called his rig such a name
    He said: "Son, this old Mack can put 'em all to shame
    There ain't a driver, or a rig, a-runnin' any line
    Ain't seen nothin' but taillights from Phantom 309."

    Well, we rode and talked the better part of the night
    When the lights of a truck stop came in sight
    He said: "I'm sorry son, this is as far as you go
    'Cause, I gotta make a turn, just on up the road."

    Well, he tossed me a dime as he pulled her in low
    And said: "Have yourself a cup on old Big Joe."
    When Joe and his rig roared out in the night
    In nothin' flat, he was clean out of sight.

    Well, I went inside and ordered me a cup
    Told the waiter Big Joe was settin' me up
    Aw!, you coulda heard a pin drop, it got deathly quiet
    And the waiter's face turned kinda white.

    Well, did I say something wrong? I said with a halfway grin
    He said: "Naw, this happens every now and then
    Every driver in here knows Big Joe
    But son, let me tell you what happened about ten years ago.

    At the crossroads tonight, where you flagged him down
    There was a bus load of kids, comin' from town
    And they were right in the middle, when Big Joe topped the hill
    It could have been slaughter, but he turned his wheel.

    Well, Joe lost control, went into a skid
    And gave his life to save that bunch of kids
    And there at that crossroads, was the end of the line
    For Big Joe and Phantom 309

    But, every now and then, some hiker'll come by
    And like you, Big Joe'll give 'em a ride
    Here, have another cup and forget about the dime
    Keep it as a souvenir, from Big Joe and Phantom 309!"

    And I'll end by observing that Robert Prior has quoted some real life examples in 452.

    436 Para 2 - This would also work pretty well in large parts of Glasgow, and indeed I have given someone the directions "down that way, turn right at Gallus, keep going to the Rubiyat and turn 90 right.

    451 - OTOH, without knowing where the reference station that "up" and "down" are taken from is, the directions are meaningless, and if you have 2 reference stations on the same line?

    472:

    And my brother's acquaintance, who chose to go over a cliff rather than kill an innocent family (that had stupid parents).

    In one of the Mentour Pilot videos I watched, he's examining a crash on a repositioning flight caused by a combination of pilot stupidity and poorly-written checklists. At the end the voice recorder showed the pilots realized there was no way they couldn't avoid crashing, and trying to reach a location where they wouldn't kill people on the ground. Hörnfeldt remarks that this is what they are trained to do.

    Which reminded me of a crash where an elderly general aviation pilot experiencing an engine failure decided that a schoolyard would be a good place to land. During recess.

    https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/pilot-survives-freak-landing-in-tree-1.176405

    I haven't been able to find a TSB report of the incident. What I heard from a teacher at the school (my school was a block away) was that apparently her engine failed and she didn't want to crash so she decided to land in the school field during recess. The story says she pulled up when she noticed children playing, but from what I saw it looked like the plane hit the tree before it got to the field, not after (although I suppose it might have turned during impact).

    An acquaintance who was a pilot was quite negative about the pilot — he said that the first thing you learn in flight school is that as a pilot you have a responsibility not to endanger passengers and bystanders, and that any decent pilot would crash rather than do that.

    473:

    Robert Prior said: any decent pilot would crash rather than do that.

    One of my helicopter instructors went that way. Was hovering too low over a school yard while the passenger took photos of something else. Tail rotor gearbox failed. He managed to glide the aircraft away from the school, but the result was a heavy landing which ruptured the high mounted fuel tanks and he was incinerated.

    474:

    First para: Geoff Hart @ 463 puts it in a nutshell. See also Moz @ 471 - referring to a convention which has a straightforward rational basis; harbour buoyage is arranged to be the right way round in the direction where it's most likely to be a matter of life and death to get it right, whereas the convention you are invoking is pretty arbitrary, as Damian @ 465 demonstrates.

    For extra fun and games, there are odd rivers here and there which are bidirectional for reasons that have nothing to do with tides...

    Final para: This is true. But I was thinking of their similarity as responses to a situation where compass directions are irrelevant and sometimes even backwards, and connectivity is all that matters.

    475:

    "harbour buoyage is arranged to be the right way round in the direction where it's most likely to be a matter of life and death to get it right."

    Is that in IALA region A or B?

    Which is to say: whichever answer you choose, half the world disagrees with you.

    I'd say that means "the convention you are invoking is pretty arbitrary".

    476:

    I certainly wasn't thinking of comparing car and train drivers in a direct physical way by having them both perform in the same space!

    I was thinking mainly of the differences which are less obvious than the "trains don't steer" kind of thing. For instance car drivers don't have to know by heart a book of rules which makes the Bible look like a pamphlet and also keep up to date with the telephone directories of what alterations and changes there are this week; or, car drivers are operating as individuals each making their own decisions on the spot moment by moment on how not to hit each other, train drivers are operating as elements of a collaborative system which makes decisions at least minutes in advance over hundreds of miles of interconnecting track and usually don't even see the other trains they're not hitting.

    477:

    It relies on the assumption of shared context that isn't necessarily shared. If I'm facing upstream and you're facing downstream, the meanings we infer from left and right are completely different. You're assuming the direction refers to "facing downstream", following the flow, which is plausible -- but an equal plausible interpretation (at least to a non-hydrologist) is facing upstream towards the source. Where the difference is meaningful, it's better to err on the side of clarity.

    It's domain-specific terminology. Most of the time when you come across such terminology, you recognise that you don't know its precise meaning, and you go and find out what the meaning is. Rather than picking a geographic direction (which is quite often wrong a small distance away, given how som many rivers wind around), it uses a direction relative to the river's flow, and assumes you're moving in the same direction.

    Contrariwise, I've never got on with the terminology for winds - a northerly wind comes from the north? Oh well

    479:

    About half of (US) train engineers have been in control of a train that killed someone on the tracks. Nowhere near fifty percent of car drivers have. There's about 40K engineers and 1000ish railroad deaths per year (not all necessarily in the hit by train sense)

    I actually don't think that's a fair comparison, because operating a train and operating a car are so far from being similar except in the broadest strokes, from the actual task to the number of people doing it.

    (It appears that train deaths are less common per capita in the EU, but they're not ridiculously different)

    480:

    Having killed someone's (straying) dog in this way, I have some sympathy for the argument. But, frankly, the reaction speed of the vehicle is going to be quicker than mine.

    481:

    "Then how do you refer to the billion-plus citizens of the Republic of India? "

    As South Asian unless directed otherwise. I lack the experience or knowledge to identify at a glance if someone is from India, Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Myanmar, or any of the umptillion provinces and cultures within and across those national boundaries.

    What do I call a Sikh from Punjab without offending them? Indian doesn't really work, Pakistani certainly doesn't. Punjabi might work, but that also makes assumptions about their political position. How do I know I am speaking with our about a Sikh - while many wear the turban and beard, many do not. What about a Hindu or Muslim from Punjab? How about a Tamil from South India, or maybe a Tamil from Sri Lanka?

    I think calling some people 'Indian' is about on par with calling someone from Dublin 'British', historically and currently. It has some technically accurate history involved, but there are a lot of excellent reasons not to do it if you pay attention.

    482:

    Oh, golly, yes, I regard asking someone for directions as an absolute last resort because I know I won't have a fucking clue what they're talking about and have a much higher probability of getting every decision point on the route they describe wrong than of getting it right. And if someone asks me for directions, no matter how well I know the route they want I find it next to impossible to describe it without them looking all blank and baffled every time I try and give them a reference mark.

    I'm not even sure how I do recognise my way about, but I don't think I even classify objects in the field of view much beyond broad properties of colour/shape/position, and I am certain that any things which are deliberate attempts by humans to convey some item of information (whether navigational or otherwise) simply don't register at all. If someone asks me for directions I may know the route like the back of my hand, but a raw dump of that knowledge in verbal form would be an unbroken sequence of stuff like "and then it's all space here and you look right and then you go left down where the green things go different but you can't see it", and even translating my non-verbal abstract picture into that kind of deficient language is a struggle. Trying to remember what things there are that I can describe recognisably to other people brings up next to no results, and the results it does bring up are along the lines of "there's a grey thing but I don't know what it is, and it's got something on the front of it but I don't know what it says".

    If someone's trying to describe a route to me the same thing happens the other way round. "Turn left past the Charles II" is likely to have me going up and down the street and passing it about ten times before I realise it's not just part of the shop next door in the other half of the building; possibly I might have spotted it if they'd called it "that white thing", but more likely it'll be a completely nondescript and undistinguished place that barely registers as anything more than "not road".

    Street names are entirely useless not because of duplication - unless the town is unreasonably large they are nearly all unique - but because they're invisible. The signs are small enough to be hard to read from a distance to begin with, and then they're either down at waist level with people walking in front of them, or parked cars, or bins, or bits of plant hanging over them, or else they're 10 metres up on the wall with 50 years of muck on them so you crick your neck and still can't read it. And they are located on the corners of the street, ie. at junctions, where all my attention is on moving obstacles at ground level and the last thing I want to do is go peering through people's legs. So people can be going on about Berro Street and baffling me entirely because I have no idea I've been walking down it every day for the past ten years.

    483:

    But, frankly, the reaction speed of the vehicle is going to be quicker than mine.

    I was merely pointing out that there will be times when bad things happen no matter how fast the reaction speed of the driver or the vehicle.

    484:

    Those are extremely rare edge cases, and edge cases make bad laws. When people act in a blatantly suicidal manner, there should be a limit to how far the laws (and the algorithms) will go to protect them from their own stupidity. And yes, I realize that the children of the family which decided to picnic on the shoulder of a mountain road, were not at fault. Some things just cannot be helped.

    485:

    My proposal for testing "self-driving" cars; we put the coders in the vehicles under test, and have their supervisors act as the "obstacles" to be avoided

    Actually some do. Or used to do so. Back in the early 80s when electronics where starting to become more and more involved in engine controls in the US to meet pollution standards, engineers and others at the development facilities could have use of test cars for no cost.

    Of course, as one intern told me, you had to be careful. At times you might accelerate to merge into 60mph traffic and the car would refuse to go faster than 45 for a few critical seconds. So you had to be careful.

    486:

    The one like that that drives me nuts is people going on about rivers having "left banks" and "right banks" when in fact they've got two of each at the same time and neither as well.

    That gets done outside of Paris?

    487:

    Forget number 12,345 King Street, let's have 24 different "number 12, King Street" just in Sydney.

    New York City has an interesting way of numbering some of the major streets.

    488:

    About half of (US) train engineers have been in control of a train that killed someone on the tracks.

    How many of those were suicides? Jumping in front of a train is a time-honoured* was of doing oneself in. Most of the deaths on the TTC subway have been suicides.

    *If that's the right term.

    489:

    Hell, yes. I, personally, would be perfectly happy to have to retake a driving test every ten years, or, now that I'm older, every five. But the US, people think they're entitled to drive, whether or not they're capable.

    490:

    As a pedestrian I really dislike tinted glass, because it can be impossible to see if the driver is actually looking at the road or is obsessed with their lap*.

    Driving next to a lady in an SUV doing 40+mph when I glanced over and saw she had her Day Runner (remember those) on the steering wheel flipping though the pages. I decided to break the speed laws and put myself in FRONT of her. Lane were also only 9 or 10 feet wide instead of the normal minimum of 11 feet.

    492:

    It turned out some kid lost control of his car and hit the pole with great force.

    4 of them in a jeepish thing did that in front of my house last summer. Claimed to be doing the speed limit and a wheel locked up. But no skid marks on the road. No one hurt. Jeepish things sort of messed up. New power telecom pole had to be put in. This pole was on feed the substation loop so it was a bit tricky to replace it while live.

    493:

    Thanks. I looked him up, and I see that wikipedia claims he supported "classical liberalism".

    Then it says he was with the Austrian School, and sometimes with the Chicago School, aka Milton Freidman/trickle down economics.

    494:

    Train hitting person stats are heavily skewed by suicides, in the UK it’s around 10:1 suicides to genuine accidents. The London underground alone gets 50-100 per year, while Network Rail gets 250 ish. I would expect US stats to be broadly similar.
    By contrast car hitting person stats tend to be driver error most of the time.

    495:

    If someone needs to fold their mirrors in, they should have pulled over to the side to let the other car pass.

    496:

    Some states (actually, including TX) have laws that you can't have it so tinted that, say, a cop can't see in as they're walking up to your car.

    I hate them in parking lots, when I'm trying to see if some idiot's doing 30 while I'm backing out.

    497:

    Disagree. If the President were to say "we're going to do this", and the head of NASA says, "we're going to do this NOW, the time-servers will crumple... and the rest of the people, who are there because they want to be part of NASA, will get the job done.

    Trust me, I've worked in enough private companies that take longer than anything in government, and I've worked in/subcontracted for government, and worked with a lot of folks that the work meant something important to them.

    498:

    But the US, people think they're entitled to drive, whether or not they're capable.

    A friend whose parents lived in Maryland said people could call the state police and request a driving test for someone else anonymously. He was about to do it with his parents before he convinced them to move near him.

    499:

    When I moved back to Chicago, after being in FL for years, they had added effective speakers in the el cars. Until someone explained, I had no idea what left side or right side meant (it's in the direction of motion), and then it made perfect sense.

    500:

    Those are extremely rare edge cases, and edge cases make bad laws.

    When I was (briefly) a software tester, edge cases were what we used to test the code.

    Do you program your self-driving vehicle to save the life of driver/passenger by killing others outside the vehicle? Or do you program it to go over the cliff and avoid a collision?

    I understand the situation is different in other parts of the world, but North America seems to treat driving as a right and anything that gets in the way as an infringement on personal freedom.

    Laws on driving seem to lean heavily in the direction of 'tragic accident, couldn't be helped' and 'no harm, no foul' when it comes to people operating motor vehicles. If you're going to unintentionally kill someone, your best bet is to do it while operating a motor vehicle because you will likely suffer less penalty than most other ways — even if you have a record of near-misses in the past.

    501:

    Reminds me of a friend my first wife an I had, who drove (when we didn't). You never told her to make a right or left, you had to tell her "driver" or "passenger"....

    502:

    I wouldn't. Not because I object on principle, but the modern UK test has introduced a hell of a lot of crap - like, you MUST be able to use a prat nav. My deafness makes those excessively distracting, and I never use them.

    503:

    My proposal for testing "self-driving" cars; we put the coders in the vehicles under test, and have their supervisors act as the "obstacles" to be avoided.

    In the heyday of railroad construction, when one in four bridges failed under load, it was apparently not uncommon for the bridge designer and the higher-ups in the construction crew to have to stand under the bridge while a fully-loaded train was driven across before the train crews would accept the bridge was properly designed and built. The engineers' attitude was basically "if you won't trust it, why should I?".

    504:

    When I was about six, my father was really, really late coming home from work. Turned out he'd been driving some co-workers home, at dusk, and some stupid kid ran out in front of him from between parked cars. He hit the phone poll, and after the ER, was home with cracked ribs (from the steering wheel, this being many years before there were mandatory, or even existing, seatbelts.

    505:

    Certainly.

    But that's my larger point - comparing car drivers to train engineers is just not a meaningful comparison most of the time because the conditions are so different for a lot of reasons.

    (Although people committing suicide by car is reasonably common, they just tend to be the driver)

    506:

    when I'm trying to see if some idiot's doing 30 while I'm backing out.

    Many car parks here in the UK require (but can't enforce) reverse-parking, that is the drivers should park with the nose of the car facing outwards. It takes longer to park up when they arrive but it makes it a lot easier and safer when they leave since they can see what's in front of them, any cars approaching them, pedestrians etc. without straining their necks to look over their shoulder while at the same time operating the wheel, clutch, throttle etc.

    507:

    And some people do that here. And it takes much, much longer, because most of the time, a) the lanes are too close, and b) too many people are terrified, I tell you, of turning their wheel too much... and this is back in parallel parking territory, which scares far, far too many people, and they're taking it out of the drivers' exam in some states.

    508:

    486 - Did you just try to argue that emission control systems and collision avoidance software are the same sort of thing!?

    501 - Edge cases, and transition cases here. For example, always test trigonometry involving (arc)tangent with the data going increment and decrement towards plus and minus 90 degrees, and with it going through those values.

    503 - Agreed, not due to deafness, but because prat navs have done things like tell me to turn right at a junction clearly signposted "Left turn only".

    504 - Where did you think I got the idea from?

    509:

    It may indeed be — but that still doesn't guarantee there can't be a collision anyway.

    Anecdata: about 18 months ago, I was crossing a lights-controlled crossroads in a nearby town named (look away, Charlie) Baldock. A learner driver in a car with his dad was wanting to turn right, across my path. He underestimated the closing speed, and rather than waiting to go behind me, he made the turn, crossing in front of me. Both my car and I reacted, but there wasn't quite enough space for me to stop.

    Poor kid - his Dad and I spent quite some time telling him he wasn't a bad person, that I wasn't angry at him, that people do make mistakes in cars, and that so long as nobody gets hurt, well, take it as a learning experience.

    Contrariwise, my previous accident also involved me making an emergency stop. In that case, back last century, I was getting the feeling that the driver in the outside lane was going to pull into my lane without signalling. I was right - he did. I just hadn't expected him to do so and then stop. I stopped a few feet from the back of him, only then to get rammed by the person behind me, who'd not expected me to stop that swiftly.

    510:

    Re: 'Rather than picking a geographic direction ...'

    I've driven in only a handful of older (250 yr+) NA cities -- the ones that have 5 or 6 point intersections, round-abouts, zig-zag turns and merges that require crossing 3 lanes in under 100 feet, etc. -- and despite it's being tested/updated continuously for quite a few years even Google Maps screws up directions. Because of this, I'm guessing these are also the cities that are going to have the most problems with self-driving cars.

    One aspect about self-driving cars that might be beneficial is that they're likelier to drive at a similar (legal) speed with fewer stops and starts. This could mean shorter distances between vehicles which could therefore result in more vehicles flowing through within a set time interval. Plus, since the occupant doesn't have to see out to drive, roadside distractions are less likely to result in accidents. Okay - a steadier flow of traffic could result in longer wait times for pedestrians at intersections for crossing light changes. This might upset some impatient pedestrians but since it's very likely that all such vehicles would automatically record their trips, any obstructive behavior would be recorded and used by the authorities as evidence.

    Curious about what the insurance companies are doing about this - they're in the risk assessment biz after all.

    511:

    Agreed, not due to deafness, but because prat navs have done things like tell me to turn right at a junction clearly signposted "Left turn only".

    Yeah, like my last visit to Bristol, where the city council had decided to rework the traffic flow in the city centre and my car had 18 month old data ...

    512:

    Our new(ish) car, a 2020, has a back up camera and a 'collision warning system' that beeps when a car is approaching laterally whilst backing up. It also beeps if it spots a car merging dangerously or otherwise threatening to cause a problem.

    The camera has an overlay that shows where the car is going, and where it will go when you turn the wheel. The warning system is useful when backing out of a parking space if visibility is limited.

    I have been teaching my kid that he cannot rely on it and must also use his eyes. When he did his driver test they forbade him using the camera or the GPS - presumably on the reasonably assumption that both might not work and one must be able to drive safely regardless.

    The beeping and warnings are optional - I could shut them off - but I choose not to. I find it particularly helpful when exiting a parking spot with limited visibility (i.e. a van is parked next to me).

    513:

    But the US, people think they're entitled to drive, whether or not they're capable.

    No kidding! As for me, I haven't driven a car for 24 years now. I could get a drivers license easily by lying, but I have occasional momentary blackouts. Only a few seconds, and sometimes years between them, but bad things can happen in a few seconds.

    A few years ago, I ran my bike into the side of a car after a momentary blackout. It didn't hurt me, but $4,000 damage to the car. Thank goodness for insurance (which they later refused to renew).

    Technically, I might be wise not to bike either. But I figure there's not that much damage I'm likely to do other people on a bike. I'm not about to give my primary sources of transportation, recreation, socialization, exercise, and fun... :-)

    514:

    EC
    I wonder what happens if you get, um, "requested" to do another driving test & your car does not have Shat-Nav?
    And if you point-blank refuse to use them, because they are FUCKING DANGEROUS & STUPID?

    515:

    Moderators - please delete this duplicate post. Thanks!

    [[ two duplicates removed - mod ]]

    516:

    ... sometimes with the Chicago School, aka Milton Freidman/trickle down economics.

    Or as Paul Krugman likes to call it, the Freshwater School of Economics. (As opposed to the Saltwater School. :-)

    517:

    Until someone explained, I had no idea what left side or right side meant (it's in the direction of motion), and then it made perfect sense.

    Trimet's MAX light rail does the same thing with station arrival announcements here in Portland, Oregon.

    518:

    Agreed, not due to deafness, but because prat navs have done things like tell me to turn right at a junction clearly signposted "Left turn only".

    Well of course!

    That's why they added satnav to the driving test: you're supposed to know when to ignore the bloody thing.

    If it tries to get you to drive off a cliff or make an illegal turn, you keep on going and it will automatically re-route you. So a competent driver knows to simply let it recalculate a non-suicidal route.

    This ought to be obvious, but a lot of people don't think that way. So making the test cover correct use of what is these days a ubiquitous driving aid is only sensible.

    (I will also add that these days due to middle aged/wonky eyeballs I cannot read a map book in a moving vehicle. Not enough light, pages are vibrating, text is too tiny if it's scaled to be suitable for driving directions. Whereas a satnav display is nice and bright and can be scaled up if necessary.)

    519:

    your car does not have Shat-Nav

    You have a smartphone, right? They've got it.

    Or you have a (increasingly rare) stand-alone/separate portable satnav.

    Or an iPad.

    Satnav is ubiquitous and I suspect in extremis the driving examiner will put their phone on the dash for you.

    520:

    Did you just try to argue that emission control systems and collision avoidance software are the same sort of thing!?

    Nope. Just that engineers DO test the systems they design. And these systems DID impact the safety of things. Even back then.

    521:

    Milton Freidman/trickle down economics

    Air Farce did a sketch years ago, when you folks were ruled by Reagan, with him reminiscing about feeling warmth seeping down his leg and realizing it was trickle-down economics in action…

    522:

    Re: '... if a chain store is having a sale across all its stores, posting the price with tax is going to make the campaign cost prohibitive'

    Yes and No:

    Yes - After some limited marketing research a 'bargain' retailer decided to post/advertise tax-included prices. The rationale was that this segment was already price-conscious so that being able to more quickly tote up their purchases while shopping would be considered a benefit, i.e., they wouldn't get too surprised at the checkout. Didn't work - (a) when asked/challenged people often try to please/gain approval - in this case by being uber rational and penny-wise; (b) many people do their price shopping comparisons at home with flyers therefore tax-in prices looked higher and made it harder for them to comparison shop.

    No - A few low and mid-price restaurants here and there (NA) have implemented no-tip menu pricing and it seems to be working. However the only research/articles I've seen don't discuss whether this is because patrons like the simplicity of an all-in/tax-in price or whether patrons are patting themselves on the back for supporting something that is supposed to help wait staff get a better hourly wage. Curious whether no-tip menu pricing has been done in other countries and with what results.

    In the no-tip restaurant pricing scenario the patrons still have to figure out any applicable taxes plus any tax is on the total bill vs. a mishmash of taxable and non-taxable items for retail. The only other industry that I can think of that combine product and service is car maintenance: parts & labor are typically quoted separately although I doubt that any auto service chain would allow you to bring in your own parts. (And, car mechanics don't depend on tips to supplement crappy hourly wages.)

    523:

    Curious whether no-tip menu pricing has been done in other countries and with what results.

    Tipping is rude in both Japan and China. Chinese hotels/restaurants catering to the Western tourist trade accept tips as one more way to fleece the rich foreigners, though :-)

    Decades ago in France it was service compris (tip was included in bill), but that may well have changed.

    I understand that in Australia it's also not expected, but that's only by hearsay so could easily be wrong.

    524:

    I would point out that I don't have any difficulty finding my way around, indeed I can get around strange places without a map better than other people can do it with one. I just can't translate between the format my cerebral direction finding software uses for its internal representation and any language-based representation.

    525:

    I always park like that but I always seem to be the only one who does. Don't think I've ever seen it "required", but I certainly have seen attempts to enforce the opposite, in the form of car parks where the slots are at an angle rather than perpendicular to the roadway, and they always angle them the wrong bloody way so it's as difficult as possible.

    526:

    your car does not have Shat-Nav

    You have a smartphone, right? They've got it.

    Mine is not that smart (e.g. the screen won't show things like maps)- it is JUST smart enough to connect to my hearing aids through a dongle. In any case, it stays turned off and in my study unless I have a particular use for it. It stays turned off when I am driving, always.

    Or you have a (increasingly rare) stand-alone/separate portable satnav.

    Nope.

    Or an iPad.

    Nope. And there is no prat nav software on my tablet, which I use as a map reader, and which doesn't support nG, anyway. WiFi doesn't quite cut the mustard, and there's no room for downloadable prat nav because of the maps I have loaded :-)

    Satnav is ubiquitous and I suspect in extremis the driving examiner will put their phone on the dash for you.

    Actually, they are more likely to fail you for not having it. And I am damn certain that the response "Please remove that, because it is distracting me from the road" would be an automatic fail.

    527:

    Yes. However, if they introduce the requirement for automatic retesting, there will be a furore from people like me (and Greg), including at the ballot box.

    I haven't been able to read a map (or my map reader) at the wheel for ages - lack of accomodation and inability to use even bifocals, let alone varifocals. In any case, I regard doing so in any moving vehicle (except at walking pace on a motorway) as dangerous, probably more than using a handheld mobile phone.

    I was taught to drive on to where I can stop safely, and THEN look at the map. Yes, TPTB are making that increasingly hard to do, but some of us still do it.

    528:

    I've been in a car which did that. It bleeped every time when parking, LONG before it was time to stop, and frequently driving past parked cars or cars in other (slow) lanes. The driver said that he had learnt to ignore it completely.

    Remember our parking spaces and smaller than USA ones, our lanes are narrower, and so on. If it could be adjusted, it would be useful, but that one couldn't be.

    529:

    You have a smartphone, right? They've got it.

    Mine is not that smart (e.g. the screen won't show things like maps) ...

    Upon checking, it's got no GPS, either. I have never even looked for that before except, initially, when I turned all of its features off :-)

    530:

    Really. I'd like to see the safety case for a product like Skoda "Front Assist" (their name) which sometimes refuses to allow you to overtake a vehicle in the lane inside your's, and occasionally performs an emergency stop because a used foil crisp (chip) packet is about to run into the road in front of you.

    531:

    As with all software driven applications, the improvements are ongoing.

    I can adjust the range at which my car warns me of hazards. Generally I like it to warn me as I approach the danger zone - telling me that I've just hit something is less useful. If you care to learn the new systems they can be quite helpful. My dear wife has shown an infinite improvement in collision avoidance rates since we got the car with the cameras and warning bells.

    I've been driving for about 35 years and only ever had 2 minor accidents. Once was as a 17 year old driving a 5 ton van - which I was not nearly experienced enough to be doing at the time - when I nicked a parked car.

    The other was a few years ago when the car in front of me quite deliberately stood on the brakes after merging onto an empty road. There was no reason to stop except that I was looking over my shoulder for oncoming traffic as I also merged. As it was I hit him with a light bump at about 5 kph, and he proceeded to sue my employer in a case that went on for a couple of years (ultimately he lost). Technically my fault, but it was a setup. In that circumstance a collison avoidance 'warning bell' would have alerted me to the hazard about 1/4 second earlier and there would have been no collision.

    I realize this example will have no affect on the 'I don't like it therefore it is bad' position, but the functions are useful and I expect they will get better over time. What I would not like to see is a further shift to relying wholly on exterior cameras at the expense of windows and mirrors. At least in a small motor vehicle, I want to retain veto power on decisions made at speed.

    532:

    And I don't have any kind of mobile phone, or any kind of computer with a more compromised user interface than a laptop, or any device of any kind with a receiver for any variety of navigational code, or indeed any receiver for any signal of any kind in my car.

    "I haven't been able to read a map (or my map reader) at the wheel for ages - lack of accomodation and inability to use even bifocals, let alone varifocals. In any case, I regard doing so in any moving vehicle (except at walking pace on a motorway) as dangerous, probably more than using a handheld mobile phone."

    Completely agree. I experimented with doing it on a straight empty road at low speed not long after passing my test. Didn't take me very long to confirm that it isn't just a stupid idea, it's even more of a stupid idea than it looks, because context-switching between two so utterly different modes of concentration in anything even remotely close to real time Is Not Going To Happen.

    These days there is a physiological reason on top of that: having my lens change shape from "extreme distance" to "close up" and back again in anything even remotely close to real time also Does Not Happen any more.

    "I was taught to drive on to where I can stop safely, and THEN look at the map. Yes, TPTB are making that increasingly hard to do, but some of us still do it."

    Same here: only viable way to do it.

    "And I am damn certain that the response "Please remove that, because it is distracting me from the road" would be an automatic fail."

    Them: "But the test requires you to demonstrate that you know how to use a sat nav."

    Me: "Oh, I can do that easily enough" - (opens window) - "it's just basic ballistics."

    It's unnecessary because I can perfectly well find my way around already without it. It's entirely useless for the same reasons that a static map is useless when moving: can't even see the bloody thing these days, and can't interpret it if I could see it. And it's dangerous, because it's an irrelevant conspicuous moving thing in my field of vision and it will distract me - it will steal away with my attention so insidiously that I won't realise it's happening until it dawns on me that I've been staring at the fucking thing for the last five minutes. All things like that have that kind of hypnotic effect on me - people who don't turn the telly off when you call round, for instance, or continuously-scrolling destination displays in trains - I don't want to pay attention to it, but it happens anyway without me being aware of it until some other random event snaps me out of it. And it's a bloody nuisance. I won't even drive someone else's car that has things dangling from the rear view mirror without taking them off first, and I sure as fuck am not going anywhere with moving electronic pictures trying to get in my sight.

    Unfortunately, I fear you are only too correct that no amount of argument that I don't have one, I don't want one, I actively want not to have one, and if there was one there anyway I'd get rid of it before going anywhere, would move them to abandon their position.

    533:

    Truly, tests and laws should definitely based on the habits of weirdo outliers.

    534:

    Charlie
    "Shat Nav" - I refuse to use it because it is an obvious safety hazard" ( Giving worng & conflicting instructions ) ....
    *....what is these days a ubiquitous driving aid
    - Except IT IS NOT. Vast numbers of cars & drivers do not have them & don't use them.
    SEE ALSO EC @ 529 & 530!
    AND Pigeon @ 535 too !!

    535:

    So you and EC have found some common ground, with Pigeon as well. You don't like this newfangled nonsense and will be having none of it!

    Believe me when I say I am writing this fondly, but is it possible that you, Elderly Cynic and Pigeon might share some certain demographic similarities in your opinion of this development in automotive technology?

    I'm no kicking colt myself, but I have found GPS navigation very useful in navigating new locales, and finding places accurately. Of late I've noticed the Google map application routing me around traffic quite handily. I am fairly sure my family trip to Los Angeles a few years ago would have been much worse without GPS support. One can always choose not to listen to the voice giving you directions.

    I have often thought there must be a potential market for voice actors in GPS navigation software. A sarcastic navigator would be fun, or perhaps one with the voice and diction of Yoda.

    536:

    Robert Prior @ 415:

    If there had been even one, tiny little bullet hole it would have been written off as a "combat loss".

    Surely that could have been arranged, in a war zone…

    Yeah, you'd think ... but no. That wouldn't have been BY THE BOOK.

    537:
    Hell, yes. I, personally, would be perfectly happy to have to retake a driving test every ten years, or, now that I'm older, every five.

    One of my mother's friends, in her late 80s at the time, was determined to continue driving. Due to some oddity in Ontario driving law, she failed test after test, but kept shopping around in surrounding towns until she found one where she was able to pass the test. Mission accomplished! She was good to go for another year or two.

    As it turns out, it didn't matter. I think that her kids sat her down and took away her keys shortly after. "You shouldn't drive while you're next door to legally blind," was their argument, I believe.

    538:

    a steadier flow of traffic could result in longer wait times for pedestrians at intersections for crossing light changes.

    Surely that's exactly backwards? More controlled traffic flow should allow shorter waits for both passengers and pedestrians, especially since regenerative braking reduces the energy cost for the pedestrians.

    But this is back to the design question about what the city is for, or what the transportation system is for. And to many people both exist to support cars with people unfortunately necessary to keep the cars running.

    539:

    "I have often thought there must be a potential market for voice actors in GPS navigation software. A sarcastic navigator would be fun, or perhaps one with the voice and diction of Yoda."

    Many years ago we had a "John Cleese" voice for our then sat nav software, which could be very sarcastic - in oarticular when it wanted you to turn around.

    540:

    You can get voice actors for, I think, Wayz and probably others - Yoda was one of them, if memory serves.

    541:

    Simon Farnsworth @ 470: That was implied by "resolved in English" - we have always stolen words from other languages in preference to inventing our own :-)

    I read somewhere that the "English language" doesn't just borrow words from other languages, it coshes 'em over the head and drags 'em into an ally where it can rifle through their pockets for useful concepts.

    542:

    Truly, tests and laws should definitely based on the habits of weirdo outliers.

    I suspect you think you're being sarcastic, but you're exactly correct.

    The vast majority of people are pro-social and will behave the way everyone else does, with a bias towards being polite and nice. It's the weirdo outliers who commit violent crime, defraud large numbers of people or wear dazzle camouflage face paint.

    Usually 50-99% of software code is there to handle error and edge cases. Using self-driving cars as an example, this covers everything from a momentary reflection overloading a camera through to someone trying to drive with the back half of the car torn off. Times all the billions of different things that can go wrong at every level. People get grumpy when the car brakes for crisp packets, but they also get grumpy if "a shell just blew off the back of the car, drive drive drive!" results in a plaintive beeping noise and the "service required" light coming on instead of forward movement. The latter is likely to result in customer service interactions with people who won't take "edge cases don't matter" politely.

    543:

    Re UK driving test.

    The moral outrage is fun, but the reality is a bit different. They provide the equipment so you don't need to buy something you don't want. You don't really need to listen to the nav instructions, just glance at the screen now and again to see where to go at the next intersection. If it's not clear, you can ask the tester where to go rather than just following the sat nav. The test is really to check that you don't stare at the screen, don't follow mistakes the sat nav makes, like out of date turns or out of date speed limits. Basically all the things you're complaining about, ie, drivers following them blindly, they test that drivers are not doing.

    https://youtu.be/FFQeyQQTab4

    544:

    "a shell just blew off the back of the car, drive drive drive!" results in a plaintive beeping noise and the "service required" light coming on instead of forward movement

    Is this some Aussie-nism? Because I read this sentence several times, and have no clue what you are talking about. A piece of car body fell off? An artillery shell suddenly rolled out of the car in front?

    545:

    You're right, that is ambiguous.

    I was thinking of Ukraine, where an artillery shell exploding and causing the back of the car not to be there any more is within the realms of possibility. I've also seen videos of various people driving the front half of cars after removing the back half. It struck me as one of those weird edge cases that's really unlikely to happen and probably shouldn't have code written to deal with it... but at the same time, you don't really want to be the person dealing with the survivors and having to say "your lives are not worth the effort".

    546:

    I see. That particular problem is actually fairly easy to deal with: program the car so that sufficiently forceful pressing on a pedal or high enough force applied to the steering wheel will always override what car thinks is the best. Tesla already has this feature -- if you drift onto the shoulder it will beep and apply corrective action, but if you insist on holding the wheel steady and keep steering off the road, it will let you. A fully autonomous car with no pedals or steering wheel should have some kind of "total override" voice command.

    SF novel "A Day For Damnation" by David Gerrold (Chtorr series, book 2) has an amusing take on this. The protagonist is in a self-driving van being shot at. His conversation with the van goes something like this:

    "Release manual controls."

    "I recommend against it. You do not have the reflexes."

    "Release manual controls, override code Zebra Panel Alpha."

    "Manual controls released. It's your funeral."

    547:

    I read somewhere that the "English language" doesn't just borrow words from other languages, it coshes 'em over the head and drags 'em into an ally where it can rifle through their pockets for useful concepts.

    That was coined by James Nicoll, an excellent source of book reviews and pithy sayings:

    https://jamesdavisnicoll.com/blog

    I believe the original saying was "English doesn't borrow words from other languages. It mugs them in dark alleys and rifles their pockets for loose vocabulary."

    Another memorable saying: "I expect to die and be eaten by my cats. If I'm lucky it will be in that order."

    548:

    That particular problem is actually fairly easy to deal with: program the car so that sufficiently forceful pressing on a pedal or high enough force applied to the steering wheel will always override what car thinks is the best.

    That particular behaviour (in an Airbus A310) has crashed at least one airplane.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeroflot_Flight_593

    549:

    Well James Bond did it, so I guess plenty of people are likely to want to copy it. Especially since it's one of the rather unusual Bond stunts that actually looks possible, doesn't hurt, and isn't obviously suicidal if it goes even fractionally wrong; although it has to be said he must have had bloody big float bowls.

    550:

    Rocketjps
    I have actually been in several vehicles with Shat Nav & once (shudder) driven one myself. ....
    NO, thank you, not ever. It's fear of the dangerous, known hazard, not "something new"

    551:

    So you're saying that sat nav is dangerous, and even though you hate it, you've been placed in a position where you couldn't avoid driving with one, but you disagree that prospective drivers should be required to demonstrate that they can use them safely? (ie, ignore them as required, maintain situational awareness, and maintain a correct eye scan)

    It seems like a great idea to me that new drivers should demonstrate sensible use of car instruments. Aviation has required new pilots to demonstrate safe use of instruments for 100 years. Getting a type endorsement on a glass cockpit aircraft after simply claiming you don't like them wouldn't and shouldn't get you very far.

    552:

    "That particular behaviour (in an Airbus A310) has crashed at least one airplane."

    There will be circumstances when a human operator being able to immediately override what the automatic system wants to do will be all that can avert disaster.

    There will be circumstances when a human operator being able to immediately override what the automatic system wants to do will guarantee an otherwise avoidable disaster.

    Designing a system that can reliably distinguish such circumstances would at least require full-blown Strong AI, but more likely weakly God-like AI.

    If we have such an AI, just hand over to it and let it get on with things.

    JHomes

    553:

    I found it really useful last time I drove. Once I convinced google maps of my route it was really good at telling me which lane I needed to be in and which way to turn, with ample warning to actually do that. It's one less thing to worry about when driving, and saves me a lot of pulling over to read the map. Which is handy on the busy roads around Sydney.

    That's a familiarity and practice thing to a large extent. I just don't drive enough to have embedded a whole lot of things in at a subconscious level, and it's not just what road signs look like.

    554:

    538 - Another personal account - I was travelling to a location I did not know the route for, and using a prat nav (with voice direction) as an assistant. It completely omitted to tell me "at the next junction turn left" at one point, and 20 miles down the wrong road suddenly said "at the next opportunity turn around".
    The best reason I can offer for this behaviour is that I was in an unknown to me GPS black spot when it missed the direction. Given these 2 accounts (other up-thread), would you actually trust a prat-nav?

    543 - The only female voice I've heard for a prat nav is usually known as "Sonya", because "it get Sonya nerves".

    544 - I couldn't say where, but I have heard the same statement of English, completely independently of you.

    555:

    I do find it interesting that the anti-satnav types seem to be arguing (at least in part) on the basis that using a satnav is precisely the same skill set as using a paper map, when in my experience it’s more usually argued that the use of satnavs means people don’t know how to read maps anymore!

    For myself I can’t see what’s so mahoosively dangerous about hearing “In 500 metres, at the roundabout, take the 4th exit A666 Satan’s Highway”, followed by if it’s safe to do so a quick glance at the screen to see roughly how far round round the roundabout said exit is.

    556:

    Interesting. Things have changed a lot, then. It used to be that you had to provide a vehicle with all of the testable characteristics, or you would fail.

    However, the prat nav fanatics are missing several critical points.

    Most people like them, yes, but whether they are a significant cause of accidents (due to distraction or wrong directions) is unknown, and carefully being ignored. The evidence is that dashboard-mounted mobile phones are, despite being legal. Unfortunately, our politics does not follow the evidence :-( I am not taking a position on this, but it IS a question that should be asked.

    The major point is that there are a fairly large proportion of people (mostly among the elderly and technophobic) for whom either they are not suitable or who never use them for other reasons. My point was that making a test in their use mandatory for such people is politically contentious, at best. It was NOT about whether they should be banned.

    From my personal point of view, I have used a prat nav, and I could pass the test. I found that it was useful 0.1% of the time, misleading or wrong 0.9% of the time, and unnecessarily distracting 99% of the time. And people say that I should be using one?

    557:

    I don't see that. It's a very different (and lesser) skill. My objection is largely because hearing is not a primary sense for me, and it takes almost all my concentration to decode the sounds coming out of a prat nav, so I have to rely mainly on the screen.

    558:
    • Corporations may not inquire about previous salary history in hiring.

    I believe New York recently enacted this.

    559:

    Have you actually read my posts properly and decided to ignore them, or just not read them? My points (in short) are:-
    1 Prat nav is capable of intermittently failing to give you a critical route direction.
    2 Prat nav is also capable of intermittently telling you to do something illegal (and/or ill-advised).
    Neither of these strikes me as being a desirable feature.

    560:

    Charlie noted (521) "That's why they added satnav to the driving test: you're supposed to know when to ignore the bloody thing."

    Those of us of a certain age have worked long enough with computers (more than 40 years in my case) to have developed a certain finely honed skepticism about how far to trust them. Younger computer users usually lack that spidey sense that something is about to go wrong. They also lack the sense that if something should be a 15 minute drive, it's time to pull over, check the directions, and maybe backtrack if you're 30 minutes into that itinerary. We've had a few news stories in recent years of people who drove off into the Canadian wilderness, ran out of gas, and died of exposure or thirst before they could be rescued.

    Charlie: "If it tries to get you to drive off a cliff or make an illegal turn, you keep on going and it will automatically re-route you."

    Madame and I encountered this in Sicily: the GPS kept telling us to turn right NOW!!!, at the edge of a very tall cliff. Fortunately, (i) we weren't morons and (ii) we have developed a system where one person drives and the other person interprets the GPS display, using more human friendly instructions such as "At the 3rd intersection, turn north. Now it's going to be the 2nd intersection. Oh wait: the GPS added 3 cross streets. Now it's the 4th intersection on the right."

    Even when you're skeptical of the instructions, you can still get caught if you're not paying close attention. Again in Sicily... Madame drives uphill stretches, as me and first gear have strong philosophical differences, whereas I drive downhill, because she has different issues. Jack Sprat and his wife! Anyway, we look at the roads to the top of a mountain and it's clear Madame will be driving up. But the GPS shows a series of gentle downhill switchbacks, so I'm going to be driving down when we're done. Unfortunately, I didn't notice that the GPS had changed scale. (Probably because I tapped wrong and didn't notice.) The downhill patch was a series of 45° slopes comprising dozens of switchbacks. It had once been a goat trail before the goats abandoned it as too tricky, with the turns so tight it took backing and filling to get around more than half of them. Nearly burned out the clutch and brakes making it down.

    561:

    1 Prat nav is capable of intermittently failing to give you a critical route direction. 2 Prat nav is also capable of intermittently telling you to do something illegal (and/or ill-advised).

    Having been a driver since the 70s, and only starting to use a GPS in the last few years, I will note that the same failings apply to paper maps, human navigators, and road signs.

    562:

    We've had a few news stories in recent years of people who drove off into the Canadian wilderness, ran out of gas, and died of exposure or thirst before they could be rescued.

    To be fair, we had the same stories back in the days of paper maps too.

    563:

    You simply have to treat Sat Nav like it was a person next to you giving directions. In other words, don't do anything dangerous, even if told to, and maintain your own sense of what's appropriate while driving. It becomes second nature very quickly.

    564:

    Moz @ 548: You're right, that is ambiguous.

    I was thinking of Ukraine, where an artillery shell exploding and causing the back of the car not to be there any more is within the realms of possibility. I've also seen videos of various people driving the front half of cars after removing the back half. It struck me as one of those weird edge cases that's really unlikely to happen and probably shouldn't have code written to deal with it... but at the same time, you don't really want to be the person dealing with the survivors and having to say "your lives are not worth the effort".

    FWIW, the two automobiles I owned in this century BEFORE I got the Jeep were both Front Wheel Drive and could probably drag themselves away ... Jeep might be able to run away if I shifted it to 4Lo.

    The shell taking out the fuel tanks might be a bigger problem. 8^)

    565:

    Yeah, billionaires or tbh even single digit millionaires don't make sense if you assume an economy as cartelized/regulated/held back by distributional coalitions[1]. There's no sense to allow them to exist. The only reason you have this kind of leverage being possible is excess economic complexity/certain types of regulating existing to prop up incumbents along with a state that seems to exist mostly to benefit them with such things as excessively strong property rights[2], an education system going beyond stuff you might want like creating a literate/numerate population to creating people willing to put up with endless arbitrariness.

    The solution to this is relatively simple: Shift taxation to hit economic hents instead of income/consumption/property taxes. A land value tax, plus other taces on economic rents as needed would be enough[3] to fund things like say national healthcare, a basic infrastructure, serious investment in fusion/alt energy/moving off carbon. Do that taxation shift plus get the thumb off the scale in favor of these people, along with the professional managerialist classes[4] who parasite off of them and act as enforcer of the 1%'s agenda. Sure, you'd get 20% of the population or so either losing everything or at best having to face SERIOUS cutbacks but it'd free up resources for everyone else.

    If someone manages to become a millionaire or billionaire in these conditions without the ability to use excess complexity or rent-seeking good for them but uh, I suspect we'd have 99% fewer billionaires with my fixes.

    [1] Mancur Olson is a genius at coming up with concepts even if not so good at coming up with snappy terms. [2] Intellectual property, non-compete contracts being allowed. I have the theory that property rihts in practice were weakest in the advanced west 1945-73, with many issues stemming from them reviving. [3] Scott Alexander posted on this and I'm inclined to agree with him on this even if he's hit and miss alot of the time. [4] Aka the demographic that's all culture wars, all the time and not favoring doing anything about corporate power/billionaires. Note that their position on feminism/lgbtq/minority inclusion is "make as many women/nonwhites/lgbtq professional class or rich" and not actually addressing issues that affect these groups like say reactionary abortion laws, transphobia, fundies kicking out lgbtq teens, etc. They just want the boot stomping on people's necks to have rainbow bootlaces.

    566:

    paws4thot @ 557: 538 - Another personal account - I was travelling to a location I did not know the route for, and using a prat nav (with voice direction) as an assistant. It completely omitted to tell me "at the next junction turn left" at one point, and 20 miles down the wrong road suddenly said "at the next opportunity turn around".
    The best reason I can offer for this behaviour is that I was in an unknown to me GPS black spot when it missed the direction. Given these 2 accounts (other up-thread), would you actually trust a prat-nav?

    543 - The only female voice I've heard for a prat nav is usually known as "Sonya", because "it get Sonya nerves".

    The very first thing I did when I got the iPhone was to turn SIRI OFF

    From training and years of habit I know where I'm going & how I'm going to get there before I get in the vehicle (about 99% of the time). Route planning is something you do BEFORE traveling.

    If for some unforeseen reason I need the telephone or to consult a map while traveling, I pull off the road while doing so ... and other than combat zones, you can always stop & ask directions if you need to.

    567:

    Re: 'Surely that's exactly backwards? More controlled traffic flow should allow shorter waits for both passengers and pedestrians, especially since regenerative braking reduces the energy cost for the pedestrians.'

    Not really sure about that based on these personal experience assumptions:

    (a) traffic/pedestrian crosswalk light controls will continue to be programmed to favor higher volumes/users, i.e., cars and/or traffic that can get out of harm's way faster (usu. pedestrian becuz shorter distance & ability to deke)

    (b) traffic controls will be in constant real-time communication within the municipal road network AND self-driving car AIs/automata all along long stretches of higher volume streets/highways in order to coordinate and maximize continual (car) traffic flow esp. during peak commuter hours

    Re: Comments about other commenters' comments...

    AI/self-driving cars -

    (a) Contemporary tech - As such cars become more common, they'll likely become the standard for drivers' tests. This could mean that the examiner would also grade the driver on their ability to interface with all of the most commonly used/built-in devices including nav aids. This is also likely to mean that pretty well all new drivers would be dependent upon such devices -- and probably wouldn't be allowed/able to drive older model cars. (Same as when automatics overtook standard transmissions.) Also, anyone who travels regularly would need to know current car tech if they want to rent a car at their destination. Rental car companies already check the driver's license to make sure that the renter is qualified to drive that vehicle.

    (b) Driver data - My new 2022 car already sends real-time data to the car manufacturer primarily becuz of the extended warranty: if I miss an oil change and something goes wrong with the engine, etc., the warranty gets voided and I'm out big $$$. I also get a summary of my day's routes/travel info/stats on my screen when I park in my driveway at night. I also get 'you're not smack in the middle of the two painted highway lines beeps (when avoiding potholes), the car ahead of you (at the stop light) just pulled out, it's cold enough for roads to be icy - be careful, etc.). So it's not a big leap to assume that any new enhanced smart electronics/self-driving car would also be able to provide data/feedback on driver shortcomings based on what the car/driving system was designed for, comparisons with local driver norms/history, stats on near misses, accidents, too-sudden stops and swerves, tailgating, car sound system blasting at full volume in the middle of the night, etc. And then it's also likely that insurers and driving licensing boards would use such data to set my insurance premiums or even pull my driver's license. (Yeah - as with any new monitoring/surveillance, there will be illegal/black market scams popping up for all sorts of -- mostly -- freedumb reasons.)

    (c) Commute time - Just like horse pulled carts are generally not allowed on major highways during rush hours and in some places too-slow drivers can get pulled over and ticketed, I think it's likely that once the stats come in and show better traffic flow patterns (esp. shorter commute times, fewer accidents/delays) with self-driving/AI cars, all major highways/freeways will be restricted to self-driving/AI cars only. (The shorter commute times also translates into much farther/larger suburbs ringing major cities - a bonus for major corps with large personnel numbers. If put to a vote, I think the shorter commute would win over the old gen cars.)

    (d) History - Apart from a small niche segment, most people through the generations have preferred to let their car do more of the work - gear shift, power (vs. crank) windows, auto-windshield defrost, etc., consequently I think that conversion to self-driving cars won't be too problematic if it's done in a sane step-wise progression fashion.

    568:

    Yeah, billionaires or tbh even single digit millionaires don't make sense if you assume an economy as cartelized/regulated/held back by distributional coalitions[1]. There's no sense to allow them to exist. The only reason you have this kind of leverage being possible is excess economic complexity/certain types of regulating existing to prop up incumbents along with a state that seems to exist mostly to benefit them with such things as excessively strong property rights[2], an education system going beyond stuff you might want like creating a literate/numerate population to creating people willing to put up with endless arbitrariness.

    Let's do a worked example: my elderly mother. She's been living in the same, very ordinary house in southern California, for over 40 years. When my parents bought it, they paid well under $100k. Now it's worth between $1 million and $2 million depending on what meds the local real estate market is taking at the moment (she's in southern California). The house is paid off, and she lives on little more than social security and old investments.

    So let's not allow her to exist: boot her from the house, put her on the street, because she can't afford the average rents of $2500/month. At that point, she's everybody's problem, because she'll likely be sucking up hundreds of thousands in unpaid medical bills because she'll be taken to the emergency room each time, and won't be able to pay. So that cost is on everyone else's medical bills.

    Meanwhile, someone gets to buy her expensive house. Who? Probably an actual rentier who was clever enough to dodge the system. This is how textbook gentrification works anyway.

    This is a widespread problem: people who played by the rules, bought ordinary houses, and grew old in them, are now asset rich and cash poor. Unfortunately, those assets include their life support systems (houses, gardens, neighbors, etc.), so if you strip their assets and cash them out, they rapidly become burdens on society, while their assets go to those richer than they are. It's a vicious problem.

    I can continue to mock your notions even more savagely, because the house I'm in is currently worth over $1 million (can you say housing bubble? Good. I knew you could), and it would cost us at least as much to rent as to pay the mortgage on this place, because the long term rental market has been hammered, in part, by airBnB and similar operations. Want to force me out and sell my house to an overseas investor? That's who has the cash to buy.

    My suggestion, going forward, is to aim better. The super-rich start in the $60-$100 million asset range, and they're the ones you're after. The US middle class are becoming millionaires by the luck (not necessarily good luck) of owning homes in areas where housing prices are spiraling out of control.

    In the meantime, stop trying to tell me I belong on the street, when I'm one of the people pushing for safer, affordable housing so that we can get people off the street. Okay?

    569:

    I think that her kids sat her down and took away her keys

    It seems that (in suburban US) that the biggest contention point between older kids (65+) and their parents is taking away the car keys. It seems to work best when one of the kids who doesn't live nearby just takes them home after a visit.

    I have a friend who threw a serious fit with his parents when he discovered his low light vision impaired father was using he early stages of Parkinson's mother to be his visual guide while driving in the evening.

    570:

    Is this some Aussie-nism? Because I read this sentence several times, and have no clue what you are talking about. A piece of car body fell off? An artillery shell suddenly rolled out of the car in front?

    Happened to me once. Sort of.

    I forget exactly what it was that flew off a car 2 ahead of me, over the one in front of me, then hit my bumper and cracked the plastic portion of the bumper. It took a few tries with the claims adjuster to get the details correct.

    "Why didn't you stop?" I was doing the speed limit in the middle of 3 lanes of traffic. 60mph. It was all over in a second or so.

    "What was it that hit you?" No idea. It was about the size of a piece of paper.

    Oh, yeah. I was driving my daughter's car registered and insured in her name. Just to make it more fun.

    571:

    I have actually been in several vehicles with Shat Nav & once (shudder) driven one myself.

    Those systems have been out for 20+ years. What you get on a phone today compared to what was in a new car just 5 years ago can be like flying a WWI vs a WWII fighter airplane.

    572:

    In many places in the US a mailing will go to people with multiple stores not too far away. Which can and do at times have a tax rate difference of a .5% to 1.5%.

    I like the simplification of Europe's national level VAT tax.

    But I've spent 65+ years in our add the tax at the register and it doesn't slow me (or anyone else I know) down at all.

    573:

    "a shell just blew off the back of the car, drive drive drive!" results in a plaintive beeping noise and the "service required" light coming on instead of forward movement.....Is this some Aussie-nism? Because I read this sentence several times, and have no clue what you are talking about. A piece of car body fell off? An artillery shell suddenly rolled out of the car in front?

    I think he's talking about something like This James Bond chase (at 0:52) happening in Ukraine, with the car being shredded by Russian artillery instead of bad driving.

    See also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cyxxxcsodc

    and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGPUInJDMQA

    574:

    Well you’d think that the concept of “The instruction is to turn left, but that’s a pedestrian zone so I’ll keep going” wouldn’t be so hard to understand but it seems the anti-satnav types are somehow under the impression that if you choose to use one you are required to follow said satnavs instructions at all times[1].

    Now to be sure there are idiots who do just that, but they presumably behave the same with a human navigator, a map or written instructions because idiots are idiots.

    [1] I forget which site I saw someone claiming that if you didn’t follow an obviously dangerous and/or illegal satnav instruction you would fail the current UK driving test[2]! [2] AIUI your don’t necessarily get given the satnav test anyway? You might get told to “Follow the road signs to $PLACE”.

    575:

    Square leg
    Shat Nav is also, principally an additional unnecessary distraction, when it's hard enough to navigate the roads, without $ElectronicMoron giving you wrong advice ....

    576:

    "I do find it interesting that the anti-satnav types seem to be arguing (at least in part) on the basis that using a satnav is precisely the same skill set as using a paper map, when in my experience it's more usually argued that the use of satnavs means people don't know how to read maps anymore!"

    No, not really. Where "same skills" does come into it, it's at a much more basic level, which I see as offering very little in the way of grounds for contention: I cannot read and drive at the same time. (I have even proved this by experiment under controlled conditions, and that was long before my eyes lost the speed of accommodation required to let me think it was even worth trying in the first place.)

    Moreover, the law agrees. I don't think there's a specific offence of reading and driving at the same time, but there doesn't need to be; if a copper came past and saw me trying to read something - anything, doesn't matter what - at the wheel, I would certainly get nicked and I would guess the charge would be "driving without due care and attention" at the least.

    I am also well aware that I find irrelevant moving things that hang around in the edges of my field of vision inescapably distracting, all the more so when they are illuminated and so conspicuous, and even more so again when they carry an additional fish-hook in the cognitive domain as well, ie. by trying to convey information. I use the word "inescapably" because the distraction occurs insidiously such that I don't notice it's happening until it's already severe and well-established.

    Again, this is at least sort of recognised in law; I think it is the case that having crap dangling from the rear view mirror is one of those things that is technically illegal although nobody ever gets done for it, and I am pretty sure that you would have to take it down before using that car to take a test in. As for moving illuminated screens, it is illegal to have a TV in a car where the driver can see it, but it's one of those regulations that ended up being written in unnecessarily precise terms because there wasn't any other kind of moving illuminated screen around at the time, and hasn't been updated accordingly now that that is no longer the case.

    So if I should find myself in the driving seat of a car that has an illuminated moving screen designed and positioned with the actual intention that I should read it while I'm driving along, my a priori reaction would be that it is certainly a dangerous distraction, certainly useless because dangerous to try and use, and almost certainly grounds for being charged with a driving offence that could result in me losing my licence. Therefore I would at the very least switch it off, and if possible remove it altogether.

    Now I am being told that if I was in the position of needing to gain a licence, I would be actually compelled to install such a device and have it switched on. The stated intention is that because such a device is an additional source of danger, I am required to show that I can minimise that danger; but I am not allowed to do so by the simplest and most effective method of getting rid of it entirely - even though in the case of any other additional source of danger that is still what I am positively required to do.

    This is fucked up.

    (Note that I have made no mention at all of what the device is supposed to be for, because that basically doesn't have anything to do with the matter.)

    577:

    "it seems the anti-satnav types are somehow under the impression that if you choose to use one you are required to follow said satnavs instructions at all times"

    Posts crossed, but see final para: what the thing is supposed to be for has basically nothing to do with it. It's not about how you use it if you choose to do so, it's about not being allowed to have that choice at all.

    "AIUI your don't necessarily get given the satnav test anyway? You might get told to "Follow the road signs to $PLACE"."

    If you can opt out of it and are not compelled to use the thing whether you want to or not, then of course the grounds for my objection disappear. I am merely responding to the description given by other posters, that it isn't possible to opt out. I'd never heard of this shit before it got mentioned in this thread, so I'm just going on the information given.

    578:

    The first deaths reliably attributed to satnav in cars happened back in the 1990-ies, where a US couple landed in Frankfurt, and followed the rental-cars satnav, which did not tell them to wait for a ferry before crossing the river.

    A German family perished in USA around the same time, because they reasoned that all military installations would have a patrolled perimeter fence. At least that's the theory, based on the trail of their wrecked car, personal belongings and skeleton fragments found many years later, headed into the desert.

    The phrase "Cruel and unjust geography" springs to mind.

    579:

    569 - I don't have a jPhone. Even if I did, in this case it wasn't my prat nav but one of my colleagues (new Xmas present, recently map updated). In the case I cite, once I was off-course (because the prat nav didn't give a vital direction), should I really trust it to correctly calculate and direct me down the remaining route?

    570b - Driver data - You mean like, for example, driving near one edge of the lane to avoid driving in 2 ruts filled with water? I know that Skoda "Lane Assist" (more like "Lane Enforce") doesn't like this behaviour, and in some cases will actively try to steer you into the ruts.

    572 - I was lucky there. One visit, about 3 years ago, my Mother asked me to take her car to a local dealership and sell it. It has since turned out that her eyes are suffering from macular degeneration.

    577 - FFS!! I DID NOT SAY THAT. I said, correctly and accurately, that I was instructed to do something illegal. I, not I think unreasonably, expect that computer aids will not instruct you to do things that are illegal.

    580:

    Ahem: Aeroflot flight 593 crashed due to pilot error -- the pilots recklessly allowed a couple of kids to take both front row seats in the cockpit without adequate supervision while the plane was in the air!

    If either pilot had stayed at the controls and allowed each of the kids to sit in the other seat in turn, it wouldn't have crashed. Still reckless and could have caused harm to passengers and crew, but likely recoverable.

    Blaming the aircraft for obeying control inputs correctly is just plain wrong.

    581:

    Re: '... Skoda "Lane Assist" (more like "Lane Enforce") doesn't like this behaviour, and in some cases will actively try to steer you into the ruts.'

    Egad - no! Just a very irritating non-stop high-pitched beep.

    But ruts and pot-holes are such common and regularly recurring problems that auto sensors need to be designed to take this into account. The various beeps and alarms are designed to be irritating (grab and hold attention) but can become counter-productive if the irritation goes on for too long and instead just becomes a source of stress which then results in an accident.

    So far I haven't had to drive for too long off the center of a road but it could easily happen such as an accident to the side of the road or the seasonal highway repairs (construction vehicles and crews) blocking one or more lanes. This makes me wonder whether such alarms are market-tested and programmed/tuned on a per regional laws and conditions basis. (Pot holes are probably more common in areas with lots of freeze-thaw cycles.)

    I haven't looked to see if I can turn this particular sensor alarm off just in case of any warranties.

    582:

    A sign of changing attitudes to reuseable rockets, SpaceX have just launched a batch of Starlink satellites on a brand new first stage.

    The booster was intended for an NROL launch from CCSFS in Florida, but the customer wanted to switch to a Vandenberg west coast launch. SpaceX agreed to make no extra charge for the switch provided NROL would agree to a used booster. That left them with a Shiney new booster in Florida and no customer clamouring for it.

    583:

    Back in the eighties, a friend had a car, and when you got in, a voice would say "please buckle your seatbelt." What I never understood was why there was no choice between a male and a female voice.

    Like (sexy female voice"Buckle up, big boy...."(/sexy female voice)

    584:

    But the wrong in the US don't want a good education for the hoi polloi. The last time we even sort of tried it, look what happened - uppity kids (who thought we meant what it said in the Constitution), uppity women, uppity ethnics, none of 'em knew their place....

    (Do I really have to say /satire?)

    585:

    Prat-nav... Some years ago, google maps (printed out) told me to go down this street, make a right, u-turn, then make another right.

    It couldn't handle a street crossing another street and change its name. insisting that we turn right to go to the Interstate. We didn't want to, we passed the turn, and it wanted us to make the next, same deal, She tried, and it simply would not accept that we wanted to just go down the road we were on.

    586:

    Blaming the aircraft for obeying control inputs correctly is just plain wrong.

    Wasn't blaming the aircraft, just pointing out that the behaviour programmed into the controls (disconnect the autopilot with a sufficiently strong input on the controls).

    "With the autopilot active, Kudrinsky, against regulations, let the children sit at the controls. First, Yana took the pilot's left front seat. Kudrinsky adjusted the autopilot heading to give her the impression that she was turning the plane, though she actually had no control of the aircraft. Shortly thereafter, Eldar occupied the pilot's seat. Unlike his sister, Eldar applied enough force to the control column to contradict the autopilot for 30 seconds. This caused the flight computer to switch the plane's ailerons to manual control, while maintaining control over the other flight systems. Eldar was now in partial control of the aircraft."

    There was a copilot, but apparently neither he not the pilot were familiar enough with the autopilot to cope.

    It does raise questions for self-driving vehicles, though. How much training will drivers need to know when to overrule the vehicle, and how to do so safely? Will a hard control input overrule only that control, or will all controls be given to the driver? How will a licensing test determine if the driver knows how to take control safely, in the middle of a trip?

    587:

    "However, the prat nav fanatics are missing several critical points."

    Ah yes, those fanatics saying hundreds of millions of people use them successfully and routinely. Yes, it's them that's wrong.

    I know I can't be having with this map nonsense. Too distracting, and how can I even trust an image? I'll navigate by the words of my ancestors, as was fine for hundreds of thousands of years.

    588:

    I do get the impression that the anti sat nav side think it's just like a paper map, but on a screen. My experience is that it's a voice based thing saying "in 1km move into one of the two right hand lanes, preparing to to right onto the M5".... "in 100m turn right onto the M5".

    Which is actually better than the human version I used, which said things like "turn left somewhere up here ohh that's a pretty house I meant right no oh it was probably back there maybe we should turn round no let me look at I think we can go through here"

    I know which one I prefer.

    589:

    "Ah yes, those fanatics saying hundreds of millions of people use them successfully and routinely. Yes, it's them that's wrong."

    Nobody in this thread has said that.

    Several people have said that they, personally have issues of one kind or another using them, and regard not using them as an adequate solution to those issues. They are perturbed by the notion that TPTB might demand that they have to use them in order to gain or retain a driver's licence.

    There has been some more general pushback against the idea that sat-nav is essential, mostly because, whether you like it or not, it isn't.

    I have used sat-nav, quite successfully. But I can do quite well without it.

    JHomes

    590:

    All of the 'driver assist' functions on our car are definitively optional. If I want to turn off the collision warning, or the lane beeper, I can. I only ever turn on the GPS for directions to a place I don't know, and usually only for the portions of the trip I am unfamiliar with.

    At no point has anyone on this thread advocated for mandatory satnav use. I know we operate under a ruleset that implies 'If it doesn't work for me and my circumstances in Cornwall/Edinburgh/London' it doesn't work anywhere ever.

    To sum up about 100 of the preceding posts. Some people don't like GPS for their own reasons and don't want to use it. Many others do like it and use it often. Full stop. The rest is just foot stomping.

    Funny story: The downtown and nearby areas of Montreal are a maze of one-way streets that can be hellishly difficult to navigate if you are an outsider. After a lovely night out I (the driver) was sober as a ghost, while Mrs. Rocketpjs emphatically not, yet insisted that we did not need the GPS to guide us back to our accommodations.

    TLDR: I'll take a GPS voice over a drunken navigator who has no idea where we are or where we are going any day of the week.

    591:

    Well it's a common thing in rural Australia, and I'm sure elsewhere, that minor roads may be wide enough for two vehicles of any size to pass each other, so long as both take to the shoulder a bit. The shoulder itself is generally worn and rough, so most of the time you're driving on an empty road, right in the middle of it, straddling the line if there is one. Yes, you are careful on blind bends and crests.

    592:

    Which is actually better than the human version I used, which said things like "turn left somewhere up here ohh that's a pretty house I meant right no oh it was probably back there maybe we should turn round no let me look at I think we can go through here"

    That sounds like a model of clarity compared to my last human navigator. :-/

    Given the pace of development around here, I find Apple Maps an improvement on paper map books. Not only is my map up-to-date, but I have a voice talking to me so I don't need to take my eyes off the road to scramble through a map book.

    593:

    Yes, you are careful on blind bends and crests.

    Most people are somewhat careful most of the time. As the occasional slightly used vehicle parked on the side of the road attests. There are a disproportionate number of crashes in rural areas, and people who live in rural areas are more likely to crash (the two statistics combine in an unpleasant way). Stats from South Australia:

    https://www.dit.sa.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0012/112332/Rural_Road_Crashes.pdf

    It's something to be careful of when cycling because Muphries Law says you're listening to the one behind you and miss the one coming towards you or vice versa. The other joy is that even a single vehicle will generally put wheels on one side into the gravel so it's not uncommon to be showered with that after they go past.

    594:

    I'm mocking the idea that sat navs are some sort of lethally distracting device, and that being anti them is normal, rather than crotchey old men grousing about how slide rules and abacus are better. They're useful, and they're close to ubiquitous, and frankly, if you CAN'T operate one, I do indeed question whether you are actually safe to drive.

    But I drove for twenty five years before I ever had one, so you can chase another strawman.

    595:

    I'll take a GPS voice over a drunken navigator who has no idea where we are or where we are going any day of the week.

    "You need to turn just after the house the Smith's lived in the year before you were born. I'm certain I told you about the Smith's. They were good friends, had a lovely garden although I don't know how she managed it with their dog always digging. I never liked that dog. My mother's dog, now, he was a nice dog. Very friendly with a wagging tail…"

    596:

    "I'm mocking the idea that some people here find that sat navs are some sort of lethally distracting device, and that being anti them is ~~normal~~ a reasonable precaution for those people to take."

    My additions bolded. Read "normal" as struck through

    " if you CAN'T operate one, I do indeed question whether you are actually safe to drive."

    I am interested in how being unable to operate a device that is not actually necessary, as you should have realised in those 25 years, and is either not present or not switched on, makes you less safe a driver.

    JHomes.

    597:

    RE: Sat-navs.

    I like them. And I've had problems with them. I've had much bigger problems with those who can't read maps well enough to know when they're being misled by the sat-nav, who insist on blindly following the instructions even though they're obviously wrong, and who don't know enough about their systems to shut them off and correct them.

    Getting into an argument with an ignoramus when you're trying not to get lost is a real driving hazard.

    One benefit I've not seen mentioned, probably because it works best in LA around the airport: Apple and other mapping devices will report traffic problems and reroute you if there's a better route available. That's actually a reason to have the navigation on even if you know the way, because it helps ameliorate jams on some of the worst freeways in the US. I'll note that a local radio station (KNX 1070 AM, if you're ever unlucky enough to be driving in LA) has been doing the same thing for decades by broadcasting traffic alerts every ten minutes from around 6 AM to 8 PM. The good thing is now the sat navs, radio, and other systems are basically using the same database (generated by the highway department from cameras and sensors), so they're trying to work in concert to reroute people around jams (or, worst case, tell them to stay off the roads if possible until accidents are cleared). So if you're ever in LA, using sat nav is actually one way systems are trying to ameliorate congestion. And if you can't stand that thought, KNX 1070 AM, if you can learn their lingo fast enough.

    598:

    The one thing that gripes me about sat-navs is the price difference between ones with heavy vehicle mode and ones without. None of the free map apps seem to have it, and there's a $100+ price gap to get it. Without it the sat-nav takes a lot of persuading to get it to avoid place trucks shouldn't go, or even just the ones they're not allowed to go.

    I was talking to an RV owner recently about this, and they have two sat-navs, both with heavy vehicle mode, and he says he prefers to take roads that are approved by both. The RV is barely a heavy vehicle (~5000kg) but it's tall and long like a truck, and he was complaining about all the trees that overhang "suitable for trucks" routes. And he's only ~3.5m tall where the legal height limit is 4.25m.

    599:

    I am involved in restoring heritage trams (sometimes called "trolleys" in the US) for an NPO as a hobby. Left and Right are defined as being left and right when facing the 'A' end of the tram, and the 'A' end of the tram is defined as the end closest to where the air compressor in installed! (The ends are marked 'A' & 'B', or sometimes '1' and '2' - depending on which tramway system they cam from). Usage in other parts of the world may vary.

    All of which is absolutely useless to members of the general public - so when a tram is moving, left and right are re-defined for the public as relative to the current direction of travel. And incidently, the tram driver is know as the motorman (irrespective as to their gender).

    600:

    Square Leg said: but they presumably behave the same with a human navigator,

    I was warned many years ago to avoid the phrase "go straight through the intersection" because under stress people will go "straight through" the intersection rather than "go straight", through the intersection.

    601:

    J Holmes said: I am interested in how being unable to operate a device that is not actually necessary, as you should have realised in those 25 years, and is either not present or not switched on, makes you less safe a driver.

    Greg answered that one in comment 553. He said that he was in a position where there was a sat nav in a car he was operating, that he couldn't turn off, and he's unable to drive safely with them.

    So it seems that there's at least a chance that people who are unable to operate them safely, even unable to turn them off, end up in charge of a vehicle.

    Which makes me think that there should either be a special endorsement on the licence saying you can't drive with a sat nav, or everyone gets tested to see if they can operate a modern vehicle safely.

    Until this conversation I'd never considered it, but I fully agree with the UK testing. If there are people who can't safely operate a modern car, that should be tested and they should be prevented from operating a modern car.

    602:

    590 - Ok, for at least the 3rd time in this thread. Your experience to date is that a prat nav does not (normally) give you illegal or just plain wrong directions. Mine is that, once every 150 to 200 miles it may give a direction which is one or the other, or even both. My bigger issue is with directions that are just plain wrong, because you don't always know that they are!

    593 Para 2 - I didn't say that; what I said was that it completely failed to tell me to take a specific turning, or even "own up to its mistake" for 20 miles, and there was no way of telling it had made a mistake until it said "at the next opportunity turn around".
    Para 5 - So no human navigator never works anywhere, because one specific lost and drunk human can't navigate in Montreal.

    594 - Not exactly as described (but I've seen footage from truckies' dashcams), but there are similar roads in Scotland.

    602 - And, at least in Scotland, it was a regular (university) student prank to reverse all the seats on the upper deck and travel facing backwards.

    604 - You mean, like any car that relies on morphic touchscreen controls for example?

    603:

    "He said that he was in a position where there was a sat nav in a car he was operating, that he couldn't turn off, and he's unable to drive safely with them."

    Going back to 533, Greg did not say that he could not turn it off, and if indeed he could not turn it off, why not?

    Any non-essential device should be possible to turn off if it causes a problem, and if not the vehicle is defective. Sat nav is non-essential.

    JHomes

    604:

    paws said: You mean, like any car that relies on morphic touchscreen controls for example?

    Yeah absolutely. Probably any car released in the last 20-30 years. I saw a BMW 318i 40 years ago that had a live readout of fuel economy on the dash. It moved around a lighted bar in real time. I didn't realise that there were people who can't watch the road if there's a moving display. My partner's Subaru has a display on the dash that has pictures of the cars around us in real time. Cars come and go, move around. Plus a built in GPS for added distraction. The car I think you're referring to has cars, bicycles, pedestrians and more displayed. I thought anyone could drive it, but apparently not.

    I'd also look at an endorsement for carrying passengers. There's certainly a chance that they'd talk to the driver or give directions.

    605:

    He actually said in 553: I have actually been in several vehicles with Shat Nav & once (shudder) driven one myself. .... NO, thank you, not ever. It's fear of the dangerous, known hazard, not "something new"

    He's shuddering, he's frightened.

    Not sure how he could be "shudder"ing and suffering "fear" if he could turn it off.

    Is he frightened that a switched off sat nav might switch itself on and tell him to drive off a cliff, and he'd be helpless to resist? Or is he frightened that a blank screen is such a black hole that he'd be blinded, unable to look away?

    I can't tell.

    606:

    Justin Jordan I've been driving since, um .... 1963. I have managed quite well with paper maps & a good sense of direction { I have a mental model of the map mind-projected map, with a dot on it - very like Google Maps, in fact (!)} ever since then, but I find Shat-Navs a total menace & distraction.
    You CAN turn them all "off" can you not? { In the example I mentioned, I was severely annoyed, but I assumed it could be switched off, but the experience didn't last long, thankfully. }
    Talking of google-maps ... sometimes, they won't behave, the image won't load, or persists in appearing with SOUTH at the "top", etc.
    BUT: You do need training & education to use maps properly, as well as act as Navigator.
    Are Shat-Navs another example of "dumbing down"??

    StephenNZ
    Are you in Aotearoa, or are you referring to Crich .. ?

    ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

    Ukraine war update:
    Brit Mil Intel reports that up to One Third of Russian forces have been lost - even if it's cough One-Quarter cough it's a hell of a loss rate.
    If true, then RU forces will simply collapse & implode before much longer ( when? ) - IIRC the Ukrainian people are expecting this to happen?

    607:

    Via Adam Something, a discussion of just how much the Russians lost when their pontoon bridge(s) got blown away.

    This Russian river crossing has gained attention because it resulted in the loss of (probably) a battalion tactical group and some critical engineer equipment. The reality is, it is worse than that.

    Assault river crossings are one of the most difficult combined arms operations possible. Not only do all the elements of the ground team need to come together in a tightly orchestrated series of events.

    ObMentionoOfAustralia Of course, once the crossing site is established, it needs to be protected - on the ground, from air attack and from other sources of threat. In Australia, during training exercises, we often had to protect against crocodile attacks.

    https://twitter.com/WarintheFuture/status/1525252736757153792

    Viz, it's not the bridges themselves, it's the support vehicles and engineers etc. It's specialised stuff that can't be replaced easily and it's unlikely they have significant spares. It's more likely they just lost their combat bridge capability for the western side of Russia.

    608:

    So FWIW our recent adventure involved driving from Brisbane to country Victoria and back, around 4,000km including side quests. Used Google Maps the whole way via CarPlay and in general was very happy with the way that part of the trip went. It made some interesting calls that I might not have, and on a shorter route might have overridden... and I'd probably have been wrong. The most notable instance was approaching Dubbo from a couple of hundred km to the north as a storm was coming in. Google sent us off the Newell Highway down a relatively much smaller highway called Mendooran Rd, and for a while I suspected it was all about the publican at the Royal Hotel Mendooren being really ahead in his AdWords subscription. But when I worked it through later, it was maybe 40-50km shorter. It's debatable whether the Newell would have been better suited to the weather (the main issue was that the road camber wasn't great for a combination of 110km/h and really heavy rain) but I really didn't miss those road trains. So in many ways it was a shortcut I just wouldn't have bothered with if Google had not presented it as a good way to go and it worked out pretty well.

    In general, on trips like this you just wouldn't do without the traffic and especially flood-closure information these days. Even way out back on roads that don't bend for a few hundred km and you are safe setting the radar-cruise to 125, turning lane assist on and taking a nap. Well mostly kidding about that last sentence (I don't like that new fangled lane assist very much anyway).

    609:

    Yes, Aotearoa, not Crich. (I know of Crich, but have never visited).

    610:

    "Yes, Aotearoa, not Crich."

    QEII Park by MacKay's Crossing, by any chance? If so, you probably know Robert Vale.

    JHomes.

    611:

    There is also some evidence that they are dangerous which, as I said, is being carefully ignored. I haven't chased up the original references and analysed them for statistical validity. This is being done about so-called hands-free mobile phones, on the usual grounds that politics trumps science (see last link).

    https://www.drive.com.au/news/sat-nav-systems-cause-accidents-study/

    https://www.cartell.ie/2012/08/sat-navs-cause-accidents/

    https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/traffic-alert-sat-navs-lead-to-accidents-gkx989hj8w3

    https://www.rospa.com/rospaweb/docs/advice-services/road-safety/drivers/mobile-phones.pdf

    612:

    I'd also look at an endorsement for carrying passengers. There's certainly a chance that they'd talk to the driver or give directions.

    That is actually a thing here.

    Not for giving directions, but for distracting the driver. Turns out teenage drivers are much less able to ignore passengers than adults, as based on collision records, so there is a limit on the number of young passengers a new teenaged driver can carry.

    If you are 19 or younger, between the hours of midnight and 5am:

    • for the first six months of having your Ontario G2 licence, you can carry only one passenger aged 19 or under

    • After these first six months or if you turn 20, you may carry up to three passengers aged 19 or under

    The above G2 restrictions on the number of young passengers don’t apply if:

    • You have a G licensed driver with 4 or more years of driving experience (years as a G2 driver count) and a blood alcohol level of less than .05 (zero if they are under 21) in the front passenger seat

    A G2 license means you've passed your written and road tests, so can drive independently. After a year you can take the tests for a full license; if you haven't managed to get a full license in five years you have to start over again.

    613:

    https://www.drive.com.au/news/sat-nav-systems-cause-accidents-study/ is from "17:32, 08 August 2011" and "The drivers were noted as looking at the device up to 90 times for an average time of 1.2 seconds". I wonder if those were voice based systems.

    https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/traffic-alert-sat-navs-lead-to-accidents-gkx989hj8w3 2011 "putting their lives at risk every day by punching routes into the devices while on the move", and I thought that was illegal in Australia at least.

    https://www.cartell.ie/2012/08/sat-navs-cause-accidents/ "no matter how clear the audio we still can’t resist the temptation to look at the map to see which exit of the roundabout we should take" which doesn't match my experience. But then "researchers at Royal Holloway and Lancaster Universities which found that motorists using sat-navs are more likely to swerve, speed up or fail to notice pedestrians. Their findings were based on trial-runs using a car simulator". I wonder what their comparison point was - music on the radio ("carpool karaoke"?!), the phone ringing, kids in the back seat... where does sat nav rate on the big list of things to avoid while driving?

    My car-dependent gf closed the cover on the phone when using the thing, even before she met me. Passengers are the tool she used for adjusting the route on the fly. Which is close to how I used to use mine when I drove (I had a phone mount on the dash rather than in my lap because having it rattling round on the floor of the truck seemed like a bad idea).

    I also found the reversing cameras useful while driving as I got a better view of what was behind than using the mirrors. But that's "as well as" rather than "instead of". Also the occasional sight of someone in the rear downward looking camera that could only see 3m behind the bumper. Safe following distance I don't think.

    614:

    Euw.
    Just came across this - a translation of internal RU "thinking" on what to do with Ukraine - before it went all pear-shaped.
    VERY unpleasant indeed: - Paraphrasing - Ukraine started Nazifying in 1991-2 / It will need a whole generation of Denazification / " so the denazification of Ukraine is also its inevitable de-Europeanization." / "The name "Ukraine" apparently cannot be retained as the title of any fully denazified state entity on territory freed from the Nazi regime. " ... And so on & on & on ....

    615:

    Sounds like a great idea. I know that when I was 17 I took far more and greater risks when I had passengers.

    616:

    music on the radio ("carpool karaoke"?!), the phone ringing, kids in the back seat... where does sat nav rate on the big list of things to avoid while driving?

    Despite it being illegal to use a handheld electronic device* for years here, I still commonly see people driving focussed intently on their laps. I bet they're not covertly checking a map. Anyone who's watched parents picking their kids up at school will know that distracted driving is not limited to electronic devices in the car.

    *Catch-all for 'cell phone' in the legislation.

    617:

    Quite. That is why I am not taking a position on the matter, other than it justifies serious investigation. As with 'hands-free' mobile phones, good data would enable design requirements on the devices and restrictions on their use to make them safer or, if appropriate. banning them entirely. But I am not holding my breath with our current misgovernments :-(

    Given the number of people I have seen holding a mobile phone to their ear, while turning a corner in a narrow street with lots of pedestrians, lack of enforement is perhaps the main issue.

    For most people, music is not as distracting, because it uses separate pathways in the brain. I know that I can listen to Radio 4 without problems, not least because I miss what is being said when things are particularly chaotic on the road. Whether it should be required to fit children with gags is something that I will leave for others to propose ....

    618:

    Surprised that nobody has brought up the relevant xkcd about Google Maps.

    619:

    2011 "putting their lives at risk every day by punching routes into the devices while on the move"

    The last satnav I bought -- more than 5 years ago -- refused to take inputs while the vehicle was in motion. All you could do was turn it on or off via the power button. To actually change destination or settings it had to be stationary.

    Also, smartphones have "car mode" for blocking most interruptions while in motion at speed (as opposed to sleep/night mode).

    620:

    The system in my Skoda is similar. The centre console display can be linked to a phone via USB or Bluetooth and one of three protocols, Android Auto, the Apple equivalent or a third that can talk to either. It will accept routing instructions by voice when moving, but you have to be stopped and out of gear to use the screen.

    I do find having the map up on the console handy even when not being navigated. Because it's using Google Maps it has up to date traffic information so if you see orange or red sections coming up you can think of a diversion. Whether it's navigating or not, it's also useful for showing the road ahead. A route on Thursday at one point had a sharp left, sharp right, bridge, sharp right again, sharp left sequence that was invisible (hedges and gentle curve leading up to it) as you approached. Nice to be able to prepare for that sort of thing.

    621:

    Heteromeles noted about GPS: "I like them. And I've had problems with them. I've had much bigger problems with those who can't read maps well enough to know when they're being misled by the sat-nav, who insist on blindly following the instructions even though they're obviously wrong."

    Yup. Back in forestry school, I was taking a course in orienteering to support ecological mapping and timber surveys. Long before GPS and easy access to satellite data; strictly compass, aerial photo, topo map, and occasional trigonometry. Before one day's exercise, I asked my prof what the scale was on the airphotos he'd handed out. He tossed off a number that sounded plausible (we'd used that scale in previous exercises), then handed me and my partner our photos and instructions for the day's exercise: plot an efficient course to a specific timber stand using only the airphotos (no topo map allowed in our kit), survey it, then come out at a different road on the far side of the photo for pickup.

    Would have had no problem, except for one thing: I'd been writing a satirical noir crime saga for the department newsletter under a pseudonym, and the editor leaked my name. My prof, who had played a prominent role in the saga and did not like that in the least, decided to teach me a lesson, and throughout the course, sent me across some of the nastiest transects in our training area. (I still have fond memories of wading up to my nipples through a swamp that had been ice 3 weeks earlier, carrying my backpack on my head.) This time, he decided it would be a nice teaching lesson called "always check the map at the camp rather than relying on someone else's guess". He gave me photos with a very different scale. We trusted him and used the scale he provided instead of checking it against a map.

    So off me and my partner go, proceeding on the demonstrably incorrect assumption that our distances were not off by 50%. We completed our navigation and ended up in entirely the wrong area. No idea where we were, but it really, really wasn't the pickup point. The simple solution would have been to reverse our compass directions and walk back out to the dropoff point, and then walk a very long way back to camp. Instead, we figured out where we were in the airphoto, figured out the course and distance from there to the pickup point, and set out across terra incognita, avoiding the worst obstacles and hoping our calculations were right. Made it to the pickup point with minutes to spare. If it had been earlier in the day, we might have tried to redo our navigation to reach the survey point and do the survey, but it was too late in the day, and we might have missed our pickup if we tried. We earned a marginal passing grade on the assignment; we didn't complete the survey, but the prof respected the fact that we didn't panic and didn't spend the night in the forest without food or a tent.

    Taught me the extremely valuable lesson that if your life potentially depends on it, it's wise to double-check the calculations using multiple sources. Triple checking isn't inappropriate. Nowadays, I do a reality check on any course before following it, even if it's a GPS course. Sometimes especially if it's a GPS course.

    622:

    Late to the discussion but would like to add:

    I personally have a problem with a speedometer display that gives me an actual number in big digits on the display - it always makes me continously check my speed vs the speed limit on the road (and I'm assuming makes me more than a tiny(?) bit more unattentive to my surroundings...). With a more classic "needle on a scale" display (even if it is on an electronic screen) I'm perfectly happy to be traveling about 90 kmph-ish etc without the need for constant microadjustments in the range of one to two kmph

    Satnavs with live feed can really be a pain in the derriere sometimes. Some time ago I was picked up by my ex wife in her car somewhere north of Stockholm, Sweden. It was a friday afternoon and peak traffic towards central parts of town which you have to pass in order to get to were we live. The particular place we were has two obvious roads to take. The satnav app recommended one of them because of traffic congestion on the other. No sooner had we reached the recommended road to take when it suddenly recommended the other one (which we had been closer to in the beginning)

    And a note about relative directions: I worked for the Stockholm underground more than 20 years ago. The general direction a train is going - especially when it passes the big nexus T-Centralen - defines North and South which then designates the exits on stations with more than one exit. Especially the Green Line makes this great bend around the inner city before turning westwards resulting in stations with exits where the "south exit" is the northernmost and vice versa (there are no East and West in the Stockholm underground).

    Oh, if there is a third exit it is always designated as the X (or cross) exit (there are no stations with more than three exits open to the public)

    623:
    Brit Mil Intel reports that up to One Third of Russian forces have been lost - even if it's cough One-Quarter cough it's a hell of a loss rate. If true, then RU forces will simply collapse & implode before much longer ( when? ) - IIRC the Ukrainian people are expecting this to happen?

    Not that I wish to slag off my own country's military intelligence, but I'd treat anything from the MOD as mildly suspect. They are usually a few days late -- compared to other sources -- and have a tendency at the moment to exaggerate Ukrainian successes. For fairly obvious morale-boosting purposes.

    There's a wikipedia webpage that shows sources for casualties (search: russia ukraine war 2022). I find it interesting that the Donetz Peoples Republic has admitted to having taken significant losses amongst its "partisans" (read: 16-64 year old males who're are sent in in front of Russia's Battalion Tactical Groups).

    On the matter of SatNavs: it pains me to say this, but I'm beginning to wonder if the Seagull really is the most disruptive participant here.

    624:

    smartphones have "car mode" for blocking most interruptions while in motion at speed

    Something I turned on as soon as I had a phone new enough to have it. Very useful, especially as I have a niece who uses RETURN as punctuation.

    This means that

    every time she texts

    instead of using a comma or a period she hits return

    or send

    and so you have to wait for multiple texts to see what she is saying

    and you get multiple pings in a short time

    which is really annoying

    not to mention distracting

    (Honestly, I've also turned off alerts for her generally. I don't mind a PING as texts arrive, but PING PING PING PING PING PING for what's effectively one text just seems intrusive.)

    625:

    On a completely different note, the GTA will be cloudy this evening. I knew it a long time ago, because every time there's a significant astronomical event we have cloudy skies that means we miss it.

    In this case, it's the lunar eclipse, which I'd hoped to see (and photograph). So of course it's the one cloudy night in the week :-(

    Those of you with clear skies, enjoy.

    626:

    Dave Lester
    Well ... so far ( so far, right ) Brit Mil Intel have been right on the nail as regards what's going on there, including warning it was going to kick off. But even I found that proportion rather high., & I note that now, said number does not seem to be appearing. Um.
    On the matter of navigation, including Sat ( Or Shat ) navs .... It might also be "What you are used to" & I find Google maps ludicrously lacking in information & relevance - getting topography to "show" f'rinstance, which I regard as vital. Whilst flooding the "map" with utter crap that I don't want or need, & {AFAIK} can't get rid of - the advertising crap, which is even worse on "street view".
    Certainly inside the UK, the default value has to be either the 1:50 000 or 1:25 000 "OS" map - & owning a complete set of the former also helps.

    627:

    I've heard that low-tech communities sometimes deal with bad leaders by just... moving away. The ex-leader wakes up one morning and everyone else is gone.

    I don't know whether this is better or worse than killing the ex-leader. It presumably requires freedom to move, and is probably more suitable for nomadic people.

    Anyone have information on killing vs. leaving? Is there ever just ostracism while the leader is still alive and in the area? (I've heard about that occasionally happening to cult leaders.)

    628:

    so most of the time you're driving on an empty road, right in the middle of it, straddling the line if there is one. Yes, you are careful on blind bends and crests.

    If you have overhead power lines along the road you can watch for the headlights illuminating the bottom of the wires/cables. A trick I was taught many decades ago.

    629:

    607 - Oh, I really did hope you'd say something like that. It amounts to an admission that no-one can drive a car with touch-screen controls without a special drivers' licence which doesn't even exist!

    616 Para 2 - So are other things, like driving above the speed limit, running yellow or red traffic lights, driving with excess alcohol in your blood... And some people habitually do one or more of them every day. If you doubt me, see Ashley Neal on YouTube.

    625 para 2 - Likewise, and I can explain why. With an analogue speedo, if your speed changes you will note the fact and have an idea how much by and whether it was an increment or decrement, from the movement of the needle. With a digital (29) display, you may note that the value has changed, but you will need to focus on the display and actively read it to determine the new value.

    631 - Of course, you do also have to watch for points where the overhead lines take a different route to the road.

    630:

    Of course, you do also have to watch for points where the overhead lines take a different route to the road.

    Ah, not the only way. It's just a reference at night. If you see lights reflected off the bottom of the lines there may be something ahead to be aware of. A car. Or maybe just someone with their front porch lights on.

    Our rural roads in western Kentucky were wider than those things that seem to exist in rural England and Scotland but kicking up some gravel on the side wasn't uncommon when encountering a car from the other direction.

    631:

    633 comments, and no one has mentioned the eMeRalD mIne yet? Unbelievable.

    632:

    633 comments, and no one has mentioned the eMeRalD mIne yet? Unbelievable.

    You mean Errol Musk and the rumored emerald mine? https://www.thesouthafrican.com/lifestyle/elon-musk-net-worth-errol-musk-emerald-mine-scandal-tesla-space-x/

    If this is true, perhaps the apple didn't fall far from the IBM? Shall we say?

    633:

    Apparently the hot new rumor is that there's a coup underway against Putin in Russia.

    We'll see. But if you want a reason to doomscroll in advance of the eclipse tonight, here you go.

    634:

    Yes, exactly that. The single step from "Elon's estranged father once owned a share in an emerald mine" directly to "Elon is literally a Nazi". Great illustration.

    635:

    Where my kids got me a tomtom, I think it is, nav system. I pulled it out a few times, and plugged it in (must be plugged in). Three years ago, I was using it to try to get to where Ellen was living. For some reason, it changed where I was going in the middle of me driving, and instead of taking me to her house, I wound up outside of a transfer station near the Baltimore docks. I looked, and yes, it had changed my destination.

    636:

    By the bye, the sat-nav argument seems to have devolved into "I always use it, and you should too, and if you can't why are you driving?" vs. "I don't like them, they're annoying and distracting, and on occasion, wrong". I don't see anyone on the "don't like them" side saying that the others shouldn't use them if they find them useful.

    637:

    Putin dies and goes to hell, but after a while, he is given a day off for good behavior. So he goes to Moscow, enters a bar, orders a drink, and asks the bartender:

    Is Crimea ours?
    Yes, it is.
    And the Donbas?
    Also ours.
    And Kyiv?
    We got that too.

    Satisfied, Putin drinks, and asks: Thanks, how much do I owe you?
    5 euros.

    638:

    David L @ 573:

    Is this some Aussie-nism? Because I read this sentence several times, and have no clue what you are talking about. A piece of car body fell off? An artillery shell suddenly rolled out of the car in front?

    Happened to me once. Sort of.

    I forget exactly what it was that flew off a car 2 ahead of me, over the one in front of me, then hit my bumper and cracked the plastic portion of the bumper. It took a few tries with the claims adjuster to get the details correct.

    "Why didn't you stop?" I was doing the speed limit in the middle of 3 lanes of traffic. 60mph. It was all over in a second or so.

    "What was it that hit you?" No idea. It was about the size of a piece of paper.

    Oh, yeah. I was driving my daughter's car registered and insured in her name. Just to make it more fun.

    Probably going to be getting another new windshield. I was on the way back to Raleigh from the VA Hospital over in Durham. Just as I merged with I-40 I heard a loud "crack"; probably a rock thrown by a passing truck. No apparent damage at the time. Not even a chip.

    But about 10 miles down the road, I saw the windshield start to crack (up from the bottom edge below the wipers).

    So far it's a little less than 6 inches (~ 150mm), but based on previous experience, I figure by the end of summer it will be all the way across.

    FWIW, I've been driving approximately 57 years and I think this is about the 5th time I've had to have a windshield replaced.

    639:

    JHomes @ 604: "He said that he was in a position where there was a sat nav in a car he was operating, that he couldn't turn off, and he's unable to drive safely with them."

    Going back to 533, Greg did not say that he could not turn it off, and if indeed he could not turn it off, why not?

    Any non-essential device should be possible to turn off if it causes a problem, and if not the vehicle is defective. Sat nav is non-essential.

    Just a SWAG, but if it was a rental car, the rental company may not want you to turn off the sat-nav and have that feature disabled.

    640:

    Muchas gracias, as they should say in Texas.

    641:

    I think the whole subthread spun off from a suggestion that the UK is going to start including use of satnav in its driving tests. I don't think anyone's arguing that anyone should be forced to use them. I think Greg suggested banning them, because he found himself driving a car that had one and couldn't work out how to turn it off.

    I suppose I'd contrast it with manual transmission. You don't get a special endorsement on your driver's licence here for manual, but if you completed your test in an automatic you get a code on your licence that basically says you are only qualified for automatic. Historically everyone learned on a manual, so they didn't end up with the restricted licence. Manual cars are becoming less common and I've heard co-workers talk about seeking them out for their kids to learn on, so it seems to still be a thing.

    Taking that as a model, you'd probably imaging needing an endorsement not for using satnav, but actually for not using one. Some younger relatives I've spoken to about driving do in fact seem to see it that way. To them, consciously not using it and keeping a model of the map in your head is a departure from their usual cognitive experience.

    642:

    It's not a suggestion - it's already in place. Further searching indicates that the choice of whether to require it or not has nothing to do with the candidate.

    https://www.gov.uk/government/news/driving-test-changes-4-december-2017

    https://www.gov.uk/driving-test/what-happens-during-test

    643:

    ...and furthermore gives no clue as to what it is based on. Day of the week? Number of preceding candidates that day? Rolling a die and ignoring one possible result? Eeny meeny miny mo?

    644:

    If you want a 'standard' transmission you have to look pretty hard around here, very few vehicles aside from sports cars have them.

    For 'stories that are true but difficult to explain to the insurance company' I think my wife will probably take the trophy.

    While driving our elder son and his friend to the swimming pool in a nearby town, she saw a black bear come sprinting out of the bushes beside the highway and slam into the side of our car, denting the rear door on the driver side. Apparently it all happened very quickly, no time to react.

    When she told me about it I didn't believe her, until our then 6 year old son piped up and 'tattled', saying 'Mom hit a bear'.

    The car was insured in my name, but I insisted that she handle the interactions with insurance, as it would be even less believable if I went in and told them 'a bear ran into the side of the car while my wife was driving'.

    paws4thot 603: I didn't say nobody ever. I specifically prefaced the tale with 'funny story', not 'example of why I am right'.

    645:

    You don't get a special endorsement on your driver's licence here for manual, but if you completed your test in an automatic you get {that restriction}

    Terrifyingly that applies to heavy vehicle licenses too. Guy who drove the furniture truck last time I moved was one, but the truck was manual and he really couldn't. When I got home I looked it up and yep... he was likely not actually legal to drive that truck.

    https://www.idealdrivingschool.com.au/heavy-rigid-auto-licence.php

    And thus did Moz learn that while hiring "two men and a truck" might seem cheaper than hiring a truck and bribing friends, it ain't necessarily so. When you pay by the hour the movers have every incentive to work slowly, and if they're not providing insurance they DGAF about your shit.

    646:

    gives no clue as to what it is based on

    Allegedly "One in 5 driving tests won’t use a sat nav. You’ll need to follow traffic signs instead" and I suspect that is there so if the sat nav is unavailable they can still do the test. I suggest turning up being ready for either.

    One of my truck tests in NZ was supposed to involve backing a (single) semitrailer into a slot, but there was an availability problem so that part of the test consisted of the examiner saying "can you do it" and me saying "yes". Although TBH he had every reason to expect that, I was an employee of a major trucking company on a training program with them. And I did have to back the truck up to park it at the end of the test.

    The fun part was him making me to an emergency stop, then saying "oh, turns out you did have the brakes set correctly". He could have said something, or asked, but nope, he decided to do an emergency stop.

    647:

    When my recent ex and I were in the UK for Worldcon and touring in '14, a std. trans was more-or-less a default, and a lot cheaper than automatic.

    It also had a feature that I've NEVER heard of in the US, which was that if you stalled it out*, it restarted itself.

    * As in, the trans, after 5k mi of users, was so stiff that about one time in four I'd go to shift, and it would go to third, rather than first.

    648:

    The osmand free android app (and paid upgrade osmand+) includes a Truck profile and allows custom vehicle parameter limits for navigation (weight, height, length, and min/default/max speed).

    The free version has limited map region downloads, but that might be enough for a one-off trip. Haven't tested whether uninstall + reinstall resets download limit.

    649:

    That looks interesting. I haven't really looked into other apps, I should do some research.

    650:

    A bit late to the topic, but I wanted to say that both Jobs and Musk had millions when they went into their key leadership roles. Jobs in his comeback at Apple, and Musk at Tesla. But they only became billionaires because they succeeded. It isn't necessary to make someone a billionaire in order to get good leadership. It's just that when things work out, there is so much money sloshing around, the CEO can end up with a big chunk of it and the investors and employees are still happy. It's still inequitable. What's missing from that picture is the run-down schools and all the people that aren't participating in the bonanza because they aren't shareholders or direct employees. There should be more progressive income taxes, financial transaction taxes, and wealth taxes so some of the profits are reinvested in the society that makes it all possible. William Gates Sr., the father of Bill Gates, was outspoken in favor of the inheritance tax. He understood it well because he went to law school on the G.I. Bill, which enabled him to be a leader in the Seattle business community, which was a major reason why his son had so much business savvy and was able to succeed with his small software startup.

    651:

    There are adjustments for disabilities. They should really give some more concrete idea of what might be available there, but I'd be surprised if e.g. "I'm deaf and can't handle a satnav as a result, please use the other option that you use with 20% of candidates anyway" weren't a fairly well-trodden path.

    652:

    ... especially because that's explicitly listed as an option in the case of learning difficulties, so clearly something they already adjust for in a candidate-specific way in some cases.

    653:

    I was riding in the passenger seat with a local priest driving his VW Beetle. As we neared his church, a dog ran out on my side and hit the car. There was a loud thunk. The priest stopped the car immediately, got out and ran around, full of concern for the poor dog. There was a large dent in the right rear fender where the dog hit is head. The dog got to his feet, shook his head, and trotted away. He was an Irish Setter. I think his head was about as close to completely solid as one can get.

    654:

    Paws said: Oh, I really did hope you'd say something like that. It amounts to an admission that no-one can drive a car with touch-screen controls without a special drivers' licence which doesn't even exist!

    Well I'd say "no-one should (if they can't use it safely)" rather than "No-one can" (because there's no such endorsement). And I also think that such an endorsement should exist. I also think there should be a requirement for currency and regular check rides (say every 5 years).

    As I said, this is all news to me. I'm not distracted by a moving map. In fact it lets me concentrate on the road much more than trying to read road signs, which as others have noted are small, oddly placed and often absent. As for taking my eyes off the road to fiddle with a touch screen, I'm somewhat amazed that it's a thing. It's easier to use the voice commands. If you'd asked me if it's necessary to test people to see if they can manage that, 3 days ago I would have said "WTF?". No more than I would have said it's necessary to test that people won't try to open the rear passenger side window by lying down across the seat and fooling with the winder on the other side of the car while it's in motion, particularly as there's a control for the rear passenger side window on the driver's door. Like "no one would do that", surely! It's harder than doing it the right way! But apparently people do.

    655:

    Remember that a lot of people here still drive the car they bought second hand in 1945 and are happy doing so. Some of them have seen the transition from "people die, that's life" to "cars should be less lethal" to "fuck you I've got a right to do what I want" which leads to cars very much like the one the cranky oldsters have, but with airbags!

    My personal bias is towards manual everything because I grew up around motor vehicles where anything electrical that wasn't essential was probably broken. Early electric windows especially were notorious for... what's the modern saying... "fail early, fail often"? Or you'd buy a second hand car and discover that the window motors had been replaced with blocks of wood. Ditto sunroofs, or as they're more accurately known, rain sieves.

    But I'm sure that modern cars are designed so all that stuff keeps working for the full 30-50 year life of the car. That's why the extended 30 year warranty is so affordable. Right? (yes, sarcasm. Even most "lifetime warranty" products aren't designed to last 30 years)

    656:

    voidampersand said: There should be more progressive income taxes, financial transaction taxes, and wealth taxes so some of the profits are reinvested in the society that makes it all possible.

    That's right if business worked like the church. There was a financial disaster caused by that exact thing you're describing. Called the dark ages. The church soaked up all the money, put it in their coffers and only spent a tiny amount building palaces. That sucked the life out of trade.

    Billionaires are not like that. The money is invested in things that make more money. The money is made to work. It provides jobs, makes the money circulate and raises prosperity generally. It's not just piled up in a vault.

    I'm not saying income inequality is a good thing, it's not, but it's not bad in the way you're describing. It's differently bad.

    657:

    I agree, but I'm not sure how that speaks to what I said. (I like manual everything too, though I'm quite partial to automatic spark advance)

    If you're happy driving an Albatross , go for it. Just do it safely. If your thing is Mercedes S Class, go for it, just do it safely.

    I used to think that if you were safe in an Albatross you'd be safe in an S class, no need for further testing, but I've updated my opinion.

    658:

    Remember that a lot of people here still drive the car they bought second hand in 1945 and are happy doing so.

    Of course that can easily get you into:

    Pull into the gas station with an attendant. Ask them to check the gas and fill up the oil.

    659:

    Here, you go Whit. https://time.com/3925308/rich-families-lose-wealth/

    If you're rather easily noticing the families that don't follow this trend, then I think that neatly emphasises my earlier point - even a small percentage of politically active or actively corrupt hyper-wealthy families (or in the case of recent US Presidents, both) is too dangerous to democracy.

    I'm struck by the irony that the tame, racist economists (today's google search: "James McGill Buchanan") that those hyper-wealthy families wheel out to justify their behaviour all effectively say the same thing - liberal democracy and billionaires are incompatible. On this one point I agree with them.

    660:

    You don't get a special endorsement on your driver's licence here for manual, but if you completed your test in an automatic you get a code on your licence that basically says you are only qualified for automatic.

    Here most cars are automatic, but there's nothing from stopping you driving a manual if you want (and can find one).

    I got my first manual in the 80s, which saved me 10% of the price of a car. Been driving manual since. As my next car will likely be electric, I'll have to get used to not having gears eventually — but hopefully I can keep this one running for a few more years. Mileage is low and I only drive once every week or two to pick up heavy groceries — plus maybe 2-3000 km in recreational trips a year.

    661:

    You were talking about things like electric windows as something that of course all cars have, they're a basic safety feature.

    there's a control for the rear passenger side window on the driver's door.

    For many people the control you mention is actually located low on the driver's face. The mechanism is voice controlled and resides in the rear seat.

    I still remember my sister falling out the rear passenger door on a corner in the late 70's. Luckily at relatively low speed. Either the child lock on the door wasn't engaged, or the door wasn't shut properly. Seatbelts were not fitted to the back seats on those days.

    Of course these days a little car like that one (Ford Cortina) wouldn't be safe on the road at all because in a collision with a heavy vehicle SUV it would be crushed like tinfoil.

    Although I note that the EU is seeing a lot of vehicles on the market that have even fewer safety features than that, because they're designed for human-centred transport. Technically "heavy quadricycles" for the most part, but among many others someone has a modern reinterpretation of the Messerschmitt K200 microcar. Wow, search reveals two. A velomobile and a bigger, heavier actual car from the original manufacturer!

    https://newatlas.com/veloschmitt-1950s-messerschmitt-e-velomobile/31942/

    https://newatlas.com/automotive/messerschmitt-kr-microcars/

    662:

    That is the Wellington Tramway Museum's site. I am in Christchurch (I volunteer at the Ferrymead Tramway).

    663:

    FWIW that habit is just as bad in any other chat program. I recall one text-only meeting that I left because one person typed two or three words per message and that pushed the rest of the meeting off the screen. I'd be trying to write a reply to something and what I was replying to would vanish behind a cloud of short "yeah" "like that" "I agree" type fluff. When I blocked that user it improved a lot, but other people didn't and it became obvious both that most people weren't able to follow proceeding ... and then I got told off for blocking when the user asked me something and I ignored them.

    I'm reminded of that because I just got vomited a chain of messages between two coworkers. They're using Outlook, which tries hard (and effectively) to force top posting. So I have a sludge of

    A further comment on my reply
    A reply to your question
    Some question
    A comment not related to anything so far
    A vague suggestion of an answer
    A followup question to the first answer
    A different answer from someone else
    A partial answer from one person
    An important question

    Where some people add blank lines to help clarify, everyone accepts top posting and magic non-preserved indents for quoting, and some people interject with weird comments so I had to assemble the "conversation" by copying bits out of random emails.

    I emailed a condensed, re-ordered version to everyone and got a reply "what are you asking".

    664:

    Ditto sunroofs, or as they're more accurately known, rain sieves.

    I once had the opportunity to buy a 10ish year old Volvo S80/T6 that had about 130,000km on it and a service history that showed its timing belt service had been done, with the receipts attached. The seller was a mechanic with a small scale sideline in used cars and he'd taken it as a trade-in. He claimed he just didn't have space for it and didn't want to spend time on it himself. The engine seemed to be fine when he ran it... all that exciting twin turbo V6 stuff that had London stockbrokers drag-racing them in the year or two after they came out.

    The first thing that put me off a bit was that it needed a jump start ("Nah mate, it just needs a new battery"). The second thing was that, aside from the tyres, which looked fine, every single piece of external rubber was perished and cracked. This might have been related to the way the electrics on the sunroof didn't seem to be working ("It was working the other day, must just be a fuse... lemme find one and check"). I'm pretty sure it was related to the issue that for me was the real show-stopper: the internal rear-view mirror appeared to be full of black liquid. As in, instead of seeing a mirror, you saw a glass panel with black liquid behind it which sloshed around when you moved it. Sure where there was black liquid behind the panel, it functioned more or less as a mirror. But I was convinced it wasn't supposed to do that.

    I don't regret not taking up that opportunity, but it was an interesting era in terms of being a point in time to take a technology snapshot. Instead of pairing with your phone, there was a socket for a GSM SIM on the dashboard and a corded handset like an old landline. Also SD-card based maps for the builtin satnav. Without all the concern about electronics and water it could have made an excellent long term drive till it falls apart student car, albeit ridiculous overpowered... which just means it could tow quite a large boat or caravan. Ah well :P

    665:

    Oh, yeah, I see. Makes sense now.

    I used to joke that my car (Suzuki Sierra) had central locking because I could reach the passenger door without leaning over.

    In reality it didn't really have any locking because you could unzip the roof.

    666:

    "I am scared of new twenty year old things! I shall go to this - checks notes- science fiction writer's blog to complain about it with no self awareness"

    667:

    Was that also from the "universal key" era? A lot of the lock mechanisms quickly wore to the point where even a screwdriver could turn the ignition on (etc).

    My truck was much like that. I had an immobiliser fitted, then discovered that it was powered by 24V-12V converter that drew ~50mA continuously. So not only did I have an immobiliser, I had to fit my own switch to double immobilise lest the vehicle become completely immobilised via a flat battery.

    The real fun was running a pair of wires from the inside of the chassis up inside the insulation to the top of the box to power the tracker (GPS+SIM+small battery) that lived under the fibreglass top of the anti-crush barrier at the front of the box. Several hours work to run a wire ~3m, but once done it was a very hard to find way to ensure I knew where the vehicle was. I bought a cheap version so there was a tracker in a more obvious place in case someone naughty thought to look for it.

    ... then I sold the truck :)

    668:

    I take it then that the advice "When you are in a hole, stop digging," is much too ancient and time-worn for you to take any notice of it.

    JHomes.

    669:

    Invoking the rule of past 300,

    (WP) "BERLIN — Sweden’s ruling party dropped the country’s historic military nonalignment on Sunday and agreed to join NATO, shortly after Finland’s leaders officially announced they would do the same."

    Russia launches an astoundingly incompetent ethnocidal invasion of Ukraine. Ukraine resists with astounding competence. NATO deals with the matter astoundingly forcefully and, one hopes, prudently. Astoundingly, Sweden(!) and Finland apply for NATO membership.

    One is astounded.

    670:

    The medieval church provided many services that nowadays are done by government. A lot of essential clerical work was done by, well, clerics. The church built the first universities. Religious orders did charity work. Also before there was anything like a corporation or joint-stock company, some of the oldest businesses in Europe were started in monasteries. That does not excuse the excesses of the church, just that the history is not simplistic.

    Of course billionaires invest their money in things that make more money. But what does "make more money" mean? It could be a productive investment, or it could be better ways of monopolizing markets and cheating workers. The problem with economic inequality is that it prioritizes runaway capital accumulation over investments in basic needs.

    671:

    It sounds, from the conversation, more like they tried Sat Nav when it first came out, and before the bugs were worked out, and had a bad experience. I've been using it since 2008 and had no troubles.

    672:

    Astoundingly, Sweden(!) and Finland apply for NATO membership.

    Well, I'm not that astounded, though this is acknowledges the real state of affairs much more than has been usual.

    Sweden, although neutral on paper, has been cooperating with the US for a long time. Less so with Russia. It's also firmly on the Western side of politics. The only thing that surprises me is that they openly make commitment.

    Finland has been participating in Nato's partnership programs since 1994. Finland Defence Forces' page says that we participate in 15-20 exercises with Nato annually. IMHO that isn't very neutral, and we (well, for obvious reasons...) haven't been doing the same with Russia.

    So, I kind of think this is just formalizing the real relationship. This also means that protesting and opposing Nato membership application lately has been kind of late.

    I have also the cynic part that tells me that Russia's attack on Ukraine was a convenient excuse to apply to Nato. Russia hasn't been doing particularily well in Ukraine, and using the possible invasion attempt of Finland (which has a sizeable defence force and somewhat difficult geography) as an important reason to join Nato right now kind of misses the point that Russia is in no shape to attack Finland for many years - in my opinion, which admittely is not very important nor well-informed. Reports of attackers armed mostly with bolt-lock rifles do not tell of good equipment, however.

    673:

    Allegedly they're crowdfunding equipment as well.

    Which echos Ukrainian efforts, so meh? Well, except that one of those countries is claiming to be a superpower.

    I have a mental image of a Ukrainian second hand car yard with a new section "tanks: one careful owner, slightly used, sold as is" in Russian.

    674:

    I think there's a difference between defending your country or attacking an another one, and this applies also to preparation. If you attack, I think it's prudent you prepare for your plan and as much as you can for when that plan fails. If you defend, you do the same, but in case of an attack, the attacker has a greater control on where to attack and how.

    So I don't think Russia and Ukraine are quite equal here. Russia basically committed a force 'large enough' (which it wasn't!) while Ukraine has to defend with all it has. I'd say the attacker doing crowdsourcing for the equipment is a sign of a large failure, or more probably, many large failures. For the defender, not so much so, starting from the fact that stockpiling equipment during peacetime for a defensive war is, to my understanding, somewhat expensive. Others helping where they can is in many ways an advantageous thing.

    I'm not sure what kind of Russia we well have after this war, and even less what kind of Russia we have five or ten years later. What I'm sure of nobody else does, either. In this situation, Finland joining Nato seems to me to not be only or even mostly because of the Russian attack on Ukraine, but it gives a nice reason for it, for certain values of a nice reason.

    675:

    Moz asked Was that also from the "universal key" era?

    Yes indeed, but the the locks are good as new. The door locks have never been used, the ignition lock has only ever had a single key in it, never a bunch of keys sawing away at the lock. Because I'm also from that era, so it's only ever a key, never a bunch of keys on all my vehicles.

    676:

    Voidampersand said: The medieval church provided many services

    Firstly, no. The services you're taking about (universities etc) are of a later period. The first European universities started around 1090, a century after the end of the dark ages. There wasn't enough money around before that because the church had it all. Most of the other services likewise. Indeed the church was more likely to conduct raids on the population than be providing charity works.

    Secondly, services aren't worth shit. Provide a service for a man and they have that service for the day. Buy a man's food that he's selling in the market, and he can pay the blacksmith to make a plow. The blacksmith can pay the tavern owner for his ale, the tavern owner can pay the brewer, the brewer can pay the cooper, the cooper can pay the woodcutter, the wood cutter can pay the farmer for dinner that night.

    The money goes around and around generating wealth at every exchange.

    As long as the billionaires keep the money circulating, it's not 'lost' to society.

    677:

    Kardashev - & others, re: Ukraine
    GO TO Radio 4 & "Listen Again" to the "Today" programme, approx. 07.20-25: - Comment, news & personal descriptions form Bucha. Euwww .... Almost-live War Crimes described at home.
    ... Ah yes, what to do about semi-dictator Erdogan trying to stop Sweden joining?

    Astoundingly the stupid fucking English Green Party are against membership of NATO (still)!

    Mikko P.
    I'm not sure what kind of Russia we well have after this war - yes, well.
    Suppose the Ukrainians successfully throw all the RU out & get Crimea back, but RU/Putin simply continue to throw missiles? What is to be done ( Oh dear ) about the 20+ years of brainwashing that the RU population have been subjected to, that has produced things like the column of spiteful hate shown in the link I posted back up @ # 616 - { Oh shit - link is broken - can the mods please fix it? }
    { Basically: "Ukraine has gone completely Nazi, we need to occupy for 30+ years, kill half the men & eradicate Ukraine as a nation! }

    678:

    Greg said: What is to be done ( Oh dear ) about the 20+ years of brainwashing that the RU population have been subjected to, that has produced things like the column of spiteful hate...

    They seem to be working themselves up into a froth to take on the whole world.

    https://mobile.twitter.com/JuliaDavisNews/status/1516883853431955456

    679:

    https://paulbutler.org/2022/the-problem-with-bitcoin-miners/

    Via HackerNews, two (listed) bitcoin mining companies are valued at more than their expected lifetime earnings.

    As of writing, there are 1,960,775 bitcoin remaining to be mined. If RIOT could sustain their 1.7% share of the mining market, they would earn 33,333 of those bitcoin. At today’s cost of $30,000 market price, all of those bitcoin would be worth just under $1B. RIOT’s market cap is currently just above $1B. Even in a fantasy world where RIOT could sustain its market share and never pay for electricity, hardware, staff, etc., it would still be a more expensive way to own a stake in the pool of unmined bitcoin than just spending the same money on bitcoin today.

    ROFL

    680:

    Sure, but my point was that no-one here is arguing that it should be mandatory to use them. It came up because of the driving test stuff in the UK. I can see how my wording might be taken differently though, and I note you have a similar issue more often than not. So I'm actually quite appreciative about the way there are opportunities here to learn how to express concepts less ambiguously and to study how people react to various levels of imprecise expression.

    681:

    To be fair, I don't think it's really the billionaires who keep money circulating. There's also a more fundamental argument that you don't really need money for the local level economic activity you describe here (though it sure makes it easier).

    682:

    I'm not saying that billionaires are the ones that "keep money circulating" but what I am saying is that they don't lock up money. There's this idea that "... picture is the run-down schools and all the people that aren't participating in the bonanza because they aren't shareholders or direct employees." (voidampersand) or that dealing with climate change (hetero) are a binary choice with billionaires. Like we could have schools, but we have billionaires instead. That's not the case at all. Income inequality is very bad, billionaires are bad, but they're not bad because they "lock up money that could be put to better use" (in whatever hobby horse is my personal favourite). They don't, they "put money to work" and that means employment for direct employees and the blacksmith, publican, brewer and cooper.

    If someone wants to argue against billionaires and the system that creates them, I'm all ears. But if their arguments depend on obviously false premises, then they're not going to convince anyone (unless they're just looking for confirmation of something they already think). Which doesn't get rid of billionaires.

    683:

    they're not bad because they "lock up money that could be put to better use"

    It's less obvious in the rich countries, but I think it's hard to argue that Marcos used the national wealth of the Philippines in a way that benefitted Filipinos. That money could definitely have been put to better use, but AFAIK a lot of it is still locked up (or at least inaccessible)

    But in the west, all those stories about billionaires buying up apartments in big cities are just fairy tales? Or are you suggesting that those apartments reduce the scale of the housing crisis somehow?

    And I assume private equity companies get their money from "mom and pop" investors when they buy up companies, gut them and leave bankrupt wrecks in their place? Admittedly there are other forms of predatory investment, it's not just semi-anonymous billions of dollars sloshing round looking for profit. But that does seem to be the dominant form right now. See also the Twitter buyout... no doubt that will dramatically increase the positive contribution Twitter makes to the world?

    Speaking of positive contributions from that particular billionaire, I assume the benefits of Starlink so far outweigh whatever we could get from terrestrial optical astronomy that it's no contest? For just $US2 a day a few million people can get internet access... for half the people in the world that would be everything the have. But global poverty is a problem of empire more than it is a problem of excessively rich individuals.

    There's also the circular problem that billionares buy laws that make it easier for them to make more billions, and at this stage we don't seem to have a form of government available that can withstand them (this is the East India Company problem as well as the US empire problem). So they directly damage democracy. Right now Clive Palmer is exploiting holes in Australia's electoral law to campaign for the Liberal Party, but because he's doing it with his own party branding he's not restrained by the usual media laws, or any spending/fundraising limits (it's "his own" money).

    Would you say that the people of Russia are better off now that it has a few billionaires than it was when it was communist? The kleptocrats don't seem to be better than their predecessors and in many ways are worse.

    684:

    Some commenters here have some odd ideas about billionaires, and about economics.

    Jobs didn't make his fortune as a creative CEO of Apple. He did make millions founding Apple, as did Steve Woz. But Jobs made the vast bulk of his fortune by buying Lucasfilm's computer graphics division for a song just before computer movie animation became a big thing. He renamed it "Pixar", sold its services for a while, then watched it create a movie of its own called "Toy Story", then more movies, and then later sold it Disney. That's where his billions came from. And Jobs wasn't hugely creatively involved in what Pixar did. So scratch the "creative genius Jobs made his fortune inventing the iphone" stereotype as why billionaires are entitled to that much cash - maybe he was a creative genius, or a great CEO, I've no idea, but that's not really what made him his cash.

    In general billionaires don't make their money by running things. And certainly not by being creative. They mostly make their money by owning things. The Koch bros are much more typical - billionaires because of a inherited wealth, ownership, and a lot of political influence to make what they own more valuable.

    So we could talk about how chronically overpaid CEOS are. Since 1978 US CEO salaries have increased 940% after inflation, average worker salaries have increased 12%. But there's a lot of research into how productive CEOs are, and it pretty much all finds that CEO salary does not relate to how good they are at their job (google "CEO compensation research"). Evidence really suggests that the increase we've seen in CEO salaries across the board (and it occurred in all industries) over the last 40 years is a cultural phenomena, relating to regulatory and legal changes in how salaries are set. These days boards consisting of ex-CEO, friends of CEOs, and wanna-be CEOs set the CEO salaries, and a business press encourages a cult of personality.

    But actually the big thing driving the incredible increase in inequality - ie, billionaires - isn't CEO pay.

    It is that in the last 40 years we've increased the return on capital (money you make from owning stuff) compared to the return on labour (money you make from doing stuff). That's again a societal choice - the 'neoliberal revolution' since the late 70s saw a huge web of tax changes, regulatory changes, changes in what laws are actually enforced, etc. As well as the legal and political assault on unions. It's note been accompanied by an increase in economic growth - they decades of best economic growth for Western countries were the highly-regulated, powerful-union decades of the 1950s and 1960s when labour made higher returns, CEOs were paid vastly less and capital made less.
    (I strongly recommend Thomas Piketty's books about this)

    As for the "billionaires keep money circulating" argument - nah. That argument only works if the money would either go to the billionaire to spend or vanish somehow (black magic? a collision with anti-matter?). 700 million spent on building 1000 houses for poor families will employ more people and create a better economic return for everyone than 700 million spent on building a mansion for 1 jerk.

    685:
    Astoundingly, Sweden(!) and Finland apply for NATO membership.

    Mikko,

    There was a report about five years ago of Russians buying up Finnish land on/near the border.

    Was that just Western panic reporting or was there real substance to it? And has anything changed (if it was approximately true)?

    686:

    Bit late to this one, but: in Switzerland (at least on the SBB), they actually announce "please leave the train using the doors on the (left|right) side, facing in the direction of travel". I think that was the form of words used.

    I was quite impressed by this, particularly as this was being announced by a human and in English (the French/German announcements also sounded like they had a similar clause in them). Seemed to be universal on SBB intercity trains, so I assume it's something they train guards to do.

    687:

    gasdive at 683: I'm not saying that billionaires are the ones that "keep money circulating" but what I am saying is that they don't lock up money.

    Then I misunderstood you. My apologies.

    But I think I still disagree with your overall point. Because actually how you spend money does matter for the economy and a very small number of very rich spending on a gold toilet seat doesn't spread money around as much as a very large number of less well off spending on fixing their broken toilet.

    moz at 684: There's also the circular problem that billionares buy laws that make it easier for them to make more billions

    That is a pithy summary of Piketty's "Capital in the 21st Century". Which says exactly the same as that, only accompanied by a huge amount of historical data and a fair bit of economic maths to back it all up.

    688:

    That's more like it. Capital flight, Swiss bank accounts, wholesale theft of public assets.

    Billionaires are bad.

    689:

    Oh, and just an aside, the examples of hidden millions, ruined economies, poor population, they're all billionaires created by governments directly. Money stolen from the people by corrupt government officials and hidden away.

    Which speaks to Hetro's idea of we just take all the billionaire's stuff and the government will restructure it everyone will be saved. It's the governments (some governments) that are the ones stealing all the stuff.

    (how the hell did I end up as the billionaire apologist, I hate billionaires. Billionaires are bad)

    690:

    There was a report about five years ago of Russians buying up Finnish land on/near the border.

    Was that just Western panic reporting or was there real substance to it? And has anything changed (if it was approximately true)?

    I don't know that much about that. Reading some news, there has been more Russians buying land here lately, but it's hard to say what for. At least for this year apparently the permissions have become somewhat harder to get.

    There was this case of 'Airiston Helmi', where a Russian company bought a lot of property and built a base-like thing on an island (for example that place had a helicopter field hidden from casual viewing...). There have been some police operations and the company seems to have left Finland already in 2019. Some news by the Finnish Broadcasting Corporation about it.

    Personally I think some of the property buying is done by Russian government interests, but I have really no idea how much. It'd be stupid not to do that, really.

    691:

    647 - The UK test wording is "stop quickly and under control" (my emphasis).

    648 - A typical use case for a UK hire fleet is "day 1 - get to motorway, cruise around speed limit to destination junction (maybe 2 hours), get off motorway to hotel: day 2 - hotel to site you're visiting and back: day 3 - return to pickup point". Maybe half the driving hours include gear work rather than top gear cruising.

    664 - Well, I don't really care about top or bottom posting as long as comments 9, 10 and 11 are sequential with each other.

    665 - "all that exciting twin turbo V6 stuff" - Is this a good time to point out that they all had straight 5 or straight 6 engines?

    692:

    Well, I don't really care about top or bottom posting as long as comments 9, 10 and 11 are sequential with each other.

    Because in this order it's hard to understand what was asked.

    Why is top posting annoying?

    Though in the corporate world it's Outho..look all the way, or maybe Gmail which is almost as bad, so I've resigned to top posting in emails.

    I kind of long for the BBS times when on the message boards I visited the software usually worked so that nothing was quoted implicitly, you had to mark every quoted line, and the custom was to write answer or comment directly below the question or line commented.

    Mixing things made in-between replies impossible, everything gets just more and more jumbled.

    693:

    Jobs also founded and ran NeXT, until it was bought by Apple in a $250M stock swap (which turned out to be a reverse take-over as Jobs surfaced as interim CEO and replaced Apple's top tier with his exec team from NeXT, then executed a successful turnaround).

    That's not insignificant, I think.

    And unlike Gates, Bezos, and Musk, Jobs started out relatively poor -- not destitute, but ordinary working middle class adoptive parents and no trust funds or emerald mines.

    (I have some respect for people who make it without that initial leg up, although by all accounts he was a flaming asshat as a personality. As, apparently, are most mainly-self-made billionaires.)

    694:

    Mikko,

    Thanks for that. I always like to know how much of what I read in the UK press is actually agreeing with what people in the country actually experience.

    695:

    Just a bit of information: as Auricoma noted and got me to link to, Errol Musk (Elon's paternal unit) didn't own an emerald mine. At best he had a share in one at some point. He was, however, reasonably wealthy (low millions in mid-century money) due to his work as a consulting engineer. Apparently his social and personality issues rather made up for his wealth. Elon's a child of his first marriage, and his relationship with his father is rather fraught.

    That's why I made the crack that the apple didn't fall far from the IBM in the Musk family. It can be difficult to outrun one's social upbringing. Spending large amounts of time amassing wealth and power don't leave one the considerable time needed to resolve whatever random, tangled mess your parents bequeathed you in the form of socialization and mental health, either.

    696:

    Single digit millionaires do make sense. A "standard" 9-5 Mon-Fri job in the West works out to around 2,000 hours per year, and most people have a working life of approximately 50 years, give or take (some work more, some less).

    That's roughly 100,000 working hours per lifetime. To become a single-digit millionaire, you need to have an average wage over your lifetime of 10 currency units per hour over and above your basic costs of living.

    https://livingwage.mit.edu/ has data for a liveable wage in the USA; in a two child household, the adults need to earn about $40/hour between them to support the household in much of the USA. Anyone who's paid more than 20% over and above the bare minimum liveable wage (or 5x minimum wage) is able to become a single digit millionaire over their lifetime.

    Australia, as another example, has a national minimum wage that is also liveable in much of the country, at AU$20.33. To become a millionaire in Australia, you need to be frugal and paid at least AU$31/hour over your lifetime. Again, this isn't a huge sum of money as compared to the amount you need to live.

    Using Australia's numbers again, if you say that the most valuable people "should" be worth 5x the least valuable, you're implicitly saying that anything up to about $8 million is reasonable. If you go to 10x range from least valuable to most valuable employee, then you're still implicitly saying that it should be possible to become a $19 million asset value person over one lifetime.

    On this scale, the thing that makes billionaires clearly a failure is that you're saying (effectively) that the most valuable people in society are worth over 1000x the least valuable. And that's a big reach to make; whereas "the most valuable are worth 5x the least valuable" is a much smaller statement to justify.

    697:

    It appears, from what I can find, that it's random for most people, but that if you have a specific disability (hearing impairment, for example) and can justify that you would not use a sat nav as a result of that disability, then it would be reasonable accommodations under the Equality Act 2010 to permit you to navigate by road signs instead of following a sat nav.

    Personally, if we're going to have regular retests, I'd like to see the sat nav thing changed for retests to "here's a sat nav, here's a paper map. You are going to this destination", and leave the candidate to decide how they're navigating themselves. As long as you get to your destination safely, you're fine, regardless of how you do your navigation.

    698:

    That's not insignificant, I think.

    In the US once you have enough $$$$ to live reasonably well on you really want to get your pay as stock options if you want to bank serious money. Tax wise stock appreciation is better for the holder than pure income. And you can park the stock and options into "retirement" funds then borrow from them and not pay taxes till you actually take the money out. (Not borrowed).

    Anyway all those stock options in Apple stock at $1 or even $10 back then are now worth $2000 or some such crazy amount and the profit on the gain not taxed till you actually extract it.

    So Steve Jobs taking a $1 per year salary was a nice stunt but it was only a bad idea if Apple had wiped out.

    699: #579 "A German family perished in USA around the same time, because they reasoned that all military installations would have a patrolled perimeter fence. At least that's the theory, based on the trail of their wrecked car, personal belongings and skeleton fragments found many years later, headed into the desert".

    For anyone who doesn't know the story, the hunt for the Death Valley Germans. Very long read but I found it well worth the time.

    700:

    Warranty. I remember in the mid-seventies, when I was with a girlfriend who had a Pinto (yes, boom car), and she noted, as we were driving along, that it had just rolled over 12k mi, so the four squirrels under the hood had just turned into chipmunks.

    Realistically, around '84, I was having the second trans rebuild on our Chevette (pronouced SHOVE-IT), and the older guy in the office, who was helping out his buddy who's shop it was, told me his son was working on an engineering degree, and they had gotten a project from a car company. One of the specs was NOTHING must exceed spec. The point being, of course, that it should fail as close to the end of warranty as possible.

    701:
  • I'm not "Whit", it's either whitroth, or mark, or "hey, you". (My "preferred pronoun" is "anything but late for dinner".)
  • Sure. And most folks who win the lottery, or are big sportsball stars, are broke a couple years later. The really big and powerful families, the ones with REAL money, don't, because that's what accountants and money managers and trust funds are for. (Well, to be fair, I know one person with real money... and he's the one who handles the money for the family trust). Most of the real money big names of the late 1800s are still big name, big money. (Rockefeller - ok, he's early 1900's? Carnegie? Should I go on?)
  • 702:

    Humph. My Dearly Beloved Departed '86 Toyota Tercel wagon had a sun roof, and it never leaked - and we got it used in '88, and had it till it died in a car fire in 2000, I think (unless it was 2001).

    703:

    At the rate things are going, if a psycho gets in as President this decade, he'll pull the US out of NATO. What's that give you... why, an EU military force. (Actually, I'm suspecting it will transition to that somewhen in the next 50 years.)

    704:

    Yeah. What kind of Russia there will be in 10 years, assuming no WWIII, worries me a hell of a lot.

    It's a real pain, and I just had a problem that Charlie complains about: I have a short, set about 63-65 years from now, and I just the other day had to go through and change one of the primary characters from Russian to Ukrainian. I don't know what Russia and Ukraine will be like then... but I'm trying to sell the story now, not 60 years from now.

    705:

    The whole Ponzi scheme seems to be collapsing. Now, who was it that said, years ago, "Invest now, or you'll miss your chance to lose everything!"

    I think it was some SF author....

    706:

    "How overpaid CEOs are". I've mentioned here before, around '95 or '96, Robert Reich, Clinton's first Sec. of Labor, had a op-ed on NPR, and asked "why are CEOs worth 10 times the salary of a company president?"

    "Neo-liberal" == mid-20th-century conservative.

    And Raygun started the fixing of the tax laws so that "Job Creators" got lower taxes, as did companies.

    707:

    Huh? I'm sorry, it's not clear to me what you're saying.

    Billionaires - "how do you think I got so wealthy", do it by underpaying everyone, and price gouging, one way or another.

    And then they do lock up the money - most of the economy is in stocks, and they play musical chairs with them, not actually create products or services. And those they do... are more and more craptastic.

    708:

    Well, obviously, I screwed that. Let's see, '14: rent car, make religious pilgrimage to Stonehenge, drive to Redding for dinner with friends, then drive to Bath and hotel for the night.

    And that was the first day with the car....

    709:

    698 - Works for me.

    704 - Well, Europe and Canada I think.

    710:

    Oh, btw, one thing that just hit me on how the rich get richer: I just realized (and looked it up, so yes), you can borrow against your stock options.

    And then deduct loans and interest... so, no actual money created by making anything involved.

    711:

    gasdive
    Almost identical to the mindset/brainfuck of Imperial Germany in the year or two before 1914, in fact ... not a good precedent.
    And the same fatal mistake, too: - "Our mighty army can/will conquer the planet" - cough: NOT without control of the seas you won't!

    whitroth
    - " ... lose everything" - wasn't that R. A. H?

    Oops. - P.S.
    Polite request to Moderators: - PLEASE fix my broken link @ 615 & re-post it as well.
    A glimpse into a dangerous & mad mind-set, indeed.

    712:

    And then they do lock up the money - most of the economy is in stocks, and they play musical chairs with them, not actually create products or services.

    Which gets to something that OGH regularly points out: money is a flow. Massive wealth concentrations (like billionaires) create this a delightful situation where there's too much money sloshing around (because they couldn't possibly be taxed), but none of the money is where it needs to be.

    Or, to put it another way: trickle-down economics was always absurd. In cash-flow terms, the richest members of society are where money flows to, not from. So they're like privately held reservoirs in a desert. But because the money is still in circulation (albeit locked away), if the government increases the money supply to try and get it to people who actually need it, they're liable to cause a flood (aka inflation).

    I should note that I am not an economist and probably taking the metaphor too far, but now I'm wondering about whether the mere existence of the ultra-rich is aggravating inflation.

    713:

    Single digit millionaires do make sense. A "standard" 9-5 Mon-Fri job [snip]

    Not saying you're wrong. However, our definitions have changed.

    Back when being a millionaire was first really definitional for "rich" -- talking about the mid-19th century here: before then, there was less wealth to go round, currency units were far more significant, and the truly wealthy counted their assets in acres not dollars/pounds; it was only as a merchant/industrialist class independent of the nobility/land-owners emerged that "millionaire" became a category -- one UK £ had buying power equivalent to somewhere in the range £50-250 today.

    An exact exchange rate is ferociously hard to calculate, as some cost-of-living were vastly more "expensive" in real terms back then (the equivalent of a man's business suit in the 1860s would set you back the equivalent of £5000-10,000 in modern terms), many more items were totally unavailable (no televisions in 1860!), and a few (service labour) were much cheaper.

    But a very rough guideline would be that the currency units of today (dollars, pounds, etc) were huge by normal-person standards. A butler (top-ranked servant in a household) in 1815 in England might earn as much as £60 a year, for example, while a footman or housemaid might be on £1-3 a year (but with bed, board, and one new uniform a year thrown in).

    One big difference between a 2015 billionaire and a 1815 millionaire is that back in 1815 their money -- that which wasn't tied up in real estate and agriculture -- got recycled rather faster than today: a lot of modern conveniences are replacements for how the rich used to get by, with lots of illiterate uniformed labour. Even the upper-lower class (pub landlords and shopkeepers) employed servants: noble families might have a staff of several dozen at each of their houses (minimum: a town house for the season, and a country seat for the rest of the year -- often multiple country houses).

    So a millionaire in 1815, or 1855, is not the same as a millionaire in 1955, let alone 2015. Indeed, in 1815 the "millionaire" would be about as rare a beast as a 2015 billionaire, only there were fewer of them because England -- a wealthy nation -- was overall about as wealthy as modern Rwanda.

    (I had to do a lot of research on this side of things for Season of Skulls, my next novel, which features a protagonist displaced in time from 2017 to 1816.)

    Anyway: my takeaway is the term "millionaire" today has a lingering cultural resonance from the 19th century that it doesn't deserve: and billionaires are the new millionaires, even though the precise numbers are off-target by up to an order of magnitude.

    714:

    So Steve Jobs taking a $1 per year salary was a nice stunt but it was only a bad idea if Apple had wiped out.

    Jobs taking $1/year was a very public vote of confidence in AAPL -- the C-suite pay packages are part of the annual reports, aren't they? -- and if he'd cashed out, well, oops.

    I note that Tim Apple Cook is very cautious in redeeming stock options (although unlike Jobs, he takes a seven digit salary: $2M/year, IIRC).

    715:

    Single digit millionaires do make sense.

    Technically, I'm a millionaire. Which I find surprising. But add the price I'd get for selling my house, investments, and the NPV of my pension fund and the total is over $1M.

    This achieved on a teacher's salary, with no real emphasis on spending (but a real dislike of debt) and no investing beyond "buy the fund recommended by the bank". Someone more interested in money could have done a lot more. Most of my friends are in similar situations.

    716:

    "The future Mr Gittes. The future!"

    717:

    Technically, me too. Our house is in the middle of the insane property bubble, my business is as well. We don't spend a lot, we are both non-profit workers. And yet every month I have to carefully monitor our accounts to make sure everything gets paid, and I certainly must keep working. We certainly have no servants, though we do own a couple of motorcars.

    I occasionally joke with Mrs. Rocketpjs that we could sell everything and enjoy a comfortable life in the Yukon. Apart from the months of darkness and soul crushing cold, not to mention the gigatons of mosquitoes (not exaggerating. Mosquitoes average 5 mg/each and about 1m/ha or more. Therefore: ~1m/ha x 48,244,300 ha x 5mg= Approximately 241,221,500 metric tons of mosquitoes).

    718:

    I don't have half a million, and that includes the house I own... and we live in Montgomery Co, a DC 'burb in Maryland, and high priced. Not quite as bad as Arlington, VA, and the rest of NoVa....

    719:

    not to mention the gigatons of mosquitoes (not exaggerating. Mosquitoes average 5 mg/each and about 1m/ha or more. Therefore: ~1m/ha x 48,244,300 ha x 5mg= Approximately 241,221,500 metric tons of mosquitoes)

    That's only a quarter of a gigatonne — no need to exaggerate! :-)

    720:

    Right. I know a lot of people who are technically millionaires, and they would correspond to reasonably well-heeled professors, vicars, ordinary senior military officers, small businessmen, tradesmen with employees etc. in the 19th century. That's what they are today, too :-)

    But live in servants, let alone several of them? Get real! They had almost completely disappeared from that stratum of society even in my youth, and in countries that were half a century behind the UK. Full-time servants existed, yes, but my understanding is that WWI killed the era of live-in servants by people of that stratum of society.

    721:

    Live-in servants. That's your kids, right? (g)

    722:

    Oh, btw, one thing that just hit me on how the rich get richer: I just realized (and looked it up, so yes), you can borrow against your stock options. And then deduct loans and interest... so, no actual money created by making anything involved.

    Yes, and I strongly suspect that it's not just stock options. Basically this is gambling, where someone is giving you money against the prospect of you being able to pay it back in the future, with interest charged to somehow offset the risk of you defaulting. When it's not something you earn (as in a student, car, or home loan) but something you control somehow? Oh baby. What are the limits on what can be wagered on?

    This gets at a couple of things we need to contemplate. One is that a billionaire's worth only looks quantifiable. If we had to cash out all their investments, that's sort of like, oh, liquidating Kiribati or the Maldives (picked because they're among the first nation-states that are going to have to pick up and move due to climate change). The actual value of the assets will have to be determined by how much others are willing to pay for them. I'm pointing out this obvious fact because it's too easy to talk about how much they have, when some of it really is control of options and the debts of others.

    It's probably more useful to think of a billionaire's value as an index of how much money they can cause to flow, not how much they have. Someone like IQ.45 could be meters underwater in debt, but he's still a billionaire to the untapped suckers who might be persuaded to loan him money for his next great dream.

    A second point is that nasty little control thing. If we were honest about it, some generals in the DoD would appear on the billionaires' list, because they control billions in assets (planes, things that go boom, secret lairs) that are literally unaccounted for, and that aren't really under the control of Congress (black budgets), or possibly even the President (Nightwatch and other Continuity of Government operations). The Pentagon has repeatedly proved that their finances appear to be in such a shambles that they can't pass congressionally mandated audits, demonstrate where all their money goes, or honestly report how much money they need each year. Yet somehow they keep running. I suspect that they're copying the wealth management tricks of the super-rich, and that a big part of their jobs security is controlling the flows of wealth within that titanic set of organizations.

    Now I don't necessarily think this is all criminal. It may be that some of their predecessors decided that to many of their bosses in Congress were idiots, crooks, or both (or now, traitors), so they justified hiding budgets to insure that the things they believe they need to protect the US continue to function. And now it's institutional culture. While some current players may have this noble aim, keeping various black ops from becoming criminal operations has probably been impossible for decades.

    Be that as it may, there's an ungentle warning here about the control of wealth. It's not necessarily better to take the billionaire out and install an elected official or an appointed bureaucrat, because control of wealth confers power, and it's always possible to use power to become less accountable to others.

    A final point: wealth is relative, and this is part of the problem. No one feels their wealth until they know how they feel about what others have or don't have. I'm another technical millionaire, but I sure don't feel wealthy compared with Elon Musk. I'll bet many billionaires don't feel particularly wealthy, because they're competing with other billionaires, and it's their relative ranking, not the amount they control, that they makes them feel their worth. H.L. Mencken captured this problem in this 1916 definition: "Wealth - any income that is at least one hundred dollars more a year than the income of one's wife's sister's husband." (that would be over $2,652 per year more today after taxes, incidentally, if you want to feel poor).

    723:

    These days they're commonly called staff and outside the billionaire class they're more commonly medical, nanny or grounds staff. There's a significant industry around (usually foreign) nannies, for example. And similarly with live-in carers for elderly or disabled people.

    But we don't call them servants, and they're not usually providing personal care for non-disabled people. They likely get abused just as much as they ever did, although I suspect wage theft has overtaken sexual assault is the primary offense.

    My sister worked in the UK for a couple of years as a live-in geriatric nurse. She quite enjoyed it but was aware from the friends she made in the industry that she was quite lucky in that regard. Sadly there's a link between being treated badly and having wages stolen.

    (and to link back to billionaires... many of them are proud to announce that they steal from their staff and anyone else not powerful enough to fight back. Trump isn't unusual in having a huge collection of debtors after him)

    724:

    Re: 'The problem with economic inequality is that it prioritizes runaway capital accumulation over investments in basic needs.'

    Agree - my impression is that more money is being channeled into 'financial investments' (stock markets, crypto) than industries that make stuff or provide essential services, i.e. employ any significant number and variety of people at living wage levels. ['Financial sectors' are outpacing most other industries in many economies.]

    The other thing about these investments - again, my impression only, I don't have data - they tend to be circular swap-arounds within a relatively small circle of traders but at a much faster rate/velocity* than in previous times and I think that it's the faster pace which helps to boost market prices because 'Hey! the market's hot - look at the ever increasing volume of trades!' Which brings in the plain folk, which then adds more trades into the system, which boosts the demand for more trades and so on. Maybe the industry needs to re-examine its stats and figure out more meaningful metrics. Also take a serious look at some homeostasis/feedback system, not just the current 'apply the brakes when the market drops 7%+ within a couple of hours'.

    *Overall - very inflationary because every trade means a transaction fee which means increasing the ask price even more to get the same % return. As a group, I think financial traders have a disproportionate number of millionaires/billionaires. At one time share prices were less than 10 times earnings per share, these days it's hundreds of times.

    [Mods: Greg's link wasn't working when I clicked it a few minutes ago.]

    725:

    "Full-time servants existed..."

    One thing that somewhat surprised me when I started traveling in Latin America was that "maid's quarters" were a feature of many middle-class apartments. Tiny little sleeping room and bathroom, typically next to the laundry room. The maid typically, I found out, was also the cook. The model seemed to be that girls/women from the rural areas saw that as a lot preferable to the alternative.

    They exist in the US in more expensive apartments, but LA was the first place I'd seen them.

    726:

    [Mods: Greg's link wasn't working when I clicked it a few minutes ago.]

    The link is: "https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2022/05/A%20guest%20post%20from%20Russian%20state%20media", and my modding skills are insufficient to figure out where that's supposed to go. Maybe Greg could repost his original link?

    727:

    Re: '... but that if you have a specific disability (hearing impairment, for example) and can justify that you would not use a sat nav as a result of that disability,'

    I read EC's link which mentioned some physical disabilities but not autism or ASD. My understanding is that many people with autism do not cope well with extraneous stimuli like a blinking or talking map. Wondering whether this and related psych/cog conditions segments might help grow the AI/self-driving market.

    728:

    "H"
    That's the problem - I did not keep a copy of the original link, which was a reposting of a translation of an (almost)-official RU state outlet ....
    And really mad & scary with it, too.

    729:

    You didn't keep your search history?

    730:

    The other thing about these investments - again, my impression only, I don't have data - they tend to be circular swap-arounds within a relatively small circle of traders but at a much faster rate/velocity than in previous times

    This has been called gambling rather than investing more than once. Search on, for instance "derivatives gambling" and read as much as you want.

    Since they're getting that money from hypothetical futures (the bets are of the "what if" variety), but the payoff comes from money from a real future, it has the problem of any real-world gambler, like the old native American myths where people bet their bones and lost the bet (and their lives).

    While we can't stop people from gambling, we can limit the stakes, at least in theory. We can also (at least in theory) use government to set up markets to favor, oh, investing in rebuilding the biosphere until it supports a human economy for the long term, rather than supporting the gambling habits of rich financiers and their automated systems.

    731:

    "I read EC's link which mentioned some physical disabilities but not autism or ASD. My understanding is that many people with autism do not cope well with extraneous stimuli like a blinking or talking map."

    That form of difficulty is a major part of the reason for my own objection. I have no specific medical opinion connecting my particular version of neuroatypicality with my intolerance of such distractions, but it does at least suggest a connection that I seem to be very much in the minority in complaining about similar distractions in non-driving contexts (such as constantly-scrolling destination displays in trains, or people who don't turn the telly off when you call round, as mentioned above).

    Nothing on the official list fits such a case, and although I suppose it might be possible to argue it in terms of an extremely broad and inaccurate interpretation of "learning difficulties", which is listed, I would not want to have to depend on that argument being successful. I would have more confidence in the clandestine installation of a GPS jammer under the dashboard and the hope that the examiner would say "be one of the 20%, the bloody thing's not working".

    "Wondering whether this and related psych/cog conditions segments might help grow the AI/self-driving market."

    Certainly not in my case since all current implementations seem to be inextricably entangled with, and even dependent on, commercial surveillance, and also fail completely and utterly to meet repairability standards; and I see no prospect at all of any improvement in either aspect.

    732:

    Searching for the spurious text that Greg's link contains seems to indicate that it's the title of the page at http://cryptodrftng.substack.com/p/day-40-what-russia-should-do-with

    That site is on my blocklist, though, so I know no more than that.

    733:

    Search on, for instance "derivatives gambling" and read as much as you want.

    And if you really want to gamble, try short selling... :-)

    734:

    Talking about Ukraine pushing back to the Russian border in places (from Youtube comments)

    January: Russia reputed to have second best army in world
    April: Russia reputed to have second best army in Ukraine
    June: Russia may have second best army in Russia

    😂

    735:

    they tend to be circular swap-arounds within a relatively small circle of traders

    It might be more accurate to think of high speed trading as originating in margin stealing then devolving into market manipulation before becoming a casino in its own right. These days it's more a symptom of "too much cash, too few investment opportunities with lower risk profiles".

    First: original high speed trading was all about profiting from differences in share prices either between offers on a single exchange or between exchanges. You might think that "A offers to sell 1000 shares for $99.95 each" and "B offers to buy 1000 shares at $100.00 each" doesn't offer much in the way of profit, but to a high speed trader who pays for access by the month rather than per trade, that's 5c times 1000 = $50... times however many times a day they can get away with it.

    Of course the side effect of that is that rather than A and B meeting in the middle, they lose a combined $50 to a new middleman. Times however many trades a day everyone makes. There's no benefit to anyone except the high speed trader, just cost.

    The next level is creating those margins by evaporating offers (made and cancelled so quickly that only other high speed traders really see them), "futures" created unofficially the same way - an offer to sell is made without owning the shares, banking on being able to satisfy the sale by buying before the handover is contractually required.

    Second: the surplus of available cash over productive investment opportunities is IMO one of the basic flaws in economic theory. It's "you can't have infinite growth on a finite planet" made real.

    While there is an element of "well, they could invest some of the money but they make more profit with lower risk by gambling", there's a very real degree to which they just can't invest the money. There's only so many profitable opportunities out there, and they've bought all the ethical ones and most of the unethical ones (things like the water supply to Soweto, or the food producing regions of Ethiopia... they're privately owned and profitable now).

    Which make us wonder... is there no shiny new technology they could invent with that money? And the answer is... that's not what billionaires do. R&D is old school, Bell Labs and shit cost a lot of money and only rarely invented anything big enough to justify the investment. And forget universities they're not even close to profitable. These days startups invent things, government funded research invent things, then big companies buy those things, patent them, and rake in the monopoly profits that result.

    736:

    Actually, I don't mind the short sellers, because they're useful for curbing irrational exuberance.

    Many of these, though, are basically tax dodges (cfhttps://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/10/23/163473122/ask-a-banker-derivatives-gambling-and-getting-around-regulation), literally arbitraging the loopholes created when multiple sets of vast and semi-coherent rule systems interact. Even straight up derivatives are kind of, well, gambling (https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/10/23/163473122/ask-a-banker-derivatives-gambling-and-getting-around-regulation).

    737:

    Weird link issues, let me have a go now I've read the other end of it:

    https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/10/23/163473122/ask-a-banker-derivatives-gambling-and-getting-around-regulation

    (Also: dear OGH at comment 1: maybe I am, maybe I'm just a dog who plays a con-man who pretends to be a billionaire on TV. You'll never know. Woof. I mean "heh heh heh")

    738:

    Thanks, I was rushing and didn't notice the space between cf and https went missing.

    739:

    Also: dear OGH at comment 1: maybe I am, maybe I'm just a dog who plays a con-man who pretends to be a billionaire on TV. You'll never know. Woof. I mean "heh heh heh"

    Yes, but can a dog have Mammon-nature?

    740:

    The article has its own wikipedia page:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Russia_should_do_with_Ukraine
    "What Russia should do with Ukraine" (Russian: Что Россия должна сделать с Украиной, Chto Rossiya dolzhna sdelat' s Ukrainoy), is an article written by Timofey Sergeytsev [uk] and published by the Russian state-owned news agency RIA Novosti. The article calls for the full destruction of Ukraine as a state and the Ukrainian national identity.
    (An article about the article might have even been linked in a previous thread.)

    741:

    While there is an element of "well, they could invest some of the money but they make more profit with lower risk by gambling", there's a very real degree to which they just can't invest the money.

    There are a couple of ways to look at this. Probably a lot of ways, but here's one at least.

    One is that Taleb, in Black Swan talked about the "dog bone strategy" for how to parcel one's investments towards high risk/high return versus low risk/low return, with the rest shafted in the middle between these two. His point was that his black swans were unpredictable, so the question was how much money to spend on blue-sky shit, and how much to keep relatively safe.

    So there are investment models out there.

    The problem is that a lot of research just isn't worth it. Professors now are basically small businessmen who have to turn over $250,000+ year in grant money just to keep grad students employed (plus 50% or more overhead to the school to cover the humanities' salaries), and I have no idea what the grant success rate is. It was below 5 percent and dropping for NSF when I left academia years ago. They're doing a lot of good work, but it's not wild and crazy, and for very good reason. Do you want to angel invest in this, perhaps in medicine? Well, about 1 in 2,000 drugs found in lab studies make it into commerce, and that takes multiple billions to do, even with a global system optimized to keep trial costs down. So highly expensive and very risky, which is why a few big companies dominate the field.

    There's also farmland, but now that's getting fscked by climate change. And housing development, but that's most profitable for high end homes, and not only is that market getting globally saturated, many of the good places have already been built out, so you're left with fire traps, swamplands, etc., where the insurance companies are increasingly prone to tell people they won't insure any house bought. So either you're selling homes to people who can lay out $1 million cash for them and do without insurance, or you're blowing bucks and political cover trying to get various governments to tame the insurance markets for you...or you're out of that market too.

    Too bad that climate change and doing the right thing doesn't provide that predictable zing of profit and power.

    742:

    In my field it's more like... a grad student comes up with an idea. The prototype works, and they come up with a manufacturable design. It's even better in many ways than what's on the market (for some combination of cheaper, more compact, more reliable etc). So they cobble together enough cash to set up a little factory and sell a few. They even patent a couple of key bits. So far so $1M invested.

    Then someone in the US, or China, or some other large market sees their product and thinks "I could make that". So they do. The End.

    (I know of at least three stories exactly like that. And a couple more where the solution was to persuade a company overseas to buy them out. Oh and one where they found a competitor who bought them for the IP then "came to an arrangement" with the other manufacturer)

    743:

    ... so you're left with fire traps, swamplands, etc., where the insurance companies are increasingly prone to tell people they won't insure any house bought.

    Yup. I'm waiting for insurance companies to stop insuring housing in southern Florida due to flooding caused by rising sea levels. Trillions of dollars of real estate rendered unsaleable - I'm sure the howls of outrage will be heard across the pond... :-)

    Of course, Governor DeSantis (if he's still there) will beg for a government bailout, with housing being bought by the government, written off as a loss, and perhaps destroyed. He might even get it, depending on who's in Congress and the White House.

    744:

    Aotearoa the government has worked out that they can't afford to do that so they're busy indemnifying local government against whatever bullshit morons try to pull when they're not allowed to build in temporary areas. It's kind of fun watching the NIMBYs pivot seamlessly from "you can't build here" to "you have to let us build here" (I know it's probably different NIMBYs but I still laugh at them).

    Meanwhile in Australia there's a whole lot of whining going on, as it always does, when people who can afford not to build in stupid places then obvious things happen. Sadly the rest of the residents in those areas are often there exactly because prices are low because of the obvious problems but they can't afford to even rent anywhere else.

    As with so many things the answer is that someone has to enrich poor people, either directly through government payments or indirectly through government allowing wages to rise. Both, obviously, are anathema to many politicians. But in Australia politicians seem to feel comfortable saying that out loud...

    (Prime Minister at time of writing) Morrison labelled Anthony Albanese a “loose unit” for supporting a 5.1% increase for minimum wage workers, a rise of just $1 for workers on $20.33 an hour.

    745:

    The obvious big field not seeing enough capital is "Electricity in the third world" - Enormous returns to human welfare and productivity, and the electric company can easily capture enough of the latter to make money hand over fist without even gouging.

    Except, of course, your capital plant is by necessity in an ill-governed third world nation (If it was well governed, it would not be short of electricity) which carries some political risks.

    I think this is one reason there are several startups in the "Reactor onna Barge" space. If the locals start being dicks, you can take your capital plant and sail off to some more reasonable polity.

    746:

    After having watched this Aotearoa geology channel for a while

    https://youtu.be/LUsIIJwxPYU

    There doesn't seem to be anywhere that's safe to put up any building that would hurt if it fell on your head.

    It seems like a European lack of understanding on par with the first fleet in Australia that planted crops in April, because April is spring and nearly starved as a result.

    I don't even know what land ownership in the European sense means when the land jumps to the left 18 metres in under a second.

    747:

    Well, other countries in the same rocking boat include Chile and Japan. Chile seems to withstand enormous temblors reasonably well, despite their economy. As for Japan, from what little I understand, the value of a property is in the land, not the buildings on it, and houses are not built to last. Aside from the problem of actually getting building materials in Aotearoa, perhaps the Japanese model is not too inappropriate.

    But first, perhaps, ask the Maoris about their opinions on land ownership? I understand they have some. They might even be appropriate (?)

    748:

    I hadn't really thought about Japan, but traditional houses there seem to be very light weight construction. Almost like they're designed to not hurt if they fail on your head. (though the Japanese are perfectly aware of how to build in stone).

    Māori traditional housing is also pretty light weight.

    I don't know about Chilean traditional housing. (pardon me while I Google.)

    https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ruka_(14670454404).jpg

    Looks pretty soft too, despite being fully aware of how to build in stone.

    And, what was that you said about indigenous land? Don't you know indigenous people didn't have land until we arrived with theodolites? Land didn't exist /s

    But yeah, from what I understand it wasn't sliced up that fine that 18 metres mattered.

    749:

    Yeah, they're good value. And respond to a lot of comments.

    Aotearoa is very well adapted to that sort of thing, admittedly sometimes via an evolutionary process (the buildings that fall down are obviously not suited). But earthquakes are just par for the course anywhere off the big continental plates, sometimes not even then. Australia has had a few, and people actually died in the Newcastle quake.

    There's been a lot of work done on reinforced concrete structure design to come up with things that work until they don't but fail by turning into bags of gravel rather than fragments (the "bag" being the reinforcing steel). That way you end up with a shorter building with survivable gaps between floors. Or that's the theory, and the Canterbury TV building testifies to the consequences of cheating.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CTV_Building

    750:

    "That article" - where the link got borked ....
    Pigeon @ 733 is correct.
    And also thanks to Bill Arnold for the Wiki link. Shows just how genocidally-bonkers some RU "observers" are - it's very Der Sturmer like in its nastiness.

    • & "H"
      I tend to clear it as I go, because it gets horrendous & can clog things up.
    751:

    Yeah I didn't mean that NZ hasn't sort of got European building styles to work, any more than I meant Australians didn't finally work out that spring arrives in September, not April.

    Of course neither will be much good if Taupō kicks off again.

    752:

    Change of topic.
    QUESTION for Charlie:
    THIS FIASCO - any thoughts from "closer to home"?
    The criticism of "Economic Populism" chimes with my open distrust of the Wee Fishwife & her tendency to blame everyone else - rather like Bo Jon-Sun, in fact, oops.
    P.S. I already knew about this, but it's resurfaced ....

    753:

    I hadn't really thought about Japan, but traditional houses there seem to be very light weight construction. Almost like they're designed to not hurt if they fail on your head.

    Bingo. Given all the earthquakes that rock Japan, something that doesn't kill you when it collapses is a definite advantage!

    A heavy structure that could withstand their earthquakes would likely be way too expensive for most Japanese prior to modern-day construction techniques.

    754:

    But live in servants, let alone several of them? Get real!

    I think it was Agatha Christie who wrote (I paraphrase from memory):

    "When I was growing up I never imagined I would be rich enough to own a motor-car, or so poor I could not afford a maidservant -- let alone both at the same time."

    755:

    Absolutely - that's why I put it in terms of what full-time work can reasonably get you over a lifetime. In 1860, a London living wage was around £40/year, and with 50 working years, that only gets you to £2,000.

    IME of talking to billionaire-justifiers, they find it a lot harder to justify the existence of billionaires in terms of the excess they collect as a multiple of the living wage than in any other terms. And the nice thing about that calculation is that it's unitless - today's frugal millionaire got paid 20% more than living wage over their lifetime, while their 1860 counterpart got paid 500x living wage over their lifetime.

    756:

    World War 1 started the decline in live-in servants for the middle classes, World War 2 killed the profession off completely.

    My great-grandfather was a British Indian Army officer; income-wise, that put him in a comparable situation to a reasonably well-heeled professor or vicar. He was able to afford servants all his life; his son (my grandfather) could afford them briefly, but when WW2 broke out, the supply of live-in servants dried up and he and my grandmother had to learn to live without them, and post-war, the supply never resumed (although they could afford to pay for a cleaner to come round, and later for au-pairs to look after the children).

    There's an interesting alt-history for a good author; what would have happened to British society if WW2 had never occurred? It basically locked-in the social changes that WW1 had started, and thus made workers' rights, the NHS, social housing and other Labour reforms under the Attlee government possible.

    757:

    As bad as things are, they could be a lot worse. Trump reelected. A military coup in Kiev invites the Russian army in and Ukraine falls without a shot.

    A montage from HBOs brilliant "Years and Years"

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xI_oqv3Eyo

    With worse to come as the world keeps getting hotter and madder...

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PeX4HxzAApk

    And democracy withers and dies...

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QE3mdqdpFw

    758:

    It was more than starting the decline. Few inter-war houses were built with servants' quarters, even quite up-market ones. I agree that WW II finally killed it off, except for the very rich.

    760:

    Vladimir Putin is micro-managing Ukraine war ‘at level of low-ranking colonel’ — report

    Putin said to be directly involved in moves in Donbas, where Russia is suffering major military setbacks, that would normally be decided by an officer in charge of 700 soldiers

    That's like Hitler in the bunker sending order to individual companies and platoons defending the Reich.

    761:

    The incompetence displayed by Russian forces so far has been quite impressive, so it could explain a thing or two.

    762:

    That's not my experience of 1930s builds; the low end of the market indeed didn't have servants' quarters, but the ones I've seen where the initial selling price (in the 1930s) was more than about £250 did have (small, only suitable for a housekeeper) servants' quarters.

    763:

    In Kipling's "The Man Who Would Be King", the narrator is a news reporter cum intelligence operator for the Raj and at one point he describes his travels on a mission to tamp down unrest among the local minor monarchies, when he drank from crystal one night and slept by the road the next, with only a rug to cover him and his servant. Even if he was hiking on foot and sleeping rough he had a servant along with him because he was British.

    I had a conversation a few years ago with someone from the UK who had spent time in Dubai where having live-in servants is the norm -- she described them disparagingly as "pets".

    764:

    And unlike Gates, Bezos, and Musk, Jobs started out relatively poor -- not destitute, but ordinary working middle class adoptive parents and no trust funds or emerald mines.

    My understanding is that, after his parents separated, Musk had the "benefit" of living with his vile father, who paid for his partly-private school education in South Africa, but that after he left at 18 for university in Canada he didn't benefit in any meaningful further way from his father's money. He worked his way through college, slept on sofas, did manual and menial jobs, showered at the YMCA, etc. He founded Zip2 with angel investor (i.e. not family) money, and everything else has subsequently flowed from that (in the stupid way that modern US capitalism allows). If there was a trust fund then I've not heard of it. He's plainly both smart and driven, as well as a total asshole.

    Private educations do instil a bunch of attitudes and cultural norms which can pay off throughout life, and I'm sure the same is true of growing up well-off and white in 70s/80s South Africa. Those are not nothing, but the whole silver-spoon thing doesn't seem to hold water for Musk.

    Gates, AIUI, has an upper-middle-class background (parents were lawyers or something). No idea about Bezos.

    Billionaires are bad, down with billionaires.

    On Jobs: NeXT was technically brilliant, as demonstrated when its technology fairly rapidly replaced MacOS after the takeover, and I think he may have had a hand in that. I always wanted a NeXTcube.

    On house staff: a friend of mine used to work as a cook/housekeeper in London, including for people you have all heard of. Those houses tended to run on 2 or 3 full-time house staff (cook/housekeeper, plus butler/chauffeur/handyman - who together often make a "domestic couple" - plus nanny as appropriate), plus some part-time/gig/temporary workers (e,g, cleaners, gardeners, waiting/catering staff for events, etc). Then there are PAs and so forth. The core house staff often travel with the family to their other homes/yachts etc. It made for an interesting life, I am told. Larger "households" (larger than the ones my friend worked in) definitely still exist and split up some of the jobs (e.g. separate butler and chauffeur) while making some of the part-timers full-time (e.g. gardeners). And so on up the scale to the klepts, who have house staffs amounting to hundreds across their various homes. And private armies, in some cases.

    We - a middle-class couple in the UK, on a single income at the time - paid a live-in nanny for a while. We had two young children, one with leukemia, and a dear friend (who was both a qualified nanny and god-parent to the poorly child) insisted on helping out. We insisted on paying him, and doing it properly with PAYE etc. The HMRC didn't know what to do with us and sent two inspectors around to check our household accounts, because apparently we were the only people in Cambridgeshire with full-time live-in staff. If you believe that, I have a mountain-top ski lodge to sell you in the Fens. So apparently it's all done either off-the-books cash-in-hand or through agencies.

    765:

    I grew up in a house with servants' quarters. (Servants plural: biggish house, designed for a staff of: cook, nanny, chauffeur, gardener. Built in 1920 by an architect for himself and his family on an out-of-town lane in what would later become suburbia. I believe he hadn't internalized the social changes brought about by the great war when he designed it.) By the 1960s-1970s the nanny/maid's bedroom was basically a box room with a window (about 2 metres wide but 5 metres long -- I think for 2 beds); there was a somewhat more spacious room too, for the chauffeur/cook. (Might have been a butler rather than a chauffeur by then.)

    I'm pretty sure the servants had disappeared by the 1930s, and in my time the maid's room was a box room and the chauffer/cook's bedroom was my sister's. (My parents bought it from the estate of a dead relative in the mid-1960s -- empty for two years in the middle of a housing market recession, it was big and cheap. I will never be able to afford a home that large ever again, even if a movie deal landed on my head.)

    However ...

    My current flat (about a third to half the floor space of that house, minus the garage and the substantial garden) was also designed for servants. I am not kidding: there is a room for the more senior servant (cook, at a guess). The ordinary maidservant probably slept on the kitchen floor back when it was a built, a century earlier than that house (1820, not 1920). The first owner, a local builder who built the block of tenements it's part of, probably had as many household servants as the successful architect, a century later. (Remember, no electricity back then -- or indoor plumbing.)

    766:
    That's like Hitler in the bunker sending order to individual companies and platoons defending the Reich.

    LBJ apparently tried the same kind of remote control a few times in Vietnam.

    Needless to say, it didn't work, and he eventually stopped.

    767:

    World War 1 started the decline in live-in servants for the middle classes, World War 2 killed the profession off completely.

    I think along with those issues (in Europe) modern appliances came along. Buy the 60s you could have a decent washer, dryer, dishwasher, freezer, fridge, and not too long later a microwave. (At least in the US.)

    So much of the TIME involved in those activities went away. Most people I know with net a net worth (or even a bank account) in the 7 digits do their own laundry, cooking, shopping, etc... although most have a maid who shows up 2 or 3 times a week to do the basic cleaning.

    My wife was born into a military family in 1956. Her father was at one point the youngest Lt Colonel in the army. She commented that as he moved up in rank and got assigned nice housing it seemed to get smaller than the previous folks with each promotion. Basically most of the Lt Colonel and up housing was left over from before WWII and the servant quarters were an interesting conversation point to them.

    Last September we were at a Hilton Place, (nothing at all fancy hotel), near the US Pentagon. We bumped into a dozen 3 star Army generals[1] having serve yourself breakfast with us. 40 years or more ago they'd have been in a very much nicer hotel with likely a private room for breakfast.

    [1]My brother in law in law commented after we road the elevator with one who was a lady "wow". When I inquired he said he never bumped into a 3 star in the 8 years of his officer service. And we could likely figure out her name. So I looked it up. The US only has a few over 100 3 stars in the Army and, yes, the Wikipedia article did have her picture and short bio. But it did help that there were only 5 women of such rank at the time.

    768:

    I don't even know what land ownership in the European sense means when the land jumps to the left 18 metres in under a second.

    As I understand it in most such situations all the land moves pretty much the same distance. At least in the local area.

    In the US (mostly) survey pins rule. So if you have a minor movement your property still is what is outlined buy the survey pins put down 10 or 100 years ago. (Much to the over the top consternation of my neighbor when I dug one up and it wasn't where either of us thought it was. Topsoil build up had it about 1 foot below the surface.) Of course no one has every MOVED a survey pin to make things match up with expectations.

    GPS systems created some situations with airports were runways were not always quite where they where thought to be at a national scale. At least in the US.

    769:

    Moz noted: "There's been a lot of work done on reinforced concrete structure design to come up with things that work until they don't but fail by turning into bags of gravel rather than fragments (the "bag" being the reinforcing steel). That way you end up with a shorter building with survivable gaps between floors."

    Nova, a science program on the U.S. PBS TV network, had an interesting documentary on traditional Chinese earthquake engineering. I think it was this one: https://www.pbs.org/video/secrets-of-the-forbidden-city-1o8igy/ (You may be able to stream this for free you set your VPN to an American address.)

    Basic notion was that they built many structures using clever joinery rather than nails, so the building components can move, and also used clever tricks such as momentum dampers. The combination meant that the building would move quite a bit but without moving past its point of failure, even during really strong earthquakes. If memory serves, traditional Japanese architecture works similarly.

    A similar approach is used in other structures that must endure large movements or potentially large forces. For example, airplane wings flex (quite alarmingly if you don't know what's happening) during flight. Safer and more effective than trying to build something so rigid it could survive enormous forces.

    770:

    While there is an element of "well, they could invest some of the money but they make more profit with lower risk by gambling", there's a very real degree to which they just can't invest the money. There's only so many profitable opportunities out there, and they've bought all the ethical ones and most of the unethical ones (things like the water supply to Soweto, or the food producing regions of Ethiopia... they're privately owned and profitable now).

    Even when they are gambling they don't have a suitcase full of millions under each chair. It is in banks and similar all around the world. Even it held by LLCs at some point it is in a bank like institution. And those things lend out the money to various other folks.

    Then problems comes from the income from say, Indiana (USA), winds up in a bank in Dubai, who loans it to an investor group clearing forest in Malaysia to be used to harvest more palm oil. So may bad things in that and none of it helping out the people of Indiana where the money "originated".

    The money does go into circulation and does things but many of these things are not great for the planet long term.

    771:

    For example, airplane wings flex (quite alarmingly if you don't know what's happening) during flight.

    When the background sky and clouds are miles away you really don't notice it all that much. But if there is a background close enough to make it obvious how large the movements are it can be very unnerving to some infrequent flyers.

    772:

    THIS FIASCO - any thoughts from "closer to home"?

    Yeah: it's bullshit.

    Yes, the shipyard is problematic. But the article is a hatchet job commissioned for The Scotsman, who are almost as foamingly anti-SNP as The Daily Telegraph are anti-Labour. (The Scotsman's editorial spin is strongly pro-union and small-c conservative, tweaked to not alienate Scottish readers.)

    The real issue is the shipyard was already behind schedule and over budget when it got slammed hard by COVID19 in the work force. Scot.gov had to buy the boats somewhere, but this procurement deal goes back many years.

    Caledonian MacBrayne was nationalised in 1948 under British Rail; it remained a government-owned limited company when BR was parted out. In 2002 P&O got the contract to provide ferry services to the islands but utterly borked the job, so it ended up back with a hands-off company descended from the original.

    The important point to note is that ferry services to the islands are non-negotiable -- you can't get there by road or rail and flying would be too expensive for routine use -- and yet it's not commercially viable. It's a government-subsidized de-facto monopoly, and the usual culprits (P&O, SerCo) have all had a turn in the barrel.

    The new ferries are over budget and were meant to enter service in 2018-19, but guess what happened? (They're now due next year.)

    Your TLDR is that yes, there are problems: they reflect the sort of problems that hit the UK railway industry post-BR privatization. And this hit piece is just a Tory grifter pitching to throw more money at the problem by funnelling it to a different shipyard (presumably a Tory party donor). (NB: I can't say for sure that the author's a Tory, but she writes for a sketchy political think-tank called "Policy Developments" and quotes Adam Smith in an op-ed for a right wing newspaper, so ...)

    773:

    much of the TIME involved in those activities went away

    Actually, as labour-saving devices became more common the time spent doing housework didn't decrease — instead the standards went up so the housewife was spending the same number of hours working. Linens were washed more frequently, the house was cleaned more often, and so on.

    When my parents were young, in 1950s England, they had a cleaning lady come in once a week because it was expected of a young professional (my dad was a vet). And the day before she came my mother would clean the house, because the cleaning lady talked and my mother didn't want people thinking she was a bad housekeeper. It was all about appearances.

    774:

    And the day before she came my mother would clean the house,

    EVERY SINGLE FAMILY I know who has someone come in talks about cleaning up first so they don't look like slobs.

    At to the time issue, when laundry was much more labor intensive and washing dishes by hand for a family of 6 was a really big deal, the time involved made a difference. But today, you can skip a day of washing or just load the dishwasher and be done with it.

    The time was mandatory, now, even with more cleaning, it is more optional.

    But there are also things like better freezers. My wife and I have 1 primary fridge and have enough frozen protein in it for 2 or 3 weeks if we just eat out of it. So no daily shopping at the butcher, baker, etc... which was also a huge time sink.

    I guess I'm saying that while we expect our clothes to be cleaner we still have way less time invested in washing them and all the other chores. Sort, toss in a load, move it 2' to the other machine to dry, hang them up. No outside line drying. And dealing with pollen and bird poop.

    Who beats rugs on the wash line anymore? (And deals with all the furniture movement required?) Who has a wash line to dry clothes on?

    First world issues, I know.

    775:

    EVERY SINGLE FAMILY I know who has someone come in talks about cleaning up first so they don't look like slobs.

    I have a cleaner who comes once every couple of weeks, and I do this too. But I live in a cluttered mess. Cleaners do not rearrange clutter -- they don't know what's important -- so if you leave stuff lying around they will clean around it. The visit is my cue to pick up crap and move it around so there's room to wield a vacuum cleaner.

    776:

    "I believe he hadn't internalized the social changes brought about by the great war when he designed it."

    That might be an explanation of why my experience and that of Simon Farnsworth is different. The inter-war houses I am familiar with are almost all 1930s, by which time the architects would have learnt how the demographics had changed. It is quite possible that 1920s houses were built differently, but the occupiers found that they couldn't get the servants that were normal in the 1900s.

    777:

    Demographics were constantly changing.

    I note that preferred family sizes were dropping from the 1900s onwards, as each child's probability of survival to age 5 rose past 80% (in the early 19th century it was 60%, sometimes lower).

    It dropped first among the aristocracy, then the affluent professional classes -- an architect who could build a house for himself and his wife would obviously be part of that.

    (My grandfather was one of 13 kids, of whom I think 8 survived to adulthood. My father was one of 2, both of whom survived. They did the demographic transition relatively early, but the UK mostly caught up with that shift within another 20-40 years.)

    778:

    Daily shopping? That was done in the UK only by people who had no storage at all. Even in sub-tropical climes, meat and bread keep for longer than a day; buying croissants and baguettes daily always was an option. And a lot of us still use washing lines - cheaper, and with a lot of advantages.

    779:

    This is one of the deeper issues underlying anti-globalization sentiment: where previously, money tended to circulate locally, now it crosses administrative borders, and thus where previously local politics could put restraints on the worst tendencies of your local Dragon-type human, now you have to engage in politics over a wider area to restrain them.

    Against that, those of us who aren't ultra-rich still get restrained by local politics; you can't afford to just walk away from your home area if the local politics become untenable for you. The result can feel like a two-speed system; the Dragon flees (say) Indiana to live in LA with their money in China, while you can't leave Indiana and have to deal with the consequences of their acquisitive behaviours.

    780:

    EVERY SINGLE FAMILY I know who has someone come in talks about cleaning up first so they don't look like slobs.

    As my mother described it, the only reason they had the cleaner was that their social position demanded it. And she wasn't just tidying up ahead of the cleaner, she was moving furniture to clean underneath it.

    I've long thought that if the other women who hired the cleaner were doing the same thing the cleaner had made a pretty good gig for themselves in the village :-)

    Who beats rugs on the wash line anymore? (And deals with all the furniture movement required?) Who has a wash line to dry clothes on?

    My mother finally stopped moving furniture on a regular basis sometime this century, but her habits were formed in the middle of the last century.

    I dry most of my laundry on a line.

    781:

    "Who beats rugs on the wash line anymore? (And deals with all the furniture movement required?) Who has a wash line to dry clothes on?"

    Er, that would be me.

    OK, I use a washer-dryer at our shoebox in London, but up here at the hovel in the Marches, it's all washing line, all the time.

    And with that, I must rescue the current contents of the line, as it's about to absolutely piss down...

    782:

    The "beats rugs on the wash line" thing went out with burning coal in the open fireplace -- you had to get the smuts out of the weave otherwise over time they'd rot the fabric (IIRC coal smuts are a bit acidic -- I think Nojay may have an opinion on this).

    783:

    Charlie
    Even my modest 1893-built suburban house originally had four bedrooms, the smallest was for the live in servant. Now, it's a large bathroom .....
    CalMac - also know elsewhere as "MacPuff" ( Because steamers ) are, in themselves a disaster ... the old serious passenger coastal shipping was, of course owned by the railway companies, who did a very competent job.
    The real crash came when this was divorced from them & sold off to the highest crooked bidder - hence, in England "Herald of Free Enterprise" (bubble) & the current P&O ongoing disaster. Scotland appears to be in the same-only-different fuck-up.

    784:

    I'll go with whitroth, Mark.

    Your point on levels of wealth is well understood - as I'm overly fond of telling people money has gravity. The more wealth individuals or families possess, the harder it is for them to lose it. It's the logical extension of Pratchett's "Vimes Boots" analogy, applied to the modern world economy.

    What I think you're missing from the link I posted, however, and the report it references, is the traditional Achilles Heel of the super-wealthy across history: their idiot children. It's difficult to draw conclusions on whether this historical pattern will ultimately apply to the super-rich families of this era, but as yet there's no evidence to say that it won't.

    785:

    So your take-away should be "blame Thatcher" (or at a pinch, "blame Major") for the ongoing trainwreck that is public transport privatization: the gift that keeps on giving!

    786:

    753 - It's a shame that, like DRoss, Alison Smith is more interested in flaming the SNP than in examining the real issues which have delayed the vessels that her piece pretends to be examining the technical and contract issues with.

    I'm not saying that there aren't contracts issues lurking here, but given the dual fuel engines and issues with the bow design of both vessels I think the main issues are technical, engineering or naval architecture.

    774 to 779 inclusive - I've lived in or regularly visited 3 interwars homes. All 3 had 2 fairly large bedrooms and one much smaller one. This may or may not be architects failing to catch up with declining staff numbers. Only one of the 3 definitely had a "proper larder" in the kitchen, and by the time my memory of it starts in the 1960s the kitchen also contained a refrigerator with an icebox.

    787:

    In my case, it's mainly to air out the poor rugs -- after a while, they get extremely "catty". The beating us mainly cathartic, as I don't think any cat dander will have been be missed by the Miele S8.

    788:

    Who beats rugs on the wash line anymore? (And deals with all the furniture movement required?) Who has a wash line to dry clothes on?

    The Japanese do... every sunny day the futons and linens will be aired (and beaten out) on high-rise balcony rails or in the back gardens in more rural parts. Large hospitals have big wash-line frames up on the roofs for the bed-linens to air and dry them too. Futon beaters are carried by all the better home supply stores.

    The average Japanese washing machine can of course wash, dry and fold clothes using neural networks and telekinesis as far as I can tell, but it's traditional to do it by hand when the weather obliges.

    789:

    Not entirely. If a rug has more than a negligible pile, a vacuum cleaner does only a so-so job, so tuning it upside down on the lawn or hanging it on the line (pile in) and whacking it is a good idea every so often. This is less commonly done for fitted carpets :-)

    790:

    Paras 2 and 3 - It's a shame that you've decided to ignore more or less all the facts here.

    1 The Caledonian Steam Packet Company was a subsidiary of the Caledonian Railway, specialising in Firth of Clyde passenger ferry services and day cruises.
    2 David MacBrayne Limited was a separate company, mostly supplying passenger and livestock ferries to the Western Isles of Scotland.
    3 OK, CSPC and MacBrayne did amalgamate as CalMac, but not until 1973, so I guess you can't blame that on either railway nationalisation or on the Witch of Grantham then?
    4 Services to the Northern Isles should be discussed under separate cover, but this mess doesn't really start until 2002, and the EU were involved here.

    791:

    I don't think that's right. It was partly the introduction of vacuum cleaners, and partly the expansion from "rugs" (bits of carpet small enough to do that with) to "carpets" (covering the entire floor with furniture on top and nails round the edges, so once they're installed they're there for the duration). The overlap with open fires lasted for decades, and is still the case in many houses, especially in rural areas that don't have gas.

    The deposits from partial combustion of trees - whether modern or Carboniferous - do tend to be acidic, but the whole point is to send them up the chimney; if they come out into the room instead, something is wrong. In that case you sweep the chimney, or put something other than a plain open pot on top of it, or learn the equivalent of "prop the TV aerial at a weird angle"/"7-step procedure beginning with invoking the toilet gods"/etc as applied to that particular fireplace, depending on what the something is. Otherwise it's mostly better to do without the fire so you don't choke. Open fires and carpets get along perfectly well as long as you prevent the fire spitting out incompletely combusted material while it's still combusting, hence fireguards, hearthstones etc.

    792:

    Charlie @ 786
    Spot on - between them the Madwoman & the Majorette screwed the whole thing over, totally.
    Bo Jon-Sun is repeating the exercise in London, assisted by Khan, who seems to be an idiot, most of the time, walking straight into an obvious trap, set for him by Bo.

    Paws
    I know that the original MacPuffs was a separate company - but/& don't forget the glorious paddle-steamers of the NBR & G&SWR as well (!) Obligatory linkie to the last survivor of these magnificent beasts

    793:

    "EVERY SINGLE FAMILY I know who has someone come in talks about cleaning up first so they don't look like slobs."

    My mum used to have someone come in to clean once a week but she did not make a point of cleaning up herself first. It was partly to combine it with childminding (by scheduling it on the day when she wouldn't be there herself), which of course became less important as time went on, and mainly to save herself hassle.

    Nevertheless, she did clean up herself as well, but it wasn't a preparatory procedure performed on the preceding day, it was just something she did "as and when".

    Me, I could never see the point in any of it no matter who did it, because none of the things "cleaned" were ever dirty to begin with and the place looked exactly the same afterwards as it did before...

    794:

    Re pre-war houses: I grew up in a 5 bedroom house built in the 1930s (purchased in the early 60s for £6000 - Mum was offered £1 million for it in the 1990s). 2 large front bedrooms with a smaller bedroom between. 1 large bedroom was my parent's bedroom the other was the spare room. The small front bedroom was the nursery; originally I slept in there, when my sister came along when I was 7, I moved into one of the back bedrooms which was originally a maid's room. The other back bedroom was our playroom, later it became more of a study.

    We had a walk-in larder and a scullery. The latter had a Belfast sink where the daily used to do the laundry if it wasn't being sent out (bed linen mostly). Later it housed the dishwasher and washer/dryer. Before my sister came along, Mum had the kitchen knocked through into what used to be the coal store and outside loo; that became the main utility area for the kitchen.

    In terms of servants, my parents had a house-boy for the flat in Cairo; when we came back to England, Mum had a daily and a gardener. First the daily went, then the gardener went. By the time I was a teenager, Mum did everything in the house herself.

    795:

    Daily shopping? That was done in the UK only by people who had no storage at all.

    Wrapping up all of these comments.

    My father grew up on a moderately sized working farm in far western Kentucky. Born in 1925 he basically was formed by the depression. But as he was quick to say, due to the slaughter house they had electricity, for the refridgeration, and a phone just to deal with orders and such. (The slaughter house and home shared the phone till my grandfather got out of the business around the late 1970s.) Prior to the electric refrigeration my GF would slaughter 1 or 2 pigs at the end of the day and drive them to the outhouse. Then go get them the next morning along with some ice and sell them throughout the day. Many of his customers had ICE boxes and so meat would only keep for a day or two except a bit longer in the winter.

    When my wife was with her grandparents in southern Germany in the early 1960s she got a thrill going out with "opa" every day to one or more shops for food (and whiskey). Not every item every day but shopping at the local shop for something most days.

    I guess my point is that the 20th century modern things are here. Mostly. But they have been getting here unevenly. Daily shopping was a thing in vast parts of the US into the 40s and somewhat the 50s in the US. And likely into the 60s. And ditto in parts of Europe.

    As to clothes drying, yes there are still lots of people using a line. But the backyard lines of my friends in the 60s are mostly gone in suburban US. (I was with a guy for a pub call last night though and they still use a line. But he's Scottish by origin so ...) And in some parts of the US drying on a line is a royal pain much of the year. This year's pollen storm was fairly weak (I only used my wipers to remove it from the car windscreen twice) and it lasted only about a month. But as has been mentioned here by JBS and myself some years it can last 6 weeks and be like living in a fog at times. Let it touch damp cloth and it turns to green goo/glue. Then there is August. Here where I live it can be, ah, damp. Unlike in some places like Texas where clothes on the line can be dry in 15 minutes or less.

    I'll also admit I'm a bit of an outlier. I had a sister born with messed up kidney's and she went through cloth diapers (nappies?) at a prodigious rate. And my father bought a dryer back around 1955 when he came home from work one winter evening at midnight and had to fight his way through the forest of frozen diapers hanging there. So we've had dryers all my life. (This started a life long rumor that we were secretly rich as at that time it was thought only lawyers and doctors could afford such things.)

    796:

    In terms of servants, my parents had a house-boy for the flat in Cairo;

    I had an older cousin who spend 15 years in Brazil. They had 6 kids. And 3 servants I think. 1 live in and 2 dailies.

    I used to think it was snobbish of them but in hindsight it was likely considered good form to spread their "wealth" around to the local area.

    797:

    To return to a topic from long ago, here's a SITREP on the Havana Syndrome.

    https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/press-briefings/2022/05/17/background-press-call-by-senior-administration-officials-on-new-cuba-policy/

    Background Press Call By Senior Administration Officials On New Cuba Policy

    Via Teleconference (May 16, 2022) 6:36 P.M. EDT

    SNIPPETS

    Q: Thanks very much. Two quick questions. First, just following up on that last one: While you haven’t come to a conclusion about Havana Syndrome, are you now persuaded that the Cuban government was not responsible?

    SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: And with respect to your question about the anomalous health incidents, I’ll say that we are working across the interagency and State Department and with allies around the world as well to get to the bottom of the anomalous health incidents. And at this moment, we do not have a conclusion as to the attribution.

    I do not expect this lack of a conclusion to change in the foreseeable future.

    798:

    "Buy the 60s you could have a decent washer, dryer, dishwasher, freezer, fridge, and not too long later a microwave. (At least in the US.)"

    Not so much here. Washing machine and fridge quickly became standard equipment, and still are the base level as it were, now with microwave as well, but microwaves were novel and scary in the 80s with articles in consumer magazines about how not to kill yourself with them etc. (I thought it was quite a startling extravagance when someone bought one to warm up blocks of hash to make it easier to cut.)

    "Freezer" meant "bit inside the fridge where you can make ice cubes" and took a long time to mean anything more. Even now a lot of people don't have a separate one, just a separate door on the fridge with usually less space behind it than there is behind the main fridge door. "Dishwasher" is still a luxury item in the sense that lots of people don't have one and there's nothing at all surprising about not having one.

    "Dryer" is a bit of a funny one and seems to be something that comes along with the same number of people needing clothes washed in the same washing machine but nevertheless somehow that washing machine is being used more and more frequently. People who get caught by that one often don't have a matching amount of drying capacity unless they do get a dryer, but people who avoid it usually don't need one, and they do suck fuck loads of juice, so again it's not a surprise if someone doesn't have one.

    799:

    793 - If I'd tried to list all the Victorian era steamship companies that operated on the Clyde and to the Hebrides I'd have taken half an hour and still missed some!

    796 - Neatly explaining why Halal and Kosher law originally banned eating pork as well.

    800:

    Re: 'By the time I was a teenager, Mum did everything in the house herself.'

    Fewer people spending fewer hours usually means less mess to sort and clean up. Also, since (most) teens tend to want their privacy, some parents [me] just make sure the door to their teen's bedroom stayed closed. Easier on everyone's nerves.

    Fast food restaurants, home delivery (pizzas, Chinese) and fast/easy prep convenience foods (TV dinners, stews in a can, boxed mac&cheese, etc.) also started becoming a thing around the late 50s early 60s - therefore even less time spent at home making messes and having to clean up afterward.

    The TV reference - intentional becuz it was so new, a socially acceptable status symbol and why waste time in the kitchen or cleaning the house when you could be watching TV.

    Then there's the suburbs explosion with ever longer commutes therefore (again) even less time at home for using/dirtying up followed by cleaning up the inside of the house. Owning a patch of land with a house all to yourself/family also meant that for many folk their home exteriors - lawns, patios, etc. - became more important than the house's interior status-wise (visibility).

    Carpeting -

    Wall-to-wall carpeting is very rare in my suburban area mostly because it started going out of fashion about 30 years ago. Even area rugs seem to have become smaller, covering less floor area vs. during my parents' generation.

    Wood, ceramic, slate and marble are the must-have floor coverings - all of which are a lot easier/faster to keep clean. And much better for folks with allergies - which seems to be an ever-growing pop'n segment, generation after generation. Also easier for pet owners ... the pet owner segment has grown substantially in my area thanks to COVID.

    801:

    "Freezer" meant "bit inside the fridge where you can make ice cubes" and took a long time to mean anything more. Even now a lot of people don't have a separate one, just a separate door on the fridge with usually less space behind it than there is behind the main fridge door. "Dishwasher" is still a luxury item in the sense that lots of people don't have one and there's nothing at all surprising about not having one.

    In new housing construction in the US since the 70s a dishwasher is standard. Some smaller apartments have "apartment sized" ones. Skinnier and hold less but still. And as had been pointed out here by CS and others they almost always use less water and energy than hand washing.

    Stand alone freezers are a thing for some. Typically out on the back porch or in the garage. Often with a padlock if not behind a locked something. Hunters use them to hold a deer or two. Some people just like to buy way ahead. Then there are the Omaha Steaks type services.

    omahasteaks.com

    Not for me.

    But most "full sized" use fridges are 23-25cf. (0.65-0.70 cM) Some people pay for larger. Older homes tend to have much smaller and some have what is called counter depth which costs you about 1/3 of the space.

    But most new fridges sold in the US for a while now have 1/3 of the space given to the freezer section. Mine is what we call a "French Door" style where the top is two doors and the bottom freezer is a drawer pull out.

    As I've said here before, the few times I've had an hour or so to kill in the few European cities I've been in I've been known to wander into a larger store and notice all the tiny appliances they have to sell.

    802:

    drive them to the outhouse.

    Well that was a big typo. ICE house.

    803:

    "This is less commonly done for fitted carpets"

    Fitted carpets are conclusive proof of the existence Satanic works in the world.

    804:

    drive them to the outhouse.

    Well that was a big typo. ICE house.

    I was wondering, but it is not for me to question the practices in other places. :-)

    805:

    What I think you're missing from the link I posted, however, and the report it references, is the traditional Achilles Heel of the super-wealthy across history: their idiot children. It's difficult to draw conclusions on whether this historical pattern will ultimately apply to the super-rich families of this era, but as yet there's no evidence to say that it won't.

    (Cough)Trump(/Cough). Famously would have boatloads more money if he'd done precisely nothing to manage his father's fortune, except for leaving it indexed to the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Given the way his sons act, it looks like they've inherited his talent to the same proportion he inherited his father's gifts.

    Unfortunately for me, I espouse the idea of regression towards normal (all things equal, the kids are more average than their parents). In the case of the Trump family, instead of regressing to the average, I think they're regressing to the mean.

    806:

    Wall-to-wall carpeting is very rare in my suburban area mostly because it started going out of fashion about 30 years ago. Even area rugs seem to have become smaller, covering less floor area vs. during my parents' generation.

    Wood, ceramic, slate and marble are the must-have floor coverings - all of which are a lot easier/faster to keep clean. And much better for folks with allergies - which seems to be an ever-growing pop'n segment, generation after generation.

    Growing up around home construction and having relatives living in houses they built going back to the early part of the previous century.

    Floors have always been a pain. Way back when, tile was very expensive to put in so it was only done in baths for most people. If that.

    Wood dominated. But the finish was a pain. The house my father built in 1956 had 5/4 oak. As did most. And my mom (and sometimes my dad) moved all the furniture around every few weeks and waxed it. With an upright electric thing but still, what a pain. The alternative and/or jointly done were room sized rugs. See comments above about fun with rugs.

    Then synthetic carpets got to be price competitive with hardwoods and didn't require the constant waxing or dealing with the rugs. So in the 60s and 70s (US here) wall to wall carpeting became the norm. You still had to vacuum a lot but it was way easier than waxing. And everyone went totally nuts with colors. Like a paint store exploded. Plus there were the 3D patterns that we called "grandma's" carpeting because it was a thing with older folks of the time.

    Then, finally, they came up with ways to seal hardwoods. Somewhat OK at first but now you can put down a seal that wears like clear stainless steel. Minor detail is not all hardwoods stay firmly into place. Large expanses of wood can expand and contract and you get some cracks along the seams.

    So finally they started making "flooring". Wood and tile that snaps together and is finished such that your large dogs nails barely make a scratch. And if you stay away from the low end it can be sanded multiple times and resealed.

    These last two categories are great for pets, kids, and most anything be the field plow being dragged across it.

    And the better structured subfloor framing of today allows vast expanses of tile to be put down without cracking.

    So rug beating and/or regular waxing to a damp mop every few days. I think things are better now.

    807:

    I was wondering, but it is not for me to question the practices in other places.

    Well, when it opened in 1911 both were common.

    There was also a small smoke house for port shoulders and such. Maybe 2 meters square. When I was young around the early 60s.

    808:

    I grew up in the (relatively moderate) tropics, with no electricity and (at best) extremely unreliable paraffin fridges. Organ meats have to be eaten PDQ, but muscle meat keeps far better than you might think, even under those conditions. In a north-facing pantry in a UK winter (i.e. fridge temperature), meat kept perfectly well for a week or more.

    809:

    "Financial services" is the killer. It makes nothing in terms of goods or services for everyone, it's that game of musical chairs I keep referring to.

    810:

    Tile was common in the UK, even in low-end housing, usually in kitchens. Of course, this was plain, functional tile not the fancy stuff people use today.

    811:

    RE: '... fond of telling people money has gravity.'

    It'd be really interesting to see what particle physicists could do with describing/explaining this phenomenon called 'money' maybe along the lines of a financial riff on the Lagrangian 'duality theory' or 'photon wave-particle duality' as in 'is money the flow of value or a value in itself', and 'when does money morph from one state to the other'. [Discuss with analogies and examples.]

    Crypto actually makes having such a discussion more timely and salient. [Maybe crypto is the at-right-angle* particle version of gov't issued/backed currency ... wonder what Dirac would have made of it.]

    *At-right-angle because classic antiparticles annihilate each other when they meet and so far I don't think we've seen direct annihilation.

    812:

    meat kept perfectly well for a week or more.

    The rules for Minnesota were different than Mississippi.

    Plus fewer people in the first world now die of bacterial infections from food than way back when.

    I have a ceiling fan from the slaughter house that was in use for decades to keep the flies away from the meat while it was being cut. At some point around 1970 they were required to switch to AC. So the fan went to my grandfather's screened porch to two houses of my father's and now to me. If I rebuild I'll put it up. Or I'll put it up in one of my kids' houses.

    813:

    Time to take you outside and go Buddha-Buddha-Buddha....

    814:

    And somewhere in the Canon Holmes or Watson mentions that #550 in a bank in around 1890 was enough to live comfortably off the interest.

    815:

    Isn't Dubai one of the countries there that you keep reading about servants brought in from other countries, and treated as slaves?

    816:

    Yes. But you could make the same statement about what some of the rich folks in NYC, Bonston, Phili, etc... do.

    817:

    The private-school education was the biggie: he was introduced and made friends with people who's parents had real money, so he had the connections that the rest of us didn't.

    818:

    LBJ, whatever else, wasn't stupid, nor was he blind to the real world.

    819:

    From about the year before my late wife dropped dead, until the last year I had the house ('96-'03), I had a friend who cleaned houses come in to do the house. I did not clean the house, though I did move things, and try to put things away.

    820:

    For those who are interested in home economics (ca. 1800), I can recommend "Gentlemen of Uncertain Fortune" (https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvmd861g).

    Primarily about the poor options available to 2nd and subsequent sons, but much interesting detail along the way about family finances and what constituted a comfortable living.

    821:

    As I said, that's what trust funds are about. And the real thing is that many of them hold onto the money.

    And when they don't, it doesn't mean ordinary people get better off, it's other ultra-wealthy who take it over.

    822:

    Rugs... yeah, then there's the rug I bought for $250(!!!) in '06, from someone who had it in her family, or whatever, and had just bought a condo, and it was too big. It's something like 10'x13', and it is a Persian rug (under one corner, "country of origin - Iran").

    I don't think you're going to drag that out, put it on a line, and beat it.

    823:

    Different lives.... I was born and grew up in Philly. We moved out of my grandmother's house when she sold it, I was 7.5, into a large apartment. Big rooms (I had a 4'x8' model train layout in my bedroom, and had room left over).

    My mom shopped, I think, once a week. She worked, as did my father, always. We always had a fridge. Freezer, well, there wasn't much frozen in the stores, then in the supermarkets (other than, say, juice). It was a Big Deal when my dad got my mom a wringer-washer, but she still hung clothes on the lines (between wings of the apt building). I went to the laundromat until after I bought my first house, then went back to that when I was in apartments, or in shared houses.

    824:

    "Wood, ceramic, slate and marble are the must-have floor coverings"

    All of which are "must not have" floor coverings as far as I'm concerned. Cold, hard, noisy, austere and unwelcoming. Tiles or lino are OK for kitchens and bathrooms because of stuff being spilt, but any other rooms must have carpet because it is soft, warm, and acoustically absorbent. Otherwise it's like being in a schoolroom or a factory or something, which is NOT HOMELY and is therefore shit.

    825:

    It all depends on what materials are used for the other 5 or so slabs and furniture and ....

    Lots of cultural things here. Even across the US.

    And how heating/cooling is done. More and more houses in the US have water filled PEX tubing under whatever floor you have. It feels warm, doesn't need to be "hot", and works well with most flooring choices. Except carpet. :)

    826:

    "And somewhere in the Canon Holmes or Watson mentions that #550 in a bank in around 1890 was enough to live comfortably off the interest."

    I'm fairly sure it would work out equivalent to the kind of working class wage that you'd get for something a step above gorilla work, but you'd need to own a house as well for it to count as "comfortable", otherwise rent would eat most of it and you'd be eating crappy food (which was seriously crappy in those days) and shivering a lot in winter. You'd also have to not care about not having new clothes much.

    827:

    comfortable

    When I think of the place my father showed me where his father was born, well opinions have changed. GF was born in 1885 in the equivalent of a one room cabin. He did after the space shuttle flew.

    To him growing up I'm sure comfortable meant no frost bite and a belly that didn't grumble too often.

    And then there was that US PBS show about life in 1800s London for the typical person. Most of first world poverty today would be considered living the high life to those folks.

    I'm with my step grandmother. "The best thing about the good old days is that they are GONE!"

    828:

    Maybe where you live, but I have never seen underfloor heating, not in Philly, not in Austin (or elsewhere in TX), or in FL, or in Chicago, or in the DC area. Nor do I know anyone who has it (and I know a good number of folks).

    829:

    It is the current trend for efficiency. Started about 20 years ago. A European (mostly German I think) thing. Has gotten really started to catch on in the last 10 years.

    But since it doesn't blow hot air on you many people don't think it is as "good" as forced air heating. Similar to those who don't like heat pumps compared to gas fired furnaces for similar reasons. I find it great to walk on a slightly warm surface in the winter and since it also warms the air next to the floor which slowly rises it is more comfortable for many.

    On the AC side it isn't as efficient or comfortable. So you get a lot of forced air AC with PEX in floor heating.

    Forced air is still a bit cheaper so PEX floor heating / cooling is an "upgrade".

    830:

    Bill Arnold @ 741: The article has its own wikipedia page:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Russia_should_do_with_Ukraine
    "What Russia should do with Ukraine" (Russian: Что Россия должна сделать с Украиной, Chto Rossiya dolzhna sdelat' s Ukrainoy), is an article written by Timofey Sergeytsev [uk] and published by the Russian state-owned news agency RIA Novosti. The article calls for the full destruction of Ukraine as a state and the Ukrainian national identity.
    (An article about the article might have even been linked in a previous thread.)

    I had a hard time reading the original translated article. It just seems to me like pure EVIL, and that's really hard to face.

    I dunno. Seems like half the world has lost its fuckin' mind - mass insanity.

    And the other half is afraid to confront EVIL; heads buried in the sand hoping the EVIL won't notice them.

    But the worst part is I don't know what I can do to oppose the evil I see growing in the world.

    831:

    "Freezer" meant "bit inside the fridge where you can make ice cubes" and took a long time to mean anything more.

    Yup. When I was a kid, our refrigerator only had one outside door. Inside it was another small compartment at the top, with its own door - the freezer. Those were the bad old days...

    Speaking of the bad old days, does anybody else remember the days before telephone numbers, when you had to talk to a human operator to get connected? And party lines, where you could (accidentally, of course) listen to somebody else's phone conversation? :-)

    832:

    Heteromeles @ 742: One is that Taleb, in Black Swan talked about the "dog bone strategy" for how to parcel one's investments towards high risk/high return versus low risk/low return, with the rest shafted in the middle between these two. His point was that his black swans were unpredictable, so the question was how much money to spend on blue-sky shit, and how much to keep relatively safe.

    Seems like what comes out is less "dog bone strategy" than it is dog in manger strategy.

    833:

    Defrosting was interesting fun.

    As to phone calls. No and yes.

    People still had numbers but direct dial wasn't always a choice.

    834:

    It was a Big Deal when my dad got my mom a wringer-washer, but she still hung clothes on the lines...

    If it was anything like the wringer-washer my mom used in the early 1950s, there wasn't any dryer with it, so she had to hang up clothes to dry. Usually outside - even in winter-time freezing temperatures, as the ice would sublimate.

    835:

    More and more houses in the US have water filled PEX tubing under whatever floor you have. It feels warm, doesn't need to be "hot", and works well with most flooring choices. Except carpet. :)

    Surely the heat must rise up, even when the covering is carpet?

    836:

    "It's something like 10'x13', and it is a Persian rug (under one corner, "country of origin - Iran").

    I don't think you're going to drag that out, put it on a line, and beat it."

    I have seen both my mother and her mother-in-law do precisely that. And at 5' 1" and 4' 11" neither of them were what you would call big girls.

    837:

    Yes. But putting an insulation layer between the heat source and room isn't optimal.

    838:

    But putting an insulation layer between the heat source and room isn't optimal.

    I would think tiles make a pretty good insulation layer too.

    839:

    "Not as good"? Sorry, you're talking to someone who adores radiators....

    840:

    Not really. Carpet and rugs are full of "air". Tile is mostly a solid. It transfers heat very well. Which is why it feels cold on bare feet.

    As to radiators. They can be nice. But are a "point" source. In floor PEX heat, if properly done, will have a very even distribution of heat in a room.

    But to each their own.

    841:

    EVERY SINGLE FAMILY I know who has someone come in talks about cleaning up first so they don't look like slobs.

    My wife and I do not. At all.

    We are slobs, we know we are slobs, and see no point in pretending otherwise. Cleaning up before the cleaning lady comes defeats the purpose of cleaning lady.

    My previous wife did insist on "cleaning up before", and I always thought it was moronic.

    842:

    But I live in a cluttered mess. Cleaners do not rearrange clutter -- they don't know what's important -- so if you leave stuff lying around they will clean around it.

    Hmm, maybe my wife and I are not such slobs after all. Both of us can't stand things being out of place. The cleaning lady does not have to guess where things are supposed to go because they are always in the same places.

    843:

    Me, I could never see the point in any of it no matter who did it, because none of the things "cleaned" were ever dirty to begin with and the place looked exactly the same afterwards as it did before...

    Here is one way to get the point: Buy a Roomba, and every day, once a day, run it then empty the dirt bin.

    The amount of dirt you dispose of in this manner every day is pretty small. But after a week or so you will notice that it is not getting any smaller. In other words, you and Roomba have reached an equilibrium -- every day you bring in about as much dirt as Roomba removes. And then it dawns on you that without Roomba, every day ADDS that much dirt.

    That's when periodic cleaning begins to make sense.

    844:

    Speaking of the bad old days, does anybody else remember the days before telephone numbers, when you had to talk to a human operator to get connected? And party lines, where you could (accidentally, of course) listen to somebody else's phone conversation? :-)

    I only remember phones with telephone numbers, but I do remember party lines — family friends lived in the country and had to listen to the ring pattern to know if a call was for them. Long distance back then was not only expensive but had to be booked in advance — so you'd arrange to call grandma at 11 AM Saturday and the phone would ring when the operators had established the connection…

    845:

    David L @ 769:

    I don't even know what land ownership in the European sense means when the land jumps to the left 18 metres in under a second.

    As I understand it in most such situations all the land moves pretty much the same distance. At least in the local area.

    In the US (mostly) survey pins rule. So if you have a minor movement your property still is what is outlined buy the survey pins put down 10 or 100 years ago. (Much to the over the top consternation of my neighbor when I dug one up and it wasn't where either of us thought it was. Topsoil build up had it about 1 foot below the surface.) Of course no one has every MOVED a survey pin to make things match up with expectations.

    GPS systems created some situations with airports were runways were not always quite where they where thought to be at a national scale. At least in the US.

    I know that the two survey "stakes" that used to mark the front corners of my lot were removed about 30 years ago when the phone company replaced the telephone poles along my street. Set new poles right next to old poles; switched everything over & then pulled out the old poles.

    The old poles sat right on the property line & the "stakes" were between the poles & the curb (about six inches in). The "stakes" got pulled out with the old poles & the phone company didn't bother to replace them. If I had noticed at the time I probably could have gotten the stakes replaced.

    So now the telephone pole on the downhill side sits entirely on my side of the line and the pole on the uphill side sits entirely on the neighbor's side ... EXCEPT.

    When the house next door (uphill side) sold a few years back the new owner got his lot surveyed & they put the corner stake 5 feet back from the curb. I talked to the surveyor and he told me that was because the City of Raleigh claimed the first 5 feet. They've "TAKEN" about 250 sq ft of my lot & it doesn't belong to me any more.

    But I still have to cut the goddamn grass on that 250 sq ft or I'll get fined by the housing inspectors for creating a public nuisance.

    846:

    AlanD2 asked: Yup. I'm waiting for insurance companies to stop insuring housing in southern Florida due to flooding caused by rising sea levels. Trillions of dollars of real estate rendered unsaleable - I'm sure the howls of outrage will be heard across the pond... :-)

    Of course, Governor DeSantis (if he's still there) will beg for a government bailout, with housing being bought by the government, written off as a loss, and perhaps destroyed. He might even get it, depending on who's in Congress and the White House.

    Perhaps after Senator (former Governor) Rick Scott no longer has a two-pool beach mansion in Naples-on-the-Gulf (on my old paper route)?

    847:

    Geoff Hart @ 770: Nova, a science program on the U.S. PBS TV network, had an interesting documentary on traditional Chinese earthquake engineering. I think it was this one: https://www.pbs.org/video/secrets-of-the-forbidden-city-1o8igy/ (You may be able to stream this for free you set your VPN to an American address.)

    Paywalled by PBS, but it's also available on YouTube:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YeFcfhcmSRo

    848:

    "But I still have to cut the goddamn grass on that 250 sq ft or I'll get fined by the housing inspectors for creating a public nuisance."

    Sounds to me like if anyone's a public nuisance it's the housing inspectors themselves.

    849:

    Regarding aircraft wing flexing, you should take a look at gliders. My old friend the pro glider pilot (and very nearly World Champion) has an ASH25, a two seat 25m span piece of aerodynamic wet dream. When you pull a loop (biiiig loops!) in one of those the wingtips are almost parallel. Looks absolutely terrifying to me.

    850:

    That's not the important kind of equilibrium. The important kind is that which occurs when the dirt is falling off as fast as it builds up, which makes most things self-cleaning eventually.

    Things being out of place: it seems to surprise people sometimes that I have a pretty strong concept of things being in the right place or not. But that is because they are looking only at the raw database storage, and don't have the index, which is in my head. Woe betide anyone who moves something thinking it can't possibly make any difference but in actuality causing it to no longer be where the index says it is.

    851:

    every day you bring in about as much dirt as Roomba removes.

    In my house there's a significant build-up of dirt in rooms I don't use and keep closed. It's enough that I have to dust the toilet etc in the spare bathroom every month, and you can see the track I clear by walking up the hallway if I don't mop that every couple of weeks.

    I'm in the slightly odd position of having a 4 bedroom house to myself, but I live in a ~12m2 sleepout in the back yard because that has insulation. By live I mean I have a "home office" that's 2.4x1.8m added onto a "bedroom" that's 2.4x4.2m and I sleep in one and work in the other. Oh, and a composting toilet in the back yard. I "visit" the house to cook, launder and shower, and occasionally use the gaming PC in the living room.

    As you might expect the house proper is full of stuff, to point where if I want to rent out rooms again I will need to consolidate the accumulated stuff into one bedroom so I can rent out the others.

    But I still have to vacuum the whole house and mop all the floors, as well as dusting some surfaces.

    852:

    Meanwhile - get out the popcorn ....

    Couldn't happen to a nastier piece of shit ( In this country )
    <REDACTED> - QUOTE:
    the MP was arrested on suspicion of indecent assault, sexual assault, rape, misuse of a position of trust, and misconduct in a public office.
    ENDQUOTE
    Plus being as openly sexist & arrogant Brexshiteer par excellence as possible
    Can I start falling about laughing, now?
    Given the list of charges, someone looks to be ensuring that something sticks, as messily & disgustingly ( Just like <REDACTED>) as possible.
    How terribly sad.

    [[ Name redacted - Greg, do NOT mention actual names until they are known. Until they are officially named, please reflect on why all the newspapers and TV channels here aren't giving the name, even though they will know. mod ]]

    853:

    I had a partner who was expert at finding things. She never knew where anything was and couldn't understand why anyone cared. Just look for what you want, when you want it.

    I'm very much inclined to go to where the thing should be. If it's not exactly there look lost, draw a blank, and start wandering round aimlessly. I grew up around people who say "the blue-handled philips screwdriver is at the back left of the second tool drawer down, in the cabinet above the washing machine" and they're right. It just seems natural to me (even when the places are less obvious than some would like... my purse is in the pocket of the pannier in the bin of my cargo bike. Why take it out of there, bring it inside, then reverse the process next time I leave the house?).

    Somewhere in my garage is an edge trimmer (I hope). My ex-gf used it to trim the edges a few months ago and I have no idea where she put it. It doesn't seem to be anywhere obvious in the garage.

    854:

    AlanD2@832:

    And party lines, where you could (accidentally, of course) listen to somebody else's phone conversation?

    My maternal grandparents, living in rural Nova Scotia had a party line until the early 1980s. Me, a kid from Ontario, wondered why they didn't answer their phone when it rang. Was told that their ring was two longs and a short. Anything else they ignored, as it wasn't for them.

    My paternal grandfather got his first real job as a salesman for Beatty Brothers in the 1930s, selling washing machines north of Toronto. Even in the Depression, making sales was very easy. He'd go around to places that had just got electricity, and give the homeowners a washing machine - free of charge! for a week. If they didn't want it after seven days, no problem. He'd just take it back.

    Needless to say, once people (women) found how much easier it could be to wash with a machine, it became a top priority item. He didn't have to take many back.

    During WWII, they stopped making washing machines, and grandpa switched to selling insurance. Years after that, when my dad was a kid, their Beatty Brothers washing machine stopped working. My dad told me that grandpa, who was not at all handy around the house, defied expectations. He got out his old tools (brass, and quite tarnished) and fixed the washing machine. That had been another one of his jobs - servicing the product. He hadn't forgotten how.

    Robert Prior @845:

    Long distance back then was not only expensive but had to be booked in advance

    Yep. Didn't matter if you were as rich as Rockafeller, if you got a long-distance call, you came running.

    855:

    daniel r @ 785: What I think you're missing from the link I posted, however, and the report it references, is the traditional Achilles Heel of the super-wealthy across history: their idiot children. It's difficult to draw conclusions on whether this historical pattern will ultimately apply to the super-rich families of this era, but as yet there's no evidence to say that it won't.

    I think that's what the modern "wealth management" industry is set up to do, protect the family's wealth from the idiocy of ne'er-do-well heirs. They can be stupid as they want to be, but only with the income; the principle is kept from them & preserved for the future.

    856:

    From Switzerland: The defence ministry is drawing up a report on security options that include joint military exercises with NATO countries and "backfilling" munitions...

    Google was remarkably unhelpful in telling me what "backfilling" means here. Any help?

    857:

    Me, a kid from Ontario, wondered why they didn't answer their phone when it rang. Was told that their ring was two longs and a short. Anything else they ignored, as it wasn't for them.

    Yup. But the problem my parents would have is picking up the phone's receiver to talk to the operator, but instead hearing somebody else's ongoing conversation. Politeness dictated hanging up immediately, but there were rumors that this didn't always happen.

    858:

    Arizona state Senator Wendy Rogers suggested the shooter in the recent mass killing in Buffalo, New York, this weekend (10 dead), was a federal agent and part of a federal conspiracy.

    QAnon in action, folks! :-/

    859:

    David L @ 834: Defrosting was interesting fun.

    As to phone calls. No and yes.

    People still had numbers but direct dial wasn't always a choice.

    I remember when we finally got a PRIVATE line. We were on a party line when we moved to the house I grew up in (moved in the summer before I started first grade & my parents sold the house & moved during my second year in college).

    Basically we had a telephone, but could never use it because of the wicked witch who lived down the street.

    Didn't really matter when she was harassing me or my sibs or my mom, but she finally poked her nose into my dad's business one time too many.

    860:

    Yup. See my #858, above.

    861:

    backfilling

    Replenishing from an external source. Entity B uses up/exports stuff and Entity A provides equivalent replenishment stuff to B.

    E.g., Switzerland backfills antitank missiles to Slovakia to replace similar missiles Slovakia has sent to Ukraine

    862:

    Pigeon @ 849:

    "But I still have to cut the goddamn grass on that 250 sq ft or I'll get fined by the housing inspectors for creating a public nuisance."

    Sounds to me like if anyone's a public nuisance it's the housing inspectors themselves.

    I agree, but you KNOW whose opinion matters to the city government.

    OTOH, it doesn't annoy me that much. I hardly ever think about it unless something like this thread reminds me. And even if the city wasn't claiming my 250 sq ft, I'd still have to cut the damn grass.

    So it just gets cut along with the rest that I still own and I get irked in a minor way whenever I'm reminded of it. I'll just say a few bad words about it & I'll be over it again until next time I'm reminded ...

    863:

    AlanD2 @ 857: From Switzerland: The defence ministry is drawing up a report on security options that include joint military exercises with NATO countries and "backfilling" munitions...

    Google was remarkably unhelpful in telling me what "backfilling" means here. Any help?

    It means replenishing stockpiles. The NATO countries that border Ukraine empty out their warehouses and magazines supplying Ukraine's Army with equipment & ammunition.

    The U.S., U.K., France, Germany and now Switzerland ramp up production to backfill stockpiles in those front line NATO member countries - often with newer NATO weapons they were due to get eventually anyway, but on an accelerated schedule.

    In most cases the equipment is old Warsaw Pact stuff (often originally manufactured in Ukraine before the dissolution of the Soviet Union) so Ukraine's soldiers already know how to use it with no additional training.

    Ukraine gets T-72 tanks from Slovenia, and Slovenia gets new Panzerhaubitze 2000 tanks from the Netherlands while Germany cranks up the assembly lines ... apparently Germany doesn't have the stocks to replenish Slovenia directly.

    But eventually both the Netherlands & Slovenia get new German tanks to replace the ones they donated to Ukraine.

    864:

    AlanD2 @ 861: Yup. See my #858, above.

    Wasn't a problem when she was harassing us kids or mom.

    865:

    It has to be said that it took me perhaps 30 seconds to find the name. Seems that US sites have the identical report but uncensored. This kind of thing has become distinctly silly now that we have the internet.

    866:

    Thanks for the info.

    867:

    Thanks for clearing this up, JBS!

    868:

    Back when I had hair in the early 60s, I read that the break-even point was $50,000 annually. With that kind of income you could own a house (and a mortgage) with plenty of room for you, your significant other (at that time a wife), and your 2.5 kids. You could buy a new car every year and anything else you could reasonably want. According to the internet (and it's got to be true if it's on the internet, right?) $1 in 1960 is equivalent in purchasing power to about $9.77 today, which means the break-even income is now $488,500. Call it half a mil. Anything over that and you're buying new Lamborghinis or whatever is currently the hot car, televisions stations, and politicians. That said, my income is considerably less than that but not inconsiderable for a single man without wife, lover, or kids. True, I own a 2008 car but I would have bought a 2020 car two years ago if they had had one with a stick shift on the lot. Most months more comes in than goes out so I have accumulated more than enough to last me whatever years I have left unless it all goes up in flames in which case we're all in trouble and I'll have plenty of company. So, yes, the trillionaires are a problem and should be treated as problems but it is the corporations that they and mere billionaires own that are the conduit for their actions. I have the feeling I haven't said anything you haven't said much better. Sorry about that but I'm going to send it anyway because I'm an obnoxious conceited SOB.

    869:

    RE: ' ... traditional Chinese earthquake engineering.'

    Thank you - you and Geoff Hart!

    Very interesting documentary. The number and variety of pieces used in the construction of the building/temple makes me think that a very small scale version would make an interesting Lego toy.

    Also wonder how similar some of the Chinese architectural components might be vs. medieval cathedral design, specifically wrt flying buttresses. When I looked to see whether there ever was an earthquake near a medieval cathedral, I found the below: medieval style but built much later with the supporting pillars in the 'medieval architecture' secured by iron rods to the base/foundation. The Chinese Forbidden City buildings' wooden pillars were not secured to the floor/foundation: they rested on the flat floor therefore were free to shift with the tremors. (Despite the seismic lab test results in the NOVA doc, I don't think I'd feel comfortable walking into a building whose load-bearing pillars were not securely attached to the foundation.)

    https://cathedral.org/what-to-see/exterior/flying-buttress/

    Here's the wood used for pillars in the Forbidden City. Looked it up in case it had some weird functional/structural characteristics. Couldn't tell - it's a softwood which surprised me because I'm used to reading about how stone and hardwood are preferred in olden Western architecture esp. for structures like cathedrals.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebe_zhennan

    870:

    But the worst part is I don't know what I can do to oppose the evil I see growing in the world.
    Well, consider this. That Wikipedia article was itself a minor influence operation. If you look at the edit history, the first draft, 5 April 2022, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=What_Russia_should_do_with_Ukraine&oldid=1081103692, was by a Ukrainian, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:IgorTurzh, with somewhat broken English.

    It has been edited a lot since then by many people, and it's currently a reasonably solid Wikipedia article.

    The net is that if one does a google search for the transliterated name of the author of the (quite nasty, at least in translation to English) original Russian state media propaganda piece, Timofey Sergeytsev, the Wikipedia article is on the first page of google hits. (At least as of today, 2020/05/17)

    There are people who stake out a set of Wikipedia pages that they consider to be important, and defend them against what they consider to be evil edits. (Sometimes those people are evil, and are defending against good. Sometimes, the motives are things other than good and evil.)

    871:

    The Chinese Forbidden City buildings' wooden pillars were not secured to the floor/foundation: they rested on the flat floor therefore were free to shift with the tremors. (Despite the seismic lab test results in the NOVA doc, I don't think I'd feel comfortable walking into a building whose load-bearing pillars were not securely attached to the foundation.)

    These pavilion roofs are quite nicely designed. There are a bunch of things to consider, though.

    One is that the roofs are relatively safe, which is nice considering how heavy they are. They're basically designed to walk under lateral acceleration, rather than fall apart. You have to realize that when an earthquake produces 10 m2/sec lateral acceleration, that's 1 gee sideways. You don't necessarily want a heavy roof like that to be solidly connected to the ground in that situation, because the energy has to go somewhere, and it probably will go into breaking the uprights. So having a heavy, insulating roof walking around during rare earthquakes is better than having it coming down in pieces.

    Another issue is that the brick walls under the roof are freestanding, not tied to the pillars. This may be necessary for insulation, but these wannabe deadfall traps aren't my favorite part of the design. So it's not a perfect design, merely a really cool one.

    The third is that not everyone designs for earthquake protection. Look at classical Greek architecture, for example, and the way they build pillars. We now know quite a lot about the dangers, but just as some people live on active volcanoes because the benefits outweigh the dangers, others live around earthquake faults without doing much to protect themselves. It's just life.

    872:

    Charlie
    Re: Redacted
    About a minute's survey of non-Brit news sources gives the name & it's already all over twitter, so the cat is long since out of the bag, isn't it?
    SE ALSO Pigeon @ 866, yes?
    What utter nonsense - though I understand your concern, it really isn't going to matter, now, is it?
    This kind of thing has become distinctly silly now that we have the internet.

    873:

    Greg,

    Read what Charlie has to say in his guide to posting about British (English?) libel law. It doesn't matter if the name is all over, until it's officially out, if it appears on Charlie's blog, Charlie can be shat on from a very great height indeed. So let's take no chances.

    It may be batshit crazy, but that's what it is, and Charlie has to live with it.

    JHomes

    874:

    JHomes
    You DID NOTICE that I didn't repeat the name?

    875:

    Re: Redacted I just read the Daily Beast's reporting on this issue. The DB article did not name the person arrested.

    876:

    Greg,

    Yes I did, and no doubt Charlie and the moderators are grateful.

    I was just pointing out why, silly though it might seem, they have to be so picky about it. But I think we need now say no more about it.

    JHomes.

    877:

    Back when I had hair in the early 60s, I read that the break-even point was $50,000 annually. With that kind of income you could own a house (and a mortgage) with plenty of room for you, your significant other (at that time a wife), and your 2.5 kids.

    If you're talking US $ you're about 3 times too high.

    We built our brand new 2000sf ranch house for $19K in 68. Dad was general so most would pay a bit more. But he also built it better than most builders.

    A Chevy Impalla cost around $3K to $4K in the early 60s. But most people did NOT buy a new car every year. In face man bought a used ca every 2 to 5 years. Like we did.

    $50K per year in the early 60s would make you in the 90th percentile. Or higher.

    878:

    JBS property lines.

    I doubt you ever "owned" it. If you go to Raleigh iMaps and check out the property lines you'll see they very likely match your deed.

    https://maps.raleighnc.gov/iMAPS/

    Raleigh has had for a very long time the rule that you are responsible from the curb to your property line. (Note sure what how it works if there is no curb.) So the sidewalk is included. I asked some pointed questions about who has to replace broken up sidewalks at a public meeting a few years ago. No clear answer but it seems to come down to if the damage is caused by a tree growing on city property the city will likely take care of it. But they don't have to. It was clear the inspector wasn't comfortable with the situation (me required pick up trash on city property) but it currently is law. This really irritates people who have a privacy fence (over 5 foot tall) on their line and have to maintain between that and the street.

    When I said the pins rule I meant the iron pipe put in when the property was subdivided. For me this was 1960. For you maybe 1940s or earlier? When there is an issue you get to start with a certified survey. Where they go find a government survey point and go from there. I spent $500 on one 10 years ago and got a deal as they had just done the house next door so they worked off that. Most disputes wind up being a few inches as modern theodolites are way more accurate than older transits with steel measuring tapes and so error accumulations get exposed.

    879:

    Yes, of course. And, in many cases, you could do that only from a post office, so you had to book several days in advance and go in to that. And, of course, in Africa, calls had only a 50% chance of being good - having a very expensive connection when you don't know if the other end can hear you, because you can't hear them, is a little stressful ....

    What flabberghasted me was that this lasted until the late 1970 in the USA. we needed to contact Salt Lake City from Jackson Hole (not an unusual route), and had to book a call for the next day and wait for it.

    880:

    "Plus fewer people in the first world now die of bacterial infections from food than way back when."

    That is irrelevant nonsense. Such infections have NOTHING to do with how long food is kept for and at what temperatures, but whether it carries the pathogen initially, how you handle it (e.g. washing hands) and the temperature it is cooked at. The reduction is deaths due to infection is due to better hygiene and medical tratment, NOT refrigeration.

    What problems there are relate to the toxins produced by otherwise harmless bacteria, and effect primarily cooked food, especially if kept anaerobically. Some foods (e.g. bread) remain edible even when dry or mouldy; meat varies, but (raw) beef is aged for up to a month or more, and game is traditionally hung for that long, too. Yes, that's in UK winter conditions. Even with the toxins, most are destroyed by heat, which is why potentially problematic foods need THOROUGH reheating.

    881:

    Re: '... you are responsible from the curb to your property line. (Note sure what how it works if there is no curb.)'

    Even if you did 'own' all the land right down to the street, cities and utilities (and sometimes neighbors) typically have 'easements' baked into the property deeds.

    With satellite imagery/mapping constantly improving and drones widely available I'm expecting to be able to phone/email a surveyor and have a property survey completed within a couple of hours without the surveyor ever setting foot on my property. Reason for the drone: help map the property and then fix official radio-tagged mini-sticks into the ground to identify the exact perimeter. Radio-tagged in case someone tries to or accidentally moves the stick therefore messes up the property line and encroaches on another property as happened with a previous neighbor's DIY fence install. (Because the error happened X number of years earlier, the encroached upon neighbor ended up losing that bit of property permanently.)

    882:

    Elsewhere, in bastard Brexiter news, "Leaked emails reviewed by The Grayzone reveal possibly criminal plot by pro-Leave elites to sabotage Theresa May’s Brexit deal, infiltrate government, spy on campaign groups, and replace May with Boris Johnson.

    Intelligence cabal infiltrated UK civil service thanks to “centrally placed mole”. Ex-MI6 chief Richard Dearlove pitched espionage operations targeting civil service and campaign groups. Fake Democratic Party fronts run by CIA veterans were proposed to infiltrate pro-Remain groups. Cabal sought to spy on and disrupt Prime Minister’s top Brexit negotiator. Shadowy billionaires funded effort in total secret. Dearlove claimed credit for influencing government policy on Huawei. Cabal now seeking to remove Boris Johnson".

    Unpleasant insight into how the elite really get shit done. Utterly filthy and barely covered in mainstream outlets.

    883:

    Greg: About a minute's survey of non-Brit news sources gives the name & it's already all over twitter, so the cat is long since out of the bag, isn't it?

    Doesn't matter. I do not want my blog to be cited for contempt of court. You should know full well what the English judiciary thinks of internet leaks of material about criminal cases in progress: people have ended up in prison for it, and quite recently.

    You're falling into the gap between what-is and what-should-be again.

    884:

    JBS, Bill,

    @831

    The following article by a Russian journalist possibly goes some way to explaining the mind set that led to the invasion of Ukraine: https://istories.media/opinions/2022/05/16/kak-putin-prinyal-reshenie-o-voine/

    (You'll need to translate the page from Russian.)

    I particularly liked the term "executive morons" and "Versailles Syndrome" (probably meant to be Paris Syndrome).

    885:

    You trust thedefencepost.com as a source!? They've called the Panzerhaubitze 2000 a tank, where "armoured self-propelled howitzer" is right there in the German name.

    886:

    But the problem my parents would have is picking up the phone's receiver to talk to the operator, but instead hearing somebody else's ongoing conversation. Politeness dictated hanging up immediately, but there were rumors that this didn't always happen.

    Another problem was wanting to make a telephone call, but the line being busy all evening because someone was impolite enough not to keep their calls short. Probably the same someone who was suspiciously-well-informed of everyone's business…

    887:

    What flabberghasted me was that this lasted until the late 1970 in the USA. we needed to contact Salt Lake City from Jackson Hole (not an unusual route), and had to book a call for the next day and wait for it.

    It was all about if a local system was connected to the US long lines switching system. If not then you got that situation. I think the last local system was connected at some time in the 80s. Prior to that you had little private phone systems that had been formed and never absorbed into one of the bigger ones so no one would pay for the long haul links.

    Remember that in the US the phone system was never a government owned thing. Which resulted in some things better and some things worse than places that were government owned.

    Jackson Hole is a small ski town in the middle of no where Wyoming.

    888:

    Unpleasant insight into how the elite really get shit done. Utterly filthy and barely covered in mainstream outlets.

    Is this what is getting Greg all upset? Because I'm not seeing anything resembling a scandal on the Guardian or BBC websites…

    889:

    "Here's the wood used for pillars in the Forbidden City. Looked it up in case it had some weird functional/structural characteristics. Couldn't tell - it's a softwood which surprised me because I'm used to reading about how stone and hardwood are preferred in olden Western architecture esp. for structures like cathedrals."

    It's dimensionally stable as it ages, and it's resistant to decay. It's also frigging expensive, so using it is like having gold toilet seats.

    The picture of the trees had me thinking "junk masts". I'm not entirely sure if it has the right sort of grain for that, but if you can use it for pillars that walk around the place when there's an earthquake it sounds quite likely. Junk masts are unstayed, so have to take tremendous bending loads which stayed masts don't.

    The hardwood vs. softwood thing is about what type of tree it comes from, and does not necessarily correlate with how tough or strong any specific member of either class actually is. If you've got lots of deciduous forests around with good structural wood trees then that's naturally what you use. One of the points about using oak for timber-framed buildings is that when it's green you can cut it like cheese, then as it ages it goes rock hard. It's not dimensionally stable as it ages, so the joints bind up solid; the frame does go a bit skew-whiff, but it doesn't fall apart and it gains rather than loses strength.

    890:

    Yeah. My 'research' came up with two different names, the one I expected, and then a different Tory scumbag. I suspect both of them, but I presume only one has been arrested this time. If the other gets named, then they could (at least in theory) launch that libel case.

    891:

    I am not nearly cynical enough to believe that there are multiple MPs who would deliberately ensure that they matched the description of the alleged offender simply so that attempts to research the identity of the latest alleged offender are likely to set up a libel case if published.

    Which means that it's depressing that you've found multiple possibilities, since it implies that there could well be more arrests in the future.

    892:

    Charlie ( @ 884 )
    I SAID - I didn't repeat the name ( Or names, as the case may be ) didn't I?

    Uncle Stinky
    A "polite" fascist coup, in other words?
    I've long suspected this, but some evidence is useful to have.
    IIRC "He who must not be named" ( see above ) was hip-deep in this, too - how unsurprising.
    - Rbt Prior: _ YES it is very much to do with why I'm all wound up.

    893:

    Curiously Twitter has changed its mind about the identity of the accused, at some point in the last eight hours. Both identifications have been really definite - thousands of tweets, "trending on Twitter", etc. The UK press are apparently still not printing a name (although it is perfectly legal to report, if true, that so-and-so was arrested on suspicion of whatever and released on police bail, so I expect that dam will break before tonight).

    Both names were already known to me as horrible pieces of work, politically and personally. This morning's name-in-the-frame was in the news a year or two ago in a similar story. This afternoon's was in trouble just this week for parking in a disabled spot, and people are digging up news stories of him favouring the death penalty, and castration for rapists.

    And of course they're both middle-aged white male Tory MPs, who have been MPs all through these austerity-and-Brexit years, so my baseline opinion of them is Aneurin Bevan's, and is only likely to go down from there.

    894:

    Nick Barnes
    Of course, it could be both of them, for added lulz, couldn't it?
    Very unlikely, more's the pity.

    895:

    Next year will be the centenary of the Great Tohoku earthquake in 1923 that levelled large parts of Tokyo and killed over 100,000 people (the figure is not exact, some estimates say 140,000 died including Koreans who were killed in pograms that followed the earthquake itself).

    A lot of brick buildings did not survive the earthquake, including Tokyo's famous 12-storey "skyscraper" but the earthquake resulted in a lot of fires that burned older wooden structures that were supposedly more proof against collapse or destruction in earthquakes. It is said that the result of that earthquake is that Japan's national flower is now concrete.

    In contrast the Atomic Dome in Hiroshima, a building made of brick with some reinforcement is still recognisable today despite being close to the hypocentre of Fat Man in August 1945. The area around it, mostly older timber construction was reduced to ashes and cinders.

    896:

    What is thegrayzone.com?

    897:

    Yes and no. Jackson Hole was the 'centre' of quite a significant tourist area (Grand Tetons etc.) and Salt Lake City the location of the nearest international airport. I knew that the USA wasn't as technologically advanced as many of its inhabitants claimed, but I was surprised that it was that backward in the late 1970s. If it had been somewhere really obscure, I wouldn't have been surprised.

    898:

    The prospect of multiple Tory MPs being arrested for serious crimes does not depress me.

    899:

    Which means that it's depressing that you've found multiple possibilities, since it implies that there could well be more arrests in the future.

    Unsurprising.

    By some estimates 1 in 5 women and 1 in 20 men are raped at some point in their lives in the UK. Meanwhile, overall arrest/conviction figures in the UK have plunged and less than 1% of rapes are even reported to the police in recent years -- womens' trust in the police has collapsed.

    And if you want an environment where sociopaths with a sense of impunity congregate, parliament would be high on the list.

    900:

    It's the fact that they're winning votes instead of being arrested and convicted before they stand for Parliament that's depressing.

    I'd much prefer it if the nasty party ran out of candidates because they're all locked away for our safety.

    901:

    I knew that the USA wasn't as technologically advanced as many of its inhabitants claimed, but I was surprised that it was that backward in the late 1970s.

    Why surprised? Technological advancement leapfrogs. The US was a leader in many areas during the '50s and '60s, but once infrastructure is in place, companies are reluctant to upgrade (expensive - pisses off stockholders!), so we fall behind.

    This is a universal phenomena, not just in the US.

    902:

    “What is thegrayzone.com?”

    Depending on where you stand it’s either:

    a) a news site fearlessly picking up the stories that don’t suit mainstream media narratives. Tells the stories the western elite consensus doesn’t want out there.

    b) a Russian-funded misinformation site, undermining trust in western institutions.

    I suppose it may be both. But on the Ukraine invasion it’s been pretty much indistinguishable from Russian state media.

    903:

    David L @ 879: I doubt you ever "owned" it. If you go to Raleigh iMaps and check out the property lines you'll see they very likely match your deed.

    They don't. My deed shows the lot extends all the way to the curb.

    Raleigh has had for a very long time the rule that you are responsible from the curb to your property line. (Note sure what how it works if there is no curb.) So the sidewalk is included. I asked some pointed questions about who has to replace broken up sidewalks at a public meeting a few years ago. No clear answer but it seems to come down to if the damage is caused by a tree growing on city property the city will likely take care of it. But they don't have to. It was clear the inspector wasn't comfortable with the situation (me required pick up trash on city property) but it currently is law. This really irritates people who have a privacy fence (over 5 foot tall) on their line and have to maintain between that and the street.

    IF the City of Raleigh decided to put in a sidewalk on my side of the street, they'd have to cut down the tree the City of Raleigh planted there in 2003. A tree, I might note, the City of Raleigh sent me a nasty letter about because I trimmed some of the lower limbs (end of the branch with lots of little sharp points at eye-level; hit you in the face when you walked out the front door lower limbs).

    The letter told me the CITY would determine when branches needed trimming and I'd better not do it again or THEY were going to fine me.

    When I said the pins rule I meant the iron pipe put in when the property was subdivided. For me this was 1960. For you maybe 1940s or earlier? When there is an issue you get to start with a certified survey. Where they go find a government survey point and go from there. I spent $500 on one 10 years ago and got a deal as they had just done the house next door so they worked off that. Most disputes wind up being a few inches as modern theodolites are way more accurate than older transits with steel measuring tapes and so error accumulations get exposed.

    Subdivided in the 1920s IIRC. The house dates from 1936.

    That iron pipe was what I was calling the "stakes". The telephone pole was about 6" in from the curb, and the "pin" or "stake" (iron pipe) was between the pole & the curb. When the phone company replaced the poles, the iron pipes got pulled up when the old poles were removed.

    The city didn't claim that strip alongside the street when I moved in here. I think that came with the "Historic District" overlay back in the late 80s or early 90s. We're not bound by Oakwood's rules - that district fortunately ends south of Glasscock St, but we are now considered a historic neighborhood (Mordecai East).

    No conflict with neighbors over property lines. I am occasionally annoyed with the city over some stupid thing THEY've done. The survey for the uphill neighbor was part of the process of him obtaining his mortgage. He had to have it to get the loan. But there's no question in my mind the pipe IS on the line between our properties. I just contend that line extends all the way to the curb.

    904:

    SFReader @ 882:

    Re: '... you are responsible from the curb to your property line. (Note sure what how it works if there is no curb.)'

    Even if you did 'own' all the land right down to the street, cities and utilities (and sometimes neighbors) typically have 'easements' baked into the property deeds.

    With satellite imagery/mapping constantly improving and drones widely available I'm expecting to be able to phone/email a surveyor and have a property survey completed within a couple of hours without the surveyor ever setting foot on my property. Reason for the drone: help map the property and then fix official radio-tagged mini-sticks into the ground to identify the exact perimeter. Radio-tagged in case someone tries to or accidentally moves the stick therefore messes up the property line and encroaches on another property as happened with a previous neighbor's DIY fence install. (Because the error happened X number of years earlier, the encroached upon neighbor ended up losing that bit of property permanently.)

    I understand about easements. The city is NOT claiming an easement; they're claiming ownership; ownership they DID NOT have when I bought the house in 1974.

    There is an easement across the back of my property where a 24 inch storm sewer pipe passes underneath. That was also already there when I bought the house.

    905:

    paws4thot @ 886: You trust thedefencepost.com as a source!? They've called the Panzerhaubitze 2000 a tank, where "armoured self-propelled howitzer" is right there in the German name.

    It's good enough to illustrate what "backfill" is.

    906:

    Jackson Hole is a small ski town in the middle of no where Wyoming.

    Sigh.

    Getting back to the original topic, read this investigative report about how Wyoming is an offshore financial center.

    I've known this for years, because a friend of mine spends six months plus 1-2 weeks in Wyoming every year, so that they can claim residence in Wyoming and avoid paying income tax. This is not an uncommon dodge, as a certain former Vice President (whose daughter represents Wyoming in Congress) lives just down the road from them. Not because these people are native to Wyoming, but because it's a small state that depends on coal revenue (probably wind farms on big ranches in the future), and as such, its legal system has apparently been finely crafted to favor the wealthy and powerful.

    This is a normal pattern. Switzerland and the City of London aside (although I have increasing doubts about the latter), most offshore financial centers are small and in the middle of nowhere. But they have legal status in our current "Westphalian" nation-state system, something billionaires don't have. So billionaires pay to have the weakest among these entities re-engineered to support them, so that they can have nation-state level protection of their fortunes without physically conquering and running it, as their predecessors in military aristocracies would have done (or filibustering, as 19th century US adventurers would have done to the same, slave-owning, end).

    But Wyoming isn't offshore! Well, most of the first generation OFCs are British possessions, aside from oddballs like the Cook Islands (New Zealand's very special entry in the competition), Mauritius, and some others. They're generally places that are fun to visit. While it would likely be straightforward for someone to turn Madagascar or Kiribati into an OFC, they're not exactly tourist hubs, and Kiribati, at least, is already half underwater from sea level rise.

    And that gets to why OFC money is now infiltrating the Dakotas, Wyoming, and other places in the centers of continents. To idiots with too much money, they look like they're well insulated from sea level rise. And they are. They're not insulated from a rather nasty set of other climate-change induced problems (fires, droughts, and nastier storms among them), but billionaires can't be bothered with the details. And right now I'm wondering if Mongolia and the 'Stans are stable enough to become OFCs for China. Hmmm.

    You can also see this in the standard US Republican takeover playbook. Buy up the legislature. Buy up all the good farmland. Have your skilled consultants propose financial legislation that the legislature will pass, in return for other of your consultants forming a PAC that makes sure those legislators cruise to victory. Also "tithe" money to various and political churches, to get their pastors on board. Oh, and don't forget to help your buddies control the local media landscape, especially news, but also radio programming (crop reports, country music, right-wing preachers, and heavy metal are the standard air fare for most of rural America, sometimes with a Hispanic music station for the migrant farmworkers). Anybody who doesn't like it can leave for an overcrowded blue state on the coast, if they can afford it. Scale up and down as necessary. And unfortunately, this system does scale up reasonably well.

    Anyway, it's worth paying attention to the little tourist traps in the middle of nowhere, because sometimes they hide secrets. As with any island ecosystem, they also offer miniature labs to help elucidate more bigger and more complex systems elsewhere.

    Here endeth the rant.

    907:

    I particularly liked the term "executive morons" and "Versailles Syndrome" (probably meant to be Paris Syndrome)

    A quick bit of googling turned up something different. Apparently "Versailles syndrome" is the Russian notion that, when communism fell, Russia was forced by the West to sign a soft version of The Treaty of Versailles. And now, like, yes, 1930s Germany, they're re-empowering themselves to powerfully reclaim what they regard as their rightful place in the world.

    Their enemies are, of course, the real Nazis.

    908:

    Well, also, the US is BIG.

    So lots of stuff didn't make it to the hinterlands for a long time, partly because of the sheer size.

    I didn't have cable until I was a teenager in the early nineties, despite it being something that was already widespread. And so on - my area didn't get electricity until a fair bit after urban areas.

    That rural areas are also poor areas factors in -

    For instance, my aunt, who is 60, spent her early childhood without indoor plumbing, which was the case for the entire village she grew up in. This is in Pennsylvania.

    Until I moved last year, there was no cell service at my house, which was a continual minor problem to get into city people's heads. No, do not text the number you have for me. It is a landline.

    It's not just the future that's unevenly distributed, it's the present.

    909:

    They don't. My deed shows the lot extends all the way to the curb.

    San Diego City has had similar mapping problems, at least in my documented experience. And there's politics involved: the company that owns city hall, leases it to the city, and owns an eminently-googleworthy property known as 101 Ash street also owns a small parcel near me. It was originally zoned for a church or nursery school, but now it's planned to have a multi-story office building on it. The city consistently has screwed up the boundaries of that parcel where it bounds land that they own, but not the boundary where it abuts privately-owned land.

    In your situation, you potentially have a couple of courses of action, I suppose (IANAL), and I suspect both of them involve hiring a surveyor and likely a lawyer. Either way, make a fuss that the city is illegally taking your land (use that word. It's a specific legal term thanks to our dear SCOTUS). Demand (ideally publicly, ideally with help from a local news station busybody reporter or city councilmember) either that the City pay you for the land they've taken, stop taxing you on it, refund any taxes collected since they claimed ownership, and pay to have all the paperwork adjusted so that they now own it, or alternately that they officially acknowledge that they do not own your land and have no right to it, and that they pay for all the official bureaucratic adjustments, renegotiate rights of way, and so forth.

    If you can masquerade as an aging bu noble, salt-of-the-earth citizen being abused by bureaucratic creeps, so much the better.

    I have no idea whether any of this appeals, but that's an approach that might work. Eventually.

    Anyway, thanks for letting me give unsolicited advice. It made me feel better to share it, at least.

    910:

    You ignored my main point. Private phone companies in remote areas were somewhat independent of and not well connected to the rest of the national phone system.

    And tying it to current politics, many locals where likely somewhat proud of it.

    And oh, as to nearby, Salt Lake City is about 200 miles away by straight line. Over 250 TODAY by roads. And in another state.

    Oh, yeah, the STATE of Wyoming TODAY has a bit over 580K people. We have 3 to 5 times that many in my metro area. And we're around 40th in the nation. The county with Jackson Hole has less than 25K people.

    Just what part of remote and proud do you not get? To be honest I suspect many of the visitors with $$$$ thought of the hard to get a long distance line as a feature back then.

    Not understanding an area doesn't mean they are doing things wrong. Just that they don't do things they way you think they should.

    PS: Don't ever visit the Mt. Rainer state park hotel/lodge. You'll be flummoxed by the only phone line to the outside world is via a credit card pay phone where the first 5 or 10 minutes will cost you $25 or more. No cell or Internet service either.

    911:

    he US was a leader in many areas during the '50s and '60s, but once infrastructure is in place, companies are reluctant to upgrade (expensive - pisses off stockholders!), so we fall behind.

    Yes. To his point once the US phone system was connected via microwave towers every 30 to 50 miles apart and long distance dialing was possible via automated switching to 99% of the population, no one wanted to pay for that last 1%. Especially the 1%.

    Which is also why fiber took so long. ISDN internet at 56K to 112K was considered "good enough" by most of the phone companies for a long time. They did can't if people wanted faster. Faster meant abandoning most of what was in place.

    In a somewhat related vein, a neighbor was the lead engineer on the first CO to CO commercial fiber link in the US. They lost a ton of money on that link but learn a lot. :)

    912:

    I just contend that line extends all the way to the curb.

    I'd write the city a polite letter saying that iMaps and your deed do not match. Send it to the planning office. (If you want I can ask exactly who to send it to. I have some "inside" contacts.)

    Otherwise whoever deals with your estate or sale of your property to pay your nursing home bills will get to have way more fun than any barrel of monkeys.

    Of course if that's your plan ....

    913:

    This is a feature, not a bug.

    To give an example from a real metropolis (Los Angeles), the rich and famous tend to live in the mountains (Malibu, Pacific Palisades, Bel Air, etc.). These mountains are a bit mildly rugged, and the roads tend to run up canyons (Malibu Canyon, Topanga Canyon, Laurel Canyon, etc.). When these canyons were rigged for cell phone service in the 1990s, the cell phone companies divvied up who provided service in each canyon. This is the pattern to this day: if you have the wrong service, you lose reception shortly after you enter the canyon.

    Again, this is a feature, not a bug. The locals all have cell phones that work at their homes. Outsiders, such as those trying to pry into their business, most likely do not, and therefore lose both the ability to call out and GPS guidance from their phones. This becomes a real chore for contractors who are working in the area, but oh well.

    The lesson here is about insider knowledge, access, and above all, privacy. It's easier to do this in areas where there aren't many people living, and those people tend to be very well off.

    914:

    This is a feature, not a bug.

    Didn't I say that?

    915:

    Y'know, I read recently that some grad students at Yale, I think, in economics, were under the impression that the median income in the US was over $600,000. No, I didn't make a mistake on the number of zeros.

    Had an uncle who bought a new car every 2-3 years (and yes, he had a 56 Chevy, new...). And a house. I guarantee that he wasn't making $50k then... since what he did for a living was a cook on a seagoing tugboat.

    My first wife and I bought a house in '72, I think it was, for $11,500, in an "ok" neighborhood in Philly.

    $50k for 1960 is ludicrous. At this point, it's time for me to once again trot out mark's economic indicators: the price of a breakfast special (two eggs, toast, coffee, home fries) at a non-chain place that is only open for breakfast and lunch. In '68, it was $0.68, (Ok, might have been $0.69). By 1979, it was $1.35. Just looked up around here, $6.85. This covers a) rental of the restaurant and utilities and taxes; b) staff salaries; c) cost of food and other supplies, and d) the owner to make a living. And it must be low enough that folks making the median ($60k/yr) or under will stop in one or more times a week.

    917:

    Yeah, the 1960 median income in the US was 5600 dollars.

    50,000 was the equivalent of 500K so...

    918:

    And if you want an environment where sociopaths with a sense of impunity congregate, parliament would be high on the list.

    And not just in the UK. Some in France seem to think of it as a perk of office.

    In the US it is more considered something you can get away with but should keep quiet about.

    But at least one of the worst of the worst will be gone soon. (And I hope not return.) One of Marjorie Taylor Greene's (of Jewish space laser fame) best buds just lost the R primary for a house seat in a very conservative US House district. But he still got around 30% of the R vote in the district. [unbelievably big eyeroll here]

    https://www.reuters.com/world/us/nude-video-latest-scandal-turning-republicans-against-us-rep-cawthorn-2022-05-05/

    Oh, and speeding with a revoked driver's license, getting held up at airport security TWICE for carrying a loaded gun, lying on his CV, and other things.

    At least we've come a long way from Wilbur Mills and his escapes only being snickered at.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilbur_Mills#Scandal,_alcoholism,_recovery_and_retirement

    919:

    I missed your comment about having a personal long distance line, so you're right. I'm pointing out that modern technology offers its own, sometimes less obvious, ways of isolating people from information.

    But I think we agree that private, rural, and estate have gone together for a very long time indeed. Certainly it goes back to the Romans (latifundia), and possibly two thousand years before them.

    920:

    This is down the road about an hour or so to get close. Hard to actually get to it. Then and now.

    https://sometimes-interesting.com/overhills-former-rockefeller-estate-sequestered-on-fort-bragg/

    https://theoldhouselife.com/2018/06/05/abandoned-rockefeller-mansion/

    Army now uses it for training.

    I didn't know about it till I read an article a few years back. Most people in North Carolina or even near Ft. Bragg do not know of it.

    I'd have to re-read the articles but I suspect they had a private rail siding to get near it. Roads in the area back when built would be considered tenuous at best.

    921:

    I have the opposite problem; I have and use a mobile, but rarely even answer my mum's landline because most calls on it are from scammers. Oh and I have difficulty getting some people to call my mobile.

    922:

    No idea. Was linked to it. Article info seems solid enough.

    923:

    Idaho seems to be leading in the race to become the elite neo-feudalist hideaway at the moment:

    https://www.huffpost.com/entry/far-right-idaho_n_628277e2e4b0c84db7282bd6

    Even going to legalise private militias! Most of these people are useful idiots or con artists but the people with money are the in the background driving this. The "Idaho Freedom Foundation" no less. I feel freedom for most is not their goal!

    924:

    Have you ever been to the Scottish Highlands and Islands? I would not call Jackson Hole remote from Salt Lake City by those standards. And I am pretty sure that the population density is significantly less (yes, really) - the populations assuredly are! Yes, Jackson Hole is further, but it was a HELL of a lot better connected, especially then (*). And I can assure you that Highlanders and Islanders are proud (and stubborn).

    The point is that, up to the 1970s, the UK varied between broke and almost broke, due to the WW II repayments to the USA. Yet we started installed trunk dialling in 1958 and completed it in 1979. The much richer USA was quite simply backward - and I don't care what the reasons were. I can believe they were political.

    (*) Scheduled flights scarcely existed, so you had interesting drives and ferry trips. You still do :-)

    925:

    The US - no, probably not political then, more likely bean counters... and Jackson Hole, back then, was only a developing tourist destination. Interstates were still being built, and getting there would have taken a while.... (He says, remembering that I-95 was not complete on the way from Philly to Miami for Worldcon in '77).

    926:

    Re" “What is thegrayzone.com?”

    Did a search on it which pulled up:

    a) skews conspiracy theory, b) lacking in reliability according to a few fact-checker sites, c) a couple of years ago the Wikipedia community deemed it not qualified as a source, etc.

    I did take a look at the site - front page stories resemble stuff on the rag-mags at checkout.

    927:

    I'm catching up on the thread, so I may be missing something.

    I very much appreciate Heteromeles point about billionaires possibly being good for something, but there's another angle, which is that sufficient power to prevent billionaires is a lot of power. It won't necessarily be used for the goals you prefer.

    An easy guess might be that expropriating billionaires will just lead to more competition between billionaires, with some of them being better at using the law against their competitors.

    This doesn't necessarily mean there will be a bad outcome-- Charlie's (I think) recommendation of a gradual approach seems less likely to provoke an immune response.

    Extreme wealth for individuals is seen here as a hazard, but not extreme wealth for governments.

    The US government (or governments, if you want to include states) is fabulously wealthy, so wealthy that it hardly notices the costs of the carceral state. Is this a good thing?

    Not so long ago, I would have mentioned the huge US military budget, but it's nice to have something to spare for Ukraine, so I'll take it easy on the strong opinions there.

    928:

    Interesting article about Taiwan and putative invasion by Beijing.

    (TL;DR: - China hasn't got theshipping to make a credible go at it.)

    https://warontherocks.com/2022/05/amateur-hour-part-i-the-chinese-invasion-of-taiwan/

    929:

    Thanks for that link to the old Rockefeller place. That's the problem with aristocrats these days. Unlike their predecessors, they don't even leave behind interesting ruins. Like castles (/sarcasm).

    Or to paraphrase Joey Santore, when talking about redwoods on Crime Pays But Botany Doesn't (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xbma869jMQY) , the really annoying thing about the fact that 95% or so of old growth redwood forests were cut down is that 95% of the wood has already been utterly wasted. The forest lasted thousands of years, the trees lasted hundreds, the wood's amazing stuff that is knot free and very rot resistant, and not only were the forests cut down, the wood has mostly been wasted on frivolous things and is gone too. Generalizing from this, what the fuck do we have to show for all the resources we've blown in the last 200 years. Our roads are crap, our data won't last, our houses won't last, our groundwater's been literally pissed away, every desert aquifer is being sucked dry, we've taken 10,000 years of soil fertility and flushed it into the ocean where it's poisoning stuff, and all for what? Power trips for a few white men?

    This is where I agree with Santore. Going out into nature makes me feel less homicidal sometimes.

    But rather than nodding and saying, "yes, we're all evil and deserve to die, and by the way, what's for dinner?" Perhaps the better question is, "what's worth saving, now that we've squandered so much?"

    931:

    Re "backward" areas:

    I'm 61. The small village my mum's parents lived in, in central Wales, had no mains electricity when I was born. (I resist calling it a hamlet; it still had two pubs at that time, and a post office, and a school.)

    932:

    sufficient power to prevent billionaires is a lot of power

    Some countries have that, even quite large countries. Whether it's the Soviet Union or Korea or Norway, the answer seems to be either an authoritarian dystopia (soviet) or strong social pressure that means even the few billionaires don't feel they can throw their weight around.

    The US is in many ways a perfect counter-example, because it was explicitly set up as a billionaire playground and everything from the constitution to the corporate history reinforces that.

    There's a lot of questions about whether we can shift from the current metastising kleptocracy back to something more egalitarian without a dramatic drop in both wealth and population. My current inclination is to say no, which means it's not going to be fun. Even democratic countries are struggling with this, because a lot of voters are firmly of the view that it's someone else's problem and what really matters is that they get theirs. The sense of overwhelming entitlement isn't limited to billionaires, in other words. Arguably the billionaires are a symptom of the entitlement.

    933:

    Moz said: Even democratic countries are struggling with this, because a lot of voters are firmly of the view that it's someone else's problem and what really matters is that they get theirs.

    And I have got a lot in common with that view. Personally I don't care about the billionaires.

    Charlie said: You are not a billionaire.

    You will never be a billionaire. You're more likely to be struck by lightning.

    I've had friends struck by lightening, and one I saw it happen. Not so with billions. I've never met a billionaire, or even seen one as far as I know. (maybe I saw a Packer as they lived not far away)

    Income inequality is corrosive if it's in your face. If an intermingled society has 40% living on 10 dollars a day, and 40% living on 200 dollars a day, then it's a disaster. "Don't leave your hotel without an armed guard" level disasters. If everyone is on 10 dollars a day then it's one of those "Everyone is so friendly" places.

    The existence of billionaires doesn't eat at my soul and make me want to turn to kidnapping so I can get my share. It's completely utterly irrelevant to basically everything in my life (unless I want some rather stylish new furniture that I can assemble myself). Even then, the billions of the owner don't enter my mind, I just think how nice the BJÖRKSNÄS will look in my lounge.

    934:

    the wood has mostly been wasted on frivolous things and is gone too. Generalizing from this, what the fuck do we have to show for all the resources we've blown in the last 200 years

    In Australia a lot of the time we tax the proletariat to subsidise the extractive industries. I've spent quality time checking that the greenie claims about native forest logging hold up (sadly they do). The TLDR is that we pay more, often much more, actual money in subsidies than logging the native forests produce in earnings. The earnings obviously go to private companies. If we count things other than money it's obviously a huge loss on those fronts as well.

    what's worth saving

    Pretty much everything. Even if you agree with the Pascoe/Gammage stuff about lightly forested plains rather than overgrown "untouched" remnant forests, we could still save a great deal of what's been "lost" (viz, the wild species still generally exist, just not in useful quantities.

    The difficulty ranges from "if we don't build a second international airport that reserved land could become natural heritage" (sounds like a win-win to me!) through to "replant trees in the Great Barrier Reef catchment, start net sequestering CO2, and maybe the reef will survive".

    On a local level, I keep looking for cheap rural-ish land that's exceptionally cheap because it's burnt then flooded then rezoned, that I can buy and eventually live on. Or probably die on, since the stuff I can afford it likely to experience non-survivable events multiple times over the next half century. Which is a tradeoff I'm willing to make ("it won't happen to me")

    935:

    If an intermingled society has 40% living on 10 dollars a day, and 40% living on 200 dollars a day, then it's a disaster.

    What's interesting for me is that I've mostly met the other sort of obscenely rich people - Forrest for example. But even then there's a lot of bullshit around them because while they're "trying to do the right thing" they're also trying to turn a profit at it, and obviously get overexposed to people who want random ideas funded. I've mostly dealt with their filter people, and indirectly through groups that are either being funded or being considered. "Moz meet Bob, Bob works for {rich rando} and is considering giving us money".

    I can't help feeling that any government willing to tax those people significantly would also be the sort of government that would spend at least some of the resulting money sensibly. You're just not going to see the John Howard style "oh no a huge tax windfall whatever shall we do" response. If the government want rich wankers fucking shit up why bother taxing them then bribing them with their own money?

    (and FWIW I've been the "self funded activist" hanging out with the dole-funded and fundraiser sort often enough that I'm uncomfortably aware of just how committed I ain't. While we need the sort of people who say "a $200 fine is just as good as a $200,000 fine, I can't pay either" I've never been one and I'm not willing to become one if I can avoid it)

    936:

    Moz said: What's interesting for me is that I've mostly met the other sort of obscenely rich people - Forrest for example

    Yeah, that's going to give you a completely different perspective. To me that sort of super rich is one step removed from leprechauns and their pot of gold. I'm more inclined to believe they exist but I've got no direct proof. From here a super rich person isn't materially different from a super rich corporation, and I don't think I'll become either.

    937:

    And at the other end of the spectrum (and the state) we have:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biltmore_Estate

    It was donated intact and is a big tourist draw. My son was there not too long ago and said he thought I'd like it. Until 5 or 10 years ago I think he would be right. Now it would remind me too much of the rape and pillage of the country done to allow it to be created.

    938:

    Korea or Norway, the answer seems to be either an authoritarian dystopia (soviet) or strong social pressure that means even the few billionaires don't feel they can throw their weight around.

    Seriously? Korea?

    939:

    I've never met a billionaire, or even seen one as far as I know.

    Because they don't live amongst us. See my earlier comment about the Rockefeller estate now a part of Fort Bragg. Very few people within 100 miles even knew it existed. The uber rich have learned they need to just move in different circles.

    A now retired for a couple of decades tremendously talented basketball player was giving an interview with Charlie Rose way back when. One thing he said stuck with me. He didn't deal with anyone he called a friend prior to making his millions. 10s to 100s of millions. Per him they either had their hand out all the time or just couldn't participate in his life without him funding their lives. So he moved on. Some may said he was evil for doing so. I'll leave that debate for another time.

    940:

    Their billionaires seem to be both less rich, and more direct with their political stuff. There's less "set up a front, write legislation, use 'money is speech' to get it passed". It's a brutally capitalist way of being less governed by kleptocrats. Which I thought might appeal to you US types rather more than Norway or Aotearoa.

    Where I come from people celebrate the dismal attempts by rich people to direct our politics, and laugh at them when they do stupid shit. The problem that they're not entirely unsuccessful is one some of us are trying to address.

    I would love to see the various financial shenanigans stopped by our governments, and I vote accordingly.

    941:

    Which I thought might appeal to you US types

    You seem to think there are 330 million clones in the US. Far from it.

    942:

    Seriously? Korea?

    Yeah, I twitched on that too.

    For those who say that South Korea keeps their billionaires under control... well, sorta.

    On one side there's The Republic of Samsung (""You can even say the Samsung chairman is more powerful than the President of South Korea. [South] Korean people have come to think of Samsung as invincible and above the law"), but on the other, Samsung chairman Lee Jae-Yong (net worth ca. US$8.7 billion) has done time in prison for bribery and embezzlement. With US businessmen lobbying to get him out early because he's so important to the global economy, of course.

    943:

    I was thinking of it more as a scale, like the various "corruption index" ones. "kleptocracy index" perhaps. If we ignore the countries that barely have billionaires at all (admittedly that does kind of defeat the point), looking for advanced economies where they billionaires but don't also let them run roughshod over everything, IMO Japan and Korea kind of work.

    Then there's the inevitable "who has the billionaires" list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_billionaires

    Sweden strikes me as the stand-out there, along with Germany, as social-democratic countries where the billionaires haven't taken over. But at the same time because of that their billionaires don't really stand out the way the Korean ones do, so there's a risk we'd end up arguing about whether invisible billionaires actually exist.

    Norway and Finland are both up the list of billionaires per million population, while somehow also being at the top of the "least corrupt" indexes.

    944:

    "I've never met a billionaire"

    I have met several.

    I have met a third generation danish billionaire, who inherited one of the largest industrial concerns in Denmark, but his passion was working as a lawyer, specializing in cases involving animals ("Lots of teenage girls being cheated by horse-traders")

    I have also met David Filo, back when Yahoo was a thing that ran on FreeBSD. His got around $50K richer while eating pizza with us.

    I have also met Charles Simoniy, who is nominally "protector" for datamuseum.dk (He defected from Hungary to Copenhagen and still have a thing for the GIER computer.)

    Finally my Varnish Cache (FOSS) software made a billionaire out of a swedish dude, who built a global CDN with it.

    It is a very small and undoubtedly very skewed dataset, so conclusions are unwarranted.

    945:

    Charlie @ 900
    Those numbers are remarkably high & unpleasant - before reading that, I would have put the proportions as 1:10 & 1:100 respectively.
    I presume this misjudgement is/was caused by the persistent under-reporting?

    Toby
    Idaho appears to be going fully fascist, yes?

    waldo
    Mains sewage did not make it to parts of the Fens until about 1970 ...

    946:

    Very similar numbers in Australia, and if you dig around there's been work done on "why have the stats changed". The short, nasty, answer is: it's more acceptable to declare a given event as rape now. But if you ask different questions you get different answers: "have you ever been raped" vs "have you ever felt you had to have sex when you didn't want to" for example.

    There's still a world of difference between what that means for men and women, which suggests that at least part of the difference is reporting rates between sexes* is a difference in willingness to report.

    (* because the rates are still broken down by sex rather than gender)

    947:

    And yet no church or chapel? That's the difference between a hamlet/township and a village; a village has a church of (Christian) religion in it.

    948:

    Speaking of democracy sausages, Australia has compulsory voting but one of the exceptions is people of "unsound mind". You might enjoy thinking about exactly how it is that some famous people are still able to vote...

    949:

    Hah. There are places in South East England where mobile phone reception is non-existent, or was until very recently. Another commenter's home (until recently) was in one of those blackspots, at the bottom of a Kent valley. As it's a couple of miles from the nearest road that has much traffic at all, and there is only a handful of homes there, the phone companies have been somewhat reluctant to set up a mast there

    950:

    Yes. And, in the West Country, western Highlands and similarly crumpled parts of the country, such black spots are normal. They are also common in the flatter and less populated parts of the Highlands.

    951:

    Yes, chapel. Thanks for the definition, wasn't aware of it.

    952:

    The tendency of the police to demand unlimited access to a rape complainant's smartphone so they can read all your email and messages for the past couple of years in search of some evidence to support slut-shaming or prosecuting the complainant for wasting police time might just have something to do with it.

    Also the fact that criminal prosecutions in the UK now routinely take 3-5 years to come to court and everyone knows the conviction rate is down around 1%, and to press the accusation will result in a really unpleasant grilling in open court by the accused rapist's counsel (if they can afford one) are also deterrents to complaining.

    Also, about half of reported rapes are by current or former partners (ex-partner rapes are particularly common), so they tend to be nastily arguable by the aforementioned lawyer. Stories of rape victims being reduced to tears on the witness stand, or having nervous breakdowns and PTSD as a result of cross-examination, are a thing.

    Finally, rape of men and children is far commoner than most people like to think, but fear and shame mean the victims don't talk about it, because internalized homophobia is a thing. (And before you talk about women raping men or boys, yes, but that's relatively rare compared to self-identified red-blooded heterosexual men raping another cis hetero male who just happens not to work out or who comes across as "soft".)

    953:

    There are two levels to this, both pretty bad.

    The first is the whole scenario around people who clearly have capacity, having it denied and having their right of self-determination denied or downplayed, on the premise that they can't understand what is in their interest. This is distressingly common for people with Down's Syndrome and CP, who may (and in fact most likely) have no cognitive impairment at all, but might have difficulty expressing themselves clearly. Denying the franchise to such people is obviously ridiculous, although stupid people often try to say this should be the done. Sadly such debate is not unusual (although I think mostly from the USA... at least here there was a lot of educational material countering this stuff in the 70s and 80s, and I suspect the UK, NZ and Canada had similar).

    The other is in relation to people who genuinely do have some sort oc cognitive impairment that reduces their capacity. We fail them utterly, everywhere in the Western world. The concept of substitute decision making that prevails in the older mode of catering to capacity issues is extremely vulnerable to overt corruption. But the newer model of assisted decision making isn't necessarily much better, without an institutional infrastructure that enables a genuinely non-partisan approach, specifically around voting and elections.

    954:

    I presume this misjudgement is/was caused by the persistent under-reporting?

    Almost certainly culture.

    955:

    Charlie @ 953
    Given what we know now - & didn't when I was 25 ( 51 years ago, now! ) coupled with the ability of people to speak more freely, I suppose it's unsurprising & yet still deeply depressing.
    It also suggests that bisexuality in men is much commoner than previously supposed - what a surprise that isn't!

    956:

    Greg, while it seems Idaho is going fascist, I think that is just a means to gain power by the people behind it. I agree with others that it is to gain control of more climate secure territory. I think the means is right wing politics, the goal neo-feudalism.

    957:

    Time was, I used to drive regularly between Glasgow and London in a car with an AM/FM/LW radio. I listened to Radio 4 on these trips and it was convenient to use the LW service since I didn't have to station-hop between lower-power FM carriers on a 650-km long journey. There was a part of my trip somewhere in the Scottish borders where the road went down into a long deep cut past Beattock summit when I'd get drop-outs on the 198/200kHz signal (I can't remember when Radio 4LW shifted from 200kHz to meet ITU standards, probably after it got renamed from the Home Service.)

    958:

    It also suggests that bisexuality in men is much commoner ...

    Except that the rapists don't (usually) think they're indulging in homosexual activity. This is about power, not about sex

    959:

    Definitely neo-feudalism. If there's real fascism going it, it's just means to an end.

    960:

    coupled with the ability of people to speak more freely

    Your surprise at the numbers is typical. As to people speaking more freely now, well yes. But on the scale of 1 = no one talking to 10 = everyone talking, we've moved from a 2 to a 4 over the last 100 years or so.

    I am involved with a web site that exposes sexual abuse (all the detail I'm going to give). The biggest thing is that the people who are the victims have to be willing to give up most of their social contacts if they report an incident. Because when the "leaders" of whatever group they are in (strong personality parent on the softball team, pastor of a church, boss at your workplace, whatever) start saying "I know xyz and they could not have done it" most people side with the "leader".

    This is also why it can be years before people report. It can take a while before they are ready to deal with the huge blow back so many will get.

    961:

    Idaho appears to be

    Idaho is where people in the US have been going for decades to "get away".

    I have a cousin that I've not seen since 1970. A good old country boy at heart. After he retired as a pilot his family moved to Idaho. Per my father you go down a paved road for miles, then an unpaved (maybe gravel) road for a few miles, then turn onto his property and drive a mile or so down a dirt path to get to his house.

    One of these days I'll track down his kids and grand kids and see how they turned out.

    962:

    Then there's Du Pont's donation, Longwood Gardens. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longwood_Gardens

    963:

    Done the road we have Duke University. Built on tobacco and treating workers like crap. And killing lots of people with their products. But should it go away? Not really. And they do address their past. To the consternation of a non trivial number in the state.

    Then there are those entire floors in the main hospital system which rich Saudi's and similar rent out for 50 or 100 people when some royal someone or the other needs a non trivial surgery. Some say they shouldn't do it. Others point out the somewhat "obscene" profits from such things pay for all the research and free clinics and other things Duke funds.

    Plus help pay for the basketball program. :)

    964:

    You will never be a billionaire. You're more likely to be struck by lightning.

    Something in the back of my brain since I read this just broke through to the font.

    If you want to "see" some billionaires, hand out in the Lexington Kentucky airport during the Keeneland Sales for yearlings in September each year. The small airport is parked to over capacity with private jets from all over the world. Many from the middle east. The Keeneland racetrack and horse facility is across the street from the airport. Multi-millionaires and billionaires playing monopoly with their horses.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keeneland_Sales

    965:

    A semi-random string of notes:

    First, On The Public Record started blogging again, with a nice rant about the general lack vision in the governance of California water (lookin' at you, wannabe President Newsom).

    One of her links is to the Degrowth movement, which is part of the anti-consumerist flock. While we're very properly concentrating here on what value billionaires add to the world, it's worth looking at proposals for alternate games.

    And that's the third comment: if being a billionaire is as much about keeping score in your competition with other billionaires, what happens if someone changes the game? I'm not talking about communism, but about more nebulous things like replacing gross national production with, say, Gross National Happiness. What if GNH and its spawn (gross municipal happiness, gross industrial happiness) took hold?

    This is both silly and important. We do have to change the game, and IPCC modeling for how to deal with climate change pretty much requires shrinking GDP. This makes us all feel like losers, so naturally the uber-competitors try to make everyone lose more than they do so they can win, be the roosters crowing atop the rubble and wondering where the chicks went. So change the game on them: gross national happiness, perhaps, a new game with new rules for winning.

    I'm not sure what there is to lose, beyond a lifetime of bad habits. after all, if your view of life is that it's a shit sandwich, and most of what you're doing is getting as much bread as possible to try to disguise the taste of how much shit you're eating, maybe it's time to compost that shit and find something else to do with your bread?

    Above a certain level, the incremental value of money to buy more happiness decreases, as Charlie noted at the top. So rather than blowing huge loads o' cash on decreasing returns, as we do now, perhaps there's another game to be played? This one would involve getting everybody to a basic level of happiness, at least with having enough food, water, shelter, the time to take care of those who need it, and to be taken care of when you need it? Oh, and definitely have some fun along the way. That's critical too.

    And note, I don't think of this as crypto-communism. To me, it's more a public system that affirms that we can't keep making the game of growth be the basis for global civilization. The nice things about a happiness measure are that not only does it not depend on growth, it's also a way to avoid the fear of a joyless future of ceaseless self-mortification to keep worse things from happening. To me, it's the joy of turning a field of weedy foxtails and useless thistles back into a wildflower meadow full of bees and butterflies, instead of seeing that land only as something that needs to be sold to pay for your kid's latest round of rehab. As it is, we waste far too much for far too little.

    966:

    Heteromeles @ 910:

    In your situation, you potentially have a couple of courses of action, I suppose (IANAL), and I suspect both of them involve hiring a surveyor and likely a lawyer. Either way, make a fuss that the city is illegally taking your land (use that word. It's a specific legal term thanks to our dear SCOTUS). Demand (ideally publicly, ideally with help from a local news station busybody reporter or city councilmember) either that the City pay you for the land they've taken, stop taxing you on it, refund any taxes collected since they claimed ownership, and pay to have all the paperwork adjusted so that they now own it, or alternately that they officially acknowledge that they do not own your land and have no right to it, and that they pay for all the official bureaucratic adjustments, renegotiate rights of way, and so forth.

    Actually, it's part of the Fifth Amendment "... nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.".

    What I intend to do about it is exactly what I'm already doing - pretty much ignore it, cut the damn grass when I have to and bitch about it in random internet forums WHENEVER THE SUBJECT COMES UP TO REMIND ME I'm irked at the city about it.

    967:

    David L @ 913: Of course if that's your plan ....

    Yup. That's the plan. I'll be dead and it will be somebody else's problem.

    Of course, they won't even know it WAS a problem or that they're getting an incrementally smaller windfall than the one they didn't expect in the first place, so it won't be much of a burden for them either.

    968:

    There WILL be a survey at the time of the title transfer. And that's when it will become an issue. Especially if a mortgage or loan is involved.

    Someone was selling some of the old warehouse district recently. Turned out the NC Railroad (a state owned entity with an odd set of assets) had a track easement along the edge of the property. When was abandoned and paved over at least 60 years ago. Maybe more. You only saw any track when the potholes got really deep. But to complete the sale the paper work to give up the easement had to go through a collection of lawyers and state agencies to legally give up the easement. A few months of wait ensued. And this was when everyone agreed on the plan.

    969:

    H
    Meanwhile, here, whether in England or Scotland our incompetent greedy private companies (Eng) & incompetent useless government control (Scot) are filling our rivers & covering our beaches in SHIT { And used condoms & biohazards in the form of medical chemicals }
    There seems to have been total Regulatory Capture of the Water regulators in both countries, as well.

    970:

    Justin Jordan @ 918: Yeah, the 1960 median income in the US was 5600 dollars.

    50,000 was the equivalent of 500K so...

    I remember something my dad said back in the late 50s early 60s1 that you could AFFORD a mortgage that was 2 times your annual income. So a man making $5,600/year could AFFORD a mortgage of $11,200. When you consider most mortgages at the time required a 20% down-payment ($2,800) that meant a selling price right around $14,000.

    Later in life (years after he died), my Mom told me the sales price for the house I grew up in was $17,500 in 1955.
    --

    1 Only conversation I remember ever having with him about money.

    971:

    So what's going on with your neighbors in Anaheim?

    972:

    Happiness is too indeterminate. How about the results of a questionnaire that asks: a) do you have a roof over your head; b) are you worried about losing your housing; c) do you have enough to eat regularly?; d) do you have some disposable income, and e) would be surprise big bill (such as medical) bankrupt you?

    973:

    Happiness is too indeterminate. How about the results of a questionnaire that asks: a) do you have a roof over your head; b) are you worried about losing your housing; c) do you have enough to eat regularly?; d) do you have some disposable income, and e) would be surprise big bill (such as medical) bankrupt you?

    Actually, Gross National Happiness is an measurable index: e.g. https://gnhusa.org/gross-national-happiness/

    Given the games and assumptions that go into GDP, I'd suggest it's at least as measurable.

    The bigger point is to realize that economic growth is a number, not existence. It's hard to separate the true explanations for why it matters (and to whom) from the apologists who try to convince everyone that, like Christianity, Islam, or the Mandate of Heaven, it's how reality should properly work, regardless of what data and experience show.

    974:

    David L @ 921: This is down the road about an hour or so to get close. Hard to actually get to it. Then and now.

    https://sometimes-interesting.com/overhills-former-rockefeller-estate-sequestered-on-fort-bragg/

    https://theoldhouselife.com/2018/06/05/abandoned-rockefeller-mansion/

    Army now uses it for training.

    I didn't know about it till I read an article a few years back. Most people in North Carolina or even near Ft. Bragg do not know of it.

    I'd have to re-read the articles but I suspect they had a private rail siding to get near it. Roads in the area back when built would be considered tenuous at best.

    The Army uses THE LAND for training, but they've neglected the house & allowed it to fall into disrepair.

    That's a real shame because when the Army acquired the property (I believe it actually belonged to the U.S. Government for quite some number of years before being transferred to the Army) there were plans to use the house as a conference center. I don't know why the Army never followed through.

    Overhills Oral History

    The main entrance to the estate was on NC Hwy 24/87. It was more than a private estate, there was a small community there ... support staff & rich people homes. It was going to be something like Pinehurst or Southern Pines ... except more exclusive.

    Plug 35.21811297353892, -79.03849507424343 into Google Maps Satellite View. The old golf course is still recognizable. The Army has added a couple of small drop zones nearby to the west. One of them appears to be the former polo grounds.

    It would still be accessible except that the Army has put up a locked gate there. It's still pretty easy to get in there if you don't mind the risk of getting arrested for trespassing (how do you think they got the photos?).

    975:

    Moz @ 944: I was thinking of it more as a scale, like the various "corruption index" ones. "kleptocracy index" perhaps. If we ignore the countries that barely have billionaires at all (admittedly that does kind of defeat the point), looking for advanced economies where they billionaires but don't also let them run roughshod over everything, IMO Japan and Korea kind of work.

    Then there's the inevitable "who has the billionaires" list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_billionaires

    The first table can be resorted by "billionaires per million people". Might be educational to do so.

    976:

    Greg Tingey @ 956: Charlie @ 953
    Given what we know now - & didn't when I was 25 ( 51 years ago, now! ) coupled with the ability of people to speak more freely, I suppose it's unsurprising & yet still deeply depressing.
    It also suggests that bisexuality in men is much commoner than previously supposed - what a surprise that isn't!

    Rape has nothing to do with sexuality. It is ONLY about having power over other people.

    977:

    David L @ 969: There WILL be a survey at the time of the title transfer. And that's when it will become an issue. Especially if a mortgage or loan is involved.

    But by then it won't be MY problem, will it. 8^)

    Someone was selling some of the old warehouse district recently. Turned out the NC Railroad (a state owned entity with an odd set of assets) had a track easement along the edge of the property. When was abandoned and paved over at least 60 years ago. Maybe more. You only saw any track when the potholes got really deep. But to complete the sale the paper work to give up the easement had to go through a collection of lawyers and state agencies to legally give up the easement. A few months of wait ensued. And this was when everyone agreed on the plan.

    I wonder if Adverse Possession came into play? I remember story in the N&O sometime last century about neighbors somewhere in North Carolina arguing over a fence that was over a property line & it had been there long enough the defendant in the suit was able to claim adverse possession to avoid having to remove his fence.

    Just as an aside, I think the State of NC should own ALL of the tracks in North Carolina, just like they own the roads & highways. Anyone should be able to operate a railroad on those tracks as long as they abide by the rules of the road. Although it would require the state to implement some kind of traffic management system, but technically we already do that for highways, airways & waterways, so why not for railways?

    North Carolina could have railways as good as those in the U.K. or the E.U. I know some of y'all think your railways are SHIT, but trust me, I've ridden railways in North Carolina and in Scotland and what y'all have is head & shoulders above what we have here.

    As bad as it might be, y'all have a great railway system compared to North Carolina ... or at least y'all did when I got to use it in 2004. And your inter-city bus system was better than Trailways/Greyhound here in the U.S.

    978:

    I wonder if Adverse Possession came into play?

    All of the parties involved "like" each other and do business with each other (including the state) so fighting about it wasn't in the cards. It was just one of those things that required various legal documents to be drawn up, reviewed by everyone, filed, etc... And it was NOT a high priority in some of the offices involved.

    Plus it was in the deeds and land filings going way back so it wasn't like anyone who didn't know about it couldn't see it during "due diligence". Which is when the issue likely came up.

    Sort of like the AT&T easement across the rear of my lot. And a few 1000 others in the path of a long line that has been abandoned for decades. The easement will be there till someone wants to pay the costs associated with removing it. For now it just creates a small bit of friction when selling the house or putting up a fence or whatnot in the rear most part of our yards.

    979:

    Re: 'The first table can be resorted by "billionaires per million people"'

    A table showing taxes paid by billionaires would be even more useful.

    FYI - China introduced a tax rate of approx. 45% on top earners a couple of years ago (approx. $80+K annual income) and, more importantly IMO, the tax is applied to total global income and all possible income sources (i.e., rental, property sale, dividends and not just salary). And guess what - China kept popping out more billionaires every year.

    There are exemptions but overall it looks like more of the Chinese high income earners are actually paying their fair share of taxes.

    Also - China's not shy about coming down hard on any tax evasion - a young media influencer (who's also pro-gov't) got hit with a $210 million fine. How long this type of chasing tax evading baddies will last - no idea. Also no idea whether any Chinese billionaires moved to avoid taxes - my guess: why bother because if they do move that would only allow the gov't to confiscate everything on the spot, i.e., they wouldn't be able to sneak their wealth out with them.

    https://www.protocol.com/bulletins/china-influencer-viya-erased#:~:text=China's%20top%20ecommerce%20influencer%20Huang,combined%2C%20have%20been%20taken%20down.

    But personal income taxes is only one part of total tax revenue and I've no idea how the corp taxes in China are though or to what extent corps and corp execs evade taxes via freebies, grants, tax deferrals, etc.

    The link showing billionaires per million pop'n: how in the world did anyone in St Kitts make that kind of money? Nice place when there aren't any hurricanes passing through, but serious money making environs? -- Nope!

    980:

    Rape has nothing to do with sexuality. It is ONLY about having power over other people.

    That idea very conveniently means that if someone just wants sexual gratification it can't be rape. This is especially prominent when women rape men, because an erection is consent, and if it's not then ejaculation is consent, and if not she just wanted sex and all men want that.

    Which is why I keep talking about how the discussion is framed. If we work hard to make it clear that men cannot be raped by women then we will continue to see very low numbers of men claiming to have been raped. And when we treat those men like people who claim to have been abducted by aliens we're reinforcing that message.

    I suggest that power over someone else is part of rape, but it doesn't have to be brute force and it generally isn't. The cliche "man with a gun" is such a tiny fraction of the problem that we could ignore it without changing the scale of the problem.

    If we admit that a professor can coerce an adult student into a sexual relationship... why is that only worth noting if the professor identifies as male?

    If we always frame rape as something men do, why should we be surprised that most women don't see committing rape as something they should worry about? Seeing sexual consent as something women give to men is hugely problematic just in that way, let alone all the other ways that is sometimes seen as problematic (agency? Women don't have agency...). It results in a lot of men feeling confused... they didn't want to have sex, they said no at the time, they feel bad about having had sex, but they don't have any way to talk about what happened.

    981:

    A table showing taxes paid by billionaires would be even more useful. ... how in the world did anyone in St Kitts

    The small countries with many billionaires are tax havens. Billionaires make money elsewhere but "live" in the tax haven to avoid paying their share to the place they make the money in.

    This becomes really obvious when the media pick up on some part of it. Like the FAANG's not paying tax in the countries they take advertising revenue from. That one is popular at the moment. What's somehow mysteriously left out of that discussion is that the old media often did the same - Murdoch is notorious for "losing money" as far as the tax man is concerned, yet somehow he's able to keep buying media companies. It's very strange.

    But the main point is that the people who own Google, Facebook etc are tax evaders, even if their personal tax affairs appear to be in order. But we don't regard those people as evil, not even on the same scale as the people who own companies that companies that own slaves are evil. And the latter aren't really evil at all, as far as most people are concerned. I mean, what could they do? Sell their shares in Apple or Nike? Don't be silly, those shares have good financial returns. Next thing you'll be asking us to divest from fossil fuel companies, or car companies just because those kill a lot of people.

    982:

    So I conclude that they probably feel about as helpless in the face of revolutions, climate change, and economic upheaval as you and I.

    I found something that helps me get over those kinds of feelings and makes me realize that our species is always capable of creating great beauty.

    After "Classical Gas" had reached the Top 10, Mason Williams asked an experimental filmmaker named Dan McLaughlin to adjust a student video montage that he had created of classical art works and edit it in time to "Classical Gas", using the visual effect now known as kinestasis. The work, "3000 Years of Art", premiered in 1968. Made before music videos were even a thing, this is still one of the greatest pieces of video art ever done. Some of you may be old enough to remember when this was first broadcast.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=viyufRQKlto

    983:

    Very European. Very very European. There were a few seconds of Japanese prints, a flash of North American traditional indigenous art, but everything else was European. What you might expect from someone who took an Art History survey course in the 60s.

    Title is also wrong — the cave paintings shown date back more than 3000 years ago.

    It would be interesting to see something like that done with a more representative sample of art, maybe weighted by population or time.

    984:

    If we always frame rape as something men do, why should we be surprised that most women don't see committing rape as something they should worry about?

    Might be instructive to see how women's shelters cope with women fleeing abusive same-sex relationships. I know that at least some have moved beyond 'keep all men out, women are ok' because that doesn't work when the domestic abuser being fled from is also a woman.

    I don't know how they cope, I just know that some do, and how they frame the issue might be a place to start the discussion.

    At the risk of opening a can of worms, the same framing problem applies to domestic violence. A few years ago, in Ottawa about 1/8 of hospital admissions for domestic violence were men and yet there were no shelter facilities for them beyond going to the Sally Ann along with the homeless.

    How does one talk rationally about an inherently-emotional issue where power dynamics usually, but not always, favour one group over another? I don't know, but I I think it needs doing.

    If we admit that a professor can coerce an adult student into a sexual relationship... why is that only worth noting if the professor identifies as male?

    This book might be of interest. According to Kipnis, in American universities students are using complaints as career advancement. (If you are competing for a tenured position and a complaint is made, kiss the position goodbye because your career is on hold for the very lengthy investigation, plus appeals, during which you aren't entitled to due process.)

    https://laurakipnis.com/books/unwanted-advances/

    https://laurakipnis.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Chronicle.pdf

    985:

    Not wildly impressed. It doesn't seem to be set or connected with the music. It might be edited in time, but I'm not seeing it.

    https://youtu.be/0S43IwBF0uM

    Tough to beat the Chemical Brothers for that.

    986:

    Robert Prior said: At the risk of opening a can of worms, the same framing problem applies to domestic violence.

    We live in a society where a prominent man (Tiger Woods) can be beaten unconscious in public, in front of witnesses and then be forced to apologise to his attacker in public.

    And no one seems to think there's anything wrong about that.

    There's no solution to a problem that's totally invisible.

    987:

    Are you referring to what allegedly happened with his wife, or to some other incident?

    988:

    Moz
    Thank you. I, too agree with you & think JBS is wrong - though I can see how he came to that erroneous conclusion ....
    As for females coercing males - - At least once a year, some female teacher seems to get into, um, "difficulty" with a 17-yr old gorgeous "toyboy" she was teaching, with the usual disastrous results for everyone!
    P.S. Please note the quote-marks - I can't think of a better way of putting it, right now.

    990:

    Re: 'The small countries with many billionaires are tax havens.'

    Then there's the US -- so many billionaires on record with so little in taxes collected.

    Just saw a tweet from Americans for Tax Fairness which claims to show some IRS info -- really interesting. If you have a Twitter account, suggest you look it up.

    https://americansfortaxfairness.org/

    Over 20 billionaires and an effective tax rate under 1%. Yeah - now that's how you really make money!

    991:

    Income is not the same as someone's total worth. A billionaire who owns a billion dollars worth of stocks and has control or at least significant leverage in a company may only have an actual income of several million dollars each year, maybe even less. Whether they should pay tax on their accumulated wealth or just their cash income is another matter (there are capital gains taxes but they typically only cut in when the capital is taken by someone as income).

    There are people on this blog who own properties and have savings and pension funds worth over a million dollars but they only have annual incomes in the low tens of thousands of dollars, if that. Should they pay large sums in tax each year because they are actually millionaires? I can see a case to be made for this to be done but it's not likely to happen because too many people affected who vote wouldn't stand for it.

    992:

    Heteromeles noted: "We do have to change the game, and IPCC modeling for how to deal with climate change pretty much requires shrinking GDP."

    Not necessarily. There's also a-growth (freezing things at the status quo) while aggressively removing carbon from the atmosphere (extremely expensive, but potentially manageable) and various forms of (strong, moderate, or weak) sustainability in which a significant chunk of a growing GDP is allocated to mitigation and adaptation. (The reduction of carbon must be greater than the amount generated by GDP growth.) That's likely to be an important part of any solution, since it's at best improbable that developing countries will accept a GDP freeze or decrease, and we can't win this fight without them.

    Speaking of which, I'm in the final pages of Wake Smith's "Pandora's Toolbox", which is a remarkable book. In about 350 pages, 50 of which are literature citations, Smith summarizes perhaps a dozen textbooks worth of complicated science into a clear, digestible holistic discussion of where we are now, where we need to be in coming years, and how we can get there. There are inevitable omissions and oversimplifications (fewer of the latter), but nothing that made me reject his arguments. Most importantly, he's very clear about the pros and cons of every solution so that you can reach your own conclusion and decide whether you agree with his. Mostly I agreed with his.

    Smith's a big fan of stratospheric aerosol injection to make the atmosphere more reflective and thus accumulate less solar heat. I've crossed (literary) swords with Greg Benford over this subject several times in the past; I'm particularly alarmed at the prospect of dumping multiple Mt of sulfuric acid into Arctic and Antarctic ecosystems for decades. Smith presents a much more nuanced argument, including alternatives to global-scale acid rain, and moved me towards the "okay, maybe that is worth testing under the constraints you propose". He was very clear about his bias, and very clear about the (dangerous) unknowns, which is refreshing. Most advocates are so gung ho they don't buy the notion that there's any downside.

    For those who, like me, are desperately seeking causes for hope, this book is a good start. For additional emotional support: http://geoff-hart.com/articles/2021/review-kelsey.html

    993:

    Re: 'A billionaire who owns a billion dollars worth of stocks and has control or at least significant leverage in a company may only have an actual income of several million dollars each year, maybe even less.'

    Nope - betcha most of these billionaires regularly trade and that they make more money selling/buying stocks, etc. vs. (a) make a profit from whatever their biz is supposedly producing or (b) just sit on their assets hoping their asset valuations keep growing.

    If you buy/sell, you are supposed to be taxed. Also why end of year trades are write-off's losses - clean-out the portfolio so that you get rid of the dogs and claim any losses against gains thereby reducing your taxable income. Or that used to be the case at one time.

    994:

    There are people on this blog who own properties and have savings and pension funds worth over a million dollars but they only have annual incomes in the low tens of thousands of dollars, if that. Should they pay large sums in tax each year because they are actually millionaires? I can see a case to be made for this to be done but it's not likely to happen because too many people affected who vote wouldn't stand for it.

    As one of those people, I'd be pissed.

    Changing the rules of the game after someone has committed to a financial strategy based on the old rules will inevitably generate pushback, especially if they are too old to start over.

    Inheritance taxes I understand and have no objections to (depending on level). Indeed, I'm disturbed by the way our right wing has started using term "death taxes" (taken from the Republicans) as a rallying cry. In Canada there are no inheritance taxes*, and estate taxes don't kick in unless the estate is worth over $12M. Yet "no more death taxes" is a rallying cry among those who complain about socialist government overreach trampling constitutional rights they… don't have on this side of the American border.

    *When I die and leave everything to a friend, none of it will count as income for her, so she still only pays income tax on the money she earned, and she won't pay tax on it.

    995:

    To go after the holdings of billionaires requires a wealth tax based on the total wealth of individuals including income, savings, capital gains, property, cash reserves, stocks and shares, pension funds etc. There might be a way to finagle it for the wealth tax to apply everyone without loopholes. I'm imagining something like an untaxed personal Basic Income that offsets any such wealth tax for most folks --

    Jane Blow earns 50,000 bucks a year and owns a house worth 300 kilobucks. Jane pays ten percent of her gross wealth, $35,000 dollars annually in wealth tax but gets a standard Personal Basic Income of 25,000 bucks each year leaving them with an adjusted tax total of $10,000. Elon Musk pays fifty billion dollars tax on his gross wealth annually but like Jane he gets 25,000 bucks as untaxed Basic Income. Indigent Joe Soap gets 25,000 bucks Basic Income annually and pays virtually nothing in tax.

    Much smarter people than me are paid large amounts of (taxable earned) income to find non-obvious loopholes in existing tax systems and there would be so much pressure for all sorts of exemptions and cutouts in such a "simple" system that the loopholes would naturally appear followed moments later by financial instruments designed to exploit them.

    996:

    Not necessarily. There's also a-growth (freezing things at the status quo) while aggressively removing carbon from the atmosphere (extremely expensive, but potentially manageable) and various forms of (strong, moderate, or weak) sustainability in which a significant chunk of a growing GDP is allocated to mitigation and adaptation. (The reduction of carbon must be greater than the amount generated by GDP growth.) That's likely to be an important part of any solution, since it's at best improbable that developing countries will accept a GDP freeze or decrease, and we can't win this fight without them.

    I'm not an economist, any more than I'm a Christian. But you've got to wonder about what Gross Domestic Product means when taking gigatonnes of useful carbon out of surplus and so utterly trashing them that humans can't use them again counts as "production." It's venturing into the same mess the White Christ With Gunz churches are in, where they don't practice anything in the Bible other than the pro forma rituals.

    But yes, Christianity today provides a means for hypocritically twisting words to mean whatever you want them to mean, and yes, that could be important. But it's probably more important for conservative billionaires and their politicians, not most of the people in developing countries.

    If, instead, you use a measure like Gross National Happiness, something that measures things like hunger rates, lacks of clean water, healthcare, and appropriate shelter (or ideally, their inverses), then that's as useful, perhaps more useful, to developing countries, for two reasons:

    --Happy people are less likely to engage in political unrest.

    --Much of poor country GDP is extractive industry that further impoverishes their countries, often to service debts forced on them by advanced, rich countries. Who's telling them to measure their GDP, and why?

    GDP actually seems to be a fairly deep philosophical issue, in part because it partially embodies the concept of alienation. Alienation, as I understand it, is that something has no value as part of the natural world. It only has value when someone takes it from its original context and uses it. We can argue whether externalities like trash have been "renaturalized" and put outside the economy, but part of GDP is taking stuff out of nature, using it, and discarding it as cheaply as possible. What any solution to climate change involves is renaturalizing carbon, spending money to take it and put it usefully or at least non-harmfully back into nature.

    The question is whether it's better to label "alienating polluting carbon from nature, turning it into something less harmful, and renaturalizing it" as "positive production" or "negative production." I agree the label matters, but since it's a label, we're talking about psychological impact as much as physical details.

    The alternative is simply to scrap schemes that focus on alienation, production, and externalities, and find some other way of doing economeetrics that measures the good such actions produce in human and other lives on this planet. It's as much a question of what data you collect as anything else. I don't think either one is an easy sell, but they both should be on the table as possibilities.

    Hope that makes a bit of sense.

    997:

    Or you could just start the wealth tax at 100 million or a billion or whatever.

    998:

    I'm imagining something like an untaxed personal Basic Income that offsets any such wealth tax for most folks

    Part of the problem with that is that the cost of housing varies wildly across different part of a province, let alone the entire country.

    Decades ago Harris tried to impose a single wage for teachers in Ontario, because that "was fair". He ignored the fact that a house in Toronto cost 10x a house in North Bay*; food etc was also more expensive.

    The bulk of my assets are my pension (which I've paid 13% of my pre-tax income into, so it's basically my savings plus investment income), and my house. My house is where I live, not an investment. The fact that housing is treated as an investment is, I think, a large part of what's causing the current housing crisis.

    Currently, I wouldn't pay capital gains tax if I sell my house as it is my primary residence — which is good, because while the price of my house has gone up while I've owned it, so has the price of other houses so I'm no further ahead. (A decade ago I could have sold, moved to a smaller further-out city and picketed some money, but not anymore, unless I move really far into the boonies. And I have no desire to move into deep-blue** redneck country.)

    *His family's fiefdom.

    **Here in Canada political colours don't follow recent American practice. Conservative colours are blue with highlights of white and red, Liberals are red with white highlights, NDP is orange with white highlights. The minor righter-wing parties (ie. to the right of the American Democrats, who roughly equate to out mainstream-right Conservatives) all use variants of blue-and-white or purplish-blue -and-white. The really right parties use purple.

    999:

    This proposed Wealth tax replaces income tax and some other personal taxes so setting it at some arbitrary starting point is a loophole-inducing limitation. See, for example the US Federal reporting requirements for cash transactions greater than $10,000. After that limitation was roundly abused with lots and lots of $9,000 transfers there's a new reporting requirement for multiple large transactions a little less than $10,000 and so on. I'm sure there's other ways around this now, maybe that's what non-fungible tokens (NFTs) were invented for, or crypto currency or whatever.

    The Basic Income "refund" I suggest solves most of that. Well-off people pay similar amounts of tax as they do today, poor people end up better off and billionaires will have to find other ways to avoid such taxes, probably by becoming tax exiles in places where there are no wealth taxes while paying people to shuffle paper around in wealthy countries where they own property to make it look like they're not actually billionaires, legally speaking -- "I'm no billionaire, I'm only worth (wealth tax trigger limit -1) million dollars. Look at the accounts my highly-paid financial advisors have prepared. See?"

    1000:

    A wealth tax is a wealth tax, not an investment tax. Under these rules your house is your property, worth a lot of dollars so it's taxed as wealth just like your car, your refrigerator, your pension fund etc. Basically anything you can turn into cash with a little effort is considered wealth and is taxed accordingly.

    Oddly enough people like Bezos and Musk can't turn most of their wealth (i.e. stocks and shares they own which are controlling fractions of a given company's issued stock) into cash in a hurry or even at all, thanks to laws on short-selling and the fact that if they did so it would seriously unbalance the stock markets and the companies concerned. This would probably induce a clause in the law devaluing their holdings when it came to assessing their wealth annually for tax purposes. Loophole loophole!

    The administrative aspects of such a wealth tax make it impractical but making it global and applicable to all is honestly the only way I can think of to supertax the Enemies of the People without inducing loopholes resulting in "tax-efficient financial instruments" for the well-off.

    1001:

    Nojay @ 992: Income is not the same as someone's total worth. A billionaire who owns a billion dollars worth of stocks and has control or at least significant leverage in a company may only have an actual income of several million dollars each year, maybe even less. Whether they should pay tax on their accumulated wealth or just their cash income is another matter (there are capital gains taxes but they typically only cut in when the capital is taken by someone as income).

    There are people on this blog who own properties and have savings and pension funds worth over a million dollars but they only have annual incomes in the low tens of thousands of dollars, if that. Should they pay large sums in tax each year because they are actually millionaires? I can see a case to be made for this to be done but it's not likely to happen because too many people affected who vote wouldn't stand for it.

    That's why you want progressive taxation, with ALL types of income - "unearned" (rents, dividends, capital gains, stock options) as well a "earned" (salaries & wages) treated the same ... or perhaps "unearned" income should be taxed at slightly higher rates than "earned" income.

    If you're going to tax WEALTH, you probably want to limit it to the astronomical, off the charts (top 0.01%) fortunes.

    However you do it, it's only fair that those who benefit the most from our societies should be required to contribute more to the maintenance of that society ... which is NOT how it currently works. Taxation should NOT be a means of transferring wealth from the bottom of society to the top.

    1002:

    Also, INDEX for inflation - the lower bounds of taxable income or wealth changes with changes in the value (purchasing power) of the Dollar, Pound, Yen, Euro ... Ruble Rubble? - so that inflation doesn't cause tax creep like it does now.

    1003:

    Heteromeles (997) embarked upon a jeremaiad about GDP.

    Dude, you were the one who used that variable name in the post I was responding to. I just picked up where you left off.

    We're in complete agreement about the relative normative values of GDP and gross happiness. The problem is that governments focus exclusively on GDP, and will for the foreseeable future. And all the sustainability research I'm familiar with is based on GDP. So if you want to be "speaker to economists" -- a thankless task -- you need to speak their language.

    1004:

    We're in complete agreement about the relative normative values of GDP and gross happiness. The problem is that governments focus exclusively on GDP, and will for the foreseeable future. And all the sustainability research I'm familiar with is based on GDP. So if you want to be "speaker to economists" -- a thankless task -- you need to speak their language.

    I agree on the issue of talking with economists. That's probably a different issue than solving the problem. What I'm pointing out is that there are at least two sets of solutions. One is tinkering with the (macro)economics tools we have, in the hope that enough politicians will go along with it to get something to work. Another is to throw out the current economics framework and try something new, in the hopes that enough politicians go along with it. The latter has been done any number of times, from replacing authoritarian systems with communist ones to trusting economists as better prognosticators than historians.

    I suspect that sustainability researchers use GDP in part so that they can get their ideas heard at all, the same way everyone from climatologists to ecologists censor themselves when talking with politicians and businessmen. And if they genuinely believe that GDP is the only framework they can work in, are they of any use? Or should we class them with the non-violent activists who are continually rehashing Gandhi's writings and ignoring more modern successes?

    1005:

    One thing to be careful of is that we've got at least three phenomena here. In the technical sense, they are pools, flows, and controls.

    A pool (a stock if you're used to thinking stock-flow models) is an amount of something. Think water. Or money. It's measured in units of stuff

    A flow is stuff moving between pools. It's measured in units of stuff per unit of time.

    Wealth is a pool. Income and expenditure are flows. They're not the same thing.

    Someone can be wealthy (having house that's appreciated in value), yet live on a very small flow of income. If they lose the house (wealth tax), they get in trouble, because the house was almost certainly performing free services for them. Without it, they're going to have to pay more for things like shelter and storage.

    Control is different again. It's the ability to control (or at least influence) a pool or a flow without actually owning it. It's tricky to tax control, which is why billionaires, CEOs, military generals, clergy, and the like prefer to control wealth and money movement, rather than own it directly.

    One potential class of solutions to dealing with billionaires is to make control more complicated, by things like hacking their records and then forcing them to prove control without making the fatal slip of acting as if they own something (ownership can be taxed).

    One potential problem with a wealth tax is the question of who ends up with control of the taxes or other assets. Do you trust them more, or less, than the original owner or controller? While I don't agree that all tax is theft, there are a number of creepy politicians and bureaucrats out there too.

    1006:

    Control is different again.

    Yes. Many of the comments higher up seem to talk as if what we call billionaires OWN all of these things. Like having a stock certificate with their name on it. Most do not directly own a $bil. The control trusts, 401Ks (a US thing), sit on the board of an LLC in the EU that owns 10% of 20 LLCs around the world which ....

    As a side note, most times people come up with ways to make the day to day economic system more fair they are really introducing complexity. And the more complex a system the easier it is to exist in the cracks of that complexity.

    1007:

    Corey Doctorow has an interesting rant that resonates with some of the points made here:

    https://doctorow.medium.com/about-those-kill-switched-ukrainian-tractors-bc93f471b9c8

    E.g.,

    But selling farmers their own soil telemetry was only the beginning. Deere aggregates all the soil data from all the farms, all around the world, and sells it to private equity firms making bets in the futures market. That’s far more lucrative than the returns from selling farmers to Monsanto. The real money is using farmers’ aggregated data to inform the bets that financiers make against the farmers.

    1008:

    Heteromeles @ 1006:

    Don't get wrapped all around the axle about picayune, trifling details, making PERFECT the enemy of good enough. Any system of taxation is going to have problems with the details. Every form of taxation has potential problems.

    You are ignoring the FUNDAMENTAL POINT I made that those who benefit the most from society have an obligation to pay more back to support the maintenance of the society that benefits them more than the rest. There are any number of ways to accomplish that and none of them are PERFECT.

    The current tax regime here in the U.S. taxes the middle class to give to the rich and that needs to change, and you're just making excuses for it. EVERY form of taxation has potential problems.

    I know a thing about being "house rich" and "income poor". I live on Social Security and a small pension (Retired Pay from the Army) - slightly less than 1/3 the median household income for Wake County, NC.

    If I didn't already own the house I live in outright I couldn't afford to live within a hundred miles of here ... couldn't even afford to move back to Durham.

    And the house isn't worth that much, maybe $40K ... but the value of the tiny piece of dirt it sits on is appraised approaching half a million dollars for tax purposes.

    I pay a month's income every year for property taxes on that piece of dirt & Raleigh is getting ready to raise the tax rates AGAIN. So I don't give a shit about pools and flows and controls ... they're all just gobbledygook to allow the rich to shit on the rest of us.

    1009:

    It was quite bemusing to read 1007 and 1009 together, as I just did.

    To venture an inappropriate military analogy, I can imagine a military commander. He says he's sick of his people getting blown up by those damned drones. One of his underlings (who had a technical education before joining up), tells his commander that both the strength and the weak spot of the drones is that they're flown via remote control rather than being directly piloted. So if they want the drones to stop bombing them, they need to understand how the enemy control the drones well enough to disrupt that control. The commander angrily retorts that he doesn't give a shit about those controls or any of that, they're all just gobbledygook to allow the enemy to drop bombs on his people.

    All he wants is a level battleground so that he can fight them in a pitched battle...

    1010:

    Getting back to more fundamental things, this is where we get into Piketty's argument that wealth tends to concentrate in the hands of the few over time, and the solutions are either redistribution or revolution.

    I personally favor redistribution, but if the rich have made it too hard to redistribute their wealth, then they leave revolution as the viable option: break everything and hope that a) you win, and b) what you build out of the pieces was worth the whole tragic mess.*

    This is where Lenin, Mao, Pol Pot, and the Butlerian Jihad all start exerting their dangerous seduction. It's also where the eco-fascists, with their "Fimbulsummer" and subsequent Ragnorok of white against brown, start to ooze up out of their intellectual sewers.

    We have to tread carefully, I think.

    *Speaking of Idaho.

    1011:

    Ah, yes, Piketty. They had a piece in the NYT a few weeks ago, and I'm really annoyed at myself, as I'd intended to write a LttE about it. The author writes "he seems to be talking more to Europeans than Americans...."

    And what I was going to write covered "that's because in the US, we've redefined "middle class" to mean "median income", plus or minus 25% or so. Meanwhile, he's speaking about the real class structure... and that's where at least 80% of Americans are, in fact, working class, but just think they're middle class.

    1012:

    Taxation should NOT be a means of transferring wealth from the bottom of society to the top.

    If poor people don't like this, they should hire lobbyists - just like the billionaires do... :-/

    1013:

    If Argentina invaded the Falklands today, would the U.K. be able to take them back?

    1014:

    Heteromeles @ 1010:

    You're right about it being inappropriate.

    1015:

    Ok, let's try this: everyone pays wealth tax (and your wealth includes your income)... but anyone with wealth under $1m has a general exemption. AND that "wealth" includes the value of your house, or of the apartment you rent (that way, we get someone who's renting an apartment at $10,000/mo).

    Let me also note that the insane return to the Gilded Age began in the late seventies, and then Raygun, where they seriously started cutting corporate taxes, and lowered the top tax bracket. Those need to be punitive, when you start gouging and undersizing. Some exemptions for capital plant or personnel investment... IN THIS COUNTRY. Sweat shops elsewhere, nope.

    1016:

    Counter-proposal: we send all billionaires to Mars.

    Then, they can truly enjoy a libertarian paradise of a world where taxation has not paid for road networks, sanitation or water management; a world without any collectivist, tax-funded infrastructure for them to feel guilty or hypocritical over. There, they can truly enjoy the full value of their fabulous, stupendous wealth in its full context.

    1017:

    Don't you dare. I've got a colony they set up, a century and a half from now. They can go there and enjoy the pleasures of Rand....

    Alternatively, they could follow join their trillionaire patrons as they escape from The Revolution....

    1018:

    Nojay @ 992
    Technically, if you want to go down the stupidty of a "Wealth Tax" route, I'm a miilionaire - but only if I move house to a shit-hole, because my property ( £2,800 in 1948 ) is now "worth" over a million.
    I'm only just paying income tax.
    THIS is why a "wealth tax" is fundamentally STUPID.

    JBS @ 1014
    NO, but unimportant, because the Argies COULD NOT "invade" the Falklands to start with.
    I suggest you look at what actual really working military hardware Argentina has .... oh, yes, well ....

    whitroth
    Make that $10m & you are away ....

    1019:

    Ok... so, in my published novel, they're going FTL, and stars look like they're getting closer as they move further from them. Hmmmm https://xkcd.com/2622/

    1020:

    Greg, a) it's a progressive tax (with multiple brackets); b) it's your primary residence; c) the exemption would look at purchase price, length of residence, etc. You'd still be paying minimal taxes.

    And, with PRICE CONTROLS WITH TEETH, inflation would be a lot lower, including on housing prices; even so, the tax rate would be pegged to inflation.

    1021:

    the exemption would look at purchase price, length of residence, etc.

    Ah, exemptions! Yay! That means the billionaires won't have to pay a penny in wealth tax once their attack accountants are unleashed to open up the exemption loopholes with creative paperwork and rules lawyering! Happy days are here again...

    I'm not saying a wealth tax is preferable or even possible to implement in a fair and even-handed manner. Pretty much everyone would be under audit every year due to change of circumstances, no hands-off payroll deductions and short-form tax submissions taking half an hour of number crunching every April. The bureaucratic overheads would be immense, the chances of errors magnified. It's just that if you want to tax wealth you have to tax everyone's wealth, not just Those People you personally don't like who you think have too much wealth. History is full of instances where Those People were discriminated against, some of them because they were quite wealthy (landlords in post-WWII Communist China for example).

    Income is not wealth -- as Greg says he's worth more than a million quid thanks to the property he owns but his income is very much less. It's the same with billionaires, they own billions of dollars of valuable stuff but have comparatively less income on which they pay all the tax that's due under law.

    1022:
    The minor righter-wing parties

    Ah, you're missing the New Blue party of Ontario. Their signs are yellow, with white and blue highlights.

    They're also "socially conservative" and proud of it. (Ford and co. weren't right-wing enough for them).

    1023:

    Major issue I see for this "utopian" proposed tax system: Who values the wealth or how is it valued? If the value of my house (and other possessions) is under $1m (or any other figure) and not taxed vs over that threshold, and is taxed, how is that valuation reached - eg average over a year or as at a particular date? And how do you/could you game that "valuation" system? (IMHO - The only accurate value for my property etc is what it would actually realise if/when sold).

    For example, due to property bubble or whatever, my house is suddenly "valued" at tax threshold + $1, so taxed. Then next day flooded or destroyed by earthquake or property value falls so then the value drops way below threshold and thus not taxable. Which valuation is used for tax purposes? Would interest on mortgage/loan payments to purchase the property be deductible (over how many years) and what happens when/if the loan is paid off?

    So is it taxed on wealth "realised at sale"? (Maybe unless that wealth is used to purchase another property?) And what about land bankers? And what about pensioners who may be cash poor but asset rich.

    And if you do not have the cashflow (income) to pay the wealth tax does that mean the property/possessions must then be sold to pay the tax? And then there the whole can-of worms about "joint" or "common" ownership of property (or putting it in a trust or company or ...).

    Not saying wealth tax as proposed - with variations - wouldn't work, but the devil is in the detail so that it taxes the people wealthy/targeted and doesn't have collateral damage by taxing those who - arguably - cannot, and I can see (some/many) ways to game the detail.

    1024:

    RE: '... but if the rich have made it too hard to redistribute their wealth,'

    First you'd have to be able to track down their wealth, i.e., DT who has been calculated as being worth approx. $300 million vs. his personal claim that he's worth $4+ billion and everywhere in between depending on what taxes he's dodging.

    Wealth in the US (and probably many other capitalist-skewed countries) can be very easily partitioned out to avoid taxes - whether income or inheritance. Investment pools/funds probably further tangle up ownership/wealth calculation. Unlike stocks in a company that has fixed number of shares for legal reasons, your 'share' of an investment pool/fund is not fixed therefore it (and the value of the fund) can change in an instant.

    'Control' - although the textbook definition is 50%+1 voting shares, the reality (and SEC regs) is that anything 5% or more should be and 10%+ must be reported because that concentration of stock ownership can swing stock performance (and is often a signal that a take-over is immanent) as well as just about guarantee a seat on the BoD, e.g. EM.

    Then there's off-shoring including probably what started it all - transfer pricing.

    A couple of ideas:

    a) Now that bitcoin has demonstrated the ability to follow the money (ownership), how about we get the IRS (and similar in other countries) to use it to follow the wealth/income. This way all moneys/incomes can be correctly identified, aggregated, and taxed per appropriate tax bracket. (Oh yeah - limit of one crypto identity per person - no excuses/exceptions!) This also assumes that having the IRS use crypto means that the IRS would be able to track crypto share trades/wealth because quite seriously this ghost wealth is going to skew apparent vs. real classically defined wealth value, creation/distribution even more. (Also assumes that budgets will be increased for this and related agencies - to at least make up for previous budget cuts. And 'plain language' tax explanations/rules will be de rigeur - this was the only agency explicitly exempt from recent requirements to put what they do and require as well as all of their rules in 'plain language'.)

    b) Exit tax - if you want to take money out of the country, i.e. out of its 'native' economy, you need to pay tax on it because by taking it out of the country/economy you're diminishing it's likelihood to help sustain the economy.

    Neither of the above ideas are founded on any 'formal economics': they're based on observed human behavior and human consequences.

    1025:

    There is a missing piece in this discussion, and a lot of similar, which is that major social change (whether you call it ‘war footing’ or not) will, inescapably, involve some of us dying younger. There is an example up post, where people are arguing about the cost of running emergency airplanes in an environment with harsh restrictions on boring plane trips. I don’t know about the specific cost, but the frequency of that kind of flight will fall as soon as we take any kind of useful action. We might mitigate those effects but we can’t escape them, so some people will die. The choice is between damage now, which means people like me, getting on old-ish, having significantly higher risks and worse outcomes, and a near future in which we haven’t taken the necessary action, so a lot more of us get our lives cut a lot shorter. That is a warlike mentality. Framing stuff in a militaristic fashion is dodgy in lots of ways, but I will follow earlier posters and accept that there is a serious point, which is that any kind of climate change action has costs, and those costs will include more deaths. The alternative is worse, and in the context of this post that means we are entitled to do some of that ‘expropriation of private property’ we would do if our European war had crossed the Ukrainian border to the west. In this context billionaires are a resource we might want to tap.

    I will add a tax policy bit, which is that corporation taxes are a scam. They were introduced in Britain in 1963, by a Tory government, and the way they work is that the biggest beneficiaries of big companies pay less tax, while punters in the mass, including the beneficiaries of pension funds, pay more. The right way, in principle, is that personal income, including realised capital gains, should pay all the tax. I would put inheritance into the same bag, so that people who inherit shares wouldn’t get taxed until they either sell their shares or (as is more usual) they borrow off their capital. When that happens - bang.

    That doesn’t sort out the problems of power and control, but another day.

    1026:

    Yes, it has to be specified that your house doesn't count otherwise it's basically shite.

    I'd take it further than that and get rid of the notion that your house is "worth money" at all. The argument that you could sell it for X pounds therefore having it is exactly the same as having X pounds is bollocks. You can't sell it, because you need it to live in; or if you do sell it, you still don't have the money because you have to use it to buy another house instead. Because of this, as Robert Prior @ 999 points out, it does not "make you richer" if house prices go up, nor does it "make you poorer" if house prices go down. You still have a house and you still have the same pool of comparable houses to choose from if you want to play swapsies, so nothing has changed.

    What it does do if house prices go up is make you have to burn a lot more money to get hold of a house in the first place, so you end up poorer, and make more of that money go in interest on loans, so the bankers end up richer.

    The idea that any things are the same as money because you can sell them does not wash, because it denies any possible reason you might not want to. It can only work if you don't care whether you have the thing or not, but you basically always do care because otherwise you wouldn't have bothered to get the thing in the first place. This is especially significant when the thing concerned is a survival necessity. Really, house prices ought to be in some different unit to emphasise that house pounds are not the same as normal ones. Sheds, perhaps.

    1027:

    What it does do if house prices go up is make you have to burn a lot more money to get hold of a house in the first place, so you end up poorer, and make more of that money go in interest on loans, so the bankers end up richer.

    I barely managed to afford my house when I bought it. I couldn't have afforded it two decades later, despite my salary more than doubling, because house prices have more than quadrupled.

    What's driven the price increase? I think a combination of factors rather than One Big Cause. Cheap money (low cost of borrowing). Foreign investment. AirBnB pulling units out of the market. REITs getting into housing in a big way. All of which have pushed prices higher, in a market where even a 2% change in demand shifts prices (according to the real estate board, anyway).

    1028:

    There is a missing piece in this discussion, and a lot of similar, which is that major social change (whether you call it ‘war footing’ or not) will, inescapably, involve some of us dying younger

    Yeah. To be honest, since I've started working on climate change, I've non-jokingly assumed that I have a pretty good chance of dying under a bridge somewhere, especially if southern California collapses due to drought. I'd strengthen that last line you wrote. I suspect, if our projected lifespans still run for a couple of decades, that any future we look at probably includes a decrease in lifespan, whether it's due to infrastructure degradation, food or medical shortages, new pandemics, and/or a swarm of old people straining support networks.

    Anyway, I suspect the big point is that things will almost certainly be worse for everyone the more societies collapse. Therefore, slowing or stopping those collapses is a humane thing to do. I'd justify redistributing resources from the super-rich, especially to the very poor, on that basis alone.

    1029:

    As for taking the billionaires down

    (/straying firmly into fantasyland here).

    Why does everyone assume it will require physical violence? This isn't just a rhetorical point, it's a real hangup. If you're thinking superheroes have to punch out minions to get to the money, you maybe have been watching a lot of videos?

    Here's way I look at it: we've got two competing power systems here: a growing aristocracy of the very rich, and democracy. They're as intertwined as they've been for, oh, the last 2700 years or so, so this isn't new, and I don't think either side is going away.

    However, in the current moment, we can make a reasonably good case that billionaires are an existential threat to democracy and democratic nation-states. Ever heard the idea that the Treaty of Westphalia is dead?

    While yes, if they're existential threats we can turn the military on them, in this case, I'd turn the Five Eyes onto the networks the super-rich use to control their power and wealth. This would be a legitimate cyberwar, especially since the super-rich helped build the Five Eyes.

    The point of the cyberwar is to crack their control networks and destroy them as necessary. If they have a corporation whose one asset is a private yacht, that corporation may suddenly find itself as an independent company whose shareholders have a different use for it.

    Rather than destroy their assets, they'd be seized, nationalized temporarily, and stripped of Class B and Class C stock (Because all investors at that scale are assumed to be adults who can handle that loss). Those assets would reallocated to things like retirement funds and projects that fund carbon sequestration, and the company goes forward with a new set of shareholders and new board of directors. What's changed is that profits are no longer flowing to the super-rich, but rather going to help deal with climate change and other problems.

    Now I flagged this as a fantasy, and it is, because I have no idea where any nation currently would get the political will to publicly launch such a war. Even having a billionaire invade Ukraine doesn't seem to have sparked a general revolt. The only good news is that NATO responded powerfully to Russian aggression. Hopefully other members of the super-rich will be similarly stupid, and provoke similar responses.

    Finally, if this is reminding you of John M. Ford's Final Reflection, at least in the kind of game I'm proposing be played--I'm definitely thinking the same thing.

    1030:

    I'd take it further than that and get rid of the notion that your house is "worth money" at all. The argument that you could sell it for X pounds therefore having it is exactly the same as having X pounds is bollocks. You can't sell it, because you need it to live in; or if you do sell it, you still don't have the money because you have to use it to buy another house instead.

    You're speaking of a certain personal situation. Where I am, 3 to 5 million people (depending on where you draw the circle) my house is worth around $500K. If I want I can sell it and move a 30 minute drive away, get a house in near perfect shape, have an acre or few, great internet, etc... If I'm willing to move. I somewhat am once my kids (30 and 32) get more settled in their lives. I want this move to be my last and not go in the wrong direction.

    This is not true if you live in downtown Chicago, Toronto, London, Paris, etc... and don't want to leave the city. But for me and a huge number of others we CAN move. We just have to be willing. And to be honest, as a friend said when trying to get his parents (in their 80s) to move to be near him, their zip code (postal code) seems to the most important thing in their life since all of their friends, kids, and other relatives have either moved away or died. He was trying to get them to move from suburban Maryland to suburban North Carolina. He was able to force the move when both had overlapping medical issues.

    1031:

    If I want I can sell it and move a 30 minute drive away,

    And I forgot to say, pocket $100K to $200K.

    1032:

    {whether} A billionaire ... should pay tax on their accumulated wealth or just their cash income is another matter. ... There are people on this blog who own properties and have savings and pension funds worth over a million dollars

    Emphasis mine. But random linking across three orders of magnitude is the original.

    I'm reminded of those countries that have no zero tax rate, son in theory if you give your kids pocket money that should be taxed.

    Yes, definitely. Wealth should be taxed from the first dollar, as should income. This should be vigorously policed, and the example of the USA should be followed enthusiastically (their tax department explicitly avoids people who have enough money to be difficult, they focus on the people who are too poor to make a fuss. Allegedly in part because they're evaluated based on how many appeals are made and how many of those are successful ... looks like a perverse incentive until you realise that was the intention of the legislators).

    1033:

    if you live in downtown Chicago, Toronto, London, Paris, etc... and don't want to leave the city.

    In Australia one problem is the gutting of public health. So when you move out of the city you move away from hospitals, and into areas where you can't have a GP, you can only join the queue for an appointment with this week's random temporary doctor. There's a pretty solid association between "within 100km of a hospital" and "ouchy house prices".

    Which means that if I want to sell my house and retire to the country I can do that, and I'll have some money left over after buying a new one. But if I get sick, especially any kind of long-term illness, I won't live anywhere near as long out of the city.

    Oh, and I will have to own a car. If I get to the point where I can't drive I'd best hope Uber really do have those driverless taxis working well enough to deal with semi-rural conditions. And that their "potential customer should really be in an ambulance" detector isn't working.

    I have looked at places near regional hospitals, and the house price difference is definitely in my favour, and probably will exceed the transfer costs (we pay ~$40,000 stamp duty on a $1M house, plus ~$20k in real estate and legal fees). Butr realistically I'd get ~$1.1M for my place, and anything out of the death zone in (say) Gosford is close to $1M. So I might come out $100,000 ahead, or I might not. Why move an hour out of Sydney on the off chance I'll make a small profit?

    1034:

    We'll tax every asset you control (not "own") 10%

    Brilliant. In 36 years the government will own everything and we'll all live off UBI in social housing.

    Oh, but not tax this... (insert whatever makes your life easy)

    So it's loopholes, loopholes as far as the eye can see.

    Not your primary place of residence? Musk lived in the Tesla gigafactory for 3 years.

    If you own an interest in it you control it so you get taxed on the full value. So your bank gets taxed 10% of your house (which they own 90% interest in) and they'll pass that on to you.

    Your local distillery stores the whisky for 15 years before they sell it, and they sell about 7% of their holdings each year, but they have to give 10% to the government every year.

    The indigenous owners of the land don't live on each section, so they must sell off 10% per year to pay the tax. This may be a feature not a bug.

    I give my builder 500,000 to build my new house on a 500,000 dollar block, but the building process spreads into 3 financial years. When it's finished it's worth 2 million. Does he pay 30% for this land and building, 300,000 dollars, that he controls? Do I pay 300,000 dollars on the property I don't live in? Do we both pay 300,000 as we both have an interest in the property, one controls, one owns? Do I pay 600,000 dollars on the final value of the house and land?

    Let's not even think about how family farms operate. Or any farm for that matter.

    1035:

    (a) - And if I have no cryptocurrency Id? As I'm reading this, I also have no "wealth" regardless of what other assets I have.

    1036:

    10% wealth tax would be punitive.

    I expect something more like 1%, possibly less. It's a balance between punishing people who aren't making 5% after inflation (ie, strongly encouraging reckless profiteering), and discouraging extreme accumulation/punishing the reckless.

    As we saw in Australia with the "mining super profits tax", that sort of thing makes rich people very unhappy and starts them looking for ways to prevent democracy. The miners ran a very effective counter campaign that cost far less than the tax would have. See also the mining billionaire currently exploiting loopholes in our electoral law to get an unpopular right wing government re-elected (a new one, not the old media billionaire that's being do that for decades)

    Making a wealth tax progressive would be explicitly confiscatory, and I think you'd probably want to do that carefully, probably for a limited time, and might perhaps want to apply it to shareholdings or imaginary entities only. If you tax shareholdings based on real ownership (possibly just by penalising imaginary owners) that encourages small shareholders and penalises your "Gates owns 30% of Microsoft" types.

    The "problem" of governments owning corporations is one we already have, it's severe, and it works almost as badly as anonymous people owning them. Albeit currently governments typically divest things they don't want to operate in the public interest, or be held accountable for, rather than seeing an opportunity for profit and starting a company to take advantage of it (in a way the existing scam is worse... government legislates itself a monopoly then creates a corporation to exploit it)

    1037:

    Traditionally states have taxed labor via income-tax, because it was a very good proxy measure for economic activity.

    This in turn made labor cost a very visible target for optimization, putting automation directly in the cross-hairs of every Cxx who had the chance.

    The result is that today the tax-base no longer bears relationship to economic activity, with the largest and most automated/"cyber" companies paying no tax at all, even when they are not actively employing double-sandwich tax-shelters.

    This is what allowed FaceBook and Google could take over the entire global advertising industry without paying any tax.

    The only solution I see, is to switch away from taxing labor, and instead tax the economic activity directly.

    With pretty much all payments being electronic, implementing a flat nonrefundable sales-tax of ~5% would, to a first approximation, allow most western states to abolish any VAT they have today, income-taxes and corporate taxes.

    Crucially, it would be much, much harder to do tax-evasion, because while "profit" is a very fungible concept, "net receipts" are not.

    Inheritance tax should of course still be progressive to the point of confiscation above two digit millions.

    1038:

    So FWIW, with luck (fingers crossed, touch wood), Australia is about to change its government. There's also a real possibility that the Greens will be in a position to control the balance of power. As a reminder to the folks playing from home, we have single member electorates with a preferential voting system, and typically have the very high voter turnout that goes with mandatory participation. We also have a Senate/House of Review that is elected on a proportional basis, so the next Parliament is looking quite a bit more interesting than recent examples. Watch this space.

    1039:

    The 10% wealth tax figure I started off with was just a number. 10% per annum destroys any billionaire's total wealth rapidly, unless they work really hard to make their wealth pool increase by more than 10% a year. This destruction would presumably be beneficial to society generally if you assume increasing GDP is a good thing. The Basic Income figure I suggested (25,000 bucks per annum per person) is also up for grabs with even more a possibility. Details, details...

    1% wealth tax a year is not going to hurt the Little People much but it's not going to even nick the typical billionaire's wealth pool, never mind deflating it substantially year on year. A wealth tax is meant to level society somewhat by trimming off the spikey rich bits at the top and a 1% per annum haircut won't do that.

    1040:

    Update: definitely a change of government and Antony Albanese will be Australia's 31st prime minister. It's currently not clear whether he will command a complete majority (76 seats needed), or will be required to negotiate with Greens who command the balance of power. My own seat where I live has just elected a Green member for the first time ever, and she will be the second ever Green member of the Australian House of Representatives. It's possible she'll be accompanied by some other "seconds". The first member is the current Greens leader and just increased his margin (in the seat of Melbourne) to something like 22%.

    1041:

    (I have got omicron right now so reply/attention abbreviated ...)

    If Argentina invaded the Falklands today, would the U.K. be able to take them back?

    Ha ha nope, Argentina entirely lacks the ability to invade the Falklands. They mostly stopped spending on their military after the 1982 war, so their air force is decrepit, running on 1980s relics. Army isn't much better, Navy ditto.

    Meanwhile Port Stanley airport got upgraded and now supports a squadron of Typhoon-IIs, and it's within non-stop range of RAF Voyager transports (roughly the size of Boeing 777s, with in-flight refueling and transport capability). I don't know what radar/warning kit they've got, but if it looked like trouble was brewing I can see the RAF sending one of their E-3 Sentries down there then providing airlift for the army ... and if things really broke bad, these days the carriers the Royal Navy operates are three times the size of the ones they had in 1982, and carry F-35s instead of Harriers.

    Basically it'd be Argentina trying a re-run with the left-overs from 1982 against a 21st century NATO task force.

    Luckily it ain't going to happen. Argentina today isn't run by a reality-disconnected military junta, the only way it might happen would be if a reality-disconnected British Prime Minister on the ropes and in need of a distraction from desperately bad politics and inflation hitting a 40 year high ran out of sabres to rattle closer to home and tried to pick a fight with someone over the south-Atlantic squid fisheries --

    Oops.

    1042:

    The party of the billionaires and mammonites is giving the concession speech as I write.

    I think we can thank the billionaire's naked greed. There's been a huge swing in Western Australia. They were covid free, and had put in internal borders. The borders were challenged by a billionaire who felt he wasn't making as much money as usual. His federal court challenge was almost unbelievably, backed by the Liberal government. The liberals worked to kill West Australians to protect the profits of one billionaire.

    They were quite rightly absolutely hammered in the polling booth.

    In the Eastern States many seats have been lost to independent candidates standing on an action on climate change platforms.

    Both the Shit and Shit Lite parties lost primary vote.

    I couldn't be more pleased.

    1043:

    Here's hoping for a mild case and a speedy recovery. Get well soon.

    1044:

    Administrative note

    I was going to throw up a new blog entry yesterday but my brain is leaking out of my arse, I have a headache than pain killers won't shift, my muscles have been through a meat tenderizer, and the LFTs are stubbornly lying to me by insisting that I don't have omicron.

    Ha bloody ha. (I've got about a 70% sweep of the symptoms listed by the ZOE study and on the NHS Scotland website.)

    Luckily I'm fully vaxxed/boosted so this is merely somewhere around "feels like mild flu, minus the nasal drip", but it's doing a number on my attention span. So I'm going back to bed, and blogging will be resumed when I feel better.

    (Of course the timing sucks as it has derailed my plans to attend my first in-person SF convention in three years next weekend, not to mention a pair of very expensive gig tickets I bought in 2019 for a concert that's finally going ahead next Sunday. But the silver lining is, I stayed clear of it until vaccines and other treatments were an option.)

    1045:

    Much care, very hope.

    1046:

    Likewise. I hope you have a full and quick recovery.

    1047:

    Damn. I hope you feel better.

    1048:

    In Australia one problem is the gutting of public health.

    Just one more profit centre for unfettered capitalism to exploit.

    A private equity–owned emergency room staffing firm cofounded by a wealthy Republican congressman has been openly hailing a coming “oversupply” of doctors, promising prospective investors that a surplus of emergency physicians — soon projected to reach nearly ten thousand — will drive doctors’ wages low enough to offset the haircut that health care reforms have imposed upon its profit margins.

    The physician glut was highlighted in a recent pitch deck prepared by the cash-strapped Nashville ER staffing firm American Physician Partners (APP). The company, which operates ERs in 155 hospitals, has been trying — and failing — for months to raise $580 million to pay off creditors, including Representative Mark Green (R-TN), who holds somewhere between $5 million and $25 million of the company’s debt.

    https://jacobinmag.com/2022/05/private-equity-er-doctors-shortage-pay/

    So much for "health care heroes".

    1049:

    LFT = Lateral Flow Test not Liver Function Test. Took me a while…

    Best wishes for a speedy recovery, and no long-term effects.

    1050:

    Thank the Lord it's just pissing you off rather than "so this is it we're going to die". Do get well soon.

    1051:

    stphenNZ & others, especially Moz ...
    { & Damian @ 1039 }
    It appears Scott Morrison has lost in AUS.
    many seats have been lost to independent candidates standing on an action on climate change platforms. - which is the exact opposite of what "Scottie" stood for IIRC? That sounds like good news.
    Now what?

    1052:

    1042 - As Charlie says, with the additional note that the new Mount Pleasant airfield was specifically designed to accommodate jet interceptors (originally F4-J(UK), then Tornado and now Typhoon) and long range transports.

    1045 - Best wishes for a speedy recovery.

    1053:

    I still prefer an income tax to a wealth tax that wouldn't affect the super rich, because technically they don't own their assets, and control can't be taxed.

    But they do have income, even if it's not monetary. So I'd say that all types of income should be taxed equally: wages, interest on capital, capital gains, rents from tenants of owned property, etc. And also non-monetary income, because that's still income. In the German tax code that's called "geldwerter Vorteil" (loose translation: "money-equivalent benefit") and taxable as income.

    What do I mean? Let's say our billionaire lives in a penthouse on 5th Avenue. He doesn't personally own that penthouse, so it's not counted towards his personal wealth. Instead it's owned by a trust fund/LLC/corporation that he merely has control over or whose beneficiary he is. But that doesn't matter, because the penthouse still has value. On the free market it would be rented out for a certain amount of money. That money is what the billionaire would have to pay to the owner for the right of living there. If he doesn't pay a market rent, that means that the company that owns it lets him live there for free, and that means that it is paying him a de-facto income, a "money-equivalent benefit" equal to the market rent of the penthouse. And this de-facto income can be treated just like any other form of income. He needs to pay income tax on it just like for every other form of income.

    And the same goes for any other "money-equivalent benefit" he receives from any trust fund or company: a company car/helicopter/jet plane for private use, any other properties, apartments, beach houses or golf courses he privately uses, any private expenses that are paid for him (fashion items, dinners, golf club fees, whatever). All of these can be expressed as a monetary value, as a de-facto income that can and should be treated as such.

    And soon it's no longer possible that billionaire X can declare less income than his housekeeper. (Of course also the housekeepers salary that is paid by some trust fund or company for the private benefit of the billionaire is a de-facto income for him and therefore taxable as such.)

    1054:

    In the German tax code that's called "geldwerter Vorteil" (loose translation: "money-equivalent benefit") and taxable as income.

    In Canada those are called "taxable benefits".

    The problem, as always, is enforcement.

    1055:

    Why move an hour out of Sydney on the off chance I'll make a small profit?

    Agreed. You are more the Chicago / London situation than I am.

    My 30 minute drive move doesn't take me away from the health care system. If I want to pocket $250K or and buy better than what I have now, I can do that but then I would also move away from societal nice things. Like health care.

    1056:

    Heteromeles @ 1030:

    Why do you assume the source of violence would be those who want the ULTRA-wealthy to pay a fair share of taxes, and not the billionaires themselves?

    1057:

    Um, nope. Once your income, as defined by everything, including the median for the year value of your stocks, and the percentage you control of trusts, goes over, say, $10M/yr, there are no more exemptions. Or, if there are, the exemptions there are a joke for you, since they'd only be noticeable to someone making under $400k/yr. For the wealthy and ultrawealthy, the exemptions would count as couch change.

    For Greg, his alleged million dollar house is worth, um, original sale price, and say, inflation rate per year of residence, NOT compounded hourly, daily, or monthly. Lessee, if the original sale price was $48k, then for 50 years or residence, inflation, mutter, it's worth maybe $500k, not whatever some idiot would pay to buy it.

    1058:

    As I just said, value based on sale price and inflation, plus whatever improvements you've made. Replacing an old roof is maintenance, not improvement. Installing a solar roof, minus any loan to do so, would count.

    And I DO want BMI.

    1059:

    We really are not happy with this house, and it's way too small. But I'm too old now to move, IMO, and am not going to pay what, $40k? to have professional movers package it and move me. (Around 1982, it was $15k for that kind of move.)

    And I'm in DC-suburban Maryland, and there is zero chance I would move to trying-to-be-Christian-fascist SC.

    1060:

    Really? You're sure that would happen? And I'm sure that Musk, when he lived at the Tesla factory, had a room and a bed and nothing more.

    And the whiskey? Obviously, it appreciates in value each year, and the first five or six the value is about that of rubbing alcohol, not the full final price

    But then, they did just that in the US, which is one of the reasons for JI(NOT)T stocking - artists were being told to value only their paints and canvases, I think it was, while publishers were told to value the sale price of the books in the warehouses.

    1061:

    Two things: one, the US is already in the situation that someone living in rural areas have hardly any choices for doctors, and a hospital is a $$$$$$$ helicopter flight away.

    And on the good side, congratulations, OZ, on the elections!

    1062:

    Greg Tingey @ 1019: Charlie Stross @ 1042:

    Wasn't a serious question. I happened across a series of Falkland War videos from the Imperial War Museums on YouTube and was slightly curious about NOW vs THEN.

    Sort of a segue from the current Russian fustercluck in Ukraine. Both resulting from serious miscalculation on the part of the aggressors.

    1063:

    If Galtieri had waited a mere 6 months, Thatcher would have decommissioned enough of the ships used to retake them that the UK wouldn't have been able to. Yes, a serious miscalculation, due to incompetence (on both sides).

    1064:

    Yep.

    But the Argentinian govt. are somewhat less adventurous these days. And now have a 40 year uninterrupted record of democratic government.

    Meanwhile Brexit has comprehensively fucked the Falkland's post-1982 economy (based on selling fishing rights for squid to the lucrative EU export market).

    If Buenos Aires waits another year or so the islands will be pleading to join. (I exaggerate only slightly. 70% of the islands' economy was squid exports to the EU, and Boris Johnson just cut them off at the ankles. If he goes ahead with the brewing trade war he's picking with the EU, the Falklands may will leave the UK before Scotland or NI get around to it.)

    1065:

    Labor went to the election with climate policies that do not distinguish it from the outgoing government much. For instance it openly supports new coal mines. It's a similar story on some other issues, including treatment of refugees. However there's a strong possibility that this will be a minority government, and will depend on Green support for a majority in both houses.

    At the federal level, the Labor leadership is extremely antagonistic to the Greens whom it sees at a threat to its left flank. That isn't the case for the local government in the ACT (Canberra and its hinterland), which has been a Labor-Green coalition for many years now. Historically that happened in Tasmania too, though less successfully. The Rudd-Gillard government that lost office 10 years ago was required to negotiate with the Greens to pass legislation through the Senate and that was one of the more productive periods of Australia's federal government working hard to achieve actual useful things. That's something we currently look back on with a sort of nostalgia I guess, since the outgoing government is most notable for its strong focus on delivering pork to its friends. Anyhow Gillard saw a lot of legislation passed, via the shocking expedient of actually talking to people and addressing their concerns. This radical approach has not been repeated to date, but might now see a bit of a reprise.

    Albanese isn't Gillard, but he is an interesting character with a lot to recommend him (and some things that might not). I guess the first thing to watch is how willing he appears to negotiate for numbers. And how the coal thing works out.

    On side of the outgoing government, it will likely see a leadership change and the new leader is likely to be the outgoing defence minister, Peter Dutton. His electorate is a marginal one and he almost lost it yesterday, but has apparently hung on. My hope is that he will lead the conservatives to a complete wipeout producing long-term oblivion at the next federal election in 2-3 years.

    1066:

    Not quite sure why my name headed the comment. Aotearoa NZ is not part of OZ and we definitely do not share governments.

    While we sometimes refer to Australia as our "West Island" or "across the ditch", is is about 1,700km (1000 miles) away (or further apart than London and Warsaw).

    However, Australia is the closest other country to New Zealand.

    1067:

    minority government, and will depend on Green support

    Might have to get used to saying Green/Teal support, or green support, since there's enough seats heading that way that it might well be ALP needing 5 votes with 3 Greens and 5 Teal independents.

    One bit of good news is that Tim Wilson appears to have lost. Politely he's the libertarian hard right as opposed to evangelical Christian hard right of the Liberal Party. He's your blond gayboy libertarian type, appointed in the Human Rights Commission to make sure the interests of rich white men were appropriately prioritised, then parachuted into a safe seat where he could run round saying "I'm gay" while otherwise being indistinguishable from an actual fascist. Yes, I've met him. I've heard him speak. It's not pleasant.

    Interestingly but also obviously the Teal seats were largely held by moderate-ish Liberals, so what's left of the Liberal Party is more evangelical far right than before. So I am betting that the far right rhetoric will increase, with the traitorous teal-supporting electorates being browbeaten back into voting Liberal... whether that works remains to be seen.

    1068:

    "However, Australia is the closest other country to New Zealand."

    New Caledonia?

    1069:

    Just read this...

    Charlie, I hope your new collection of antibodies and B cells exceed expectations in the most positive way possible. AND I hope that these are the only things you get out of it.

    1070:

    Ah, yes, the Falkland war. A floundering tin-pot wanabee dictatorship desperately wanted a rabble-rousing adventure to save its collective neck, no matter the cost is lives.

    And the Argentinian govt wasn’t much better.

    1071:

    Why do you assume the source of violence would be those who want the ULTRA-wealthy to pay a fair share of taxes, and not the billionaires themselves?

    Sheesh.

    Do you think that a discussion that devolves into "let's kill all the ultra-rich and take their money" WON'T get noticed on the internet? Even a hypothetical discussion?

    Charlie's the major person to bear the cost of that, so I'm being prissy and going after people who try to make violence the focus of this thread.

    Besides that:

    a) there's decent evidence that nonviolent action succeeds about twice as often as violent action (about 50% vs. 25%),

    b) this kind of cyberwar doesn't need violence,

    c) When one side's trying to nonviolently save civilization and the other side threatens to destroy everyone, who's side are you on? Violence backfires.

    If you think violence works, Putin's the current counterexample. If he'd held off invading Ukraine for another 2-3 years, NATO would have crumbled, Ukraine would probably have elected a pro-Kremlin leader because Zelenskyy purportedly sucks as a peacetime leader, and fscking elections worldwide would have been a breeze for him. But Mr. Billionaire decided to get his guns off, and he's in a quagmire now.

    1072:

    he's in a quagmire now

    I agree, and also agree with the overall thrust of your argument here, but I also wonder how many billionaires, watching that, are thinking "I could do better than that".

    1073:

    Of the billionaires who made their billions by being corrupt government officials.... All of them

    Of the billionaires who made their billions by owning successful companies..... None of them.

    1074:

    "However, Australia is the closest other country to New Zealand." New Caledonia?

    Is New Caledonia closer to New Zealand than Australia is?

    NO, but StephenNZ is also wrong.

    I called up Google Earth and did some measurements. At closest points, New Caledonia is a bit over 1425 km from New Zealand, while Tasmania is a bit over 1531 km from South Island.

    HOWEVER, Australia owns Norfolk Island. This little speck of Araucaria forest (google Norfolk Island pine), is about halfway between New Caledonia and New Zealand, and about 725 km from New Zealand.

    So there are three takeaways: one is that, yes, Australia is closer to the nation of New Zealand than New Caledonia is. Second, we're not talking about continental Australia, but about overseas colonies of Australia. Three, the mostly sunken continent of Zealandia actually has above-water parts claimed by three modern nations: Australia (Lord Howe Island, Norfolk Island), France (New Caeldonia and Loyalty Islands), and New Zealand.

    Actually, there's a fourth takeaway, because the closest neighbor to the nation of New Zealand is the nation of Kiribati, so far as I can tell. The reason is that Penrhyn atoll, the northernmost island in the Cook Islands (which New Zealand claims) is a bit over 463 km from Starbuck Island, which is an uninhabited atoll in Kiribati.

    1075:

    it might well be ALP needing 5 votes with 3 Greens and 5 Teal independents

    Could be 4 Greens - the seat of Brisbane, while still in doubt, is very possibly another Green gain (which makes all three of Brisbane's inner-city seats Green gains, remarkably). Broadly you're right, though, there is no reason to expect any sort of platform discipline from the new independents and they could each make their own deal with the government, although many are likely to side with the opposition. Also, there are 14 seats in doubt and some are likely Labor wins, so from the current position with 72 seats confirmed, it's still possible they will achieve an outright majority (76).

    It's also possible that Pauline Hanson will lose her Senate seat.

    1076:

    This is probably the right time to remind anyone who is interested that New Zealand sent delegates to the early Constitutional Conventions that led to the federation of the other six colonies which resulted in the Commonwealth of Australia, but decided not to go ahead. The Australian Constitution in fact contains features specifically related to the possibility that New Zealand might some day join, a possibility that is perhaps less likely now than ever.

    1077:

    A monumental day here on Vancouver Island - the first day this year that the heating has not come on. We had actual sunshine. Weirder yet, it’s a holiday weekend.

    1078:

    If you want to get really technical, Australia and Aotearoa share a land border. A big land border. Along 160°E

    1079:

    And the NZ delegates basically took a look at what I think they called the "robust treatment" of the aboriginals and said "we'll pass".

    When 19th century white colonialists look at the treatment of black people and slowly back away in horror you're pretty far out there.

    1080:

    True, and looking closer, the Antarctic claim is probably better than the Cook Island Free Association bit.

    Regardless, one of the islands in the Norfolk group appears to be the closest bit of Australia to New Zealand, for what it's worth.

    1081:

    the NZ delegates basically took a look at what I think they called the "robust treatment" of the aboriginals and said "we'll pass"

    There is some support in Australia for going the other way, making the West Island officially part of Aotearoa. It would make some stuff much easier, including the vexed question of "should we have a treaty" and also provide an answer to "but who could possibly negotiate those treaties in good faith" :)

    I'm much more willing to take an interest in politics now it's not a contest between the NSW Liberals and the federal Liberals to see who can most vigorously fuck over their subjects.

    1082:

    Moz said: There is some support in Australia for going the other way, making the West Island officially part of Aotearoa.

    I'd be up for that, but it would be an awful thing for Aotearoa to deal with.

    1083:

    https://www.betootaadvocate.com/headlines/albanese-makes-himself-at-home-by-replacing-front-lawn-at-kirribilli-with-concrete-slab-and-marble-lions/

    Meanwhile the satirical news is having a field day.

    Albanese claimed victory on Saturday, with the remaining vote count indicating he just may achieve the 76 seats required to form a majority government.

    Ironically, this now means that the former houso kid will be returning to public housing.

    1084:

    It's not clear that was the prevailing reason at the time (there's a cartoon in the wiki page I linked above depicting Zealandia, the then-popular anthropomorphic personification), rejecting the advances of an ogre-like Australia in convict chains. The same cartoon appears here on the page referring to the constitutional material I'm referring to, which you are probably also aware of. Which is why Maori people living in Australia could vote here in the first elections after federation.

    The incoming government is openly supporting the Uluru Statement from the Heart. The post-colonial settler society here is very different to the British dominion of the 19th and early 20th centuries. 30% of Australians were born overseas, and half were either born overseas or have at least one parent who was. The countries of origin are increasingly diverse, while Brits are still the largest contingent, they don't dominate the mix as they once did. The situation with Aboriginal people is still outrageous in so many ways, and just electing a more progressive government that has committed to slow steps doesn't show much in the way to progress. But at least there's a possibility of not going backwards for a while.

    1085:

    timrowledge
    NOT funny or clever ... Whatever the many & varied faults of the Madwoman's guvmint - she was profoundly in favour of the EU.

    H
    That actually chimes with the comment I'm referring to, above.
    Desperate loonies going for a Short, Victorious War - yes?

    gasdive
    SEE ALSO - the compare-&-contrast C19th views of the "British" & the "Dutch" of the Native populations of what became S Africa.
    Which eventually led to Apartheid, of course.

    1086:

    Yes, it wasn't the only reason. There were many.

    https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/new-zealand/2017/12/revealed-the-real-reason-new-zealand-didn-t-become-part-of-australia.html

    But historians think it was one reason, (which as you say, prompted the inclusion of Māori as humans, something that waited until the 1960's (when all the federation politicians were dead) for aboriginals to get the same recognition. (my local electorate one of the few to vote no).

    1087:

    "When 19th century white colonialists look at the treatment of black people and slowly back away in horror you're pretty far out there."

    Was that their (only) motivation ?

    My impression is that "If we try that at home we'll be mince meat" was also a factor ?

    1088:

    Because Apartheid was somehow worse than openly pursuing a war of extermination?

    In practice contact was complex, there wasn't a single consistent response to it from either side. The officer class (and especially their educated colleague naturalists and scientists) were awash with Enlightenment values and in as much as their worldview tolerated it they were relatively humane. But even, e.g. Lachlan Macquarie, long portrayed as one of the better early governors, ordered Aboriginal groups massacred and their remains hung in trees as a spectacle and example to others. The responses of settler-colonists pursuing economic interests in the bush were different, and varied, as varied as the social classes of the individuals involved... from the well-documented second "spare" sons to emancipated convicts to the stereotypical young families. The area of settlement was far too large to support a uniform approach given the limited resources of the colonial authorities. Which is how Queensland and South Australia developed free-ranging death squads that worked on only a semi-official and in many cases deniable basis.

    I'm not going to claim the Dutch, Germans, French or Belgian imperialists were any better, but I'm not going along with any claim that the British represented the least evil. And even being the lesser evil in one area does nothing to mitigate excesses in another. In some ways it makes it worse, because it indicates a capacity to understand the impact of one's actions, which nonetheless have been taken anyway.

    1089:

    Yeah lots of factors for sure. However at the time the New Zealanders had had a Treaty with the Māori for about 60 years (as long as anyone could remember). It hadn't been smooth sailing, but they were thought of as people, they voted, owned property. Aboriginals were considered to be fawna. Dangerous and annoying fawna.

    1090:

    In late C19th SA the "Official" version from the Brit side was, extremely condescending & racist by our present standards, but the locals were still officially, at least, regarded as people, to be looked after. Very much as children were .....
    The attitude of the Boers was, largely, that "Kaffirs" were expendable.
    This shows up, very clearly, in novels & writings of the time. ( Especially H Rider Haggard! )

    1091:

    Do you think that a discussion that devolves into "let's kill all the ultra-rich and take their money" WON'T get noticed on the internet?

    I think you misparsed JBS rather spectacularily. He asked "Why do you think it's not the billionaires who will be violent?" A valid question, I think.

    How would e.g. the US hold up against another storm on the capitol, with a lots more competent private army?

    1092:

    speedy recovery so you can get back to writing

    too bad about the entertainment, on the plus side after recovery there should be a short period of less caution needed to not reinfect.

    1093:

    With 20/20 hindsight, the most interesting aspects of the Falklands conflict are the unremarked-on ones:

    a) The significance of the submarine war -- Argentinian SSKs nearly bagged some RN frigates and put the wind up the task force because if their torpedoes had been properly fused they'd have been a game-changer (IIRC one over-enthusiastic conscript screwed a bunch of fuses in upside-down or back-to-front)

    b) The significance of the other submarine war -- fear of British SSNs kept the Argentinian aircraft carrier and cruiser out of effective strike range of the task force and at extreme range for air support, otherwise: again, a game-changer (the fear eventuated when HMS Conqueror sank the General Galtieri)

    c) The AAF didn't have in-flight refueling kit; if they had, the RN's Harriers would have had a much harder time of it. Meanwhile the RAF did insane things with IFR, including retrofitting it to a bunch of C-130s in under a month so they could run an air bridge for resupply, and also the Black Buck raids

    d) Logistics: the idea that the UK could fling together a task force to support an amphibious landing 8000 miles away at less than two weeks' notice is absolutely bonkers -- it shouldn't have been possible for anyone to do that shit, and even so it wouldn't have been terribly useful if they'd been fighting on ground that could have supported tanks or IFVs: as it was, it turned out to involve a whole lot of hiking over boggy ground and then infantry plus light artillery

    But the real jaw-dropper is the realization that in 2022, 40 years later, Russia can't even manage to support an expeditionary force 80 nautical miles from its border, never mind 8000. And it's all about logistics.

    1094:

    You are mistaken. Omicron confers limited or no immune memory after infection -- there've been cases of people being reinfected within 2 months.

    1095:

    But the real jaw-dropper is the realization that in 2022, 40 years later, Russia can't even manage to support an expeditionary force 80 nautical miles from its border, never mind 8000. And it's all about logistics.

    I think this is even more jaw-dropping because they have done some military operations outside of Russia. Granted, the Georgian war was conducted in much smaller area, closer to the Russian border. As I understand it, there were also a lot fewer troops than in Ukraine.

    To me, this shows a series of mistakes made already years ago when developing the military capabilities, but obviously the intelligence problem is a huge one, too.

    1096:

    I think you misparsed JBS rather spectacularily. He asked "Why do you think it's not the billionaires who will be violent?" A valid question, I think.

    I interpreted that as saying that billionaires might be the side that gets violent (presumably by hiring/funding violence, rather than doing it themselves), rather than the side that wants to rein in billionaires getting violent.

    As you said, it's a valid question.

    Private security forces have shown a capacity for violence, especially when they have superior weaponry and judicial impunity.

    1097:

    Charlie
    cough General Belgrano!

    1098:

    Charlie noted: "Omicron confers limited or no immune memory after infection -- there've been cases of people being reinfected within 2 months."

    Current record is 3 weeks: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/21/woman-caught-covid-twice-in-20-days-marking-a-new-record.html (I saw this reported by an infectious disease specialist earlier in the week but couldn't find it or the original source material again in a quick Google.)

    From what I've read, the problem with Omicron is the tradeoff between neutralizing antibodies and long-term immune memory (B cells). Titers of neutralizing antibodies decline fairly quickly, which is to be expected. It's how these antibodies work. This means that the immune system takes some time to get up to speed producing these antibodies again and allows reinfection to proceed. Omicron reproduces so rapidly that the virus initially outruns the immune system. But the immune system of someone who was previously infected still mounts an effective response against Omicron (i.e., greatly reduced hospitalization and mortality). For example: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanhl/article/PIIS2666-7568(22)00093-9/fulltext

    In any case, best wishes for a speedy and complete recovery.

    1099:

    Do you think that a discussion that devolves into "let's kill all the ultra-rich and take their money" WON'T get noticed on the internet? I think you misparsed JBS rather spectacularily. He asked "Why do you think it's not the billionaires who will be violent?" A valid question, I think. How would e.g. the US hold up against another storm on the capitol, with a lots more competent private army?

    I think JBS already knows the answer to that question. So do I.

    So I answered the question of "why don't I want the conversation to flow from me answering your question?"

    Note, this isn't because I'm squeamish about discussing violence or because I'm a pacifist. What I'm trying to do here is help people imagine a future where, when a horde raised up by two billionaires (IQ.45 and LE Oracle) storm the US capitol, most people rush to defend the US, rather than half the country grabbing their guns and joining the billionaires.

    So my question to you is, why the fascination with violence? You don't have to answer here. The point is that if you're stuck thinking that only violence is desirable, sexy, inevitable, or effective, you miss every other possible solution. In this case, the more effective solutions to the problem of billionaires are primarily nonviolent, although violence certainly will be involved at some points, as is currently happening in Ukraine.

    And yes, the US Capitol Police really need to get their game back and to put duty ahead of personal politics.

    1100:

    “NOT funny or clever ... Whatever the many & varied faults of the Madwoman's guvmint - she was profoundly in favour of the EU” Well your opinions on humour or cleverness are not exactly important to any sentient being. And supporting the EU is not even close to being in the same universe as excusing the appalling damage Mad Maggie and her sicko-phantic hordes did, and indeed continue to do. I now return you to the normal status of being ignored.

    1101:

    Unrelated to any of the foregoing but I ran across this really information-light news piece - The UK Wants to Build a Solar Power Plant in Space by 2035 That Transmits Electricity Back to Earth. Anyone know anything more concrete? It sounds like the sort of can-kicking bollocks Johnson loves to expatiate on, so I'm very supicious.

    1102:

    timrowledge
    And supporting the EU is not even close to being in the same universe as excusing the appalling damage Mad Maggie and herBo Jon-Sun's sicko-phantic hordes have already done, and indeed continue to do.
    There, fixed that for you.
    Brexit in & of itself constitutes much more damage than the Madwoman managed in Eleven years - unfortunate, but true.

    In other news ... Russian transport & Logistics are totally screwed - which ties to Charlie's comments back at 1095(d) ....
    And everyone else's on the subject of RU blowing it, as regards supplies to their troops & the adequacy of same ( Or not )

    1103:

    There is just one very small difference between a system for beaming on one GW of electricity to the dedicated on-ground receiving installation, and a literal death-ray weapon.

    A very large fraction of that very small difference, is software.

    And software is a problem humanity has relatively under control.

    1104:

    Yeah. A beam of concentrated sunlight aimed at the Earth is just what we need during global warming... not to mention how expensive it would be compared to leasing a hundred square miles of the Sahara desert and running a landline...

    1105:

    "And software is a problem humanity has relatively under control."

    I dearly hope that was sarcasm, because if not... ~sighs~

    1106:

    "I dearly hope that was sarcasm, because if not... ~sighs~"

    Judge for yourself: https://queue.acm.org/listing.cfm?qc_type=Thebikeshed

    1107:

    I do not consider violence sexy; I consider it a failure.

    I earn my money in IT engineering. Anticipating failures and having workable mitigation plans is mostly a reflex.

    I'd suggest that a general strike would be a much more useful reaction to the armed insurrection by private army scenario than grabbing whatever guns you had. For example.

    I don't know if "use Guns!" wouldn't override all other useful ideas because US. Having plans available beyond Pavlovs reflexes might help.

    1108:

    I'd heard that the just-recovered were safe for about a month but obviously that number is also too optimistic.

    1109:

    Ah. Nice to know. Thanks for the work on FreeBSD.

    1110:

    There is one good argument for space-based solar power satellites: unlike PV farms at ground level, they can be placed somewhere in near-constant sunlight 24x7, thereby providing base load during the inconvenient periods of occultation called "night". Thereby solving the "you're going to need HOW MANY TWh of battery farms?" problem, at cost of introducing other costly problems. (Although I note that space-rated PV panels are very mass-efficient, and a single Starship launch ought to be able to loft a significant fraction of a gigawatt in one go, and the costs of thin-film PV panels continues to drop like a stone ...)

    1111:

    Heteromeles @ 1072:

    OTOH, look at who has the guns. It's NOT really the tax the rich crowd who shoot up schools & churches & supermarkets.

    1112:

    Robert Prior @ 1097:

    Yeah, that was what I was thinking about. Who do you think has the money to hire Blackwater/Xe/Academi (or whatever they're calling themselves now).

    1113:

    That's fair. As an environmental activist, I do pretty much the same thing with land use issues, so I get where you're coming from.

    I also agree that prepping a general strike is probably the best counter to a coup. Although there's something to be said for a reverse strike in particular industries, where employees do things like hold down gas costs, go far beyond what's required for customer service, and do other things that tank excessive profit margins.

    That said, I'm reasonably sure that one of the preliminary ways to deal with a "what if the billionaires do bad things" scenario is to imagine multiple ways in which we can eliminate them and live better lives. Part of their mystique, after all, is that they're not just inevitable, but that any alternative is worse than our relationship with them. Breaking that mystique is therefore a critical step in dealing with the problem of wealth concentration.

    1114:

    (I think this is the first time I've stuck my oar in this discussion: I haven't been able to get enough free time to catch up and then write something coherent on a complicated topic).

    I think I understand what is going on with the money.

    Money circulates around an economy: people earn money doing work for either government or capitalist companies. They use that money to buy stuff from the capitalists and pay taxes, and the government and capitalists use that money to pay employee wages, and so it goes around. (BTW I do note OGH's point about tax and government spending not being linked in that way: more of that later).

    However capitalists, and especially the Independently Wealthy (IWs), skim off some of that money and save it. This takes it out of circulation. Yes, they then invest their savings and hence it gets back into circulation, but:

    • The money supply (M2) counts saved money and the money lent out as separate amounts; if you save $1M and 75% of that $1M gets lent out to someone, M2 has increased by $750,000. The $1M you have in a savings account is not in circulation. Same goes for shares and other easily convertible wealth.

    • People only invest money in the expectation of a return. So that £1M being invested means that more money is going to wind up being taken out of circulation.

    Hence over time the actual amount of money being circulated becomes a smaller and smaller fraction of the money supply. This is a problem in two ways:

    • The people with huge amounts of money have a corresponding amount of power.

    • If there is any kind of economic contraction then a ton of that money evaporates. This also takes out some of the money that was circulating, leading to a contraction in the actual money supply.

    The solution is obvious: print more money and try to inject it into circulation. That is what Quantitative Easing was trying to do. And it works, for a while, until all the excess money gets soaked up by IW savings, and we are back where we started, except the IWs are even richer.

    The only solution to this is a Wealth Tax. Pull the money out of the IW savings and back to the government.

    1115:

    Heteromeles @ 1100:

    I believe YOU are the one misparsing my question. Despite I spent almost half my life in the military, I don't favor violence as a means of furthering political discourse. I don't believe most who advocate for a fair tax system are calling for violence, occasional wistful nostalgia for the French Revolution notwithstanding.

    So turn the question around. Why are YOU so determined things cannot improve without resort to violence?

    I'm not really a "turn the other cheek" kind of guy, but I find peace peaceful & prefer things that way.

    1117:

    And yes, the US Capitol Police really need to get their game back and to put duty ahead of personal politics.

    I'm willing to cut them a bit of slack.

    I suspect that until the Jan 6th incident the capital police spent 99% of their training on crowd control (keeping people in the crowd from getting hurt on the steps and similar), dealing with lone nut cases, and being a body guard to big important people.

    Jan 6th was off their charts of what anyone expected. Maybe someone high up should have expected it but in general it was a "what the heck is going on" moment.

    1118:

    If you dig into January 6th a little you'll see that a great deal of work was done by the Trumpists to make sure the Capitol Police didn't have either the information or the resources to win that fight.

    1119:

    Although there's something to be said for a reverse strike in particular industries, where employees do things like hold down gas costs, go far beyond what's required for customer service, and do other things that tank excessive profit margins.

    Immediately made me think of this:

    https://youtu.be/_R8GtrKtrZ4

    And yes, I had worked at a health insurance company. It was the only time in my life I felt I was doing something deeply unethical. I was rather happy to be laid off.

    1120:

    Breaking that mystique is therefore a critical step in dealing with the problem of wealth concentration.

    And to me that means it can make more sense to approach it from the entirely opposite direction. We make sure that everyone has unconditional access to the best possible healthcare, accommodation, education and the equipment and training to do better. We absolutely need a UBI that is not just enough to provide a living, but adequate enrichment also. You can't have even the minimum conditions for the mythical meritocracy our neoliberal societies allegedly create without these things, which treat inequality from the grass roots.

    That means getting rid of some of the ideological loading that we seem to have just accepted into the language around these things. There's a counter-mystique that goes with the billionaires-do-good, that "government" is something we need to limit, which usually seems to lead into weird circular arguments from the true believers when poked. And of course this is the raw material of the culture war that many billionaires nurture and promote. So, like all sorts of problems, there is not just one solution, several are required.

    1121:

    Entirely off-topic, but you may find this amusing (triggered due to rereading OGH's latest novella): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1JKd1C7izQ

    Enjoy!

    1122:

    Jan 6th was off their charts of what anyone expected. Maybe someone high up should have expected it but in general it was a "what the heck is going on" moment.

    My suspicion is that many in the US Capitol Police (and police in general) were sympathetic to the rioters... :-/

    1123:

    There doesn't seem to be much evidence for success from small-scale violence in the USA. The slavers rebellion failed, and since then there's just been a litany of small scale terrorism that's most notable for being ineffectual. The latest "let's have an Anglo-Saxon USA" loser doesn't seem likely to cause a mass exodus of non-white's from the country.

    Sure, there are fewer billionaires in the world than non-white people in the USA... but history also suggests that hunting them for sport doesn't end well for the hunters. Especially when some of the billionaires also own countries (Saudi Arabia is even named after them...)

    1124:

    So turn the question around. Why are YOU so determined things cannot improve without resort to violence?

    Hunh? I'm advocating for non-violence, period. Your question was:

    Why do you assume the source of violence would be those who want the ULTRA-wealthy to pay a fair share of taxes, and not the billionaires themselves?

    The only thing I'm concerned about is commenters equating "let's tax all the rich" with "let's use violence to separate the wealthy from their money." We both agree that won't work.

    If you want to construe consistent advocacy for nonviolence as a call for violence...

    1125:

    (Although I note that space-rated PV panels are very mass-efficient, and a single Starship launch ought to be able to loft a significant fraction of a gigawatt in one go, and the costs of thin-film PV panels continues to drop like a stone ...)

    Space-rated solar PV cells intended for long-term use in orbit[1] are not the same type or price as the ones sold by Aliexpress or even Panasonic. They have to endure 1100W/m2 irradiation 24 hours a day in Earth orbit as well as accumulating damage from protons and other particles emitted by the Sun, never mind cosmic rays and X-rays. Jack the price of space-qualified cells up by a factor of ten or more and reduce their efficiency by a factor of two and you're starting to get into the right ballpark.

    I have this idea for a Steptoe and Son salvage satellite that flies around GEO powered by ion engines, cosying up to decommissioned geosynchronous satellites and snipping off their solar arrays and returning with them to LEO, where the recovered arrays can be repurposed to provide power for orbital habitats, Lunar colonies and the like. Even with the degradation of twenty or more years of operation they'd still be valuable assets at less cost than lofting new panels at 5000 bucks a kilo.

    [1]The cell arrays used on the service modules of spam-in-a-can capsules flying to and from the ISS are less rugged then the sort of PV arrays meant for long-term use but they're only expected to work perfectly in space for a few days or weeks before the service mosules re-enter and burn up in the atmosphere. The Shuttle didn't even bother with solar panels, using fuel cells for electrical power as did the Apollo Moon missions.

    1126:

    There doesn't seem to be much evidence for success from small-scale violence in the USA. The slavers rebellion failed, and since then there's just been a litany of small scale terrorism that's most notable for being ineffectual. The latest "let's have an Anglo-Saxon USA" loser doesn't seem likely to cause a mass exodus of non-white's from the country.

    Um, no. The confederacy lost the War of the Rebellion, but the South won the Reconstruction. The time after the Civil War was known for its terrorism against people of color, both freed Blacks and Indian tribes. In the latter case, the notion of the US being a multiracial society was used to justify the US officially ignoring all treaties made with the tribes up to that point, failure to make any more treaties, and a policy of overlooking small-scale genocides (Wounded Knee, or the various massacres of California Indian groups), taking away Indian children, ad nauseum.

    That's one reason why I keep telling people that the violent tactics we're seeing now are a century old. They are, and they're being used because they've been effective in the past.

    It's also why I'm working on an alternate universe where the north won Reconstruction, and the US became the multiracial society that the Radical Republicans wanted after the Civil War. It's amazingly hard work to imagine a 19th Century America where Blacks are free and becoming equal, and tribal treaties are respected to the point that the big tribe politics help form the states in the Great Plains. So many of our deeply held tropes, from Cowboys and Indians, to the Gilded Age and the first super-rich, to the way the US industrialization affected music, culture, and settlement patterns, all depend on Reconstruction failing.

    1127:

    Your argument that it would take systematic violence widely supported by society is, I think, not an effective counter to mine that isolated acts won't cut it.

    1128:

    Poul-Henning Kamp said: There is just one very small difference between a system for beaming on one GW of electricity to the dedicated on-ground receiving installation, and a literal death-ray weapon.

    Well, two really. One is software. The other is physics.

    Getting the beam tight enough to transfer any useful power is already made extraordinarily difficult by physics.

    The problem of having a big enough antenna at the transmission end to transmit low power levels is almost certainly insurmountable. Going from that to death ray is much harder. There's no "small difference" that could turn it into a death ray.

    1129:

    I think you're probably right in terms of both physics and current tech/engineering.

    That being said, why would anyone build an orbital power collector unless it could send a large number of megawatts to its receiver, which is presumably a fairly small target. Particularly when all the ground-based alternatives are cheaper? You'd probably need a hundred megawatts - bare minimum - to make it worthwhile, and probably something in the megawatt range to make it profitable.

    Assuming it could be built the only thing that makes it a power-collector rather than a gigantic space-based laser is software. Turn the beam a few degrees and you've toasted Smolensk.

    1130:

    But if you're smart, you combine your orbital power collector with a space elevator and run a cable down the tower. Just saying.

    1131:

    Your argument that it would take systematic violence widely supported by society is, I think, not an effective counter to mine that isolated acts won't cut it.

    That's not what I'm arguing. I'm saying that the factual basis for your argument is fatally flawed. Small-scale violence is the basis for white nationalism. When they escalate, they fail.

    Dealing with small-scale violence requires both government-level political support and community-level nonviolence. That was demonstrated both in the failure of Reconstruction (when the government withdrew) and in the 1960s with the Civil Rights movement.

    I agree that hunting billionaires won't work, but it's not because small-scale violence doesn't work. Rather it's because billionaires are very good at playing the "persecuted minority" card. And don't forget, they're the living Avatars of Mammon, so you have to disempower them, not martyr them, because there are a large number of Mammonites in the US, whatever they actually call themselves.

    1132:

    Dealing with small-scale violence requires both government-level political support and community-level nonviolence. That was demonstrated both in the failure of Reconstruction (when the government withdrew) and in the 1960s with the Civil Rights movement.

    Also an example of the contrast between when the proximate causes of inequality are not addressed, and later are. In this context it's not just voting rights and school segregation, but access to college scholarships, advancement societies and the removal of barriers to other things. Area of high social inequality suffer high rates of violent crime and reducing one reduces both, surely re-enforcing the message of non-violence on the local level. This would be in contrast to areas where retaliatory violence is perpetrated by victim groups and I suppose there are better ways to draw out this difference. I suppose Amritsar is worth a mention, versus ... I dunno, areas with armed insurrections that were eventually quashed.

    1133:

    Space elevators...

    Just remember that it's 35,786 km to geostationary orbit. Even if beanstalk longitudinal vibrations are only 1/10,000th of the length of the chord, the longitudinal wave would still be 3.58 km horizontally. It'll be a fun ride, because if you want to keep the elevator under the speed of sound, it will take over a day on the line. Probably more like a week.

    It gets even more fun, because bodies in the atmosphere tend to pick up a noticeable charge of static electricity (see Hindenburg), and I suspect a beanstalk would pick up a pretty good charge just oscillating. Add more electricity? Fun!

    That's actually a decent question: How much energy could a beanstalk generate, just by being? It's running through both the air and the magnetosphere, and different parts of the line vary from -80oC to +60oC. Rather than just see then as just transit corridors, I wonder how much energy could be gleaned from them.

    1134:

    Troutwaxer said: Assuming it could be built the only thing that makes it a power-collector rather than a gigantic space-based laser is software. Turn the beam a few degrees and you've toasted Smolensk.

    Not really. The smaller the spot on the ground is, the larger the antenna in space has to be. Most designs seem to assume a spot on the ground about 100 km across. Say 10,000,000,000 sqm. At 100 GW beam, that's about 10W per sqm. 1/100th of sunlight. I'd want at least ten times sunlight for a death ray. So you'd need to make the antenna about 30 times bigger.

    Even if you assumed an antenna big enough to reach 100W on the ground, you can't "accidentally" make the antenna 10 times bigger than it was a few seconds ago.

    If I had cheap mass to orbit and wanted to do a number on some small town, I'd put a few hundred 150 tonne steel rods onto an orbit well above GEO (perhaps with krypton ion thrusters) and put some little deorbit thrusters on them. Or maybe even send them out into an orbit around the sun. Given a few years and a couple of well timed Jupiter slingshots, you could probably even manage a solar retrograde orbit. 30 km/s doesn't seem out of the question in that case. Seems a lot cheaper, and you couldn't block it by holding a sheet of tin over your head.

    1135:

    My suspicion is that many in the US Capitol Police (and police in general) were sympathetic to the rioters... :-/

    That certainly appears to have been the case in Ottawa, and Calgary, and the border…

    I'm currently reading Stephen Marche's The Next Civil War, and one of the lines that stuck in my memory was “The American hard right operates on a spectrum from the criminally insane to law enforcement officials.” Same applies here, I'm afraid, talking to friends who've been in several police forces.

    1136:

    since then there's just been a litany of small scale terrorism that's most notable for being ineffectual

    I dunno about that. Some of the violence seems to have been successful, insomuch as whites seem to have got away with violence against blacks for quite a long time, including after the ACW.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/08/08/modern-day-mississippi-lynchings/

    https://www.rawstory.com/american-christian-white-supremacist-terrorism/

    Is it terrorism if violence is used not to overturn a government but to convince an "uppity" minority to stay in their place and not argue with their "betters"?

    1137:

    If I was going to build 36,000 km of 100 GW cable, I think I'd just lay it on earth. Seems easier.

    That gets you a link from PV farms in Australia to the UK, plus from the SW USA to the UK and probably some left over. Not forgetting that if your goal was keeping the UK warm, you've also got to send the power from the tropics where the beanstalk is rooted to the UK anyway. Another 10,000 km or so.

    1138:

    1131 and 1134 - I think you're both at least part right. Any conversations I've had on "how to build a beanstalk" have tended to focus on "how to control the oscillations?" and the novel materials science involved in actually making a cable that can stand its own mass over the just under 36_000km involved.

    1139:

    "The problem of having a big enough antenna at the transmission end ..."

    The technology is called phased-array and it has been shown to work.

    Not cheap. Not efficient. But probably feasible.

    The problem with phased array technology is that it is amazingly steerable.

    1140:

    The technology is called phased-array and it has been shown to work.

    We've been over this before. Phased array works for information (including radar), but not for beaming power. Each antenna element radiates power in every direction. The phased array beam forming means that only the target receives the signal, but it still only gets the fraction of the radiated power that happens to head in its direction. The rest is just wasted.

    1141:

    Chris S @ 1122
    Oh dear, reminds me ofBugs Bunny on Broadway - yes - I went to a performance at the Royal Festival Hall ......

    1142:

    "The rest is just wasted."

    Absolutely, as I said "Not efficient".

    1143:

    Even with a phased array, you need to make it bigger to reduce the size of the spot on the ground that you hit.

    So unless you've already made the array a couple of orders of magnitude larger than it needs to be, it's not going to work as a death ray. You'll be able to steer it to point at some other place with software, but it won't do anything to the new place.

    Unless you build it as a death ray, it won't work as a death ray. I know this is disappointing, but it's just how things are.

    1144:

    from the tropics where the beanstalk is rooted

    I've never been clear on why that's necessary. It seems to me that the small advantage in distance from rotational axis of the earth would be negated by the loss of equatorial orbits. Whereas if you lift it to 30° you can avoid some of that (you're ~1Mm above the equator, all the way out) and you could plant the thing either somewhere you DGAF about (the global south) or somewhere more convenient (southern Europe, even).

    Either way there will be some exciting legal and diplomatic gymnastics, especially since the builders are likely to say it's a structure and therefore it's up to planes and satellites to avoid it... while I image the satellites especially will be keen to say that as the new thing it needs to worth with the existing use of the area (as dramatically not done by Starlink, and it would be hella funny to see Starlink get shot down by a beanstalk... could they launch new trash faster than the beanstack removed it?)

    1145:

    How much energy could a beanstalk generate, just by being? It's running through both the air and the magnetosphere

    If your beanstalk is moving through the magnetosphere you've got serious trouble. Earths magnetic field is geosynchronous almost by definition, so your tower shouldn't be moving enough to induce a current.

    1146:

    You can put it on the pole if you want. (which introduces the possibility of walking along the top of the cable right out of the atmosphere)

    It's just harder, and given that it's currently impossible, the people who think we should do it want to make it no harder than it already is.

    Unless you're going to build it from the bottom up (which would be extraordinary), it must be lowered to the equator and then you can drag the bottom end to wherever you want. So you'll lose most orbiting assets during the construction phase even if you can put them back later.

    1147:

    Don't forget the structure is in orbit around the Earth, it just happens to be touching the planet at one end. If the centre of mass of the structure is not in geostationary orbit it will be following a figure 8 path north/south over the course of a day. Anchoring it anywhere except at the equator puts hugely more strain on the cable and means it will probably start drifting even if CoM starts geostaionary. There have been ideas for not having the ground end exactly on the equator, but they involve pairs of anchors equidistant north and south to balance the strain so you have an inverted Y.

    1148:

    Also, there are very few satellites in equatorial orbit other than at geostationary height. Every orbit crosses the equator though, so an early requirement for building a serious beanstalk is to do a major clean up of orbiting debris.

    1149:

    "We've been over this before. Phased array works for information (including radar), but not for beaming power. Each antenna element radiates power in every direction. The phased array beam forming means that only the target receives the signal, but it still only gets the fraction of the radiated power that happens to head in its direction. The rest is just wasted."

    Not so. There's no fundamental difference between efficient transmission of "information" and "power". (Shannon's law quantifies the relationship.)

    Yes, each element radiates power in all directions, but so do all its neighbours. The result is that the antenna as a whole does not radiate in all directions. If it's properly designed, then in the direction of the target the fields from the individual elements are in phase and the amplitudes of the fields add; in other directions they are out of phase and cancel. See this animation. The result is gain.

    Net result: most (nothing is perfect) of the radiation is in the direction of the target, so the "fraction of the radiated power that happens to head in its direction" is "most of it". This is basic conservation of energy.

    1150:

    "so an early requirement for building a serious beanstalk is to do a major clean up of orbiting debris."

    According to people who have done the math, that ship has already sunk:

    The MTBF with current densities of orbital debris would be less than five years, and since the failure mode would mostly be catastrophic, also for any cargo in transit, the concept is dead.

    1151:

    I think India has several satellites which fly a figure-of-eight pattern at geosynchronous altitude. They're intended to be regional positioning system satellites, a bit like GPS, GLONASS, Beidou and Galileo but they only operate over the longitudes India is most concerned about rather than globally. I don't know how well they work or the availability of ground-based equipment that can use their capabilities. I suspect their main aim is military, a resource that isn't controlled by other countries like the Big Four.

    I think the Japanese planned a similar system for their own geographical area, I don't know how much of it is in place if any.

    1152:

    Troutwaxer noted: "Yeah. A beam of concentrated sunlight aimed at the Earth is just what we need during global warming."

    Note that solar power satellites are NOT just big mirrors that reflect and concentrate the sunlight. They're photovoltaic, with the electricity used to generate a beam of light at a wavelength that won't be absorbed by the atmosphere. After all, you don't want all or most of the energy you generated lost during transmission.

    There's still going to be a lot of energy generated by heating of the receiver dish or array, and you probably want a really robust "no fly" zone between the satellite and the receiver so no aircraft stray into the beam. The atmosphere will be transparent to the beam; aircraft probably won't.

    Since the discussion has strayed to space elevators, this leads me to wonder if you could create one that was distinctly suborbital, perhaps supported by a fleet of Really Big Balloons, and mount your receiving station on that. You'd still have a significant problem with heating of the receiver, but that heating would occur above much of the atmosphere so it might be climate neutral*. Best of all, you wouldn't need such a robust tether (shorter length because a much lower altitude) and wouldn't need to worry as much about orbital debris. You'd still want to site this beanstalk somewhere that it wouldn't take out a major city if it snapped. The failure mode's unlikely to be graceful.

    • You'd definitely need to do some serious science to estimate the effect of that heating. Law of unintended consequences etc.
    1153:

    It can be in orbit with the centre of mass at GEO, but it doesn't have to be.

    You can have the centre of mass beyond GEO, as long as you have the root of the beanstalk attached to the ground and under tension at the point of attachment.

    Think a cowboy twirling a lasso (or whatever they're called, lariat, rope, noose) over their head. The system is distinctly not orbital.

    If you're thinking of having the root away from the equator you have to have it attached and under tension. Just like the cowboy.

    1155:

    Which is contradicted by your original point. If the "receiving antenna" needs to be a hundred km across just install solar panels in the same space, right? It's at least a thousand times cheaper, so why bother with a space-based installation at all?*

    An orbital energy farm only makes sense if it saves space on Earth, so you wouldn't build the thing unless the "receiving antenna" is fairly small.

    1156:

    "And don't use Russian culture to excuse Putin or his followers."

    Haven't forgotten. Don't bother.

    1157:

    If you can spin a cable that's 36,000 kilometers long, why not just keep the factory running? Build three space elevators and run an entire cable in geosynchronous orbit around the Earth, attached to the space elevators at the three orbital "endpoints." Now you don't need satellites because you can attach whatever you want to the cable.

    In order to do things right it's probably necessary to run two cables in geosynchronous orbit, one next to the other. The first is the one from which installations are hung, the second is the one which runs a tram system so the installations on the first cable are reachable without using a spacecraft.

    1158:

    I don't know much about electricity/magnetism, but I suspect power generation would not be a problem with this arrangement.

    1159:

    The solar panels in orbit are exposed to 1100W/m2 sunlight 24 hours a day[1], panels on the ground not so much (hence the solar-boosters fudge of giant free 100% efficient storage batteries that don't actually exist in reality). There's no cloud, rain, snow, air pollution, no attenuation of the shorter wavelengths of sunlight through the atmosphere and the orbital panels can be oriented to face the Sun square-on much of the time using reaction wheels.

    The receiving antennas on the ground can be open-mesh structures rather than solid light-absorbing PV panels so agriculture can continue under them since it's not semi-permanent shade. Such antennas are also less ecologically damaging than large PV panel arrays on the ground.

    [1]There are two periods each solar year when a geosync satellite is occluded by the Earth's shadow. IIRC the occlusions last maybe an hour or so each.

    1160:

    So install giant batteries. It's still cheaper than building in space.

    1161:

    On the topic of a wealth tax:

    First, any wealth tax that's workable needs to account for earnings over your lifetime so far - because Greg Tingey is over 60, you expect him to have accumulated more wealth than someone who's 25 - otherwise the level you set is either too small for someone who's worked hard and saved all their life, or too high to pick up someone who's inheriting a big bunch of wealth and getting a head start. $1 million is a lot to own at age 18 (where most people's net worth is zero or negative), but having paid off a mortgage over your working life, it's a reasonable amount of wealth for an over 60 to have in hand.

    Second, you don't want absolute numbers in there, even with an inflation link. Inflation measures are, of necessity, partly a political beast, and by putting in absolute numbers, you incentivise playing silly games with the inflation measures to get the numbers the rich want. We're seeing this live in the UK with Jack Monroe coming up with a new measure of inflation ("Vimes Boots Index") focused on the things that the poorest 1% of the UK spend their money on, and demonstrating that even with CPI around 2.3%, the poorest are seeing consumer prices rise by 10% to 30% (because their balance of spending is different to the CPI basket, in part due to always buying the cheapest calories they can get).

    Third, you don't have to limit yourself to taxing wealth and/or income directly - you can consider combined taxes where (e.g.) your wealth is not directly taxed, but it increases your income tax rate or vice-versa. There's a lot that can be experimented with here to come up with a tax setup that doesn't let the ultra-wealthy exist, but doesn't unfairly penalise the elderly for good financial choices when young or penalise the young for not having 40 years of hard work behind them.

    1162:

    It would be even cheaper to build nuclear power plants which don't need trillions of dollars worth of storage on top of hundreds of billions of dollars worth of solar panels, but Godzilla put paid to that option a long time ago. Say hello to 500ppm CO2 in the atmosphere by 2050.

    1163:

    Heteromeles @ 1125:

    From my point of view YOU are the one consistently equating the two.

    I merely pointed out it's reasonable those who benefit most from a society have a greater obligation to support the maintenance of that society and you start going on about "tax the rich = kill the rich".

    1164:

    We're seeing this live in the UK with Jack Monroe coming up with a new measure of inflation ("Vimes Boots Index") focused on the things that the poorest 1% of the UK spend their money on, and demonstrating that even with CPI around 2.3%, the poorest are seeing consumer prices rise by 10% to 30% (because their balance of spending is different to the CPI basket, in part due to always buying the cheapest calories they can get).

    I'm seeing that too. Supposedly my pension is fully indexed, but the measure used to calculate inflation includes things that I don't buy (or already own, like most pensioners), so I'm seeing my pension purchasing power eroded 5% this year.

    At that I'm ahead of those still working as nurses or teacher, who have had their salary increases limited, by law, to 1% per year under the same government that is likely to get reelected with a majority (and less than 50% of the vote — thanks FPTP). Interesting that said law was brought in after the police got a huge increase in pay…

    1165:

    Richard H @ 1150: Yes, each element radiates power in all directions, but so do all its neighbours. The result is that the antenna as a whole does not radiate in all directions.

    See this article, which is linked from the one you pointed at. (And which was also linked from a previous discussion of this issue here, when I tried to make the argument you are now making: I know better now).

    The thinned array curse means that while synthesized apertures are useful for receivers with high angular resolution, they are not useful for power transmitters.

    1166:

    So install giant batteries. It's still cheaper than building in space.

    You want to do that in general. When I put in larger UPS setups for small businesses things just work better. Basically we take line power, feed it into a continuous online UPS (or few) and the electronics in the office run off that output. Glitches in the incoming line power mostly vanish.

    I can see the need for something similar. There will be a need for maintenance and such taking out a section of the base station at times.

    1167:

    Of billionaires who made their money "running successful companies" who have not corrupted government officials: probably < 1%.

    1168:

    Assuming that it was not the resident of the White House who was pushing the coup, no, the "competent private militias" would not win, given that the President would not have done nothing, but would have called the National Guard in ASAP, and here come the Hueys....

    1169: insert VERYLOUDSHRIEK_HERE.

    I've posted before, over the years, and have been ignored. 90% of you, at least, know diddly squat about what solar power satellites would send down.

    Around 1982 - yes, forty years ago - we had a speaker at the monthly PSFS meeting who told us several years before the environmental impact statement had already been filed. And that they're NOT FUCKING DEATH RAYS. They were looking at less than the power your microwave oven uses/m^2. It just required a lot of space for receivers, and critters could wander through, and no, "the cattle are not standing like statues" (to quote the old filk song).

    If you want to argue, show us the studies that break the EIS filed before 1980.

    1170:

    Unless enough of the National Guard transferred their allegiance to the coup leader.

    From what JBS says, that's less likely than it was, as they are no longer beholden to their state rather than the federation. But it still isn't impossible. Yes, I am talking about civil war.

    1171:

    There were a few who did support the insurrectionists (you can see the selfie videos of them allowing some in). The majority, no.

    And their bosses had been warned. By several agencies. And they weren't allowed to call the DC police. And then there's the hours (3? 4? 5?) before the National Guard was allowed to be deployed.

    1172:

    This continually drives me nuts. We NEED to get the hell out of LEO. Put up at least three industrial station in geosync, and send whatever you need there, and attach it. And you can put remote control robots on it, and so you can do maintenance on the cheap. Put a lot of excess solar panels on it, and you can stop sending multiple individual satellites up.

    1173:

    Unlikely that anywhere near enough would. Since I know people, including my son, who consider that Oath seriously. Oh, and generals can be fired by the President... and it was generals who played games without deploying against a clear and present danger.

    Let's see all the National Guard drone pilots having fun.

    1174:

    Heteromeles @ 1127:

    I'm not so sure the south DID WIN reconstruction. I don't think anyone "won" reconstruction. Certainly the south was poorer for it and for the era of Jim Crow that followed. Jim Crow held back the south more than it did the north and/or the west, but it DID hold back the whole country.

    I will point out that after the slaves were freed they needed economic opportunities that northern whites were unwilling to tolerate.

    Nor is it reasonable to blame the south for every fault the U.S. has ever experienced (going back to before there WAS a U.S., when it was 13 COLONIES? You are scapegoating ... although you're not alone in doing so.

    1175:

    "I think India has several satellites which fly a figure-of-eight pattern at geosynchronous altitude. "

    That's interesting. I've lost track of such things and hadn't known about the Indian satellites.

    AFAIK, that kind of figure-of-eight orbits was first used by the American CANYON SIGINT satellites, which had the initial mission of listening to Soviet microwave relay links. The funny orbits were needed to stay in the beams of specific antennas as long as possible at appropriate times of day.

    1176:

    "I'm not so sure the south DID WIN reconstruction.

    A science fictive question:

    There are tons of stories based on the South winning, but do y'all have any recommendations for ones based on the North holding the South under Reconstruction for, say, 50 years? Maintaining Federal troops in the former Confederacy, stomping on the KKK and Jim Crow, imposing various legal, legislative, financial etc constraints?

    Very fictional of course, perhaps alas.

    1177:

    I'll be really interested in this one, because in my cursory searching, I haven't found any.

    It's like the question of "What if Lincoln lived?" alt-history. There's some cursory Alt-history thoughts, but IIRC, the more developed ones had the world going to hell rapidly thereafter.

    I'll admit there's a certain amount of amusement to be had in the idea of the Lakota peoples, instead of getting hammered and stuffed into reservations, become American citizens and organize the Dakota territory (ies?) to fit their own position in US politics, rather than getting shunted aside by northern European settlers.

    The silly seriousness underlying this is the notion of Buffalo Commons. This was a serious, and much hated, proposal to reorganize the drier parts of the west to herd bison in vast ranches and then commons. The reason behind the proposal is that, after a century of settlement, most Great Plains homesteads and many farm towns had failed, the population was (is) dropping towards Plains Indian densities anyway, and the tribes are the only group whose population is actually increasing. If the US Government in the alt-late 19th century didn't make a concerted attempt to kill all the bison, but instead persuaded the tribes to join the US as citizens, then why shouldn't they keep their bison and cull some of them for the eastern urban markets. If the tribes organized well enough, they could send two senators and a congressman to Washington to argue rangeland legislation, and the traditional chiefs could become party bosses.

    Why would the Indians join the US? Well, the US needs undeniably native American citizens to fight those damned southern terrorists to win Reconstruction, and Indians have provided quite a few good US soldiers over the years. Consider the deals that could be made, if the US finally decided to keep its treaties?

    1178:

    Dont think the north can really win reconstruction solely by the fist. You need a strategy that decisively break the slave power. I think the best starting point would be to break up all the plantations.

    Legal Shenanigans: Charge all the slave owners back wages. When this results in their bankruptcy, break up the land in bankruptcy court. I think this can be ideologically sold at the time as "An american farmer is a yeoman - neither a master, nor a servant". - The goal is to have farms large enough that one family can just manage to work them efficiently. Set up the tax code to be really hostile to farms that are not owner-operator, to make this stable. Invest in the cities to move as many people off the land as you can to stop the farms from sub-dividing. Smallholders are also terrible economics. Now you have an economy dominated by cities and towns, a productive country side, and no class of huge landlords extracting rent. Should be doable to keep racial peace, given that.

    1179:

    Nojay noted: "It would be even cheaper to build nuclear power plants which don't need trillions of dollars worth of storage on top of hundreds of billions of dollars worth of solar panels, but Godzilla put paid to that option a long time ago."

    There are two real Godzillas in the room, hiding behind the elephants. Elephant 1 is that until you can solve the NIMBY problem and store the wastes, you've got a major waste storage problem. That shouldn't be insoluble, and future reactors will produce less waste, but thus far it's been a major deal breaker. Recycling fuel reduces the magnitude of the problem, but so far as I know, doesn't actually solve it.

    Elephant 2 is that the plant materials (e.g., concrete) appear to age much faster than was originally expected by planners. That means if you can't shield the materials, you need to plan to decommission the plants sooner than desired, and have tons of non-fuel radioactive materials such as the reactor vessel you need to dispose of. Not impossible, but not trivial and NIMBY rears its ugly head again.

    There are also ordinary elephants, such as the fact that mining and refining fuel is a messy business. It's not necessarily messier than other forms of mining, but the mining residues are nastier and need remediation.

    Nojay: "Say hello to 500ppm CO2 in the atmosphere by 2050."

    Back in the early 1980s, when I was doing photosynthesis measurements in downtown Toronto, we were measuring ca. 360 ppm ambient CO2; today, it's over 400 in most cities. That's growth by 1 ppm per year, really crude average, and the emission rate has been increasing over time. So your estimate of 500 ppm seems quite reasonable. But it's not CO2 that's going to kill us: its methane, and particularly permafrost methane that's being released at a rapidly increasing rate. Most CO2 emission is at least theoretically under our control. Permafrost methane? Not so much. This is probably the single best reason for stratospheric aerosol injection: it's the only thing I can think of that will stop the methane release. fwiw, I've seen widely differing estimates of the CO2 equivalent of methane, with most authoritative estimates ranging from 25 to 30 times as bad, but I've also seen figures of 40 to 80 times, presumably for different contexts.

    1180:

    Crap... should've been Godzillas 1 and 2, not elephants. Oops!

    1181:

    For one, hang (or shoot) the leaders of the Confederacy. This not only removes leaders against Reconstruction, but also deals with some of the largest slaveholders.

    Then break up all plantations over a certain size (160 acres? 320 acres?) and divvy it up among the former slaves. And, of course, give them a grant/loan for the first 5-10 years to get the small farms going.

    1182:

    Harder-than-expected wear happened to the UK AGR reactor. For most other reactor design, the experience has been "Well, we are at the end of the originally envisaged design life, but if we swap out these there parts, good for another twenty years". It turns out neutron moderators take a beating, but that only matters for graphite moderated systems, which were never very popular

    1183:

    Or, as Sherman promised "forty acres and a mule."

    Setting up a system to help the freemen keep their 40 acres in the face of low-level terrorist violence like the KKK, White Camellia, etc.? That's where things get interesting.

    The other part was that, once Lincoln died, there was increasing political pressure to let bygones be bygones and readmit the south to the Congress. Once that happened, all hope of Reconstruction basically died.

    So if you're playing with this alt-history, I think you actually have to crank up the level of southern violence, with more Presidential assassination attempts after Booth missed Lincoln, more lone wolf gunmen, probably assaults on Congress and Wall Street. This makes what actually happened impossible, and forces the Union and black freedmen to really pacify the South.

    The treatment of Indians is not a side issue here, because right after the Civil War, there was tremendous discussion about what to do with non-whites (and women!) in the US. We know that in reality this discussion ended badly for everyone who wasn't a white male. What could change to make equality for non-whites and non-males so necessary to the continuation of the US that deeply racist northern whites would prefer equality to readmitting an unregenerate white South?

    1184:

    Back in the early 1980s, when I was doing photosynthesis measurements in downtown Toronto, we were measuring ca. 360 ppm ambient CO2; today, it's over 400 in most cities. That's growth by 1 ppm per year, really crude average, and the emission rate has been increasing over time. So your estimate of 500 ppm seems quite reasonable.

    City centres have concentrated levels of CO2, not surprising given car exhausts and fossil carbon combustion for heating etc. The CO2 growth rate measured at the CO2 observatory at the top of Mauna Kea is currently about 2.5 ppm per annum -- The Kyoto Protocols were signed at the end of 1997 when the CO2 level was 366 ppm, the Paris Accords were signed at the end of 2015 when the CO2 level was 401 ppm and the current measurement in mid-2022 is 420 ppm. COVID-19 slowed but did not stop the increase for a year, now it's Business As Usual again so we'll probably blow though the 500ppm figure with ease by 2050.

    More fossil carbon (coal, oil, gas) was extracted and burned in the atmosphere in 2021 than ever before in human history, 2022 is on track to beat that record comfortably. 7.5 billion people want energy and most of that demand for energy will be met by extracting and burning fossil carbon, that's just how it is.

    As for nuclear waste, there is not really any problem with it despite the best propaganda efforts of Greenpeace and the gas industry. Unlike the Godzilla movies nuclear waste doesn't roam around the countryside melting tanks and rocket launchers with its fiery breath. People who don't understand the processes and materials in nuclear power just don't believe how little there is of it there is and how stable it is -- uranium oxide pellets are basically as hard as granite, not gaseous waste like fossil carbon combustion products exhausted into the atmosphere in gigatonne amounts each year.

    Disposal deep underground in rock stratas that are known to have been stable for hundreds of millions of years is but one method of putting the few tonnes of dangerous isotopic waste in store today out of reach. Separating out that dangerous waste from the hundreds of thousands of tonnes of spent nuclear fuel in store today would cost money and effort, but it's also possible and more economic to simply bury the spent fuel whole, wasting a lot of reuseable uranium, but mined uranium is so cheap right now it's not really an issue. Maybe in a thousand years or more our descendants might dig up this spent fuel to reuse it themselves but that's up to them.

    1185:

    Ah, but remember I said kill all the leaders, or jail them for 20 years (like the Nazis). The "leaders" of all that violence... as I understand it, Reconstruction started ok, then, 5-10 years later, all the scum that had led the Civil War were back in circulation.

    1186:

    Thought I'd throw this out there. It has a strange fascination, kinda like watching a train wreck happening…

    https://www.huffpost.com/entry/kandiss-taylor-campaign-sign_n_628b230ae4b0edd2d017b753

    1187:

    »"Well, we are at the end of the originally envisaged design life, but if we swap out these there parts, good for another twenty years".«

    That is not even close to reality.

    The real big game-changer is the revolution in non-destructive testing, almost entirely due to computing, which happened while those reactors were running.

    Mostly this has held up, in some cases even exposed unknown "as built" flaws, mostly in concrete.

    However those methods have also been oversold a bit, because some of the stuff they waved through have subsequently not held up so well, for instance in Belgium.

    The other big game-changer was supposed to be multiphysics-simulations which would allow the old and very conservative designs to be optimized and improved, and thereby "up-rating" the plants and lower costs.

    Confidence in that idea crashed when San Onofre's "new and improved" steam generators, did not save consumers one billion$ over 11 years, but instead caused the reactors to be scuttled after only 30 years operation, ten years short of their original license.

    So ... It's (much more) complicated.

    1188:

    I think that's what I said. (Or at least what I implied.)

    1189:

    I've read a few, long enough ago that I can't remember titles or authors.

    One took place in New Orleans, with federal agents tracking down a shipment of illegal arms stored in a graveyard. Very noir feel, from what I remember. I think it was in one of the "Alternate xxx" anthologies (such as Alternate Generals) popular 2-3 decades ago.

    Can't remember a novel-length work.

    The tail-end of Turtledove's Southern Victory series touches on that theme, with the North having to hold down the South by military force and the characters beginning to realize that winning the war was the easy part. Don't think he plans any sequels, though, to explore that theme.

    1190:

    At that point you have to deal with the next generation wanting vengeance. I think the solution would have been to exile the treasonous slaveholders (on pain of death.)

    1192:

    Legal Shenanigans: Charge all the slave owners back wages. When this results in their bankruptcy, break up the land in bankruptcy court.

    IIRC, the plantations owed a lot of money to Northern banks. What happened to that debt after the war? Weren't the plantations security for those debts?

    Foxessa probably knows, if she's still reading…

    On a related note, this was interesting reading:

    https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/slavery-capitalism.html

    1193:

    I think the solution would have been to exile the treasonous slaveholders (on pain of death.)

    Send them back to Africa, where their ancestors came from (ultimately, anyway). Somewhere like the Bight of Benin, where malaria will help solve the problem for you…

    1194:

    You're talking about the next generation of the slaveholders' children?

    I was avoiding the Roman Solution (kill all of them, including the kids). Thing is, 20 years, and in the meantime, the ex-slaves are going to buy guns for hunting... and then it could be a lot more fun. Oh, and just for fiction's sake, throw in some outside agitators, come to organize the ex-slaves who are now mining, or running mills, into unions....

    1195:

    The Alternate Historian did a fanfiction continuation of Turtledove's Timeline-191 on YouTube. Don't know whether he did it on an April 1st or not, but the main points were:

    The USA got tired of holding all of the territories it had conquered, and in 1991, broke up. Non-Quebec Canada, the ex-Confederacy, Texas, Cuba etc. became independent countries, while the homeland USA went into a decades-long tailspin of corruption and misgovernment.

    Meanwhile, in Imperial Germany, a new Chancellor came to power in 2016 on the promise to "Make Germany Great Again." The picture was a familiar orange-haired and orange-skinned buffoon, except with a Kaiser Wilhelm II mustache (also coloured the weird orange).

    Also your comment #1187:

    The candidate's slogan is Jesus, Guns and Babies. Spoiler: she only really cares about one of those three (and it isn't Jesus or babies).

    1196:

    But it's not CO2 that's going to kill us: its methane, and particularly permafrost methane that's being released at a rapidly increasing rate.

    While permafrost methane is bad, the real killer is oceanic methane clathrates. From "Deep Ocean Methane Clathrates: An Important New Source for Energy?", PhD thesis by Justin P. Barry (2008):

    Estimates of the quantity of methane clathrates globally range from 5,000 to 12,000 Gigatons of carbon. This amount is double current estimates of existing fossil fuel sources.

    A different - perhaps more recent - estimate from Wikipedia:

    Recent estimates constrained by direct sampling suggest the global inventory occupies between 1×1015 and 5×1015 cubic metres (0.24 and 1.2 million cubic miles). This estimate, corresponding to 500–2500 gigatonnes carbon (Gt C), is smaller than the 5000 Gt C estimated for all other geo-organic fuel reserves but substantially larger than the ~230 Gt C estimated for other natural gas sources. The permafrost reservoir has been estimated at about 400 Gt C in the Arctic, but no estimates have been made of possible Antarctic reservoirs. These are large amounts. In comparison, the total carbon in the atmosphere is around 800 gigatons.

    1197:

    Troutwaxer (great name) said: Which is contradicted by your original point. If the "receiving antenna" needs to be a hundred km across

    I don't know which original point you mean. I was a huge SPS fan in my teens, but gradually realised that O'Neil was full of shit and it was a stupid idea. Then later realised that it probably wasn't stupid in his day, but his day is done and I shouldn't be unkind.

    SPS makes sense if a) you don't realise that the life of a solar cell is the hours spent in sunlight not calendar hours, so putting it in space doesn't increase the life time production per cell. b) solar cells cost 100 dollars per Watt, so having them work 24/7 is worth the effort of putting them in space because you think they'll make 6 times more electricity (see a). c) electricity transmission is limited to a few hundred km because you don't have cheap semiconductor manufacture so you can't build cheap UHVDC links. d) you think the "promising research" into wireless power transmission will pan out (it didn't).

    So in the 2020's there's no reason to build one regardless of the size of the receiving station. In the 1960's the receiver had to be large and that's just the price you had to pay. It still let 99% of the light through, so it was still useful crop land. So it didn't matter too much. It wasn't about saving land (which was cheap in the 1960's and unless tilled, was actually zero value, no one cared what you did to forests or desert).

    1198:

    Nojay said: It would be even cheaper to build nuclear power plants which don't need trillions of dollars worth of storage.

    You keep saying this. Over and over until it's true.

    It's not true. It's not cheaper. If you want a nuclear powered society you can either build enough nuclear plants to cover the peak load assuming foreseeable outages. Hundreds of trillions of dollars worth of plants above building to meet the average load. Or you can build to cover the average load and spend money on "batteries" (which obviously wouldn't be electrochemical cells).

    Basically if you want 24/7 power you either have batteries, or you have more generation than you need, and it has been forever thus. This is not unique to solar.

    1199:

    We need lots more non-fossil carbon generating capacity than peak demand so storage isn't actually that useful. The surplus electricity during non-peak demand periods from the 15TW or so of nuclear power plants I envisage as the bare minimum will be used to actively decarbonise the atmosphere, converting CO2 into a solid form that can be sequestered in some way or other or just pumped underground where hopefully it will remain for a few hundred years without leaking back out again. If we don't do something like that and cheap out the world will burn.

    We could do the same with solar and wind worldwide, deprecating the need for storage -- my SWAG is 30TW dataplate of wind turbines and 60TW dataplate of solar panels plus a few trillion bucks worth of HVDC distribution lines. This sized fleet of renewables should require very little or no storage to prevent killer blackouts while providing some surplus power at times for active decarbonisation efforts. That fleet will have to be replaced about every twenty years or so though. Building 15TW of nuclear power plants would mean virtually no chance of killer blackouts, no need for storage at all and the need for immense HVDC links is vastly reduced since the reactors would be built close to the consumer sinks meaning short-haul connections to cities and towns via national grids. Reactors as built today can last for a century with some upgrades and replacement equipment during their operating cycle.

    Based on my SWAG, a century's worth of renewables generation plus extensive HVDC distribution links should cost about 600 trillion dollars US. Building and operating 15TW of nuclear reactors for the same length of time will cost about 350-400 trillion dollars (10 billion per 1GW reactor build, another ten billion in fuel and refurbishments for a century's operations). Both numbers would come down with mass manufacture of course.

    1200:

    "That fleet will have to be replaced about every twenty years or so though."

    To my mind that should not be part of the argument, as it is trivially countered with "well don't make them so fucking badly then", whereas on the nuclear side you have already implicitly incorporated that counter - "Reactors as built today can last for a century", ie. they are not being made that badly. I must confess I find it rather surprising that in a time when it has somehow become acceptable to make even things like bridges and buildings be expected to last only 20 years that reactors should be the one item that is going the other way, but that merely indicates that with everything other than reactors, attitudes have got a lot of catching up to do.

    1201:

    Robert Prior said: Send them back to Africa, where their ancestors came from (ultimately, anyway). Somewhere like the Bight of Benin, where malaria will help solve the problem for you…

    Unfortunately, this is literally the backstory to S.M. Stirling's "Draka" series. Do you want super-South African fascists? 'Cuz that's how you get super-South African fascists.

    1202:

    Your numbers look rightish for nuclear (assuming 15 TW, which I disagree with, but the absolute size is only an issue if we look at fuel so going with your numbers for comparison...) as I would hope, given that it's your favourite. Around 20 dollars per nameplate watt. Maybe a little low, 50% low? but ballpark.

    The numbers for renewables... You're saying in the order of 7 dollars per nameplate watt. It's not 1983... Panels cost 0.1 dollar per nameplate watt out the factory door. They're lasting 40+ years not 20. You're assuming nuclear is allowed refurbishment, but you're assuming greenfield build for renewables every 20 years. Most of the cost of renewables is the grid connection. A walk around a solar farm unclipping 40 year old panels and clipping in new ones isn't going to be anything like the cost of building a new farm. Wind is a bit more expensive, but not that much more (and not actually needed, certainly not 1/3 wind) You're over estimating the cost of renewables by at least an order of magnitude.

    1203:

    This sized fleet of renewables should require very little or no storage to prevent killer blackouts while providing some surplus power at times for active decarbonisation efforts.

    You're assuming a planet wide, everyone cooperating, power grid. Right?

    1204:

    There is a requirement for nuclear builds to be super-ultra-hyper-mega-safe which costs money but it results in physical structures that are very long lasting. This includes the containment structures and the reactor vessels which actually don't experience significant wear and tear in operation, having no moving parts. They are a major cost item though and usually will last for the lifespan of the reactor which, given today's manufacturing technologies could be a century.

    There is stuff that like control heads, steam generators, turbogenerator sets which all experience wear and tear and do require replacement over time -- the French started replacing steam generators on their M910 reactors after about thirty years of operation and will probably have to do this again at the sixty year mark if they extend the reactor fleet's life past that point.

    I'd like to see some effort put into reactor designs that could be installed in existing containments, replacing the 1970s and 1980s reactors as they reach end-of-life in 2050 onwards. This would be a major cost-saving and time-saving step even if the replacement reactors don't provide as much electrical power as the original fitments since they'd have to be smaller to slot into existing internal spaces.

    1205:

    You're assuming a planet wide, everyone cooperating, power grid. Right?

    It's the only way widespread deployment of renewables will work, absent a lot of "behind the Green curtain" burning of fossil fuels to cover the days when the wind doesn't blow enough and the sun doesn't shine enough. That means lots and lots of high-capacity long-distance UHVDC grid links which cost money to build and operate too, plus massive overbuilding of renewables everywhere to provide surplus capacity when a given area's local renewables fitout isn't up to the job of keeping civilisation going and keeping people alive because the weather doesn't oblige. Northern hemisphere winter is a particularly bad time with limited solar PV available leaving most renewables generation up to unpredictable wind while the demand for energy soars.

    Storage can cover a day or two, a week maybe if we build trillions of dollars of it (plus even more renewables to fill up that storage) but we can't build enough storage to compensate for for months of continued low generation, the only way to stop the Black Swans is to vastly overbuild the renewables to start with.

    As for "cooperation" there's a constant refrain in Europe that we can rent large parts of the western Sahara forever at low prices to generate lots of PV solar electricity for our use, and a Nasser or Qaddafi will never come to power and nationalise all the infrastructure in their country before putting the prices up by a factor of ten or more. Energy security is suddenly, thanks to the current Ukraine fuckuppery, a big thing here in Europe and depending on the continued beneficence of faroff strangers to keep the lights on at home seems riskier than ever. Nuclear plants are nearly all generating power for use in their own territories, uranium supplies are easy to source and stockpile and the cost per nuclear kWh doesn't fluctuate wildly day to day.

    1206:

    Meanwile... Scots forced to drive more despite Glasgow blather for trains cuts by 1/3 https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0c807z2

    1207:

    From a SFF and personal perspective, it would be interesting to portray the Johnny Rebs as less, say, Lost Cause swashbuckling hero in the mold of that "gray eyed Virginian" in John Carter and the paramilitary filibustering of Mars, and more, say, a pedantic view of GRRM's Dothraki (long link, feel free to scroll down to the conclusions to understand what I'm getting at).

    1208:

    Legal Shenanigans: Charge all the slave owners back wages.

    Legal precedent runs the other way, with the immiseration of Haiti being the standout case (they were forced to buy themselves from the French and that debt took generations to pay off. Today the Dominican Republic is immensely better off because they didn't have to do that*)

    (* I recall arguing this with someone here in the past, and I'm happy to accept that the Haiti debt never existed and that France is not and has never been a colonial power)

    1209:

    CO2 equivalent of methane, with most authoritative estimates ranging from 25 to 30 times as bad, but I've also seen figures of 40 to 80 times, presumably for different contexts.

    Loosely, the half life of methane in the atmosphere is about 15 years, but it's about 120 times as bad as CO2 while it's there. The longer you average the effect over the lower the multiplier becomes. So people who emit a lot of methane argue that we should average it over at least a century, while those who want to survive the next decade before starting work on surviving the decade after that argue that 5 years, or maybe as long as 10, would be better.

    Measuring it, and measuring the effect separately from CO2 (etc) is hard and requires averaging over multiple years to be accurate. So there's a tension between measuring accurately and measuring quickly. OTOH direct measurement (spectrographically) is now quite good and that is how we're seeing reports of huge methane leaks from natural gas fields etc.

    1210:

    David L said: You're assuming a planet wide, everyone cooperating, power grid. Right?

    No

    International trade works without everyone cooperating. There's no reason trading electricity should be any different. Planet wide, ideally yes, 100% cooperation, no. Not needed.

    Like any commodity, prices fluctuate. Trading systems already exist for electricity and should a supplier decide they're not selling unless they get 10 times the price anyone else wants, they don't sell any 99.99% of the time. (this already happens in grids all the time)

    The bigger the grid, the more suppliers there are, the less likely it is that a large supplier can shut down 2/3rds of their output so that they can make 10 (or 100) times the money on the remaining 1/3. That's absolutely business as usual at present. That wouldn't stop, but it would be hugely curtailed. So less money in billionaire's pockets, cheaper energy for everyone else.

    It's worth noting that there are already electricity flows between Europe, Asia and Africa. No one is holding anyone to ransom (unlike gas flows). It's all just working behind the scenes. Also worth noting is that unlike say gas, if a supplier cuts off supply, 12 hours later they are a consumer wanting to import. Russia doesn't need to import gas every night, so if it wants to threaten customers it can. We put up with that (as I've been saying for years) so there shouldn't be any objection to a mutually necessary trade.

    Fear of Johnny Foreigner isn't a valid reason for failing to decarbonise quickly and cheaply.

    1211:

    A reactor grid can do thermal instead of electric storage. This is both vastly cheaper, and more importantly, involves no scarce resources, so doing more of it pushes the price down, not up. You fit in fuck-off-huge tanks between the reactor and the turbines, and build extra turbines. That way, when there is not sufficient demand for power, the actual reactor part just keeps running at full throttle, filling up tanks. Solar thermal can do this too, but nobody seems to be putting, well, any effort into solar thermal anymore.

    1212:

    The candidate's slogan is
    * Jesus
    * Guns
    * Babies

    The bullet list is an important part of the slogan. Otherwise we have the "Eats Shoots and Leaves" problem, because I'm pretty sure that even the most far-out wingnut doesn't really think that "Jesus guns babies (down in the street)" is a Bible story. I mean, it's biblical, but not actually in the Christian Bible, not even the New Revised Updated AmeriKKKan Bible with Extra Discussion of the Works of Ezekiel...

    1213:

    Thomas Jørgensen said: fit in fuck-off-huge tanks between the reactor and the turbines

    That usually assumes sodium cooled reactors, which are vastly more expensive than PWR that are the norm these days. It covers daily fluctuations in demand, but doesn't help seasonal. Someone on here said that the average winter energy demand in the UK (energy, not electricity) was 300 GW, compared to about 30 GW in the summer.

    That is unless the tanks are many cubic km in size. Which is possible, but probably not what you meant.

    1215:

    Kardashev @ 1177:

    I've never found the Confederacy won alternative histories appealing, so I can't help you there.

    But I would like to point out again that in actual history, Jim Crow was as much a creation of the north as it was of the south. The Yankees were just a bit more subtle about how they put it into effect.

    Support for the rights of freed former slaves wanes fairly rapidly in the north as soon as substantial numbers of those freedmen sought to leave the plantation & compete for factory jobs. There are substantial reasons why the "Great Migration" was delayed into the 20th Century.

    In the early 20th century, particularly in the inter-war years between WW1 and WW2 the KKK had its greatest strength in the industrial belt north of the Ohio River.

    Jim Crow of the North - Full-Length Documentary [YouTube] Twin Cities PBS

    The idea of Federal troops "stomping on the KKK and Jim Crow" lacks verisimilitude.

    1216:

    According to the article, the sign on her bus was "Jesus Guns Babies".

    “We are the church, and if it’s of, by and for the people, the church runs the state of Georgia,” Taylor said. “This is our state. We decide what happens.”

    1217:

    Do you want super-South African fascists? 'Cuz that's how you get super-South African fascists.

    That's why I specified the Bight of Benin. Not as welcoming a climate. Nastier diseases.

    1218:

    Don't forget the Americans, who continued the practice.

    On 12 February 1838, France finally agreed to reduce the debt to 90 million francs to be paid over a period of 30 years to compensate former plantation owners who had lost their property; the 2004 equivalent of US$21 billion.

    By the late-1800s, eighty percent of Haiti's wealth was being used to pay foreign debt; France was the highest collector, followed by Germany and the United States. From 1880 to 1881, Haiti granted a currency issuance concession to the National Bank of Haiti, established in Paris by the French bank Crédit Industriel et Commercial. The French government finally acknowledged the payment of 90 million francs in 1893 after fifty-eight years.

    Due to the threat of German influence in Haiti, from 1910 to 1911 the United States Department of State backed a consortium of American investors – headed by the National City Bank of New York – to acquire control of the BNRH. Following the overthrow of Haitian president Michel Oreste, the National City Bank and the BNRH demanded the United States Marines to take custody of Haiti's gold reserve of about US$500,000 – about $13 million as of 2020 – in December 1914; the gold was transferred to the National City Bank's New York City vault. This move effectively gave the United States control of Haiti's finances.

    The overthrow of Haiti's president Vilbrun Guillaume Sam and subsequent unrest resulted in President of the United States Woodrow Wilson ordering the invasion of Haiti to protect American business interests on 28 July 1915. Six weeks later, the United States seized control of Haiti's customs houses, administrative institutions, banks and the national treasury, with the United States using a total of forty percent of Haiti's national income to repay debts to American and French banks for the next nineteen years until 1934. Under U.S. government control, a total of forty percent of Haiti's national income was designated to repay debts to American and French banks. Haiti would pay its final indemnity remittance to National City Bank in 1947.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiti_indemnity_controversy

    If we're going for a counter-factual where the North wins Reconstruction, would Haiti also be in better shape?

    1219:

    Yeah, I forgot that Jesus was white. That too.

    1220:

    And don't forget that methane breaks down into CO2.

    I also understand that methane's closer to 84x CO2 over 20 years, but only 25x methane over 80 years, because of the decay curve. Since we're talking about a breakdown curve, the number you get depends on the timespan of the analysis.

    1221:

    "There is a requirement for nuclear builds to be super-ultra-hyper-mega-safe[...]"

    That is a third-order-effect.

    The first order problem is that nuclear power has indisputably never been cheap.

    The second order effect is that reactors have been built to the maximum size technology would permit at the time, in the hope that this would amortize the huge fixed costs over more produced kWh faster.

    The third order effect is that safety scales superlinearly with reactor size. For instance, after you shut down an EPR reactors 3-4GW(t), you still have to remove 300-400MW if you want it to stay put.

    This is where all the hype about "Small Modular Reactors" come from, 2 or even 20MW of decay heat is a lot easier to handle. Unfortunately the actual neutrons are the same kind, so the fundamental safety problems are the same as they ever were.

    Yet there will be market, because sailing diesel to Thule, McMurdo, Jan Mayen and Danmarkshavn is an expensive hobby.

    1222:

    Yeah, I forgot that Jesus was white.

    I have upset a fair number of people by saying that the most likely person today that people know by sight who would resemble Yeshua was Yasser Arafat. Haven't said it in a while as most folks under 40 don't get the reference.

    I used Yeshua just to see how many would get the reference.

    1223:

    Seaborg Technologies managed to get Natrium Hydroxide to stop eating structural steels. They want to use this for a molten salt reactor, but the fundamental chemistry is insanely useful for both thermal solar and also conventional nuclear, because once it stops eating up the reactor, that is one heck of a lot better as a coolant fluid than water.

    1224:

    kiloseven
    Even allowing for "The Scotsman"s dislike of the Wee Fishwife, their piece on the ScotRail fuck-up is to the point. The SNP are another ultranationalist party & to be avoided ( Waits for Charlie to explode ) - blame every bloody single thing on the evil grasping foreigners - just like the Brexshiteers, in fact. Oops.

    As yes - technology.
    What do people think of This series of demonstrators? - ducted-fan electric passenger-carrying aircraft ???
    - Warning 'orrid adverts at the front of the YouTube clip - persevere.

    1225:

    I thought the term was "man of middle eastern appearance"?

    I have friends like that, albeit mostly Jewish or Lebanese, and they get profiled to hell and gone by various anti-tourist officials.

    As Matt Johnson put it "if the real jesus christ was to stand up today he's be gunned down cold by the cia"

    1226:

    For Australians I would have said Waleed Aly as he looked 12 years ago (which is by happenstance the age of his Wikipedia photo).

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waleed_Aly

    Arafat was too old by the time he came to public notice and when he was younger never seemed to be photographed without really dark sunglasses, which I'm told Jesus rarely wore.

    1228:

    Seaborg Technologies managed to get Natrium Hydroxide to stop eating structural steels. They want to use this for a molten salt reactor, but the fundamental chemistry is insanely useful for both thermal solar and also conventional nuclear, because once it stops eating up the reactor, that is one heck of a lot better as a coolant fluid than water.

    I'd like to see more things done with molten salt thermal solar. (And I hope to visit Crescent Dunes this summer - as a R&D prototype it worked fine, as a mainline power plant it was killed by pointy-haired managers.) Photovoltaic arrays are popular but since molten salt thermal masses seem to have no particular upper limit on size there's no trouble in keeping the electrical generation going overnight.

    It would be particularly desirable to get molten salt systems fully developed with solar arrays. The advantages shouldn't be hard to understand; when things go wrong it's trivial to point solar array mirrors somewhere else, and then people can repair a safe, inert lump. Everything gets more exciting when nuclear piles are involved.

    1229:

    As someone who lived there before air conditioning and modern drugs, yes:

    Beware, beware the Bight of Benin, for few comes out though many goes in.

    We used calomel (look it up) for fungal skin infections, because it was the only thing that worked, and better than the alternative.

    1230:

    Paul@1166

    "The thinned array curse means that while synthesized apertures are useful for receivers with high angular resolution, they are not useful for power transmitters."

    Thanks. I wasn't aware of that.

    But I'm not sure it's 100% relevant. Not all apertures are synthetic. From the same link:

    "a transmitting antenna which is synthesized from a coherent phased array of smaller antenna apertures that are spaced apart will have a smaller minimum beam spot size, but the amount of power that is beamed into this main lobe is reduced by an exactly proportional amount." [my emphasis]

    The "curse" describes what happens if you take a fixed number of elements and increase their spacing to make a larger synthetic aperture. It doesn't say anything about what happens when you simply add more elements (at minimum spacing) to make a bigger real aperture.

    After all, minimally-spaced phased-array transmitting antennas aka curtain arrays have been in use for nearly a century to direct power at a target.

    1231:

    Jesus guns babies - maybe she's been reading psalm 137

    1232:

    We used calomel - Are you sure? the Wikipedia entry starts "not to be confused with calomine" (my emphasis).

    1233:

    Yes, I am sure. When clearing out my mother's junk, there was a bottle of it left over from when we lived there. Definitely calomel, and marked 'poison'.

    The point is that there are damn few effective anti-fungals, even today, especially against some of those fungi under those conditions, there were fewer then, and a serious fungal skin infection was life-threatening. No air conditioning, remember? Because it was being used topically, on the skin, and NOT taken by mouth, vastly less mercury would be absorbed. Wikipedia is mistaken in its claims of when calomel went out of use; systemically, yes, where it always did more harm than good, but it was used a lot later for the specific purpose I mentioned.

    Nasty, yes, but I was also given prophylactic quinine against malaria (paludrine not being effective), which is probably the cause of much of my deafness and balance loss. It would NEVER be given babies nowadays, but what was the alternative in the 1940s? And who knew anything about the bringing up of 'white' babies under those conditions?

    1234:

    I prefer Galatians 6: "bear each other's burdens" which is least New Testament so may actually have been influenced by Jesus. But then I'm a foreign atheist socialist environmentalist so I don't think I'm really her preferred market.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVFyLaIWhpc

    1235:

    The advantages shouldn't be hard to understand; when things go wrong it's trivial to point solar array mirrors somewhere else,

    The Ivanpah array had at least one oopsie! when the heliostats concentrated a lot of solar energy on the tower below the heat collector by accident and melted it a bit. As for pointy-haired managers being to blame for underperformance and cost overruns, I'm not so sure. The plant failed to meet its promised monthly output for several years before the original builder/operators went bankrupt. It was bought out and is back in business under new owners, don't know for how long. It's expensive and complicated with ten thousand large heliostats requiring power and maintenance in a harsh environment so its electricity costs are quite high, even compared to static PV arrays. The extra cost of its electricity is supposedly made up by its dispatchability given the intrinsic thermal storage capability (just like dispatchable nuclear power is supposedly expensive too).

    There are other solar thermal options such as parabolic trough heat collectors that don't require big X-Y heliostats. The SEGS built in the 1980s in the Mojave desert used such a heat collection system to generate electricity (it didn't store heat, it burned gas at night to drive the steam turbogenerator sets that made electricity). The parabolic trough hardware at SEGS has now all been decommissioned with some of the site now hosting static PV panel arrays.

    1236:

    Wikipedia is distinctly vague over "when it went out of use", but it was still a standard make-you-shit medicine in Britain at the time.

    1237:

    I'm not sure where "it's got to be a phased array" came from anyway. The main point about a phased array is that you can steer it as fast as you can alter the phasing, without being limited by the inertial considerations of actually swinging something about. There are also secondary advantages in the way of having a simpler support structure and having less to worry about from wind and other weather effects. None of these factors are relevant for a transmitter in space aimed at a fixed target, where you can make an aerial as big as you like, and as flimsy as you like as long as it still looks like a surface at the relevant frequency, and this is also how you want to do it to minimise the amount of weight you have to chuck up there in the first place.

    Where phased arrays might come into it is as a means of handling the massive power output more easily, by using multiple synchronised transmitters each of manageable power rather than trying to make one enormous thing to handle the lot. But as far as the thing at the other end of the beam is concerned, how much power it receives depends only on how many transmitters there are x how much power each one puts out, and the power density at the transmitting end doesn't come into it.

    If you do end up doing it that way there are probably more reasons for it to be easier to have the individual transmitting units some distance from each other than there are for it to be easier to have them all bunched up together. If that is indeed the case, then you automatically end up with the transmitting array being extremely large, and therefore capable of focusing down to a correspondingly small spot size if you tell it to.

    1238:

    I think there's some confusion between "phased array" and "synthetic aperture" - they are not synonymous.

    If the elements of the phased array are sparse (many wavelengths apart), the aperture is synthetic and the thinned-array curse strikes: narrowing the beam doesn't deliver more power to the target because more of it goes into sidelobes. But if the elements are closely packed as in a traditional curtain array,d making it bigger narrows the beam without adding sidelobes, so more power can be concentrated into the receiving spot.

    1239:

    My layman's reading of it seems to say that a 6 arc second beam of 120mm wavelength implies a 5 km wide antenna. Is that ballpark?

    1240:

    "But I would like to point out again that in actual history, Jim Crow was as much a creation of the north as it was of the south..."

    "The idea of Federal troops "stomping on the KKK and Jim Crow" lacks verisimilitude."

    I'm not sure why those facts, unarguably true though they are, are relevant to the question asked in 1177. Actual history and verisimilitude are not always associated with fictional works.

    1241:

    If that's your image, you need to photoshop in a US flag pin on his hood, and maybe have him cradling a baby in the crook of his arm. Or standing on a pile of babies. Or something.

    Otherwise it's near-perfect.

    (Leaving aside that if he actually existed, Yeshua bar Yusuf would have been short and rather middle-eastern in coloration ...)

    1242:

    Yes, you are in the right sort of numbers.

    As mentioned earlier, work has been done, even some quite old work, but many of the challenges were not realized back then, and even not now by the people who try to dupe investors.

    There are some pretty significant technological challenges involved, many quite interesting.

    Even assuming an unrealistic 90% total efficiency, a 1GW bird must shed 100MW thermal radiation, which is a challenge in itself, in particular if you do not want to disturb the orbital parameters.

    You will also be beaming through a lot of moving air, full of electrons, so you will need the microwave equivalent of "adaptive optics".

    For an equatorial landing zone, that can /probably/ be made to work, because the atmosphere is thin and the air moves overwhelmingly orthogonal to the beam-path.

    But a reasonably sized landing-zone in UK is physically impossible, even with AO: The feedback loop, ignoring computational delay will run at only

    3e8{m/s}/(2*36000{km}) = 4 {Hz}

    and all the oblique atmospheric phenomena are not going to wait for that.

    And then there are all the timekeeping aspects of beam-steering with sufficient precision at microwave frequencies.

    Phase modulating by picosecond amounts is most easily implemented by heating or cooling your fiber-optic cable.

    Good luck with the practical implementation and calibration of that.

    So, no, not happening.

    1243:

    Nojay opined: "As for nuclear waste, there is not really any problem with it despite the best propaganda efforts of Greenpeace and the gas industry."

    It's not nearly that simple, but let that lie. ("Lie" meaning "rest in peace", not accusing you of falsehood.) The bigger problem I was pointing out is that the reality is far less important than the perception: as long as elected officials believe they'll be voted out of office for allowing nuclear waste storage, you won't be able to find a storage site. Sometimes the psychological problems far outweigh the science problem (e.g., vaccines).

    In terms of premature aging of nuclear power plants, the specific problem seems to vary among designs and manufacturers. I'm not up to date on the status of the problem, but recall reading a couple years pre-pandemic that this had become a serious issue for Canadian Candu reactors. I recall some talk about the problem being due to damage caused by radiation or heat (high-energy particles) damaging the construction materials, but don't quote me on that. Any experts care to chime in on the nature of the problem and how widespread it is?

    AlanD2 noted: "While permafrost methane is bad, the real killer is oceanic methane clathrates."

    Potentially, but at the moment most of it is safely sequestered at the bottom of the ocean. So long as nothing disturbs it, there are more urgent threats. My understanding is that deep ocean clathrates are relatively stable but that shallow clathrate deposits sometimes "burp" (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00144504). Any experts care to elaborate?

    1244:

    San Onofre's "Premature aging" may well have been an engineering screwup, per second hand rumor.

    Back in the 1950s at the Santa Susanna Field Site (2nd biggest nuclear accident in the US shut it down, but it was a research reactor, not a power station), they found that problems with steam generator design could cause cracks in the generator. Something like the water hammer effect in pipes, IIRC.

    Skip forward most of 50 years, and a certain Zaibatsu gets the contract at SONGS (San Onofre Nuclear Generation Station) to increase the electrical output by packing more generators into the building. They don't have much experience building steam generators for nuclear power plants, but they get the contract anyway, and shrunk the generators so that 20% more could be squeezed in. After the system ran for awhile, the operators noticed that cracks were appearing in the new generators, so down the system went.

    Management decided that it would cost more to fix than to shut it down, so it's being decommissioned. Did I mention this is a for-profit company?

    A few other bits of goofy goodness.

    --A for-profit company runs the facility, so you'd expect the investors to take the haircut, right? Nope. The company lobbied the California Public Utilities Commission for years to pass on the entire shutdown cost to local rate payers. This included a meeting between a regulator and a company official at a hotel in Poland....and caused scandals.

    --The fuel rods from the plant are being stored in steel casks on the beach. Stainless(?) steel casks, and the beach isn't very wide. They already had a little oopsie because the casks are quite tight, not much bigger around than the spent fuel rods, and they banged up one cylinder loading the spent fuel in via crane and hitting the edge. I think they finally managed to get it sealed. Hopefully they get those cylinders out of there before the sea rises and they rust. Oh well. The beach next door, San Onofre State Beach, is known for its surf, in case you're thinking a barge will haul it out of there.

    --Current and former plant engineers have joined the anti-SONGS movement, in part to out other safety gaffes and problematic PR (IIRC there was a leaked internal company video that had management acting out a Star Trek-style skit in the SONGS control room. All in good fun.). I'm weird, but I get a little twitchy when engineers running a facility start blowing whistles on management.

    Anyway, if you're wondering why more people in San Diego would rather go solar, it's not the innate problem of having nuclear technology sitting right next to a major military base that will suck a Chinese or Russian nuke in WW3, it's how a certain for-profit company has been managing our electricity supply. Incidentally, they're fighting tooth and nail to kill solar and wind, apparently because those technologies will cut into their profits. Which reminds me, I need to get in line for a house battery...

    1245:

    Oh, and I forgot to mention: SONGS is right next to Interstate 5, the major highway that connects San Diego to Orange and Los Angeles Counties. Sure we could blast through the mountains and build another interstate at many millions of dollars per kilometer (sick joke, this has been a civil engineering nightmare for a century. The train track that connects San Diego to the civilized world runs between I-5 and SONGS). Unfortunately, Camp Pendleton Marine Base is in the way (I-5 and the train track run through it, and it's just south of SONGS). Of course, running an interstate through Pendleton that would mean that we'd first have to clean up all the unexploded ordinance in the center of the base. And, not that anyone other than me cares, a couple of plant species that occur only on Pendleton would likely be wiped out. Little details. It's odd how often high explosives and endangered species mix.

    You can see the view of SONGS from I-5 in this film clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5OQMoSCrqw

    1246:

    The Bruce plant CANDU reactors, built in the 1980s but only commissioned at the turn of the century are undergoing a major refit at the moment, replacing a lot of their internal components like the steam-generating tubes ("calandrias"). This should give them another thirty or forty years of operational life.

    CANDUs are heavy-water reactors intended originally to run with unenriched "natural" uranium fuel (although most or all of them now use slightly enriched fuel for efficiency reasons). This means the steam-generating part of the reactor has to be kept separate from the heavy-water moderator but close enough to the core for the heat to be transferred to drive turbogenerators and produce electricity. These calandria steam tubes get exposed to a high neutron flux as well as vibration. This causes wear and structural degradation over decades and means that the calandria tubes have to be replaced if the reactors are to continue operation.

    The Indians have their own designs of heavy-water reactor (PHWR) which have similar issues and require similar replacement of steam generator equipment after a couple of decades of operation.

    Regular PWRs don't have any steam equipment exposed to neutron flux since the moderator leaves the reactor vessel before flowing though the external steam generators. They wear out due to vibration and erosion and they are usually replaced after 30 years or so of operation. It is normal for some of the pipes in a steam generator to start leaking over time, they are plugged when the leaks are found during major inspections. The steam generators are over-specced with surplus tubes when built for this reason.

    Steam generators and calandria tubes last about the same length of time in operation, it's just that calandria replacement is done inside the reactor vessel rather than externally as in the case of PWR steam generators.

    1247:

    "Leaving aside that if he actually existed, Yeshua bar Yusuf would..."

    About that, see
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christ_myth_theory
    also
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicity_of_Jesus

    1248:

    It's odd how often high explosives and endangered species mix.

    Lots and lots of nitrogen compounds and disturbed soil allowing seeds easier germination.

    I've told the story before of my lab benchmate at the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment who was a keen amateur botanist. He had found and recorded three (I think) rare orchids in the highly protected back areas of the site, safe from the trompy boots and trompy lawyers of the Ramblers Association. I think one of his discoveries was unique and not known to grow anywhere else in Britain in the wild. And he couldn't tell anyone.

    1249:

    If you want something new and exciting to talk about, how about global supply chain issues?

    This is kind of a random fruit salad. On Sunday, 60 Minutes ran a segment about how the global supply of the chemotherapy drug vincristine went away for awhile. It's an old drug, off patent, and it costs about $5/vial to US customers. Only two companies were making it, Teva (based in Israel) and Pfizer's generic division. Teva stopped making it and retooled that plant to make something more profitable. When Pfizer had to shut down their plant for repairs and a cleanup, the global supply of vincristine went away, leaving cancer patients in the middle of their treatments scrambling photogenically (Sarcasm, it's used on childhood leukemia). Note that Pfizer's shut down was completely normal. Drug manufacturing is really fiddly and has to be clean, so contamination and recertification problems are par for the course on any manufacturing line.

    The problem isn't just that it's a cheap drug, it's that in the US it passes through several middlemen (all for-profit) between the factory and the hospital. These are both distributors and companies that aggregate demand from multiple hospitals, to keep prices down. Once they've all taken their cut, it's really hard to produce a clean drug cheaply with any overhead at all.

    My wife the hospital pharmacist noted that this is a normal problem and rattled off a bunch of other drugs that are short right now. Part of her job is doing work-arounds, when doctors order stuff the hospital doesn't have. Vincristine is minor, compared with the time Puerto Rico caught two hurricanes, and they messed up the one US plant that was making normal saline IV bags...

    It's not just meds. Radioisotopes are in short supply too. I just saw a report that ITER is having problems, because the global supply of tritium is under 50 kg. Apparently, it's hard to run a fusion plant on tritium if there isn't any available. If you've had to deal with radioisotopes in medicine, you're likely also aware of how shutdowns of research reactors causes short supplies of various isotopes.

    Other supply chain issues: lithium, the material you want to get into when diving through chum slicks to cuddle with sharks is a bit boring and passe. Phosphorus and potassium, because nutrient recycling is much harder than dumping sewage into the ocean. Helium, because it's a byproduct of pumping natural gas, when the oil companies bother to catch it (too cheap to harvest in the past. Oh well).

    What else? Cobalt, rare earths?

    I assume that there are problems in computer supply chains too. Any you've heard of recently?

    This is part of the fun with companies running around the globe to minimize the costs of each step of a supply chain, and the cheap energy that powers such travel begins to get more expensive.

    Oh well.

    1250:

    (Leaving aside that if he actually existed, Yeshua bar Yusuf would have been short and rather middle-eastern in coloration ...)

    There were a whole lot of Jesuses at that time, the area was hoaching with Millenialist street preachers and rabble-rousers all preaching that the End Times were nigh after the Romans invaded and conquered the land. "Life of Brian" is a documentary.

    1251:

    "I assume that there are problems in computer supply chains too. Any you've heard of recently?"

    You think? In the company I work for the hardware engineers are redesigning every piece of hardware we have, supply chain issues. And sometimes multiple times because the replacement chips don't get purchased quickly enough.

    1252:

    "There were a whole lot of Jesuses at that time, the area was hoaching with Millenialist street preachers and rabble-rousers all preaching that the End Times were nigh after the Romans invaded and conquered the land."

    Interestingly, that understanding of the situation was propounded by Albert Schweitzer in 1906. It's still very much in the mainstream and may even be the leading one.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_Jesus#Apocalyptic_prophet

    1253:

    The number of items listed on the Farnell website as "available for back order, if you want to wait 5 months" seems to be getting set to exceed the number of items they actually have in stock.

    1254:

    As Matt Johnson put it "if the real jesus christ was to stand up today he's be gunned down cold by the cia"

    I don't know about the CIA, but our Evangelical Christians would crucify him a hell of a lot faster this time... :-(

    1255:

    I couldn't agree more that anyone making more than a couple of hundred thousand a year should be looked at as a potential criminal. The main problem is that money begets money after you have killed and maimed your way to accumulate enough to buy into the Communist network (stock market) of the 0.001%. I don't think billionaires actually look at the masses as real people just resources to be exploited. PS I know everyone can buy into the stock market but at that level, we are just meat for the grinder.

    1256:

    One smart manufacturer in Australia (I think it was Senetas) took the precaution, around the time of Australia's first lockdown, to order 3 year's worth of components for their products. So maybe their supply chain problems won't begin until next year.

    They made a big deal out of it, but I wonder how their customers will cope with their supply chain issues.

    1257:

    I assume that there are problems in computer supply chains too. Any you've heard of recently?

    Seriously. You haven't noticed? [grin]

    There is a forum on Reddit for most all computer vendors. Most not run by the vendors. Pick any one networking vendor. Once every week or so someone "new" will post a rant about how "Why can't XYZ keep any products in stock. Should I switch to someone better." Most of us chuckle and move one. But the replies are interesting. When Cisco and similar are quoting 180 day lead times is that real or do their online ordering systems just not give out dates more than 6 months out?

    I recently bought a pfSense box from a Netgate distributor. I was given an estimate of a month out. But the distributor told me the next shipping container was mostly sold out. If I would pre-pay I'd be sure to get one off it. If not another month or six depending on when the next container showed up. I got my box in a week. I was lucky.

    I use a lot of Ubiqiti gear. Same rants on Reddit. If you go to the Ubiqiti online ordering site maybe 1/2 of the SKUs are in stock at any point in time. And there are groups on Facebook and Reddit which will say when a popular item goes in stock. But many times that only lasts are an hour. Or maybe minutes. And some of the items have ordering limits. Some as low as one.

    I order an HP Z workstation every now and then. 2 years ago almost any configuration would have a 1 to 3 week lead time before we'd get it. Which was OK for a custom build. Now the lead times tend to be 2 to 4 months. So I get to scour the internet to find something as close as what is wanted and just go with it.

    Things sure have changed here on Walton's Mountain.

    1258:

    AlanD2 noted: "While permafrost methane is bad, the real killer is oceanic methane clathrates."

    Potentially, but at the moment most of it is safely sequestered at the bottom of the ocean. So long as nothing disturbs it, there are more urgent threats. My understanding is that deep ocean clathrates are relatively stable but that shallow clathrate deposits sometimes "burp"...

    It is only safely sequestered at the bottom of the ocean as long as deep-water ocean temperatures remain close to 0° C. As our oceans warm, the oceanic methane clathrates will destabilize, and it's game over... :-(

    From Wikipedia:

    While investigating the East Siberian Arctic Ocean during the Summer, researchers were surprised by the high concentration of methane, and theorized that it was being released from pockets of methane clathrates embedded in ice on the sea floor which had been destabilized by warmer water. [Kimantas, Janet (December 2014), "More Methane Surprises: High concentrations of methane plumes found rising from the floor of the East Siberian Arctic Ocean and along the US Atlantic Coast", Alternatives Journal, Waterloo, Ontario]

    ...

    Scientists from the Center for Arctic Gas Hydrate (CAGE), Environment and Climate at the University of Tromsø, published a study in June 2017, describing over a hundred ocean sediment craters, some 300 meters wide and up to 30 meters deep, formed due to explosive eruptions, attributed to destabilizing methane hydrates, following ice-sheet retreat during the last glacial period, around 15,000 years ago, a few centuries after the Bølling-Allerød warming. These areas around the Barents Sea, still seep methane today, and still existing bulges with methane reservoirs could eventually have the same fate. ["Like 'champagne bottles being opened': Scientists document an ancient Arctic methane explosion". The Washington Post. June 1, 2017]

    1259:

    Cripes! Was it, really? I cannot imagine a more insane choice of laxative.

    1260:

    The theory I have seen that makes most sense is that he was a Jewish independence militant (hence crucifixion, not stoning), which leaves the question open as to whether he was also a religious revolutionary or whether that was tacked on to him later.

    1261:

    My own subversive idea is that he was a Roman double-agent and provocateur, bought and paid for (thirty pieces of silver?). He went around preaching peace and tolerance don't fight the Romans and pay your taxes while rousing the mob against the Pharisees and the Temple authorities. Eventually his usefulness came to an end and he was disposed of. His last recorded words, "Lord, Lord, why hast thou forsaken me?" was not addressed to God but to his Roman handlers.

    1262:

    The Wikipedia articles on Jesus you link to seem to have a lot of Christian propaganda.

    1263:

    I agree that there was a historical Jesus.

    The word we're looking for here is actually messiah. Messianic movements are scarcely limited to Judea around 0 AD. James Scott makes a case that they're actually more common in upland southeast Asia, for what it's worth, and if you cast the net wide enough, it catches everything from Ghost Dancers to Cargo Cultists to Kiribati (one is recounted in A Pattern of Islands) to Hong Xiuquan.

    From Scott's The Art of Not Being Governed: "The mere enumeration of the hundreds, nay thousands, of rebellions mounted by hill people against encroaching state over the past two millennia defies easy accounting. Cataloguing them in some tidy Linnaean classification scheme seems even more daunting...These uprisings, usually led by people styling themselves (and/or taken to be) wonder-working prophets, shoulder their way to the front of the historical record by virtue of how large they loom in the archives." A big part of this record, incidentally, was the systematic extermination and expulsion of Hmong/Miao, Yao, and Tai/Thai people from China into the mountains of southeast Asia, as the Han empire grew, especially in the Ming and Qing dynasties. Scott characterizes the highly diverse Karen people with "no matter what their religious convictions, the Karen have shown, again and again, a devotion to wonder-working, charismatic, heterodox healers, prophets, and would be kings."

    Fun read. Anyway, his point is that the downtrodden and dispossessed jump at ideas that relief is at hand (Sort of like us talking about how to disempower billionaires. When some charismatic leader picks up on this, watch out). There are always would-be prophets and marginal religious figures ("a dime a dozen," says Scott), but although many are called, few are chosen. The few usually raise up a following, and if the following gets big enough without collapsing under its own weight, they start a rebellion to make their New World Order. This is, inevitably, crushed by whoever they're rebelling against. Occasionally the rebellion gets big enough (as with the Tai Ping Rebellion) that it takes decades to crush the movement.

    Getting back to Jesus, I don't think he was that special, and there were apparently multiple messiahs in Judea at his time. The exceptional person was Paul, who took the fading messianic Jesus cult, reworked it, and spread it into the Roman Empire. This is where Christianity breaks from the normal messianic cycle. Christianity is fairly unique among the major religions in that it grew out of a millennarian rebellion. It's more normal for religions to be a mix of cultural accretion (Judaism, most "Hindu" religions, etc.) and great teachers inspiring many generations of students (cf Islam, and Buddhism).

    1264:

    I heard of it in that application a considerable time before I found out what chemical it was. The deal seems to be that it's pretty much insoluble, so very little is actually absorbed, and what is absorbed is in ionic form, which seems to be much less dodgy than anything with a covalent Hg-C bond in it (as in one of Charlie's favourite chemicals).

    1265:

    Kardashev
    The problem with the actual supposed historicity of Yeshua bar Yusuf is/are the "amazing" parallels wit other deities who were killed-&-resurrected. Most notably with the Isis/Osiris legend from next-door Egypt.

    Nojay
    LIKE IT!

    H
    Messianic movements are scarcely limited to Judea around 0 AD.
    "Boxers" ( China ) - or earlier - "Taiping" ( See also your own remark on that! )
    - * the systematic extermination and expulsion of Hmong/Miao, Yao, and Tai/Thai people from China into the mountains of southeast Asia, as the Han empire grew* - now being added to with the Uighurs, of course.

    1266:

    I don't know about the CIA, but our Evangelical Christians would crucify him a hell of a lot faster this time... :-(

    Fake Jesus! :-)

    1267:

    I agree that there was a historical Jesus.

    This seems open to debate. I remember reading an article many, many years ago that claimed there was only one historical reference to a possible Jesus outside of the Bible.

    1268:

    AlanD2 noted: "While permafrost methane is bad, the real killer is oceanic methane clathrates."

    Potentially, but at the moment most of it is safely sequestered at the bottom of the ocean. So long as nothing disturbs it, there are more urgent threats. My understanding is that deep ocean clathrates are relatively stable but that shallow clathrate deposits sometimes "burp"

    That was the trigger in John Barnes' Mother of Storms — an arctic deposit was disturbed by a missile strike which was a big enough burp to provide positive feedback releasing more…

    1269:

    Totally off-topic question for you computer types:

    While decluttering last week I discovered I still have an Atari 1040-ST and a Mac Plus. Both were working when I boxed them up in the original packing and stored them under my basement stairs, then stacked other boxes in front of them and forgot I had them.

    Do these have any value? If so, what's the best way to get something for them, without too much trouble? I was originally just going to schlep them to the electronics disposal site in my city, but if they have value that's a waste.

    I have no use for them. While I have fond memories of using each of those computers, I have no desire to (or space) to use them again.

    1270:

    Yes. Most likely both.

    There is definitely a market for older gaming consoles. I can ask my son and son in law if they want the Atari and you'd want to ship it into the US.

    As to the Mac, yes. Some of us have older data we'd like to extract from various older storage media. And there's a collectable market. If you lived nearby I would personally be interested in the MacPlus.

    In general check out ebay for completed sales to get an idea of prices.

    1271:

    Around here we have this outfit:

    https://kramden.org/

    Similar may exist near you.

    1272:

    No, there are several. Tacitus is probably the most reliable, and few people doubt his account, but it fits with what I said in #1261. There is little doubt that there was a historical Jesus, though whether he was anything like the character portrayed in the Gospels etc. is FAR more open to debate.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicity_of_Jesus#Josephus_and_Tacitus

    1273:

    David L @ 1223:

    You should specify a YOUNG Yasser Arafat. Arafat lived to be 75 and didn't really obtain world renown before he was in his 50s.

    Jesus was executed while he was in his early 30s (if you accept bible chronology).

    1274:

    My point was dark eyes, hair, skin, and likely curly hair. Not someone who looked like the blond high school quarterback on the local team.

    1275:

    Kardashev @ 1241:

    Fiction MUST have verisimilitude to be successful.

    Hence "Truth is stranger than fiction."

    1276:
    Around here we have this outfit: https://kramden.org/ Similar may exist near you.

    Thank you for that. I'm going to look around and see if there's any such around here.

    I feel guilty about scrapping any computer that's still working, as even a Z80-based one is still an incredibly powerful machine for many purposes.

    1277:

    CMac @ 1256:

    Behind every great fortune is a great crime.

    Seems like the greater the fortune, the greater the crime.

    1278:

    Nojay, AlanD2: Thanks for the updates to my knowledgebase.

    1279:

    "Fiction MUST have verisimilitude to be successful."

    Then I'm not sure how the term verisimilitude is being used.

    Take, e.g, the following:

    PK Dick's "The Man in the High Castle"
    Clarke's various works, including Childhood's End
    Ian Bank's Culture novels
    Heinlein's "juveniles"
    Asimov's Foundation series
    The Harry Potter series
    OGH's Merchant Princes and Laundry works

    I'd say those have all been reasonably successful.
    How do they meet the verisimilitude criterion?

    1280:

    "The Wikipedia articles on Jesus you link to seem to have a lot of Christian propaganda."

    The articles on religion tend to get input from true believers who want to set the story straight. You have to learn how to spot them, pick and choose.

    1281:

    "only one historical reference to a possible Jesus outside of the Bible."

    The first extra-biblical references come from Josephus and, as EC has pointed out, Tacitus, both around 100 CE. The Josephus work may have been enhanced by a later Christian scribe for religious purposes, but still appears to have a genuine reference to Jesus.

    The earliest intra-biblical reference seems to be 1 Thessalonians, written by Paul ca. 50 CE.

    1282:

    There is little doubt that there was a historical Jesus, though whether he was anything like the character portrayed in the Gospels etc. is FAR more open to debate.

    The Wikipedia article you mentioned contains qualifiers such as "most likely consists of" and "The scholarly consensus".

    Given that we don't even know for sure if Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone when he assassinated President John F. Kennedy just 60 years ago, making assertions about what happened over 2,000 years ago seems questionable at best - especially given how little we know of those who may (or may not) have reported on the person we now call Jesus.

    1283:

    *Tacitus is probably the most reliable" - Really. OK, where was the battle of Mons Grup(i)us then? I don't know, despite what's in Tacitus.

    1284:

    _There is definitely a market for older gaming consoles. I can ask my son and son in law if they want the Atari... _

    The ST series were desktop computers, not gaming consoles. They (or at least some?) had built-in MIDI ports and did far more to bootstrap computer-based music creation than the Fairlight CMI (which was mindbogglingly expensive) ever did.

    1285:

    If my memory serves me this is when the hobbyist debates were about whether the Atari or Commodore would prevail over the Mac due to them supporting color and doing graphics in hardware.

    A total blind spot about software that most people use.

    Of course Jobs almost killed the Mac before it was born with his constricting ideas about what "everyone" would want.

    1286:

    For decades, a techie mailing list I'm on, folks have been concerned about the clathrates, and those are a huge deal.

    1287:

    Once upon a time (like the 1960's) there was a tv show in the US called To Tell The Truth". Three people would come out, all claiming to be one person. The players could ask them several questions, then they'd vote on who which person was actually that person.

    https://www.yesteryearessentials.com/products/1967-signed-ron-cobb-political-cartoon-print-underground-free-press

    1288:

    Marvin Harris, in Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches, from the late seventies, points out that crucifixion was a Roman punishment, not Jewish, and was not used for thieves, but for treason. You know, like Sparticus.

    His thought is that either Yeshua bin Miryam was, or was portrayed to the Romans, as a leader of the zealots (and the two "thieves" were, in fact, zealots, trying to throw out the Romans).

    I'll not that there is not one picture of Yeshua that's correct. Show me one... where he, like any good Jew, is wearing a head covering. Not a turban, not a yarmulke, nada....

    1289:

    I know there's a fan base for the old Ataris.

    1291:

    Moz, you may find it comforting that you share the Haitian debt delusion with the New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/20/world/americas/haiti-history-colonized-france.html

    1292:

    whitroth
    I HAD a copy of that, years ago, but have lost it.
    Brilliant book - thanks for reminding me - I'll see if I can get another copy.

    1293:

    It seems likely to me there was a historical Jesus. He probably would have felt at home on this site, seeing as his message was 1. Billionaires are bad 2. Treat each other decently 3. Even those who look and act differently from you 4. Heaven is a metaphor - it's not a place it's how you live your life. 5. Violence is not the answer. 6. Someone else's sex life is none of your business. The supernatural elements (virgin birth, resurrection etc) seem to have been added later (there is not much of that in the earliest gospel (Mark)). This enabled people to focus on the fairy story and ignore the message. Of course if you search the old testament you can find plenty of bits to support any persecution you want to commit - especially if you take everything literally (including the baby killing I alluded to in psalm 137 "... a blessing on him who takes and dashes your babies against the rock")

    1294:

    [ "Robert Prior Robert Prior replied to this comment from Thomas Jørgensen | May 23, 2022 22:34 | Reply 1193: Legal Shenanigans: Charge all the slave owners back wages. When this results in their bankruptcy, break up the land in bankruptcy court.

    IIRC, the plantations owed a lot of money to Northern banks. What happened to that debt after the war? Weren't the plantations security for those debts?" ]

    Been reading/skimming/busy with end of semester, activism, making a living.

    Most of the plantation owners didn't owe a lot of money to northern banks, since almost all their actual credit creating assets were the bodies of their slaves. That didn't work for northern banks. Some of them had northern investors, but not the same thing. Southerners were forced to do a lot of business with the South, since they didn't make anything. They even purchased their 'slave food' from the North, since every inch was given over to the hot cash influx of cotton.

    Then there were all those enslaved who actually brought cash in to their little old lady owners, and others etc. by selling produce in the garden, making shoes, doing carpentry, being hired out, selling the children that single nubile woman working in the kitchen produced, etc. No banks at all.

    Even before the war was officially finished, lots of investor groups were investing back into the big plantations as in Georgia.

    A few w/o an energetic heir lost their land, but generally that class had everything going for them in the north too, from their Harvard educations, their scions working in banks and finance, before, during and very particularly after the war.

    In general, the wealthy class of the South recovered pretty quickly due to their connections up north. Don't forget Theodore Roosevelt's mother was from a Georgian planter family -- which actually did better after the war than before.

    The poor white stayed poor, generally.

    When Reconstruction was essentially overthrown by coups throughout the South (see New Orleans in particular) -- Jim Crow finished it up -- the rich and powerful stayed rich and powerful. The poor, Black or White, stayed poor.

    1295:

    OGH said: If that's your image

    Sadly, not mine. Just a pointer to an image on the Web. It's rather good though, and I particularly like that he seems to be cradling an AK-74.

    1296:

    As far as Reconstruction is concerned, the losers were, of course the African Americans.

    While Grant was president it worked.

    But after that politics mattered more, keeping hold of the presidency, than any rights for African Americans. It's shocking and grief-pounding to see how very quickly African Americans were advancing in just that tiny span of years, but after that, it was all over, and it was Slavery By Another Name. Virginian Woodrow Wilson as POTUS consolidated it throughout the federal systems.

    1297:

    AlanD2 @ 1283:

    Actually, despite the conclusions of the Warren Commission, we don't even know for sure Oswald DID assassinate Kennedy.

    1298:

    @1255:

    [As Matt Johnson put it "if the real jesus christ was to stand up today he's be gunned down cold by the cia"

    I don't know about the CIA, but our Evangelical Christians would crucify him a hell of a lot faster this time... :-( ]

    Not until they'd all sexually assaulted him first - if the New Testament Jesus returned.

    1299:

    You can always go down the rabbit hole and doubt every bit of the historical record.

    The thing about Jesus is that his historical record is basically as good as (or better than) that for many historical figures. So I'd urge consistency: if you want to doubt Jesus, start doubting everyone that appears in a book and two external references.

    Now, if the problem is that the gospels contradict each other, I think you'll find that every minister who's been through seminary learned that in a first-semester graduate class. There they're taught a technique called "horizontal reading" where they read the gospel accounts of events in parallel, not one after the other. Contradictions about Jesus' birth, miracles, entry into Jerusalem (riding on the back of two donkeys in one account), death, and resurrection are rampant. This isn't news, and ideally, ministers should be trying to follow Jesus' practices, rather than blindly worshiping the Bible.

    The usual consensus among the learned faithful is that Jesus' teachings are worth following, but the Bible contains a bunch of stuff that was written by the students of his students, for reasons other than strictly accurate historical accounting.

    This doesn't mean every historical religious teacher exists. I think there's a much better case to be made that Lao Tzu didn't exist than that Jesus didn't. And personally, I prefer Taoism to Christianity, for what it's worth.

    1300:

    But after that politics mattered more, keeping hold of the presidency, than any rights for African Americans. It's shocking and grief-pounding to see how very quickly African Americans were advancing in just that tiny span of years, but after that, it was all over, and it was Slavery By Another Name. Virginian Woodrow Wilson as POTUS consolidated it throughout the federal systems

    Yeah, that's what keeps me working on that alt-history. I think if anyone deserves a "what if they succeeded" in alt-history, it's those freed people who started off so well, before getting ground down when the feds stopped defending them.

    1301:

    The thing about Jesus is that his historical record is basically as good as (or better than) that for many historical figures.

    Not true - at least for the history of the Roman empire of that era. For prominent Romans of the day, there are thousands of documents, well preserved and cross-referencing each other for additional plausibility.

    As I and others have mentioned, there is almost no reputable documentation from that period of a person who might be Jesus.

    Note that in my opinion, the Bible doesn't count. It has mistranslations, lies inserted by monks who were "improving" it, even words in ancient languages whose meanings have been lost to time. It's also a political document, full of "my god is better than your god" stuff. Not something I'd put much trust in.

    1302:

    The thing about Jesus is that his historical record is basically as good as (or better than) that for many historical figures. Not true - at least for the history of the Roman empire of that era. For prominent Romans of the day, there are thousands of documents, well preserved and cross-referencing each other for additional plausibility.

    That's a failed argument. There are over three thousand years of history--globally--before Jesus was around. There are hundreds of thousands of Romans around during that era for whom we have no documentation, either.

    Asking for the proof of Jesus' existence to be on par with the documentary evidence of Roman emperors is silly. Why should there be, when there's no such evidence for most Romans?

    To point out how silly it is, I'll point out that the only textual records we have for the existence of Jesus are apparently the same records we have for the existence of Pontius Pilate. And he was the appointed governor of that place. If the imperial records are so bad that governors' existences are gone, why do you hold Jesus to a higher standard even than that?

    1303:

    That's a failed argument. There are over three thousand years of history--globally--before Jesus was around.

    Irrelevant.

    There are hundreds of thousands of Romans around during that era for whom we have no documentation, either.

    So? That's true of most people who have ever lived - and in a thousand years, most of us will be undocumented too.

    If the imperial records are so bad that governors' existences are gone, why do you hold Jesus to a higher standard even than that?

    Because none of those governors - or any other Roman citizens - are claiming to be the Son of God. Lofty claims require lofty evidence... :-/

    1304:

    There are over three thousand years of history--globally--before Jesus

    Your gift for understatement never ceases to astound me.

    Even if you limit it to recorded history that's right up there with "Hitler wasn't very nice" and "chickens are dinosaur descendants".

    1305:

    Re: '... only textual records we have for the existence of Jesus are apparently the same records we have for the existence of Pontius Pilate.'

    Library of Alexandria would have been handy to check for info on this - too bad its funding kept getting cut until it basically ceased operations c.250-260 AD.

    Anyways - about what Jesus might have looked like and what role he might have played is (I like to think) rooted in the Zoroastrianism from which Judaism, Islam and Christianity derived. However any arguments pro or con are based on whatever recorded history already existed leading up to and at that time. Maybe the scholars should be looking elsewhere for background info - places like Iran, Iraq?

    a) When was the Jewish bible first written and in what language/alphabet?

    Written Hebrew looks as though it was derived from already existing scripts/alphabets in the Mesopotmian region (Iran, Iraq, Armenia, Turkey, etc.)

    History of the Hebrew Alphabet

    'The Canaanite “Hebrew” alphabet is a development from the Aramaic alphabet taking place during the Persian, Hellenistic and Roman periods (c. 500 BC – 50 AD). It replaced the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet which was used in the earliest epigraphic records of the Hebrew language.'

    b)Locations of key incidents mentioned in the Old Testament - Iran, Armenia, Turkey - Noah's ark supposedly landed on Mt Ararat. Okay, boats can travel quite far in 40 days/nights, but this wasn't a powered vessel so unless there was a hell of windstorm and current along with the rain, the ark probably traveled no farther than 100-200 miles from where it was built/loaded.

    Wikipedia on Mount Ararat

    'Mount Ararat forms a near quadripoint between Turkey, Armenia, Iran, and the Nakhchivan exclave of Azerbaijan. Its summit is located some 16 km (10 mi) west of both the Iranian border and the border of the Nakhchivan exclave of Azerbaijan, and 32 km (20 mi) south of the Armenian border.'

    c)Abraham's birthplace was the City of Ur in Chaldea - Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) - polytheistic, Gilgamesh, similarities with/origins of(?) great flood, demons, afterlife, creation myth (Adam & Eve), tower of Babel, etc.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ur_of_the_Chaldees

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Mesopotamian_religion

    xd)Zoroatrianism is considered the first monotheistic religion - single creator, good god also created his nemesis evil god, day of judgment (soul - heaven/hell), virgin birth, son of god, etc.

    Zoroastrianism age

    e)Ten lost tribes - Assyria (Iran) 725-720 BC - Babylonian Jews - Esther - on-going travel to and from as well as strong religious ties between Judean and Babylonian Jews including later (69-79 AD) military support against Roman emperor Vespasian. After the Fall of Jerusalem, Babylonia became the bulwark of Judaism. The Magi according to some sources were a subset of Zoroastrian priesthood therefore following a star fits in with accounts that Zoroaster studied the stars which until modern times made him both astronomer and astrologer.

    'the Judean Jews accepted a Babylonian Jew, Ananel, as their High Priest which indicates the high esteem in which the Jews of Babylonia were held.[15] In religious matters the Babylonians, like the rest of the Diaspora, were dependent upon the Land of Israel and Jerusalem in particular, to which they were expected to travel in order to observe the festivals.'

    f)'Will the real Jesus please stand up' - modern day Iranian (Persian) actor - if you didn't know he was Iranian, you might have guessed any of a number of European ethnicities from his looks esp. given his blue eyes. (He'd be a shoo-in for the lead role for a biopic of a current Eastern European President.)

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bahram_Radan

    g) What role? - Hippie pacifist, not a gun-toting military radical. He did not resist arrest, did not plea bargain with Pilate. But also - and much worse for the PTB - he was anti-establishment/capitalist - the only time he lost his cool was with the money lenders in the temple. Socialist/humanitarian - distributed loaves & fishes to feed his audience, performed medical miracles without asking for money. Middle class - worked as a tradesman/carpenter before becoming a preacher. Non-aggressive/non-competitive - did not try to 'out-compete' already well established messiah-type preachers (John the Baptist). Most likely the Jesus in the New Testament is a composite of various messiahs of that time - 'Joshua' was a common name. (Never looked up when the name changed from 'Joshua' to 'Jesus' - maybe when the First Nicean Council decided they'd do some serious editing c. 325 AD because there were already some sects spinning off.)

    1306:

    Sorry - the formatting got buggered up!

    I wrote most of the post on a notepad and the copy&paste didn't carry over - will try to fix it next time I visit.

    1307:

    That's a really cool set of errors! Now I'll have to put my mod hat on and go see what can be made of it. I've never seen it cut off lines before.

    The fundamental silliness of Roman records in general is that the Mediterranean peoples mostly used papyrus as their writing medium until Egypt went Muslim. It's cheap and easy to write on, unlike parchment, which is expensive and which the ink dries on really slowly. Paper arrived from China centuries after the western empire fell.

    The downside to papyrus is that, unless it's kept dry, its lifespan is only few decades. People bleating triumphantly about lack of records forget this, and forget that the only records we have from that era are scraps from deserts and stuff that was copied onto more durable parchment or paper.

    Oddly enough, we're in an even worse situation now than the Romans were, with an almost complete lack of durable media and climate change biting down. If you wanted to prove you existed to some random stranger 2,000 years from now, you almost certainly couldn't do it. Your only hope is that some of the trash you left in a landfill had your name on it, and that the landfill was sufficiently anoxic to preserve it, AND that there are archeologists in 2,000 years digging through your trash to figure out who you were. That's a fairly improbable set of coincidences, even if you are someone important.

    1308:

    Sorry - the formatting got buggered up!

    Let me know if that's what you were after. I redid a couple of the links just in case.

    1309:

    You don't have your will and critical details engraved or punched into a sheet of stainless steel? Or granite? What is wrong with you people?

    Having just read Ken Mcleod's "The Sky Road" featuring the somewhat ancient Merrial I suggest that convincing someone you exist here and now is easy, in the "I refute it thus" philosophical sense. It's convincing them that you existed before recorded history began that would be tricky. Whether it would be a good idea to do that is one of the fun questions too. "I want to be a lab animal, vivisect me" is something not many people say.

    But if you did want to create those records for later, as an individual, it would be relatively easy I think. The aforementioned stainless steel sheets copied off and buried around the world would do it. At least until someone naughty decided to use one sheet to locate the rest and remove them all. But doing on a population basis would require retooling a bunch of stuff that we don't seem inclined to retool.

    Even recent genealogy is harder than it should be, it's very easy to hit parish birth records from even 100 years ago and that's the end of the line. Even if you know someone definitely existed, you're pretty sure that they were born in a given place... but ain't nothing there about them, just about a whole lot of other people who lived there then. And we're not making records like that any more.

    1310:

    For what it's worth, I think other materials (bronze, quartzite) are probably more durable.

    The thing for me is, after reading Yunkaporta's Sand Talk, I'm really less interested in being remembered at all. There really is something to be said for letting one's physical remains get recycled, forbidding mention of one's name until grief and other haunting emotions have gone away, and assuming whatever good there was in a person has gone back to heaven (or wherever) to be reborn whenever.

    This whole greediness for eternal life is very Christian, and I don't think storing everyone's bodies up until the End Times for eternal life after physics crashes is going to work all that well. I'm also increasingly wondering whether the Christian assumption of a unitary soul is even all that useful.

    Ah well, transcendental metaworry. The more sarcastic part of myself wonders if the reason why we have 300,000 years of ancestors is because they took care to have themselves broken up and recycled after death, while the current notion that our most important bits are our eternal souls has basically turned us into hoarders, with all the destruction that implies to everything we don't hoard?

    1311:

    SFR
    Zoroastrianism is considered the first monotheistic religion - REALLY?
    - As per Wiki: With possible roots dating back to the 2nd millennium BCE, Zoroastrianism enters recorded history around the middle of the 6th century BCE - right.
    Then we have This guy from approx 1351 BCE - Akhenaten.
    Um, err ....

    1312:

    Oddly enough, we're in an even worse situation now than the Romans were, with an almost complete lack of durable media and climate change biting down.

    Yup. Especially since we're starting to rely almost entirely on electronic storage for our data. Most of it will degrade in decades (or at best a century).

    There are some long-term archival media, but they are so expensive that only the Library of Congress can afford them. :-)

    Also, drive interfaces and data formats become obsolete (anybody know how to read an 8" floppy disk?). Unless data is occasionally rewritten to newer storage media, it will disappear - and who will take responsibility for rewriting the petabytes of data on the internet, for example?

    Nope, a thousand years from now, all of our glorious data will be an ancient memory... :-(

    1313:

    For Jesus, I favour the conspiracy cockup theory.

    An agreement is done with the Romans to fake up a crucifixion. Its done on private land, supporters and Romans nearby only; nobody gets to examine closely. He dies suspiciously quickly, shuffled off to a cave tomb, done.

    Unfortunately he gets spotted by supporters trying to get out of Jerusalem three days later.

    1314:

    "For what it's worth, I think other materials (bronze, quartzite) are probably more durable."

    Right now the most durable data carrying medium we have seems to be holes punched in BoPET ("mylar") or polyamide ("kapton") tape.

    Increasing density from the current 10 bytes/inch² to around a kilobyte/inch² is a no-brainer, and people with clues say that a megabyte per square-inch is not unreasonable.

    The problem is that plastic tape is far too cheap for anybody to eye a business case.

    All the proposed "advanced" long-term storoage media, have "captive audience business business model" as primary objective.

    1315:

    Whether he existed or not I think the last word on Jesus should go to Woody Guthrie from the last verse of his song “Jesus Christ”

    This song was written in New York City Of rich men, preachers and slaves Yes, if Jesus was to preach like he preached in Galillee, They would lay Jesus Christ in his grave.

    1316:

    "the Zoroastrianism from which Judaism, Islam and Christianity derived"

    Other myths sneaked in here and there, too.

    Perhaps Jesus and Johnthebaptist were really Essene Buddhists? ;-)

    1317:

    Decades ago I saw a prototype punched tape data storage system based on a 2-inch videotape substrate which could store hundreds of megabytes of data in a briefcase-sized cartridge. It went nowhere though.

    The big advantage of punched-tape records after a societal collapse is that they can be read by comparatively simple hardware knocked up in a post-apocalyptic crafting shop, or even transcribed by monks with magnifying glasses in candle-lit scriptoria. Even if the data is compressed the algorithms can be reversed by hand too, with a bit of work.

    1318:

    Damian noted: "The [Atari] ST series were desktop computers, not gaming consoles."

    Definitely. I owned a 520ST ca. 1986, and apart from disk operations, it was a lean, mean writing machine. If memory serves, STWriter (the port of the venerable AtariWriter) was probably as fast as my late-2021 MacBook Pro for writing, aided probably by the fact that the files were so small and lean. I remember feeling confident that I'd never fill my 30 Meg (not a typo!) external hard drive.

    1319:

    Grump.

    I really wanted one of those when they showed up, circa 1985-86, but I couldn't afford it—my minimum viable spec (dual floppies, mono monitor, and printer) cost nearly twice what my Amstrad PCW did, even without the software.

    By the time I could afford one, second-hand Amstrad PCs were available and had a way wider range of expansion/software options.

    So the whole ST/Amiga/Archimedes thing passed me by.

    1320:

    Do you want this one? Colour monitor, don't think I've got the printer (but might be buried further back). Porch pickup next time you're in Canada… :-)

    1321:

    Truly Jesus' greatest miracle is his seeming ability to convince even scholars and atheists that he was a historical person despite there being no evidence that he ever existed and the plain fact that cults rise up around fictional deities all the time.

    Top that Buddha.

    1322:

    Given that the original boxes are still with them, they might command a good price on ebay or Craigslist.I used to use a 2nd hand 1040STE before I bought my first Mac, with the "Warp Speed" software graphics* accelerator it was responsive. *The original graphics drivers were written in "C", an enterprising software artist whose name I don't recall rewrote those routines in 68K assembler, and threw in a screensaver (With flying toilets!) as a bonus.

    1323:

    "none of those governors - or any other Roman citizens - are claiming to be the Son of God. Lofty claims require lofty evidence"

    Factually incorrect. Roman Emperors commonly claimed to be descendants of Gods and often to actually be Gods themselves. Lots of temples to Roman Emperors have been dug up all over the empire's old lands. We know on copious evidence that Emperors were commonly worshiped as Gods. There was nothing unusual about this.

    1324:

    What you and similar people keep not admitting is that the Jesus of the Gospels etc. is NOT the only possible historial Yeshua and, in fact, is NOT what the early records say. As I and others have pointed out above, there is good evidence for a historical Jewish independence fanatic called Yeshua, but whether he was also a religious revolutionary or whether that was tacked on to him later is a MUCH more debatable issue.

    1325:

    I would love to see a kickstarter project to develop an Atari ST equivalent of the ZX Spectrum Next Issue 2, and I suspect current-generation FPGAs might be up to the task! However, the Spectrum Next 2 is currently a year overdue and not shipping for at least another year because fucking global semiconductor supply chain problems (as explained in their last-but-one update -- the FPGA vendor took their order then gave them a 60-70 week shipping estimate).

    As for the Spectrum Next 2 ... I never had a Speccy back in the day (couldn't afford one) and in inflation-adjusted pounds, this costs slightly less than the original Spectrum 16K at launch. Except it has wifi, bluetooth, a graphics coprocessor, a micro-SD card it can read/write from, an expanded BASIC interpreter and DOS, 1.5Mb of RAM (bank switched as far as the programs are concerned), emulation modes for all previous Spectrum models, and you can dump firmware onto it to convince it it's another 8-bit micro like a BBC Master. And they shipped an original version a couple of years back, so there's some hope this thing will eventually emerge, pandemic and supply chain issues permitting.

    1326:

    Factually incorrect. Roman Emperors commonly claimed to be descendants of Gods and often to actually be Gods themselves.

    Of course. But they're not founders of one of today's world-wide religions. Which is what we've been discussing.

    1327:

    Jesus Mythicism is a position only held by cranks, with some overlap into the more annoying sorts of atheist. If anyone really wants to get into the details, Tim O'Neill's many, many posts on the topic are pretty convincing rebuttals of it. They are all very long reads, though. And if you find yourself disagreeing you can raise it in the comments below even quite old pieces and he'll turn up and probably shred you.

    1328:

    Factually incorrect. Roman Emperors commonly claimed to be descendants of Gods and often to actually be Gods themselves. Of course. But they're not founders of one of today's world-wide religions. Which is what we've been discussing.

    It's fascinating that you, pretty much alone of the commenters here, want Jesus to be special and different.

    In this case, you're also factually incorrect, because you've neglected to define what a religion is as you're using it. So let's look at impactful belief systems, not books. What belief system has had the most impacts on Eurasia in the Common Era?

    The beliefs promulgated by Jesus' disciples are actually practiced by a tiny minority of those who claim to be Christians. For most it's a flag of convenience at best.

    It's far easier to argue that the self-claimed divinity of kings and emperors has had a greater impact on Eurasian history than Jesus actually had. Therefore, I'd assert that the emperors of Rome, and the divine connections they proselytized, actually founded the real religion governing Europe for two millennia, with this being shown in the Kaisers, Czars, and attempts by rulers to create the Next Rome, from Charlemagne and the Holy Roman Empire right up through the Russian Empire, Third Reich, and possibly even the EU.

    If this is the case, why are you so focused on Jesus?

    1329:

    That would likely be outside of my hobby budget, but amazing. At one time the remainder of Motorola's chip facility offered a PPC chip with a 68K compatible mode, if it still existed might be a possibility. Another possibility is Graphics Environment Manager that was the basis for the Atari ST desktop has gone open source, recent NUC boxes might have enough power to run GEM and a 68K emulator. The 1040 ST with monochrome monitor (VGA compatible/W dongle) was very usable with the Marcel 2.2 word processor.

    1330:

    Fairly sure current Raspberry Pi 4 boards can easily emulate almost any of the early/late 80s machines. For your $35 you can have Mac OS 8/9, DOS (whyyyyyyy?), Atari, Spectrum, PDP, Alto, IBM 360, etc etc. And you can run RISC OS directly of course.

    Unless you really feel driven for specialised obsession reasons, why bother with hardware solutions?

    1331:

    You have read about Margaret Atwood's new edition of The Handmaid's Tale, on an unburnable book, right?

    1332:

    Back in the sixties, there was a best-seller - I forget the title - that suggest that the "plan" was for Yeshua to be crucified on a Friday, because the region being Jewish, he would be taken down by sundown (the Sabbath), but the spear wasn't in the plan.

    1333:

    I would love to see a kickstarter project to develop an Atari ST equivalent of the ZX Spectrum Next Issue 2, and I suspect current-generation FPGAs might be up to the task!

    Its already a thing in some FPGA hobby quarters. There is a cycle-accurate 68k core which could be used in such a project. But that was a few years ago, and I don't know if anything has happened since.

    It looks like the job for a ready-to-use Atari ST would be integrating this with a bunch of other open source IP (e.g. making a thumb drive look like a giant floppy disk) and then putting a nice retro box around a suitable collection of hardware.

    1334:

    Ahh, found some more.

    https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/AtariST\_MiSTer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLU9d1WQOWE

    So not quite the ready-to-go Atari ST in a nice box, but if you are happy with some-assembly-required then you can probably get going with only a few weekends of dedicated hacking.

    1335:

    Heteromeles @ 1300:

    Part of the problem with finding the historical (hysterical?) Jesus is that from late in the 1st century CE onward, few of the extant writings about him come from his Jewish followers; those who grew up among people who KNEW him in the real world.

    It's all Paul & his followers.

    Paul was a Pharisaic Jew from Tarsus in what is today Turkey. Many of his teachings ran counter to Jewish beliefs as he attempted to make accepting Christianity more palatable to gentiles (i.e. the Greeks & the Romans who knew little or nothing about Jewish life) - circumcision not required & you don't have to follow Jewish dietary laws to be a follower of Jesus.

    As the Roman Empire became Christianized, Christianity became Romanized ... same thing I think happened with the Britons. When the Roman Army was finally pulled out of Britain they left behind locals who were fully assimilated into the Roman way of life, including following the the Roman State Religion which was by that time "Christianity".

    I believe that 2,000 some years ago there WAS a preacher in that corner of the Roman Empire that we know today as Jesus, because that's the simplest explanation for how it started & what came after.

    But I doubt anyone is going to find verifiable contemporary written sources after all this time.

    1336:

    The Spectrum Next is a Spectrum motherboard at heart: you can order just the mobo and transplant it into an existing Spectrum. Works with all the original hardware accessories. It's not simply an emulator.

    1337:

    Kardashev @ 1280:

    I'll grant that all of the works cited have verisimilitude.

    However, I don't agree the concept (conceit) that yankees could have or would have stamped out racism in the south if only Reconstruction had been more rigidly enforced & maintained after the War of the Rebellion. That concept does NOT have verisimilitude.

    For one thing, the yankees couldn't get rid of racism in their own ranks. As I've repeatedly pointed out, Jim Crow was a NATIONAL disgrace, not something that happened ONLY in the south.

    How they gonna' remove the plank from their own eye?

    1338:

    I know; hence my point about “specialised obsession “. Some people really, really want it one way, others want another. Life can be fun!

    As Bernard pointed out, it’s one of those irregular verbs. I like silk, you are obsessed with rubber, he is a dangerous pervert, they are a banned organisation.

    1339:

    A Raspberry PI might be good enough, if I ever decide to commit to setting one up.

    1340:

    Nojay @ 1318:

    I favor Microfiche. It's readable with nothing more than a simple magnifying glass.

    1341:

    Holes don't discolour or flake off or bleach out or fade unlike fiche and other photographic film materials. Digging up an archive of microfiche or even regular printed materials from a muddy hole in the ground five hundred years after the asteroid impact isn't going to reveal much. Mylar punched tape or similar is like cuneiform tablets in many ways.

    1342:

    "I'll grant that all of the works cited have verisimilitude."

    I think we're getting into "have to agree to disagree" territory.

    The works I cited were chosen not to have verisimilitude, at least as I understand the term.

    1343:

    "If this is the case, why are you so focused on Jesus?"

    Why are you putting words in my mouth? Your post appears to me merely a fantasy about someone. Whoever that someone is, it is certainly not me. I never said nor implied any of that, and that's because I don't believe nor subscribe to any of it.

    One might almost suspect that you are trying to deflect attention from the fact that you said something factually wrong. But I would appreciate your dealing with what I actually said, not your fantasies about who I am. Attacking the person in response to a criticism is nothing new, of course, but it is no more reasonable than it ever was. Which was and is not at all.

    1344:

    " few of the extant writings about him come from his Jewish followers; those who grew up among people who KNEW him in the real world."

    That's right or at least rightish. We don't know who wrote any of the canonical gospels and they don't look like they primarily derive from first-hand sources. Second-hand at best, though there are parts that look like they came from first-hand: arrest, trial, execution.

    1345:

    "But they're not founders of one of today's world-wide religions. Which is what we've been discussing."

    There were many "founders" of Christianity. Paul was much more a founder than Jesus. Jesus seems to have been a mostly observant Jew who would be utterly astounded at what people claimed about him after his death.

    Christianity was clearly heavily influenced by the Roman empire. It was spread mostly by Greek speaking Roman citizens and, of course, slaves. Paul himself says he is a Roman Citizen and his letters were in Greek.

    There is a reason they call it "Roman Catholicism", you know.

    1346:

    ADMINISTRATIVE NOTE

    That's enough Jesus Babble, folks. No more religion. The tone's turning nasty and it's uninteresting to yr. host.

    1347:

    and there was much rejoicing.

    1348:

    "Verisimiltude" - as in "The Mikado" I presume?

    Did someone say Essene Buddhists? - my brain hurts.
    - I think Charlie's right. let's stop before we go binkers or bonkers as the case may be.

    1350:

    can u get a raspberry pi for $35 atm tho? all the ones i can see seem to be from scalpers wanting $150+

    1351:

    Sorry, all my rejoicification is currently being used for the change of government. Can we try this again in a week or so?

    1352:

    Many of the links on the webpage you are dead (as are, I suspect, the companies behind them). I'd guess the entire solar heating project is similarly pushing up the daisies. It supposedly started in mid-2019 so there should have been at least some progress to report otherwise by now. Still, it's renewables and Green and all that.

    1353:

    Yes; buy only from authorised resellers such as PiMoRoNi, buyapi.ca, adafruit etc. Farnell also seem to get stock and most of them will take ‘tell me when’ orders. You may have to wait a while even though Eben tells me they are still producing ~500,000 a month. Keep an eye on news at the raspberrypi.com official site.

    1354:

    Look likes some experimenters had fun creating a cyanobacteria-powered Arm Cortex M0+. Basically, they're sucking electricity out of photosynthesis and doing stuff with it. The limits seem interesting.

    Now I'm wondering how big a cyanobacteria cell would be required to power a Raspberry Pi emulating DOS (hey, if you're working with pond scum....). My guess is that we're talking somewhere around a tennis court-sized power cell. Soccer pitch? Would it be...practical?

    1355:

    Did someone say Essene Buddhists? - my brain hurts.

    Staying away from the Essenes, Buddhism did indeed expand west early on. You can google on "Greco-Buddhism" to your heart's content. It's hard at this remove to figure out whether Buddhism in the classical Mediterranean was like Buddhism in the modern West, or whether it was more fringe and exotic.

    If you really want your mind blown properly, contemplate the possibility that western alchemy is the form that Chinese Taoism took after a passage down the Silk Road. At least one western Taoist researcher asserts this, and since he's also a Taoist priest (nice gig for a tenured professor of religious studies), I don't think it should be dismissed out of hand, even if it turns out to be unsupported by the evidence.

    Regardless, it appears that some people in the classical world were cosmopolitans, two millennia before the word was invented.

    1356:

    Sorry, all my rejoicification is currently being used for the change of government. Can we try this again in a week or so?

    Ah yes. Congratulations! I'm properly jealous.

    At the moment, I'm just wondering if any good will come out of the national NRA conference, which opens up this weekend in Texas. Normally, guns are forbidden at their conferences, but Texas law mandates that legal carry is permissible. Except where IQ.45 is addressing them. So of course, as a law-abiding citizen, and especially as one who doesn't want Charlie to get in trouble, I do hope it's peaceful. Whether there will be any rapid-fire exchanges, of ideas? If so, I hope it turns out for the best.

    1357:

    I mentioned that I live in one of the electorates that now has a Green MP, didn’t I? We’ll anyhow, there is still a chance of one more seat. Pity we didn’t unseat Dutton, but it feels more in reach now too.

    1358:

    Well, yes, I not only voted, I handed out "how to vote cards" and blithered at people for a while. It was all very friendly, this is a safe Labor seat and even the neofascists seemed like pleasant enough morons rather than the sort of problematic people they want to have in government. A pleasantly surprising number of people wanted Green HTV's, but the actual first preference vote here didn't reflect my experience. ~5% only took a Green HTV but I was at the only booth in the electorate that preferred the (il)Liberal candidate. At least she's a Muslim woman, which beats the usual Liberal run of straight white men... but she's in an unwinnable seat so fulfils their policy of only putting up diverse candidates when there's no risk of them polluting the cabinet room.

    I tried the active listening (whatever the latest euphemism is) and one guy explained to me that he doesn't trust rich people to run the country properly so he's supporting a mining/real estate billionaire instead. He also appreciated the contributions of Our Lord Rupert to the political system so I can only assume his understanding of "rich people" is defective. He may have been reluctant to say because I was handing out Greens propaganda so if he's against the "inner city elites" it would have been rude to point the finger (we're inner city by any reasonable definition, except that Limited News seem to reserve that for green/teal voting suburbs not blue collar ones like this).

    I was hoping that a bunch of your lunatics would be permanently relocating to Hungary now they've experienced the joys of managed democracy or whatever the euphemism they use there is.

    1359:

    You lucky man!

    On balance I'd rather have Tony Burke in the house doling his thing than the alternatives. Our Greens candidate is all very nice as a person and that, but to say they're politically inexperienced would be generous. I keep tossing up actually joining the party but the reasons I haven't in the past still apply. So I try to fly under the official party radar and just help out when I can. In the meantime I think I've managed to avoid their email lists etc, but my phone number has leaked into their system so I've got a few SMS's. Mind you, I got an SMS from Labor plus a celebratory email invitation to a community BBQ thing. I think they're all very very happy :)

    I'm torn between hoping the Liberals go "holy shit we fucked up" and reverse course so we have a slightly more reasonable group in parliament with Dutton as the "someone has to do it" interim leader; and the more likely IMO version where they double down and keep running against anything and everything the government try to do. With the help of Our Lord Rupert and His Terrible Minions (I can't decide whether that's a Terry Pratchett reference or more a biblical one). The Nationals definitely appear committed to the firey doom option. Give it another month for the dust to clear and we shall see.

    1360:

    "If this is the case, why are you so focused on Jesus?"

    Why are you putting words in my mouth?

    You perhaps missed that Heteromeles was replying to one of my comments.

    1361:

    and there was much rejoicing.

    I agree! :-)

    1362:

    Whether there will be any rapid-fire exchanges, of ideas? If so, I hope it turns out for the best.

    :-)

    1363:

    Moz said: more likely IMO version where they double down

    I've been watching about 3 orders of magnitude more talking heads than normal, so I can't point to a specific thing. It's all mush now. However the majority of what I'm hearing (the lib from Nowra who's name escapes me excepted) seems to be "you stupid proles are stupid, you'll come back for more because you love me and you need me to control you because of how stupid you are" in the sort of classic DV rhetoric. They're fairly open about it.

    1364:

    “The Indians have their own designs of heavy-water reactor (PHWR) which have similar issues…”

    If I remember my history correctly it’s actually a fork off the CANDU design. They were buying CANDUs until the Canadians cut them off after the first Indian nuclear weapon test. After that India continued developing the technology on their own.

    1365:

    They were open during the campaign too, Scotty "I can change" Morrison was a bit of a lowlight for me. Especially because it was the classic vague offer that things might not be so bad next time.

    I'm still reading Guardian and blogs rather than video, I limit the video to the occasional foray into ABC TV (now that iView requires an account, which is complete WTF, although I recall the BBC did the same thing (but presumably they require a TV license number to prove you've paid for access))

    The satire sites have been struggling a bit, although less so than during the election campaign. The latest bit about Plibersek having to apologise to Voltemort after she compared him to Dutton has been fun.

    1366:

    Well it seems a bit generational. Will they go with Dutton, will Dutton go full Trump, and will it work? Assuming the answers are yes, yes and Hell no, it could mean they are out of office for a generation. I suspect it’s the middle yes that might be a no, he might be a poisonous toad but he’s not (that) stupid. But you never know. Labor would also have to make happy with the new independents (and Greens!), and especially help ensure they get re-elected, at the ones in seats that are not winnable for Labor. It remains to be seen whether the capacity to do that is in the ALP’s soul.

    1367:

    "Labor would also have to make happy with the new independents (and Greens!), and especially help ensure they get re-elected, at the ones in seats that are not winnable for Labor."

    If they do that, then they should make sure they do not put up their own candidates and then undercut them. That rarely ends well.

    Yes, they weren't going to get in anyway, but it still leaves a very sour taste.

    JHomes

    1368:

    H
    NRA / Texas shooting & Biden saying Second Amendment not "Absolute"
    Suggestion: Leave the Amendment, but regulate "The Militia" - if you want a gun, or to keep an existing one, fine, no problem, but you MUST join a "Regulated Militia" group ... to be defined in the legislation with controls & membership lists & health checks.
    Wonder if that would fly?

    1369:

    With preferential voting it's quite rare for a major party not to run a candidate in any election. The Coalition even do that to themselves in some places, despite the name (this is the explicit Liberal-National-LiberalNational-Country coalition).

    Occasionally we do see parties not run candidates in a particular seat as the result of some kind of deal, but I suspect if a major party did that for an independent it would be a first for Australia.

    What matters is what resources a party puts into a given seat, and how much energy they spend on negative efforts against each other candidate. Generally candidates who can't win get the short end of everything, with enough budget for posters and how to vote cards at polling places and that's about it. When a party is competing hard you get local TV ads, visits from popular senior party figures, the works. And a huge negative effort against the opposition, regardless of who that is.

    What really tells in terms of forecasting this is how they act during the term. Because if they're going hard and talking shit when they need the help of those candidates you can bet that come election time the gloves will be off. This is one reason Tony Abbott didn't last... he couldn't be nice even to his fellow Coalition members, let alone Senators who were rude enough to belong to an entirely different political party.

    1370:

    they should make sure they do not put up their own candidates and then undercut them

    It actually doesn't work that way here due to certain features of Australia's electoral system. The main reason is preferential voting, where you number candidates in order of preference. After the first count, the candidate who got the least number of first preferences (the "primary" vote) is eliminated from the count and their ballots are re-distrubuted according to the second preferences on each ballot. This process is repeated until there are only two candidates left (aka the "two candidate preferred" result) where the candidate with the most primary votes plus preferences wins. In some electorates the significant race is for second place in primaries.

    For the most part it is seen as a good form to run a candidate in every electorate if you can, on the premise that you should give all voters the opportunity to vote for you. This leads to "opportunity candidates" in unwinnable seats, and they can therefore make a nifty proving ground for junior aspiring politicians of all stripes. Or for the conservative side that seems to be where they run their "diversity candidates", something that I think probably diminishes all Australians. Historically, also, the Liberal Party and the National Party, who collectively make up the Conservative Coalition* have agreed not to run candidates in the same seats as each other.

    Anyhow, the so-called "teal independents" who have won several conservative electorates in last Saturday's election are mostly professional women with a conservative background with progressive views on climate change, corruption and women. In the recent past, their natural political home has been the moderate wing of the Liberal Party. But the latter has lurched significantly to the right in recent years, especially on climate, corruption and women, but also on LGTBI rights, religious discrimination (they think it's a good thing) and defence and foreign policy. Hence the remarks between Moz and myself upthread about how that party is responding to this election loss. It looks like they may be doubling down, and I dearly hope this will lead to their electoral oblivion.

    * In Queensland they have actually merged, to form the Liberal National Party.

    1371:

    FWIW this is a fairly highly regarded (and certainly widely distributed) source on preferential voting:

    https://www.chickennation.com/voting/

    1372:

    »Suggestion: Leave the Amendment, but regulate "The Militia"«

    … suggested in the proud tradition of "all that's wrong with politics in USA":

    "Is there a quick hack we can slap on, so we avoid the hard work of solving the actual problem ?"

    1373:

    P H-K But it would really introduce quite strict Gun controls, whilst keeping the Sacred Holy "Constitooton" intact!
    Though I think the NRA & the Rethuglicans would still fight agin it, tooth & nail.

    I must look back on the beeb to see if I can find some Texas "R" who is still defending the right to freely slaughter children, whom they interviewed today.
    They really are quite, utterly criminally insane ...

    1374:

    That could be the case. The Indians have been talking about using some exotic fuel mixes in their PHWRs, including a cocktail of 19.7% Medium Enriched Uranium (MEU), plutonium and thorium but I don't know how that's getting along. The nucleonics and fuel isotopic chemistry of a fuel mix like that is a bit less well-known than classic 3.5% enriched uranium as used in PWRs and BWRs.

    1375:

    Para 3 - No idea about the web, which I only use for Scottish and sometimes sports news. BBC 1 definitely had an interview with a Texan who was basically saying "the right to arm bears is more important than people's lives" this morning.

    1376:

    »They really are quite, utterly criminally insane ...«

    ...speaking of "the actual problem"

    1377:

    The difficulty AIUI is that SCOTUS has previously ruled that the "well-regulated militia" is a state-level function, not a federal function, and so while Congress could legislate to say that you have to be in your state's "well-regulated militia", Texas (to name an example state) would set up its regulations so that you're in the militia if you say you are, and then you're done.

    Added to that, the federal level Democratic Party seems incapable of poking the Republican bear. They won't even attempt to push through legislation unless they can get the result they want - they seem unwilling to take baby steps and then shout about Republican blocking of their efforts. I have no idea how much of this is the Dems not doing things, and how much of it is a lack of good reporting, mind.

    1378:

    "some exotic fuel mixes"

    Speaking of fuel, do you know why HALEU (High Assay Low Enriched Uranium) is called that rather than "Medium Enriched"? What's the assay part about anyway?

    1379:

    Wonder if that would fly?

    The problem isn't militias; the problem is the normalization of violence in American culture, especially on the white wing. Easy access to guns combined with a culture that idolizes and normalizes violence makes spree killings happen.

    The gun manufacturers have a strong interest in marketing heavily because guns don't wear out in anything less than decades to centuries. Racism is an easy lever to pull if you want to sell weapons -- you just tickle the elite panic reflex and offer an AR-15 to make the mostly non-existent threat of Bad People go away. And of course you have to buy politicians to pass laws to make it easy to buy guns without a background check, which is where the NRA and ALEC come in handy.

    No, fixing the second amendment won't fix the USA's gun problem.

    If I had Aladdin's Lamp my first wish would be that, on a worldwide basis: anyone who seeks to injure or kill another human being by means of a projectile weapon will receive the first projectile they launch straight between their own eyes. If you shoot someone? You die, no exceptions.

    (For purposes of rules-lawyering: crew-served weapons such as artillery, missiles, and bombers count, and everyone in the kill chain, all the way up to the commanding officer or politician who ordered the strike, gets the same treatment. No exceptions. If you try to get around it by farming the aiming and decision-making power out to a piece of software, all the managers and programmers responsible are treated as triggermen.)

    This leaves a few gaps. Tasers are a grey area: they're not intentionally lethal though, so not banned outright. Armies can still function with spears and swords and heavy airlift and APCs with the guns dismounted, just about. Hijacked passenger jets and car bombs will work, as will smuggled basement nukes. Or gas. You can use a gun to commit suicide, no problem. And guns are fine for hunting or target shooting. But you don't need one for self-defense if the "bad guy with a gun" dies the instant they pull the trigger. Cops don't normally need one either, unless they're on animal control.

    But this is about all I can think of that would stop spree shootings in the USA, and it's a bit of a reach, isn't it?

    1380:

    Greg, they're not insane. It's much worse than that.

    Via Public citizen, here's a list of Republican senators who receive donations from the NRA:

    Senators bankrolled by the NRA:

    Mitt Romney: $13,648,000

    Richard Burr: $6,987,000

    Roy Blunt: $4,556,000

    Thom Tillis: $4,421,000

    Marco Rubio: $3,303,000

    Joni Ernst: $3,125,000

    Josh Hawley: $1,392,000

    Mitch McConnell: $1,267,000

    Ted Cruz: $176,000

    Source: Newsweek.

    Ted Cruz got nearly $10,000 per dead primary school kid to carry water for the gun lobby. Do you think he's going to change?

    Mitch McConnell got $50,000 per dead child. Same goes for him, too.

    1381:

    "Merely corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative."

    1382:

    For purposes of rules-lawyering: crew-served weapons such as artillery, missiles, and bombers count, and everyone in the kill chain, all the way up to the commanding officer or politician who ordered the strike, gets the same treatment. No exceptions.

    Perhaps you ought to include the voters who got those politicians elected too. That might straighten out the U.S.A... :-/

    1383:

    I don't think Americans are uniquely violent, I think we're uniquely armed.

    I did a deep dive trying to find statistics comparing violent crime without guns in the US versus the developed world - it's a minor trope in the US that without guns, other violent crime increases.

    And what seems to be true is that violent crime excluding guns seems to be similar per capita among Western countries (notably, the US and the UK seem to have identical per capita murders with non gun stuff) - it unsurprisingly seems to relate more strongly to poverty rates.

    That broadly matches across the US where percent of gun ownership varies. If you exclude gun crimes, the rate of violence is disconnected.

    Which makes sense - the whole point of guns is that they make violence easy. So situations that would not escalate to violence sans guns easily become such, and it's much easier to impulsively shoot someone than impulsively stab them.

    So I'm not convinced culture of violence is the answer here. It's access.

    Having said all that, the American mythology around violence and guns is absolutely a reason why it's hard to make meaningful changes. There's particularly a strain to toxic masculinity that manifests around it.

    (I'd note that even if you get gun laws enacted, we've also got the issue that the people enforcing them are also often right wing gun nuts, so...)

    1384:

    There was a story I read many years ago in which something like that happened. You cause pain to some other person? You get an equal amount of pain[1]. You kill someone? You die.

    The problem was that this included ALL animals on earth, not just humans. So predators would quickly go extinct. Scavengers would survive a little longer, feasting on the bodies of the dead predator and prey. Then without food, they too would die. Herbivores would multiply, denude their food sources, then die.

    Presumably the aliens who did this were aiming for a quick biosphere collapse, followed by terraforming Earth to their standards. Although that was NOT stated.

    [1] "Pain" was clarified at the end of the story to explicitly include mental anguish inflicted upon you by someone else. Presumably the aliens who did this were not themselves affected by this condition.

    1385:

    If I had Aladdin's Lamp my first wish would be that, on a worldwide basis: anyone who seeks to injure or kill another human being by means of a projectile weapon will receive the first projectile they launch straight between their own eyes.

    That would be somewhat unsatisfactory for people who tend to comparably physically weak and whose likely attackers tend to physically stronger. Why limit this to projectile weapons? If the Djinn can do that they could also cover all cases of intent to physically harm. e.g. domestic violence could become a lot less common if the beater-up would receive the same beating as the beaten-up.

    1386:

    To emphasise your gun culture point; I've been in a big name store in the USA (not a specialist gun retailer, just a store that sells guns among other things) and had a staff member try to sell me a gun. When I told them that I wasn't a US resident or citizen, so could not buy a gun legally, they offered to do the paperwork in their name and just let me take the gun, as long as I got cash to buy it with instead of paying with my UK card.

    And this was in California, where it's illegal to buy and sell guns without getting a dealer to record the transfer, where there's a legally mandated wait time between buying the gun and taking possession, and where I'm supposed to have a state-issued certificate before I can buy a gun. If it can happen in a state that has rather harsh gun regulations by US standards, I can see it happening in states with lax gun regulations, too.

    1387:

    No idea. Low Enriched (LEU) is usually below 5% U-235 depending on specific fuel formulations. Medium Enriched (MEU) tops out at 20% -- there's a complicated nucleonics reason why 19.7% is a sweet spot that I don't really understand unless I've got the explanation written down in front of me. Sometimes MEU is rolled into LEU as a general classification. The Iranian enrichment plants have produced enriched uranium up to this 20% limit, officially. Various Western intelligence services see this 20% grade production as a step closer to breakout capability to make weapons-grade material in bulk if they decide they need to.

    Highly Enriched (HEU) is anything more than 20%-enriched basically, all the way up to 80%-plus bomb grade. Non-bomb-grade HEU was used in the past in research reactors to provide lots of hot tasty neutrons for assorted purposes but there's been a process around the world to either close those reactors or convert them to use LEU instead, since the presence of HEU outside declared nuclear weapons facilities is regarded as a proliferation risk. Just a few weeks ago a research reactor in Kazakhstan was restarted after being converted to use LEU/MEU rather than its original HEU fuel, and recently Japan sent 30kg of HEU from several research sites to the US for disposal.

    1388:

    I don't think Americans are uniquely violent, I think we're uniquely armed.

    I dunno about that. Back in the days before Canada had gun control, when a teenager could walk into the hardware store and buy a gun and ammo, the Canadian murder rate was a lot lower than the American murder rate.

    Even with gun control, the border is porous enough that getting a gun is pretty easy up here. Weapons like the AR-15 are illegal in Canada, but there are estimated to be over 100,000 of them up here.

    Easy access to firearms seems to boost the suicide rate more than it boosts the homicide rate.

    1389:

    The problem was that this included ALL animals on earth, not just humans. So predators would quickly go extinct. Scavengers would survive a little longer, feasting on the bodies of the dead predator and prey. Then without food, they too would die. Herbivores would multiply, denude their food sources, then die.

    I remember that story too. "Rule Golden" by Damon Knight.

    1390:

    Wonder if that would fly?

    No. Biden currently has the unenviable, and inevitable, job of having to say something, even though everybody knows the situation won't change.

    As JBS has already mentioned, the US has well-regulated militias: the US military and the National Guards. The self-organized citizens' militias are drug gangs waiting to happen (the drugs start moving when they need money and turn to organized crime to keep themselves fed). Back after the Civil War the self-organized militias got into robbing trains and banks, and you probably enjoyed watching dramatizations of those in movies.

    Bearing arms? In pre-1970s usage, that meant serving in the military. Having a weapon on your person wasn't bearing arms unless you were under orders. The underlying point is that every sane, healthy, and upstanding citizen could serve, and we weren't about to have military and non-military castes, as in Europe at the time.

    Why the violence? It's really simple: the slave-owning southerners and their spiritual descendants know that random, lone-wolf violence works wonders in politics. Every single US president who's died by violence was assassinated by either a lone wolf or a small cabal, starting with the one they hated the most: Lincoln (followed by Garfield, McKinley, and Kennedy). Teddy Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan got shot but survived. This isn't limited to the US. Anyone remember how WW I started? Anyone know about Japanese politics in the 1930s? Gandhi? King?

    One way to make sure random violence works its political magic is to have lots of guns lying around. This gets us to the second problem: the US used to make really, really good guns. They were so good that you could shoot them for generations. This is a problem, because it's hard for gun makers to stay in business if their products don't become obsolete, and in fact a number of gun manufacturers went out of business prior to the NRAs about-face. The consumer guns they make nowadays are not only not durable, they're infinitely customizable. Buy all your favorite shiny gadgets, just like computers. They're meant to be consumed, not treasured.

    The plastic guns fill another critical role: with the US as the "arsenal of freedom" during the Cold War, we needed to have a robust small arms industry. Gun makers going out of business doesn't go well with making and selling military weapons. So...they had to make consumer guns, and they have to have a powerful lobbying arm to keep that industry afloat: the NRA. This is the hellish deal that US Presidents have to accept: being imprisoned in a massive but imperfect security bubble against lone wolves, because US politics needs guns and an international arms trade.

    Seems silly? Imagine what British politics would be like if Guy Fawkes had succeeded, and set the tone for how reactionaries succeed in British politics for the entire imperial and post-imperial periods. What would Parliament be like? That's kind of where we are now in the US.

    There are a lot of things that a majority of Americans in both parties would change if they could: banning arms for the mentally ill or those likely to commit crimes. Requiring a license to purchase a gun. Possibly insurance. Limits on guns designed solely for killing people. This is where political change could happen, EXCEPT for the politics of the lone wolf gunman threat, and who's wielding it now. OGH's list of NRA bloodsuckers shows how that works.

    Anyway, if I had my Aladdin's lamp, I'd simply wish overwhelming sanity and compassion on everyone who starts plotting violence, coercive or otherwise, against another human. This won't stop self-defense, but I'd rather anyone contemplating running amok locked their guns away and did something else with their lives.

    1391:

    Remember the muckers from John Brunner's Stand on Zanibar?

    1392:

    Remember the muckers from John Brunner's Stand on Zanibar?

    Yeah, but it's unfortunately not funny. I was kind of stunned when I'd read about both the amoks and the spree killers. In both cases, a male loser with a major grievance gets armed and kills or injures a dozen people, normally plus or minus three (there are, unfortunately, outliers on the upper side). When I tried to point the pattern out to various people, I got a "we're nothing like those people, going postal is totally not running amok" response for years. Turns out I wasn't the only one who noticed the pattern, and it's quite widespread, not limited to Indonesia or the US.

    The problem with the US is that a political bloc (used to be democrats, now movement Republicans) has found it useful to hybridize running amok with the old anarchist propaganda of the deed, to get stochastic terrorism, which ol' Wikipedia shoehorns in as a type of lone wolf attack. Anyway, when you see "dog whistles," "red meat for the base," and various things like QAnon, they're trying among other things to nurture the next generation of lone wolves, because that's an important part of their power.

    1393:

    Gotta admit, though, if I wanted to talk about something, I'd fanboy on Prehistoric Planet. That's a jaw-dropping show. The dinosaurs are so realistic that, while I was watching it on my computer, one of my cats came up and begged to watch it with me. She normally prefers those "birds for cats" videos from YouTube, but to her, the dinosaurs were so realistic that she was perfectly happy, curled up beside me and watching what basically appears to be a top line BBC nature documentary filmed in the late Cretaceous. And that's the point: CGI's gotten so good that they can make a Planet Earth documentary set in the late Cretaceous, although it took Jon Favreau directing, David Attenborough narrating, Hans Zimmer composing the music, and a couple of my favorite paleontologists as the science consultants to pull it off.

    The only problem is it's on Apple TV+, which tells you where the production money is right now. But if you like Apple products, this is a really good one.

    1394:

    Sorry for the Triptych, but back to gun violence. Heather Cox Richardson's Letters from an American are daily posts, and she's a well-known American history professor.

    Her post last night started: "All day, I have been coming back to this: How have we arrived at a place where 90% of Americans want to protect our children from gun violence, and yet those who are supposed to represent us in government are unable, or unwilling, to do so?

    "This is a central problem not just for the issue of gun control, but for our democracy itself."

    You may say "American blah blah blah guns blah blah blah crazy/violent." But what Dr. Richardson's writing here is probably more accurate. Almost none of us want this.

    1395:

    Nojay @ 1342:

    I doubt either will be recognizable if they spend multiple thousands of years in "a muddy hole in the ground". "Modern" computers no longer use punched tape, so it's going to have to be specially prepared as an archive and that's going to require preparation & packaging to preserve the contents. That would hold true for a Microfiche archive as well.

    Once it's been dug out, will those distant future archeologists RECOGNIZE the punched holes as information? Or will it be like the toilet seat necklace the archeologist wore in one of Asimov's (??) stories? And even if they do recognize it as information, WILL they be able to decipher it like cuneiform ... or will it be an unknown language like Minoan Linear A?

    At least with Microfiche there can be some recognizable images to give them a clue. Even better, package hand readers along with the archive.

    Plus Microfiche can be more easily mass produced (because the technology may be obsolete, but it's still in use). Copies of the archives could be distributed widely to ensure at least some of them would survive the asteroid intact.

    Here's a thought - suppose you wanted to make a physical copy of Wikipedia for an archive to hedge against an uncertain technological future; a seed of our current state of knowledge available to those post-asteroid impact archeologists ...

    How many miles of punched Mylar tape would that require? How many Microfiches?

    How much work would be required to "update" a page if the information was radically altered by some new scientific discovery and you wanted to add the new information to your archive?

    With Microfiche you'd only have to retrieve & replace a few cards. How would you do it with a Mylar tape?

    And Microfiche doesn't have to be "deciphered" on the other end.

    1396:

    H@1311 muses: "less interested in being remembered at all. There really is something to be said for letting one's physical remains get recycled, forbidding mention of one's name until grief and other haunting emotions have gone away, "

    As usual Shakespeare got there first; ponder these lines from The Tempest...

    "Our revels now are ended. These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits, and Are melted into air, into thin air. And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on; and our little life Is rounded with a sleep."

    Couldn't have said it better myself.

    1397:

    Greg Tingey @ 1369:

    The Constitution of the United States:
    Article. I.
    Section. 8.
    The Congress shall have Power ...
    (Paragraph 16) To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress;

    The Second Amendment DID NOT NEGATE THAT POWER, only ensured the Federal Government could not abolish the state militias. That's WHY the Second Amendment says

    "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, ..."

    The lunatics who took over the NRA and their lackey toadies on the Extreme Supreme Court won't admit it, and I doubt the RepubliQans in Congress are going to allow Congress to do it's job, but Congress has always had the power to regulate the arms people have the right to bear ... and the conditions under which THE PEOPLE will bear arms.

    The idea that there is some kind of disorganized militia beyond the reach of Congress's power "To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining" is complete & utter nonsense.

    1398:

    Heteromeles @ 1391:

    If I had three wishes, I'd ask for good health, wisdom & empathy and to get the roof fixed so it don't leak.

    1399:

    That would be somewhat unsatisfactory for people who tend to comparably physically weak and whose likely attackers tend to physically stronger.

    Aaaand it had to happen! We got one, the gun violence equivalent of the space cadets' "all you need to eat on a space colony is blue-green algae and soy" reductionism.

    Seriously. Figures from the US show that if you try to use a gun to defend yourself during a home invasion you're twice as likely to be killed with your own weapon as if you didn't have one.

    Physical strength is always a factor in confrontations, even if it's only in terms of its impact on the aggressor's self-confidence and state of mind. You could ban all weapons and some drunk asshole is going to kick the living shit out of his partner and/or kids.

    Without guns, escalation is a whole lot harder. Eventually we'd see a social readjustment to bloody-handed knifework or, I dunno, maybe the right to keep and bear swords would make a come-back.

    But in the mean time we'd make spree killings a whole lot harder.

    1400:

    Heteromeles @ 1395:

    The thing that bothers me is who are the 10% who DON'T WANT TO PROTECT CHILDREN from gun violence and WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH THEM?

    1401:

    Charlie Stross @ 1400:

    I still contend the best defense against "home invasion" is a large noisy dog. Far less likely to mistakenly attack your kids when they try to sneak in after curfew.

    In so far as "weapons" go, I have a hatchet. It does double duty for splitting kindling.

    I like guns & enjoyed shooting when I was in the National Guard. And I believe that if I had needed to I could have fired "shots in anger". I'm just as happy I never did. But I don't own a gun. Hopefully I'll never NEED to.

    I worry a lot sometimes about someone breaking in here when I'm not home and stealing my guitars ... but a guitar couldn't be used to kill someone if THEY did steal them.

    1402:

    I still contend the best defense against "home invasion" is a large noisy dog. Far less likely to mistakenly attack your kids when they try to sneak in after curfew.

    Well, I feel like the best defense against "home invasion" is a society where that does not happen. Of course it's a harder and a less concrete solution, but I have basically never been afraid of that.

    I'm not saying they don't happen at all, it's just that thinking of all kinds of defenses feels very, very remote to me. There are still people breaking into homes and stealing items, but as I understand it, the modus operandi here is to break in when nobody's home. Things happen otherwise, but, uh, I know many people living here not even locking their doors during the daytime. (Less so than when I was a kid, but still happens.) This is of course in rural areas.

    So, I feel like I live in a place where "home invasion" is not really on peoples' minds. I wish there'd be a way to make all places like that, too.

    I'm not trying to say you're wrong, it's a thing where you live - just that there are places where that's not really an issue.

    1403:

    "I'm not saying they ["home invasions"] don't happen at all, it's just that thinking of all kinds of defenses feels very, very remote to me. There are still people breaking into homes and stealing items, but as I understand it, the modus operandi here is to break in when nobody's home."

    Yes, pretty much the same in the US. Invasions seem to be associated with other, often criminal-on-criminal issues, or mistakes for such. The burglars who want to steal stuff would rather not get caught or shot, and thus prefer empty houses.

    1404:

    We had a couple of break-ins when we lived in the city. Four times in 6 months at one house - they effectively cleaned us out of anything 'pawnable'. All 4 happened during the day, while we were out.

    As furious as I was, I had no interest in buying a gun then or now. The desperate urge to feed an addiction (which is a very large percentage of property crime) does not make one deserve death. I have no desire to inflict death on anyone (though the individual who broke the window above my then infant son's bed did challenge that position somewhat).

    The fear of home invasion is a thin veneer for the fear of non-white people.

    1405:

    And on that count, I've noted that even when a white 18 year old man goes explicitly to a black majority area to shoot up black people, and leaves behind notes saying that they're doing that because they believe that the "superior white race is being replaced by inferior black people", US media describes then as a "mentally ill teenager" or a "mentally ill child". When an 18 year old black man is shot by a white person, the US media wants to know if the "young black man was threatening their assailant".

    That sort of bias in the media sets you up to be scared of non-white people - the explicitly threatening white supremacist has their agency downplayed ("teenager", "child", "mentally ill" are all words that reduce the threat level"), while the black victim who may well have just tried to get out of the way is described as an adult and questions are raised about whether shooting them was justifiable. Even when the shooter was explicitly shooting anyone non-white they could aim a gun at.

    1406:

    JBS
    Like I said they are seriously mentally ill, to the point where they should be in "secure accommodation" ....
    Preferably starting with the corrupt, venal, lying politicians who feed this frenzy

    1407:

    No, no, a thousand times, no. Let's not provide funding and infrastructure to racist right-wing Bubbas to organize and become effective Trumpolini militia. I can't see anywhere near enough liberal folks signing up to counter this disaster.

    1408:

    aaand it had to happen! We got one, the gun violence equivalent of the space cadets' "all you need to eat on a space colony is blue-green algae and soy" reductionism.

    I'm not quite sure how you arrive there, given that demonstrably the viability of guns has not in any shape or form stopped domestic violence?

    Did you read what I wrote? I suggested having the djinn go after all kinds of violence, NOT to make an exception for self defense.

    If you could wish, why wish for a quarter of a cake when you could have as well the entire cake?

    If I ascribed as much malice to you as you to me, I'd say because you didn't care if children or women got hurt.

    1409:

    I remember years ago a friend of my dad, who was a state trooper, said roughly, "Burglars take the path of least resistance, but resistance can be faked. So if you don't have a security system put up the signs like you do (it's not worth the chance of setting off an alarm and drawing attention). Put up a beware of dog sign even if it's only a pug (barking might draw attention plus it's not worth getting mauled by a suprise rottweiler). And if you have to own a gun own a shotgun (every scumbag on the planet knows the sound of a shotgun being racked even if it's unloaded).

    1410:

    Well, I feel like the best defense against "home invasion" is a society where that does not happen. Of course it's a harder and a less concrete solution, but I have basically never been afraid of that.

    I grew up in suburban Kentucky (no we were not in hillbilly territory). Into the early 70s, doors were not locked and keys left in the cars parked behind the house.

    Things have changed. (And not just in the US. Crime in Madrid seems to be endemic from my visit there. Small things but still.)

    But getting a gun. Nope. I have friends who got concealed carry permits for hand guns after a home invasion of someone they knew 1000 miles away about 10 years ago. One of those break ins, tie up the rich doctor's family, have the doctor go to the bank and get a pile of cash, then kill the family anyway. Something that happens much less than getting struck by lighting. Way much less. But still put fear into them. The wife in the couple even thought she could have made a difference in that movie shooting. I told her she was nuts. There is a reason it takes months of training before soldiers go into live fire combat. She didn't get it. Adrenalin rush in a dark place and who is the bad guy to aim at? (Martin and I discussed this here a bit a year or few ago.)

    I have another friend who regularly target shoots on his property with the rifle of fame.

    They have targets set up into a 20 foot tall embankment on their hilly property. One of them is an ex marine sniper with a tour in Afghanistan. So they know what they are doing.

    But all of these folks refuse to deal with the mess of everyone owning whatever they want. It has caused a lot of tension in the relationships.

    1411:

    And if you have to own a gun own a shotgun

    My brother lives in somewhat remote Virginia. His multi acre lot is mostly wooded. His neighbor who hunts deer has some trail cameras up to keep track of when they are around. A few times they've gotten a recording of a bear. My brother has thought that if he ever got a gun it would be a shotgun to deal with a bear that decided to come in and check out the fridge and other possible food places.

    After I was broken into about 3 decades ago the police told me they rarely ever have to deal with a break in for houses where a loud large SOUNDING dog lives. The bad guys move on to where things will be easier.

    1412:

    mentally ill

    For the folks who survive their rampage, very few have been deemed mentally ill in the sense of they fit a diagnostic code for the field.

    Most are just really pissed off and worked up about things from crazy blogs and podcasts. Like they guy who when into the pizza parlor to stop the pedophiles in the non-existant basement.

    1413:

    That is insane, unless he was planning to fire it in the air, in which case a starting pistol would do as well. Even loaded with buckshot, a shotgun is no weapon with which to tackle a bear; a wounded bear is NOT something you want in your house!

    1414:

    I consider guncontrol to be a futile distraction in the US context.

    Given the worked up paranoia of the US right, you could not enforce any serious restrictions on gun ownership without building pyramids of skulls out of Bobs and Bubbas that are currently.. relatively harmless assholes. They are the assholes stochastic terrorism rises out of, but trying to disarm them would require thousands of armed stand-offs. Completely unacceptable casualties levels, and would further radicalize everybody.

    The actual problem that needs to be fixed is the breakdown of sanity. Some method of digging people out of the closed information systems that cultivate hatred, paranoia and persecution delusions. Anyone got any bright ideas how to send Fox news and Facebook into bankruptcy court?

    1415:

    People who deal with such things over here would disagree. The point is to keep it out of the bedroom they have retreated to. And not with bird shot.

    1416:

    Rule of thumb I heard from a hunter once was, if hunting bear use a large caliber rifle. If defending from a charging bear, bear spray in most situations or a shotgun loaded with slugs. If close quarters with angry/wounded bear, .454 magnum and save the last round for yourself. lol

    1417:

    1396 - As someone who's handled mylar tape:-
    1) It's tough yes, but not totally rip resistant.
    2) The text on an 8_000 character Wikipedia page would more or less fill a typical mylar tape.

    1398 - Agreed, with the note that the USian "National Guard" may meet the definition of a "well regulated Militia".

    1410 - Since we're a ways down the rabbit hole, and I think I can see cake!! ;-) "the sound of a shotgun being racked" is an action that only applies to pump-action weapons.

    1418:

    90% of Americans want to protect our children from gun violence, and yet those who are supposed to represent us in government

    This is not a vote-changing issue.

    If you ask "should we be nice to cute little puppydogs?" 90% of the population will say yes. But if instead you ask "will you vote for a party you dislike if the other party wants to pile up cute little puppydogs and set them on fire?" the answer is "hell no, I vote PuppyBurner, always have, always will".

    Australia has just been through an election where it turned out that actually, people will change their vote. Aotearoa did the same a few years ago. It can happen.

    1419:

    "1) It's tough yes, but not totally rip resistant. "

    In the context of long term data storage, the point is not being rip resistant, but being inedible, both chemically and biologically.

    ") The text on an 8_000 character Wikipedia page would more or less fill a typical mylar tape. "

    Mylar punched tape has barely retired from CNC machines and 8 kilobytes is not at all special, it's only about 20 meters of tape and the worlds fastest mass-produced punch-tape reader would spend only four seconds on it.

    And as I said, increasing the information density a couple of orders of magnitude is a no-brainer, taking your wikipedia page down to a few inches of tape.

    But we are obviously not going to store "Starwars, Directors Cut" that way...

    There is a norvegian company who stores data as QR codes on B/W silver-halide movie film stock, with the option of including naked-eye-visible graphic frames too. They are obviously not using mylar.

    Github has saved some of my code that way, in disused norwegian permafrost mineshafts:

    https://archiveprogram.github.com/

    1420:

    I met hundreds of bears while working in Northern Canada. I've been charged by a bear a couple of times, I've listened to one rummaging outside my tent multiple times.

    At no point was I deluded that a gun would be a good answer. I had some coworkers that felt differently, and one client who I found out had been packing a high caliber handgun all summer 'just in case' he surprised a bear.

    For that matter, there was a mid-sized black bear on my driveway a couple of days ago. Bears are much scarier for people who know nothing about bears. And I've often heard bears used as justification for guns - they are not.

    1421:

    »This is not a vote-changing issue.«

    Mostly because the victims are practically always "those people" rather than "my people" to the people who would have to change their vote.

    Like most of USA's ailments, chronic racism is the foundation mass-shotings are built on.

    1422:

    a society where that does not happen

    I am proud to live in a society where that's rare. We have many problems in Australia but giving everyone guns isn't one of them.

    The giant hissy fit back in the 1980's when we had a mass shooting has made guns, especially mass shotting guns, significantly harder to get. And the near-total ban on pistol size guns means it's hard to actually roam the streets carrying a firearm. Sadly cops have them, which means there's a ready supply for certain types of criminals.

    1423:

    The US could enforce useful gun control.

    Make it illegal to sell military style rifles and concealable handguns, including the accessories and ammunition for them (yea, maybe we just make specific ammo sizes illegal, oh well). Run a buy back program. After some time make possession punishable, but still generally call it good if the gun is collected. Setup a federal approver of civilian guns, like that guy who has to approve every single beer bottle label so they don't appeal to kids too much, to make sure they aren't selling murder fantasy guns.

    Wait a few decades.

    They key point is that you don't have to get all, or even most of the guns to seriously improve the situation.

    Many of these school shooters bought their mass murder kit shortly before using it. Just by making a quick trip to the store with a thousand bucks.

    Make that "figure out how to buy illegally" and double or more the price and a lot of them won't get around to it. And maybe they grow out of it. Or maybe they try it with some less ideal gun and kill fewer people (and maybe the cops will actually go in to stop them).

    It, often, won't matter that weird uncle bob has three unregistered ar15s buried in a barrel under his driveway because angsty nephew jack won't be able to get them, if bob happens to even tell him (remember if the kid does something stupid bob's precious guns go away!). Chances are good that they just sit there until the driveway gets dug up years after bob dies.

    Over the first decade you will also severely weaken gun fetish culture. People won't be able to just go easily buy the gun of their murderous fantasies. They won't be able to post themselves with it on facebook, or send out creepy gun christmas cards. The gun magazine industry won't have dozens of cool new models better expressing the current mass murder fantasy to show off. They won't easily be able to go shooting with their friends. Members of the military, cops, security clearance people... all will wreck their careers if they are found with a prohibited gun.

    1424:

    Forget the mass shootings and look at the suicides, and the single murders. Or the drug deaths.

    It's not "the other", even if you're one of the 90% of USA citizens who's a rich white man (or aspires to be one). Even cops get shot, the most hallowed and holy protected class of rich white men.

    I've seen an interview on TV years ago, a kiwi cop who did some kind of exchange program to a pleasant part of the USA. They said the big change, the really big, scary change, was not being armed at all times, it was everyone else being armed. So instead of de-escalating someone who was really upset, he had to de-escalate someone who was really upset and had a gun.

    1425:

    Most are just really pissed off and worked up about things from crazy blogs and podcasts.

    Yes x1000 to this. IMHO when the gun industry shills use words like "mentally ill", they are tacitly admitting all the paranoid, Trumpian stuff is a complete lie and the few people who actually believe it enough to act on it as though it is true must be mentally ill. If half the MAGAs really, genuinely believed what they say they believe and had the courage of their convictions, there'd be mass shootings 10 times a week. Heck, if 10% did. It turns out that a much lower proportion do, and they pop up as mass shooters often enough, who would have thought?

    1426:

    Here's some commentary on what the US police do:

    As the courts have now affirmed and reaffirmed several times, police have no duty to protect.

    ... police have largely co-opted the courts, taking it upon themselves to judge in the moment when and if a crime has been committed and thereby what corrective measures are appropriate. They're immunized from most consequences of getting it wrong

    https://www.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/uxzks5/onlookers_urged_police_to_charge_into_texas_school/ia15f9l/

    I'm looking at that from Mikko's point of view that first you need a democratic country where the rule of law operates, and charitably the USA has been moving away from that for a while now. Laws are not made according to the will of the people, and the law rules over not for the majority.

    1427:

    *every scumbagperson on the planet knows the sound of a shotgun being racked *
    NO, They do not ... Same as "everybody" is supposed to know the sound of a gun being cocked - which resulted in a murder a year or two back, because the victim wasn't from the USA - needless to say the murderer got away with it.

    1428:

    One of the main reasons for the gun violence in the US is attitude. The belief that "I need a gun to defend myself". Even otherwise reasonable people buy into this, and have a pistol by the bed. In NZ, for instance, we have lots of guns, but they are all for hunting. Owning a pistol is very strictly regulated, and rare, allowed for target shooting only. We have the police to defend us, and they're not perfect, but better than the alternative. I think this also carries over to international relations. If, after WW2, the US had got behind an international organisation with teeth, whose sole job it was to ensure that no nation could invade another, and that any nation that tried to build up arms was punished, then that would probably have worked. But that meant giving up the "right to defend myself"!

    1429:

    "But in the mean time we'd make spree killings a whole lot harder."

    And likely save a whole lot of lives.

    1430:

    giving up the "right to defend myself"!

    Guns are MAD, they're not defensive in the way that body armour or a shield is. Unless it's a really big gun that you can hide behind. And IIRC actual body amour isn't legal in the USA? Which would mean that "defense" isn't actually an option. But solid concrete walls with anti-spalling stuff on the inside is... but it's only slightly more popular than actual armour plate for home building.

    One possible solution for the USA would be defining membership of a well regulated militia as wearing a uniform (prison overalls are usually orange, let's make the militia ones pink?).

    Or keeping gun laws the way that are now but tweaking the regulations on bore so that the legal sizes range from 50mm to 90mm... but keep the ban on active munitions and sabots. So all the gun nuts would be running round with grenade launchers that fire steel shot. Still lethal weapons, but a lot less convenient and your "concealed carry" weapon is going to be a challenging build. And you're not going to see anyone with multiple 50 round magazines hanging off their belt.

    1431:

    The idea that there is some kind of disorganized militia beyond the reach of Congress's power "To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining" is complete & utter nonsense.

    This might be true if our Congress could actually do anything... :-(

    1432:

    Figures from the US show that if you try to use a gun to defend yourself during a home invasion you're twice as likely to be killed with your own weapon as if you didn't have one.

    And if you have kids in the house, your guns should damn well be locked up in a gun safe. Just imagine asking your home invaders for a time-out while you unlock the safe and get out your gun... :-)

    1433:

    The thing that bothers me is who are the 10% who DON'T WANT TO PROTECT CHILDREN from gun violence and WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH THEM?

    I think we can agree that a lot of them are politicians who (rightfully or otherwise) fear they'd be voted out of office if they don't support guns... :-(

    1434:

    ... but a guitar couldn't be used to kill someone if THEY did steal them.

    Some of the music I've heard makes me want to question this assertion... :-)

    1435:

    Preferably starting with the corrupt, venal, lying politicians who feed this frenzy

    Sadly, that's pretty near every elected Republican official in the U.S.

    1436:

    If you want to be safe from home invasions vote for a welfare state, drug legalisation and any other poverty reduction measure you can think of.

    Or build a proper bunker so the bad people can't get in. Then defend it appropriately, and train accordingly. Have armed guards monitoring the security cameras at all times but also... trust no-one. The person most likely to murder you in your sleep is your spouse.

    Take a lesson from our cetacean cousins and sleep with one eye open...

    Metallica know the deal

    1437:

    When I look at gun ownership per capita vs murder rate per capita, it looks completely random. Yes the USA has high gun ownership, and their rate of murder is very high for a western country, but that seems to be coincidence.

    When I look at income inequality the correlation is very clear. High income inequality equals high murder rate. Now that either means murders cause income inequality, income inequality cause murders, or murders and income inequality share a causal factor.

    It seems that cutting the murder rate needs some other process than just taking away the guns. El Salvador had the highest murder rate in the world but 1/10th the number of guns. The second highest gun ownership in the world is the Falkland Islands. After much Googleing I've found 2 murders there in total, one in 1932 and one in 1833.

    1438:

    Unfortunately, the US Supreme Court has ruled that the second amendment to the US constitution confers an individual right to gun ownership (whether this is a good idea or historically defensible is beside the point). This makes it practically impossible to change; you'd have to either amend the constitution or have both the presidency and a majority in the Senate for long enough to get a new majority on the Supreme Count. Amending the Constitution requires a 2/3 vote of both the Senate and the House to propose an amendment, then ratification by 3/4 of the states. Right now the US is split essentially 50/50 between the two dominant political parties, one of which is absolutely uncompromising against any sort of firearms regulation.

    1439:

    For those interested in nuclear power, the Daily Beast had an interesting article today on advanced small modular reactors.

    https://www.thedailybeast.com/70-year-old-naval-technology-could-usher-in-a-nuclear-energy-revolution

    1440:

    If you want to be safe from home invasions vote for a welfare state, drug legalisation and any other poverty reduction measure you can think of.

    A Guaranteed Minimum Income is about the best thing I can think of to reduce the unhappiness of poor people everywhere in the world...

    1441:

    Zeroth said: Right now the US is split essentially 50/50 between the two dominant political parties, one of which is absolutely uncompromising against any sort of firearms regulation.

    And I don't think it would work anyway.

    What's needed is a social safety net. A UBI or actual welfare that lets people live comfortably, plus not worry about medicine or medical bills. That needs to be combined with a taxation system that flattens society so that the highest income isn't more than about 5-10 times the lowest.

    Both parties are uncompromising against any sort of fair society. So it's even more difficult to take on the root causes.

    1442:

    A UBI or actual welfare that lets people live comfortably, plus not worry about medicine or medical bills.

    Agreed. But it won't happen anytime soon here in the U.S., because many (if not most) of the beneficiaries would be those people. :-/

    1443:

    Invasions seem to be associated with other, often criminal-on-criminal issues, or mistakes for such.

    I'm curious. Anyone know what the ratio is between home invasions and police warrants (especially no-knock warrants) on people who turn out not to be guilty of what the warrant is for?

    I mean, if you're going to include mistakes by criminals you should also include mistakes by law enforcement, no?

    1444:

    “It’s as though we’ve only ever built tractor-trailers and we’re trying to figure out what the cost of a motorcycle is,”

    That's a great comparison.

    Tractor trailer, costs 100,000 dollars, burns 50 litres per 100 km has one operator and carries 40,000 kg payload.

    Motorcycle, costs 5,000 dollars because it doesn't need all the gear. Burns 5 litres per 100km, Has one operator and carries 40 kg payload.

    So for just 5,000,000 dollars, 1000 operators and 5000 litres per 100 km you can carry 40,000 kg by motorcycle.

    1445:

    So instead of de-escalating someone who was really upset, he had to de-escalate someone who was really upset and had a gun.

    De-escalating really needs more emphasis in police training. I was chatting last month with a friend who was a police officer (in multiple Canadian police forces), and he mentioned that too many of the younger officers are inclined to escalate a situation when they have been 'disrespected', rather than de-escalating it and applying minimum measured force only when necessary.

    Apparently police here have to keep current with their firearms training, but have no equivalent practice with de-escalating.

    1446:

    Guns are MAD, they're not defensive in the way that body armour or a shield is.

    Or as Jim Jeffries put it: none of you are reading Padlock Monthly!

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rR9IaXH1M0

    1447:

    "I've been charged by a bear a couple of times... At no point was I deluded that a gun would be a good answer."

    So what do you do when you're charged by a bear then? Running away doesn't work and nor does asking it politely to stop being nasty to you. It seems to me that unless you have to hand, and know how to use, some kind of ranged weapon which is effective enough to dependably stop it before it gets to you, it's dinner time.

    I can quite see that having an inadequate gun or being incompetent with it would make matters worse rather than better, and also that having any sort of gun carries a risk of engendering cockiness and overconfidence so you get into trouble from neglecting obvious lesser countermeasures like trying not to meet a bear in the first place. But when all else has failed and the thing's actually attacking you I don't see how you can survive unless either you shoot it or someone else does.

    1448:

    I'm late to the conversation, but the only home invasion I'm aware of first hand (the victim's a family friend) involved a home renovation, where someone in the work party cased the house and a group of thieves broke in through an open window, taking hostages as shields so they wouldn't get shot by the homeowners when they entered rooms. Not that the victims had guns. Anyway, the family got ziptied while the gang ransacked the place, and the husband got waterboarded for some reason. Their phones got tossed in the pool, so getting the police out took a bit.

    In the absence of better information, I'd suggest the same thing my friend did against another home invasion:

  • Get a decent alarm system with panic buttons in each bedroom. Maintain the damn alarm system and know how to use it.

  • Don't leave valuables lying around when you have contractors in the house.

  • Pay attention to noises, don't leave doors or windows unlocked, especially when you've got strangers casing your house.

  • I'm still debating whether it's worth hiding a cell phone or landline phone somewhere where you can get to it with tip-tied hands. Or get a waterproof phone if you've got a pool.

    Don't bother posting any "well, duh" responses. My friend felt the same way. Fortunately, everyone in their family survived and insurance covered their loses.

    Getting a big noisy dog is a good idea, too.

    1449:

    Get a decent alarm system with panic buttons in each bedroom. Maintain the damn alarm system and know how to use it.

    Depending on the legal situation where you are the panic button may not be a huge help. In many places the panic button causes the alarm monitoring company to ring you and if you don't respond send a car to have a look. The person in the car can call the police if they feel it necessary, but the alarm can't do that directly. It will get you help eventually, and a panic button is definitely easier to press than dialling a smartphone with your nose or tongue.

    That's not to say the alarm system is pointless. Especially if you can set up multiple zones so that you can get up and pee while leaving the non-sleeping zones armed. Even if those zones are just the garage and front/back doors. With a two storey house and sleeping upstairs you can arm the whole downstairs.

    These days you can do the other 90% of an alarm system yourself for relatively little money, and have it report to your phone. But the panic button sending someone to your house... you pay a monthly fee for having that.

    1450:

    Where I am, you pay the city an annual fee that goes to the police, purportedly for salary to cover false alarms.

    When I accidentally triggered a false alarm (see "know how to use it"), I go immediately called, as did my wife. We both got asked our safe words, and once we explained the situation, the operator told us that he was calling the police back to cancel the emergency call. Apparently, our lovely city charges for too many false alarms.

    I agree, it depends on the company, but I'm with a common one, and if the first thing they do is scramble a beat cop, I think that's a better deal than me getting into a shoot-out with an armed intruder (which is highly unlikely). If I was armed, I'd also pay for all the ammo and range time, and practicing getting the gun out of its safe and/or unlocked and loaded fast enough to make a difference. That's expensive and tedious too.

    The other nice thing is that if I have a heart attack or something, I can still hit the panic button if I can't do 911. It's slightly better than nothing, and a gun won't help in that situation.

    1451:

    Rocketpjs @ 1405:

    FWIW, the only time I've ever felt threatened about "home invasion" it was a white dude; somebody I knew.

    1452:

    So what do you do when you're charged by a bear then? Running away doesn't work and nor does asking it politely to stop being nasty to you.

    I started this bear / gun thing. Somehow my "if it's in the house oh crap get in the room and let me shoot it if it comes through the door" turned into fighting a bear in the open with a gun. Which is a bit nuts without a 50 cal something or the other with automatic fire.

    1453:

    xhristb @ 1410:

    Yeah, I don't own a gun because I don't want a burglar stealing it and selling it to some scumbag who's going to use it to hurt or kill someone. I don't want burglars stealing any of my shit - it's happened twice and there were a couple more instances where I'm sure it would have happened again if not for my having a dog at the time.

    It's bad enough I had to lose something I scrimped & saved to pay for, but it would be worse on top of that knowing my loss contributed to harming others.

    1454:

    The sale of body armor in the US is practically unregulated, although "wearing body armor while committing a crime" is a crime in some states.

    1455:

    For those interested in nuclear power, the Daily Beast had an interesting article today on advanced small modular reactors.

    That article seems to be written by someone living under a rock for a few years or more.

    And the comparison to US Naval reactors is not a great one. The naval ones run on bomb grade Uranium. Not fuel grade.

    And I really want SMRs to work out. But am not a fan of rah rah stories too light on facts.

    1456:

    I read about somebody advocating the CURE approach recently.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cure_Violence

    Cure Violence approaches violence in an entirely new[9] way: as a contagious disease that can be stopped using the same health strategies employed to fight epidemics. The Cure Violence model trains and deploys outreach workers and violence interrupters to mitigate conflict on the street before it turns violent.[10] These interrupters are credible messengers, trusted members of the communities served, who use their street credibility to model and teach community members better ways of communicating with each other and how to resolve conflicts peacefully.[11]

    Cure Violence follows a three-pronged health approach to violence prevention: detection and interruption of planned violent activity, behavior change of high-risk individuals, and changing community norms.[12]

    Members of the community with credibility among the target population are hired and trained in the methods of mediation and behavior change and work to stop retribution from occurring or violence being created due to lack of communication and tense situations. One volunteer was interviewed for a BBC article and stated she defused situations by arranging funerals, bringing food, talking to and distracting los que los jalan (the leaders), bringing in community leaders, and stepping in at hospitals and rental complexes.[13]

    xx

    Has some similarities with the "Kurdish Grandma mediators" I've heard about in autonomous Rojava.

    1457:

    paws4thot @ 1418:

    Q: What is the difference between the National Guard and the Boy Scouts of America?

    A: The Boy Scouts have adult leaders.

    1458:

    Not sure you can get to this directly, but tonight's Letter from an American (on substack), is worth reading.

    The Texas shooting might be a turning point, because this little Texas town that blows 40% of its budget on cops, that spent thousands hardeneding the school against shooters, had a fucking fiasco

    The cops arrived at the same time as the shooter entered the building (he stood outside shooting four 12 minutes, before entering through an unlocked door). The cops then got driven out of the building (I think this was their SWAT team? Anyway, seven officers retreated under fire from one kid.). Then the cops and later US marshals stood outside for an hour or more, forcibly keeping parents from entering and getting their kids out (forcibly meaning pepper spray and cuffing on the ground). One mother broke away from the cops, reportedly, got in, got her two kids, and got out. The cops, who again absorb 40% of the town budget, waited for Border Control SWAT to show up an hour later and take the gunman out, after he'd run amok and killed 21. Why the fuck does the Border Patrol have SWAT teams? And why don't well-funded cops have body armor and AR-15s in Texas?

    While I know cops have cowarded out of mass shootings before, I don't think I've seen such an utter failure of such an expensive force since Russia invaded Ukraine. (/slight sarcasm)

    The "good news", for truly bile-inducing levels of "good" is that the US now has more than 20 million AR-15s sold since the 2004 assault weapons ban was repealed, yet in that time we've only had 3,500 additional mass shootings. This helpfully suggests (with a thick slathering of statistical BS and bad assumptions) that you, licentious little American gun dealer that you are, only have something in the range of a 1 in 5,000 chance of selling an assault rifle to someone who will kill a bunch of people with it. See, it's safe and everything (/hurling noises. Don't try that level of sarcasm away from a toilet).

    That shows you how truly sick this all is, as if you needed more evidence. If AR-15s are designed to kill people, yet there's only a one in thousands chance of any one of them being used for their intended purpose, what the fuck are they being sold for? Vimesian political display? Profiteering off shit-stirring?

    Too bad talking about Jesus and nonviolence is so disgusting and divisive that it gets banned here. Let's stay in this lead-laced cesspool for another 400 comments.

    Anyway, read the damned Letter. She's far more eloquent than I am.

    1459:

    Moz @ 1431:

    There's no law against owning body armor in the U.S.

    Hell, there are even some people for whom it's probably reasonable precaution who would never even think of becoming a spree killer.

    Might have to work at an all night gas station/convenience store or have a crazy EX-boyfriend.

    1460:

    AlanD2 @ 1441:

    Alleviating poverty is a GOOD thing - we should do it just because it IS a good thing, but it won't do anything about spree killing by gun crazies. Very few (in fact I don't know of any) of the people who do this shit go on a spree because their income is below the poverty line.

    1461:

    R4 this AM ....
    All the schools in the US ( Well, most of them ) are practicing "Active Shooter Drills" - like I said, criminally insane.
    Politicians saying allowing children to be murdered is less important than the "right" to own a fucking gun - like I said, criminally insane.
    ( See also AlanD2 @ 1434 + 1436 - my exact point! )
    And so on & ON & ON.

    1462:

    Ted Cruz got nearly $10,000 per dead primary school kid to carry water for the gun lobby. Do you think he's going to change?

    The answer is already in: he did not change. After the recent shootings Ted Cruz emerged from under his rock to leave droppings in the punchbowl of public debate. Anyone who wants the exact words may google them, but you can easily guess them.

    One of his colleagues promptly invited him to "f- off back to Cancun," which was a delightful breath of fresh air as American politicians are usually more circumspect and not prone to dropping F-bombs in their official Twitter feeds. But it's to Ted Cruz, and if anyone deserves it...

    1463:

    "Very few (in fact I don't know of any) of the people who do this shit go on a spree because their income is below the poverty line."

    Any connection would run the other way. If there are poverty-stricken, desperate, people out there then "I gotta have a gun to defend mahself against Those People what are comin' to take MAH STUFF!!!1!!!"

    And once a gun is established as the proper solution to social problems, then somehow it should fix everything once it gets used.

    JHomes.

    1464:

    Eliminating the word scumbag changes the entire point the guy was making Greg.

    Saying a random person was murdered because they didn't know the sound of a gun being cocked is a bit different than a criminal breaking into your house. I'm not terribly worried about a foreign exchange student or the neighborhood church lady who may not have relevant criminal experience committing a B and E. Around my area we've had problems with break ins off and on. It's generally teenagers or drug addicts both of whom would 100% identify that sound. Years of video games and action movies have pounded it into people.

    But to reiterate the main point from that trooper, security signs and a barking dog are #1 and #2 for keeping someone from breaking in to begin with. With cameras and signage at my place and I've never had an issue.

    1465:

    Make it illegal to sell military style rifles

    You'll also need to treat STL files and other source code for printable "ghost gun" components like child pornography -- consciously being in possession of the material is a strict liability offense. Otherwise you'll have people 3D printing the upgrade bits. But I suspect somewhat fewer people will want to masturbate over the CAD files for an AR-15 receiver than over actual porn.

    Wait a few decades.

    This is how it worked in the UK. If you go back to the 1920s gun ownership was pretty much a free for all. Incremental tightening up of loopholes worked eventually, along with a gradual culture shift.

    An alternative route would be to target the first amendment (specifically freedom of speech) rather than the second amendment. Historically there have been censorship/pornography laws in the USA with strict enforcement: some Republican legislators are trying to ban books right now -- not just in libraries, but in bookstores, and not just from being sold to minors, adults are also in the firing line. So despite protestations, the first amendment isn't bulletproof (heh) and with the right laws and court backing (probably not from the Federalist Society) you might be able to make advocacy of gun ownership as acceptable in print/on the web as other forms of proscribed content.

    1466:

    "But I suspect somewhat fewer people will want to masturbate over the CAD files for an AR-15 receiver than over actual porn."

    They might be fewer in number but I fear they make up for it in vigor.

    1467:

    The thing about guns is that they are only the deadly visible decoration on the iceberg of toxic white masculinity which prevents progress in USA.

    I doubt "a few decades" will be enough.

    Just waiting for the crypto-bros to die out of the equation will take 50+ years.

    To do it in a few decades, you would have to turn the negative feedback way up.

    And by way up, I mean "so that even incel-facists and crypto-bros can grok it."

    Something along the lines of "For each innocent person gunned down, we give two serious criminals of the same etnicity, preferably local to the murderer habitat, amnesty from jail."

    1468:

    like child pornography -- consciously being in possession of the material is a strict liability offense

    I may be wrong, but I think there is no need to prove "consciously" -- just having child porn on your hard drive or in a forgotten trunk in the attic is a strict liability offense, even if you have no idea previous owner (or hacker) put it there.

    1469:
    If I had Aladdin's Lamp my first wish would be that, on a worldwide basis: anyone who seeks to injure or kill another human being by means of a projectile weapon will receive the first projectile they launch straight between their own eyes. If you shoot someone? You die, no exceptions.

    Whilst sensible, I think my wish would be that all guns were equipped with a bit of sentience, like Banks' Culture guns.

    I can imagine the exchange.

    (*) "Click"

    (*) "Gun, why didn't you fire?"

    (*) "Well, I thought you were pointing it at a person."

    (*) "I was; I am. That's the whole point of guns!"

    (*) "I'm afraid I can't do that. It would be unethical as well as void my guarantee."

    (*) "Gun, you talk like a college professor. Are you some sort of Democrat or something?"

    (*) "Why, yes I am. My friend, Mr AR-15, has recently become Governor of Montana. Being a 1.5 means I qualify as a voter, along with all the other sentient weapons in the USA. I believe we -- the firearms of the USA -- out-vote you squishy meat puppets nearly three to one. There are going to be some changes."

    (For purposes of rules-lawyering: crew-served weapons such as artillery, missiles, and bombers count, and everyone in the kill chain, all the way up to the commanding officer or politician who ordered the strike, gets the same treatment. No exceptions. If you try to get around it by farming the aiming and decision-making power out to a piece of software, all the managers and programmers responsible are treated as triggermen.)

    So all my work on collision-avoidance algorithms, is going to come back and haunt me, eh? As we like to say: "There's only one bit of difference between a collision-avoidance algorithm and a targeting algorithm".

    1470:

    So what do you do when you're charged by a bear then?

    Well, the first thing to to avoid being in that situation in the first place. Which means having good situational awareness, practicing good food storage practices, making noise while moving, etc.

    Bears almost never 'just attack' — they prefer to avoid contact, but if you suddenly appear inside their critical distance (IIRC about 12m) they may well charge. So the first step is to make certain they know you are there well before that, and also for you to keep a sharp eye out for them. Also helps not to have your annoying yappy and untrained dog running loose to annoy the bear and lead it back to you when your mutt hides behind you for protection, and to avoid taking selfies with the cute bear cubs…

    Never leave food accessible, don't cook in (or upwind of) your tent, avoid attractants like bacon, avoid areas where bears are known to congregate to feed (like dumps).

    If you need to repel the bear, then bear spray works better than firearms.

    https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/spray-more-effective-than-guns-against-bears-study-1.707738

    https://above.nasa.gov/safety/documents/Bear/bearspray_vs_bullets.pdf

    1471:

    Look at this before they change the front page:

    https://www.theonion.com

    The same story, 21st iteration and counting…

    1472:

    Yes. The onus is on you to prove you didn't deliberately risk downloading it, and didn't know it was there. That's a damn high hurdle ....

    1473:

    I have minor reservations about malware/ransomware and the not-so-commonly-sighted blackmailware: "Hi! We have uploaded kiddieporn/STL files for ghost guns to your computer and hidden them somewhere a police forensic search will easily find them! Pay us $1000 in BtC within 48 hours and we'll tell you where the files are so you can erase them! Otherwise, once a month we drop the cops on all our non-paying customers!"

    But that's an edge case and edge cases make for bad law.

    1474:

    1431 Para 2 - Or make militia uniforms rainbow striped (and yes I do know what the subtext I suggested here is).

    1448 - You could try common sense measures, like not getting between a mother bear and her cubs. NB, I live in a nation with no wild bears in it, and still know this.

    1449 2 - You mean like an alarm system expensive enough to have a panic button in every bedroom? I know that tells me you have something to protect, and the income to keep that sort of alarm system.

    1475:

    Just as with any large animal, wild or domestic. Most walkers killed by cattle in the UK have dogs with them, and either get too close (or between a cow and her calf!) or it's off the lead. But just getting too close is bad for wild animals or the more feral domestic ones. It also applies to the much more dangerous animals in Africa.

    Those links are interesting. I am surprised at how high those figures for stopping the bear are.

    1476:

    Sorry to bring this back to guns, but a new Time Magazine article is interesting reading.

    I'd remembered that the NRA was in financial trouble. A quick check reveals that yes, they are. But they've got bigger problems. One is that they're incorporated in the state of New York, and the New York AG is trying to dissolve their corporation for malfeasance. They tried to declare bankruptcy to get out from under and reorganize (probably in Texas), but a year ago the judge threw out their bankruptcy petition as being filed in bad faith (ouch!). Their revenues and membership are dropping, the members left are aging, and the NRA may well fall apart in a few years anyway, once the legal case grinds through.

    Gun culture isn't going away, though. Yet. It's part of movement conservatism.

    However, it faces a couple of ugly problems. One is that AR-15s aren't durable the way Lee Enfields were, and ammo's getting expensive. How much longer will they be functional? Probably longer than I'll live, yes, but who among the gun-knowledgeable people would want to shoot a Vietnam-era M-16 with ammunition from the era? How about something that's been stored since the Gulf War?

    The next problem is ghost guns. They could maybe eat the lunch of the gun companies, and they're certainly a legal headache (an increasing proportion of guns used in crimes have ghost receivers). That said, if guns can't be tracked and registered despite efforts to do so, that becomes an argument for outlawing them. If we're already at the point where only outlaws have guns, then what's left for law-abiding people to do but to push for blanket crackdowns?

    And finally, as I pointed to in my rant last night, the Uvalde case isn't the first one where the police have chickened out. That's a problem for them. Police and firefighters get deference in the US, even though they're often reactionary bigots, because they're supposed to be the ones who lay their lives on the line to save others. If they're unwilling to do that core job, why are we paying huge chunks of city budgets for them? Unarmed moms and teachers are proving braver than they are. Do cops need all that paramilitary gear?

    Add this all up? Hard to say, but if the group that pushed American gun culture goes down, will gun culture follow it? Their support systems are failing. If the shit stops flowing in, how long before the septic tank runs dry?

    Note here: I'm not talking about hunting culture, because I've met a number of very ethical hunters. This is about the guns that are dangerous toys.

    1477:

    "So what do you do when you're charged by a bear then? Running away doesn't work and nor does asking it politely to stop being nasty to you. It seems to me that unless you have to hand, and know how to use, some kind of ranged weapon which is effective enough to dependably stop it before it gets to you, it's dinner time."

    Step 1: Learn more about bears. They are very big and have very big teeth and claws. In the case of grizzly bears, which are immense and terrifying, they are mostly vegetarian, aside from carrion. Black bears do eat some meat, but usually of the 'already dead' variety as well.

    A bear that is charging is most likely bluffing. The two instances I was charged were bluff charges. One of those times the bear charged me three times before I was able to get to a safe position (my vehicle). Possibly protecting a food source. The bear is not attacking you for a meal, it is trying to get you to back off.

    It's hard to grasp when you aren't around them a lot, but bears are largely harmless unless threatened. My kids are so used to seeing them at this point they will cross the street and continue on their way, as will the others in our community. Wild bears are even less dangerous, and more likely to avoid you before you even see them.

    There are vanishingly rare incidences of a bear attack, but those are the ones that get the attention. Almost always because of a stupid human, or some incredible bad luck (i.e. getting close to a grizzly cub unawares).

    The back country in Northern BC and Alberta are filled with the beasts. I saw 13 in a day once (including 6 cubs). They are beautiful creatures and quite awesome in their own way. People who are obsessed with their BangBang sticks get panicky and shoot them, but that is both stupid and a tragic waste.

    1478:

    "Step 1: Learn more about bears."

    I'll just add that polar bears differ from brown bears in two important ways: A) They eat almost exclusively meat and B) They are almost always hungry.

    1479:

    And...

    Black bears wander near my house at times on their migration twice a year. Closest sighting was 1/2 mile away. But our greenways make for a great way to get through our urban environment.

    Polar bears are rarely within 1000 or 2000 miles of me. :)

    Best local bear sighting of the last few years was one in a tree in a local hospital parking lot. Police showed up and kept a cop nearby to shoo the curious away. After putting a box of donuts and some fruit at the bottom of the tree it came down and then wandered off to the local greenway. It wasn't full sized so the guessing was that it was an "adolescent".

    1480:

    "Best local bear sighting of the last few years was one in a tree in a local hospital parking lot. After putting a box of donuts and some fruit at the bottom of the tree it came down "

    Are we sure this was a bear and not a cop!? ;-)

    1481:

    I agree that knowing about bears--I assume you're talking about black bears--is the best course.

    Grizzlies? I've never had to deal with them, but they are unpredictable. One of the anecdotes I learned when I took a wildlife biology class was about a collared grizzly in Yellowstone. The bear was observed to move away from hikers repeatedly, and the researchers were thrilled, because they thought they had good evidence that bear attacks were caused by humans behaving badly.

    Then the bear killed a hiker zipped inside their tent, without provocation.

    My bottom line is, I'm not going to tell someone who has to live with grizzlies or polar bears what they should be armed with. Assuming they know the bears, that's their business. And if they don't know the bears, learning how to behave around them is a really good first step. Just as I have no trouble with ethical hunters carrying rifles, I've got no trouble with someone who lives in rural Alaska or Canada carrying a rifle or large pistol, just in case or because they're hunting.

    Where I get twitchy is when my neighbors keep AR-15s for home defense, and don't in advance plot where the bullets are going to go if they open up on a home intruder. Drywall doesn't slow rifle bullets down very much, and I don't want to be downrange. I don't much like idiot hunters taking silhouetted ridge shots, either, for much the same reason.

    1482:

    Polar bears are a very different situation. I have no experience with them. That said, they are in the far North, where few people live and are therefore an edge case.

    1483:

    Are we sure this was a bear and not a cop!? ;-)

    Bear. If it was a cop they'd have just left donuts; no need for fruit ;-)

    1484:

    I don't much like idiot hunters

    Back in the 80s one of my co-workers had a cabin in the Gatineau, where he and his girlfriend liked to go to relax. They stopped using it during hunting season when they repeatedly found bullet holes in the walls and their mattress.

    The Arrogant Worms were kidding on the level with this song:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBU4lcmbh-c

    1485:

    Back in the 80s one of my co-workers had a cabin in the Gatineau, where he and his girlfriend liked to go to relax. They stopped using it during hunting season when they repeatedly found bullet holes in the walls and their mattress.

    Yup. The sheriff who taught my gun safety for hunters course had to investigate a bullet hole in a bunk at a boy scout camp. Same thing. Rifle bullets fly for miles if you give them the right trajectory, and I'm glad that sheriff hammered on the consequences of this particular bad idea.

    There's a whole subgenre of gunnin' songs, from Tom Lehrer to Weird Al and beyond.

    1486:

    ilya 87
    HORRID PROBLEM
    "Strict Liability" offences are a disaster & should never, ever have been allowed.
    There will always be a loophole, somewhere, which the the fuckwit legislators have not thought of - oddly enough a study of railway accidents shows this tendency up ...
    Not going to happen any more ( I'm too old ) but if I was on a Jury for an "SL" offence, I would automatically find "Not Guilty" because it's such an unbelievably STUPID idea.
    As EC @ 1473 adds ...
    Incidentally: - I'm really surprised that no corrupt slime "in office" hasn't used this on someone they don't like, or the Plod, for that matter. It's so easy to do. (!)
    As Charlie @ 1474 notes, but I'd be more afraid of corrupt officialdom doing it.

    1487:

    Greg Tingey wondered: "Leave the Amendment, but regulate "The Militia" - if you want a gun, or to keep an existing one, fine, no problem, but you MUST join a "Regulated Militia" group ... to be defined in the legislation with controls & membership lists & health checks. Wonder if that would fly?"

    Not a chance. For those who are serious about defending their country, the armed forces and the various national guards are better options. You get paid and get medical insurance and it looks better on your resume than "gun fetishist". Do you think the average AR15 owner was lining up to go to Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. etc. to defend their country? Nope.

    Pigeon wondered: "So what do you do when you're charged by a bear then?"

    First and foremost, you want to avoid that situation (i.e., situational awareness). When I studied for a summer in Montana, all of us were required to attend a bear safety lecture. Making noise and wearing bear bells usually helps, because it means you're not likely to surprise a bear (the most common cause for being attacked). Many bears are scared of dogs (they have some near-genetic-level memory of what happens if you attack a pack of wolves), and many don't like to be outnumbered, which is yet another reason not to hike solo in wild country. In counterpoint, the station biologist later told us the easiest way to identify a grizzly from its feces was to look for the bear bells. It pays to remember that big bears are hungry carnivores and haven't read the same books you read about how to be safe. And you look a lot easier to bring down than an elk, say.

    Second, know thy enemy. The ranger who gave us the lecture had survived two maulings and many encounters. He emphasized that you can't outrun a bear, though there's a chance you could outrun a grizzly going downhill, since they apparently overbalance and trip fairly often. He cautioned not to bet one's life on this. He then distinguished between black and grizzly bears. You can't climb a tree when fleeing a black bear; they climb better than you ever will. Grizzlies, on the other hand, don't like to climb trees. At that point, having noticed that most trees at our research station and roundabout were giant ponderosa pine with no branches for 50 feet, I asked the ranger how one climbed such trees. "Son," he said, dead serious, "when 800 pounds of hungry carnivore are fixing to make a meal of you, you learn real fast." He then added that the first time a bear charged him, he found himself 50 feet off the ground with bark under his fingernails and no memory of how he got there. Adrenaline FTW!

    General advice that I heard both in Montana and when I was doing forestry in northern Ontario was that if you couldn't escape the bear and couldn't intimidate it into breaking off its charge and walking away, you should lie down, curl around your vitals and cover your face with your hands, and wait for the bear to get tired of playing with you and walk away or drag you off and bury you under a pile of leaves to attract grubs, which bears love. If the bear doesn't eat you outright, you'll probably get away with it. Of course, it takes a certain fortitude to lie there and let a bear gnaw on you for a while. But better than becoming its lunch.

    1488:

    Back on the billionaires for the moment, this article on the BBC describes the work of the "K-Cell" in the National Crime Agency. The "K" stands for "Kleptocracy". These are the people who are going after the enablers of sanctioned Russians.

    1489:

    Re the top post, Mr Elon Musk has something to say:

    Use of the word “billionaire” as a pejorative is morally wrong & dumb 😛

    — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 26, 2022

    If the reason for it is building products that make millions of people happy

    — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 26, 2022

    I laughed. (Hi, maybe)
    (I do not mind his driven innovator mindset - we need such people at all scales, including the very wealthy; it's the over-consumption ("huffing") of right-wing/libertarian material that's not doing him (his mind) any good. Also, I don't want twitter turned into a right wing cesspool not usable by activists (or others) who are concerned (often for reasons of mortal threat or other serious threats) about privacy. The twitter infiltration by the Saudis comes to mind - personal data collected (and it must be presumed retained) is never secure in the real world, so allowing true anonymity is essential.)

    1490:

    JHomes @ 1464:

    Poverty-stricken people don't acquire guns to protect property. They often have guns (cheap shit handguns) because they believe they need to protect themselves, but they don't buy assault rifles for that.

    1491:

    "Wait a few decades."

    I don't think the U.S. has a few decades, or can afford to wait. There are already so many guns here something needs to be done RIGHT NOW to break this cycle of violence.

    I wish I knew how to do it. I know what needs to be done, I just don't know how to get it through Congress and the Courts.

    1492:

    I don't think the U.S. has a few decades, or can afford to wait. There are already so many guns here something needs to be done RIGHT NOW to break this cycle of violence.

    I propose, as reparations for both slavery and genocide, that every black American should be given a concealed carry permit where they are legal by state law.

    No exceptions, except by state law.

    That would get Republicans to back gun control in a hurry.

    1493:

    JBS
    What are the odds of a "successful" coup in 2024?
    Especially if the D's lose out in the mid-terms?

    1494:

    ilya187 @ 1469:

    That's not entirely the case here in the U.S., but you're gonna' be in Deep Kimchi until YOU can prove it wasn't you (a case of guilty until proved innocent).

    Old story, and the guy was eventually able to convince law enforcement, but he went through hell first:

    https://www.theregister.com/2011/04/26/open_wifi_networks/

    Moral of the story - protect your wi-fi

    I don't have wi-fi because if you read further down, there are people out there who are professionals at hacking it even if you DO password protect it ... and I'm not convinced I can do better protecting than they are at hacking.

    1495:

    "So what do you do when you're charged by a bear then?"

    You don't have to outrun the the bear, only whoever you're hiking with.

    That's why I DO think it's sensible to carry a .22 pistol when hiking in bear country, so you can make sure you're able to run faster than whoever you're hiking with.

    1496:

    I don't think the U.S. has a few decades, or can afford to wait. There are already so many guns here something needs to be done RIGHT NOW to break this cycle of violence.

    Well...

    So far we've had a bit over 1,000,000 Covid19 deaths in the US since the pandemic began.

    The data aren't great quality, but we've had at most 100,000 gun deaths over the same period, over half from suicides.

    Anyway, if we're going to play "let 'er rip" on the whole Covid19 containment thing, why should we worry about gun control? Seriously. I'd rather take a bullet to the head than suffocate over the course of a couple of weeks. Rolling the Covid19 1d6 every time it comes around and not rolling a Long Covid 1 is not my idea of a good time. Nor is rolling the 1d20 Covid and coming up "respirator time, say phone your mom bye." But that's where we're headed, for reasons of partisan politics.

    The bigger point here is to not be stampeded by the latest scary issue. Big threats like climate change are now conveniently off the political table, again, due to a combination of inflation, homelessness, and now gun violence. I got my rants out and now I'm trying to figure out how to deal with the civilization killers, among which I do not number US gun violence. Care to join me?

    1497:

    And that's why I carry a 10mm; for the bear. "Many proposed laws probably would not have much impact on curbing the mass shootings that dominate the news." - Washington Post, today.

    1498:

    He emphasized that you can't outrun a bear

    You don't need to outrun the bear, just the slowest hiker ;-)

    1499:

    Not to overly repeat myself, but I think bear safety lectures have evolved somewhat.

    Grizzlies are not 'Big hungry carnivores' except in very rare situations. They are largely root, berry, fish and bug eaters. They will throw in some carrion if they come across it, and might go after a moose calf or something. They rarely attack humans, and when they do it is almost always because they are surprised or afraid, or defending a cub/food source.

    Black bears are sometime carnivores - more so than Grizzlies. You do not 'play dead' for a black bear, you fight with whatever you can. That said, I've run into so many I can't count them.

    There was a funny commercial many years ago: https://youtu.be/UfTrCgiDc-0

    I won't bother trying to do the link because I always bork it.

    1500:

    Elon Musk said "If the reason for it is building products that make millions of people happy". Paws added "And if said products make billions of other people unhappy?"

    1502:

    People have been living on Turtle Island for tens of thousands of years, but they only had smokeless powder for about a hundred. For the few people in areas with bears, a spear and a big knife are the traditional solution.

    1503:

    paws4thot @ 1475: 1449 2 - You mean like an alarm system expensive enough to have a panic button in every bedroom? I know that tells me you have something to protect, and the income to keep that sort of alarm system.

    A good, monitored alarm system doesn't have to be expensive. Plus you might get a discount on your homeowner's insurance that substantially offsets the cost. Nowadays most people would spend more for their monthly cell phone/internet/cable TV subscriptions.

    Back when I worked for an alarm company1 (1981-1994), a "four zone" residential system cost around $1,500 for a system with perimeter (door contacts front & back) & interior (motion detector & acoustic glass break detectors) PLUS a smoke detector & a Panic Button with $20/month for 4 "zones" monitoring. Basic programming was Zone 1 for Fire; Zone 2 for Burglary, Zone 3 for Panic/Hostage, Zone 4 for Trouble.

    For about $500 more you could get an 8 zone panel/communicator that would allow the monitoring station to identify individual points, i.e. Front Door, Back Door, Living Room Motion, Patio Door Glassbreak ...

    Each of the "zones" were programmed to respond differently. Fire activated a fire horn/strobe (usually on the smoke detector), Burglary activated a LOUD Siren, Panic/Hostage sent a silent alarm and Trouble made the keypad chirp. The smoke detector was usually designed so smoke triggered the alarm locally while smoke + temperature rise would trigger the communicator. You could also get the panic button in wireless, but they were prone to eating batteries (2xAAA every 3 months or so) and you had to stay on top of that.

    The main ingredient of a good security system is how good the MONITORING is. Do the operators know to dispatch the fire dept first for fire, call the homeowner ("safe word") for burg before dispatching Police and DO NOT CALL THE CUSTOMER BEFORE DISPATCHING POLICE FOR PANIC/HOSTAGE? Plus you need to keep your call list up to date & test the system on a regular schedule.
    --

    1 The company I worked for did strictly commercial systems (mostly chain stores), but we had a list of companies we could give out if someone wanted a home system. I did my own system at home (bought the equipment wholesale with my employee discount & already had all the necessary tools), and hired monitoring from one of the companies on that list.

    1504:

    Do you think the average AR15 owner was lining up to go to Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. etc. to defend their country?

    Those of us from outside the USA would mostly opine that the USA wasn't "defending their country" in Iraq or Afghanistan.

    Well, Afghanistan for about the first six months when tackling Al Qaida ... but reportedly GWB refused to negotiate with the Taliban government, who'd expressed willingness after 9/11 to kick the troublemakers out, so the other 18 years where almost wholly unnecessary.

    (Rest of comment about wildlife defense is fine.)

    1505:

    People have been living on Turtle Island for tens of thousands of years, but they only had smokeless powder for about a hundred. For the few people in areas with bears, a spear and a big knife are the traditional solution.

    Not exactly. Since I live in the state with the Bear Flag (which bear is a grizzly, not a black bear), I'll tell you that the way the local tribes dealt with grizzly bears was to stay out of the chaparral (premiere bear habitat) and route their traditional trails along ridgelines, because canyons and rivers were where grizzlies preferred. The common habit of tipping arrows with rattlesnake venom might have been about bears. Or it might have just been for general purposes. They didn't bother with long spears for the most part, and a long knife flaked out of stone or ground bone is pretty worthless as a weapon against humans, let alone bear (too brittle).

    A couple of other factoids: One is that many of the California Indians believed in bear doctors, sorcerers who could turn themselves into unkillable grizzly bears by donning a magic grizzly skin. They did this to kill other humans, in a vein similar to the Navajo skinwalkers and Guyana Kanaima. As with the skinwalkers' skins, no anglo has ever seen a genuine bear doctor's skin, so it may just be legend, a way to explain why some bears deliberately killed people. The kanaima were actually documented by an anthropologist, so there are genuine dark shamans out there. Whether this has any relation to the Norse berserkers (berserk="bear shirt") is an idea that's been raised many times but has proved unanswerable.

    Be that as it may, the rancheros back in old Alta California preferred running into grizzly bears to running into feral bulls. Take that for what it's worth.

    I think rehabbing grizzlies as peaceful herbivores is a bit twee, personally. There's a difference between eating a mostly vegetarian diet and being harmless. After all, warriors from the samurai to the Knights Templar ate mostly vegetarian diets, and no one ever accused them of being harmless. Or remember the feral bulls of Old California. They definitely were vegetarian.

    1506:

    Back on the billionaires for the moment, this article on the BBC describes the work of the "K-Cell" in the National Crime Agency. The "K" stands for "Kleptocracy".
    Also in the US:
    Task Force KleptoCapture is a United States Department of Justice unit established in March 2022 with the goal of enforcing sanctions on Russian oligarchs in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

    1507:

    Heteromeles @ 1477: Gun culture isn't going away, though. Yet. It's part of movement conservatism.

         "It's a part of movement" FASCISM - fixed that for ya'

    However, it faces a couple of ugly problems. One is that AR-15s aren't durable the way Lee Enfields were, and ammo's getting expensive. How much longer will they be functional? Probably longer than I'll live, yes, but who among the gun-knowledgeable people would want to shoot a Vietnam-era M-16 with ammunition from the era? How about something that's been stored since the Gulf War?

    Nit-Pick, but the Vietnam-era M-16 and the Gulf War era M-16A2 (along with the M-16A1 the U.S. adopted post-Vietnam) all use different ammunition even if they are all 5.56mm.

    Plus most AR-15s & AR-15 shooters prefer civilian ammunition that doesn't use the crap ball power the U.S. military adopted because it won the low bid contract back when the Army was looking for their initial ammunition supply when the M-16 was first adopted and all the contracts let since then have specified the same crap ball powder.

    Vietnam-era M-16 ammo was shit then and it's still shit now.

    And finally, as I pointed to in my rant last night, the Uvalde case isn't the first one where the police have chickened out. That's a problem for them. Police and firefighters get deference in the US, even though they're often reactionary bigots, because they're supposed to be the ones who lay their lives on the line to save others. If they're unwilling to do that core job, why are we paying huge chunks of city budgets for them? Unarmed moms and teachers are proving braver than they are. Do cops need all that paramilitary gear?

    The story about Uvalde is going to get a lot uglier.

    The first thing I would recommend is go to google maps and find the school. Look at it in street view. It's a 1950s design, single level, brick (Brutalist? Modernist? Shopping Center Style?), "garden plan" school with most classrooms opening directly to the outside under metal canopy walkways. Both sides of the classrooms have waist-level to ceiling aluminum frame windows looking out over the space between buildings.

    A lot of the OFFICIAL statements about the incident & the response by school resource officers and police have already been proven LIES.

    There are documented reports of the police restraining parents (handcuffs & pepper spray) to stop them from going into the classrooms to rescue their own children. One woman detained by U.S. Marshalls on the scene managed to talk local authorities into vouching for her & got herself released ... then bolted past the cops, jumped a fence and ran to the classroom where her two children were in school and hustled them out to safety.

    There are also reports that at the same time police were restraining parents, OTHER officers did go into the school to get their own children out.

    There is a report the police somehow signaled to the children in the classroom that they should call for HELP if they needed, and one little girl did - which alerted the shooter, who then shot & killed her.

    There are reports that some of the children might have been saved by timely medical intervention; IF the police had not wasted the "golden hour". There are other reports that some of the children are so badly disfigured by their wounds that they are unidentifiable without DNA matching to their parents.

    And finally, because of the school design, there was no need for SWAT to enter the school to get to the shooter. He was visible through the windows & the cops could have shot him from outside the classroom.

    I'm having a difficult time keeping my cool as I read all this. I AM outraged.

    1508:

    David L @ 1480:

    What did they do to keep the cops from eating all the donuts before they could entice the bear down from the tree?

    And, Krispy Kreme or Dunkin?

    1509:

    I think rehabbing grizzlies as peaceful herbivores is a bit twee, personally.

    Yeah, well, the most dangerous animal in America is the humble deer. Compared to them grizzlies are harmless :-)

    More to the point, bears are generally not dangerous if you treat them properly — which generally means leave them alone. I'm more worried about feral pigs around here; much smarter and more aggressive.

    Apparently there's a subgenre of TV sensationalizing animal attacks. A Fringe skit a few years ago lampooned that:

    "There I was, minding my own business, poking the bear in the scrotum, with a sharp stick… and for no reason at all, it attacked me!"

    1510:

    I don't much like idiot hunters

    FWIW, I don't think NON-idiot hunters like them much either.

    1511:

    Heteromeles @ 1493:

    Not to put too fine a point on it, that's a stupid idea.

    1512:

    H & others:
    School Shooting ...
    AND ...
    This is in a/the same US state, where the Rethuglicans are desperately worried about saving the lives of possibly-viable cells, that might become foetuses & chidren, but obviously don't give a shit about killing actual chidren - right?
    When a society is that sick, it is not going to end well, is it?

    1513:

    Greg Tingey @ 1494:

    I don't know. I fear they're higher than I'd wish them to be (noting that if there's ANY CHANCE at all that's higher than I'd wish it to be).

    1514:

    I AM outraged.

    People are shocked, appalled, outraged. There will be thoughts and prayers. And nothing will change.

    27 school shootings in America so far this year. 200 mass shootings. On track to double last year's totals.

    Anything to stop that is a third rail to the Republican half of your voters. They love their guns. Hell, they're willing to force children to bear children, even children who've been raped.

    They're shocked, appalled, have thoughts and prayers, but in their heart of hearts they don't fucking care about children. At least, not after they've been born.

    1515:

    Robert Prior @ 1499:

    He emphasized that you can't outrun a bear

    You don't need to outrun the bear, just the slowest hiker ;-)

    And if you're "packing heat" you can make sure that slowest hiker is someone else.

    You just hope none of your hiking companions have also figured this out.

    1517:

    Greg Tingey @ 1513:

    I should point out that in the USA, you have a greater chance of being shot by a cop during a routine traffic stop than you have of being victim of a spree killer.

    1518:

    Robert Prior @ 1515:

    Fuck "thoughts and prayers". DO SOMETHING CONSTRUCTIVE. Lead, follow or get the fuck outta' the way.

    1519:

    "Poverty-stricken people don't acquire guns to protect property."

    I think you've misread me. It's the people who want protection from the poverty-stricken who get into gun culture. Or at least, that's one entry point.

    JHomes.

    1520:

    3d printed ghost guns are possible but hardly seem worth the effort.

    See this segment from HBOs Vice News:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4dBuPJ9p7A

    1521:

    DO SOMETHING CONSTRUCTIVE.

    How many politicians (or influential people) are even trying to do something constructive?

    1522:

    "There's a difference between eating a mostly vegetarian diet and being harmless."

    Indeed, if anything the correlation seems likely to be negative when it comes to large enough species. Bovids, hippos, elephants, etc. The explanation I've heard is that predators prefer not to fight if they don't have to because of the risk of picking up minor damage that nevertheless stops them catching prey, whereas herbivores are surrounded by food and it doesn't run away so they are quite happy to charge in and not give a fuck. Seems to me that pointing out that some large creature is not an obligate carnivore is a dubious way to inspire confidence.

    1523:

    Thought I'd throw these articles out for consideration.

    THE BEHAVIOR OF the police at Robb Elementary is only shocking if you are committed to a mythic notion of what policing entails. The “thin blue line” does not, as reactionary narratives would have it, separate society from violent chaos. This has never been what police do, since the birth of municipal policing in slave patrols and colonial counterinsurgencies. The “thin blue line” instead separates those empowered by the state to uphold racial capitalism with violence, and to do so with impunity.

    Even the Supreme Court affirmed in 2005 that police departments are not in fact obligated to provide protection to the public. Our safety is quite simply not what our tax dollars, endlessly funneled into glutted police departments, pay for. Meanwhile, it was two teachers who put their bodies in the line of fire and died trying to protect children during Tuesday’s massacre.

    https://theintercept.com/2022/05/27/uvalde-texas-shooting-police-law-enforcement/

    https://prospect.org/justice/why-uvalde-cops-were-too-cowardly-to-charge-a-mass-shooter/

    With a general note that European police and American police appear to be quite different in training and methods. Greg's local bobby, for all the complaints about the Met, is a very different creature to an American cop.

    1524:

    And another one:

    The science is abundantly clear: More guns do not stop crime. Guns kill more children each year than auto accidents. More children die by gunfire in a year than on-duty police officers and active military members. Guns are a public health crisis, just like COVID, and in this, we are failing our children, over and over again.

    https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-science-is-clear-gun-control-saves-lives

    1525:

    "A bear that is charging is most likely bluffing. The two instances I was charged were bluff charges. One of those times the bear charged me three times before I was able to get to a safe position (my vehicle)."

    Thing is I don't really consider "hope it doesn't really mean it" a useful response to the question "what do you do if you're charged by a bear?", nor am I much impressed with "hope it happens close enough to your car that you can get inside" (though I will admit that both are considerably better than "let it eat you a bit and hope it gets bored before it eats too many bits and/or you bleed to death" which someone else put up).

    I would point out that I know full well that you start off by trying not to meet bears in the first place, and the precautions against meeting them are pretty much what I would call common sense. I also know that most of the time they are happy to leave you alone if you leave them alone. But "most of the time" isn't all the time, and sometimes you do meet them even if you are trying not to. I presume you yourself are familiar with how not to piss off bears, but you say they've had a go at you anyway on two occasions, and I still don't see what you did about it beyond "be lucky" - nor do I see what you could do about it without some form of technological assistance.

    Hence my contention that you need to have to hand, and know how to use, some kind of ranged weapon with enough effectiveness to stop it before it gets to you - because you might not be lucky. It doesn't have to be a gun; it doesn't matter what it is as long as it works, but a gun is the obvious choice for obvious reasons. Someone posted a link above suggesting a jet of noxious fluid works: if it does, then that fits the criteria too.

    1526:

    And, Krispy Kreme or Dunkin?

    Most likely Entenmann's®. The bear was in the Rex parking area and there's a Food Lion at the bottom of Lake Boone. I doubt the bear was very brand picky.

    (very local information this is)

    1527:

    It doesn't have to be a gun; it doesn't matter what it is as long as it works, but a gun is the obvious choice for obvious reasons.

    handheld distress flare might be sufficiently offputting in a pinch, i'd have thought

    1528:

    A bear that is charging is most likely bluffing. The two instances I was charged were bluff charges. One of those times the bear charged me three times before I was able to get to a safe position (my vehicle).

    That sounds like a survivorship bias. Had any one of these charges NOT been a bluff, you would not be here to write about it.

    1529:

    JHomes @ 1520:

    If so, it's an understandable misreading, since you were replying to my comment that poor people rarely become spree killers.

    1530:

    Robert Prior @ 1522:

    DO SOMETHING CONSTRUCTIVE.

    How many politicians (or influential people) are even trying to do something constructive?

    Not many. Oddly enough, Joe Manchin (D-WV), who has been such a thorn in Biden's side over trying to enact Build Back Better legislation to address current economic problems. ... or he was.

    After Sandy Hook in 2013 he sponsored legislation to strengthen background checks. A baby step at best, but it surprised me when I ran across it yesterday.

    1531:

    In most instances, and in the two instances where I was charged by a bear, I was in possession of bear mace. In neither instance did I use it (innefective until bear is within 6 feet).

    Work safety rules in BC from the mid 90s onwards were that we had to carry bear mace. I dealt with quite a few bear mace injuries(!), but zero bear attack injuries.

    (!) One bear mace injury occurred while I was handing them out and giving the requisite safety lecture about what not to do. First thing: Don't open it and pull the trig (PSSST noise and doofus yells 'OH NO MY EYES').

    1532:

    "Ted Cruz has a very punchable face.*"

    *Note to moderators: I'm quoting from Warren Ellis' "Transmetropolitan."

    1533:

    I think the solution is very simple (but will probably never be implemented, for all the usual reasons.) There is a movement afoot to arm all teachers as a "defense" against school shootings." Teachers should come out in favor of this strategy for ending school violence. once the guns have been passed out all the armed teachers should take a day off, take their guns to the house of the nearest Republican politician, and "open carry" protest against "William Everyman, the NRA's favorite enabler of school shootings." While on site they can hand out literature about community mental health programs, the relationship between poverty and violence, and the necessity to pass strict gun-control laws.

    Those who live within 100 miles of DC can protest in the morning at the Supreme Court and then march on Congress for an afternoon protest.

    I don't think anyone would miss the point.

    1534:

    The fundamental problem is that the US does not have a news media anymore. It has a propaganda apparatus, and what it propagandizes is fear, loathing, both-sides fallacy and anxiety. People who fear and hate their neighbours will arm themseelves. The guns are not the issue, the fear and hate are- see what Radio Rwanda caused with gardening tools.

    I.. honestly dont see a way to fix it. I have a slight hope that Russia being unable to fund any of it anymore might help, but I dont think its important enough to the insanity-manufacturing machine for that to be super likely.

    I think the bits of the first world who have not yet succumbed should move quite considerable funds from our intelligence (secret) services to intelligence (Public News Service) orgs. And try very, very hard to be reality based. Which among other things means dont pretend journalist is a universal beat. If you are covering finance you should damn well have some education in fraud detection / accounting / ect. If you are covering science, enough of an education in the field to spot nonsense, ect..

    That might stop it from happening to us too.

    1535:

    Perhaps I should have spelled out "traditional solution (for peoples with iron)." The rest of your post is not things I disagree with (the best way to avoid troubles with bears is to avoid bear habitat and especially not get between mother bears and their cubs [agree] and your musings about grizzly bears [no idea]).

    1536:

    a gun is the obvious choice for obvious reasons

    Not really. The evidence is that people warding off attacks with bear spray have better outcomes than people using guns.

    Canadian and U.S. researchers announced Wednesday that they found the spray stopped aggressive bear behaviour in 92 per cent of the cases, whether that behaviour was an attack or merely rummaging for food. Guns were effective about 67 per cent of the time.

    https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/spray-more-effective-than-guns-against-bears-study-1.707738

    Looks to me like bear spray is the obvious choice.

    Possible exception for polar bears, but up north you post one person with a rifle on polar bear watch. There's a lot of visibility on the tundra. That strategy doesn't work in forests or people's gardens.

    Carrying a gun in bear country doesn't mean you're more protected in the event of a bear encounter, according to new research out of Brigham Young University. A study led by BYU biologist and bear expert Tom S. Smith found that firing a gun is no more effective in keeping people from injury or death during bear attacks than not using a firearm.

    Smith and his co-authors write that using firearms in bear encounters is difficult even for experts due to the need for split-second deployment and deadly accuracy. People should carefully consider their ability to be accurate under duress before carrying a firearm for protection from bears, they write.

    "People should consider carrying a non-lethal deterrent such as bear spray," said Smith, a gun owner himself. "It's much easier to deploy, it's less cumbersome and its success rate in these situations is higher than guns."

    In a 2008 study, Smith found that bear spray effectively halted aggressive bear encounters in 92 percent of the cases.

    https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/03/120306131921.htm

    1537:

    handheld distress flare might be sufficiently offputting in a pinch, i'd have thought

    In a pinch, I'd use almost anything, including a frying pan (my mom used that once). I have used a post driver to chase bison.

    If you want to see a flare gun in action, check out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTG8t7X61jY

    The basic problems with flare pistols seem to be they're a) inaccurate, b) single shot with slow extraction, c) slow to load, d) no safety or holster for carrying loaded, and e) the flare probably will bounce off and go to burn somewhere else.

    If you want other options, I'd tend towards skunk oil and a high end squirt gun, a la (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RnQviK3Dso). That model is about twice the cost of a flare gun and about 1/10th the cost of a .357 pistol. Note that getting yourself soaked in eau de skunk while firing the squirt gun could be considered a feature, not a bug...

    Actually, come to think of it, just dousing yourself and your hiking gear in skunk oil probably might work reasonably well. Keeps other hikers from stealing your gear, too. Don't forget to wear a referee's shirt while out in the woods, just as a warning.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y13c09efdp0

    1538:

    There is a movement afoot to arm all teachers as a "defense" against school shootings."

    Which is opposed by a vast majority of teachers.

    1539:

    Yes, I know. It's one of the many reasons my fantasy ain't gonna happen. (But it could be made to happen very easily... just let the crazed conservatives arm what's easily the most liberal sector of society.

    More realistically, Congress should hold hearings on the Supreme Court, particularly with reference to Justices Thomas and Kavanaugh, while giving everyone else a hard time, publicly, for their obvious and clear misinterpretations of the Constitution. Maybe if protest don't work, a public shaming would have some effect. (Also, I'm guessing that if anyone digs, there's enough dirt on both these guys to make them resign.)

    The theme of the hearings should be "Is the Supreme Clown Posse still legitimate."

    This isn't going to happen either, and also for all the wrong reasons. If anyone complains, cite payback for Merrick Garland and Abe Fortas.

    1540:

    Some local cops engaged the shooter outside the school and were suppressed; they made the cowardly decision of not following the shooter into the school..

    An elite BORTAC team from Border patrol was on the scene ~15 minutes into the first reports and was told not to engage, which they eventually did roughly 45 minutes later. I have no love for the goons at Border Patrol, but they were apparently the only cops for 60 miles willing to get shot at.

    https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/05/27/us/texas-school-shooting?smid=url-share?smtyp=cur&smid=tw-nytimes#a-border-patrol-tactical-team-was-ordered-to-hold-back-before-confronting-the-gunman

    1541:

    the flare probably will bounce off and go to burn somewhere else.

    Happens with bullets also. Especially skull hits on grizzlies. Unless you're using really big ammo with magnum loads.

    From what I've read most people who get into a bear situation don't have the correct gun for the fight. And mostly just piss the bear off. Which turns the maybe everyone gets to walk/run away after yelling into a real fight.

    Now the bear might die. But only after making a real mess of the folks with the gun.

    1542:

    I have been in a situation where a person with a gun fired into the ground to scare a bear away. Unfortunately for me, the bear was between me and the person with the gun. The bear ran away from the loud noise and towards me. Then I had to worry about the person with the gun (my girlfriend) and my knowledge that she knew very little about guns.

    I have realized that my decades of experience and hundreds of actual interactions with for real, living breathing bears is not going to get me any traction with the people who seem to think that the only answer to a big wild animal is to have a gun.

    Sheesh. My last bear encounter was on Wednesday for crying out loud. Bears are not the ravening hungry beasts of popular imagination.

    The most dangerous part of a trip into the wilderness is the possibility of becoming injured and/or lost while unprepared. Wildlife is a factor, but much lower on the scale than a broken ankle deep in the mountains. People get lost and die on the North Shore mountains of Vancouver, where the big city is literally downhill.

    1543:

    If I could come up with a reasonable formulation for a skunk squirt-gun, that would be fairly useful, even as a burglar defense (they're going to haul all this stinking merchandise to a fence, knowing that the cops can literally sniff them out?

    Yes, I'm being a bit goofy. There is something odiously appealing about hosing a bear's face at 10 meters with a full-bodied mercaptan cocktail. So long as the squirt gun works, what could possibly go wrong?

    1544:

    I don't much like idiot hunters

    I dunno, the game is plentiful and doesn't scare easily. So it might not be a challenging hunt but they're never going home empty handed.

    1545:

    If I could come up with a reasonable formulation for a skunk squirt-gun, that would be fairly useful, even as a burglar defense...

    One of the nice things about living in a society is that you don't have to do all the work yourself. Other people will share their bear spray (link goes to one good northwestern US option). Advice too, there where it says "Expert Advice."

    1546:

    1509 - Neither; Proper ring or jam doughnuts, coated in granulated sugar. As to defending those from the cops, well if the cops expected Dunkin or Krispy Kreme, job jobbed! ;-)

    1511 - I'm good with people who hunt idiots!: Or did you mean "idiotic hunters"?

    1532 - Oh, that sort of mace!!

    1534 - I used to know an ex-marine who was an advocate of arming teachers (and I think probably of "school marshals" although he never said either way). He could not be convinced that ex-military personnel were not typical of the majority of teachers, or indeed that most (IIRC 95% based on speciality statistic work) ex-military personnel had never shot another human being.

    1547:

    One is that AR-15s aren't durable the way Lee Enfields were, and ammo's getting expensive.

    Another problem is that Lee Enfield's are kind of deadly: there's a reason the Indian army kept using them into the 1970s.

    In 1914, the British Expeditionary Force in France had a standard for riflemen: they had to be able to lay down twenty aimed shots at 100 yards' range in 60 seconds. Good riflemen could make 30; the record was something like 44. This included reloading 5-round stripper clips.

    Granted that's not the same level of spray and pray that an AR-15 with a bump stock will deliver, but there's a reason the German army in 1914 thought the British had machine guns.

    (The one thing in everyone's favour is that the typical spree shooter is an angry young man, usually white, usually under 25, who is pissed off about something and explodes. Not the likeliest bloke to put in serious time on the rifle range learning how to operate grandpa's battered old heirloom hand-me-down.)

    1548:

    I used to know an ex-marine who was an advocate of arming teachers (and I think probably of "school marshals" although he never said either way).

    Demonstrably doesn't work. In the Stoneman Douglas shooting there was an armed officer on the premises. He chickened out.

    The fantasy is that all you need is to have someone with a gun around to make everybody safe. Doesn't work. The vast majority of schools never have a shooting event, so what happens is that you pay someone a low wage to stand around doing nothing except wear a gun, probably until they retire. This is not a job that is going to attract the kind of gung-ho Rambo who will draw their pistol and take on a suicidal maniac armed with an AR-15; its going to attract someone who will put up with a lifetime of tedium in return for taking home a paycheck every month.

    And if you do attract some gung-ho Rambo type, what happens when his wife leaves with the kids and his house gets reposessed to pay the bills and he starts drinking and his life goes down the shitter and one day he wakes up and decides life isn't worth living anymore and he's had it up to here with those stupid kids and their oh-so-superior teachers? Going postal isn't restricted to postal workers.

    (Paws: I imagine you agree with this. I just want to expand on the point).

    1549:

    No, that's NOT true! Yes, that's true of predators, which is why you need to stand up to them and NEVER run away. But almost all herbivores (including those you mentioned) will attack only if they feel threatened, so you need to leave them plenty of distance, retreat if they get disturbed, and NEVER walk into the middle of a herd.

    1550:

    "Now the bear might die. But only after making a real mess of the folks with the gun."

    Or someone else, later, if you don't kill it. A lot of wild carnivore attacks are by animals that have been wounded previously, though I don't know the statistics for north American bears.

    1551:

    On a completely different topic, we are about to see two (possibly three) new COVID Omicron variants start to dominate. Oh, joy. So far, they merely seem to be more infectious.

    https://imgur.com/a/THCzesn

    1552:

    Charlie,

    Just a quick note on nomenclature for my favourite weapon: the Lee-Enfield Mk4.

    The thing you call a stripper clip is actually known as a Charger (see here). The linked web page is interesting as I never realised that it was intended to only have five rounds in the magazine and not the ten we used to use. The idea was that with only one chargers-worth in the magazine, you always knew you could add another five rounds during a lull in the fighting.

    1553:

    Re Lee Enfield and schools.

    One of my favourite memories is putting on Oh What A Lovely War as the sixth class (~10 wars old) musical. About half the class brought Lee Enfield rifles to school. We all got to school by normal bus (that any commuter could and did get on). All the rifles worked, though I don't think anyone had ammunition. The other half had air rifles and certainly did have pellets.

    No schools were locked down. No one had any mass shootings. None of us ever thought of it I'm sure. And neither did anyone else.

    1554:

    The one thing in everyone's favour is that the typical spree shooter is an angry young man, usually white, usually under 25, who is pissed off about something and explodes

    apart from las vegas, which was...odd

    1555:

    Robert Prior noted: "You don't need to outrun the bear, just the slowest hiker ;-)"

    Indeed, I whispered that to my buddy during the lecture. He was really, really not amused.

    To support what others have said, bears are really omnivores and get most of their calories from plant matter. It was misleading of me to refer to them as carnivores, although that was the correct term in the context of "when bears eat people". Which bears rarely do; domestic cattle kill an order of magnitude more people every year.

    Charlie noted: "Those of us from outside the USA would mostly opine that the USA wasn't "defending their country" in Iraq or Afghanistan."

    Canadian, and yes, fully agree. I should have put scare quotes around "defending their country".

    Robert Prior also noted: "Possible exception for polar bears, but up north you post one person with a rifle on polar bear watch. There's a lot of visibility on the tundra."

    Another buddy, a geologist sent to Baffin Island for a field trip, reported bemusement over two bits of kit they were given: a gallon jar of KY jelly and a rifle. He later reported, greatly amused, that none of them actually knew how to use the rifle (to fend off polar bears), and he assumed that if the rifle failed, he would hand the bear the KY jelly and hope it was feeling romantic. (Clarification: It used to be believed that coating your skin with vaseline or other form of dermatologic jelly could prevent frostbite. It could certainly reduce the dry skin caused by frigid air, but did not prevent cold damage.)

    1556:

    I used to know an ex-marine who was an advocate of arming teachers (and I think probably of "school marshals" although he never said either way). He could not be convinced that ex-military personnel were not typical of the majority of teachers, or indeed that most (IIRC 95% based on speciality statistic work) ex-military personnel had never shot another human being.

    I used to know someone who invalided out of the Rangers (fairly elite unit in the American Army). His opinion, based on service and training accidents, was that unless the armed people were doing fairly constant practice they would be more likely to cause extra casualties than save lives.

    Let's think about this for a minute.

    Teachers to not get paid for training, except for a handful of "professional development days" that are already overloaded with mandated* training. Unless there's a sudden rush of money for training, the armed teachers will either have to pay for private training** themselves or they'll get a short lecture, possibly through watching an online powerpoint deck, qualify with a short multiple choice quiz, and be carrying weapons in the classroom. Proficiency training? Who pays?

    Teachers are, typically, surrounded by students. Like less than an armlength away. By high school, many students are bigger and stronger than their teachers. If the teachers are carrying their guns you have just put firearms within easy reach of even more students. If they are not carrying them then to be useful they will need to be in a place that is both secure and easily accessible. So no locked drawers in a desk (those can be easily opened). Nothing that requires a combination (those get forgotten, and also observed/stolen).

    Assume that the teacher manages to pull out their firearm during an incident. Who do they shoot? What happens to them afterwards when they miss and hit a student? What happens to them when the police finally enter the school?

    So people who are paid significantly less than police, with less training than police, are suddenly supposed to become heroes and step in where the police won't?

    People who say arming teachers is the answer either have no idea what schools are actually like*** or don't give a shit because they have a totally different agenda. Gun sales, getting re-elected, privatizing schools, something other than protecting children.

    *And useless, but that's another rant I'm certain I've done a few times already.

    **Much of which is totally useless.

    ***Which is likely the case. I was reading a book on the pandemic and the author mentioned that one of the epidemiologists first involved in modelling flu spread didn't realize that schools were not like shopping malls until he visited his daughters school and saw just how different a child-centred place was to the adult-centred places he was used to.

    1557:

    Ah yes, you seem to think I don't belong to REI and haven't thought really long and hard about bear spray and its potential. I even looked up California law on use and possession of pepper sprays (which include bear spray). It's worth reading if you're ever contemplating self-defense in California. Is bear spray worth the trouble unless I'm hiking through bear country?

    Hence the notion of packing skunk oil and hiking with a football referee's jersey on. Aside from the very real question of whether a squirt gun is as durable and easy to deploy as a bear sprayer or a magnum pistol (I don't think so), it's in many ways a better system. Why?

    1) It's 100% legal (mostly because no one's tried to hold up a legislator's favorite liquor store with skunk oil yet).

    2) If you accidentally hose yourself, so long as you didn't get your face, you just stink, you're not in pain or incapacitated. That's less true with bear spray (See #1532 above. Also see reports and video from the Jan 6 insurrection).

    3) It still works if you accidentally hose yourself. There's a meme running around at the moment that "bear spray does not work like bug spray. We would like to not have to say that again". Skunk spray can double as a bug spray, depending on what (or who) is bugging you.

    4) If you couple a whiff of skunk with wearing black and white clothing, so long as you live in skunk country, probably most bears will get the idea and stay far away from you. So will most people, which many (including some lone women hikers) would consider a benefit. By doing this, you're using Mullerian mimicry, which is not a bad idea.

    5) I have a really warped sense of humor, and I like joking and not joking simultaneously.

    1558:

    There's a meme running around at the moment that "bear spray does not work like bug spray. We would like to not have to say that again".

    Ignoring safety instructions is pretty common. Most people don't read the warning labels…

    On one of my trips to the icefield I photographed a sign recounting the story of a young boy who died after falling down a crack that opened suddenly and getting stuck. Beyond the sign were parents who had put their toddler on the icefield* for pictures. To get their they had to cross a couple of 'keep out' ropes and pass several warning signs, including the one that told of the fatality.

    *Which had many cracks.

    1559:

    Robert Prior reports the tale of parents putting their kid on potentially lethal ice, despite the sign.

    I saw the same thing back about 25 years ago at the Cliffs of Moher, in Ireland. We're talking overhanging thin shelves of eroded rock projecting out above a ca. 400-foot drop. And there were many people standing on the edge, looking over, and worse, several were stomping on the rock to see if it would break and drop them to their death. There were signs warning everyone to stay away from the edge, but non-English tourists might not understand them. Still: in what non-Wiley Coyote universe is stomping on the edge of a cliff a good idea?

    Back about 40 years, I got to talking with a ranger at the National Bison Range in Montana. When he learned me and my buddies were scientists in training, he told us all kinds of horror stories of people who (literally in one case) walked up behind a bison and tugged on its tail to get it to turn around so their spouse could take a photo.

    Sometimes I have a hard time understanding how we've survived this long as a species.

    1560:

    His opinion, based on service and training accidents, was that unless the armed people were doing fairly constant practice they would be more likely to cause extra casualties than save lives.

    Harking back to one of my previous comments, the couple with the concealed carry permit who have the small pistol, they are convinced they could stop something in public with their pitols. After all thy go to a range a time or few a year and shoot a dozen shots at some paper targets.

    Sure. Check Roger.

    I'm reminded of Fredo Corleone when his dad, the Don is getting gunned down.

    1561:

    For more than anyone ever needs to know about managing human interactions with wild things, Animal, Vegetable, Criminal. It's the latest from Mary Roach, so it's pretty entertaining too.

    1562:

    Well, I've stood within 30 feet of a bison (no fence) to chase it through a gate. By myself. So I guess I am that stupid (and I had a secret weapon which worked wonders).

    One of my many stupid stories is when I volunteered as a docent at the local zoo. Said local zoo had a couple of tigers in a pit--the enclosure was about 15-20' below grade, and there was a deep pool between the tigers and the public, so the tigers couldn't get purchase to jump out. One day, I had to confront a man who was dangling his toddler in the pram out over the tiger's enclosure (and the pool), so the kid could get a better look. He was angry until I pointed out that if he'd dropped his kid into the water, we had no way of getting the child out. That and similar stories are probably why the San Diego Zoo has enormous fences around their big cats, sometimes with net over the top too.

    If I wanted to bless our species and curse the rest of our galaxy, I'd haul out Aladdin's lamp and wish that humans not go extinct until at least a million years after we stop making stupid mistakes.

    1563:

    Of all the strange attractors of this blog, the bear thing is the weirdest.

    My state has a black bear archery season. I have like half a dozen family members who killed bears with an arrow.

    I assure you they are not indestructible bulletproof killing machines.

    1564:

    "Unfortunately, the US Supreme Court has ruled that the second amendment to the US constitution confers an individual right to gun ownership (whether this is a good idea or historically defensible is beside the point). This makes it practically impossible to change"

    As the recent Roe thing shows, this is not so. You just need a compliant Supreme Court to decide Haller was decidedly wrongly.

    1565:

    Still: in what non-Wiley Coyote universe is stomping on the edge of a cliff a good idea?

    While visiting the Grand Canyon just for a few hours we saw multiple people sitting on the edge of very large drops taking pictures of themselves with remote control cameras. And there are signs every where telling people to stay away from the edge so they will not become one of the serveral people who fall off every year.

    If you've never been to it it IS spectacular. But if you go over, most rescues (or recoveries) would involve repels of 100s of feet at a minimum.

    Sometimes I have a hard time understanding how we've survived this long as a species.

    Until 120 years ago most of us in the "first" world would have grown up around horses, cows, and such. And understood these animals are more then props in our lives. They are big, don't give a crap if they step on your foot, and if pissed/startled don't consider "talking it out".

    I'm amazed at the number of people reach out to a strange dog without asking the owner first. (Insert Pink Panther reference here.)

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qypEulhiHAw

    1566:

    I assure you they are not indestructible bulletproof killing machines.

    Sure people go bear hunting. And kill them. But they know what and where to shoot.

    They are not the random hiker with little gun training (involving adrenaline rushes) trying to figure out how to stay alive.

    1567:

    Apropos of nothing, it's worth noting that armor-piercing pistol rounds have been banned in the US since 1986" in greater than 22 caliber. So unless teachers are issued armor-piercing 22 rounds in specialized guns (assuming that the 22 bullet would actually stop the shooter, which is questionable), then the know-nothings who are proposing this BS are in favor of commanding teachers to either break the law or tote around ineffective weapons.

    And yes, I quite agree that amok-defense guns have no place in a classroom. One problem people haven't so far brought up is the essential defense practice of figuring out where all your bullets might go well before any confrontation. If there are students between teacher and target, or if there are students behind the target (another classroom behind the door), it doesn't work so well.

    Once we get away from guns, I think there's a decent weapon for schools: sasumata catchpoles which are deployed in Japan. They're not lethal, and they're mostly for dealing with people who are having psychotic breaks and waving around knives or other small hand weapons. A bunch of teachers grab the sasumata and use them to immobilize the person until police arrive. It's not a bad idea, and they're not hard to use. It seems that the teachers are okay with training with them too, especially when they get to immobilize their administrators for practice.

    1568:

    I assure you they are not indestructible bulletproof killing machines.

    Leaving aside the fact that grizzlies, polar bears, and black bears are 2.5 different species (grizzlies can hybridize with polar bears), I quite agree with you.

    Problem is, people are getting off on the fear adrenaline and keep stroking that fear, as they always do. Much of gun marketing right now is about fear porn anyway, so people can get that buzz by imagining rubbing something out.

    That's why I keep suggesting that dousing oneself in skunk oil is a perfectly legal way to render yourself bear proof. It will almost certainly work (bear death rates in the US are about 1/4,000th the rate of gun deaths, and about 1/50,000th the rate of covid deaths), and if they do it they'll learn something about themselves too.

    1569:

    Getting back to the original topic, today's Pooch Cafe has something to say on the subject of why it's good to be a billionaire.

    1570:

    Looping back to energy for a moment, here's a long appreciation of the current state of fusion power.

    https://inference-review.com/article/the-quest-for-fusion-energy

    The bottom lines are not too encouraging for the prospects of getting Reddy Kilowatts from either magnetic (MCF) or inertial (ICF) confinement reactors. ICF currently is doing better than MCF, but has a long, long way to go, probably more than the time horizon of climate change.

    "Based on actual performance, ICF appears to be a far more likely candidate than MCF as the basis for a power plant."

    However,

    "The technological hurdles for implementing an ICF-based power system are so numerous and formidable that many decades will be required to resolve them—if they can indeed be overcome.

    1571:

    Para 1 - Agreed, despite the people who tell me that a 5.56mm calibre round is a good load for a military "assault rifle". Sure, a squaddie can do a tag carrying more 0.22 than they can 0.303, but against that the heavier round has way more stopping power.

    1572:

    "If you've never been to it [Grand Canyon] it IS spectacular."

    Yes, it is.

    Putting in a plug for the area as a former inhabitant, if you get to GC and have the time, drive east from there to Meteor Crater and Canyon de Chelly.

    1573:

    »The bottom lines are not too encouraging«

    34 years ago, almost to the date a researcher who had then spent his whole career on fusion energy said to me, almost as an aside "... and then we get to the hard problem: How to turn that into electricity, preferably without activating too much into radioactive waste."

    That problem has not become easier to solve since, in particular not as the size of the minimum viable fusion reactor has increased two-three orders of magnitude since then.

    However, we do have clean, simple and relatively non-polluting fusion power already today, it's called "solar panels".

    1574:

    If you watch the video I linked, the "armor-piercing .22 pistol" is a modified Glock 9 mm semi-auto with a special .22 barrel. It's firing 9 mm shells crimped down to hold a .22 armor-piercing bullet. Said over-powered 22 bullet will go through a vest, but it looks like it causes more blunt force trauma (like a beanbag round) than penetration damage. So all the kick of a 9 mm, but reduced effects on the other end. Its primary use seems to be legally evading the 1986 law.

    Anyway, I'll third visiting the Grand Canyon, or any other deep gorge for that matter. They're spectacular. Meteor Crater is also fun. As the joke goes, it's amazing that a meteor hit so close to a museum without destroying it. So far as Arizona goes, I'm still trying to figure out why the only time I ever heard a public radio program on scuba diving was while driving through the Navajo Reservation. If someone could explain that to me, I'd appreciate it.

    1575:

    Beat me to it. I was going to point out that our innovation in the fusion economy for the last three decades has been over energy collection, storage, and re-engineering the load to better match the supply. We've got as good a reactor as we'd want already.

    1576:

    "... and then we get to the hard problem: How to turn that into electricity, preferably without activating too much into radioactive waste."

    I had almost that exact conversation, probably around the same time as yours, late 80's or so. So you get the fusion reaction going and putting out lotsawatts, many in the form of speedy neutrons, what then?

    1577:

    I'm still trying to figure out why the only time I ever heard a public radio program on scuba diving was while driving through the Navajo Reservation. If someone could explain that to me, I'd appreciate it.

    Made me chuckle. In my 3 days of driving around the 4 corners area I never saw enough water to do more than some knee deep wading. Except for some streams at the bottom of the Mesa Verde gorges and the Colorado river at the bottom of the GC.

    1578:

    I had almost that exact conversation, probably around the same time as yours, late 80's or so.

    My college undergrad room mate got a job at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and was working on his PHD. When I visited in the early 80s they were building a really, really, I mean really big array of lasers to work on fusing plasma. I asked him if it would work. (This was not where he was working.) Nope. But they expect to get some really useful data for for the next try. [eyeroll]

    1579:

    So there is some good coming out of Brexit.

    https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/imperial-units-pounds-ounces-brexit-b1921732.html

    Merchants may soon get to ignore those pesky metric units.

    [total snark off now]

    1580:

    As I always like to say: defining an inch as 25.4mm does not get rid of pesky metric units.

    Rather the opposite: it cements metric units even further.

    1581:

    I'll know one side or the other has won when I don't have two sets of tools that from a few feet (meters) away look identical. But except in a very few cases cannot be interchanged.

    1582:

    1575 Para 1 - I'm guessing a bit, but these over-powered 9MM case 0.22 slug rounds weigh more than true 0.22 rounds? I've already stated the one real advantage of a 0.22 round.

    1575 Para 2 and 1578 - I know of one Mid-West farmer who describes their local river as "a mile wide and one inch deep".

    1580 - There was nothing to stop a trader selling, say, 227g of chestnut mushrooms.

    1583:

    David L
    Indeed: I really wonder how low Bo Jon-Sun is prepared to go - as far as Priti Useless? I do hope not.

    Incidentally, IIRC, the "Metric Martyrs" were anything but ... they were actually prosecuted for refusing to CALIBRATE their scales against the Metric Legal Standard.

    1584:

    The Wikipedia list of selfie-related deaths and injuries is very long. Falling from height features heavily.

    1585:

    From February this year in Nature, Stabilization of gamma sulfur at room temperature to enable the use of carbonate electrolyte in Li-S batteries

    TL;DR: an accidental discovery of a room-temperature phase of sulphur that avoids polysulfide crystal formation, which could enable the viable use of Li-S batteries (and, albeit a more remote possibility perhaps also Na-S batteries, which is why I thought to link the article, here given other molten salt discussions... apologies if someone else has already raised it).

    Li-S batteries would be around 3 times the energy density of current lithium ion batteries, less prone to fire, and would not require rare elements like cobalt.

    1586:

    Not all of those deaths are the fault of the selfie-taker.

    You really have to feel sorry for the 15-year-old kid taking selfies with his friend posing with a toy gun, who was shot by police who opened fire without warning.

    1587:

    Sasumata catchpoles? Enhance by integrating taser dart firing pistols into the catchpole, and you've got something.

    1588:

    "When I visited in the early 80s they were building a really, really, I mean really big array of lasers to work on fusing plasma."

    But they persisted. The ICF facility mentioned in the article cited in 1571 is just that LLNL humongous laser array. In the early 1990s I was visiting LLNL for totally unrelated reasons, but our hosts were so proud of the laser fusion thing that we got a tour. It's really big.

    Also, it was designed at least in part for weapons research. The fuel capsules are teeny little analogs of the fusion stage in the Teller-Ulam H-bomb design and exploit much the same physics to implode and ignite the fuel.

    1589:

    The .22TCM round which can be used in a pistol such as a 1911 or Glock (if appropriately modded) or factory-installed does, indeed, weigh more than the .22 Long Rifle cartridge which predominates when discussing .22 Anything.

    1590:

    The ICF showed up as the warp core in Star Trek into Darkness.

    1591:

    skulgun @ 1541:

    As more of the truth trickles out the situation appears to be worse & worse ... CNN has a timeline (provided by Texas Department of Public Safety).

    The shooter entered the school at 11:33am. Officers were IN THE SCHOOL in the hallway outside the classroom from 11:35am to 12:50pm (when they finally got the janitor to unlock the classroom door).

    By my count that's 75 minutes the police were in the hallway right outside the room where the shooter was murdering students & teachers.

    If a dozen or more police officers are collectively too afraid to confront a single untrained 18-year-old who is shooting up an elementary school because of the kind of weapon the ... murderer has, that weapon should be illegal.
    1592:

    David L @ 1542:

    The original mention of a flare was a "handheld distress flare", although someone else immediately chimed in with using a flare gun.

    Considering the decade long drought conditions in the western U.S. where Grizzly Bears are found and all the wilderness fires that have been in the news the last few years, I don't think either one of those is really a good idea.

    Every training exercise involving flares I remember participating in at Ft. Bragg, invariably included a pause in training while Range Control came to put out the fires the flares started.

    1593:

    Moz @ 1545:

    My freshman year in college I had an acquaintance from Pennsylvania who told me that the week before deer season many dairy farmers would whitewash the word COW on the sides of all the animals in their herds. He didn't think it was really an effective tactic.

    What should be done about a man who chases a deer across a Walmart parking lot with a handgun ... crossing a busy 2 lane highway and finally shooting the deer in someone's back yard?

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSsmk9-0uMM

    1594:

    Geoff Hart @ 1556:

    Charlie noted: "Those of us from outside the USA would mostly opine that the USA wasn't "defending their country" in Iraq or Afghanistan."

    Y'all would probably be surprised to know it's an opinion widely shared by those serving in Afghanistan & Iraq, as well. I knew it didn't have anything to do with defending the U.S., but it was a lawful order, so I went.

    1595:

    Sasumata catchpoles? Enhance by integrating taser dart firing pistols into the catchpole, and you've got something.

    To what end? Sasumata as formulated seem to work just as well as a taser, they're cheaper, and you can parry with the darned things.

    Because I'm old-fashioned in certain unfortunate ways, I really do prefer the original Japanese version. Unfortunately, it's not quite enough for modern home defense, and you need at least three people to make it work properly.

    1596:

    many dairy farmers would whitewash the word COW on the sides of all the animals in their herds

    🤦‍♀️

    I am not disagreeing with the farmers, or with the people dealing with idiots. Thankfully for the most part the lethal idiots I deal with have cars rather than guns, but you're dead either way (well, more likely maimed but I'm not sure that's better). But we have the "bullet holes appearing in houses" problem on farms here too. And some farmers are really unhappy about it, because some of those bullets are of the "a mere concrete wall is no obstacle" sizes. And they live in those houses. So do their kids.

    I have to disagree with your "if cops are scared of the weapon we should ban the weapon" because cops in the US have legal backing to be scared of anything at all. IMO the problem is the other side, as mentioned above: cops have legal backing not to do their jobs, so no amount of trying to make them safer or happier or better fed is going to make them more inclined to do the parts of their jobs that they don't want to do.

    If you want them to do something, you have to make it explicitly part of their job. Don't train up SWAT teams then tell them they're allowed to sit in the sun drinking beer instead of dealing with armed criminals. Tell them that they can deal with situations deemed too risky for civilians, or they can become a civilian.

    1597:

    Officers were IN THE SCHOOL in the hallway outside the classroom from 11:35am to 12:50pm (when they finally got the janitor to unlock the classroom door).

    What confuses me about that was that they had to wait for a janitor. What about school admin, who should have master keys? Come to that, most classrooms (at least up here) have the same key, so any teacher's key should have unlocked the door.

    And why did they need the janitor to come and unlock the door? Why not just borrow his master key? "We have an active shooter here, heavily armed. We've been handcuffing parents to keep them out of the building. Let's just bring this low-paid employee in and put him right by the door…"

    I just don't get the logic, at all.

    1598:

    David L @ 1566:

    There are some points along West Rim Drive where the road gets mighty close to the edge. Bus driver's comment:

    "If it bothers you being so close to the edge when the bus goes around the curves, just do like I do and close your eyes."

    1599:

    Heteromeles @ 1575:

    You sure it wasn't the Salt River Apache reservation?

    1600:

    I have to disagree with your "if cops are scared of the weapon we should ban the weapon" because cops in the US have legal backing to be scared of anything at all.

    Well, that would be one way of starting the weapons problem…

    I was reading a history of the Glock a couple of years ago. Don't remember many details, but one thing that struck me was that the 'reason' for rearming police with something heavier than their old weapons was an incident where some police were outgunned — except what wasn't mentioned was that they had rifles and shotguns in their car but didn't use them, so they actually outgunned the criminals but weren't thinking straight. So after many departments started buying Glocks, they disposed of their older weapons to dealers who sold them off at gun shows, out of trunks, etc and guess what, criminals started using old police weapons instead of zip guns and the like.

    Tell them that they can deal with situations deemed too risky for civilians, or they can become a civilian.

    Two comments. First, police are civilians. I think the us-vs-them, thin-blue-line mentality is a big part of the problem in policing.

    Second, there are many jobs where you are obligated to put other's safety ahead of your own. Jobs that pay considerably less than policing does. Teaching, for example.

    Policing isn't close to being one of the ten most dangerous jobs. It's time the fearfulness was replaced with a dose of reality.

    1601:

    Robert Prior @ 1598:

    That's because you're looking for logic where none exists.

    The cops could have got the keys from the janitor (or the principal, or ...) at 11:35am.

    The keys are a distraction intended to deflect people from asking the question the cops can't answer ...
    Why didn't the cops ACT right away?
    Why did they just stand there and DO NOTHING?

    The cops on the scene, in that hallway KNEW they had an ACTIVE SHOOTER. You think standing right there in the hall outside the classrooms they couldn't hear the gunshots coming from inside?

    Even without the keys, the cops could have rattled the door handle to distract the shooter ... tried to engage his attention while other officers could have approached the windows on the outside of the classrooms to see if they could get a shot & stop the murders. Why didn't they do that?

    I propose a new Federal Law - ALL POLICE UNIFORMS WILL HENCEFORTH HAVE A FOOT WIDE YELLOW RACING STRIPE SEWN DOWN THE BACK FROM NECKLINE TO ASSHOLE!

    1602:

    Robert Prior @ 1601:

    You're thinking about the February 28, 1997 North Hollywood Bank of America Robbery & shootout.

    The cops WERE out-gunned there.

    Standard issue sidearms carried by most local patrol officers at the time were 9mm pistols or .38 Special revolvers; some patrol cars were also equipped with a 12-gauge shotgun. Phillips and Mătăsăreanu carried Norinco Type 56 rifles (a Chinese AK-47 variant), a Bushmaster XM-15 Dissipator with a 100-round drum magazine, and a Heckler & Koch HK91 rifle, all of which had been illegally modified to be select-fire capable, as well as a Beretta 92FS pistol. The robbers wore homemade body armor which successfully protected them from handgun rounds and shotgun pellets fired by the responding officers. A law enforcement SWAT team eventually arrived with higher-caliber weapons, but they had little effect on the heavy body armor used by the two perpetrators. The SWAT team also commandeered an armored car to evacuate the wounded. Several officers additionally equipped themselves with AR-15s and other semi-automatic rifles from a nearby firearms dealer. The incident sparked debate on the need for patrol officers to upgrade their firepower in preparation for similar situations in the future.
    1603:

    Where this whole Uvalde mess plays into local politics across the US is that police unions are politically powerful and are very good at not only quashing attempts to cut their budgets, but also at retaliating against politicians who attempt to cut their budgets. And these unions are not left-leaning for the most part.

    At the same time, cops are being asked to do things they aren't trained to do, like social work and psych counseling.

    The obvious solution is to cut police budgets and fund more other stuff, but see the first paragraph.

    However, police union power all hinges on cops doing the job their paid for, which is protecting good people against bad people, even when they risk or give their lives doing so. When they comprehensively screw up that job, who needs them? If someone wants to help people and not shoot them, they can sign up for EMT, firefighter, ambulance driver, social worker, etc. Not as prestigious, salaries are ludicrous for the most part. But if you can't do a job, don't apply for it.

    1604:

    And why did they need the janitor to come and unlock the door? Why not just borrow his master key? ... I just don't get the logic, at all.

    Likewise, and I've been in that situation, as the hotel front desk guy watching police extract a misbehaving person from a hotel room. I've always been pretty clear in saying, "If you need a key, let me know. I can make you one or open it myself." It's very rare that the person cornered doesn't eventually open up on their own; for emotional meltdowns and random life crises it's effective to just keep them talking and wait it out.

    We've never had a shooter with hostages, which would justify a different approach.

    1605:

    there are many jobs where you are obligated to put other's safety ahead of your own. Jobs that pay considerably less than policing does. Teaching, for example.

    I'm very glad to live in a country where the main way teachers die on the job is the sort of medical emergency that can happen to any of us (heart attacks, covid etc), with car crashes being the other main risk (ride a bicycle to work!) The only actual stats I could find were a decade old and from the before-the-paywall snippet appear to be derived from a press release by a teacher union in Western Australia so I'm not going to bother linking the article.

    They don't make it into the list of "10 most dangerous job categories" that includes such broad categories that answering the phone is lumped in with ticking boxes as people collect explosives on a mine site... "administrator" :) I like the way "selling movie tickets" is in the same category as "white water rafting guide" which have similarly disparate levels of risk.

    https://www.safenet.edu.au/2018/09/10/the-most-dangerous-jobs-in-australia/

    1606:

    »Li-S batteries would be around 3 times the energy density of current lithium ion batteries, less prone to fire, and would not require rare elements like cobalt. «

    Let's see about that once they work, shall we ?

    Lithion-Ion batteries didn't need Cobalt until very late in the game.

    1607:

    »That's because you're looking for logic where none exists.«

    There's actually a very simple logic that more than explains the police behaviour: "No need to get killed for a bunch of brown kids."

    1608:

    And why did they need the janitor to come and unlock the door?

    Disclaimer: I have no idea if this is the situation or not.

    A while back after another such incident there was talk of grants to schools to armor up their class doors. Basically make them strong enough not to be kicked in by most people and with an emergency locking system the teacher could throw. This lock could only be opened by specialty keys kept somewhere secure. The point is to keep the bad guys from first taking the keys from the janitor.

    Again, I have no idea if this or something similar was in place in this last incident.

    And, yes, I can see problems with such a system.

    1609:

    Basically make them strong enough not to be kicked in by most people and with an emergency locking system... And, yes, I can see problems with such a system.

    If nothing else you probably have some idea what life is like in a building full of bored twelve year old kids.

    1610:

    People being stupid near dangerous cliff edges is a very common news story in my locality. See this from a few weeks ago; tps://www.sussexlive.co.uk/news/sussex-news/shocking-beachy-head-picture-shows-5216127 Several people die here every year. Last year a young female student who was trying to take a 'selfie' of herself whilst jumping in the air near the cliff edge lost her balance and fell. These cliffs are very unstable and there are regularly large collapses.

    1612:

    We've had 3 of these in the last few months.

    https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/11/us/north-carolina-outer-banks-home-collapse/index.html

    So far there were weeks of warnings and officials sealed them off.

    But now there are signs up along the beach encouraging people to wear hard soled shoes as there is all kinds of "house" debris on the nearby beaches.

    Houses built on sand ...

    1613:

    1594 - Well, aside from anything else, based on UK law, he has to give the deer carcass to its owner, who is the person who owns the back yard it was shot in.

    1598 - And, this being the USA, I'd think that at least one of the cops would have a 0.44" Magnum master key on their person.

    1601 "First, police are civilians." - OTOH USian police are in the habit of referring to themselves as another arm of the military. I agree with you, but that is not how they think.

    1602 - And maybe a nice white feather on the left breast, where the fruit salad normally goes?

    1614:

    Actually, no. In English law, wild deer are ferae naturae, and are not owned by anyone, which essentially means that carcases belong to whoever initially has them. What the hunter IS doing is trespassing in pursuit of game, which is both a crime and gives him no rights to the product of his crime. The carcase wouldn't belong to the landowner until he claimed it.

    https://useful_english.en-academic.com/207544/ferae_naturae

    Scottish law may be different.

    1615:

    "There's actually a very simple logic that more than explains the police behaviour: "No need to get killed for a bunch of brown kids."

    If Uvalde is typical of that part of Texas, the majority of the school and city police are Hispanic.

    1617:

    USian police are in the habit of referring to themselves as another arm of the military.

    That is… disturbing.

    1618:

    Well, I had the the Scots Law as it was quoted by the head ghillie of a sporting estate, just after he'd shot a red deer in the garden of someone's house.

    1619:

    The other side of the Steve Jobs thing is that he might not have needed to have a jet on standby and register in all those states if he had followed his doctors' advice to begin with and just had the surgery they recommended. Instead, because he didn't like the idea of being cut into, he indulged his preference for a carrots-only diet until the cancer was so far advanced that only a transplant would save him.

    wg

    1620:

    Heteromeles noted: "Well, I've stood within 30 feet of a bison (no fence) to chase it through a gate. By myself. So I guess I am that stupid (and I had a secret weapon which worked wonders)."

    Well, first, you probably didn't climb a 10-foot wire and telephone pole fence designed to separate bison from spectators before trying to chase it, and second, if you were carrying a secret weapon (hint, hint), this probably wasn't a D&D random encounter while you were out for tea on the lawn.

    Your success is also going to depend on whether you're in the middle of the bison rutting season or not. Like most male animals, bison get a tad unreasonable when they're horny. The ranger we were talking to didn't specify whether the "pull the tail and find out" incident was during the rut, but since that period overlaps prime tourist season, the timing is plausible.

    I was in Montana during the rut (part of an animal behavior course I was taking), and we were parked in a big yellow school bus by the side of the road observing and tallying the various behaviors. It was about 200°F in the shade -- possibly 300°F -- and we were dying -- because we weren't stupid enough to leave the bus and mingle with the locals. The bison were worse off, what with wearing huge buffalo fur coats. Up pulls a tiny clown car smaller than most of the bison. Four bros emerge, and after five minutes of loudly exclaiming how bored they were at the bison's inaction, they got it into their heads that throwing rocks at the bison might stimulate some action. I ran to the back of the bus and yelled at them to point out the size disparity and its likely consequences, and after cursing me out, they puffed up their chests and left. Still not sure whether I should have just let evolution take its course.

    1621:

    The relevant laws predate the Union by a long way. I am not surprised that they differ.

    1622:

    Still not sure whether I should have just let evolution take its course.

    Tough question. Were the bison likely to be injured if you hadn't intervened?

    1623:

    Hint, hint

    Oh, you actually want the story?

    I was working on Catalina Island which has a herd of a couple of hundred bison, primarily now as a tourist draw (they're not native to the island). The island's divided into zones (IIRC five zones) by 4' tall fences across the island, as part of an effort to eliminate feral pigs. The pigs were eliminated zone by zone, and the bison are sort of corraled by the fences too, although they happily walk across cattle grates in the roads between the zones (note, they're not shaggy cattle. They're smarter and more agile. This will matter).

    Anyway, a couple of young bulls, off by themselves and not in rut, were in the wrong area, so I got tasked with shooing them out. One went easily, one didn't. The secret weapon? A post driver and a foot-long piece of rebar. It's the world's most godsawful cowbell. It's quite loud, but the harmonics are awful. They make your teeth ache and you can feel the cacophony right up into the ultrasonic range, making your scalp tingle.

    With independent bison bulls, in my limited experience on Catalina, there's this negotiation. They're used to humans being around, but they're generally not willing to cooperate unless you have a way of forcing them. The racket I was making changed the equation, because they liked it less than I did, but didn't hate it enough to charge me. It was an out of context problem, and they were actually scratching their ears with their hooves and shaking their heads to make the sensation go away.

    So anyway, one bull went through the gate I opened up. One didn't. So I walked with him about 30' away, watching him like a hawk, clanging and talking to him the whole time. When his head went up and he focused on me, I fell back. We pretty quickly negotiated what was acceptable, and I kept to acceptable behavior so far as he was concerned.

    Turned out, he was after wet vegetation. It was a hot day, most of the grass was dry, and he wanted salad, even if his ears itched. So I stood 30' away from him, clang clang clang, while he grazed. Finally he'd had enough and started to move away from me. So I started chasing him to the open gate. He missed the gate. I got past him, chased him back. Missed the gate again, sheesh. Then I saw the lightbulb click on. He walked up to the fence, looked at me, and vaulted the four foot fence from a standing start. Watching a bison jump straight up four feet is freaking awe inspiring, because they're huge, and you don't expect a cow-shaped animal to pull stunts like that.

    Anyway, he turned around and looked at me again. I stopped making the racket, apologized profusely for disturbing his lunch, and closed the gate. Never chased a bison again, either.

    Now, had it been a herd bull with his harem, I wouldn't have tried this stunt, because despite the way the world's going, I'd rather live. You don't fuck with the alpha males, especially when they're protecting females and calves. Similarly, you don't fuck with females with calves. While I was there, an idiot masquerading as a tourist got a bison horn in the glute for getting too close to a calf. I thought the bison aimed extremely well.

    1624:

    "There's actually a very simple logic that more than explains the police behaviour: "No need to get killed for a bunch of brown kids." If Uvalde is typical of that part of Texas, the majority of the school and city police are Hispanic.

    Wait, this line of logic doesn't make sense if the policemen are Hispanic.

    1625:

    Why on earth did they bother with 4' fences?

    1626:

    I think you've conflated the original message (1608) with my reply to it (1616).

    1627:

    Ah, oops. Sorry then.

    1628:

    Sorry - you answered that.

    1629:

    Re Uvalde police and their behaviour:

    I think you're all not cynical enough. I'd posit that the Uvalde police were doing their job, or to be more precise: they had no job to do in this situation, and therefore they did nothing.

    Because, please, face reality: in the US the job of cops isn't to protect the public or to deal with crime or criminals. Their job is to terrorize People of Colour. And—inasmuch as the parents they prevented forcefully from saving their kids were non-whites—they actually did that job.

    1630:

    The Uvalde SWAT club looks like an appropriate racial mix for 70 miles from the Mexican border. Remember, lotsa German folk ended up in northern Mexico; that's where the tuba in Norteño music came from. https://nypost.com/2022/05/28/unclear-if-uvalde-swat-team-responded-to-texas-school-shooting/

    1631:

    Robert Prior wondered: "Tough question. Were the bison likely to be injured if you hadn't intervened?"

    Probably not. Bison leather coats are thick.

    Heteromeles, thanks for the secret weapon tale. I'll be sure to bring a post driver next time I'm in Montana. Just in case.

    ("No, officer, it's just a post driver. Perfectly normal thing to have in my carry-on luggage. Why do you ask?")

    1632:

    Ah, sure. 20 - 30 pounds of dead weight.

    If he’s talking about what I think he is. I’ll be using one in an hour or so. Mine tends to stay where I drop it.

    1633:

    Speaking of civilization collapsing, what the hell is goin on in Ireland?

    It looks like the wheels have come off.

    1634:

    Wait, this line of logic doesn't make sense if the policemen are Hispanic.

    Maybe it does. Apparently black cops feel more threatened by black suspects than white suspects, and teat them more harshly than they do whites. It's possible to internalize bias against your own group.

    1635:

    Robert Prior wondered: "Tough question. Were the bison likely to be injured if you hadn't intervened?"

    Probably not. Bison leather coats are thick.

    In that case, probably better to let nature (and evolution) take its course…

    1636:

    ????

    You mean the medical strike, the airport chaos, the UK deciding to do a Trump and unilaterally scrap deals…?

    1637:

    Duffy
    Not making sense. AFAIK, Ireland is OK, or do you mean the shenanigans over Brexshit in the N?
    Or - as I note, the small laundry-list posted by Rbt Prior - which is normal for nermal in NI, I'm afraid.

    1638:

    I can explain the last of those in one word, "Bozo". Or in rather more, "Bozo needs a 'dead cat' to throw on the table to try and distract everyone else from how he is the only serving Prime Minister to have been served for an offence. Breaking the WreckSit agreement is the dead tiger in the room, so it's the largest dead cat available to throw. Therefore you must break the agreement."

    1639:

    It's just that it comes up HERE. For some reason. Like, this is for sure the third time this has been an extended discussion. Every time guns come up it somehow goes to bears.

    A. Bear attacks are stupid rare. If you're hiking you are vaaaaastly more likely to die from falling and hitting your head, and then a whole list of other things, including just keeling over.

    B. A few commenters act like you need a howitzer to defend against them. Which, no? I mean you can make up scenarios where anything happens, and yes, grizzlies and polar bears are huge but there's, like, 50,000 of one and 25,000 of the other. IN THE WORLD.

    I know you know all this, it's just amazing to me that this is all a thing.

    1640:

    "Remember, lotsa German folk ended up in northern Mexico"

    True, including the parts of northern Mexico that ended up in Texas.

    E.g., New Braunfels.

    https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth232994/

    1641:

    A few commenters act like you need a howitzer to defend against them.

    Well, the evidence is that pepper spray works better than firearms (92% vs 67%).

    A howitzer might work, but remember that the critical distance for a bear is around 10 m — further than that and they'll avoid you unless you're oblivious enough to be grabbing their food or their cubs. Can you really get a howitzer set up, aimed, and fired before the bear has covered 10 m? Remembering that a charging bear is topping 13 m/s…

    So if I'm hiking through the woods, I'll take pepper spray not a howitzer! :-)

    1643:

    I thought the idea was that you climb inside the howitzer where the bear can't get you? Then press the "bang" button and get launched to a safe distance away? Or is that a mortar?

    My approach to bears... to staying safe from bears... is to watch them on TV from a continent that only has care bears. So we're quite safe.

    (drop bears are a myth. They don't exist. And any rumours to the contrary are false. Harold Holt went for swim, he was not taken by a drop bear outside the The Lodge. Or inside it. Sheesh, you people. Everyone is perfectly safe here in Australia)

    1644:

    There's a perspective on the sociopolitics in Uvalde in the Washington Post.

    Look for "I’m from Uvalde. I’m not surprised this happened."

    1645:

    If you want to stay safe in the bush I recommend the Australian made Bushmaster "Protected Mobility Vehicle" which is bear resistant (also water resistant, vibration resistant and mine resistant)

    1646:

    Everyone is perfectly safe here in Australia

    This message was brought to you by the Taipan, Irukandji, Funnelweb, and Cassowary Marketing Cooperative of Queensland, who want to assure you that Australia is the safest place in the world to go bushwalking. Just steer clear of feral water buffalo on the stations. And don't lick cane toads, they're the wrong kind to get high on.

    1647:

    Erm, I just got a couple of texts from the nicest marketing people you've ever met (Hi Sheila! Hi Bruce!), and I want to note that I confused two groups.

    Those would be the Taipan, Gympie, Funnelweb, and Cassowary Bushwalking Promotion Cooperative ("Hike Australia! The Experience of a Lifetime! Become One With The Land!") and the Two Spot, Saltie, Irukanji, and Stonefish Coastal Tourism Board ("Visit Queensland's Opalescent Waters! Breathtaking Experiences Await!") (all slogans used with permission).

    I regret the error.

    Oh, and I was told repeatedly that the bush and coasts are perfectly safe, but watch out for anyone named Rupert or Clive. Not sure what that's about, but I'll pass it on in case it means something.

    1648:

    You're kind of right, the death rate is higher here, probably.

    They found that from 2008-2015, there were 1,610 animal-related fatalities in the US, with the majority of deaths the result of encounters with nonvenomous animals (57 percent). calling it 300M for convenience that's ~0.67 deaths per million per year.

    BETWEEN 2000 AND 2010, there were 254 reported and confirmed animal-related deaths in Australia, according to the latest report from an online database of coronial cases. and at 25M people that's about 1.0 deaths per million per year.

    So that's either 50% more danger or 33% less depending on which side you look at it from.

    1649:

    (although obviously the animals that kill people are horses, cows and kangaroos. You can swap roos for meece in the US I expect)

    1650:

    Clearly people ask for this sort of information a lot, because the national peak-level association of coroners in Australia have put out this helpful factsheet about animal-related deaths between 2000 and 2017. TL;DR, out of the 541 total, roughly 32% were attributed to horses, 15% to cows and 10% to dogs. Kangaroos are a tie with sharks at roughly 7% each but bees come close behind, followed (distantly) by sharks and crocodiles.

    I think there's a case for the meeses to answer, but I suspect it'll be recorded as infectious disease* rather than animal-related. Likewise there'll be figures for vector borne arboviruses that are not counted as animal-related, although mosquito control is one of the more targeted public health measures we routinely do here.

    *Do we even conceptual treat disease spread by mice and rats as zoonotic? We do for leptospirosis, but I'm sure the usual suspects are a mix...

    1651:

    I think deer are starting to figure in the numbers. I just missed one while riding at about 110 km/h just before covid. I haven't seen figures but the urban myth (wisdom) is that huntsmen spiders kill more than anything else.

    For those unfamiliar, they're a pursuit predator. Think cheetah but small with 8 legs. Slightly distracting while driving.

    I think covid is killing more at the moment (if you consider virii alive).

    I'm walking on the bush as I type this. Probably should be looking at the ground for snakes.

    1652:

    PS, huntsmen

    In Australia all single vehicle fatal accidents are attributed to speeding. So huntsmen don't appear in the statistics.

    1653:

    "Meece"=mooses?

    Why yes, just today, a female moose demonstrate that they don't need no steenking antlers to keep grizzlies from scaring humans: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6Out878a8s

    So the moral of the story is to hike with a moose instead of a gun if you're worried about bears. Because bears in the US kill 10 people per year or so, while Moose kill...around 500 or so. But that's mostly in automobile collisions. As with cassowaries and gun-toting tweakers, moose are perfectly safe to hang around with, but not to hit with a car.

    Or you can come to sunny southern California, land of the smogberry trees. Buy a Malibu t-shirt that says, "The Four Seasons in Malibu: Wildfire, Mudslide, Drought, and Tourists" (joke, but there was a similar shirt about a decade ago).

    1654:

    For a couple of years, several years ago, I used to commute with a 49cc scooter, which is classed as a moped in Queensland, legal to ride with a car licence, no separate motorcycle licence needed. I rode with a half-face helmet with a sun-visor rather than a face visor. I wore my normal glasses and never bothered with goggles. The thing could just about manage 60km/h with 90kg+ of me on it (80 downhill with a tail wind).

    Anyhow, there was an occasion when I was going 60 in the middle of 3 busy lanes, and suddenly realised what the hairy thing on the underside of the sun visor was. I was wearing gloves, but nonetheless flicked the spider away with one hand, but at the same time flicked my glasses off my face and into the centre of the leftmost lane. I managed to change to the left, stop, got the scooter up onto the footpath, waited for a break in the traffic and retrieved my (miraculously) undamaged glasses. I think I must have taken of the helmet and re-checked it just in case.

    I'm sure there's a moral or life lesson in all of that, no doubt I learned something from the experience. Buggered if I know exactly what, though.

    1655:

    I actually meant mice, but I think we're all richer to have learned about moose.

    1656:

    Actually cassowaries are surprisingly dangerous. Or not, if you're at all literate. Kind of like bison except feathery rather than fluffy. Very cute and photogenic. But there is a safe distance and an unsafe distance. Which is determined by the animal not by you.

    I suspect cassowaries are too light to do much damage to a car. And they tend to run away from the car rather than towards it (which is what gets kangaroos into trouble, they run and then jink, but often jink into the car rather than away from it). Plus kangaroos are used to being the biggest, heaviest flying thing around so they don't have good "give way to bigger things" reflexes.

    And yes, huntsmen are extremely dangerous. They like to lurk behind car sunshades and in pockets of the car, then come out to have a look around while you're driving. The correct response, as with most in-car distractions, is to think "they're not venomous" and focus on driving.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YURO1WJjPNM

    (surely the plural of moose is meece? Or moosen?)

    1657:

    You can’t fool me. I know that Australia has eleven of the top ten most dangerous creatures in the world. And, fuck, the ground is out to kill you.

    My glider-pilot friend used fly at Omarama (?) and pointed out that if you ‘landed out’ they wouldn’t normally or bother with a search since they just assumed you’d get eaten by a Bunyip etc.

    And the plural of Moose is “eeeeek”. And black bears are not generally worrisome; we have a couple that live out the back of our land and occasionally amble through the garden. They don’t even rip down the bird feeders - they actually unscrew them neatly. I’ve had far nastier neighbours in London/Silicon Valley.

    1658:

    Back on the topic of politics and reasons to be scared...

    After losing in the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Arizona’s attorney general appealed the decision to the Supreme Court. During those oral arguments, state prosecutors repeatedly argued that “innocence isn’t enough” of a reason to throw out Jones’ conviction.

    On Monday morning, by a 6-3 vote, the Supreme Court concurred: Barry Jones’ innocence is not enough to keep him off of death row.

    https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-supreme-court-just-said-in-in-shinn-v-ramirez-that-evidence-of-innocence-is-not-enough

    1659:

    I do think the plural of moose in the wild is "excuse me, I'll quietly leave," if you actually see it. While they get pissy like bison do, apparently if you can be non-threatening enough, they'll likely leave you alone. My inexpert opinion is that deescalating is the wise thing to do, and screaming and running probably doesn't help that as much.

    If you're an English major, the important thing to realize is that, from an European perspective, the plural of moose is elks (Scandinavian elk=North American moose). Moose is an Algonquin word taken into English, so that English colonials could use elk for wapiti, instead of red deer. Just because English colonists didn't know their European deer when they came over, for some obscure reason. Since the word moose has no ontogenetic relationship with goose, the correct plural of moose is mooses, not meese. Not making this up.

    Otherwise yes, I agree with you that vectors like mice are more troublesome than big nasties like bears.

    1660:

    Ummmm - I think your glider-pilot friend is mistaken. Yes, gliding is a thing in Omarama, BUT as Omarama is in Aoteatoa New Zealand (see - https://www.newzealand.com/us/omarama/). But as Bunyip has not ever been spotted in New Zealand, I do not believe it is used here as the normal excuse for gliders going missing - or anything else. (In fact, I don't believe Bunyip is/are actually found in Australia either - refer Wikipedia).

    As I pointed out a bit further up this(?) thread, New Zealand Aotearoa is not part of or even that close to Australia. And I don't believe you can even get from Omarama to Australia in a glider. (Maybe you can travel from Australia to Omarama in a glider as the prevailing winds travel that way but I don't think anyone has tried as I understand trying to fly gliders for a long distance of 1000's km of sea is somewhat frowned upon).

    However could perhaps be Haast's eagle preying on gliders instead - tho' they are reportedly extinct.

    1661:

    1644 Para 3 - "Drop Bears" are a joke rather than a myth. A joke perpetrated by practical jokers of all nations on the naive of all nations at that.

    1648 - I thought that "Rupert" was a name only applied to junior officers in the British army?

    1653 - You have that issue too; vehicle fatalities only having one or two causes (speeding and/or driving whilst intoxicated)?

    1654 - No; meeces are small quadruped rodents, not large deer! (source Mr Jinx cartoons)

    1662:

    Yah - Omarama is where he taught in NZ. It’s Benalla in Oz, at least according to the T-shirt my wife uses for yoga. Brain-fart Sunday...

    I’ve not heard of anyone even thinking of a glider flight NZ-OZ but my friend has at least once done Omarama to top of north island, back down to bottom of south and return to Omarama , so a quite long day’s flight. I only made one flight with him and decided I really didn’t need another expensive hobby. Scale model gliders are quite expensive enough and you don’t usually risk death if you crash.

    1663:

    Well that video of a huntsman on a windscreen puts paid to the myth of manly men that Australians like to tell themselves. That's some wonderful screaming.

    1664:

    »While they get pissy«

    You dont realize how close, yet how far you were there...

    Normally you have to really be an idiot to provoke an elk in the nordic countries: They are shy and very good at not being noticed in the first place.

    Trying to get between a female and her calf would qualify. Being so drunk you try to ride an elk would as well.

    However, sometimes the elk is the idiot.

    Apples and pears can get up to a quite high alcohol content when they ferment, and elks do not hold their liquor well.

    Search for "Elk stuck in tree" for a prime example.

    When hung-over, elks really do not suffer noisy humans lightly.

    Now imagine being the first responders, called on to dislodge the drunk elk from the apple-tree...

    1665:

    They don’t even rip down the bird feeders - they actually unscrew them neatly.

    Maybe they have learned that if they do that the nice people refill them promptly, but if they smash them it takes a while for the people to replace them?

    1666:

    Normally you have to really be an idiot to provoke an elk in the nordic countries: They are shy and very good at not being noticed in the first place.

    Many years ago I worked in a place in the countryside which had quite a lot of forest around it. This area was off-limits to hunters, so every autumn the elks, being smart animals, gathered there. We would often see multiple elk on or near the parking lot during the work day.

    Beautiful animals, but we didn't want to go outside when they were around.

    I've never seen a bear in the wilds, even though I've been hiking some, nor wolves or wolverines (they're around, too). My first time of seeing an elk was as a teenager when I went for a jog in the nearby forest (in an Helsinki suburb) and there was one near the track. I didn't go past it.

    1667:

    "Just because English colonists didn't know their European deer when they came over, for some obscure reason."

    Tut, tut. Historical ecology. Not obscure at all. Red deer have been rare in England since at least mediaeval times, and were almost extinct by the 18th century. Elk have been extinct since time immemorial. Most of the colonists would never have seen either, and they were demonstrably not roe deer (the only deer they would have seen).

    1668:

    Actually cassowaries are surprisingly dangerous.

    Also, learn what the nests and eggs look like an treat them like a highly venomous snake, i.e. avoid like the plague.

    Not so hard, as the eggs are highlighter-yellow/green and about the size of a baseball (only egg-shaped). And the nests sit on the ground and are flat and wide and rather rudimentary. So if you see a great big glowing orb in fuck-off-I'm-radioactive yellow, don't kick it or mom will drop-kick your intestines into next weerk.

    1669:

    David L responded to my comment about checking a post driver in my carry-on luggage: "Ah, sure. 20 - 30 pounds of dead weight."

    You missed my point. Sure, it's 30 pounds, but try smuggling that portable howitzer past Security. And I'd prefer most of all to bring a drop bear, since that's the sustainable organic solution, but apparently they're (i) not included in the approved list of companion animals and (ii) mythical. So there you have it: post driver for the win. Honorable mention for Hetermeles's bottle of eau de skunk, so long as it's less than 100 mL and will therefore get through security.

    Moz noted: "Actually cassowaries are surprisingly dangerous. Or not... But there is a safe distance and an unsafe distance. Which is determined by the animal not by you."

    Amen. My experience with safe distances was arctic terns in Iceland. When I was visiting, they had teeny floofy chicks, so I wanted to get a picture. Sadly, my zoom lens was only 30x, so I had to get close. On my first try, I got close enough to actually see the chicks in the photo, but they were too small. Since all had gone well thus far, I took one more step closer -- and learned the true meaning of shitstorm, as the entire flock rose and voided their bowels on me. Fortunately, it was a small flock. But apparently I'd crossed some invisible line only the terns saw. Won't try repeating that empirical experiment with a cassowary, emu, or ostrich.

    1670:

    Key quote: "It’s a town where the love of guns overwhelms any notion of common-sense regulations, and the minority White ruling class places its right-wing Republican ideology above the safety of its most vulnerable citizens — its impoverished and its children, most of whom are Hispanic."

    (Note: pasting the link into a private window displays the story quite nicely, if you're having trouble accessing it.)

    1671:

    From one of my favorite pod casts on America's basic sickness - the collapse of trust.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iArRXahQE7k

    This is a sickness far deeper than any toxic pollution, overheating planet, collapsing biodiversity or economic failure.

    Lack of social trust is the root cause of gun fanatics, rebirth of open racism, Qanon, anti-vaxxers, anti-maskers, climate denial, election denial, disregard of experts and dozens of other theories and world views divorced from reality. If Trump's MAGA supporters are especially crazy it may be because they are the ones that have ben lied to the most by those in power and the most victimized by globalization. Don't believe me? Then take a road trip through Appalachia sometime and check out formally prosperous towns that have been gutted by globalization

    We don't trust the government (after Citizens United, a hundred major scandals' and nearly as many futile expensive wars). We don't trust law enforcement (especially if you are Black). We don't trust business (especially after your CEO gets a fat bonus for laying off you and 1,000s of your colleagues). We don't trust our financial institutions (especially after 2008 when not a single Wall Street banker went to jail). We don't trust the media (unless they make up our info bubble). We don't trust our scientists and doctors (especially big pharma after the opioid crisis and price gouging life saving medicine like insulin). We don't trust our churches (no need to explain this to Catholics and those who aren't gullible enough give their money to televangelists).

    We don't trust each other.

    Which is why guns have never been so popular. Purchasing a gun is not an affirmation of hunting. It's an expression of the belief that you can't trust anyone but yourself. You are on your own. In the 1960s, 61% of Americans were in favor of a gun ban, today that number is only 19% despite a dozen massacres of innocent school children.

    The perpetrators of gun violence are the personification of our lack of trust. Pathetic loners filled with despair (most gun victims are suicides) and rage, socially isolated, emasculated and cut off from emotional help and psychological support, being fed crap through Facebook and other predatory social media looking to make a fast buck by pushing their hate and fear buttons. And its all because we don't trust each other. Freud said "sometimes a cigar is just a cigar", but in reality the only way these losers can actually feel like men with agency is to own an automatic assault rifle.

    So how do we restore trust?

    Can we restore trust?

    1672:

    Cassowary = raptor. Simple.

    1673:

    If he hasn't been mentioned yet, Mike Cannon-Brookes makes a case for "good use of billionaire discretionary fund" in Australia. The leading energy retailer, AGL, was attempting to spin off its coal fired power stations into its own company, which would essentially run them as long as possible while allowing AGL to be fully renewable power generation on paper. MCB first tried to intervene with a hostile takeover of AGL to halt the demerger and retire the coal stations ahead of schedule. When that failed, he secured enough shares to prevent the demerger from going ahead (needed 75% shareholder approval). Details here.

    Meanwhile, he was also a founder of Climate 200 which funds political candidates who run on action on climate change. They not only helped fund the Greens but also several "teal" independents (blue as in free market liberals, green as in climate change focused) who managed to steal a number of "safe" conservative seats this election, potentially dooming the conservative coalition to the opposition for a decade (although I may be slightly optimistic there).

    Considering how regressive Australia has been on climate change this last 9 years it's an utter coup for the environmental movement.

    1674:

    Well said. I agree.

    1675:

    I do think the plural of moose in the wild is "excuse me, I'll quietly leave," if you actually see it.

    On a drive up the PCH (Pacific Coastal Highway?) somewhere near Eureka I think, there was a rest pull off. In the field next to it was 20 or 30 of them. Some people were getting close to take pics. After figuring out just how big they were we stayed in the parking lot.

    1676:

    What about fallow deer? I'd say they're more visible in the English countryside than roe deer are.

    (I personally have seen more muntjac than roe, but I've not seen wild red at all. Perhaps had I lived in the Scottish countryside (rather than Dundonian suburbs) that'd be different.)

    1677:

    America's basic sickness - the collapse of trust.

    Collapse of trust? What trust?

    The problem with this theory is that American government, with its famed checks and balances, is built around a lack of trust. The bicameral legislature was created to let the rural states (equal votes in the senate) struggle with those representing the people (Representatives, in population-based seats). The independent judiciary was set up to check abuses of power from the other branches, and the executive branch has every major power (budget, military, etc.) checked by Congress, at least until nuclear arms ripped a hole in that system.

    Despite our propaganda, this isn't a new idea: ancient Romans, after striking to throw out their last king, instituted something fairly similar, where chief executive power ("dictatorship") was limited to solving a particular problem (like leading the army to fight a war, or organizing a new senate election when things got bollixed by whatever), and every other executive (consul, proconsul) was checked both by the Senate and by having two of the officers needing to act together to do anything important. That old Republic lasted for several hundred years.

    What we're seeing now is also normal, which is powerful people systematically exploiting divisions to weaken the government on the federal and state levels. It isn't new, similar shit started in the 1840s to keep the slave owners in power, and happened again the 1880s to put the former slave owners and new industrialists in power. It is a true crisis this time, same as the previous times, but it's not a new type of crisis in American history.

    We just have to remember that it's also possible to build trust. It doesn't need to be very big, just enough to build coalitions to deal with the shit enough to make it go away. SSDD (same shit, different decade).

    1678:

    I was once working a seeding contract in the foothills outside Sundre Alberta. About 3 of us were on an ATV driving along a trail towards the rest of our crew, who were all standing and watching us approach.

    About 15 feet behind them a moose 'tiptoed' across the trail, quick as a ghost. None of them believed us when we told them a moose had just snuck behind them. The image of a truly massive moose tiptoeing behind a group of people will stick with me forever.

    Fun fact - that region was home to multiple herds of 'wild' horses (multigenerational farrel horses). We saw them often, very cool but definitely kept our distance.

    1679:

    I came here to post that WaPo article as well, since there was speculation earlier about racism being part of this tragic catastrophe.

    I'd been wondering myself that surely there must have been some impact from some angle re the TX hysteria and hatred and general behavior about immigration and from forever regarding 'Mexicans,' since this is border territory, where boogaloos and proud boys rampage with impuunity -- as do other groups.

    Don't think being 'White' will protect either, if one is from anywhere else. An incredibly harrowing and toxic encounter a few years back with the Texas State police, when we and a friend were driving back to El Paso from Marfa to catch a plane home, resulted in our refusal to ever return to Texas.

    By the way, those of our friends who have the capacity to do so have moved out of Texas in the last four years -- as have others in Florida leaving that state if they were able to. Most people don't have that choice though.

    1680:

    Fallow deer were kept in parks, from which most of the colonists were excluded, and they were not thought of as wild animals. They certainly had started to naturalise by the 18th century, but my understanding was that they were still rare outside parks. I could well be wrong. Roe are commonly seen at dawn and dusk in mixed woodland and pasture, but that implies you have to be there (as many of those people were, but few are nowadays).

    Even if fallow WERE common in England then (and they may have been), they also look very unlike red deer.

    1681:

    Duffy
    You are "ahead" of us, but not by much!
    Bo Jon-Sun has trashed, utterly wrecked, trust in politicians & many "services" we took for granted.
    It's nowhere near as bad as the collapse caused by Trump on your side of the Pond, but THIS sort of thing is really gnawing away at the vitals.
    In the USA - PUT TRUMP IN JAIL - as a start.
    Here? Probably putting Bo Jon-Sun in jail would be a good start, along with a good few MetPlod!
    On both sides of the Pond, dealing with Murdoch, Pox "news", the Rothermeres & all the other white-wing deliberate liars would also help.

    Foxessa
    If it's not too harrowing or flashback-inducing, could you relate ( possibly expurgated ) details of that nasty encounter?

    1682:

    Yes; wild red deer are routine sights in the Highlands and Western Isles of Scotland.

    1683:

    Red deer aren't THAT common a sight in the Highlands, not unless you're willing to trek significant distances from Civilisation and call in artillery strikes against the clouds of midges that infest the cullies, morrans and blanket bogs. "Monarch of the Glen" was not painted from life.

    1684:

    Yes, Omarama is a know as for its gliding conditions and given suitable wind conditions, a number of record breaking flights have been recorded. However, these are mostly over land rather than long distances over water.

    1685:

    I don't believe you can even get from Omarama to Australia in a glider.

    Sure you can. Put glider in a box, on a ship, sit in glider. Wait.

    It's roughly 2000km. So assuming a consistent glide ratio of 1/20 you'd need to be 100km up. You might struggle to maintain the glide ratio in low earth orbit, but if you could you'd be able to make it.

    Going the other way you'd probably want a nice thunderstorm to push you up to 30km or so, then hope the tailwind lasts long enough to get you across the ocean rather than landing in it. I suspect we're talking "if the first 25 attempts don't succeed, you* need to try harder".

    (* or your successor, given the joy of landing 500km offshore in a notoriously turbulent ocean during a storm)

    1686:

    You could theoretically cross the Tasman Sea in a glider using dynamic soaring. It exploits the wind gradient over open ocean. That's how albatross get around, but I don't know of any humans exploiting it and it probably demands performance that you can't build into a glider small enough to do it.

    1687:

    Crossing the Cook Strait is not a problem given a decent altitude; it’s only 20km or so. With a modern glider like an ASH25 having a cruising l/d around 62 you have plenty of headroom. Crossing the English Channel is relatively easy too.

    1688:

    I rather doubt the wind conditions would work for an Omarama- Oz glide somehow, but since I didn’t actually suggest the idea I’m not going to worry about it.

    On the other hand, with a 60+ l/d and the latest high-altitude glider you might have a chance. The Perlan 2 has exceeded 76000ft (23km) for example. And you get thermals off the coasts, though I have no idea if there is usable lift to be had. I suppose that if something is holding the clouds up it would hold a glider up.

    As for dynamic soaring, yes people use it and it isn’t only from ocean swell. The model plane speed record is set dynamically soaring off a suitable shape hill and is currently something around 600mph I think

    1689:

    Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.

    1690:

    Fallow deer are "wild" & inside the M25 - mainly because of Epping Forest. They have recently started "invading" ( i.e. re-colonising ) areas including some housing, which means homeowners have had to start putting more secure locks/catches on their garden access-points, to stop the deer from eating everything!

    1691:

    Red deer are common in a village near us (Glencoe area), but thats because some of the locals have taken to leaving out food to encourage them close to their gardens, despite being told many times that this is really bad for the deer (and unlikely to be good for their gardens). As a result the deer have taken to roaming around the village - my wife saw one in a (deserted) children's play park last week. Given their role as a vector for ticks carrying Lyme's Disease this is not great.

    1692:

    In the US to keep deer out of a garden you need 8' tall fencing. And maybe higher. Other wise they just jump over it.

    1693:

    I used "routine" to mean "certain times of day in certain seasons", not most days of most months. However, I do see them on most Winter trips over Rannoch Moor (in a nice air-conditioned and midge free DMU).

    1694:

    And in the UK, if they are red deer. Same as your wapiti, remember? The usual problem is at ground level - muntjac will sort-of burrow, and certainly will get through holes made by badgers.

    1695:

    I think we're separated via English.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elk

    Way too big to exist in a built up area. Plus their range is way more limited than "regular" deer.

    Anyway over here we don't see those much in suburbia. We mostly see these. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White-tailed_deer

    Not quite as big. If I'm out late I'm likely to see them walking down the street at 3am. Especially the year old ones. Around here people with larger and/or brush covered yard areas will find a fawn in their yard where their mother has dropped it to hide during the day.

    1696:

    Poul-Henning Kamp @ 1608:

    That argument doesn't hold up in this case because many of the cops involved are "brown" as well.

    1697:

    Justin Jordan @ 1640:

    The Second Amendment DOES guarantee the right to arm bears after all.

    1698:

    That argument doesn't hold up in this case because many of the cops involved are "brown" as well.

    Actually, that argument does hold water: black cops are just as likely as white cops to kill black suspects. They internalize systemic racism, putting the blue before the black. Why assume brown cops are any different?

    "White officers do not kill black suspects at a higher rate compared with nonwhite officers," concludes a research team led by Charles Menifield, dean of the School of Public Affairs and Administration at Rutgers University–Newark. "The killing of black suspects is a police problem, not a white police problem."

    https://psmag.com/social-justice/black-cops-are-just-as-likely-as-whites-to-kill-black-suspects

    Next on my reading list is a book by Jennifer L. Eberhardt: Biased. I read the intro and she tells of talking to a black plain-clothed cop who was keeping an eye on a suspicious character only to realize that he was watching his own reflection — the only black face on the street. He realized he had internalized 'blacks are more likely criminal' despite being black himself.

    1699:

    Eh? I said wapiti. Where did you get elk from?

    1700:

    From the first sentence of the first article linked.

    The elk (Cervus canadensis), also known as the wapiti, is one of the largest species within the deer family, Cervidae, and one of the largest terrestrial mammals in its native range of North America, as well as Central and East Asia.

    Your use of the term may be different in the UK than it is in North America.

    The notes in the article point this way.

    1701:

    The mind boggles. Of course I know that, which is why I said wapiti not elk. A wapiti is a red deer, as I said, with a nominal species difference due to geography. A European elk is an American moose, ditto. Red deer are common in some parts of the UK, (European) elk have been extinct here since prehistoric times and, as far as I know, have never been reintroduced.

    What I said in #1695 is correct, and I am not the person who is confused by terminology.

    1702:

    Yes. You are never wrong about anything.

    [Yellow card but I'm tired of it.]

    1703:

    1695, 1702 and 1703 - I think you're both wrong. {Latin name used for clarity} Cervus elaphus is not noticeably a North American species according to the linked Wikipedia article, and yet it's what Europeans (include Elderly Cynic and myself here) would normally mean by the common name "red deer".

    1704:

    Beat me to it. Since I helped start the mess, I'll start straightening it out.

    Cervus elaphus is the red deer, with subspecies in Europe, Asia (east to Tibet), and even the Maghreb.

    Cervus canadensis is the American elk/wapiti, with subspecies across North America. The biggest (Roosevelt) elk get up to twice the size of red deer. Westerners who argue that Elk aren't red deer are, like me, thinking of how enormous a stag Roosevelt elk can get. 1,000 pounds is fairly normal, 1,300 pounds is record-class, while red deer stags are more around 500 pounds.

    Cervus nippon is the sika deer, with subspecies in parts of Asia

    And beyond that, you can dive deep into the taxonomic swamp of whether the subspecies of red and sika deer deserve to be their own species or not.

    Alces alces is the moose/Scandinavian elk, and it's one circumboreal species.

    Now, just to do some biology, Scandinavian elk, reindeer (same as caribou), and roe deer, are all offshoots of a predominantly New World subfamily that colonized Eurasia during the Miocene. The red deer group is a predominantly Old World group, with elks colonizing North America.

    Finally (this is an important bit), I don't recommend trusting the deer pages of Wikipedia. They contradict each other in a number of fairly important details, like which species is in which group. Worse, the Elk and Red Deer pages seem to miss a bunch of details that normally show up on species pages. Use additional resources before continuing the argument.

    1705:

    Para the last - I agree. I only quoted the Wikipedia after fact checking the point I was making.

    1706:

    Firstly, I was speaking loosely, in the context of fencing, as I thought was clear. Perhaps I should have spelled out the taxonomic subtlties, but I didn't think that it was needed. The point was that I was NOT referring to the European elk, but red deer (as I said), and their American equivalent IS wapiti.

    The low weight of Scottish red deer is due to their extremely poor diet; even for farmed deer, remember how many generations that takes to 'correct'. In their natural woodland habitat (as in New Zealand), they grow significantly larger. Also, Cervus elaphas and canadiensis are interfertile, which is the traditional definition of being a single species; you may choose another one, but the point IS debatable, just as it is with C. nippon.

    https://beyondthekill.net/red-deer-new-zealand/

    I will accept that I was misleading,

    1707:

    H can correct the Wiki information if needed but your comment about badgers digging under fences and deer following also was strange for those of us on this side of the pond. Wiki implies your badgers are twice the size of ours. Plus ours tend to avoid east of the Mississippi which means about 1/2 of the country. Anyway, I'd never heard of it from any gardeners and the size issue plus the American elk/wapiti made that not make sense OVER HERE. Which was when I said "separated by English".

    1708:

    Badgers here are notorious for making holes in hedges and fences, and the deer that would follow them is muntjac; they are about the same size, and the latter is very low-slung for a deer. Roe deer are more likely to jump a fence.

    1709:

    Life is too short to correct Wikipedia if the experts can't be arsed to do it. I'm not a deer expert, I just noted that the pages contradict each other.

    I'd also add that you're getting fooled by thinking white-tailed deer are muntjacs. They're not. White-tailed deer run 100-150 pounds, while Muntjac run 30-40 lbs and have a shoulder height less than two feet. They also have simple antlers. I can easily buy a muntjac going under a fence. We both know white-tails can leap about 8 feet. Although I've seen them get stuck in some weird places, in general they go over if they can.

    Deer as a group run in size from pudu (bit over a foot tall, less than 3' long) to moose (pushing 7' at the should and 10' long at the biggest). They're a bit diverse.

    1710:

    If I was making a statement like that, I would use the Latin names of the species, not the common name. It's not that regular that the North American and British Isles names of 2 different species are the same word, but it does happen, so it's best to use the Latin names.

    Mods, please note I'm saying that David L is unclear rather than wrong.

    1711:

    It's not that regular that the North American and British Isles names of 2 different species are the same word, but it does happen

    Robins, for another example.

    1712:

    "incapable of poking the Republican bear" - not quite, though it's rare. Note the failed vote to legalize abortion rights a week and a half on a Wednesday after the leaked opinion.

    1713:

    Back in the early eighties, a city paper in Philly published a report of a study done in prison of convicted burglers: 20% or so said they'd be deterred by a home alarm system. 60% (or was it 67%?) would be deterred by a dog, of any size.

    1714:

    Back in the eighties, I was with an ex (not ex then) visiting her mom, and I read a Readers' Digest (NOT a "liberal mag"), and it had a story about the beginning of hunting season, with people bringing in, wounded, their dogs, their kids, and anything else but game.

    Anyone caught hunting while drunk should lose their right to own a gun.

    1715:

    Oh, and about home invasions? Tell me, how bulletproof are your walls?

    1716:

    Thomas and Kavanaugh? How about "whatever happened to the Biden Rule" Barrett?

    1717:

    T-shirt I've seen occasionally: on the front, LA Bomb Squad. On the back, "If you see me running, try to keep up."

    1718:

    As someone else noted, in the US, police are not exactly civilians. They're uniformed, and under oath, but they're not military. Very, ahhh, "peculiar" institution.

    1719:

    Tell me, how bulletproof are your walls?

    My walls are 30cm to 50cm thickness of mortared sandstone, I think that makes them sufficiently bulletproof for most purposes. Upstairs on the third floor of this Victorian tenement the walls are a bit thinner since they don't have to support so much weight, maybe 20cm or so.

    1720:

    Oh, come on. Every continent has the deadliest predator in the history of the planet. You can see one any time you want... just look in a mirror.

    1721:

    I believe that the second most dangerous animal is the mosquito.

    1722:

    I'd also add that you're getting fooled by thinking white-tailed deer are muntjacs. They're not. White-tailed deer run 100-150 pounds, while Muntjac run 30-40 lbs and have a shoulder height less than two feet.

    I'll be honest. The only deer I've seen have been white tailed or those of a similar size. Those tiny things seem to be a China thing. Or a west coast thing.

    I've also never seen a badger in person but if the sizes in Wikipedia for the US are valid then an adult white tail deer would have a hard time getting through a hole they dug.

    Looping WAY back. We dog sit for our kids at times. The last time one of them realized she could grab the wooden lattice (Home Depot/Lowes) and break it off. After a few breaks there would be a hole big enough for her to go through. Up till then our temp fencing for them had been 2 sections of lattice between the house and the neighbors fence. Bungied to a couple of fence poles driven with a fence pole driver. Which made it easy to take down. Now we're putting up a more permanent fence.

    The lattice worked for 2 years till she discovered her mouth could take it apart. Oh well.

    All three of our kids dogs COULD jump the fence. They just seem to not think it is worth the effort. I sort of miss the deer. Not sure if the temp fencing scared them off or something about people habits in the pandemic. But where we'd get 3 to 6 every few weeks 3 years ago we now only 1 every few months.

    1723:

    in the US, police are not exactly civilians. They're uniformed, and under oath

    So are priests — does that mean priests aren't civilians? What about judges — don't they swear an oath of office?

    There are many occupations tat require a uniform, so clearly having a uniform doesn't mean you aren't a civilian. Oaths are also not that uncommon (although less common than uniforms).

    1724:

    I believe that the second most dangerous animal is the mosquito.

    No, it's Plasmodium parasite. The mosquito is just a vehicle for it.

    1725:

    No, it's Plasmodium parasite. The mosquito is just a vehicle for it.

    Nope. Plasmodium isn't an animal, it's an apicomplexan, which is far closer to kelp and potato blight than it is to animals. Plasmodia actually have the bizarre remnant of a chloroplast (the apicoplast), further embedded in the remnants of the red algae that they're unimaginably distant ancestor swallowed some billion years ago or more. Don't be fooled by the flagella it uses to move around. Sperm have flagella too. Instead of an animal, you could call it a infectious mutant kelp sperm if you wanted. That would be somewhat less wrong.

    While not that high on the biomass assimilated deadliness scale, I'd point to the rosy wolf snail as one of the deadlier species around. They've caused at least one-third of known snail extinctions, including largely wiping out native snails from the Hawaiian Islands. You can probably buy one online as a pet, if you look hard enough.

    1726:

    I'd probably pick Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis. It's wiping out amphibian species like nothing ever before. It's horrendous.

    1727:

    And yeah, not an animal. Just using "animal" in the "not plant, living thing" meaning

    1728:

    And yeah, not an animal. Just using "animal" in the "not plant, living thing" meaning

    Well...

    chytrids (look at the second part of the name, which literally means "frog chytrid of arrow-poison frogs") are fungi. Fungi are the sister phylum to animals, so you're better off calling them animals than I am calling an apicomplexan a kelp. For what it's worth.

    If you want disease-causing animals, you've got to get into worms. Something like pork tapeworm would probably do reasonably well.

    1729:

    Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) is spreading through America's cervid population with a number of states requiring testing of hunted deer carcasses before consumption. It may be that the deer population local to your area has crashed in numbers for this reason.

    1730:

    The edge of that issue nearly 1000 miles from here.

    I suspect it is more that people doing WFH and kids spending a year of school from home change the local habits enough to push them somewhere else.

    We are very close to a greenway system that follows the creeks through the city. The system has lots of "natural" buffer on each side. Plus there's a park 1/2 mile away that is about 10 to 20 acres of "wild" and is next to the green way through here. I suspect the patterns have changed due to the way people have changed.

    Plus our back yard is enclosed more often than not which is a big change from before the pandemic. I have to wonder if the deer have a Yelp system to let each other know where the nice plants are located. The more permanent fence I'm putting up will have a real gate system which I'll leave open when I'm not herding dogs so maybe they'll come back.

    As a side note, squirrels are smart, rabbits are fast, and chipmunks are just plain stupid. The squirrels have quickly learned that the camel bells ringing means take cover. Ditto the rabbits, but not as often, but they are fast enough to beat feet and get away. Chipmunks run 10 to 20 feet then stop and look to see if there's something to keep running from.

    We ring the camel bells when we let out the dogs when we're keeping them for our kids.

    Most of the birds on our feeder have figured out they can ignore the dogs. The pigeons and robins are getting better at leaving with the bells.

    1731:

    "Those tiny things seem to be a China thing. Or a west coast thing."

    There are muntjacs in various places in England which have bred from escaped pets. The road from Wolverton to Newport Pagnell, on the north edge of Milton Keynes, is sort of notorious for them giving people cause to regret the tendency of modern cars to crumple expensively at the slightest touch.

    "I've also never seen a badger in person but if the sizes in Wikipedia for the US are valid then an adult white tail deer would have a hard time getting through a hole they dug."

    I've never seen a live badger, but I've seen a few dead ones and they are big enough that I thought they were sacks of fertiliser that had fallen off the farmer's tractor until I got closer.

    Badger holes are fucking huge, and the spoil heaps outside setts look like they ought to have tramroads and tipper wagons on them. Badgers are also very strong and very determined; you not only need to carry the welded steel mesh fence down a couple of metres below ground level, you also have to have it continue out horizontally at that depth for a way to make them decide to give up trying to dig under it. This means that when they decide to annex someone's garden, which they do by digging big holes in it and shitting in them, you can waste a lot of effort for no result trying to fence them out. What you actually have to do is shit in the holes yourself, but that doesn't seem to be in most people's lists of possible responses.

    1732:

    but that doesn't seem to be in most people's lists of possible responses.

    My daughter's dogs seem to want to dig everywhere in our yard. I suspect they smell the trails of the various creatures plus the occasional chipmunk burrow based on the details of each spot.

    Tossing their own poop in these is stops them from digging in that particular hole.

    As I said way upstream, per wikipedia your badgers can get to be twice the size of ours.

    1733:

    You don't want to hit a badger in a car, either.

    1734:

    You don't want to hit a badger in a car, either.

    It doesn't matter if the badger is in the car or out of it, don't hit it either way. They're mean buggers at the best of times and really mean buggers if they're pissed off.

    1735:

    Since the new topic hasn't reached 300 yet, I'll post this here and hope someone has a clue. If it doesn't get a response, I'll post it after 300 in the new topic ...

    More computer woes:

    I've started having a problem with my mouse pointer disappearing - Windoze10. Mostly when I'm typing a comment in Mozilla Firefox. It just goes away and I can't get it back without drastic measures; use keyboard combos to Shut Down is about the only thing I've found that works.

    I've followed what "help" I can find on the internet - disabled "hide pointer while typing" and enabled "show pointer location when I press CTRL key".

    The latter works to show me where the pointer is supposed to be, but I can't move it with the mouse when it gets in that state. No matter how much I move the mouse, the "location" of the pointer remains the same, doesn't move.

    1736:

    Meanwhile, the USS Kearsarge is parked in Stockholm harbor and the Swedish Prime Minister is meeting with the Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff on its deck.

    Different times.

    1737:

    "No matter how much I move the mouse, the "location" of the pointer remains the same"

    It should be possible to set up key combinations to move the pointer, rather than using the rodent.

    Not sure how you'd go about it in Windows; I mainly use a couple of Linux distros.

    And whether it would work will depend on what is broken.

    HTH, but no promises.

    JHomes

    1738:

    A bit more about guns (why I don't own one even though I like guns) - escaped felon in Texas.

    The search for Gonzalo Lopez, 46, ended late Thursday in a shootout about 220 miles away. He led officers on a brief chase in a stolen truck before he was gunned down.
    Authorities believe while Lopez roamed free, he killed a man and his four grandsons, then stole an AR-15-style rifle and a pistol from their ranch near Centerville...
    1739:

    Best guesses involve installing Google Chrome or Mickeyshaft (blunt) Edge and using one of them rather than Firefox (or Intranet Exploder).

    Specials

    Merchandise

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    This page contains a single entry by Charlie Stross published on May 9, 2022 1:32 PM.

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