Subsidies are an incredible tool when used well, like when they funded a bunch of utility cooperatives that electrified rural US. Maybe you’re asking why we should because propping up the car industry when public transit and bike infrastructure should be subsidized instead, rather than challenging subsidies, though.
But don’t services like Discord forbid third party clients?
Me waiting for inflation to slowly increase Discord’s yearly revenue until it tips into the legally defined Gatekeeper™ status under the EU Digital Markets Act so they’d be playing with fire if they banned people for using interoperability apps.
Freedom feels good and just so happens to, for the most part bring nations socially
This part I’d agree with
and economically, closer to the US
This part, much less so. The US has a pretty bad history of overthrowing democratically elected leaders and replacing them with US business friendly politicians, whether through hijacking the legal process as with delaying President Lula, or by backing a coup as with Pinochet.
Given the context of this conversation, I should probably note that I don’t support China taking over Taiwan, or meddling with our elections to sow instability either. I’m just challenging the point that the US is friendly to democracy - which has also had bad influence on European democracy (where I am).
My immediate concern with tags is descending into what Twitter has become: hashtags have been meaningless for a long while since there’s too much wrongly tagged stuff, different communities often use the same tag for different things, or there are ten tags all for the same thing. All of which means we’d need some form of moderator role that handles tags, and while I think it’s doable, it might take some trial and error to figure out how exactly we divide tags between moderators, how tags are proposed/created, and how tags are grouped/combined (e.g. food, foods).
So not only will you be able to get it, the people who get it to you can’t be big corporate shitheels.
Cannabis Social Clubs have existed in Europe for a while under a legal gray area, e.g. in Spain. I imagine that’s why Germany went with a non-profit cooperative model instead of the US’ (recent) for-profit corporate approach. Although Canada’s approach of a state monopoly is similar to what Norway does with alcohol, which is another way to socialize the profits of drugs.
This is it, notice how Google Trends[1] shows a rise in “30 year old boomer” not long before “boomer shooter” becomes more commonplace. It’s just the whole applying “boomer” to things like being stuck in their ways or boomer-like behavior, rather than age, that took off a few years back.
[1] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=boomer shooter,30 year old boomer&hl=en
The average politicians may not present themselves as being smart, but the lobbyists, think tanks, advisors that interact with them and influence their behaviour are not dumb. Rather than assuming it’s either malice or ignorance, we can instead opt for a more middle ground assumption: it’s both malice and ignorance, symbiotically feeding off each other.
Ask yourself this: has Bitcoin had - or is it trending towards - a net positive impact on our world? In other words, is it worth investing in long term? If it isn’t you should treat it as a short term investment and get out as soon as you’ve made a profit - and you’ve literally 4x’d your investment. The fact that we’re talking about the price in c/News is already a bad bubble sign and reminiscent of all the other times we’ve had crypto bubbles.
How much electricity does the world banking system use? (Answer: a whole lot more)
Per capita or in total?
No surprise that a housing cooperative is doing a 4 day work week. It’s so sad that the 2010s’ political push for more cooperatives died with the change to Kier’s Labour in the UK. We could’ve had far more democratic businesses today that would be more open to trialing 4 day work weeks - actual risk taking, unlike our current dictatorial bosses who have to be dragged into the future while they wait for others to take the risks they’re too cowardly to take.
Putting someone in a home is more important than getting them socialized medical care
I get your point and I agree, but allow me to reframe this dichotomy a little: housing is health care - it literally saves lives. These issues are intertwined, and socialized housing should be part of a socialized health care strategy.
By ‘both’ I mean we don’t have to either not solve this (climate hell) or just subsidize private hydropower, we can overcome both of those.
But… the point you brought up does lead me to talking about the Norwegian oil strategy that you might be interested in! Norway is doing exactly that: subsidizing private discovery of oil, tax the sale of oil heavily - and it has been very successful (to the detriment of the environment…). The US can learn from that by subsidizing private hydropower development (to incentivize building more of them) and then using targeted taxes when they’re actually operating. It’s the strategy that is often touted as “how Norway avoided Dutch disease / the resource curse”.
I didn’t actually mean subsidizing private hydropower above, though, I meant the government doing it themselves so that the profits are socialized rather than privatized. That’s mostly what Norway has done with its hydropower strategy. The case for taxes for hydropower, and natural resources in general, is basically the Georgist case: nobody invented or created the nature/land that allowed for that hydropower station, it was already here long before we were, so taxes make sense in that they socialize profits extracted by private companies.
We can just do both? Look at Norway’s hydropower strategy: the government owns and operates most of it, and they tax private hydropower. That’s significantly better than handouts. There are valid critiques of what the Dems are doing, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take the small victories we can (like this) nor does it mean republicans aren’t worse (they’ll just do even worse handouts to the rich).
This is about specific sites’ abnormally high methane pollution, and China is in the data set but does not have as many “super-emitters” according to this. Here’s an example where China’s listed in the linked Sky article:
Coal is also a problem with one facility in Shanxi, China, peaking at around 181 tonnes an hour last February.
However, they go on to rank the countries in the article as such:
Kayrros’s data shows Turkmenistan had higher methane emissions than any other nation, followed by the United States, India, Russia and Pakistan.
So the answer is simply that China, along with the EU, does not have as many “super-emitters” to worry about. Other regions do, and that means they can target those sites specifically to reduce their methane emissions now that the data clearly highlights them.
What is it with corporations just buying stuff up for excessive amounts of money and then firing a bunch of people?
Probably because they’re unelected descendants of upper middle class to straight up wealthy people, assigned by a wealthy board of more wealthy individuals (if it’s a public company), rather than a competent leader the workers with actual knowledge of how work is being done on the floor have decided is the best.
When you don’t leave managing the business to an incompetent nepo baby, this happens:
[…] the UK Office for National Statistics showed that in the UK the rate of survival of cooperatives (read: democratically owned organisations) after five years was 80 percent compared with only 41 percent for all other enterprises.[6] A further study found that after ten years 44 percent of cooperatives were still in operation, compared with only 20 percent for all enterprises.
Fakhfakh et al. (2012) show that in several industries conventional firms would produce more with their current levels of employment and capital if they adopted the employee-owned firms’ way of organising
The kicker is this:
We use World Bank data27 to calculate the time needed to reduce (to below 1%) poverty at $6.85 a day. This is the higher of the three global poverty lines used by the World Bank; it is used because we believe it gives the most accurate picture of the numbers of people globally living in poverty.
I sure as hell could not survive on $6 a day - and we can talk about purchasing power, but resources have international trade prices and you’re priced out of those resources if you’re poor because of pecuniary externalities. At the current rate of wealth inequality growth, it will probably take so many years it might as well be “forever” to eradicate actual poverty and not the “at least you’re not a slave” poverty definition they’re using.
(note: I skimmed through it, so I could have missed something crucial)
That’s not what we were talking about here. We were talking about building enough housing to be able to guarantee it for everyone. That’s not rent control, that’s just investing in our housing supply.
The topic of this conversation follows from your statement:
Which is bad for landlords (including the ones that work in legislation)
i.e. landowners and people in power hold sway over the decision making process and are keeping us away from legislation that houses people. Unless I misread you. That’s why I brought up another example.
Rent control doesn’t work, the economists are correct (Who woulda thunk it, but studying the way prices are determined is a valid field of academic study). Or rather it does work for some people but makes life harder for others, and isn’t nearly as good of an approach as people think.
You clearly did not read the link, the person who wrote it is a PhD economist. Also, using one solution as a way to fix housing is naive, when we could (and should be, it’s horribly unaffordable for average people in urban areas, where most people in western countries live, already) be using many, including rent control.
Also economists (who are usually wealthy enough to be able to landlord if they want to do so)… which means they’re financially incentivised to hold right wing economic views like “rent control doesn’t work, 9/10 economists recommend against it!” like it’s a toothpaste advert and economists who challenge that don’t get much spotlight in the mainstream.
“A liberal* is someone who opposes every war except the current war and supports all civil rights movements except the one that’s going on right now.”
* not to be confused with “left wing” as the term is often used in the US
Lemmy technically doesn’t hide your likes - the interface might not show you, but all your likes are public in the Fediverse. Kbin, when I used it, would show which users upvoted/downvoted a post. That’s important because it means researchers and OSI people can still do fact finding - Twitter doesn’t like the idea of having to be open even if it’s a requirement (albeit to researchers specifically) in the EU now.