RockIslandLine

Any nation is free to set a good example.

Several people have given several reasons, many of which alone are enough to demonstrate awfulness.

The biggest reason they are bad is that they don't work. I would happily subscribe to a concierge service that showed me genuinely useful information. However, the advertising systems we have got are not built for my use case, they are built for someone else's which is adversarial to mine. I could not possibly care less about your quest to build brand loyalty and awareness.

As noted, people often get shown ads for products which they have already bought. When I buy a car, it's a safe bet that I don't need another car for several years. Every car advertisement that I see in that time is wasted effort for both the advertiser and myself. I also notice that nobody is advertising along the lines that might influence my choice. As a single, eco-conscious male, I don't need "three rows of seating" and I need "low zero to sixty" times even less. Automobile advertising is heavily devoted to the highly profitable SUV segment. Eliminate the Chicken Tax and promote decarbonized and efficient vehicles. Stop basing advertising campaigns around stoking even more antisocial behavior.

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

And the flip side, people getting shown advertisements for products they have rejected is also wasted effort. I don't need penis pills, and every advertisement I have ever seen for them has always been wasted effort.

Stop polluting my information streams with awful crap I don't need.

Nobody likes being watched. Instrumenting the interaction that I need so that you can make wrong inferences about my preferences is pretty galling. Undermining my control over what information I do give out is worse.

https://proprivacy.com/guides/super-cookies-flash-cookies

Further, not specific to targeted advertising is the method of advertising. Advertisements in popup windows are a terrible idea. Forcing me to take an action before giving me useful information is a terrible interaction model. And that's not designed to make me want to buy your product. Advertising when it exists should be as unobtrusive possible. Obnoxious behavior sucks.

"and the CEO talked to the protestors and told them how helpless he himself was, as he was just part of the system with relatively limited ability to change it. I'm not sure I buy that, and not sure the protestors did either, as the CEO still has enormous power."

Precisely. Nobody should accept that kind of obvious nonsense.

People are put into positions to make decisions. So make better decisions.

Iowa may be an example of how ethanol is done wrong in practice, but I'm not sure your theory is so sound.

Make ethanol from sugar cane, not corn. Louisiana should be the center of US ethanol production. Much higher EROEI.

"I could imagine corporate-run nuclear plants that have the same incentives as airlines."

So how exactly do you enforce that corporate executives and their families must live on site for decades?

Why? We've got lots of coal mines with the equipment to move tons of material. Just start stacking cordwood down below.

"They don't want their family to starve."

We know how to stop that. We don't have to sentence people to subsistence agriculture. When you know better, you do better, and we know better.

We can farm in ways that build high carbon soils. We can do this even in the 3rd world. Teach people the proper techniques.

It's nonsense to claim that we just have to accept this kind of collapse.

Engineering new biomes for fun is different than having to do it every year or you die.

What do you do when seasonal heat makes Pakistan and India uninhabitable for large parts of the year? We're not prepared for that kind of migration, we didn't even deal with Syria well.

Farming and other activities often require decades to truly show a profit. When rainfall patterns are changing on short timescales, you will not be able to plan for food production given the underlying churn in fertile locations.

Several different issues. Nuclear is necessarily large & centralized energy production, with all of the antidemocratic politics and corrupt economics that comes with that.

The insane project duration and nonsense cost overruns for nuclear construction are their own problem.

And you get a lot of people who don't understand and don't want to understand the safety aspect.

https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/comed-bribery-s...

This kind of satire is unnecessary and unhelpful.

It costs nothing to say "lab testing" instead of "in vitro". Literally the same number of syllables, zero loss of precision, and immediately understandable to a wider audience.

"legally complex" is different from "impossible".

And yes, people who have years worth of expenses saved are clearly better able to accept risk than someone with $10K in an IRA.

You're not making persuasive arguments here at all. An in both theory and in practice I'm on your side.

"Whether it is bonds, or some other instrument, they all pay interest. That debt exists, is owed, and yet you're saying "Just don't pay that interest"?"

I'm saying it's wrong to create federal bonds with an interest rate that is far different from zero.

The rules are different between currency issuers (nations with a fiat currency) and currency users (citizens, municipalities, provinces, nations on the gold standard).

Currency issuers have a unique ability to guarantee that you will hold an exact amount of the currency on a given date. No currency user can make that guarantee.

Because currency issuers can guarantee repayment on debt in their own currency, the repayment risk on the debt is strictly and exactly zero. Thus the interest rate on that debt should always be very close to zero if not exactly zero.

The fact that Canadian government debt pays high interest rates merely tells you that the government did things wrong in the past.

"But if you want to put $5-$20K into a friend's business, or a business you know well, the SEC makes it hard unless you're already a millionaire."

What do you mean? Individuals are still allowed to sign contracts. So write up a specific contract.

"Maybe I'm missing something, but where is the for-profit motive for banks to lend, for absolutely no return?"

You're definitely missing something, because private lenders are perfectly free to charge interest. ZIRP applies only to federal debt.

"Yet, why would I, as a banker, lend to the government at all?"

Currency issuers never need to borrow. That is an incorrect statement of why Federal debt exists. Federal debt is a savings instrument, and as Europe and other negative interest rate debt has shown, there is still a market for savings instruments even at the zero lower bound.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-15/negative-...

"Negative-Yielding Debt Hits Record $16 Trillion on Curve Fright"

That is in fact a fundamental distinction between the Universal Basic Income and the Federal Job Guarantee.

One criticism of the UBI is that being unmoored from production makes it extremely inflationary. That requires high levels of tax to destroy enough money to offset the inflation.

https://www.realprogressivesusa.com/news/economic-justice/20...

"will increase innovation by getting people out of bullshit jobs and enabling entrepreneurs to pay their bills until their companies are profitable."

I think that relies on a definition of "innovation" that is not proper.

What does "innovation" mean?

We already have restaurants. If you open another restaurant have you done anything innovative at all? Most likely not.

You're not going to develop the next generation of microchip in your basement. Multibillion dollar industrial plants are beyond the means of an individual who depends on UBI.

So what kind of new development are you likely to actually create?

"Right now, 8% of Federal Revenue pays just the interest on that debt. If interest rates go up, say in a year or two.. so goes up that payment."

Canada has a fiat currency. Thus the Canadian government can set the interest rate on federal debt to zero.

http://multiplier-effect.org/modern-money-theory-how-i-came-...

Permanent ZIRP (zero interest rate policy) is probably a better policy since it reduces the compounding of debt and the tendency for the rentier class to take over more of the economy

"Millions of people live every day with only a couple of dollars a day."

Not in the USA they don't. There is no possible way that an individual could pay for food, clothing, and shelter on that income.

"Companies are just collections of people."

False. Corporations are golems, not people at all.

"I am not able to see how a network of distributed vertical food farms would be less resilient to political disasters than growing everything in California."

I fixed it for you. States like Indiana import 90% of their calories. Midwest farming is all about massive row crops, not human food.

https://www.crcworks.org/infood.pdf

Yet Indiana does not even feed itself, let alone feed the world. The state imports an estimated 90% of its food. More than $14.5 billion is spent by Hoosier consumers each year buying food sourced outside of the state.

You get all kinds, possibly depending on when the town was established. For many of the Chicago suburbs, there is a defined "business district" where most of the restaurants, bars, barbershops, etc are. This may very well be a couple of streets that run all the way across town. Frequently, every 4th or 8th street is "arterial", and the bulk of the businesses will be on those streets. So you have a few to several blocks of "internal" streets where there is indeed only residential housing.

Meh. There's plenty of density for "a strip mall every four blocks". And you can make that structure totally walkable instead of requiring cars. The important thing is not to jack the rent through the roof.

Most suburbs don't, for no obvious reason. I did complain to the Mayor a few years ago that the grocery store four blocks from my house has only street access and no sidewalk access.

I'm not at all sure why the author seems to think that converted garages are great business incubators. That's a terrible idea. It's what my uncle did for his cabinetry business, but that's largely solo. I can't imagine wanting significant business traffic on residential streets.

"The other thing to keep in mind is that the 'huge' bonuses usually aren't very large from an income statement point of view; if you bought an extra 0.5% growth (or savings), it was easily worth it."

It's hard to prove a counterfactual, but it's only worth it if said person is the only person who could achieve those results.

"Nobody wants to try to turn around a bankrupt company at their old salary (with their old RSU's and options now worthless)."

So they quit, and the company goes bankrupt on a different timeline. Why should either society or shareholders accept new bonus declarations?

For certain definitions of "pay", any nation with a fiat currency could certainly place a number into a spreadsheet.

Making that number mean anything might take a while.But we could certainly write a permanent bond and put it onto the books.

HVDC transmission losses are low, like 5% per 1000 km. So yes, a large, dispersed solar network could create and distribute electricity effectively.

Have you posted about this on the gfortran mailing lists? They are generally interested in examples that show where the compiler could be improved.

"Even Uber might never be profitable."

Uber will never be profitable, they can't pay their labor.

What sucks is that their failure will destroy the business model for someone who might have been willing to give it an honest effort.

TPP was a terrible response to the opportunity. Write better treaty text and you get a better result.

Killing TPP was the correct result.

Optimizing for size versus performance often eliminates optimizations like unrolling loops.

At the assembly level, it's sometimes true that a single instruction or smaller sequence of instructions takes more cpu cycles.

Analyze the different instruction sequences here:

https://www.nxp.com/docs/en/supporting-information/MC680X0OP...