Superpower is one way to phrase it.
Another is illegally using Facebook’s monopoly and data to crush or buy potential competitors. I think the olds used to call that anti-trust.
13,323 karma · joined November 20, 2014
Another is illegally using Facebook’s monopoly and data to crush or buy potential competitors. I think the olds used to call that anti-trust.
Hopefully we can find ways to extend that humanity to the other sentient creatures we currently exploit in the hundreds of billions a year.
And the fact that hydrogen is most popular in Germany and Japan should provide a clue.
These are countries with well established ICE car industries and therefore shifting to hydrogen provides the least disruption when it comes to their car manufacturing as well as infrastructure.
The disproportionately high interest in hydrogen is likely not being driven because of a belief in its future success, but likely more as a hope to continuing the status quo.
So this isn’t really a good argument even if we ignore the fact that it’s a non sequitur.
A better argument is that the good faith exception, while making sense in principle, can easily be abused by the police to make illegally obtained evidence look like it was done in good faith, and therefore the exception itself should be removed because of how difficult it is to actually gauge and enforce.
But even if we assume for the sake of argument that the every piece of the bike is manufactured in the U.S., manufacturers will still be affected by the Chinese tariffs.
Their packaging material? Their machinery that they use? The tools that they use? The cost of the plumber they call to fix the bathroom on the shop floor might be higher because the tools the plumber uses have now become more expensive.
And that’s just China. The U.S. has placed tariffs of at least 10% on everything including lumber, aluminum, steel which will raise the cost of everything at every step of the economic activity that leads to the manufacturing and purchasing of a product.
As the dust settles over the next couple of months and years, it’s very likely other countries will come looking for you, if that hasn’t started already.
And even if they have a trust that’s allowed to make decisions for them, the trusts are unlikely to change the principal’s choices.
At least when I was heavily involved in the finances of a school with a much smaller endowment, less than 5% of it was general funds. The rest had tremendous restrictions on how it could be used.
Side bonus, we also don’t kill the highly sentient and highly intelligent creatures you’re concerned about.
So you’re perfectly fine with these countries, for example, executing US citizens without due process if they visit those countries right, because the standard you apparently want to hold the government to is basically the bare minimum rights an individual has vis a vis that government.
Also, you overestimate the rights US citizens have as well. Under Obama, for example, the government targeted a U.S. citizen for assassination. After Trump 1 the SC essentially said everything the President does is legal.
There is absolutely no reason that the President couldn’t completely target a U.S. citizen for assassination for no reason other than they didn’t like the color of their hair, and by your standard you’re absolutely fine with that.
The #1 difference, which at the very least has to be explained if you don’t even consider it relevant, is that Greece couldn’t print Euros whereas the U.S. does print dollars.
The fact that they could write the entire article without even mentioning this difference frankly makes it suspect to say the least.
But there are so many other issues.
- The author keeps treating currency as debt. And while it’s true at some level, currency is not debt. Because currency can be created. Borrowing in your own currency means you can simply print more currency if you need to.
This isn’t a good thing, because your currency would plummet in value and you wouldn’t be able to buy anything from abroad, but that’s what these tariffs are trying to do anyways! The tariffs are realizing the possible but not likely worst case scenario from the future now, in the most obnoxious way that alienates allies and makes the country immediately poorer for no good reason.
- China is buying assets. Trillions of dollars worth. And yet we don’t see those trillions of dollars worth of property and U.S. assets owned by the Chinese government? Why is that? Where is the massive purchase of U.S. assets by foreign governments the author threatens will happen?
There isn’t any such thing because the assets the Chinese are buying is the US dollar. This is where reserve currency status comes in. The author links to an article about the reserve currency supposedly not being all it’s cracked up to be (and one can have that discussion), but never even addresses what it means to be the reserve currency.
What it means is that perceived U.S. governmental and financial stability and the belief that the U.S. would honor its debts, makes the U.S. dollar valuable in and of itself.
China and India, under normal circumstances, are much more likely to trade with each other in USD than they are either in Rupees or Yuan. That’s what it means to be the reserve currency.
But neither of them can print USD so they have to buy USD, which has an intrinsic utility value in itself. This is what funds American “consumption” (we will get back to this as well). The assets China is buying is quite literally the U.S. dollar and not a future promise to buy assets in the future.
The problem, however, is that recent U.S. govt actions are destroying that trust and stability underlying the intrinsic value of the USD, at which point it will indeed become an IOU. But that is a decision the current U.S. government is making that no other country wants them to make. Destroying this will lead to a real destruction of trillions of dollars worth of actual U.S. assets, because that trust has real value.
- The author insists the U.S. is using the products flowing into it for “consumption” not “investment”. And yet the U.S. GDP, which represents productive output, keeps increasing faster than most other western and developed nations. How is all this consumption translating into actual productive growth? US productivity growth has also far outpaced other similar nations, even those that we supposedly consider “investment” nations such as Germany.
The reality is that the U.S. is just “consuming” is romantic nonsense which somehow ignores non physical production (ie services) even though arguably this is even more important today. Think about the latest exemption that the U.S. just applied on electronics. That’s over 20% of Chinese exports to the U.S. It basically falls under “consumption”, but smartphones and laptops are the basis of trillions of dollars of productive output. Without this “consumption” the US would have a GDP that would be a fraction of the size it is today.
But we can go even further. How about household appliances? The fact that nearly every US home has a dishwasher and washing machine and dryer means far more Americans are able to work further increasing productive US output than without this “consumption”.
The idea that “investment” is somehow superior to “consumption” is suspect to say the least. Both investment and consumption can be bad. The famous Alaskan “bridge to nowhere” was investment, but it was worth far less than a parent buying a cheap Chinese produced toy for their child, and the positive impact that had on the parents and kids.
The whole point of free market capitalism is that individuals can usually make better choices than an overbearing government for what is and isn’t a better use of their money.
This can be corrupted. So Americans spend way too much money on eating junk food, meat, dairy, consuming drugs, etc. but all of those are largely homegrown goods and a result of “investment” creating huge industries pushing these products on Americans.
There is bad consumption and bad investment and good consumption and good investment (defined purely in terms of productivity).
I can go on with other issues with the article, but this is already way too long, and I actually don’t disagree with the end. The U.S. government needs to reduce its massive deficits not because it means it will have to sell assets in the future. Unless this administration completely destroys the U.S. governments credibility this won’t be a problem. No, the problem is the distortionary effects of that deficit domestically. And we can see that with the concentration of wealth it’s leading to causing American industries to compete not by selling better products or being more productive, but by buying the U.S. government to cut their taxes, to redirect government spending towards themselves, and to keep out competitors.
Fortunately solving this problem will help with the deficit as well. Go back to the tax levels before the trillion dollar tax cuts on the wealthiest and to reduce the deficit with barely any impact on actual productive activity.
There are significant logistics here. How many batteries should be stocked in any one place.
Batteries are large. So you’re also talking about a lot of space.
At the same time you still need to build out the electric capacity to charge those batteries.
The number of batteries you would need would need to be some multiple of the actual number of cars sold. So if there are 300 cars sold, you probably need something like 1200-1500 batteries in the same city just so a car doesn’t have to travel unreasonable distances to do a swap.
The multiple is probably higher and it gets much worse spread out over the entire country/world. Thats burdening each car sale with multiples costs of the most expensive component in the car.
It’s mechanical, so there are likely to be more breakdowns and other issues.
Battery replacement requires changing the car design and leads to a design that’s almost certainly much less protected from the elements or requires the addition of expensive protection, both in terms of the cost of the additional protection and the weight of the protection.
People tend to treat replaceable batteries poorly.
Battery replacement is just not a good choice relative to the much simpler ability to pump in electricity.
This is very Apple at its peak’esque.
Too many companies, especially in the EV space (Tesla is awful at this) will announce tech years in advance and often not even deliver.
When we first heard about this 5 min charger a few months ago I fully expected it to be available in a car at least years from now if ever.
It was supposed to be a BlackBerry/Blackjack killer at the time.
And then the iPhone was revealed and Google immediately changed Android’s direction to become a touch OS.
Because even despite many of the companies failing, the govt made a profit on TARP.
Also, the name of the show is BLACK mirror. Besides the iPhone symbolism by which the name is inspired, the whole point of the show is to hold up a mirror to the dark side of society.
This may lead to a show that is without nuance or is less interesting, but thats the point of the show.
For Development?
Yeah, committing to a library isn’t research, but it is very clearly development.
You may not want this kind of development to receive tax breaks, which is a reasonable position to have, but this rhetorical trick of pretending R&D is only about research to pretend actions that are very clearly development are somehow illegitimate R&D is highly misleading to say it nicely.
A safe haven isn’t much of a safe haven if that’s where the fire has started.
This isn’t just dead season
No one wants to be detained.
People who are spending thousands and tens of thousands of dollars to travel are fine if they need to spend a few hundreds additional ro fly back and cancel their vacation. Or sucks but it’s in the realm of the risks you take with international travel.
However, being detained, even for 1 day, and treated like a criminal is something none of these folks want.
Just as an example of what I mean, no other democracy in the world has a cabinet filled with a bunch of billionaires.
In any other democracy in the world, the leader simply couldn’t openly appoint his biggest donor who also happened to be the biggest government contractor to go ahead and control government payments right out in the open.
There are dozens of things Trump had done openly that would have resulted in massive scandals in even some of the least democratic democracies in the world.
Not only is this relevant to Tech, it’s relevant to YC tech.
At the very least it’s as relevant as the regular immigration lawyer AMAs.