fmstack

not gonna lie, a scenario where a big nasty effect of climate change pastes Europe first might make the powers that be wake up to the impending disaster faster. For the folks with the big money one death in Europe might be more shocking than 100 deaths in India.

hold up hold up. there's a key distinction between the two categories of things you list in your examples. The first three are items that are consumed to meet Alice's specific desires, with features that match these desires-- a specific car, a specific house, a specific vacation. Alice buys them because she wants to use them.

In a sense Alice also buys physical capital to use them, but she's not using physical capital because of its specific qualities but instead because of the money the products it produces will fetch when sold on the market. Alice wants a vacation because she wants to go to Paris or New Zealand or whatever. Alice wants a machine part because she wants the money it will make her. Two very different categories of thing!

I bring this up not exactly as a critique of your analysis, but instead because none of the discussion in this thread is particularly tethered to the process of production, and it's specifically the disruption to production that makes the SVB collapse troubling.

I absolutely 100% registered for an account here just so I could respond to this random comment.

Friend. “Peer reviewed” doesn’t mean what you think it does. Peer review isn’t something that indicates that a given claim is verified. Instead, it’s something that indicates that a given paper has reached the bare minimum for consideration. It’s generally a red flag when people use “peer reviewed” as a synonym for “true,” particularly when the paper is published in a relatively unknown journal, and an entire parade of red flags when people treat “not peer reviewed” as “almost as good as true.”

Regardless of your opinions on the use of various treatments for COVID-19, I strongly recommend that you read this article and take their methodology to heart. “Doing research” doesn’t mean poking around on scholar.google.com and reading extant studies. Sometimes “doing research” means actually running an experiment to verify that the effects claimed in a published paper are replicable. Sometimes “doing research”, as in this case, entails doing statistical analyses of publications looking for tells of shoddy methodology or even straightforward misrepresentation. Note: There’s some really fun tricks that people can use to detect bogus data — for example, when humans attempt to fabricate “random” data, typically the numbers they come up with don’t match an actual random distribution.

Anyway, I hope that helps.