ucaetano

> The difference, in this case, is objectively measurable: Canadian poultry, beef, dairy and produce are generally safer than American.

I'd like to see sources for that, and even if that's true, it doesn't imply that the market subsidies are the cause of that.

> Also, I'm Canadian. I'm not making an American tech salary, not by any stretch of the imagination.

You don't have to be making a tech salary to be less sensitive about the price of beef.

> How do you propose we protect the landscape, water, ecology?

Through environmental regulation, protected areas, permitting, environmental reviews, etc. This is the common model in most of the world. It works well in some places and not well in others, just as laws sometimes work, and sometimes don't.

Passing subsidies to farmers might (strong emphasis on might) have some unintended benefits to the environment (or not), but it is a terrible way to try to protect the environment, particularly because most (if not all) of the investment in this goes to the profit margins of the farmers.

And sure, there are plenty of real world examples: look at environmental review and permitting processes for your city or state. I happen to be very close to a number of environmental engineers who handle such permits on a daily basis, both on the granting as well as on the requesting side.

Want to build a road on your farm, or increase your farming area? You'll likely have to submit a permit to Fish & Wildlife, as well as to the county water authority, to the Army Corps of Engineers, etc. Depending on the type of work, you might need to hire an engineering firm to do hydrological analysis and understand how the work impacts water drainage and flow, how it impacts flow downstream to other properties, and often enough to sensitive environments miles away.

One example was a friend of mine doing work for a homeowner in an unincorporated area who wanted to build a culvert under their driveway to increase drainage and reduce the risk of flood on his property.

Well, while building the culvert would increase the flow and decrease the risk of flood in his property, it would also mean that the flow downstream would increase significantly, resulting in higher flood risk to other properties downstream. Open, rugged soil acts as a sponge and as "potential energy dissipators", slowing the flow of water during heavy rains. Paving means that all the water flows downstream quickly, flooding lower areas.

Also, the culvert would channelize a lot of the water flow, meaning that the toxic substances from the driveaway and the home's roof would not be spread out in a harmless way (the solution to pollution is dilution) that can be handled by the ecosystem, bubt would flow quickly to streams and pools in the lower areas, increasing the concentration of such substances to unacceptable levels and damaging the critical environment for an at-risk endemic species of frogs.

While the homeowner dismissed my friend's concerns and decided to request the permit anyway, it is highly likely that the permit will be rejected because of the points above (actually, I know the person handling the permit on the government's side, it will be rejected for sure).

> supplanted families who want the land to be healthy for their children?

That's a fairy-tale story that the farming industry has been pushing around for decades to portray the image of the old-school farmer working dawn to dusk to support the family.

Agriculture hasn't been like that since the dust bowl. And even then, they didn't really care about the "healthy for their children", the dust bowl happened largely due to farmers (mostly small and mid-size by then) overfarming their lands and using deep plowing to overcome top-soil degradation.

Agriculture is a high-risk, capital-intensive industry that benefits dramatically from economies of scale.

Drop the romantic, nostalgic fantasia that so many still carry around farming.

Yep, let consumers decide which farms should be kept or not, I'm all in favor of that!

Even consumers frequently love the idea of a protected ("managed" market is a misleading term for "we subsidize and protect certain incumbents"), particularly when it is a national market (for nationalistic reasons) or when it is associated with a romantic/emotional vision ("oh, the poor little honest canadian farmers, working dawn to dusk and being protected from the evil massive corporations").

This is particularly true when you're not price-sensitive (i.e. poor), which by being on Hacker News, you most likely aren't.

So you don't mind paying more for that emotional feeling that you're "protecting" those farmers, even if other people might be more sensitive to the cost.

A government protecting farmers isn't any different than it protecting monopolies, and is just as bad. The only difference is the emotional & nostalgic impact on people.

That's a broad generalization, and it seems that it is mostly driven by anger.

The reason you can go to a supermarket and buy food IS the "new" way of doing things. The reason there's close to zero food waste in production and distribution of food in developed markets is the "new" way.

Their farm is dying because it is inefficient. Let it die.

> generates strong public support to maintain the system we have.

Oh, yeah, everyone loves a protectionist market, when they're part of it...

You don't need supply management to do that. Not only that, supply management is a terrible way to do that.

> Sadly, like the author, I can't really think of a good solution.

But that IS the solution. Preserving archaic inefficient institutions and forcing society to pay for it solely due to nostalgia is a terrible idea.

But there are solutions: entertainment & agroturismo. Sure, it won't preserve every single farm, or even 1 in 1000, but it will preserve some of then, just as tourism helps maintain a lot of historical sites around the world.

Yep, people here don't seem o understand the concept of barter...

Oh, and wait until you have to declare your "data dividend" in your tax declaration...

Wait until people find out that the cost to implement, monitor, support and regulate something like this will be higher than the dividends they'll be getting...

But you still can't run experiments on cosmology. SO if your definition of "science" is "based on experimental data", cosmology isn't a science.

No, you don't. But having the complex macroeconomics models far beats relying on layman's guesswork.

You've never looked at a macroeconomics model, have you?

Economics is complicated because it is modeling the behavior of human beings.

Math is easy, computer science is easy, modeling the collective behavior of humans is hard.

There are also no ways to run experiments in cosmology.

> I intended an implicit "because you will lose it and then you will learn" that I think the author is also implying.

But you won't learn, because there is nothing to learn, just as there isn't anything to learn from betting on the lottery or in a casino.

Well, there is one thing to learn: you should not do it!

> If you do a 9 week fake money stock pick'em exercise (say in a FINA class), people will follow it for exactly 9 weeks, some will lose, some will win, and everybody who doesn't win will take away "gee I should have picked better, that was obvious in retrospect" which obviously isn't the point.

On average, people will lose.

Seriously, people won Nobel prizes proving this. Do you think that they were wrong?

> With real money, I feel like you're more likely to learn the intended lesson.

Which is: you should not be doing it in the first place!

This is like spending $10,000 in a casino to learn that you should not be putting your investments in a casino.

Here, I'll save you some money: I'll charge you just $500 to tell you that you should not be actively trading and picking assets.

You're welcome, please give me your CC info so I can charge you.

The problem is that it isn't "amount you can afford to lose": you'll lose.

It is a guaranteed way to lose money on average. It is just like gambling: if you want to do it for fun, and count the loss on your budget, fine. But don't fool yourself into thinking that it is a sensible investment or that you're doing it because "you know finance".

Just don't. It is a bad idea and particularly a symptom of overconfident people who think that "they are smart and can read trends and predict the market". Nope.

Indeed, economics end up being the study of resource allocations by human beings, both at the individual and collective levels, and the resulting system.

But macroeconomics is indeed based on a lot of things, and you seem to be very misinformed. Macroeconomics relies very heavily on mathematical tools such as calculus and topology to model the collective behavior of humans.

If you are really interested in learning more, I recommend "Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations: A Story of Economic Discovery".

Economics is a science as much as hydrology is a science: it isn't exact, but it is based on solid science.

Nobody derived Navier-Stokes equations to reach the formulas that show the erosion of a river bank, or the discharge calculation of a weir. Doing so would be nearly impossible given the extremely high level of complexity.

So instead of trying to start with the fundamental equations and build "up", you start by analyzing the behavior and modeling it.

It isn't any different than what Kepler, Newton, Galileo, etc. did: you look at the real world and build models that describe the world with enough precision for what you need.

Sure, you might say that hydraulics isn't a science per-se, but an applied field and so on. In that case, so is economics.

> Learn basic finance to invest your own money

> The next step on your journey should be to get some practical experience. The best way to do this is to open a brokerage account to invest some of your own money.

Wow, I can't believe someone would suggest doing this as a way to learn finance, when ALL finance literature reaches exactly the same conclusion: that is a terrible idea.

The author clearly doesn't understand finance and financial markets...

But hey, follow his advice anyone, someone has to make really bad investing decisions so that us making the solid investment decisions can beat the average.

Because the number of not-willing-to-pay, enthusiast, micro-managing, photo-organizing users is likely tiny, and not enough to support a product with Google costs.

The market is splitting more and more into consumers who take too many photos to organize it themselves and pros who need robust workflow management solutions.

Don't get me wrong, I loved Picasa, and was very sad when they stopped supporting.

I particularly miss some features, such as creating a time-lapse of all photos of a certain person with the face aligned, which was awesome to show how friends and kids change.

What if they simply don't profit enough to justify giving you free stuff?

You really shouldn't count on having Gmail available forever!

Or even for a few years.

But that doesn't solve the issue that the photos on Google Photos are private by default, so Google would need to change the sharing to public on all photos that have external links, which would be a terrible privacy measure.

> Now, we are making these sensors available to companies outside of self-driving

They are explicitly limiting this to use cases that don't compete with self-driving, so it is likely bound by licensing and non-compete agreements.

So don't expect seeing one of these sensors in a competing self-driving vehicle any time soon.

> Now, we are making these sensors available to companies outside of self-driving — beginning with robotics, security, agricultural technology, and more — so they can achieve their own technological breakthroughs.

It will likely come with licensing and non-compete agreements.

> Referencing the toxicity of water is a bit disingenuous, since the average human body is 60% water or more to begin with. Glyphosate, on the other hand, is a substance wholly artificial and foreign to the human body.

Quite the opposite: water is the basis of our life, a substance that we all depend on. Still, it can easily kill you.

It is exactly my point: no substance is entirely safe.

The article is pretty misleading.

There is no substance that is absolutely safe at any level for humans. Even water will easily kill you (over-hydration is a real risk, especially for athletes).

FTA:

> The EPA says glyphosate is safe up to 2 milligrams per kilogram of body weight per day, and Bayer, who now owns Monsanto, claims that its safety for consumption by humans has been proven by years of research. However, the World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer, among many others, disagrees, and considers glyphosate a potential human carcinogen.

The three claims are completely compatible, the WHO isn't disagreeing, it is simply listing as a potential carcinogen. This is actually less bad than eating salami, which is actually a known carcinogen.

Regardless of the actual safety of glyphosate, the article is journalistic crap.

And that's before we get into the actual amount of beer you'd have to drink to ingest any significant amount of glyphosate...

> Do they?

Yes, they do. The old Eurostars (e300) are the Alstom TGV TMST, and the new ones (e320) are the Siemens Velaro.

The e320 have an interior configuration very similar to the ICE-3s in Germany, although I believe that the seat pitch in the Eurostar is shorter than in the ICE.

The same is true for the e300s: they have the same disgusting, sweat-infused seats of the TGVs :)

Yep, France's TGV serves the same purpose as the original railroads in France: exerting control from Paris over the provinces. It is a centralization mechanism built for the Parisian elites.

Eurostar trains include both TGV and Siemens Velaro rolling stock.