Ham Radios

ABSOLUTELY HARAM

It’s more complicated than that. Electronics and appliances are the obvious examples of things that have inflated much slower than average (or even deflated). Apparel and tools have inflated much slower. Energy generally has inflated much slower than average, but has shown a ton of volatility. Food and cars have inflated slower than average, but individual items might have followed their own path. Healthcare, education, and housing have gone up much faster than average inflation.

And the ratios don’t stay consistent over time. When I was a kid, burger meat was cheaper than similarly sized chicken breasts. Now the ratio is flipped. A plane ticket between New York and London is much cheaper today than in the 70’s. Even a tank of gas for driving from one state to another is way cheaper today than in the 70’s, in large part because of better fuel efficiency.

And anything labor intensive is inherently at tension with itself. A seamstress or tailor can only make so many items of clothing per week. Those clothes will have to cost enough to justify their pay, and the raw ingredient textiles used to make the garments. So if their pay hasn’t kept up with inflation, then the labor-intensive items they make probably haven’t kept up with inflation, either. Ideally, increased productivity would allow raises to not be absorbed into the price of whatever is being produced, but that doesn’t always happen.

Looking at old menus and catalogs shows that some things have gone up a lot in price, while others didn’t experience the same effect.

That’s a misleading picture. Yes, the population of veterans did support Trump over Harris, but the population of veterans skews overwhelmingly male, white, and old.

Look at Pew’s 2023 survey. Among veterans:

• 28% are under 50, 36% are between 50-69, and 37% are over 70.
• 74% are white non-Hispanic.
• 89% are men.

Meanwhile, Biden probably won among active duty in 2020.

I suspect that if you surveyed veterans under the age of 50, you’d get a very different result. Or, if you surveyed the general non population but weighted it to be as old, white, or male as the veteran population, would the results be very different from veterans generally?

These narcissists would never agree to endure insults as part of a scheme. They’re also too incompetent to plan this kind of stuff.

There’s no plan here. It’s just always been an inherently unstable situation, with schemers who aren’t as smart as they think they are, all trying to achieve their own ends using ideas they don’t understand.

I think it’s healthy for opposing viewpoints to be expressed

Yeah, that way the community can get inoculated with these ideas and learns how to respond to them, and over enough time the response gets faster and more efficient so that the body as a whole builds up a resistance against whenever those types of comments show up.

I could sell you a virtual deed to the Golden Gate Bridge right now, you could buy it but it doesn’t really mean anything.

Yeah, that’s possibly the most famous scam in history (people selling deeds to the Brooklyn Bridge), enough to where “I’ve got a bridge to sell you” is a figure of speech for calling someone gullible or naive.

And then despite the world knowing about the Brooklyn Bridge scam, the cryptobros actually went and found a bunch of suckers to fall for the exact same scam, only with blockchains instead of notary seals.

Don’t paparazzi make plenty of money off of selling unauthorized photos of celebrities? Celebrities can control some uses of their likeness, but not all of them.

No, the Red Lobster insolvency was driven by declining sales and increasing debt, amid some shady corporate shenanigans with their finances. When they filed, they were about $30 million in the hole (even assuming their high valuations for their intangible assets).

Private equity owners (Golden Gate) made them sell off the land they owned, only to lease it back at above market rates. Then sold the chain to its biggest seafood supplier (Thai Union), who used the restaurant as an outlet for their wholesale seafood rather than as a standalone profitable business (which resulted in huge quality drop off and declining sales).

They were headed in the wrong direction, and the $11 million they lost on endless shrimp didn’t make a big difference. It was circling the drain anyway, based on big strategic errors (or just plain old private equity fuckery).

Copper is a material that is used in many more orders of magnitude for infrastructure and basic development. It’s technically “consumption” to eat food everyday and have running water and electricity in your home, but the type of materialist luxury consumption you’re talking about doesn’t factor into global copper demand. There are 7.2 billion smartphones in use, and about 14g of copper in each one. That’s about 100,000 metric tons of copper, when the article talks about 110 million as a baseline (11,000 times as much), and above 200 million (20,000 times as much). So no, consumer electronics aren’t going to move the needle on this scale of a problem.

If you’re going to tell the developing countries that they need to stop developing, that’s morally suspect. And frankly, environmentally suspect, as the article itself is about moving off of fossil fuels and electrifying a lot of our energy needs in both the developed and developing nations, whether we’re talking relatively clean energy source like natural gas or dirtier sources like coal, or even dirtier sources like wood or animal dung.

What does this have to do with how the world distributes useful copper? Nobody is buying up copper because of being tricked by advertising, so I’m not sure what the relevance of your comments are, to the topic at hand.

I don’t think you’re wrong, I just don’t think this thread really raises the issues you want to talk about.

I don’t disagree, but I don’t see the relevance of these particular flaws of unrestrained capitalism to this specific stated problem: that there might not be enough copper to be able to continue to use it as we always have.

There are lots of flaws to capitalism. Running out of useful copper, while copper is being used in wasteful ways, doesn’t really implicate the main weaknesses of capitalism systems.

This is an article about scarcity, insufficient supply to meet demand.

Artificial demand creation isn’t necessary, or even productive, when the existing demand already outstrips supply.

And if it is the case that demand is much higher than supply, that’s a baked in financial incentive that rewards people for efficient recycling.

Capitalism is bad at pricing in externalities. It’s pretty good at using price signals to allocate finite resources to more productive uses.

Old people, even those who rely on care workers directly, also rely on a lot of other types of workers. They need to eat, so some portion of the farmers, agricultural processors, logistics workers, cooks, dishwashers, etc. will need to continue to support the industries that feed people. Then the industries that feed people also rely on their own supply chains: equipment manufacturers and maintainers, electricity and energy, etc.

Simply being alive relies on the work of others. Broadly speaking, we expect there to be a ratio of workers to the broader population, including those who are not working: children, students, disabled, elderly retirees, etc. If the workers stop working, the non-workers won’t be able to live.

If there’s a one-person society, they basically will always need to work at least some to stay alive. If they’re incapacitated from age or injury, that might mean death, no matter how much they’ve accumulated up to that point.

So no, I don’t think this is a uniquely capitalist problem. Non-capitalist societies have dealt with population collapse before, but those tend to impose real danger to the non-working elderly, and not all of them survive the turmoil.

This article does a lot of speculation from few facts but is truly compelling.

I appreciate the clarity the article uses in the factual support for the ultimate theory, building on each inferential step that seems pretty obviously correct. The stuff that’s actually presented as being fairly certain:

• The fossil record shows many lines of archaic homo sapiens whose physical features don’t share modern homo sapiens’ “juvenile” baby face characteristics.
• The dating of those fossils and the migration patterns of our known ancestors suggests that these archaic homo sapiens aren’t actually our ancestors, but were outcompeted by our branch.
• The anthropological record shows that these archaic homo sapiens weren’t as dominant as our ancestor branch, but were close and could hold their own. Apparently the ancestors of modern humans never lost territory, even if it took millennia to displace other hominids.
• These archaic branches had some limited tool use, and some evidence of trade and ceremonial burial.

The article presents theories about our branch being less violent, having less aggression, able to build lasting alliances with larger groups of tribes. But it’s grounded in some interesting facts that are interesting, in themselves.

Looking around the article actually posted, I’d place my bets on more control/restraint on violence, for the coordination to be able to form social networks that could overcome any threats of skirmish level, inter-tribal violence:

Paradoxically, low aggression may have been a massive advantage in intertribal warfare. Low aggression could have helped us to form big social groups – tribes of hundreds and thousands. And modern humans don’t just form huge groups, we’re unique among animals in being able to form peace treaties between different groups, and alliances between groups to defend or attack territory. What made modern Homo sapiens so uniquely dangerous might not have been a tendency towards violence and aggression, but friendliness, and the ability to forge alliances. The ability to create groups and social networks, and hold off fighting – at least, until we’re in a position to win – could have given us a decisive edge.

It’s an interesting article, worth reading in its entirety.

Mortgage applications are not yes or no. There is a checklist that if met, gets approved.

That’s just a “yes or no” with extra steps.

Yeah, my reading of this is that this poster took particular personal satisfaction from denying an application, but it didn’t cross my mind that there was any element of actual control or decisionmaking.

It’s like when someone cuts you off and then crashes their car. You didn’t cause the crash, and a crashed car is a much more severe punishment than simple rudeness would deserve, but you can still derive satisfaction from the sequence of events.

“Simping for” is fundamentally different from being interested in the history of. In some cases, quite the opposite.

I spent some time researching the legal frameworks of American slavery, and a ton of time on racist laws between Reconstruction and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, in large part because I think that it is under reported just how racist the origins of a lot of our day to day lives are. So when I’m deep in the weeds on racist history, it’s often because I can see the parallels today and don’t want to reinvent the wheel on stamping out the pockets of racism I actually have the power to change.

It’s complicated, and people can have different philosophical approaches to the goals and purposes of criminal punishment. But my argument is that people should be internally consistent in their views. If people believe that the consequences of a crime should be considered when sentencing for that crime, then emotional consequences should count, too, because emotional harm is real harm.

I didn’t think I’d ever agree with Hawley

Hawley represents the future of the Republican party, in my opinion: populist conservatism that is willing to bend on party orthodoxy on how taxes and regulations shouldn’t be captured by big corporate interests, but is just completely abhorrent on cultural issues (and whether the government should be involved in those issues).

In an earlier political era, there would be opportunities for cross-party dialogue on the issues that the parties have deemed non-partisan (where divisions don’t fall within party lines and party leadership doesn’t care that their members hold a diversity of views on), but the number of issues that fall within that category have plummeted in the last 20 years.