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There can be situations where debt is a good idea, and there can be situations where debt is a bad idea. In ~2010, debt financing was incredibly cheap, so if the USA was able to take out debt at that time and use it for productive economic growth that paid more than the financing cost, it would have been a good investment.

Sure, debt can be good idea when it's carefully considered and planned by a well run organization, preferably one where its leaders have their personal finances highly dependent on its success.

However the chronic issue almost every government has is that the government is neither well run, nor do the people running it suffer any financial consequences when things go poorly.

I don't have a realistic fix for this, of course, but it's fun to imagine annual performance reviews for politicians with guillotines available to HR.

You can't coddle someone to success.

The most succinct way I've heard this massive cultural problem explained.

In a more fair world a person should probably not be able to amass more than USD 1B by making the right bet on the stock market. That wealth is build in this way is anti-meritocratic.

It's anti-meritocratic for someone to invest their money intelligently in the stock market?

How do you determine the threshold where on one side they're entitled to the wealth they earned, and on the other side their wealth is unfairly earned?

I don't really see a link between electric bus fires and diesel fires. The safety issue is that electric vehicle fires are far more difficult to control than their combustion counterparts.

"Electric Vehicle Fire" by "South Metro Fire Rescue Centennial, Colorado"

https://youtu.be/itGeAq9rBeY

Yep, that's where they shine. There are always cars that are "more", but few that can be used as hard as Porsches. When you fall out of love with something more exciting because it spends more time in the shop than on the road, the Porsche is always there ready to go.

A combination of factors; cost, customer expectations, and convenience.

It's easy to produce a lot of power, it's not easy to do so reliably and within emissions specs. That's where the cost comes in, and where customer expectations come in. If VW is going to be offering a 110 kW 2.0 liter engine, well, Mercedes-Benz can't come in and offer a 90 kW 2.0 liter engine just to meet specs. At the end of the day, margins are fairly thin and regulators are compliant. It's cheaper to just cheat the emissions than make the engine meet emissions specs.

The convenience factor is diesel exhaust fluid (AdBlue); the stuff really does work very well. However, dispensing it at the most effective rate in regards to emissions would mean it has to be topped up between service intervals; very inconvenient. Increasing the tank size is a non-starter because packaging space in modern vehicles is at a premium. So the dirty secret (at least for Mercedes-Benz, confirmed by one of their engineers) is that they calibrate it to last service intervals; not to meet emissions. It's only in rare cases where the owner has to refill the tank themselves.

In regards to the AdBlue situation, if you're in Europe where there are a lot of diesel passenger vehicles and also a lot of diesel trucks and buses, next time you're in the city or on the highway, pay attention to the characteristic diesel stink, either as a pedestrian or a driver. You're never going to smell it from a truck; it'll always be a passenger vehicle. :)

I know this is a popular take, but the blindspot is commercial engines.

bypass emissions sensors on 630,000 RAM pickup truck engines

In this case, and in nearly _every report of a scandal_, the issue is with passenger vehicle engines, not commercial vehicle engines.

Diesel engines can be engineered to meet emissions requirements without cheating, they just aren't except for commercial use.

Had the same experience, and ended up being satisfied with Magic Earth[1]. I tried more or less every major navigation service (paid and "free"), and I ended up sticking with it.

And no, I'm not affiliated in any way; just wanted to share a recommendation because I was in the same boat.

[1]https://magicearth.com

Adult Control Panel? I always think "Adult" when I'm trying to bring up the legacy panels instead of the function-crippled slow modern iterations.

Car sewer? Car brain? Wow, didn't know we had zealotry and disparagement over _choice of transport_ of all things, generally a matter people have little choice in; it's determined by where you live and what sort of life you have.

The alleged effect.

Every year of private renting was associated with an extra 2.4 weeks of aging on average.

The alleged solution.

Our finding that renting social housing was no different to outright ownership lends weight to calls for greater support for social housing.

As for

I suspect the authors are across your concerns and perhaps understand them as well, if not better, than you might.

This study is in the same category as any other study undertaken in service of a political goal. The authors would not publish a study that disagrees with their politics anymore than cigarette companies prior to the days of public awareness would have published a study showing cigarettes as anything other than utterly harmless.

The days of expecting any semi-coherent audience to stop thinking and accept everything that follows as fact as soon as the words "scientific research" and "professor" appear are long, long gone.

What? They're already here. I don't see too many around yet but they're definitely on sale.

https://apnews.com/article/electric-vehicles-china-subsidies...

The information/free thought antagonists I don't understand. I don't get their angle. And I don't believe their intentions are all conspiratorial.

It depends on who you're talking about.

The ones on the contemporary left are easier to understand; it's ideologically coherent with their belief system when it comes to the role of the state. You can disagree with their ideology (well, maybe not in their presence if you like having functional eardrums) but you can't say they don't make internal sense.

The really wacky ones are on the contemporary right; depending on context they might support something enthusiastically or vehemently oppose it even though it's actually the same thing, it's just the context changing.

Never had the pleasure of visiting but if this is accurate it might sound like the best of both worlds.

To be honest I never really compared airport food because I barely eat when traveling so I'll concede this one.

What, you don't enjoy German dining where the vast majority of restaurants serve food made in a factory? What an unsophisticated palette you have. /s

https://youtu.be/wzc_VNh42HM?si=ngrOt5nHsadPCRuR

Yeah. These romanticized threads always give me a kick. Every large city here in Germany has a chronic smell of diesel and dog piss. There's a level of grime to everything that would really bother someone used to an American suburb. Not to mention the majority of apartments are in old buildings with no ventilation or cooling.

Like you said, there's advantages but ignoring the downsides is amusing if you've ever actually lived in a large city.

It's hardly a given all countries will be shrinking, just ones that follow a certain value system.

As for a sustainable model, yeah. Have kids. Like normal living organisms do, have always done, and will always do. If a population as a whole is unable to sustain itself through this incredibly basic function then their values have led them to an evolutionary dead end.

My experience is that most govt regulators are complacent, mediocre, low energy desk jockies who default to doing as little as possible.

Yep. But the upside is that they're often the only thing standing between you and more or less infinite profit; and they're hardly an obstacle if you have the right set of keys.

For what is self-labelled as an investigation, there's very little technical information. At the very least (in my limitedly qualified opinion) the main factor should be identified; were all the holsters in the reported incidents leather? The only acknowledgement of the topic is brief.

as it might be in a warped holster or when a finger or object inadvertently brushes the trigger from its side.

He added that accidental discharges can be caused by improper ammunition, worn holsters or foreign objects working their ways into the trigger guards.

If this occurred also with plastic holsters, then I'd be concerned. But, unsurprisingly, WP decided to not provide this basic information.

If they're all leather, yes. The holster is a critical part of the weapon system. If you're using a leather holster it has a far more limited lifespan than, say, a leather wallet. RTFM.

I assume you mean with subsidies and grants.

I don't disagree with the patient's diagnosis, but my issue is with what would happen if we were living in, as you put it, "a functional democracy".

Contemporary democracy isn't new. Has it ever delivered what you claim it would if it were functional?

I could be wrong, but I can't think of a historical period where it did.

Seems to me like it's working as designed, if not what people think it's designed to do.

But why are there such high import duties for something they don't even manufacture? There's no domestic industry to give an advantage to through this.

Fair enough. I conceded I might be totally wrong because my conclusion is based on casual observation of passenger trains and their infrastructure rather than looking into the industry.

I could feasibly reach all cities and _most_ large towns by rail in Germany. Sure, it's slow as heck if you're not taking the express train with no transfers and few stops. But the infrastructure is there. Whereas in the US there are massive areas where the nearest train connection is hours away.

I assume there are factors with freight trains I don't know anything about, and if they're as profitable as you say then the infrastructure is actually very optimized for profitability; if there's somewhere worth reaching, the trains reach it.

I concede I might be totally wrong here, but the issue with rail seems to be profitability.

I live in (moved to) Europe, and the railways are far more developed than in the US. But as far as I know, they all have to be heavily subsidized by the governments to even function. None of them operate with a true profit. Here in Germany, 2.2% of the latest federal budget is to support the railways. This is despite the railways being privatized (into a government owned corporation).

And while trucking is also subsidized to an extent, and it's a difficult business, but people do successfully operate trucking companies.

Airships might have the same problems as rail does with intermodal connections, but it's worth a try to see how the profitability equation works out (in real life, not MBA-land).

_Maybe_ it's feasible for large multinationals to run direct routes between their warehouses, with trucks being used for last-mile delivery. The only cost is operation; in comparison with rail where the infrastructure is a constant sink, and in comparison with trucks where the infrastructure cost is outsourced to society.

This is the most r/NoahGetTheBoat thing I've read this week.

PETA claims its investigators visited a whopping 57 operations in Thailand where coconut milk companies that work with HelloFresh forced the animals to work in incredibly dangerous and unsanitary conditions.

"HelloFresh strictly condemns any use of monkey labor in its supply chain and we take a hard position of not procuring from suppliers or selling coconut products which have been found to use monkey labor," a spokesperson said. "We have written confirmation from all of our suppliers globally that they do not engage in these practices."

Whether or not HelloFresh uses suppliers that engage in this practice isn't what I care about.

And I understand that economic conditions in Thailand aren't like they are in wealthier countries.

But what I find mind-boggling is that the people doing this can clearly deduce that monkeys are intelligent enough to be _workers_, and yet they still decide to chain and beat them instead of reaching some sort of mutually beneficial arrangement we see often in nature between two species, and also with other animal/human relationships.

Assuming very cheap availability of raw bamboo, do you know if it's feasible to get the processing cost down with scale, to end up being cheaper than wood timber?

I know, that's implied. That's why I said it's a cultural class; both parties are unable to co-exist.

It's nothing personal. It's just, outside of FAANG and fields with a FAANG-like culture, the expectation is generally professionalism. At least in my field, if customers Google a company they don't want to see posts by employees of this nature. This sort of thing just doesn't fit.

In my opinion, these things work best quietly. Reach out on 1:1 basis to people you know and expand network. Don’t sob in public.

I concur but I noticed recently that with a lot of younger folks, it seems like a cultural shift.

Maybe encouraged is a strong word, but at the very least it's far more acceptable to make these things public than, say a decade or two ago.

I can't say it's wrong, per se, because I see the reasoning behind it. But there's a cultural clash.

I haven't hired anyone in a while, but if I had to posts like these would definitely result in a hard pass, no matter their skills.

Japan isn't the US, though. The effects of Japan's stagnation and economic woes are very real on the ground, and in terms of quality of life.

I'm not praising Japan as being somehow superior in that regard, but Japanese culture _does_ have traits that allows the Japanese to bear hardship with a measure of grace and calmness.

I can't imagine the US being in the situation that Japan is in without far more severe political consequences.