slv77

There are many of parents who are good at running activity programs for youth but there aren’t many parents who are good at running a youth leadership training program. The article rightly points out that the Eagle Scout project, which is supposed to be a leadership capstone project has devolved into learning how to navigate bureaucracy.

The BSA settlement over sexual abuse allocations was $2.46B for claims going back to the 1970s. No matter how good the program to prevent abuse today, this generation of controls will be judged against the standards of 2070s. This makes any asset heavy youth program financially untenable.

Personally I think scouting, done right, is a beautiful thing but I don’t see how the program survives or how any similar volunteer program would she able to survive long term.

As a scoutmaster you have probably noticed the problems go much deeper:

1) The BSA national organization sized itself in the 1970s based on the idea that membership would continue to increase forever. The national organization is grossly oversized relative to the needs of the troops. The result is that the national organizations needs are at odds with the troops needs. The national organization is primarily focused on funding itself, including its debt, which creates a net burden for troops. 2) This net burden manifests itself in multiple ways at the troop level including using troops for fund raising efforts for the national organization where little if any of the funds make it back to the troop, increasingly irrelevant mandatory merit badge requirements to appease national donors who want to make their mark (reducing scout choices) and increasingly expensive costs for camps and equipment. 3) Lack of a solid development program for Scoutmasters. Few men in corporate America truly know how to manage or lead anymore. This rot started in the 1970s when computer programs replaced middle management and operations was largely outsourced. Outdoor skills have eroded as the population became more urbanized. Scoutmasters can’t teach what they don’t know and the national organization hasn’t filled that gap. For example compare BSA with NOLS for quality of their skills training. 4) Without a strong selection and development program for scoutmasters there is no prestige. Corporate America’s doesn’t see it as a place to develop leadership from but a distraction. That means that the people the scouting organization can draw from are the very, very good and the very, very bad. 5) Sexual abuse is a significant problem for any youth development organization and that fact was ignored by the BSA for way too long. The majority of perpetrators are men. As an organization with a declining pool of volunteers to draw adult leadership from the ratio of abusers who volunteer is going to be uncomfortably high. Courts and the court of public opinion have shown that there is no limit to the liability for this type of behavior. This is a strong signal that American’s simply do not want youth programs where this kind of thing can happen. 6) Being an adult leader of a youth organization comes with breathtakingly high amount of personal liability. Simply moving a car full of youth from one place to another risks financial devastation. The BSA does little to nothing to mitigate that risk and the only other way to mitigate that is through 1:1 youth to parent involvement where children are under direct, parental supervision at all times. This is antithetical to a youth lead program like the BSA.

Bots use sites like this to validate lists of stolen cards with low dollar donations to validate the cards before using them on the target site. Without some one of protection sites like these are quickly flooded with fraudulent transactions and then fined and shut down by Visa and Mastercard.

Maybe if moral virtues can be purchased they were never moral virtues to begin with?

Many moral vices naturally decline with age as physical senses and hormones dull and life loses novelty. It may be a comforting fantasy that we can somehow link our inevitable physical decline to a story of moral progress and assume that our accumulated wisdom would protect us from the folly of youth if we were somehow thrust again into our younger bodies.

But what if instead moral progress is about finding the right way of living? About spending more time with your kid than with a screen.

Maybe the virtue wasn’t in getting over the wall but finding yourself on the other side and choosing it because it is better? Society puts up walls all the time to prevent people from finding themselves on the wrong side of the wall. Nobody ever talks about the “grit” of the addict persistently dodging law enforcement to score their next fix.

Maybe the problem is society putting walls in the wrong place. If that’s true, does it really matter how you get over the wall?

People have different preferences, some people are going to be more productive at home and some less. Some people simply can’t work from home.

I think the challenge is that leadership isn’t coherent when it comes to RTO:

1. Leadership has largely abandoned the notion of geography when hiring or building teams. Building geographic centers of excellence where all team members with the same function working closely together used to be a thing. Leadership wants the flexibility to pick the best talent, at the best prices, on short notice but also wants ad-hoc collaboration. Workers are rightly confused when every meeting they have in an office is on Zoom. 2. Leadership has largely abandoned the notion of timezone alignment and structured working days. Leadership wants to hire talent across the globe which requires more cross-timezone collaboration and non-standard-work hour meetings. That wasn’t possible when at 5PM to 7PM everyone was commuting. It also isn’t reasonable to expect people to hold a rigid 8AM to 5PM in-office schedule and then take 2 hours of meetings from 6PM to 8PM. 3. Leadership is complains that office space is both essential to productivity AND too expensive to spend money on. Employees home setups in terms of working space, noise isolation, connectivity and configuration are now more productive than what is offered in-office. When leadership took people from dedicated offices, to cubicles, to open seating and then to “hot desking” it was justified that commercial real estate was scarce, expensive and required the sacrifice of productivity to manage costs. Now that it is plentiful and cheap? Leadership is saying that RTO is needed for productivity AND that they will continue to reduce spending on office space per employee.

The only way to mentally reconcile that is to either assume that leadership is incompetent or that they want to return to 18th century sweat shops and envy China’s 9x9x6 culture. I can see why mid-level management is struggling getting compliance which is why they are relying on badge swipes.

If all the drug cartels in the world were limited to pawning copper scrap it would make me very happy indeed. I am also sure that it would benefit a large number of people who live in countries where cartel money dominates the economy.

I wouldn’t want to live in a world where the equivalent of the life’s work of its average citizen are traded causally like chips on a poker table and the only option to opt-out is to barter or starve. It would be hard to see the difference between that and feudalism.

All of the other items you mentioned are things that society attempts to regulate against as well. And while there are an infinite number of ways to exchange value it stays between those involved. If the drug dealer is happy to trade heroin for house painting the damage is self limiting.

Once it’s converted to money it’s everyone’s problem. I can’t avoid my mortgage interest helping supporting the dealer who is supplying the addicts who are stealing my stuff. The harder I work, the worse it gets.

The controls may not be effective but I think they are necessary. I wouldn’t want to live in most countries where money laundering dominates financial activity.

Money is a call option on the labor of its citizens. When money accumulates to people who operate against the best interests of its citizens more and more of a countries labor and future is traded for less societal value. There exists some tipping point where no societal value is created and money exists just to drain the vitality of its citizens. In other words, no matter how hard you work things only get worse.

A great article on this dynamics that is worth a read (https://www.propublica.org/article/china-cartels-xizhi-li-mo...)

There have been proposals to inject sulfur into airline engines at high altitudes so this approach has been well studied. The first challenge is that even if it addresses the problem of global temperatures rising it does nothing to address other issues such as ocean acidification. At some point C02 levels become physiologically relevant to humans and it feels like living in a stuffy room all the time. The second problem is that it has to be maintained forever. Any technological glitch and the planet goes into run-away heating. Basically we’d be making a decision for humans 100 to 1000 years in the future to maintain a specific lifestyle.

It would be the equivalent of people in the 1970s deciding to not move away from ozone-layer destroying CFCs and deciding to fit all humans and animals with permanent sunglasses to prevent cataracts instead.

I’m not arguing for or against the merits of the recent strikes. I am disputing the notion that Iran’s anti-US stance is purely rhetoric for domestic consumption.

One of the arguments against limited strikes against the Iranians was that it would be simply stirring up the hornets nest and things spiraling out of control.

Iran sponsored insurgents in Iraq and provided the training and means to build explosively formed penetrators that killed 196 US troops:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2020/01/03/...

The US assassinated Soleimanis and Iran reponded with direct middle attacks on US bases:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Martyr_Soleimani

Iranian activity agains the US goes back decades and has escalated recently:

https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2025/06/19/iranian-and-iranian-...

Other than a brief thaw in relations in 2015 there is nothing that would suggest that Iran’s anti-US rhetoric is for domestic consumption and for show.

North Korea had enough conventional artillery to level Seoul with an estimated 1M casualties. That was why Clinton decided against attacking North Korea as they moved towards building the bomb:

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/reboot/north-koreas-artill...

Iran’s deterrent was/is through its proxies (Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis) along with its sizable missile inventory, anti-air capabilities and strategic threats to oil and gas exports.

Israel’s investment in missile defense and the outcome of the Oct 7th attacks severely weakened Iran’s deterrence to a conventional attack.

I think the lesson should be that any nation that has enough conventional leverage to deter an attack could choose to build nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons may complement, but can’t displace other capabilities.

The US has nuclear weapons but that didn’t deter Iran from launching direct attacks on US troops in the Middle East or sponsoring insurgents in Iraq. Nuclear weapons are also essential worthless against non nation-state actors such as Al-Qaeda.

This paper from 1999 provides some context about the US and Israel relationship in the context of nuclear weapons in the Middle East.

The third temple's holy of holies : Israel's nuclear weapons

https://dp.la/item/525bc46d51878c5e285d9069a80246d0

Housing prices have historically been highly correlated with income and interest rates. That correlation seems to have broken down.

There are areas where it still is sane but much less of them than historically and concentrated in areas with very little population.

Housing prices relative to income have gone up pretty much nationwide:

https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/blog/home-price-income-ratio-re...

Much of the US housing stock includes homes built before 1990 (30 years ago). If most of the median home price increase was due to build quality there would be a bimodal distribution of housing appreciation with newer homes having appreciated more than older homes.

Most of the appreciation in housing is due to higher household incomes due to two income households.

Spanish scholars have speculated that Columbus was a crypto-Jew. The DNA analysis could have potentially ruled out that theory.

https://www.cnn.com/2012/05/20/opinion/garcia-columbus-jewis...

Business expenses must be ordinary and necessary to be deductible. A roofer would have a hard time justifying deducting a boat under the rule but a commercial fisherman wouldn’t have trouble.

Entertainment expenses are no longer deductible with recent tax law changes with few exceptions. It would be difficult today to get a CPA to sign-off off on a lot of what may have passed previously. A decent write-up can be found here - https://www.thetaxadviser.com/issues/2023/nov/navigating-aro...

Others have tried and the IRS has even provided a helpful guide on if your endeavor is a hobby or a business (https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-news/fs-08-23.pdf).

Monsanto engineered several crops to create their own insecticides with genes from bacillus thuringiensis (BT). BT corn was approved by regulators for corn not intended for human consumption.

In practice it became impossible to keep BT corn out of the food supply. With corn as a staple crop and the international trade in corn everyone on the planet became a test case.

There was controversy on the impact of corn pollen on non-target species, including monarchs and lady-birds/lady bugs and bees. Follow-up studies didn’t show significant impact in quantities likely to be encountered in the field.

All GMs have risk of pollen drift and the risk of gene spread. Farmers growing non-BT corn for export may have their crops rejected in some markets if contaminated. Corn cross pollinates with a genetic ancestor of corn in South America which is considered a weed because it can cause domestic corn kernels to not develop properly. There is some risk of gene transfer and creating a “super” weed.

https://ejbpc.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s41938-018-0...

https://ohioline.osu.edu/factsheet/agf-153

The Federal Reserve is paying 5% interest on $7 trillion of reserves held by banks. Since this is in excess of what the Federal Reserve is earning on the assets on its balance sheet they are booking the difference as “deffered assets”. Little of this needs to trickle down to retail depositors given the Federal Reserves “ample reserves” policy so this is effectively a bank subsidy.

For all the talk of the Fed “printing money” this is literally printing money because there is no offsetting asset on the Feds balance sheet. Eventually the hole in the balance sheet is supposed to be closed by interest earned that would normally be paid to the US Treasury.

In other words the Federal Reserve has figured out how to directly bail out banks without the consent of Congress to the tune of $10B+ per month. The higher they raise interest rates, the bigger the subsidy. That should leave a lot of banks well capitalized to pick up assets of small regional banks and REITs that will eventually fail. Roughly $10B in bank subsidies can translate into $100B in loans with required 8% capital ratios.

The Federal Reserve considers their “ample reserve” policy a “public good” as in it is good for the public to see savings eaten away by inflation and higher public debt burden of interest payments to subsidize banks.

This author is essentially arguing that the security of his garden shed is equivalent to the security of most banks because statistically banks get robbed more often.

Spammers and scammers have a fixed cost to initiate an attack and the potential return on investment is proportional to the user base. A platform below a certain size simply isn’t profitable to attack. It isn’t that small shops are going to be better at mitigating spammers and scammers as the article states, small shops just aren’t being attacked.

If the arguments were true that there are diseconomies of scale there wouldn’t have ever been consolidation in email hosting. Email providers all use the same protocols so the incremental cost of attacking a small provider is zero. A small company hosting their own email will quickly see their customers flee for the big providers as they drown in spam. Scaling spam management was the primary driver that drove consolidation in email providers in the early 2000’s.

This also drove consolidation in areas with similar economics such as e-commerce. The low cost of attacking a new player in the e-commerce space and the cost of scaling risk management drove a lot of the growth of PayPal and spawned the growth and consolidation of outsourced e-commerce fraud risk management.

The economics are going to be true of any n-squared business model where the value is in the size of the network. I go to LinkedIn because it has the lowest scam rates but because most of the people I work with are there.

While a wildly diverse ecosystem would be more resilient against fraud this is the internet, the biggest n-squared system of them all. It’s unlikely that the internet is going to devolve into small, diverse fiefdoms so the problem is here to stay.

A lot of those regular folks could have kept their money in US Government bond funds or in FDIC backed bank accounts as well. They invested in commercial real-estate paper because they wanted higher returns than those bonds funds would provide. Usually higher returns means accepting higher risk.

Maybe to level the playing field the government should publish a list of investments with high returns and implicit government guarantees so that we’d all know where to put or retirement money. It really screws with my retirement planning to only find out after the fact.

Economic incentives aren’t aligned between cow-calf operations and feedlots. There may be a significant difference in feed efficiency between calves. Some may turn grain to meat at a 2:1 ratio and others at a 4:1 ratio but ranchers are paid the same for each calf. A way to cheaply identify calves that are more feed efficient or align incentives would be worth some money.

Most of these ranches will be running cow-calf operations. A cow-calf operation is a herd that produces calves which can be sold to a feedlot or backgrounding operators.

In factory farming it’s the calf that is the factory that turn grain into beef. It takes 3 pounds of grain to produce a pound of beef so it’s cheaper to move the calf to the grain than the grain to the calf.

At the same time a cow can only produce one calf per year so it is cheaper to keep the herd of cows that produce the calf on marginal grasslands rather than on the richer farmland near the feedlots.

While these ranches aren’t directly shipping steaks to customers they are more than a vanity project for the wealthy.

Sometimes people want to be firefighters to protect the people they serve but others love how being in a crisis makes them feel alive. The later are why arson investigators first look at firefighters when doing an arson investigation. Some of them need the fires and will start them just to fight them.

There are a lot of these types that gravitate to crisis management roles like DevOps.

There is a lot of help and experience in setting up intentional communities. A good place to start is https://www.ic.org/.

If it were an arbitrary biological instinct then it wouldn’t be contextual based on cultural clues.

It is difficult to create scenarios that trade-off one life for millions without implying responsibility of the person being asked to make the decision. People are grappling less with moral trade-offs in these decisions than they are with the dual axis questions or morality and responsibility. Create a scenario that trades off one life for a million but doesn’t imply the person choosing is in a position of responsibility and it becomes morally unambiguous.

For example a researcher choosing to sacrifice a healthy individual to donate their immune cells to save a million terminal cancer patients is considered morally reprehensible because people can’t to see how the researcher could be considered responsible for the a healthy individuals life. If the individual goes from being healthy to being in a coma and researcher becomes family member the question then becomes morally ambiguous.