One city has a millionaire who builds a yacht for 100M dollars in a local shipyard and uses it for holidays. The neighbor city has a millionaire who spends 100M dollars to build 10 ferries he gifts to the city.
The general population is clearly better off in the second case, even if it does not matter for the workers in the shipyard.
Cute gambit to talk about ferries, the one mode of transport that doesn't have insane land-use debates. (Although they do need waterfront property on both ends.) I'll give you a point for that one.
But let's be serious. Ferries have a very limited use in only a few cities. Even then, the appeal is limited because they're relatively slow.
I submit that the most common result of replacing one yacht with $100m of public transit spending is that the unions and the bureaucracy will eat up the $100m in a few minutes.
The theory here is that diverting more smart people into "good" careers like urban planning will be great. But if we look at the last 100 years in the United States, the rise of careers like urban planning have been correlated with an explosion in construction costs.
Yet back in the bad old days when there weren't urban planning degrees and only a few effete twits went to college, private capitalism was able to build two big urban transit systems in NYC. No book smart people. Just sandhogs and profit motive. How much did it cost to add just a few stops to the NYC subway over the last two decades?
Yes, when you don't care about the environment or safety regulations or displacing people poorer than you, infrastructure is a very easy problem to solve. Fortunately for you, we seem to be heading back towards that way of thinking.
Also, I live near a city that had one of those ridiculous, way over budget projects where sure, some money was funneled to unions and bureaucracy or whatever evil monsters you've concocted here. No amount of billionaire pet projects could match the amount of good it did across the number of people it affected. Sometimes the inefficiencies of human cooperation are greased with money, and that's perfectly fine.
That seems very lucky of the second city. Let's hope we get lucky with some generous billionaires soon!
I don't claim that regulations are simple, and incentives couldn't be created to result in infrastructure investment by the wealthy... but I won't hold my breath.
I think the core idea is to avoid someone actually losing money. The producer might end up with a loss, the actor's profit is strictly positive (not accounting for opportunity costs...).
It's important to be precise because everything is not the same. In the German case the ruling was not because someone posted a critical meme, but because it was not entirely obvious the picture was edited (as in: you and I can immediately see the photo was edited, but some people will not recognize the edit). I do not agree with the ruling, but as a citizen I am happy that in Germany we still care if claims are true or not (and try to prevent people from lying).
Does this happiness that some people care whether claims are true or not overrule the arrest and deportation of peaceful protestors, and people in general based on social media posts, or do you also feel happy about that?
Isn't that just relying on the stupidity of someone who may not exist?
Like every single year people make the same dumb joke "Republicans vote on Tuesday and Democrats vote on Wednesday" leading to prosecution for misinformation when they cannot prove anyone actually tried voting on the wrong day because of the meme
Once you start talking millions of people someone will make that or any other mistake.
The US has a higher threshold, but it’s clear those standards mean many people are duped by “obvious” lies. It’s kind of an arbitrary line, but ignoring the dumb feels like a mistake to me when dumb people are active in society, still vote, etc.
She was a woman at Harvard in the middle of 20th century, it's already obvious that she was rich, which once again supports my point that the word "heiress" provides virtually no new information here.
The irreversibility is still important to highlight, as it is distinctively different from a similar consent issue with search: "Google indexed my website against my will, but I will just forbid them to include me in search results going forward".
It is irreversible similar to how a student reading a textbook from LibGen can remember and profit from that information forever. Kinda crazy how many in this community went from champions of freedom of knowledge to champions of megacorps owning and controlling of all of human creation in the span of like two years when it became clear other corporations could profit off that freedom too.
Hydro power is a great thing, it was the first renewable energy that was available in meaningful quantities. However, great sites for hydro power are definitely limited. We will not suddenly find a great spot for a new huge dam. Imagine the only source of vegan B12 to be some obscure plant that can only be grown on a tiny island. In this scenario, the possible extend of vegan consumption is fixed.
In the regions where it works (PNW, Quebec, etc) we could easily build more. The hurdles are regulatory. The regulation isn’t baseless - a dam will affect the local ecosystem adversely. But that’s a tradeoff we choose rather than a fundamental limitation.
The other trade off is correlated with the energy stored : potential for catastrophic disaster in case of failure. as a society, living below is not risk free in the long run.
Just to add to that: Any fluctuation in prices works to incentivise storage, negative prices are not so special in that regard.
Negative prices allow for some weird actions to become profitable - like starting an empty washing machine, turning in the light in an empty room or needlessly heating some water tank. Basically everything we are used to think of as waste. It sounds absurd, but it's not really a big deal.
That's a very optimistic outlook after it was revealed what preparations had been taken to deal with a global pandemic, a risk scenario that at least every country had a playbook for.
I just think it is not possible to meaningfully prepare for a once-in-a-century event. You simply cannot sustain significant budgets for such scenarios.
