The investigations uncovered Epstein’s close ties to former President Bill Clinton and Britain’s Prince Andrew, as well as his once friendly relationship with former President Donald Trump
Dear AP, why the fuck are you downplaying Trump’s ties to Epstein? Trump hung out with child diddlers to diddle children. He was hilariously cagey when asked if he’d release Epstein materials as president.
There may not be enough evidence to get him in court, but he should be held in the same group as Clinton and Andrew.
Bro the guy was literally “the leader of the free world” and said nothing about his friend selling children to child diddlers and you are going to come at me with a “but akchually WHICH LAW DID HE BREAK?!?!?!?”. Go piss.
I was responding to a person who said Trump belongs in the same category as Clinton. So you believe Trump’s transgressions are no worse than keeping his mouth shut about illegal activity? It seems you are defending them by ridiculing me.
Laws should follow and codify ethics, not dictate them. If a transgression (such as not reporting CSA to the relevant authorities) is not already banned by law, that doesn’t mean it’s fine. It means the law needs to be amended.
In this specific case I agree, not reporting CSA should be illegal (and probably is?) I’m not so sure that we should codify the current ethical understanding into law though.
We need to leave room for development. Forcing new ideas to first go through the battle of legalization isn’t helpful in this regard. Laws are there to regulate what normal social regulation can’t do properly.
I think people who cheat on their partners are morally speaking bad people. But writing into law you can’t have multiple partners at once is quite obviously a bad decision, because there are happy polyamourus relationships. The government doesn’t need to get involved here, being treated like the ass that you are for cheating is punishment enough, and leaves the room for developing new ways of living together.
I guess we need to distinguish between legislation, regulation and case law established through judicial precedent. Legislation is definitely too cumbersome to react to shifting moral standards. Regulation and judicial precedent are more flexible in cases where legal consequences are warranted.
As so often, there is nuance to the topic. General statements are hard to make both concisely and precisely. I opted for brevity, but you are absolutely right.
Either way, we agree that complacency about CSA is fucked up.
If you hang out at a bar with Nazis in it, it’s a Nazi bar and you’re a Nazi too. Same with pedophile island. Some things are so evil if you know about it and do nothing you are just as complicit as the people directly doing it.
There is this, where a anonymous person has reported beeing raper by Trump as a Teen girl (please read this at your own discretion). She never went to court because she was intimidated.
Seems he resigned from that department but I can’t find anything about him other than a piece talking about his wife since then. Nothing about his stance on policing, his job, etc.
Don’t even think about asking about the extraterrestrials.
Uh, not . . that there are any, it . . that is, if there were any there would certainly be information that . . uh . . about, uh, that. Which there isn’t! Ha ha! Nope. Anyway. Let’s finish getting these taxpayer funded Ten Commandments installations put up, hand me that hammer will ya
In lots of third world ones too. Here in Brazil there’s no such thing as “paying for ambulance” if you are in a health plan or using public health systems.
we get to spend time arguing about gay books in the library
Congratulations! You’ve pointed to the exact reason why we’re stuck arguing about gay books! If right wingers didn’t have absolute bat shit social issues to bitch about they’d be joining us in bitching about the real issues we face!
You can get one for free if you want. Theres still wild horse populations.
But if you want, you can spend hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions on a horse. You could also probably get one for a few hundred but that one is already on its way to a glue factory.
There are very, very few wild horses, and they’re pretty much untamable. But there are TONS of feral horses with populations growing out of control and governments at a loss for what to do about it
Yes, but it comes from a domesticated genetic line. Imagine if a Pug or Chihuahua went feral. It wouldn’t exactly be the same as the original wolf-like starting point.
It’s the same with horses. After generations of being bred by humans for specific traits, they’re very different than the original wild population. They’re probably also easier to re-domesticate than wild horses.
They are all feral by definition in the new world (although I’ve never read about your link before!)
Legislative BS that requires public opinion often refers to them as wild (because it plays to romanticizing) or they are sometimes labeled wild just to categorize how they will be treated by land and animal controllers (so they are considered “natural” in some areas). Before like the 70s, they were treated as pests and killed, but people thought they were cool and pretty, so it had to stop.
Arizona had always had a shitty time because the horse populations destroy the environment, but when parks people tried to thin or remove them, people complained because horses are pretty.
The Przewalski’s horse is not the wild form of our horse. It’s a other sub species (a little bit like the zebra or the donkey) with (for example) another chromosome count. Another problem is that there are evidences that the modern Przewalski’s horse feraled from a domesticate form of the primal Przewalski’s horse (that was tamed by the Botai culture). A further problem is that the Przewalski’s horse was extincted in the wild for decades and only survived because of human breeding (so it was kind of tamed again).
Boarding, farrier, vet, plus the mental and emotional toll of owning a 1000lb toddler that exhibits an inverse correlation of majestic beauty and intelligence. God, I love horses lol.
I dated a girl who had two horses and she was shaving every expense to keep her horses well where she was selling plasma. After noping out that relationship after a month, my friends explained to me the whole “Horse Girl” stereotype and every single one matched.
Settlements are always necessarily dispositive of the truth. Sometimes it makes sense to just pay a settlement fee than to go through litigation if you expect your attorney fees to be greater than the settlement cost. Also it’s not uncommon for settlements agreements to not confirm allegations so as to not benefit future cases against the defendant.
“My commitment: We will never seek victory in a just case against us, even if we will probably win,” he wrote. “We will never surrender/settle an unjust case against us, even if we will probably lose.”
Either he’s full of shit, he did after a horse for sex or both.
On one hand it might be cost effective but on the other its not like cost is an issue for someone with like ten zeoes in his account balance. Maybe he thought getting it out of the news cycle was more important then how it would look becoming a thing… too bad lol
Corporations cut corners because the fines they’re issued by the government don’t go far enough. They get a slap on the wrist and work it out in the wash.
Corporations cut corners because the fines they’re issued by the government don’t go far enough.
But in the example for the shipping company the example is that the company used a minimum amount of crew. Using a minimum amount of crew isn’t something they’d get fined for.
If the regulation wasn’t enough or if tugs should’ve been used then it’s strange to claim that the fine isn’t high enough. As the regulations were followed.
I don’t know much about Peltz but I kind of agree that you don’t NEED to have all black or all women cast. The art should dictate it. But on the flip side, having an all black or all women cast isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Representation in media may not matter to some, but it can make a big impact on others.
Furthermore, most of Africa is black. What were you expecting out of Black Panther???
Everett Ross is associated with Black Panther in the comics as well… And is basically a token there. But his existence predates the Disney acquisition.
I get your point but I mean Wakanda is supposed to be the most technologically advanced society. Why shouldn’t diversity sort of be a given in that context? Because only fellow Africans can be trusted to keep the place a secret?
Seems kinda hostile. Africans can be born without pigmentation for one thing. And just because there are colonial powers doesn’t mean a society has to be so bigoted (which they clearly aren’t in universe) to see everyone who doesn’t look like themselves as part of “the others”. They allowed the Avengers in anyways. But my point was meant more like, technology thrives when cultures and people come together.
They completely cut off their society from the rest of the world, it’s not like any African gets a pass in, they don’t allow anyone that isn’t Wakandan. It was like, a pretty significant plot point.
Yea well like I said in the other comment, a society that advanced free from cooperation with other cultures or people seems unlikely. The point of their isolation isn’t lost on me. Still I wouldn’t know why zero tolerance towards that policy would be necessary or sustainable while thriving for technological innovation.
a society that advanced free from cooperation with other cultures or people seems unlikely
True. The writers probably agree. Hence Wakanda literally having been built on top of a literal mountain of magic space science unobtainium that makes science go brrr practically by just being there.
Oh, and with magic drugs that allow Wakandan leaders to not only single handedly beat up any would be invaders, but also share the wisdom and acquired knowledge of all their ancestors.
Seems quite less unlikely and unsustainable when you take into account those two little details. 🤷♂️
Not trying to point out lack of realism in a work of fiction anyways. I was just trying to suggest that diversity hires could’ve been the name of the Disney game on those movies just as they are on many others. When it comes to representation there’s definitely no need to diversify a majority black cast. At least not for the sake of more caucasian faces. But I really do feel the words “the art should dictate it”. Black Panther’s source material was probably honored quite faithfully.
You got me there ngl. I’m not saying Black Panther has plot holes, I’m not even saying that the cast should’ve been more diverse because Disney or whatever. I was just trying to level with @hddsx saying the art should dictate the content instead of executives bending it to their will. In the case of Black Panther it was probably the art or the source material anyways so no real issue there.
Yes the implication that they sequestered themselves away and somehow progressed alongside the rest of humanity, sorry not only progressing but outpacing the rest of humanity is ridiculous.
It has nothing to do with them being African, the concept is made ridiculous by simply possessing a working knowledge of what human beings are.
Well how far do you want me to go in refuting that? Would attributing the US space program to the leftover Nazi braintrust be too far? I’m saying what I have said. That no people on their own can truly thrive. We excel when we work together (the moral implications of working with ex white supremacists exist but don’t negate that fact).
But yea sure we’re talking about a work of fiction. I just thought that people here feel that vibe of Disney pushing diversity for the sake of diversity. I feel like that does raise certain valid points about artistic integrity. And if that makes me sound to you like the guy who can’t stand the thought of a female Bond then that’s you reading stuff into it that I haven’t said.
To me turning Arielle black is like making Maleficent the protagonist. If something works (not for me personally but for audiences in general) then it will be rewarded accordingly. Whether i.e. The Marvels worked is up for everyone to decide.
I’m just letting you know your previous comment had racist undertones.
Your comment about turning Ariel black also has racist undertones. Mermaids aren’t real, maybe the black actress was better suited for the role in ways we don’t know about?
Well I think you were now given the chance to judge the book by something other than its cover. If you stick with your original assessment that’s entirely your prerogative. I was giving Arielle as an example of something that worked.
Sure, it isn’t necessary, but would he say the same thing about an all white or all male cast? That’s the default, so having something to show the default isn’t the only option is good too. As a cis straight white man, I don’t give a fuck if there isn’t a straight white man in a movie. Why should I? I see myself everywhere being validated. Let’s give other people extra space because they’ve been denied it for so long.
It’s mostly not necessary, just like it’s not necessary to have an all-white cast. In the last few years I came to realize that colorblind casting doesn’t diminish great art, just like it won’t help bad art to become better. I’m not saying casting should always be colorblind, but in sci-fi and fantasy movies I don’t see skin color or gender matter at all.
If you want to know why Americans are bummed out about their purchasing power, just look at this chart about how wages abruptly stopped increasing with productivity 45 years ago. People are accomplishing more than ever before in history and being left with less buying power. In many cases wages don’t even keep pace with inflation because companies pay based on what they can get away with, not what the work is worth.
Productivity and wages aren’t intrinsically linked.
Say you’ve got someone digging a trench with a manual shovel, and then the Bobcat is invented. Let’s say that the Bobcat lets someone do five times as much digging. The wage paid isn’t going to be five times the shoveler.
The wage will be set by whatever it takes to get ahold of someone who can operate the Bobcat. That’ll depend on how many people are out there who can operate a Bobcat, and what else they might be doing.
The only guarantee is that it won’t be more than five times the manual shoveler, because then (setting aside, for a moment, the non-labor costs) digging the thing with the Bobcat would be less-efficient than having it manually-shoveled.
In fact, productivity and wages can be inversely-correlated.
Let’s say that instead of a Bobcat operator and a manual shoveler, where the skillset is different and the pool of people who can do each may differ, you have some technological improvement that doesn’t change the pool of labor at all. Let’s say that someone suddenly realizes that the Bobcat shovel could be twice as large and it can scoop twice as much. Ignoring, for simplicity, things like setup time, suddenly every Bobcat operator is twice as productive.
Now, usually there’s some level of price elasticity of demand. If you can make something more-cheaply, then more people will buy it – some people wanted a trench but it just didn’t make financial sense, but now suddenly it does. But let’s assume that demand is entirely inelastic. There is still the same amount of demand then, even if the trench can be dug more-cheaply, and the same amount of trench will be dug.
In that case, one only needs half the number of Bobcat operators. The market allocates workers based on their wage – pay more, more people will be willing to do a job, pay less, and fewer will. What will happen is that Bobcat operator wages will drop until about the required number of Bobcat operators are willing to do the work. Those who were already on the edge will exit the field, do something else.
Wages can also change when productivity doesn’t. North Dakota had an oil boom about twenty years back. There weren’t nearly enough people to work the fields. Wages skyrocketed, and people entered the field or moved to the area. They weren’t more-productive than the previous workers. They were paid more because the supply was limited; paying more resulted in the needed number of workers showing up.
Wages can closely track productivity in some situations. Suppose you have zero price elasticity of supply – that is, no new workers are able/willing to enter a field, no matter what wage is being offered. And there is infinite price elasticity of demand – in practice, immense demand for the thing at the particular price, but not above that. An example – maybe a bit contrived – would be if a number of people with identical cars all locked their keys in their uninsured cars prior to a flood, and a lone locksmith is available. They can break a window to get their keys and rescue their car, or have the locksmith open the car. Anyone who can will pay the locksmith to open the car for up to the cost of replacing the window, but not more than that. There is no time for more locksmiths to show up – supply is inelastic. In that case, if the locksmith could manage to open a car in half the time, he’s be paid twice as much.
But normally, wage serves the role in a market of allocating workers to a given field. It isn’t directly bound to productivity. And you wouldn’t want it to do that, because that’d kill its use to do that labor allocation, which is how the market moves workers where they’re needed. Let’s set aside practical difficulties and imagine that we could pass a law to lock productivity and wage. Suppose it resulted in a lower wage than market rate – as it would with the North Dakota oil workers above – then you wouldn’t have enough workers, and oil that should be extracted would go unextracted. Suppose it resulted in a higher wage than market rate, as it would with the Bobcat operator above. Then you’d have a line of capable-of-using-a-Bobcat people, all of whom want the Bobcat operator’s job. In practice, because the wage is locked, non-wage compensation probably changes – that is, the conditions of the job get worse. The Bobcat operator has to be on-site the instant the job starts, any mistake on his part and he’s immediately replaced, etc. And you have the crowd of people trying to get his job probably trying to offer bribes and the like to get him ejected and themselves put in place.
Disclaimer: I don’t have a degree in economics. I read your post and I think I have countering points to make, but if you can rebut my points below specifically I’ll try to listen. (Also just want you to know I’m not the one who down-voted you since you seem to be arguing in good faith and I’m all about that. Sometimes I’m wrong.)
You talk about making things more cheaply and that resulting in a cheaper product. If companies agree to all charge the maximum they can get away with, it kills industry price competition (a foundational necessity of functional capitalism) and renders price elasticity a falsehood. If Coke and Pepsi both charge 1.50 for a can of cola, it doesn’t matter if increased productivity means Coke can make a can for 20 cents instead of 30 cents - the savings are just converted into extra profit. You can see this in record profits for many sectors as productivity has increased - the savings of needing fewer people to do the same work isn’t passed on to customers. As proof, here’s an article about how much more things cost today than in the 1970’s (adjusted for inflation). Yet we know that people are over 3x as productive per person over the same period, so clearly companies are not passing along savings in the form of cheaper goods. I know more than productivity affects price, but those factors would have to be overwhelmingly more costly to justify the increase and I don’t think things like shipping are that much more expensive.
Inelastic demand for necessary products like fuel, utilities, food, health care, etc also means that in many industries increased productivity does not need to translate to savings. Pharmaceutical companies, either as an industry of multiple providers or where they hold exclusive patents, will raise prices of products to whatever they can get away with because people will either pay or die. So again cheaper products and competition is a myth.
Speaking of getting fewer people to do the same work, companies lay off people all the time when individual productivity or automation goes up. You talk about employing 1/5th the Bobcat workers and net lost 4 workers being forced to find other work. This may make economic sense but it’s terrible societal sense. It results in financial insecurity and homelessness among educated, capable people with all the associated national problems like mental health, crime, drug addiction, etc.
As US economics function now, companies do not pass along the value of increased productivity to their customers in savings, nor to their employees in increased wages, shorter work weeks, or stable employment (re: layoffs). Instead they maintain or raise prices depending on what they can get away with and employ as few people as possible to maximize profit. This has the societal consequences we’re seeing now, such as in OP’s article.
You talk about making things more cheaply and that resulting in a cheaper product. If companies agree to all charge the maximum they can get away with, it kills industry price competition
Sure, if all companies in a market formed a cartel and engaged in price-fixing, and it wouldn’t be a competitive market.
and renders price elasticity a falsehood.
In a situation like that, you’d still have price elasticity of demand working the same way – that’s on the consumer – but supply could be artificially-constrained by the cartel to be lower than would normally be the case.
If Coke and Pepsi both charge 1.50 for a can of cola, it doesn’t matter if increased productivity means Coke can make a can for 20 cents instead of 30 cents - the savings are just converted into extra profit.
Sure, if they form a cartel, you don’t have a competitive market. Note that I would guess that the soft drink world is probably not an easy one to create a cartel in, because it’s probably not that hard for a competitor to enter – there are a number of store brand colas – but there will be products where it’d probably be easier – say, airliners or something like that.
You can see this in record profits for many sectors as productivity has increased - the savings of needing fewer people to do the same work isn’t passed on to customers. As proof, here’s an article about how much more things cost today than in the 1970’s (adjusted for inflation).
I don’t think that the article is saying that all things do – they’re giving examples of some things that do. They give four examples:
The first is homes. Homes do cost more, but I would be surprised if that is due to formation of a cartel of homebuilders – there are a lot of homebuilding companies, and cartel formation is harder the more companies are in a market.
House prices are higher. But they aren’t for the same houses – new homes have gotten substantially bigger. If you want an apples-to-apples, you want to look at how the same home changes. The Case-Shiller index tracks repeat sales to eliminate this as a factor. Someone’s graphed this (the red line) since 1974 and put CPI up, to account for inflation (the black line).
The long run trend since the 1970s is to follow inflation fairly-closely. What you see there are instead two large “surges” – and we are in the middle of the latter. The first was during the runup to the financial crisis, when a lot of money was lent out and drove a bubble. After that popped, about 80% of the increase in house prices since 1974 was due to inflation.
There’s been a new surge since then, which started with the COVID pandemic. The Federal Reserve held interest rates down during the pandemic to avoid a recession. That made it cheaper to borrow money, so a lot of people borrowed more and more and bid up house prices. But that’s a short-term thing, not a since-the-1970s trend.
Here’s an article from the Fed back when the surge started talking about it.
The second is college tuition.
Similarly, I think that it’s pretty safe to say that all the universities and colleges out there have not formed a cartel, as they’re a lot of them out there, and it’d be pretty difficult to do.
I haven’t looked at this one before, a quick google makes it look like this is may be something of the fact that they’re measuring “sticker price”, not what people actually pay.
The way universities work, there’s an advertised price, which is the highest price that anyone pays. Then there are various forms of financial aid, which reduce the actual amount that an individual pays; typically, this is need-based aid, where poorer students pay less.
Looking at this, it looks like what’s happened is that government subsidy directly to universities has fallen off…but aid to students has risen. The former doesn’t contribute to the advertised tuition price (the university gets money directly, doesn’t need tuition money) but the latter does (the student pays tuition but then gets financial aid).
googles
Yeah. Apparently that was part of a shift from state-level subsidy to federal-level subsidy:
States and the federal government have long provided substantial financial support for higher education, but in recent years, their respective levels of contribution have shifted significantly.[1] Historically, states provided a far greater share of assistance to postsecondary institutions and students than the federal government did: In 1990 state per student funding was almost 140 percent more than that of the federal government. However, over the past two decades and particularly since the Great Recession, spending across levels of government converged as state investments declined, particularly in general purpose support for institutions, and federal ones grew, largely driven by increases in the need-based Pell Grant financial aid program. As a result, the gap has narrowed considerably, and state funding per student in 2015 was only 12 percent above federal levels.[2]
This swing in federal and state funding has altered the level of public support directed to students and institutions and how higher education dollars flow. Although federal and state governments have overlapping policy goals, such as increasing access to postsecondary education and supporting research, they channel their resources into the higher education system in different ways. The federal government mainly provides financial assistance to individual students and specific research projects, while states primarily pay for the general operations of public institutions. Federal and state funding, together, continue to make up a substantial share of public college and university budgets, at 34 percent of public schools’ total revenue in 2017.
Hmm. That’s probably advantageous; one of the few things that I think that the US has probably done wrong from a policy standpoint is having a good deal of educational subsidy still be local rather than federal, as it creates problems if people are educated in one place and then move to work in another. That’s a very serious problem in the European Union, and while the US has more-centralized subsidy, still a lot was non-federal.
But I’ll say that I haven’t looked to dig into college costs changes over time before, the way I have housing, so this is an off-the-cuff take. But if it is an artifact of a shift to federal subsidy, I’d probably say that it’s a good thing, fixing a problem that was present in the past.
Let me continue going through your comment in a child comment, so this doesn’t get too long.
Okay, the next one is healthcare costs, which they say have risen by about 50% by their metric since 1972. So, I haven’t dug into that, but there I could believe that you might legitimately have the sort of cartel you’re worried about. Well, okay, not a cartel, but regulatory capture. A doctor can only practice in a state if the medical board approves, and doctors can influence the standards set by the medical board – that is, block out competition, something that most industries can’t do. Doctors do make pretty high salaries in the US, much higher than in many other countries, and I’ve read articles before that are pretty critical of the role that the regulatory system places in creating the barriers to entry.
According to the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), in a decade America will have a shortage of up to 124,000 doctors. This makes no sense. The profession is lavishly paid: $350,000 is the average salary according to a recent paper by Joshua Gottlieb, an economist at the University of Chicago, and colleagues. Lots of people want to train as doctors: over 85,000 people take the medical-college admission test each year, and more than half of all medical-school applicants are rejected. And yet there is a shortage of doctors. What is going on?
Yet there is another explanation for the doctor shortage, which has to do with the pipeline into the profession, and which the American Medical Association has played a part in creating. It takes longer to train a doctor in America than in most rich countries, and many give up along the way. Future physicians must first graduate from university, which typically takes four years. Then they must attend medical school for another four years. (In most other rich countries, doctors need around six years of schooling.) After post-secondary education, American doctors must complete a residency programme, which can last from three to seven years. Further specialist training may follow. In all, it takes 10-15 years after arriving at university to become a doctor in America.
If the expense and length of the training were not off-putting enough, the number of places in the profession has also been artificially held down. In September 1980 the Department of Health and Human Services released a report warning of a troubling surplus of 70,000 physicians by 1990 in most specialties. It recommended reducing the numbers entering medical school and suggested that foreign medical-school graduates be restricted from entering the country. Despite the shortage, doctors trained abroad must still sit exams and complete a residency in most states regardless of their years of experience.
Medical colleges listened, and matriculation flatlined for 25 years, despite applications rising and the population growing by 70m over the same period (see chart). In 1997 federal funding for residencies was capped, forcing hospitals to either limit programmes or shoulder some of the financial burden of training their doctors. Some spots have been added back, but not nearly enough. Many potential doctors are being shut out of the profession. “Not everyone who would be willing to go through that training and could do it successfully is being allowed to,” says Professor Gottlieb, the economist.
Nurse practitioners and physician assistants have been given responsibilities typically reserved for doctors, such as writing prescriptions. Foreign-trained doctors have filled some of the gap too. Yet the shortage persists. This looks a lot like a labour market that has been rigged in favour of the insiders.
So I’ll grant that in that case, we may legitimately have a non-competitive market producing an increase in prices.
Next one is the price of a car.
1972: $26,100
2022: $48,200
So, I think that there are a couple factors that you can look at here. The first – and here, the article specifically talks about it – is that this isn’t a like-for-like comparison, kind of like what I mentioned with housing. If people want to spend more on a car, that can mean that there are more people buying fancy, luxury cars, not that the car has become unaffordable. They do mention the Corolla as a baseline, which is more-or-less what I would have done, and adjusted for inflation. They do say that it’s about 30% higher, but also point out that the 1972 vehicle is not really equivalent to the 2022 vehicle, as the 2022 vehicle has a lot more hardware and features.
They don’t mention it, but I’d also point out that they were measuring this in 2022; during the COVID-19 crisis, there was a severe shortage of chips to automakers, which dramatically constrained supply and idled a lot of production, and while I wasn’t paying attention to the prices of new cars, I assume that they spiked then. I do know that the price of used cars spiked as a result.
So, I won’t run the numbers there, but I think that I’d want a stronger argument with some numbers for a cartel, if that’s the concern. I’ll grant that automakers are few enough that I could legitimately believe creation of a cartel (and you can definitely point at cases where cartel behavior has shown up, as with Dieselgate in the European Union, where automakers colluded not to offer large urea tanks).
Oh, and it looks like I counted incorrectly – there’s a fifth one:
Vacation (admission to Disney World) 1972: $1,170 for a three-night/four-day stay at Disney World for two adults and two kids 2022: $2,670 for the same
Ehhh. Okay. This is not something that I’ve looked at before, but I’m not sure that Disney World – a single business – is representative of vacationing in general. I’ve watched video from Disney World, and my vague impression is that Disney World, at least today, is somewhat-upscale. They didn’t have all the resorts and stuff that they have today.
googles
Yeah, it sounds like they’re offering a more-elaborate experience than in the 1970s:
As a reminder, it only consisted of one theme park, one mediocre water park, Discovery Island, and an outlet mall at the time [1979].
I’d think that maybe something like…hmm…airfare plus hotel fees plus restaurant meal costs at popular vacation spots might be a better metric, maybe?
Yet we know that people are over 3x as productive per person over the same period, so clearly companies are not passing along savings in the form of cheaper goods.
So, you’re thinking “well, if productivity rose, labor costs are an input, and there’s a competitive market, then we would expect to see price drops”?
Well, some things have also dropped; I mean, you’re looking at a list of things that’s cherry-picked to find increases. A personal computer, a flight on an airplane. I’d guess that energy prices are probably down since the 1970s:
Productivity increases aren’t evenly spread across all sectors. You wouldn’t expect to see a productivity increase in one field directly translate into a price decrease, even in a competitive market, in another.
Let’s see if we can find something talking about productivity on a sector basis.
So, this has a graph measuring 2005-2019 productivity growth by sector. The worst-ranked sector was construction, where productivity dropped at a compound annual growth rate of -0.9%. In information technology, productivity rose at a compound annual growth rate of 5.5%.
And to just grab those two as an example, I think that that’s probably not wildly out-of-line with what we’ve seen. Housing prices have risen a bit, based on the data I covered in my parent comment. Software’s generally cheaper than it has been in the past.
The author claims that there’s a fair bit of correlation with the degree to which a given sector was impacted by the advent of computers. I could believe that; Moore’s Law dictated that, for much of the 20th century, we saw exponential growth in transistor density, and any field that could benefit from more computing power had a factor that was exponential affecting it. That tailed off in about 2003, though, and performance improvements in computing since then have in significant part been in parallel computation, which isn’t exactly a drop-in improvement for everything the way serial computation is.
Inelastic demand for necessary products like fuel, utilities, food, health care, etc also means that in many industries increased productivity does not need to translate to savings.
Inelastic demand for something (and I assume that you’re not talking about the labor market, as I was, but rather what the industry produces) doesn’t entail that an increase in productivity doesn’t cause the price to drop. It’ll mean that as the price falls, no more of the thing is sold, but as long as the market is competitive, one would expect to see a price fall off.
Pharmaceutical companies, either as an industry of multiple providers or where they hold exclusive patents, will raise prices of products to whatever they can get away with because people will either pay or die.
So, you’re correct that a patent grants a (limited-term) monopoly, and in the presence of a monopoly, you don’t have a competitive market. Generic drugs are competitive, but ones still under patent protection – I believe that a pharmaceutical patent lasts as long as an ordinary utility patent, 20 years – aren’t. Is that good or bad? Well, the concept of having a limited period of monopoly to fund the fixed R&D costs of producing new things has been a pretty long-running convention. The funds are going to have to come from somewhere. That model has drug users pay the price for the first 20 years, at which point you have a competitive market that drops down towards cost of production. Is that a good model? Well, it means that one has to wait 20 years for competitive prices. On the other hand, it has funded the creation of drugs, and the money will need to come from somewhere (or else the users will die). Should there be a different model? I mean, there could be. But one way or the other, the money would still have to be coming from somewhere. The government could tax and provide subsidies to pharmaceuticals. Sometimes that has happened – with the COVID-19 vaccine, for example, everyone paid for it and the government paid for everyone to take it, since it impacted everyone else.
So again cheaper products and competition is a myth.
I mean, they aren’t going to be seeing competition for 20 years after invention, sure, but they do after that. If you want to say “competition takes some time to show up after invention”, I’d agree with that, but I think that saying that it’s a myth is kind of over-broad.
Speaking of getting fewer people to do the same work, companies lay off people all the time when individual productivity or automation goes up. You talk about employing 1/5th the Bobcat workers and net lost 4 workers being forced to find other work. This may make economic sense but it’s terrible societal sense. It results in financial insecurity and homelessness among educated, capable people with all the associated national problems like mental health, crime, drug addiction, etc.
Yeah, any economic change – technological, changes in trade, changes in education, etc – is going to tend to produce disruption, shift workers around. But what’s the alternative? I mean, this is broader than just questions of wage and productivity. Let’s say that you legitimately don’t need, oh, a bunch of farriers any more, because now people are using cars instead of horses and don’t need their horses shoed. I mean, one can’t just freeze the economy, or the world would look like it did whenever one froze the economy. Photography impacted portrait painters, television impacted theater actors, electronic computers impacted human computers, farm machinery impacted fieldworkers, telecommunications impacted postal workers. But…that impact has to happen if one is to realize the benefits of those technologies.
Should wages should be used as the mechanism to allocate workers? Well, the benefit there is that the people who most want to stay are the ones who do. You can have a command economy, and you have that oil boom in North Dakota, and oilfield workers are needed, and you could have the government say “you ten people go to work in North Dakota or you go to jail”. If you use wages as the mechanism to determine who goes, then it winds up being the individual workers deciding for themselves who wants to enter or leave an industry; that will filter based on how those people actually feel about the industry.
There are things that maybe we could do to improve re-entry into the workforce, even given labor reallocation. We have tried government-subsidized retraining programs, and my impression is that we haven’t had phenomenal success. Maybe it’s possible to have more-effective retraining.
Some of it is labor mobility, the ability of someone to move from an area with low demand to an area with high demand.
It might be that homeownership is a negative for labor mobility; it’s harder to move if one also has to sell and buy a home. Some countries, like Germany, have a much higher rate of renters. That could provide some other benefits; people who work in an area seeing population outflow tend to get hit both by layoffs and declining house values. But I think that many people like owning their house, and that seems like a pretty substantial shift.
It’s harder to move if you have a multigenerational household, but we’ve generally already moved away from those.
Remote work might help, for some fields. Not every field can do that.
As US economics function now, companies do not pass along the value of increased productivity to their customers in savings,
I don’t think I agree with that as a broad statement. I think that you can find areas – and you’ve mentioned some, like drugs that are still under patent where there are not competitive markets, and there, sure, that won’t happen. But in a competitive market, decreases in input costs – labor or any other – will tend to translate into reduced prices. I don’t think that it’s reasonable to say “the economy as a whole consists of cartels”.
nor to their employees in increased wages, shorter work weeks, or stable employment (re: layoffs).
Sure, I’d agree with that – there’s no direct link between productivity and wages, work time, or avoiding layoffs.
Instead they maintain or raise prices depending on what they can get away with and employ as few people as possible to maximize profit.
So, I don’t think that it’s realistic to freeze the economy in place. When the environment changes, for technological or other reasons, one is going to have to reallocate workers. You can maybe argue that we could provide greater retraining subsidy or something like that, maybe in some cases slow the rate of change, but I don’t think that just not changing is a realistic solution. In a world where the environment changes, there are going to be people who are gonna have to stop doing what they were previously doing. No matter how your economy is structured, that’s gonna be a constraint.
And sure, the way that gets expressed is via profit – that is, if the company down the road is using one guy in a Bobcat and our company is using five guys with shovels, in a competitive market, that company is gonna undercut our prices and take our business. Competition means our profit drops off, we start losing money, need to take the Bobcat route ourselves or go out of business. But I don’t see as how it changes all that much. If there were a command economy, you’d still have to either have someone say “okay, no more shoveling, now it’s Bobcats”, and the same disruption happens or you have to freeze the economy.
This long explanation supporting capitalism and ‘the market’ fails to take something crucial into account that all these market promoters forget:
Labor cannot have an undistorted market so long as the option to not sell your labor isn’t a valid one.
For any market to be relatively undistorted, a seller must be free to choose not to sell at all if none of the offers are equal or greater than her assessment of the value of her product.
However, as long as labor is needed in order to procure food, shelter, and adequate living conditions, this cannot be the case - people are coerced into selling their labor at values lower than their assessment of its value because to not do so means being denied adequate living conditions.
If people were free to choose not to sell their labor without this coercion, then those seeking to purchase people’s labor would find they likely cannot find anywhere near as many people willing to sell at the price they are offering.
Basically, you are making excuses for the fact that due to this market distortion coercing people to sell their labor, the divide between productivity and wages has grown. It is not necessary to lock wages to productivity - if people have the option, and they see massive profits being pocketed off their work with increasingly minimal compensation, they would choose not to sell…except there comes the coercion to ensure they don’t do that.
I wonder if the same excuses would be made if we turned it around and told companies they must sell their products, no matter how little the customers are offering…
jeezus Christ Lemmy. what’s up with the downvotes?there is one response at this time and 16 downvotes. the response isnt even disagreeing with the sound theory presented, just saying that our system is too fucked up to work right.
Because it’s a wall of text trying to justify why we’re all struggling, and I think people are just done trying to engage with such “galaxy brained” theories that are completely removed from our lived realities. Especially when people probably have better things to do than some point-counterpoint internet argument.
Not to mention, this “sound theory” is just that: a theory. Frankly, all of economics is entirely made up! That’s not to say it’s not a valuable and important study, but it’s also not based on any natural laws. It’s an entirely human construct and something we don’t fully understand. ANY economic theory can be torn apart in thousands of ways by adjusting the models a bit. In the west we’ve been fed the theories from Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan for longer than most of us have been alive, and it seems like those theories are falling apart around us! I think a lot of people are seeing that when GDP goes up and “the markets” go up, we don’t get anything. But when “the markets” go down, we have to immediately shoulder the burden. We see our hard work being absorbed by investors seeking their ROI. We see our loyalty repaid by mass layoffs so executives and investors can earn even higher profits.
So when someone tries to justify it all using the same theories and models that seem to be causing the problem, I don’t blame people for just down voting and moving on.
We’re tired of being trickled down on and it’s time for a new theory.
They may be but they aren’t a very honest one if they are. The idea that the only options are letting corporations take all the gains or a riot at the job site is very anarcho-capitalism.
I could work two hours a day and still get all my tasks done. I could do that, go to my next job, and do another two hours of work and double my income. But because I have to have my butt in a chair in an office eight hours a day on the off chance my boss thinks of something additional for me to do, I’m stuck being four times more inefficient than I need to be.
This is the answer. For 50 years now wages have remained stagnant while productivity has gone up through the roof. We are being robbed decade after decade, and by now claims of “strongest economy” feel like slaps in the face. Many of us are earning more than ever before, yes, but also have less purchasing power than ever before.
Remember that in the 1950s a high school grad could support a family of 4 with a house and car on a single income. That’s how much has been taken from us by the rich and corporations.
Toyota already admits that they are behind on their battery technology, despite having decades of opportunities to improve and innovate with their hybrid models.
Now they want to double down on their atrophy by effectively throwing their money away instead of investing in the future?
On the surface, this does not sound like a good plan for long term growth and profitability.
“Well, we’ve proven to ourselves that we’re incapable of investing without it being a sunk cost that we are too petty to let go and will fight tooth and nail to make profitable… So let’s just skip investing in much of anything new ever because we’re nincompoops. If there’s no guaranteed profit, why invest?”
Yes, biggest car manufacturer, which also manufacturer of the most popular hybrid car in the world, doesn’t know what they are doing when they are making cars. Right. I’ll take your word for it.
You want me to ignore my own experience and all of the bad business decisions we’ve observed companies make throughout history because you want to be oppositional and edgy.
Also doesn’t help that you don’t know what a fallacy is. I recommend you have a look at Wikipedia.
Nokia was way more dominant in the phone market than Toyota in the automotive industry. Yet, when it was time to jump on the new technology that everyone else was jumping on (android), they fell into the sunk cost fallacy and stood by their own, outdated tech (symbian). That promptly got them bankrupt. Toyota may still change its course, but if they wait too long, they are going to end up just like Nokia did.
That’s a far better comparison than other offered. Nokia failed not because Symbian was outdated, but because they tried to have too firm of a grip on it and it didn’t evolve fast enough. But yeah, I can see that happening if Toyota decides not to share their tech with others and hydrogen doesn’t end up being wide spread as a result of it. Not sure if they’ll go bankrupt but still. Honda once almost did when they went all in on Wankel engines.
Japan has no lithium to mine. So hydrogen is the best option for them. While I understand this for Japan, there’s a big world out there where Toyota is a market leader… for now.
Yes, steam methane reforming is the most cost effective. But there are other ways to make it. The most eco friendly was is electrolysis that uses electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. There are some microorganisms, such as algae and bacteria, that can produce hydrogen through biological reactions—but those aren’t able to scale today.
Important thing is there are multiple ways to produce hydrogen. Cheapest is through methane, but that’s only because methane itself is cheap. There are other methods of producing hydrogen and the more demand there is for it, the cheaper it’ll get. Especially when you consider there won’t OPEC to mess around with prices by rigging production against demand. So it would be smart to focus on fuel source which can be easily produced anywhere and can provide similar performance like current ICEs.
It wasn’t very abundant 10 years ago. More deposits have been found, refining and extracting technology has improved and hopefully we will see the first commercial mass produced sodium-based battery this year (not in 25 years like fusion).
Lithium nickel cobalt batteries are still the best for density per kg, but will be reserved for premium cars in the future.
You are also missing the fact the Japan’s power grid is in a desperate need of repairs and improvements. Hydrogen won’t fix however it introduces some lower cost temporary fixes that can be quickly implemented. In the long term the correct solution would be to fix the grid but we both know if there’s a cheaper and easier solution what they’ll go with…
They are giving discounts, not paying people to buy their car. It’s a big difference. Government is also giving subsidies for EVs and corn. Should we say government is paying you to buy corn?
They have just released hydrogen internal combustion engine. This engine can burn gasoline, CNG or hydrogen. So transition with it would be super easy. But world is set on EVs which are not that great and a lot less cleaner than people seem to think. Mining for Lithium is a very chemically dirty process and there’s no abundance of it, especially not enough for everyone to switch to EV. Am thinking they realize this and are jumping over the hurdle early on, but are trying to push hydrogen into spotlight. More production means prices will drop and eventually it would get a lot cleaner to produce it as well.
That’s really not impressive. Lots of people converted their vehicles to run propane or NG during the 70s oil embargo. You can do it with pretty much the exact same piston engine.
BEVs are far better and yes cleaner.
More production means prices will drop and eventually it would get a lot cleaner to produce it as well.
Funny that you think this of hydrogen, but not of batteries. Given that I’ll say cheers.
Batteries are already being developed and advanced. I just don’t see why people think there can only be one technology. Even now we have multiple viable technologies and I see no reason why that can’t keep going on.
In the small chance you’re serious, because production of, transportation of, leakage of, and burning of gas, ng, or propane still pollutes. Hydrogen can technically technically be done cleanly but is still energy intensive, difficult to transport, difficult to store, difficult to distribute, difficult to store again in your car, and leaks along that whole path. It’s really not a good path. And for what purpose? So you can fill up in a few minutes (assuming the nozzle hasn’t frozen from use, look it up), forgetting that most people can charge their ev overnight meaning they start every day with a full tank.
BEVs and clean energy has a far, far easier and simpler path forward. Not to mention the development potential of batteries far exceeds that of hydrogen production (production only because there’s really not much that can be done for other parts).
If you want another solution it’s transit, ebikes, and trains.
Hydrogen ICE makes something that was already losing on efficiency even worse. It possibly has some race applications, but probably nothing beyond that.
there’s no abundance of it, especially not enough for everyone to switch to EV.
That’s not true at all. There are 1.4 billion cars in the world now, while the lithium ores that are readily available for mining (22 million tons) were estimated to be enough for 2.8 billion cars a year ago. Twice the amount of cars existing today.
But since then, there was already another massive stockpile discovered in the US, that alone is bigger than that (20-40 million tons), so enough for another 3-5 billion cars. But there will surely be discovered new sites, now that we are actually, intensely looking for it. We have been looking for oil for more than a century now and are still discovering new reserves. Lithium will be the same.
Yes, world’s largest car manufacturer doesn’t know what they are talking about when they talk about car manufacturing. Or they realize battery powered vehicles are only a stop gap measure that doesn’t have long term feasibility and they are jumping over that step. They were amongst the first manufacturers of hybrid vehicles and still produce most popular hybrid. But no, Toyota admits they are behind on battery “technology”. You really have to stretch logic to get that argument going.
They have launched a fully electric car, and it absolutely sucks. It say it’s the worst in its price class, behind not only newcomers (Tesla, Rivian, BYD, etc) but even American, European and other Japanese manufacturers.
Kodak Was the biggest player in photography and invented the digital camera, look where they are now. Don’t underestimate corporate greed, infighting and short-sightedness.
Am not, but am also not underestimating the fact they have decades worth of data on battery manufacturing, use and recycling. All of us are just talking out of our ass. Also comparing anything to Tesla and positioning Tesla as quality makes your argument significantly less impactful.
Possibly. But assumption that they make good cars because they are popular is not a wrong one to make. It’s possible they are fucking up, of course. Remains to be seen.
I don’t think this is really an appeal to authority.
The assertion is, without knowledge of the future, Toyota’s predictions (based on research and expertise) is more reliable than that of some cryptobros on Lemmy.
You’re debating who’s opinion is more credible, the selection of an appropriate authority if you will.
An appeal to authority world be “smart guy says hydrogen is dead”.
An appeal to authority world be “smart guy says hydrogen is dead”
I was keying in on OP’s statement:
Yes, world’s largest car manufacturer doesn’t know what they are talking about when they talk about car manufacturing.
With the sarcasm taken into account, the intent appears to be:
The world’s largest car manufacturer must know what they are talking about when they talk about car manufacturing.
Taken with OP’s other arguments, he clearly believes Toyota shouldn’t be questioned simply due to Toyota is the largest and most profitable car company (thus far, anyway). I’m pretty sure that’s an appeal to authority.
Someone will be along in a moment to tell us all about how you can’t store hydrogen. Meanwhile there are eyewatering amounts being invested into water cracking facilities right now.
Saying that a company convinced a politician that something was a good idea doesn’t make it true. A lot of money has been invested in really stupid things in the past.
Politicians aren’t pouring many billions of taxpayer dollars into these facilities.
Large companies, global consortium size companies, are doing research which is leading them in this direction.
It’s not Toyota execs sitting in a board meeting saying “what can we do to be edgy”, it’s well resourced think-tanks being asked for potential solutions to our energy problems.
Large companies, global consortium size companies, are doing research which is leading them in this direction.
Again, a lot of money is invested in really stupid things. If you’ve worked in a big company you know that, if you haven’t watch a Thunderf00t video then. I personally was in a meeting several months ago where $500,000+ was spent on a new machine, rather then just extend the meeting for a couple hours and plan the process for how it could be avoided.
He won’t. His estate will be seized and liquidated and it won’t even begin to cover the fine, because the value of everything he owns is criminally overinflated.
He’s about to get a huge paper wealth injection with his truth social thing about to go public. Usually you’ve got to prove certain arduous financial metrics to do that, but the SEC is all, “lulz, you’re fine. Go ahead and offer your worthless stock!”
I’ll be curious to see who the biggest “investors” are in that stock. This is set up to be one helluva laundry.
I wonder if Musk will be a big investor. He buys Twotter and ruins it, while Trump opens a competitor platform. Musk buys stock in that so when it IPOs he rakes in the money, all while Twitter users move over to TS to help it sell at the stock price they want.
I once typed in the wrong number in my electric bill and got my lights shut off. It was like 10 dollars. Somehow when you're rich enough you can just choose to pay things or not.
I feel such deep and powerful hatred because it’s not just a sudden illness that goes away. People don’t realize that not only will some of these children die but some of them will develop lifelong debilitating illness such as central nervous system diseases including SSPE as well as a type of AIDs. Viruses cause permanent damage.
In the same way that Polio can cripple people, Chickenpox can cause shingles, and the Spanish Flu lead to a worldwide outbreak of Encephalitis Lethargica characterized by a chronic loss of consciousness trapping you inside your own body like a prison.
Those people are subjecting this to children. If I wrote the laws, this would be a crime punished on the same level as murder.
Idk. You leave shitty comments around in the same irresponsible way that the antivax parents do. You think people give a shit about what you say, exactly like them.
You don’t hate this place. You fucking hate yourself. Taking a shit over in some unrelated thread may feel good to you but it can’t hide how weak and just… sad you are
That’s not really what people consider “stocks” but yes of a lot of economists and political theorists were able to debate the details of the policy people could decide and urge their reps to do the right thing. Worth a shot I guess.
It’d be better just to require blind trusts. The trust has a fiduciary duty to invest their money well, and the politician can write a letter requesting a certain high-level investment strategy prior to the start of their term (ie, primarily large cap, primarily bonds, high/low risk tolerance). If they want they can add or remove money as USD during their term and they’ll get back whatever’s left at the end.
What is your solution, that she resign or that she divorces her husband whom she married in college? Her husband’s primary income is from the investment firm he owns, so basically she cannot be a legislator while married to him if those are the rules.
I would sooner reform shared finances of married couples, at least that of congress, or better yet bar shareholders from running for office, than end Nancy’s marriage of 60 years over her supposed insider trading (which I’ve never even seen a decent argument about, if anything Paul’s trades are kind of shit given her position of power).
Legislators, members of governments and their households should either be forbidden from doing insider trading, with regular detailed audits to ensure it, or should be forced to use blind trusts for investments.
I wish more people could have been like Carter. He wasn’t perfect, far from it, but he was a legend given the time period and how he spent his later years.
That’s exactly the issue, in the USA marriage gives joint ownership of assets barring anything outlined in prenuptial agreements. So while Nancy Pelosi has never traded any stocks she still reports all of her husbands stock trades as per the transparency legislation that she helped pass into law. Paul Pelosi would also be banned from trading stocks, his lifelong primary employment, as a result of the ban.
Former Congressman Stephen Buyer went to prison for 2 years for insider trading.
What is Nancy Pelosi’s insider trade? I recommend submitting a tip to the SEC, you could get payed a pretty penny for it if it leads to evidence and a conviction.
Show me how many black people inherit a house vs whites. Show me how crime rates drop in areas where more homes are owned outright, with no rent or mortgage.
The concept of “just save your money and you’ll be rich” is so fucking stupid.
You can’t save what you don’t have, so you have to be comfortable enough to have disposable income and to have enough disposable income that you’re not completely giving up on any daily or weekly pleasures to make your poverty-stricken life any less of a pain.
God forbid you want to grab a coffee from somewhere because you work 12 hours a day 6 days a week just to pay your bills. “YoU ShOuLd Be SaViNg ThAt MoNey!”
Which leads into how we’re fucking up with wealth disparity and tax structure and capital gains.
It wouldn’t take them ten generations to catch up if payroll taxes were less than capital gains. It wouldn’t take ten generations to catch up if the top 0.3% paid for our public healthcare instead of us getting fucked by funding our own private healthcare where we’re getting gouged left and right. We’d be a lot closer to those ten generations if we hadn’t stomped on Tulsa, and didn’t take every other opportunity to take advantage of the poor. Enjoy this $35 overdraft fee.
And they’ll never catch up because we’ve dropped the estate taxes to absurdly low levels. 15 generations from now, in 375 years, Jeff Bezos descendents will still be much better off than any middle class family. (Assuming nothing changes.) That’s absurd. It’s one thing to provide for your children and grandchildren, but at some point your family should have to provide something back to society again, even if your great, great, great, x5 grandfather did invent the wheel.
We’re all getting fucked, they’re just getting it worse. Their fight is our fight, even if it’s just for selfish reasons. You think the cops can’t get away with shooting your kid just because he’s white?
While its likely true that the wing panel was both non-critical and secure, I'd be much more worried that if they missed something like that, that they could have missed any number of other things as well. Isn't there supposed to be some sort of check-list run?
Pilots perform an inspection of the aircraft before every flight. Missing fasteners on the top of the wing would not be visible during a walkaround from the ground.
Planes are allowed to fly with many parts missing. A few missing fasteners on a non structural part is fine, but missing fasteners that the pilots are unaware of is a big issue.
There isn’t much on top of the wing that is highly critical. Some planes you can’t even see the top from anywhere in the plane too. An actual issue like leaking fluids or damaged flight control surfaces are visible from the bottom. Something like a few missing fasteners really isn’t t that alarming. I’ve flown plenty of times with some missing, sometimes speed taped and sometimes both the first few times I asked the crew chief but eventually I became familiar with where and how many missing weren’t an issue.
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