The cost doesn't really matter. The US led financial system (which is a glorified Ponzi scheme) is on an unsustainable path. The war in Iran is about resources (force Iran to use US dollars to trade oil, give US more leverage in dealing with China...etc.) and to delay the collapse. You build "digital pyramids" like AI data centers and consolidate power/resources while you still can. Financial cost of the war is largely irrelevant. Whether the outcome will be to your advantage is a different issue but pattern is predictable with historical precedence (Romans...etc.). Unfortunately innocent people pay the price.
Welcome to the club! My Adsense account was banned years ago with no explanation or anything. They even stole my balance. I've heard of similar horror stories of people losing years worth of email and other data with no recourse.
As machine learning algorithms become more widespread, expect this to become even more common with a lot of services. Whether paid or free, you're just a number and can be disabled at anytime whenever their flawed algorithms flag you for any reason. I've been actively switching away from Google as much as possible and encourage others to do the same. For email, I use custom domain (still hosted on old Google Apps) so I can switch whenever needed.
I'm always surprised to see how many CEOs walk away with millions while running their companies to the ground. The vast majority of the S&P 500 corps are mostly monopolies (Telecommunication, Airlines, Insurance...etc.) and for the most part run themselves yet the CEOs are paid exorbitantly.
How much did the CEOs of Circuit City, Blockbuster and so many others made while being completely oblivious to what was happening around them? Even low-level employees probably saw the shift to online/Amazon yet CEOs still walked away with millions. The Corp structure/model seems to be completely broken and most of them can only survive as monopolies.
It's the opposite. The absolute occurence of stroke was higher in people who got the vaccine, but other risk factors were also higher; adjusting for those, they found a "less-higher than expected" amount of stroke, which they attribute to the flu vaccine.
If you have a lot of faith in these sorts of statistical adjustments and the assumptions behind them, then you may find this result compelling.
So-called smart money strikes again. Thernaos, Nikola, WeWork and now FTX (I'm sure I'm missing many and there are some other less obvious ones like Carvana and Opendoor). Billions and billions of dollars were funneled into these obvious scams all while being cheered on by celebrity hedge funders (likes of Cramer, Mr. Clown...etc.) and yet there are zero consequences for anyone involved.
Holmes Will probably be in jail shortly, Milton was convicted of fraud last month and should be sentenced soon, SBF fallout is too new. There will be some consequences although maybe not equal to the fraud. Frauds looks so obvious in hind sight but not so in the moments.
Are they assembling or manufacturing? If you need to import all your raw materials then you're not really manufacturing anything and I seriously doubt that anyone in this country is willing to do the dirty bad breaking work for low wages with no prospect of ever owning your home.
> you need to import all your raw materials then you're not really manufacturing anything
What a weird and unorthodox definition of manufacturing. Do you expect every factory to also have an attached mine and lumberyard and smelter and mill?
It's strange to me how often this gets repeated as if nobody can look at Zillow and do basic math.
I just checked a random suburb of Detroit (you know, since we're talking manufacturing) and in Warren MI right now there are 64 houses for less than $100k. There are hundreds more in the city of Detroit, but it's dangerous so people may not want to live there. Plus, there are a ton of factories in Warren, so what better place to look?
No prospects of ever owning a home? Or no prospects of moving straight into your dream home in a hip downtown area near the coast at 26 years old? Let's call it what it is.
Now look at Indeed and do basic math. Looking at the job ads for Warren, MI indicate there are no manufacturing jobs that pay more than $20 per hour, and most of those are part-time or term-limited. They're even trying to pay certified forklift operators sixteen bucks an hour. Good luck saving up your 20% down payment on Warren, MI wages.
That forklift operator (certification by the way, is a one day training and test) could be 18 years old living at home and save up the $20k for a downpayment in a year or two. Longer if they're not really trying. So again, we end up with a non-college educated forklift driver being able to buy a home near where they work in a couple of years time.
Part of the problem is when regulation and incentives push to make it so only Bentleys are profitable to make.
My friends owns a house on five acres in a city in Montana. They wanted to carve out an acre or two for their adult kid to build on. They must put in a road, sidewalks, connect to sewer, and city water even though they are on a well and septic. Light poles, geologic surveys, and wildly expensive permits. They were not prepared for over $200k of development and fees before even laying down the house foundation. Now the land stays empty. The land itself is sellable apparently for several hundred thousand dollars. A developer would be insane to buy and develop the land and sell a house for anything under a cool million.
Originally they thought they could spend about $70k and let their kid build. Nope.
> Part of the problem is when regulation and incentives push to make it so only Bentleys are profitable to make.
I’ll second this. Almost everywhere you go in the US are mandates that dramatically increase the cost of developing your own property (i.e. as a taxpaying individual, not as an incorporated developer). I own property and want to develop it for elderly low-income family members to enjoy, incidentally creating low-income housing consistent with the area, but permits and fees are roughly 40% of my costs. The building permit costs extra because the materials used (mostly dirt!!!) are non-flammable ! The square footage is based on the perimeter of the structure but I’m building with stabilized adobe (AKA DIRT!!!!) thus building code requires a wall thickness of 14”, resulting in substantial percentage of unusable square footage contributing to the permit cost and later property tax. Flood control district required mitigations are founded on an incorrect hazard map which results in extra expense and extra permitting costs. And so on, e.g. road access fees for roads which are never built in 25 years of fee collection, new fees for water service maintenance supposedly covered in past bills but audits kept confidential for security, legal costs to sue the county to follow it’s own rules...
(edit: wow, my knee really jerked on this one. So infuriated)
I think a lot of this is intended well. Like, a house with no road (and therefore emergency vehicle access), built on unsurveyed geology, could be a disaster waiting to happen. Requiring septic probably means the town invested heavily in the sewer system (a worthwhile investment as a former septic user) and allowing individuals to opt out breaks the financial picture.
"The American Dream" has also slippery sloped itself from a house with a white picket fence in a safe suburban neighborhood to if I don't become Elon Musk then there is no American Dream.
China is certainly thinking about expanding their influence right now. I don't know exactly to what extent they can do that, but I'm sure they can see the opportunity for what it is. They've been expanding their influence in the Eastern world for some time
I think it was because people freaked out on public transit. In fact, there is a run on getting licensed to drive (have multiple co-workers trying to book appointments; they used to rely on public transit but realized it was suboptimal during covid). I recall it was very expensive to buy a bicycle in my city this time last year (those had a dual purpose - exercise/outdoors + transit).
This is serious. I'm sure that this will have and is likely already having some serious impact on humans that we don't know much about despite what the studies claim.
Maybe slightly but it's very rare that the limiting factor on plant growth is the availability of CO2. Much more commonly plants are limited by access to nutrients and sunlight.
I worked for an algae biotech company and while we did "dope" our ponds with CO2, providing ample mixing to get more sunlight and supplementing the ponds with plentiful nutrients (the "big 3" but also trace elements of a number of more obscure inputs) had dramatically larger impacts on growth rates.
> Much more commonly plants are limited by access to nutrients and sunlight.
In many parts of the world water is also pretty important. We know that global warming will change global air currents, but is pretty difficult to predict how this will affect precipitation.
Yep - very good point - you can easily see my bias here since our "plants" were suspended in water (an algae farm) so it was never a concern for us - but if you look at the basic photosynthetic formula you need as many molecules of water as you do of CO2.
The sorta bigger half here is that it allows plants to grow in more locations than with lower CO2 levels, because plants can photosynthesize while using less water than before (they need to expose themselves to the atmosphere less).
Which is why you more often see stuff like deserts greening when they were dead before. The Amazon rainforest isn't going to 2x in height.
Yes, in many greenhouses CO2 is added to the atmosphere. But 10% faster plant growth does not compensate for thay fact that we reduced forest cover in uk to like 12%
Yes, but that is not necessarily a good thing in terms of carbon capture. Eg research indicates that in the tropical rainforests, lianas get the largest boost, allowing them to basically smother the tall trees. However, these store the most carbon, so the total carbon stored in the forest goes down.
I wonder if it might slow metabolism and increase obesity levels. There were some strange stories a few years ago about a study that concluded it wasn't just humans that have gotten fatter in recent times, but wild animals too. Even laboratory animals kept under supposedly identical conditions have gotten fatter. I am sure you can look up the reports if you google.
