What money are you expecting to get int hat scenario? If I had to guess it wouldn't be a fraction of the cost.
> buy out stakes of pension and index funds
Index funds are part of the reason the top companies stock gets so bloated compared to those just outsid of their frame.
>If any important bank fails because of this, nationalize it and let their customers exit using money from the federal reserve. Then try and recover as much of that as possible using the banks investment portfolio. Costs a lot less than bailouts.
I agree. It worked here in Belgium tho they did spin off toxic elements of the bank in a not so great way prior to doing this.(some regular people still got shafted)
I dunno, man, you’ll have to figure that out for yourself. Wikipedia says “ In total, U.S. government economic bailouts related to the 2008 financial crisis had federal outflows (expenditures, loans, and investments) of $633.6 billion and inflows (funds returned to the Treasury as interest, dividends, fees, or stock warrant repurchases) of $754.8 billion, for a net profit of $121 billion.”
A nation-state, technically. A state is an organization with a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical violence. There have been historical states (eg. European kingdoms of the high middle ages) that meet the definition of a state while still having very fuzzy borders.
>Farms still need the crops picked and the work is difficult and the pay is only good relative to the opportunities in other countries so there's no replacement domestic workforce.
Somewhat, the other side of the coin is if they can even find labor at a price that has a chance of competing with growers who have local access to cheaper labor because they're in poorer countries. The price they'd have to pay to get legal pickers is more likely to fully drive those farms out of business or at least out of those crops into more machine harvestable crops.
The main point though is that the "problem" of seasonal farm workers staying in the US illegally is to some extent artificially created by attempting to strictly enforce the border. Before that they were able to come work freely and would happily return to their home country because the process of getting into the US for the harvesting seasons was (relative to the modern process) easy, safe and cheap so there was no reason to stay in the US. Why would they, their wages would go farther in their home countries and that's where their families were and they would be able to cross back for the next major harvest they wanted to participate in.
A similar thing is said here in europe but an important caveat is that they typically had no way of drawing most support. No commonly accepted way of regularisation. Buying property. Etc.
One can easily go back but will more easily go back if there's no point in staying beyond the momentary moneymaking and essentially just no future.
It's imo how china manages to have roughly as much migration as Berlin despite sharing a border with pakistan, afghanistan, etc and without large militarised force to kick people out. Simply don't give to incentive.
You or the farmer you buy food from competes for farmland with Bil Gates.
You or the one providing your house builder with wood competes for lumber forest with Alex Karp.
The list goes on and on.
It appears trough technological innovation the standards of life rise in many ways but trough innequality it can affect the standards/ affordability of our basic needs.
EMA food prices in number of hours of work required to sustain oneself and they have fallen for half a century. Bill Gates has not only been alive for the entirety of that period but he has been leading Microsoft for the majority of it. If this is how the list is (and I’m simply going to judge it by its first element) then it seems to provide stronger evidence against equality being a prime goal, considering wealth equality has dropped during that period.
I'm not going to point at bill gates buying and leasing out loads farmland and attribute to it new corn strains, better pesticides and higher feed conversion chicken breeds.
You may as well be calling for soviet style state controll the way consolidation, top down ownership is and competition mechanics are dismissed or praised depending on the standpoint.
You got it backwards. Bill Gates and Alex Karp don’t pay megamoney for lumber or farm land. They consume a bit more than the average person, but not by the same %age as they are richer.
But everyone else can’t afford basic necessities or furniture anymore. And so being a farmer or a woodworker or whatever becomes a less attractive job, less people will do it, and you will have a harder time finding someone fixing your plumbing. Or pay a premium.
Instead, the ultra-wealthy are demanding extreme luxury, and so a would-be farmer is now a hotel page boy carrying around some rich dudes’ luggage, hoping for a tip.
Bill Gates buys huge amounts of land precisely for ecology: Beef meat causes global warming in a disproportionate way compared to chicken or even disproportionate per euros or per gram of protein compared to lentils. All ecologists agree that beef/red meat should disappear from our plates if we want to overcrowd the Earth with more equal people, and along with erradicating a hugely deathly disease that is malaria during his lifetime, Bill Gates will also have accomplished that dream too.
I find a lot of consistency of his audience in hating him for the very reason that he implements his audience's wishes. To this audience, there is no redeeming oneself.
>Bill Gates buys huge amounts of land precisely for ecology
Yes and he was gonna give a vast share of his wealth away for the good of the many over 5 years and then tripled it. woops. Let us not pretend farmland has not been a good investment in those parts.
Let us be honest. Almost every such good thing he does is a tax credit which polishes his image and legacy. He was a pretty cutroath businessman and there's no reason for me to now paint him with some saintly image.
>Beef meat causes global warming in a disproportionate way compared to chicken or even disproportionate per euros or per gram of protein compared to lentils.
I can get behind the idea that beef has a bigger carbon footprint due to the fossil fuel fertilisers used to grow their feed as compared to the conversion ratio freaks that modern meat chicken breeds are.
The fact that the methane from their farts is somehow the long term issue I however reject.
And I'd like to point out that without much of both that excrement and fossil fuel based fertiliser we have a famine on our hands so 'overcrowd the Earth with more equal people' doesn't seem like such a fine coherent goal.
>I find a lot of consistency of his audience in hating him for the very reason that he implements his audience's wishes. To this audience, there is no redeeming oneself
Explain to me why do you presume I am "his audience".
Almost every such good thing he does is a tax credit which polishes his image and legacy. He was a pretty cutroath businessman and there's no reason for me to now paint him with some saintly image.
Bill Gates has had a major role in more than 120 million extremely poor children not dying of horrible diseases in some of the most destitute places on earth.
But he bundled a browser with his OS thirty years ago, so fuck all that, right?
Then I guess billionaires really should pay less taxes unlike us plebs since they're so much better at picking out and solving the wrongs of the world.
It is good that Microsoft was bribing some african governments because clearly they could use the money so much better saving them from themselves by redirecting that income to the global fund (and tax credits)
Perhaps we should incentivise his veiled land purchases for the common good since on thing obviously absolves of another.
BTW just since you use it for the rethoric. Can I also point out how that major role in 120 million children (by their own estimation and 40mil since 2000 on some other own estimation) includes the work of everyone else donating to, remotely involved with or working in line with his organisation.
You know including my tax money going to the the vaccination drives of Gavi, the WHO, UNICEF, etc
It seems to miss the bit where bill himself attributed the vast majority of such global health and development funding to donor nations.
You think we could get a tax credit for our major role in that?
>Where did I suggest that he should pay less taxes?
You went on about his saintly works disregarding that for those billionaires it's quite relevant that they're structured as tax deductions and quite in tune with their wealth gain contrary to stated aims.
>I just think the sneering at him because of MS’s business practices decades ago is pathetic.
Oh the business practices are consistent and present. People just pay less attention or get a more clear view looking back.
That said he has a 0.9% to 1.4% stake now.
What i consider pathetic is attributing some grand benevolence to his veiled purchase of farmland trough loads of shell companies. Are we also to take it Alex Karp just really really cares about forest preservation? You know it's somewhere in the sidelines of Cladonia Skog AB's aims.
I've been somewhat of a nightowl my entire life.
I thought that was just how i was and it was in my genetics. There's also some correlation with adhd there according to some studies.
However i managed to be a morning person without strain when i wasn't working for a while and decided to focus on not letting too much light in my eyes in the evening, didn't drink much coffee and went for morning jogs.
It felt like without strain i woke up automatically in the morning and was a real eyeopener.
Sadly it's still a modern society issues feels hard to avoid screens when i have to work and do so much else during the day. Also big seasonal light changes at this lattitude means morning jogs would be in the dark right now if they have to precede work.
I think for 99% of working age adults you can source some amount of their health woes to the working pattern they're glued to. It is obvious for those on the night shift because it's so standout, but every person becomes a slightly more haggard version of themselves when they're doing 40 hours a week and it's only noticeable to those around them and only when they've spent some time out of work.
I'll go even further, I started taking a medication for an unrelated cause (should not affect sleep/wake) and I now wake up bolt awake at 7:30am every day whether I like it or not. Historically I was someone who struggled with being awake before 10am. I have no idea why the shift happened, it's very confusing, but it was like a bolt of lightning reset my sleep schedule almost overnight.
For me it is 4am. No matter what time I go to sleep, I will wake up at 4am. I can go back to sleep, but I am up at 4am to at least check my watch.
My cause: Basic training. Spend a few months waking up in a panic at 0400 and that time gets ingrained. I never had an issue before joining the military and now, more than decade later, it remains like a scar on my brain.
Also I was depressed when I was a night owl and now I’m not. As another anecdote. Old me would’ve thought I was a night owl and would’ve made a comment like OP. But I was not in a good place. I became a night owl because I let blue light change my schedule.
Similar, though I just stopped with caffeine after 8 pm, went to bed when I got tired and limited any bedtime phone use strictly to a Sudoku app (the mental effort made me sleepy).
I had been a night owl since a teen, and yet here I was waking up naturally at around 7 am feeling refreshed. I realized a lot of what had kept me up at night was the freedom and silence. Once I moved on my own, there was nothing to escape so to speak. So I just stopped the caffeine and stopped avoiding bed.
Migration, outsourcing/deindustrialisation, automation, rising inequality (after an insanely cash printing bout during covid went mostly to the top) would be my guess.
I am curious if anyone here has experience with the best breeds of rabbit for meat that's are also the most easily self sufficient. (Reliable litters, surviving mostly on grass in rabbit tractors)
Essentially the best for self sufficient homesteading.
I wouldn't want the cornish cross equivalent that strugles to propagate without care, needs bags of feed or dies if you look at it funny.
We've raised meat rabbits for years, among other overstock.
Depending on where you live, a New Zealand/California mix is about as good as you can get for meat rabbits. They grow well and aren't overly delicate.
If you live somewhere with wild heat waves, just straight Californias, or some of the custom breeds from Texas A&M would be better to avoid heat deaths.
Also, you can just feed them grass in rabbit tractors, but they won't thrive like if they had access to a more varied diet. That's for all rabbits, not just meat rabbits
(I have no experience with livestock, there was a story about this on NPR a while back... I wonder what breeds that was... oh, there's another large meat focused bread in the US to consider)
They're in proximity to people that run on a progressive threadmill.
When it became socially opportune to so i've seen city folk elsewhere shift their animal rights stance to defend halal slaughter laws deeming it to be progressive because it's tied to a group lower on the proverbial ladder.
Animal welfare laws don't give atheist butchers the option to be cruel. They're required to stun the animal first. Why give halal/kosher butchers the option to be cruel? Especially if you claim "most do" choose to stun.
Be kinder to animals, change "most do" to "all do" by removing the religious exception.
...and then come the progressive types to defend 1000+ year old ritual slaughter customs.
In the US at least, freedom of religion does grant some exceptions. The Amish do not participate in Social Security and Medicare, for instance, but I cannot opt out. I’m not sure how it works other places.
> Presumably any and every religious tradition on slaughter is better than max-capitalism factory farming style?
It's really not. You're mixing two things, "max-capitalism factory farming" alludes to how the animal is treated while it's alive, e.g. caged hens vs free-range hens, while what we're talking about here is animal suffering via religious ritual slaughter.
Kosher and halal slaughter are not animal-friendly. They mandate cutting the animal's throat but preserving its spinal cord so it feels every possible pain in its last moments alive as the blood drains out.
Stunning it before death and/or putting a bolt through its brain would be a lot more humane, but those methods didn't exist when those religions came up their rules, so of course not one iota of progress can be added.
You'll see that authorities in e.g. the UK have been asked to regulate kosher/halal butchers, require them to at least stun the animal before doing their ritual slaughter... and the authorities chose not to, and let them keep their religious exemption to animal cruelty laws. Kosher and halal slaughterers can choose to stun the animal first, which would be humane, but they don't have to.
I don't normally talk about downvotes but whomever downvoted the informative comment from amiga above should not have, it was very interesting, I learned from it, and as such it's in line with hacker news ideal.
What money are you expecting to get int hat scenario? If I had to guess it wouldn't be a fraction of the cost.
> buy out stakes of pension and index funds
Index funds are part of the reason the top companies stock gets so bloated compared to those just outsid of their frame.
>If any important bank fails because of this, nationalize it and let their customers exit using money from the federal reserve. Then try and recover as much of that as possible using the banks investment portfolio. Costs a lot less than bailouts.
I agree. It worked here in Belgium tho they did spin off toxic elements of the bank in a not so great way prior to doing this.(some regular people still got shafted)
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