maoistinquisitr's comments

This whole current moment rhymes too well with 2000 and 2008. Who are the Ken Lays, the Bernie Ebbers's, and the Madoffs? I suspect Bezos and Musk are going to fall hard.

The key variable is Trump's total failure to implement his stated policies on immigration.

https://www.numbersusa.com/news/more-400000-asylum-seekers-o...

Wages would be going way up if Trump were actually delivering in terms of deportations and the cessation of guest worker programs.

A tariff or tax regime indexed on real wages and also environmental protection is necessary.

Selling things in the USA profitably on the basis of cheap labor in countries with weak environmental and labor protection should not be so simple.

A tariff program is probably not even necessary because overwhelmingly American corporations can simply be taxed for their import activities in a VAT manner and the problem goes away.

> Government massively subsidizes the oil industry all the time.

Not true. Even if it were true most of the oil industry is losing money hand over fist.

But not as fast as the phony baloney "renewable" industry is, even with its insane subsidies.

People can't wrap their heads around the fact that sane estimates of the energy supply of the future do not support cars. People will be walking and biking and riding buses. The future is a place with far fewer cars.

Which is fundamentally stupid because the beta-carotene to vitamin A pathway is highly limited. The whole idea is wrong. Vitamin A deficient people need vitamin A. Stuffing extra beta-carotene into them will just turn them orange and have other bad effects.

> US is one of the least densely populated developed countries

None of the other developed countries have vast interior deserts. The east and west coasts and some parts of the Mississippi and Great Lakes watersheds are plenty overpopulated.

Your comparison illustrates my point. Oklahoma is not crisscrossed with efficient water transport and reliable annual fresh water. Oklahoma is probably overpopulated as it is.

The Netherlands is, too, in the long run. But for now it's economically sustainable.

> There is a LOT of room in the country for growth

No there isn't. All the places with viable logistics and water supply are pretty much full up. Urban areas need barge transport, good rail grades, aqueducts, and rivers to carry away waste. You can't plop a city down in the middle of nowhere. The energy economics mean it will never work. All the sites worth building on have been built on. A lot of the places supplied mostly by truck are of questionable viability in coming years.

Probably the only area of the country that could long term sustain a much higher population density is the great lakes region.

It's not reinvested capital. It's highly leveraged funny money from a decade of ZIRP.

And this isn't really a "tech" problem at this point. The "real" economy is full of huge companies that are barely making any money, but are racking up debt and revenue. This article goes into how the same thing is playing out in the agriculture sector.

http://archive.dailywealth.com/3602/the-real-trouble-with-bi...

Amazon makes weird non-GAAP claims. In terms of GAAP, Amazon had negative free cash flow of $4.2 billion in Q1.

Both German and Russian war production increased throughout the war under command economies and massive bombing. They key factor was fuel.

Well look how communism in Asia played out over the ensuing 40 years. Would it have been such a horrible idea to let Japanese boys die fighting off communists? And why are 50+K American lives still at stake (and billions of dollars in defense spending) policing the region?

We should have worked with the Japanese and had them mostly run the place.

> Hitler’s not so bad once you get to know him

Agreed.

> US (not invaded, economy grew during the war

GDP grew during the war due to federal debt. The standard of living markedly declined and didn't recover until much later.

Japan and Germany fought WWII because they wanted to secure oil supplies. The USSR and USA defeated them because they had massive amounts of oil at their disposal. The USA was #1 producer at the time. Also, both the Germans and Japanese failed to secure oil supplies and refineries quickly enough and quickly ran out of liquid fuels. WWII can almost be boiled down to this factor alone. If Germany and Japan had secured supplies of liquid fuels they would not have been defeated. Democracy and capitalism has nothing to do with it.

Well then why is the water in your city pumped by diesel engines, and why are all the goods delivered by diesel locomotives, barges, and trucks? The entire logistics industry is just full of morons that didn't get the memo over the last 80 years that electrified motors are better than diesel?

No, they use diesel motors for almost a century because they are more efficient and cost effective.

Not really. You are underestimating the massive energy efficiency advantages of modern diesel engines, across many contexts. It's the same reason why water pumps and freight locomotives and all kinds of other equipment that could theoretically be electrified isn't.

Diesel buses are very energy efficient. Electrified rail is surprisingly inefficient.

Building bus rapid transit lanes makes more sense than spinning up a light rail infrastructure almost any way you measure: capital costs, energy, maintenance, flexibility...

I also wonder how much sense intercity rail even makes for most trips. If you could set aside a lane for buses only on I-95 Boston to DC (for example), you could have a bunch of routes that go directly from various neighborhoods to other neighborhoods at mostly 110 mph.

I don't really see any ads just by running NoScript. I don't see the need for an ad blocker.

If a site won't render with javascript disabled, then I just close the tab.

Python and JS are both equally awful. The sad reality is that Perl 5 still remains the only viable scripting language aside from scheme (lol) with sane scoping and lexical closures.