I think it’s healthy for opposing viewpoints to be expressed

Yeah, that way the community can get inoculated with these ideas and learns how to respond to them, and over enough time the response gets faster and more efficient so that the body as a whole builds up a resistance against whenever those types of comments show up.

I could sell you a virtual deed to the Golden Gate Bridge right now, you could buy it but it doesn’t really mean anything.

Yeah, that’s possibly the most famous scam in history (people selling deeds to the Brooklyn Bridge), enough to where “I’ve got a bridge to sell you” is a figure of speech for calling someone gullible or naive.

And then despite the world knowing about the Brooklyn Bridge scam, the cryptobros actually went and found a bunch of suckers to fall for the exact same scam, only with blockchains instead of notary seals.

No, the Red Lobster insolvency was driven by declining sales and increasing debt, amid some shady corporate shenanigans with their finances. When they filed, they were about $30 million in the hole (even assuming their high valuations for their intangible assets).

Private equity owners (Golden Gate) made them sell off the land they owned, only to lease it back at above market rates. Then sold the chain to its biggest seafood supplier (Thai Union), who used the restaurant as an outlet for their wholesale seafood rather than as a standalone profitable business (which resulted in huge quality drop off and declining sales).

They were headed in the wrong direction, and the $11 million they lost on endless shrimp didn’t make a big difference. It was circling the drain anyway, based on big strategic errors (or just plain old private equity fuckery).

Copper is a material that is used in many more orders of magnitude for infrastructure and basic development. It’s technically “consumption” to eat food everyday and have running water and electricity in your home, but the type of materialist luxury consumption you’re talking about doesn’t factor into global copper demand. There are 7.2 billion smartphones in use, and about 14g of copper in each one. That’s about 100,000 metric tons of copper, when the article talks about 110 million as a baseline (11,000 times as much), and above 200 million (20,000 times as much). So no, consumer electronics aren’t going to move the needle on this scale of a problem.

If you’re going to tell the developing countries that they need to stop developing, that’s morally suspect. And frankly, environmentally suspect, as the article itself is about moving off of fossil fuels and electrifying a lot of our energy needs in both the developed and developing nations, whether we’re talking relatively clean energy source like natural gas or dirtier sources like coal, or even dirtier sources like wood or animal dung.

What does this have to do with how the world distributes useful copper? Nobody is buying up copper because of being tricked by advertising, so I’m not sure what the relevance of your comments are, to the topic at hand.

I don’t think you’re wrong, I just don’t think this thread really raises the issues you want to talk about.

I don’t disagree, but I don’t see the relevance of these particular flaws of unrestrained capitalism to this specific stated problem: that there might not be enough copper to be able to continue to use it as we always have.

There are lots of flaws to capitalism. Running out of useful copper, while copper is being used in wasteful ways, doesn’t really implicate the main weaknesses of capitalism systems.

This is an article about scarcity, insufficient supply to meet demand.

Artificial demand creation isn’t necessary, or even productive, when the existing demand already outstrips supply.

And if it is the case that demand is much higher than supply, that’s a baked in financial incentive that rewards people for efficient recycling.

Capitalism is bad at pricing in externalities. It’s pretty good at using price signals to allocate finite resources to more productive uses.

This article does a lot of speculation from few facts but is truly compelling.

I appreciate the clarity the article uses in the factual support for the ultimate theory, building on each inferential step that seems pretty obviously correct. The stuff that’s actually presented as being fairly certain:

• The fossil record shows many lines of archaic homo sapiens whose physical features don’t share modern homo sapiens’ “juvenile” baby face characteristics.
• The dating of those fossils and the migration patterns of our known ancestors suggests that these archaic homo sapiens aren’t actually our ancestors, but were outcompeted by our branch.
• The anthropological record shows that these archaic homo sapiens weren’t as dominant as our ancestor branch, but were close and could hold their own. Apparently the ancestors of modern humans never lost territory, even if it took millennia to displace other hominids.
• These archaic branches had some limited tool use, and some evidence of trade and ceremonial burial.

The article presents theories about our branch being less violent, having less aggression, able to build lasting alliances with larger groups of tribes. But it’s grounded in some interesting facts that are interesting, in themselves.

Looking around the article actually posted, I’d place my bets on more control/restraint on violence, for the coordination to be able to form social networks that could overcome any threats of skirmish level, inter-tribal violence:

Paradoxically, low aggression may have been a massive advantage in intertribal warfare. Low aggression could have helped us to form big social groups – tribes of hundreds and thousands. And modern humans don’t just form huge groups, we’re unique among animals in being able to form peace treaties between different groups, and alliances between groups to defend or attack territory. What made modern Homo sapiens so uniquely dangerous might not have been a tendency towards violence and aggression, but friendliness, and the ability to forge alliances. The ability to create groups and social networks, and hold off fighting – at least, until we’re in a position to win – could have given us a decisive edge.

It’s an interesting article, worth reading in its entirety.

Mortgage applications are not yes or no. There is a checklist that if met, gets approved.

That’s just a “yes or no” with extra steps.

Yeah, my reading of this is that this poster took particular personal satisfaction from denying an application, but it didn’t cross my mind that there was any element of actual control or decisionmaking.

It’s like when someone cuts you off and then crashes their car. You didn’t cause the crash, and a crashed car is a much more severe punishment than simple rudeness would deserve, but you can still derive satisfaction from the sequence of events.

I think the key to understanding the context is that GDP is a flow, not any kind of accumulation.

If Person A earns $100,000 this year, gets a 4% raise every year, will they be richer or poorer than Person B who earns $120,000 and gets a 5% raise every year, after 10 years? We have no idea, because we don’t know from the question what their starting wealth was, how much they save or spend, whether the stuff they buy retains its value or appreciates or depreciates, etc.

So Russia can have growing GDP, but can still be running its economy into the ground if the stuff they’re producing is getting destroyed, or has no lasting value.

It’s complicated, and people can have different philosophical approaches to the goals and purposes of criminal punishment. But my argument is that people should be internally consistent in their views. If people believe that the consequences of a crime should be considered when sentencing for that crime, then emotional consequences should count, too, because emotional harm is real harm.

Why do we punish based on consequences caused by the crime, then?

A drunk driver is punished much more severely if they hit and kill a person, than if they hit and hurt a person, than if they hit a tree, than if they don’t crash at all.

As long as we’re punishing people based on the actual impact of their crimes, then emotional impact should count.

why evidence rules exist in court.

Sure, but not for victim impact statements. Hearsay, speculation, etc. have always been fair game for victim impact statements, and victim statements aren’t even under oath. Plus the other side isn’t allowed to cross examine them. It’s not evidence, and it’s not “testimony” in a formal sense (because it’s not under oath or under penalty of perjury).

I’d argue that emotions are a legitimate factor to consider in sentencing.

It’s a bit more obvious with living victims of non-homicide crimes, but the emotional impact of crime is itself a cost borne by society. A victim of a romance scam having trouble trusting again, a victim of a shooting having PTSD with episodes triggered by loud noises, a victim of sexual assault dealing with anxiety or depression after, etc.

It’s a legitimate position to say that punishment shouldn’t be a goal of criminal sentencing (focusing instead of deterrence and rehabilitation), or that punishment should be some sort of goal based entirely on the criminal’s state of mind and not the factors out of their own control, but I’d disagree. The emotional aftermath of a crime is part of the crime, and although there’s some unpredictable variance involved, we already tolerate that in other contexts, like punishing a successful murder more than an attempted murder.

Along the same lines, from the same writer/creator, Armando Iannucci, there’s The Death of Stalin. The absurdity of how the inner circle navigated the politics around Stalin, including after his death, is hilarious but also a good look at how these power dynamics work in an authoritarian, despotic government.

Or also from Iannucci, Avenue 5, which basically is set in the future where all of this political nonsense continues, and is in the background of a comedy about a space cruise ship.

Everyone has their own reasons. If you disagree with their management, then you should celebrate other people choosing to leave, even if for different reasons than your own.

How you gonna keep them down on the farm factory (after they’ve seen Paris a school library stocked with books)?

I don’t brush anything under the rug. I actively shared the Tweet that started this hole BS.

I get that. But my point is that you can’t claim that Proton’s CEO is acting independently of the Proton corporation itself when Proton’s official corporate accounts chimed in on his side on this.

Both of the American parties are a shitshow

Not on antitrust. The Biden administration was one of the strongest advocates for consumers on antitrust issues we’ve seen since Robert Bork convinced Reagan to tear it all down.

Anyone who says otherwise is trying to lie to the American public about it, and should be called out for actively advocating for false MAGA propaganda. Andy Yen did it, and Proton agreed with it.