> If I had a button that would wipe out the entire Amazon jungle and replace it with a world class high technology industry, I wouldn't even think twice before pressing it.
I used to think this way, but I've come to realize that it's very short-sighted. It's not sustainable, and we're already seeing how unchecked industrialization over the last couple centuries is leading to unintended/undesirable effects on our health, and indeed the suitability of the environment we need to live in. Sure, those problems can be pushed onto future generations, and so far (maybe) we've been able to solve them. But if we care at all about humanity's ability to thrive, we need to be more careful.
In developed countries, nobody has to struggle anymore just to stay alive, which is a far cry from the way it was 200 years ago. Advancements now are along the lines of increasing entertainment, or quality of life. But enjoying a good life doesn't have to be a zero-sum proposition, and I think society should put a higher cost on the ability of wealthy people to use up irreplaceable natural resources for their own benefit.
You know what's not sustainable? Exponential growth fueled by credit.
Banks loaning money at nearly zero percent interest. Money that gets loaned out, spent, deposited back into the bank and loaned out again, and again, exponentially, until a ludicrously huge financial callstack is created.
This financial callstack wants to unwind. It can only do so safely by the payment of debts. At some point, someone will actually have to go out there and extract value out of this planet in order to pay back those debts. Since debt grows exponentially, so does the harvesting of the resources of this planet.
If you want to solve the problem, you need to go to the source. You need to get rid of credit. Without this, environmentalism is nothing but national suicide. You're opting out of exponential growth and promptly outcompeted by the countries that didn't opt out.
> In developed countries, nobody has to struggle anymore just to stay alive, which is a far cry from the way it was 200 years ago.
Yeah... Because they industrialized and got filthy rich. Now they can afford to give so called "rights" to their citizens.
Rights cost money. They don't appear out of thin air. Somebody's gotta work to provide them. Even the right to not get killed in broad daylight only exists because extremely violent men with guns are protecting the rest. Those men gotta be paid.
Money is not infinite. It runs out. The music can't stop. Gotta keep making money in order to keep providing all those nifty rights. The simple reality is if you don't have real industries you're probably not making that much money. My country is essentially the world's soy farm, nvidia stock alone probably moves more money in a day than my entire country put together.
Look at the national debts of countries the world over. That's money they don't have. Money future generations will be paying interest on for a long time. You want to get reelected but you're broke, so you borrow money you don't have and spend it all giving "benefits" to a population that is dumb enough to think it comes for free. Then there's so much money circulating the value of the currency is inflated away, and people's children grow up and get radicalized when they realize most of their taxes are spent on interest payments on loans made by the previous generation.
> At some point, someone will actually have to go out there and extract value out of this planet in order to pay back those debts.
Not a single atom on the planet has to be moved to extinguish all debts. Money and debt are (very useful and powerful!) bookkeeping constructs only.
> Look at the national debts of countries the world over. That's money they don't have.
Then who has it? Modern money is based on debt, and where there's a debt, there must be a creditor.
> Banks loaning money at nearly zero percent interest. Money that gets loaned out, spent, deposited back into the bank and loaned out again [...] Money is not infinite.
You seem to be basing your argument on some seriously outdated and thoroughly refuted models of money.
> Not a single atom on the planet has to be moved to extinguish all debts.
You should elaborate more on this bold claim.
> Then who has it?
Plenty of people. Treasury bonds holders. Pension funds. Insurance companies. Other countries. The government owes all of those people and regularly pays them interest.
> You seem to be basing your argument on some seriously outdated and thoroughly refuted models of money.
Fractional reserve banking is outdated and refuted?
I think it was "Smarter Every Day," but there's a YouTube channel where the guy went all-out in trying to design, source, and manufacture a simple grill scrubber 100% in the US, and failed. He got the product finished and on the market, but it was literally impossible to do it with 100% American content. IIRC, part of the problem was suppliers that lied about their sourcing, but that still represents the complete lack of availability of US sources.
People invest in things that maximize returns. 30 years ago they had a choice: invest in building out more manufacturing infrastructure in the US, or doing it in China. China was, and is, less expensive to run. So China got the investment dollars.
You could absolutely build any product in the US. You'd just also have to build the infrastructure to build the industrial base, and that means spending more money than you would in China.
In the US anyway, calling yourself an "engineer" is only regulated if you sell your services to the public as one. Inside of a business, like a car manufacturer, the position title of "engineer" can be applied to any job at all, however the business wants.
As a degreed engineer myself, this was a bit jarring to me when I first entered the workforce, seeing co-workers who had never been to college calling themselves engineers. But fortunately I got over it.
"Our analysis of road segments in California and Virginia revealed that the number of segments with observed HBEs was 18 times greater than those with reported crashes. While crash data is notoriously sparse — requiring years to observe a single event on some local roads — HBEs provide a continuous stream of data, effectively filling the gaps in the safety map."
So we don't have to wait until an accident actually occurs before we can identify unsafe roads and improve them.
The reality in 2024 was that yes, the alternative was more of the previous administration.
Maybe that was never a way to whatever ideal solution or policies might be possible in the future. But the only possible benefit of the current administration is that people's eyes get opened to the lunacy that's possible, resulting in a sort of mini-revolution that enacts changes that prevent the collusion and grift that are happening now.
The Trump administration doesn't have any real government improvements in mind. They're only play is to destabilize the current status of whatever's in their sights, blame Democrats or whoever else is convenient for the mess, and profit from the confusion. Example: The Republican party has always had financial conservatism as a main goal. When was the last time the national debt or deficit improved under Republican leadership? Another, healthcare: For all of the complaining that Republicans have done about Obamacare, why haven't they replaced it with something better yet since they've had full control of the government? They've shown that they don't actually care about good government.
What we got in the current administration wasn't any kind of secret before the 2024 election. People voted for it anyway because they're susceptible to the kinds of misinformation they were being fed. Trump's latest comments on his lack of commitment to peace, the cost of housing, and the well-being of the general population (just to name a few) make it clear that he doesn't consider them important; and Republican's fealty to him show the same of them.
This kind of failure-to-enforce is endemic to government. Oversight and enforcement are implicitly expected of well-regulated governments, and that costs money that nobody wants to pay. Laws get enacted with little thought to how much it will cost to administer them, and they either get underfunded or added to the list of government bloat.
There is no easy way out. The oversight to ensure that governments do what they're expected to without corruption costs real money. We haven't yet figured out how to balance good government with fiscal efficiency; but it would at least be an improvement if people could be educated on the actual cost of properly implementing a law before it gets voted on.
As usual for cases like this, the only chance for a person to force compliance is to have enough money/resources, putting it out of reach for the general population.
This is one problem, but in the GPDR's case it's worse: the law is designed for governments. The only people who can actually take action based on the GPDR ... are NOT the courts (same with the AI act btw).
Which governments have immediately used to:
1) exempt themselves from GPDR (e.g. allowing the use of medical data in divorce cases, and then refusing deletion of medical data from public institutions "for that reason". Then of course this was extended to tax enforcement (some of you European bastards DARE to try to get dental treatment when owing back taxes! Some things CANNOT be allowed)
2) they used it to attack certain firms for entirely reasonable reasons. One example, one of the very first cases, before the law was even in force was against Google. You see there are some online articles about José Manuel Barroso, the communist non-executive chairman and senior adviser of London-based Goldman Sachs International (yes, really, communist, not a joke), ex-socialist, then EU commission president ... that according to him violate the "right to be forgotten" (which technically doesn't apply to public figures, but apparently EU commission presidents aren't public figures)
There were some articles he wanted deleted about how technically he is (was?) a murder suspect (he organized and participated demonstrations where some people were killed by a mob that he was part of, and probably the leader of), and how there were complaints against him by his students that allege he beat them up (as in physically), apparently in arguments about financial systems (yes, even when he was a pretty extreme communist he was a professor). He couldn't get the articles deleted ... and so he wanted them hidden. He got what he wanted, without court involvement.
We have figured out how to get money to enforce paying taxes and GDPR compliance: Pay them with the taxes and fines. USA's IRS has a famously high ROI, and I'm willing to bet a single GDPR fine for Google/Facebook/Microsoft pays for a whole lot of GDPR enforcement.
In general, when it comes to enforcing laws on normal, individual people, governments seem to have no problem finding and cracking down on you. When it comes to enforcing laws on the rich, or corporations, suddenly the kid gloves go on and the "but we're simply not funded for enforcement!" excuses emerge...
While enforcement and the cost of enforcement is an important consideration, I would say that there is still value in unenforced law and regs. They set an expectation and a norm.
Sometimes. Other times they create an environment where the only rational action is for everyone to constantly break the law, allowing for selective enforcement.
You're describing something that isn't relevant. Besides, if breaking a law is the only rational action, then a fortiori the law cannot be just and therefore legitimate. Lex iniusta non est lex.
And w.r.t. enforcement of just laws, unless selective enforcement is used to target people for unjust reasons, I see no problem with it. In fact, selective enforcement can be a good thing that better serves the common good. Perfect enforcement can actually makes things worse.
I have this setup, and the Firestick UI is horribly slow. Sometimes it takes 30 seconds or more for it to give any response to a button press. It's worst when I'm trying to watch something on Amazon Prime, to the point that I hardly watch that anymore because the UI is so annoying.
This sounds like either your FireTV stick is too old or your TV is.
My LG TV is more than a decade old (non-smart LED TV), the FireTV stick is around 6 years old.
But apart from the FireTV stick (whose remote controls the TV too) taking 15 seconds for a cold start (the TV tends to go to deep sleep mode after idle for long time or when switched off via remote), or 5 seconds for a warm start, the FireTV GUI is quite snappy thereafter (I can briskly move the cursor/selection across icons/thumbnails, menus and apps), till I switch it off again. Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime, Discovery+, Apple TV - they all work well on this old setup.
You may want to uninstall some apps on the FireTV stick to give it some breathing space when it runs.
Try the FireTV stick on a PC monitor having HDMI input. If you face same issues there, then it may be time to buy a new FireTV stick or Chromecast, or splurge for a new smart TV.
I used to think this way, but I've come to realize that it's very short-sighted. It's not sustainable, and we're already seeing how unchecked industrialization over the last couple centuries is leading to unintended/undesirable effects on our health, and indeed the suitability of the environment we need to live in. Sure, those problems can be pushed onto future generations, and so far (maybe) we've been able to solve them. But if we care at all about humanity's ability to thrive, we need to be more careful.
In developed countries, nobody has to struggle anymore just to stay alive, which is a far cry from the way it was 200 years ago. Advancements now are along the lines of increasing entertainment, or quality of life. But enjoying a good life doesn't have to be a zero-sum proposition, and I think society should put a higher cost on the ability of wealthy people to use up irreplaceable natural resources for their own benefit.
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