People like to use the example of Crassus’ fire brigade as an analogy for how corporate interests extract value from regular people in society. Crassus and his fire brigade would go around buying burning houses on the cheap, and then put out the fire for the benefit of Crassus, the new owner. There were some who believed that Crassus was setting the fires himself, but the extractive playbook here works whether he was setting them himself or not.

Are agricultural megacorps buying up farms with depressed values and then fixing them so that the values increase? Probably not. They’re in basically the same boat with the price of commodities, in terms of the inputs (water, fertilizer, labor, equipment and machinery, fuel, energy) and the outputs (wheat, corn, soybeans, etc.). It’s a problem for them, too.

Maybe they have deep enough pockets to ride out the current crisis and will have more to show for it in the end, but for now, they’re in the same boat.

why were highly skilled Korean engineers working “illegally” in USA to begin with?

Most of them say they had valid visas or work authorization.

The U.S. has a visa waiver program where people can come into the U.S. without a visa, and have certain rights similar to visa holders. Many of the South Korean workers have taken the position that the visas they had that allowed them to work for 6 months, or the visa waivers they had entitled them to do temporary work for less than 90 days, and that they were within those time windows.

The lawsuits being filed also allege that immigration officials acknowledged that many of the workers did have legal rights to work, but that they were deported anyway.

So no, I don’t think it’s been shown that the workers did anything illegal. It really sounds like ICE fucked up by following a random tip a little too credulously.

The listeria outbreak also exposed Boar’s Head as a deeply mismanaged company. When the CFO, who had been at the company for over 20 years, was deposed under oath, he couldn’t answer the question of who the CEO was, or who his boss was. It came up in a lawsuit between family members of the family that owns and controls the company, and has their own competing factions in charge of different parts of the company.

From a pure corporate governance perspective, that type of dysfunction is a recipe for disaster.

Probably fair to assume that the shooter was aiming for center of mass. A stationary person at 180m is pretty easy to hit in the chest, and someone with enough skill/confidence might have opted to aim for the head, but nobody is aiming specifically for the neck. A hit on the neck almost definitely means the shooter was aiming for something else and missed high (or low) by inches in a way that still hit the guy.

It has long been used as a transitive verb. The Oxford English Dictionary has collected examples going as far back as 1897 using it generically to make something disappear, but this particular meaning, of government officials forcibly abducting a person and not explaining where the person went, really started to pick up by the 1960’s. The novel Catch-22, published in 1961, had a character use it in the transitive way, with the protagonist complaining that it wasn’t even proper grammar. And that novel was popular enough that it started to appear a lot shortly afterwards, in magazines and newspapers and books.

Why are you forgiving student loans?

That’s the federal government’s administration of a federal government program, so no, that’s not the same at all.

Why do you tip servers in America?

That’s the basic deal. If a restaurant implements a no tipping policy, they’re allowed to do that. I don’t see how that’s the same or different from a restaurant implementing a “discount for veterans” or “no discounts for veterans” policy. It sounds like we’re in favor of a system where the restaurant chooses what they want to be about, whether it’s a tip-based system or not, or a discounts for vets place or not.

So in a sense, it sounds like you agree with me that we should let the restaurants choose. Neither choice is a “punishment” of anyone.

But really you’re just punishing veterans with PTSD

Failing to give special treatment to someone is not punishing them. Especially when we’re talking about special treatment for an entire category of people, most of whom don’t have PTSD (estimates range from 6-27% of those deployed to a war zone, and not all veterans served in a war zone), many of whom are financially well off.

Maybe the VA and the federal government should do more for vets. Maybe the military itself should take care of the troops a bit better. But asking private businesses to prop up veterans at their own expense seems like a misguided approach.

From the article:

There are multiple organizations broadly known as “National Geographic,” so before we go any further, let’s run through some definitions and distinctions. In 2018, Disney bought a majority stake in an entity called National Geographic Partners, LLC—or NGP, for short. This is the for-profit company that encompasses the magazine, the television channel, and other properties that live under the Nat Geo brand. It was formed in 2015 by then–majority partner 21st Century Fox and the 137-year-old National Geographic Society. The Society is a registered non-profit organization, and it remains a 27 percent-owner of NGP, even after Fox’s sale of its 73-percent share to Disney. When I refer to “National Geographic” in this story, I mean the National Geographic Society unless otherwise specified.

In other words, this article is about the nonprofit that has existed for 137 years. The for-profit subsidiaries were 73% acquired by Fox/Murdoch, and then sold to Disney when Disney bought Fox. But this film was published directly by the nonprofit and not the for-profit subsidiary that is partially owned by Disney.

This long form article is why I pay for a Defector subscription. It’s a good, well researched article that gives the appropriate background and tells a story that nobody else has told, and that maybe never would have been told, by any other outlet.

Mandatory until the European Commission updates the standard. The law mandating the use of USB-C explicitly has a procedure for how to propose a new standard to supersede the current one.

You might enjoy dunking on them (which is fine) just as long as you’re not actively pushing them away.

The easiest way is to enlist their involvement in dunking on the actual politicians, officials, and policymakers. A fascist movement relies heavily on a reluctant populace complying in advance, which is why little pieces of resistance can be effective against fascists. Humor, sarcasm, and outright mockery of the people giving the flimsy orders diminishes their power by persuading the public that there won’t be consequences for those who ignore those orders.

It’s not going to be enough by itself, but having the apolitical comedians turn against fascism is still a useful thing to have on our side.

I don’t think it’s an insurmountable challenge. Just that the ratio is what matters, which means abrupt changes to birth rates might be more problematic than the magnitude of the change over time.

But I also don’t think that a stable population size solves the climate crisis or resource depletion. It might be the case that 8 billion people in 2075 end up consuming way more energy and natural resources in an even less sustainable way than the 8 billion people of 2025.

Even if you take money out of the equation, people need the productive output of other people to survive.

A man alone on a desert island cannot retire. As soon as he is unable to provide for himself, he dies. Yes, he can accumulate certain “savings,” but much of what is needed to survive cannot be banked and used later. Food storage is limited, and any method of long term food storage tends to require additional processing to be edible, so there will always need to be some kind of just-in-time cooking process to keep people fed. Same with shelter, where maintenance needs will always be there, or health care, where real time treatment will always need to be done.

In a society with a shrinking population, there will be an unrelenting pressure to simply stop supporting those who are not productive. And those who are productive will selfishly shape that society to cover their own needs first.

That’s not just capitalism, it’s every economic system. Taking care of our elderly and our disabled is a luxury of a prosperous society. If the ratio goes out of wack, the willingness to continue supporting that luxury may not always be there.

we’ve been fed this narrative that overpopulation is eventually going to destroy the world

It’s always been wrong, and some of us have been arguing against that kind of neo-Mathusian worldview this entire time.

Note that the same view also leads to the incorrect conclusion that population shrinkage will be good for resource management, pollution, etc. If one believes that a large and growing population will deplete the world’s resources and destroy the environment, one might conclude that a shrinking population will help conserve the world’s resources and preserve the environment.

But look at how things actually play out. The countries with the shrinking populations are still increasing their resource consumption, and the slowdown in population growth hasn’t slowed down resource depletion in large part because humans don’t all use the same amount of resources. If the population of India shrinks to the size of the population of the United States, but then increases its greenhouse emissions to match that of the United States, that would be bad for the environment despite the population reduction.

A shrinking population isn’t really a problem in itself, but an aging population is. That’s the concern about birth rates, is the worry that unproductive old people will have their lives cut short rather than enjoying a reasonable retirement.

My problem with nuclear is both the high cost and, somewhat counterintuitively, the very long life cycles to spread that high cost. The economics only make sense if the plant runs for 75 years, which represents an opportunity cost of displacing whatever might be available in 25 or 50 years.

A solar plant planned in 2025 might be online in 2027, and decommissioned in 2047, replaced with whatever technology/economics are available then. But a new nuclear reactor bakes in the costs for 80+ years, to be paid by ratepayers who haven’t been born yet.

So if in 2050 a 2030-constructed nuclear plant is still imposing costs of $66/MWh on ratepayers, to finance the interest and construction costs from 25 years earlier, will that be competitive with the state of solar/wind/batteries/hydrothermal at that time? Given the past trend lines, it seems economically foolish to lock in today’s prices for the next 80 years.

This paper lays out the cost projections that one could expect with the lessons learned from Vogtle Units 3 & 4, with the tax credits and government guarantees available as of 2024:

https://web.mit.edu/kshirvan/www/research/ANP201 TR CANES.pdf

Ok, current projections are still for the next two AP1000s at Vogtle to be something like $10 billion. That’s just not cost competitive with solar/wind. And it’s also not very realistic to assume that there won’t be cost overruns on the next one, either. Complex engineering projects tend to run over.

Also where did you see they did amortization of solar?

I’m just familiar with Lazard’s LCOE methodology. The linked paper talks about LCOE, so that’s just how that particular cost analysis works.

Vogtle added 2 AP1000 reactors for $35 billion. Future deployments might be cheaper, but there’s a long way to go before it can compete with pretty much any other type of power generation.

But the other misleading part is they looked at 20 years which is close to the life cycle for solar/batteries and not even half the life of nuclear

I think Lazard’s LCOE methodology looks at the entire life cycle of the power plant, specific to that power plant. So they amortize solar startup/decommissioning costs across the 20 year life cycle of solar, but when calculating LCOE for nuclear, they spread the costs across the 80 year life cycle of a nuclear plant.

Nuclear is just really, really expensive. Even if plants required no operating costs, the up front costs are so high that it represents a significant portion of the overall operating costs for any given year.

The Vogtle debacle in Georgia cost $35 billion to add 2 MW of capacity. They’re now projecting that over the entire 75 year lifespan the cost of the electricity will come out to be about $0.17 to $0.18 per kilowatt hour.