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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • That was an intended effect, as they were all facing enormous deficits in the wake of the '08 housing/car-note crash. Cash-for-Clunkers was supposed to be a back door bailout of dealerships in exchange for moving high emissions vehicles off the market.

    Hot take: the dealership system is just a useless middleman system that should have been dismantled long ago as the “only way” to buy a car.

    In theory, we live in a large and competitive housing market, such that people with excess cash can change landlords in pursuit of lower prices.

    Boston will never have enough supply to meet demand. This is the one example I know very well, there are countless others. A thousand bucks a month in podunk land is enough to rent something entirely and that will 100% be exploited by landlords, after all it’s free money for doing nothing.


  • Popular opinion is that if you give people free money they will use it on what enriches their lives.

    Economists would probably just point out the fact that whenever you subsidize something the thing you’re trying to make easier is suddenly even more expensive to the point where there’s hardly a discount if one even exists.

    Look at the cash for clunkers program. At the end of that car dealerships were raking in huge profits.

    In this case if you give someone a thousand bucks a month, odds are landlords will pocket the majority of that, because housing is the biggest cost for everybody who is not already an owner. If everyone has 1000/mo more, they can suddenly afford 1000/more on housing. This may make minimal impact in areas with extremely high COL, but all the associated suburbs, rough parts of town, college areas… yeah those rents are gonna go way up.

    example: 4BR apartment? Oh… I guess that’s another +$3500/mo… after all all four of you are getting that money for free. New price: $7000/mo. It’s only 1750/mo, or 750 per person per month because the government (our tax dollars) is paying that poor, poor landlord. How ever would they survive elsewise?








  • It’s just a convenience thing. Disposable vapes can’t be charged and the battery lives the life of the vape. I have not personally seen a non-disposable vape battery that has a user servicable battery compartment for 510 threaded vape cartridges either fwiw.

    Lithium ion batteries are basically never recycled on average. Regardless of where batteries are used though you usually find that something like 5% or less of them are actually recycled. Considering lithium ion batteries last less than 10 years and every piece of consumer electronics that isn’t bound to a cable nowadays has them i’m guessing we waste a lot more battery volume in the rest of our day to day devices. Cars, laptops, cell phones, ebikes, escooters, vapes, nintendo switches and all kinds of kids toys, solar generator batteries etc etc etc all contribute to the problem and they are ubiquitous.

    I’m 100% for a lithium ion battery recycling deposit fee. I think it should be fairly expensive too, maybe 50% of the battery replacement cost or more of a quality battery replacement and based on gram weight of sold battery in a product. The toxic chemicals that get into the environment from these things catching fire when improperly disposed after long enough timeframe is no joke and we shouldn’t treat it like one.






  • Attrition goes up and companies had a harder time filling the newly vacated roles compared to companies that didn’t force a back to the office.

    Work from home as an option is a HUGE boon to the employee so of course offering it weighs heavily upon an employee’s decision to take an offer. I’d give up 10-20% of my salary for 100% wfh, i’d expect more salary for 0% wfh or some other huge benefit like the office being very close to home.

    I already turn down jobs because they are located inconveniently in relation to where I live.


  • Wow, what a clickbait headline which misconstrues what the sales pitch document actually says totally and completely.

    80% of executives say they would have approached their company’s return-to-office strategy differently if they had access to workplace data to inform their decision-making.

    Sure, this means some executives may have chosen different strategies - but this does not mean they regret their decisions. They probably would have opted for 5 days in office or just told select groups to come back to the office or something else. Very different than “we wish we didn’t have in person staff!” or “We regret asking people to return to the office!”




  • If you write a book you should have rights to how that book is distributed. That’s the idea behind copyright.

    Copyright is all about preventing anyone else from profiting off of your work by simply copying your work. Thanks to Mickey Mouse that duration is now life+70 years which is absurd.

    Distilling the concept down and removing the nuance: As of today if you produce a written work you have monopoly control over that work for life+70 years unless you sign contracts stating otherwise.

    Today, copyright as a construct creates monopolies that survive the creator.

    In the case of Drug copyright, the duration is 20 years from the invention, which generally ends up being about 10 years after clinical trials to make money before anyone can make a copy. I struggle to see why the rules do not evenly apply, but the rationale behind drugs seems to be that humans benefit from them being available for as cheap as possible. If we had 20 year durations on TV and Movie copyrights it would be better for the masses and would give creators decades to earn profits on their work.

    Drug makers try everything possible to extend copyrights on their drugs by doing things like creating medical devices with superior delivery methods in the case of injectable drugs. Since the new delivery method is more effective the old one is generally not used and so generics have to then wait for the delivery method to be out of copyright… This is just one example though. There’s no promises a generic drug ever comes to market if the drug is not widely used. The same shenanigans would be used by the entertainment industry to re-package their content with remastered versions or re-scanned original films like they have done with DVD, Blu-Ray and Streaming versions. Extended editions would also be an option… but the original copy would be free for all to enjoy after 20 years.

    Why anyone is able to profit off of the original edition of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings for another hundred years is beyond me, it should just be free and available to everyone imo. The money has been made.

    That’s my opinion anyway. Monopolies and income in perpetuity are horrible concepts generally only abused by the few at the detriment of the many. In the real world many just pirate content anyway. If it were up to rights’ holders NO copies even for personal use would be allowed. They would just have us pay per view even for copies we purchased.


  • How about if one person should make money in perpetuity for doing a job, everyone should?

    You want to keep paying the architect, plumbers, electricians, carpenters and all the other construction crew that worked on your house right?

    Oh wait… not that…

    Maybe payment in perpetuity is a bad idea because it just funnels wealth to the few at the expense of the many… I mean it’s ok to charge people a billion times for something done a single time right?

    There’s a huge philosophical discussion here, but instead you want to throw names. Things are the way they are overwhelmingly because of arbitrary bullshit.

    Intellectual Property is a construct enabling monopolies and generating billions of dollars off the trivial reproduction of work done by others. All this perpetual money making bullshit is just piggybacking off of something that never should have been.