My car is Japanese, I'm skeptical that the Chinese can limit anything on it.

You post this over and over and it's just not true. Lots of people who don't work continue to eat. Anyone can give anybody else food, parents, children, friends, charity donors. Nobody is stopping you or anyone else from giving food to anybody you want to.

But what you want is the ability to force other people to provide you with food (and presumably clothing and shelter and entertainment) without compensation. Essentially you want slaves who will provide you what you want without any obligation on your part to provide anything they want.

What if the people who produce the food decide they don't want to work? I've worked in food service. They were generally unpleasant jobs. I did them because people were paying for the food and that money was in turn used to pay me. If the people who were consuming the food weren't paying for it I certainly wouldn't continued to provide it.

Tell me honestly, if you were guaranteed 2000 calories per day of rice and beans for the rest of your life would you drop this "if you don't work you don't eat" nonsense? Or do you want a variety of fresh and tasty foods prepared and delivered, if not to your door, at least to a place close to your home?

Do you expect a labor force to grow, harvest, clean, package and ship the food to a convenient place for you to get it? If so, why do you think those people should have to do that work but don't think you should have to do any work at all? Are you ok with just raw vegetables or do you also expect factories and machinery to fill aisle after aisle of supermarket shelves? Do you think all those people should be forced to work to feed you without expecting anything in return from you?

You forgot to multiply by the number of widgets.

But yes, the value of your work is the portion of the revenue (not profit) that your work produces. Sometimes this number is easy to calculate other times it's extremely hard or impossible to calculate so it gets estimated with a very, very rough guess.

And if the amount of revenue is less than the cost of all the materials and labor, why even produce the widgets at all? If the company is not making a profit, why would the owners of the company not change the business or shut it down. Running a business that keeps losing money just doesn't make sense. And there do exist non-profit businesses, but they still try to make a bit of money and are at risk of going out of business if they lose money for a while and didn't have enough profit saved up to cover the losses.

Similarly, if you want more money to assemble widgets than what anyone is willing to pay for those widgets, why are you assembling them?

Every single person in the world routinely makes choices to not buy things they think are too expensive. Why should labor be any different? The people running companies choose not to hire people, or to lay people off, if the work those people would do is worth less than the paycheck those people require in order to do the work. This is no different than you walking into a store and choosing not to buy an item off the shelf because you think the price is too high. You could buy it, but then you'd have less money to spend on other things that you'd prefer to spend it on. The buyer decides how much they want to pay and if it's less than the seller will sell for, the buyer walks away. That's all layoffs are, the buyer (company) deciding they would rather spend money else because the price the seller (employee) is asking is higher than the buyer thinks it's worth.

It's not just companies. Everybody wants to get more stuff for less. That's why you want more pay for less work and it's why you buy less expensive stuff when you could pay more for the same thing. You just view it differently when it's you wanting more for less than when your employer wants the same thing.

Are you under the impression that there are no nuclear power plants in America?

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.eia.gov%2Ftools%2Ffaqs...

Of the 54 nuclear power plants in America I can't think of a single one that caused a city to be evacuated for 10 years. Did I miss some news? Which cities have been evacuated for 10 years?

These nuclear power plants have been operating for a LOT longer than one quarter. Your claim is just entirely contrary to objective fact. There are 54 nuclear power plants that have been operating in the US for many quarters and exactly zero of them have resulted in a city being evacuated. It's not impossible, but it's also not impossible that an asteroid could hit the earth and wipe out all life. Your assessment of probability is out of sync with observed fact.

Sure, that means this story is false. Obviously coal use did not hit a record high in 2024. How could it have with solar, wind and batteries being so cheap? Why would anybody burn coal when there's a limitless supply of cheap solar, wind and battery power available?

Unless maybe solar, wind and battery are not limitless and need to be supplemented with something else. But I'm going to trust you. Climate change is a solved issue because there's enough solar, wind and battery power available to replace all other power generation and keep up with new demand and not only that, but it's cheaper too.

Only if during that hour those customers make the decision that they really didn't want what you were selling. If they buy it later today or tomorrow or next week, you didn't lose anything. If a container ship carrying your product across the ocean sank, that's a loss. The item you didn't sell during your e-commerce website outage is still in a warehouse waiting to be sold. When it sells, you'll collect the money that you didn't collect when your website was down.

And if the outage did allow them to realize that buying the item from you would have been a poor choice and a regrettable use of their money, that's probably a net benefit.

No money is lost just because a transaction doesn't take place. The seller still has whatever they were selling, the buyer still has the money they would have spent. If a delay allows the buyer to reassess and determine that their money is better spent on something else, then different sellers make sales they wouldn't have.

If billions were truly lost by some, most of those billions were gained by others. But I suspect that at the end of the week the net losses were negligible. The vast majority of money that would have been spent during the AWS outage probably was still spent. The vast majority of work that would have been done during the AWS outage probably still got done.

A few people were busier than usual, other people got a bit more time to slack off. But most of the people who slacked off, probably made up what they missed a bit later.

Are you claiming that people went hungry because of this AWS outage? I find that hard to believe. But even if some people did skip some unhealthy delivered meals, the money they would have spent is still in their pocket waiting to be spent on something else. You could just as well claim that billions were gained as a result of the AWS outage because people who couldn't order food delivered bought something later with the money they didn't spend on food delivery.

And I seriously doubt AWS or other companies spent any additional money fixing this outage that they wouldn't have spent otherwise. Some people had a busier day than expected, others had a less busy day waiting around and reading slashdot or other non-AWS-dependent entertainment of choice. But at the end of the week it is very unlikely that very many people accomplished less than they would have if the AWS outage hadn't happened.

Are you claiming that bakers couldn't bake without AWS? Or that people went hungry?

Even if a bakery did shut down due to an AWS outage, which I doubt, the people who would have bought the baked goods almost certainly bought something else. No money was lost, it was just spent somewhere else.

When things are destroyed value is lost. The broken window fallacy is a fallacy because the work that went into replacing a broken window could have gone into installing a window in a new location. Two windows is more than one, so replacing a broken window is a loss compared to installing a new window while still having the unbroken old window.

Shifting money from one place to another is not a loss.

If some companies lost billions due to a few hours of AWS outage, it's likely that other companies gained billions from customers who went elsewhere. But more likely, in most cases the customers just waited and spent the same money later.

Or, perhaps the customers just saved money. Maybe they would have spent money, but when the AWS outage prevented them from spending it they had a bit of time to think and realized that they didn't actually need to buy the thing they would have bought. Perhaps in some cases the AWS outage was a net benefit, preventing people from wasting money on something they didn't really want/need.

Sugar cane is a type of grass. Corn is a type of grass. What is "proper sugar" other than the desiccated remains of juice squeezed out of grass? What is high fructose corn syrup other than the not quite completely desiccated remains of juice squeezed out of grass?

Sure, the sugar juice maybe squeezed out of the stalks while the corn juice is squeezed out of the seeds, but in either case you're squeezing juice out of a particular species of plant in the general family of grasses and removing as much water as you conveniently can in order to make it lighter for transport.

In both cases you're doing it because the juice is a mix of sugar molecules in water. The exact ratio of glucose molecules to fructose molecules is different between the two juices, but both molecules are sugars and they are very similar to each other in general shape and constituent atoms as well as in how they are perceived by the human tongue.

I'm not suggesting you overindulge in either, but you're putting too much weight on the word "proper" when you write "proper sugar" as if that particular desiccated grass juice is the "correct" one.

If it were worthwhile, either one could be further processed to increase or decrease the fructose to glucose ratio to any desired ratio. It would cost money to do it, so there would have to be a good reason. But glucose and fructose are made of the same atoms, so converting either one to the other is just a matter of chemistry.

Alternatively, it's bioengineering. Instead of fabricating solar panels out of silicon to generate electricity to synthesize chemical fuels, we harness biological processes. I recall reading a sequel to E.T. where the aliens of E.T.'s species used entirely biological technology for everything, including constructing and powering their spaceships. The book was probably utter nonsense, I was very young when I read it, but the idea of engineering biological systems isn't absurd.

When you think of nanotechnology you probably think of Iron Man's suit assembling itself from nothing, but aren't mitochondria basically nanotechnology? How much smaller can a machine get than the cellular apparatus that read RNA and build molecules from the RNA instructions?

Engineering plants to produce liquid chemical fuel seems like a reasonable thing to do in a technological society.

Yes, it's been tried repeatedly. But keep in mind that the person trying would be, by definition, a sociopath, so they're only trying to wipe all the other sociopaths from the face of the earth.

Obviously, non-sociopaths never try wiping people from the face of the earth. So when the wiping is finished, you'll be left with the most successful of the sociopaths at the top and the non-sociopaths doing the best they can without turning sociopathic.

Personally I'd prefer strong rule of law, a low tolerance for selective enforcement, and a distribution of power. Minimize the amount of power that any one sociopath can have by handling as much as possible at state and local levels. Only give the federal government and executive branch the bare minimum of responsibilities that can't possibly be handled at a lower level.

And at a state and local level, have a process for eliminating laws if they aren't enforced with a high degree of consistency. If laws aren't worth enforcing consistently on everyone who is observed breaking them then they shouldn't be on the books. Figure out what rules really matter at each level of government and rigorously enforce them regardless of who breaks them. "Do you know who I am?" should be met with "Yes, and you ought to know better than to have broken that law, so you should get stricter punishment, not a free pass."

Currently the US federal government has way too much power and money, and the president controls way too large a percentage of that power and money. It makes presidential elections way too tempting a target for any sociopath to resist. So the only question is who is the most sociopathic and willing to go to the greatest lengths to get that position. I'm way less concerned about a sociopath winning a seat on the local town council or even mayor or governor.

Maybe "philosophical" isn't quite the right word, so let me put it another way. You say you value people, specifically you wrote "I think that people are valuable, and knowledge is valuable." So let's put a number on it. I'm a person. If I create a bitcoin wallet what number are you willing to transfer into my wallet to represent how much you claim to value people?

Or when you say "I think that people are valuable" are you referring to some definition of "valuable" that doesn't mean "worth a lot of money"? Because "worth a lot of money" definitely is one definition of the word "valuable", but I think you're using it to mean something totally unrelated. I referred to that totally unrelated definition as "philosophical" but I'd be willing to accept another word as long as we can agree that it is a second definition that is completely unrelated to the first definition.

Some people are "valuable" in the sense that I would be willing to pay them a lot of money. Other people are "valuable" but I wouldn't pay them any money.

If I met you in person and you weren't immediately offensive I might buy you a beer. I wouldn't buy you a college education. If the college education is "valuable" to you in either sense of the word then you should pay for it. If your college education is "valuable" in the financial sense of the word then maybe I'll end up paying you for the services you can provide as a result of that education. But you shouldn't expect other people to pay for your education if it is only "valuable" to you in the non-financial sense.

Don't confuse the two definitions and think that because your education is valuable to you in a non-financial sense that other people should be compelled to pay for it in the financial sense.

And if you paid for it yourself (or if your parents paid for it) that's great. But if your degree was enriching to you but other people were forced to pay for your enrichment then that's less great. My grandfather was enrolled in classes from his eighties and nineties because education is enriching, but he had the money to be able to pay for it. I would strongly encourage everyone to get any education that they can afford to pay for.

They are, but the word "valuable" has two different and mostly unrelated meanings. You're referring to an abstract philosophical value. But the word "valuable" also refers to how much a person is willing to pay for a thing. People aren't always willing to pay money for the things they consider philosophically valuable.

If your degree has great financial value then you wouldn't need somebody else to pay for it.

The disconnect comes when you say something has great philosophical value but you can't or won't pay the financial cost of it. Your assessment of the financial value is different than your assessment of the philosophical value. You say it has great value (referring to philosophical) but when presented with the bill you suddenly don't think it's that valuable (referring to your willingness to pay). Or maybe more simply, you think that because something has great value to you, somebody else should be willing to buy it for you.

"assigned to them"? What an absurd phrase. They bought it, they paid for it. They may have paid to have it built in the first place. Or they may have paid someone else who paid to have it built and only did so because they were confident that they'd be able to sell it when they wanted to. Maybe they inherited it from somebody who bought or built it, confident that they'd be able to leave it to their children after their death.

Landlords don't have property "assigned to them". Where did you ever get that notion? Nobody would ever buy or build anything as expensive as a house or an apartment building if they thought it could be taken from them without compensation. Buildings exist ONLY because the people building them and the people contracting for them to be built are confident in the existence of property rights that guarantee that the building can be exchanged for money, whether rent or sale, at the owner's discretion.

If you take away the confidence that the owner of a building can exchange it for money, whether in the form of rent or sale, then you destroy the construction industry. The residential construction industry simply cannot exist if people who would pay for residential construction believe the legal system won't support their plan to exchange a building for money.

Also, the statement "a landlord doesn't do any labor" shows a profound ignorance of landlords. A really staggering level of ignorance that really really raises the question of how can a person be so fantastically ignorant.

But you can choose not to become a doctor, or a construction worker or a water treatment plant worker.

If it becomes possible to demand certain goods and services with no obligation to pay for them just by saying "it's a human right to receive that good or service" and no recourse for the provider of the goods and services when people flagrantly take what they "need" with no intention of paying, than it'll become obvious that those are the sort of goods and services that nobody should go into a career of providing.

Confiscating the work and property of people who currently have it is pretty much a one time thing. After you've made it clear that anyone providing those things is subject to having them confiscated without compensation, you pretty much kill any future hope of new people going into those lines of business, and anybody who can get out of those lines of business will be looking for alternatives.

If you're satisfied with never another apartment building being built, and with never a house being built without the future resident paying in full in advance, then go ahead and try to make it legal to for any current occupant to stop paying and claim that their current occupancies justifies their forever future occupancy.

But if you think it might be nice for new buildings to get built, don't try to justify why the moment somebody moves into it, the people who paid for it to be built have no recourse to compel payment from the people who will live in it.