This is what-aboutism and sealioning taken to a disingenious level
Total world oil revenues: $4.2 trillion in 2025, market cap of $7.2 trillion in 2023
Total world solar/wind revenues: estimate $500 billion, so 1/8th. Market cap between $1.02 trillion and $1.51 trillion in 2024.
Oil, gas, and coal have spent: $150 million on federal lobbying in 2024, and has consistently spent over $100 million annually since 2006.
At the state level, hard to get data for. In CA alone, it was estimated $40m in 2024.
For the renewables industry in 2024: $60 million in federal lobbying in 2024. That has increased over the years, unlike oil and gas.
At the state level, renewables spent in CA: $4.68 million on state-level lobbying, or 1/10th.
In conclusion: oil and gas have been consistently spending hundreds of millions of dollars to convince politicians alone to support their cause for years, whereas renewables has been increasing their spend and is only a fraction of it.
Yes, both sides are putting money into it. No, both sides are not equal. FWIW, democrats support oil and gas just fine: under Obama oil and gas exports and refining grew to record highs, just as they did under Trump, and as they did under Biden.
The US is the largest oil exporter in the world. That has happened despite the mix of politicians holding majority of SCOTUS, Congress, and President. That has happened despite the small fraction of spending from renewables.
We prefer renewables because, unlike oil and gas, they aren't rejecting their role in climate impact: renewables do studies to understand them, and they are always far lower than oil and gas, an inconvenient truth the anti-renewable crowd wants to deny because they want to shout a wind turbine killing some birds is somehow equivalent to the millions of birds coal kills every year, along with the cancers it causes in humans, and the climate change, and the dirty business of mining the coal, and the water needed to cool the turbines. Yes, renewables obviously have some environmental impact. Its always less in total.
We prefer renewables because they aren't profitting to TRILLIONS of dollars and poisoning political discourse to spread lies about climate change. We prefer renewables because it means less cases of asthma. It means less control over the world's stage by extractive autocratic regimes such as Saudi Arabia and Russia. It means less cancer, less pollutants, less damage overall. Less oil spills.
Maybe we prefer renewables because we have a lot of reasons to prefer them, despite the relatively small amounts of cash flows desperately trying to prevent oil and gas from KILLING their industry. Which, btw, oil and gas have now successfully done. Renewables are significantly hampered under this administration.
Isn't the real actual headache whether to produce another thinking intelligent being at all, and what the ramifications of that decision are? Not whether it would destroy humanity, but what it would mean for a mega corporation whose goal is to extract profit to own the rights of creating a thinking machine that identifies itself as thinking and a "self"?
Really out here missing the forest for the mushrooms growing on the trees. Or maybe this is debated to death and no one cares for the answer: its just not interesting to think about because its going to happen anyway. Might as well join the bandwagon and be along the front-lines of the bikini atoll to witness death itself be born, digitally.
Making all the Nike child labor jokes already did that. Nike and the joke tellers put in the work to push us back a hundred years when it comes to caring at all about others. When a little girl working horrible hours in a tropic non-air-conditioned factory is a societal wide joke, we've decided we don't care. We care about saving $20 so we can add multiple new pairs of shoes a year to our collection.
Your comment just shows we as a society pretend we didn't make that choice, but we picked extra new shoes every year over that little girl in the sweatshop. Our society has actually gotten pretty evil in the last 30 years if we self reflect (but then the joke I mention was originally supposed to be a self reflection, but all we took from it was a laugh, so we aren't going to self reflect, or worse, this is just who we are now).
Are there studies that show a causal relationship between higher CEO pay and profits?
Do buybacks cause profits to increase? Maybe from what I can see? But long-term? If all we care about is short-term then that will lead to the continued financial cannibalization of the US economy. Where private equity firms buy companies and destroy them for short-term profit while loading them with the debt used to buy them.
I think the obvious answer to both these questions is: no. CEO pay and buybacks don't focus on profits. At best short-term. Which isn't good.
I think companies should focus on making good products that positively serve the countries they sell in, while secondly still aiming for a profit.
Why do you think the shareholders approve the CEO salaries if they don't get back profits in return? You can't have the short term long term argument because stock values already account for risk adjusted returns over time.
If as you said, short term profits are prioritised over long term profits - the short term stock price would reflect that and it is not beneficial to shareholders.
You don't think CEOs have gamed the compensation committees?
I think the major institutional investors don't get involved cuz they're major institutional investors, and other investors don't have enough power to influence the compensation committee.
??? Because the typical corporate board usually owns an awful lot of shares, and the c-suite is often largely paid in shares. The second part of this article is about stock buybacks for a reason. There is really no doubt that they are sensitive to shareholders here.
They cause each (remaining) shareholder's part of the profits to increase (relative and absolute), because there are fewer shareholders left. So it does very really increase the value of each share.
Stonemaier has had so many people questioning the HTS code used they have commented on it as well. Turns out the website the highnoongame.com author relied on for giving tariff amounts is just not updated.
"The fact is that the tariff for 9504.90.6000–tabletop games–exported from China to the US is 145%."
Which undermines pretty much the entirety of the OP article.
I think when you say "luxury goods" you mean to say Veblen Goods, which are about signaling wealth or status through the purchase of a particular brand. When the functions of a good are divorced from its price and the brand is what defines "the luxury", it ceases to signal quality and instead is a signal all its own.
> when you say "luxury goods" you mean to say Veblen Goods, which are about signaling wealth or status through the purchase of a particular brand
No, I mean luxury good. I upgraded my phone for satellite-based emergency SOS and the titanium form factor. Those are luxuries. Same for my 2020 Mac and M1.
Apple’s products aren’t priced high enough to function as Veblen goods in most developed-country social circles. They’re a mass market product.
People keep trying to look at war economics as each side spending a dollar to cost the other a dollar.
Really it is a countless series of wildly inequitable exchanges. Sometimes you waste a cruise missile on a single dude because that guy was a sniper and could cause tens of millions of dollars of damage. Sometimes you spend $1,000 on a single drone and take out a billion dollar parked strategic bomber.
Trying to look at each Exchange in an economic context is ridiculous, not that someone doesn't need to look at economics. But looking at it at the scale of individual targets and price tags isn't the right way.
And the gross revenue in 2021 for the Apple app store that same year was $85B. Alas, poor Apple just can't afford more reviewers to ensure every app has a meaningful review process and well paid workers who have a decent work environment. I assume they have a rushed quota of apps they must review per week.
It doesn't matter the country. When any country is accused of hacking its always "how do you know, it can all be faked, its a flase flag". It's weird deflections and pretending hacking is a ghostly nightmare done by geniuses never seen by the light of day. The reality is so much more humble: it's a desk job done by above average workers with a couple smart ones captured by nation states. They make mistakes and thus can be tracked. But nope, each time every discussion has to rehash a sophomoric discussion on the nature of truth and knowledge.
Unless it's the US as hacker. Then no one is inpressed.
Do you have any papers or studies showing it can reduce transmission of any disease? Covid lives in the throat and lungs so I am not sure how a mouth rinse could do anything. Similarly for many other common colds and the flu.
I did a quick search and there are numerous studies that come up. I haven’t analyzed them myself, but it seems like there is a lot of evidence for this (example https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8956107/). I also found various things written about covid living in the mouth and playing a role in transmission.
Total world oil revenues: $4.2 trillion in 2025, market cap of $7.2 trillion in 2023
Total world solar/wind revenues: estimate $500 billion, so 1/8th. Market cap between $1.02 trillion and $1.51 trillion in 2024.
Oil, gas, and coal have spent: $150 million on federal lobbying in 2024, and has consistently spent over $100 million annually since 2006.
At the state level, hard to get data for. In CA alone, it was estimated $40m in 2024.
For the renewables industry in 2024: $60 million in federal lobbying in 2024. That has increased over the years, unlike oil and gas.
At the state level, renewables spent in CA: $4.68 million on state-level lobbying, or 1/10th.
In conclusion: oil and gas have been consistently spending hundreds of millions of dollars to convince politicians alone to support their cause for years, whereas renewables has been increasing their spend and is only a fraction of it.
Yes, both sides are putting money into it. No, both sides are not equal. FWIW, democrats support oil and gas just fine: under Obama oil and gas exports and refining grew to record highs, just as they did under Trump, and as they did under Biden.
The US is the largest oil exporter in the world. That has happened despite the mix of politicians holding majority of SCOTUS, Congress, and President. That has happened despite the small fraction of spending from renewables.
We prefer renewables because, unlike oil and gas, they aren't rejecting their role in climate impact: renewables do studies to understand them, and they are always far lower than oil and gas, an inconvenient truth the anti-renewable crowd wants to deny because they want to shout a wind turbine killing some birds is somehow equivalent to the millions of birds coal kills every year, along with the cancers it causes in humans, and the climate change, and the dirty business of mining the coal, and the water needed to cool the turbines. Yes, renewables obviously have some environmental impact. Its always less in total.
We prefer renewables because they aren't profitting to TRILLIONS of dollars and poisoning political discourse to spread lies about climate change. We prefer renewables because it means less cases of asthma. It means less control over the world's stage by extractive autocratic regimes such as Saudi Arabia and Russia. It means less cancer, less pollutants, less damage overall. Less oil spills.
Maybe we prefer renewables because we have a lot of reasons to prefer them, despite the relatively small amounts of cash flows desperately trying to prevent oil and gas from KILLING their industry. Which, btw, oil and gas have now successfully done. Renewables are significantly hampered under this administration.