So, yes, you agree the "faster" market will produce a larger quantity of sugar pill fraud because you are so willing to dismiss it as "obvious", yet you won't acknowledge the other kinds of near equivalent fraud such as silver pills, horse dewormers, and more.
Sure, sometimes the FDA is slow to approve drugs that have science behind them. Or from other countries that proved efficacy and safety. But frankly people can already do whatever they want with regards to health. The wellness and alternative medicine industry is larger than the actual pharmaceutical industry. Your fears are unfounded.
No you can't do whatever you want. I have narcolepsy. There is currently a drug in development that is known to work (TAK-861). My doctor is involved in the research. It works so well that in phase 2 trials they couldn't keep them blind because the research subjects know instantly that they got the real medicine. My doctor would have prescribed it to me a year ago if he could. But he couldn't because the worthless bureaucrats at the FDA won't allow him to. I will have to suffer for another year before I can get it because of this bureaucracy. There is ample data published so far to show safety and effectiveness on top of the advice of my doctor. But I can't get it because of these worthless safetyist bureaucrats and their endless process and procedure. I demand to be treated like an adult and be allowed to judge the data for myself and take the risk rather than have the decision made for me by a bunch of government stooges. And on top of that, the drug will be much more expensive than it has to be because Takeda has to spend so much more money developing it. So I lose two ways.
I think every engineer knows that all things come with trade-offs.
A great engineer, however, is able to readily admit when one option among others has a far, far greater set of costs than another, for the exact same benefit.
And if said engineer can't decide (for claim of ignorance), they mature to learn that the experience and knowledge of others is the best source for understanding the trade-offs involved to make a decision.
I think its pretty clear solar power has trade-offs. I think it's also obvious solar has far less negatives than all other power generating sources.
Interesting that just sharing a link of the trade-offs got a bunch of down votes when I didn't even take a side.
Maybe it was a misunderstanding of my intentions to purely share information based on your reply.
If you don't mind, please help me understand. Did it come across as anti-solar in general? That's how I'm interpreting your reply.
The article, which I wonder if anyone read, argues local environmental concerns based on the giant size of the solar farm. One of those things was mountain sheep that migrate across the lands. This would be creating a wall of sorts. Another was Native American archeology. What I'm ignorant of is if any of these issues were addressed at all & what the impact is.
In a general sense, I'm a huge fan of solar farms. I think they make more sense than using land to plant corn for energy, which funny enough also got me down votes here.
I didn't downvote or anything, but I read the article a few hours ago and felt the information in that article is only political. If we're talking about destruction, ecological or of heritage, your choice not in whether it happens, but how much and where. Consequently, I feel that the stated reasons of political action groups are usually myopic at best. But really, I always suspect they're speaking in bad faith.
If you really care about animals, plants, or archeology, you're probably not a fan of coal or natural gas, which are obviously destructive of geology and habitats, and that's _without_ getting into more nebulous and catastrophic climate stuff.
I tried digging deeper into understanding the opposition's arguments. I do understand my article was light on details & as you stated, fairly politicized arguments.
Based on my research, 1/3 of the land that would have had major construction disturbances effecting plants & archeology. A fair counter argument is that construction crews deal with archeology all the time. I would also assume it should be fairly easy to take rare plants into account & make sure there is an equal amount grown & taken care of after construction is completed. I don't know what plants they are concerned about, but solar farms do improve a lot of vegetation by offering shade & reducing evaporation.
The entire area was to be fenced off which would prevent big horn sheep migration. It seems no pathways were offered to be built to help with migration of animals. This seems like something that could be fairly easy to do though it would add expense of fencing & reduce some solar panels possibly.
"When I didn't even take a side" sea-lioning and worse is so prevalent with regards to solar, wind, and climate change that frankly if you are going to link dump without much of your own input, it's going to be written off as disingenuous.
So many people constantly talk about the costs of solar. If that is all you are contributing to the discussion, you aren't adding much new or interesting, in my opinion.
As an aside, I also just generally hate when commentors link to stuff with nothing else. It feels smug. Start the discussion you want to spark with honesty and earnest thoughts. Those who "just ask questions" engage in this same tactic to derail topics and pretend like they didn't take any side. Just "linking to useful information". What's useful about it? Highlight something to start discussion.
I am not claiming you are doing these things. But surely you are aware of and can appreciate the tactics of those that spread misinformation.
That's fair & I get your point. Thank you. The parent link was really light on details. My link gave some opposition reasons but I could have summed them up or dug into them better. Since it's a very local issue, I assumed getting real info would be challenging without digging into local government minutes.
While I was just trying to help understand some opposing reasons, you're right that it didn't add much to the overall discussion.
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.
Sure, sometimes the FDA is slow to approve drugs that have science behind them. Or from other countries that proved efficacy and safety. But frankly people can already do whatever they want with regards to health. The wellness and alternative medicine industry is larger than the actual pharmaceutical industry. Your fears are unfounded.