This is where windfall taxes come back into basic utility. Also it becomes the basis for antitrust action on price collusion if all the sellers coordinate

One interesting corollary to the bicameral mind theory is that our brains have multiple sentient centers to them- that in turn might explain that feeling of struggling with a decision and being able to see the same thing from more than one point of view. It also explains why different parts of the brain light up in different situations

It shouldn’t be, but enough people are either ignorant that it’s a racket or they profit somehow by it that nobody says anything, or they’ll call you a damned commie if you openly question powerful people like that

I got tired of seeing my teflon-coated pans wear out like that or lose their non-stickiness, it bothered me to realize that the ‘premium cookware’ I was buying was temporary trash I’d need to replace every couple of years.

I retired my teflon cookware and now have just steel and cast iron (and ceramic-coated cast iron) and I don’t miss teflon-coated cookware at all.

Sure, sometimes I end up with stuff stuck to my pans, but realistically that was true with my ‘non-stick’ pans as well. The nice thing about cast iron and steel is that with use, they seem to get better, whereas the teflon pans start out nice but deteriorate in the way they work. When I do end up with stuff stuck to the pan, I can scrub that clean in a few seconds with a steel scrubber or scraper, whereas stuck-on stuff with teflon (the stuff the dishwasher didn’t get, anyhow), seemed to demand the extra-soft scrubber (and lots of time, because the soft scrubber doesn’t work as well).

I’ll never understand why this isn’t a bigger story- it’s literally the keys to everyone’s quality of life

It’s about time we stopped protecting Nazi politics under the rubric of ‘free speech’.

The countries that don’t do that still have freedom of expression (and they tend to have human rights protections even more expansive than ours), it’s just that it makes no logical sense to hide nazis (whose politics amount to advocating against human rights for particular people) under the skirts of human rights protections.

what Putin might possibly have over Musk’s head

Well they both had connections with Epstein and have moved in similar circles- that whole thing smells like a long-running Kompromat operation targeting top industrialists and financiers, frankly.

As for Elon’s wealth making him untouchable? My dude, leverage is a thing and he is leveraging other people’s money and as such, he depends heavily upon those arrangements staying where they are. The interest on loan he took to fund the Twitter takeover (with other people’s money) is a lot, and whether or not Twitter can cover those costs is a very real question. This looks a lot like the debt traps Trump is in- they might both have money, but their money is tied up in assets it’ll cost them something to liquidate (and which they can’t readily get more of) and when that starts to look like cycling loans around to stay liquid, that adds up to pressure.

There’s good reason to expect that Putin has some sort of hold over Trump- he fits the profile (bad at business, constantly needs money, will do anything for attention, has been mob-adjacent his whole life, has been actively groomed to be an asset by soviet-bloc intelligence services, etc).

Now that I see Elon getting the same sort of head-pat treatment, I expect he’s in similar thrall and begin to wonder if that kind of public statement from Putin is anything but a public, encoded reminder that the leash is still there and if he doesn’t behave it all comes tumbling down.

LOL self-defense is escalation now

Capitalism really is trading goods for currency, and allowing lending and investment.

That’s commerce. Commerce predates capitalism, by a lot.

Capitalism also involves other things that go beyond basic commerce, such as systems of property law to incorporate quasi-sovereignty to capital ownership. That’s more or less where we get the default model of businesses as de facto dictatorships ruled by the owner, vs. being democracies organized by stakeholders or participants. It’s a big, deep subject that’s unfortunately talked about in reductionist terms a lot. It’s probably not helpful that a lot of early (and recent) scholarship on capitalism seems to frame itself as revelation of the nature of capital and markets, as if capital and markets are natural forces and not man-made things.

This last bit- treating capital and economics as if they were laws of nature (instead of being contrived by men)- does a lot of work to obfuscate fundamental systems of power, which in turn helps keep that power unaccountable. One major source of tension between capitalism and socialism has to do with whether the sovereignty of ownership ought to be democratized or subject to democratic accountabilities.

This is where it’s time to revisit why and how the economy fared so well in the USA when high top marginal tax rates incentivized top earners (and business owners) to spend on things that got them something when the alternative was paying 90% on money above the line to be in that bracket.

When that money was spent on higher wages or hiring more people or funding pensions or on research & development, the result was growth and a prosperous middle class. The super-wealthy were still super-wealthy, the major difference was that high top marginal tax rates created incentives for them to spend their money in ways that actually did trickle down

Until we are able to sort out the cost/tech to make a green-sourced grid (such that the role of utilities is to capture surpluses from when the sun shines and the wind blows and sell it back when transient sources aren’t producing) nuclear is going to be an important part of a non-carbon-producing energy portfolio.

Already it’s cheaper to bring new solar and wind online than any other sort of electrical production; the fact that those are transient supply sources is the last major obstacle to phasing carbon fuels entirely out of the grid. If nuclear can be brought safely online it could mean pushing the use of fossil energy entirely into use cases where energy density is critical (like military aviation)

Well, yeah. Everyone has the right to make bad decisions

This was 100% predictable

Y’know, if you’re going to spend the money anyways, just subsidize the sellers for the season and let them cut costs to the point that demand tips up. That way they’ll make some money themselves and learn for the next season where the price point is.

All paying to destroy it in order to keep prices up does is… keep it expensive above what the market will bear and cost the taxpayers while making them thirsty and sad

There were families that made Bezos-class money at the height of slavery, and those families’ descendants are still rich today.

At the very least, these families shouldn’t be anonymously rich, they should be infamously rich, notoriously so. Even if a truth-and-reconciliation process is ‘too much’, let us at least have the truth out, and loud.

Maybe you don’t think you have anything to hide today, but what about the future? Millions of women gave their period-tracking apps that kind of personal/private data when Roe was in effect because at the time, states couldn’t use it to prosecute women who miscarry or get abortions. Now that Roe is gone, that data is out there and can’t be recalled.

By the same token, everyone who went out and got a 23-and-me genetic test gave their genomes to private companies who can legally sell that information to insurance companies that can use that information to hike their premiums or terminate their policies if they think your genes predispose you to some expensive-to-treat condition. Also those family trees don’t lie about whose kids are the product of adultery, hahahahaha

You do have things to hide in the sense that they’re nobody else’s business.

Also, some countries have established digital privacy as a right (in particular, EU countries) and that’s not just about protecting your dirty stinky secrets, it’s also about preventing social media being weaponized as political or information warfare vectors based on private information obtained without your consent. (the same profiling used to target relevant commercial ads to you is also usable to target information warfare and propaganda to your susceptible relatives, and they vote in addition to giving racist rants at holiday dinner)

In other words, your privacy is intrinsically valuable- if it wasn’t, exploiting your private information wouldn’t be a multi-billion-dollar industry

Could we possibly stop appointing neoliberal boomers that haven’t had an original political idea since McGovern to nation-leading posts please? That right there might help the US dramatically, especially in terms of restoring balance to economic and climate policy.

If the US was willing to lead an effort to tax polluting industry and direct the funds from that towards clean tech or energy transition, much of the rest of the world that matters would probably be willing to come along, but signals like this one from Kerry just tell the world that the US doesn’t have the moral courage to even stop subsidizing fossil energy that hasn’t needed subsidies for decades

The kinds of rhetoric CCC uses to influence EU policy bears a striking resemblance to the populist rhetoric that was so successful in getting US voters to demand the privatization/dismantling of the public regulatory state. In essence it boils down to arguing that Brussels, like Washington DC, shouldn’t have the power to regulate businesses on behalf of its citizens because it should be left to consumers to make those decisions on their own.

This sort of rhetoric presents itself as being about empowering the individual, but when the individual is then free to choose from options that are harmful to important things like public health or the environment, are they really better-served when consumers making those retail choices in an unregulated business environment causes serious problems? Is that a sufficient reason for non-regulation of polluting industry, or against the right of the EU to regulate business on behalf of its citizenry?

When you consider that populist appeals to rugged individualism and non-regulation have consistently led to markets with glaring externalities and monopolism where they have been applied, it looks very much like when Koch dollars are spent to influence politics it’s entirely an exercise in subverting the ability of nations to regulate business that would much rather not be regulated no matter how harmful its externalities might be.

Isn’t that just what a robot that secretly has plans to do that would say?