Comments by "looseycanon" (@looseycanon) on "VisualEconomik EN"
channel.
-
158
-
95
-
69
-
26
-
The bond option is nonsense. We need more farmers in the EU, because, already, larger farming conglomerates have way too much power over price of their products (on top of getting subsidies). If a farmer is permitted to leave his farm, who's gonna take over? Yes, the big firms. This is nonsense, really.
No, what we need, are different kinds of subsidies, that target different aspects of farming and forestry (frankly, I believe, that it is inevitable, that these two will merge, given they both deal with land and current ecological bias in politics). We need subsidies for reforestation, land adaptation, machinery purchases and development of up the value chain projects (a farm growing cows for milk to be able to make milk products, or to tan the leather they get from their cows upon slaughter and process it all the way into shoes or car seats, etc.). All else needs to go. And then, we need to change the environment, that we operate in. Louis Rossmann has beaten the horse of right to repair to the death multiple times already, but we need to make machinery self repairable and simpler to operate (I'm looking at you John Deer, I'm looking at you!). We also need to end current system of patents on crops. Because of them, if you seed crops, you can't make your own new seed out of your own harvest, because some company holds the patent to that DNA! Crazy! And finally, if somebody decides to become a farmer, he/she needs assurances, that if things go sideways, they won't end up on the streets, as well, that when they need a loan for something, they won't get refused in the beginnings, because they have nothing to show for them selves for now.
And finally, animal cruelty laws need to be revisited, for they have overreached into normal practices, sometimes, even because they were not particularly cruel, but they seemed as such.
23
-
23
-
There is a problem with VAT and other consumption taxes, when you have large population centers near a border. Take map of Czech Republic. Cities like Cheb, Ústí nad Labem, Liberec, Opava or the entire Ostrava metropolitan area sit so close to border, that a trip accross can all expenses included be less costly than buying in the city itself, especially if there were common currency in both countries, as that would remove volatility of exchange rate from the calculation. As there are no international payment fees on cards in Europe, you can imagime, just how many people make occasional trips to Poland or even Germany for durables.
Then there are property taxes, which have the problem of trickling down onto the tenants, which tend to be the poorer members of society, so it hit's them disproportionately more, because the landlord can move ideally to a border town of a country with high consumption tax and low property tax. This works even domestically in case of Czech Republic, because certain cities have tax multipliers associated with them (spa cities, the capitol and based on population), meaning a man can make this multiplier differential rather big, if he choses to live in a village near a city and doesn't need to make trips to the city too often, or if he makes them for other reasons (sunk costs).
And then you have the overall tax burden, which is also a problem.
on cards in Europe, you can imagime, just how many people make occasional trips to Poland or even Germany for durables and why there was a train service from.
21
-
14
-
While I would agree with you on points (1) and (2) to be a problem, point (3) is not. Just look at the Internet, which has changed to the point, it is unrecognizable. Polish Railways had problems recently with some of their DMUs, because of a software update and the ability of their supplier to change contract post sale (Louis Rossmann had a video on this) and lock their property over the Internet. You have companies these days turning everything into subscriptions instead of innovating and creating products and new uses for their existing products to sell to customers. All they are trying to innovate, is the means of monetization, which doesn't provide new value. In current climate thinking first "how will this screw me over" is the right approach. Sure you don't adopt industry breaking technologies, but you also dodge bullets like Theranos and soon to be Tesla, which is clinically dead without subsidies. As for (4), highways are good. They're in better state than most places I've been to, and I've been to a lot of places. Those are not a problem. The railway though... Railway had caught a virus of bullshit ideas such as high speed rail and now, they're paying the price. Instead of focusing on volume of cargo moved by rail, building up marshaling yards and loading yards, all of Europe has decided, that rail can compete with air, which outside of overnight trains is truly idiotic idea, and focused on high speed interconnects of large cities. Instead of laying third of fourth rail, they've decided to increase speed, which is only usable by passenger trains and therefore the increase of maintenance costs have to be born by passengers alone, because freight doesn't need that speed. Instead of making the passenger trains longer by utilizing through coaches, they focused on speed. Therefore, I'd contend, that Germany, nay all of Europe, doesn't have a problem with the volume of investment, but rather, incorrect focusing of said investment.
11
-
Here is an alternative. As long as work can be done from a computer, make it mandatory home office? This way, people can move into the countryside, further away from the cities and commute not for work, but for leasure. Affordable housing? Well, countryside is more affordable than the city. You need a personal car anyway, if you want to hold down a job (your boss will not care, you missed the bus, or that you'll have to wait for an hour after the shift ends for the return trip. Furthermore, bosses will never pay you for the time spent on commuting to and from work, even though that could be considered work activity, as you are moving to the place, where you do what you do) even in a city, so you'll have to have it. The difference is, by working from home, you're no longer a daily driver, you're a weekly driver. Meaning you'd also cut CO2 emmissions without pissing off half the electorate... Win for the worker, win for the family, win for the environment and the only one, who looses out on this, are micromanaging managers, who'll lose their primary justification for existing, meaning the companies will come leaner.
10
-
One, never think, that people don't get jobs. They do eventually, you just don't see it. Two, maybe do something about hiring by companies. I live in Czechia, I'm sending out resume like crazy and can't get anyone to respond to me, all the while I hear, how there is general shortage of accountants, which is my field. I am responding even to racks from Austria and Slovakia too and I'm getting same old same old, so this is at very least regional, not national problem. For years now, I have seen companies whining about not being able to hire anyone and how the talent pool is small, but yet they refuse someone, who has a degree in relevant field and actually wants to do the job. Conclusion?
10
-
Student loans is a trap, even with conditions presented. The way I see it, let the uni be free, paid for with taxes. Rather, boost it a bit more. Provide additional assistance to people, who are of low disposable income (eg. income after base necessities like housing or food and medicine are met) and provide them with laptops (Yes, for first half of first semester, I did not have a PC and then I bought a computer, that was literally falling apart) and alter tax system, so that it is more progressive. You see, this could be seen as problem of taxation. What taxes are collected, which demographics pay the most? If tax system is progressive and education system, through it's characteristics is regressive, these effects can be evened out. Education has become a necessity for a lot of fields, because there are not many alternatives to university degree or there are regulations, which bar entry in to particular fields.
For instance, you could be forced to pass a school leaving exam in electronics or get a bachelor's degree, just to run a wire as a network engineer. The rest, you can learn by watching channels like Crosstalk Solutions or Willie Howe. And this is telling, because, while you'll learn the meat of the field on youtube, you can't do your job, without the ability to run a wire and that needs a degree and working experience either directly in the field or as electrician (at least that is the situation in Czechia), meaning you're locked in to education. The way, how job market is developing, degrees are becoming more and more of a necessity, because simple work is being replaced by machines and more complex work requires education. The trend seems to be only heading towards more and more education intense fields, at least for human work. And now add on top of that, that attending a uni would either get more expensive, or in order to get "free" education, you'd have to jump through bureaucratic hoops, at the end of which, nothing is guaranteed. No, making education paid for, in spite of presented evidence, is not a good idea. Further research is necessary, because, while some root causes were clearly identified, I don't think it's all of them.
10
-
There are three key ingredients for high speed train, to be successful.
1) High wages in economy, because to get the speeds necessary, maintenance of infrastucture and trains them selves is enormous.
2) High population density. You want the train to lose as little time on accelerating and decelerating, while picking up maximum amount of people along the route.
3) Restrictive geography, denying the populace the ability to disperse them selves.
Here comes, what I believe kills high speed rail anywhere outside of Japan and possibly Italy. If you look at Japan, you see islands of elongated shape. Most people live along the cost in huge cities that are not that far away from each other. Italy has similar shape but not the same density. This is why there is chance for profitability in these places, but not elsewhere, that is more "round" like, like Germany or Poland, where people have more space to disperse. Planes don't need so much infrastructure and don't need to share it with others, hence, why they are the better choice for long distance travel... unless you're traveling overnight at regular speeds that is, but let's not get ahead of ourselves...
If you want to see long haul trains in general, you need to look to Russia, which is underdeveloped, needs to bring in raw resources from distant places in Siberia to their demographic center in their European part of the country, where majority of them live and passanger trains are an afterthought (as far as civilian use is concerned), or India, which has very low incomes, is somewhat underdeveloped areas interlaced with highly developed centers (for reference, watch Chirs Tarrant's Extreme railways episode about Konkan Railway, somewhat dated, but shows the concept)
9
-
Fun fact, years ago, I set my dad with a bank, and I specifically explained to the bank, they need to issue him a MasterCard, because he needed to pay in Germany a lot and Visa was basically unheard off in Germany at the time. Well, a year later, the bank switched and, what followed was five years of praying, whether locals accept Visa. Things are fortunately better now. These days, if you pay by credit card, you get charged an extra fee for it... (happened to me recently)
8
-
there is consumption tax on fuel, so use of vehicle pays for itself in this regard. Not to mention, that even this tax is again taxed for VAT. We could discuss, just how much this tax should be and whether proceeds from that tax should be strictly allocated to car infrastructure projects, but to say, that street also needs maintenance, which needs to be paid is dumb, cause it is being already paid twice, in nations, where on street parking is allowed only for those, who've paid, three times.
7
-
Guess what made the mindset of "eco friendly bike lanes" possible... It's the fact, that those nations are rich as F and flat as justice. Netherlands is crazy, when it comes to car regulation, btw. You can only have extremely small engine, if you want to pay reasonable mandatory insurance. I'm talking less than two liters (which causes accidents, cause you don't have the power you need to safely overtake, but let's move on, nothing to see here)... unless you go full hog and buy a proper muscle car, because at that point, your consumption is so high, you're exempt from the environmental part of that insurance, because you effectively pay it in fuel taxes. Insane.
7
-
5
-
5
-
5
-
5
-
5
-
I do spot some problems.
1) Thinking, that housing can be fixed by high density is simply nonsense. We're dealing with population aging and that we can only solve it by having children (at least in the long term), which however needs housing to be of particular type, eg. single family homes with a large enough back yard, at least according to Peter Zeihan. I can say, that people around me indeed didn't start having kids until they've managed to live with their spouses in houses of their own. High density housing would not solve the island's issue, as it discourages childbearing rather, it would transform one problem inter intensity of another and that is no solution. You don't solve an issue by creating another one. The approach needs to be holistic
2) I recall Neil Degrase Tyson being interviewed (I believe by Joe Rogan) on desalinization deployment and according to him, prices of water and shipping are too low to make desalinization viable. It also explains, where we find the most of these plants. In petro-monarchies of the Gulf, which have both the need for water and income from natural resources to justify the investment. To them is desalinization question of water autonomy then. It's different, when you can't afford something and when you can, but don't need to. Also, desalinated water cannot be used for some applications without further treatment, such as in agriculture, which would either require this extra treatment or parallel infrastructure for this lower quality water, both of which ramp the costs up.
3) changing the islands into industrial economies wouldn't be easy, even if the nimby problem wasn't present here. Canarys are off the coast of Africa fair bit of distance from the Spanish mainland and more importantly, the rest of the EU. Shipping is very cheap these days, but that is thanks to scale of shipping done. Would each island be able to produce enough of industrial output and consume enough goods to justify at least a weekly visit by a Panamax to take advantage of the low shipping prices and thus be competitive on the market with the least barriers of entry? You could argue, that the islands could produce strictly for exports to African nations, but that has it's disadvantages too, not to mention that the goods in the other direction would also not be supplied that easily, hence lower incentive for shipping to the islands, hence higher prices, hence lower competitiveness... I am not convinced of viability of such measure.
Taking everything into consideration, making the area into IT hub is likely the only sustainable way to go, because it doesn't need that much more inputs, but there we have that Nimby problem again...
5
-
5
-
@abedmarachli7345 Not necessarily, we Czechs have pubs because of beer and thanks to pubs, we are, as Tomáš Sedláček put it a well pierced through society thanks to that. In that same pub, at that same table, I an executive (well former) sit with local mayor, a doctor from a nearby hospital, a garbage man, an entrepreneur, a prostitute (not currently with a client), a priest from a nearby church. We sit at one table and discuss stuff drinking half liters of beer. Thanks to this, we, even though we're from different socioeconomic layers of society, have understanding for one another, because that beer makes us come to the pub, meet and talk. Can it get sometimes heated sure. Can you drink too much and end up in a hospital? Oh absolutely, but in moderation... I like the name alcohol got in Westerns in Czech dub, the "Fire water". Because it's very much like fire. A good servant, when drunk responsibly, but a very bad master, if you lose control.
5
-
4
-
4
-
Advantages of cities are nice, but not infinite. Covid taught us, that we can, even with modest internet speed, learn equally well in the sticks as in cities. Same can be the case for work, if legislation get's put in place, that would empower the employee to chose, where he'll be working from, as long as it doesn't change his/her tax residency. The problem here is, that employers want employees back in the office, because employee with autonomy is dangerous one to them. With more and more digitalization coming, fewer and fewer jobs will need be done in person on site, which could erode this advantage of the city, which is even further compounded by increasing city hostility to cars, which are the bridges between relatively cheaper housing of the countryside and better wages of cities for in person jobs.
I call into question two things. Willingness of employers to pay and actually compeet for employees and housing wage to cost of living ratio. I live in Czech Republic and here is something, that I have observed. Companies have been crying crocodile tears for years now, how low unemployment we have and that we need more immigration. While we certainly do need more incoming people given our birth rate, even before the pandemic, we've had prices for a lot of goods and services comparable with Germany and Austria, yet our minimal wage is among the lowest in the EU and very few companies offer actually livable wages (I have two cats, don't own a car, game on rather old PC and can't pay rent alone. Have to live with my parents, while earning nearly median salary and having close to no expenses) and I haven't seen much in terms of wage growth even before covid, when economists were warning of overheated markets (both labor and real estate). however, if that were the case, I'd expect double digit growths in salaries year on year without corresponding rise in consumer prices and more importantly, fewer and fewer jobs starting at minimum wage. That has failed to materialize. There is an interview (sadly only in Czech) here on youtube on Český Rozhlas plus youtube channel, which points to a fact, that even through five years of sustained meteoric growth of our GDP, emplooyers remained complaicant with wages and benefits (Analytik: Firmy nabízejí minimální mzdu a diví se nezájmu), particularly pointing out, how many companies offered minimum wage as starting jobs even for qualified positions like accountants. Really the only outliers there were IT jobs and those, professions, which were both in short supply and can be spun up into a business of their own relatively easily (especially electricians). Meanwhile, property and housing prices have been soaring, out growing wages in significatn measure.
Really, the video has wibes of looking only at nominal data. I'd want to see comparison, where measurement unit wouldn't be a Dollar value, but rather number of time unites spent to secure equivalent goods and services in the city and in the countryside. I think, that assumption, that city is better, would get overturned.
4
-
Get this, in banking, if you want to establish a bank account as an arms manufacturer or reseller, you're considered a high risk client and are likely to deny any service. And the banks go way beyond regulation here. Another problem is, how and who the banks are willing to lend money. I have a friend, who had a cat café a while back. She applied for a business loan. Sixty papers in and eight visits to the bank later, she was refused, citing her business was too risky... so, she asked for a consumer loan and she was approved in thirty minutes. We need regulation, that would force onto the banks structure of loans given, to steer money into business venture. Not personal consumption! That should be covered by wages, not debt.
4
-
That's actually not true. You can also add consequence in terms of fines or add policies, which would motivate other producers in to the market. Now you may be thinking, that noone would enter, because price cap doesn't allow them to make profit, but you would be wrong. Nonfinancial hurdles to enter and operate in the market also exist, which you can remove. Things like environmental protections or patents can be rolled back to allow for more productive use of assets and thus for other players to make profit even under conditions of price caps, because you've just lowered entry and operating expenses of that particular market. Another case, where price caps would actually help, is field, where demand is highly inflexible. Take housing, for instance. You might think, that nobody would build new housing, if price caps were introduced, however, thanks to that same price cap, families now have more disposable income. Some of this translates into inflation in other fields (energy, foodstuff, construction materials), but the effect is net positive, allowing the families to finally put aside for down payment on mortgage and actually build new houses them selves. Meaning the caused effect is the kind of housing, that is built.
4
-
4
-
4
-
question is, does it belong there? And if so, what about the downstream applications? Let me remind you, that refineries don't produce only gasoline! There are over 5000 products, which have crude oil as base resource, ranging from energy through plastics to medicine. Tell me, when you're virtue signalling so much. How should a child, cured with a drug made out of oil, wrapped in a plastic made from oil due to transportation and dosage concerns, transported to the hospital by ambulance using fuel made from oil at the refinery be punished for it's extraordinary carbon footprint, when pre-industrial methods, not reliant on, oil also exist?
This is just one extreme case to better understand the demonization of oil. People (and more importantly governments, which peddle the green nonsense) only see the carbon released and forget, that basically everything around us has some kind of oil product in it, even if fuel were completely abandoned!
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
@mattabouttrails Choices, which are informed, by what we're being told left and right! What was the mantra from our parents and greater society for the last forty years? Get a degree, you'll earn a better salary. How much has cost of education increased over that same period of time? Education, which is mandatory to enter certain fields, including trades! (you need a university degree and couple of years of working practice, or school leaving exam and more years of working experience, to become self employed electrician in Czechia. University degree and more years of working experience to become a safety inspector in said field)
As for housing, not every employer is willing to let you work remote and earn a decent salary, so you can operate from home, meaning even that choice is note entirely in the hands of an employee and where self employed entrepreneur does not have much more space to work either.
3
-
3
-
@asambatyon I see and raise counterpoints.
1) you still need cash. If not for other reasons, then because of your destination. Just try and visit Iran with just a credit card. I visited Netherlands a few years back. I wouldn't say, that the Netherlands are exactly lagging behind in terms of innovation. Hell, in certain fields, they're at the bleeding edge. You'd think, "I can pay with a card anywhere, right?". Well, guess what. I wanted to buy some icecream from a small shop and they refused my card, because it was a MasterCard, fortunately, I'm crazy enough to have bank with banks and one of them carried Visa, so I was able to pay, but that was my sole Visa card in a eight card setup! This is important, because most banks where I live only carry one card provider! Further more, about a decade earlier, my dad lived in Netherlands for a while. Back then, he told me the same thing about card acceptance. Either Maestro or Visa. A while later, he started trucking to Germany and at about the same time, his bank changed from MasterCard to Visa. Well, for a few years, he couldn't pay anywhere and only postal office ATMs took his card in Germany. This lasted about five years. And banking on banks, pun intended, is not as good of an idea either. Just recall the Trucker protests in Canada, where their prime minister had those protester's assets with banks frozen, to put pressure on them. It was an extreme, hopefully never to repeat again situation, but it showed the necessity of keeping some cash on hand at all times, even if everyone accept's cards.
2) while I'll admit, that pushing an update to someone over the Internet is convenient for both parties, there are problems here. What happens, when a company, that ran the servers for some kind of phone home feature, goes bankrupt and it's assets are sold off? Suddenly, your, in case of Tesla, is at best flying without updates, getting more and more vulnerlable to outside attackers, or worse, get's bricked and you'll have a very expensive paperweight. And that's just a decision by a company, what about errors? Say another Crowdstrike? Either way, you or me as customers get screwed over. We have seen this about a year ago with ANNO 2070, fortunately, the original team pushed an update and took over the server infrastrucutre, but where are guarantees, that others will follow suit? Nowhere. Another problem with pushing "update" to a device is EULA, fortunately, around here it's basically illegal to do, however, in the US, you can end up with update to EULA, forcing you into forced arbitration instead of seeking relief through the court system, and you can't decline it and continue to use a five years old TV for instance, or worse, as showed up with Disney recently, ending losing a family member in one of their parks, and Disney claiming, that because you've accepted a EULA for their subscription service, you can't sue, but have to arbitrate (this is like a year old case). The question really is not, whether software is relevant for a product, but whether it should be.The very concept of ownership is getting erroded away with these "smart" and IoT approaches. Is that worth the "convenience"? I'd argue not. Maybe those mechanical engineers see it from this angle? Maybe have a look at Louis Rossmann's channel. He's been doing videos about these "just push an update" shennaningans.
Ultimately, until approach of providers changes, taking the skeptical, nay parranoid route towards new technology adoption is the safer (ei more reliable) bet in my opinion. We don't need to adopt top of the line technologies, if outdated ones still manage to handle the tasks, they were supposed to handle. If not for other reasons, then because doing so will leave you without a backup in case of that new technology failing in some aspect. This, after all, is why, when you're shopping for a backup connection for your home/business, you don't go with Fiber/copper, because that's usually your primary. You go with a WISP, cellular, or, in case of really deep pockets, satelite/Starlink. Or why an EV is never the first car in the family... that is the old reliable petrol car. Because if the nice new one fails, you're not left in a river without a paddle.
3
-
Careful about judging "antiquated" technologies. Truth is, you don't need fiber to the premises. One, you can easily push 200 megs over telephone lines, depending on how far DSLAM is. Coax is dedicated data cable and can be superior in some applications. Hell, these days, you can buy MOCA adapters and push hundred megs at longer distances than with Ethernet. And here comes the question. Do we actually need those speeds? Get an ER-X, put it into your network, log into it and try to fully saturate your connection. You may achieve it, when installing a new game from Steam, but how often do you do that? The answer is, you don't. We don't need multigigabit to home and likely never will. Hence why these antiquated technologies persist. They are adequate to current and future needs and everybody already has the gear they need to connect to the system. Buying newer, simple cause it's newer, is waste of resources under such conditions.
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
Problem is, what supply chain issues are those issues. Most things these days are NOT made by hand, they are made with machines. Machines which rely on chips to operate. A bunch of machines failed, but due to chip shortage, there were no spare parts to fix the machines and thus those remained out of order, hence supply shortage in other fields. It works both ways really.
The war is root cause for oil prices going up, because Russia is using that as a weapon and Europe is diversifying it's suppliers, which means less oil for domestic US consumption, and since oil/LNG are used for fuel, in turn for energy, in turn for everything, everything is going to the moon. And yes, even oil drilling, transport, refinement and further fabrication are all chip dependent, meaning the long term chip shortage and lockdowns, which even further constrained supply, are felt even here. So really, do you want to point to the single common denominator? Well, for most of the things it's covid... and ambition of one senile old KGB agent.
3
-
The problem with rent controls is precisely the problem of limited supply upon creation of such policy. Hence, ALONE, these measures don't work. It needs to go hand in hand with other measures, such as empty home tax so high, the owner will put the home on the market not for rent, but for sale. Another policy, that needs to come, is relaxed zoning and REMOVING ecological requirements on new construction (idea being lowering construction costs). Also, telecommuting needs to be encouraged along with personal car ownership. The idea being, that you try to spread demand over larger area, eg. larger market, to the point, where public transport cannot provide efficiently any services.
3
-
3
-
3
-
I think, this is a mistake... Yes, world is reening itself of oil, we have incentives, yada, yada... The world will never get off oil! Even if we stop using it for fuels, there are still plastics, pharmaceuticals, fertilizers... The list is well over 10000 entries long! over 10000 kinds of products have oil in them in one form or another and Saudi Arabia has the lowest costs to extract oil on Earth. What I'd do, would be to:
1) establish a university, that would train and research stuff related to oil extraction and processing.
2) I would double down on oil processing and industrial automation. Really these days, oil is seen primarily as an energy resource. I'd flip that. I'd see it first and foremost as a manufacturing material and only and what can't be processed further would be burned. That way, SA would have abundant and basically forever cheap and secure source of resources for their products. Even if the world abandoned vast majority of products made from oil, there would still be pharmaceuticals and fertilizer, wihtout which the system will not ever work and on which Saudis would have massive advantage, given low raw material costs and cheap electricity, because they wouldn't need to import anything and burn what's now used for fuel and cannot be processed further to have their own power source. I'm not worried about climate discourse derailing this, because particularly in democracies, parents will not tolerate their children dying of smallpox, measels or anything treatable, or famine, because the nation, which produces majority of fertilizer isn't green enough. Noone is going to put tolls or sanctions on a nation producing this basic stuff over something as meager as climate change.
3) bad image cannot be overcome with PR. That is the lesson SA needs to learn and actually implement reforms. That is one thing they can't speed up. Just look at major brands and what is their reputation in spite of in some cases downright excessive PR budgets! I'm talking EA (once mark of quality, now of garbage in gaming), Blizzard (same story and to think that SC2 nearly saved them!), Ubisoft (who once ran three different DRMs on one of their games and now are actively trying to deny us owning purchased games), HP (and their printers from hell). Only genuine change can do that.
3
-
3
-
Europe needs to wake up from it's environmental fever dreams and start playing to it's strengths. The capital that is in the EU, fertile farmland and agricultural technologies, and it's location near Africa, where all those resources Europe needs are located and where there is a growing population in need of increased food supply. If Europe were to ditch it's green agenda and focused on consumption based model instead instead of exports model, using exports strictly to feed it's own consumption, we'd be much better off.
But not everything needs to be done, like they do in the US. Take unemployment, for instance. There are people, who want to work, and I do believe them to be vast majority, but companies don't hire them, because they'd need training. Well, make unemployment benefits infinite, but conditional on active job hunting, individualized, to cover job hunting expenses and rent/mortgage + basic expenses to maintain a living, and at the end of the year, bill it all to employers. The deal being, "look, you'll either hire them, or you won't either way, you'll pay for them.". That would finally put pressure on companies to hire people and to train them and down the line utilize them!
3
-
2
-
2
-
I'm sorry, US universities understood, that teaching job related stuff is necessary? That more engineers are needed, while fewer philosophers and artists are necessary? Dude two words: Women studies.
The problem is NOT the universities, the problem is the students and the pressure these students are under! When deciding our majors, very few people actually care, what they're going to study. They chose based on course's perceived difficulty and, thanks to basolutely attrocious approach to teaching math in middleschools, very few people voluntarily chose math heavy fields, which are all STEM fields. Science? Think of a field, that doesn't need advacned math. Technology? Again, math squared. Engineering? Can you design and build an aircraft carrier without math? Mathematics? Have you ever tried mathematics without math (in which case, I want the stuff you're on)? Thanks to antiquated and, frankly, forceful approach in middleschool, mathematics heavy fields are viewed as hard ones and not chosen by the students, hence there are fewer and fewer actually net contributing workers in Europe, which in turn is the first factor, why there are so few high end businesses around here. Basically everyone with good brains in their heads goes to the US to get STEM education and stays there, or move to other countries, that have lower costs of living thanks to idiocy of enrgiewende and the rest of green BS (make no mistake, this was not the war. If the war didn't come, it would have been other reason, like a Central Europe wide blackout caused by too much or too little Wind in North Germany. The war merely accelerated the problem), that is sweeping through Europe. Because of this our energy costs have skyrocketed to the point, you can't have energy intense activities in Europe, be it steel mills, IT parks or FABs, or even start a family, because you can't afford basic necessities of housing, utilities and Internet opn one income! This is the second factor, that's killing legacy industries like steel, which have their equipment written off already and are therefore financially competitive with new stuff (which is why historically we've never replaced old energy sources in their entirety, rather, we added more modern ones into the mix), and preventing new high yeild fields from taking off, like server farms. instead, we're focusing on how to lower our footprint on the planet, ignoring the fact, that the necessary reduction of said footprint requires Europe to be driven into absolute poverty. Third factor is the fact, that if your business venture dies around here, you're on the hook for the debts taht you've picked up to get the business going, making European population far less entrepreneureal (well, that and the fact, you effectively can't have a side husstle because of how contracts are done around here), which reduces the number of businesses, that could have a part of them on cutting edge of their respective fields, hence have no real motivation to cooperate with universities on high yeild projects.
As to the graph that you've shown, that is not sufficient granularity. Law falls under humanities and you could argue, that lawyers are the actual engine of US ecnonomy, given how it is them who craft license agreements and find ways, how to brick what you bought without breaking said agreement, thus creating recurring revenue streams for companies. Copyright is the same tale.
Make no mistake, Europe has it's problems with beraucracy, but it is not in the academic field. We have picked up policies, that don't encourage studying more challanging fields like engineering and science, because one, these fields have certain impacts and needs, that are either shunned or can't be provided for anymore in Europe, making student far less likely to chose them, even in the rare cases when the student actually choses based on field perspective. It makes no sense for a student to chose a field, when its major employers will not maintain their operations in Europe. High costs of living and too high risks and devastating effects of running a business in Europe force people, who could create businesses, that would benefit from and to business-university cooperation, out to the US and Asia, which in turn limits universities ability to partake in cutting edge research, which in turn drops them in the rankings. We need to start from the students, change how mathemathics are taught in middle school and abandon implementation of the green transition in favour of returning of energy demanding, but actually productive industries and lowering of costs of living, maximizing real take home pay in the economy without touching taxes (to ensure predictability of tax law).
The one thing I kind of agree with in the video, is rigidity of our majors. There is certainly something to be said about not being able to chose subjects that interest you and have them applied to your credit requirements to graduate, on the other hand, giving the students too much choice could also result in a problem. We can't permit an economist to evade all math in his field, tendency to which is precisely what I observed in my colleagues in my study days. What I'd like to see, would be a change in the structure of credits needed to attain. Currently, most places have class A credits, which are mandatory, class B, which are mandatorily chosen (basically subjects from a shortlist), class C credits, which tend to be chosen general studies subjects and class D, which don't earn you credit to current field, but should you chose to study at that uni another field for which the subject is relevant, can be applied there. The further into the alphabet you go in credit classes, the further you can substitute them (A can substitute both B and C, B can substitute class C). What I'd like to see, would be intoduction for four class applicable credit system, where substitutions would only be possible for the last class of credit and specifically have one of the higher credit classes be interdisciplinary thing or specific effect of studied field on other fields and I'd reduce the mandatory credits to absolutely essential knowledge necessary for the more specialised courses. (as economics major, I only learned the mathematical application of micro and macro economics on business in master's degree course, while the subject matter was taught in bachelor's course. The connection or where that subject knowledge was actively applied was never mentioned in that course, which I belive, to be a massive mistake). To illustrate, what I'd like to see, would be a business major student having to study specific field of business, like agri business or horti business. A agronomist would have to study some specific aspect of forestry (for instance, presence of forest has effect on soil, certain methods of raising cattle require knowledge from both fields). Multidisciplinarity is the dealbreaker for the future in my opinion.
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
The field of study is the key. Sure, it's nice to learn just to learn (there are some universities, which will allow you to enroll in classes not related to your field), but if you can't apply it, it's worthless. Also, as someone who sent over 3000 resumes out while job hunting, I can tell, companies don't give a damn. Really, i feel, that these days, the best way is to go both. Learn a trade, come to an agreement with your employer and do school part time. Will also help you determine, whether the guy is worth working for.
2
-
There are problems in societies, that we have created. Take falling birth rates. Where do we live? In small flats, sometimes even in single rooms, that simply don't provide sufficient space to raise a family. Add to this laws, that favor women, who are the controlling parties to "bedroom fun" and the pill and you have perfect cocktail for low fertility, because men will evade risk stemming from knocking up a woman, because what they could earn is limited and further threatened by divorce/alimony and whatever pregnancies get would have gotten started are prevented. Add to this fairly good access to abortions and we are, where we are. The way I see it, at least two of these have to go, if this trend is to be reversed.
Another case can be made for patents slowing down innovation, because you these days have to work around patents of others, meaning, that even if you'll find a revolutionary combination of preexisting technologies, you can't implement it, because everything you'd get out of it, would get sucked up by patent holders, who are behaving literally like the mythical trolls. Same holds true to copyright. Economically speaking, we have a problem with rent seeking behavior, which materialized in "You'll own nothing and love it!" mantra, which is preventing especially the younger people from increasing their wealth through ownership and ability to fix their broken things. (I'm looking at you Apple, Samsing and other technological companies, I'm looking).
Then you have scammers, who manage to get outright cult like following and bring "revolutionary new idea", who suck in tremendous amounts of cash, sometimes even for idea, that outright doesn't even promise to solve a problem, which siphons money from solving actual problems like "stopping the climate change while maintaining our economic prosperity and industrial output", which would have actually provided some kind of outputs.
Another problem lies in environmentalism it self, which has taken on mantra of "Saving the environment at all costs", and which has gone the path of economic output and raising the bar to entry for all kinds of activities, commercial or otherwise. Resources exploitation, one of two actual engines of economy (the other being population growth), because everything else is dependent on original resources, is being demonized as unenvironmental, polluting and unethical, and abandoned, which has caused us massive shortages connected to primarily oil and, thanks to war in Ukraine, also steel, aluminum, fertilizer and some components necessary for high tech innovation (mostly neon).
All of this would need to be reversed, if economic growth were to return to the West.
2
-
2
-
Maybe recalculate values for individual states by purchasing power parity. Hawai has one problem (well, two that interact, sadly). Hawai is an archipelago far away from US mainland and there is this law, don't recall the number and year, that states, that for domestic transportation of cargo, only US based companies may be used, ships must be built in US shipyards and must be crewed by US citizens... Well, US has all but stopped building ships outside of US Navy, Freighter production got gobbled up by Korea and Japan, Americans don't by in large engage in maritime life, let alone shipping, so vast majority of ships are not even crewed by Americans and there are fairly few shipping companies around as most of these typically prefer to use flag of convenience and both register their ships and their companies in these countries. That is why you see so many Panamanian flags on ships out there. All of this means, that the vastly cheaper shipping, that is actually used in international shipping, can't be used to transport goods between mainland and Hawai, making everything significantly more expensive. This, however would not show up in direct GDP comparison between states!
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
@rizkyadiyanto7922 It really comes to what's needed to make stuff. First, I'd fix the macro, by removing environmental protections, ditching emission allowances and refocused energy grid towards reliable sources of energy like nuclear and coal (cause there's a lot of it around here). Then, I'd create incentive schemes, which would motivate companies to develop new ventures and to enter new fields by helping them finance these new ventures. Key being, that "zombie" companies would either refocus them selves over time entirely, or found new synergies with their "dead" business (for instance a dying farm would be able to receive financial aide to build a sales team focused on international trade, specifically north Africa to export cattle, or an electrician company would be able to get money to retrain their staff to also handle computer network design and implementation, bringing two types of wiring under one roof)
2
-
2
-
2
-
Yeah, this doesn't hold water. Few observations:
1. Which of the countries, was the poorest, when we saw the map? Bulgaria, which is not your typical tourist destination. Sure, it has two major ones plus its capitol, but other than that? Bulgaria is not best known for it's beaches, but for it's rose oil, economically speaking. If there is strong correlation between how poor a country is and prevalence of tourism, why is not Bulgaria as well known for tourism as Italy or Spain? Why, also fairly poor country, is not Romania listed? They too have a touristy area between ports of Constanta and Mangalia, as well as Danube delta. A prime candidate for tourist heavy economy, if this correlation were so strong, yet they are probably best known for Dacia car company and gypsies.
2. Why would tourism take away people from jobs? People always go for those jobs, that earn them more money and financial security. How was tourism described in this video? Basically as a low paying seasonal job! The very antithesis of in demand job, like the ones in stem fields. You don't need a computer science degree to become a network admin or even a coder. It takes grit, willingness and experiment, but it doesn't need formal education. I spot a different problem. Among the regions mentioned were mostly islands. Meaning, there are very few mine-able resources in these areas (at least economically viable in comparison to other places) as well as lower population in comparison to a larger mainland, which in turn permits only for lower level of specialization an consumption. Why would you build a factory on Mallorca, if vast majority of your potential customers were on the mainland (even assuming strictly domestic trade)? Why would you build a material processing facility or even final goods assembly on Mallorca, unless source of said material was also on Mallorca and there were few other sources of said material? Everything would have to go by plane or ship. To transport something by plane, it needs to be of high enough value (say microchips), to justify the price for transporting a tun of cargo by air. You might be thinking, that building a processing plant could be a good idea, because you have a port, but wrong again. In order to get to the really efficient and therefore per tun cheap ships, you need aggregate production and consumption on the island to be on particular scale, which comparatively small island will never reach due to lack of population. You would also need storage facilities, because ships don't come as often as trucks, which also increase your expenses, further making you less competitive, than someone, who has their operation strictly on mainland and only export finished product to the island in necessary quantities. It seems to me, that geographic factors preclude creation of more innovative industries in places like these, because everything is more expensive to source from or procure for the island, than for equivalent operation on mainland. Even service jobs, which could be done over the Internet, would be more expensive due to relatively higher cost of living caused by these higher expenses. Meaning tourism is the only industry, which can be developed in areas like these, given the capital requirements to bridge this gap for other industries (I'm talking logistics hubs, better Internet connection, self sustaining agriculture using high tech solutions, harbor enlargement...) It is too big of an investment for a return, that will always be lower than equivalent operation on the mainland, due to better economies of scale, thanks to better access to customers as well as production factors (material, labor...)
To sum up, higher cost of operating a business, which in part are caused by higher costs of living due to higher costs of logistics support for these places, are precluding other industries from operating in these areas, even though they may scale better than tourism (say accounting or IT services). Leaving tourism for these places as the only industry, which will develop part of its value chain, because there is some kind of attraction in the area, which draws people in, such as beaches or mountains (I'm looking at you ski resorts, I'm looking at you). The only way to turn this around, would be to find a mine-able resource, which would be refined on the island to the point, where value of the product would permit competitive edge over other producers.
2
-
And four, the underlying causes are overzealous green agendas of western powers, mostly US and the EU, which don't take in to account the reality of energy storage, transport and production and who have reduced massively complex issue of climate to a single digit, that being of new emissions of greenhouse gasses, completely ignoring two facts.
1) Climate change is NOT caused by new emissions, but rather the old ones, which are, and will be for a number of centuries, already there! Meaning reducing current emissions even to a 0 is too little too late at too steep of a cost to society.
2) Energy storage is already hitting the limits set by laws of physics. There are no energy storage systems out there even in prototype phase, which could come even close to effective deployment in the grid, nor are there batteries safe and powerful enough, to allow green energy sources like wind and solar, to replace oil.
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
So, my phone doesn't have NFC. Czech banks came up with a service, that allows you to look up an account using a phone number, if the other party has it set up. If not, they can simply give me their bank details and I can set up a wire from my phone, if needed, or if it's a bigger amount, from my PC. You can already pay fines by card. All regular governmental money interactions I have are doable by wire (It's actually the prefferred method around here). Furthermore, there's the problem of getting debanked, as happened to Farage a while back. What will you do, if no bank touches you? There is clause about banks being able to do that for whatever reason they deem fit in every contract I have ever seen! The fact, that you can't change your bank account number, when you're with a bank, is redheairing. You can always have 50 bank accounts (I already am on 10) and simply wire money between them as needed. In most of Europe, SEPA payments are free for normal people and they can be accross borders, no problems whatsoever. Hell, when I was working as accountant, I was regularly returning money from Czechia to the Nordics, Baltics, France, Germany, Greece... there are publically available tools like ibanvalidator, which allows you to validate any IBAN or calculate IBAN from a domestic account number of that account. And it works for the whole world! Meaning so long, you actually know the account number, you can send the money over! Meaning, we'd rather need legislation otlawing the practice of IBAN discrimination and make it mandatory to accept cards!
You can open up extra accounts to pool money for common purchases. I run such an account for our entire family! Conditional cash scares me to hell! Imagine this. You build yourself a PC and install Windows, because everything is still made for Windows... and Microsoft, heading for their service based business model, decided to charge you per minute in use?!
There are payment providers with domestic technologies. It is also not entirely true, that payment providers are not based in the EU. SWIFT is in Belgium... In the Netherlands, they used to have (not sure whether still have) cards, that were not international standard, but carried the number of the account itself on it instead! There's nothing easier than mandating IBAN to also be printed on a card, perhaps even with a QR code for a machine to read it and request a payment over the Internet, simply, by asking the bank running the account, to transfer the money, which could be approved by the account holder from his phone or even (better) dedicated token. We already use multibanking (managing accounts from different banks through other banks), so communication between the banks is not an issue.
The very fact, that somebody holds a record is a problem, particularly if part of that record was, what was bought. As for offline payments... we already have prepaid cards around here. They are very rare, true, but they exist. So offline Euro would be useless thing, that could cause more trouble than worth.
All in all, as staunchly pro European guy am I, I see no use for this and costs associated with the system. :(
1
-
As someone, who's looking at no retirement due to unsustainability of demographic development and stunted wages, I say this. We will soon have to face a very, very ugly choice. The young, or the elderly. One of them is going to have to be removed from the ability to influence government, because resources for redistribution are not generated quickly enough, be it metals and oil due to green idiocy, or suspiciously hostile rules for new construction of housing. One has to be sacrificed, if the other is to live and unfortunately, it's the elderly, who have currently the upper hand.
1
-
Doesn't work. For one, if you were to lower the spending budgets, you'd have to cut retirement benefits eventually. The government, which would do that, is the government no longer in power. We have simply way too many old people to make this feasible on the necessary scale. With entrepreneurship being made too easy, you gut out employment, because suddenly everyone is contractor, because companies refuse to hire normally and you've got gutted social security, because it's cheaper for the companies. Can't lower taxes, as reinvestment of revenues back into companies is ridiculously low already and, unfortunately, this would not motivate companies to reinvest or at very least increase wages. There is nothing that would make them do it. Really the only thing that I could agree with would be new energy regulation to remove subsidies and incentives from intermittent sources and ban even mere advocating against nuclear power. But what you write of as a whole would destroy Europe.
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
@ArawnOfAnnwn I don't think so. We have already shed our dependency on Russia and Russians them selves have stopped a lot of imports from the EU. And yet, we're still kicking as much as we are. Russia has been overcome.
China has been becomming hostile state for Europe for about a decade now. They have been threatening tariffs all the time, or stealing our tech (Americans are not alone in this)... Not to mention, that China is some 10% to 11% of EU total exports. That's just half of what the US would have been, if there were a tariff war. Furthermore, they are not the only manufacturing hub. India could easily replace them as destination for any semiproducts still made in the EU. As for products and more importantly luxury stuff, China it self is schrinking for these markets, because the young proffessionals, who buy this stuff, are rarer and rarer find in China. they either flee to neighbouring countries and Singapore, or age out of the cohort. On top of that, China needs food so much, they are destroying ecosystems the world over, while Europe has multiple agricultural powerhouses. They can't tariff that, without causing serious domestic issues and given how stuff is going on in China right now... 1) nah, I don't really see them putting tariffs in before half of Trump's term is up and 2) even if they did, would Europe actually feel the effect in like six months?
On top of that, there is a huge continent to the South of Europe, that needs capital goods, has the resources for the energy transition and young population, that want's luxury. And Europe is a lot closer to it than Russia, the US or China all are. That is, where growth is gonna be, and with whom Europe can rise with.
1
-
@networkgeekstuff9090 Doesn't matter. The risks from possibility of bailing out a state are greatly outwighed by the possibility of just printing USD, if the FED ends up in tatters thanks to Elon's cost reduction measures and Trump's need to finance all kinds of projects without increasing debt, taxes and with no real assistance from tariffs. Cause that never ends. We have seen this in action, I believe in the Ottoman Empire back in a day. Didn't end well. And I'm not referring to what Erdogan had been doing, this is much older.
My point, however, was, that even as diverse states as the US states across multiple different relevant scales can be, they are each a part of a single nation and it works, all be it with hiccups such as political polarization. If it can be made to work in the US, it can be done in Europe. Sure, Hungary will likely become European Alabama and Slovakia Mississippi, but we'll come to terms with that too.
1
-
1
-
1
-
Yeah, I do recall, that when Konkan railway had been built, I don't remember the name of that head honcho, didn't want it to have any government involvement. Result? Multiple engineering marvels, that experts said would take years to finish took significantly shorter, particularly one of the largest bridges on the rote took just over half the projected time to build. Meanwhile, where are the major governmental projects? I'd say, that you Indians have three problems. Gandhi wanted to tackle the first, but sadly, had been assassinated before he could properly begin. Second is really civilizational blight irrespective of the nation, so that is not really your fault and the third one one has to adapt to. I'm talking about the cast system, bureaucracy and geography. It seems to me, that particularly the cast system is a huge problem, given it affects access to education and that economic development... you guys need someone to step into Gandhi's shoes and walk the path he started to the finish.
1
-
Really, I think, that the main problem back then was how ideologically it was refused by house Republicans... Obamacare should have covered a few more things, a ban on lobbying in healthcare, total compensation guidelines for insurance companies and banning insurance companies from dispersing profit to any other causes than future healthcare costs. Make no mistake, I'm getting redder by the day and no, not in the communist way, but Republicans like to go on and on about moral hazard argument and commandments and how christian they are... not realizing, what they're doing, by letting insurance to be for profit business, is straight bankruptcy of morals. And where are the stories of great saints not forgiving debts and putting people into effective slavery? I skimmed the Bible in my studies, but something as abhorrent as this would immediately catch my eye!
1
-
1
-
Not the pandemic. At best, it was a catalyst and then Putin poured oil in to the fire. Pun intended. This really started with governments in the west going green for the political agenda, creating toxic environment for refineries to exist. This started years ago, when for instance banks were forced to drop oil from investment portfolios to get compliant with new regulations for banking (well, and to virtue signal to their customers). Add a number of years with little to no profit and business environment, which doesn't give good outlook for retooling an old plant, so competition dries up and those, who are left, rise prices. And since it takes years to change course in terms of policy and additional years to bring plants in to production status... Yeah We're screwed, because some of us wanted to "save the environment", while not realizing the costs.
1
-
1
-
@kate8160 Yes, but not quickly enough. It takes hours for a nuclear or coal power plants to change their output. That is why they are used for base load and are the LAST power plants asked to alter their output, when something big happens. To illustrate, a while back Dukovany nuclear powerplant in Czechia had to intervene in the grid, because Austria didn't have wind, Hungary had their powerplants under maintenance and there was an accident in Slovenia, which destroyed their interconnect to Austria. It took inability of two NATIONS to have a nuclear powerplant ramp up production and stave off nation wide blackout! A gas powerplant can ramp up it's production or wind it down in as little as fifteen minutes, which is much better for grid regulation, given you need to maintain certain amount of power in the grid in every second! It is much easier to anticipate within acceptable margain of error, what consumption will be in an ever changing consumption model fifteen minutes ahead of time than eight hours ahead of time!
That is why we need to get rid wind, where winds are not consistent, and solar completely and replace it with gas and nuclear. Because when placing in wind and solar, you're displacing coal and nuclear and increasing the need for natural or oil gas, because wind and solar are intermittent and worse, in case of solar selectively intermittent, because it only produces during the day, but most consumption comes in the evening as families come home and consumption spikes! (businesses that are high energy consumers usually work around the clock, so they don't produce a corresponding dip). And you need to cover that spike irrespective of other factors. When there is not enough wind, you need to provide power from gas. Hell, during the day, when there is not enough sun, you need to provide power from gas, because you can't have blackouts!
1
-
If you ask me, you'd have to make universities go more specialized and maybe, just maybe, completely eliminate prep schools. I earned a Bachelors in accounting. Why do I need to study micro and macro economics (all be it truly fascinating subjects I actually like). That's two semesters worth of time, which could be spent on IFRS or specifics of some big taxes, like VAT (which can have so many of these specifics, that they alone could cover a a whole degree), or handling of customs and their effect on accounting. Or why teach marketing to statisticians? These are also questions, which the education system needs to finally ask itself. And then, there are the employers, who demand absolutely impossible skills from fresh graduates, which uni can't teach!
1
-
Yeah, let me give you a different perspective. Landlords have the ability (in some countries outright right) to work out your salary, meaning they can calculate rent so high, the effectively lock tenant in. Housing providers actually don't compeet, because it is against their individual and collective interest and utilize extra income to limit the ability of tenants to obtain housing of their own through lobbying, creating zoning laws and more importantly, technical requirements for new houses to be built and old houses to be renovated. This increases upfront investment needed to purchase a home. Down the line, these decrese running costs of the buildings, but if you can't get approved for a loan, you can't get on the ladder and the landlord just squeezes more. As for house shrinking, that has been happening actually, especially in Europe, but there is another problem. We actually don't need smaller housing, because of work from home. The kids room in a typical household has now become the office. This idea was apt in the 90s, when the Internet was not quite as widespread, but now it is so ubquitous, that cars are expected to report to a central server their trouble wherever on the road they are. This translates as far as housing is concerned, that as long as employers are willing to accept remote work, dedicated space for work related activities needs to be present in a dwelling. Meaning building or renovating into smaller dwelling units doesn't solve the problem. because there is not as much space to save, hence a new unit doesn't necessarily get created from the space made available. Furthermore, if I were to shoehorn Zeihan in to this mix, this would further amplify our natality crisis, because people have been shown to not want to establish families in cage sized flats, rather they need a suitably large house counting no less than 2+number of kids+bathroom sized house. With advent of work from home, make that 4+number of kids+bathroom, because both parents need to work to maintain a family these days and employers might not be willing to tollerate husband and wife working for different companies or even different departments to share an office.
No the only thing, which can solve housing crysis, is encourage telecommuting, individual transportation and to remove new construction blockers like climate impact limitations and zoning beyond strictly safety concerns (flood plains, sea line etc.), while at the same time implementing and under penalty of seizure of property enforce rent controls and demand construction companies to build housing, whenever they build anything. For instance, you have eighteen story building, then you can mandate that at least six floors of the building will be flats, ohterwise, the building will not get a permit for the office space and shops it was initially envisioned as.
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
@tonycatman I have to disagree with your assessment. Say you steal my sickle. Then I'm not building another one (ignoring the fact, that the sickle can be very easily used as a weapon, eg. an equalizer) I make a scythe and equip it with a mechanism, that would allow me to quickly flip the blade and turn it into a a warscythe (eg. I create dual use item). Or you steal it from me in my sleep? Then I'll wall off my house. You make a ladder to get over the wall, I'll dig a moat and fill it with water around my house to attract predators over night... etc. etc. escalating all the way to forming a state of my own and raising an army to crush you, provided my income permits such a development. What you describe will not prevent generation of capital, it will, however, inform what kind of capital get's created. I don't disupte, that some kind of "law" or equivalent system would eventually develop, but it would develop as result of creation of capital. The only reason, we have law instead of rule of the stronger, is because it creates more predictable environment, but you can only start creating predictible environment, when you have enough food and capital to ensure, that you can free up workforce to specialize for that purpose. Remember, as a species, we had spears, arrows and other weapons long long before we have codified laws and weapons are a type of capital.
1
-
Yeah, that wouldn't help much... There are two main reasons why:
1) Most of the fields, that you need to enter these days, are in their very early phase, meaning even companies them selves, don't really know, what skills they'll need in the future and thus can't communicate that need to universities, to create a study program, which would help with this.
2) A lot of societies needs are only perceived and can be outright disconnected with real needs in our economy, or be set up on poorly evaluated facts. Case and point, electromotive. You need a huge battery for an electric car, which has even greater impact on the planet, than petrol. And you have people, who claim it's not true, point to scientific studies, which don't take in to account consumer behavior and end up undercutting the need for battery size, because that supports their position and policies are built on that, which results in the picture, of what is needed in the economy for skills, being distorted, because under normal circumstances, in scenario like this one, more people would study fields surrounding internal combustion engines and would be looking for ways to make them even more efficient, and fewer people would go in to metallurgy and related fields, because there would not be such a demand for mining and refining more kinds of metals. Meaning, there would be a straight up mismatch between skills taught and skills demanded... Or in a different way, imagine industry standard being Ethernet and universities still teaching coax token ring.
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
There's a bigger problem here. Not all goods have the same inflation as others and there are goods, which will always be bought. Take housing (which some nations don't bring in to account when measuring inflation), energy, transportation, Internet access, meat, vegetables, cooking oil, cheese... A lot of the things in your traditional CPI are consumer goods and services, like computers, cars, vacations... Really things, which only a small fraction of society buys on a regular basis. So what I'd do, is I'd create a CPI variant, which would measure the highest costs of basic necessities to ascertain basic costs of living.
As for not taking technological innovation in to account, I think it should not be taken in to account. Why? Two reasons.
One. Because, while there is the argument for including it to make the measure more precise, including it would shift the reported number to higher income bracket in the society, suddenly, you'd not be overestimating for people, who can afford to buy more efficient stuff outright or through help of reasonably interested loans, thus lowering one, sometimes very substantial part of CPI, you'd be underestimating inflation for those, who can't afford these capital expenses. That is the first problem.
The second is unpredictability of technological change. Say a well off family would buy a new, more efficient fridge. That is demonstration of what was shown in the video. Consumption of electricity is lowered and inflation on that particular good/service should be lower. However, that assumes no other change had occurred! Say said family was family of gamers and graphics card in one of the gaming rigs owned by the family had died or gone so obsolete, it is no longer relevant for modern titles, so the family replaces this graphics card with a 3090 TI. Graphics cards are the most power hungry parts of a computer, meaning that due to effectively maintenance, whatever savings in terms of energy could be partially offset due to technological innovation, all be it in a different field. Now some might argue, that you need to measure taking only one change in to consideration, as to measure the effect. However, that argument falls on it's face, because of the time horizon that's measured by inflation, which typically is a year.
What we really need is whole set of statistical information to evaluate the situation and take the right action. For instance, to take a more targeted action to reduce inflation in particular component of CPI, not just utilize the blunt instrument of monetary policy.
1
-
1
-
1
-
Ordinary citizens don't have more capacity to save and invest. Unless one already owns a home, they are subject to landlords, which can workout or even demand disclosure, how much money a person makes, and set their rent at such a level, that the tenant can't ever save for down payment on their own house. The idea here is, that if someone gets a house of their own, even on a fixed mortgage, they'll stabilize the largest expenditure they have month-on-month basis for a number of years, whereas their income should increase over same period of time. Rent on the other side, will increase every year without question (baring rent controls).
Then there is transition from owning to operational leasing of goods, which producers, eg. companies are pushing down our throats, sometimes completely disallowing perpetual ownership of a product, or making it ineffective investment (as rule of thumb, investment in a tool should completely return in 5 years), forcing a normal Joe to "rent", what he otherwise could acquire for good year on year. Take MS Office as an example.
The government also plays a part in this, forcing people into purchasing less effective and in the long run therefore more expensive services and/or goods. Take electric cars, which are more expensive than conventional ones and will always be more expensive (due to higher volume of refining of greater variety of materials, when compared to normal cars), which are currently pushed by governments, in order to battle climate change. In the past, thanks to relative simplicity of a car, one could fix them himself, lowering total cost of ownership of an asset (yes car is an asset, in spite of whatever financial gurus are saying. Car gives you greater range to access either net lower priced housing or higher paying job), when compared to modern cars and especially electric cars, allowing them to retain greater amount of wealth by "working on their own", which incentivized longer period of ownership of said asset. This has gotten less and less possible, due to increased complexity of cars, which culminated in EVs, where owner could prevented from even learning, how to fix their car under pretense of safety. To illustrate, my grandfather owned and drove the same car for twenty years and fixed everything on it himself. That is unthinkable with a modern car and impossible with an EV, because after twenty years, battery of that EV would be completely dead and that is the most expensive component of that car! Even modern cars with internal combustion engines have become so complex, an individual without very specialized and therefore expensive tools, can't touch anything on their own cars, forcing that person to seek out services of a certified mechanic, often times controlled by car manufacturer, who retains a part of mechanics profit through access to knowledge base and tools necessary to fix the car. (I'm looking at you John Deer, I'm looking at you!)
These rent seeking practices lower a persons ability to retain wealth, hence contribute to greater economic inequality.
1
-
1
-
1
-
You do realize, that eco-friendlyness is chief culprit for this mess, right? Where do you think, those regulations, which hit hydrocarbon sector come from? People fall en mass for a scam, that we don't need hydrocarbons, that we can live without them, that we'd be better off without them. You know, basic ecology talking points oversimplified. Polititians either fall for it too, and/or cinically use it to get reelected. Their electorate begins to demand an actual change, so they begin to move in terms of policy certain way, to appease their electorate, and banks either wait or begin to ditch oil ang gas in anticipation of further sector harming legislation... and we're, where we are.
The whole problem with ecology, is that it has shrunk to one question alone. Global warming and refuses to see other solutions, then production equivalent of austerity, however, people who peddle this don't realize the reality of the situation. Say we'd stop using plastics at all. What would we displace them with? Could you imagine integrated circuits of computers with other carrier material than plastic? What about bottles? Imagine, how much would a your standard 2l bottle of your prefered bevarage weigh! How do you carry that on you at all times? In my travels, I used to carry on foot five leters of water just for my self. How much heavier would my backpack get, if I were to use glass instead of refilled pop bottles? And remember, glass is the only sensible alternative to plastic here! And what about lost merch as result of breakage? Who'd carry the losses from that? Companies would have to calculate that in to costs of final product too.
There is this ted talk, you might want to watch: Why renewables can’t save the planet by Michael Shellenberger. I think, you'll find it illuminating.
1
-
1
-
1
-
@kieranrollinson8750 Not, if they end up facing a fine, which would make their electricity even more expensive to not produce. At this point, they begin to limit damages and increase or maintain production... Or if they could lower their AVERAGE price relatively quickly, by, for instance retooling one of their closed down powerplants, at which point, they make profit. All that needs to be done, is to allow that powerplant to work economically, for instance, by scrapping emmission allowances/carbon tax.
Electricity, however, is a bad commodity show this on, due to the inner workings of the grid. Long story short, not all electricity can be bought equally, but at all times, there has to be certain amount of electricity in the grid to prevent blackouts. So electricity is bought in tiers first goes base load, then wind and solar, then more easily regulable sources like natural gas or petrol. Facemasks would have been better choice
1
-
1
-
1
-
I do have a slightly different angle to it. Just look at what and how we consume! In much simpler economy dominated by agriculture products, hotter areas with large navigable rivers have an advantage. They can trade and reliably grow foodstuffs. The latter part is still very relevant but, because of advances in agricultural technology, the competitive advantage from good soil is lost and then you have to deal with other factors. A farm with worse soil, that knows, how to compensate for the problem by using fertilizers and procedures, that limit pests, will have similar outcomes to a farm in perfect conditions. The new factor that enters the room is iron and steel tools. Capital goods, that those in hotter climate would be harder to use, given until invent of a tractor, you had to use animals like cattle or hroses to power things like plows or carts so large, a human wouldn't even budge with them, and gain fertilizer in the form of manure. The advantage that rises from combination of these factors for colder climate then is, that harvests become equal in volume but more predictable as more and more factors enter the production chain, because each factor other than weather, which is tied to climate, is less and less volatile. In a hotter region, where particularly animals can't be used to power the tools used in agriculture, capital goods have lesser impact on farm productivity and therefore are not so widely adopted, because other options would provide better outcomes, including just not expending the effort. To make things worse, as economies become more complicated, because more kinds of stuff gets traded, the more basic goods become less and less valuable to trade, meaning to maintain income, more and more quantities have to be realized on the market.
So here is my argument. Because of how hotter climates interact with capital (eg. how usable that capital is in these regions), these regions get hit by a double whammy. 1) They don't adopt capital based agriculture model until it becomes sustainable under local conditions, which gives them centuries to millennia worth of developmental delay when compared to colder, temperate regions, more suitable for that kind of agriculture. And 2) because they don't adopt the use of capital goods in agriculture, their agriculture sector cannot support a larger population, that could produce more capital and capital goods than otherwise comparatively weaker temperate regions, compounding the problem.
1
-
1
-
Oh, there is potential. Make no mistake. If BRICS turned itself as a regulatory integrator, alligning bureaucracies for international trade and maybe coordination of tariffs between members, there's a lot it could do. Russia is a major energy hub (well, was, until they couldn't export Westwards and because they never built infrastructure to go the other way), plus it has a lot of lumber and lumber products to export. Russia is also the largest exporter of wheat (well, at least was before the war). South Africa is well positioned for copper mining and processing, which China and the rest of the world needs for the energy transition. Brazil has potential for agriproducts and lumber. India is becoming a major manufacturing hub, it's population is significantly younger than China, plus it's close to Arabian peninsula, so easy access to oil from there, which will not be thratened by any terrorist groups, given Iran is part of the pact right now. China is China. There's a lot of demand for some products there, thought his will be diminishing with aging population... There's a lot of potential there, that is being squandred, because the participants haven't properly committed to the idea.
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
@lightworker2956 While you describe the situation mostly correctly, there is a problem here. Soviet union did collapse, but it did not happen because of that tax. It was instituted shortly before the collapse, so it did not have effect on the political side of things, but you could see uptick in birthrates for the period it had been effective + 9 months. I happen to be a below average male, so I know the pains all too well. The thing is, so far, everything else we've tried either did not return positive effects, or they were so marginal and with costs so grand, those policies eventually had to be withdrawn. Just look at how little effect positive policies have in Hungary and how costly they are! We can't be without government. Small government is anarchocapitalist wet dream, that had been proven to not work. Not to mention, we need the kids to be properly raised. Just hammering down on single moms causes unintended consequences (such as when a single mom is a widow, not of her own choice). No the problem is, that women can be independent, and that means access to work.
1
-
the problem with services, is that they are way too flexible. Comes economic downturn, everyone's easily ditching their suppliers and you've got a huuuuuge delta in employment, which in turn translates in to gigantic delta in consumption... and everything's flying up and down. What needs to happen, is we as Europeans need to realize, that everything has it's price. Be it overspecialization on one thing (cars, particular service, etc.), environmentalism... these are all things, that make it harder and more expensive to manufacture stuff. It is environmentalism, which is the main enemy of industry. What would happen, if Europe ditched emission allowances for CO2 to energy market? Coal would suddenly become unbeatable energy source on price, only threatened by nuclear! Forget wind parks and photovoltaics. They just don't create enough power reliably enough, to be even considered in an environment, that doesn't care about emissions. Why? Well that is simple. It is in abundant supply in Europe, can be mined locally and Europe has perfectly tuned transportation system for coal (railways). And yet, we are abandoning it in favor of vanity projects, like VRT or electromobility...
1
-
1
-
Oh it is even worse. In order to have children, people of child bearing age must have intercourse. However, thanks to pro women laws being passed, how the family court works and more awareness of it, men are beginning to check out of intimate relations. I read somewhere, that over 30% of men under thirty have not had sex at all. Why? Women can chose, whom they'll let inside of them and, because they're hypergamous and have been more successful than men on the job market, thanks to the vast majority of university support programes aimed at them, as well as having better predispositions to actually finish a degree, supply of men successful enough to attract a woman is plummeting. Things have gone so far, that telling a woman the clear fact, that her greatest asset is her fertility, is considered an insult. On factual basis, that statement is correct, however. A man can't give birth. That's just basic biology.
Now, how to address this? There is a number of solutions.
1) Political system could be retuned, demanding exclusiveness between right to vote and drawing on state pnesion. No right to vote means no incentive for the politicians to push through policies, that would benefit the elderly at the cost of the young. Pension should also be strictly calculated not from costs of living or any bonuses to enjoy one's time. Only what had been gathered in previous year may be dispersed among the elderly.
2) Worker centric employment contracts. It must become strictly employee purview, from where he would work, if the nature of the work permits it on a physical level. Eg. no more office space. No more commuting. If it can be done from home, it must by law be done from home and it can not be the employer declaring, what can and can not be done from home. This must be either patently clear (eg, can't build a house from home. There needs to be extremely special, hard to transport, not connectable to the Internet equipment involved) or it must be short term (as in a business trip to a foreign country). This would have twofold effect. One, it will allow people to disperse, hence return to the villages, and two, it would equalize housing prices, making the market whole again.
3) Construction of new houses must not be interruptable by anything. No right to object, no environmental protections may stand in the way.
4) The relationship between men and women must be reballanced. For the last fifty years, women have been pushed through hard with no requirements being levied on them, to counterbalance newfound rights. Women should become subject to a "Singles" or "Childless" tax in order to motivate them to lock down a man to raise a child with. Divorce and domestic violence laws must change to shield men from women, be it fake accusations (of both fatherhood or violence), in order to allow men to let their guard down and try again in the dating pool. Some 30% of men under 30 have never had intercourse! This statistic must be turned around, if we are to have more kids.
5) Any and all environmental regulations must be toned down to allow for sufficient economic growth. Europe needs to restart it's coal, nuclear, oil and gas power plants and stop further expansion of intermittent power sources. Polluting to generate power or heat must be free. No emission allowances or carbon tax allowed.
6) Discourse about this matter must be put under review. Currently, there are people out there, claiming it would be benefficial for the planet to have fewer people. These people must be stopped. Spreading of pro-environemtalist standpoints must be made illegal or at very least, costs must be front and center. If we knew, how much this is gonna cost and that we'd pay for it, noone would vote any green party into opposition, much less power.
It would be a harsh wake up, but it may be necessary for our survival.
1
-
Finally a video, which points out the problem with public transport! Yes, every change, every stop that the bus or train makes is a problem for everyday commuters! Take my case. I live in the center of the city of Brno, I used to commute to the outskirts for work. When my dad took me, even in peak traffic, where everyone is whining, about how bad cars are, as they sit in those cars, from my house to the office building I worked at took some 20 minutes, give or take 5 minutes, one way. Some 40 to 50 minutes both ways. Public transport? Had to walk to the tram. Then change to another tram and then to a bus, with final significant stretch of commute on foot again. It took me 45 to 60 minutes one way! That's hour and a half to two, if things got extra bad three hours through a city, that has probably the best public transport system on Earth!
Really the solution for this is not public transport, nor banning cars in cities or even car ownership. No. The solution is, mandating those jobs, which can be made remote, remote. No more accountant going to the office every day of the week to handle invoices. Instead, once a week to deposit processed paper invoices, which he/she handled from home. No more comming to call center, to respond to clients. That can be done from home. It's the inflexibility of employers, who motivate vast majority of trips! It is, because you have to travel and be somewhere at fixed time frame, which doesn't confirm to public transport's schedule, which motivate's us to use the fastest possible private mode of transportation. And before anybody start's talking about bikes, I've got news for you. There will never be guarantee, that you'll live within reasonable commute time (say 30 minutes one way) from your working place by bike. That's simply utopia.
There are two solutions, which help cities. Two solutions, which can go hand in hand to actually solve cities problems. They won't solve climate change, but they will solve smog.
First. By mandating all positions, which don't require physical access (I'm talking manually swapping sheets of steel in a machine levels of physical access) to be strictly remote positions, you'll turn daily drivers into weekly+joy riders. That's cutting driven kilometers by at least half, at no costs to public coffers and potentially cutting cost to employers as well, not having to rent office space. Bigger homes, which will be required for people to work from home will likely increase in price. That is the only drawback
Second. All new cars can be mandated to be plug-in hybrids with internal combustion engine and 20 to 30 kilometer battery. This way, cost of the battery is lowered, which is the most expensive part of an EV. Battery degradation doesn't affect the car that much, as on longer drives, or when hauling something, it would still use normal engine, and the base, from which the battery would degrade is lower and there can be a mandate, to use electric drive only, when in normal use, in particular zones or even entire cities, because those are not such long distances, that need to be taken. Price of batteries and their inherent properties (including their carbon footprint), is what's killing the EV market.
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
@abedmarachli7345 Fortunately not, that would make me a smoker too (am the only non smoker in the family) :D I too happen to have a friend, who infront of me drank himself into liver failure (my vote was deciding to take him to the hospital). Furtantely, he's still young and we cought it early, so he managed to recover. I have seen a girl, who wasn't prepartying, to end up with alcohol poisoning after a single drink. I myself have ended up in the hospital after a night of very irresponsible drinking. There is indeed danger in alcohol, but that is why it is so important, to drink responsibly, not to evade it outright. I for one didn't touch hard alcohol for five years after that hospital incident (and still drink hard alcohol very rarely), shifted to wine and made it a rule to never drink alone and more than one bottle in a day (that's about two glasses each). That is how much I know I can handle safely, without endangering myself. The problem is, much like driving or riding a bike, you don't learn, without doing it. We as humans do dangerous things all the time, but we learn, how to do them safely with experience. Yes, there are bad outcomes, but that doesn't mean, we shouldn't do it at all, particularly if there is a reason to do it. Because everything can have a bad outcome.
1
-
1
-
1
-
Here are some counterarguments.
Bereaucracy: Czechia. Just look at our construction permit lead times. We're some of the worst on Earth. New Brno railway station has been in the plans for over a 120 years, and it's only now beginning to get build... European Union and other democracies are making doing business harder and harder, when it comes to
The Dutch Curse: Sweden. I believe, it was your video, where "it is important, what was in the country before the discovery of oil.". Everybody marvels about local way of life and civil development, but that would have been impossible to achieve without inflow of currency for oil and natural gass exploited there.
Trade as source of wealth: Historically, trade was with closest neighbours. Nowdays, we can do everything over much larger distances. Zetor earned itself such a recognition in arab world, that it became synonymous with the very idea of a tractor. Shoes and clothes we wear are seldom made outside of Southeast Asia. It was the momentary unionisation of the world in terms of trade, that allowed for greater specialization and sea access became paramount. Just look at any world wealth map. You'll find the wealthiest regions near coasts or on rivers navigable by big ships. Think Hamburg, Los Angels, New York City or Tokyo, which had basically eaten Yokohama and several other cities. Meanwhile, lnadlocked countries, or countries bordering seas with no access to the ocean, tend to be on the poorer side. No, it's lack of trade interdiction, brought up by USA's dominance on the seas and formation of the European project, which eventually culminated into European Union, which removed arbitrary trade barriers, which would be more common, if, say Germany were devided into it's historical constituent states. Exporting goods would have been near impossible for, for instance from France to Croatia, because, Italy with it's own interests would stand in the way. What you'll see, if larger countries begin to break apart, trade, thanks to individual national customs, inspections and bearaucracies. Trade would get interdicted.
Democracy: Democracy is NOT the best kind of governance, when it comes to resource deveilopment, which is, what you need to trade. A single party government simply sais and does, no matter the human lives, it destroys. Meanwhile, a democracy, thanks to "not in my backyard" principle, will, majority of the time, refuse to develop the resource. Case and point, Czech Republic and Lithium. There is in Cínovec mountain, as well as waste material from the old mine there (tin was mined there back in a day). Introducing the Communist party, who completely derailed joint venture with Australians, causing the venture to collapse. Another example, Iceland. Minerals needed for energy transition were found in vast quantities. A referrendum was held, and mining had been rejected over local natural beauty... which has 0 intrensic value (no tourism is not viable counterpoint, just watch the video about different types fo tourism). Now, we're waiting on just how will the Nordics (can't remember now, which scored this one) decide about phosphate mining in their country, there has not been news, that would indicate large scale mining planned.
Specialization: You can't overspecialize either. Look at economies, that are severely dependent on single resource, like Russia, for which it's energy resources, all of which had been sanctioned, the Gulf states, also heavily dependent on hydrocarbons, had to create cartel to ensure, that they won't get bankrupt and now are scrambling for all kinds of investments and diversification, because, due to ideological distaste for fossil fuels currently reigning in the West, their primary, in some cases near SOLE, pinacle of specialization, export is going the way of dynasaurs, pun intended. Specialization always needs to be wheighed against domestic price security and ability to produce things to some extent domestically. If not for other reasons, to preserve the technology.
1
-
Well, you could squarely point this on China and Russia. China didn't catch the virus and lied to the rest of the world, to save face. And Russia went Reich and attacked a neighboring country. There are your causes, because, no mishandling of initial infection in Wuhan, you have much lower industry fall off, because it doesn't affect the rest of China and by extension, the rest of the world, which means higher production capacity, which in turn, means even stronger Ukraine in the war (because of stronger economic position of their allies) and closer to peace treaty, because Russia wouldn't be able to survive sustained shelling of their troops until winter (or at very least, it would cut the number of days the conflict took, viewed in retrospect, when over).
1