Comments by "looseycanon" (@looseycanon) on "VisualEconomik EN"
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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)
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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)
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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.
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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.
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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...
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@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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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!
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@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.
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@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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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