honey_im_meat_grinding @ honey_im_meat_grinding @lemmy.blahaj.zone

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2 yr. ago

By 'both' I mean we don't have to either not solve this (climate hell) or just subsidize private hydropower, we can overcome both of those.

But... the point you brought up does lead me to talking about the Norwegian oil strategy that you might be interested in! Norway is doing exactly that: subsidizing private discovery of oil, tax the sale of oil heavily - and it has been very successful (to the detriment of the environment...). The US can learn from that by subsidizing private hydropower development (to incentivize building more of them) and then using targeted taxes when they're actually operating. It's the strategy that is often touted as "how Norway avoided Dutch disease / the resource curse".

I didn't actually mean subsidizing private hydropower above, though, I meant the government doing it themselves so that the profits are socialized rather than privatized. That's mostly what Norway has done with its hydropower strategy. The case for taxes for hydropower, and natural resources in general, is basically the Georgist case: nobody invented or created the nature/land that allowed for that hydropower station, it was already here long before we were, so taxes make sense in that they socialize profits extracted by private companies.

How do you define 'corporate' ownership? If you can own 100 properties as an individual, does that count as 'corporate'? If it doesn't, that seems like an easy loophole. If the intent is to ban large quantities of homes owned by single entities, then doing it by quantity sounds more sensible.

That might redistribute old homes, but it doesn't necessarily solve the drip feeding of new homes that we have going on right now. For example, the UK used to build 250k+ houses every year during the 1950-1980s period. 50% of that was government built council houses for those in need. It's estimated that we need to build 250k more homes than we currently do in the UK, and the private housing industry has not done its part.

We can just do both? Look at Norway's hydropower strategy: the government owns and operates most of it, and they tax private hydropower. That's significantly better than handouts. There are valid critiques of what the Dems are doing, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't take the small victories we can (like this) nor does it mean republicans aren't worse (they'll just do even worse handouts to the rich).

This is about specific sites' abnormally high methane pollution, and China is in the data set but does not have as many "super-emitters" according to this. Here's an example where China's listed in the linked Sky article:

Coal is also a problem with one facility in Shanxi, China, peaking at around 181 tonnes an hour last February.

However, they go on to rank the countries in the article as such:

Kayrros's data shows Turkmenistan had higher methane emissions than any other nation, followed by the United States, India, Russia and Pakistan.

So the answer is simply that China, along with the EU, does not have as many "super-emitters" to worry about. Other regions do, and that means they can target those sites specifically to reduce their methane emissions now that the data clearly highlights them.

For the record, government debt isn't bad. What is bad, is how that debt is used. If you use it to fund productivity boosting infrastructure projects, then it pays for itself. If you use it to invest in successful companies in return for shares then it pays for itself... unlike when Tesla got a $400 million gov. loan and gave nothing in return - which meant tax payers had to take the hit when Solyndra (which got money from the same scheme) bankrupted itself into the toilet, tax payers took all the risk and got shafted both when a company failed and when one succeeded.

The Norwegian government, for example, owns 30% of the domestic stock market. One of many strategies the US government should probably be looking to if they want a healthier way to invest in companies.

Using debt to back tax cuts on the other hand, like Trump did according to this article, is an awful strategy.

What is it with corporations just buying stuff up for excessive amounts of money and then firing a bunch of people?

Probably because they're unelected descendants of upper middle class to straight up wealthy people, assigned by a wealthy board of more wealthy individuals (if it's a public company), rather than a competent leader the workers with actual knowledge of how work is being done on the floor have decided is the best.

When you don't leave managing the business to an incompetent nepo baby, this happens:

[...] the UK Office for National Statistics showed that in the UK the rate of survival of cooperatives (read: democratically owned organisations) after five years was 80 percent compared with only 41 percent for all other enterprises.[6] A further study found that after ten years 44 percent of cooperatives were still in operation, compared with only 20 percent for all enterprises.

Fakhfakh et al. (2012) show that in several industries conventional firms would produce more with their current levels of employment and capital if they adopted the employee-owned firms’ way of organising

The kicker is this:

We use World Bank data27 to calculate the time needed to reduce (to below 1%) poverty at $6.85 a day. This is the higher of the three global poverty lines used by the World Bank; it is used because we believe it gives the most accurate picture of the numbers of people globally living in poverty.

I sure as hell could not survive on $6 a day - and we can talk about purchasing power, but resources have international trade prices and you're priced out of those resources if you're poor because of pecuniary externalities. At the current rate of wealth inequality growth, it will probably take so many years it might as well be "forever" to eradicate actual poverty and not the "at least you're not a slave" poverty definition they're using.

(note: I skimmed through it, so I could have missed something crucial)

That’s not what we were talking about here. We were talking about building enough housing to be able to guarantee it for everyone. That’s not rent control, that’s just investing in our housing supply.

The topic of this conversation follows from your statement:

Which is bad for landlords (including the ones that work in legislation)

i.e. landowners and people in power hold sway over the decision making process and are keeping us away from legislation that houses people. Unless I misread you. That's why I brought up another example.

Rent control doesn’t work, the economists are correct (Who woulda thunk it, but studying the way prices are determined is a valid field of academic study). Or rather it does work for some people but makes life harder for others, and isn’t nearly as good of an approach as people think.

You clearly did not read the link, the person who wrote it is a PhD economist. Also, using one solution as a way to fix housing is naive, when we could (and should be, it's horribly unaffordable for average people in urban areas, where most people in western countries live, already) be using many, including rent control.

Also economists (who are usually wealthy enough to be able to landlord if they want to do so)... which means they're financially incentivised to hold right wing economic views like "rent control doesn't work, 9/10 economists recommend against it!" like it's a toothpaste advert and economists who challenge that don't get much spotlight in the mainstream.

Meanwhile Meta takes great pains to remove any glimpse of an erogenous zone like the most deranged Christian fundamentalist

I felt this a year ago when I got measles and all the medical staff I talked to were pretty surprised. Parents didn't give me the vaccine as a child, but I got vaccinated as soon as I could afterwards. The weirdest part is I work from home and don't leave my home too often, which means I was either really unlucky, or it was already pretty widespread in the UK then.

"A liberal* is someone who opposes every war except the current war and supports all civil rights movements except the one that’s going on right now."

not to be confused with "left wing" as the term is often used in the US

I realize a lot of Republicans don’t give a shit about consent, but most of the rest of us do

I'm pretty sure the core goal of right wingers in their respective domains is preventing us from gaining the ability to consent to more stuff - or in their more extreme, for taking away our ability to consent to things - so yeah you're right about that. Democracy is a system of consent, and our progress towards that was being challenged during the Enlightenment. Today, for example, many right wing economists are against democratically elected managers/bosses, unions, democratic government owned enterprises, government welfare safety nets for the vulnerable, housing cooperatives as a solution to the housing crisis, the list goes on. The pattern being that all of those increase the average person's ability to consent to more stuff by leveling power asymmetries.

I’m starting to think the term “piracy” is morally neutral. The act can be either positive or negative depending on the context. Unfortunately, the law does not seem to flow from morality, or even the consent of the supposed victims of this piracy.

The morals of piracy also depend on the economic system you're under. If you have UBI, the "support artists" argument is far less strong, because we're all paying taxes to support the UBI system that enables people to become skilled artists without worrying about starving or homelessness - as has already happened to a lesser degree before our welfare systems were kneecapped over the last 4 decades.

But that's just the art angle, a tonne of the early-stage (i.e. risky and expensive) scientific advancements had significant sums of government funding poured into them, yet corporations keep the rights to the inventions they derive from our government funded research. We're paying for a lot of this stuff, so maybe we should stop pretending that someone else 'owns' these abstract idea implementations and come up with a better system.

Selling sex to kids is just as exploitive and repugnant.

Why are we nuking implied nudity entirely off a website to solve a different problem, i.e. kids having access to their parents' credit cards?

A lot of which were good mods too. I've noticed a lot more racism and otherwise right wing posting being left alone/unmoderated since the protest, in the subs I used to browse actively - nowadays I just check in with them every now and then without an account and the intentional or not lack of moderation is making me want to stop doing even that.

It's definitely a coordinated, global effort. This doesn't just happen in multiple states and countries all at once by chance, it really feels like some group is conspiring to make it happen. We already got this passed in the UK by a de-facto unelected leadership who whips their party into voting their way.

I have to wonder if it's linked to how many women saw success with OnlyFans and the like, so they could avoid working in horrible conditions like at an Amazon factory that pretends to have rules on how long you can do work that probably damages your body, and then just conveniently lets it slip that they ended up making you do what was supposed to be 30 minutes, for several hours. Some capital owners are already trying for child labour, so their desire to abuse workers more than usual is already established. I wouldn't be surprised if it's all connected, but I'm not sure if there's solid evidence, so this is just a fun theory I have.

We still need rental properties, and small local landowners should be the priority.

Landlords aren't necessary for rentals to exist. We built hundreds of thousands of government owned properties every year(!) the UK's post-war period. Some of them have bad rep for looking like soviet blocks, but modern social flats look like any other now so that isn't a valid complaint anymore (I have to point them out to friends, they otherwise wouldn't have a clue). These can and have been very much used for temporary accommodation, like private rental units.

If you're more of a market economy fan: we also state-funded housing cooperatives, democratically owned housing. Vienna is the popular example where they even have shared communal swimming pools, but 20% of Norway's entire population lives in them and they're still growing steadily despite not having gov. funding for decades. It's not impossible to come up with a way to use these as rental units while retaining the democratic element (i.e. the renters "own" the flat while they rent it and "sell" it on when they move). In Norway, for example, you're exempt from property transfer taxes when you sell a coop flat meaning there's no tax friction if you want to move from one coop flat to another. Since the flat is never technically yours in a coop (only the share giving you the right to reside there) it just goes back to the coop when you move out, and they can handle renting it on to someone else (so you don't need a slow bartering process to move out). Your rent can also straight up go towards a larger share in the property, so you're not propping up some landlord, the only thing you're really paying for is management of the coop like you would with a privately owned block of flats anyway (except the coop probably wouldn't spend thousand on an Xmas tree).

If we're going to be thinking about government regulation and law changes anyway, we may as well try more than just small ""ethical"" landlords. They may well be part of it in some limited way but let's think beyond just that.

They're in talks about it, hopefully we'll see action soon. There was also an article in NRK (BBC equivalent state news) about Tesla (non factory) workers in Norway having bad working conditions and mulling unionisation, but the leadership there is anti-union so they have to do it in secret.

https://www.nrk.no/norge/tesla-ansatte-organiserer-seg-i-hemmelighet-1.16641657 (you'll have to use a translation service if you can't read Norwegian)

This is a benefit to the worker. They’re leaving because they got a better paying gig or less work/fewer hours for the same amount of money.

Yes, because there's no union there to bargain for better pay, bonuses, more time off work, and so forth. Tech is a new industry where workers have more bargaining power on an individual level because expertise is so sought after. Now imagine combining that with unions and we'd probably all be doing 4 day work weeks already, like unions are currently bargaining for in various countries. We'd likely also have more time for tech debt, as unions increase certain types of innovation.

Like, if unions can do this for McDonalds workers after a sympathy strike in Nordic countries:

Every few months, a prominent person or publication points out that McDonalds workers in Denmark receive $22 per hour, 6 weeks of vacation, and sick pay. This compensation comes on top of the general slate of social benefits in Denmark, which includes child allowances, health care, child care, paid leave, retirement, and education through college, among other things.

Why would we assume tech workers in a very profitable industry wouldn't be able to get away with even more?