nednobbins @ nednobbins @lemm.ee

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2 yr. ago

Sounds right.
Presumably "y'all's" would be the second person superplural possessive.

We also have "Ya'" where we elide the entire ending and you need to determine plural vs singular from context. For example, "Ya' can't get thea, les' ya been there befoa."

“You” is also ungendered. There seems to be a common idea that English is missing a second person plural. We have one, it’s “you”. We just stopped using the second person singular. That’s what all those variations of “thee, thou, thy” etc were.

“Y’all” would be a superpluralization. If that’s still not enough we also have the ultraplural form of, “all y’all”

That’s the meaning. The earliest example is

“from St. Jerome's "The Letter to the Ephesians" (written in Latin) in AD 400: "Noli equi dentes inspicere donati." (This translates as "Never inspect the teeth of a given horse.") https://www.grammar-monster.com/sayings_proverbs/dont_look_a_gift_horse_in_the_mouth.htm#:~:text=This%20idiom%20is%20over%201500,determined%20by%20examining%20its%20teeth.

The German version is “Einem geschenkten Gaul schaut man nicht ins Maul”. Often followed by, “Einem geschenkten Barsch schaut man nicht unter die Kiemen.”

Light intensity is inversely proportional to the square of the distance. A light that's only a few microns away from your cornea would look incredibly bright even with minimal power.

What happens if he violates the conditions of the bond and the bail is in danger of being seized by the court?

Could Foster Bail Bonds LLC legally send a bounty hunter "bail recovery agent" after him? Would they?

If they're in it for the ratings I can't imagine better footage than having Duane Chapman kick in the door of a former president. OTOH if they go that route they'd be signing up for one hell of a wild ride with no way off. They either become the most famous bail bond company ever or they get completely crushed and the owners go to jail or worse.

It's functionally close enough to a conglomerate though.

I'm not exactly sure what '"free market" cultist' is or if you're accusing me of being one. Modern economists don't normally align themselves with simplistic ideologies like "free market", "communist" or "capitalist". They're aware of the historical and modern usage of these terms but they tend to focus on areas that are far to specific for those terms to even make sense. You won't find a lot of economists that argue for complete Laissez-faire capitalism any more than you'll find real economists arguing in favor of classical Marxism.

There is general agreement that conglomeration benefits management more than shareholders. There's general agreement that they are more likely to arise under some economic conditions and that those conditions usually aren't associated with socially optimal economic policies.

It's a bit complicated.

The CEO and the other shareholders aren't the same.

For the CEO, it's a good way to diversify since they can't diversify the normal way.

For the regular share holders it's a way to diversify but it's not as good as being able to buy and sell the individual components.

I'll skip a lot of the math but the upshot is that their Sharpe Ratio (expected return divided by risk) is higher if they do their own diversification than if they buy one company that tries to diversify within it.

These weird combinations look fun but they're generally the result of having conglomerates, companies that have gobbled up a bunch of smaller, unrelated companies.

Conglomerates are tricky to pull off because managing a lot of disparate business lines. A CEO who knows all about how to market construction equipment is likely to miss that one of their other products became an iconic sex toy years ago. The big problem is that more focused companies can typically outmaneuver you in their area of focus.

Theoretically, there might be synergies that make your company more effective but normally, conglomeration is drag on the risk-adjusted rate of return on your company. It's much easier to pull off when your government has strong protectionist policies or if there are officials you can bribe to keep out the competition.

Why would a company do something that's generally bad for the company? It's generally good for the CEO. A CEO often has a very concentrated investment portfolio. Changes in the value of the company they're running can have a huge impact on their personal wealth. Conglomeration allows a single company to be a diversified asset. It does it in a way that's objectively worse for shareholders but better for the CEO.

I’m a bit sad no one has paired it with “Nanu nanu” yet.

Cries old person tears.

I think you're sort of right but it will depend heavily on how radical a shift the new technology is. In order for there to be this kind of divide there needs to be a steep learning curve to the technology. People are only willing to put up with those learning curves if there's a significant advantage. That means that manufacturers can only successfully market "difficult" technologies if they provide a big advantage.

I'm not aware of any old people having difficulty transitioning from quills to, fountain pens to ball point pens. They all basically did the same thing and you only had to make minor adjustments. Nobody bothered learning how to use the Writer since it didn't actually let you do anything better. They were willing to go through the significant curve of learning how to use typewriters because, once they did, they could write significantly faster.

Computers and cell phones are a whole different way of interacting with people and information than "hardcopy" was. You didn't just swap some objects that did the same thing with a different approach. It wasn't even just a slightly different way of doing the same thing. Those technologies allowed us to interact with the world in a totally new way. It was worth learning a bunch of weird computer stuff that older generations had never heard of because we could do things they never dreamed of. (eg I used to get rushed when talking with my grandmother to save on long distance bills, now I don't even think about long distance costs other than latency.

I'm sure that sort of thing will happen again but it would require a far more disruptive technology than AR. That's a small iteration that we've already been primed for. When Terminator 1 came out, nobody was confused when it switched to "terminator vision" and you saw the AR display. That's why I joke about neural interfaces. In theory, that could give a person significantly higher throughput rates to their computer. There are all kinds of potential benefits to. It would be worth it for people to put up with steep learning curves, unintuitive interfaces and lots of troubleshooting if it meant they could suddenly "read" at 10,000 words a minute or control complex robots. Not everyone would go through that effort and it would create the kinds of divides that we saw with computers.

When I look at current technologies as an old(ish) person, it's a very different view than my parents and grandparents had. They didn't understand the new technologies. I have no trouble understanding them, I just think a lot of them are a waste of my time (unlike screwing around on Lemmy, which is totally productive /s).

My wife and I regularly joke that one day we'll harass our kids to help us with our neural interfaces but I don't think that sort of thing will happen any time soon.

When I was a kid in the 80's a lot of people could already afford computers. They weren't so cheap that everyone had them but they were affordable to a fair number of people if they really wanted one. A C64 cost $595 at launch, that's under $2,000 in today's dollars.

The biggest barrier to computers were that they weren't "user friendly". If you wanted to play a simple video game you needed to know some basic command line instructions. When I wanted to set up my first mouse for my 8086 it involved installing drivers and editing config.sys and autoexec.bat. You couldn't really do anything with a computer those days unless you were willing to nerd out.

At the same time, nerding out on a computer could easily get you deep into the guts of your computer in a functional way. I learned that the only way I could play video games at night was if I opened up the computer and disconnected the speaker wire so it wouldn't alert my parents. I also learned that I could "hack" Bards Tale by opening up the main file with debug and editing it so that the store would sell an infinite number of "Crystal Swords".

Today there are 2 cell phones for every human on earth. Kids walk around with supercomputers in their pockets. But they've become so "user friendly" that you barely even need to be literate to operate one. That's generally a good thing but it removes an incentive to figuring out how the stuff works. Most people only bother with that if they're having some trouble getting it working in the first place.

At the same time it's gotten much harder to make changes to your computer. The first Apple was a pile of circuits you needed to solder together. You can't even remove the battery on a modern one (without jumping through a lot of hoops). If you edit some of your games it's more likely to trigger some piracy or cheat protection than to let you actually change it.

There are still large communities of computer nerds but your average person today basically treats computers like magic boxes.

I'd expect that kind of gap in other areas. I'd take 3d printing as an example. You can get one now for a few hundred bucks. They're already used in industry but, at this point, they're still very fiddly. The people who have them at home are comfortable doing stuff like troubleshooting, flashing ROMs, wading through bad documentation and even printing custom upgrades for their printer.

The problem is that we never bothered to create a system where free education would actually work.

Producers always like to sell their goods for as much as they can get. Normally, a consumer looks at a product, decides if it's worth the price and then either buys it or doesn't. If prices are too high, producers are forced to lower them to stay in business.

The current system essentially created a 3 way business transaction that guarantees runaway education costs.

The universities provide a service. It's really hard to determine the value of that service since there isn't a liquid market for "an education" or "a Harvard degree" that you can easily look up.

The government then says they'll cover a percentage of that cost. This is a bit tricky. A normal subsidy is effectively a paying a fraction of the cost. Once you introduce loan forgiveness, either as a frequent or guaranteed event, that fraction effectively goes to 100%.

The student is getting a degree of unknown value but since they don't have to pay (at least not the whole thing) they'll just agree to the purchase, even if they don't personally think the good is worth as much as the provider is charging. There's no reason to if someone is picking up the bill.

The universities see that their price elasticity of demand (how much their sales suffer when they overcharge) is essentially 0. That means they can raise them with impunity. The end result is that Universities can essentially help themselves to large government grants without any requirement to show the public how we benefit from those grants.

If we consider education to be a public good then we should treat it as such. That would mean that we cancel the student loan program, get rid of tax subsidies for educational institutions and just have the federal government create a competing educational system. Take the money we're spending on outsourcing education to the private sector and add to it. For the system to work it would need to attract top tier professors and that means good research facilities and salaries. It's not a complicated idea but it would be a massive undertaking.

As a bonus we'd get some great initialisms. The federal universities would obviously be the FU system. State campuses might have names like FUNY and FUCA.

And yes, the point of such a system is that it would be paid entirely by taxes and would be free to students.

The funny thing is that your elders said exactly the same thing to their elders. It was a member of the "silent generation" (pre-boomer) who coined the phrase, "Don't trust anyone over 30." Even when those elders told them that their elders (great elders?) told them the same thing your elders didn't believe their elders either.

The flip side is that many of your elders, who realized that their elders didn't have all the answers now think that they have all the answers.

Smart money says that your generation will do exactly what all the other generations did; Do a lot of youthful rebellion against the obviously stupid stuff from previous generations, mix in rebellion against a bunch of stuff that's actually not stupid, discover nuance, strive for a system that combines the best elements of the past with the best ideas of the present, fail, get jaded, forget about nuance, assume that you have all the answers, get frustrated that your kids are making obvious mistakes that you've told them how to avoid.

I'd start by narrowing the scope of this question to conservative Christians in the US and Europe. India has a larger population that the US and the EU combined, is quite religiously conservative and leans socialist. Even though the Catholic Church issued a "Decree Against Communism" in 1949, that has since been amended and many Catholics around the world embrace socialism. While modern Muslims do participate in market economies, Islam has some fairly strict laws against capitalism; Sukuk is the complex workaround they use in order to get against their prohibition against charging interest.

For Christians in the US and Europe I think there are a few major components.

Christianity has had strong capitalist elements for a long time. In particular, John Calvin argued, among other things, that God rewards good Christians in this life as well as the next. These rewards can take the form of material wealth and therefore material wealth is evidence of God's favor. This philosophy was obviously extremely popular among the wealthy.

After WWII the US government wanted a way to convince people that our erstwhile allies, the USSR and China should now be considered enemies. One obvious element to emphasize was that they were both Communists. An element of Communism was godlessness, "Religion is the opiate of the masses." So the US took the contrary stance and presented itself as a Christian nation. Two of the more obvious results were that "under God" was added to the pledge of allegiance and Congress replaced the unofficial "E Pluribus unum" (out of many, one) with, "In God we trust." Since it was primarily intended to be anti-communist it was, effectively, pro-capitalist.

In the US there was also a deliberate shift when George HW Bush realized that evangelical Christians made up a large part of the Republican base. At the time churches had a fairly strong aversion to politics. They generally considered politics and economics to be part of the profane world and thought it was beneath them. He managed to convince them that the profane wasn't just irrelevant to spiritual health, it was an active threat. By this view, good Christians couldn't ignore politics they had to take an active role to help fight Satan. Since the Republicans were the ones actively recruiting Evangelicals into politics they made sure the message stayed supportive of their policies (including economic policies).

The problem we see when we try to implement price controls is that they inevitably lead to shortages. The oil caps in the 70s are a famous example but the NYC rent controls were just as bad. The standard practice if you wanted an apartment was to look in the newspaper for open house listings that day. You would show up before the open house starts with at least 1 months rent plus first and last months rent as security deposit, in cash. If you liked the place you signed within the first half hour. If you waited someone else took the apartment.

Part of the challenge is that it's not as simple as a 10% profit cap. What if someone owns a house for 2 years? Do we cap it at 20% profit? Do we index the allowable profit to inflation and then add a "reasonable" offset? Do we want to allow different profit caps for different renovations? (maybe we don't want to treat swimming pools and solar panels the same way?) How long do you need to live in a house to consider it owner occupied?

As those regulations get more and more complicated you end up with a ton of loopholes. The more you do that the more profitable regulatory arbitrage becomes as a business model.

In general, tight margins favor large companies over small firms. They can operate at such a large scale where they can thrive off of profit margins that would starve small businesses. That's the general issue with mega-retailers. They operate on single digit margins. Mom and pop can't streamline their operations enough to survive on those margins.

Our housing stock needs both growth and maintenance. That comes from investment. If we push the private sector out of those investments without replacing them we'll just end up with a crumbling housing infrastructure. If we cut large businesses out of it government would likely need to take up the slack. And to be clear that government intervention would need to be massive. The real estate market is huge and if we cut out the private sector we will definitely need to raise taxes, by a large amount, to cover it. That's not off the table but we should walk into a decision like that with eyes wide open.

I don't think it's a good idea either but we live in a society that effectively decided that we do want houses to be investments decades ago. That's entrenched now and many people bet their life savings on the promise that their house would be a good investment.

If we change that without taking those people into account they're all screwed. While some rich people would get screwed in that process a whole lot of poor people would get screwed too.

The problem with this plan is that it assumes that we're only hurting some cigar puffing Wall Street fat cats but, in reality, the pain would be felt much more broadly.

In the US, the majority of people own the home they live in. https://www.propertyshark.com/info/us-homeownership-rates-by-state-and-city/ Those aren't big corporation or greedy landlords, they're 50+ percent of the population of each state. Some of those people are billionaires and many of them have below median income. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/chart-assets-make-wealth/

Those super wealthy people that we're happy to throw under the bus don't have their wealth tied up in their homes. Their real estate investments tend to be small fractions of their portfolios. The ones that would get hit the hardest are the ones with less than $100k. I'm glad that you're in a position where you can survive a large financial loss on your house but a lot of people don't have that luxury.

Any plan that just kills their investments without some way to take care of those people will create a disaster. Maybe we could bump up Social Security somehow? That would involve significant tax increases but it could plug the gap.

Huge swaths of our economy are set up to assume that houses are financial assets. NIMBY policies are largely about maintaining or increasing the financial value of the real estate. The corporations buying up all the housing are kind of a red herring. The US has one of the highest owner occupancy rates in the world. There has been a slight (about 1.6%) in non-own occupied housing and only a fraction of those 1.6% are corporations. So it's technically true that corporations hold more residential real estate but they hold so little of it that it's unlikely to be a primary factor in home pricing or availability.

As I said elsewhere, the data is very clear on the matter. We don't have a lot of empty housing inventory being horded by greedy investors. By any reasonable measure, we have a housing shortage.

I'm assuming OP intends to specifically exclude rental companies. As near as I can tell this plan would also exclude individual renters. Not sure how that would play out if someone wanted to defray the cost of their home by renting out a room or subdividing their home.

We could. Why would anyone want to make those investments once we've cut off all their profit potential?

Investors chase profits. We can cut off their profits but when we do that 2 things happen; some of them just leave the industry and some of them break the law to try to get around the regulations. Almost nobody just eats the loss and continues investing.