domain:parrhesia.substack.com
zeke5123a
14m ago
People want nice stuff—especially housing. Bing that cost down and other things like the above won’t matter
Zephyr
18m ago
I won't go into specifics but most people figure it out by their late 20s
I'm kind of stupid, can you DM it to me? I am fairly certain I failed to figure it out.
Sunshine
19m ago
If the defense industries can't function without Chinese support then they're useless and should be destroyed. What were they planning to do if war with China ever came?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
22m ago
Smart leadership solves this.
China doesn't explicitly have a policy against offshoring (though they have been trying to keep India from getting the tools and capital to compete), they have a strategy of fostering industry in their own country. They have smart leadership.
It's not just offshoring that matters, what about foreign countries paying large sums for key workers to come over and share skills? China did this to South Korean shipbuilding when they were in a slump, paid the best people to come over for a few years. And now they have the biggest shipbuilding sector in the world.
And why is offshoring a thing? Energy costs are lower, environmental regulations less severe. Smart leaders would lower the cost of energy and industrial inputs by relaxing the most onerous renewable/environmental/planning restrictions. Smart leaders would make the labour market more flexible (US hasn't done too badly here compared to other rich countries), would prevent ridiculous anomalies like caps on doctor training, would invest more in R&D, would modernize infrastructure, would shamelessly steal other people's IP as they see fit.
Individual policies are ineffective if the leadership is stupid. Subsidies just encourage inefficiency and corruption without discipline. Tariffs can be very harmful for imported components and cause uncertainty if they're raised and lowered willy-nilly.
Subsidizing R&D can also just result in people relabelling things as R&D, reducing energy costs can encourage inefficiency... Everything has a 'perverse incentives' evil twin. Sanctions on exporting sensitive technologies can just be busted or third-party routed around, as the US has discovered with AI chips. Any smart person could tell you that it's dumb to sell rare earth mines off to China, whether it's 1995 or 2025. But smart people do not run the US government.
Individual policies must be well-implemented and precisely targeted by a responsive, dynamic bureaucracy in accordance with a coherent long-term vision. It's a crisis of intelligence, not policy.
BahRamYou
30m ago
i mean, i'm happy to take my salary in the form of corporate stock if that would 10x my compensation... but regular employees don't seem to get that option.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
34m ago
My understanding is that contrary to stereotype the Russian Air Force has been extremely risk averse in how they employ their aircraft because they know that they're not that great at building airplanes.
The VKS basically did nothing other than relatively ineffective close air support with frog foots and helicopters (which, on a side note, proved quite effective at using anti-tank missiles at the extreme of their range against Ukrainian armor during the '23 counteroffensive) or lob missiles from outside the range of Ukrainian air defenses for the first year and a half or so of the war (notably expending a large number of them to little effect during Surovikin's campaign against the Ukrainian energy grid).
The major game changers have been the Russians introducing their equivalent of the JDAM (allowing them to drop far more tonnage for far less money from outside the range of Ukrainian air defenses) and their development of the Geran series of suicide drones. The latter has provided a cost-effective way of attacking into the teeth of Ukrainian air defenses and saturating them such they more frequently achieve hits with their ballistic missiles.).
hanikrummihundursvin
38m ago
Paying out the nose for it would in theory be fine. Since you're paying to your own citizens. Funding infrastructure and human capital and more.
But in reality, implementing anything of the sort would is hazardous at best. As the global marketplace would slowly siphon these gains out of the economy. Resulting in a very similar process to the direct selling of natural resources, just by a thousand cuts.
Loquat
39m ago
I knew the songs were big online, but I was still surprised to hear one of the other neighborhood moms singing "Golden" to herself while we were cleaning up after a recent block party.
Sunshine
39m ago
I had the same thought when I read that first line. How can the 'nuclear option' for a nuclear power be anything except using nuclear weapons? Surely that's the nuclear option.
Loquat
43m ago
I do believe there's some space in between, "dog is trained enough to respect the invisi-fence" and "dog is trained so well it can be trusted to stay in an open yard regardless of how many squirrels, kids, etc may come running by".
Celestial-body-NOS
We are all human beans. Together, we will rice.
58m ago
Nah, if anything scrap the $100 and $50 bills
The total at US grocery stores can easily go into the triple digits.
larger denominations just help with money laundering
And with being able to buy food without needing the approval of one's bank.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
1hr ago
It's not missing the point, it's bringing up another separate point that bears on the argument.
It doesn't bear on the argument because it's got nothing to do with the argument. The argument is that CEOs are parasitizing comp that should be going to the barista, and the barista union will undo this injustice.
Trying to shoehorn in concerns about CEO performance is missing the point at best and quokkadom at worst ("wow, the union and I both think the CEO is overpaid, we must have a common cause! Comrades, what do you mean you don't care about the stock going up?")
Costco, for example, doesn't have this problem. Costco is well run, pays its people well, treats them well, and has had an excellent run of fairly compensated CEOs. Costco pays a total of $20mm including stock. Is Starbucks doing better than Costco? (No) Is Starbucks more complex than Costco? (No)
Okay, but Google, for example is (reasonably) well run, has vastly outperformed the S&P over the past five years, pays its employees pretty well, and people still bitch about the CEO comp. "Well, he screwed up when he laid off all th-" "but google employees don't get paid at top of ma-" no, this is a competitive business, nobody does everything right, the point is that the company is doing well and employees are paid fantastic amounts.
Why are Starbucks baristas and Google engineers alike complaining about this? It's because of leftism. Nothing to do with CEO performance.
CEO overpayment is an obvious and manifest injustice, so of course people are going to latch onto that. Saying well it's a big company with a lot of money sloshing around so stealing a few bucks is no big deal is the morality of the shoplifter and the lazy employee, not the profit maximizing shareholder or the diligent corporate steward.
Yeah, agreed, bad CEOs should get the boot. The mistake is to think this has anything to do with the amount of comp that the rank and file get.
Bad CEOs are bad for the rank and file because if your employer goes out of business it's bad news. That's about it. The other points you mention are much more relevant for investors than employees who stand to gain about tree-fiddy a week if the CEO takes a 50% paycut.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
1hr ago
Given current construction prices and the size of your build, you either got a great deal or live in the middle of nowhere or both.
The 2019 RSMeans book indicates that the cost multiplier of my new house's location is 0.92. (Some states have locations as low as 0.74.)
For a house that small, you probably are fine with just exhaust fans and some makeup air to a small air handler.
It's an interesting idea. I see that, according to the Architectural Graphic Standards for Residential Design: "Most new residences are too tightly constructed to provide adequate leakage ventilation. Therefore, manual and mechanical ventilation are recommended."
stuckinbathroom
1hr ago
I would even settle for a tradition of requiring the CEO to invest a material percentage of his liquid net worth in the company’s stock on his first day on the job, precisely to put the fear of God downside risk in him. Or, more or less equivalently, a tradition of letting shareholders pierce the corporate veil and personally sue the CEO in civil court for securities fraud or breach of fiduciary duty in the event that the share price declines too much (perhaps relative to a broad market index, or a basket of competitors’ stocks or something)
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1hr ago
After tariffs I don't think I can handle becoming an expert on rare earth metals this year too. I'll just go to production with your opinion.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
1hr ago
So plane travel was not nearly as affordable for poor and lower middle class people as it is today
I suspect this has something to do with air travel in the past being romanticized as the good old days.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1hr ago
I don’t think that’s true, or at least not necessarily true. Microsoft has a huge advantage in “lock in”, meaning that you run into a lot of problems if a company decides to go with other software platforms. The files they depend on to run their business are made in Microsoft products and thus in many cases, unless the company had the foresight to enforce a rule that ensures that they didn’t all save all their stuff in formats that only Microsoft can use, switching to something else imposes a burden. That’s before considering the learning curve for switching to a new company. It’s enough of a PITA that most don’t switch unless the software is really bad.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
1hr ago
yes that's in stock, not cash, if that makes a difference
Yes, that's a huge difference, mostly because the stock is only worth anything if the CEO does a good job of running the company. This can cause problems as well, such as CEO taking measures to juice short term sugars process at the expense of long term corporate health, but is a standard way to align incentives.
Tesla is also a special case because the CEO is also the principal founder and largest shareholder by a considerable margin, so it is to be expected that his interests and the company's will align.
Shrike
1hr ago
My understanding is that close air support was always understood to be extremely attrition heavy in a peer war - supposedly, the USAF expected to lose 60 A-10s against the Soviets daily.
Other sorties are much lower risk - while the Russian Su-34 and Su-25 fleets have been hit hard, the MiG-31s and strategic bombers have been quite safe in the air.
(Frankly if anything the Su-25 losses are lower than what we might expect from Cold War projections, the Russians have been using them for close air support - and I think continue to do so, Wikipedia lists one as lost in February to a MANPADS, which suggests a CAS role, and they've lost around 40, it looks like, over the course of years, not weeks. However without knowing the total number of sorties I can't compare to the supposed USAF projections for the A-10.)
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
1hr ago
So the book is Marine! The Life of Chesty Puller, but being a biography of Puller, there isn't anything else to explain Willoughby's motives at all. There might be more insight to be had from a good bio of MacArthur on that front.
Goodguy
1hr ago
I think the cost of plane tickets back in the day is exaggerated. Based on my reading, I think they were about 10 times more expensive than the most budget airline deals of today, but still affordable for the average upper middle class person. In the early 70s you would have paid the equivalent of about $1000-$1500 in today's money to fly from coast to coast in the US. So plane travel was not nearly as affordable for poor and lower middle class people as it is today, but it also wasn't something that only the upper class could afford.
BahRamYou
1hr ago
Then you should also consider that part of his high pay is also in keeping expenses low, so there is in fact an antagonistic relationship there. If starbucks was forced to use all of their profits to pay employee salaries, the board would probably expect to pay the CEO a lot less.
While I do not doubt that for 2% of the US GDP, you could get some batteries, a decent range of chips and possibly REE refining, I think that for full independence from foreign markets at near-equal performance, even 100% of the GDP would not be enough.
Modern production chains are incredibly complex. A lot of products which are viable if your target market is a few billion people are not viable when your target market is just 300M. Remember when the 2011 floods in Thailand drove up hard disk prices for a year or two, because HDD manufacturing had naturally clustered in the Pacific rim?
Gains from scale are real and significant, they are what is powering the global economy. If someone in the US decides to build a game console which is made out of ore mined in America and manufactured and assembled in the US, that would require investments of many billions and result in a product which would be 10x as expensive as its international competitors.
If you want full autarky, join the Amish.
A better question would be which parts of the production chains you see as strategic important and especially vulnerable, and then think whether it is feasible to onshore these (or subsidize a friendly country building them). At the end of the day, the American people will survive if China will refuse to sell them the latest iPhone, after all.
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