Currently this post sits at 5 down votes, so it’s not just that some people are unable to learn from the past, it’s people who are unwilling to learn from the past.

If you’re presented with evidence that what you want to do, will not work and will have negative consequences and you still want it to go ahead, then I have to ask: Why?

Why insist on doing something again which has failed in the past and which will undoubtedly fail again in the future? What is this meant to accomplish?

Simplified: Energy is stored as heat in matter (the jostling of atoms and molecules) and there are many more water molecules under the bridge than there are molecules/atoms in the bridge. So both the water and the metal heat up during the day and cool down at night, but since there is much more water, the water has a much more stable temperature. In short: Larger volumes of atoms have larger heat capacities.

If the water under the bridge was stagnant and a shallow puddle, then it’s temperature would vary much more throughout the day as well, but it would still warm up less than metal or soil, since a body of water loses some of it’s heat through evaporation.

This is also why coastal climate is a thing: the huge mass of water in the ocean makes it so that coastal areas are warmer in the winter and cooler in the summer.

Some people are unable to learn from the past. And the last time this happened isn’t even that long ago.

In 2012 then candidate president Hollande did a surprise announcement of a 75% tax on earners of 1m+. And it was such a surprise that even the fiscal expert on his team was surprised.

Before Hollande was even elected, rich people started responding by changing their domicile to outside France, often also actually (part time) emigrating.

After getting elected Hollande then tasked his government with implementing such a tax. And that whole lengthy process was a political disaster, ending with the implementation of a heavily watered down temporary tax.

The chronology: https://www.lesechos.fr/2015/01/chronologie-de-la-taxe-a-75-sur-les-tres-hauts-revenus-avant-disparition-197994

After implementation the tax failed to bring in the projected money, because well, people react to what they perceive as overtaxation + the overall economy wasn’t doing so great due to this and other policies of Hollande: https://taxfoundation.org/blog/france-s-75-percent-tax-rate-offers-lesson-revenue-estimating/

Half an article with a graph of the effect on wages, the rest is behind a paywall: https://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2019/06/28/quand-la-taxe-a-75-a-ete-supprimee-le-nombre-de-contribuables-declarant-plus-de-1-million-d-euros-par-an-a-augmente_5482849_3232.html

In 2017 Hollande was the most unpopular french president in history and he did not run for reelection. Not solely because of this tax, but it certainly didn’t help.

And that was 75%. So a 90% tax on the rich is just incredibly dumb populism.

I’m absolutely certain that it wasn’t ads that put a firm like TomTom on a downward slope. This was actually the first time that I’ve heard someone proclaim that ads are the reason.

If your business is to sell maps + navigation devices for money and then the times change and now nearly everyone already owns a smartphone with built in gps + some car manufacturers provide sat nav as a default + another company is giving access to a map away for free, well then your business is in trouble.

I’ve never even heard of ads in TomTom or Garmin, since I stopped using a dedicated sat nav once I had a smartphone, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it was one of the things they tried to stay afloat after smartphones became ubiquitous.

Thanks for the name. I skimmed through it and tbh, I’m not seeing why no additional context/doubt could be provided. They might have internal guidelines to not do so, but the charter itself does not seem to stop journalists from providing additional context outside of official statements/reports. It seems to me that this sentence was a choice by the editor/journalist.

I just searched for some keywords, “fact” landed me on the paragraph that seemed most applicable: “duly accurate and impartial news, current affairs and factual programming”. The other paragraphs I found, that could have been applicable, were about being impartial when UK politics were involved.

They weren’t dodging, it’s a thing and it should be the first result if you bothered to look it up: https://www.bbc.com/aboutthebbc/governance/charter

Do you have a reference for that law? I’m interested in seeing how it’s worded.

USA aid is very important to Ukraine, but even without it they would continue fighting. Ukraine has been without USA material aid for months already in the past, when the republican party was blocking it. And as it turned out, Ukraine sustained higher casualties and had less offensive power than with USA aid, but they were never close to folding.

Ukrainians + their supporting neighbours are very motivated to not be occupied by Russia, so they’re not going to just give up if Putin’s stooges come to power in the USA.

According to the official investigation Epstein did commit suicide so that’s what the journalist should report, but that doesn’t mean that the journalist can’t add something like “in suspicious circumstances” to make clear that the circumstances of Epstein’s death were well, very suspicious.

I consider as most effective, the system that is most effective for the whole market in the long term, not the system that only works best for a few in that market. And yes, I realize that authoritarian market intervention is great for maximizing short term profits for those few companies/persons, but if the rest of the market suffers in the long term because of it (and they are), then we’re dealing with rent seeking and that’s pretty commonly accepted to be bad in the long term. Bad for society, but also bad for wealth creation. And if it’s bad for wealth creation, then it’s definitely not effective capitalism. This is why I consider authoritarian capitalism to not be the most effective form of capitalism.

And yeah, I’m aware that the USA is on this trajectory. Other western democracies are too, but of those that are, I think it’s still mostly to a lesser extent than the USA.

About China: China’s competiveness has significantly regressed in the last few years. Xi Jinping’s authoritarian and imperialistic policies have not been good for business. Under Xi Jinping guanxi is also much more important again than it was under Hun Jintao: companies have no real rights, they too are dependant on maintaining relations and obeying the government. If they fail to maintain relations or if they bet on the wrong political horse, then the company leadership will be gone pretty fast.

Authoritarian capitalism is not the most effective form of capitalism. It is the most effective for those that are already on top, but for the market as a whole (and especially for the society around that market), it’s going to be worse in the long run.

Companies that are protected from competition by an authoritarian government will be able to extract higher profits in the short term, but their products and services will become worse in the long term, which not only harms their customers, but also the company’s chances of selling their products on actually competitive markets. The American car makers are a good example of this imo.

Companies that are protected from having to pay fair wages and/or providing good working conditions, will be faced with labor shortages if the workers have alternatives, or with a depressed consumer market because the people have less money/time to spend on consuming things.

I really like their pagewide xl printers, but those are purely aimed at businesses. Just to name one thing I like :D

And those xl printers are the only thing that I can think off. I won’t even consider buying a current HP computer/laptop/small printer/…

This is also something that many people outside of the USA don’t understand: 49% of the americans are not voting for the Trump/republican shit show that they see in their foreign media, but rather for a heavily editorialized image of the person and party.

The quotes are there because it’s a common misconception that as soon you have any kind of 4g signal, you have access to a fast connection, which is not the case. So in many countries at some point they proclaim that “xx%” of the population now has access to “4g”, which will be technically true, but the actual % that has access to fast 4g will be substantially lower.

Hey, thanks for taking the time to answer.

Afaik, high internet speed requires higher frequencies and high frequencies reach less far + have less penetration through/around obstacles. That’s what makes providing “4g” virtually everywhere easy (good enough for phone calls at least), but if they want to provide actual high speeds everywhere, then it suddenly becomes not so easy (nor cheap).

That the USA and Canada don’t provide proper high speed internet access/choice to many of their rural citizens is caused by the rent-seeking mentality of their network companies + the governments that enable this. Most of those rural citizens live in places where there are more than enough people for it to make economic sense to invest, but investing would lower short term profits, so they don’t. Instead those customers are stuck with the choice between a single provider who is offering bad service, or no service at all. And as we’ve seen with the Boobies American, they’ve got enough of their dumb citizens convinced that they are oh so exceptional that this is the best that they could ever expect.

Tbh, that 4g coverage up north looks pretty damn good for how few people live there. To me it just makes no economic sense to provide that good a service there. So I’m curious and as a Finn you might know: does it make economic sense or was this investment done for other reasons?

And why are you unwilling to accept that there is a lot of nothing land in Finland? Most of Finland is a lot of nothing land, plagued by mosquitoes in the summer and darkness in the winter.

Your country is neither unique, nor exceptional in this regard.

The Finn already addressed this in their first post: 97% of the country has 4g. That is country, not people in the country. So yes, a reindeer in Lapland has a better potential internet connection than many rural north americans.

Edit: I found some recent numbers: this carrier claims to provide 4g to 99% of the population, 5g to 96%. https://www.dna.fi/wholesale/about-us/networks That 2nd statistic must be pretty damn rare, the country of Nokia indeed.

I’m not so sure about that, it’s not like news like this makes it to right-wing voters, they are too busy consuming “alternate” facts media and being outraged about whatever they’re expected to be outraged about now. And republicans need just 1 more presidential win for there never to be a non republican president ever again.

I’m tacking on this opinion article from 2020 with a few good examples/explanations of how bad stock buybacks are in the long term.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/petergeorgescu/2020/05/13/stock-buybacks-are-banned-let-it-be-a-trend/

Boeing and general electric are of course mentioned. The line goes up, until it doesn’t. The key to being a successful CEO, seems to be, to be the one making the line go up and then gtfo before it comes crashing down.