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booly

@ booly @sh.itjust.works

Posts
2
Comments
527
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • How much money should one person realistically make or have?

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  • It's impossible to become a billionaire after that without exploiting others, whether that is workers, employees, investors...whoever.

    People say this, but I don't think it's true.

    If I simply ask for people to give me money if they like me, and I get 1 million people to give me a dollar each, then I become a millionaire. Nobody's being taken advantage of, everyone is voluntarily doing this.

    Getting to a billion is a lot harder but not impossible. If I ask and 10 million people give me $100 each over the course of 10 years, I might make a billion dollars that way.

    So who can do this kind of "ask people for money" at these scales? Anyone who provides a service where the marginal cost of each additional recipient of that service doesn't cost anything. A musician playing music in a subway station performs basically the same amount of work whether 10 people walk by or 1000 people walk by in the time that he performs. And if you're a recording artist, you might release a song that literally over a billion people enjoy.

    Yes, sports leagues and movie studios and record labels and Ticketmaster and book publishers and live venues and broadcasters and tech platforms are often exploitative in many ways, but authors, musicians, artists, filmmakers, comedians, and other creators can and do sometimes do things that make the world better by billions of dollars worth of happiness, while taking a cut worth hundreds of millions, or even billions.

    Ultimately, we do things that produce value in some way or another. Sometimes we get to keep the fruits of our labor, and sometimes we get to profit from that value created. Often, as in the world of intellectual property, the value is very far removed from the actual cost to produce, including the cost in terms of human labor. When that happens, sometimes the excess value is worth billions. Even without a big team creating that value.

  • Google Deploying Huge CO2 Battery Facilities with Company Energy Dome

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  • Or maybe use excess power to electrolyze water for fuel cell use later?

    Hydrogen storage presents a lot of challenges, because it tends to leak at normal temperatures found on Earth. So we either tolerate a lot of loss during storage, or we use lots of energy chilling it to a temperature where it won't easily escape.

  • Is there a point we can track down when we stopped caring about doctors, nurses, teacher, etc? And thought it was a great idea to pay atheletes millions and screw everyone else?

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  • There are about 500 NBA roster spots. Total basketball related income across the league is $10.25 billion, and the CBA requires that player income make up half of that. So there's $5.13 billion to split between 500 players, an average/mean of $10.25 million per full time player (some players get called up or put on reserve when injuries or something like that happen).

    There are about 3.8 million public school teachers in K-12. If you took literally every dollar paid to NBA players and gave it to public school teachers, that'd be about $1350 per teacher.

    There are other sports, of course, but we're also talking about nurses and doctors and EMTs and public librarians and other important underpaid jobs. Taking all money from sports isn't going to make much of a dent in those other jobs' pay.

  • Is there a point we can track down when we stopped caring about doctors, nurses, teacher, etc? And thought it was a great idea to pay atheletes millions and screw everyone else?

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  • Ridiculous pay for star athletes and celebrities is at least fair

    Put another way, we as a society actually do spend wayyy more money on doctors, nurses, and teachers. It's just that there are many millions of people who have to split that pot of money, whereas for pro athletes there are only a few dozen or a few hundred to split that comparably smaller pot of money with.

    I might have the same favorite NBA player as literally millions of people in this country. I for sure don't have the same favorite doctor or favorite teacher, though.

    So if a genie showed up and said "give $1 to your favorite celebrity and give $100 to your favorite teacher," we as a society would give way more money to the teachers, but each individual teacher would receive less than each individual celebrity who gets paid under this system.

  • What good do luxury apartments do that no one can afford?

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  • I very rarely hear my neighbors.

    Somewhat paradoxically, the soundproofing in big buildings tends to be much better than in smaller buildings. The concrete and steel and thick storm resistant windows and fire doors between unit and hallway required by the building code for tall buildings have so much weight that things like footsteps, moving furniture, and other sources of noise just don't carry between units.

  • Jim Beam shutting down bourbon production at Kentucky distillery for a year as Trump’s trade wars hit sales

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  • Sure, but if they're reducing new whiskey production at exactly the same time, I would think that they'd basically gain a bunch of space right at the time they'd need it. A rickhouse designed for barrels might not be a perfect fit for the big polyethylene tanks, but I'm sure a major shift in operations could result in a relatively low cost switchover as necessary.

  • Jim Beam shutting down bourbon production at Kentucky distillery for a year as Trump’s trade wars hit sales

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  • I'm just saying that these huge conglomerates aren't going to let something like a reduced production change the end product. They're a holding company for a bunch of different brands, including Canadian, Irish, Scottish, and Japanese brands, and they will run whatever stills they need at whatever percent of capacity they need to meet their projected demand. Their other three American distilleries will still be churning out product, and if they do resume production you wouldn't be able to know which bottle comes from which distillery.

  • Gotta Catch 'Em All

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  • Yeah, seems like someone could pass the test by only knowing pokemon, which isn't what we'd want in testing people on their drug knowledge.

  • Gotta Catch 'Em All

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  • Actually, I suppose a name being used for a drug or a Pokémon precludes it from being used for the other, so it is a very shared issue, lol.

    Theoretically, unrelated trademarks can have the exact same name in different fields, owned by completely different owners, but that generally only applies to trademarks that are regular words that are already in use: Apple Computer versus Apple Music (which the Beatles owned and ended up selling to Apple Computer), Monster Energy Drink versus Monster Cable versus Monster Jobs, Dove soap versus Dove chocolate, etc.

    Still, the law looks to likelihood of customer confusion, and maybe it would be too confusing to have a Pokemon named Ozempic.

  • Jim Beam shutting down bourbon production at Kentucky distillery for a year as Trump’s trade wars hit sales

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  • Brick and mortar retail might be struggling, but it'll take a larger set of data to try to tease out trends about whether that means a shift to online retail, a shift away from goods towards services, or an actual reduction in spending.

  • Jim Beam shutting down bourbon production at Kentucky distillery for a year as Trump’s trade wars hit sales

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  • Too long in oak changes the flavours and at some point it won't taste like your product.

    They can and do dump them into non-reactive tanks. Or bottles.

  • Jim Beam shutting down bourbon production at Kentucky distillery for a year as Trump’s trade wars hit sales

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  • Jim beam was in the “cheap rotgut” category for ages.

    The normal white label? That was always considered middle of the road for bourbon. The cheap stuff is the stuff that comes in plastic bottles. It's only recently that bourbon has had a renaissance where the top brands are highly sought after and there's a perception of luxury/exclusivity with some bourbons.

  • Jim Beam shutting down bourbon production at Kentucky distillery for a year as Trump’s trade wars hit sales

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  • With any luck they will sell and rebrand, beam is a dead brand.

    Cmon. Suntory Beam owns a shitload of brands of American Whiskey:

    • Baker's
    • Basil Hayden's
    • Beam's Eight Star
    • Booker's
    • Jim Beam
    • Kessler
    • Knob Creek
    • Legent
    • Little Book
    • Maker's Mark
    • Old Crow
    • Old Grand-Dad
    • Old Overholt

    And them shutting down one of their four distilleries is not going to affect the quality. It's a highly industrialized operation, and they're already good at making the process invisible to the consumer, which bottle comes from which still.

  • Jim Beam shutting down bourbon production at Kentucky distillery for a year as Trump’s trade wars hit sales

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  • Andy Beshear remains popular and won reelection during the Biden presidency, after being elected during Trump's first term. And before that, he served a 4-year term as the state's elected Attorney General. So he's won 3 state-wide elections in a row during the Trump era (2015, 2019, 2023). His electoral success there isn't a fluke of any kind of backlash in either direction, but is a reflection of his political skill and popularity in the state.

    And his father, Steve Beshear, served four terms in statewide elected office as a Democrat, too.

    Understanding local and regional variation in politics is important for understanding how political power can be accumulated and used. And dismissing any Trump voting state as a lost cause is fundamentally ceding power to the fascists. No, we fight for every state, every district, every election cycle, and outside of elections as well.

  • 100

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  • Linguistically, idioms can take on a meaning separate from its constituent parts, in a way that people can forget about the constituent parts but still understand the word or phrase.

    The word "goodbye" derives from "God be with ye" and eventually morphed into the word we know now. The definition of the word "odyssey" derives from a Green myth but has a standalone definition that is understood by people who aren't familiar with the myth. A ton of other words come from horse racing ("from scratch," "across the board," "hands down," "frontrunner") and maritime stuff ("groggy," "show someone the ropes," "even keeled,"). We draw on shared stories (ancient myths, folklore, the Bible, even classic and modern literature) for much of our vocabulary.

    We shouldn't be surprised by language arising out of modern movies and television shows, or even shared internet memes enter the common lexicon.

  • U.S. consumers are so fucked up, that they put more than $1 billion on buy-now, pay later services during Cyber Monday

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  • Yeah but it's pretty nice to be able to take advantage of a promo deal as long as it's not a sticky long term relationship. Some people in this thread are talking about a reward system of 20% cash back on what you put on BNPL, and 0% interest, as some kind of Paypal promo going on during Black Friday.

    If you take the deal as a one time thing, it's a great deal. They hope that you might get used to using the service next time it's not such a great deal, but if they don't have a way to lock you in, then just take the money and run.

    See, for example, the glorious year of MoviePass setting its own money on fire. People got great deals on movie tickets, and then the company went bankrupt and didn't keep their customers.

  • YSK that the First-Past-The-Post voting system allows a political party to gain an absolute majority with only a minority of the votes

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  • Ranked choice is the best for single seat elections: let everyone choose their first choices, and do an instant runoff where people not in the top X at that stage are disqualified and their votes transfered to the voters' next choice, until there actually is a candidate with majority support among remaining candidates that made it that far.

    Parliamentary systems, though, have room for other representative formulas where each voter isn't necessarily just voting for a single seat to be filled. If you have a system with strong parties, you can vote for a party, each party wins a certain number of seats, and then the party fills those seats with their members according to their internal procedures. This system, however, requires strong parties where members can be controlled by the party.

    Single seat elections aren't necessary in every situation, and it's worth thinking through which types of representative structures may be better than single-seat districts and when to use proportional representation through multi-seat elections, and how to formally recognize the role of political parties in those systems.

  • In a dramatic shift, Americans no longer see four-year college degrees as worth the cost

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  • That's just a small subset of non college grads. If you're going to compare people who are aiming for a specific profession in a specific industry, you should look at the career outcomes of the college path, too, with specific majors that are feeders into specific careers.

    Maybe you can argue that plumbers are doing "just fine" with the median wage at around $60k per year (across the entire career trajectory from the age of 20 to 60), or that welders make a median $50k, but those numbers don't come anywhere close to accountants ($81k), financial specialists ($82k), financial analysts ($102k), electrical engineers ($112k).

    And you could argue that I'm cherry picking professions, and I am, but simply by saying "trades" is also cherry picking a profession.

  • In a dramatic shift, Americans no longer see four-year college degrees as worth the cost

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  • Are you under 30? The blue collar trades income trajectory is pretty flat over time, so it's the 30's where college educated careers tend to come out on top, and the 40's and 50's where college grads really start running away with a huge gap.

    Plus in any trades job into the BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, and you'll generally see lower median wages (and much lower 25th percentile wages) than pretty much any white collar college educated career.

    And living through a few business cycles also shows that non-college jobs, including the trades, are just less stable (and tend to force earlier exits to retirement or disability).

    Keep your head up. High pay in HCOL areas tends to pay off over time, because not all costs scale the same, and being able to pay down debt or save a higher number of absolute dollars is better for your long term financial health.