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this makes me wonder how much longer a towel could be used if it were promptly dried after use, rather than put up on a hook where some of it dries sorta and the rest of it clumps.

How many times in U.S. History have the 3rd or 4th options been elected to the office of President? When the answer is zero, how do you count them as options?

You are literally more likely to win the lottery than you are to elect a third party to U.S. President.

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plausible: check

testable: TBD

falsifiable: TBD

still, 1 out of 3. not bad!

prices will be raised regardless. record profits? raise prices. record growth? raise prices. cost of production goes down? raise prices.

if you won’t deny a thing to someone it’s pretty hard to sell it to anyone

can we put the extra 30 hours on the end of each year as a formless blob of ‘time off’?

nah hold on it has to be

day/quarter/week/year

/s

Relay or decrentralize it maybe.

The thing I read about this earlier said Signal is super against decentralization iirc. Or at least against federation? Are they different?

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all I’ve got is vitamin D powder

no need, i’ll simply keep the surplus value of my labor

For those that supposedly champion capitalism, this should be a win win in demonstrating what the market does when you are no longer competitive.

Yes, absolutely. Unfortunately it’s quite traditional only to tolerate markets as long as we’re happy with their behavior. The moment a market starts worrying or upsetting us is never “oh man, maybe this ‘markets’ thing isn’t all it’s cracked up to be”, it’s “obviously some regulation or policy is ruining this market, or it would never do this thing i don’t like”.

So we’re stuck with the lose-lose-lose of:

• keeping markets, their volatility, and all the shit that comes with that

• giving up the fringe benefit of markets redistributing wealth when they collapse

• denying anyone a chance to see clearly what it means to trust markets to manage our economy for us.

Could you give some details? Maybe an invite link? I can only seem to find expired links to any EV Nova discord that google turns up.

that’s not the point. the point is that there are people who can’t afford to save money in the long run. not like metaphorically can’t afford, like literally mathematically cannot afford.

they are trapped by their existing financial burdens which they already cannot meet and which are getting larger every month thanks to compound interest.

inflation, which normally has the effect of reducing the value of debts over time, is instead making their financial burdens effectively larger too. as inflation drives up the cost of living, wages stay the same and they have ever less of their income available to make debt payments as a result.

A Greek proverb says a society grows when old men plant trees whose shade they shall never know. What’s the exact opposite of that?

Well what’s happening right now is old men are actively uprooting anything that won’t grow to shade tree size in their lifetimes. It’s as if their aim is to one day build their own coffin out of the absolute last tree on Earth.

if you ever feel so inclined, all you need to make your own tortillas at home is:

1. masa flour aka specially treated corn flour

2. a stovetop and a pan for cooking

3. a plastic food storage bag

4. something with a flat bottom, ideally transparent

5. water

the bag of flour typically has instructions for how much flour and water to mix. you can mix it by hand and form it into balls by hand. the size of the balls only matters if you care about the tortillas being “the right size”.

From there, you press a ball flat, toss it on an already hot pan over medium heat, flip it after a couple of minutes, and remove it after a minute more. to press the ball flat, place it under your flat-bottomed transparent thing and mash on it until it looks tortilla-shaped enough for you.

the plastic food storage bag is optional/recommended to stop the tortilla balls sticking when you press them. cut the food storage bag open along its seams and remove its zipper if it has one. what you have left is a single sheet of plastic with a seam/hinge in the middle.

it might be sounding like a lot but it’s really just:

• mix flour into wet balls

• mash flour in your “press” made of random flat dishes and a plastic bag

• cook the thing a little

• eat

if you iterate on those 4 steps a dozen times, you’ll be out like 50 cents of flour and you’ll have produced at least one satisfactory tortilla. and it’ll be so, so much better than store bought, you’ll think about it every time you have store bought tortillas therafter.

The only way to make a profit under capitalism is to satisfy the needs of your consumers, regardless if you want or not.

This isn’t true. This isn’t close to true, not even a little. Rent seeking, manufacturing wants/needs, extortion, the list goes on and on, but…

It will not be profitable if other external factors arise, just as regulations, licences, government-granted privileges that squash other competitors

…Yep. You’ve defined capitalism so that all these inevitable features of a capitalist economy are “external factors”. What a stroke of genius. But much like the extraction and consumption of fossil fuels, the myriad ills that inevitably accompany it are “external” only because capitalists have named them so.

Scarcity is not something you can “conquer”.

It’s not something capitalism can conquer, because any solution that would end scarcity for a good or service would thereby end profitability for the same. No capitalist would provide it; they’d sooner let their capital collect dust than be used without profit. Or in the case of the Great Depression, they’d sooner set fresh produce and livestock on fire than let other consume it without profit to themselves.

The unplanned order of markets […] emerges spontaneously, so it costs us nothing.

Markets cost us nothing because they emerge spontaneously? Things that emerge spontaneously cost us nothing? I’ll leave it to the reader to poke holes in this obvious nonsense. I’ll merely point out that capitalists have proven themselves masters at turning a profit from things that “emerge spontaneously”, costing everyone a great deal in the process.

fwiw, chemical energy batteries (aka typical batteries) are also potential energy batteries.

I don’t know a simple or correct label that differentiates batteries whose potential energy is gravity-dependent from batteries whose potential energy is chemical-reaction-dependent, but the concept of gravity-based energy storage absolutely is cool as heck.