I inadvertently switched my thrichotillamania to my beard a few years ago.
I miss it terribly. Shaving is so much work, and while it’s relaxing, inevitably an ingrown hair pops up and retriggers everything anyway when I attempt to grow it back.
I’ve been worried I permanently destroyed it like the guy in the meme, but I had my thumb bound up for 5ish weeks and it came back in nicely before I decimated it again.
I’ve had a beard ever since I could grow one. It hit me pretty hard when I turned 18, just boom, beard, and haven’t shaved it smooth since. I literally have no idea what I look like as an adult without a beard.
If a company is “too big to fail” the punishment should be that the government bails them out, then breaks it up into smaller parts that are free to fail or succeed naturally without government intervention
Just nationalize them. If the government has to bail them out then then the government just bought them. If a company is too big to fail then it’s too big to be privately owned.
That’s what they did in my country when a bunch of the big banks almost keeled over in 2008/2009. They were temporarily (partly) owned by the state and eventually bought back their rights to operate as a separate business when things were going better again.
They also gave GM a 45 billion dollar stock swap and GM never paid it back. They paid back the loan but not the stock swap. Every time I hear people brag about how the government saved GM I wonder what amazing things any company could do with not only 45 billion to play with but the government ensuring that no one could take them down for a year.
Give me 45 billion and the full faith and credit of uncle sam, I will create so many jobs.
Mh, not necessarily. After 2009, many banks were just saved and not a lot else changed. Although admittedly, banks too big to fail have special monitoring and are subject to extra harsh rules, but they weren’t broken up.
Not much of a “punishment” to the business to have socialized losses. Oh you’ve mismanaged your ginormous business and it’s going to cause a huge, negative ripple effect on the economy and impact everyone else? Here’s some free money, courtesy of working class taxpayers! Also we’re going to break you up and place no restrictions on how big you can get so that one of your smaller entities can inevitably get enough market share to be in a position to do the same thing a decade later! Huh? Punishment? Oh… Uh… Don’t do that again please, Mr. Business, sir 🥺
Hard to effectively punish entities that feel no pain and are otherwise basically immortal
Best we can really do is mow the grass periodically (which the US gov has been failing to do for a LONG time now, although we’re starting to see anti-trust rumblings in the tech industry now thankfully)
A sovereign fund will be easier to administer. Issuing individual shares to people directly would be an administrative nightmare.
Allow the sovereign fund to acquire the shares, and then we can vote as board members in a national vote, though we’d probably just elect a representative for the fund.
Fuck all this representative bullshit. They never actually represent us.
That sounds like a great plan to have the money squandered.
Maybe the dividend is just applied towards your tax return, that would reduce the complexity of issuing 350k shares. I don’t want politicians getting their grubby hands on the money.
Maybe the government should give the money to the employees and if they feel that the company can make a come back they can invest the money in it. If not they can use the money to move on.
That seems fair. If the powers that be where I work for offered me to invest in the comoany itself I would do that. I bet I would get a better return over an index fund the way business is going. Of course they would find some way to fuck it up and corrupt it.
That’s not something that really works with industries that are zero sum games. You can’t have a dozen competing rail companies in a given state because there is only so many paths that a rail system can take, and you need to clear out continuous stretches of land through eminent domain.
If a company provides a vital services and fails, it should be nationalized. If a company does not provide a vital service and fails, it shouldbe allowed to fail and the employees themselves bailed out.
I love how people here try to put this in practical terms like “when you need to pay something 100 is better”. It’s infinite. Infinite. The whole universe is covered in bills. We all would probably be dead by suffocation. It makes no sense to try to think about the practicality of it. Infinite is infinite, they are the same amount of money, that’s all.
I think it’s because there is nuance in the wording. It doesn’t say “dollar amount”, it says “worth”, and the worth of a thing can be more than its dollar amount.
Infinite hundreds is “worth more” in a sense because it’s easier to use, and that is added value!
Our little house in the forest started out fully off-grid for the first year. As a result of that our ceiling lighting is actually 4 strands of solar garden lights wrapped around the rafters.
It isn’t as bright as this aisle. But it is 100 individual leds strung up semi-randomly and has a similar feel.
Well then. Settle in. This story gets longer every time I type it.
Historically - my work has moved my wife and I around 2-3 times per year. Not just to different cities, but countries and even continents. At last tally we had lived in 8 cities in 3 countries across 2 continents, in ten years…
Then we got ‘stuck’ in Switzerland for 11 months due to covid lockdowns, on what was meant to be a three week trip, and I told myself I would never move again.
So when we got back to Canada I started looking in earnest for some cheap land to buy and just settle in. As it turned out, cheap land didn’t really exist anywhere with civilization, so we bought 6 acres of forest in the province of Quebec with a creek dividing it in half at the far end of a logging road 5km from any services.
When I say any services… I mean it. Our piece of land didn’t even have a driveway. So we started clearing small trees (we have a rule that any tree over 6-8inches in diameter earned their place, and we have to work around them) and got our travel trailer settled in.
We built some DIY solar to keep the lights on and phones/laptop charged. And I drove to the closest town each morning to check in with work and commit any changes I had made the night before and attend any meetings that couldn’t be converted into an email.
We then carved a few paths to get water from the creek, and dug an outhouse.
Over time we went from hauling buckets up from the creek and boiling them on the propane stove to do dishes and showered using bags hanging from a tree behind the trailer - to eventually having a gas pump and some garden hoses that we could fill the trailer’s tanks with.
Once we had the basics of cooking, heat, and waste taken care of I focused on building up the solar system to allow us to have actual internet service from Xplorenet satellite internet so that I could work from home instead of driving to town every day.
Then the work really started… Clearing land and building a small amish style shed (12ft X 28ft with a 4 ft screened in porch) and getting it insulated. We got the insulation done, and the woodstove installed just in time for the first big snow and moved into the tiny house from the trailer.
We then dug and installed our own septic system and built a 10x12 addition to act as a bathroom and put in an old clawfoot tub that we bought from an old guy on the side of the highway. I then set up a 12v PEX-based water system and propane camping water heater to service the bathtub and a kitchen sink.
It is primitive, and involves some prep every time we need hot water. But it is getting improved all the time.
At this point the hoses from the creek would freeze rapidly, so we replaced the system with two 1000litre IBC totes that live up against the house so we could fill them both up and put the hoses away instead of having to pump water daily.
After about 16 months of this weird 1880s lifestyle with internet access the power company finally agreed to come hook us up. And then life changed massively again.
We could now run our desktop computers, put immersion heaters in our water tanks, and generally spend less time worrying about things freezing or waiting for the sun to charge enough battery to run the vacuum cleaner.
I’m forgetting about 99% of the details here. I suppose at this point I should be turning this into a blog or a post somewhere… But that will have to wait for a time when daily life isn’t so much physical effort. I can barely afford the time to shitpost and leave snarky comments that I do now :p
This coming Spring will be time for a water well and starting the housing for a few chickens, ducks, and a goat or three.
And last but not least - The lights that brought me to this thread. Ignore the vapour barrier ceiling and unfinished walls. I’m working on it! Solar Lights as indoor lighting
The chipmunks who will climb onto my lap to eat and the blue jays who scream every morning if I don’t bring them their breakfast, are the perfect balance for dealing with human problems at work.
It is always getting harder and more expensive, but I truly believe that almost anyone who is physically capable of holding down a job could probably pull this off.
We got extremely lucky and got our land for relatively cheap at the beginning of the sale from a subdivision of a bunch of forestry land.
But it is not uncommon to find it even cheaper if you can look around in some of these tiny towns in the middle of nowhere.
We were on the other side of the country so we couldn’t really negotiate as we needed a place to land the trailer when we got here.
Other than that, we’re basically dedicating most of my salary to doing improvements every payday as we can afford it. I do make quite a good salary but nothing extravagant.
It’s much easier to not spend money when you have to drive 15 minutes to get a pop or some gas… So a lot of the total budget can go into improvements. And I am a pretty cheap bastard so a lot of it is cobbled together
But it will keep improving until eventually It feels like a real house. Or so I keep promising my wife… ;)
To be fair, government bailouts are not just free money the government gives large corporations with no attached expectations. When the government bailed out GM, for example, the treasury gave GM $52 billion. $6.7 billion was considered a loan (with interest) which GM has since paid back. The rest was an investment resulting in a 32% ownership of GM by the US Treasury.
It would be terrible for everyone involved, not just the economy but also for quality of life. Bailouts are bad, but not bailing out is worse. So what do we do? (Sorta) simple, legislation the prevents the amount of risks that banks are allowed to take. My proof is by counter example. The great financial crisis of 2008 was due to deregulation, mainly pushed by Regan era policy. Limits on banks force them to take their due diligence with each loan and decreases the risks of bubbles (crypto, housing, coins, etc.) forming in the first place.
Bailouts are worse. Whatever you subsidize you get more of, so if you subsidize financial mismanagement you get more of the same. It is called a preverse incentive a term I am sure your economics 101 class didn’t mention for a reason. The same reason why preachers don’t mention the stuff about Jesus saying to pay taxes.
It is better to let the banks fall, FDIC the accounts, and make sure the bankruptcy courts make recommendations to the AG office for criminal prosecution.
Besides which there was really no danger of AIG or Goldman folding. They lied about their financial situation. By the time it crashes they had moved all of their toxic assets into pension funds.
And there is a shit ton of people going bankrupt over medication costs, housing costs, and student loan debt. Do you care about those issue as much as you care about giving a car corporation more money to make oversized gas-guzzlers?
People like you are the reason why everyone is so broke. You care about your tribe and no one else. Did your UAW workers get a pay raise? Cool, and fuck everyone else. Give me free money
On top of this, there is arguably avoidance of a huge negatives impact on workers in GM and elsewhere. So not only the shareholders who were benefiting. And even within shareholders there are regular people, pension funds, etc. Some bailouts make sense.
No bailouts make sense ever. If you really want to give free money to people just give it to them. You don’t need to make sure that their shitty employer is still shitty tomorrow.
I wouldn’t. Most places refuse to take $100s due to rampant counterfeiting, and banks don’t bat an eye at a huge stack of ones as a deposit. To just flow through life, a limitless supply of ones is far easier to deal with than any amount of crisp $100 bills. Inflation might change this, but probably not in my lifetime.
Most places where you live. This isn’t a problem for the entire globe. Some of it, sure. But not all of it. I pay with hundreds all the time in Australia and noone gives a shit.
The hyperreals are a formal treatment of infinite numbers. It still doesn’t let people use infinity as a number in the way that posts like this suggest, but they’re interesting nonetheless. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperreal_number
It depends what worth entails - if it’s just the monetary value then yeah they’re the same, but if the worth also comes from desirability and convenience, then infinite stack of 100 dollar bills would be way more desirable when compared to 1 dollar bills.
Less space needed to carry the money around (assuming it’s stored in some negative space and you just grab a bunch of bills when you wanna buy something), faster to take the bills for higher value items and easier to count as well.
Or as some of us on the spectrum call it: the overstimulation aisle!
I respect your preference but live in fear of it. I have to walk briskly down that aisle, I’m pretty sure I would actually have a mental breakdown if my house was that bright, lol.
We went the other way. Replaced every bulb we could find with a lower wattage equivalent. Lit the living room with those flicker flame bulbs so it’s like being in a fire-lit cave at night. Replaced some more lights with dimmable salt lamps. Hung up Christmas lights in other places. There is virtually never a time after sunset when a room in my house is fully lit.
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