RockIslandLine

"If you are calling a plurality or majority of people 'the worst kind of human,' does the term not lose utility?"

No. it is absolutely possible for a society to have deep enough differentiation that a plurality of members can truly be described as monsters.

Look at MAGA. Depraved is too kind to describe them.

Any nation is free to set a good example.

"and the CEO talked to the protestors and told them how helpless he himself was, as he was just part of the system with relatively limited ability to change it. I'm not sure I buy that, and not sure the protestors did either, as the CEO still has enormous power."

Precisely. Nobody should accept that kind of obvious nonsense.

People are put into positions to make decisions. So make better decisions.

Iowa may be an example of how ethanol is done wrong in practice, but I'm not sure your theory is so sound.

Make ethanol from sugar cane, not corn. Louisiana should be the center of US ethanol production. Much higher EROEI.

"I could imagine corporate-run nuclear plants that have the same incentives as airlines."

So how exactly do you enforce that corporate executives and their families must live on site for decades?

Why? We've got lots of coal mines with the equipment to move tons of material. Just start stacking cordwood down below.

"They don't want their family to starve."

We know how to stop that. We don't have to sentence people to subsistence agriculture. When you know better, you do better, and we know better.

We can farm in ways that build high carbon soils. We can do this even in the 3rd world. Teach people the proper techniques.

It's nonsense to claim that we just have to accept this kind of collapse.

Engineering new biomes for fun is different than having to do it every year or you die.

What do you do when seasonal heat makes Pakistan and India uninhabitable for large parts of the year? We're not prepared for that kind of migration, we didn't even deal with Syria well.

Farming and other activities often require decades to truly show a profit. When rainfall patterns are changing on short timescales, you will not be able to plan for food production given the underlying churn in fertile locations.

This kind of satire is unnecessary and unhelpful.

It costs nothing to say "lab testing" instead of "in vitro". Literally the same number of syllables, zero loss of precision, and immediately understandable to a wider audience.

"legally complex" is different from "impossible".

And yes, people who have years worth of expenses saved are clearly better able to accept risk than someone with $10K in an IRA.

You're not making persuasive arguments here at all. An in both theory and in practice I'm on your side.

"Whether it is bonds, or some other instrument, they all pay interest. That debt exists, is owed, and yet you're saying "Just don't pay that interest"?"

I'm saying it's wrong to create federal bonds with an interest rate that is far different from zero.

The rules are different between currency issuers (nations with a fiat currency) and currency users (citizens, municipalities, provinces, nations on the gold standard).

Currency issuers have a unique ability to guarantee that you will hold an exact amount of the currency on a given date. No currency user can make that guarantee.

Because currency issuers can guarantee repayment on debt in their own currency, the repayment risk on the debt is strictly and exactly zero. Thus the interest rate on that debt should always be very close to zero if not exactly zero.

The fact that Canadian government debt pays high interest rates merely tells you that the government did things wrong in the past.

"But if you want to put $5-$20K into a friend's business, or a business you know well, the SEC makes it hard unless you're already a millionaire."

What do you mean? Individuals are still allowed to sign contracts. So write up a specific contract.