well yeah chile is long but significantly longer than broad. for the US, the length/width ratio is more like 2:1 so it’s less extreme.

and also yeah, australia is big, but mostly all desert (i guess 90%) while the US is only 50% desert.

yeah i suspected it was actually an army project to prepare for the escalation of the cold war. that’s why it was released after 1980 … it was considered that it wasn’t necessary anymore (to keep it in stockpile).

wood contains about 50% water btw, so it’s not really dry

“death” is not actually a thing; life is. that is what we should be looking at

i can actually handle loud noises really well, as long as they’re not unexpected loud noises

edit: the reason why i am posting that is because i knew that the US was pretty fucking big, but this just kinda puts numbers on the game, if you know what i mean.

basically “higher quality” laws always make it very difficult for new players (such as your friend) to enter the market, because you have to have a whole lot of assets to start. which means there’s less competition -> providers don’t have to optimize on price so much -> they can get away with higher mark-ups.

the same is happening with cars, and housing. in the EU for example they require that every car have a few extra sensors (such as driving assistance, check whether the driver falls asleep, etc.). this makes manufacturing cars more expensive -> cars get more expensive. we all (everyone who buys a car) pay for this. they “improve quality” (mandatorily) at our expense.

xD

i think you’re unreasonably assuming here that a revolution would happen everywhere on the planet at the same time. realistically, that’s not the case. you start with one place, then another, etc. and in the meantime you have exactly the problems that i cited. how to interact with other entities, etc?

Mamdani seems to have a favor to improve supermarkets somewhat? Already showing this with the city-owned grocery stores (allegedly for food deserts). I assume the philosophy is somewhat like “you can only have a strong population if they’re properly fed”. which is true.

I’m just saying, from a purely mathematical point of view, the city would do more good by building cheap and efficient social housing, and public transport etc.

seize

in other words, steal. i’m actually fine with that if it’s for the greater good. the question is: would it work? do you have any idea how to run a company on that scale? there’s a whole lot of companies that have business connections all around the world. what happens to those? can you handle these connections? what if other companies think that you’re not trustworthy anymore and refuse to do business with you? how do you handle these cases?

also what about money? just that the company is now held by workers does not somehow suddenly make it have much more money. especially grocery stores maybe have 3% profit margins, that means, even if no CEO siphons off wealth, the company’s ability to spend money increases by maybe 3%, so wages could go up 3%. just to inform you, about what’s realistic here. it’s not as if you’re suddenly having a 3x wage increase.

whether your government only makes chaor or actually helps, depends a whole lot on the government and especially on the people in it. there are good governments, for example here in austria.

the issue is more, whether your government represents you and whether they care about you. that is something that depends on your local context.

so i can tell you from an example why private companies exist that do things that are typically done by public companies … here in austria, there’s a railway operator called WestBahn. They provide passenger trains on the route from vienna to innsbruck (roughly). That’s the only route that they service. Why do they do it?

because it’s one of the most provitable routes in all of austria. it has many, reliable passengers. servicing that route turns a profit. servicing many other routes, for example bus lines in some remote village, is still necessary, but obviously doesn’t turn a profit as it has maybe 3 passengers at a time.

so, they pick the 1 route that’s actually very profitable, only service that, and leave every other route to the state-owned alternative. that’s what’s happening.

train networks, schools, healthcare, heck even social housing, here in central europe

“seize the means of production” as if that’s an easy/good thing to do. then what, the employees own the company? and they get paid depending on company profitability? well, not every company turns a profit. what if the company has a bad year? will the employees go hungry? who says that it will turn a profit next year?

yeah you’re right about your point so far, but this is different. if every grocery store in town were forced to raise prices by 5%, then they could all do it because all their competition does it too.

but if only one store decides to do it, then the customers would change to the other store nearby who offers lower prices.

yeah, i remember reading that a bakery that bakes bread for $0.60 per bun today wouldn’t even have to increase the price to $0.61 if the price of raw wheat doubles. that’s how low the share of raw resource cost is in an everyday’s item. was crazy to me to read this.

yeah https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

We throw out thousands of tons of food every day.

which btw is good. imagine the opposite: if we threw away no food, that means that we consume about 100% of our food. now, if any environmental disaster hits (think of hurricanes, wildfires, etc.) then the amount of food produced will take a bump by maybe 10% in that year, ok? so now we produce 90% of the food we need … disaster.

a positive excess in production capability is the only thing to prevent shortages when risk inevitably happens.

nah the reason why people are working full time in the US today is not because food production requires that much work input, it’s because of everything else.

to produce food, according to some calculations, you need about 1.2 hours of labor per person per week on average. source: read it a while ago. 2% of population produce enough food for 200% of population, assume these 2% work 60 hrs/week, that makes 1.2 hours per week if 100% of people were working in agriculture.

the reason why the people work full time is not because food production takes that much effort, but because agriculture is not the only thing that people are busy in. so you don’t have 100% of people working “for food”. it’s everything else that takes the 98% of effort, not the food production.