[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/worldeconomicforum/2016/11/10/s...
"You Will Eat The Bugs" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_8LTUmHWP0
edit: I should add that the video above is a joke, but what scares me is the fact that the technology to make this reality already exists, and is a large political crisis away from being imposed.
Meat is a part of the carbon cycle. The carbon in plants is largely atmospheric. The plants eat the carbon, the animals eat the plants, the animals belch CO2 and methane, and that methane becomes CO2 again after ~12 years. The kind of carbon rising in the atmosphere isn't even that of animals (by stable isotope testing).
Guess what, those who believe that bugs are the answer. Bugs eat plants. Bugs don't burp, but to grow insects at scale, the plants need to be processed and brought to them. Guess what that means? Burning fossil fuels in transportation.
Cows, on the other hand, can feed on grassland.
As someone who is has eaten plenty of bugs, I sincerely hope that the globalists try something other than bugs. The "science" behind it is extremely flimsy. You can't just take livestock out of the carbon cycle and think that's going to do anything for climate change.
But... It does. 220lbs of methane per cow on average. Annually.
> Guess what, those who believe that bugs are the answer. Bugs eat plants. Bugs don't burp, but to grow insects at scale, the plants need to be processed and brought to them. Guess what that means? Burning fossil fuels in transportation.
This is a bit absurd. Now I'm not saying I'm not in said "bug camp" - but you're arguing that transport of plants, using fossil fuels, even remotely touches the amount of fossil fuels, not to mention water, that is required for transport of livestock / processed meat?
> Cows, on the other hand, can feed on grassland.
True. Cows feed on grassland that could be significantly more productive acre for acre. Not only the space they need to live but the space required to grow the feed corn, the water that is consumed and the fossil fuels that get burned. The argument is fantasy at best.
The final thing being - cows don't exist without humans in their current capacity. Insects, on the other hand do. We don't need meat. We have access to plenty of what we need to thrive via plants without bugs. It's unfortunate that meat is looked at as a staple with overconsumption of specific meats even being touted as healthy (e.g. chicken).
Already being captured for energy. VC funds are all over this
> I'm not saying I'm not in said "bug camp"
So you are saying you are in the bug camp, got it.
>but you're arguing that transport of plants, using fossil fuels, even remotely touches the amount of fossil fuels...[meat]
Hyperbole and no accounting. You have no idea. Scale production and see what happens. Have you any data to validate your assessment?
> grassland that could be significantly more productive
How so? Do you believe all grassland on earth should be appropriated for "best use" to increase productivity? Why would you believe that? Are you aware that allowing cattle to forage in forests helps prevent wildfires and enriches the soil increasing undergrowth and biodiversity. The practice is largely banned in state and national parks thanks to zealots of ecowarriors and bug campers.
>We don't need meat
What we need is trivial. We don't need cars or shoes or knowledge.
Meat can be considered a byproduct of an immensely useful material that lasts indefinitely, has been harnessed by possibly every culture to exist and has uses that every person requires.
Leather.
You need to read Oryx and Crake before you destroy the world.
Meat is the flesh of sentient living beings with feelings and their own rich internal lives. Their bodies do not belong to us to strip for parts as we see fit. Though people throughout history have often eaten meat, there have also been many cultures that do not (about half of India is vegetarian for example). In the developed world, our factory farms have become brutal inhumane places of horrors with no connection to the indigenous uses of animals you reference.
> has uses that every person requires.
In the developed world it is false to say that every person requires animal products, as we surely don't. Most people can thrive on a plant based diet, no need to destroy the lives of thinking beings for their meals or shoes.
We are not ruminants. We don't have multiple stomachs.
Your emotions are the deciding factor in your position. I implore you to look at the animal kingdom with honesty and not a disney-washed, Blue Planet version for children.
Nature is harsh and awful. Animals often die by incredibly vicious means from predators. Gored and crushed in their jaws.
We are humane to a fault. Now people are so disconnected from the reality of nature, they expect to impose restrictions based on their emotions. I find this argumemt to be lacking substance.
The developed world you highlight is dependent on petrochemicals. Everything you have and use. Leather is one of the very few durable goods that is not.
Sure, you can say compassion is an emotion. But can you really even be a part of society without compassion? To say we should be willing to enslave and kill animals because we should set our compassion aside... why? Why do you argue for a world without compassion? Yes nature is brutal. And yet we have child seats for cars because we don't expect to expose our children to random brutality. What about a pig or a cow makes you feel it deserves brutality when we will work so hard to shield one another from the same?
We don't live in the jungle. That is not the point of society. We do care for one another, and compassion drives many aspects of our society. I see no reason it should not play in to what we eat.
> We are not ruminants. We don't have multiple stomachs.
This doesn't have anything to do with veganism. Vegans don't eat grass from the ground. We don't need multiple stomachs. This is a straw man.
Many people are eager to make their opinions the de facto law of the land. In reality they have rarely done any searching outside of their emotions.
They same people then cling to statutory protection when their ignorance is displayed
> Already being captured for energy. VC funds are all over this
There are roughly a billion cows on the planet. I live in the midwest. If VC funds (not sure what this means exactly) are all over this - then why have I not seen thousands of cows wearing ridiculous contraptions to sequester said methane? Show me the data.
> So you are saying you are in the bug camp, got it.
This is ignorance at it's finest - I'm not promoting bugs as food, nor am I discouraging it. Your comment is ignorant and assumptive at best and provides no value to your response other than to show little thought around the topic.
> Hyperbole and no accounting. You have no idea. Scale production and see what happens. Have you any data to validate your assessment?
https://livestockdata.org/data-object/livestock-and-greenhou... https://grain.org/article/entries/5976-emissions-impossible-... https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/09/animal-based-food-vs-... https://www.ecowatch.com/which-is-worse-for-the-planet-beef-...
Again, your arguments have no context and no basis. This information is widely available and is suppressed by dairy and meat industries - no different than tobacco or big oil has done.
> How so? Do you believe all grassland on earth should be appropriated for "best use" to increase productivity? Why would you believe that? Are you aware that allowing cattle to forage in forests helps prevent wildfires and enriches the soil increasing undergrowth and biodiversity. The practice is largely banned in state and national parks thanks to zealots of ecowarriors and bug campers.
It seems you haven't looked at the environmental impact that is caused by the supporting agriculture, which is required, to support livestock at our current consumption levels.
There's over 90 million of acres per year plated for "feed" corn. 90 million acres that are used for singular feed crops. 90 million acres that have fertilizer and pest control applications annually to keep the machine in motion. And you're proposing just letting the cows "forage in forests". Laughable at best, considering there are over 94 million cows in the US alone. Your idea is probably banned because cows are also, not natural wildlife in state and natural parks. There's something called the food chain and cows would be prime, and easy, targets for many predators. So your idea would disrupt the food chain and provide, basically, no value. And yet you claim that "it's because these practices are banned". Again, a biased and unfounded point of view that you've provided zero data to support.
https://petkeen.com/how-many-cows-in-us/
> What we need is trivial. We don't need cars or shoes or knowledge. > Meat can be considered a byproduct of an immensely useful material that lasts indefinitely, has been harnessed by possibly every culture to exist and has uses that every person requires. > Leather.
I don't know where to start with this because you're all over the place. First you start with a strawman that, seemingly, implies you live a minimal lifestyle of which you don't have a car, shoe, or cognizance? The idea that we don't need "knowledge" basically proves the point: your commentary is drivel.
> You need to read Oryx and Crake before you destroy the world.
Please provide sources.
Really, look into who proposes a carbon tax. It isn't scientists
It’s proposed by a huge assortment of economists, including a lot of heavyweights: https://clcouncil.org/economists-statement/
Economists!? Honestly not the group I would defer to at this particular moment in time. We are on the precipice of a possible global finance collapse thanks to their pseudoscience
Make sense? Obviously a ridiculously tall order politically, maybe impossible, the rich would take the brunt, but it’ll also be harder for the middle/upper middle class to jet across the country.
I’m also pessimistic about MMT and it’s effects, but I’d view that as more of a political necessity to keep the music going for debtor nations than something most economists thought was actually ideal. No one has the stomach for austerity, and it frankly would probably be catastrophic anyway, we just have to try to inflate our debt away without hitting hyperinflation.
Maybe..?
We have to transition away from growth economy and inflation, neither is sustainable. We're hitting the end of the line in under 100 years.
If debt is fake and we're just using time to diminish it, then let's just do that and stop robbing people of their wealth. Likely impossible for politicians and economists to allow this either
Half of china;s pollution comes from producing shit that we consume. We outsourced out pollution, and then have the gull to complain about it.
You know where 99% of all electric busses are? In China. You know which country has more electrified rail than the rest of the world combined? China. You know which country has the highest percentage of it's population take high sspeed train isntead of flying? China.
China has deplorable pollution, this is a fact. Busses and rail aside.
The first world pays them to make cheap goods without regulation so that we can wash our hands and keep clean.
Changes nothing about carbon tax
China pollutes 3x less per person than US does, even taking into account the fact that they prodice our good. Their government actually takes climate change seriously and they invest more in clean technologies than we do.
Other have commented that you are wrong about how carbon tax works as well
This 'china the boogieman' and 'we will keep polluting untill china closes the last coal power plant' is the political fongerpointing of the lowerst sort.
Well, the US doesn't have 900 million peasants to dilute our numbers. Moreover, at 3:1, China is still a greater gross polluter, if you take the reporting from China at face value. From other data collected in China where there is 1. Profit 2. Political repercussion - the outputs always seem to match up with the government prescribed allowable limits....
Those arguments are assuming the carbon tax will work as it is on paper. I am assured by ever other treaty that China and other 3rd world countries will be granted exemption.
China is not even the point. It's the whole "Third World" status protectionism racket.
The entire program will not work unless the entire world plays by the same rules and adheres to the same standards. This will not happen
Get your head out of your rear, and stop complaining about farmers in 3rd world countries who 'will be granted exemption' so they can go from having 1 farting cow to 2 farting cows and actually afford a meal every day - they still produce less pollution in their lifetime than you do in a year.
I am sorry for being rude, but you are a total hypocrite, and untill you sort out your shit, no other country is interested in what you have to say.
I'm not complaining about farmers. You have based your entire position on assumptions that not everyone in the world agrees with.
Had you thought about that? Have you thought that there are significant reasons why some countries would gladly accept 'climate change'??
Your premise is that everyone is going to do this reduction in output and gladly yoke themselves with an individual accounting for their global expenditure. How utterly foolish.
The climate accords you so poignantly mentioned are attended by private jet riding elites that have NO intention of reducing their quality of life.
When you choose to step into the light of reality, I'll gladly meet you
Has there ever been research done on this? Historically humans depended on animal protein for essential amino acids. It seems far-fetched to suggest we could scale up quinoa to 7+ billion humans given current global realities.
Humans naturally consume animal protein out of biological necessity. This has only changed for people who have the necessary resources to follow incredibly regimented and expensive vegan diets.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_meat_co...
A world where "we have plenty for what we need with just plants" may be a possible world, but it's not the one we live in now. It seems like it would require immense effort to get there.
What I'm saying is you don't need to eat it 2-3 times per day. I don't eat meat by choice.
> Historically humans depended on animal protein for essential amino acids. It seems far-fetched to suggest we could scale up quinoa to 7+ billion humans given current global realities.
I'm curious how you think we're feeding those 7+ billion today? If you're saying that animal production globally is efficient with respect to natural resources and waste, well that's even crazier than growing plants via alternative farming methods.
> Humans naturally consume animal protein out of biological necessity.
This is where the argument is lost on me. I'm not sure what point is being made here but it reads as if you're saying prehistoric humans got their protein through animals and animals only. This just isn't true and some research has stated only 40-50% of protein was acquired via animals. But the real problem here is that sales and marketing has led us to believe that we need more protein. Way more than we actually need. So much so that we're polluting via urine because of overconsumption of protein [0].
[0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/eating-too-much-p...
I eat meat only a few days a week, and typically only for dinner. So we are in agreement there.
I don't even have the same concerns about a vegetarian diet. Dairy and eggs have everything you need and in large quantities.
Veganism is a luxury lifestyle in 2022. If you aren't meticulous about your shopping, cooking, and consumption, it will make you profoundly ill given enough time.
Agreed. I haven't eaten red or white meat for over 5 years now. I'm not strict about animal oils / fats tainting my food intake. I also still consume eggs/dairy/fish. The difference being I consume very little of those things. I may eat fish 2 times per week at the most. I eat maybe 2-4 eggs per week (both cooked and used as an ingredient). Dairy I don't consume other than as an ingredient or the very occasional dessert (ice cream).
I've only improved my health during that time. And as you get older it's interesting to see peers continue to overconsume and pay the price accordingly.
We don't need to be vegans to make a significant improvement on our planet. But what's considered "normal" from a dietary standpoint today is nowhere near a truly healthful diet nor is it treading lightly on our ecosystem.
There are tens of millions of healthy vegans. Not everyone can be healthy on a pure vegan or even vegetarian diet, but very nearly everyone can do just fine on a couple of meals a month that involve cows, chicken/duck once a week, and an egg every day or two.
If you need large amounts of non bean/grain/hemp protein for some reason then chicken is still vastly better than beef, and insects are totally an option.
If you are going to make a claim about the overwhelming majority of anything it should come with a source.
Please provide evidence that less than half of caloric intake for hunter gatherers came from meat instead of making additional claims without reference.
https://tools.myfooddata.com/protein-calculator/174914-17429...
There is quite a happy medium out there between veganism and a Jordan Peterson-style carnivore diet.
Do you actually believe that humans can function optimally on only rice, beans, and peanut butter?
And how much phytate does hemp seed contain? 4g/100g. Good luck with mineral absorption.
Proportion of amino acids isn't the only important metric.
The methane a cow farts is not ex novo, but was part (albeit transformed) of the ecosystem already. It's like complaining about cows wasting water. And if we were not eating meat, these cows would still eat grass and fart methane.
Methane is bad when it's added to the natural ecosystem, like extracting petroleum from a hole underground and burning it.
Accounting for CO2 intensity is all squishy-squashy. But if we tax the actual emissions then the true energy impact will be reflected in prices and the market will adapt to whatever actually really is optimum--whatever lends the most utils of resource use.
That kind of exercise is far more likely to get kinetic than defining "truth" (or whatever) because it is more directly linked to peoples livelihoods and standards of living.
We could just start with the easiest case, which is a product/process that inherently releases pollutants (anything that releases gases) that may have some negative effects on others or the environment (the threshold should be low), then determine the market rate for capturing that pollution back from the environment and tax accordingly. This would also apply to medicines and lotions that don't get metabolized by the users and are inherently are going to end up in the ocean.
It gets trickier when we consider things that directly harm some people nearby, like smoking, and at a certain level of harm, these things should just be banned outright (i.e. you can't really undo lung cancer or mercury poisoning). Or things that aren't inherently pollutants (plastic containers), but in practice end up causing a lot of pollution.
Our government is too incompetent to approach the problem in a first-principles based way like this, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try. Banning individual things after they get out of control and doing complex mental gymnastics like cap and trade are much worse solutions.
Under this tax regime as long as the homeless person makes sure to promptly file the appropriate forms each year they should not be at risk of jail time.
( Being the internet, this is all a joke )
>Cows, on the other hand, can feed on grassland.
That's a feature, not a bug (hah) for them.
As you point out, bug farming requires a large number of inputs and a complicated process. This makes it highly amenable to centralisation & control.
Whilst modern livestock farming is similar in complexity, in theory, it can go back to having more decentralised inputs, with a drawback of lower yield.
Well, as far as I've looked into it, the production of meat is significantly more water and energy (carbon) intensive than if we were to consume plants directly. And there's also the carbon output via methane. The meat production is completely unnecessary and it's not an efficient conversion.
> The fact that eating insects is being suggested as an alternative makes it even worse.
I don't know why someone would suggest eating insects at all. We don't need either of those things. Just eat the plants directly. There's no need for an inefficient conversion mechanism from plants to something else.
> As someone who is has eaten plenty of bugs
Interesting. Why did you do that?
Plant diets are lacking, we are not herbivores
No, they are not lacking. Have you tried a plant based / meat-free diet and found this to be the case?
"Studies at Harvard University as well as other studies conducted in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and various European countries, confirmed vegetarian diets provide sufficient protein intake as long as a variety of plant sources are available and consumed"
You are making assumptions and otherwise fail to realize that a lifetime diet has more impact than can be understood with a contrived, likely biased, study designed to find the answer sought.
Inuits lived primarily on whale blubber. It's entirely possibly to live on a diet nearly devoid of nutrition. No I won't provide you with a study. It is evident from the modern western diet of processed foods
They feed on soy and corn that was grown using twice its mass in fossil fuels and transported further than it would be to the insects. They the multiply its ghg severity by turning a bunch of it into methane. The carbon mass of cattle comes from the gas wells, (including fugitive methane which dwarfs the burps).
They don't live on grassland either. They live on freshly burnt down old growth rainforest.
We can, however, cut the number of cows down to just the ones that can graze, and eat vegetarian for the other 9/10 days. This frees up 70% of the corn and soy land too. If you really need extra high quality protein then insects are an option, and can eat some of the crop byproducts we cannot.
If everyone eats cows that are pastured, you will have 1 small burger a month. Because that's how much beef pastures can support divided by the number of people that want it. The rest if bred on soy and stuff
It's not the referent when someone says "beef has high emissions"
Plants are largely composed of cellulose, which is not digestible by humans. Just because we pass it through and just because a study found trace amounts of cellulose-consuming bacteria in our gut doesn't mean we are well developed to handle cellulose. Those are "calories" we are pooping out.
If you were to just look at the carbohydrate content of plants, well, if we reductively look at the energy density of macronutrients, sorry, carbs of any kind are not as energy dense as the fats from meat.
As an aside, this is one chief reason why calories, which are a measure of heat, are a poor metric for nutrition.
> Pastures and farmland are not effective carbon sinks.
Neither is any kind of farmland, whether it's cows that are being raised or tomatoes.
Carbon sinks only mean something in the case of fossil carbon being introduced to the atmospheric carbon cycle, but that doesn't matter anyway because no amount of trees added to the earth are going to offset anthroprogenic climate change in any appreciable way.
> Most land used by cattle was earlier forestland or other land that served as a carbon sink.
Not all forest land is a carbon sink, and not all forest land is woodland.
Also, I would really appreciate some evidence for this.
> For example, one of the major causes of rainforest destruction in Brazil is cattle ranching.
As if demolishing the Amazon is a prerequisite to cattle ranching, as opposed to something people do because the economic incentives are there, which has nothing to do with whether raising cattle in and of itself is harmful to the climate. Tons of beef are is raised on the Great Plains and has been for over a century, and the Great Plains is nothing close to the kind of carbon sink you're thinking of.
Trying to tackle sources one by one is going to be a mess and give us a crap solution full of holes, and tons of argument and inaction as people fight for their preferred solutions.
Tax the carbon entering the carbon cycle and let the costs of that flow through all the supply chains, soften the blow for people via rebates and by ramping the amount up over time to a well-telegraphed future target, and things will adjust. The poor will generally come out ahead after the rebate, since they tend to generate a lot less carbon, the rich will pay much more. Things like flying will probably triple in price, or more, if we set it at the price for durable sequestration, and so people will fly much less for recreation. And maybe we'll survive as a species to see another couple generations.
I wasn't proposing any specific solution, just stating that eating animals does in fact contribute more CO2 than eating plants. And I have no problem with carbon taxes, in fact I'm in favor. A carbon tax could certainly cover this case if it taxes the CO2 that animals emit.
I think the issue is that we’re artificially increasing feed crop yields with massive use of synthetic fertilizer. And beef is a very inefficient use of those resources.
I don’t know if bugs is the solution, but when our answer to everything is “more gas!” I’m willing to entertain and try alternatives.
Putting aside the ridiculousness of the Big Agra's bedroom activity with the Government, what's your point? Corn is a type of grass after all. The same rules apply. If there's a problem with how corn in particular is raised and transported for cattle feed, that's really not central to whether raising cattle is bad for the climate in and of itself. Cattle can and are fed on grass all the time, even in cases when the cattle is grain-fed in the months before they are slaughtered.
> It's a fact that Americans eat more meat than they should
According to whom?
CDC, avg american men eats more than 100gm protein perday, CDC recommends 56.
Then read about blue region people who eats much less meat, in most Blue Zones diets people eat small amounts of pork, chicken, or lamb. https://extension.psu.edu/longevity-tips-from-the-blue-zones
How is this ridiculousness? The government heavily subsidizes corn, which makes it cheap to use to fatten up cows. If corn wasn't cheaply produced, it would be used less in beef production.
Government subsidies are why corn is in most products, and why it's being used for a percentage of fuel. The corn being produced is low in nutrients and high in sugar. The subsidies are not a positive thing for the economy or for our health.
Are you familiar with the recent developments in regenerative agriculture including livestock integration?
https://montanafreepress.org/2021/07/06/regenerative-agricul...
Sustainable livestock sounds great. But it won't scale far enough to meet even the current US demand, at least not if grown domestically. So maybe just subjugate a bunch of other countries, and ensure they do it sustainably! Can't be clear cutting rainforests we might need to breath or anything.
As we search out the threshold of unsustainable living maybe we could tap the breaks a bit first? Earth is a nearly closed system we must all share, and cows are a terribly inefficient way to produce protein and calories.
avg american men eats more than 100gm protein perday, CDC recommends 46-56. As you asked, now are you going to follow that? https://www.bluezones.com/2020/07/blue-zones-diet-food-secre...
https://peterattiamd.com/category/nutritional-biochemistry/p...
From what I could find sarcopenia's exact causes aren't fully understood yet.
Regardless of the correct quantities protein does not need to come from animal sources. And if we want to live with less suffering and environmental destruction we'll need to reduce reliance on animal protein.
What pisses me off is people complaining about my local, free-range meat consumption while chomping on fruit and grain grown in more temperate countries and flown here.
EDIT: But I have to admit, as a meat eater, I support the research into bugs for food. Because animal protein is unrivalled compared to vegetable protein. Although squeamish, I'd rather eat cricket flour than trying to make a vegan diet work.
Not sure if you're being serious here, but the _extreme_ vast majority of food is shipped, not flown. It's something like 0.16% [1], and I'll bet that's low-volume, high-worth food. And your local meat _probably_ has a higher carbon footprint than meat imported from a better climate; lamb from New Zealand, plus shipping to the UK, has a lower carbon footprint than lamb from the UK eaten in the UK [2], because the New Zealand climate is better.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/food-transport-by-mode
[2] https://www.ecoandbeyond.co/articles/british-new-zealand-lam...
People really underestimate how efficient shipping has gotten over the last 50 years or so.
The idea that importing lamb from NZ is better than locally grown is absolutely ridiculous I wouldn't even know where to start.
Why does it mean that? Alternative methods of operating would be either electric vehicles, or farming the bugs in the same place as growing bug food.
No, that carbon is also human generated. All these cows are created only for human use. They are not here by natural process.
As a kid, I was super grossed out when I watched it.
Now, I'm not so sure.
I eat a ton of crawfish, and love them. Pretending that they aren't bugs is just marketing.
Are there other bugs I'd like with the appropriate amount of Zatarain's?
Probably.
You might find this useful:
Blackrock, Zillo, etc. cornering residential housing market. Sorrelle nails it: https://youtu.be/pwmEJWKCLF8
What I find so interesting is that the super rich don’t even seem to be trying to hide this mischief.
the problem is, that revolution is just two missed meals away, and with people living on the edge (due to huge costs of living), just a tiny unforseen "thing" happening, can cause those two missed meals, and angry hordes of people lynching the politicians.
They don't need to. Talk to normies, they love their pods, Doritos, Xtreme Mountain Dew, sportsball, porn, celebrity drama, and Instagram.
The product that elites provide to normies is far, far, superior to bread and circuses by every single hedonistic metric you can think of. They love it.
Still, its surprising to see comments like this on HN - stuff like that is usually flagged and downvoted.
Which is a problem if you want to get real information and there really is a conspiracy. And this is a possibility. Mainstream sources are plainly politicised and owned by a very small, 'elite' section of society - they will not say what needs to be said - their paychecks, training and editors prevent this. So...
The conspiracy world seems far closer to the truth nowadays, with a deeper, more meaningful take on reality that attempts to explain what is going on, than anything you can find on a TV or mainstream source.
The conspiracy world wraps the world in a compelling narrative that is more coherent than actual reality relying on surface level understanding of numerous topics and trivial fabrications. If you dig into it then you soon find out that its a tremendous pile of bullshit amenable only to people who are willing to spend hours scouring niche sites for entertaining nonsense but unable or unwilling to pick out the trivial flaws in the reasoning of the narratives they push.
This statement
> The conspiracy world seems far closer to the truth
is tremendously suspect. I suggest you examine your beliefs more carefully.
Lol maybe several years back.
It'll give our sustainability leaders a raging せみ.
This guy was predicting where things were going based on the principles of capitalism; it's more profitable to charge people in perpetuity than to charge them only once. It is not a conspiracy beyond that.
If you don't like it, then avoid products with continuous payments and favor ones that don't as much as you can. If businesses see there is more appetite for buying things permanently than renting them, then they will sell things. DVD beat DivX.
If you want to own things cancel your streaming service subscriptions and buy movies and TV shows and books and music instead. Stop posting the same tired, worn out quote and do something.
The problem is the "as much as you can". Even for devices that you can still "buy" you are often not really the one in control of that device and the maker will continue to try to extract more money from you using that device.
> DVD beat DivX.
And streaming beat physical media. Movies and TV are a really bad example for your point as it is prohibitively expensive to "buy" these compared to a streaming subscription and that difference is only going to get bigger as less and less people make the effort to own things. This isn't something you can affect on your own.
It's getting referenced a lot because people can actively see the rug getting pulled beneath their feet.
> This guy was predicting where things were going based on the principles of capitalism; it's more profitable to charge people in perpetuity than to charge them only once. It is not a conspiracy beyond that.
I think it's actually being driven by a rise in cost of living, with an expected standard of living that is unchanging. You aren't for example going to downgrade your phone or car whilst working at the same company, and if they thing itself is getting more expensive, the only thing left is the type of ownership.
It's already here in terms of loans, where you make lots of small payments (rent) to eventually own the item. In the UK there is a scheme "right to buy", where the rent is counted towards your eventual bid to buy a property.
> If you don't like it, then avoid products with continuous payments and favor ones that don't as much as you can.
That's not how it will happen. To work at X company and interact with Y service (which allows you to live), they require you have some minimum piece of equipment. You can either buy it outright (which your wage does not allow for) or loan the item (essentially rent it). You end up being forced into the system.
An example could be a car to get to work, but you have to drive through a low emissions zone which is dictated by car manufacturing year. Another example could be an app on a phone where it requires a minimum OS version, only supported my the latest and greatest model.
> If you want to own things cancel your streaming service subscriptions and buy movies and TV shows and books and music instead.
You're preaching to the wrong person - but these things are only a matter of time. Music for example is becoming less and less of a choice, many artists have nothing but digital versions, and those are purposefully setup to prevent distribution, locking you into some hellish platform.
I don’t know much about the private ones (there aren’t any near me) but I’d imagine the market is less in demand than compared to the past. The high end of this market buys their own vaults, and the lower end of this market no longer stores wealth in physical form. My grandma had stock certificates and gold coins. People today have 401ks.
After all, it was never a primary business for banks, it was just a value-add.
Then there's the self-storage market that takes a good chunk of this now, they're secure enough for grandma's heirlooms and you get a significantly bigger box.
You can apply leverage to almost any business model.
E.g. seems to be some overlap with the pawn broker lending business here in my view.
Here in the UK lots of moderately wealthy but illiquid individuals keep their illiquid collectables (art, wine, cars, jewelry) with upmarket pawn brokers, who store their stuff securely and provide them with a healthy loan to value. Most of them pay the loans back, and many of them do this continuously.
Otherwise I agree on the labour intensive, hard cost part.
it seems perfect for automation. just a box retrieval system. all that the bank should add is physical security.
that said, banks are providing the usual shady upsell shit (loans, mortgages, credit cards, "premium" services) and that market is already pretty competitive, but basically it's not "free" because the costs of the labor intensive internal workings of these non-slim companies (plus regulatory compliance)
A simple illustration of what might trigger people to thing of the other side of this might be "Why is it so hard as a U.S. citizen to get an offshore bank account that the U.S. absolutely completed can't get access to no matter what?"
The U.S. government thinks they have very valid reasons they should be able to see the details of the accounts of all U.S. citizens regardless of where those accounts may be. For the most part I agree with the concept, because as an entity responsible for collecting and running off of taxes, allowing otherwise is antithetical to their existence, and I'd rather the U.S. government continue to run. That doesn't mean I think they should have access to everything about all accounts, but they should have access to some information. At the same time, I don't think they should access to nothing about certain accounts, for similar reasoning. Both extremes are unacceptable, as is often the case.
Back in the day this "extreme" was called the 4th Amendment to the US Constitution. But law enforcement doesn't respect the highest law of the land, and neither do the courts, and neither does the government. IMHO that makes the whole lot of them criminals.
That said, hiding evidence from law enforcement/money from the tax authorities is a crime anyways, regardless of where you hide it.
There is no duty to provide evidence of a crime to law enforcement in the US, anyway - merely to comply with warrants or the like, if issued. There is a difference.
It is also not illegal to hide money - just illegal to not pay taxes due. There is also a difference there too.
The goal isn't to lock all money down and infringe on personal rights, it's to keep it from being hidden and untaxed en masse by many very rich entities.
others have had this opinion, and it's short and sweet:
Fourth Amendment
The right of the people to be secure in their persons,
houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches
and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall
issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or
affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be
searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
I'm a big fan of the entire bill of rights and believe in their interpretation as concrete, specific and personal. This includes the 2nd.
Most of the world doesn't agree with that concept. AFAIK, the only countries which tax citizens instead of just residents are the USA and Eritrea.
That said, I was being a little loose when saying citizenship. The U.S. has various laws many of which are regarding taxation of business within its borders, with entities housed in its borders, or citizens abroad. They will seek to enforce those laws. I think that's for the most part that's fairly standard.
There are of course a myriad of ways in which the issue becomes more complicated, and I'm not trying to claim the government can do no wrong and all their actions are justified, I just think it's important to look at the issue holistically. The government should be capable, which appropriate checks and balances, to enforce the laws. People should have the ability to have some expectation of privacy from the government unless there's a specific reason the government seeking otherwise that's valid.
Here's my opinion, I think the US should do what virtually every other country in the world does - accept that its power is not absolute, and tax its citizens based on residence, not on citizenship.
Do you have skin in this game? If not, get off my back and stop trying to make my life worse. Expats are already screwed by the tax code. We have FATCA and FBAR and we get denied basic financial services when we're outside the US. Many banks in other countries now deny American expats bank accounts because they're terrified of repercussions from the US government if the foreign bank doesn't fill out US tax forms correctly.
We don't need more of this crap you're pushing. Stop screwing up ordinary people's lives. I will make the most charitable interpretation I can here and assume that you want to hurt other Americans and tell them if they don't like it they can stop being American out of ignorance, not out of malice.
The US gives expat citizens a huge tax deduction. You only pay taxes if you're a wealthy expat. The paperwork is to enforce it.
Otherwise, wealthy people in the US could just "live" in tax havens and evade US taxes.
> If not, get off my back and stop trying to make my life worse.
I wasn't aware I had such power. Who knew my random comments on the internet could cause financial law and policy to change?
In all seriousness you and I have the same ability to enact change here, which is to vote and advocate for a position. The point at which you don't, that is if you gave up your citizenship and right to vote, it would no longer effect you.
That's a concrete example of a benefit you get from citizenship, which comes with rights and responsibilities. The fact you don't want to give it up is evidence that you see it as beneficial.
The last thing I'll say is I specifically left opening in my statement so someone could argue that the burden is harder than it needs to be on expats, because my point isn't that they should pay all the costs they currently do, but that some cost for the benefits they get is in my opinion acceptable. Maybe a slightly less knee-jerk reaction to my comment may have made that apparent.
If you want to advocate for these policies you have to address the harm that they're doing to people, you don't get to just "leave them an opening." You've advocated for harm. You've made yourself the bad guy here. Do you explicitly support these harms as a cost of governance? Are these individuals sacrifices for the greater good of prosecuting financial criminals? Or are you simply oblivious to this problem? So far you've dodged the issue, lectured us on how the democratic process works, and implied that if anyone doesn't like it they can renounce their citizenship, which is phenomenally condescending, believe me I understand these things very well so spare me those lectures.
Isn't the US one of the few (the only?) countries which makes this really hard?
Like, if I wanted to get rid of my citizenship (European country) all I need to do is get another one, it is void the second that happens. And even if it wasn't, I do have the right to get rid of the citizenship at any time, no reason or justification needed.
If I remember in the US it is not only expensive but also they for some reason have this system where they can deny you renouncing your citizenship.
I'm not sure the specifics of when they deny renouncing citizenship, but if you don't have citizenship somewhere else or your visa to that country is as a U.S. citizen, I could see those as being valid cases for rejection until those are resolved (also if you have outstanding warrants or are under investigation for something).
You can only renounce US citizenship if you have citizenship somewhere else. There are millions of Americans that live outside the US that only have US citizenship and therefore cannot renounce.
It's a situation the host country is obviously happy with as well, otherwise they would offer citizenship and the problem would be solved.
Which is pretty expensive, and you still get taxed for ten years afterwards.
To be clear, in case I wasn't enough above, I'm not saying I completely agree with all the specifics of the U.S. current law on what and how much to tax expats, just that on a conceptual level I don't have a problem with some amount of taxation in exchange for representation (among other things), and people that disagree with that entirely should consider what their best choice is.
Citizens have the right to vote though, so they can try to effect change like all the rest of us, and that includes efforts to change how expats are taxed.
Some kind of theoretical minimal citizenship taxation might be reasonable. The current US taxation regime certainly isn't.
It looks to me like they're both taxes.
In all developed countries there is an on-going effort to make sure that off-shore assets are identified so they can be taxed appropriately.
Canada requires it.
https://farbertax.com/cra-foreign-assets-and-income/reportin...
Edit: s/Europe/The EU.
There are even government sites with fun visualizations you can explore: https://datalab.usaspending.gov/americas-finance-guide/
Budget is what they ask Congress to put in spending bill which is signed into law. Then funds are appropriated. Then funds are spent. Pentagon spending audit is overdue by a couple decades. https://text.npr.org/997961646
Donald Rumsfeld gave a speech and pledged to get to the bottom of the missing $2.3T. He even created office space just for that effort and put everything there so the bookkeepers could get the job done. Guess where the Pentagon was hit the very next day? https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-war-on-waste/#app
Do you have a source for that? The article you linked does not promote this thinly-veiled conspiracy theory.
Here is a link to the satelite agency having enough funds in a secret slush fund that they avoided the budget process and simply bought land and built a top-dollar building. No accountability in early 1990s! https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1994/08/10/b...
A few years ago the Admiral who was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs shocked me by publicly throwing out the number (if I remember correctly) of $7 trillion that the DoD couldn’t account for. That would buy a lot of lunches for hungry children in our country. Anyway I was shocked by his admission, although I think his estimate is too low.
What our country needs is more patriotic people like that Admiral who at least occasionally inform the public.
In the US, it's as if there's an informal agreement that secrecy, like copyright, may obtain for up to a typical human lifespan. If you buy into Plato's concept of the 'noble lie', that governments must deceive their populace to some extent for their own good, then it's sort of inevitable that there would be a tacit agreement to let sleeping dogs lie until everyone involved is dead. The benefit is social harmony (not least because disagreement is an easy way to identify malcontents), the cost is an erosion of institutional trust.
* https://www.npr.org/2011/04/20/135578901/cia-declassifies-it...
That tradeoff was sustainable for a long time; fans of secret history, the paranormal etc., always knew the government had a lot of secrets, but the scope was somewhat steady and comprehensible (atomic secrets will get you executed, other things can be discreetly admitted to after they become obsolete). I think three factors have upended that: the lurch toward a security state after 9/11, the rapid speed of information transmission (and diminishing half-life of utility) as society has become more networked, and economic inflation (which is to an extent a factor of the other two). I include the last because paranoia seems to correlate with inflationary anxiety because it functions as a hidden variable that throws off estimates of supply and demand, and that in turn means strategic considerations move from policy choices towards other means.
Security considerations expand in inverse proportion to institutional confidence, and where social consensus is lacking this can have a runaway feedback effect. Hence the proliferation of hybrid war information operations that are designed to leverage normal skepticism/cynicism into anxiety and paranoia. Educational and economic asymmetries across a polity are like a gap into which wedges can be driven, because more effort must be put into reducing the asymmetry than refuting the IO directly and this is perceived intuitively if not rationally.
A simple example is the idea that the moon landings are fake, often tied to flat-earth or nuclear weapons denial. Space literate people rightly point out the existence of laser reflectors on the lunar surface and their accessibility by booking telescope time, but those alleging its fake can easily spread confusion around this. NASA wants to do original science and avoid disturbing the landing sites, which is understandable; but the upshot is that nobody under the age of about 50 has ever seen live footage from the moon, and so 'debunking the fake footage' is more viscerally exciting to the uninformed or uneducated viewer than gathering the abstract knowledge required to evaluate such claims.
The problem isn't "our society"; the problem is the FBI being lawless and the DoJ refusing to hold them to account because they regard them as the "same team".
Somehow, our news media still reports FBI statements as implicitly true, and the media-consuming public takes it all at face value. This is astounding to me.
Civil asset forfeiture became such a cash cow, jurisdictions are constantly looking for new ways to apply it.
1. The "ground" in question shouldn't be your own property, or tied back to you by paper trail. A trusted ally's property with a handshake agreement, or poorly-trafficked public land. When the Feds decide to make you a target, they can and will use ground-penetrating radar on your property.
2. Regarding the radar, bury the pipes along with plenty of shrapnel to mess with the signature, in the event that your chosen location was not as anonymous as supposed.
3. Use any any all methods to avoid tracking when traveling to/from the location. Eliminate RF signatures from phones, etc, avoid license plate readers and cameras, use bicycles or older vehicles without telemetry collection, wear clothes you wouldn't normally wear and discard afterward, etc.
However, the number of places where you can more securely store small objects with excellent and armed security exploded in recent years. They are currently used to host servers and other internet facing computers. I'm sure they'll store a similar rack-mounted box containing your will if you offer to pay them.
That's $2500/sqm
Full access control with background checks.
They aren't putting anything of yours in their building
Sadly, this is a big ask for many in the world and trust has been redefined with modernization.
Make no mistake, the idea is to prevent you from retaining valuables. If you have something of value it must be invested to further growth. That is the paradigm of the system.
Otherwise you can place them with a corporation, with insurance, and pay. Hoping that they don't have the ability to deny your claim
Society has to compromise: we cannot monitor all or monitor nothing, so we delegate maybe imperfectly to a subset of people vetted a bit more rigorously to breach expectations sometimes for a reasonable greater good.
If they hid the raid to cover up a screwup, we'll have to sue. If they hid the raid to find more criminals, we'll have to accept it.
Also, with so much digitization that's occurred, assets tracked in electronic accounts, fewer and fewer people have need for a such a service anymore. Eg. In the late 20th century you can imagine somebody putting stock certificates in a safe deposit box. Why would you do that now?
Fundamental is that your data should be encrypted and duplicated before you give it to your host so if someone tries to read your data, they just get random numbers, and if someone breaks your devices, you give them a bad rating and move on to the other nodes in your BnB RAID.
Lots of stories about safe deposit boxes getting drilled by accident, stolen, lost etc. Banks don’t really care about them or the business and you have limited ability to do anything if something bad happens.
E.g. maybe just do some crappy furniture or something and throw the valuables in a cushion? Something like that.
it’s perhaps hard in the US, but it’s not impossible, it’s just more expensive than most people want to pay, because it’s actually an expensive service to provide. physically resistant boxes at scale, with per-box isolation and per-box access by randoms?
Where are people supposed to store physical copies of backups and yubikeys outside of the house safely?