Tiresia

The obvious alternative to this is touted to be open source, ie. people making things for free and sharing it with others.

Unfortunately, the amount of things you can achieve for free, possibly relying on donations, is very limited. If you want to become a serious business, you need a serious funding model.

That's... obviously incorrect? Most important software is open source that was made for free. Most data centers run on freeware. And even with mass consumer facing software like youtube browsers the best options are freeware like Revanced. In academia, the whole concept of academic tenure is based on the empirical proof that professors do their job best when they don't have any obligations and they can just get a basic income to do whatever.

The best way to organize the tech industry is to make copyright and patents illegal and to give everyone a universal basic income.

The question is whether it is more healthy in the long run to let resellers get away with it or to punish everyone by trying to implement a system that catches resellers.

That's an empirical question, that we don't have a lot of data for directly. We do have a lot of indirect data. On the trying to catch people side: that the current democratic-legalistic justice system is extremely counterproductive in how severely it punishes criminals, that attempts to stop fraud with government social programs typically cost more than the fraud they fights, and that fighting digital piracy negatively affects sales because pirates spread popularity through word of mouth. Meanwhile on the free association side, public libraries aren't robbed empty; community kitchens have plenty of volunteers to get food, pay rent, and clean up; big boxes of Halloween candy can be left on someone's porch and most of the time it doesn't get robbed by one person; lots of countries have self-sustaining queueing cultures; etc.

I don't really know cases of gift economies being tried and failing, but it's possible that it often isn't reported if it happens.

In terms of social predictive reasoning, you could make the argument that openly telling resellers "it's fine if you resell it if you need the money but please donate or contribute if you can, and please tell people about us" is way more effective than turning it into a game of wits where resellers are too busy evading the security system that everyone else suffers under to question whether they're making a morally just decision. For example, it seems harder for an undocumented person to prove themselves trustworthy without putting themselves in harm's way than for a veteran reseller-scammer to fool someone.

In terms of moral red lines, AFAIK many people in this Instance are happy to have seen nothing if someone shoplifts or pirates something. Would it be worse if a reseller takes things from someone who has already decided to give it away for free?

So all in all, I would be very curious about the experiment of just letting resellers take stuff if they're willing to withstand people being sad at them about it.

The Supreme Court could stop it, but will they? And if they do, will their orders be enforced?

I honestly think that train has left the station. The coup rollout is already disregarding court orders, so the Supreme Court also declaring some actions illegal would not be insurmountable. It would cost the coup time to let public outrage descend below criticality, but within the government the purge is hitting escape velocity.

I saw a murder of crows the other day being assholes to a pair of ducks. Ruined my mood.

Thanks for your perspective, I'm glad there are people like you who feel free to openly articulate in support of it. It's sad people are downvoting as disagreement, because I can't imagine them downvoting out of a good faith belief you're not contributing.

A) When the state owns the company, being "non-profit" is just a matter of accounting. And Uber wasn't a public service back when they were operating at a loss. The power structure is far more important, and when "the benefit of the Chinese people" is decided top-down through nonrepresentative means, that's not socialism even if you trust the dictator/oligarchy/overlord/etc. to play nice.

I am genuinely glad your government has given you ample housing, but that doesn't make your relation less one of being owned and managed. (not to say the west is better, just that China isn't good enough either).

B&D) The USSR is one nation, and a centrally industrialized dictatorship at that. As a point of scientific process, how are they supposed to have definitively proven wasteful capitalism is necessary as you claim? Even if they genuinely attempted degrowth, that's just one data point or approach. Different systems that fall under the same bucket can fail or succeed depending on more fine-grained specifics.

Also, the USSR slaughtered millions of small-scale farmers (so-called Kulaks, who happened to largely be Ukrainian) to make way for their industrial megafarms. They were not an example of trying degrowth, they were an example of an industrial centralized dictatorship being embargoed by most of the world.

Your point of not being crushed by the US is well-taken, and maybe Nixon did make an offer China could not refuse at the time. But I think that time has been over for the past 10-20 years. China can defend itself, and even if the military-industrial complex needs mass production to stay on par with the west that does not need to apply to the rest of the economy.

C) Take it from someone who lives in a mature and "prosperous" nation. The fruits of capitalist-style growth suck balls. You're not giving people a better life by building their industrial/living infastructure wrong initially, you're taking them away from family and craft and friendship. All things that threaten those in power, by the way

If you have time, look up Marx' description of societal alienation. He puts it better than I could. And feel free to ask me to look stuff up to.

China has the opportunity to build an economy that degrows from consumption patterns that assume a far lower level of industrialization.

It's sad that in their state capitalist philosophy of centralizing power over the means of production, they are still building a lot of inefficient consumerist infrastructure. Without that, the target green capacity could be a lot lower and much easier to achieve.

It is very impressive though that they could hit carbon neutrality only 10 years after the nations that outsourced their carbon-spewing industries to them while staying state capitalist. They're definitely doing a better job than the US, though the EU is probably doing better still.

Here's a mockup, including driving_crooner's fix.

Okay, I will ~~buy~~ steal rare earth minerals from indigenous people. Thanks for the advice!

An inverted pyramid would make much more sense in terms of shape language. Put 'buy' at the lowest and narrowest point, like it's the lowest/worst option you have that fewest people need to resort to.

Maybe I'm reading too much into this, but this kind of sounds like a technofascist trial balloon to push for the privatization of the US military. The implication being

Why can't our nation's air industry not simply buy the right to fly through no-fly zones? This is deep state oppression curtailing YOUR freedoms to go where-ever you please. If we just privatize military research and production it will be more productive (SpaceX is better than NASA) and American (a big state is communist; those military officers that don't want to invade Canada are traitors), and people can fly over SpaceX's latest acquisition Area 51X if they buy the rights.

Project 2025 was not written by Trump even if he is the executor/scapegoat. Smart people exist and work for the politicians, shareholders and lobbyists that shape current US policy. And trial balloons don't need to be cleverly worked out, in the era of Trump you can just throw stuff at the wall, see what sticks, and pay private media to not make a story out of the rest. There's a good chance this will come to nothing, but why wouldn't a petty technocrat try to ingratiate himself to the new technofascist regime by offering a win-win.

anywhere

Fun fact: there are places that are not the United States.

Wouldn't that cause it to melt faster?

The better the top layer is insulated, the less heat from sunlight dissipates into the cold glacier and stone beneath. This means that the same amount of absorbed heat brings more of the top layer to the melting point than in a less insulated situation. Once the snow has melted it will go back to the old rate, but 22 days of delay would be optimistic.

Assuming the albedo is the same. If the glaciers are grey from dust and debris, then fresh snow will probably increase the reflectivity, which means less sunlight is absorbed as heat, which would cause the snow to last longer. So maybe 22 days of delay would be pessimistic. Or the effects might cancel out.

I don't know if the infrared and air-to-material heat conduction properties of glacier ice and snow are very different. It's probably less significant than albedo and insulation.

So my guess as an amateur physics grad is that during a heat wave (where air-to-material conduction is the primary driver), snow would melt faster than glacier ice, while during a typical preindustrial arctic early spring (where absorption of sunlight is the primary driver) snow would melt slower than glacier ice.

tl;dr: climate science hard