Gorgritch_Umie_Killa

Tickets/Voucher for a rock climbing centre could be up his alley.

If you want something that will last you could get him a powder bag, or his first Carabiner as well.

Be prepared that the climbing place might not let him use the Carabiner in conjunction with their equipment though, so it might sit around until he got his own harness if he ever went that far. Powder bag would be all good.

Lefty friendly, i would assume your interests would align with trying to help the common person, and climate change adaptation.

Your stated experience, and interests sound varied, and present you as a highly active person.

Combining these things in my mind i instantly thought you should get into food system adaptation for a warmer more volatile world. Where people could really suffer horrendously with climate change is if food production systems break down. We need smart people, willing to try new approaches in that system. Farming where i’m from is bed of roses, and a lot of the skills you listed farmers here would likely use, so its probably the same/similar elsewhere.

So specifically i’s thinking organic farming, or permaculture, or perhaps a more scientific route such as propagation of new tougher varietals.

Logistical needs are also important, the amount of energy used to transport food must be immense and so that could be an avenue you could go down marrying your comments about mechanical engineering to the idea of improving the worlds food production systems.

Good luck with your ongoing career, whatever you decide.

An acquaintance once landed a contract to clear up a gold mine site after shut down. He bid super low for it, the only condition he stipulated was it be left in the condition in which he had inspected it, something like that.

The operator immediately gave him the contract, and he immediately gathered up all the dust from conveyor belts etc sifted through it, separated all the left over gold inside and sold it.

Set him up in a big way, the idiot operator tried to take him to court to claim the gold as theirs, with no success.

So yeah, sometimes there truly is gold in that there dust.

He bought it because he was going to be forced to https://finance.yahoo.com/news/why-did-elon-musk-agree-080448660.html

I really dislike how this fact is being forgotten. There is no ‘big brain’ conspiracy going on here he got caught out making an offer that he didn’t actually mean to be taken seriously. The rest has been making the best, for himself, of a bad situation.

Also this article only gets to the really interesting question in the last twenty words or so. ‘Why are people still on there?’ Thats the analyses good journalists could be focusing on.

Well said.

The car industry execs should be laughing their heads off at naive bank execs assuming they know more about it than the car execs. Don’t they think the car execs already know what the risk and competitive nature of their own business.

Guess what bankers, this is how you produce positive growth in a real productive industry, and its risky business. Instead the bankers prescription assumes managed decline.

It’s like that new guy at work who constantly tells everyone about ‘hacks’ only they’ve discovered, when everybody already knows about them.

To paraphrase the post,

We people have always been ignorant, we just keep the receipts now.

Treemix or tribroot band?

Good illustrative example.

I’m always hesitant to assume growth will always reassert itself in the end though. You know the old saying, ‘past performance is not an indicator of future performance’, type thing. After all extinction is a thing.

Um, i suppose you could apply the effect of the black plague on middle ages europe.

Estimated to have killed 1/3 of all people. There was a subsequent rise in wages/worker bargaining power attributed to the lack of labour supply.

I suppose thats an example of rock bottom and coming back with some benefit.

I wouldn’t call it ‘bouncing’ back though, more like struggling on with a sliver of silver on those grey clouds. Not an adviseable course for a country to take.

Closed loops are a pretty steep expectation. I’m pretty sure (with no evidence to back me up) with the amount of importers, suppliers, manufacturers, retailers in the supply chain for a product on a shelf, it would be a costly proposition to attempt closed loop.

More costly than using a system of levys to promote behavioural change. Which is the idea behind the system i’s suggesting in the previous comment.

Its about changing the system for the better to generate the fewest negative externalities possible. If a closed loop increases costs more than a system of levys, then everyone will be squeezed more than necessary to get the same result, making negative externalities, like black markets, fraud, more likely than they need be.

Cigarettes in Australia are a great example of this in action. There is a black market for Cigarettes here because they are so expensive from the retailers, but the barriers to widespread black market adoption are still perceived as too high for the greater majority of smokers. The result is a small black market, which will almost always exist for any product you can think of, but the government has tightened the screws on smokers in the public market to make it as uncomfortable process as possible for the sale and purchase of Cigarettes. Until the introduction of younger generations vaping, and the lack of younger generations similar experiences with Cigarettes ill effects, the policy position led to a hard disincentive that worked to decrease smoking rates. But, as always, time and creativity need a reaction that we are still trying to get right.

A better system is to require all grocery/food/packaging, customer facing retailers to record all sales and from which suppliers those products were bought.

Then charge the retailer the average cost of ‘recycling’ or ‘to the planet’, or another measure of cost.

This will increase costs on all products, but by design more on the costs of hard to recycle goods and packaging.

Charge retailers that daily, watch end to end, from supplier/producer to consumer, behaviour change and iterate accordingly.

Start off with an industry sector though, like grocery stores, most are bricks and mortar, and have high brand acknowledgement so can’t easily escape regulation. The key is to charge the location of sale, not the companies ‘HQ’.

Yeah no, of course. I understand. For me it’s a problem i never considered with all those stadiums. The worst the ones over here would get is like hail once a year, or a precipitation of Queenslanders every so often ;p

Yeah theres that comradery. “Tailgating with more sweat” thats such a vivid description lol! You need to be on these guys marketing team with lines like that.

$20/hour is actually a fairly reasonable hourly rate for the US isn’t it. I’m just going off min wage being $15 in a lot of States now

Wow. That takes self serve to whole other level. I get the stadiums are big, but that kind of request needs to come with consideration, even reduced ticket prices could do the teick if they’re asking fans.

Or yeah, they could just pay fair value for services rendered, i know alien concept isn’t it! Lol

Are attendees going along with it?

I haven’t been to the NFL, but friends took me to a baseball game while i’s there. It was a Mariners game, very fun night. But i felt the pressure to spend on everything as soon as you walked in, it felt like the stadium was incompetition against each specatator over the contents of your wallet.

Luigi Zingales, a Chicago University Economist, recently did a Q&A where he talked about the two meanings of competition that the English language roles into the one word, that of competitions to defeat an opponent, and competitions creating something in kind. There are parts of the community that have opted for the first definition and act in all times against their opponents, as you say “weaponized greed”. What they don’t realise is what makes the market a force for good is acting with competitors, following the second defintion.

A good example is the downtown nightlife district of a city. Alone those bars and eateries might be nice establishments, but if they’re the only option in town their product offering can become stale, but together in competition with each other they act to collectively create this fantastic and flexible destination for a night out.

As for hostile public spaces the same happens here l, in Australia, so so much. I even have to catch myself and correct my preconceived notions when i see someone laying in a park. I suppose the only difference is the economic interests are more evenly weighted, due to no detroit-like lobbyists.

Its also societal construction and built environment issues. There is a genuine lack of agency in the Millenial generation, and likely less again in the younger generations.

Take the built environment, its unfriendly to those with low resources, leading to isolation or dependency on those with resources, often boomer parents. The suburbs stretch on and on, all services public or private have been bundled together more and more, think super hospitals. Then they are placed further away because they now serve vast areas, there is also a fragility in these cost cutting ‘efficiencies’. If your one hospital is out of action what do you do? Even down to ever wider roads for ever larger cars, this impacts other activities an area could be engaging in.

Societal construction has undermined any civic engagement organisations that don’t have a pro-owner slant. Its telling that unions have been smashed, but chambers of commerce? They are basically unions for business owners. It’s also an unwillingness of boomers to let go of power in certain community groups. How many of these locak groups are almost exclusively full of very mature age people?

My last point i think ties into the above though. The X’ers, Millenials, and younger are getting hit progressively harder by the wage worker depression, while no risk financial speculation, and asset driven wealth inflation, line the beds of those with the means to participate. Usually the older, or children with inherited wealth. This means longer working hours for less relative income, a need to keep upgrading your ‘skillset’ to prove your value to HR, creating a poorer strata financially and in time. If the younger generations weren’t forced to change careers every six or so years to finally reach an ‘adult’ job, we would have time to participate more in our society.

I think the Millenial generation (mine) is going to be rather boring in the footnotes of history. (X’ers had a bit of punk and metal that keeps them spicy.) We won’t have the resources to be anything but rather conservative in our policies (classically so, not the radical republican-conservatism of the 80’s on).

On the bright side, in my country, Australia, the predicted shift to the ‘right’ as people get older seems to have broken. Which signals a rejection of the policies those parties stand for. Which are the policies causing the most acute problems for Millenials, and generations younger. So, maybe as the boomers fade, a generational solidarity will rise due to a union of desires, and our countrys will begin to feel less like generational trench warfare. That is my firm hope for the future of my time on this planet with you lot.

Isn’t that two more colours than Henry Ford gave you! Sheesh! Ungrateful much!

I could see that happening, its probably what holds a lot of States and Countys back.

A lot of States are happy not to have a large corporations tax, because they get their share through another means, say income, or land tax. Which they charge employed persons, if a company doesn’t employ many people, then they will be less value to a State like that.

Long time reddit lurker here. I’m active now i’m here. I wonder how many peeps there are here like me?