BraveSirZaphod

I mean, it’s both, among other things.

Target would absolutely love to charge $1000 for a carton of eggs, and would if they could, but they can’t. There has always been some ceiling price past which most consumers will simply walk away and go somewhere else. What exactly that number is depends firstly on the actual cost of getting the item in the first place, since no store will sell an item at a loss (unless they expect that to drive greater returns elsewhere), but then on how much money people actually have available to spend, and that very much is influenced by how much money the Fed is printing, among plenty of other things.

My point here isn’t that corporate greed isn’t a factor, but it’s not a new factor. It’s not like corporations were feeling generous in 2019 and then got in a greedy mood in 2021. They always have and always will charge as much as people are willing to pay, so any changes to what they’re charging should be examined by looking at what other factors might be at play. In this case, they’ve probably realized that they’ve gotten past the point of driving too many customers away.

Obviously corporate PR will never come out and say “We’re being greedy because fuck you, but we got a little too greedy so please come back”, but that is and always has been the dynamic.

This behavior is literally millennia older than capitalism.

Well, this is Brown we’re talking about. The students probably got too high and just accepted whatever deal was thrown at them without thinking about it.

He is terrible, but he’s better than any replacement, he’s shown a willingness to work with Dems, and most importantly, if he ever breaks any promises, the Dems can sick him to the wolves.

Okay, so imagine you just ban plastic soda bottles. Now plastic bottles cannot be used in any circumstances, no matter how genuinely warranted, even if a user is willing to pay all costs to ensure its environmental impacts are offset. Also, all soda is now significantly more expensive, so “the poors” still have less access to it.

And by definition the amount you would have to tax to achieve this has to be so much that it destabilizes the market.

Potentially, yes. The entire point is that these artificial low prices are only possible because the negative externalities are being inflicted on other people in the form of pollution. By actually factoring this impact into the cost of the good, its true cost emerges and the market will settle into whatever the equilibrium is. If the only thing enabling mass access to cheap soda is a ton of pollution, then you either accept mass pollution or you lose the mass access to cheap soda. There’s not really any way around that fundamental trade-off.

The spot where you charge it really doesn’t matter much except to the accountants; it’ll always just be factored into the price of the product. There’s no real difference between the company increasing the price by ten cents or a ten cent tax being levied at the register.

I really wouldn’t call it an indulgence tax though. There are plenty of uses for single-use plastics that aren’t sodas or indulgences.

You frame this as a ‘there is no solution i can see that’s worth it so why bother’ and this tells me you are not interested in a solution.

That is the exact opposite of what I’m saying. I’m saying that an externality tax to capture the actual cost of single-use plastics would do a lot to reduce their use without distorting markets and causing unintended side effects while likely being more effective than blanket bans.

Regulation is fine, but people need to realize that there are always downstream effects that often result in a less efficient version of the same outcome.

For instance, say you just pass a blanket ban on plastic soda bottles and mandate glass. Production costs immediately go up (not to mention transportation and logistics), and those costs are naturally passed onto the consumer, so the prices of all sodas go up.

Has this really improved things? There are real questions about the environment impact of glass, since they’re significantly heavier and thus require more carbon emissions to transport. Glass is better if it’s reused, but there are situations where it’s unlikely to be reused. Soda is now more expensive, just as it would have been under a plastic tax (and because lower income people tend to drink more soda, you’ve hit them extra hard relatively), but now you’ve also eliminated the ability for plastic bottles to be used in situations where they truly are called for; for instance, you probably don’t want to be selling glass bottles at a music festival, so an organizer will need to instead purchase extra plastic cups instead, resulting in the consumption of extra glass and plastic.

I know people have this idea that the only factor that goes into a price is how greedy the CEO happens to feel that morning, but that’s simply not the case. Prices are set by market circumstances, not greed. It’s not like NYC landlords suddenly got less greedy in 2020; the market radically changed. They’re already charging the most that the market will bear. In terms of regulation, it’s almost always more effective to go after the market incentives - that is, price signals - instead of just taking a hammer to the thing you don’t like and hoping it doesn’t have any bad effects.

An extremely specific and highly regulated type of work action has a lot of rules in order to legally be protected.

For instance:

The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that a “sitdown” strike, when employees simply stay in the plant and refuse to work is not protected by the law.

https://www.nlrb.gov/strikes

Especially at the level of working for Google, employment is a voluntary agreement, not a right. If the employees find it unconscionable to work for Google, the correct thing to do is to, you know, not work for Google.

Workers have essentially zero right to protest on company time on company property and disrupting work.

It would be another thing if, to address your counter-example, an employer went through everyone’s social media and systematically fired everyone who made the “wrong” public stance in an avenue that has nothing to do with the job (still legal probably, but much shittier), but using your own work time to interrupt business operations isn’t going to be tolerated pretty much anywhere.

Again, if these employees had been protesting outside the company offices on their own time and were fired for that, I’d be more sympathetic, but that’s not what happened here.

That’s what’s always a bit maddening about these conversations. It’s not like companies are just shredding plastic into the atmosphere because they’re cartoon villains who love evil.

They’re making cheap plastic shit because we love cheap plastic shit. They’re making this stuff in response to explicit consumer prioritization of low costs above all other factors. If consumers broadly demanded soda in glass bottles and expressed a willingness to pay the extra cost that this entails, every soda company would use glass.

I’m not saying that you individually should be blamed for all environmental pollution, but we have to realize that companies are responding to the exact same incentives that we do. They’re obviously operating at a much larger scale, but they use cheap plastic shit for the exact same reason we do. If you’re looking for policy solutions, a great option would be to introduce an externality tax on plastic so that this environmental cost is actually factored into the production and end price and can fund remediate the damage, similar to carbon taxes. Of course though, the moment you say the word ‘tax’ people’s brains completely shut off, so this is probably a non-starter.

I mean, it’s a plant. You can grow it, and plenty of it is grown. It is objectively more sustainable than, say, coal or helium.

This feels more like a poor non-native English speaker than an AI. LLMs do happily lie, but they don’t usually have significant grammar mistakes like the missing articles here.

This isn’t even true though. The vast majority will agree that a little bit of inflation is good, deflation is very bad, and hyperinflation is essentially cataclysmic.

That’s the infuriating thing about this whole mess that feels impossible to solve.

Rhetoric like this directly radicalizes Israelis and pushes them towards violent escalation, which then radicalizes Palestinians into violence as well, further inspiring more Israeli violence, and on and on the cycle goes.

And then anyone who advocates for any amount of moderation will simultaneously get called a terrorist sympathizer for not wanting to nuke Gaza and a genocide accomplice for not wanting to forcibly remove or kill every Israeli.

I certainly hope you’re not an American and have never been to the United States, because I’ve got some unfortunate news about who that land properly belongs to.

I’d love to see your thoughts if you’d been in the area to experience Hamas’ “peace” on October 7th.

Speaking strictly legally, Yale and any other private university have a non-trivial amount of authority to regulate the use of their own private spaces, and even ignoring that, the right to protest is not unlimited, particularly when it starts to impede the ability of others to conduct their own legal activities. Yale claims that the trespassing decision was made due to the protests blocking the ability of faculty and staff to access their facilities.

There’s also reports of one student being stabbed in the eye with a flag pole, and fundamentally, the Constitution does not give anyone the right to camp and protest on private land. Students were warned multiple times before police were finally moved in. Part of civil disobedience is accepting the consequences of said disobedience. Those arrested knew what would happen and chose accordingly. I won’t fault them for that.

That is not at all what right to work means.

I get the frustration, but if you’re going to criticize a thing, it’s a lot more effective if you actually know what the thing is.

Austerity does not tend to foster economic growth

I mean, that’s precisely the point. Growth isn’t really the priority right now, because that also tends to increase inflation. The loose aim of Milei’s plan is to return things to an actually accurate economic baseline by cutting extremely distortionary government spending and subsidies and allowing the peso to fall to its true actual value, and only then pivoting to focus on real and sustainable growth that’s actually backed by legitimate increases in efficiency and production rather than government money printers and IMF loans that only make the problem worse.

I won’t pretend that this approach doesn’t have some harsh consequences on people that will be disproportionately born by the poor or that there aren’t any other options, but there is a legitimate economic basis for the idea. Whether it’s worth it or is fair and just is another question.