Maybe they could cut the price by 66% and market it as a golf cart.

After licking every slice.

Scientists: Climate Change will lead to everything going to shit if we don’t change our gluttonous ways and become good stewards of Creation.

Supply Side Jesus: HERESY!

That’s what she said.

A lot of today’s problems, like the rise of the KKK, stochastic terrorism, and infiltration of law enforcement by neo-nazis, can be traced back to an insufficient number of Confederates being hanged after the war.

MBFC is full of shit when describing bias - they call firmly right liberal capitalists “the left”. I don’t think they even have a word to describe actual socialists.

They’re decent about judging the reliability of factual reporting though.

“STINKY” is the default SSID for Starlink routers. These stupid motherfuckers couldn’t even figure out how to change the default settings. I wonder if they were using a default username and password too?

OpSec my ass.

15:52

Good point about the vanes jamming in their sleeves potentially being a problem at startup. As RPM increases, centrifugal force will make it harder to retract the vanes, so they might need some kind of powered actuation beyond just a passive spring.

I imagine there would be no contact with the engine wall, just a narrow gap with an active system to adjust the size of the gap, similar to some jet turbines. The video goes into it a little bit at this time:

https://youtu.be/UPFFXBAe5mc?t=952

And someone in the comments who has experience with building this kind of engine talks a little about how its difficult but not impossible to lubricate the seal with a higher viscosity fluid that will want to build up and prevent a vane from fully extending at high RPM. A different comment points out that piston rings experience similar problems with carbon and grit.

Seems like an interesting option for naturally aspirated race cars. They let you hit high RPM without worrying about valve float and without using overly powerful and lossy springs.

The difficulty of keeping them sealed suggests they’re less than optimal for high boost turbo applications, or high compression, fuel efficient commuter engines. Narrow tolerances may also increase manufacturing costs and decrease longevity, which is less of a problem for a race engine compared to something designed for mass production.

The Book of Enoch is wild though. It reads like a first hand account from a bronze age tribal getting abducted by aliens.

The market didn’t need regulations to maintain its freeness back then because the vast majority of transactions were made with small businesses. The limited technological capabilities in transport and communication also decreased the need for government regulation by decreasing the ability of the largest concentrations of capital to succeed at implementing global anti-competitive strategies.

To achieve the same degree of market freedom today, in the era of omni-national mega-corporations wielding monopoly influence, requires utilizing levers of power outside of the market those mega-corps dominate. The intervention of democratic governments to enforce anti-monopoly laws and prohibit other kinds of anti-competitive behavior is a necessary component of any plan to transform today’s marketplace into one that looks more similar to the market of Adam Smith’s day.

It is though - this is what capitalism invariably becomes. Musky Twitter is a symptom of late stage capitalism. This is why so many people say capitalism is bad and doesn’t work as advertised.

The golden age of classical liberalism, when capitalism actually worked, the 1700-1800’s, more closely resembles what we would today call market socialism.

Once the agglomerations of capital became large enough to impose irresistible anti-competitive force, the days of capitalism’s beneficial functionality ended. They say “the freer the market the freer the people”, but an unregulated market isn’t free - it invariably trends toward monopoly and irrationally assigned concentrations of wealth and power, eg Musk, Bezos, DuPont, Sackler, etc…

Capitalism supports, rather than resists, the anti-competitive influence of capital. A truly free market requires the intervention of powers other than capital - eg, democratic governance imposing something akin to Market Socialism against the wishes of those anti-competitive agglomerations of capital.

fund it exclusively out of his own pocket

That’s how newspapers got started - they were propaganda organs of the rich and existed exclusively to manipulate public opinion. Things really haven’t changed that much, but somewhere along the way people were tricked into paying for them.

They have no effect until you stop taking them. Then you hallucinate for a few weeks, like a low to medium dose of LSD.

I think its more likely that YouTube will shut down and be replaced by nothing. Its existence has never made sense as anything but an act of charity from an organization with tech resources to burn.

Its framed as being done to “strengthen their financial resilience”, but I suspect the motive is to slow down the rate at which banks are creating new money, driving up inflation. If these bank regulations pass, we can lower taxes without blowing up the inflation rate. Or, the Federal Government can spend more without increasing taxes, keeping the inflation rate the same.

The banks hate it because they would issue fewer loans, and therefore make less money. Its takes money out of the pockets of bankers and puts it into the hands of the Federal Government.

I’m generally in favor of markets deciding what gets produced, i.e. letting the banks judge which businesses asking for loans have the best chance of paying them back. However, the market has some blind spots where we’re all better off if the government steps in - for example, defense spending, infrastructure, and R&D (investing in NASA has historically provided incredible RoI).

That the Fed is even considering this new approach suggests to me that there is a perceived need for a rush of government spending in the near future, and the current geopolitical landscape suggests it will be spent on weapons.

The polling places in some rural municipalities are literally Masonic lodges where they make you announce out loud to all in attendance which primary you want to vote in.

surely producing a lower volume of lower quality products will improve the bottom line, right?