partial_accumen

And I wonder if I should, sometime in the future, apply to those wards managed by the same people that 2 years ago rejected and outright ignored me, because it’s always good to have a plan b on the back burner and I’m running out of managers within my hospital I haven’t interviewed with.

You know your industry better than I do, but my industry-agnostic answer would be: “Yes, absolutely apply if it moves your career forward”. Even horrible bosses/departments can be useful as stepping stones. Many times these are open and others are avoiding them because the environment/boss sucks. If you can do a year in that department/boss as a springboard to a higher position elsewhere, I typically think its worth it.

They are doing fantastic with electric car adoption too. Incredibly progressive in that area with other countries still stuck to their antiquated reliance on gas vehicles and still trying to prop up that industry.

I’m all for the electrification of cars in China, but don’t think for a second its because they’re concerned about climate change. China doesn’t have the vast petroleum reserves of most other large nations. This means if they continue to have their energy needs in control by other nations, it will always be a national vulnerability, so they are seeking ways to hedge against decoupling from world energy markets.

If you want to otherwise continue to think China is fully committed to green energy, don’t look at how much domestic coal China has, nor how much China continues to increase its consumption.

Keep in mind, I’m not throwing shade on China. This is geopolitics. If it was the USA in the same situation, I’d be saying the same thing.

Additionally, making more money is MUCH easier when you have money too start with.

I was one of these. I started my IRA in my 20s with what little money I could put into it. When I left a job I’d roll my 401k back into my IRA under the same Edward Jones advisor.

After over more than 20 years I started questioning it. I asked for statements of all of my deposits. I took those dates and deposit amounts and plugged them into a basic historical simulator to see what would have happened if I put the same money into an S&P500 fund. My real investment account was over $40,000 lower than had I just put the money in myself into the S&P500. I dropped that advisor and transferred my entire balance into VTSAX and never looked back. Future deposits went into my own brokerage into boring index funds from then on.

I credit Edward Jones with making saving for retirement stupid easy for myself a dumb 22 year old at the time. However, I should have wised up sooner and it cost me at least $40,000 for my naïveté.

If investing in the S&P 500 is such a surefire way to make money, then why isn’t everyone doing it?

First, lots and LOTS of people (and companies do it).

Three reasons people don’t do it:

1. Some people believe they can make even more money by putting it into something else (other riskier stocks, non stock investments like their own sole proprietor businesses, bitcoin, scratcher lottery tickets).
2. Some people are entirely risk averse. If they can’t SEE their money they don’t trust where it is so they buy precious metals or stack cash up. Neither of these are good investments for returns, but are generally safer that index investing (which is what S&P500 is) if you need to sell on short notice.
3. Investing anything requires money you don’t have to spend somewhere else. Lots of people are at negative money, so they don’t even have a dollar to invest.

I mean, imagine a future where every computer is just a chromebook, phones are no longer phones but just a “terminal” that streams the actual OS which runs in the cloud.

It will get close to happening for nearly all computing, then it will swing back the other way to local storage and compute, then after 15-20 years it will swing back toward centralized compute and storage. This has already happened 3 times.

• Original computing was mainframes. “Dumb terminals” that had zero local storage and only the most rudimentary compute power to handing the incoming data and display it, and take keystrokes, encode them, and send them on.

• Then “personal computers” became a thing with the advent of cheap CPUs. Dumb Terminals/mainframes were largely discarded and everyone had their own computer on their desk with their won compute and storage. Then the Netware/Banyan era began and those desktop computers were networked to have some remote shared storage. (there’s a slightly different branching with Sun/HPUX/DigitalUnix and Workstation grade hardware)

• Then Citrix WinFrame and Sun Ray stateless thin clients showed up once again swinging the compute and storage almost entirely remotely to centralized heavy powered servers with (mostly) dumb terminals, but these were graphic interfaces like MS Windows or Xwindow.

• Once again, powerful desktop CPUs showed up with the Pentium II etc compute was back under users desks.

• Now phones and tablets with cloud has show up, and you’re asking the question.

So what I think will swing primary compute and storage back to the user side (handheld now) is again, cheap compute and storage on the device. Right now so many services are cloud based because the massive compute and storage requirements only exist in volume in the cloud. However, bandwidth is still limited. Imagine when the next (next?) generation of mobile CPUs arrive, and with a tiny bit of power you could do today’s bitcoin mining on your phone or process AI datasets with ease in the palm of your hand. And why would you send the entire dataset to the cloud when you can process it locally and then send the result?

So the pendulum keeps swinging; centralized and distributed, back and forth.

Others have suggested professional counseling. Thats the right answer. Do that.

I can tell you even without the emotional baggage you’re carrying, getting started on your own in life is hard and confusing. There’s no book that tells you everything you need to do (and when) and what NOT to do that will cost you time and money you don’t have at that stage of life.

If you are under the impression that others launch successfully into independence without issue, let me remove that idea. All of us, even with massive support from our families had difficulty. You’ve got some extra difficulties on top of what others have. Don’t despair when its not going right. That doesn’t mean you’re a failure.

Instead of trying to remember where you put it, imagine if you had it in your hand and you wanted to put it away where you would put it. Imagine you’ve never own one of these before (this is important so you don’t pollute your thought process with all your previous search efforts).

You brought it home from the store, you used it and it rattled around for awhile until you decide to put it somewhere for future use. Where is that place? Would that place have existed when you put your actually owned needles away before? If not, where would the place that existed have been?

The perspective and the idea of a co-op however is completely different from what you describe: to distribute the hardships, the risks and rewards right from the start onto many shoulders. There’s no more “my company, my sacrifices” etc. It’s all we.

That sounds great, but how does that translate into real-world scenarios that organizations experience? As an example:

How do co-ops decide who needs to be fired when there isn’t enough money to cover payroll?

I guess my question is why do ML theorists think workers can organize enough to run a state when they can’t organize enough to run a business?

I’m not a Marxist, but my understanding of the theory is the difference between having all the the resources available to a nation-state to re-organize the state vs having to work with the meager resources provided by the existing state while working side that state’s existing restrictive system.

I don’t know, it seems the whole argument seems to boil down to “there’s not enough time, money or skill”.

“money” - what does money mean after you’ve toppled the state? Do you need money for rent? No. There’s no rule of law that will evict you from your home if you don’t pay your rent. Do you need money for food? No (in the short term). You break open the stores to take what food you need and is needed to feed the populous. The “money” problem can also be for required material resources the specific service you’re trying to set up. If you need something to carry out the will of the new state, you take it from whoever has it (which under Marxism usually means from the ruling elite), so that’s not a problem under this system.

“time” - The nation-state has been toppled. You don’t need to go to your wage job anymore for your life essentials. You’ve got all the time in the day you can dedicate to setting up the new state.

“skill” - If you have the skill to do the job but couldn’t do that job before because it didn’t pay you a living wage, that problem is now gone. The state will provide for your means, and you will do job X which the state needs done. If the state doesn’t have someone with a skill, the state will provide free education to train up citizens who will then be skilled enough to do job X needed by the state.

So none of those are actual problems on paper under Marxist because its generally applied to the nation-state level, not working in micro within an existing oppressive regime.

I say “on paper” because Marxist itself is flawed because it requires humans to act purely altruistically forever, and frankly thats beyond the capacity for humanity. Or said another way, Marxism would work great if there were no humans involved, which defeats the purpose of Marxism.

These are great points, and looking at some of the other responses I get the sense that it’s a time and skills issue. So, what exactly do communists and socialists imagine will happen when “workers seize the means of production”?

I admit I’m not a scholar in this area, but my college reading of Marx and Engels they were taking about nation-state levels of “seizing the means of production”. As in, the entire nation’s ability to produce goods, grow and transport food, facilitate communications, etc. Doing so on such a grand scale that the elites/bourgeois would be forced to cede control of the levers of power because society effectively halts with the means of production in the hands of the working class (proletariat).

Marx wasn’t talking about a socialist group starting up a competing grocery store to the entrenched established players in that market space.

I don’t want to discourage anyone from pursuing these ideas, I think at least in the U.S. it might be cool to have a consultancy or non-profit which helps connect such founders and provides them with education, training and startup resources.

There are educational resources for starting non-profits organizations (and I’m assuming co-ops). The real resource any org (for-profit or nonprofit) needs to start up is: large amounts of money. In for-profit ventures (assuming your business plan is respectable) you can get bank loans or outside investors. Both of these groups expect a return on the money they’re giving you to get started up.

With a co-op, I’m guessing the only sources of startup capital are: government grants, philanthropic donations, or a founder that already has amassed their own fortune.

Edit oh and some of the other points are that one wouldn’t get rich doing this. So what?

At those really dark times for your business you ask yourself “why the hell am I even doing this?” for most business owners the answer is “so that at some point in the future my life will be much easier”. For a co-op, there has to be a very deeply held belief that what you’re doing is extremely meaningful and your sacrifice will be “worth it” somehow. While those people exist with almost a religious level of obligation to their cause or their community, I think they are extremely rare.

I don’t envy the leadership in a struggling co-op. Running an organization is hard enough at the best times as a single owner. Having to run it by committee when it is crumbling sounds like a painful death.

I’ve already seen people look down on wealth accumulation, so I think it’s fair to say that the motives for someone who’d start such a business venture are different, which is valid and reasonable.

You may already have your answer. In your first post you said: “I’d also like to see more childcare co-ops, or community shared pre-k schools.”

What is stopping you from you creating a child-care co-op?

Secondly, I don’t think market forces will impact such businesses because if you’re creating communities around them, then people will choose what they know and trust.

This is naive. Market forces (and other externalities) can have massive impacts on your organization irrespective if you’re a for-profit or co-op. Just think of what COVID did to many organizations. Though nothing change in the business model or service offering, thousands of companies went under because the conditions of the market changed through no fault of the organization owners/leaders.

In short, co-ops are the closest socialist/communist business model that’s actually implemented in the U.S., so why are more leftists not doing this?

Starting a business (that is based on a sound and viable business plan that has even a snowball’s chance of surviving its formative early years) is really REALLY hard. It takes massive amounts of money or debt, the early years promise years of having no income for yourself (or paying yourself below minimum wage), it means a staggering amount of hours you need to put in to keep it going, forgoing vacations and important family events, loss of friendships because you’re having to put all your time and energy into the business without socializing, having to work when you’re incredibly ill, incredible amounts of stress (which increases by 10 times when you have employees that now depend on you for their livelihood) and even if you do everything perfect your business can fail leaving you with nothing for the years that you put into it, and potentially also with tens of thousands or millions of dollars in debt. It means many times being force to make decisions that massively affect other people’s lives (your employees or your customers). It can be versions of the Trolley Problem time and time again.

“According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), approximately 20% of new businesses fail during the first two years of being open, 45% during the first five years, and 65% during the first 10 years. Only 25% of new businesses make it to 15 years or more.” source

So ask yourself if you want to go through all of that, and instead of wealth you can live on and support your family with at the end of it, you get simply a “thank you” for building a co-op.

Team Cat points out that in a prior race Russell impeded cat in nearly the exact same circumstances, but Russell received no sanctions. There is clear bias on the part of the FIA and the race stewards against Cat #69. Team Cat will be appealing the decision against Cat #69.

Russell wasn’t on a push lap, even though he was on the racing line.

It’s a regressive policy

Agreed.

made as a reaction

Agreed.

and not an action,

Err, clearly an action. A reaction IS an action by definition.

and thus inherently destructive.

Point of order, counselor. Conclusion not supported by the facts. If you apply your same logic ( and conclusions) to the COVID lockdowns, then your conclusion would be those were unnecessarily destructive.

Sure, one action can have multiple reasons and outcomes. I agree with it in part that I need to pay my fair share of road taxes. I also recognize that this is a relatively new market force, and highly accurate consumption-to-taxation isn’t in place yet (again, for many reasons).

That doesn’t mean it’s why they do it, though.

Its not the only reason they do it.

And here I have to pay more to register my hybrid.

Same for my EV (double the hybrid registration cost in my state). However, that’s because of how road taxes are collected on the sale of gasoline/diesel fuel. Its still overpaying on EV taxes though. For the same registration fee I pay on an EV ($200/year) I could drive over 15,000 miles on a gasoline car getting 30 miles to the gallon. I drive maybe 11,000/year so I’m overly taxed compared to ICE drivers.

It’s going up. Unequivocally up.

Its going up, but the rate of change is going down. So yes, demand is still high, and the total amount of demand is increasing, it is increasing by a smaller amount each year. Here’s that demand growth/decline data for the oil sector.

This makes me wonder if China will be a geopolitical target for the oil nations like Russia and the Middle East.

Russia can’t afford to stop selling oil to China. Its one of its few customers left to sell oil to.

China is Saudi Arabia’s largest customer. Saudi Arabia can’t afford to piss off China.

If you have cheap electricity and cheap batteries, people will buy EVs. Colour me surprised.

Cheap EVs is part of it, and that part is subsidies from the government, but China has also increase the registration cost of pure ICE vehicles. Yeah, you can still buy them, but they’ll cost you a lot of extra money to register them to be legal to drive on the roads in China. On top of this, in major congestion areas, you have to get entered in a lottery to even get a license plate (ability to register a car). The government in China continues to reduce the number of ICE license plates available, and increases EV license plates. (source)

So its a lot more than just “cheap electricity and cheap batteries” in action in China causing this massive switch to EVs.