The US industrialized without much in the way of large scale state industrial policy. The federal government was quite weak in the 19th century and, excepting tariffs on British goods, I can't think of any explicit policies it established that were intended to foster industrial capacity. And I think it's debatable how much tariffs actually helped the US develop its manufacturing capacity
> The US industrialized without much in the way of large scale state industrial policy.
What? From funding the Lewis&Clark missions, to forcing japan open, to clearing out the natives for railroad companies, to helping found colleges ( check out many engineering/tech focused colleges like MIT was founded in the 1800s ). You can even argue that american independence and the civil wars were about expanding state industrial policy.
> The federal government was quite weak in the 19th century
So "weak" that we went from 13 small states on the east coast and expanded 3000 miles all the way to the pacific? What the hell are you talking about?
> I can't think of any explicit policies it established that were intended to foster industrial capacity.
The US became the dominant industrial power in the 1800s and you can't think of any policies that helped? You think all the territories in the ohio valley, texas, oklahoma, california, etc chock full of oil were just given to americans by overly generous natives, brits or mexicans? Are you a moron?
If the US didn't have state industrial policy, the US would have never become and industrial power. We'd have just gone down the jeffersonian agrarian paradise road.
Having access to large tracts of land is not a necessary precondition to industrialization (see South Korea). Did the capital accumulation from the exploitation of resources in the American West make it easier to industrialize? Probably. But America would have industrialized if it never expanded beyond the Ohio River valley (access to coal probably was necessary).
Also, as an aside, yes, most of the American West was largely lucked into. America was lucky that France and Spain were dirt broke, that Britain was distracted by continental conflicts with France and Russia, and that native societies had been decimated by disease and a subsequent collapse in governance. That's not to say that there wasn't smart, farsighted leadership in American government, but it was a weak power.
I think steaming just represents such a small share of revenue for professional musicians that negotiating over it isn't worth the headache for the most part. For Swift in particular, touring definitely represents the overwhelming majority of her income.
I wouldn't tbh, though I'll admit I'm speculating solely on public information. During the 2023 strikes, SAG-AFTRA and the WGA negotiated additional residuals based upon whether 20% of the streaming services subscriber base viewed the content within 90 days of release.[1] So, streaming platforms are evidently willing to share subscriber viewership data with 3rd parties if it's a contractual requirement.
I would be surprised if content licensors haven't negotiated an as good or better deal for themselves.
I certainly believe that if you want to be a successful musician, not even a pop star necessarily just one that's able to draw crowds large enough to sustain you financially, you probably are bound by certain norms and expectations. Not necessarily because audiences hate women (or men for that matter) that break the mold, but they're not as easy to digest. It adds friction. And when there are thousands of other artists out there to listen to, that friction can be the difference between success and failure.
I agree with you though, if you're willing to live a small life where you only need the love and respect of a small handful of people, you can do almost anything and very few people will genuinely hate you.
Other people might have other preferences. Maybe we could have a price system where people can express their preferences by paying for things with money, providing more money to the product which is in greater demand?
Sure.. Except some people / companies have so much more money, they can demand impractical things and pay above-market rates for them, causing all others to scramble to live day-to-day with the distorted market.
The vast majority of water in agriculture goes to satisfy our taste buds, not nourish our bodies. Feed crops like alalfa consume huge amounts of water in the desert southwest but the desert climate makes it a great place to grow and people have an insatiable demand for cattle products.
We could feed the world with far less water consumption if we opted not to eat meat. Instead, we let people make purchasing decisions for themselves. I'm not sure why we should take a different approach when making decisions about compute.
> We could feed the world with far less water consumption if we opted not to eat meat.
If you look at the data for animals, that’s not really true. See [1] especially page 22 but the short of it is that the vast majority of water used for animals is “green water” used for animal feed - that’s rainwater that isn’t captured but goes into the soil. Most of the plants used for animal feed don’t use irrigation agriculture so we’d be saving very little on water consumption if we cut out all animal products [2]. Our water consumption would even get a lot worse because we’d have to replace that protein with tons of irrigated farmland and we’d lose the productivity of essentially all the pastureland that is too marginal to grow anything on (50% of US farmland, 66% globally).
Animal husbandry has been such a successful strategy on a planetary scale because it’s an efficient use of marginal resources no matter how wealthy or industrialized you are. Replacing all those calories with plants that people want to actually eat is going to take more resources, not less, especially when you’re talking about turning pastureland into productive agricultural land.
That paper makes the opposite argument than you thought it made. Even from a freshwater perspective it’s more water-efficient to get calories/protein/fat directly from crops than from animal products.
Since you like their work, the authors of your paper answered that question more generally here https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10021-011-9517-8 where they conclude "The water footprint of any animal product is larger than the water footprint of crop products with equivalent nutritional value".
You make some often debunked claims, like we'd have to plant more crops to feed humans directly if we stopped eating meat.
This shouldn't make intuitive sense to you since animals eat feed grown on good cropland (98% of the water footprint of animal ag) that we could eat directly, and we lose 95% of the calories when we route crops through animals.
You’re confusing my argument. I’m not arguing that meat is more efficient than plants; that by itself is obviously untrue because of the trophic efficiency loss. I’m arguing that meat uses marginal resources that would otherwise be useless for growing food. If we eliminate meat we’d eliminate a lot of marginally productive farmland that is naturally irrigated and have to replace it with industrialized irrigation farming that will be significantly more expensive and use more water and energy. Maybe if we had a global cultural reset with industrialized farming, but no one is going to be happy replacing their beef and chicken with the corn and barley and hay that those lands normally grow, much of it inedible to humans.
That paper isn’t actually debunking anything that I’m saying. If the water foot print per calorie is 20x for beef but the feed is grown with 90% of its water from rainfall, that’s not a 20x bigger footprint in a way that practically matters because most of that water is unrecoverable anyway. The water that is recoverable just makes it through the watershed.
Meat is a way to convert land that cant grow things people can or want to eat into things that people will eat. That pastureland and marginal cropland growing animal feed can’t just be converted to grow more economically productive crops like fruit and vegetables without Herculean engineering effort and tons of water and fertilizer. Instead the farming would have to stress other fertile ecosystems like the Southwest which would make the water problems worse, even if their total “footprint” is smaller. The headline that beef uses 20x more water per calorie completely ignores where that water comes from and how useful it actually is to us.
I don’t doubt that we can switch to an all plant diet as a species but people vastly underestimate the ecological and societal cost to do so.
I mean it's even simpler. Almonds are entirely non essential (many other more water efficient nuts) to the food supply and in California consume more water than the entire industrial sector, and a bit more than all residential usage (~5 million acre-feet of water).
Add a datacenter tax of 3x to water sold to datacenters and use it to improve water infrastructure all around. Water is absolutely a non-issue medium term, and is only a short term issue because we've forgotten how to modestly grow infrastructure in response to rapid changes in demand.
>the track record of the effective altruism folks doesn’t seem all that great.
I've been donating 5-10% of my income to GiveWell[1] and their top charities like GiveDirectly[2] and the Against Malaria Foundation[3] for nearly a decade at this point and I think their track record has been fantastic. Effect altruism only gets shady when longtermists get involved and start speculating on the moral worth of lives in some distant future. If you focus on human beings alive today, effective altruists (and development economists) have done a great job identifying how to make your charitable donations go the farthest in reducing suffering.
I think you would need a complicated set of metrics to claim something like "improved" that wasn't caveated to death. An immediate conflict being total number of articles vs impressions of articles labeled with POV biases. If both go up has the site improved?
I find I trust Wikipedia less these days, though still more than LLM output.
I can't think of a better accidental metric than that!
I'll go ahead and speculate that the number of incoherent sentences per article has gone down substantially over the last decade, probably due to the relevant tooling getting better over the same period.
I'm pretty sure the point parent was trying to make is that you can't get other people to leave their phones at home and there is very little recourse if a private citizen decides to record you without your consent from their phone in a public space. There's of course a difference in the powers involved, but people have had their lives ruined because somebody captured a video of them out of context or in their worst moment.
More crazy than the Cold War? The World Wars? The great flu pandemic? The Chinese Civil Wars? The European Wars of Religion? The Black Death? The Mongol Invasions?
I can't think of a single year in human history when the world wasn't crazy (maybe with the exception of a couple years in the late 1990s)
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