The idea of rent suggests that you're paying a use fee to an owner. But if you live in a house that you own, and therefore lose the potential rental income, who are you paying that use fee to? Is the loss of potential income really the same as rent? Because in that case almost every choice/action in life involves a potential loss of income. There's probably always something more profitable one could have done with time/money.
> Is the loss of potential income really the same as rent?
yes it is. The term is called cost of capital, and sometimes imputed rent. But it's not an "expense" per se like it is when you pay liquid cash to somebody for use of a capital good.
Yup! Most people won't even entertain this idea though.
I grew up ranching, hunting, farming, etc in the US west so I've seen this first hand. I went to an ag college as well. So, very familiar with this.
Cows are really, really bad for the environment. It's an incredibly inefficient way of producing calories.
We use massive amounts of land to grow relatively little food, in regards to beef. We deforest massive amounts of land to grow little food.
Cows do not belong in the American continents. They're not native. They make habitat/ecological issues way worse.
The record breaking fire year Oregon had in 2024? Cows contributed by eating native grasses which encourages invasive grass growth. Invasive grasses spread into monocultures and burn very hot. Cows also destroy riperian habitat which acts as a natural fire break.
US taxpayers also subsidize ranching on public lands in the form of suuuuper cheap grazing rights. Think hundreds of millions of dollars every year. Then we have more wildfires, more animal extinctions, etc so ranchers can let their cows loose.
We decimate local animals/predators because they are inconvenient for cows(think wolves and bears) which decimates the ecosystem. Look at Yellowstone and the mountain of evidence which shows predators are crucial for a functioning American ecosystem.
Then we have the issue of water rights which is "use it or lose it" so we have farmers growing grass in the arid US West. Where does a lot of that grass go? Overseas and into cows.
Then there's the methane problem.
Then there's the ethics problem.
Then there's the unhealthy diet problem which costs taxpayers billions in preventable illness.
Also, urban populations and rural populations have a symbiotic relationship. Someone has to process and transport all of that harvested crop/livestock. Is Fresno the thriving metropolis (snert) it is today without the farming of the Central Valley? Are the ports of Oakland and LA nearly as busy if they aren't shipping out all of that agricultural product?
I believe the royal society for the protection of birds studied whether cats are a threat to bird populations and concluded that they really aren't. Obviously cats do kill birds, but overwhelmingly the major threat to birds is habitat loss caused by humans. Also, cats kill rodents, which indirectly helps birds because rodents are a big threat to bird populations, because rats take eggs from their nests. In fact, cats preferentially kill rodents. Something like 90% of their diet will typically be rodents. Birds, for them, are only opportunity kills. In other words, cats are an easy scapegoat because they quite visibly do kill birds, but humans (as is usually the case) are the true underlying problem.
It really depends on the region. Island populations are disproportionately at higher risk to eradication by cat due to the difficulty or impossibility in replenishing the population from outside/neighboring populations.
Biblical scholar Bart Ehrman argues that there are many versions of Christianity, and there always have been since its inception. What you are representing as the "core teaching of Christianity" is the version that was primarily articulated by Paul, and that became the orthodox version due to its eventual adoption as the religion of the Roman Empire. But even at the time of Paul there were rival interpretations. There were the Gnostics, the group led by James in Jerusalem, and even those who insisted one had to adopt Judaism to follow Jesus. And significantly, Jesus himself probably wouldn't have recognized the interpretation of Paul.
And looking beyond early Christianity, one can pick any period of Christianity's history and find numerous rival doctrines.
I think he is wrong that predictions 100 years out are almost always going to be wrong, because city and government planners routinely do this kind of stuff. They predict future growth rates and plan accordingly. They invest in reservoirs, wider roads, bigger power plants and transmission lines, etc. Sometimes those predictions are wrong and they build for growth that never happens, or vice versa. But much of the time they get it right and that contributes hugely to our present-day quality of life.
Yes exactly. He, and many others, get the causality wrong. The extrapolation is not wrong because extrapolation is always bad but partly because the knowledge spurs people to do something. Moore’s law is a good reverse example of this. It’s not magic, humans invest massively in making it happen.
In his book "The Deep Hot Biosphere" Thomas Gold argued that life probably originated deep underground. Gold is a pretty controversial figure, but this hypothesis makes sense for a number of reasons: the underground environment is a lot more stable than the surface, and the chemistry to extract energy from the chemicals in that environment is a lot simpler than the chemistry to extract energy from sunlight. So it makes sense that underground chemosynthesis would emerge before photosynthesis.
Gold seemed an interesting character - I was just reading his Wikipedia.
The WaPo article on him is good
>As an astronomer and geophysicist, he says, "it always seemed absurd to me to see petroleum hydrocarbons on other planets, where there was obviously never any vegetation, even as we insist that on Earth they must be biological in origin." https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/features/daily/h...
I was agreeing with you up until trash pick-up, which I think is a bad example, because there are obvious reasons why it makes sense to have the city contract with one company for that service, rather than having multiple companies with multiple dump sites and different fleets of trucks roaming the city. And if you give people the option to not pay for trash pick-up, that's just opening the door to having people pile up trash around their houses and yards. You know it would happen. So yeah, I don't think trash pick-up is an example of regulatory capture like your other examples.
I really don't understand why you would think that, although I have access to more information, so what seems obvious to me may not be obvious to others.
Only a few of the largest cities in the county have trash-collection service, (with the largest having a cheap city-owned trash-collection service) so in the smaller cities and most unincorporated areas there is no service. Service is only mandatory where it is available, so in much of the county service isn't mandatory. The dump is run by the county, with multiple transfer stations to cover areas far from the dump, and anyone can take their own trash there and pay by volume. The trash collection services take trash to the same locations.
The county has regulations against unsightly and dangerous property conditions that if violated can lead to fees, and unpaid fees will lead to liens. They cover general refuse, but most of them are focused on problems that trash service doesn't affect, like fire-prone vegetation, abandoned vehicles and buildings, and large tanks and containers, as these are more of a problem than general refuse. Where I live It's also legal to burn trash, when there isn't a fire risk or excess heat, although some cities in the county do prohibit it.
Also, hoarders tend to hoard, and the convenience of trash pickup service, vs the time for a dump run, isn't likely to make a difference in someone's cleanliness.
