I can’t imagine Mars soil having any usable nutrients since there are no microbes or any other biological activity. You probably have to bring or produce all fertilization from scratch.
Maybe we should eliminate nationwide regulations on theft and violence too? Let the locals deal with these things since they are local issues. That way municipalities with funding problems could save some money.
Are you ready to double the pay of police? If you wanted to go through a lot of training and be held to high standards, you'd probably look for a more lucrative gig than being a cop
Not only am I willing to double it (or more), I'm willing to drastically reduce their duties. We ask far too much of police officers in the US, we need to respect their wellbeing and start addressing root causes of issues.
Yes, absolutely! Raise police pay, along spending money on police training. Then hold those officers to high standards. This is absolutely the way forward.
This certainly entails raising taxes, which makes better policing difficult to implement when one of the two major political parties is religiously opposed to taxation.
Cops are often the highest paid employees on municipal and state governments' payrolls. For example, in NJ, the median pay for a cop is $105k[1] before factoring in overtime, benefits or bonuses.
It's a lucrative gig. In NYC, the NYPD runs commercials advertising full benefits, competitive compensation and only having to work for 20 years before being able to retire with a pension.
If that’s what’s needed to attract reasonable people into the police then so be it. If we aren’t willing to pay for proper training and supervision then we have the police force we deserve.
Being a police officer is a very high paying job for someone without an education. With overtime, the average pay in many departments is over $100k. For people without an education, who get a massive amount of job perks. The problem is that the job has too much power, which attracts violent, power hungry individuals. Take away their power, and you'll have a police force that desires to make their community a better place.
I agree with this! I have a hard time wanting to pay the police force more, because it not only attracts those who are overachievers, it attracts people who see it as the easiest way to make the most money. Why get an engineering degree or a business degree when I can just be a cop, carry a cool gun, and not have to pay speeding tickets? I think accountability is the single most needed thing; qualified immunity corrupts those qualified by it's protection.
I work in medical devices. I don’t have to take liability insurance to do my job. I get training on FDA regulations and if I don’t follow them I get warned or fired. We also have internal and external audits with Independent auditors that have the power to demand changes or shut us down. The whole company culture is about doing things the right way and this is coming from the top. As far as I can tell all this is missing in US police or if there are auditors they are toothless or corrupt.
That’s already the case. QI doesn’t prevent anyone from suing the department or city. It only prevents them suing the cop. A system in which all cops are indemnified is simply QI with more paperwork.
This would make sense to me. Why are some businesses being shut down and have to deal with income losses and others like landlords can keep going and demand their income? This seems fundamentally unfair to me.
Ah, but comrade, paying rent itself is inherently unfair. It allows for profit off merely having bought something sooner than another had a chance to. If the rent stops now, why should the rent start back up?
My goodness, people here must really not have any experience either renting or owning. As a new homeowner, it is obvious what I used to be paying for -- someone to fix my living space any time something broke without charge and someone to maintain my building and my outdoor areas. It turns out that these things are actual work...
Not to mention the financial risks, liability, having to handle problatic tenants, etc. Ironically, a lot of landlords are those trying to live the American dream. They're people that are working their ass off trying to be upwardly mobile. And while I understand that even they often have privlages not afforded to the lowest income brackets, they also aren't the 1% or aristocrats of the French revolution. The virtiole against billionaires has filtered down to them pretty unfairly. ...and tte real issues we have over what parameters of the power law distribution of wealth should be tolerated have a much lower impact on the income bracket of lanlords than they do on the top 0.01%
One to look at rent is that it's like the old joke about prostitution: you don't pay for the sex, you pay for them to leave afterwards.
Rent gives you greater location flexibility and less commitment to a specific place and building. You don't have to maintain it yourself, and you are freed from the mental load of having to do long-term planning around it at all. Not that it's necessarily good for the surrounding community, but to some degree, renting gives you the luxury of "driving it like you stole it" and that's a real value for some people.
I own my house. When plumbers dumped water in the basement and destroyed a floor, that was my problem. Renters pay for that kind of stuff to be someone else's problem.
I can see the argument about flexibility, but it doesn't really seem to mesh up with the skyrocketing demand for rental properties in urban areas.
On the other hand, I'm not sure why the service of removing risk from home ownership is good (or why it couldn't be separated into ownership and property management.) In the paradigm you're proposing, the renter wants to be insulated from the risk of property damage or adverse effects on the home they purchased. And the price they're willing to pay for this is... 100% of the equity of the place they live in?
This isn't all that different then how a person chooses to work for a company rather than run a company themselves.
People often dread working for others, but still do it because the risk and difficulties of running a business themselves aren't worth the ability to easily change jobs/roles/location that working for someone else allows.
If you own a house or business, if something goes wrong, you have to fix it, or sell the asset so it's not your problem anymore. If you rent/work for someone else you simply move/work somewhere else.
Anyone who wants to buy a rental house is free to do so. Just make an unsolicited purchase offer to the landlord for more than the net present value of all expected future rental income. Most landlords are willing to sell their properties, even when they're not currently listed on the market.
People who would rather buy houses than rent should feel free to do so. No landlord is forcing someone to rent their property.
It is often the case that renting is quite a bit cheaper and always the case that it's more flexible to do so, which is why a lot of people choose to rent instead of buying. Society benefits when people who wish to rent housing have housing available for lease.
It's certainly more feasible to rent if you don't have the money to buy a house, which is why every single renter i know is doing do. I'm just not sure why this is necessary or a valuable economic innovation that justifies the rent paid.
Rentals are a useful innovation because the transaction is beneficial for both parties.
The leasor turns their large investment into a stream of payments, and the leasee turns their stream of payments into use of a large investment without having to make such an investment and without needing to have the capability to make that investment.
Avoiding making a large investment in property makes it easier for the leasee to move if needed, since there aren't significant costs to unwind a lease like there are to unwinding property ownership.
You're not sure why it's a valuable economic innovation that people who don't have the money to buy a house can rent one? What alternative are you suggesting, that they should get a house for free?
But the price of buying a home would be a lot lower if there was no rent (or other ways to own a home you don't live in). There are more homes than there are people.
Just about every 4-plex and apartment building in the world wouldn't exist if there was no rent to pay for their construction.
(On a much more minor note, there are not more housing units (about 140M) than people (about 335M) in the US and probably not in the world; though that's literally what you claimed, it's probably not what you really meant to claim. Taking the most charitable re-interpretation of your claim: there are slightly more housing units than households (about 140M vs about 130M) in the US. See above about the prediction that many of these housing units likely not existing [or continuing to be offered/maintained] if rent were outlawed.)
The fact that the people who would rather buy them lack the available resources to do so on their own, putting aside any economies of scale benefits from either developers or their demand.
Preferring a better option doesn't mean much unfortunately. To go with a variant on a crass old joke "I would rather be paid billions to sleep with an endless line of beautiful women than work retail but they aren't hiring for that position unfortunately."
The opportunity cost of the downpayment (and also the fact that lots of people wouldn't have the money for a down payment anyway). Generally the returns from property investing are relatively low compared to other investments.
Things like property taxes and maintenance are fixed costs for property owners. Those can eat up 50% or more of the rental income. So if renters aren't paying, even property owners who don't have a mortgage have high fixed costs that they have to pay.
Because virii and reality don't give a damn about human sense or fairness fairness compared to what can and does work. "Making things fair" and forcing non-hazardous businesses to close as well even if they can teleoperate would be counterproductive.
The rents are given locked in periods which change vs the potential real swing in value. It is a "futures contract" sort of situation. If sales at a location increase tenfold over others of comparable nichw and expenses rent raising relative value compared to comparably priced competitors then the landlord cannot instantly raise rent for the contract period. They effectively got stuck renting "undervalued". This situation is a reverse of sorts - the income is down but the price is locked in so the retailers are paying for overvalued rent.
This leads to a bit of rent hardball as the retailers can "call their bluff" as they know if they were evicted they could not be replaced with anyone willing to pay the old value and try to force concessions.
I wonder how many people asked that during the World Wars? Why do they have to suffer because some rich assholes decided they need every industry to support the war.
“Your "dream" job at a FAANG might be more unpleasant and boring than you've been expecting.”
The money can compensate for a lot of unpleasantness. I think finding a “dream job” is an illusion for most people. The question is usually “bearable” or “unbearable”.
From what I can see the real problem is that most people don’t care about facts anymore. They just want to hear what they think anyway and the political parties are too happy to feed that.
When you talk to left wingers and right wingers about the economy of the last ten years the left guys will tell you it was paradise until 2016 and then everything went to hell. The right wingers will tell you it was misery until 2016 and then the boom started. When you look at stock indices, unemployment or other charts you will see a steady rise over ten years. You won’t even see that the president has changed. But pointing that out is futile. Most people don’t want facts.
When I look at this chart I see ups and downs but overall a pretty steady upward trend. I don’t see eights years of Obama misery and then triumph under Trump. That was my point.
Your point was that people don't care about facts, which you are proving in ironic fashion. Even when presented with evidence and facts, you fail to acknowledge it.
The samples themselves are plunge frozen into vitreous ice using liquid ethane, so they won't move much on their own. The electron beam, as well as the stage they sit on inside the microscope do cause movement of the grid/sample, however, and so on modern microscopes, what we actually record are movies so that we can correct for things like beam induced motion with software.
Exposure is a separate variable because it also causes sample degradation. Ideally, a microscope is only shooting one electron at a time at the sample (that never happens obviously), but the fewer electrons, the better. On overexposed micrographs, you can see the burn marks on the sample.
