I may be missing something, but if there is no competitive pressure/monopolistic market, why would these businesses need the excuse of inflation/cost increases to increase their prices? Wouldn't we expect prices to have gone up before inflation?
Or is this a specific criticism of a regulatory blind spot for reigning in market power? Monopolies can get away with price increases now, but they wouldn't normally?
Do other QM interpretations predict that quantum computers wouldn't be able to benefit from superposing N qubits over 2^N (possible) output states? As far as I understand, it's not just Copenhagen that allows for this.
Would an interpretation need to reject Bell's theorem to get there? Or could it not include superposition but still keep all of Bell's theorem?
I assume fabrication refers to semiconductor fabs, not factories assembling computers together. None of the world's most advanced semiconductor fabs are in China, and whether they can catch up to TSMC/Samsung remains to be seen.
On my Thinkpad x13 there was an option to use "Linux sleep" or something like that in the uefi (bios?) Settings. I think this just gives it the normal sleep behavior, and definitely reduced how often my laptop would come out of my backpack hot and on low battery (running Linux)
As a poor college student, I was surprised hearing the stores I went to described as fast fashion. For me, thrift stores or hand me downs were the sensible choice for clothes, and h&m or forever21 were splurges for $30 pants or whatever. Obviously the price points and quality that these fast fashion brands output don't lend themselves to being deliberate, long term "investments", but spending twice as much on pants that I was already hesitant to buy was unthinkable.
I also think buying some chinos or button down shirts at these places made it a lot cheaper to get business casual work clothes as I transitioned from fast food/retail to actual internships etc. I think it's really good for young people or people turning their life around to have very low barriers to entry when it comes to "looking respectable" or fitting in with the workplace as they grow, and fast fashion helped do that for me (and some of this could be addressed by loosening dress codes if you're hiring college students/young people/whatever).
Housing isn't finite, if Americans are willing to spend money to increase the value of Mexican housing, Mexican builders/government can build more housing to take advantage of the increased demand. I don't see much reason why any country would need to ban foreign investment, especially when supply is artificially constrained by unjustifiable regulation (true of western US and Canada, no idea if true of Mexico)
I know anta sports (Chinese) owns Arc'teryx and Salomon (and other brands as well), which are both big deals in very niche parts of outdoors companies (mountaineering/climbing and trail running/skiing respectively) but I don't think there's any single Chinese company that owns all the outdoor brands, unless anta is owned by some other company. Luxottica, the eyeglass company gp referred to is also Italian, not French (afaik), and their stranglehold was weakening with online retailers breaking in (last I checked was ~5 years ago, this might have regressed since).
I think that's a fair description of the achievements made so far, but there are some quantum simulations that would be worthwhile or even groundbreaking to simulate (and it's possible that quantum computing is the only way to handle large quantum simulations). My guess is that we're a ways off from them, and even further off from any impressive integer factorizing/cryptography breaking quantum computers (but those predictions are basically worthless).
I'm definitely not an expert in the field, but I read lecture notes by Scott Aarsonson that referenced research by Microsoft that looked into nitrogen fixation specifically as a (potentially) achievable simulation with a (potentially) massive impact.
This website is incredibly helpful for quick simulation. My favorite design detail is that the circuits are stored in the url, allowing easy bookmarking or sharing of some specific circuit.
Interestingly, some modern photography lenses have achieved aperture mechanisms with much rounder geometry, sometimes with near perfect circles at multiple apertures. This can result in a more desirable bokeh, at the cost of well defined sun stars.
right but corporate lobbying isn't the only way in which America is unique. Concerns about concealed research results could be very true, but that's an entirely different question than corporate lobbying. My position isn't that companies don't do anything wrong or aren't trying to influence policy, I'm just skeptical how successful political donations are at subverting democracy.
Well, the American public is an outlier when compared to many other democracies in other ways as well, in general I'd guess they'd view environmental/health regulations less favorably than most other developed nations. "Just don't lick the walls lol" is something I've heard regarding lead paint here in America, which sounds insane to me, but it's the insanity of democracy, not anything else.
When I look at these health care charts, I don't see a real consensus, even when oversimplifying health care to 4 broad categories (36 20 30 6 percent respectively). I don't know who the respective corporate interests would be for each of the categories, though I'd guess that there's big corporations that favor 2 or 3 of these potential solutions, and only a third (at most) of Americans that support one of them. A third of the populace doesn't make a popular mandate, and it certainly isn't enough for a senate majority (especially for democrats).
The climate change one might be more convincing, but I actually think we've seen some real progress on this. Alternative energy is getting cheaper, there's tax incentives for installing solar panels or EV chargers in many areas, and tax incentives for buying EVs. There's certainly more we can do, and the polls were phrased to suggest that the general public thinks so too. But if the admittedly significant oil and gas lobby is trying to hold this issue back, I'm not sure how successful they've been. Finally, this isn't an actual bill or anything. Every "green" bill I've seen is opposed by conservatives based on their constituency, whether they're a red conservative from texas, or a blue conservative from west virginia. I don't know if Joe Manchin takes donations from coal companies, but he'd unquestionably support coal either way.
I may have heard of this once on a reddit philosophy post or something, I think this really isn't an example of a popular idea that's squashed by corporate interests. That's not to say it's not a good one (I have no idea), but I don't know if we'd pass this (or if there's even any corporate opposition).
Yeah, I brought up this idea in my parent comment, but the part I'm unsure of is whether or not there's broad public support for making taxes simpler. The devil is in the details here. If making taxes simpler included removing the mortgage interest deduction or maybe the child tax credit, I could imagine the proposal being extremely unpopular. I think some republicans have included simpler taxes on their list of campaign promises, but there hasn't been a swelling consensus around the issue. Finally, complicated tax deductions are a way for the govt to incentivize certain behavior or have some fine tuned controls over revenue, so there's a reasonable justification to keep some complications. tldr I agree that turbotax (and probably others) have lobbied to keep taxes complicated, but unless there's evidence that the broad public really cares about this, I'm unsure that those donations really did anything. It's easy to vote in your donors' interests when the vote doesn't matter (or if you were already voting that way!)
I'd probably support an asbestos ban for most construction (though I'm not a chemical or civil engineer, so I could have some blind spots here), and this probably comes across as pedantic, but I didn't see anything that indicated that there's broad public support for banning asbestos. Again, that's not saying that we shouldn't do it, just that I'm not sure it's a great example of the "will of the people" being overruled by a corporate interest.
I think your comment means that the "will of the people" isn't why democracy is broken, but it's the extra-democratic processes involved in making legislation that is the problem. Do you have an example of some policy that is generally popular, but not passed because of corporate lobbying?
I think solutions to immigration/health care/climate change are generally contentious and don't have a popular consensus. Something smaller like a "simpler" tax code seems more convincing, where a small industry of tax preparation software or something lobbies to keep income taxes complicated. At the same time, many deductions are quite popular, and these are necessarily complications to the tax code. I'm just not entirely convinced that lobbying is hurting us in any meaningful way, though a stronger example or argumentation might change my mind.
The point about cost ("My money reserves are finite...") seems to be addressed by Carla's superior productivity. To pay someone in your own country would definitionally cost more than paying someone in a more productive country (assuming identical output, ignoring shipping cost, etc). I think your analogy of 1 nation == 1 person is obscuring complexity as well. A country with a market economy couldn't simply _do_ something, they'd have to pay for it (with incentives, taxation, debt, etc.), even if they aren't trading with another country. In terms of your analogy, if you want to do your own "farming, mining, and homebuilding", then you'd have to pay "yourself" more than you'd pay Carla, or accept inferior output.
These points make me consider that what you mean by "money reserves" refers not to actual currency, but to something like trade deficit. If this is the case, can/should nations make decisions about their economies and trade policies based on projections of trade deficits?
I don't work in radar/military stealth, but my argument isn't that you're wrong about any of your technical claims. Rather, my argument is that the F-35 was designed and purchased by people who are at least as aware of those technical details as you are. This is an assumption, but I don't think it's a huge one. As a nitpick, the F-35 may still be operational in 50 years, just as the B-52 is operational today. The question is whether its stealth will still be useful, not whether it can get airborne. Nobody is using the B-52 for its stealth anymore (happy to be proven wrong), and the decision to lean on the F-35's stealth capabilities for 50 years won't simply be "The B-52 has been running for 69 years, nice!"
Sorry, my previous comment was probably overly dismissive. I'd argue that developers and users of the F-35 already understand that stealth gains are not permanent. Countries and military organizations that purchased the F-35 definitely hope that the stealth advances last longer than 2025, but they will pay for improvements, new planes, and new tech long before 2070. It seems comically naïve for them to take claims of "2070" at face value without verifying, but that's just conjecture on my part.
Or is this a specific criticism of a regulatory blind spot for reigning in market power? Monopolies can get away with price increases now, but they wouldn't normally?