The Six-Figure Price Tag for Selling a $2 Hot Dog

manicgothicoctopi-deactivated20

The Six-Figure Price Tag for Selling a $2 Hot Dog

Vendors who want to sell drinks and snacks in city parks bid hundreds of thousands in annual fees for the privilege — particularly in Central Park.

Sam Roberts

triggeredmedia

He pays the city’s parks department $289,500 a year just for the right to operate his single cart there.

Without gov’t regulation who is going to charge someone over quarter million dollars to sell hot dogs?

throw-away-opinions

When people talk about government hurting small businesses, this is exactly what they mean.

manicgothicoctopi

Small businesses are only hurt by their cruel owners/bosses the government has never and can never do anything wrong.

mitigatedchaos

How much space in the parks and streets in the cities should be devoted to hot dog stands?

This is not a trick or rhetorical question. It says right there in the summary that they bid money to be allowed in Central Park. You have to limit the number of vendors or it won’t be a park anymore, but a market. Tragedy of the Commons and all that.

Source: triggeredmedia the invisible fist

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argumate

“Movies will be free after the revolution!”

Movies take the work of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of people. How will we decide where to allocate our resources for the best results?

shlevy

Centralized committee!

argumate

Yes! The State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television smiles upon you!

mitigatedchaos

shtpost visual shtpost the mitigated exhibition what even is this blog the invisible fist the iron hand the red hammer

bambamramfan

collapsedsquid

I was doing semi deep dive into Orion’s Arm after @immanentizingeschatons reminded me of it, and it got me thinking about post-scarcity and politics.

Specifically, I was comparing it to some of the other post-scarcity settings I’ve seen, like Eclipse Phase, Mindjammer, and Nova Praxis. One thing that all of these have in common is that the politics presented in the game seems off.

Nova Praxis and Mindjammer to my mind don’t really have political conflict. They try to describe some of the political units, but they seem to be stereotypes masquerading as politics or and otherwise just poorly described. Eclipse Phase and Orion’s Arm do have political units, but they’re fairly obviously based on the political viewpoints favored in the demographic and seem kind of goofy and impossible because of that.

And it strikes me that to some level this is an impossible problem. If you think there won’t be real politics in the post-scarcity future, I’m going to very much doubt that. But if you think that you can predict the nature of political conflict in the post-scarcity future, I’m also going to very much doubt that. So, either way, you’re stuck with writing a political scene that’s weird.

mitigatedchaos

But really, can there truly be post-scarcity? Maybe with magic violating conservation of matter-energy, but without it, someone is going to want to use the mass of your asteroid to build their habitat to replicate their ideology.

collapsedsquid

I consider “post-scarcity” as describing when technology has advanced to the point where the common material desires like food, housing, and entertainment of any person are trivially easy to fill.

isaacsapphire

Then aren’t we there already in some countries?

bambamramfan

Indeed. “Post scarcity” more refers to “when people believe there is not a scarcity of stuff.” And as the discourse over the $500,000 New York family shows, it is unrealistic that that would ever happen no matter how many resources our society generates.

mitigatedchaos

The year is 3122. Transhumanity has colonized the entire solar system. The total GDP of mankind and its descendant species long ago exceeded its 2340 high of 14 quadrillion US2016 dollars. A new discourse arises.

PRIVATIZE THE SUN

Source: collapsedsquid shtpost the invisible fist

ranma-official

afloweroutofstone

I saw a post earlier by someone claiming that Fyre Fest was actually an example of central planning gone wrong, which is like level 45 deflection and market fetishism

averyterrible

the problems with the economy are due to the fact that businesses are not run internally as marketplaces,

mitigatedchaos

the problems with the economy are due to the fact that businesses are not run internally as marketplaces,

I’ve thought about this unironically, but methods to actually implement it are difficult.

Fyre Fest was probably just a scam though.

Source: afloweroutofstone the invisible fist

argumate

what I’m trying to do is end the dominance of capital over all our lives, end the endless wars for profit, the system of white supremacy and settler colonialism that has resulted in generations of suffering, and end the actual destruction of our ecosystems. and since the only alternative to capitalism is communism,

I see this conflation all the time and I’m compelled to be bugged by it every time.

There just haven’t been that many wars for profit lately relative to historical standards, the ideology of white supremacy has little to do with adoption of capitalism across non-white nations, settler colonialism is orthogonal to all of these issues, and destruction of ecosystems is a side effect of industrialisation and ballooning population growth that needs to be addressed in similar ways regardless of economic system.

politics the invisible fist the red hammer

sinesalvatorem

endecision

People who dislike cars and want more public transit:

I sometimes prefer public transit to driving because I hate parking and navigation, and I can multitask on public transit. But I also prefer driving to public transit because public transit is loud, smelly, dirty, crowded, expensive, and slow, with no air conditioning or heating, uncomfortable seats or only standing room, delays and breakdowns, long wait times in general, no availability late at night, tunnels that plug my ears painfully, and other passengers being loud/rude/annoying, blaring music, scamming, panhandling, stealing things, fighting, spitting, urinating, harassing people (transphobia cw), and sometimes being actually threatening or dangerous.

What solutions have people come up with to these problems? (My experiences are mostly with BART, AC Transit, and Caltrain.)

sinesalvatorem

Same question for my own followers.

My experiences of transit have been buses in [Redacted]; the underground in London, New Castle (UK), Frankfurt (Germany), and Washington DC; the Northern Rail (UK); Berlin’s buses; the BART and the Caltrain; and buses in Toronto, the Bay Area (USA), and North Bay (Ontario, Canada).

Those are listed from best to worst by my personal experiences of them. They’re mostly Subway > Overground train > Buses, except for [Redacted]’s weird capitalist buses. I’ve also preferred [Redacted] over Europe, and Europe over North America.

What makes some public transit systems better than others? And how would you make something like the BART more like that? And are they really a substitute for being able to insulate yourself and your family in a personal vehicle?

mitigatedchaos

You’re not gonna like this, but…

A number of the problems stem from the culture of the population at large, its level of disorder, and its level of criminality. If you want Japan-tier respectful train passengers, you are going to have to take Japan-tier measures towards, essentially, the entire rest of society, and this will not be very Libertarian.

Which is fine by me since I’m not an atomic individualist and am fairly Statist and even Nationalist, but that isn’t where you are in the political spectrum.

Source: endecision public transit the invisible fist

ＰＲＩＶＡＴＩＺＥＴＨＥＳＵＮ

shtpost the invisible fist

theunitofcaring

Anonymous asked:

Again, people googling randos they've never heard of before is not evidence that they become Nazis themselves. You know what stops Nazis? Ten million communists with weapons. You know what would have helped? Liberals. Fucking. Helping. I know you like fascists way too much to defend the oppressed, but AT LEAST DO NOT INTERFERE.

theunitofcaring answered:

If your plan only works if no one ‘interferes’ by arguing on the internet that your efforts are observably counterproductive and unhelpful, then your plan is a colossal failure.

But, seriously, the ‘should you no-platform speakers at colleges’ debate isn’t the ‘punch Nazis’ debate and I think it’s really unhelpful to conflate them. Someone might believe that it’s right to pull fire alarms, scream at the top of your lungs, block cars, etc. in order to make sure that, say, trans-exclusionary feminists can’t give a talk at their college, while also believing that bludgeoning purported Nazis is a terrible idea. “Does suppressing speeches on college campuses and in other public arenas by having violent demonstrations against them work?” is the question I am discussing in that post, and as you correctly observe, “no, that fails to suppress the speech” is not an answer to a wide variety of unrelated questions.

When I write posts about whether punching Nazis is a good idea then you are welcome to spam me with hysterical anons claiming that I love Nazis, am personally a liberal fascist, am responsible for the rise of the Third Reich, etcetera etcetera, but when that’s also your response to ‘no-platforming fails because of the Streisand effect’ then someone might conclude that’s just your default response to literally any dissent, you know?

As always I am proudly and openly committing to interfering with street violence against unarmed people, organized brutality of every kind, and the spread of dishonest, misguided, and nonsensical information about how a society can fight violent extremism. Yes, I will interfere. Yes, I do interfere. Yes, I will persuade everyone that I possibly can to interfere alongside me.

mitigatedchaos

In today’s news, aggrieved Communist Anon unaware of difference between no-platforming, street violence, and war, as well as Lend-Lease Act.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lend-Lease#US_deliveries_to_the_Soviet_Union

politics the red hammer the invisible fist

argumate

Now I’m wondering what if students could spend student loans on other things, like starting businesses.

voxette-vk

So you’ve come around to the radical libertarians calling for voluntary slavery?

argumate

Just highly suspicious of the American student loan system! Like most American institutions it seems to neatly combine the worst aspects of socialism and capitalism. Why not just have regular loans (allow bankruptcy etc.) or just socialise the system entirely like a sensible country??

mitigatedchaos

The money must be laundered through the private sector to prove that it isn’t Socialism™.

Nevermind that either doing it in a more capitalist, more socialist, or just straight-up better national centrist way would be more effective.

American dysfunction politics the invisible fist

wirehead-wannabe

Is there any legit reason for my toothpaste to have triclosan (an antibiotic) in it? My understanding is that that usually harms rather than helps at reducing the population of “bad” mouth flora.

mitigatedchaos

I am not a doctor, and this does not constitute medical advice:

As far as I am aware of, no. I would recommend against any use of antibiotics outside of an illness as well.

Personally, I import Sensodyne from the UK, as it contains an ingredient (Novamin) which apparently occludes the dentin and reduces sensitivity (I’ve found it effective in practice). (The US version apparently merely desensitizes the nerves even though it’s sold under the same branding.)

Alcohol will also kill bacteria without the effects of antibiotics, but it’s said to dry out the mouth.

the glass tower the invisible fist i'm not a doctor jim i'm a time criminal

argumate

The “war is good for the economy” meme just won’t die, even among people who should know better.

mitigatedchaos

All we need to do is blow up Europe again, and also China and Japan and every other country with significant industrial capacity, and we’ll be good to go for another two or three decades.

argumate

I can actually see a possible argument here:

“War destroys an enormous amount of value in the form of lives wasted, resources burned, and infrastructure destroyed, but it can also break a political deadlock and allow reallocation of production within the economy that leads to increased efficiency after the war, as well as smoothing the way for redistribution programs to ex-soldiers that reduce inequality and boost demand.”

Like, maybe? But the fuckin’ annoying thing is that killing a few million people and sending millions of tons of shipping to the bottom of the Atlantic is a very indirect way of passing legislation and it would be nice to just do it directly.

mitigatedchaos

Actually I meant that America was one of the very few countries with significant industrial capacity that had not been hit by strategic bombing campaigns reducing major cities to rubble. As such, it had a major competitive advantage in the aftermath of the war.

Most of the rival countries destroyed were already economically developed beforehand, so the survivors were able to reconstruct their advanced economies, which represented monumental growth - but only relative to the conditions caused by the war.

politics the invisible fist

See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

The Six-Figure Price Tag for Selling a $2 Hot Dog

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