Floofshy overflow

Corporations care about near-term profit. What counts as near-term profit is determined by accounting rules. e.g. technically, investing in a 100-year bond is a very long term investment (since you only get your money back in 100-years) but accounting rules don't count it as a expense to a 100-year bond, so companies don't under invest in them. In contrast, investing in say consumer goodwill will show as an expense. So a CEO looking to boost profits this quarter might sell a bad product (ruining consumer good will in exchange for some fast cash) even if that hurts the company in the long run. Thus, by reforming accounting rules, we can control corporate behaviour. For example, if "how much the public approves of your company" counted as an intangible asset, companies would be less willing to ruin their reputation in exchange for a dollar (because it would appear as a loss to investors) There are limits. Because investors ultimately want actual cash as dividends or stock buybacks, even if we say "a dollar given to the poor is worth two dollars in heaven", investors will still punish companies with such heavenly profits.

There’s already precedent for damages to good name, reputation, etc., and both investors/employees have interest in a company’s perceived quality.

(i'm op) Yes, but those don't appear on the balance sheet. They don't appear on quarterly earning reports. They don't directly determine CEOs bonuses like profits do.

Balance sheets do include something called "goodwill" but it only appears when acquiring a company (the difference between what you paid and what the company's books record the company as worth). So that is unrelated.

the uncommon allergy haver to anticapitalist pipeline

in January 2023, companies became required to label sesame on all products it was present in, and undergo rigorous cleaning procedures to prevent sesame contamination, after it was declared the 9th "major" food allergen in the United States.

so, instead of considering this a mandate to give a single shit about people with sesame allergies, almost all American companies decided to just add sesame flour to all their relevant products. because apparently that was cheaper.

it's almost impossible for me to find hot dog and hamburger buns without sesame now. and I am one of the lucky ones. I'm someone who just so happened to notice the label updates, not get caught unawares and have a severe allergic reaction. I'm someone lucky enough to be surrounded by multiple choices of supermarkets, and someone with the incredible privilege to have parents who'll help me search the shelves, and cover those costs that my allergies rack up. not everyone with allergies/other intolerances has all or any of those privileges to begin with.

most food allergies will never be prevalent enough that under capitalism, it will be profitable to give them the level of accommodation that they deserve. I speak from experience with a wide portfolio of hypersensitivity quirks when I say that the rarer the food allergy, the worse it gets.

and here's the thing: I can live without hamburger buns, with only superficial decreases in my quality of life. but sesame isn't my only rare allergy, and ever since this legislation hit, I've been lying awake at night, afraid of what I might lose access to next.

I've been lying awake at night wondering what I'll have to do to live, to obtain enough safe food to survive, if any of my other allergies get this same treatment. and I reiterate. I am one of the privlidged ones.

what these companies have done is completely legal. what these companies did has also cut off up to over a million people from what were previously safe, affordable staples of their diets. a system that has any incentive not to accommodate the dietary needs of any population is not a system that can be allowed to exist. this is the uncommon allergy haver to angry, fuming anticapitalist pipeline.

Considering the government made a poorly considered regulation that hurt the people it was supposed to help, it is interesting that this wasn't an uncommon allergy haver to angry, fuming anti-regulationist pipeline.

since the ionosphere and the ground are conductive but the air in between isn’t, could we use the earth as a giant capacitor to store power?

Telsa (the man not the company) planned to do with to enable wireless transfer of power.

proposal: deregulation agency. They have the broad mandate to propose removing any regulation or adding exceptions to it. The relevant agency head can veto this removal. The purpose is that the deregulation agency gets the ball rolling. Potentially finding regulations that no one likes (but no one dislikes enough to get rid of). Regulators have a tendency to over-regulate (since their job is to make regulations). Employing some de-regulators would hopefully balance this out.

I’d actually like to see an agency whose job is to regulate proposed regulations as if they’re proposals for new medications, and employs the cautionary principle on the side of blocking new regulations. Maybe require them to all pass multiple stages of randomized controlled trial to be proven both safe and effective.

I feel like a lot of our regulation problems lately have swung in the other direction - less "pointless red tape" and more "oh so that's what 'written in blood' means, you need to let train drivers sleep so they don't cause horrific accidents". I dunno, I don't think we direly need more deregulation right now or that it makes sense to talk about "regulators over-regulating because it's their job" as though it makes any sense

The trouble is that regulations are not fungible. You can easily have bad regulations at the same time as weak regulations. Regulations are hyper-specific and so go out date quickly. Example of regulations of dubious quality: lots of what the TSA does, like the no fly list or the liquid ban. requiring kids bikes to have coaster breaks. The SEC outlawing prediction markets Outlawing of no-lose lottery bank accounts The war on drugs The trouble with "written in blood" is after disasters the logic is often "something must be done, and this is something" with minimal attention payed to the cost/benefit ratio.

v unfortunate how 'ageing' means both 'the amount of time since you were born increasing' and 'your body gradually getting worse at everything until you die'. only one of those is a problem, the other's fine. good, even.

sometimes people get upset about one cause it means the other, but i think it's important to keep the distinction in mind. or at least it helps me.

for example, I was feeling upset 'the amount of time since you were born increasing' before I realized I could just lie to myself about that, and unlike most denial deployments, it increased my comfort with reminders that 'the amount of time since I was born' increasing.

my internet is fast enough that youtube often defaults to 1080p and I will usually switch it down to 720p or 480p manually because it feels opulent. I don't need that much bandwidth man save it for the next guy

I switch to 360p or even 240p sometimes for similar reasons. But also I just like the blur.

I have an ungoogleable question I need your help solving. Every day I look at the wikipedia top read articles list (don’t know why) and it is uniformly to do with celebrity deaths, reddit top posts, big movies, anniversaries of tragedies, people looking up the crimes a new netflix documentary is about. pop culture in general. except almost every day for years now, Cleopatra is in the top 20 most read wikipedia articles and I can’t figure out why. tell me your theories please.

likely netflix being sued in Egypt for their depiction of Cleopatra being too black in their new show: https://www.cinemablend.com/streaming-news/netflix-is-getting-sued-for-portraying-cleopatra-as-black-now-the-films-director-speaks-out