Price Gouging helps on both managing the demand, and resolving supply.
Demand
- Normal person - You don't particularly need gas. You don't own a generator, and you have nowhere else to go. If gas prices are $3, you will go stock up just in case that's the normal price and you know it'll be hard to get soon. If gas prices are $10 or more, you will just wait until prices come down. Maybe next time you store an extra gas can just in case.
- Small demand - You have a generator and burn through gas to keep niceties going. If gas is $3 and plentiful then you'll happily burn it to keep AC on. If gas is jacked up to $10, you will ration your use and only keep on the fridge and lights. If prices raise too high to $50, you won't buy gas. These prices naturally ration your use. If prices are too high, next time you might have bought a more efficient generator instead to save money.
- Critical Demand - You have a mission critical use for gas, and are running low. Maybe you're keeping people alive with hospital care, or keeping critical services up like servers/bloodbanks/etc, or saving lives with gas powered equipment inside the affected area. You will pay up to $50 for this gas, and at this price almost nobody else will buy it but you. Next time, you resolve to keep more gas stored locally.
Sometimes, an area won't be hit that bad hurricane and won't see too much increased demand. Other times, an area will be hit very very bad, and rarely places will need to allocate gas to only critical demand from the start.
How can you make sure gas sometimes gets to critical demand, and other times only gets rationed slightly or not at all? Freely set prices solves this automatically, while rationing needs a whole fucking algorithm to resolve (which might not even be something that people on the ground can check). Rationing also always disincentivizes at least one group on the ground to not prepare for next time (eg, if rationing is per person, then average people are disincentivized from keeping gas cans. If rationing is 100% critical, key institutions are disincentivized from storing because gas stations become their personal backup storage).
Supply
- $3/gal - This is the normal price. You have no bidding power to ameliorate the problem. You will only start to get gas once the roads are cleared. Even once cleared, trying to deliver to you sucks more than normal, so you will get LESS gas than usual, prolonging the crisis.
- $10/gal - This is a high price. You have slight bidding power. As soon as the roads clear, you're first in line because you can pay a premium to get priority on gas delivery or more deliveries to clear up the suppressed demand. You will get gas FASTER than normal, resolving the crisis faster. Next time, you spend the extra to make sure your station is topped up before the storm.
- $50/gal - This is a 'gouged' price because the crisis lasted longer than expected or you have even more critical need. At these gas prices, you can resolve issues NOW. Maybe you contract an offroad fuel truck to coming driving over even with fucked roads. Maybe you can pay to airlift fuel in. Maybe you hire people with ATVs or pontoons to ferry fuel canisters if things get bad enough. No matter what, at a high enough price, people will find a way to resolve things. Next time, maybe you'll take your profits and spend a lot of money on doubling your storage, so you can earn more money.
Sometimes, you can wait for gas supply to be resolved naturally, other times you need to exert a little more effort to fix things, and rarely you need to make extraordinary responses.
How do you know when you should spend extra money to do this? Solving it requires an entire government agency, and as we saw in Katrina that agency is shit. Gouging is messy and not everyone prices optimally, but they are highly motivated so they try what they can think of and the problem gets fixed eventually as the market finds what is most efficient.
Everybody watched and still watches the classic action fics.
I was talking to a girl I met in south america in her early 20s about her favorite action movie. She wasn't even born when T2 came out, and is in a whole other fucking continent.
T2, The Matrix, Die Hard, etc.. All the usual suspects a 50 year old in the USA would say, and she specified not the sequels. It's not just old folks biases or a fad to call the new stuff shit. The old movies are objectively good, the new movies are objectively bad.
It's the easiest thing in the world to test. Just choose any city in the US and have them not vaccinate half the kids for a few years. They'd get instant definitive results.
Which is kind of telling that they've never done this in any vaccine rollout. It's always national given to everyone, with no staggered rollout. That's because they know the answer, and they don't want other people to know.
The way website permissions work, power is always 100% hierarchical. The top mod can strike down all of the lower mods put together 100% of the time, even the lowest mod can strike down every user put together 100% of the time.
Governing systems flow from power. In real life we only got rid of tyranny, when the power of nobles then later average citizens became a credible threat to tyrants. If we want to fix the problem of mods turning into petty tyrants, then somebody needs to devise a system that can divest at least a little power into normal users.
If it's mass reporting by a bunch of hivemind idiots, you don't necessarily need to ban them. Actual humans are expensive for a service to get, so I wouldn't expect any company to discard value like that.
But they should absolutely flag those accounts and reduce the weight of their reports, so it's worth less and less to the algorithm for mass reporting. They might even manage it by category, so they ignore reports from these accounts for 'Hateful Conduct' but still listen to them when it comes to reporting spam, CP, or stolen content.
'Teamed up' undersells it. In many conquistador armies, they were outnumbered 10-1 by native allies.
The conquistadors had better direction, organization, and tactics, but the overwhelming bulk of the armies were natives. They were native uprisings, featuring conquistador support.
Also, the total cost of the space race from nothing to the final Apollo mission was only $25.8 billion ($170B inflation adjusted). Government horseshit has caused everything to balloon out in price.
That's less than we spend on illegal immigrants each year. We could be on mars right now, but instead we pay to have illegals rape and murder our kids.
Unironically.
The wizard population capped out a thousand years ago, judging how Hogwarts is less filled than when it was constructed. Meanwhile the muggle population exploded from a few million globally, to 8 billion today.
Yes, it's a big fucking problem when your population goes from being outnumbered, to being outnumbered a million times worse.
Yeah, I'm not a big Trump fan after his presidency. He did little more than a poor job at a holding action for 4 years.
But I'm a huge fan of our country not getting annihilated by dems, who will send us hurtling full speed into destruction.
How can critical role make a profit if it sells only 20k?
They make, what, $5 a comic at most? That seems like enough to hire one guy to do the comic if you've got zero spent on overhead or materials or any other services.
Yep. It took tons of pressure, bots, buying or infiltrating mod accounts.
And it managed to kill off the site to 1/10th of it's authentic comments as most people realized it was all fake and gay, defeating the whole purpose of infiltration.
All your examples are seem to have the same core of libertarianism that naively misses the good reasons why we do that.
- All crimes must have an injured party
Crimes can have victims that are potential, diluted, or too willing to be victims. Do you want to remove all bans on drunk driving or texting while driving, because that harms nobody (until someone is killed)? Nobody thinks they'll make the mistake. Is it okay to spew pollution into the air and water, such that any injured party can barely even be aware if they were injured? If the class of victim includes "everybody on the continent" how is that any different from And should jews be allowed to molest children as long as they convince them that it feels good so it's okay? If not, how is that different from drugs, where a victim is harmed but you think it shouldn't be a crime because it feels good and they are willing? (And before you say that kids can't consent, tbh, underage kids are probably more able to make intelligent decisions on sex than an addict is able to make on the topic of if they should do more meth.)
- You must have actually committed the crime
Failed attempts have to count, or people will be able to attempt doing illegal things until they succeed. Should trying and failing to assassinate someone not be a crime? As long as you don't hit a bystander, you get as many tries until you succeed, since shooting a gun and hitting nothing isn't a crime. What about trying to hire a hitman to kill your spouse? Anytime where a cop catches you, no crime happened so you have to go free. What about scams where 99.9% of your targets don't get scammed, so the only crime you can be charged for is when you succeed, even if you have to call 10,000,000 houses (which is totally legal, since no harm in calling).
- You must have mens rea.
If you allow ignorance to be a defense, then people will be incentivized to be ignorant. Is it okay for me to fumigate with lethal chemicals, if I just don't check who is in the building first or I use the wrong chemicals? I didn't know, so it wasn't a crime. What if I start a campfire and don't know how to smother it properly, causing a wildfire that destroys billions in land and kills thousands? It's okay because I'm so retarded, I guess. If I buy a dangerous dog that mauls a todler, is it okay because I saw worldstar videos that say this breed of dog is the best?
These tools in law are needed. It's bad that they've been perverted to bad ends, but the only solution is to replace the corrupt judeocracy with actual good stewards and enforcement of the law.
America is in second place to China's first place, and we've got about 60% of their capacity. We're also growing our industrial output at about 2x the rate of China, who has significantly slowed down.
Plus we make actual good shit. We produce quality products and high tech stuff, while China makes cheap shit and crappy electronics.
We're fine on a manufacturing front.
This goes against the zeitgiest here, but I think it's one of the few good things in this era. This isn't a map of control, it's a map of giving the fruits of your nation away to others, or the map of importing foreign shit into your country.
Most of the US's trade in 2000 is offshoring and sending our wealth to foreign counties for cheap shit. Giving all our stuff away is how we got into a bad state here. By 2020, we already started seeing a return to onshoring. The US is currently the country with the lowest percent of their GDP in exports, not counting countries like Ethiopia who simply cannot have trade. We now have more domestic production and make more things in America, and we give less to other countries. This is good, IMO.
The Chinese work hard, extract wealth from their country, then send it to other countries so they can get fake and gay numbers on a bank account balance. That's retarded. It can buy you soft power, but we're rapidly realizing that isn't real. Physical objects and resources and production facilities are valuable, but promises of fiat are not. As Russia in 2022 proved, all of your assets in clown world can evaporate overnight. And as 2020 proved, those trade links to other countries are liabilities, not assets.
I'm not sure if you've been to other countries, but other countries are not self sufficient. There's way more 'Made in America' in America, than there is 'Made in <country>' in any foreign country. And I want there to be even more 'Made in America' here. This is a map of America turning it's attention inward, and (hopefully) cutting ties to the rest of the world in the near future, and I am happy to see it.
It's a long and heavily sourced video going into the ways that MrBeast is unethical and sometimes outright illegal.
He fakes his videos, redirects his random prizes to people he knows, lies and makes kids think they'll win prizes by watching him, and holds illegal gambling with his target audience of preteens. And most people suspect this, but an hour of proof is solid and convincing.
This isn't really an "I hate MrBeast" drama video. The guy who made it does hate him, but after watching it I think it'll be mostly a useful video to send to parents (or maybe the older MrBeast fans who are aging out) to convince them or their kids to stop being fans and see through the fraud.
I'd be more worried that it sends my data back to Moscow AND to Google.