ruraljuror

I haven't heard of the Azolla Event. Before diving in, I'm curious how you think the data sufficiency and breadth/quality of the research surrounding this Azolla event compares to the data sufficiency and breadth/quality of research on anthropogenic climate change. You know, just to make sure that you're applying the same scrutiny so we can talk apples to apples here. Can you give me an example of what living under an authoritarian green regime looks like? As I'm sure you're aware, there are a lot of authoritarian regimes already in power in the world as well as a lot of authoritarian movements that are gaining steam, but none of them seem to be using environmental justice as their means of gaining or retaining power. Religious exploitation, stoking racial/class divisions, and voter suppression tend to be the dominant tactics of which I'm aware, but correct me if I'm wrong of course. But you're right that living under an authoritarian rules is painful for the poorest members of society. For example, rich Texan women will have no problem flying out of state to get an abortion and covering their tracks, while the poor women of Texas in need of an abortion will be the ones who suffer. I'll also note that "who is bound to bear the cost of reducing carbon decisions" is a political problem, not to be conflated with excess atmospheric CO2 as it relates to the habitability of earth for humans, which is a physics problem. As a contemporary corollary, the unvaccinated COVID denier views the virus through the prism of a political problem at first, but it's usually not until right before they're intubated that they realize that physics was the real problem all along. It's never too late to correct a mistake, until it's too late to correct a mistake. I'm doing no such thing. I have no doubt that transitioning to an environmentally sustainable economic system will cause some human suffering. The issue is whether we do our best to proactively make that transition in a way that will minimize said suffering, or if we'll reactively just let the cards fall where they may and let nature implement the suffering on what will most likely be a much larger scale. Even if we accept your argument as true that it's sustainable for humans to continue emitting CO2 right up to "where the run out of things to burn," you're still implicitly acknowledging that we're going to have to transition away from fossil fuels eventually. We live on a finite planet, with finite fossil fuel (or any material for that matter) resources - an economic structure that relies on continuous growth and unlimited non-reusable resources will eventually collapse. The only question is, again, if we control the transition or if we wait until all the resources are gone before we come to terms with the reality of this pretty irrefutable premise. Seems to me that he better option is pretty clearly using those remaining resources in order to make the transition to a more sustainable way of life much less painful for everyone. Sure, voluntary in the sense that they don't have to proactively do anything, and they'd be free and welcome to protest against their tax dollars being used to support the Armageddon space crew's mission as well, but the US, for one, is free to allocate those tax dollars in support of a mission intended to enable the continued existence of the US, as well. Why are we talking about pre-human eras again? I though we dismissed this already. Of course it's possible! We may have dodged a serious bullet here. It's also possible that smoking two packs of cigarettes a day while visiting Congo and staying enveloped in a cloud of smoke kept some ill-advised safari tourist from catching malaria. We'll never know. But in either case, continuing to smoke those two packs a day is much more likely to end is life prematurely than it is to extend his life again by pure happenstance. Why do you think there are poor people who live in countries where there isn't much government intervention? Why were there 'poor' people in places before government even existed? And it does matter whether or not poverty is human's natural state, because it kind of undermines your ability to scapegoat government for all the ills of the world. Government has created plenty of problems, but it's solved more. If that weren't the case, then not only would we be living in the dark ages, but we likely wouldn't even know that the dark ages (or any other age) ever happened. It used to be commonly repeated that 97% of climate scientists concurred with the consensus on anthropogenic climate science, but that wasn't technically true. In actuality, it was 97% of peer reviewed/published research on the subject (at whatever time that 97% figure was distilled) supported the anthropogenic climate change hypothesis. You should go check out the other 3% of papers if you want to see the minority report, but what you'll find is most if not all of them have been retracted or could not be repeated or contained mistakes that have now been corrected by the research teams. I think checking into this stuff would be enlightening and a great use of your time. There are still disputes among climate scientists, of course, but they almost exclusively seem to revolve around issues of what changes to expect, to what degree, when they will occur. The issues that you're stuck on are largely settled at this point - of course they could still be wrong, but then again so could you, right? This is where credibility, expertise, and a little humility can be very helpful. Of course scientists have biases and various conflicts of interest, but you're mistaken to think that there's no money to be made in doing research aimed at disproving or at least undermining the credibility of the anthropogenic climate change hypothesis. There have been no shortage of fossil fuel backed think tanks and research teams trying to muddy the waters on the issue for several decades now. My favorite example, of course, is Richard Muller who was a physics professor and climate skeptic who was hired by one of the Koch Brother foundations in order to disprove climate change. The very process of conducting that research, however, completely changed his mind on the issue - after which he said: "I now believe that there has been significant warming for the last 260 years...The clear evidence... is that essentially all of that is caused by humans." Fair enough. I don't particularly like it either, but it was designed with the intent to appease those who prefer market-based solutions. Some people have a hard time acknowledging problems for which their ideology provides no effective solutions so they essentially put blinders on. As a result, other people are in effect are incentivized to try and frame the solution in a more palatable way in order to help some within the former group of people come to terms at the very least that there is in fact a problem that must be addressed. Recognizing and identifying the problem is a necessary first step to solving it, so here we are, with imperfect, compromised solutions as always. I can't keep track. Is there some global authoritarian green regime that's going to crush us all under its boot or is there an ineffectual international body that can't even get China under control and sets unenforceable benchmarks that will lead to doom even if met? Is this not a bit contradictory, or am I missing something? I would think that you would be on board with attempting to make the transition away from fossil fuels a gradual process that will minimize negative economic impacts. As with the carbon tax, these policies are crafted to be compromise with people who share your way of thinking, but it's almost as if you resent having your position taken into account. It's confusing to me. But you're of course right that plenty of people who are "well connected " will profit the shift to greener technologies. That said, plenty of "well connected" people are currently profiting from fossil fuels, so I'm not sure what the relevant point is here with regard to climate change. This seems like a crony capitalism issue, not a science issue, or even a political issue exclusive to green technologies. I prefer to buy American! And I'm not sure exactly what you mean by "If not invading China" - but it sort of seems like you want to invade China, which is not a great idea, but I'm honestly afraid to try to talk you out of it for fear that you'll dig in and that I'm going to be back here making the argument as to why nuclear war is a bad thing this afternoon, which I'd really like to avoid.

This is a true statement, but it completely ignores the scale of the impact that humans have had on the environment. Has there ever been another species on the planet that has had 5% as much of an impact on the chemical composition of the atmosphere as humanity? Correct me if I'm wrong of course, but it seems to me like your argument here is pretty hollow. Yes, there would be a negative feedback loop and I am totally comfortable framing humanity as a part of the environment that is living in it and changing it. No complaint here except that it completely ignores what I said in my last post about the goal being to minimize human suffering and death. A negative feedback loop like what you describe would be a very painful thing for humanity to experience. You're ignoring the minimization of death and suffering again. Eventually the sun will consume the earth. Of course, a Texas sized asteroid could hit us before then and render that issue moot. Then again, perhaps a super volcano apocalypse will beat the asteroid to the punch. Just because there are many, many natural ways that humanity might come to an end, would we not still want to avoid ways that humanity might come to an end as a result of human causes if possible? Just because the Milky Way will eventually get sucked into a black hole doesn't meant that we shouldn't try to avoid a nuclear holocaust in the short term, right? Further, lets say that it was a natural cause like a Texas-sized asteroid that was going to end humanity. Would we not do everything in our power to try to stop it? What if there were only a 10% chance that the asteroid was going to hit Earth? Would we not want to be prepared for the worse even with the odds in our favor despite the fact that humanity had no responsibility in creating the asteroid in the first place? And yes it's true, agriculture does much better in warmer climates than it's going to do in an ice age, but I'm not sure how that's relevant. If the evidence indicated that human behavior was leading us into the next ice age, I'd certainly advocate maybe we ought to adjust that behavior in order to avoid an ice age, as well. I've also read that C02 emissions may have kept us out of the cyclical ice age we were due for, to which if true I say 'cheers to first couple stages of the Industrial Revolution for unknowingly doing us a major solid', but again I'm not sure how this is relevant to our current pickle. Maybe the Ice Age would have been worse than the worst case scenario of the Warming outcomes that humanity might experience instead, but if we have the opportunity now to avoid those worst case scenario warming outcomes nonetheless, then it's pretty clearly a moral imperative to do so. Why is it relevant that the government impoverished the people? I assume that you're not advocating for the government to provide air conditioning to everyone in order to correct the mistake, right? Further, is poverty not the natural state that we're all born into absent any laws on the books about estate and succession? I've been hearing a lot of data sufficiency arguments these days (mostly about vaccine efficacy) but I have a really hard time believing those promoting such arguments hold this kind of data standard to anything outside of popular opinions that conflict with their own ideologies. Alas, you're right of course that the data set is limited. You're also right that predictions are based on past observations, as are most if not all good predictions, though it's worth noting that these predictions also tend to take into account a wide range of future conditions that may arise in order to flesh out the modeling. At this point, however, a lot of smart people have spent their entire careers analyzing the limited, imperfect data that we have available, and they have then taken into account historic conditions and extrapolated a likely range of future conditions in order to make the most educated guess possible, and as it turns out, those scientists have come to a near 100% consensus on more than a few of these issues. What makes you think your assessment of the data sufficiency is more appropriate than the assessment of the people who spend their lives testing and defending their findings and assertions? Again, everything you say here is accurate as far as I'm aware. Are you under the impression that the scientists referenced above don't take into account complexities in the earth's environment beyond C02 percentage? If so, you might be surprised how complex some of the modeling has become these days. I'm a bit at a loss here with you decrying the carbon tax system. As with Obamacare before it, the whole carbon tax structure was created to appease those who claimed they would only support market-based solutions. And I'm not sure why you keep referencing what China does as though that's something the US, UN, or signers of the Paris Climate Accord can control. Assuming that you're not advocating for invading China and crushing their industry (which we incidentally are major beneficiaries of, as has been pointed out to you by others in this thread) thereby forcing them to lower their emissions, then the best possible way for us to influence China's emissions is to 'clean up our own house' first as @Rockatansky said, and by developing clean energy technology that's effective and cheap enough that makes dirtier technology inefficient and obsolete, by comparison. Win/Win.

These arguments about Venus and the composition of the Earth's atmosphere 50mm-400mm years ago would make sense if the goal of reducing CO2 emissions were simply to preserve life on earth in general, but I hope it's clear that the goal is to preserve human life. Even more specifically the goal is to minimize the human death and suffering that will inevitably result from climate migrations, food shortages, adverse weather events, economic contraction, and other negative consequences that will make the world less habitable for human life as we know it. Life on Earth will almost certainly survive anthropogenic climate change. In fact some human life will almost certainly survive, as well - the amount and condition of that human life is what's in question here. But one way or another the amount of C02 that humans are generating is unsustainable, so ideally I think we'd all like to limit the casualties that will accompany that transition whether it is self-imposed on our own terms or ultimately forced upon us by nature, right?

If there are no safe harbor regulatory thresholds, then how can I drive a non-electric car or cook on an outdoor grill without emitting pollutants that I could potentially be held legally liable for? Given the joint and several nature of the liability as you've defined it, and given the evidentiary standard you've defined which requires only that you prove that I indeed did emit such pollutants and that those pollutants did affect the property of others, am I then potentially liable for damages caused by pollution anywhere in the US if not anywhere around the globe just by cooking some burgers on charcoal barbecue in my backyard? How does the system you're imagining preclude these kinds of results? Aren't the plaintiffs left in the exact same boat if/when the shareholders run out of money and/or declare personal bankruptcy, as well? If more remuneration equals more justice, so be it, but I'm not sure what will really be accomplished by swapping the financial ruin of one innocent party for the financial ruin of another innocent party other than astronomically higher legal expenditures. Also, it's becoming less clear to me if your primary goal is greater plaintiff justice or if the primary goal is a punitive stick that will force investors to more actively regulate companies with which they invest? If the goal is more justice, to employ a gambler's analogy, this deal seems like a push where you still owe the vigorish (insurance premiums and attorney's fees) at best, and if the goal is greater investor oversight and regulation of the companies in which they invest, do you not then think that the most likely way investors will pursue such oversight and regulation is through governance by voting for it at the ballot box? We'd be right back where we are - where we started. I think you're missing the point here. Light will inevitably cross property lines. I live miles from downtown but the light from skyscrapers not only crosses my property lines, it also enters through my windows and into my home even when the shades are drawn. If I find a judge and/or jury that decides a little compensation in order, there potentially would be a large enough class to launch a class action suit and black out downtown, not to mention the city's exposure as a result of streetlights all over town. What's the downside to clearing up this mess with a simple light pollution ordinance instead of potentially wasting literally everyone's money and time in court? How does increased risk of nuisance lawsuits with less predictable outcomes make a society any more free?

Ann Patchett is what makes Parnassus special.

What you've described sounds pretty much exactly how common civil law has developed, except you're choosing to codify norms and promote consistency/predictability via insurance policy terms instead of through legislation. I'm not sure what exactly that accomplishes besides introducing a new middle man into the mix who can sell a bunch of new insurance policies. Can you give an example that shows a situation in which current law would lead to a worse/unjust result, while the system you describe would lead to a better, more just outcome? Those crazy tin foil hat people are currently free to file any and all the lawsuits they please, but I think it's very important that those lawsuits meet certain minimal criteria in order for the case to proceed past the filing in order to prevent abuse of the court system. Currently, for a lawsuit to proceed past the initial filing, the plaintiff is going to have to show that there is a legitimate cause of action that the court has power to address and that there has been verifiable harm that resulted from the cause of action. Without those minimal criteria, the court system could turn into a circus pretty easily and shift all the power to those with enough money to fight a legal war of attrition. Let's take your example of suing over electromagnetic radiation to it's logical extremes: Let's say I get really into astronomy and decide that I don't want any light from my neighbors' houses entering my property. Unfortunately, those neighbors don't comply with my requests, so I take them to court. Under the current system, my neighbor's attorney might point to a local light pollution ordinance, then show that I've failed to allege the emittance of light exceeding that threshold, at which point my case will be dismissed. If there's no such local ordinance, then my neighbor's attorney might show previous cases in which judges ruled that any property-line-crossing light that results from a property owner's right to reasonably light their own property does not constitute a redressable harm acknowledged by the court system. One way or another, the case is getting quickly quashed, and should I choose to continue filing similar suits despite having each action tossed, my attorneys are likely to face some form of retribution that would put an end to my nuisance lawsuits for good. Under your system, are you proposing to allow the case to go all the way to a jury? If it does go to a jury and even if I lose, is there anything that prevents me from filing suits against all my neighbors the next night and repeating the process over and over again until my neighbors relent and give in or until I happen to find a jury of 12 sympathetic stargazers and/or lightphobics? I put CO2 in quotes to avoid that pushback, but alas. To counter your points, I'll note that water isn't poison, for example, but if you drink too much of it you will die. Similarly, water is a natural constituent of our air/land, but excess quantities in the form of hurricanes and floods can certainly have devastating impacts on the habitability of a given place. More importantly, it was my understanding that you were promoting what you believe to be a system that is better suited to environmental protection than the current system, but if your system doesn't or can't identify excess CO2 as an environmental problem, then that's kind of a non-starter from my perspective in terms of being an improvement. I'm open to the possibility that the world might be a better place if limited liability as a means of shielding investors had never been conceived, and if mutual funds had never existed, etc. I have not idea what that world would truly look like and what unintended benefits and detriments would accompany it. But why do you think it's a good thing that somebody might lose their house for being a shareholder in a high risk company. To be clear, I understand that you believe this to be the best way of providing oversight to insure the companies that one is invested in is not exposing itself to "too much" liability. But what is "too much"? Do you also think it would be a good thing that somebody might lose their house for being a shareholder in a low risk company? What about somebody who loses their house by being a shareholder in a it-seemed-like-a-no-risk company? In your system, it seems clear that those outcomes would be inevitable too, but there is no moral hazard example to be made out of these latter two lower-risk investors. Are they then just collateral damage whose only effect on the market will be to serve as a cautionary tale and stifle investment? What is gained to justify these losses? It gets a bit trickier to discuss this stuff when we have to include some kind of communication framework that doesn't yet exist in order to make the equation add up, but I am curious about the first possibility you mentioned and what you are imagining will compel companies to adopt new disclosure and auditing processes? Also, who do you envision paying for and conducting the audits? I do like the idea of and can see benefits to every shareholder being an activist shareholder, but I also think it is a much better theoretical concept than a practical one. There are between 3 and 0 people at any given company that know literally everything that's going on at the company where they work day in and day out, so there's no amount of communication that will enable shareholders to have a complete understanding of their daily risk exposure. Further, this whole framework could put an end to actual activist investing, since would-be-activist investors would have to expose themselves to the very risk they seek to eliminate in order to attempt spur reform from within the company. It just seems to me like there's a major flaw in the whole idea that investors will 'know what they're getting into' if their houses are on the line. Even if I'm a cybersecurity expert myself, there's no amount of information that I will be able to attain about Bank of America's cybersecurity set up that can help me make a meaningful determination of their risk exposure to getting their mainframe hacked. So if I own one share of Bank of America stock, what sense does it make me conceivably on the hook for a multimillion dollar breach of customer data, even if only in theory? Even if I'm well versed in actuarial science, current Iowa tort law and local social strife, it seems unlikely that I'll be able to identify the racist pattern with which one of the State Farm reps in the downtown Cedar Rapids branch is denying claims and thereby exposing the company to untold punitive damages, so what sense does it make that I could potentially be held liable? No amount of communication can bridge those gaps or eliminate those risks, so why punish passive investors who were in the worst position of all parties involved to identify and minimize those risks. I think by focusing on business structure and insurance, you may have missed my point, which was that even a very low risk investment (like 5k for something trivial like an ice cream truck) could potentially lead to negative outcomes that are grossly disproportionate to the potential reward. Without limited liability, I would never invest in a venture like this because it doesn't matter how responsible my brother is - it's always possible that he commits some act of negligence that negates the liability policy and could leave me on the hook for thousands of times more money than the investment could have ever earned. The risk could never be justified and money for these kinds of investments would all but dry up entirely. This might be a good time for a fact check, but I would guess that most sole proprietors and general partnerships don't have much outside investment. More importantly, the risk/reward ratio is what makes these kinds of vehicles so popular for small businesses and family operations given the potential tax savings they provide and the relatively small amount of assets they own that could potentially be at risk in the first place (especially since many jurisdiction protect homes from bankruptcy). Also, the relatively small scope of operation for most sole proprietors and general partnerships makes it much easier to insure against liabilities that are likely to be encountered in the scope of business, but one of the main factors at play here is that these kinds of businesses are typically owner/operated, so these kind of operators can tolerate these risks because they're the ones in the best position to minimize it as well as to be held accountable if and when they fall short and to benefit directly from the reward when they don't. Resting liability on the shoulders of those in the best position to minimize it is goal.

Just getting back to this. First, I want to note that I really respect your environmental concern and passion on this issue. Very admirable. That said, a good bit of what you're saying here doesn't add up for me in terms of practical application. Maybe you can fill in some of the gaps. Based on your parenthetical there, it seems like you're aware that under current law that nobody actually owns the river - people who own property adjacent to rivers just own the banks but not the water itself, which is why it's illegal to damn them up or divert all the water thereby preventing the water from reaching the property owners downstream. If I understand what you're proposing correctly, and if property owners property lines extend into the river itself, what keeps the property owner or owners at the source of the river from building a lake and depriving all the downstream property owners of their water rights? What are the damages for polluting water? Is it a sliding scale, meaning more pollution equals more damages? Are some forms of pollution worse than others? Do you expect the government to define these damages through legislation or do you envision just tossing these questions to juries on a case by case basis? When you bring things like air and electromagnetic radiation into the mix, it seems like your plan here becomes a lot more problematic. You still have the damages issues. For example, can I sue radio broadcasters for the radio waves that pass through my property? Who defines how much that cause of action is worth and what is that definition based on? Can I get an injunction to prevent the radio waves from passing through in the first place? Air is even trickier. So you take a sample of the air on your property and find it's loaded with C02 (or any other "pollutant" for that matter). How do you prove that C02 came from a specific entity, or do you literally have a cause of action against any person and any company on earth given that we all emit C02? For example, (beyond CO2) if you find traces of cigarette smoke in the air on your property, can you sue every smoker in the city, the county, or the state? I think you overestimate the amount of information available to passive shareholders - in my experience, they often if not usually don't know what they're getting into when they buy the shares. If they're investing through a brokerage account or in a mutual fund or index, etc. (which is like half of US households) then they most likely don't even know which companies they own stock in on a given day. But even for passive investors who are actively picking companies, I still think it's a bad idea to impose liability because those investors don't have access to detailed information on the company's operating practices. For larger companies, most of the company's own employees don't have access to enough information to see all the potential avenues for legal liability that the company may be exposed to at any given moment, and they certainly don't have much opportunity to influence those operations beyond the scope of their own employment. Why would we expect passive investors to be in a better position to 'know what they're getting into' than the company's own employees? Further, do you envision passive shareholder liability to be joint and several? Do you think it should be proportional to ownership share? Case in point, if I own stock in McDonald's and somebody decides to sue me because they get badly burned by McDonald's excessively hot coffee, am I liable for the entire extent of the damages or do I only owe the value of my stock divided by the entire McDonald's market capitalization? These principles apply beyond stock bought through exchanges, too. If for example, I give my brother $5k to help him start an ice cream truck business in exchange for some equity, do you think I should be on the hook for damages if he accidentally runs a school bus off the road and is sued for millions? Seems to me like that kind of system would prevent just about anyone from investing in any business. This would be especially devastating for businesses with only moderate ROI expectations. For example, I might be able to justify this kind of risk exposure on a 5k investment if it was a tech startup that had the potential to earn millions, but the risk/reward calculation will never come out in favor of investment under these conditions for smaller ROI ventures like restaurants, anything brick and mortar, services like plumbing/electricians/contrators, or just about any small general proprietorship and partnership operation, which would be the only kind of corporate structure left once all liability-limiting vehicles have been eliminated per your design. Seems to me that would put a swift end to the vast majority of investment and new businesses across the board (which may or may not be your goal here, I'm not entirely clear). In any case, thanks again for the full-throated environmental defense. I'm curious to see how you resolve some of the uncertainties (or confusions on my part) I've pointed out, but thanks for the thought exercise either way.

Yes and Yes

You might be right, but Oracle didn't close on the land purchase until the beginning of June, so being tight-lipped for 2 and a half years before the deal was finalized is pretty irrelevant. Most companies don't make any formal announcements until deals are closed, so that's to be expected. Once the land and incentive packages had been secured, however, Oracle immediately sent a couple of employees back to Nashville later that same month with the stated purpose of prepping for the formal Oracle/Nashville announcement in mid-August. The period in which Oracle was operating in "silent mode" had evidently come to an end, but then mid-August came and went with no formal announcement and no updates about the cause for the delay, etc. What happened in the 6 weeks between the Oracle prep crew's return trip to Nashville to plan for the formal announcement and the planned date of that formal announcement itself that came and went? Tennessee was in the national news getting more than its fair share of bad PR, for one. In fact, that PR was so bad that the very Tennessee legislators who created that bad PR almost immediately did an about face and rescinded their new policy in response to the widespread backlash. To me, it seems pretty plausible that a company might want to avoid stepping in a PR mess that even the creators of that mess wanted no part in. I mean, why wouldn't they delay the announcement in that scenario? Given that these kind of corporate announcements are almost exclusively PR exercises to begin with, it would be at the very least counterproductive to carry on with the announcement as planned, and could even lead to negative PR for Oracle by association for a policy from which even theTennessee General Assembly wanted to disassociate. Given that climate, I would argue that to carry on with the announcement as planned would have been PR malpractice. That said, as Downtown Resident noted above, it's also entirely plausible that the Delta spike was a bigger factor in leading to the delay, or any number of other potential reasons to slow down the process that we're not privy to. We'll most likely never know what the main factor behind the delay was, in any case, so please feel free to fill in the gaps with your own speculations if you please.

Where did you get this idea from? Seems to me that the opposite is actually true because of the way courts look at causation, specifically proximate causation. Similar to the impossibility of "proving" that any given hurricane, flood, or other adverse weather event was "caused" by CO2/climate change, it's very difficult to prove that any given environmental impact (or health impact experienced by someone occupying that environment) was directly caused by any given defendant. For example, let's say a chemical plant is dumping waste into a river, and a bunch of people in the town downstream get a rare type of cancer. How do you prove that those chemicals are what caused the cancer? If those chemicals are in fact to blame, then how come not everyone in town has the same kind of cancer - are they not drinking and bathing in the same water? Arguing statistics and correlations in court has historically been a very tough sell in a judicial system that has higher standards of proof than statistics are able to meet. As for the rest of your comment, if you're not familiar with the concept of piercing the corporate veil, that might be worth checking out. The liability limitations on limited liability entities is not as unlimited as you may think, though thankfully they do extend to passive shareholders who have no ability to impact corporate governance.

I think you misspelled 'natural disaster'

Based on the quality of these diagrams, I think the people on this message board have spent more time thinking about this proposal than these developers have, which is a good sign that it's hopefully half-baked and subject to major revision. The Broadwest view preservation argument doesn't seem too realistic to me (though you never know), but a corporate relocation with a specific campus layout in mind could make sense. That said, I think it's more likely that these developers have limited capital secured already and spent a disproportionate amount of it acquiring the property in the first place, so now they're mocking up the largest development that they can currently afford to produce in order to show a viable path forward using only their existing resources/credit, which will allow them to negotiate from a more favorable position as they seek additional capital to build something more substantial on this prime lot. I hope that's not just wishful thinking, anyway. I also think it's possible that these developers may very well have been planning to build three 20 story office towers but because construction material prices have skyrocketed and office space demand is more of a question mark than it's been in a long time, instead of going back to the drawing board they decided to just cut the towers in half and are pushing on against the current. How is it possible that we don't know who the developers are? That should be pretty revealing.

As I'm sure y'all recall, it was just a few weeks before Oracle's mid-August announcement goal whenTennessee was making waves in the national news for a few consecutive cycles after we fired the top vaccine-related health official at the Tennessee Department of Health for encouraging teenagers to get vaccinated and then followed that up by doubling down and ending state backed outreach efforts for any/all vaccines to minors across the board. I figured at the time that would create a wrinkle in Oracle's announcement timeline and might even lead to a much smaller announcement/PR blitz whenever the time comes to make it official. Just speculation, but Oracle doesn't want any unnecessary heat or unwanted attention, and they don't seem to be afraid to operate behind the scenes.

The NBA won't say a negative word about China because the NBA owners make a ton of money from the Chinese market and don't want their access to that market to go away. The Chinese government has complete control over Chinese media of course (including whether NBA games are televised), but it's a really big leap to assume they have similar or even substantial influence in the American media market. I don't know much about the Guardian's ownership group, but there are only a very small number of media conglomerates that own the vast majority of media outlets in the US at this point, and I think all of them are either old family operations or publicly traded companies with publicly available information about their ownership structures. I have no doubt that the Chinese government has plenty of money invested with various entities that own pieces of US media, but it would take another giant leap to believe that those kinds of passive/piecemeal investments would enable any kind of activist investor influence, let alone editorial control over the media content. In any case, I'm not sure that the media blackout on china's pollution is quite as severe as y'all seem to think. I just googled "China coal pollution" on the news tab and there are relevant articles from CNN, Bloomberg, BBC, LA Times, the Hill, Financial times, and many more just from the last few weeks. Here are some sub headlines to give a little context: China’s significance as the world’s greatest emitter of pollution and Chinese policymakers’ own view of climate change negotiations will render any cooperative strategy ineffective - The Hill China puts growth ahead of climate with surge in coal ... - financial times What China’s dangerous coal relapse means for the rest of the world - la times I'm sure there are more than a few PR puff pieces out there too, praising China and minimizing their negative environmental impacts, but I don't think it's accurate to say that the media is really burying any messages here. It should also be noted that US media doesn't have a historically great track record covering climate change issues in the first place (for a lot of reasons unrelated to China) that are probably worth considering before jumping to the Chinese puppet master conclusion - the incongruity of addressing longterm problems within a 24 hour news cycle, for one.

The point of the second sentence is that all defense and infrastructure spending that occurs in Tennessee, Texas, or any other state should be counted as welfare spending because most of the infrastructure spending that occurs in any state is either an accident of geography or could have just as easily be constructed in other states instead, therefore it shouldn't count toward the state's GDP. If Texas remained a part of Mexico, for example, all the military bases and national infrastructure spending that occurs in Texas would simply be in Oklahoma, Arkansas, and New Mexico instead. Those bases and that spending wouldn't disappear, it would all just be happening somewhere else, which is why it shouldn't be counted toward Texas' bottom line. To provide another example, Route 66 could have just as easily been routed through Kansas instead of Oklahoma. Does all the money generated through federal spending/maintenance of that US highway in Oklahoma represent value produced by the state of Oklahoma, or does it represent value produced by the Federal Government that just happens to be in Oklahoma?

I agree with everything you've written here, thanks. What I was more interested in is the implications of what you're saying, and how those implications are best addressed in your professional opinion. To clarify, it seemed to me that you were essentially saying states that rely on a significant portion of tax receipts from the top end of the tax bracket tend to struggle during economic downturns because a significant portion of the income typically collected in those upper most brackets will decrease in parallel to the economy because those incomes are often more closely correlated to macroeconomic trends than the incomes of lower bracket earners. You then went on to shoot down the possibility of governmental borrowing during economic downturns in order to maintain government services and obligations because as you noted politicians are not typically inclined or incentivized to retire those debts when the economy gets back to surer footing. Do I have that about right? If so, the question that I was trying to get at is 'what we should be doing about it?' I interpreted your remarks to indicate that your preferred course of action would be for governments not to rely on too much income from the top brackets in the first place in order to avoid these kind of credit-killing, budget-busting shortfalls during economic downturns. Am I correct that that's generally what you were advocating? If so, that's where my agreement with your position would diverge given that to me it seems that argument is basically the equivalent of a nutritionist recommending a daily caloric intake of only 800 calories so that during times of inevitable famine, our bodies are already used to the limited portions. It's a logical argument, but it's not a very practical argument, or a very humane one for that matter when there are potentially other possible ways to address the issue. Assuming I've got all your premises correct here, which is a big assumption on my part and correct me where I'm wrong of course, it seems like your prescribed course of action seems better suited to keeping high end tax rates low than it does to actually addressing the difficulties at hand, which is what I wanted to point out. Why not adjust the tax rates/brackets during economic slumps in order to prevent budgetary shortfalls, for example, unless the primary underlying goal is simply to keep the top tax rates low? Would that not address the credit and budget issues you raise while putting the bulk of the burden on those least affected by the economic downturn (who coincidentally also have the most to gain when economic trends turn upward again) instead of putting the burden on those we've agreed are most negatively affected by the downturn?

I agree with you about the importance of the role that the US military plays in maintaining the US dollar as the world's reserve currency. I also think you're right that a significant chunk of military spending has a positive return on investment. The part that you're missing from the equation, however, is that the military spending that is occurring in Texas could just as easily be happening somewhere else and making a comparable ROI. Similarly, some if not all of those large bases that happen to be located in Texas could just as easily have been located in Arizona, Louisiana, Oklahoma, or Oregon, Virginia, Upstate New York, etc.

Would you mind sharing your source for this info? Seems like most of the data I've seen indicates that young people and more economically vulnerable populations are the ones that get hit hardest during economic downturns. Also, just to make sure we're on the same page, am I correct that the threshold to enter the top 20% of income earners is only about $130k per household currently? Also, it's my understanding that only the top 10% most successful business owners are able to pull out that much (~$130k) from their business in a given year, but correct me if I'm wrong of course. Assuming those figures are in the ballpark, I'm curious at what income level do you think taxes should be raised in order to fund social services during a downturn? Or do you think cutting social services during economic downturns is the better way to balance the budget since the business owners are bearing more of the direct burden from the downturn itself?

How about Nashville Spats and Speeches? Or Nashville Spits and Preaches if we want to go more of an active verb route? Just so long as we minimize the Nashville Bots and Leeches.

Many a book has been written on the subject, but here's a quick primer on the 'race to the bottom' that you're describing if you're interested: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/race-bottom.asp It's not odd at all that relocations like these rarely happen from one 'blue' area to another, in fact quite the opposite. Do you think it's odd that when US companies outsource production facilities overseas that they typically choose poorer/developing countries instead of outsourcing those facilities to other 'first world' countries? Of course not, that would be odd given that what those companies are seeking is lower taxes, cheaper labor, and as little regulation as possible. The same principle applies to companies that relocate headquarters and production facilities within the US.

This is kind of two separate questions. Half of the homeless population in the US came through the foster care system and were clearly ill-prepared to enter the world when they aged out and almost 60% of homeless people in the US have mental illness and/or are veterans, so the reason that there are so many homeless people is that we're shamefully bad at looking out for people who often need it most. The reason that the homeless tend to congregate downtown is for access to amenities, panhandling opportunities, social services, and safety via strength in numbers.

Given that this article was written before any of the vaccine developers had released literally any trial data about their vaccines (and therefore well before said vaccines had been granted full FDA approval), it would be pretty crazy if pundits and doctors were singing the same tune now, right? They would be way out of key if they were. Seems to me, in order for society to function we all (including pundits and doctors) have to adjust our perspectives and opinions and the resulting actions we take in the world based on the best information available at any given moment. To not make those adjustments would simply be letting our preconceived biases and the perspectives/opinions we formed based on outdated information drive the boat - typically straight into the dock.

I believe that's "wookin' pa nub"

Please refrain from the drive-by political tangents. If you want to have a discussion about why you think Steve Cohen is terrible, I'd be happy to participate in that discussion in the coffee house as it has been repeatedly made clear that the audience for political opinions is pretty small compared to the audience for this particular thread/discussion. I will note, however, "chicken man" and "Awful!" are not particularly compelling arguments, and saying Steve and the Memphis leadership is the worst in the country leaves your position open to a lot of counterexamples that I think you're going to have a hard time defending. I'd also like to point out to the mods that if you want to nip the political tangents in the bud, MLBrumby's post would be the place to start, right?

No Tax For Trax Forum