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Joined 26 days ago
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Cake day: May 11th, 2026

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  • It’s rent seeking through regulations. It’s too expensive to make a simple car that also complies with these regulations. The only people who can afford to do it are gigantic established brands with a century of production lines and established infrastructure.

    “Oh no. More car brands failed. We can’t let them fail can we? Allow us to merge more?”

    “Oh no. We’re in trouble financially. If we die you won’t have cars at all any more because we merged everything. Lots and lots of your voters will be pissed if that happens. There’s also no way in hell a new car brand is going to establish itself when it costs so damn much to meet these regulations we lobbied and guided to benefit our established interests”




  • Monsanto and friends know that if you make $500/acre they can charge $490/acre. It’s really that bad for input costs because there’s zero competition, and if there technically is more than one company in a space they just refuse to compete, but technically aren’t a cartel…

    Then you have China not buying soybeans from US farmers over politics (justified imo) and those leopards ate a lot of faces

    Also the rescue programs that were meant to help prevent farmers from folding were frozen under DOGE so a whole bunch of farmers made the necessary investments and expenses to qualify for programs that don’t exist currently, costing them even more money while they’re deep in the red.

    A drought and bad harvests have been hitting the US. Last year’s harvest was already not good and this year’s was weird due to the weather and lack of rain or snowpack.

    The Midwest US is only farmable at its current intensity due to the Ogallala aquifer which is like a gigantic underground fresh water ocean. It’s been pumped dry in many places, and will run out in a few decades.

    I heard of a town hall deciding what to do about pumping that aquifer. The choices were

    A) stop all pumping

    B) reduce pumping to steady state levels. It doesn’t recharge and it doesn’t empty more

    C) depletion in 100 years

    D) depletion in 50 years

    Guess which option was chosen…

    It’s also not because they’re dumb they just can’t be responsible. You go bankrupt if you pump less since you grow less, or would need to grow crops that use less water but net lower yields, lower pay, and it doesn’t pay for your giant 16 row corn header or combine.



  • Most of us are quite intelligent, lots are STEM, many are post-secondary grads.

    Unironically if a plane crashes heading to a furry convention it would literally bring western software to its knees overnight. There would be outages. “He’s our most experienced engineer! Only John knows how this system works!” Bank of America goes dark






  • iocase@lemmy.ziptomemes@lemmy.worldIt's so beautiful 😍
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    6 days ago

    Daily reminder that if a road is designed to last 15 years, by definition that means you need to replace 1/15th of your entire road network each year. If you can’t replace that much you fall behind… And things break and stay broken.

    It also takes longer to replace the roads you can work on because they’re more damaged than you planned for when you built them and planned out the lifecycle, meaning you end up even further behind.

    Also the economic benefit of a road mostly happens when it’s brand new, or upgraded to carry heavier traffic it couldn’t before. That’s an actually return on investment. Replacing anxexisting road to it’s old state is replacing a broken window in broken window theory. It doesn’t cause lasting increases in economic activity.

    All of this is to say, fuck cars. I hate them. I hate how much we spend on infrastructure that rots and gets invoiced by rent seeking construction companies and municipal and provincial/state governments being complicit in rent seeking with these companies.

    I wish we had more trains and less sprawl. It would cost a lot less and would actually be sustainable. Oh well… The hard way it is…