Sure, if you can pass the environmental requirements. And of course if any of the toxic waste leaks onto my property I’m gonna sue you for everything you’ve got.

It’s not city hall zoning laws stopping you from building toxic waste dumps. When I said people should be able to build what they want, I was talking about mixed density housing and mixed use / light commercial.

There are some good people here on Lemmy but my god are there an awful lot of obtuse, blockheaded teenagers! Get a clue!

How do you put price caps on houses? They vary so much in price depending on location. A shack in San Francisco costs the same as a mansion in the middle of nowhere.

No this kind of centralized approach is doomed to fail. We’re much better off with Georgism with a land value tax and the total repeal of zoning laws. People should be able to build what they want, where they want, and the land value tax captures the increases in property values as a result. When a neighbourhood becomes too expensive to afford for single family households it gets converted into apartments.

All of our housing problems come from meddlesome local politicians, their NIMBY supporters, awful zoning laws and easements, and a terrible property tax system which disincentivizes development. A very simple land value tax system along with the total removal of local politicians’ power over housing development solves all of these issues.

Personal pan pizzas are by far the best size! The small size means they get ultra crispy and don’t get soggy in the middle like larger pizzas do!

Don’t mistake an explanation for an excuse

I don’t think he really understood what being a Nazi means. Not everyone knows what really happened with the Holocaust. Think about the state of the US education system for a moment.

Don’t get too caught up in thinking about desserts (who deserves what, in the moral sense). That path can lead to a downward spiral.

Instead try to focus on some positive things that you can do to change your life (or the lives of people around you) for the better. You will feel much better that way.

Similar issue in Japan, Taiwan, China, and more. I remember reading about an idol fanbase going ballistic when their favourite weather girl got a boyfriend.

The whole idol industry is incredibly toxic. It turns parasocialization into a ruthlessly monetized business.

We could do a lot more though. Canada’s not even meeting our NATO commitments.

They can always trade the US some chips for them!

Buy the weapons now so you don’t have to beg for them when you’re under attack. If you’ve got the money then it makes perfect sense.

Taiwan should really be smart about which weapons they buy though. Anti-air systems and anti-ship mines as well as drones are what they need. Fancy jets are not cost effective for defence.

Try looking up your local pizza place’s website. Many local places now have online ordering right on their website, no apps required!

Instant pot can make way healthier meals. Cut back on fried food and start making delicious, healthy soups! Bonus is that soups store really well in the fridge AND freeze really well, so you can do big meal prep really easily with an instant pot!

Edit: instant pot is also really great at making rice and pasta! People even use it for steam-baking with the pot-in-pot method (but that’s a bit advanced)!

People become Nazis when they feel lost, powerless, and their lives meaningless. They reach for it in a desperate attempt to be part of something important, powerful, and meaningful.

But it’s empty and nihilistic, so it doesn’t work out.

We as a society haven’t figured out how to deal with modernity. All our problems are of our own making. We’ve destroyed religion (the original provider of meaning and belonging) and left a void in its place. That’s all the desire for Nazism is: a desire to fill that void (and a scapegoat for why it exists in the first place).

Of course you and I can see that the scapegoat is wrong and totally absurd. But that’s not important to them. There’s no easier way to feel powerful than to topple a hated enemy.

Just watch out for a man wearing glasses and wielding a crowbar!

Thanks! I’m really enjoying the discussion too!

Friedman actually has addressed the Ford Pinto question directly. He makes the very good point that it’s not a matter of principle, it’s a difference of opinion on the cost-benefit analysis. The deaths that resulted from Ford’s decision not to install a $13/car shield to protect the gas tank were tragic and regrettable but the argument that we can’t put a price on human lives does not fly.

We HAVE to put that price on a human life if we’re going to use cost-benefit analysis as a tool to help allocate resources. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a communist government party official, a liberal democratic courtroom, or the CEO of a business. The calculation needs to be done because resources are finite.

Friedman makes the rather dramatic point of asking whether it would be worth it to spend a billion dollars to save a person’s life. No matter what number you might ultimately settle on, there will always be disagreement because there are always alternative ways to spend the same money that might save even more lives. It would definitely not be worth it to spend NASA money to make the world’s safest car if that means a million people starve to death due to that choice of resource allocation.

Friedman is not opposed to central government of course. He mentions it in that video that he believes in the court system. He also believes government is the right call for several other functions which he discusses in other lectures (national defence and of course legislation to protect people’s rights and resolve disputes and other issues that arise).

For what it’s worth, the amount of money Ford lost in the long run, from lawsuits and settlements paid, reputational damage, loss of marketshare, loss of R&D, and loss of consumer confidence was astronomical. Ford learned the hard way that marketing for automobiles is not about convincing a consumer to buy your car once, it’s about convincing them that they made the right decision to buy your car so that they continue buying cars from you for the rest of their life.

In other words, brand loyalty is absolutely everything to car manufacturers and if you abuse that trust you lose bigtime. Now the Ford Pinto will live on forever as an example of corporate shortsightedness and callousness. There are plenty of people who would never buy a Ford again for that mistake.

Friedman actually has replies to many of the issues you’ve raised. He is not convinced that government can do anything efficiently and his argument rests on Darwinian principles: government employees are insulated from the consequences of their failed policies in a particular way that biases them towards towards inaction, inefficiency, and even waste.

For example, he talks about the bias of the FDA towards rejecting new drugs over approving them. If the FDA approves a new drug and it kills a handful of people it makes the front page of every newspaper in the country and becomes a huge scandal that costs the FDA heads their jobs. However, if the FDA rejects a drug that could have saved a million lives over several decades then nobody even knows about it!

So the FDA is extremely biased towards rejecting anything and everything that comes their way. But since companies can sue the FDA if they don’t exactly follow the law when rejecting drugs, the FDA has developed extremely long and detailed and cumbersome documentation processes. The forms and the trials are so extensive and cumbersome they take years and billions of dollars to complete. And the end result is that many drugs never even start the process because the companies have no guarantee of being able to recover their investment!

His alternative to all this is simple: tort law. A robust tort law allows people to sue drug companies for selling harmful drugs. This is actually how things worked before the FDA existed and it led to drugs such as Aspirin that might never have existed in today’s regime!

Anyway, the hardest thing about trying to evaluate Friedman’s arguments is that each one is pretty compelling in isolation but the sum total of all the changes is such a radical departure from what we have now that it’s hard to fathom.

I think I’m coming around to it though. One thing that’s indisputable is that our current governments have totally betrayed us and left everyone polarized, isolated, angry, and utterly lacking trust in societal institutions.

Germany has government funded education throughout. It’s still regressive! They stream people into either working class tracks (hauptschule and realschule) or academic (gymnasium). In effect, this means working class students have far less opportunity to go to university in Germany than they do in the US, despite the latter’s problems with affordability.

Friedman would go 100% the other way and abolish public schools entirely, along with abolishing the minimum wage, subsidies for universities, subsidies for business, and tariffs. His argument is that the minimum wage puts a floor on the productivity of a worker which means many people who could be hired at a lower wage and be trained on the job instead do not get hired at all and have to pay for their own training through school (either directly with tuition or indirectly through taxes).

The current system ends up creating large classes of people who get an education in subject matter that’s totally irrelevant to their career (like someone studying sociology in order to work in HR). Why should we, as taxpayers, be paying for this? Employers should be paying to train their own workers on the job!

He’s one of the most famous economists of the 20th century. There’s a ton of YouTube videos of him debating all kinds of people and giving lectures on many different topics from his perspective.

Milton Friedman, my favourite libertarian, advocated for a negative income tax as the best form of social safety net. It means that the minimum amount of money any person gets is not zero!

He also liked to point out that a lot of other government programs were in fact regressive: paid for in taxes by working class people and providing the benefit to middle class and up. A classic example of that is funding for higher education. It’s pretty darn regressive to pay for higher education with taxes collected from working class people whose children don’t even attend higher education!

He has a lot of other arguments that make a ton of sense. He is against any and all forms of subsidies for large businesses and he is against laws which create and protect monopolies and oligopolies.

The one thing I’m not clear on is how to organize society to protect against future government interference and especially corruption by special interests.

Well you could eat one in South Korea instead. They love hotdogs there. They have developed some cool new takes on the corndog: