OT: EV Charging Stations Stripped of Copper Cables

So does a mixed economy of both private enterprise and publicly-owned bodies if the size of the state sector can be constrained. Unfortunately, states have a tendency to grow themselves if not kept in strict check and this is in large part responsible for the truly *vast* debt burden now carried on the back of so many Western countries.

There's a race between government getting bigger and wasting ever more resources, and technology making us more productive to support all that waste.

I was just talking to a fellow old fogey (who is literally a Fellow) and we agree that young people are getting stupider, so the productivity increase probably can't keep up.

Yes, the debt will have consequences too. It keeps increasing and can never be paid back. Economists keep getting stupider too.

Traditionally, the solution for that problem has always been devaluation or rampant inflation, or both. Either way, it's a form of gross theft.

Jeroen Belleman

Because it's inefficient, immoral, exploitative, and thrives on social injustice and inequality.

Not sure that holds on a number of levels - technology was supposed to result in a 3 day week and prosperity for all when I was growing up in the 60s.

And I've just come across Jevons paradox while studying retrofit. The notion that as technology increases efficiency and reduces cost, a sort of dumb reaction happens, where people tend to consume more - 'leave the heating on - it's an ASHP and hardly using any electricity' type of thing. Apparently it's quite common in energy efficient homes.

Maybe we're all just idiots and there's nothing to be done :-)

The reliable investment seems to be land and housing, which will probably survive inflation.

Unless property taxes become ruinous.

Speek fur youre selfs!

That's one factor, another is the enormous increase in regulations since the Sixties. Not only is government much larger, but private businesses must employ or hire accountants, compliance officers and other lawyers to keep the directors out of jail. The work force has to a large degree shifted from productive work to non-productive work.

And of course the birth rate has been greatly reduced, meaning that retiring productive workers are not being fully replaced. Add in the large increase in graduates, who feel they are too well educated to do anything involved with making stuff or maintaining their country's infrastructure, and it's a wonder anything useful gets done today. Also add a mature welfare state, which will eventually consume all production.

Starting a business is horrible. You need a zillion registrations and businesses licenses, local and state and federal. You need a lawyer (at $500/hour) and an accountant and a business manager, three overhead people for one working employee. And a Board of Directors and insurance for them.

Not to mention product liability insurance, UL and FCC and CE compliance, ITAR and stuff.

Well, to be fair, that phenomenon is confined to the West and is due to the dogmatic insistence of Leftists that all are equal and must be educated accordingly. So the classes grind away at the speed of the slowest ship in the convoy ("no child left behind" - George Bush Jr - RINO). The brighter children in the class are thus dumbed down at best (at worst, switch off altogether and start sniffing glue) and grade inflation is employed to fudge the facts and make it appear that everything's fine when it most assuredly isn't. This is definitely NOT happening in countries like China and that is why they're kicking our arses and have been for some time.

"Top economists" are no different from the "top climate scientists" - they're paid handsomely for parroting whatever the Globalists at the WEF tell them.

I believe it was Tom Sawyer who said, "Get into land - they've stopped making it."

Aside from the unavoidable Federal stuff, I gather it's much less burdensome in Florida.

Mark Twain I mean!

Some people start a company in California but incorporate in Delaware. That only helps a little.

What shocked me is that California assesses a fee of $800 per year no matter where you incorporate. Then what really shocked me is that they waive the fee the first year.

A bigger problem is kids getting bogus degrees, like film-making and sociology and journalism and comparative literature and music theory.

Even "computer science" can be useless.

I think some people are realizing that they should not borrow a fortune to attend college but be apprentices in a trade, and actually get a job.

Given a graph of usefulness vs expertise, some fields have a peak pretty soon and then drop off.

Seriously? Can you imagine a world where society doesn't educate people in such things?

I say 'educate' rather than train or skill. To understand how to do something is one thing - to understand it and form an opinion is (often) something else.

We just don't need a million of them :)

" The Golgafrinchan Ark Fleet Ship B was a way of removing the basically useless citizens from the planet Golgafrincham. A variety of stories were formed about the doom of the planet, such as blowing up, crashing into the sun or being eaten by a mutant star goat. The ship was filled with all the middlemen of Golgafrincham, such as the telephone sanitisers, account executives, hairdressers, tired TV producers, insurance salesmen, personnel officers, security guards, public relations executives, and management consultants.

Ark Fleet ships A and C were supposed to carry the people who ruled, thought, or actually did useful work.

The ship was programmed to crash onto its designated planet, Earth. The captain remembers that he was told a good reason for this, but had forgotten it, although the reason was later revealed to be because the Ark Ship B Golgafrinchans were a 'bunch of useless idiots'.

I would add to that lists sports pundits where the sole job is to extend something like a 90 minute event to 3 hours by talking bollocks.

Most western countries have a whole lot of state-owned infra-structure, and their "debt" burden is what paid for it.

Big companies are owned by a lot of share-holders who hold their debt, and collect dividends from the company. What's the difference?

The assumption that every investment a government makes is wasteful is one that the US business lobby spends a lot of money on propagating, and John Larkin is a gullible sucker for all their propaganda.

Of course you imagine the young people are getting stupider - they don't admire you as much as you think you deserve.

In John Larkin's ever-so-well-informed opinion.

Cursitor Doom keeps on making this claim. Leftist's don't insist that everybody is equal, and they certainly don't insist that everybody gets exactly the same education - they tend to want the education system to educate everybody to the limits of their potential while acknowledging that these limits can be very different, and spread along a wide variety of possible routes.

That's not the way education works - academically bright kids get shifted into academic subjects, dextrous kids get moved into trade skills. and dim kids get into remedial education.

I wonder where Cursitor Doom thinks that this actually happens?

I wonder what makes Cursitor Doom think that? There are a lot of Chinese kids, and the bright ones do get picked out, taught English - and a phoneme based writing system which is a lot easier to use that the ideographic Chinese system - and those bright kids are doing well. Kicking our arses is an exaggerated claim. When I was working in the UK I personally knew one Chinese mechanical engineer who was very good indeed, but he got head-hunted by a firm in Calfornia.

Or so Cursitor Doom likes to imagine. In reality he he hasn't got a clue, but is emotionally attached to his fatuous conspiracy theories.