I guess that depends on your interpretation of "invest." I don't know of anybody who claimed to save money on eggs by raising their own chickens. It's more of a lifestyle decision than a financial one.
Two cases when I've received a bank check without being able to choose an alternative: 1) as payment of proceeds in a class-action lawsuit; 2) when I got a refund from my insurance provider after changing the terms.
These might not be very common, but they're still not really rare in society either.
New vocab word, thanks. The word's been around for a while, so I guess there's some solace in knowing that this isn't the first time. Hopefully this is just a speed-bump to progress, and not a long-term decline.
> Agree with you on the foldables. God, no one wants that.
I think there are a lot of people who would love to have a smaller form-factor for when the phone is in their pocket, with a large screen for when it's being used. The current state-of-the-art might not be very good for foldable phones, but the demand is there, and that's what drives innovation.
> If I had a button that would wipe out the entire Amazon jungle and replace it with a world class high technology industry, I wouldn't even think twice before pressing it.
I used to think this way, but I've come to realize that it's very short-sighted. It's not sustainable, and we're already seeing how unchecked industrialization over the last couple centuries is leading to unintended/undesirable effects on our health, and indeed the suitability of the environment we need to live in. Sure, those problems can be pushed onto future generations, and so far (maybe) we've been able to solve them. But if we care at all about humanity's ability to thrive, we need to be more careful.
In developed countries, nobody has to struggle anymore just to stay alive, which is a far cry from the way it was 200 years ago. Advancements now are along the lines of increasing entertainment, or quality of life. But enjoying a good life doesn't have to be a zero-sum proposition, and I think society should put a higher cost on the ability of wealthy people to use up irreplaceable natural resources for their own benefit.
You know what's not sustainable? Exponential growth fueled by credit.
Banks loaning money at nearly zero percent interest. Money that gets loaned out, spent, deposited back into the bank and loaned out again, and again, exponentially, until a ludicrously huge financial callstack is created.
This financial callstack wants to unwind. It can only do so safely by the payment of debts. At some point, someone will actually have to go out there and extract value out of this planet in order to pay back those debts. Since debt grows exponentially, so does the harvesting of the resources of this planet.
If you want to solve the problem, you need to go to the source. You need to get rid of credit. Without this, environmentalism is nothing but national suicide. You're opting out of exponential growth and promptly outcompeted by the countries that didn't opt out.
> In developed countries, nobody has to struggle anymore just to stay alive, which is a far cry from the way it was 200 years ago.
Yeah... Because they industrialized and got filthy rich. Now they can afford to give so called "rights" to their citizens.
Rights cost money. They don't appear out of thin air. Somebody's gotta work to provide them. Even the right to not get killed in broad daylight only exists because extremely violent men with guns are protecting the rest. Those men gotta be paid.
Money is not infinite. It runs out. The music can't stop. Gotta keep making money in order to keep providing all those nifty rights. The simple reality is if you don't have real industries you're probably not making that much money. My country is essentially the world's soy farm, nvidia stock alone probably moves more money in a day than my entire country put together.
Look at the national debts of countries the world over. That's money they don't have. Money future generations will be paying interest on for a long time. You want to get reelected but you're broke, so you borrow money you don't have and spend it all giving "benefits" to a population that is dumb enough to think it comes for free. Then there's so much money circulating the value of the currency is inflated away, and people's children grow up and get radicalized when they realize most of their taxes are spent on interest payments on loans made by the previous generation.
> At some point, someone will actually have to go out there and extract value out of this planet in order to pay back those debts.
Not a single atom on the planet has to be moved to extinguish all debts. Money and debt are (very useful and powerful!) bookkeeping constructs only.
> Look at the national debts of countries the world over. That's money they don't have.
Then who has it? Modern money is based on debt, and where there's a debt, there must be a creditor.
> Banks loaning money at nearly zero percent interest. Money that gets loaned out, spent, deposited back into the bank and loaned out again [...] Money is not infinite.
You seem to be basing your argument on some seriously outdated and thoroughly refuted models of money.
> Not a single atom on the planet has to be moved to extinguish all debts.
You should elaborate more on this bold claim.
> Then who has it?
Plenty of people. Treasury bonds holders. Pension funds. Insurance companies. Other countries. The government owes all of those people and regularly pays them interest.
> You seem to be basing your argument on some seriously outdated and thoroughly refuted models of money.
Fractional reserve banking is outdated and refuted?
> If you want to solve the problem, you need to go to the source.
Which is precisely why it's so short-sighted to try to solve your problem by "wiping out the entire Amazon jungle and replacing it with a world class high technology industry." If you're going to have a magic button to solve problems, then why not use it wisely, instead of propagating the spiral towards destruction?
> The simple reality is....
True -- there are no magic buttons. The reality is that people with wealth and power use them to take finite global resources and leverage them to ensure they they stay wealthy and powerful. That is implicitly not sustainable, as well as being questionably moral. It's not possible to avoid being part of the system, but you don't have to actively make it worse. You can advocate for fairer alternatives, or at least not wish for the destruction of entire major global ecosystems.
I think it was "Smarter Every Day," but there's a YouTube channel where the guy went all-out in trying to design, source, and manufacture a simple grill scrubber 100% in the US, and failed. He got the product finished and on the market, but it was literally impossible to do it with 100% American content. IIRC, part of the problem was suppliers that lied about their sourcing, but that still represents the complete lack of availability of US sources.
People invest in things that maximize returns. 30 years ago they had a choice: invest in building out more manufacturing infrastructure in the US, or doing it in China. China was, and is, less expensive to run. So China got the investment dollars.
You could absolutely build any product in the US. You'd just also have to build the infrastructure to build the industrial base, and that means spending more money than you would in China.
