The Yen Carry Trade isn't some big secret... it's caused enough turmoil that it hit the front pages of the WSJ a few times in last few years (Aug 2024 was a big one iirc)
Finance bros will make their way in here soon to give a better peanut gallery, but I think "is there something here" comes down to do you believe the final bit of the articles opening act:
> When correlations between historically uncorrelated assets (e.g. Gold, Bitcoin, Microsoft, and Silver) approach 1.0 during a sell-off, it serves as a distinct indicator that traders are not selling what they want to sell, but rather what they must sell in order to meet margin calls in a funding currency that is rapidly appreciating against their liabilities.
I mean, you don't have zoning in space, but you have things like international agreements to avoid, you know, catastrophic human development situations like kessler syndrome.
All satellites launched into orbit these days are required to have de-orbiting capabilities to "clean up" after EOL.
I dunno, two years ago I would have said municipal zoning probably ain't as hard to ignore as international treaties, but who the hell knows these days.
Read the last line:
[The impact of the Los Angeles Aqueduct Project to the Owens Valley region was immediate and detrimental to future agricultural work of local farmers. In 1923, in an effort to increase the water supply, the city of Los Angeles began purchasing vast parcels of land and commenced the drilling of new wells in the region, significantly lowering the level of groundwater in the Owens Valley, even affecting farmers who “did not sell to the city’s representatives.”[44] By 1970, constant groundwater pumping by the city of Los Angeles had virtually dried up all the major springs in the Owens Valley, impacting the surrounding wetlands, springs, meadows, and marsh habitats.[45] The consequent transfer of water out of the Owens Lake and Mono Lake decimated the natural ecology of the region, transforming what was a “lush terrain into desert.”]
Cadillac Desert is the usual recommendation on how f'd water deals are in the West, the Owens Valley landgrab is merely the opening chapter. No argument there.
It's the urban/rural division subtext of the brown lawns and the economically-infeasible desal techno-saviorism that comes off a bit russian botish.
The big scale in water politics is in the colorado river compact and how water rights are bought up by foreign alfalfa farmers to effectively ship water overseas. Brown lawns is pennies in front of the steamroller. Pennies that are effective at stoking urban/rural divisions, but still pennies in the grand scheme of things.
My country is considered to be among the world's most fertile land as it has world's largest rivers, which spew out fresh alluvial soil (very fertile for agriculture).
But when drought hits any corner of my nation, the rich and poor folks alike take extra efforts to conserve water. It is rare to see excess public wastage of water during drought.
Perhaps it is because some parts of this ancient land is already permanently aridified into desert long ago, and the rains can be erratic even during non-drought years. So people have learnt to respect water to a good extent.
To put it into perspective, the vast Sahara desert was once a lush rainforest. Cutting down the jungle trees and mismanagement of water resources by humans, is what turned into a forbidding barren desert.
So it is certainly shocking to see one of the richest lands in the world (which can certainly throw enough money at almost any civic problem), wasting water, especially during drought. And it is shocking and infuriating to see people with common sense (who are conserving water during drought) being punished by the state for doing so.
> The big scale in water politics is in the colorado river compact and how water rights are bought up by foreign alfalfa farmers to effectively ship water overseas.
Wait, what? California owned water is being shipped overseas?!! Even during drought?
I really don't know how to respond to such madness. All I can say such a crime (although , I have a feeling this is somehow legal) should be considered like a felony at the very least.
I heard California got a good governor. While other states have been de-funding public schools and suspensing school launches for the poor kids, he is ensuring the opposite, so such compassion will help to school and grow the new generations to be better contributors to society and nation. Maybe you Californians ought to do some mass-signatures campaign writing to him and other officials, urging them to reform the unethical historical laws and corrupt policies on water rights.
Huge amount, but maybe not in the way you intended.
Many of California's ecosystems have evolved to expect fires. Humans can't stand fires and aggressively put them out. So fuel that would be regularly burned off in mild wildfires instead builds up into megafires that exceed the limits of what the ecosystem can handle (a lot of California trees are fire-tolerant, but there's a point where the flames get too high and too intense).
So yeah, the human activity that affects these cycles is caused by our cognitive dissonance and fear to phrases like "mild wildfire".
> Its military has force projection to nearly every point on the globe, with hundreds of global military bases
How are the hosts to all those bases going to react when suddenly the guest acts belligerent? When the ally drops down to an occupier, that force projection suddenly starts looking like occupation, which becomes a lot more expensive to maintain.
And the expense has worked until now because everyone else has wanted our currency so what's a bit more currency printing, but when we kick our own global reserve currency status because we fucked all of our allies, well now that "force projections becomes a lot more expensive" actually becomes expensive^squared.
This is absolutely idiotic for anyone who indulges in the privileges of empire.
It's not about not meeting the standards of the town's health department, it's about having a 1-size-fits-all health standards.
If you make a 5-seat japaneese-style neighborhood micro-eatery conform to the same cross-contamination standards as a 800-people-per-hour mcdonalds, you're making one of these unprofitable and de-facto illegal.
Yes, lets have health codes. But lets also recognize different risk profiles and encourage all sorts of entrepreneurship. If it's 1-size-fits-all, then the only size is going to be XXL.
Can you be more specific on exactly what kind of cross-contamination standards make it impossible for a small eatery to exist? Do you have any specific rules in mind?
Its been a while since I went through a food safety course, but I don't really recall any that would make it impossible for a small shop to achieve. I follow most of the rules I learned in my own kitchen at home. Stuff like don't use the same cutting board and knife between meat and veggies without cleaning in between, don't wear jewelry while prepping, keep things in safe time/temperature constraints, etc.
Cross contamination standards can't make it impossible for a small eatery to exist, and without standards enforcement businesses will absolutely go full The Jungle. Unfortunately, I could believe that paperwork around cross contamination standards could get there- a chain can spread the cost of the laywering to get paperwork right over hundreds of establishments, and learn it progressively as it gets worse, a single establishment has to do all the paperwork themselves up front.
It's not about cutting boards or temperature constraints. Yes, that applies at any scale. It's the stuff that legally mandates a minimum-size operation. Article talks about it:
> Relatedly, our health code regulations also effectively outlaw people from opening restaurants in small spaces. Most jurisdictions require at least 3-4 different sinks—one for washing dishes (usually a large three-part sink), separate ones for washing hands, one for mopping, and often another for prepping food. This makes small commercial kitchens in under 200 square feet much harder.
> America’s food regulations are also not set up for a single person to manage. The U.S. has 3,000 different agencies handling food regulations. The whole system, scattered across eight places in the municipal code, is basically uncoordinated and varies depending on where you are.
Meatpacking has the same issue. FDA regulations are designed for industrial-scale chicken, beef, and pig processing. And if you're processing hundreds or thousands of heads a day, it's absolutely needed. But what if you have just a few heads? What if you have a small flock you want to sell to your neighbors? A 1000-head-per-delivery processing plant won't even answer your call, and you even if they did you have zero negotiating power, so your only options are to go big or not be able to legally sell it.
A lot of people have amish or menonite communities that are able to process your livestock legally, but even those are disappearing. So small farmers have no way to legally get their product to market, and so they're being gobbled up by the large industrial farms.
The regulations use safety pearl-clutching to force a specific outcome that benefits a specific group, and it's not the small family farmer the commercials idolize.
Nixon's secretary of ag said it explicitly: get big or get out.
I dunno I personally don't think its a huge ask to not use the same sink to clean the mop as the sink where they do the dishes but I guess some people don't mind mixing the usage.
I don't even mix my mop/cleaning sink (usually my tub at home) with my food prep, and my hand washing sink is separate from my kitchen sink when I'm actually in cooking mode. Even food trucks around me manage to meet these requirements.
If we're using the most extreme examples to distract using visceral disgust instead of addressing the core point of one-size-fits-all regulations tend to kick out the bottom rung of the economic opportunity ladder, might I offer a small $5 solution? Buy a mop bucket.
> If we're using the most extreme examples to distract using visceral disgust instead of addressing the core point
I am absolutely addressing a core point, that's a big part of what you previously quoted about being unable to meet health safety requirements. I didn't bring up that example, you and the previous author did. Its quite combative to act like I'm just pulling out some extreme example, when you're the one who provided the example as a regulation strangling businesses, and was the only example given.
You said cross contamination standards make such places impossible. I asked for concrete cross contamination examples that make it impossible, and the only one you've given me so far is sinks. So I'm sorry I'm only really talking sinks here, that's all I have to work with here. Other than the vagueness of the fact there's a lot of tiny jurisdictions, but that doesn't really matter given we're talking about hyper local hole-in-the-wall places. They really only care about whatever their specific local regulations are, which are usually pretty easy to go figure out.
>> Most jurisdictions require at least 3-4 different sinks—one for washing dishes (usually a large three-part sink), separate ones for washing hands, one for mopping, and often another for prepping food
Just having the mop bucket doesn't solve the problem. You take that mop bucket, and dump it where? Where do you go clean the bucket and the mop after you dump it? Where do you go to get water for the mop bucket?
What do these super tiny restaurants that are supposedly impossible to have in the US do to actually clean their dishes? What do they do to properly clean hands after handling unclean meats to prevent cross contamination? What do they do to clean the things they use to clean the facility? Do they have people with unclean hands covered in potential salmonella in the same sink they're doing dishes in? Or the sink where they cleaned the mop bucket an hour ago in? Which sink gets the axe?
You're telling me we need to get rid of these sink requirements (its the only thing you've concretely pointed to), but offering no suggestions other than "buy a mop bucket", which doesn't solve the problem at all.
You've also pointed to the idea that overregulation is what is killing small meatpackers, but once again give no concrete examples of what regulations you'd drop. I do agree there has been too much consolidation in the meatpacking industry and that smaller producers have been squeezed out. I agree this is probably a bad thing overall and we should do something to change this path we're on. I'm not 100% sure its safe to lay a large chunk of that blame on overregulation. If anything, some of the reduction of regulations have made the burden higher, such as reduction in USDA inspectors with the requirement that the meatpacker hire their own inspectors. The inspection still needs to be done, but now its the meatpacker that needs to train the inspector and pay the payroll for that person. So please, can you share some concrete examples of the regulations which should be removed for meatpacking as well?
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