I’ve just described some famously “excellent economy” countries, but I certainly didn’t describe Japan.

KLF burned down a million pounds. Has anyone else in history done anything like this? Even if so, KLF’s in rarefied company because it’s not something that happens even remotely close to regularly.

And the amount of anger I see in people when discussing what KLF did with their own money means the art was significant enough to generate strong opinions.

There has yet to be an attempt at a centrally planned economy that actually had accurate data to plan with.

Not advocating for central planning but the important point is that these failure modes are possible under any tyrannical regime. For an example of where capitalist competition fell down in a similar way, look no further than the Irish potato famines.

It always baffles me that people have near religious faith in a Holy Satoshi that walks away from billions of dollars “for the sake of the game”.

If he’s really so unconcerned with money or fame, it would be far more interesting for him to build it up precisely to blow it down. That’s some cosmic coyote kind of behavior and that I will always get behind.

In such a world it would only add to penalties for proven libel.

It’s a pretty simple concept: if the truth hurts, you’ve got no one but yourself to blame.

NDAs theoretically should never be able to paper over illegal actions. In a similar vein, non disparagement clauses should not be able to paper over the publication of legitimate insider experience of terrible — even if legal — behavior.

The real what-if for me is pondering what might have been had HP and other vendors not caved to the Wintel cartel in abandoning their plans to include BeOS as a preinstalled OEM option. Microsoft was sued by Be in civil court and Be won their case, but it was too little too late.

I used to prefer trades but have gone all in on mass market editions. They just feel better in my hands, especially larger volumes. Plus I can stuff it in a coat pocket on my way out the door.

And FWIW, I’ve found that the “printed by Amazon” editions have actually been higher quality than recent offsets. For example, the newest editions of Hitchiker’s Guide seem to have been laid out without any regard to the inner margin. It’s fiddly to read the first word on each line.

Meanwhile the Star Wars Legends mass markets fulfilled by Amazon in Italy and France have thicker, brighter, paper and clean margins.

For the mass market format, I have to take what I can get, and I’m glad that there are still reasonably priced editions available.

But you were talking about their practices, which tended towards custodial over exploitative. And overall these practices clearly supported biodiversity as a whole, otherwise we wouldn’t note the biodiversity of this region as anything special (see again the quote I took from your first article).

I apologize anyway for my slightly combative tone. I appreciate the resources you shared even if I haven’t had time to absorb them in full yet.

I never claimed that they had no impact, but it is clear that the impact tended towards neutral to positive because: a) the forest was still there; and b) it had the higher rate of biodiversity in the world.

Indigenous burns in California are recognized as being a net positive for the old growth forests and the biodiversity within. It doesn’t take a lot to extrapolate that the same was true in the Amazon.

This implies that the biodiversity is a result of (or, at the very least, supported by) the indigenous practices, which is a far cry from your claim that biodiversity suffered from those practices.

The continued belittling of indigenous forestry practices contributes to out of control wildfires.

People don’t understand that there are ebbs and flows to a farming life. There is always work to do but no one is out in the fields much unless it’s harvest or seeding times.

If there was never a worry about this, they could bring out (and decide) that ceiling only after being outbid.

It’s always been a requirement to make it up in volume of spins. I don’t see how this is any different.