Not to be too witty, but mine cost approximately fifty dollars, which amounted to the costs of the permit ($20) and time with the justice of the peace ($30).
That's a valid point, but they are trying to incentivize behavior to fix the issue OP asks about, so it's probably a good thing overall (it's not a hoodie for 5-star reviews only).
"The cuts amount to about 13 percent of SurveyMonkey’s workforce of about 750. The cuts were made primarily among the sales team devoted to SurveyMonkey for Business."
If its not growing, for from many investors, yes, that is a failure.
I have $1. I can do many things with it. Why would I give my $1 to someone in exchange for a piece of their business if that business is not growing when I could instead give that $1 to someone who is growing? I want my $1 to become worth more.
Yes, yes yes, I know companies that pay dividends or profit sharing, etc. However what's the return on those? It is higher than somewhere else?
Divorce yourself from thinking about what the company does or ever how much money it is making. For many investors, they are looking for opportunities to put in some money, get an asset, and then sell that asset for a profit. Growth is key to forecasting returns and thus comparing different investment opportunities.
I get what you are saying, and even agree to an extent. The fact that Dell had to take itself private to be able to save itself is a good recent example of how the super short term thinking of stock market investors can hurt a company.
That said, if a company doesn't want to be exposed to that sort of investor, then it shouldn't have done IPO and become a publicly traded company.
The best alternative to antibiotics is more antibiotics - a flood of more antibiotics, more than we could ever use up. The best way to do that is support automation and other efficiency gains and individual projects in mining the bacterial world for novel antibacterial weaponry. That used to be impractical, but now that there is, as of 2015, a way to culture the 99% of bacteria that couldn't be cultured before, it is now very practical to look for everything we might need in biomedicine in the bacterial world. See:
I can't imagine that approaching ecology from a perspective of re-wilding will be of much benefit. The wild is happy to take over a space that isn't kept civilized (for instance, the exclusion zone around Chernobyl), so you quickly end up with a situation where you want to be able to predict the consequences of any actions you take against the existing ecology, which is anyway how we are managing 'wild' spaces.
Unfortunately many of the effects of humans are long-lasting. The elimination of buffalo, for instance, or the loss of most wolf populations in North America which lead to the explosion of deer, IIRC. I am quite interested in the possibilities of selective breeding to replace extinct species, and the major die-off currently happening could have negative effects we have not yet even begun to see.
"how do we suck the carbon from 150 years of burning fossil fuels out of our atmosphere?" Stop destroying forests, stop burning fuels, start growing more plants. The real question is, how to accomplish these.
Look at the most basic need: food. Demand is relatively constant - you need enough to eat, and shouldn't eat too much (obviously in practice there is a certain amount of elasticity and differences in demand for different types of food). Supply of food already exceeds demand (look at food waste, supermarkets tossing out ugly produce or burning unsold items to maintain their profit margin). So - demand for food barely goes up, supply continues to exceed demand.
I would say shelter is as much of a basic need, and places like the bay area show that prices are rapidly increasing due to demand. Would a basic income exacerbate the problem in places that already have an issue with high housing costs?
As far as food goes, wouldn't the prices of luxury foods, like porterhouse steaks and the cost of going out to eat likely increase rapidly? I mean, no one needs to eat expensive food, but isn't the purpose of the basic income to prevent people from having to eat ramen 3 times/day?
The bay area is an interesting example. Prices are skyrocketing from demand, but part of the reason why supply has been so slow is that demand has been so sudden. San Francisco has always had a high quality of life, but it did just fine until the tech booms. The majority of people now moving to SF are coming for economic reasons. Would UBI reduce these motivations, easing pressure on the local rental market? I don't know.
SF definitely demonstrates that the price of food will go up if there's enough money floating around. But you can still get a burrito for $6 if you know where to look.
But the more interesting possibility is actually that we don't increase demand. You have the unemployed, who will go from having no income to having income, and demand from them will certainly rise for the necessities. But for the large middle swath, perhaps this will not add to their spending, but instead provide a means for people to take longer vacations, stay home with children, or create artwork more adventurously. Perhaps this will, rather than increasing demand generally, provide flexibility sufficient for the middle class to feel safer in spending more time in ways that build social ties, benefit the community, and create cultural value that is insufficiently valued in the current economic regime.
