Arguably Wrong
@arguablywrong
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Theoretical population genetics and apparently now amateur epidemiology
Joined December 2016
I had thought it was an actual *plan*, not some idiotic econ model that literally recommends buying 20 cents of butter and a dollar of eggs a week.
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The USDA food plan is literally insane. Two fun facts:.1) it recommends you spend 8% of the budget for a toddler on fruit juice.2) their calorie budget for a 40yo man is 3000.
First, it clearly says the *maximum* not *baseline*. Second, the USDA puts out monthly food plans you can use as guidance for grocery spending. Their "thrifty" food plan (lowest $) for a family of four (male & female adults, two kids under 12) budgets over $50 per person per week
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Even with a discount rate of 0%, the net benefit over their lifetime of a new Danish baby is only ~$25K. They wouldn't get into the black until age 53. Probably I'd need to work out productivity growth over time as well to get this more accurate.
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That gets you the expected current value of each future year of a new baby's future life. With these numbers, that baby never gets fiscally into the black. The discount rate is high enough that the future productivity of the kid is outweighed by the current costs.
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I thought this was interesting, so I ran some Frankenstein spreadsheets. Take US actuarial tables to get survival rates to each age up to 90. Take that viral Danish plot of net fiscal impact of Danes at each age, convert to US dollars. Add a discount rate of 3% per annum.
If you think making decisions while discounting cash flow is bad, try making decisions without discounting cash flow.
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Fresh bread, though, will go moldy in about three days without preservatives (sodium benzoate, mostly). So you either need to visit the bakery regularly or bake your own bread regularly to avoid it.
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Pancake mix should also be able to be preservative-free, e.g. this brand doesn't have any:.
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The syrups are interesting because most syrups should have high enough sugar concentration to keep them from going bad without preservatives; just checked my maple syrup in the fridge (Kirkland) and it doesn't have preservatives in it.
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That means either you need some other preservation method (canning, freezing, vinegar or high salt/sugar) or you have to change the way you eat to avoid the need to keep food from going bad (cook from shelf-stable ingredients or go shopping daily).
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The preservative discussion here is interesting. I come at this from a different angle, not as a health food nut but as a food storage guy. The key thing, which seems obvious, is that without these preservatives food will go bad shockingly fast.
Starting to suspect that people are being intentionally dense about this. Yes, I think it’s a problem that the ingredients for a simple American breakfast often served to children - pancakes and a little syrup - are now impossible to find in a typical grocery store without a.
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The open borders guys believe it's unfair to keep people from moving to the US. Would they also believe it's unfair to, say, keep Guatemala from joining the US if they all voted in favor of it? Honestly curious here.
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Thought experiment re: immigration. Suppose the members of some nation overwhelmingly wish to be a part of the US. There's two ways they could do that: individually move to the US or join the US as a new territory or state of it.
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RT @ghosttyped: Good news for the tech job market buried in the “big beautiful bill” - companies will be able to fully and immediately dedu….
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Means the most dangerous escalatory pathways would come from significant Indian conventional successes, particularly if they come with taking of Pakistani territory. We should lean hard on them so they don't do this.
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Worth discussing nuclear doctrines:.Indian doctrine is no first use, nuclear weapons only in retaliation. Pakistani doctrine is first strikes are allowed, if used against attacking troops on Pakistani ground.
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In the same vein, it used to be that the state had to prove you had a guilty mind, that you had intended to commit an unlawful act. But now we have whole swathes of "regulatory crimes" that are strict liability but still carry substantial penalties.
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But if there's no law change, and before you had decided not to prosecute group X for facial violations of the law but now you are, there's no protection against that.
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