NickM

I would hazard a guess that for most western cultures, it's probably easier to convince people to replace meat with plant-based food than it is to replace meat with bugs. So if we want insect-based foods to take off, I feel like there's got to be some fundamental advantage over just switching to a vegetarian diet. Maybe that advantage exists; I just don't know what it might be.

The train, by contrast, involves leaving from downtown near where I live, sitting on the train, and arriving in Manhattan a few blocks from my office. It's so much simpler and more relaxing, and much easier to actually get work done during the trip, so oftentimes it's worth the extra couple of hours the trip takes. If we could invest in high-speed rail and make the whole train trip even, say, 30% faster, there would be no contest.

I think the situation is a little more complicated than that. Electricity is a much cheaper fuel than diesel, and maintenance costs are lower for electric vehicles too, so in the long term electric buses may end up saving more money than they cost.

Add to that the fact that interest rates are very low right now, and it may even turn out that financing the electric buses and charging systems could allow cities to save money from day one, though I haven't crunched any numbers so this is admittedly just speculation on my part.

Sure they do. Saying that people don't have control over anything is like saying "the light switches in my house don't control the lights because the switches can't do anything without a person flipping them". Just because there's no spontaneous self-generated action that a switch can perform by itself doesn't mean that the switch isn't controlling something.

Looking at this from a different angle, do you believe that a digital simulation of your brain would produce the same kind of subjective experience of consciousness within the computer that you yourself perceive? Is subjective experience simply a side effect of certain types of computation? That may be true, but if you believe that, you start to get into some profoundly bizarre implications about the nature of reality. Check out the novel "Permutation City" by Greg Egan for a great exploration of this topic.

- It'll be a long time before fuel cells are cost competitive with gas or electric cars, but for planes the cost of fuel and operation is much more significant than with a car, so the upfront cost for building the plane seems less significant in comparison

- Refueling infrastructure is much easier to implement at a (relatively) small number of airports than it is to build many small consumer refueling stations everywhere

- Space is more important than weight in a car, but the opposite may be true for a plane

- Crash safety is a much bigger problem for cars than planes - plane crashes are rare, and if a plane crashes there's a good chance everyone dies anyway, but if you're designing a car you're going to have to be really careful to make sure every other fender bender doesn't result in a hydrogen explosion

Of course there's the issue that most hydrogen today is created from fossil fuels, but perhaps there are ways to generate it sustainably and still remain competitive with the cost of jet fuel?

Electric cars can be a very competitive alternative to gasoline cars, but electric batteries are not yet energy-dense enough to make long-distance air travel viable, so it feels like hydrogen planes might be the least bad solution if we want to get off of fossil fuels.

Well, unless you count physical exercise.

Yeah I mean, in theory that's great and all but in practice most people are going to have to go through a lot of paperwork and hassle to set up a loan or otherwise get the cash together up front. Even if you can get a full refund, test driving is still a much lower commitment.

That said, maybe supply is so much more of a bottleneck than demand for them that it's not worth the money to keep all the stores open. Or maybe enough consumers have cars now that owners are just giving test drives to their friends and family instead. I don't really know what the right decision for them is here, but the "oh well nobody needs test drives because of our refund policy" argument did feel a little silly to me.

It's frustrating to know that despite how bad they are, despite every new discovery of terribleness, nothing's going to change, and they're just going to get bigger.

Plenty of other social networks that once seemed dominant have collapsed in the past. I agree it feels frustrating, but if a large enough minority of users abandons Facebook I do think that we could hit critical mass where even people on FB start using alternative communication tools to keep in touch with ex-Facebookers, and then that'll start creating a positive feedback loop by making it easier for more people to leave as other platforms fill in and pick up the slack.

Maybe it's time to just switch back to downloading the PDF forms, filling them in on my local computer, printing them out, and just mailing them in. Ugh.

The first time around, it's a little bit of a pain to figure out what forms you need to attach and such, but it's really not that hard if you read the instructions for the forms and just follow the directions. If you're doing something complex like running a business and dealing with depreciable property or calculating AMT, it gets a little hairy, but even then I've generally been able to figure things out by just reading through the free publications that the IRS puts up on the web. I also like the sense of deeper understanding that I get from seeing how everything is being calculated, instead of just answering a bunch of questions and then having an algorithm spit out a number for my refund.

If I give you $27 and you give me $3 back, then yes, technically you've handed me $3. Taking that out of context ignores the end result, which is that I've given you a net $24. You wouldn't be $3 richer if the transaction had never taken place, so acting all indignant that you paid me $3 when you came out way ahead seems pretty disingenuous to me.

Because Amazon can easily go elsewhere, and most places have lower taxes than NYC. Giving them a ~10% off coupon on an extremely high tax rate is not the same as handing them money.

You can object to the deal on principle, sure, but you're ignoring the fundamental reality of the situation; if NY refuses to give them any incentives, they can just as easily go to some other location that will give them incentives. And if all the states banded together and agreed that nobody would give them incentives, NY still loses, because then they'll just pick a place with lower tax rates.

I can understand the appeal of trying to stand up to big corporations, but in the end, NY isn't screwing Amazon by refusing to negotiate with them on this, they're just screwing themselves. If you want to have high tax rates and not lose business to other states, it's a winning strategy to be open to compromise sometimes.

Perhaps, but people have been saying exactly this about Tesla for the last ten years now. Hasn’t been an issue for them yet, despite much improvement in the EV offerings from other manufacturers.

I know it's popular to hate on the global elite and jump all over their hypocrisy at any opportunity, but we need to take a long, hand look at ourselves for a minute. There are no headlines right now proclaiming outrage over the number of people flying private jets to go on fancy vacations, but tons of headlines about people flying jets to this climate talk. It's crazy and irrational for us to scream about people using private jets for events that are trying to help the world but then ignore all the selfish personal uses of private jets that are constantly happening for more frivolous reasons.

The outcome of talks like these is tremendously important if we want to address climate change; if allowing people to spend a little extra jet fuel will help encourage better attendance and ensure the attendees feel refreshed and sharp when they arrive, then that seems like an okay tradeoff to me. The extra CO2 being emitted here really is a tiny drop in the bucket.

EDIT: Judging by the silent downvotes, I guess people would rather just cling to their blind outrage than think critically about their own reactions to these things. Disappointing.