NickM

That's not what the articles says at all.

I get your point, but to be fair, the numbers in your comparison are a bit off, since a $40-60k tax credit would make many electric cars effectively free. That would be a much bigger incentive than what Norway has.

Personally, I live in Rochester, NY, and I absolutely love it. There are definitely some neighborhoods that I avoid, but there are also extremely nice areas in the city with beautiful yet affordable housing and lots to do. There are all kinds of fun events, concerts, and festivals going on all year; lots of nice restaurants, bars, and coffee shops; an assortment of beautiful parks; the list goes on. The community of friends I've met here is also much more tight knit than anything I've encountered in bigger, busier cities.

I think a lot of people tend to gravitate toward extremes: I see a lot of answers in this thread pointing to very large cities, or super-rural areas out in nature, or far-away international metropolises. There's definitely something to be said for picking a middle ground, though - I feel like I get to have my cake and eat it too, and if I want to occasionally go to a Michelin star restaurant or climb a mountain, I can always do that on vacation (which, of course, is easy to fit in the budget too, given the amount of money I save by living here).

The frames are built from really thick wooden beams that can take a beating. I had a large tree fall on my house earlier this year, and the trunk bounced/slid off, doing only superficial damage to the roof and siding; I talked to multiple contractors and insurance people who said a newer house built using modern construction standards would've been flattened, or at least suffered serious structural damage.

Things like windows are built to last too. The original wooden sash cord designs are still functioning 100+ years after they were built, with the exception of a couple windows that needed the cords replaced, but that's relatively cheap and easy. I expect the same windows will continue to work another 100 years as long as they're cared for and maintained.

This isn't about "the democratization of luxury", as another commenter suggested. Cheap construction costs more in the long term. This is about a cultural shift toward favoring short-term over long-term thinking. Long-lasting wood sash cord windows would not be expensive to build in this day and age, and they could be quite energy efficient too with modern glass and weather stripping, but people don't think or care about the long term the way they used to, and so they'd would rather settle for cheap, shiny vinyl windows that yellow and crack and fall apart in a matter of decades.

Well sure, but at least some houses used to be beautiful and long-lasting; nowadays, even large, expensive mansions are typically built in a cheap, slapdash manner, using techniques and materials that are not nearly as long-lasting or durable as the ones that would've been used to build a nice house a century ago.

For a really obvious example, just look at roofing materials; a good slate roof can last over a century with minimal maintenance, but nobody builds houses with slate roofs anymore. Instead, even high-end homes use asphalt shingles that last 20-30 years tops.

- Humans need food to live because it provides energy and nutrients.

- From a fundamental standpoint of physics and available materials, nutrients are relatively easy to get; as far as I know, most vitamins and minerals are pretty cheap to either come by naturally or manufacture, and you don't need that much of any of them to keep a person healthy, so let's assume food energy is the real limiting factor here.

- The energy in most food comes from photosynthesis (either directly, in the case of eating plants, or indirectly, in the case of feeding plants to animals for growing meat).

- Photosynthesis is an extremely inefficient way to turn solar radiation into chemical energy. Only about 3 to 6 percent of incoming solar energy is used by plants to create biomass, and not all of that biomass necessarily equates to calories we can digest and absorb.

So, while this isn't a particularly appetizing future to imagine living in, I don't know of any fundamental reason why artificially producing edible calories via solar electricity and chemical processes couldn't vastly exceed the efficiency of natural-grown food. It might be tricky getting to the point where fake food like this is healthy and tastes good...but if it saves the world from starving and stops civilization from collapsing then hey, it's not a bad fallback plan.

Besides being a big jump in efficiency, this type of tech could also enable the use of non-arable land for food production, since presumably you could set up the necessary manufacturing facilities anywhere you want.

But suppose we never figure out a good way to recycle these batteries, and we just have to throw them all in a landfill and keep making new ones. Is that actually so terrible? There's nothing toxic in a typical li-ion battery, so basically we just have inert materials that were taken from the ground being put back in the ground. Mining for nickel/cobalt/lithium is not great for the environment, but the effect is pretty localized, so a "disposable battery future" is probably still highly preferable over the fossil fuel status quo where the entire planet is fucked.

They claim they want a "geographically diverse team", but without saying what benefit that brings them, that doesn't really explain anything.

If you want to make an impact, look toward political solutions; raise awareness among your friends and family, write to your representatives, send a letter to your local newspaper, etc. etc. The only reason companies are overexploiting these resources is because it's profitable; a small tax or tariff could tip the scales in a much bigger way than your own individual consumer habits ever will.

The author directly addresses this further down in the article. Regression to the mean is a possible explanation of the numbers he cites, but it doesn't refute the main point he's making, which is that some numbers suggest poor people capture more of the gains from economic growth than is widely thought.

Local currencies have been created and used in many places all over the world for a long time, without needing anything like crypto. Nobody is being called a criminal over this, it's quite common.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_currency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_community_currencies_i...

Playing with other variables besides calories, like the specific foods you pick and the timing of meals, can produce dramatic, measurable health changes and make a huge difference in how hungry you will feel at different times of day.

EDIT: I just saw the other reply someone wrote that used a rocket analogy instead of a jet plane analogy, funny how we both independently came up with such a similar response.

I'm curious, do you think the whole idea of a market-based solution is bad, or do you just think that actual real-world implementations have been lacking so far?

I mean, it seems to me that if you tax emissions strongly and uniformly enough, then at some point it has to have an impact. I think existing schemes have just been pretty weak.

I agree that carbon taxes can potentially hit poor and middle class folks unfairly hard, but this can easily be solved via carbon dividend type schemes.

I like semi-autonomous systems because they still take some of the cognitive load off of driving. Paying attention is still easier than paying attention plus constantly having to adjust speed/steering/etc.

There is also something to be said for sending humans to a place where humans have never been able to go before. To many people, that's an end goal in and of itself.

https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pallotta_the_way_we_think_abou...

Choice quote: "so in the for-profit sector, the more value you produce the more money you can make, but we don't like non-profits to use money to incentive people to produce more in social service. We have a visceral reaction to the idea that anyone would make much money helping other people; interesting that we don't have a visceral reaction to the notion that people would make a lot of money not helping other people."

I saw that other answers had already explained how shorts lower the stock price, but nobody had pointed out the other ways in which they "damage the company", as the original post put it.

Maybe folks are skeptical about the fraudulent NHTSA complaints? If so, here's a source: https://electrek.co/2016/06/13/tesla-fale-complaints-suspens...