NickM

Though, of course, you then need even more reporting than we already have, but it would have the upside of no longer disincentivizing work like the current system does, and rewarding savings over spending too.

“A decade more” seems way too pessimistic given current EV prices and battery capacities. The 2022 Bolt will have a starting price of $32k with a 65kWh battery, for example.

The gist is that a private equity firm bought a defunct fossil plant and are running it to power mining rigs directly, without any connection to the outside power grid. Apparently this allows them to do an end run around certain regulations and taxes which only apply to grid-connected power plants.

The scariest part is that this is apparently insanely profitable for them. NY is pretty progressive and it would not surprise me if they crack down on this kind of thing, but other states or countries seem unlikely to do that.

All the stories we've read lately about fossil plants shutting down due to being replaced by renewables could ultimately be for nothing if companies like this one buy them all up and restart them.

45% of voters rank Trump 1st, Romney 2nd, Biden 3rd

25% of voters rank Romney 1st, Trump 2nd, Biden 3rd

30% of voters rank Biden 1st, Romney 2nd, Trump 3rd

This seems like a fairly plausible real-world situation, and it also seems pretty easy to imagine how Democrats could look at the polling numbers and realize that Biden is never going to win in their state, and that ranking Romney 1st is their only chance to stop Trump.

But suppose you're right and voters rank candidates honestly because they can't predict how to vote strategically; ultimately, I think that is arguably even worse, because even if voters can't predict how to vote strategically in advance, they can certainly still feel resentful after the fact when the results are tallied and it becomes clear that they got screwed over by voting honestly. At least in plurality voting, it's easy to understand the tradeoffs and choose whether you want to vote for a spoiler candidate or not. Surely it will not lead to greater voter enfranchisement for people who find out after they voted that they accidentally spoiled their own votes, and could've had a say in the outcome if they'd expressed their rankings differently.

If this still all sounds hypothetical, keep in mind that this is exactly what happened in the 2009 Burlington, VT mayoral election. The Republican candidate acted as a spoiler for the Democrat (who had the broadest popular support) and instead the Democrat was eliminated and the third-party Progressive candidate was elected. This led to wide-spread dissatisfaction and IRV was repealed there in 2010.

45% of voters rank A 1st, B 2nd, C 3rd

25% of voters rank B 1st, A 2nd, C 3rd

30% of voters rank C 1st, B 2nd, A 3rd

Nobody has the majority, so B is eliminated, and A wins round 2 with 70%. But 30% of voters preferred B over A, and if they had ranked B first, then B would've won in the first round with 55%. By voting honestly, the C voters threw away their votes. None of their later rankings mattered, because C was not eliminated before a victor was declared.

Certainly that's what happened in Burlington, VT where a spoiler candidate swung the 2009 mayoral election, and IRV was subsequently repealed. They didn't say "oh oops, well this experiment failed, let's try approval voting instead"; they just went back to plurality voting and that was that.

I agree, but there's also not really a better word to describe something that is like a Ponzi scheme in every respect except the lack of central coordination.

Having a distributed hive mind of people all collectively trying to pump the value of a coin basically yields the same end result as a conventional Ponzi scheme, but makes it much harder to regulate or shut down.

Even worse is the fact that many of the people involved truly believe in their own evangelism, and don't realize that they're part of a negative-sum game. With the amount of value destroyed via mining, and the lack of any new value being created by the people investing in crypto, there will inevitably be more losers than winners in the long run, but that doesn't stop people from spouting HODL memes because they genuinely think that value is being created from nothing and that everyone is somehow going to get rich off of this stuff.

He really should have known better, but all that said it's not hard to imagine how this could've played out behind the scenes. He's previously mentioned having trusted friends who convinced him of the value of crypto, and he may have genuinely believed that it would drive growth of renewables long-term, but then changed his views as he became more aware of the damage this is causing in the here and now.

Of course hormones do have effects on the brain, but "chemical X affects our mood, therefore chemicals Y and Z must mean there are huge inherent differences between the genders" feels like a pretty weak argument to me.

I don't think that's necessarily true. It will be expensive to switch to renewables, certainly, but the ongoing externalities and subsidies for fossil fuels are already extremely expensive to society. Even if you completely ignore climate change, the costs in terms of healthcare and QALYs just due to air pollution alone are tremendous.

We have the technology we need to solve climate change already, the problem is not that people aren't willing to make the necessary sacrifices, the problem is that it's hard to get past societal inertia and overcome entrenched special interests.

Just because lots of people have kids, for example, doesn't mean that having kids makes people happier, and in fact studies seem to show the opposite to be true on average. That said, I'm not trying to say that having kids is always an irrational choice, and certainly it makes some people happier (or it might make people "unhappier" but lend them a greater sense of meaning and purpose that balances things out). But clearly you can't just say "well, correlation must imply causation because otherwise why would people do X if it makes them less happy?"

It's entirely possible to have an enduring, meaningful, devoted, monogamous relationship that brings a great deal of happiness to both partners without that relationship being a requirement for the people involved to experience any amount of happiness or fulfillment in their lives.

Maybe before the cap, you could argue that the true combined marginal rate was lower than 50% since the deduction for the state income tax would offset some of the federal tax, but a $10k deduction doesn't matter much to someone who's making enough to be in the top income brackets.

Well I'm no expert, but other countries seem to be managing it just fine.