Viewing profile — RockIslandLine

Several people have given several reasons, many of which alone are enough to demonstrate awfulness. The biggest reason they are bad is that they don't work. I would happily subscri…

"and the CEO talked to the protestors and told them how helpless he himself was, as he was just part of the system with relatively limited ability to change it. I'm not sure I buy …

Iowa may be an example of how ethanol is done wrong in practice, but I'm not sure your theory is so sound. Make ethanol from sugar cane, not corn. Louisiana should be the center of…

"I could imagine corporate-run nuclear plants that have the same incentives as airlines." So how exactly do you enforce that corporate executives and their families must live on si…

Why? We've got lots of coal mines with the equipment to move tons of material. Just start stacking cordwood down below.

"They don't want their family to starve." We know how to stop that. We don't have to sentence people to subsistence agriculture. When you know better, you do better, and we know be…

Engineering new biomes for fun is different than having to do it every year or you die. What do you do when seasonal heat makes Pakistan and India uninhabitable for large parts of …

Several different issues. Nuclear is necessarily large & centralized energy production, with all of the antidemocratic politics and corrupt economics that comes with that. The insa…

This kind of satire is unnecessary and unhelpful. It costs nothing to say "lab testing" instead of "in vitro". Literally the same number of syllables, zero loss of precision, and i…

"legally complex" is different from "impossible". And yes, people who have years worth of expenses saved are clearly better able to accept risk than someone with $10K in an IRA. Yo…

"Whether it is bonds, or some other instrument, they all pay interest. That debt exists, is owed, and yet you're saying "Just don't pay that interest"?" I'm saying it's wrong to cr…

"But if you want to put $5-$20K into a friend's business, or a business you know well, the SEC makes it hard unless you're already a millionaire." What do you mean? Individuals are…

"Maybe I'm missing something, but where is the for-profit motive for banks to lend, for absolutely no return?" You're definitely missing something, because private lenders are perf…

That is in fact a fundamental distinction between the Universal Basic Income and the Federal Job Guarantee. One criticism of the UBI is that being unmoored from production makes it…

"will increase innovation by getting people out of bullshit jobs and enabling entrepreneurs to pay their bills until their companies are profitable." I think that relies on a defin…

"Right now, 8% of Federal Revenue pays just the interest on that debt. If interest rates go up, say in a year or two.. so goes up that payment." Canada has a fiat currency. Thus th…

"Millions of people live every day with only a couple of dollars a day." Not in the USA they don't. There is no possible way that an individual could pay for food, clothing, and sh…

"Companies are just collections of people." False. Corporations are golems, not people at all.

"I am not able to see how a network of distributed vertical food farms would be less resilient to political disasters than growing everything in California." I fixed it for you. St…

You get all kinds, possibly depending on when the town was established. For many of the Chicago suburbs, there is a defined "business district" where most of the restaurants, bars,…

Meh. There's plenty of density for "a strip mall every four blocks". And you can make that structure totally walkable instead of requiring cars. The important thing is not to jack …

"The other thing to keep in mind is that the 'huge' bonuses usually aren't very large from an income statement point of view; if you bought an extra 0.5% growth (or savings), it wa…

"Nobody wants to try to turn around a bankrupt company at their old salary (with their old RSU's and options now worthless)." So they quit, and the company goes bankrupt on a diffe…

For certain definitions of "pay", any nation with a fiat currency could certainly place a number into a spreadsheet. Making that number mean anything might take a while.But we coul…

HVDC transmission losses are low, like 5% per 1000 km. So yes, a large, dispersed solar network could create and distribute electricity effectively.