Viewing profile — burgessaccount

“Barter” may not be the best term for it, but until the 18th/19th century (varied a lot by location), most people procured the physical goods they needed through their own family’s…

I think the article really under-emphasizes the role of capitalism in this. If I need help with my kid, I don’t call my mom, I hire a babysitter. If my mom needs medical help, she …

I’m not so sure about blaming social media. I really wish the article had included any sort of concrete data on whether estrangement has actually become more common over time. In m…

Yeah. I guess my instinct would be this is something platforms have to do while they’re still considered cool? Like Snapchat could have done this seven years ago but couldn't pull …

This feels like when Microsoft pays for TV characters to use Bing instead of Google. It doesn’t make Bing look cooler, it just makes the TV shows look cheap.

You can google all the stats I provided, just like I can google all the no-citation stats you provided. Yup! I’m a big fan of contraception and options for women. That will probabl…

No, the test is, does a public high school diploma command more pay than no high school diploma? And the answer is a resounding yes. As I have noted, multiple times, in this discou…

Hmm… can’t point to one specific book, but there are lots of links. You can google “reforestation monoculture” and “reforestation native species.” This article is a great place to …

Or it’s possible that your public school helped make you into the person your professor thought had potential. Re: Seattle. I didn’t say “the public school system is perfect and ne…

Also, your public high school got you admitted to Caltech, so… worthless??

Okay, well I had the opposite experience, and found that my public high school had made me over-prepared for Yale, to the point that writing 20 page papers was easy. One individual…

Of course rising population is at the heart of this. But unless you’re planning to Thanos our way out of the situation, the people in the Western world need to consume less. Less b…

I find that statement pretty goofy. I went to an excellent public school - better than many private schools. The overall expansion of public schools since the 19th century has mass…

Instead of subsidizing the ridiculously inflated cost of these programs through loans, the government should just open a string of bare-bones universities across the country that o…

That’s exactly right. I work in film and TV, and there are great, high-paid jobs in those fields… if you win the equivalent of a professional lottery. Unfortunately these MFA progr…

Definitely true! I am a huge fan of trees. But the wrong tree in the wrong place is a bad thing. I try to advocate for responsible and thoughtful reforestation - which is, unfortun…

Particulate matter in the air causes precipitation. Spraying large amounts of particulate matter into the sky is likely to drastically change global rainfall patterns - so you migh…

I actually think all people in the developed world - rich people of course most of all, but “commoners” too - do need to learn to be content with a lot less. Before the industrial …

Trees actually can provide tremendous cooling dynamics, beyond CO2 absorption. They provide shade at ground level. If every house in the US were surrounded by trees instead of usel…

Calcium carbonate is a better fit - see Gates’s experiments. Likely to still be disastrous, but better than sulfur dioxide

A few other problems - 1) trees take a lot of water to grow, and 2) all the carbon they sequester can go right back into the atmosphere in a forest fire. Some very scrupulous carbo…

Yeah, I mean the green new deal was like 75% not climate spending? And a billionaire does not need to tackle the whole problem, just make a dent? My main point was that we actually…

I partly agree - yes, individual people spending money is not a long-term solution. But we aren’t even in the stage of needing stable, long-term solutions - we need immediate, dras…

I’m very excited about them as a possibility (I think there’s another thread about them on HN?) but so much is unproven. We have no idea how much carbon the sand will absorb, or ho…

Why doesn’t he just use a few of his billions to build free renewable power plants? Emissions reduction, now, is so much more important than the possibility of carbon reduction in …