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Self-driving cars decrease the internal costs of driving (allowing you to do it without having to pay attention) while keeping the external costs (congestion, danger, pollution, no…

I'm not exactly sure the point you're making about each country pointing at another as a positive example. The chain you've listed (US->UK->Germany->Spain->China) is a pretty good …

Different people have very different relationships to art (in this case, music). For me, the aspects of communication and empathy are key: I think of a song as a message from a par…

I like the thought behind the piece, but what I think the criticisms are reacting to is the profusion of short, bursty sentences (just like the ones in the parent post), which can …

This is normal for the Economist. I don't really understand why -- they clearly have an American edition (I get their print version in the US and its headlines and organization is …

Can you explain more why you think this? As I see it, cars in general remain very highly negative-externality, and self-driving doesn't change it much. Regular ICE cars: - air poll…

I don't think this is a crazy take, but it is missing two big factors that self driving maximalists often ignore. First is the cost of driving. A reasonable rule of thumb is $0.50/…

The bright line distinction is Pepsi watching Food Lion's end-consumer pricing and trying to force it up in order to mollify Walmart. I actually doubt this is remarkable in the wor…

It's not the discounting that's a problem -- it's the intentionally watching other stores and preventing them from closing the "price gap" with Walmart > As a result of Food Lion t…

I cannot understand this sentiment. If you commit a crime in a country and don't pay the fine, why would you be surprised if they made you pay the fine next time you crossed the bo…

In the USA, unemployment is based on a periodic, 60k household survey. You may not have ever been contacted but that's just the nature of sampling. It's true that some countries re…

A couple of points: - Headline unemployment _is_ "people who want jobs [enough to be looking for them] but can't find one". The metric you linked to is including people outside the…

I respectfully disagree. Once you open up the possibility of physical force the guarantees of cryptocurrency look pretty thin. Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/538/

It's always interesting when I see this take because I was raised the opposite way and was really surprised to learn a few years back from articles like [1] that some people consid…

Sorry, what's your position here - that any renting of a property is an "economic rent" and thus immoral? That makes little sense to me. I am a renter and glad to be so because I'm…

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding, or approaching this wrong as someone who doesn't tend to have bad reactions to altitude if I am careful with it. But doesn't this kind of defeat the p…

Title is a little misleading, as attested to by several comments here. It's more a standardization (which, yes, does include "banning" the non-standard labels) Relevant quote: > Th…

Can you explain why you'd characterize it as hyperbole? Larger vehicles are demonstrably more dangerous[1], especially to children, and do put out more CO2 emissions. In what other…

I don't see the argument here. Importing less leads to selling less USD (yes), somehow leading to devaluation of USD? Is the implication that the dollar is strong because the US go…

I was going for sources that could be cited -- for instance, I could only find reliable data on the Big Mac because of the Economist's famous index thereof. If you have a good sour…

I see this view a lot, but every time I look at the actual data it isn't borne out. BLS official inflation: $100 in Jan 2010 had the purchasing power of $144.94 today. That works o…

My point is that it's a spectrum, not a bright line. We do, in fact, have roads that go into parks. Some parks even have trails; some even provide bathrooms and campsites, with var…

I've come to believe that there's a place for the more accessible enjoyment of the outdoors that the via ferrata seems to represent. Every park represents a different place on the …