Viewing profile — nate_meurer

That's a good point, and good examples. I'd compare the destruction of aquifers (some of them anyway) as akin to those things.

> Water which is evaporated is also returned to the ecosystem. It falls back out as rain. This is about as useful as saying "the water stays on Earth". The ecological damage entire…

This looks like a good review, and it definitely pertains to your effort here. Although the authors play up the positivity of their conclusions a bit (which is useful if they want …

No, I pointed out specific flaws in those papers. You're just pretending that I'm dismissing them out of hand so you don't have to read them yourself. Once again, the Australian st…

It's an interesting article overall, but this assertion: > Carbon dioxide is bad for cognition. is dubious and unsupported by science. As I point out downthread, we have extensive …

> astronauts... reported mental viscosity(brain fog) and headaches I can think of plenty of excellent reasons the environment in the space station would lead to physiological issue…

> Cognitive decline starts above 600 ppm according to air quality studies. According to an older, small study of short duration (Mendell and Fisk at LBNL), the results of which are…

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Interest and military and take a distant third and fourth place respectively. Here are the rough proportions of the top US federal budget expenditures according to the Treasury Dep…

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Well yeah, it's still debt. It's still the unpaid balance of the cost of goods and services. The essential purpose of a market for IOUs is to allow us to issue a lot more IOUs. Thi…

My point is not that economic surpluses don't ever exist, but that the perceived surpluses that people invoke in order to defend the present welfare state are unsustainable, and th…

Food and clothing are actually an argument against you here. Sure we waste a lot of both, and yet food insecurity is rare in the First World, and lack of clothing is pretty much th…

Norway's fiscal discipline is certainly the exception that proves the rule. Britain's failure to steward the wealth of its half of the North Sea's bounty provides a good example of…

If that's true, it's odd that so many social welfare programs across the western world are consuming an ever-growing share of GDP, incurring massive debt, and grinding toward insol…

No, we're not. It just seems like there's excess because the costs of running social programs are being paid with runaway debt. Those bills will eventually require settling, and it…

The wealth of the "capital class", whatever that means, is dwarfed by the debt being run up by governments. My favorite example: if you confiscated all of the wealth from all of th…

> giving them more power doesn't look like a slippery slope straight to dystopia. This only makes sense if you have no concept of "future", wherein different, less reasonable peopl…

This isn't 1846. Mexico is our largest single trading partner. Spending our own lives and treasure to babysit an unstable nation on our Southern border is in fact the last thing th…

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What do you mean by "Democrat failures"? The Democratic party doesn't believe Biden's immigration policy was a failure, and in fact the official party position seems to be that Bid…

Which of these governments do you trust? The same governments, mind you, that are working diligently to end anonymity on the Internet.

When is comes to immigration in particular, that simply isn't true. As I alluded to in my comment, Obama inherited Bush's Operation Streamline immigration regime, which was running…

I know the Optimus marketing wank is all sci-fi humanoids, but I wonder if the products that actually hit the market will be much simpler, not trying to compete with human arms, as…

I don't think the Obama comparison is very useful. Trump faces a vastly more difficult problem than Obama did. For most of his presidency, Obama simply continued the Operation Stre…