411–420 of 483 posts
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Cuba would be an example otherwise? Despite having the nearby superpower trying their hardest to destroy Cuba, their communist system continues to work fine
Cuba is an abysmal failure. People have their occupations set by the government, depend on meager monthly state rations, and have almost no disposal income for consumer purchases. That's why people flee Cuba for the US and not the other way around.
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> See a transcript of Alito's speech this week. Does anyone have a link to the transcript? I can only find video clips of the keynote speech.
Video and Transcript of Justice Alito's Keynote Address to the Federalist Society https://reason.com/volokh/2020/11/12/video-and-transcript-of... https://youtube.com/watch?v=tYLZL4GZVbA
The USA needs a law that limits individuals to only donating something like $5,000 per person to any political campaign entity such as PACs, Super PACs, and political campaigns. Companies should not be able to contribute anything, only citizens. CA Props should also have this limit. Otherwise, the USA will be defacto ruled by whichever entities are able to contribute the most to campaigns and advertising for politici…
such a rule would be very difficult to make. let's say that there is a NGO that advocates for the rights of illegal immigrants. can a fundraiser donate more than $5,000 to that NGO? if not, I doubt that many NGOs would survive, so let's assume so. if that NGO wants to endorse Biden, are they allowed? if not, can they hint that people should vote against the candidate who wants to build a wall? If they are allowed to…
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The current trajectory of temperature increase is at least 4~5°C (rather optimistic) in 2100, which would mean that a pretty wide area surrounding the equator will, year-round or for significant parts of the year, have a wet-bulb temperature at or above 35°C. It is the limit at which human life (and mammal life in general) is entirely impossible, due to over-heating. That unlivable area will include most of India, In…
I have come to the unfortunate conclusion that "lack of rice" (and lack of clean water) is going to be a major issue whether we build out nuclear or not. I think humanity is in for a dark couple hundred years. The window hasn't closed, but we are hard pressed dealing with all the wrong fights and time is losing. The less "1000 year tail of disaster" opportunities we can have available when things start to unravel the…
The world concrete production is a larger source of GHG than the entire world fleet of trucks used for goods transportation, with some margin. And that's only accounting CO2 emitted by the chemical reaction itself, not even accounting for the production of the energy necessary for the reaction, that often comes from natural gas.
That CO2 is not being displaced by nuclear power plants, solar panels, wind turbines or batteries in fancy cars. It's being replaced by not using concrete anymore. My point is that GHG emissions go way way further than just electricity production or gasoline to power cars or planes: it's chemistry (fertilizers, concrete, etc) and metallurgy.
I don't hear much about it, not least because I think it's a very hard problem: right now, using less concrete means less constructions. There aren't enough trees, and they don't grow quickly enough, to do everything using wood, although that could be a partial solution. But the construction sector employs A LOT of people. So the path to less concrete is a path to fewer jobs, and a shrinking economy...
We are in for a very rough ride indeed.
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How much of that was spin and framing against the Democrats or did anyone seriously believe that they were in favour of mob violence? New rule: if you don't condemn child rape every Monday morning then until you do it is assumed that you are in favour. Tiny furors like the "who's wearing an American flag lapel pin" are is too often motivated by political opportunity rather than any real question of where the parties…
> Republicans seem to love their mostly meaningless and unsurprising performative doxologies. You need to update your views for today's political scene. These conditions were true up til around 2008. Since then, the Democrats are now the party that engages in the performative doxologies. Need I remind you of all that tone-deaf BLM kneeling crap in DC? Or how about the mask mandates? The face masks are the Democrats'…
Arguments against spreading diseased aerosols based on politics or some personal liberty are simplistic and ignore physical reality.
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It's also, like, 4x more expensive per kWh (probably 2x more expensive with variability taken into account) than wind or solar and is uninsurable without a government backstop. I really wonder why people are so keen on it. It made sense to build them 40 years ago to deal with global warming. Today it's only financially viable if it's massively subsidized compared to wind/solar. What is it that makes that extra cost s…
The biggest thing it has going for it is constant power without fossil fuels. The grid needs backing power. I've seen a lot of other efforts at this, but (correct me if I'm wrong) there are still none that work, scale, and are affordable.
Point sources like nuclear plants add baseload, but are not flexible in supply.
A more resilient grid will have much more interconnection between sources and sinks and much more dynamic control and feedback loops.
Solar power is currently the cheapest form of new power available, it is limited by the hours of daylight.
Wind power is weather limited, but offshore wind power can provide relatively constant generation.
Batteries and equivalent energy storage (eg pumped hydro) provide the short term grid stability requirements that are currently provided by gas-powered peak plants, but with much faster response time and much cheaper capex and opex costs.
As rooftop solar and household battery (including stationary vehicles) expand, dynamic usage will also capture a lot of the energy market from large baseload generation.
All of these are affordable now, work, and, with investment in the grid/network, scale.
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The problem is that the Libertarianism/free-market policies simply don't work. They've failed to address the growing inability to normal people to have financial security and a reasonable quality of life. At some point, continuing to advocate those policies in the face of their outcomes becomes negligence at best.
I agree about the negligence, but additionally it's dishonest to talk about libertarian free market policies (for or against) without acknowledging the central bank and its current mission of grossly inflating the currency supply to force most everybody to work continuously. If the middle and lower classes could benefit from increasing productivity with reduced consumer prices, and were allowed to build wealth by sav…
It's an interesting premise and I, like others, dislike the notion that I'll have to work on a treadmill for most of my life. But I don't see the 1-3% inflation rate as more than a sort of incentive to invest in equities (which I also resent), rather than a means of keeping the lower classes away from the fruits of increased productivity.
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The biggest thing it has going for it is constant power without fossil fuels. The grid needs backing power. I've seen a lot of other efforts at this, but (correct me if I'm wrong) there are still none that work, scale, and are affordable.
The grid needs consistent power that is transferrable and responsive to load. Point sources like nuclear plants add baseload, but are not flexible in supply. A more resilient grid will have much more interconnection between sources and sinks and much more dynamic control and feedback loops. Solar power is currently the cheapest form of new power available, it is limited by the hours of daylight. Wind power is weather…
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Nope. Marginal propensity to spend kills that out of the gate. Poor people save a much smaller proportion of their income than rich people, on average. Since rich people are rich (meaning that percentage is out of a bigger pie than the poor person's), and their savings rates are higher than poor people, you just multiply that out and see that rich people will get richer much faster than poor people. This doesn't take…
What really riles me about taxation is that generally people who work longer/harder/smarter to increase their net worth get taxed far more than those who increase it because they have a spare 50k they put into the stock market. For a just society we should tax working far less than taxing capital and dividend gains, not the opposite.
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This article isn't about BigTech. That's pure Whataboutism.
It also conflates donations from employees with that of their employers. There's a big difference between a billionaire like Koch individually spending hundreds of millions of dollars to block climate change, and thousands of individual tech employees donating small amounts of money towards their favorite causes and politicians.
Granted, the original article and the comment which cites it mixes PAC + employee. For the purposes of identifying political bias in an organization though, the employee donations are quite a bit more illuminating. PAC donations are more strategic investments in incumbents, thus tend so be roughly 50-50 in the current political landscape: "A company’s PAC donations have less to do with supporting a specific party than with accessing those in power. Corporate PACs donate the vast majority — 90 percent in the last midterm — of their money to incumbent candidates, who are much more likely to be elected than challengers. Tech companies are no different."
For completeness, here is Googles PAC + employee donation breakdown: 87% D, 13% R. On par with the partisanism of Koch Industries, which even Charles Koch decries as a mistake. I don't have the data to split KI PAC vs. KI employee donations.