HN user

sacomo

105 karma
Posts1
Comments56
View on HN

This is why things like the NY Stock Transaction Tax rebate should be repealed and expanded. And why we need property taxes to apply to these financial holdings. There is currently too much untaxable property that will never be cycled through the economy in a way that allows them to be properly taxed. Propublica's framing is still wrong.

Vaccines still aren't 100%. This is bad advice from the CDC. It will only lead to anti-masker/vaxxers using this as an excuse for not wearing a mask. Even the fully vaccinated should be wearing a mask around other people. 94%/97% is not 100%.

edit: Japan is a good example for how masks have drastically reduced the number of infected due to mask culture. Japan has half the US population and still isn't vaccinating the general public. Even the spikes in Japan are tiny compared to the US due to mask usage. Japan is mostly open, trains are still packed, shops are still filled with people. Masks work and should still be worn once vaccinated.

edit 2: good luck.

I am in favor of more laziness. Spend 20% of time automating 80% of the work. Spend more time with your loved ones, pets, take longer walks.

I'm not up to date on current industrial-scale solar cell manufacturing processes, but doesn't the manufacturing proccess still require massive amounts of coal? And what is the lifespan of the cells before they have to be replaced with new cells that also require coal to be produced?

On the battery side, I'm pretty sure that industrial-scale production still requires mining and mountain top removal. And what are wind turbines made out of? Where are we getting those resources from?

Like I said, I'm not up to date on the state-of-the-art industrial manufacturing processes required to make solar cells / turbines. But I'm pretty sure it will still require massive habitat destruction and the release of unimaginable amounts of greenhouse gasses to get us where we need to be.

I'm not very optimistic that we have enough time, nor individuals have enough financial resources, for the market to realize how cheap / efficient these technologies are. We really need this progress implemented as part of large scale systemic programs. The market is simply too slow.

Against Hickelism 5 years ago

One general flaw with any of these historical graphs concerning poverty, standard of living, etc. is that we don't have good data for most countries going back that far. The graphs are making some big assumptions for the older, spotty data.

Real data on poverty has only been collected since 1981, by the World Bank. It is widely accepted among those who research global poverty that any data prior to 1981 is simply too sketchy to be useful, and going back to as early as 1820 is more or less meaningless.

The data for 1820–1970 comes from a source (Bourguignon and Morrisson 2002) that draws on the Maddison database on world GDP. That data was never intended to assess poverty, but rather the distribution of GDP — and that for only a limited range of countries. Data for the Global South is particularly thin, and there is very little that exists for prior to 1900. The data is not robust enough to draw meaningful conclusions about what was happening to people’s livelihoods during the colonial period.

[dead] 6 years ago

"Nothing will fundamentally change." ~ Joe Biden