HN user
Right. The water isn't gone from the universe, certainly. But it's gone from the city/county water system. You've then got to wait for it to come back via the natural water cycle. Whereas it's a lot more efficient to keep as much water as possible in the human system and just keep cleaning and reusing it.
Using water to cool a data center is absolutely not equivalent to using it for farming. Once you irrigate a field, that water is gone. But if water is cooling something, then it can be collected and used again. Of course, that requires a city or county to have a water reclamation program.
Likewise, if you water a lawn, that water is gone. But if you flush water down a toilet or a shower drain, the water is potentially reusable. Just needs to be cleaned.
Waste water can also be used for cooling. I believe that's how the Palo Verde nuclear plant outside of Phoenix is cooled.
I'm sure any wealth tax would only apply to wealth above a certain amount. For instance, inheritance tax only applies to $15mil and above. Likewise, when you sell a house the first $500K (I believe) in capital gains from the sale is tax free.
I don't think people with savings of $15mil and above (assuming that would be the cutoff) are in danger of going bankrupt in 20 yrs from a 1% wealth tax. Assuming your 3% return, they'd be earning $450,000 a year that wouldn't be touched by the wealth tax.
Why would environmentalists be concerned about shading canals?
The underlying problem is that the number of representatives hasn't increased in about 100 years (not counting addition of Alaska and Hawaii). Increase the number of reps, as was regularly done up until early 20th century, and a lot of this gerrymandering nonsense will disappear. Of course, the powers that be don't want to do this because it would make the system more fair and democratic.
The idea of rent suggests that you're paying a use fee to an owner. But if you live in a house that you own, and therefore lose the potential rental income, who are you paying that use fee to? Is the loss of potential income really the same as rent? Because in that case almost every choice/action in life involves a potential loss of income. There's probably always something more profitable one could have done with time/money.
Water for people isn't the problem. It's water to grow food for cows that's the problem.
I believe the royal society for the protection of birds studied whether cats are a threat to bird populations and concluded that they really aren't. Obviously cats do kill birds, but overwhelmingly the major threat to birds is habitat loss caused by humans. Also, cats kill rodents, which indirectly helps birds because rodents are a big threat to bird populations, because rats take eggs from their nests. In fact, cats preferentially kill rodents. Something like 90% of their diet will typically be rodents. Birds, for them, are only opportunity kills. In other words, cats are an easy scapegoat because they quite visibly do kill birds, but humans (as is usually the case) are the true underlying problem.
Biblical scholar Bart Ehrman argues that there are many versions of Christianity, and there always have been since its inception. What you are representing as the "core teaching of Christianity" is the version that was primarily articulated by Paul, and that became the orthodox version due to its eventual adoption as the religion of the Roman Empire. But even at the time of Paul there were rival interpretations. There were the Gnostics, the group led by James in Jerusalem, and even those who insisted one had to adopt Judaism to follow Jesus. And significantly, Jesus himself probably wouldn't have recognized the interpretation of Paul.
And looking beyond early Christianity, one can pick any period of Christianity's history and find numerous rival doctrines.
We also know there's rampant fraud in the business world: Enron, WorldCom, Madoff, Lehman Brothers, S&L scandal, etc. etc.
Now the billionaires are gutting the government's oversight ability. Business fraud will go through the roof. But I guess that's the plan.
I think he is wrong that predictions 100 years out are almost always going to be wrong, because city and government planners routinely do this kind of stuff. They predict future growth rates and plan accordingly. They invest in reservoirs, wider roads, bigger power plants and transmission lines, etc. Sometimes those predictions are wrong and they build for growth that never happens, or vice versa. But much of the time they get it right and that contributes hugely to our present-day quality of life.
Their government pay is meaningless to them. They can legally trade on insider information. That's their real paycheck.
In his book "The Deep Hot Biosphere" Thomas Gold argued that life probably originated deep underground. Gold is a pretty controversial figure, but this hypothesis makes sense for a number of reasons: the underground environment is a lot more stable than the surface, and the chemistry to extract energy from the chemicals in that environment is a lot simpler than the chemistry to extract energy from sunlight. So it makes sense that underground chemosynthesis would emerge before photosynthesis.
I was agreeing with you up until trash pick-up, which I think is a bad example, because there are obvious reasons why it makes sense to have the city contract with one company for that service, rather than having multiple companies with multiple dump sites and different fleets of trucks roaming the city. And if you give people the option to not pay for trash pick-up, that's just opening the door to having people pile up trash around their houses and yards. You know it would happen. So yeah, I don't think trash pick-up is an example of regulatory capture like your other examples.
Although the Big Bang is widely referred to as a theory, cosmologists actually categorize it as a model not a theory. Does that mean it's not scientific? No. It's just that a lot of cosmology isn't testable, per se. The same is true for the historical sciences in general (evolutionary biology, geology). Given the time scales involved, there's no way to design tests or experiments.
We have no reliable information about the identity of Homer. All we have are a variety of legends. But there are some decent arguments for thinking that Homer might have been a woman. We just don't know.
Yes, after billions of years you would move outside of the sight horizon of the long-lived observer on earth and disappear from view. For you, the traveler, this would happen in mere minutes. But you wouldn't have crossed the universe in that time because the edge of the visible universe is constantly expanding away from us faster than we can travel to catch up with it. Even if we travel at the speed of light.
The edge of the visible universe functions for us like a cosmic event horizon. Similar to the event horizon around a black hole. A particle leaving earth at light speed can never reach or go beyond that horizon. Even in infinite time. That's assuming the universe continues to expand. If it starts to contract then, yeah, the horizon is going to crash in on us.
Actually, you couldn't cross it in a matter of minutes. In fact, you would never even reach the edge of the visible universe. This is because the edge of the visible universe is expanding away from us at faster than the speed of light.
This sounds like the old Marxist argument of Capitalists appropriating (or parasitically leaching) the surplus value of the laborers they employ.
But in the case of social media, people get paid not only in money but also with attention and status ('likes'). Actually, the vast majority of users aren't getting paid any money. But we're social creatures, and we'll do almost anything for status and attention.
Getting the best price they can would be fair in a competitive marketplace. But when consolidation leads to fewer competitors, more monopoly, then the constraint of fair competition has been removed. The stores are free to raise prices and consumers have nowhere else to go.
It used to be that immigrants would simply invent a fake SSN in order to get a job. The e-verify system may have complicated that, but I imagine it's still pretty much the same for smaller businesses. And especially agricultural work, meat processing plants, etc. All the businesses that rely on undocumented labor.
So the immigrants are paying into the SS/medicare system, but they don't receive any of the benefits.
I think the solution to the housing problem is to increase supply. Not to try to prevent a whole group of people from being able to buy homes.
They're being offered loans, which they'll have to pay back. This won't cost taxpayers anything. And anyway, these undocumented migrants ARE TAXPAYERS THEMSELVES. I fail to see any reason to be outraged about this.
I once read a book on primatology (can't remember the title, wish I could) that observed that over 8 million people live together in NYC. For the most part peacefully. But if you put 8 million chimpanzees together in the same space they would rip each other apart. It would be a bloodbath.
Which is to say that one of the unique things about humans is our ability to get along with each other. To form ever-larger stable communities. So I question your declaration that the "true nature of humanity" is to be in competition with one another. I'd say we're the dominant species on the planet precisely because we have an ability to put aside competition and cooperate with each other. Not always, of course, but the majority of the time.
The tradition in parasitology of self-experimentation -- swallowing unknown larvae to see what they do to your body -- perhaps might deter new recruits from entering the field.
Many drugs promote socialization. To the point that you have to question the distinction between drugs and food/drink. Take sugar. It's often the focus of social gatherings. But the bad effects of sugar arguably outweigh those of alcohol, given the epidemics of diabetes and obesity.
Alcohol happens to have 10,000 years of cultural tradition behind it. Plus, it pairs well with food.
Alcohol can have large benefits for helping people to bond and socialize. The article itself pointed this out. Of course people can socialize without alcohol. But I think it's plausible to argue that alcohol in moderation can improve and deepen the experience.
The Hollywood versions of Greco-Roman mythology aren't the same as what you get in Ovid's Metamorphoses. References to Ovid's Metamorphoses can be found on almost every page of Shakespeare, and if you haven't read Ovid (and really, how many people nowadays have?) a lot of Shakespeare's references can be cryptic.
Updating it wouldn't eliminate the original. It would simply give many people an accessible introduction to the work, and perhaps inspire them to explore the original. I really don't understand the resistance to providing people with that introduction.