Our society also needs a bit less economic disparity. Maybe going back to a minimum wage of $12.50 per hour like it was in 1968 (inflation adjusted) would be a good idea.

"Because I perceive this one example of a conflict of interest, this other conflict of interest is not important."

Is that really your position?

Maybe a better position would be "I think the everyone should be bound by conflict of interest legislation that is effective." or "I will not support anyone's conflict of interest actions."

BTW, didn't the Republican-led congressional inquiries into Biden wrongdoings in this area lead to nothing? When the political opponents can't find much to pin on somene, maybe there isn't much to find.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Ftheonion.com%2Fyou-peopl...

As a society, we are getting richer collectively - just not necessarily on an individual basis. Our overall productivity has been increasing for a LONG time. We have enough resources and are going to have even more in the future, we just have not decided on a system to distribute it equitably.

Each generation is collectively more affluent than the previous one, its just that each generation concentrates that affluence more and more into a smaller fraction of the whole.

To be fair, MOST of the money spent in "foreign military assistance" is money spent on local arms suppliers, and works to keep the USA military equipment up to date and fresh and to keep the USA military industry humming along and benefiting from economics of scale.

Like the "poor folks food aid" (both foreign and domestic) is mostly subsidies to the American agricultural sector, foreign military aid is mostly subsidies to the American defence sector.

I was thinking the same thing. Wind+solar seemed to actually be a tiny bit more than hydro.

A third of a billion people might agree with you. About 7.8 billion people don't feel that way. Are there no good wordworkers in that group.

I don't doubt that YOU prefer non-SI measurements, and feel that it works well, but you should not deny that A LOT of other people seem to be doing OK with SI, and that perhaps your minority opinion might not be so well grounded as it feels like it is.

You lean on “better” like it’s objective, but it’s not. It’s your value call: less CO2, quieter streets....shoved on everyone via state power. I say let people decide what matters to them, cost, range, whatever. If EVs can’t stand on their own, maybe they’re not as great as you think.

Well, individual choice on externalities like CO2 and noise do not really work that way. If I don't want you to pollute, the only way I can really influence your behaviour is to convince enough people to support public policies that make you not pollute, or at least discourage you from doing so. So, when enough people value clean air and quieter streets, they hopefully manage to make it more costly anyone to pollute it.

In this particular case, it looks like the new ICE numbers in total are falling from a peak in 2018, which seems pretty surprising to me. Perhaps those EV's a greater than many think.

I may be missing your point, or maybe you were being sarcastic? Copper is easily recycled. The scrap metal dealers are currently paying between $2 and $3.75 per pound according to a good search for prices in Los Angeles.

I suppose we can "make more oil", but while "synthetic" petroleum products can be made out of basic elements using the magic of chemistry, doing so is energy and cost prohibitive compared to digging it out of the ground, which is why we are in the atmospheric CO2 mess we are in.

Five hundred edits is not THAT high of a hurdle. 30 days is a LOWER bound for the account lifetime.

"The theory's central puzzle remains unresolved: the way quantum systems are described mathematically differs from what scientists observe when measuring them."

Someone is saying something wrong. Calculations of quantum system agree very well with measurements of quantum systems, otherwise we wouldn't use the calculations - and we do. The agreement between theory and experiment is tested to absolutely ridiculous levels of accuracy - like to ten (or more) digits.

We may not be all in agreement of what the model MEANS about how the universe works, and we may feel that it is crazy that things behave both like particles and waves which seems like it should be a contradiction, but things really are measured as behaving just like the mathematical model predicts. That certainly isn't an "unsolved central puzzle."

I wonder if running a natural gas generator to power the heat pump would be financially cheaper? At a 3x multiplier as long as your generator was at least 33% efficient you would be net positive. At a 5x multiplier you could get by with a 20% efficient generator.

I think natural gas power plants can be as good as 60% efficient, so anything better than a 1.7x multiplier would make it "better" to heat using generated electricity, but of course you aren't going to install that in your back yard...

I think they are talking about when the sun expands and engulfs the earth's orbit in some VERY long distant future (6 billion years hence). The more appropriate analogy might be planning to shelter in a cave when it rains and when the mountain above you erodes away, finding another cave for shelter. If we are still "stuck" on this planet in 6 billion years time, if nothing else we had a pretty good run of it.

Um actually... the vast majority of "foreign military aid" is money spent in-country. We send hardware "over there", after paying local people to make it (or we send old stock and just do without until the new stuff is built to replace it.) Yes, we could probably get better economic impact if we spent the money on local infrastructure and investments into increased productivity and probably better social impact if it was spent on addressing wealth inequality, but most military spending does end up in the pockets of citizens at home. The reason a tank costs so much is largely because of the production costs at those local tank-factories - so the money to produce it mostly goes into the domestic economy, even if when gets blown up overseas.

This idea that "the fascists have won" does not need for there to be any coordination - each one of the autocrats can be acting independently and still divvy up the world and grab stuff for themselves. With the "In their mind" modifier, the statement becomes even less "nutty" in that it is just a hypothesis that this is the world view of "the fascists", even if it might not entirely reflect reality.

Perhaps I am delusional too, but this does not seem particularly nonsensical.