The further you spread people out, the more you need cars. It's a straightforward scaling problem and easily verifiable empirically.

As with all pollution, if the car pollution is the problem the solution is to tax the pollution and let individuals and markets adapt. Right now we do the opposite by heavily subsidizing car transport and the results are not surprising... people respond to the subsidy and even become dependent on them.

Don't forget, in America we have no functioning rail network, not even in highly populated and busy corridors. It's not like they have a choice to take the train, or they probably would have. In America, if you want to travel you get to choose between burning jet fuel or burning gasoline on the increasingly dangerous roads.

Stroller, so you can transport the kid to and from the gate. Immature humans cannot walk reliably, or at high rates of speed until age 5 or so.

Car seat, because putting kids in carseats on the plane is the best move until they are, again, over age 5 or so. Airplane seats are too big to hold kids securely, so there's nowhere for them to lean and they just squirm everywhere. If you put the kids in their usual carseat they are are used to, they are much more likely to fall asleep, which benefits everyone. The carseat is also safer for when a random part of the airplane opens up right next to you and sucks your shirt off because of rapid decompression. We have to plan for these things nowadays.

The whole refrigerant treadmill is a an obvious grift and you can't convince me otherwise.

Every 10-20 years they (meaning a conglomerate of industry focus groups, big chem companies, and the government) declare that the Old, Commoditized Planet Destroying Refrigerants (OCPDR's) are too bad for the environment, but they've invented New Patented Miracle Refrigerant (NPMR) that is better. The NPMR also happens to be expensive, and it also "happens to be" incompatible with all the refrigerant systems out there, usually due to higher pressures or special lubricants, and typically, it's also a worse refrigerant in thermodynamic terms (there was a reason OCPDR became popular after all), making the systems to use it bigger and more expensive at minimum, and likely actually less efficient.

The government will announce a phase-out of the OCPDR and phase-in of the NPMR. The result is that the OCPDR prices will skyrocket through the roof after they are illegal to manufacture, so commodities speculators make a fortune on the OCPDR's for years into the future. Meanwhile the Big Chem companies have a guaranteed market for their NPMR, they spin off their OCPDR factories to the little guys and at first they are the only companies who know how to make it or have the patents to make the NPMR. And the entire HVAC industry will make a killing for the next 10+ years ripping out old, perfectly functional AC's and industrial cooling systems, simply because they are not compatible with NPMR and OCPDR is either unavailable or so expensive they are forced to upgrade.

After 10-15 years, the NPMR becomes the next Old Commoditized Planet Destroying Refrigerant and the cycle starts over. Once Big Chem isn't making as much as they used to, it's time to invent New Patented Miracle Refrigerant once again and get the government to mandate it. The whole cycle is very similar to the whole patented drug vs. generic drug treadmill.

Meanwhile, non-corrupt nations or applications outside regulation are simply switching to R290 and other hydrocarbon refrigerants, which has a global warming potential of only 3, better than practically any other refrigerant, and it's also extremely cheap and easy to manufacture, like, 10x cheaper than latest NPMR. Wildcat HVAC people in my area are using R290 to re-charge old R-22 systems, and they work just as well or better than they did on R-22, meanwhile having literally the best possible GWP available, and saving old, functional HVAC systems. But this is illegal in the US because R290 is not approved, and the official path is to either buy R-22 at $megamoney per pound, or replace the entire system with one compatible with NPMR (for now). Literally the only "problem" with R290 is that it's not patented, and anyone can make it, which doesn't make Dow Chemical or DuPont any money at all, which is why it will never be adopted in the US.

This is almost exactly backward. Exercise is only tangentially related to obesity. Obesity is caused by eating patterns. Furthermore, sloth is exacerbated by being obese.

Exercise can move the weight-loss needle slightly...very slightly, unless you are exercising at huge levels. But even if you are exercising at huge levels, it is very easy to just make that up by eating. Exercise is neither necessary NOR sufficient to cause weight loss. Changing eating patterns is BOTH necessary AND sufficient to cause weight loss...with or without exercise. So you have to learn to eat less, no matter what. Meanwhile, exercise makes you hungrier, so it's either a net wash, or plausibly even a negative for weight loss.

Most people who try eating less just make a joke of an effort. Like they switch to diet Ranch dressing or something. I'm talking about, try eating a small meal once a day. Try eating every other day. If you must eat 3 times per day, try eating like, 200-500 calorie meals. Whatever it takes to cause weight loss. When you find out how much food that is, that's just how much you can eat without gaining wait. Prepare to be disappointed, but all it means is that you were over-eating before. Data shows modern people eat more than ever. If you simply eat like your grandfather you'd probably be a healthier weight.

Every year during Lent I fast from Sunday to Sunday. During this time, I sit on my ass and contemplate life. I usually lose 12-15 pounds. The rest of the year, I commute by bike, hike, kayak, and do other active things, and I eat food and drink beer and slowly put on weight despite the exercise.

There is an entire industry built around gyms, exercise clothes and equipment, coaching, "health food", "diet food", diet cookbooks, etc. etc. but the one thing that 1) works, guaranteed and 2) is about the only thing that does consistently work is the same thing that doesn't benefit absolutely anybody (except you): Eat less. A lot less. And repeat until desired results are achieved. You will never see an advertisement for this. Even the medical establishment doesn't promote eating less...they are making a killing with diet drugs (which do seem to work but stop working as soon as you stop taking them unless you...learn to eat less).

It doesn't really matter to count calories exactly. The only benefit of counting calories exactly is if you want to *just barely* lose weight. Otherwise, if you aren't losing weight fast enough, just eat less. Repeat as necessary until you get results. It will work.

No, I don't have a way to lose weight that doesn't involve eating less. But eating less works, guaranteed. And, all all its various forms, it's just about the only thing that does work.

Deployment of the COVID vaccines. By late April 2021, all U.S. states had opened vaccine for those aged 16 and over. By December many millions of doses had been administered.

Freight trucks should use overhead catenary wires for power delivery. We have decades of experience that it works reliably to transfer power to electric trains, and at very high power and at very high speeds, all with low maintenance. We also have diesel hybrid trains that use overhead wires when they are available and simply lower the pantographs when they leave the electrified area and continue to run on diesel. The same model can be used to electrify trucking; we should just put overhead wires up in freight corridors. Give the trucks batteries too (or diesel if you must) so they aren't tied to the wires and they can leave the freight corridor (with a freshly charged battery) to make their delivery.

It wouldn't be suitable for all cases, but for some routes along heavy freight corridors, we could even link the trucks together for better air resistance, so you would only need one driver for multiple trucks. And you could have them roll on some kind of track that would simultaneously guide the trucks and have lower rolling resistance than rubber tires and lower maintenance that asphalt roads. You could call the result a "train" or something.

The actual economic problem of American-style shopping malls is the fundamental conflict between car transport and foot traffic.

Retail thrives on foot traffic, but you can't have foot traffic and car traffic at the same time/place. It has to be car-free because walking or eating is not relaxing with traffic zooming by, and having parking lots for every store makes everything too far apart and too stressful to be walkable, and makes the density of storefronts too sparse to be sustainable. Cars destroy any sort of pleasant, walkable, economically viable shopping district. The American shopping mall is an attempt to make a fake walkable shopping district surrounded by a sea of parking, so that people can drive to it, because car transport is the only available and allowed form of transport in America.

We see this all the time either with enclosed malls or the outdoor ones where they create a fake classic walkable city shopping district or plaza (like a fake 5th avenue, San Antonio Riverwalk, Ginza/Shinjuku, or any number of small-town main streets and town squares that were build before automobiles), but they tried to do it in a way compatible with car transport. But surrounding it with a sea of parking and arterial roads to serve it makes it fundamentally fake, the economics don't work out, and it fails. In a real city, you get a real economy, including people living there. They sometimes try to add apartments to the fake lifestyle center things but nobody wants to live in what's essentially a strip mall that they still need a car to escape from. If they still need a car, they are better off to live in a nearby car-dependent residential enclave and drive to the mall like everyone else.

The irony is we could have just not destroyed our walkable cities, and our cities could just BE like shopping malls, except with real economies, which they used to be before cars destroyed everything, but there is no sacrifice too great for the altar of car worship.

You can either have "efficient" car travel (highways, giant parking lots, drive thru queues), or you can have pretty much anything else valuable (housing, nature, pleasant walking and shopping, etc.), but you can't have both, because car transport basically destroys value.

America has take the car transport to its logical extreme and it turns out that the logical extreme doesn't support things like pleasant shopping malls that generate lots of foot traffic. Every walkable area you build requires an even bigger parking lot. The more actual destinations you build, the more roads you must build to serve them so the petri dish basically runs out of resources.

Taxing land and other monopoly instruments can generate income for things like UBI while simultaneously improving the economy by extracting inefficient rent losses. This has been known for centuries but we still don't tax land because the really rich tend to be rent seekers are actually rich from seeking rent, and not from their labor or even from deploying capital to provide goods and services. They prefer we tax labor and capital, which they pass straight through the economy back to the working classes in the form of depressed wages and increased costs.

The solution is called Georgism which proposes that Ricardian rent should be removed from the economy by taxing it, including taxes on other monopoly instruments such as patents. It's not popular because the rich don't want it, and because the right will never admit that some taxes can help the economy, and because the left won't admit that free markets can be good.

Sort of true, which is why it matters so much WHAT is taxed.

The whole idea of LVT is that taxes should be shifted away from the property improvements--taxing capital or labor always increases prices and reduces supply, because all taxes on capital and labor cause deadweight loss--and toward the location value. Taxes on location value do not reduce supply, do not cause deadweight loss, and decrease prices...nearly the opposite effect. In fact, taxes on location value cause a net benefit to the economy because land title is a natural monopoly, so location value represents Ricardian rent, not profit. Removing rent always improves the economy, although the rent-seekers who are collecting the rent don't like it.

The taxing authority can make housing arbitrarily expensive or effectively ban it completely by levying high conventional property taxes. You are right about that.

They cannot cause similar harm by taxing location value, which is why LVT is so remarkable. Even if they raise LVT to 100%, the outcome is that housing supply is only higher, rents are lower, and real wages are higher, which is why the pure Georgists propose doing exactly that, and if that generates too much tax revenue, distributing the surplus as a dividend, like Alaska does for their natural resources fund. A a more conservative approach would be a split tax like they do in Pennsylvania, so that the balance between property taxes are LVT can be adjusted. Right now LVT usually only contributes a tiny portion of the property tax bills, often single-digit percent. A split tax rate would allow a different balance like 50/50, or 75/25, but the best balance would technically be 100/0 where we don't tax improvements at all and have the entire property tax come from location value, and tax capital only if that doesn't generate enough revenue...or preferably cut government spending if that doesn't generate "enough" revenue.

Just Tax Land

(And remove zoning restrictions)

Free men, Free land, Free Markets

An LVT would fix that

Housing supply is extremely inelastic. So when occupancy is 5%, it's fine. When occupancy hits 0%, prices might shoot up 5X, 10x... because people gotta have a place to live, and they are bidding on not being homeless. And those with the means will win the bids and many will be homeless.

Housing demand is also inelastic. Better than housing supply, because people are mobile and housing is not. But just "move to another city" isn't exactly like picking a different brand of cereal.

The actual solution is to make zoning restrictions that waste land and restrict housing supply illegal, probably by pre-empting them at a higher level on human rights grounds.

That will make increasing housing supply possible. And then implementing land value taxation, which will make increasing housing supply profitable.

Nothing will change until the profit incentive changes, and then it will change quickly.

Some taxes do in fact improve and help the economy, in real, big-picture terms. Namely taxes on land monopolies, other natural or artificial monopolies, and pigovian taxes on areas of market failure, such as certain resource extraction or pollution.

Taxes improving the economy is possible because certain market failures, some of them endemic, are also bad for the economy, so taxing them turns out to improve the economy overall. In some cases, such taxes can even improve the real economy even if the proceeds from the taxes are used unproductively or "flushed" from the economy altogether. This is not economically controversial, and has been known for hundreds of years (since Adam Smith at least), but "good" taxes are not widely understood and not widely implemented. This is because these market failures, although they harm the overall economy, make certain people fantastically rich, and the people benefitting from them generally have political power and don't like to be taxed. So instead we tax labor and petty capital, which actually does damage the economy exactly as you say, but this is simply because laborers and owners of petty capital do not have political power, and so they are targeted for taxes. We tax what we tax because we can get away with it politically, not out of any calculation that those things are the right things to tax.

The fact that all of our current taxes are harmful does not imply that all taxes are harmful. "Good" taxes do exist, and are also capable of generating large amounts of money while simultaneously objectively improving the economy by extracting harmful economic rent, such as certain natural resource taxes, land value taxes, and carbon/pollution taxes. These taxes do exist piecemeal across the globe but they are usually a small part of the tax picture if they exist at all, for the reasons described above.