The tax has to be extremely high in order to dissuade people from taking highly addictive substances. And if the tax is extremely high, a black market will develop to provide it for cheaper (this already happens with cigarettes). So taxes don't remove the need for prohibition.

And what if the parent wants to fork over $150 but they don't have a working credit card with them? Should the child just die? That's on the corporation.

The "15-20 hours a week" number is highly questionable - 40 hours a week might be a better estimate. Quoting Wikipedia:

So, if every person on earth subscribes to one tiktokker or youtuber, only 7000 people worldwide can support themselves this way?

If every person subscribes to 1000 others (and who has time for that many?), then only 7 million people can support themselves, worldwide?

You're aware that this "job of the future" can only ever support a tiny fraction of the population?

Are they more copyright protected than any encyclopedia, all of which synthesize older ideas into a new mix of words?

The Jevons paradox shows how by decreasing the amount of a resource needed to make a product, you can actually increase the amount of resource that is used. As the product becomes cheaper (because less of the resource is needed), demand for the product rises enough to offset the smaller amount of resource per product.

It's entirely possible that this "paradox" is relevant here, with programmer labor as the resource in question. The cloud, AI, and other "technology surges" have made programmers more efficient - allowing them to produce more product per unit labor, and thus to sell the product for a lower price (frequently free these days!). This has in turn increased demand for software - perhaps enough to entirely offset the lesser number of programmers needed to make a particular unit of software.

They had no problem locking people in their homes indefinitely, but getting them to take a simple shot three times was too hard?

So is every cause of death.

There are lots of conmen out there, but very few of them are talented enough to be entrusted with *billions* of dollars of their victims' money.

If I had been meeting with him before everything fell apart, I'd probably thinking "there must be *something* about him that makes him special enough to be a billionaire, I'm not going to be the only person here to embarrass himself by expressing doubt in what everyone else knows, and what seems to have empirical evidence too even if I don't fully understand it".

In a way it's like any other speculative bubble in the market. Except that here the bubble was not in an a financial asset, but in an individual's reputation. Apparently human nature is such that bubbles will continually be generated, and the illusion of crowd wisdom will keep them alive until the evidence against them becomes overwhelming and they pop.

"Cut even more corners"? Flying is safer than it's ever been and is steadily getting even safer

Climate change isn't the only problem, and perhaps not even the largest problem, with coal. Coal emissions include mercury, lead, radioactive elements, and massive quantities of soot and ash. These emissions kill tens or hundreds of thousands of people every year, and are 10 to 100 times as toxic as gas emissions. Switching from coal to gas may not have a huge effect in terms of climate change, but it does have a huge effect in terms of human health, and it's worth it for that reason alone.

Exactly. I can't believe I had to scroll this far for the explanation.

During the pandemic lots of people became unemployed. The ones still employed tended to be the most valuable workers, the most productive ones.

Right now, unemployment is at near record lows. Employers are demanding workers, and are willing to hire them even if they're the low-productivity ones who normally wouldn't be worth hiring.

So average productivity goes up and down even if the productivity of any particular worker stays the same.

What incentive does the reviewer have to do this type of quality review? What compensation would they get for doing it? Reviewers are typically other scholars in the field who review papers anonymously, without compensation, out of a sense of this being part of their professional role (and, more selfishly, the chance to nudge other people's research in their preferred direction). Checking for fraud is a long, boring, thankless task and I don't think current reviewers would be in a hurry to take it on themselves.

Of course what this implies that a change to the journal peer review model is necessary - presumably journals will have to pay someone to check for fraud, in additional to the content review which peer reviewers do. Journals won't be in a hurry to pay this extra expense. As we see right now with the issue of open access, it's quite difficult to get journals to change their policies, and equally difficult to get authors to move to journals with better policies. In theory all these issues can be addressed when it comes to fraud, but it won't be easy.

This seems like a classic case of equality (everyone gets the same standards) vs equity (everyone gets the same outcome). Generally a preference for equity is associated with the left. Ironically, here's its the right demanding it.

If I understand correctly, steel refining doesn't just require heat, it also requires injection of a gas to bind oxygen from the iron ore leaving pure iron. Coal produces such gases and hydrogen works too, but you can't use just electric heat with no other inputs.