If we were sure that we'll never go to war with China, I'd agree. Right now we're facing a situation where we may end up in another world war, but we'll be on the side fighting against the manufacturing powerhouse. If it weren't for such strategic concerns, I'd be all for dropping all the tariffs (well, we should add some carbon tariffs) and outsourcing all the manufacturing to China. Trading electronic dollars that we invent as needed for hard goods? Hell yeah. I'll take all of that they want to give us.

But I don't think the geopolitical situation can be ignored. I'm not sure that propping up the US auto industry is the best way to maintain vehicle manufacturing capacity, but until a better alternative is proposed we should probably stick with it.

It really won't. We already know how battery degradation works. Unless they bought trucks with too-small batteries to begin with, the trucks will wear out before battery capacity drops enough to require replacement.

My point is that expanding the acronym isn't useful, except perhaps to chemists who would already know what the acronym expands to. Explaining what PFAS are is useful. And the article did that:

PFAS are a class of 15,000 chemicals used across dozens of industries to make products resistant to water, stains and heat. Though the compounds are highly effective, they are also linked to cancer, kidney disease, birth defects, decreased immunity, liver problems and a range of other serious diseases.

They are dubbed “forever chemicals” because they do not naturally break down and are highly mobile once in the environment, so they continuously move through the ground, water and air. PFAS have been detected in all corners of the globe, from penguin eggs in Antarctica to polar bears in the Arctic.

So, I think the Guardian did a fine job of explaining what matters.

The difference is that a gas station requires a massive capital investment to build. An EV charging stand just needs the same electricity as any other business. In the long term it might be efficient for the market to produce an excess of charging stations.

The models have errors and uncertainties, including about when we might hit various tipping points.

The fear is that the "alarmists" were wrong, and the climate is warming faster than they thought.

Atmospheric CO2 takes a very long time to drop (and we're still adding more) and when pollution dropped more sunlight got through and raised temps slightly.

Sorry if that's too complicated for you.

Don't worry, the average intelligence jumped way up after you dropped.

The prof was assuming you were smart enough to understand that everyone would know the sun warms the earth.

He was saying that sun's output was constant enough to have no effect.

I hope you can take some solace in the fact that the average person is still apparently much smarter than you.

The world is full of folks with impressive credentials, it's inevitable a few of them will dive headfirst into crackpot theories for a variety of reasons.

Not to say this guy is a crackpot, but what he's claiming should be pretty easy to demonstrate to credible outside experts. That he hasn't done that rings many alarm bells.

I'm baffled by people who insist on taking statements completely literally when it's obvious that's not what the speaker meant. Especially when the person in question actually explains what the statement means!

"What if the statistical connections that we are basing our predictions on are no longer valid?"

ie, the scientist who obviously understands that nature changes, is worried because this current change isn't really predicted by current models. If the warming keeps up that means the models are wrong in the way we really don't want them to be wrong and that's bad news.

California has level 4 taxis (which have had problems) but few (if any) level 3 consumer cars. So I'm not sure what data you think BC should be using.

You really need folks to spell out the concerns with untested level 3 cars?

For someone complaining about data it seems to have eluded you that level 3 vehicles are so new that they haven't even made it to the Canadian market.

It means common sense. Before deploying level 3 cars on public roads they want more data.

When reasonable people have a reasonable expectation that the new product may be more dangerous and they don't want to wait for a bunch of fatalities to occur to stop it.

Per- And Polyfluorinated Substances. Did that help?

With 65,502 bytes left over.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N

Not flat, 10% increase. Some of that increase may be due to more dual-income households, but we were already pretty well along that transition by 1999.

I'm not sure your intuition is correct. Sure the supply of work isn't infinite but it does increase when productivity goes up.

Look at a website designer, in the early 90s you were writing HTML and CSS by hand, drawing icons with crappy editors, etc, etc.

Now, you've got crazy libraries and full-fledged website builders, I'm guessing a modern web designer is MUCH more productive.

The result? There's waaay more website designer jobs out there, that's partially because the Internet is bigger, but also because you get way more value for your cash buying a website designer now.

Some of the same will be happening with software dev. Sure, some companies that doesn't see any need to do more than they're currently doing may cut staff, but a lot of other companies will realize that the software project/product they were thinking of is now viable.

I'm guessing that folks using the US flag as an accessory are generally pushing a fairly specific political belief.

I'm in Canada and a bunch of a-hole truckers and their followers blockaded the Capital and border crossings to try and blackmail the rest of the country. And of course they flew Canadian flags everywhere to pretend like they were being patriotic.

I love my country and my flag, but if I see some truck driving around with a Canadian flag I know it's probably some Fox-News watching Trump fanboy who was trying to extort the rest of the country which is pretty damn un-Canadian to me.

And they were right of course! (well kinda right anyway)

The real divide was the former Confederacy vs the rest of the country. Because the South was Democratic there were a lot more D in opposition than R.

But it was a Democratic President who pushed it. But if you look among legislators in the former Confederacy, Republicans were more likely to oppose it. And similarly outside, Republicans were more likely to oppose it.

So saying Republicans were more opposed isn't really wrong.

That feels more like trivia, particularly considering the different populations at the time.

To be fair, economists struggle with that too.

Not entirely wrong. Not that the Jews sitting around in post-WWII refugee camps had many other good options.

From the local's perspective, they kinda were invaders.

So they were right I guess.

At that point they're probably just screwing with you.

Just curious, do you think the COVID vaccine saved lives? Do you believe in AGW? Do you think Trump won in 2020?

Because I can find a lot of people on the right who espouse some pretty nutty beliefs on those topics, and they aren't the equivalent of the kids skateboarding, they're literally the leaders of the GOP and the associated media outlets.

It's fairly well established that he had contract offers contingent on him ceasing his protest, so yeah, he clearly demonstrated that he was willing to sacrifice a significant portion of his career earnings for his protest.

He did well with Nike, possibly better than he would have done never having protested though NFL QB salaries are pretty good so it's hard to say.

But it's pretty ridiculous to assume he anticipated a huge endorsement deal when he started his protest.

It's fine to disagree with his protest.

But pretending that he wasn't willing to sacrifice a lot? That's pretty disgusting.

You know those idiots who stormed the US Capitol on Jan 6th? They were far right fascists who were trying to overthrow the US Democracy and murder the Vice President and they deserve long prison sentences.

But I won't deny they were willing to risk a lot for their insurrection.