A wealthy person will have greater means to lower their CO2 emissions. If prices for natural gas goes up then they buy a heat pump. If gasoline prices go up then they buy an electric car. The middle class will see heat and transportation prices go up, so they cut back on vacations and lower the thermostat in winter.

This is true, but by simple nature of the wealthy consuming more the wealthy will pay a higher share of the carbon taxes. Maybe upper middle class will be least affected by being able to afford higher efficiency devices but not having so much money that they have excess consumption.

Unless this is micromanaged on the individual level it cannot be revenue neutral to the person.

I never said that it would be. In fact, I said the opposite, that it would be a progressive tax (you're arguing the opposite, that it is regressive). The term revenue neutral means just that - it is revenue neutral at the level of the government. It does not mean tax neutral at the individual level.

If on a more careful analysis (and not our armchair assertions) you are correct that the working class are more affected by this, then yes the carbon tax refund could be administered non-uniformly, i.e. a greater refund amount to those of lower income. Basically if I'm right there's no problem (as long as you're okay with higher taxes on the rich). If you're right there's a simple solution.

Re: regulatory burden. Basically you are saying that government should be more efficient. Yes, that would be great. It's an imperfect world that we live in however, govt is inefficient, as is private industry, because they're all made up of imperfect humans. Simplifying tax code like you ask for would be nice, but there were problem byzantine negotiations between various private stakeholders and legislators that led to the current tax code. Better enforcement of consumer protection law (such as lead paint as you say) would be great, but Republicans don't like spending money on enforcement.

The simple matter is...
THEY DID NOT KNOW.

It was actually quite well established that people in Boeing knew there was a risk. And the FAA realized there was a risk but did not immediately ground the aircraft, though I haven't looked deeper into why the FAA did not act until after a disaster. Boeing was being run by the MBAs and they created incentive structures such that the problem was not properly reported up the pipeline. Those who put these incentive structures in place should have known better, this is textbook for similar engineering disasters, and the 737 Max disaster will certainly be a prominent new case study in textbooks of engineering and business ethics, and organizational management.

So yes you're correct that upper management did not specifically know that they had a disaster in the waiting, but they had created an environment where corners would be cut to save costs in the short term, boosting shareholder value and executive bonuses. As it's very hard to prove a criminal case there is very little risk to doing this, and lots of potential reward for the executives.

You're just deliberately ignoring the point that most people calling for a carbon tax think that it should be implemented in a revenue neutral way. That means that everybody gets a refund equal to the total carbon tax revenue divided by the number of people. That means that for low income, low-consumers of resources they will see a net decrease of taxation, while the wealthy high resource consumers will see a net increase. Certain product prices will go up but for the average consumer their refund will more than cover these increases.

Lowering regulatory costs... how much do you think this will actually help the country? The Boeing 737 Max disasters is what you get when you reduce regulatory burden - hundreds of innocents killed in the pursuit of profit because the FAA didn't dig deep enough into Boeing's filings, and didn't immediately ground the plane when they realized that the MCAS problem would lead to crashes. A train with reduced regulatory oversight is more likely to have tracks that are not structurally sound, or they'll build it in sensitive ecological areas, or something like this. You want this to be a solution to green energy, but it simply isn't. Pricing the unpriced externality (carbon and other greenhouse gases) is the most efficient solution which actually encourages the free market to solve the the problem.

It is impressive the maneuvers your brain went through to call this an anti-vaccine view. All she is saying is that she does not have confidence in Trump personally. This is a logical point a view. Trump has told people to go about their normal lives even without a vaccine, and I have not doubt that he would push a vaccine that isn't very effective, or has significant side effects, if he thought it would boost the stock market.

"Charity is a nice way to reduce your taxes, so this is also profit oriented."

What are you smoking? If a company turns a profit of say $1 per share, they owe around $0.30 in tax (depending on the state), leaving $0.70 left over. If they donate any non-zero amount of cash then the post-tax profit is less than $0.70 per share.

Now companies can donate surplus assets and materials, though my understanding is that they can't legally deduct more than the depreciated value of assets. This can be more of a win profit-wise than donating cash, but most companies that I'm familiar with donate cash.

To quote the article summary:

Titanium and other tough alloys were chosen for the new toilet to withstand all the acid in the urine pretreatment.

Additionally, this is a toilet made to last years on the space station. It needs to be durable, reliable, cleanable, and not be heavier than necessary. Porcelain is too heavy, and probably cannot easily be made into an air-suction based space toilet. Stainless steel might also be an option, I believe that's what the bowls are other components are made of on airplane toilets. But steel is heavy, titanium is lighter.

Do you want to know why the average age of vehicles continually increases. Those environmental rules you're so proud of. New cars become more and more expensive, forcing people to keep older cars on the road held together with duct tape and string. Oops.

Well, that and all of the new electronics and safety features that older cars do not have.

It will never be surmounted unless people actually push for it to happen. CA is pushing for it to happen. Otherwise fossil fuels with their unpriced externalities will continue to reign supreme until it's too late. Autos today are not a free market because ICE cars are being subsidized heavily by the public cost of pollution and CO2 emission. The govt must step in to address this unfair subsidy.

And it's not like gas cars will disappear in 15 years. You can still buy them used. And you can probably buy them out of state and bring them in. This introduces a barrier to obtaining gas cars, but it does not ban them.

This type of rule gives automakers a better business case to accelerate their EV efforts, improve their technology, and reach economies of scale more quickly. And CA landlords are notoriously resistance to property improvements (as any landlord is in a high-demand market) but demand will eventually create supply. And perhaps with some help of government regulation.

That said I do think that this rule should be created through legislation and not an executive order.

You apparently didn't even read the summary. The people who get the money are Illinois Facebook users:

The settlement covers any Facebook user in Illinois whose picture appeared on the site after 2011. According to the new document, those users can each expect to receive between $200 and $400 depending on how many people file a claim.

Most universities have lots of people-dense social environments such as dorms, lecture halls, dining halls, and classrooms. There's no way to return to business-as-usual in a university and maintain a flat curve. There's just too many people sharing too many common areas. They ultimately need to get some percentage of students off campus to reduce density. And if they do this then they pretty pretty much have to offer a fully-online option, even if there is an option for some in-person instruction.

And of course the idea was that during the initial lockdown everybody would prepare for a modified life upon reopening with new countermeasures to reduce the spread and keep the curve flat, or at least flat-ish. Mainly this involves reduced people density in common areas especially indoors, mask wearing, and surface cleaning/hand washing. Adherence to these countermeasures in the US unfortunately was not high enough to maintain a flat curve and we're back in growth. I understand that AZ is running low on ICU space.

Uhh, you do realize that hydroxychloroquine has side effects? In a large body of uses, particularly those taking it outside of a doctor's supervision, it seems like people might die. That's the "At worst" side of things for prophylactic usage.

Normally the risk of side effects just has to be less than the risk of the disease itself for a drug to be viable. For prophylactic usage it needs to be even better though by a factor of what the infection rate would have been in lieu of the prophylactic. And there's another thing: by using up the limited supply of this drug on unproven prophylactic usage it cannot get to the people who already need it for pre-existing conditions.

And it does not "Seem that thousands of doctors believe HCQ is beneficial". Most of them would defer to the actual studies, which are not indicating that HCQ is promising as a treatment. I'm not sure where the actual research currently suggests on prophylactic usage, but there doesn't seem to be any reason to believe that the side effects will be lesser in healthy individuals than sick individuals.

People were stupid enough to drink cleaning products after Trump had his little moment where he basically suggested this on air. So why do you trust Trump on this one?

Anyways your final inflammatory statement is also puzzling. What money do you think there is to be made by deferring to data when it comes to medical decisions?

It doesn't look like the article Slashdot linked includes this, but Musk specified that this would be "locally autonomous" drone fighters, which I took to mean that humans would input certain parameters like authorizing the drone authority to engage a target, but the maneuvering in a dogfight would be handled autonomously by the drone.

As machine learning continues to improve it seems to be that you can probably train an AI on the exact same cues that human pilots use, and an AI will be able to become faster than a human in reacting. Look at the massive processing power in the self-driving computer now in Teslas, it consumes only 100 watts. A fighter jet has far more prime power available to it than a car, so how much is needed for a fighter AI computer - maybe 1kW? 10 kW?

AI will likely eventually be able to match or exceed humans in dogfighting. It will require years of work of course, but then so does training human pilots and developing human-piloted aircraft. The question is at that point will the AI or the human be better/faster at adapting and changing tactics, given a certain level of funding?

The Air Force can't afford to ignore this technology track. I wouldn't say its success is 100%, but the odds of success are high enough that it can't afford to fall behind its adversaries.

The CDC has indeed been caught flat-footed, the pandemic response team was gutted in 2018 by the executive branch and not replaced. In order to quickly spin up a response you need a team assembled and ready before a pandemic hits.

This seems to be a classic case of penny-wise and pound-foolish attempts from the executive branch to save money. Or perhaps a more cynical view is it's a classic case of crippling a government agency so that it fails at its tasks and it becomes more politically expedient to privatize.

Did you even read the slashdot summary, let alone the more detailed article or the even more detailed study report? If you even read the Slashdot summary you would clearly see that the primary update was based on real energy usage data measured in factories. And now the authors of this study are getting numbers which are more in line with other researchers.

At least in academia, researchers can usually patent concepts developed or proved with the help of government funding (as well as a huge amount of underpaid work by the researchers involved). The government will get a royalty free license for the patent. But the researcher can turn around and license this patent commercially.

This rewards researchers to propose and pursue promising ideas that will actually lead to products and applications, rather than vaporware. The government also knows that bringing a product to market takes time and money, and it is more difficult to convince investors to put these in to a startup company commercializing academic research if it is not patent protected. Big companies have little incentive to innovate unless a startup is threatening them.

The space station cost $150 Billion to build and operate. $35,000 per night is essentially a rounding error in the ISS budget of the main contributing agencies. A 1 month stay would be priced at a measly $1 Million. The value to the private astronaut would be far in excess of $1 Million.

The price seems low by at least a factor of 10.