Oil is actually fairly elastic. Healthcare probably has the closest thing to perfectly inelastic demand.

That's only true for goods and services with perfectly inelastic demand:

https://scholar.harvard.edu/fi...

Carbon taxes > Carbon credits. It removes the incentive to fudge carbon reductions for profit in this way, instead only emissions are measured and the closer they get to 0, the less companies pay. The taxes can then be spent on things like doing real atmospheric/oceanic carbon sequestration by a government that doesn't have a profit motive incentivizing them to screw it up in a way that conveniently funnels zillions of dollars into top management's wallets.

So let me get this straight. If there were *real* carbon offset credits, that would in your view be *just as dishonest* as fraudulent ones?

how?

Italy and Japan have shrinking populations. We would too, if it weren't for immigration. However our population growth rate is still low, and if it were any lower we'd be facing serious economic and social challenges. Sure, a shrinking population would drop housing prices, but we are far from having so many people there isn't space to fit them. Our real problem is seventy years of public policy aimed at the elimination of "slums" and the prevention of their reemergence.

If you think about it, "slum" is just a derogatory word for a neighborhood with a high concentration of very affordable housing. Basically policy has by design eliminated the most affordable tier of housing, which eliminates downward price pressure on higher tiers of housing. Today in my city a median studio apartment cost $2800; by the old 1/5 of income rule that means you'd need an income of $168k. Of course the rule now is 30% of income, so to afford a studio apartment you need "only" 112k of income. So essentially there is no affordable housing at all in the city, even for young middle class workers. There is, however a glut of *luxury* housing.

In a way, this is what we set out to accomplish: a city where the only concentrations of people allowed are wealthy people. We didn't really think it through; we acted as if poor to middle income people would just disappear. In reality two things happened. First they got pushed further and further into the suburbs, sparking backlash by residents concerned with property values. And a lot of people, even middle-class young people, end up in illegal off-the-book apartments in spaces like old warehouses and industrial spaces.

How did slavery enable those things to exist in a way that voluntary labor could not have? Voluntary labor can do anything slavery can, although perhaps with slightly lower levels of inequality.

If only the TLAs handled them with the Jihadist-level seriousness they deserve, then their complete lack of opsec would actually threaten their operations...I don't think Jan 6th caused any significant change their sadly. US law enforcement and intellligence agencies still handle domestic right-wing militias with kid gloves.

There's a lot of mythology around who Trump voters are. Part of it is that statistics can be confusing, especially if you're prone to jump to conclusions. Yes Trump wins the voters without a college degree, and people without college degrees tend to make less money, but we can't leap to the conculsion that Trump voters are poor. In fact, data shows Trump lost the $50k and under income group solidly in both 2016 and 2020. In 2016 he won every income group greater than $50k, although only *strongly* in the $50k -$99k group. In 2020 he solidly lost every income group betlow $100k, but but won the over $100k group by an enormous 12 point margin.

Putting it all together, Trump's core voter group are people with limited educational attainment who are economically comfortable of (good for them) well off without having a college degree. However he doesn't own any particular socioeconomic group; really elections are determined by changes in turnout in key swing states. There was strong turnout among Trump's *share* of $50-$99 ke voters in 2016; I don't think many of those voters changed their mind, but their compatriots who sat 2016 out came out to vote in 2020.

Just because the cigarette industry pictured doctors recommending smoking in its advertising didn't mean that *all* doctors, or even most thought smoking was healthy for you. This was largely in the 30s and 40s when they took advantage of a positive attitude toward science and particular medical science. They began to pull back from this after 1950 when evidence was mounting for the link between smoking and cancer, for fear of pushback from the medical community.

What does this have to do with lab grown meat?

To be fair those were like the cranks who are saying "CO2 is just plant food" right now. Cigarettes were well-known to be harmful by mainstream medicine well before WW2.

Oh, correction, not too far behind this lady ;-) Hey girl, you up for some tab hoarding and chill? :-P

Ooof, I'm not too far behind this guy...and yeah Tab Session Manager is the glue holding this shitshow together...

More to the point, they're *guaranteed* bucks.

People don't understand the significance of risk to profitability. By underwriting 80 billion dollars of risk for banks, it's essentially guaranteeing them profits. When it's politically infeasible to spend money on something, the government guarantees loans. That's politically popular across the board because it's spending *later* money and it puts money in bankers' pockets.