It obviously is targeting coal. A fair policy would simply tax carbon and let the various industries compete after accounting for their carbon imprint. But that wouldn't leave infinite opportunity for bureaucracy to pull the puppet strings for eternity, and might also prove them unnecessary.

Not sure where you got the 24 number from, but my midwives put the optimum age much younger.

When I was discussing risk factors with my midwife, and filling out the survey, they had "age" listed as a risk factor. I'm pedantic, so I clarified "you mean old age, right?", which of course was true. They were talking about women being OLDER as a risk factor. But I asked if young age could also be a risk factor. They just laughed and said "no, older is always higher risk". Which didn't seem right, so I pushed...there must be a young age where risk starts to go back up, right? They just said they never have patients that young. When I pushed, they finally admitted the lowest-risk age was 17. Below age 17, risk slightly starts to go up again, but is still essentially flat even down to onset of mensus. So medically, even 14 and 15 year old would not have age itself considered to be a risk factor.

And the reason is cost. Everyone can't afford an $50-85,000 car to save the planet...a car that you still have to sit in traffic in, still have to pay insurance on, and still have to find a place to park. But lots of people can afford a $2000 ebike. Electric cars, any cars, are too expensive for mass adoption, if not the cars themselves the car infrastructure. Electric cars were always a way for rich people to signal their allegiance to environmental ideals while still engaging in conspicuous consumption. And they were always a way to try to save the car industry, and not a way to save the environment. Otherwise we see a lot more small, cheap electric cars.

Cap and trade is not a carbon tax. It's a bureaucratic scheme to avoid a real carbon tax. To my knowledge, US has never implemented a carbon tax. The closest thing is extraction taxes which are usually distributed to the state, not the federal government.

This was described brilliantly and at length in 1870 by Henry George in Progress and Poverty. I.e, we should heavily tax inelastic monopoly / luxury goods and pollution, which taxes falls disproportionately on the rich (a good thing) and are hard to evate, and distribute the results in public works and UBI (what he called a "citizens dividend" analogous to the Alaska Permanent Fund dividends).

The problem with Georgism is the political spectrum will not stop fighting with itself long enough to implement the economically optimum solution. You need to convince conservatives that the path toward better prosperity involves taxing the rich and giving "handouts" (UBI) to the poor. And you have to convince the liberals that the money should go to individuals and not social programs, and that allowing free capitalism is the best way to improve the lot of the poor (Georgism specifically proscribes taxing capital).

The problem with most UBI schemes is they never describe a workable method of funding it. Increasing taxes on capital or labor simply passes the costs of funding right back to the working class in inflation and costs, exacerbating instead of improving inequality; this is true even if the tax is only levied on the capital of the rich.

The problem with most tax-the-rich schemes is they never say what they will do with the money. They should actually give it to the poor in the form of a UBI, but usually they want to spend it on "social programs" where they can be in charge of who gets the money and how it's spent (while siphoning off some in the process of course, if not directly, by requiring the existence of a bureaucracy).

As articulated in the 1920s by Arthur Pigou in general. Expounded upon at length in terms of land monopoly in the 1870s by Henry George. Implemented nearly universally for tobacco harm reduction. But still astroturfers show up and claim it can't work for carbon emissions because reasons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigouvian_tax

Or just tax carbon emissions, and watch them switch to lower-carbon alternatives all by themselves. No need for a special "portland cement taxes" or "EV subsidies" or even the entire "efficient building" bureaucracy. Just make it cheaper to migrate away from carbon by taxing emissions and and companies will all of a sudden get creative about how to migrate away from carbon....

Vinyls are always mastered separately because the format requires it. You have to fit the grooves on the platter. This requires setting the levels, compression, groove depth, and everything.

It's very possible for the vinyl to sound better even from the same master mixtape. Radiohead OK Computer is one example.

It's a total mixed bag. Many albums from the 80s sound shit on CD because they were just in a mad rush to release everything to CD. In the 90s, it could go either way. If the master mixtape was decent, the vinyl usually sounds better. In the 2000s, it briefly reversed as many indie rock labels did the same thing they did in the 80s and just rushed to release everything on vinyl to cash in on the trend, so I have a lot of indy rock discs I got suckered into buying that are only good for hanging on the wall.

The worst master mixtapes are going to sound like shit on both. If there is anything to salvage from the mixtape though, it can totally go either way.

Yet, the vast majority of Americans live in cities, and 90% of all trips are local. It's true the US is big, yet we have many highly-populated metropolitan regions that have no train transport, which are even more suited to train transport than places in Europe where they DO have good train transport. This is what people are talking about, not the Mojave desert. Furthermore, if you look up historic train timetables from say 1940, you can see that we already had comprehensive train transport in the US as well, but the government simply invested trillions of public money in car transport and essentially nothing in train transport, or even taxed transit companies while outright building government-owned highways. That's why the rail went away; it was deliberate policy choice.

People aren't wrong when they point out things like "Spain is similar in size to the US mid Atlantic". Yet, the US mid Atlantic has 30% more population than Spain, and the geography is more favorable than Spain as well. So why isn't the US Mid Atlantic crisscrossed with high speed rail like Spain is?

The population of the Texas Triangle is over 20 million. Southwest alone operates 11 flights per day just between Dallas and Houston alone, and there's over 88,000 car trips between Houston and Dallas every day. So why in the world is there not a train between those two cities? This is what people are talking about, not rural South Dakota.

Expect to hear more about studies like this now that 1) modern diet understanding is converging on an insulin-driven hormonal model (Jason Fung, Robert Lustig et. al.), and 2) the medical establishment is currently making a killing selling new diet drugs like wegovy.

They aren't going to throw out nearly a century of diet propaganda that revolves around eating more (decades of lowfat diet propaganda that results in overstimulation of insulin, insulin resistance, and runaway hunger due to the above), eating more often (i.e. deification of breakfast, and now snacking, both of them usually empty carbs, highly processed, or both), and eating more profitable and addictive foods (sugar and cheap processed carbs).

The worst thing that could upset the gravy train is if you realized you could change your body setpoint with relatively simple eating pattern changes. That benefits literally nobody (except you).

Your analysis is flawed because alcohol is legal and heroin is not. You can't compare a population of legal users and a population of illegal users. And you can't compare a legal drug and a black market drug.

When you ban something, all the casual and paw abiding users stop, leaving the addicts and unscrupulous users only. The normal dynamic when you ban something is you get fewer users, but the users you do have are more hardcore addicts and cause greater problems.

The purity of black market drugs is also bad. Black market alcohol was terrible. Over 500 people died on one day, in one city (NYC, 1926) from poisoned black market alcohol. This never happens anymore.

Until we legalize and regulate heroin the same way we do alcohol, for at least a generation or two, it's impossible to say if heroin is more dangerous than alcohol.

What people get wrong about Prohibition, is that criminalizing alcohol actually worked. It wasn't a total failure. The lesson to take from Prohibition is not "see, banning things doesn't work; everything should be legal!" because that doesn't really fit the policy or the results of Prohibition.

Alcohol really is a societal problem and with the rapid urbanization of the early 20th century, the problems with Alcohol were acute...I don't know why they were so bad but alcohol abuse was really quite bad. Alcohol use plummeted during Prohibition, domestic abuse went way down, liver cirrhosis deaths went way down, etc. etc. And despite the inevitable organized crime that resulted, overall crime went down too.

Some people still drank alcohol, did crime, and died of course, but much fewer people. The normal law of prohibition is that when you ban something, you will have fewer consumers, but each one will, on average, be worse off and more disruptive than consumers in a legal market. The product becomes much more expensive, lower quality, and more dangerous. People forget this happened with alcohol too. 585 people died in one day in NYC 1926 because of poisoned alcohol.

We did move away from total alcohol prohibition, but we still have many controls (taxes, licenses to sell and make, age limits, locations and hours where it can be sold, concentration tiers, areas it's still banned, advertising controls, major controls on driving while consuming, jobs where you still get fired if caught using, etc. etc.). Basically, we replaced total prohibition with a web of other controls...we did not replace prohibition with a free-for-all. We still are banning drinking while driving, implementing age limits and major, real-crime punishments for providing alcohol to minors, and a patchwork of harm-reduction regulations, taxes, etc.

What's important to realize about Oregon's "decriminalization" experiment is there was never a legal market for the drugs. We have still never tried a regulated market of pure, safe drugs the way we do alcohol. We kept the bootlegging and black market, and just stopped arresting users. This is nothing like alcohol. We should still try "real" decriminalization with strong controls. It will take some time to figure out what those controls need to be.

One logic goes something like this. You have to put yourself in a long-term, America-first, somewhat isolationist mindset.

--Start early. Europe has been starting wars with itself for centuries. After the US was created, it followed a strongly isolationist policy. Not getting sucked into European war of the week was a normal American value and not exceptional. The US wanted to take its ball, go home to our hemisphere, and be left alone. Forget Russia and Ukraine, back then it was let France and England keep killing each other for all we cared. The US joined the world wars reluctantly and lately, this benefitted the US from being the least destroyed of everyone; we would have benefited even more if we had not fought at all and not been destroyed at all.
--NATO was created as a post-WWII military alliance against...mainly Russia, but specifically the Soviet Union. When the Soviet Union was a power threat, the US supporting NATO made sense for the US. Since the Soviet Union fell, there is no further benefit for US to support NATO anymore, and it should have withdrawn from NATO shortly thereafter, but there was always the threat of a new communist threat popping up. Existence of NATO at this point is merely a way to foment aggression and war against Russia, who is obviously threatened. This is not important to US interests, because Russia is not a threat to the US if they are left alone, and to make things worse, US funds NATO a lot. A neoconservative mindset briefly considered that staying in NATO was ok with the logic that it allowed us to "maintain influence in the regions" but with the repeated failure of police actions abroad, repeated failure of attempts to "influence" abroad, including 9/11 which was blowback for such "influence" attempts, the vietnam war which was an "influence" attempt against soviet communism, and on and, plus a flagging economy back home while billions and trillions are spent on this, has the conservative mindset falling back to the early-20th century isolationism. Influence is good but the cost is too high.
--The current power threat is not Russia, but China. By the original logic of NATO, if anything, there should be a NATO against China.
--Russia by itself is not a threat but could be potentially a useful bulwark against China or even against an uppity Europe. Russia joining forces with China would be bad or disastrous for the US. Therefore there is no benefit to the US in being aggressive toward Russia. NATO primarily exists, post-soviet union, for the purpose of being aggressive against Russia. Europe's security concerns aren't primarily a US problem and Europe should defend itself from Russia on its own dime, not ours. If anything, US should seek to maintain good relations with, and leverage over, Russia, because if we fail to do that, China will step in and use relations and leverage to woo Russia which does not benefit the US.
--NATO and expansion of NATO, even in the absence of the Soviet Threat which was the only reason US was really benefitting from NATO, has CAUSED Russia to perform the recent territorial invasions to try to secure their sphere of influence. This is not a theory; it's exactly what Russia said they would do, for exactly the reasons Russia said they would do them, all caused by NATO expansion and aggression exactly like Russia said not to do. And this aggression against Russia does not benefit the US at all, what's worse the US is funding and supporting it through the US's outsize contributions to NATO.

That's my attempt to fairly explain the American conservative standpoint that is "soft on Russia". Russia wasn't causing us any problem until NATO aggression caused Russia to start defending/expanding its territory, and even then, it doesn't cause the US a problem, it causes Europe a problem, except it does cause US a problem because of the NATO alliance and the fact that we are entangled in Europe. It has nothing to do with supposed theories about love for Putin.

True but we basically conquered tobacco as a public health issue through harm reduction techniques, without ever banning it completely. There's really no need to ban it completely since we got most of the benefits by banning smoking in public places around others and making cigarettes just a little harder and more expensive to access, so less people casually take up the habit. We should take similar harm reduction action with respect to cars so we can address the public health problems, but there's no benefit in banning them, especially because they have legitimate and beneficial uses.

Human activity always creates pollution and in some cases it's worth it... because of the human benefits, or even because a certain pollution prevents even bigger ecological consequences. Taxing pollution is a way to harness the market to ensure pollution is optimized. Without consequences, companies have no incentive not to just dump pollution into the environment because they can profit from polluting the commons and it doesn't cost them anything; it's a straightforward tragedy of the commons market failure. Banning pollution is not reasonable or even possible in most cases. Governments sometimes sell permits to pollute but rarely do they have a goal of making the polluting entity actually pay in proportion to the pollution they cause, usually more like a license for unlimited pollution. An exception is so e carbon pricing schemes which are on the right policy track. Gad taxes are essentially proportional as well.

I agree with you 100%. I am not a libertarian but a modern Georgist. Libertarianism is not coherent not least because of its incomplete treatment of monopoly issues. Georgists believe capitalism is the best and most natural system, yet there is no capitalism without the State, and the State should derive its income from (and limit its income to) taxing rent and negative externalities that create market failures, simultaneously limiting scope of government, limiting restriction of the market, and regulating the market towards the most efficient market-decided outcome, and preventing the cascade of rent-seeking commonly called "late stage capitalism" but correctly called "late stage rent accumulation".