I think that the solutions to climate change are things we already know how to do. Use nuclear power, use window power, use solar power, focus on more walkable and bike rideable cities. Focus more on mass transit and especially things like trains. Replace parking lots in cities with a mixture of shops, parks, and places to live.

None of these things are magical, none of them require new technology, we already know they work well.

You are absolutely right about taxing plastic a lot more. I am generally fine with plastic that is meant to be used for a long time or for plastic that is used for health reasons but many all the cheap disposable plastic garbage has got to go.

Plastic recycling is a scam. It was a scam when the idea was first created. The plastic industry pushed the idea in order to blame consumers and also keep their industry from being regulated. It doesn't work outside of a couple types. It is better for the environment to incinerate it than try to recycle it. I am not saying that incinerating is good, it is quite bad ... it is just better.

If we just focus on the economy above everything else we will die. The world will end up more and more polluted and the impacts of that are already quite bad. The issue needs to be solved without creating so much harm. Focusing on the economy above all else will end up destroying everything including the economy.

If you want this to work you have to set the tax high enough to pay for the remediation. It can't pay for just part it needs to pay for the FULL cost of the remediation. that is the only way to internalize the costs.

In the end I don't actually care how hard an alternative is. For example if you make an engine that puts out a lot of pollution and there is no way to make it so it is not polluting that doesn't give you the right to sell the engine anyways because that is the best you can do.

Governments need to evaluate the threat from various chemicals and then decide what is an acceptable level of usage of them. If that means certain technologies can no longer be used that needs to weigh into the decision.

I know refrigerants are hard chemically. It is also going to get a LOT worse as the outdoor air temps they are expected to work at rises significantly. It is an unfortunate situation CAUSED by companies refusing to stop putting out so many green house gases and opposing actual alternatives.

This is completely correct. I actually think that both left and right refuse to accept science. The right seems to reject science more often than the left but that could just be an issue of the times we live in right now.

In the end neither side will allow facts to get in the way of what they want to do.

Biden should not have interfered in the rail workers strike. I don't care what kind of meltdown it would cause. What those workers wanted as entirely reasonable and the default for any civilized country. If they are so critical the government should have forced the rail companies to use some of the highest profits they have ever had in history to actually pay the workers more fairly and address issues like sick leave, safety, etc.

I hope the transport strike later this year in the USA is truly crippling. It is not okay for the heads of companies to just siphon off all the money for themselves while treating workers poorly.

This is why I decided to stay in Germany after finishing my PhD. I can see what the government is doing for me. I can see what the taxes are paying for. More high speed transit, worker protections, health care, retirement, rental protections, etc.

They recently add a 45 euro monthly ticket that allows you to travel on basically any train or bus in Germany. They are working with some other countries to make something like that EU wide.

I also see more efforts to make the cities walkable and bikeable. Discussions on a right to work remotely if a job does not actually require a physical presence to do the work. etc.

I think it is entirely reasonable to ask what the government is actually doing for you with the tax dollars.

Paying people, a living wage is not the primary cause of inflation or even a major factor in it. Economists have studied the problem and companies have been bragging about it in their quarterly earnings reports. The primary cause of inflation is profit taking. Energy companies and many others are posting their highest profits ever. They increased prices because they could, and it has driven up prices across the economy. If I remember right about 85% of inflation right now is profit taking about 10% in supply costs and about 5% in labor costs.

Also, if paying workers a living wage is so crippling to making the system work then how it is that companies in the EU pay their workers a living wage and also have health care, 6 weeks of vacation, and many other services but the food and other things really don't cost any more than in the USA.

So far from internal testing and some of the papers I have read is that tools like copilot are about a 30% improvement for experienced developers and much less for novices. It has to do with these tools work best when you write a function that has a narrowly defined single purpose. Novices tend to write giant master functions while experienced devs tend to write many functions with a more narrow scope that are easier to test.

What some places are starting to do is adding a tax on empty places. A bunch of empty apartments are bad for a city and a tax on a vacant property seems to be a good way to combat this problem. Keep raising the tax until the landlords start renting the place out.

If you where to write code in a normal human language it would read like a legal document. We are just not very specific in our normal usage of the language and a computer needs the specificity. Honestly, I think it would be harder to understand writing English to be specific enough for a computer vs learning a more narrower scoped language designed for the problem. Sometimes I wonder why the legal profession has not done that also.

I have seen driver updates from motherboard makers come as self-extracting rar files and a couple times I have seen them as actual rar files.

So why is it then that most other countries in the world have very simple tax codes and no need for tax prep software. How do other 1st world countries manage to have a system that is trivial for 99%+ of the population?

The IRS has campaigned for decades to simplify the tax code. They HATE the current tax code. It is companies like TurboTax that support keeping the tax code so complicated along with companies that want special loopholes.

If the IRS had their way we would have a very simple tax code, it would be almost totally automated. The IRS job would mostly be collecting the owed taxes instead of trying to show how much someone owed and that they had not paid it.