If it was cheaper in dollars, no plastic would be produced from virgin hydrocarbons. In fact, plastic from recycling is significantly more expensive than producing it from natural gas byproducts.
It would be fantastic is plastic recycling was actually economic, but it's not, really. Even high "recycling" countries like Sweden end up burning much of their plastic.
There are a couple of ideas to make trees/biomass a better carbon sink.
One is to literally sink the trees - cut 'em down, float them down a river, let them sink to the bottom of the ocean. You have to do a lot of planning so that the trees can sink to a relatively barren and cold part of the briny deeps so you aren't destroying ecosystems or just delaying the decay. By using rivers to do the majority of the moving work, you minimize the energy requirements.
Another is to burn the trees/biomass in an oxygen-free environment, turning it into nearly pure carbon. You can offset the energy needed to move and bury the biomass by using the energy released in the oxygen-free burn as an offset. You would then bury the carbon, either back into coal mines (!) or use it as a soil amendment like terra preta. Various companies are looking at carbon soil amendments as a carbon-negative process.
The question is whether any of these methods can provide more than a drop in the bucket of climate mitigation.
Of course I understand progressive taxation - if you've ever done taxes in the US, you can't help but notice those tax bracket tables. I, of course, have never hit the top of those tables, but I've gone thru a number of them. Taxation is the US is remarkably progressive - much to the surprise of many who rail about tax unfairness (as opposed to income distribution unfairness).
My reply was designed to give the parent poster the maximum benefit of the doubt - apply his 0.001% tax on every single dollar earned by the top 1% or top 25% as a pure surtax to gather the most possible revenue. And it turns out to be bupkis - when you take 1000th of 1% of even a really big number, you don't end up with much.
Unless the claimed cost overhead is less than $3.94 per vehicle, no version of your 0.001% surtax does a damn thing. The EPA and NHTSA estimated it would cost about $2,000 per vehicle, which is... a lot more than $3.94. This is super-basic math, here - your vaunted doctoral degree is meaningless and you have your own political bias blinder on.
FWIW, I am for higher CAFE standards or some sort of carbon tax. I'm not against fuel economy - I"m against innumeracy, which you have in spades.
It was unclear from your very seat-of-the-pants estimates whether you meant top income tax bracket (currently 37%, only collected at income above $500/600K single/married) or the top income bracket.
Fortunately, they are pretty much one and the same - approximately 1% of taxpayers reach the top tax bracket. And you were talking about a surtax - a tax on top of what they already pay.
I gave numbers for total income received by both the top 1% and top 25% - this is before deductions or other modifiers to a taxable amount. So my numbers were super conservative - I was essentially allowing 100% of their income to be subject to your 0.001% surtax. And it pulled in nothing.
Even bumping your percentage 1000 times over came up with numbers that barely move the needle when it comes to new cars. Under a higher CAFE standard, every average new car is better than any average old car, so nearly all cars would be subject to your refund.
I know quite a bit about tax law and income distribution in the US - maybe Germans aren't quite as knowledgeable. At any rate, a 0.001% estimate proves basic innumeracy.
The top income bracket (the 1%) pulls in about $2 trillion dollars. 0.001% of that gets you $20 million. On an average year, Americans purchase about 17 million vehicles, so your tax will save approximately $1.18 on the sticker price of each vehicle.
Now, if we expand to, say, the top 25% we get a figure of $6.7 trillion. 0.001% of that gets you $67 million, or about $3.94 per car.
"Screw that," you say, "I was just throwing out a number. Increase the tax by 1%". Now we're talking real numbers! A 1% surtax on the top 1% could (theoretically) pull in $20 billion dollars! Split among cars and you get... $1,180 per car. The average car in January 2018 was $36,270, so you would drop that to $35,090.
Whoo hoo! That makes the car only... $180 more than the same car in January 2017. And that's not including the cost to hit the new emissions and safety targets your tax was supposed to cover.
Yeah, it's worse than that - the "treatment" group stated that they were less likely to do the bad/aggressive things, but a second part of the test was to stick pins into virtual dolls that represented friends of theirs. The treatment group was more likely to actually stick pins into proxies for their friends.
Not just that - the group that received treatment had a 62%/38% split between women and men (24/15), while the control group was balanced 50%/50% (21/21).
This was not a great study.
The sample is biased because they had crappy controls.
So, a group that is 62% female is less likely than a group that is 50% female to want to rape someone when asked a second time. There doesn't seem to have been an attempt to see if it might be that women, in general, are less likely to want to repeatedly fantasize about rape, or vice versa.
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I think his comment is more narrow - that the training sets used in facial recognition are smaller among ethnic minorities and therefore may have a higher rate of false positives ("they all look alike"). This could mean that minorities would be falsely targeted at a higher rate than the majority culture.
This, of course, is fixable - add larger, more diverse data sets and eventually the AIs will be just as good (or bad) at their job regardless of vagaries of skin tone, face shape and the like. That leads to the second problem - a pervasive surveillance state. There are upsides to such a thing (crime becomes a lot easier to solve) but the downsides are huge and obvious too.
We have a national employment database. It's called e-Verify. It's been illegal to hire undocumented workers since the 1986 Immigration Act and e-Verify has been around since 1996.
The issue is that it's not mandatory to use e-Verify (although some mainly southern states do require it), so only about 50% of employees are screened. Attempts to make it mandatory have repeatedly failed, largely due to Democratic refusal (there are some small business Republicans who are against it too).
Mandatory e-Verify has been in every Trump budget and he brings it up routinely, as do a bunch of Republicans. Democrats and libertarians are largely against it, albeit for different reasons. Immigration advocates are against e-Verify "unless it includes some kind of help for the unauthorized workers who are already here".
I'm not taking any position pro or con its use or the motivations of its supporters or detractors.
All very true, but I suspect that this sort of technique is going to push its way down into the pathology departments too. After all, a number of the pathology steps involve looking at things closely and pattern matching, which are the same types of things being done by the AI being discussed.
I don't expect it to happen any time soon but I can certainly envision a system in 15-20 years that would have a nurse practitioner scan a patient, take biopsies of flagged spots and feed the biopsies into a "pathologist in a box" machine that would do all the checks required - probably down to the DNA level.
Moving the bulk of the cost of diagnosis to a capital expense rather than a labor expense could eventually drive down medical costs tremendously - once we have machines that can do most of the work, the relentless pace of technology and process improvement will make the machines cheaper and cheaper.
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Most of the post-WWII prosperity and middle-class grwoth in the US was thanks to most of the rest of the industrialized world being reduced to rubble. The 1950s-1970s boom in the US was a consequence of having the only industrial base that was completely intact after the war. Once the rest of the world rebuilt, that type of growth was impossible to sustain and we started to see stagnating wages and economic problems.
The US has reinvented itself a few times since (the tech, financial and services economies) which have provided periodic boosts to our economy, but we're never going to see the 1950s heydays again barring a dramatic technological shift.
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