If the negative externalities of fossil fuel usage (up to $1,600 per person annually) were properly internalized into the price of electricity as economists say should be done (with the revenue going to hospitals to pay for health care for respiratory patients), nuclear energy would suddenly become much more cost-effective than it is today.
But sadly, we live in an age of privatizing profits and socializing losses.
Who needs it for transport? This could be a good alternative to cell towers, weather satellites, and so on.
Well, that's not 'delivering it' to me. That's making me go to their store to pick it up.
In a way, it's like community mailboxes. Stuff is no longer delivered directly to your house, but it's still convenient.
How does the locker work? Do I get a code emailed to me?
Yes, exactly. Just go there, punch in the code, and the locker door opens automatically.
Last year, the USPS raised my 6 month P.O. box rental fee by 41%. It seems strange that they raised the rental rates even while fewer P.O. boxes were being rented in a down economy.
It just shows how the USPS (or Congress, who sets the rates) are disconnected from reality.
If we were to focus less on revenge and more on rehabilitation, as you suggest, then the sentence would be the same for all crimes. You could have shoplifters "locked up" for longer than mass murderers. And I'm not entirely sure that would be a bad thing.
Having a diversity of OSes puts you at the mercy of random and subtle bugs in one OS that require customizing either the OS or the code.
Or crossing that OS off the list. Or having the bug fixed.
When you listen to music on electrostatic speakers, you can hear things you couldn't hear before. It makes normal speakers sound muffled as if you're listening through a pillow. So the speakers can mean the difference between hearing the mp3 compression and not hearing it.
Germany is increasing coal consumption not because its investment in green energy has failed, but because it is shutting down nuclear reactors in the wake of Fukushima.
Of course we all want gas to be free.
You quoted fox news...
Because only Nixon could go to China.
How do you internalize a cost when you can't identify the cost?
We know that air pollution costs up to $1,600 per person annually in respiratory problems. We also know that the cost of climate change is estimated at around $20 per ton of CO2. Therefore, the costs can be identified and quantified.
Let's also fix the market failures of air pollution and carbon emissions by internalizing their costs into the price of fossil fuels. If you agree that correcting market failures makes the free market more efficient, then you must be in favor of a carbon tax.
I've seen people banned simply because they held an unpopular viewpoint for which the moderators couldn't come up with a rational counterargument and didn't want to deal with the cognitive dissonance. Banning has become a shortcut abused by those in power to silence inconvenient truths, with no formal mechanism in place to appeal the bans.
Worse, there's no easy way to know which message forums engage in this overhanded behavior, because said message forums typically delete any messages exposing it. This creates information asymmetry which restricts the flow of alternate viewpoints. As a result, we all lose.
Boards like Slashdot and Reddit are better, because they (usually) don't delete posts without leaving a trace, but it still comes down to moderators downmodding simply because they don't agree. Maybe mod actions need to be individually justified, with those justifications open for debate and subject to cancellation, but that gets complicated real quick, and by the time it has gone through the process, the conversation has already moved on.
Real Programs don't use shared text. Otherwise, how can they use functions for scratch space after they are finished calling them?
