Comment Re: The book burning has begun (Score 1) 65
Well, your buying power would be crippled.
Well, your buying power would be crippled.
but the tradeoff they are making for us is that everything we import could cost as much as 3X more than it did before they destroyed the value of the dollar.
Before or after you add on the tariffs? Don't forget those are on the sticker price and paid in USD, so if something costs you 3x as many dollars then you'll also need to pay 3x as much in tariffs on top as well (assuming the tariff rate doesn't change again, of course). Even at Trump's base tariff rate of 10%, that would mean something that would previously have cost $100 to get shipped to your door from AliExpress or wherever now costing $300, plus a further $30 in import taxes.
I think there would be a red line when one US Dollar no longer gets you more than one Canadian Dollar, but who knows with all the crazy at the moment? Some people probably won't think it's a problem even when it no longer gets you one Mexican Peso...
Sure, itâ(TM)s quite possible for two people to exchange offhand remarks about the local weather apropos of nothing, with no broader point in mind. It happens all the time, even, I suppose, right in the middle of a discussion of the impact of climate change on the very parameters they were discussing.
The thing to understand is we're talking about sixth tenths of a degree warming since 1990, when averaged over *the entire globe* for the *entire year*. If the change were actually distributed that way -- evenly everywhere over the whole year -- nobody would notice any change whatsoever; there would be no natural system disruption. The temperature rise would be nearly impossible to detect against the natural background variation.
That's the thinking of people who point out that the weather outside their doors is unusually cool despite global warming. And if that was what climate change models actually predicted, they'd be right. But that's not what the models predict. They predict a patchwork of some places experiencing unusual heat while others experience unusual coolness, a patchwork that is constantly shifting over time. Only when you do the massive statistical work of averaging *everywhere, all the time* out over the course of the year does it manifest unambiguously as "warming".
In the short term -- over the course of the coming decade for example, -- it's less misleading to think of the troposphere becoming more *energetic*. When you consider six tenths of a degree increase across the roughly 10^18 kg of the troposphere, that is as vast, almost unthinkable amount of energy increase. Note that this also accompanied by a *cooling* of the stratosphere. Together these produce a a series of extreme weather events, both extreme heat *and* extreme cold, that aggregated into an average increase that's meaningless as a predictor of what any location experiences at any point in time.
Sure but the advantage of crops is you can easily scale your solar collectors by planting more acres. There are soybean farms with a half million acres out there that would produce significant amounts of biodiesel if used for that purpose. Now algae is a lot more efficient in a physics sense, but an equivalent algae facility would be on the order of 100,000 acres. The water requirements and environmental impacts of open algae pools would be almost unimaginable. Solar powered bioreactors would increase yields and minimize environmental costs, at enormous financial costs, although possibly this would be offset by economies of scale.
Either way a facility that produces economically significant amounts of algae biodiesel would be an engineering megaproject with higher capital and operating costs than crop based biodiesel, but an algae based energy economy is a cool idea for sci fi worldbuilding. In reality where only the most immediately economically profitable technologies survive, I wouldnâ(TM)t count on it being more than a niche application.
It isn't just fanboys. Tesla stock is astronomically overpriced based on the sales performance and outlook of what normal people consider its core business -- electric cars (and government credits). For investors, Tesla is *all* about the stuff that doesn't exist yet, like robotaxis.
Are they wrong to value Musk's promises for Tesla Motors so much? I think so, but it's a matter of opinion. If Tesla actually managed to make the advances in autonomous vehicle technology to make a real robotaxi service viable, I'd applaud that. But I suspect if Musk succeeds in creating a successful robotaxi business, Tesla will move on to focus on something other than that. Tesla for investors isn't about what it is doing now, it's about not missing out on the next big thing.
The real problem with biodiesel would be its impact on agriculture and food prices. Ethanol for fuel has driven global corn prices up, which is good for farmers but bad in places like Mexico where corn is a staple crop. Leaving aside the wildcat homebrewer types who collect restaurant waste to make biodiesel, the most suitable virgin feedstocks for biodiesel on an industrial scale are all food crops.
As for its technical shortcomings, if it even makes any economic sense at all then that's a problem for the chemists and chemical engineers. I suspect biodiesel for its potential environmental benefits wouldn't attract serious investment without some kind of mandate, which would be a really bad thing if you're making it from food crops like oil seeds or soybeans.
Just one point: "free love" actually has a historical definition. It means that sexual activity should not be regulated by governments. That would also, technically, include the right to practice celibacy.
I wonder at what rate they'll need to increase the pricing in order to maintain it. Ironically improved traffic may make driving more desirable.
They will have to increase the price eventually as demand for transport overall rises. The point of the pricing is to deter driving enough that the street network operates within its capacity limits; if driving becomes more desirable than status quo ante, they aren't charging enough and will have to raise prices to keep demand manageable.
Think of it this way: either way, traffic will reach some equilibrium. The question is, what is the limiting factor? If using the road is free, then the limiting factor is traffic congestion. If you widen some congested streets, the limiting factor is *still* congestion, so eventually a new equilibrium is found which features traffic jams with even more cars.
The only way to build your way out of this limit, is to add *so* much capacity to the street network that it far outstrips any conceivable demand. This works in a number of US cities, but they're small and have an extensive grid-based street network with few natural barriers like rivers. There is simply no way to retrofit such a street architecture into a city of 8.5 million people where land costs six million dollars an acre.
So imposing use fees is really is the only way to alleviate traffic for a major city like New York or London. This raises economic fairness issues, for sure, but if you want fairness, you can have everyone suffer, or you can provide everyone with better transportation alternatives, but not necessarily the same ones. Yes, the wealthy will be subsidizing the poor, but they themselves will also get rewards well worth the price.
If you don't have time to do it right, where are you going to find the time to do it over?