Congestion pricing is only an option in places that have good alternatives to driving, something that a freeway in California does not have.
Working from home is an alternative, one that we should use more.
(Of course, I WFH full time and have for 20 of the last 30 years, so I have a bit of a bias.)
While I'm all for the American dream there needs to be a hard limit on how much money a single person is allowed to accumulate.
You do know that Musk doesn't actually have a trillion dollars in *money*, right? He doesn't have anywhere remotely close to that much money. His total liquid assets are extensive, sure, maybe as much as a few billion, but nearly all of his incredible net worth isn't money. You could probably call it "potential money".
There's no doubt that Musk has near limitless funds at this point. But, "trillionaire" is just paper games.
And everyone should keep in mind that this is true for basically all of the billionaires. Not that there isn't real wealth there, but it's a lot fuzzier than the numbers appear. Basically everyone with astronomical wealth mostly owns shares in companies, and how much of that value is real in any near-term sense depends on a lot of factors.
Musk's wealth is more speculative and fuzzy than most because his companies' valuation is based not on the revenues the companies generate now but theories about what they might generate in the future. Tesla's high valuation is all about the promise of self-driving cars restructuring transportation. SpaceX's is a little bit about cheap access to space changing a lot of stuff and more about AI. In all cases the high valuations are bets on world-changing technology being becoming real, and on Musk's companies being able to capture a good chunk of the resulting revenues.
The US solved this problem 150 years ago. First with the observation that immigrants acculturate. Second with the acceptance that elements of their culture are going to get melded in to form a new culture. Culture is never static, anyway, it always drifts and morphs. Immigration just changes it a bit faster. But it's good! This ongoing immigrant-driven culture change is what made the US a superpower. Embrace it.
Indeed is USED to work this way....and if so, sure, cool.
The trouble is...it no longer works that way, there is no more 'melting pot'.
For various reasons, one being we've let WAY too many in at once....they do not come here to become Americans and assimilate, they are here to take over and make a Mini-whatever country they came from
They segregate, they do NOT learn the language and in Muslim cases, they try to change our laws to fit their religion.
In the old days, you didn't see protests with migrants waving flags of their home land, but instead were waving the US flag....
So, no that old way isn't working....and if we don't stop the influx....we risk losing our country even more than we risk losing it right now.
Doing that in the Commonwealth of Virginia is just going to get you a bigger fine. Radar detectors are illegal (or at least used to be the last time I drove there).
Glad most of the US doesn't suck like the Commonwealth of Virginia.....where we are free to know when we are being observed and electronically surveyed by the police.
Fortunately in the UK we have average speed checks over long distances so arseholes find a hole in their bank account and maybe points on their driving license too.
Ah....well, while it is getting bad here in the US, at least we're not the dystopian hell the UK is at this point....
But that is a weak causal story compared with the much more direct variables everyone is living through: housing costs, wage stagnation, student debt, childcare costs, healthcare costs, delayed household formation, and wealth being increasingly captured by the top of the economy
That analysis is utterly wrong. Far, far worse than the smartphone theory.
It is, in fact, the almost exact opposite of the truth. The truth is that wealth is what causes fertility decline. Wealth and female education, actually, which come hand-in-hand. This story is strikingly visible everywhere around the globe. As a population becomes wealthier and its women become better-educated, fertility falls. Without exception, and the effect is so powerful it overrides culture, religion, everything.
This is the primary driver in the US, too. In fact, wages have not stagnated, not when you look at the full picture including government transfers, and every generation is wealthier than the one before. Somewhat surprisingly, given the current housing price bubble, each generation even has higher home ownership rates than the previous generations at the same ages. Houses and apartments are also significantly bigger and more luxurious (which explains most of their higher prices, actually; do some comparisons on a per square foot basis over time, then adjust for the higher quality and greater amenities we have today).
But if you look at how Americans spend their money over the years, the biggest change you'll find is that we spend less on housing, food and clothing as a percentage of our income (in spite of bigger, nicer houses, far more restaurant and delivered food, and much larger wardrobes) and much more on entertainment -- and that in spite of the fact that entertainment has gotten dramatically cheaper.
And then, you lose your country....the culture is lost, what makes your country YOUR country....disappears.
The US solved this problem 150 years ago. First with the observation that immigrants acculturate. Second with the acceptance that elements of their culture are going to get melded in to form a new culture. Culture is never static, anyway, it always drifts and morphs. Immigration just changes it a bit faster. But it's good! This ongoing immigrant-driven culture change is what made the US a superpower. Embrace it.
However, immigration is only a stopgap solution to the problem of population decline, because fertility is declining everywhere on the globe, fast. The global fertility rate is basically at replacement now, but the decline is continuing, and accelerating. We'll drop below replacement as a species in just a few years. Even then population will keep growing for a while due to the "filling out" effect, but then it'll start dropping, fast. And it will quickly become top-heavy (more old than young).
Our economic system does not cope with population decline.
Probably not just our economic system, our civilization as a whole, though AI may change that. A highly technological civilization depends on having a large population because it depends on a vast amount of knowledge, which requires a tremendous amount of specialization. Some of this is the obvious sort, such as the scientists and engineers who are focused on increasingly-narrow areas of expertise, but a lot of it is not at all obvious, especially in industry, where everything we make requires a huge amount of knowledge that was learned by doing and isn't -- and maybe can't be -- taught anywhere but on the job.
To some extent we could probably manage with a smaller population if more of the population became highly educated (not necessarily in the academic sense, though we'd need that, too), but that transition wouldn't be easy, in part because there are lots of people who simply aren't interested in highly-technical work. We'd need a lot more of them to become willing to learn and do it anyway. Obviously the first step would be to bring the whole remaining population up to what the developed world considers a basic level of education -- that would enable us to tap new supplies of scientists, engineers and technicians. But the population reduction that seems likely to come means we'd need a lot more than that to be able to maintain our knowledge base and production diversity.
AI might change all this, of course. It could make it completely unnecessary for humans to participate in any of the above. But without something like that, it seems unlikely that our technological civilization could survive with less than a billion people or so, and technological progress would likely take a severe hit long before we hit that level of population reduction.
Governments are supposed to correct market failures. When a technology has a trajectory to be an eventual winner but faces short-term obstacles that the market isn't handling, that's an appropriate time for government to step in.
I need to get my readers, I'm just NOT seeing it....
It's a crime in the US to "shout fire in a movie theater". Guess Americans live in Soviet times too.
NO. It is a crime to FALSELY shout fire in a theater. Huge difference.
Even that isn't true. The correct statement is that it's a crime to falsely shout "Fire!" in a crowded theater in circumstances where doing so is reasonably likely to incite a panic that would cause death or injury.
If you shouted "Fire!" in an American theater today, odds are that everyone would just ignore you, and a reasonable person would expect that to be the outcome. That's because fires in modern theaters are (1) quite rare, (2) much more likely to be announced by an alarm and (3) not difficult to escape safely due to the plethora of clearly-marked exit routes that are required by law. So everyone knows that in the event of a fire trampling people in an effort to escape is not necessary for self-preservation, that calmly walking to the nearest exit is better.
It's worth noting that the truth or falsity of the shout isn't really even much of a factor in the legal question. What matters is whether a reasonable person would expect that the shout would be likely to cause unnecessary death or injury as opposed to not shouting. The original Schenk v. United States case opinion in which Holmes used "Fire in a crowded theater" as an example, did argue that truth was an absolute shield, but later rulings, especially the 1969 case that overturned Schenk, removed that protection. If you shout intending to cause real physical harm and expecting that to be the result of your action it's a crime, even if what you shouted was true.
If 30 seems safe to him, who should argue?
Then he needs to get the fuck OFF the highway and drive regular roads with lower speed limits....until he can earn his "big boy pants" and learn to drive at highway speeds with the adults.
If you can't hack it, then you don't belong there impeding other people with the proper driving skills.
TEMU Hospital....
Today on Temu Hospital we see Dr. Nick.......
The key elements in human thinking are not numbers but labels of fuzzy sets. -- L. Zadeh
