https://www.getmonero.org/libr... Also if you have monero you are buying real world illegal stuff with it. So why would you need it on an exchange? That's like registering as a person of interest.

Hydrogen is very difficult to use and extremely dangerous.
At between 18.3% and 59% hydrogen in air the mix is explosive. No other flammable substance has that broad of a range of explosive mix. Hydrogen is extremely easy to ignite compared to even gasoline vapor.
Hydrogen requires either cryogenic or extreme pressure to store any meaning full amounts.
Hydrogen makes metals brittle and can leach through all but the best seals.
Hydrogen is a nightmare to transport and to transfer

Consider the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... - It gets exponentially harder to change your delta and hydrogen gives the best impulse. SpaceX, the most successful rocket company ever, has chosen not to use hydrogen. It's storage is that difficult that it doesn't make sense in the most advanced rockets. There's no way it makes sense in a car.

Trains, even if they run on coal are so much more efficient at moving people than individual cars that anything that makes them less useful will lead to more cars being used. A full train can hold hundreds of people. If a fraction of those people choose to use cars instead because the battery train is too expensive or there are few of them then the reduction in pollution by using batteries over a fossil fuel is lost. Heck, even if the other cars are battery cars, over the lifetime the diesel train is better for the environment.

On the one hand, all crypto currencies are a scam (even the ones I contributed to)
On the other is banks lending out my money and paying me almost nothing

On the third hand is the stock brokerage firms lending out my game stop shares, paying me exactly zero interest and not letting me take my shares out.

I might actually have to side with the open scam.

I did security audits and the company that did the second best was a toy company. They did better than any banks, every governments agency we audited and all the defense contractors. The difference was that if this toy company got the security wrong they would lose large amounts of money. If a bank or the government f#$ks up security they don't bear the pain.

Private equity firms provide a service for the economy. If you built a midsize company and want to retire they often offer you more than any other entrepreneur will. They offer liquidity for the market in midsize companies and they offer liquidity in the housing market. As a home seller they allow you to sell faster and potentially at a higher rate.

But why are PE firms able to profit in these markets? Why is there a lack of liquidity that gives them an arbitrage advantage?

In housing it is the high cost of real estate agents, lawyers and the cost of navigating land transfer taxes plus the low risk on the investment because of zoning laws pushing house prices up faster than inflation.

In the midsize company market it is regulations and legal expertise that give them an advantage. In a sane world, a PE firm shouldn't be able to run a heating and cooling company or a small chain of coffee shops or any other 15 to 200 person operation better than someone with expertise in the market. But a PE firm knows how to run the accounting department, they know how to handle payroll and all the HR issues that come with having more than a few employees. They know how to write contracts to avoid high legal costs later. They will make the decision to cut staff to the level to support the lowest amount of work, not the hopeful most amount of orders.

If you want to get ride of most PE firms in the mid market cap range get rid of all the non-safety labour regulations. Eliminate the strangle hold realtors have on the housing market. Make local land registry offices do their f#king job and ensure clean titles with easy, low cost title transfers.

Thank you for confirming one of the causes. You don't want to live like that so you vote to not allow anyone else to live like that. You vote to only allow the housing you aspire to live in. And it is impossible for everyone to live in single family homes and still have functional communities. Sure you can live in a small, older rich neighbourhood near shops and near where you work but most people won't be able to. They will either have no home (and not be able to take a good job) or have to commute long distances to work stuck in traffic with all the other commuters. Public transit won't work because the density won't permit it. These people will get in their cars almost every time they want to do anything, shopping, work, school, entertainment. And then they will raise a generation by driving them to sports practice, crafting, entertainment, friends houses....

It was voters. Voter greed. The majority of voters live in owner occupied dwellings. In Canada that number is 67%. Homes shouldn't be a good investment. They should depreciate with time the way cars do. However through greed and ignorance, home owners used their majority to enact laws and regulations that would restrict the building of competing housing. Home owners feel entitled to house prices going up significantly faster than inflation. In Canada 44% of people plan on using the profit of their house to pay for retirement. The entitlement runs so deep that most non-home owners believe they have a right to buy a house and to also enjoy a huge profit in that house when it goes up in value. This leads to not only the 67% of Canadians wanting most new housing to be single family homes but a good fraction of the remaining 33% also are in favour of zoning that only allows single family homes. Heck, if you talk about allowing apartment buildings you will hear people people opposing it say "I don't want to live in an apartment". Implying that because they don't want to live that way no one should. Or maybe they mean I don't want any cheaper, more convenient housing to compete with my house. Rational thought goes out the window when people are talking about defending their most prize asset.

But that doesn't stop them from suing or doing things that they know will they will lose later in court. The time and money it takes to beat them is victory enough for them.

Who always seems to be right.

As a society we accept a huge number of traffic fatalities and injuries. The driver at fault doesn't pay the true cost of the damage they do. If they did insurance would be unaffordable. Once self driving cars prove that they can reduce traffic deaths by a significant amount I think society will no longer accept the number of deaths by human drivers. We will put more and more of the cost of accidents on the drivers and their insurance. Eventually the cost of insurance for a human driven car will be comparable to the cost of a self driving car. At that point only the really rich (or total dicks) will be able to drive themselves.

A carbon tax measures how much carbon you buy and unless you sell it to someone else assumes that you burn all of it and then taxes you accordingly. So if you buy 1 pound of coal or gasoline, it assumes you released about 3 pounds of CO2. A carbon credit is a huge subsidy to people who are currently polluting with the idea that they get rewarded if they reduce their consumption but they face no consequence if they keep on polluting the same amount. Carbon credits are also earned for sequestering carbon. Carbon credits leads to an entire bureaucracy that is incentivized to lie about how good a job it is doing. Carbon credits are a dumb idea in theory and always corrupt in practice.

This is a tragedy of the commons. In California most of the fresh water is used by farmers to grow food for pennies on the cubic meter. So California passed laws saying the farmers had to use their water or lose it. So farmers use it. If we instead allowed the farmers to sell the water then the most efficient users of water would buy it. I can flush my toilet, have a lot of showers and even water my plants for the water needed to grow a bag of almonds. The idea that the water is too valuable to have a price means that water has almost no value and is wasted.

Yes we gave away the rights to more water than there typically is in the various rivers but we as a society made a deal with the people who we gave those rights to. We can't say, oh, we all made a mistake, we want to take your water rights away. Ground water is even worse in many places. If you don't take as much water out as possible your neighbors will take it out anyway.

We have this bizarre idea that people will on their own decide how much of a common good they can take and cumulatively people won't take more than is sustainable. How many fish stocks have been depleted when we knew they would be gone? How much CO2 have we put into the atmosphere while arguing it's the Chinese, the Americans, the rich, the 100 biggest oil companies, etc that should be cutting back? It's not my greed it's everyone else's.

And let the economy figure out the best way to substitute other forms of energy. Governments are generally incompetent at everything. We should only let the government choose things for us when we have no better alternatives. And for the love of god, please stop direct and indirect subsidizing fossil fuels. So no caving to automakers when they want to save classic car jobs. Have time of use pricing for electricity that reflects the spot price of electricity at least for high income families. Stop zoning most of our cities such that most housing requires a car.

For every $1 these AI companies earn in revenue I can see them being successfully sued for $10 or more. Even if the US congress gives them some sort of immunity in the USA they are still going to be sued for a non trivial fraction of the world GDP in the rest of the world.