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.

If you add more redundancy to movies people will scroll more. This is like the geniuses in California that extended red lights because people were running yellow lights. Now lots of people run lights after they have turned red.

There seems to be no shortage of people with 2, 1 or zero children with ideas how to stop the population decline. In New York there is no shortage of ideas from people who have never built a multi dwelling unit on how to make housing more affordable. There are people who have never started a business and hired others with ideas about how we should create more jobs.

I have 5 kids (four amazing ones and the Tasmanian Devil on speed). If you want just replacement fertility you will need some families of 5 kids. Do the math. If you have 10 women and you expect 2.3 babies per woman, and 3 women either opt or can't have children, then 7 women need to have 23.

5 kids means starting young. It means having either a stable job at 25 or confidence that you will have a stable job. It means having stable housing. It doesn't mean a single family home with 6 bedrooms. It means a reliable place to live. It means having geographic mobility to look for work and opportunities. If you live in a country with rent controls, then you have created a housing shortage and only the rich can afford to move. If you live in a country that decided that the only stable jobs require a bachelors degree then it means your young at 25 will be deeply in debt. If you think everyone should be able to retire at 65 then you probably have created an economy that is a pyramid scheme diverting consumption to the older generations. If you have healthcare that universal but really gate kept by a doctors shortage, then your young, who don't have doctors feel insecure in having children.

If you screw your younger generations over for too long, then having large families becomes unfashionable. Society will erected more and more barriers to large families. You won't have even families of 4. You will have people putting off having their first child until after 30. People in their 20s might never have held a baby in the last 10 years which will make them even more hesitant to have one.

F#@k off with the virtue signaling, token subsidize for having a child. Children are expensive, like 10 or 20 thousand dollars a year. A thousand dollar subsidy won't change anyone's mind. A thousand dollar subsidy per child that you claw back to zero if a family makes 100 thousand is an insult.

If someone does something intentionally that causes another person harm, can't that person already sue for damages? Why are we creating a new law to allow this? Is there some legal obstacle preventing this? If there is, why not remove the obstacle instead of creating more laws. Or is this new law just virtue signaling?

AI will make some workers more efficient leading to those jobs being more valuable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
We are already seeing this with radiologists. AI is better than a human at reading almost any diagnostic image but you need skilled humans to babysit the AI. The major cost and bottle neck to most scans was getting the radiologist to view the images. Now the scans are faster and more reliable making them much more valuable. We can detect diseases with far higher accuracy and lower false positives than we could 5 years ago.

The economy has two inputs - Capital and Labour.
The economy has two outputs - Consumption and Capital

Almost all of our governments spending is directed towards immediate consumption. Thus when the government borrows to spend even more, they increase the amount of consumption in the economy. The economy doesn't magically make more of everything. So government spending crowds out capital creation.

Interest on the government debt goes eventually to individuals. Depending on who those individuals are the interest could go to more capital or be a transfer of consumption from future tax payers to the present investors.

Assuming only gravity holds the object together. Or another way to put it, the minimum orbital time is dependent only on the density of the object not its size. For example loose iron can only spin at once every 2 hours.
So this object must be solid and could not have formed spinning this fast.

I've stopped reading maps and I now get lazy and let my car GPS lead me everywhere in a new city. I can be in some cities for over a month and never get a good barring on where I am.

Even worse, I once took 3 of my kids to a museum. The oldest was 9 and he got one of the museum info papers. When he turned it over he exclaimed "look, a paper GPS!". He was 9 and I'd never shown him a map.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Note: These guys are heavily libertarian.

What matters to me and my family is the nominal amount we can consume. If my neighbor has 500 million in assets and he manages them well then that is good for me. If I choose to rent then I want there to be lots of profitable landlords competing for my rental income. I want there to be others that are earning lots of money so they can be taxed to pay for socialist things like healthcare. Wealth is just who owns the means of production. I want there to be lots of wealth so my labor is more productive. I don't want to be working and worrying 100 hours a week about my business and my employees and I probably wouldn't be good at it. I'm never going to risk my entire savings on a way to enable strangers on the internet to make transactions, I'm never going to invest everything on making electric cars sexy or building reusable rockets. It takes a certain personality (likely someone who most of us would call an asshole) to make risks like that.
I want to live in a society where I can consume goods, housing, leisure and healthcare and not constantly worry about the future.
I don't want a society were we demonize the wealthy so they leave or don't reinvest in what they did well, where we demonize landlords to the point no one invests in rental housing and the young lose all geographic mobility to find a career. I also don't want a society where we create artificial housing wealth by restricting home construction.

At the end of the day I would rather be a poor person in society where there is a huge amount of consumption of all the things I want than be an asset or earning rich person in a society that has scarcity of the things I want to consume.

Warren Buffet's wealth is his ownership of the means of production. He has invested in companies that made things we need. He invested in companies that generally turn a good profit. He has made the USA and the world more productive because of his good decisions. In turn this has made the labor of those working at those companies more valuable. The economy makes two things, capital and consumption. I want there to be more capital so that there is more stuff for me and everyone else to consume. At the end of the day, I don't care if I own the capital, Buffet, or the government. All I care is that the capital is used in the most productive way. Buffet directed capital where it could be used best. I would rather he pass that capital on to someone else who can manage it.