My thermostat doesn't have any notion of DST, so it's wrong for about two months per year because it takes about a month for me to notice that the furnace is running extra early or extra late and that I need to change the time on the thermostat by and hour by choosing the "Set Clock" option.

But thermostats are cheap and simple to replace, so if I actually cared I could replace it and so could anybody who has one of the weird ones you've seen.

Mine doesn't know what DST is because it has no idea what date it is, it just repeats a seven day cycle endlessly. I'm not sure what excuse there is for designing a thermostat that actually knows the date but doesn't have an option for changing or disabling DST. A thermostat like that would be incompatible with parts of the US and all of Europe and Asia. Why would someone design a thermostat that's hard coded to only work in a specific geographic area and only as long as DST practices never change. It's not like the anti-DST discussion is new. It's been going on for decades.

The link you provided doesn't describe a subsidy at all, it describes costs being tax deductible. The specific costs are oil company specific, but the idea of costs being deductible is generally applicable to companies of all kinds. Companies in general are taxed on profits, not revenue.

If the government taxes businesses on revenue and doesn't allow deducting costs it would put all sorts of businesses out of business, not just oil companies. Agriculture for example, probably wouldn't exist if farmers weren't allowed to deduct the cost of farming from their revenue.

There are very few companies of any kind that could exist if they weren't able to the specific costs associated with their sort of business from their income. The interesting thing about the article you linked to is that oil companies can't deduct 100% of the cost of "IDC" whereas presumably other types of capital expenditure can be fully depreciated according to IRS depreciation schedule rules.

It sounds to me like your link describes the exact opposite of a subsidy, it's calling out a specific type of cost that oil companies can only partially deduct. Whereas in an industry agnostic tax scheme, oil companies and all other companies would deduct 100% of all costs regardless of type and pay an identical tax rate on net profit regardless of industry.

Those really, really expensive yachts are a huge wealth transfer to the working class. Do you have any idea how many working class people it takes to build, maintain and operate those things?

And most of the rich don't hoard their wealth because if they did, inflation would make them a lot less rich. Most of the rich have most of their money invested in ventures that make them more money.

But if they did hoard their wealth, that would actually counteract (at least partially) inflation. Taking money out of circulation decreases the money supply which makes the remaining money more valuable.

The issue isn't hoarding wealth, it's investing wealth into non-productive ventures. Which, granted, does include paying hundreds of millions to skilled tradespeople to build yachts that sit underutilized. But it also includes building and operating cruise ships for the less rich, and operating professional sports leagues and the entire entertainment industry.

Can you cite any person, by name, who is not a republican who has said that? A direct quote, written or video, would be helpful. Because I've only ever heard it coming from foaming at the mouth maga types.

Or your daughter comes home sober with her boyfriend. And her ex-boyfriend who just happens to be a cop uses your cameras to keep track of who she's dating and when.

My car is Japanese, I'm skeptical that the Chinese can limit anything on it.

You post this over and over and it's just not true. Lots of people who don't work continue to eat. Anyone can give anybody else food, parents, children, friends, charity donors. Nobody is stopping you or anyone else from giving food to anybody you want to.

But what you want is the ability to force other people to provide you with food (and presumably clothing and shelter and entertainment) without compensation. Essentially you want slaves who will provide you what you want without any obligation on your part to provide anything they want.

What if the people who produce the food decide they don't want to work? I've worked in food service. They were generally unpleasant jobs. I did them because people were paying for the food and that money was in turn used to pay me. If the people who were consuming the food weren't paying for it I certainly wouldn't continued to provide it.

Tell me honestly, if you were guaranteed 2000 calories per day of rice and beans for the rest of your life would you drop this "if you don't work you don't eat" nonsense? Or do you want a variety of fresh and tasty foods prepared and delivered, if not to your door, at least to a place close to your home?

Do you expect a labor force to grow, harvest, clean, package and ship the food to a convenient place for you to get it? If so, why do you think those people should have to do that work but don't think you should have to do any work at all? Are you ok with just raw vegetables or do you also expect factories and machinery to fill aisle after aisle of supermarket shelves? Do you think all those people should be forced to work to feed you without expecting anything in return from you?

You forgot to multiply by the number of widgets.

But yes, the value of your work is the portion of the revenue (not profit) that your work produces. Sometimes this number is easy to calculate other times it's extremely hard or impossible to calculate so it gets estimated with a very, very rough guess.

And if the amount of revenue is less than the cost of all the materials and labor, why even produce the widgets at all? If the company is not making a profit, why would the owners of the company not change the business or shut it down. Running a business that keeps losing money just doesn't make sense. And there do exist non-profit businesses, but they still try to make a bit of money and are at risk of going out of business if they lose money for a while and didn't have enough profit saved up to cover the losses.

Similarly, if you want more money to assemble widgets than what anyone is willing to pay for those widgets, why are you assembling them?

Every single person in the world routinely makes choices to not buy things they think are too expensive. Why should labor be any different? The people running companies choose not to hire people, or to lay people off, if the work those people would do is worth less than the paycheck those people require in order to do the work. This is no different than you walking into a store and choosing not to buy an item off the shelf because you think the price is too high. You could buy it, but then you'd have less money to spend on other things that you'd prefer to spend it on. The buyer decides how much they want to pay and if it's less than the seller will sell for, the buyer walks away. That's all layoffs are, the buyer (company) deciding they would rather spend money else because the price the seller (employee) is asking is higher than the buyer thinks it's worth.

It's not just companies. Everybody wants to get more stuff for less. That's why you want more pay for less work and it's why you buy less expensive stuff when you could pay more for the same thing. You just view it differently when it's you wanting more for less than when your employer wants the same thing.

Are you under the impression that there are no nuclear power plants in America?

https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs...

Of the 54 nuclear power plants in America I can't think of a single one that caused a city to be evacuated for 10 years. Did I miss some news? Which cities have been evacuated for 10 years?

These nuclear power plants have been operating for a LOT longer than one quarter. Your claim is just entirely contrary to objective fact. There are 54 nuclear power plants that have been operating in the US for many quarters and exactly zero of them have resulted in a city being evacuated. It's not impossible, but it's also not impossible that an asteroid could hit the earth and wipe out all life. Your assessment of probability is out of sync with observed fact.

Sure, that means this story is false. Obviously coal use did not hit a record high in 2024. How could it have with solar, wind and batteries being so cheap? Why would anybody burn coal when there's a limitless supply of cheap solar, wind and battery power available?

Unless maybe solar, wind and battery are not limitless and need to be supplemented with something else. But I'm going to trust you. Climate change is a solved issue because there's enough solar, wind and battery power available to replace all other power generation and keep up with new demand and not only that, but it's cheaper too.

Only if during that hour those customers make the decision that they really didn't want what you were selling. If they buy it later today or tomorrow or next week, you didn't lose anything. If a container ship carrying your product across the ocean sank, that's a loss. The item you didn't sell during your e-commerce website outage is still in a warehouse waiting to be sold. When it sells, you'll collect the money that you didn't collect when your website was down.

And if the outage did allow them to realize that buying the item from you would have been a poor choice and a regrettable use of their money, that's probably a net benefit.

No money is lost just because a transaction doesn't take place. The seller still has whatever they were selling, the buyer still has the money they would have spent. If a delay allows the buyer to reassess and determine that their money is better spent on something else, then different sellers make sales they wouldn't have.

If billions were truly lost by some, most of those billions were gained by others. But I suspect that at the end of the week the net losses were negligible. The vast majority of money that would have been spent during the AWS outage probably was still spent. The vast majority of work that would have been done during the AWS outage probably still got done.

A few people were busier than usual, other people got a bit more time to slack off. But most of the people who slacked off, probably made up what they missed a bit later.

Are you claiming that people went hungry because of this AWS outage? I find that hard to believe. But even if some people did skip some unhealthy delivered meals, the money they would have spent is still in their pocket waiting to be spent on something else. You could just as well claim that billions were gained as a result of the AWS outage because people who couldn't order food delivered bought something later with the money they didn't spend on food delivery.

And I seriously doubt AWS or other companies spent any additional money fixing this outage that they wouldn't have spent otherwise. Some people had a busier day than expected, others had a less busy day waiting around and reading slashdot or other non-AWS-dependent entertainment of choice. But at the end of the week it is very unlikely that very many people accomplished less than they would have if the AWS outage hadn't happened.

Are you claiming that bakers couldn't bake without AWS? Or that people went hungry?

Even if a bakery did shut down due to an AWS outage, which I doubt, the people who would have bought the baked goods almost certainly bought something else. No money was lost, it was just spent somewhere else.

When things are destroyed value is lost. The broken window fallacy is a fallacy because the work that went into replacing a broken window could have gone into installing a window in a new location. Two windows is more than one, so replacing a broken window is a loss compared to installing a new window while still having the unbroken old window.

Shifting money from one place to another is not a loss.

If some companies lost billions due to a few hours of AWS outage, it's likely that other companies gained billions from customers who went elsewhere. But more likely, in most cases the customers just waited and spent the same money later.

Or, perhaps the customers just saved money. Maybe they would have spent money, but when the AWS outage prevented them from spending it they had a bit of time to think and realized that they didn't actually need to buy the thing they would have bought. Perhaps in some cases the AWS outage was a net benefit, preventing people from wasting money on something they didn't really want/need.

Sugar cane is a type of grass. Corn is a type of grass. What is "proper sugar" other than the desiccated remains of juice squeezed out of grass? What is high fructose corn syrup other than the not quite completely desiccated remains of juice squeezed out of grass?

Sure, the sugar juice maybe squeezed out of the stalks while the corn juice is squeezed out of the seeds, but in either case you're squeezing juice out of a particular species of plant in the general family of grasses and removing as much water as you conveniently can in order to make it lighter for transport.

In both cases you're doing it because the juice is a mix of sugar molecules in water. The exact ratio of glucose molecules to fructose molecules is different between the two juices, but both molecules are sugars and they are very similar to each other in general shape and constituent atoms as well as in how they are perceived by the human tongue.

I'm not suggesting you overindulge in either, but you're putting too much weight on the word "proper" when you write "proper sugar" as if that particular desiccated grass juice is the "correct" one.

If it were worthwhile, either one could be further processed to increase or decrease the fructose to glucose ratio to any desired ratio. It would cost money to do it, so there would have to be a good reason. But glucose and fructose are made of the same atoms, so converting either one to the other is just a matter of chemistry.

Alternatively, it's bioengineering. Instead of fabricating solar panels out of silicon to generate electricity to synthesize chemical fuels, we harness biological processes. I recall reading a sequel to E.T. where the aliens of E.T.'s species used entirely biological technology for everything, including constructing and powering their spaceships. The book was probably utter nonsense, I was very young when I read it, but the idea of engineering biological systems isn't absurd.

When you think of nanotechnology you probably think of Iron Man's suit assembling itself from nothing, but aren't mitochondria basically nanotechnology? How much smaller can a machine get than the cellular apparatus that read RNA and build molecules from the RNA instructions?

Engineering plants to produce liquid chemical fuel seems like a reasonable thing to do in a technological society.