Yup

One person’s purchase is another person’s sale. That’s the fundamental point you appear not to be grasping. When an elderly boomer buys personal care, they are paying a provider which includes employees who get some of the money. I don’t know how this can be hard for you to understand.

The Musk thing is just weird. You rightly say he can’t spend all the money he has. You then just bizarrely and naively think he’s somehow using the money he is not taxed on to “spend” (by which I presume you mean invest) in “new capital for future generations”. Fuck me, that’s the most naive thing I’ve heard all year and I’ve read stuff from MAGA senators thinking they wouldn’t get fucked over by Trump.

300 mile *range*, you doofus

I discussed 300 miles range EV in literally the preceding paragraph at some length. You just needed to remember the context from one paragraph to the next

There is not some fixed sum of wealth in the world. When boomers spend money on healthcare, it doesn’t burn up like smoke. It goes to pay employees and buy wound dressings from companies that make profits and pays stockholders and enriches fatcat bosses, etc — in other words, the money is still there, still in circulation. Does it accrue unequaly and do I consider that a moral and strategic problem? Yes! But it doesn’t disappear.

And you’ll have to work quite hard to convince me that a structural reallocation of wealth away from inheritence and towards health and social care is necessarily worse for inequality, given that inheritance is one of the single biggest factors in driving wealth inequity that we know of. All of this is complicated - Medicare and Medicaid is publicly funded.

But the core point is true: the lump of wealth fallacy applies to your basic argument, and wealth doesn’t go up in smoke, it gets reallocated. Our focus ought to be on making redistribution happen, as fairly as possible, and delivering sustainable growth in wealth.

This article is largely about short-term noise. But in the medium term, most buyers of second hand vehicles are going to under-value used EVs, for two core reasons:
1. EVs are being thought of like consumer tech eg phones and computers, with new generations superseding old generations and offering substantial improvement each time (it was for exactly this reason that I have always bought my (new) EVs on finance, so I could upgrade easily
2. People assume EVs deteriorate in the same way as ICE vehicles and thus should follow an ICE-shaped decrease in value with age on the used market. But EV batteries and motors will last much longer than engines. An LFP EV that has 300 miles of range when new will be getting 240 miles, ie 80% after 3000 cycles, based on cycle degradation alone. That would be 900,000 miles. You have to allow for calendar degradation on top, but it could still be well over 500k miles, with no wet belts or turbos etc to repair or replace as on an ICE engine. EV motors are equally long-lived. So these assets will last much longer than most people expect, and that’s not yet baked into prices

What that means is that a canny buyer could be a 2027 300 mile nearly new LFP EV at a big discount to the new price, and keep it for literally decades. And in 2030, they’ll be able to buy a five year old used LFP Ev at a massive discount to the new price, and still keep it for literally decades

It was also morally evil and a war crime, but it turns out to have been a really dumb move too. Who’d have thought?

https://www.middleeasteye.net/...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Sure, sure Iran lies. But there’s independent reports showing both incidents happened. The question of deliberateness is separate. But given Trump and Hegseth’s proclivities, I think it would be odd if they *did* hold back.

I don’t discount anything. *You* discount what a plus 4 world entails. I don’t use the term “horror show” lightly. It *will be worse* than your fever dreams about the effects of attempted mitigations.

Nothing about it would have been easy or pleasant, and yet it would still have been less awful than the alternative. A plus 4 world is a horror show for human civilisation.

My apologies: your original claim was about Europe, but your specific post that I responded to was about the UK.

What other sources? Which numbers show your claim of “half”? I don’t agree that 0.6 is significantly lower than 0.78, whereas I would have agreed that half would have been significant. But half would have been 0.39 to 0.44, not 0.6, and your original claim wasn’t about significance, or about Europe, it was specific to the UK, saying the UK had half the rate of car ownership rate of the US.

Putting words in my mouth in that way is a pretty pathetic thing to do.

Finally, Europe is not one place that acts uniformly, culturally or politically. It doesn’t have the same universal built environment. Car ownership is widespread across many European countries, but no single European country has as high a rate of car ownership as the US.

Exaggerating to make your case does you no favours.

That is indeed one of the potential mechanisms of action. Road noise is something that many people have night-time exposure to more than any other type of noise.

The mechanism would be: traffic noise fragments sleep (even if you don’t wake); thus, deep sleep becomes less restorative. In deep sleep the brain’s “glymphatic system” clears metabolic waste, including misfolded proteins. Parkinson’s involves accumulation of -synuclein, and impaired clearance might accelerate this process.

Poor sleep is already recognised as both a symptom and potentially a contributor to neurodegeneration.

What are you talking about? The US has about 0.78 to 0.88 cars per person. In the UK it’s 0.6. You will notice that 0.6 is not, in fact, half of 0.78 or 0.88.

This is just your priors speaking. There are plausible biological mechanisms of action: chronic activation of the stress response, and long-term cortisol exposure promotes inflammation, oxidative stress and mitochondrial dysfunction. Dopamine-producing neurons in the substantia nigra are particularly vulnerable to oxidative damage. Other potential mechanisms include sleep disruption, systemic inflammation and CVD effects. The causative link between road noise and CVD is especially well-established already, eg stroke risk goes up if you live near noisy roads.

If you *don’t* believe this, you’ll have to explain the quiet facade findings with your alternative explanation. Good luck with that.

While it’s bad to overstate something, it’s equally bad to understate something. And you’re doing the latter. The very abstract of the JAMA article says “Meaning: These findings suggest that road traffic noise may be a risk factor for Parkinson disease and that access to a quiet facade may mitigate the associated risk.”

This isn’t just some random correlation done by naive idiot scientists looking at two variables that reasonable people would never think would be linked. This is epidemiologists with expertise in understanding population risk factors for neurological disease investigating whether road noise is, as suspected, a risk factor for Parkinson’s.

You truly are just endlessly a prick. You give yourself these ridiculous airs and graces as though you are fearlessly telling truth to power, when in reality you’re being a cock on the internet telling someone they use Apple Maps to get to the shops because they say they use the service in their home country. This isn’t bravery, it’s stupidity. And it’s even more stupid that you pretend that you were saying something dispassionate, when it’s patently obvious you were attempting some sort of idiotic insult along the lines of my being too dumb to get to the shops without the help of Apple Maps. So you can get fucked good and hard by the moral horse you’re trying to ride in on.