nbailey @ nbailey @lemmy.ca

Posts

5

Comments

154

Joined

2 yr. ago

The solution is a wealth tax. It worked for the first 10,000 years of human civilization, after the 100 year failed experiment of income/sales tax it’s time to go back.

Coal.

A $2300 Toyota three years ago. It’s probably saved me about 15K in car payments. It’s old and ugly but I’m so much further ahead because of it.

"sooner than expected", "tipping point", "nonbinding resolution", "climate scientists warn"

Everything is fine...

Their “stress” is also bullshit. A rich guy being worried about his pile of gold getting smaller is not the same as a struggling mother worrying about feeding her kids, or a miner worried about a cave-in.

Specifically, it’s 2012-era instagram as a federated app. It’s full of tech nerds, camera guys, birdwatchers, furries, gardening enthusiasts, railfans, and all the other quirky early adopters. It’s absolutely wonderful.

Boss makes a million,

I make a buck.

Steal the catalytic converter,

Off the company truck.

“All my lawyers are disbarred” is what happens when you take “all my exes are crazy” to the logical conclusion.

The nuclear power industry is essentially the only one that's been mandated to be responsible for the cleanup of the entire lifecycle of their product. No other industry has to pay clean up after the mining, refining, use, recycling, long term storage, and disposal. And to be clear, that's good -- every industry should be like that. Nobody should have the "freedom" to dump without repercussions.

I think if the fossil fuel industry also had to shoulder the costs of all their externalities, they would be far less profitable than nuclear power. The entire industry is basically reliant on their ability to dump toxic garbage wherever they want, because if they couldn't do that, there would be no industry.

This is not as good of an idea as you may think.

First is where the hydrogen comes from. Most commercially available hydrogen comes from fossil fuels. The most common process involves superheated steam, methane (aka natural gas), and a catalyst. Very little hydrogen comes from renewable energy via hydrolysis.

Second is efficiency. The total process of transforming renewable energy to hydrogen, storing and transporting the gas, then using it to move a locomotive is only about 30% efficient. There are significant losses at every stage, and it’s a very complex supply chain.

Now, compare this to very boring overhead electrified railroads, which have existed for over one hundred years. Modern systems can achieve nearly 85% efficiency from generation to locomotion, are cheap and easy to build, and have some of the most reliable rolling stock around since they’re essentially a really big slot car. The only downside is the big up-front investment in overhead lines, but that quickly pays for itself with the overall efficiency of the railroad system.

If you ask me, this is a bad idea. It’s somewhere between well intentioned but poorly thought through engineering, and the good old fashioned greenwashing of the fossil fuel industry.

Absolutely. Debian is the only distribution that’s truly safe from a corporate takeover. Some people call their strict governance model onerous, I call it necessary.

I think the most important change is to revert taxation to the way it was for thousands of years up until about 100 years ago.

It used to be that all taxes were wealth taxes. A guy would come around, eyeball all of your stuff, guess how much it was worth, and then demand a cut of it for the emperor/pharaoh/ceasar/etc. If you didn't have anything valuable, the guy would more or less leave you alone.

That's not how it works now. The main forms of taxation are on income and spending, with tax codes carefully written to avoid any "non-income" forms of revenue. There are very low capital gains taxes on stock dividends, zero on most home equity gains, and loads of ways to avoid those if you're even remotely savvy. Basically, it's specifically structured to extract wealth from the working and preserve the wealth of the rich. Personally, I paid nearly twenty thousand dollars in income tax alone while the richest guys in Canada paid practically nothing.

We need to go back to a wealth tax, which worked for 99% of human civilization. It's easier than ever, considering that every financial institution and government knows your exact net worth down to a few %. The burden needs to be taken off of the working class, and this is the easiest way to do it. No revolution, no eating of the rich -- just some rich guys kicking in their fair share.

Of course, we all know it's not going to happen -- the wealthy are far too powerful to threaten their own interests. Until then, we work the fields I guess.

The social contract has failed in Canada. We've basically reverted to feudalism (with big TVs & iphones) with barely a whisper. We're working harder than ever and getting less and less... It's extremely demoralizing when we realize that all our work is going straight into stock buybacks & real-estate investment funds for the boomers to suck dry, leaving us with no savings, investments, homes, or really anything with value.

It's actually kind of problematic, since tempered glass is an important safety feature in cars. It's strong and resists impacts, but when hit with the right kind of tool will shatter into small 'cubes' that don't have sharp and dangerous shards. Without safety glass it's much harder to rescue people that are trapped in a vehicle, you basically have to hammer on the shatterproof glass for several minutes which you might not have if the car is sinking in water, near a fire, exposed to dangerous chemical spills, etc. Honestly, I don't think that design for 'cybertruck' would be approved by US regulatory standards.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempered_glass#Uses

It's crazy how they blew their lead. In 2019 there was no Rivian, no F150 Lightning, just them and their goofy prototype. If they went for something they could have actually mass produced w/o the stupid gimmicks, they probably would have dominated the E-truck market before it even started.