My $30K geothermal heat/cool system is saving me a pile of money!!! Maybe. Payments for the initial cost are in a 30 year loan about $180 a month, and the electricity to run the entire place including heating and cooling ranges from about $85 to $160 / month for 1700 sq. ft. where, in Virginia, winters are moderate.
Meanwhile, in Minnesota, on an admittedly quite small, but also quite old house, my gas + electric bill hit over $100 and I thought it was too much.:p I think it tops out at $150/mo or so during the coldest month.
Escuse me but fuck you I just paid $25k in property taxes for a 3br, 2 bath house.
I have met my daughters teachers. Paying them even more than the 6 figures they make now would only add further insult and injury to the insult and and injury
So property taxes on an average house cost $25,000 dollars in your area, and you are pissed that the teachers are making (probably low) six figures?
(I had the sneaking suspicion it wasn't a smash and grab though, seeing as like 15 cars had their windows busted, nothing of note stolen, and a mobile glass replacement company was onsite the next morning.
Odds one person would not call a mobile glass company that shows up the next day: 1/n.
Odds that out of fifteen people, at least one would not call a mobile glass company that shows up the next day: (1/n)^15.
Quick test that shows that if even 96% of the people don't contact a glass company that shows up the next day, there's a better than even chance that the glass company will still be there the next day.
Or take a car. If your brakes go out, you have an emergency brake.
Since we are nit-picking, in a conventional auto, master cylinders are split, with one side braking the front left/right rear wheel, and the other braking the front right/left rear wheel.
So if there's a problem "downwind" of the master cylinder, there's a good chance the car can still be stopped by the main brake system. If all brakes shared the same hydraulic line, then even one leak would drop the pressure, causing the brakes to fail.
Admittedly there can still be a problem with the master cylinder itself, or the linkage to the brake pedal. But the system is designed for some degree of fault tolerance.
Once upon I time, I thought it was a legitimate concern. But they've Chicken Littled it way beyond anything I have patience for at this point. Every week or two, we get another 'report' speeding up the timeline to armageddon by 25-50% or adding another foot or two to predicted sea level rise. I can only take so much before I have no choice but to write this whole thing off as fear mongering. To what end, I don't know, but it's clearly obvious at this point that it is - nothing is this dire. Nothing.
Scientists have been making warnings, and of course the news reports the most extreme scenarios, distorting the picture.
But oceans are 30% more acidic than pre-Industrial levels, the area covered by arctic sea ice is trending downwards, and sea levels have a measurable rise.
It won't be the end of humanity, but it is already developing into an expensive problem to fix, as well a politically destabilizing problem as global climate change creates new winners and losers.
Isn't the mileage a below-the-line deduction?
So it is effectively less paid in taxes - assume 25% tax rate (federal), that's spending $2200 and saving $550 in taxes. So if you spend less than the difference between those two numbers, you come out ahead.
I don't think this is a bad move since getting cars out of cities is a smart priority. But this has the effect of banning poor people.
Poor people don't vote as much.
Roads are already biased against the poor. They are subsidized via the general fund, yet frequently built for automobiles, which are costly to purchase and maintain. If roads were orientated towards bus users, cyclists, and pedestrians, that would be much more usable by the poor. Or heck, even 50cc scooters - they are far cheaper than the equivalent motor vehicles.
Dedicating lanes to buses and integrating them into the larger transit system with single-ticket transfers between rail and bus (where applicable) is known as bus rapid transit, and it is the only way to make buses efficient for riders. However, it makes streets less efficient for everyone else and it makes more sense to install elevated PRT in the long run because buses suck too.
BRT has the advantage of being more flexible, and being able to use a lot of existing infrastructure. Rail is expensive per mile. BRT uses existing lanes with existing right of ways.
But dedicating lanes to buses is politically unpopular in the US. Mass transit is mostly unpopular in the US. Part of that is geographical, but even in major metro areas, we'd rather add another traffic lane than increase bus service, even though we've been adding traffic lanes for decades and traffic isn't getting better.
The new rock is a heavy-lift rocket. Call it what it is or by some generic name "Neptune", Odin or something. Its cool enough as it is without exaggerating.
Exactly. They are talking about raising the fares twenty five cents. The real question is why are the fares still $2.75? The cost of a bottle of water in NYC is $1.80. The cost of a 1 mile taxi ride is $8.00.
Because we subsidize travel in this country, for right or wrong. We subsidize roads heavily for automobiles, which makes driving cheaper and creates sprawl. Then in order to encourage bus service, we have to subsidize that as well so it can compete with (subsidized) cars. We've been doing this for decades.
It's a nice thought experiment to think what would happen if we dropped all subsidies tomorrow, but in practice, we can't - too much infrastructure is built up in the idea that transportation is available to us at below-cost rates. We've socially engineered ourselves into a place where subsidies must continue for the foreseeable future.
Because the imports replaced high-paying factory jobs making the same stuff.
Manufacturing output has grown over time in the US. The amount of employees has decreased as technology made each employee more efficient. So those jobs went away. Did the increase in economic efficiency make the middle class poorer? Would we be better off as Luddites?
I have an MBA and I cannot afford to pay for the house I grew up in. My father paid for it on a single wage and hadn't finished college. It is easy to see where the culprits are: a high reliance on imports for manufactured goods and a significantly large share of earnings being diverted away from labour and going to the highest earners.
Why do manufacturing imports make the middle class poorer?
I know it's a popular idea that exports make us strong, imports make us rich, but that basically boils down to mercantilism. Mercantilism sounds good (we're richer off if other nations gives us gold in order to buy our goods), but as Adam Smith himself pointed out, that's confusing money with wealth.
The problem is that there is a minimum speed for any object falling on the Moon or any planet) without being slowed down by an engine or by friction with the atmosphere. If I am not mistaken, that speed is equal to the Escape Velocity. For Earth that is 11.1km/s and for the Moon that is 2.38km/s. This is easy to understand if you consider that any massive object sits at the bottom of a gravity well. The same amount of potential energy is required to enter or exit the well. https://xkcd.com/681/
The kinetic energy that's gained by dropping a comet into the moon's gravity well is a plus - we can use that to add some spin to the moon, instead of keeping it tidally locked to earth.
The moon would require roughly 1,000 comets to terraform. Comets would provide both water, oxygen, and momentum (spin). Due to its weaker gravity, the moon would hold onto its atmosphere for tens of thousands of years.
Moving 1,000 comets seems not too far off from our capabilities today. Reaching the moon is definitely possible - we've done it. The only difficulty is social - as far as I know, we haven't pulled off such a multi-generational project.
The pace of discovery is slowing because of the law of diminishing returns. We already picked the low hanging fruit. Now each incremental advance gets more and more expensive, and the number of significant breakthrough "leaps" get fewer and farther between.
This is only true for the assumption that the difficulty of remaining discoveries, as expressed by the resources needed, exceeds the increase in resources we've thrown at the problem.
That appears to be the case, and it seems like the right answer, but I don't know why.
I don't work remotely, but if I was in an industry where all I did was remote work, I don't think I'd pick Tulsa. Would anyone?
If you need to be in a walkable large city with a diverse culture and lots of things to do, Tulsa doesn't fit the bill.
If you want to occasionally drive to a large city, there are better cities than Tulsa.
And if you want to take advantage of working remotely to explore the best of nature (skiing, hiking, mountain climbing, etc), there's still plenty of small rural towns with cheap properties available
Public transport, ride sharing or some such?
Israel has about a third the rate of car ownership of the USA. I can see that the 'poor', and even the middle-class, might find the cost of a private vehicle becomes uneconomic. Maybe. It's an interesting thought.
And, BTW, what is going on in San Marino? With its land area, pretty everywhere appears to be within walking distance, and yet there's 1.3 cars per person!
Been poor in the US before, still have poor friends, and even in car-centric US, poverty makes car ownership hard. The estimate is that a "cheap" car still costs $0.25/mile for all the expenses incurred while it is being used for transportation. That's not cheap on poverty wages.
I've still kept the view that automobiles are a money sink. Far from poverty now (knock on wood), but we're driving beaters.
Note that by 2015, the average age of all motorcyclists was 48. Which makes me wonder if doctors involved in organ donation are seeing an over-representation of certain cases - young, dumb, and helmetless guys. Older, wiser folks may still die, but they may be more likely to wear much more protective gear, thus causing more injuries that prevent them from being organ donors.
A fair system would be that those emitting greenhouse gasses should be tasked with collecting them from the atmosphere, but I don't see how that would be possible.
You can't just require that every ICE should have a collection tank for the emissions.
You could set up a carbon recapture market and force fossil fuel companies to buy enough carbon capture credits to offset the carbon they create.
For example, Exxon pumps one gallon of gasoline. When burned, that gallon of gasoline makes 20 lbs of CO2. They would be forced to buy 20 lbs of CO2 recapture for that gallon. Then they'd pass the cost on to whoever buys that one gallon of gasoline.
Off the top of my head, cryptocurrencies that require proof of work seem to all suffer from this flaw. Work is energy, energy has the side effect of global warming with our current grid. Any proof-of-work system that doesn't require a large amount of energy is going to result in a massive influx of new coins being mined, causing a large amount of inflation.
A few possible solutions would be:
Use a cryptocurrency system that (a) doesn't require proof of work and (b) whatever it does require is not energy intensive.
Technological advancements make carbon-neutral cheaper than fossil fuels, to the point that burning coal for electricity makes no more sense than burning whale blubber for electricity.
What would you use a vehicle like that for? I drive a BMW i3 which is a gigantic family car and when my kids get older, I'm looking forward to hopefully switching to self-driving Uber as my main transport.
So back to that truck.
I can imagine that it's good for farming, but it's very high up, so without loading docks, it seems very impractical. I'm also guessing it has a huge engine (didn't check), so you're probably hauling car parts or other heavy materials?
I have an old truck that's probably about that big.
As much as it probably sounds like I'm stating the obvious, it's good for hauling bulky stuff. Brush and leaves, mulch, lumber and related materials, two-wheeled vehicles, etc.
But I mostly use it to haul stuff to the dump.;)
As an average joe working in IT, my personal truck probably runs a few times each year, since it is a slight PITA to drive and I have other vehicles. I go back and forth on the convenience of having a truck available, and if it's just cheaper to rent one when I need it.
Funny enough, I'm much more likely to haul stuff with the car, since we love canoe camping and the car's much more convenient and comfortable. Two backpacks in the trunk, a canoe on the roof rack strapped down, and we're good to drive four or five hours to great canoe camping sites.
Nethack has both pacifist conduct and the ability for types of monsters to go extinct via too many of that monster type dying. People have pulled of pacifist extinctionist challenges, which is possible because in Nethack, deaths done by your character break pacifist conduct (e.g. spells, physical attacks, etc (there are a few exceptions)) but deaths via other means (your pet killing things, etc) do not.
Slashdot Mirror
Meanwhile, in Minnesota, on an admittedly quite small, but also quite old house, my gas + electric bill hit over $100 and I thought it was too much. :p I think it tops out at $150/mo or so during the coldest month.
So property taxes on an average house cost $25,000 dollars in your area, and you are pissed that the teachers are making (probably low) six figures?
- Someone with property taxes and no kids.
Odds one person would not call a mobile glass company that shows up the next day: 1/n.
Odds that out of fifteen people, at least one would not call a mobile glass company that shows up the next day: (1/n)^15.
Quick test that shows that if even 96% of the people don't contact a glass company that shows up the next day, there's a better than even chance that the glass company will still be there the next day.
Since we are nit-picking, in a conventional auto, master cylinders are split, with one side braking the front left/right rear wheel, and the other braking the front right/left rear wheel.
So if there's a problem "downwind" of the master cylinder, there's a good chance the car can still be stopped by the main brake system. If all brakes shared the same hydraulic line, then even one leak would drop the pressure, causing the brakes to fail.
Admittedly there can still be a problem with the master cylinder itself, or the linkage to the brake pedal. But the system is designed for some degree of fault tolerance.
Scientists have been making warnings, and of course the news reports the most extreme scenarios, distorting the picture.
But oceans are 30% more acidic than pre-Industrial levels, the area covered by arctic sea ice is trending downwards, and sea levels have a measurable rise.
It won't be the end of humanity, but it is already developing into an expensive problem to fix, as well a politically destabilizing problem as global climate change creates new winners and losers.
Isn't the mileage a below-the-line deduction? So it is effectively less paid in taxes - assume 25% tax rate (federal), that's spending $2200 and saving $550 in taxes. So if you spend less than the difference between those two numbers, you come out ahead.
Poor people don't vote as much.
Roads are already biased against the poor. They are subsidized via the general fund, yet frequently built for automobiles, which are costly to purchase and maintain. If roads were orientated towards bus users, cyclists, and pedestrians, that would be much more usable by the poor. Or heck, even 50cc scooters - they are far cheaper than the equivalent motor vehicles.
BRT has the advantage of being more flexible, and being able to use a lot of existing infrastructure. Rail is expensive per mile. BRT uses existing lanes with existing right of ways.
But dedicating lanes to buses is politically unpopular in the US. Mass transit is mostly unpopular in the US. Part of that is geographical, but even in major metro areas, we'd rather add another traffic lane than increase bus service, even though we've been adding traffic lanes for decades and traffic isn't getting better.
Mr. World, stop trying to bribe Mr. Wednesday.
Because we subsidize travel in this country, for right or wrong. We subsidize roads heavily for automobiles, which makes driving cheaper and creates sprawl. Then in order to encourage bus service, we have to subsidize that as well so it can compete with (subsidized) cars. We've been doing this for decades.
It's a nice thought experiment to think what would happen if we dropped all subsidies tomorrow, but in practice, we can't - too much infrastructure is built up in the idea that transportation is available to us at below-cost rates. We've socially engineered ourselves into a place where subsidies must continue for the foreseeable future.
Manufacturing output has grown over time in the US. The amount of employees has decreased as technology made each employee more efficient. So those jobs went away. Did the increase in economic efficiency make the middle class poorer? Would we be better off as Luddites?
Why do manufacturing imports make the middle class poorer?
I know it's a popular idea that exports make us strong, imports make us rich, but that basically boils down to mercantilism. Mercantilism sounds good (we're richer off if other nations gives us gold in order to buy our goods), but as Adam Smith himself pointed out, that's confusing money with wealth.
The kinetic energy that's gained by dropping a comet into the moon's gravity well is a plus - we can use that to add some spin to the moon, instead of keeping it tidally locked to earth.
The moon would require roughly 1,000 comets to terraform. Comets would provide both water, oxygen, and momentum (spin). Due to its weaker gravity, the moon would hold onto its atmosphere for tens of thousands of years.
Moving 1,000 comets seems not too far off from our capabilities today. Reaching the moon is definitely possible - we've done it. The only difficulty is social - as far as I know, we haven't pulled off such a multi-generational project.
This is only true for the assumption that the difficulty of remaining discoveries, as expressed by the resources needed, exceeds the increase in resources we've thrown at the problem.
That appears to be the case, and it seems like the right answer, but I don't know why.
I don't work remotely, but if I was in an industry where all I did was remote work, I don't think I'd pick Tulsa. Would anyone?
If you need to be in a walkable large city with a diverse culture and lots of things to do, Tulsa doesn't fit the bill.
If you want to occasionally drive to a large city, there are better cities than Tulsa.
And if you want to take advantage of working remotely to explore the best of nature (skiing, hiking, mountain climbing, etc), there's still plenty of small rural towns with cheap properties available
Been poor in the US before, still have poor friends, and even in car-centric US, poverty makes car ownership hard. The estimate is that a "cheap" car still costs $0.25/mile for all the expenses incurred while it is being used for transportation. That's not cheap on poverty wages.
I've still kept the view that automobiles are a money sink. Far from poverty now (knock on wood), but we're driving beaters.
Gas tax comes nowhere near to paying for the cost of building and maintaining our streets and roads.
Is that a self-selecting sample?
"In 2004, the average age of motorcycle riders killed in motor vehicle traffic crashes was 38, whereas in 2013 the average age was 42."
Note that by 2015, the average age of all motorcyclists was 48. Which makes me wonder if doctors involved in organ donation are seeing an over-representation of certain cases - young, dumb, and helmetless guys. Older, wiser folks may still die, but they may be more likely to wear much more protective gear, thus causing more injuries that prevent them from being organ donors.
You could set up a carbon recapture market and force fossil fuel companies to buy enough carbon capture credits to offset the carbon they create.
For example, Exxon pumps one gallon of gasoline. When burned, that gallon of gasoline makes 20 lbs of CO2. They would be forced to buy 20 lbs of CO2 recapture for that gallon. Then they'd pass the cost on to whoever buys that one gallon of gasoline.
Off the top of my head, cryptocurrencies that require proof of work seem to all suffer from this flaw. Work is energy, energy has the side effect of global warming with our current grid. Any proof-of-work system that doesn't require a large amount of energy is going to result in a massive influx of new coins being mined, causing a large amount of inflation.
A few possible solutions would be:
Any other thoughts?
You missed the big one.
Honda Super Cub (all variants) - over 100 million sold, from 1958 to the present.
I have an old truck that's probably about that big.
As much as it probably sounds like I'm stating the obvious, it's good for hauling bulky stuff. Brush and leaves, mulch, lumber and related materials, two-wheeled vehicles, etc.
But I mostly use it to haul stuff to the dump. ;)
As an average joe working in IT, my personal truck probably runs a few times each year, since it is a slight PITA to drive and I have other vehicles. I go back and forth on the convenience of having a truck available, and if it's just cheaper to rent one when I need it.
Funny enough, I'm much more likely to haul stuff with the car, since we love canoe camping and the car's much more convenient and comfortable. Two backpacks in the trunk, a canoe on the roof rack strapped down, and we're good to drive four or five hours to great canoe camping sites.
Nethack has both pacifist conduct and the ability for types of monsters to go extinct via too many of that monster type dying. People have pulled of pacifist extinctionist challenges, which is possible because in Nethack, deaths done by your character break pacifist conduct (e.g. spells, physical attacks, etc (there are a few exceptions)) but deaths via other means (your pet killing things, etc) do not.
I was going to cut and paste them, but I couldn't get past the filter.
So here is a link.
If you cut the overt religious and denial of wordly pleasures out of it, it would make a decent CoC.