You and Arthur Laffer have both provided cogent descriptions of the same thing: the "Poverty Trap."
when those in poverty do go to work, they are effectively subject to extra, higher, marginal tax rates. Since welfare is phased out as income rises, the loss of benefits is economically the same as a tax on rising earnings.
Take the example of someone in poverty who receives $12,000 a year in welfare benefits and gets an offer for a job earning $16,000 a year.
- She will lose 50 cents in benefits for every dollar earned, an effective 50 percent tax that takes away $8,000 of her earnings.
- The payroll tax will take another 7.65 percent of earnings, federal income taxes another 10 percent at the margin, and state income taxes roughly another 5 percent at the margin, on the average.
- That leaves an effective marginal tax rate of 72.65 percent, leaving little incentive for the poor to work.
Art Laffer and Steve Moore call this "The Poverty Trap." Laffer examined the total effect of all needs tests and taxes affecting an inner-city family of four on welfare in Los Angeles. He found that the poor sometimes faced the highest marginal tax rates of all income groups. The family in his analysis, earning wages between zero and $1,300 per month, faced marginal tax rates ranging from 53 percent to a high of 314 percent. When the family's monthly wages increased from $1,000 to $1,100 per month, they lost $214 in spendable income. A 1995 Urban Institute study by Linda Ginnarelli and Eugene Steuerle confirmed these results, finding that the poor faced effective marginal tax rates of 70 percent to 101 percent. A more recent NCPA study by Laurence Kotlikoff and Jagadeesh Gokhale found that a low-income couple earning 1.5 times the minimum wage per hour moving from part-time to full-time work would lose an astonishing $1.06 for every extra dollar they earn.
I don't see anyone on the left who has nearly as much insight into this problem as you and Art Laffer do. Read more about how to eliminate the "Poverty Trap" here: http://www.ncpa.org/pub/ib143 {Hint: the solution is not a violent revolution.}
I found some statistics to back up what I told you.
In 1900, approximately 100% of Americans were uninsured against hospital and medical expenses. By 1987, that odious number had dropped precipitously, to only 13%. (Source: Census Bureau Annual Social and Economic Supplements)
The robust economic growth associated with capitalism is the only factor that enabled this astounding triumph. (Yes, even those covered by Medicare and Medicaid can thank capitalism. Without it, there would have been insufficient tax revenue to create those programs.) Who, with any ability to put things in perspective and apply critical thinking to leftist propaganda, would not want to keep that winning streak going?
On the other hand, to the extent that a country heartily embraces socialism, the results are disastrous. In the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, repeated economic crises required the ruble to be revalued as follows:
- The original Soviet ruble had become so worthless that the second Soviet ruble was worth 10,000 of them. - The third Soviet ruble was worth 1e6 of them. (Switching to scientific notation for obvious reasons.) - The fourth Soviet ruble was worth 5e10 of them. - The fifth Soviet ruble was worth 5e11 of them. (This revaluation was intended to prevent peasants who had saved money from buying consumer goods. Ah, the workers' paradise!) - The sixth Soviet ruble was worth 5e12 of them. - The seventh Soviet ruble was worth 5e13 of them. - We're not done. The "unembracing" of socialism was a necessary but painful transition for Russia. All incarnations of the Soviet ruble had become so worthless that the "new ruble" of 1 January 1998 was worth 5e16 (yes, 50 quadrillion) original Soviet rubles.
In 1992 -- after socialism had had 75 years to spread its disincentive effects throughout Soviet society -- the GDP of the vast and technically proficient Union of Soviet Socialist Republics had been reduced to about the same magnitude as tiny Denmark's.
Yes, under some circumstances government must inflate the money supply to prevent deflation, and under other circumstances government must tighten the money supply to prevent inflation. I get that.
However, the Fed actively targets 2% annual inflation, and I don't really buy their explanation. When sellers have to go around marking up their prices by, on average, 2% per year, that doesn't seem like a productive use of their time and effort.
The people damaged by the release of the Panama Papers aren't Americans.
Conspiracists say that's because a pro-American entity engineered their release. But could it be that capitalism is practiced a little more ideally in the U.S.? (After all, isn't it incongruous that 68 billionaires live in Moscow, while Russia's per-capita GDP is only $14,600?)
More pollution and more trash are by products of people using more resources.
I've seen visual proof that is false. Over the past 20 years, the sky over Denver has become much less smoggy, even as resource consumption increased. Why? R&D departments, funded by capitalists, developed internal combustion engines that burn fuel more completely.
Socialism tries to make it capitalism more efficient
A generous description of socialism is that it seeks to address social ills in the short term, at the expense of economic growth that would provide a more sustainable way of addressing those ills in the long term. (A less generous description is that socialists get off on exercising control over the fruits of others' labor.)
Owners of capital naturally seek the highest possible return on their capital. And high-return-on-investment endeavors, by definition, create more and better jobs than low-return-on-investment endeavors. So it is axiomatic that when government coercively directs capital into endeavors other than those that capitalists would choose, fewer jobs are created than otherwise would be. (Providing for the national defense is an exception. Building roads and bridges is not an exception.)
If you want people to have healthcare capitalism will always fail at that.
Another easily-disproven assertion. Over the decades before purchasing health insurance became mandatory, the number of uninsured people dropped drastically. Why? Economic growth, caused by capitalism, gave more and more employers the means to provide this benefit (and it gave governments a lot of additional tax revenue, enabling the creation of Medicaid and Medicare for citizens who don't work). As such, capitalism caused a huge, organic decrease in the number of uninsured people. Allowing this trend to continue for a few more decades certainly would have made health insurance universal, with minimal coercion.
It's claimed that the non-free-market tinkering of the "Affordable Care Act" has accelerated the decrease in the number of uninsured people. If true, it happened in a coercive, very non-organic way that certainly puts a dent in economic growth -- and $101 trillion in unfunded liabilities make me pessimistic that the approach is sustainable.
in order to better yourself you need to take risks
In order to become famous, notably wealthy, a successful entrepreneur, or an unsuccessful entrepreneur, you need to take risks. In order to become a reasonably comfortable anonymous middle-class person, you need to play it safe. (To stay in school is to play it safe.)
Every new technology has created more jobs than it has destroyed. Technologies that were minorly disruptive were minor net creators of jobs. Technologies that were hugely disruptive were huge net creators of jobs. Predict a pessimistic deviation from that paradigm at your own peril.
We don't "let them starve" now, and a failure to implement Sam Altman's idea does not constitute "letting them starve" in the future.
Salaries across the world are slowly trending towards a midpoint. This will suck for more developed countries and will boost lesser developed countries.
Yes, I've long said "free trade is the great equalizer." It's not that workers in developed countries get a pay cut. It's that their raises are not as large as those of workers in less-developed countries.
The rising tide really does lift all boats, and the trick is to not begrudge them their 8% raise when you're only getting a 2% raise. The alternative -- banishing the factors that drive growth -- means both parties would get a 0% raise.
In theory, if the vessel is well insulated, it doesn't need to be a pressure vessel (the liquid H2 will stay liquid). Maybe just have a relief valve to vent gaseous H2 in case the insulation gets degraded.
I agree with you that you'd have to redesign the entire aircraft to convert it to H2 fuel, and that the dry weight would be heavier.
But given that jet fuel weighs 0.81 kg/liter, while liquid H2 weighs 0.0708 kg/liter, the takeoff weight (with a full load of fuel) of the larger aircraft is potentially less than that of the smaller, conventionally-fueled aircraft. I haven't done that math.
Restricting oneself to uncritical, non-diverse sources of information -- a filter bubble, an echo chamber -- is a problem, is it not?
The datasets that do show warming have received far more corrections than the UAH satellite dataset. So by your criteria, they are more suspect than the UAH satellite dataset.
First of all, we need to correct a math error. A cylinder with diameter 5.87 m and length 73.9 m has a volume of 1,999,910 liters, not 1,362,000.
Now, how big does the aircraft have to be if you want to meet the following criteria? 1. Can carry 1,197,875 L of H2 fuel (for simplicity, all in the fuselage) 2. Has 1,999,910 L of volume in the fuselage available for other-than-fuel (same as the 777) 3. Keep the same proportions as the 777 (diameter/length ratio is 0.0794)
Answer: you only have to make the aircraft 16.9% longer. Then you will have Diameter = 6.86 m Length = 86.4 m Fuselage volume = 3,197,785 liters (1,197,875 for H2 fuel + 1,999,910 for other-than-fuel)
Apple claimed that it wanted to defend the privacy of its customers. Great.
Then they extended that principle to defending the privacy of a known terrorist, who is dead, and who consented to having his activities monitored (because the phone was owned by his employer, the County of San Bernardino). In this case, the county government was Apple's customer, and Apple was going against the wishes of its customer by protecting the privacy of the county's most nightmare employee. That's a PR debacle.
And if the FBI is telling the truth about having cracked the phone, the vaunted privacy that Cook pledged to defend is rather diminished. (Most customers will never give any thought to technical details, like the 5C lacking the security chip that later models have.) That's the second PR debacle.
And how does TFA propose to make self-replicating robots feasible?
The first step would be to simplify the solar panels' design as much as possible. "Instead of having 1,000 different types of screws," he says, "let's have five."
Brilliant! Don't you HATE how current-generation solar panels use 1,000 different types of screws?
Sometimes, this type of discovery leads to a revision of the estimate of the age of the universe. (The reasoning being, how could structure X have formed only Y million years after the big bang?)
At the Nugget Hotel in Sparks, NV, I felt like exiting the building via the stairs instead of the elevator.
I entered the stairwell through a door marked Exit, NOT "Emergency Exit Only." (A little unavoidable foreshadowing here...)
At the bottom of the stairwell, I went through another door marked Exit (NOT "Emergency Exit Only").
That door closed behind me and LOCKED. Another door ahead of me was marked EMERGENCY EXIT ONLY. And they weren't bluffing... this door was obviously alarmed.
Now here's the kicker. In this little room in which I was trapped, they had installed a phone, so victims like myself could call hotel security to get themselves extricated. (The alternative, of course, would have been to fix the signage so people wouldn't get trapped in the first place. Nosiree, apparently that hadn't occured to them.)
The security officer who escorted me out of this little dungeon confirmed, "Don't feel bad, this happens often."
I think a 98% reduction in accident rates is pretty easily doable by first-generation autonomous cars. But you know there are some people who don't think in those terms. "Look," they'll say, "here's one that drove into a bus; we mustn't let these things on the road!"
So what is needed to keep this lifesaving technology from being derailed is a concerted effort to educate people that the perfect must not become the enemy of the extraordinarily good.
What I found is even worse than that: "the rate of oxygen production by photosynthesis was slower in the Precambrian, and the concentrations of O2 attained were less than 10% of today's".
But the current hysteria is not about oxygen levels changing from 2% to 21% over any timescale; it's about CO2 levels changing from 0.028% to 0.045% -- while much larger changes have occurred naturally, over much shorter timescales than billions of years.
Humans are eminently adaptable. Even prehistoric humans found ways to survive in an incredibly diverse spectrum of environments, from the Sahara to the high Arctic.
I could get into how none of the climate models have proved correct, and none of the predictions made my climate doomsayers have come true. How many times do you have to hear a "climate expert" say something like "all the glaciers in region X will have melted by 2007" -- when in reality, nine years after that prediction's expiration date, all the glaciers in region X look pretty much like they always have -- before you begin to question the legitimacy of climate experts? Quoting David French,
In January, 2006 -- when promoting his Oscar-winning (yes, Oscar-winning) documentary, An Inconvenient Truth -- Gore declared that unless we took "drastic measures" to reduce greenhouse gasses, the world would reach a "point of no return" in a mere ten years. He called it a "true planetary emergency." Well, the ten years passed today, we're still here, and the climate activists have postponed the apocalypse. Again.
Gore's prediction fits right in with the rest of his comrades in the wild-eyed environmentalist movement. There's a veritable online cottage industry cataloging hysterical, failed predictions of environmentalist catastrophe. Over at the American Enterprise Institute, Mark Perry keeps his list of "18 spectacularly wrong apocalyptic predictions" made around the original Earth Day in 1970. Robert Tracinski at The Federalist has a nice list of "Seven big failed environmentalist predictions." The Daily Caller's "25 years of predicting the global warming 'tipping point'" makes for amusing reading, including one declaration that we had mere "hours to act" to "avert a slow-motion tsunami."
But for sheer vivid lunacy, nothing matches this Good Morning America report from 2008. The images show Manhattan shrinking against the onslaught of the rising seas -- in 2015. Last year. Gasoline was supposed to be $9 per gallon. Milk would cost almost $13 per gallon. Wildfires would rage, hurricanes would strike with ever-greater intensity. By the end of the clip I was expecting to see the esteemed doctors Peter Venkman, Egon Spengler, and Ray Stantz step forward to predict, "Rivers and Seas boiling!" "Forty years of darkness!" And of course the ultimate disasters: "Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together . . . Mass hysteria!"
Can we ignore them yet? Apparently not. Being a climate hysteric means never having to say you're sorry. Simply change the cataclysm -- Overpopulation! No, global cooling! No, global warming! No, climate change! -- push the apocalypse back just a few more years, and you're in business, big business.
In reality, I respect the wild-eyed rapture-pastors far more than the climate hysterics. They merely ask me to believe, they don't use the power of government to dictate how I live. Pastors aren't circumventing the democratic process to impose dangerous and job-killing environmental regulations.
Slashdot Mirror
You and Arthur Laffer have both provided cogent descriptions of the same thing: the "Poverty Trap."
when those in poverty do go to work, they are effectively subject to extra, higher, marginal tax rates. Since welfare is phased out as income rises, the loss of benefits is economically the same as a tax on rising earnings.
Take the example of someone in poverty who receives $12,000 a year in welfare benefits and gets an offer for a job earning $16,000 a year.
- She will lose 50 cents in benefits for every dollar earned, an effective 50 percent tax that takes away $8,000 of her earnings.
- The payroll tax will take another 7.65 percent of earnings, federal income taxes another 10 percent at the margin, and state income taxes roughly another 5 percent at the margin, on the average.
- That leaves an effective marginal tax rate of 72.65 percent, leaving little incentive for the poor to work.
Art Laffer and Steve Moore call this "The Poverty Trap." Laffer examined the total effect of all needs tests and taxes affecting an inner-city family of four on welfare in Los Angeles. He found that the poor sometimes faced the highest marginal tax rates of all income groups. The family in his analysis, earning wages between zero and $1,300 per month, faced marginal tax rates ranging from 53 percent to a high of 314 percent. When the family's monthly wages increased from $1,000 to $1,100 per month, they lost $214 in spendable income. A 1995 Urban Institute study by Linda Ginnarelli and Eugene Steuerle confirmed these results, finding that the poor faced effective marginal tax rates of 70 percent to 101 percent. A more recent NCPA study by Laurence Kotlikoff and Jagadeesh Gokhale found that a low-income couple earning 1.5 times the minimum wage per hour moving from part-time to full-time work would lose an astonishing $1.06 for every extra dollar they earn.
I don't see anyone on the left who has nearly as much insight into this problem as you and Art Laffer do. Read more about how to eliminate the "Poverty Trap" here: http://www.ncpa.org/pub/ib143 {Hint: the solution is not a violent revolution.}
I found some statistics to back up what I told you.
In 1900, approximately 100% of Americans were uninsured against hospital and medical expenses. By 1987, that odious number had dropped precipitously, to only 13%. (Source: Census Bureau Annual Social and Economic Supplements)
The robust economic growth associated with capitalism is the only factor that enabled this astounding triumph. (Yes, even those covered by Medicare and Medicaid can thank capitalism. Without it, there would have been insufficient tax revenue to create those programs.) Who, with any ability to put things in perspective and apply critical thinking to leftist propaganda, would not want to keep that winning streak going?
On the other hand, to the extent that a country heartily embraces socialism, the results are disastrous. In the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, repeated economic crises required the ruble to be revalued as follows:
- The original Soviet ruble had become so worthless that the second Soviet ruble was worth 10,000 of them.
- The third Soviet ruble was worth 1e6 of them. (Switching to scientific notation for obvious reasons.)
- The fourth Soviet ruble was worth 5e10 of them.
- The fifth Soviet ruble was worth 5e11 of them. (This revaluation was intended to prevent peasants who had saved money from buying consumer goods. Ah, the workers' paradise!)
- The sixth Soviet ruble was worth 5e12 of them.
- The seventh Soviet ruble was worth 5e13 of them.
- We're not done. The "unembracing" of socialism was a necessary but painful transition for Russia. All incarnations of the Soviet ruble had become so worthless that the "new ruble" of 1 January 1998 was worth 5e16 (yes, 50 quadrillion) original Soviet rubles.
In 1992 -- after socialism had had 75 years to spread its disincentive effects throughout Soviet society -- the GDP of the vast and technically proficient Union of Soviet Socialist Republics had been reduced to about the same magnitude as tiny Denmark's.
Yes, under some circumstances government must inflate the money supply to prevent deflation, and under other circumstances government must tighten the money supply to prevent inflation. I get that.
However, the Fed actively targets 2% annual inflation, and I don't really buy their explanation. When sellers have to go around marking up their prices by, on average, 2% per year, that doesn't seem like a productive use of their time and effort.
The people damaged by the release of the Panama Papers aren't Americans.
Conspiracists say that's because a pro-American entity engineered their release. But could it be that capitalism is practiced a little more ideally in the U.S.? (After all, isn't it incongruous that 68 billionaires live in Moscow, while Russia's per-capita GDP is only $14,600?)
More pollution and more trash are by products of people using more resources.
I've seen visual proof that is false. Over the past 20 years, the sky over Denver has become much less smoggy, even as resource consumption increased. Why? R&D departments, funded by capitalists, developed internal combustion engines that burn fuel more completely.
Socialism tries to make it capitalism more efficient
A generous description of socialism is that it seeks to address social ills in the short term, at the expense of economic growth that would provide a more sustainable way of addressing those ills in the long term. (A less generous description is that socialists get off on exercising control over the fruits of others' labor.)
Owners of capital naturally seek the highest possible return on their capital. And high-return-on-investment endeavors, by definition, create more and better jobs than low-return-on-investment endeavors. So it is axiomatic that when government coercively directs capital into endeavors other than those that capitalists would choose, fewer jobs are created than otherwise would be. (Providing for the national defense is an exception. Building roads and bridges is not an exception.)
If you want people to have healthcare capitalism will always fail at that.
Another easily-disproven assertion. Over the decades before purchasing health insurance became mandatory, the number of uninsured people dropped drastically. Why? Economic growth, caused by capitalism, gave more and more employers the means to provide this benefit (and it gave governments a lot of additional tax revenue, enabling the creation of Medicaid and Medicare for citizens who don't work). As such, capitalism caused a huge, organic decrease in the number of uninsured people. Allowing this trend to continue for a few more decades certainly would have made health insurance universal, with minimal coercion.
It's claimed that the non-free-market tinkering of the "Affordable Care Act" has accelerated the decrease in the number of uninsured people. If true, it happened in a coercive, very non-organic way that certainly puts a dent in economic growth -- and $101 trillion in unfunded liabilities make me pessimistic that the approach is sustainable.
in order to better yourself you need to take risks
In order to become famous, notably wealthy, a successful entrepreneur, or an unsuccessful entrepreneur, you need to take risks. In order to become a reasonably comfortable anonymous middle-class person, you need to play it safe. (To stay in school is to play it safe.)
Every new technology has created more jobs than it has destroyed. Technologies that were minorly disruptive were minor net creators of jobs. Technologies that were hugely disruptive were huge net creators of jobs. Predict a pessimistic deviation from that paradigm at your own peril.
We don't "let them starve" now, and a failure to implement Sam Altman's idea does not constitute "letting them starve" in the future.
Salaries across the world are slowly trending towards a midpoint. This will suck for more developed countries and will boost lesser developed countries.
Yes, I've long said "free trade is the great equalizer." It's not that workers in developed countries get a pay cut. It's that their raises are not as large as those of workers in less-developed countries.
The rising tide really does lift all boats, and the trick is to not begrudge them their 8% raise when you're only getting a 2% raise. The alternative -- banishing the factors that drive growth -- means both parties would get a 0% raise.
In theory, if the vessel is well insulated, it doesn't need to be a pressure vessel (the liquid H2 will stay liquid). Maybe just have a relief valve to vent gaseous H2 in case the insulation gets degraded.
Circumference of the base is pi*D.
Area of the base is pi*r^2 = 27.06 m^2.
I agree with you that you'd have to redesign the entire aircraft to convert it to H2 fuel, and that the dry weight would be heavier.
But given that jet fuel weighs 0.81 kg/liter, while liquid H2 weighs 0.0708 kg/liter, the takeoff weight (with a full load of fuel) of the larger aircraft is potentially less than that of the smaller, conventionally-fueled aircraft. I haven't done that math.
You don't hang out on "those kind of websites" -- i.e., web sites that apply critical thinking to the assertions promoted by James Hansen, the assertions promoted by Michael Mann, the assertions promoted by Al Gore, etc.
Restricting oneself to uncritical, non-diverse sources of information -- a filter bubble, an echo chamber -- is a problem, is it not?
The datasets that do show warming have received far more corrections than the UAH satellite dataset. So by your criteria, they are more suspect than the UAH satellite dataset.
First of all, we need to correct a math error. A cylinder with diameter 5.87 m and length 73.9 m has a volume of 1,999,910 liters, not 1,362,000.
Now, how big does the aircraft have to be if you want to meet the following criteria?
1. Can carry 1,197,875 L of H2 fuel (for simplicity, all in the fuselage)
2. Has 1,999,910 L of volume in the fuselage available for other-than-fuel (same as the 777)
3. Keep the same proportions as the 777 (diameter/length ratio is 0.0794)
Answer: you only have to make the aircraft 16.9% longer. Then you will have
Diameter = 6.86 m
Length = 86.4 m
Fuselage volume = 3,197,785 liters (1,197,875 for H2 fuel + 1,999,910 for other-than-fuel)
A 16.9% longer aircraft is not a dealbreaker.
The critical question is, over what timescale does the ocean re-absorb the carbon that the Navy just moved into the atmosphere?
If it takes like a week, I think it's safe to call this process carbon-neutral.
If it takes 10 years, not so much.
Oh, so he's taking the position supported by scientific data. What a scoundrel!
You're claiming the UAH satellite data isn't legitimate scientific evidence?
UAH satellite data
I do not deny the UAH satellite data. Do you?
There seem to be Orwellian rules for applying the term "denier." I don't deny the UAH satellite data.
UAH satellite data
Do you deny the UAH satellite data?
That's a rather vague sig. Which aspects of America do you want to stop? (I'm curious if they overlap the aspects of America that I want to stop.)
Good intelligence officers have never revealed sources or methods, and never will.
What would be new is if this principle weren't applied to the method used to crack the iPhone that San Bernardino County issued to the terrorist.
If we can make energy cheaper by an order of magnitude compared to how it is today, that opens the door for some great things.
And the comments below this article provide some insightful ideas about exactly that scenario.
Apple claimed that it wanted to defend the privacy of its customers. Great.
Then they extended that principle to defending the privacy of a known terrorist, who is dead, and who consented to having his activities monitored (because the phone was owned by his employer, the County of San Bernardino). In this case, the county government was Apple's customer, and Apple was going against the wishes of its customer by protecting the privacy of the county's most nightmare employee. That's a PR debacle.
And if the FBI is telling the truth about having cracked the phone, the vaunted privacy that Cook pledged to defend is rather diminished. (Most customers will never give any thought to technical details, like the 5C lacking the security chip that later models have.) That's the second PR debacle.
And how does TFA propose to make self-replicating robots feasible?
The first step would be to simplify the solar panels' design as much as possible. "Instead of having 1,000 different types of screws," he says, "let's have five."
Brilliant! Don't you HATE how current-generation solar panels use 1,000 different types of screws?
Sometimes, this type of discovery leads to a revision of the estimate of the age of the universe. (The reasoning being, how could structure X have formed only Y million years after the big bang?)
Has anyone seen that happening this time around?
At the Nugget Hotel in Sparks, NV, I felt like exiting the building via the stairs instead of the elevator.
I entered the stairwell through a door marked Exit, NOT "Emergency Exit Only." (A little unavoidable foreshadowing here...)
At the bottom of the stairwell, I went through another door marked Exit (NOT "Emergency Exit Only").
That door closed behind me and LOCKED. Another door ahead of me was marked EMERGENCY EXIT ONLY. And they weren't bluffing... this door was obviously alarmed.
Now here's the kicker. In this little room in which I was trapped, they had installed a phone, so victims like myself could call hotel security to get themselves extricated. (The alternative, of course, would have been to fix the signage so people wouldn't get trapped in the first place. Nosiree, apparently that hadn't occured to them.)
The security officer who escorted me out of this little dungeon confirmed, "Don't feel bad, this happens often."
the thin, light cells puts out 400 times more power than the standard, glass covered photovoltaic cells
Wrong; they put out 400 times more specific power than standard cells. The summary omits the word "specific," which makes for a huge error.
I think a 98% reduction in accident rates is pretty easily doable by first-generation autonomous cars. But you know there are some people who don't think in those terms. "Look," they'll say, "here's one that drove into a bus; we mustn't let these things on the road!"
So what is needed to keep this lifesaving technology from being derailed is a concerted effort to educate people that the perfect must not become the enemy of the extraordinarily good.
What I found is even worse than that: "the rate of oxygen production by photosynthesis was slower in the Precambrian, and the concentrations of O2 attained were less than 10% of today's".
But the current hysteria is not about oxygen levels changing from 2% to 21% over any timescale; it's about CO2 levels changing from 0.028% to 0.045% -- while much larger changes have occurred naturally, over much shorter timescales than billions of years.
Humans are eminently adaptable. Even prehistoric humans found ways to survive in an incredibly diverse spectrum of environments, from the Sahara to the high Arctic.
I could get into how none of the climate models have proved correct, and none of the predictions made my climate doomsayers have come true. How many times do you have to hear a "climate expert" say something like "all the glaciers in region X will have melted by 2007" -- when in reality, nine years after that prediction's expiration date, all the glaciers in region X look pretty much like they always have -- before you begin to question the legitimacy of climate experts? Quoting David French,
In January, 2006 -- when promoting his Oscar-winning (yes, Oscar-winning) documentary, An Inconvenient Truth -- Gore declared that unless we took "drastic measures" to reduce greenhouse gasses, the world would reach a "point of no return" in a mere ten years. He called it a "true planetary emergency." Well, the ten years passed today, we're still here, and the climate activists have postponed the apocalypse. Again.
Gore's prediction fits right in with the rest of his comrades in the wild-eyed environmentalist movement. There's a veritable online cottage industry cataloging hysterical, failed predictions of environmentalist catastrophe. Over at the American Enterprise Institute, Mark Perry keeps his list of "18 spectacularly wrong apocalyptic predictions" made around the original Earth Day in 1970. Robert Tracinski at The Federalist has a nice list of "Seven big failed environmentalist predictions." The Daily Caller's "25 years of predicting the global warming 'tipping point'" makes for amusing reading, including one declaration that we had mere "hours to act" to "avert a slow-motion tsunami."
But for sheer vivid lunacy, nothing matches this Good Morning America report from 2008. The images show Manhattan shrinking against the onslaught of the rising seas -- in 2015. Last year. Gasoline was supposed to be $9 per gallon. Milk would cost almost $13 per gallon. Wildfires would rage, hurricanes would strike with ever-greater intensity. By the end of the clip I was expecting to see the esteemed doctors Peter Venkman, Egon Spengler, and Ray Stantz step forward to predict, "Rivers and Seas boiling!" "Forty years of darkness!" And of course the ultimate disasters: "Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together . . . Mass hysteria!"
Can we ignore them yet? Apparently not. Being a climate hysteric means never having to say you're sorry. Simply change the cataclysm -- Overpopulation! No, global cooling! No, global warming! No, climate change! -- push the apocalypse back just a few more years, and you're in business, big business.
In reality, I respect the wild-eyed rapture-pastors far more than the climate hysterics. They merely ask me to believe, they don't use the power of government to dictate how I live. Pastors aren't circumventing the democratic process to impose dangerous and job-killing environmental regulations.