I guess there's a silver lining in every fubar. I'll note here that SpaceX could probably throw together a SLS-class vehicle for one to two years of SLS funding with a similar degree of schedule slippage. There is a huge cost multiplier to having NASA do these things.
Half of Bangladesh being under water is a "first world cause"?
It's not that hard to move a hundred million people. The US, for example, does it every few years.
If anybody will survive catastrophic climate change it will be the "first world".
Come up with evidence first for this alleged "catastrophic" nature. You clearly haven't been reading actual research.
Plus, most of the "first world" is in a temperate climate zone which means it will be warmer, but livable, unlike say the tropics in such a scenario.
Most of the warming won't be in the tropics. And once again, if that really is a problem at some point in the distant future, then move the people. It's not that hard a problem.
The overarching goal is simple: globally, we must halve carbon dioxide emissions every decade.
And if we don't do that, say because developing world countries have better things to do than turn their economies upside down for First World causes? What's plan B? Sooner or later we're going to have to deal with the real world strategy of adaptation not the imaginary ones of radical greenhouse gases emission reduction.
Funny how, when the CBO contained a clause you could spin as a bad thing - republicans loved it, now they pretend it's meaningless because it's dissing trumpkill.
The CBO is an adversarial source. You can only take seriously the things that they admit which harm their side - the congresscritters who requested the CBO study and placed the operating assumptions that the CBO is required to operate under..
And yet EVERY SINGLE ONE of those corruption cases I cited happened in a state with a private prison to pay the bribes. In fact you're just plain wrong - a public prison has every incentive to make their fixed budget stretch as far as possible, that means as few people inside as possible.
Ok, I looked through every post you made in this discussion. What was the number of corruption cases you cited? ZERO. It's very easy for EVERY SINGLE ONE of your ZERO cited cases to be whatever you want them to be. But even if you had cited a few cases, it's still trivial to cherry pick.
Corruption goes beyond your, ehem, limited selection. For example, we have this public jail example of corruption (and more, here) from New York City. And some of the supposed private corporation bribery was actually done by prison guard labor unions.
The growth of Californiaâ(TM)s incarceration system, and the decline of its quality, tracks the accession to power of the stateâ(TM)s prison guards union, the California Correctional Peace Officers Association (âoeCCPOAâ). The CCPOA has played a significant role in advocating pro-incarceration policies and opposing pro-rehabilitative policies in California. In 1980, CCPOAâ(TM)s 5,600 members earned about $21,000 a year and paid dues of about $35 a month. After the rapid expansion of the prison population beginning in the 1980s, CCPOAâ(TM)s 33,000 members today earn approximately $73,000 and pay monthly dues of about $80. These dues raise approximately $23 million each year, of which the CCPOA allocates approximately $8 million to lobbying. As Ms. Petersilia explains, âoeThe formula is simple: more prisoners lead to more prisons; more prisons require more guards; more guards means more dues-paying members and fund-raising capability; and fund-raising, of course, translates into political influence.â
And you simply don't understand the conflicts of interest that face jails private or public. They only get funded, if there is a need for the jail and the funding tends to be proportional to the number of prisoners either way.
NZers paid GST (VAT) of 15% on top of the price that Apple charged.
Exactly. Did I not say that New Zealanders paid taxes?
Sounds like you're not prepared to understand what that means, so I'm probably wasting the max keystroke my keyboard can perform here...
Back at you on that. Apple's profits will be reduced due to this VAT (else they could just charge more in the first place). Thus, it is irrelevant that the tax is treated as being paid solely by customers for this tax is also paid for by Apple.
Firstly basic research is practically non-existent in the private sector and always has been
Not true. For example, about a quarter of US college students go to a private sector college. And any listing of top research universities will have a heavy private sector presence (such as here, here, and here).
Similarly, let's see who actually is funding R&D in the US:
In 2006 the total expenditure for R&D conducted in the U.S. was about $340B in current dollars. Of this total, basic research accounts for about 18% ($62B), applied research about 22% ($75B), and development about 60% ($204B).[8] Over the past decades the U.S. institutions contributing to the output of basic research have shifted dramatically.[9] Although industrial contributions to national R&D now far outpace Federal R&D support, only about 3.8% of industry-performed R&D can be classified as 'basic', with the remainder devoted to applied R&D. For industry-funded and performed R&D, the basic percentage is about the same for 2006, 3.7%. This percentage of basic research performed by industry has hovered slightly below 4% of all industry-performed R&D for most years since the late 1990s.[10] In 2006, industry funded 17% of U.S. basic research, and performed 15% of it.
The Federal Government is the second largest source of R&D funding (28%) following industry. Federal expenditures vary greatly from agency to agency in terms of amounts, directions, and objectives, depending upon the mission of the particular agency.[11] Federal funding is the primary source of basic research support in the U.S. (over 59% in 2006[12]), of which about 56% is carried out by academic institutions. U.S. basic research is also funded by foundations (about 10%), universities and colleges (about 10%), and state and local governments (about 3.5% through funding of academic basic research).[13] Federal obligations for academic research (both basic and applied) and especially in the current support for National Institutes of Health (NIH) (whose budget had previously doubled between the years 1998 to 2003) declined in real terms between 2004 and 2005 and are expected to decline further in 2006 and 2007. This is the first multiyear decline in Federal obligations for academic research since 1982.[14] The intent of Federal policy is to increase support for physical sciences research in future years.[15]
Right there, we see that 17% of basic science funding in 2006 was paid directly by private industry with additional amounts by foundations and private universities and colleges. So claiming that the private sector in basic science research is non-existent is outright wrong. Even when you narrowly consider only the funding from private businesses!
We then need to consider that public funding has crowded out private funding - after all, what's the point, for example, of a billionaire donating money to a new particle accelerator, or a body of researchers to solicit private funds when public funding can easily outspend the private funding by an order of magnitude or more? Before that happened, private funding was a huge source of basic research. For example, most US professional astronomical telescopes from before the Second World War were privately funded. So private funding has been artificially suppressed by the plentiful public funding.
Finally, there's the matter of efficiency. Private research efforts tend to be a lot more productive for the money spent than public ones (which are often more about where the money is spent an
And all those taxes were paid by New Zealanders. Who still had to pay other taxes.
Sounds win-win for everyone. New Zealanders pay for their government, government gets the taxes and spends it on stuff New Zealanders apparently want, and Apple gets lower tax rates.
Whether the federal budget is 5-trillion dollars or 5 dollars, what you DO with it will STILL matter more.
I disagree. Not redirecting $5 trillion in funds away from competent organizations like businesses allows for a lot of privately funded basic research. That tends to be better value for the money spent too.
And pay for it with this magic revenue source that only you and a few other clueless people can see. If you don't care how much is spent, then it doesn't matter how much you care about what it's spent on.
It's all the same thing. But to me... that link is so integral it didn't need saying - I guess I had to spell it out for you to see it.
That is absurd. Complaining about the budget because a trivial bit of cut funding allegedly starves granny is nothing like complaining about the budget because it doesn't reduce spending.
A program started by Eisenhower 70 years ago is hardly a 'whim of the moment' now is it ?
But you aren't Eisenhower and his program doesn't need Federal support.
More-over - Trump is making ZERO effort to reduce the budget anyway, that's not at all on the cards: he is merely redirecting funds from programs that save lives to programs that kill people (he is pushing every saving int further o increasing a military budget that was massively overbudgeted 40 years ago already). Why do that ? So he can give cushy no-bid contracts to his friends to sell the army even MORE tanks they neither need nor want.
There you go. You found something concrete to complain about.
No, some of it is meant to protect the helpless and needy, a group that fascists like you and "reason.com" hate.
Notice the ad hominem attack here. Meals On Wheels can do that protection just fine with your help, why does it need trivial amounts of additional support from the Feds?
For more information on just how little these programs are funded at the federal level:
But does Meals on Wheels rely on government grants to do its good work? There are hundreds of Meals on Wheels organizations around the country, so it's hard to generalize, but overwhelmingly, the groups get the majority of revenue from charitable giving, not government funds. In 2015, for instance, the national Meals on Wheels reported that government grants accounted for just 3 percent of its annual revenues of $7.5 million. Meals on Wheels for San Diego County in California says that government grants made up just 1.5 percent ($68,534) of its revenues of $4.4 million. Not all branches are so independent. Atlanta's group gets 48 percent of its revenue from government grants (none of the annual reports I looked at broke down exactly what level of government or specific program supplied the money). Many of the annual reports don't even break down revenues by source (see here) and others aren't even posted online.
The source article has links to the numbers mentioned.
Once again, we see a Trump Derangement Syndrome sufferer crying wolf. Could you at least do that when he does things wrong? It dilutes the message.
And the federal government shouldn't be funding charities unless it's a direct exchange of money for direct services to the government like any other would-be private contractor. The federal budget isn't an endless stream of money to be spent on whatever whim of the moment you have.
It's funny how some of the same people who decry immigration and H1-B visas think their lives will be made better when robots take their jobs.
No mention of the fact that automation creates jobs too? My view on this is that a lot of people are conflating labor competition with the developing world (which has as a result held down labor pricing power for past 40 years or so in the US) as a phase change in how automation interacts with human labor, while ignoring that automation is still creating jobs, just as it has for the past few centuries.
Just because jobs aren't being created as rapidly as one would like in the developed world, doesn't mean that things have changed. The jobs are just being created elsewhere with better conditions for employers.
Yes, that is a common argument of the second group. That anyone who shows concern over their virtue signaling is really a covertly selfish person who has come up with a sensible objection merely to hide their true intentions.
Globally almost 100% man-made is accurate because natural climate variations simply aren't that fast enough to be a big contributor.
I disagree. If one looks at recent global temperature, one sees significant variation. For example, the five year temperature anomaly average for 1954 is less than a tenth of a degree higher than the start of the graph at 1880. (about -0.13 C versus -0.2 C). But there was a low of -0.4 C and a high of 0.1 C in that same period separated by a little more than three decades.
That indicates to me significant variation in an important climate parameter.
They all like to disguise the argument "we do nothing, and fuck everyone that isn't me" as "well, the evidence really isn't very strong, I mean, I'm not convinced it's really happening"
I agree those people exist. But we also have people who want to fuck over billions of people to show how much they care about the environment. Those people tend to wax poetic about how much future harm they're supposedly preventing.
Sorry. We just can't muster the energy to effect climactic changes on that scale, short of having a Nuclear War.
A nuclear war doesn't involve that much energy either. Every bit of heat generated on Earth's surface is radiated to space in short order. I would guess within a couple of weeks. We don't freeze to death because solar power and to a much lesser extent geothermal heat continues to heat the surface of Earth.
What increased levels of CO2 change is the amount of infrared frequency heat radiated to space. This is why the "greenhouse effect" got its name. CO2 and a number of other "greenhouse gases" are transparent at visual light frequencies, the peak energy frequencies of solar energy hitting Earth, but more opaque to the infra-red frequencies, which are the peak energy frequencies of heat on Earth radiated to space. So more CO2 means that some heat is absorbed by the atmosphere instead of being radiated to space. That is the mechanism of global warming.
As I recall, the amount of heating at present levels of CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere is thought to be 1.5 C per doubling of CO2. As you may notice, this is far from the IPCC's claimed 3 C per doubling of CO2 in long term heating. That is based on assumptions about positive feedback effects which the IPCC has yet to fully demonstrate (though two commonly mentioned mechanisms are reduced snow cover (which reduces the Earth's albedo at mid to high latitudes) and methane release from warming tundra and clathrate deposits in oceans).
So to summarize, global warming is not due to human activity directly heating the Earth. Instead, it's due to CO2 and similar gases hindering the cooling of Earth as well as significant alleged positive feedback. Humans produce a lot of those gases, and unlike most of the natural processes, it's a large net release with a slightly different isotope mix than decaying plant matter. So we do have a significant increase in the last couple of centuries in CO2 with some supporting evidence that it is mostly due to human activity.
We also have some crude radiative models that explain most of the current warming by themselves. So it is not a stretch to say that we have evidence that human activity is responsible for at least a significant portion of current warming, perhaps even most of it.
It's cheaper to have everyone on health plans so they can get diagnosed early and treated early.
Except that costs more not less. There are certain medical treatments like prenatal care or immunizations that more than pay for themselves. But paying a doctor to look for expensive problems is not one of those things.
Inertia and some ancient virtue signalling in the wake of an oil embargo. Someone determined that less electricity would be used, therefore it became something we must do.
I sure hope that's sarcasm, because otherwise it's some of the dumbest, zero-sum, entitlement thinking I've seen in weeks. An obvious alternative here is to end Social Security altogether. Then there is no unfair taxation of future or present generations.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess there's a silver lining in every fubar. I'll note here that SpaceX could probably throw together a SLS-class vehicle for one to two years of SLS funding with a similar degree of schedule slippage. There is a huge cost multiplier to having NASA do these things.
What you say sarcastically I say with conviction: we only have a few centuries at most.
Your conviction is very valuable to me. I'm going to worry about real problems now.
I guess someone needs to pick up a few ranks in diplomacy. Too bad they'll only have at most a few centuries to figure this dilemma out.
Half of Bangladesh being under water is a "first world cause"?
It's not that hard to move a hundred million people. The US, for example, does it every few years.
If anybody will survive catastrophic climate change it will be the "first world".
Come up with evidence first for this alleged "catastrophic" nature. You clearly haven't been reading actual research.
Plus, most of the "first world" is in a temperate climate zone which means it will be warmer, but livable, unlike say the tropics in such a scenario.
Most of the warming won't be in the tropics. And once again, if that really is a problem at some point in the distant future, then move the people. It's not that hard a problem.
The overarching goal is simple: globally, we must halve carbon dioxide emissions every decade.
And if we don't do that, say because developing world countries have better things to do than turn their economies upside down for First World causes? What's plan B? Sooner or later we're going to have to deal with the real world strategy of adaptation not the imaginary ones of radical greenhouse gases emission reduction.
Funny how, when the CBO contained a clause you could spin as a bad thing - republicans loved it, now they pretend it's meaningless because it's dissing trumpkill.
The CBO is an adversarial source. You can only take seriously the things that they admit which harm their side - the congresscritters who requested the CBO study and placed the operating assumptions that the CBO is required to operate under..
And yet EVERY SINGLE ONE of those corruption cases I cited happened in a state with a private prison to pay the bribes. In fact you're just plain wrong - a public prison has every incentive to make their fixed budget stretch as far as possible, that means as few people inside as possible.
Ok, I looked through every post you made in this discussion. What was the number of corruption cases you cited? ZERO. It's very easy for EVERY SINGLE ONE of your ZERO cited cases to be whatever you want them to be. But even if you had cited a few cases, it's still trivial to cherry pick.
Corruption goes beyond your, ehem, limited selection. For example, we have this public jail example of corruption (and more, here) from New York City. And some of the supposed private corporation bribery was actually done by prison guard labor unions.
The growth of Californiaâ(TM)s incarceration system, and the decline of its quality, tracks the accession to power of the stateâ(TM)s prison guards union, the California Correctional Peace Officers Association (âoeCCPOAâ). The CCPOA has played a significant role in advocating pro-incarceration policies and opposing pro-rehabilitative policies in California. In 1980, CCPOAâ(TM)s 5,600 members earned about $21,000 a year and paid dues of about $35 a month. After the rapid expansion of the prison population beginning in the 1980s, CCPOAâ(TM)s 33,000 members today earn approximately $73,000 and pay monthly dues of about $80. These dues raise approximately $23 million each year, of which the CCPOA allocates approximately $8 million to lobbying. As Ms. Petersilia explains, âoeThe formula is simple: more prisoners lead to more prisons; more prisons require more guards; more guards means more dues-paying members and fund-raising capability; and fund-raising, of course, translates into political influence.â
And you simply don't understand the conflicts of interest that face jails private or public. They only get funded, if there is a need for the jail and the funding tends to be proportional to the number of prisoners either way.
NZers paid GST (VAT) of 15% on top of the price that Apple charged.
Exactly. Did I not say that New Zealanders paid taxes?
Sounds like you're not prepared to understand what that means, so I'm probably wasting the max keystroke my keyboard can perform here...
Back at you on that. Apple's profits will be reduced due to this VAT (else they could just charge more in the first place). Thus, it is irrelevant that the tax is treated as being paid solely by customers for this tax is also paid for by Apple.
Firstly basic research is practically non-existent in the private sector and always has been
Not true. For example, about a quarter of US college students go to a private sector college. And any listing of top research universities will have a heavy private sector presence (such as here, here, and here).
Similarly, let's see who actually is funding R&D in the US:
In 2006 the total expenditure for R&D conducted in the U.S. was about $340B in current dollars. Of this total, basic research accounts for about 18% ($62B), applied research about 22% ($75B), and development about 60% ($204B).[8] Over the past decades the U.S. institutions contributing to the output of basic research have shifted dramatically.[9] Although industrial contributions to national R&D now far outpace Federal R&D support, only about 3.8% of industry-performed R&D can be classified as 'basic', with the remainder devoted to applied R&D. For industry-funded and performed R&D, the basic percentage is about the same for 2006, 3.7%. This percentage of basic research performed by industry has hovered slightly below 4% of all industry-performed R&D for most years since the late 1990s.[10] In 2006, industry funded 17% of U.S. basic research, and performed 15% of it.
The Federal Government is the second largest source of R&D funding (28%) following industry. Federal expenditures vary greatly from agency to agency in terms of amounts, directions, and objectives, depending upon the mission of the particular agency.[11] Federal funding is the primary source of basic research support in the U.S. (over 59% in 2006[12]), of which about 56% is carried out by academic institutions. U.S. basic research is also funded by foundations (about 10%), universities and colleges (about 10%), and state and local governments (about 3.5% through funding of academic basic research).[13] Federal obligations for academic research (both basic and applied) and especially in the current support for National Institutes of Health (NIH) (whose budget had previously doubled between the years 1998 to 2003) declined in real terms between 2004 and 2005 and are expected to decline further in 2006 and 2007. This is the first multiyear decline in Federal obligations for academic research since 1982.[14] The intent of Federal policy is to increase support for physical sciences research in future years.[15]
Right there, we see that 17% of basic science funding in 2006 was paid directly by private industry with additional amounts by foundations and private universities and colleges. So claiming that the private sector in basic science research is non-existent is outright wrong. Even when you narrowly consider only the funding from private businesses!
We then need to consider that public funding has crowded out private funding - after all, what's the point, for example, of a billionaire donating money to a new particle accelerator, or a body of researchers to solicit private funds when public funding can easily outspend the private funding by an order of magnitude or more? Before that happened, private funding was a huge source of basic research. For example, most US professional astronomical telescopes from before the Second World War were privately funded. So private funding has been artificially suppressed by the plentiful public funding.
Finally, there's the matter of efficiency. Private research efforts tend to be a lot more productive for the money spent than public ones (which are often more about where the money is spent an
And all those taxes were paid by New Zealanders. Who still had to pay other taxes.
Sounds win-win for everyone. New Zealanders pay for their government, government gets the taxes and spends it on stuff New Zealanders apparently want, and Apple gets lower tax rates.
I'm for zero corporate taxes in the US. It works for me.
Whether the federal budget is 5-trillion dollars or 5 dollars, what you DO with it will STILL matter more.
I disagree. Not redirecting $5 trillion in funds away from competent organizations like businesses allows for a lot of privately funded basic research. That tends to be better value for the money spent too.
And pay for it with this magic revenue source that only you and a few other clueless people can see. If you don't care how much is spent, then it doesn't matter how much you care about what it's spent on.
It's all the same thing. But to me... that link is so integral it didn't need saying - I guess I had to spell it out for you to see it.
That is absurd. Complaining about the budget because a trivial bit of cut funding allegedly starves granny is nothing like complaining about the budget because it doesn't reduce spending.
A program started by Eisenhower 70 years ago is hardly a 'whim of the moment' now is it ?
But you aren't Eisenhower and his program doesn't need Federal support.
More-over - Trump is making ZERO effort to reduce the budget anyway, that's not at all on the cards: he is merely redirecting funds from programs that save lives to programs that kill people (he is pushing every saving int further o increasing a military budget that was massively overbudgeted 40 years ago already). Why do that ? So he can give cushy no-bid contracts to his friends to sell the army even MORE tanks they neither need nor want.
There you go. You found something concrete to complain about.
No, some of it is meant to protect the helpless and needy, a group that fascists like you and "reason.com" hate.
Notice the ad hominem attack here. Meals On Wheels can do that protection just fine with your help, why does it need trivial amounts of additional support from the Feds?
But does Meals on Wheels rely on government grants to do its good work? There are hundreds of Meals on Wheels organizations around the country, so it's hard to generalize, but overwhelmingly, the groups get the majority of revenue from charitable giving, not government funds. In 2015, for instance, the national Meals on Wheels reported that government grants accounted for just 3 percent of its annual revenues of $7.5 million. Meals on Wheels for San Diego County in California says that government grants made up just 1.5 percent ($68,534) of its revenues of $4.4 million. Not all branches are so independent. Atlanta's group gets 48 percent of its revenue from government grants (none of the annual reports I looked at broke down exactly what level of government or specific program supplied the money). Many of the annual reports don't even break down revenues by source (see here) and others aren't even posted online.
The source article has links to the numbers mentioned.
Once again, we see a Trump Derangement Syndrome sufferer crying wolf. Could you at least do that when he does things wrong? It dilutes the message.
And the federal government shouldn't be funding charities unless it's a direct exchange of money for direct services to the government like any other would-be private contractor. The federal budget isn't an endless stream of money to be spent on whatever whim of the moment you have.
It's funny how some of the same people who decry immigration and H1-B visas think their lives will be made better when robots take their jobs.
No mention of the fact that automation creates jobs too? My view on this is that a lot of people are conflating labor competition with the developing world (which has as a result held down labor pricing power for past 40 years or so in the US) as a phase change in how automation interacts with human labor, while ignoring that automation is still creating jobs, just as it has for the past few centuries.
Just because jobs aren't being created as rapidly as one would like in the developed world, doesn't mean that things have changed. The jobs are just being created elsewhere with better conditions for employers.
Yes, that is a common argument of the second group. That anyone who shows concern over their virtue signaling is really a covertly selfish person who has come up with a sensible objection merely to hide their true intentions.
Globally almost 100% man-made is accurate because natural climate variations simply aren't that fast enough to be a big contributor.
I disagree. If one looks at recent global temperature, one sees significant variation. For example, the five year temperature anomaly average for 1954 is less than a tenth of a degree higher than the start of the graph at 1880. (about -0.13 C versus -0.2 C). But there was a low of -0.4 C and a high of 0.1 C in that same period separated by a little more than three decades.
That indicates to me significant variation in an important climate parameter.
They all like to disguise the argument "we do nothing, and fuck everyone that isn't me" as "well, the evidence really isn't very strong, I mean, I'm not convinced it's really happening"
I agree those people exist. But we also have people who want to fuck over billions of people to show how much they care about the environment. Those people tend to wax poetic about how much future harm they're supposedly preventing.
Sorry. We just can't muster the energy to effect climactic changes on that scale, short of having a Nuclear War.
A nuclear war doesn't involve that much energy either. Every bit of heat generated on Earth's surface is radiated to space in short order. I would guess within a couple of weeks. We don't freeze to death because solar power and to a much lesser extent geothermal heat continues to heat the surface of Earth.
What increased levels of CO2 change is the amount of infrared frequency heat radiated to space. This is why the "greenhouse effect" got its name. CO2 and a number of other "greenhouse gases" are transparent at visual light frequencies, the peak energy frequencies of solar energy hitting Earth, but more opaque to the infra-red frequencies, which are the peak energy frequencies of heat on Earth radiated to space. So more CO2 means that some heat is absorbed by the atmosphere instead of being radiated to space. That is the mechanism of global warming.
As I recall, the amount of heating at present levels of CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere is thought to be 1.5 C per doubling of CO2. As you may notice, this is far from the IPCC's claimed 3 C per doubling of CO2 in long term heating. That is based on assumptions about positive feedback effects which the IPCC has yet to fully demonstrate (though two commonly mentioned mechanisms are reduced snow cover (which reduces the Earth's albedo at mid to high latitudes) and methane release from warming tundra and clathrate deposits in oceans).
So to summarize, global warming is not due to human activity directly heating the Earth. Instead, it's due to CO2 and similar gases hindering the cooling of Earth as well as significant alleged positive feedback. Humans produce a lot of those gases, and unlike most of the natural processes, it's a large net release with a slightly different isotope mix than decaying plant matter. So we do have a significant increase in the last couple of centuries in CO2 with some supporting evidence that it is mostly due to human activity.
We also have some crude radiative models that explain most of the current warming by themselves. So it is not a stretch to say that we have evidence that human activity is responsible for at least a significant portion of current warming, perhaps even most of it.
It's cheaper to have everyone on health plans so they can get diagnosed early and treated early.
Except that costs more not less. There are certain medical treatments like prenatal care or immunizations that more than pay for themselves. But paying a doctor to look for expensive problems is not one of those things.
Inertia and some ancient virtue signalling in the wake of an oil embargo. Someone determined that less electricity would be used, therefore it became something we must do.
I sure hope that's sarcasm, because otherwise it's some of the dumbest, zero-sum, entitlement thinking I've seen in weeks. An obvious alternative here is to end Social Security altogether. Then there is no unfair taxation of future or present generations.
But they'd still expect me to drive myself there.
But you paid for the road. That's so unfair.