InclinedPlane

"Some reason."

Could be, and now I'm just spitballing here, but it could be the use of government backed currencies, the heavy degree of government oversight and regulation, and the federally insured deposits.

The idea that electric vehicles will completely replace ICE vehicles is a hopeful one but faces a lot of roadblocks to get to 100% (or even 80%) and may ultimately be unrealistic. As such, it is dangerous to bank utterly on that goal in efforts to curb net CO2 emissions. So this is not just a stop gap but a backup plan, and more.

Additionally, as a replacement for "drilling oil out of the ground" as the first step in everything that makes use of gasoline and similar products (so jet fuel, heating oil, diesel, gasoline, lubricants, plastics, etc.) this is a good thing, not just from an emissions standpoint but also from a pollution and environmental impact (drilling, crude oil transport, etc.) aspect.

Even more importantly, this is a way to bridge the "energy storage" gap for green energy sources like wind and solar. Base electric power generation is a very second by second thing, hydrocarbon production can easily be an "average output over a week or a month" sort of thing, which is where wind and solar do well.

There's a learning curve, but it's not that bad. The biggest constraint is that you are in a very limited "world" in Arduino land, it's very systems programm-y. You don't have a proper OS, you don't have a filesystem. You don't have near unlimited resources. Depending on the chip you use you may have a small amount of RAM. Also, arduino enforces a basic structure on you of having setup() and loop() functions. Once you get used to it it's fine, but it takes some experience to get the hang of it fully.

And even if, for some reason, you have no withholding, and aren't expecting a refund, you may still be required to file just because your income is above the threshold (which is about 12k I think).

Quick question, do you know the difference between paying taxes and filing taxes?

Also, do you understand how withholding works and how you pay taxes with every pay check not just every year? And that if you have too low of an annual income to actually owe any federal tax you need to file in order to get your withholding back?

Yeah, this isn't just a dark pattern, this is a black hole pattern, this is a scam. With a dark pattern there is a way, if you're careful, to navigate through things and get to the desired outcome. Here there was no such route, you had to have entered from the correct starting place to begin with to have a chance at all, and that entrance was hidden from the public.

> "The idea that the value and utility of the automobile is diminished because everybody has one is absurd."

You missed it entirely. The argument is that it is unreasonable and unsustainable to expect that everybody should own one. We have normalized many of the costs of near universal automobile ownership today, but in many ways it is unsustainable, particularly as urbanization increases and particularly as cities are the main economic drivers in the modern era. We're killing ourselves with the idea that everybody not only should own a beach house but has to own a beach house in order to function in society and the economy, and there just isn't enough beach front property for that to be realistic.

Not really. In this case the commodity is transportation. What are modes of transportation? Walking, bikes, trains, buses, and personal automobiles (among some others). In New York City the automobile industry doesn't have a monopoly on daily transportation needs, millions of people take the subway every day. In Amsterdam transportation needs are partly met by people who ride their bikes a total of 2 million passenger-kilometers on an average day. Similarly, walking is a bigger share of daily travel needs in pedestrian friendly cities than it is in many automobile focused cities.

That is an important point, especially in the 20th century, because the common nature of the automobile naturally leads all automakers towards sharing common cause on certain big issues (like road building and use; parking availability and cost; petroleum production, use, and taxation; land use; and so on), many of which differ strongly from the desires tied to other ways of meeting transportation needs or of the public at large. "Monopoly" is the wrong term, but oligopoly is accurate, and equally concerning.

Additionally, a low stress non-crunch environment is better at retaining talent, which is significant on the short term but even more so on the long term (in a whole host of ways). Keeping people around longer means more retention of experience, less disruption to the corporate culture over time, more predictability in execution on projects, a more stable work environment (and less stress) for everyone else, etc, etc.

No, it's not. A pyramid scheme works with net zero productivity. It's just a rearrangement of resources, that's it.

Life is a resource network. There is production, and consumption. Economically people contribute to the economy and are paid money which is used to "take" goods and services back out of the economy. This is very different from a pyramid scheme.

There's plenty I could say in answer to this but most of it is unnecessary.

There is no excuse for a company such as Boeing, working under the regulation of the FAA, to produce any version of any model of plane which is fundamentally unsafe to fly. Period. None.

We're done here.

They do. But there's nothing special about the gravity of a black hole versus the gravity of "ordinary matter". The vast majority of the matter in a galaxy is in orbit and won't get anywhere near close enough to the central black hole to fall into it. This is true of stars, planets, gas, and dust just as it's true of dark matter.

This is bonkers. Nobody anywhere in the world should expect that one buys an airplane which is unsafe by design. Also, the idea that there are two versions of a plane, one that kills people and one that doesn't, and if you buy the wrong one that's completely your fault is just insane.

Capitalism as it exists today in the US (and other parts of the world) is a paperclip optimizer. The pressure is for those with power to leverage that power toward their maximum short term financial benefit. One consequence of this is that health care has essentially been parasitized by profit seekers who extract money from the system as if it were a strip mine. You can easily see the impact of this in the gross statistics in the form of the extremely high spending on health care in the US vs. comparatively poor return on that spending in terms of overall health outcomes. This is a corrupt system which today produces health care only as a side effect of its main purpose of wealth extraction. That is a natural consequence of our culture, economic incentives, etc. combined with the vast power imbalances between health care "providers" (hospitals, drug makers, device makers, etc.), insurance companies, employers, and individuals. There's no such thing as a patients or insurance holder union, the imbalance is enormous and there's very very little to tip it back from being dominated by the interests of the powerful.

It's important to remember that it was their job to be mindful of the risks. These weren't folks working at a bake sale or something, these were trained professionals who had been entrusted with significant and weighty responsibilities, and they did not take those responsibilities seriously enough. No, they weren't idiots, and that makes it far worse. Negligence is a common human failing, we should remember what it looks like and how it happens, we shouldn't pretend that it doesn't exist or that it should be excused.