jlgray

Who among us hasn't suddenly, in the middle of some mundane task, broken down and started spewing pages of surreal, stream-of-consciousness nonsense?

This is the thing for me. If your company has a fully-stocked kitchen, quality chairs, monitors, adjustable desk, and noise cancelling headphones, it might be a comparable to a good home office setup in terms of comfort. What kills me though is commuting. All told, I spend 3-4 extra hours on days I go to the office, and that time comes out of my free time, effectively turning a 40 hour job into a 60 hour job.

An under-represented argument for a carbon tax is the fact that it would encourage companies to innovate, both with respect to efficiency as well as using renewable energy.

I predict that industries in countries that adopt a carbon tax earlier will end up with a competitive advantage.

I don't think the comparison to cigarette taxes is completely fair. Cigarettes are relatively inelastic w.r.t. price as they are addictive, and have no real competing product.

Electricity and power generated from carbon emitting sources on the other hand have a much more elastic demand curve. E.g. if your energy bill is cheaper with renewables, no one would choose to go with fossil fuels. Likewise with electric vehicles. If the cost of tanking up an EV is significantly lower than an internal combustion vehicle, people will switch for purely economic reasons.

You can look at the lack of a carbon tax as an incentive on fossil fuels which socializes the externalities.

Science and technology are generally agnostic to their usage, and will be used to both positive and negative ends whose magnitude is proportional to the power of the underlying technology.*

AI has the potential for massive positive effects as well as massive negative effects.

What saddens me is that we have systems and incentives in place which encourage governments and corporations to use powerful technologies to negative ends.

* Obviously there is room to quibble about the positive/negative balance of individual technologies, e.g. gunpowder, bio-weapons, etc., however I am sure a circumspect analysis could find positives even in things developed primarily to improve the efficiency of war.

I had a number theory professor who said there are a number of deceptively promising avenues of attack using simpler methods than Wiles, but that end up being dead ends. He said mathematicians are now mostly of the opinion that Fermat was probably onto one of these.

$50bn/year would be more revenue than fb had in 2017, though of course the majority of their 2.23bn monthly users would disappear if asked for $.01/mo.

It is an interesting thought experiment, though, to consider what facebook would look like if its revenue was derived from convincing users that it was worth a monthly subscription.

Zoning requirements and permits for operating hotels are not unreasonable.

Some people rent out a spare room now and again for extra cash, and some people have multiple properties that are occupied exclusively by Airbnb renters, essentially running an unlicensed hotel.

The latter can be extremely obnoxious if its your upstairs neighbor, not to mention the effects that being discovered by Airbnb real estate investors can have on a town or neighborhood.

I always feel like the right solution would be to have a significantly shorter copyright duration, but make it extendable for a large and increasing annual fee.

I don't care if Disney gets to keep the rights to Mickey Mouse. The real problem is all the other stuff that gets swept along in the bargain.

Since they're talking about small publishers having trouble keeping up with google SEO updates, is there a reasonable way to actually break up google search?