I personally _love_ Thomas Sowell's work. Basic Economics would be a great start, especially now with the current housing crisis. Very amusing and interesting read aswell.
He's got quite a few (albeit politically tinted) interviews with the Hoover Foundation on Youtube.
Good point, never thought about that. Here in the Netherlands, it used to be "common" to house other people than your direct family for some time, e.g. during harvest season.
Hey man, if you're really suicidal, please get help.
Aside from that I can personally recommend exercise, d3, sunlight and a regular bed time.
Know that depression makes everything suck, you wont enjoy things you used to. Even if your life was great you wouldnt enjoy it. But you will again once you get over the chemical imbalances in your brain. I'm rooting for you.
And that is totally fine and 100% the intent of that slide. You and Netflix don't match in terms of expectations. Id give kudos to netflix for being up front about it.
I fear "We're not a family" at this point is an oft copied mantra (I recall seeing this in GitLab's S1), same as Amazon's "missionaries over mercenaries" that's now prevalent (Coinbase, the most recent example), as well.
Ironically, "we're not a family" may end up being nearly identical to "we're a family".
People distrust "we're a family" because it's an illusion, not because of the potential for an actual sort of "family" or friendship. But they may also come to distrust "we're not a family" once it becomes as cliche and they realize that every company they work for that makes such a claim will inevitably devolve into making the employee-employer relationship out to be more than it actually is or should be.
I disbelieve most corporate values because companies are run by humans, and humans are pretty bad at self evaluation. Well, that and I've had enough experience to tell me that explicitly stated corporate values usually mean very little in practice. Only you can unveil a company's values, though that's no easy task beyond some basic red/green flags.
Some of my strongest lifetime friendships have been made in small startups where everyone treated everyone like family. I don't mean the Cleavers, either, but a real family with internal spats, sibling rivalry, and embarrassing stories brought out at parties. We broke bread together, suffered loss together, celebrated victories together, and protected ourselves collectively from outside threats. We were welcome in one another's homes. One of my coworkers (at three different firms) and I married sisters. I met my ex wife at his wedding. It was a wonderful life experience, but not something that I think can scale beyond a couple dozen people. Anyone who's telling you their 200-person company or 5,000-person company is like a family is lying to you to attempt to buy loyalty or is deluding themselves.
I fear "We're a family" at this point is an oft copied mantra
Of course I am assuming those that use said mantra are refering to the touchy feely version of family and we are not going down the 'what does family mean anyway' rabbit hole, where rivalry even Fratricide and Parricide, they even have a word for killing a family member.
Gasoline cars already pay tax per mile, as gas is very heavily taxed. Electric cars do too, as electricity is also taxed pretty heavily. (Notice a trend yet?)
The only advantage is that there can be a more fine grained taxation of cars, based on time and location. But I don't trust my government with that kind of data.
The disadvantage of taxing based on fuel is that it mostly benefits newer cars, generally owned by the richer groups in society. People barely able to afford a car are hit by a pollution tax they can hardly work around, because it's either "pay the fuel tax" or "get another job", and despite the so-called labour shortage, that's not as easy as it seems if you're not educated.
In terms of taxing pollution the Dutch system is actually quite reasonable, because there's barely any green energy being produced in the country compared to the old fossil fuel plants. All that "green" electricity is just a piece of paper that says the joules come from some hydro plant in Norway, but they don't actually come from a green source, of course. If you can charge your car by solar panels, you'll be much better off.
Taxing by distance actually taxes road use rather than fuel exhaustion, which is a much better way to tax for road maintenance in my opinion. The heavy electric cars do a much bigger number on the roads than grandma's city car from twenty years ago.
In an optimal system, both taxes would be combined and balanced. However, the government has shown that it will abuse any data it collects for other purposes, and balancing things isn't one of the government's strong suits either. It's sad, really.
> The disadvantage of taxing based on fuel is that it mostly benefits newer cars, generally owned by the richer groups in society
At the point we currently are, even 10-15 year old cars can get a good mileage. Sports cars and aggressive driving, on the other hand, can't. So while it's not perfect, I think the system actually works quite well.
Additionally, taxing fuel has the advantage that people 'feel the pain' every time they refuel, which is a lot more effective than paying once a year.
>Gasoline cars already pay tax per mile, as gas is very heavily taxed. Electric cars do too, as electricity is also taxed pretty heavily.
In the UK, electricity is taxed at an effective rate of approximately €2 per TJ, whereas diesel and gasoline for transportation purposes are taxed more like €18-20 per TJ.
It seems pretty clear that that a large-scale switch to EVs is going to cause a pretty large tax hole unless something is done about it.
The tax savings and subsidies are a major driving force behind people getting EVs. They're inherently more expensive if those tax advantages were to be removed.
Currently it's carrot and stick, they'll eventually have to transition to a "smaller stick and larger stick" model.
It means you can tax car usage more heavily than would be the case if you just taxed their electricity consumption at the same rate as electricity used for other purposes (like home lighting and heating), in a way analogous to how in the UK petrol and diesel used by cars is taxed much more heavily than petrol used for other purposes (eg heating, or agricultural vehicles). This is useful because it discourages heavy use of private vehicles and especially of inefficient ones (compare the UK or Europe to US car usage, culture, and vehicle preferences -- I can't help thinking US cheap gasoline is relevant there).
In the UK, petrol is taxed much more heavily than electricity currently is, incidentally.
But mostly this is about the fact that currently petrol and diesel taxes bring in a lot of money, so if we don't shift that onto "extra taxes on electric vehicles" then there's going to have to be a rise in general taxation -- which is generally not popular.
Do they not already have even better data via mobile networks?
I am in the US and I assume the government has access to my location history to however accurate mobile networks are at any time, because I always have my phone on me.
This wouldn't necessarily indicate the vehicle being used or its owner/registrant for tax purposes. Additionally, mobile network triangulation isn't usually as accurate as GPS or other satellite systems.
Not knowing the answer I just read 3 and a half page. It seems the Dutch police only obtains location data in real time and only when someone is a suspect.
I will start off by saying I have very little knowledge of physics or astronomy, but reading comments like these feels like I'm watching a 13th century British sailor confidently state what's on the other side of the Atlantic ocean...
Do we really know enough to be able to say if a planet is habitable? Or could there be other forms of life that we don't know of yet... We have only recently put a man on the moon, and now we're saying we would be able to detect dyson spheres...?
> We have only recently put a man on the moon, and now we're saying we would be able to detect dyson spheres...?
A moth doesn't even have electricity, but it can detect a lampshade. A Dyson sphere is basically a stellar lampshade; we can detect it if the laws of thermodynamics hold, and we're pretty sure they do. (A Dyson swarm is similar, though a bit harder to detect.)
The spectral signature would be different if that happened. If all of the stars are Dyson spheres, then… maybe our models about stars are fundamentally wrong. But I doubt it; the maths to work out what the signature should be (given the composition) is pretty simple. Take a blackbody, put spectral lines as measured in the lab onto it, then redshift it.
People bring this up a lot. It's fair to ask. I do often find it comes from a place of wishful thinking. I mean I'd like to have FTL at my disposal true. But what we're dealing with now seem to be either hard physical limits or such close approximations to be effectively the same. The key two are:
1. The speed of light is a hard limit; and
2. Thermodynamics (particularly the Second Law) applies. Specifically, you can't get energy from nothing.
From this you can draw a few conclusions:
1. The likely sources of future energy are solar (most likely IMHO) and nuclear fusion. I hope fusion is viable. I'm not yet convinced it is. More exotic far-future options include antimatter and black holes. Antimatter is something you'd make. Think of it like a battery. So you still need the energy to make it. Black holes as propulsion are the same way. Generating power around a large black hole is theoretically possible but has a bunch of issues;
2. Reaction mass is a huge problem for traveling large distances, so much so that using photos to impart momentum seems the most practical. Fusion could be viable here. Antimatter and black hole propulsion are theoretically possible;
3. Because of energy demands, capturing the Sun's energy makes the most sense and doesn't require any "magical" or exotic science or technology;
4. Because of thermodynamics, eventually heat will radiate into space. It's really the only way of dissipating heat, ultimately.
5. Like I said, the IR signature is purely a function of temperature; and
6. A star with a Dyson Swarm will have a very strange (to us) spectrum. Very little visible light. High amounts of IR. There is really no hiding such a megastructure.
So this is essentially a natural conclusion based on physical laws we have no evidence for that they're false or meaningfully incomplete. Thing is, if the speed of light isn't a hard limit that actually makes it more likely we'd find spacefaring life not less because the reach of such a civilization would be so much farther.
And it's also assuming that any life is like us, with no other technology or way to cycle/recycle heat other than to radiate it into space.
I mean, I know the proof of life is us, but the human-centered view of the universe does reek of prior historical "knowledge" that the earth was the center of the universe. I understand searching for life like us, as that is what we can extrapolate from current data. But to use that to infer that we're it, it's just too much for me.
This is the realm of the Fermi Paradox (which is a misnomer because it's not really a paradox at all).
The key question is that if planets are so common and space is so big, why does it seem to be so empty of life? You bring up an argument that maybe life is so different as to be undetectable. It's a fair question to ask but the beauty of the Fermi Paradox is that you don't need to argue about what's most likely. You simply have to be concerned with what's possible.
Let me put it this way. let's say that there is 1 other spacefaring civilization in the Milky Way and they've evolved like you said in a way completely alien to us and as such don't follow a path we can easily detect or at least we don't think to look for it. I can buy that as entirely possible.
But now let's assume there are 1,000 spacefaring civilizations in the Milky Way. What are the odds that every one them falls in this category? What are the odds that none of them follow a similar evolutionary path to us and what we consider highly likely? It becomes increasingly incredulous as you scale up the number of civilizations.
So what's more likely? 1,000 civilizations followed a path alien to us independently? Or that there are few to no other civilizations out there to detect?
To say we're the only 1 of 1,000 to follow this path is really a different kind of human-centric hubris.
Extracting energy from a star is so low-tech it defies logic to think we're the only ones who will (likely) do it.
It depends on the area, of course, but most of the construction you're seeing is likely already purchased; developments sell well before the shovel hits the ground these days.
Depends on who is already financed. Likely this will be a lagging indicator and we’ll see further increases in institutional investment. Government at all levels will avoid being involved because citizens have grown used to the liquidity of their homes. The long term consequence to the retail market is going to be a tough pill to swallow. Builders adding to inventory are partnering with institutions already. All of this plays out in favor of expanding the SFR market share.
Buyers' cost tolerance is driven by the cost of their mortgage, which is extremely sensitive to interest rate hikes, which typically rise as a way to curb inflation.
No cheap mortgages means a lot fewer eligible buyers.
