> There can be situations where debt is a good idea, and there can be situations where debt is a bad idea. In ~2010, debt financing was incredibly cheap, so if the USA was able to take out debt at that time and use it for productive economic growth that paid more than the financing cost, it would have been a good investment.
Sure, debt can be good idea when it's carefully considered and planned by a well run organization, preferably one where its leaders have their personal finances highly dependent on its success.
However the chronic issue almost every government has is that the government is neither well run, nor do the people running it suffer any financial consequences when things go poorly.
I don't have a realistic fix for this, of course, but it's fun to imagine annual performance reviews for politicians with guillotines available to HR.
> In a more fair world a person should probably not be able to amass more than USD 1B by making the right bet on the stock market. That wealth is build in this way is anti-meritocratic.
It's anti-meritocratic for someone to invest their money intelligently in the stock market?
How do you determine the threshold where on one side they're entitled to the wealth they earned, and on the other side their wealth is unfairly earned?
I don't really see a link between electric bus fires and diesel fires. The safety issue is that electric vehicle fires are far more difficult to control than their combustion counterparts.
"Electric Vehicle Fire" by "South Metro Fire Rescue Centennial, Colorado"
Yep, that's where they shine. There are always cars that are "more", but few that can be used as hard as Porsches. When you fall out of love with something more exciting because it spends more time in the shop than on the road, the Porsche is always there ready to go.
A combination of factors; cost, customer expectations, and convenience.
It's easy to produce a lot of power, it's not easy to do so reliably and within emissions specs. That's where the cost comes in, and where customer expectations come in. If VW is going to be offering a 110 kW 2.0 liter engine, well, Mercedes-Benz can't come in and offer a 90 kW 2.0 liter engine just to meet specs. At the end of the day, margins are fairly thin and regulators are compliant. It's cheaper to just cheat the emissions than make the engine meet emissions specs.
The convenience factor is diesel exhaust fluid (AdBlue); the stuff really does work very well. However, dispensing it at the most effective rate in regards to emissions would mean it has to be topped up between service intervals; very inconvenient. Increasing the tank size is a non-starter because packaging space in modern vehicles is at a premium. So the dirty secret (at least for Mercedes-Benz, confirmed by one of their engineers) is that they calibrate it to last service intervals; not to meet emissions. It's only in rare cases where the owner has to refill the tank themselves.
In regards to the AdBlue situation, if you're in Europe where there are a lot of diesel passenger vehicles and also a lot of diesel trucks and buses, next time you're in the city or on the highway, pay attention to the characteristic diesel stink, either as a pedestrian or a driver. You're never going to smell it from a truck; it'll always be a passenger vehicle. :)
Had the same experience, and ended up being satisfied with Magic Earth[1]. I tried more or less every major navigation service (paid and "free"), and I ended up sticking with it.
And no, I'm not affiliated in any way; just wanted to share a recommendation because I was in the same boat.
Car sewer? Car brain? Wow, didn't know we had zealotry and disparagement over _choice of transport_ of all things, generally a matter people have little choice in; it's determined by where you live and what sort of life you have.
> Every year of private renting was associated with an extra 2.4 weeks of aging on average.
The alleged solution.
> Our finding that renting social housing was no different to outright ownership lends weight to calls for greater support for social housing.
As for
> I suspect the authors are across your concerns and perhaps understand them as well, if not better, than you might.
This study is in the same category as any other study undertaken in service of a political goal. The authors would not publish a study that disagrees with their politics anymore than cigarette companies prior to the days of public awareness would have published a study showing cigarettes as anything other than utterly harmless.
The days of expecting any semi-coherent audience to stop thinking and accept everything that follows as fact as soon as the words "scientific research" and "professor" appear are long, long gone.
> The information/free thought antagonists I don't understand. I don't get their angle. And I don't believe their intentions are all conspiratorial.
It depends on who you're talking about.
The ones on the contemporary left are easier to understand; it's ideologically coherent with their belief system when it comes to the role of the state. You can disagree with their ideology (well, maybe not in their presence if you like having functional eardrums) but you can't say they don't make internal sense.
The really wacky ones are on the contemporary right; depending on context they might support something enthusiastically or vehemently oppose it even though it's actually the same thing, it's just the context changing.
Yeah. These romanticized threads always give me a kick. Every large city here in Germany has a chronic smell of diesel and dog piss. There's a level of grime to everything that would really bother someone used to an American suburb. Not to mention the majority of apartments are in old buildings with no ventilation or cooling.
Like you said, there's advantages but ignoring the downsides is amusing if you've ever actually lived in a large city.
It's hardly a given all countries will be shrinking, just ones that follow a certain value system.
As for a sustainable model, yeah. Have kids. Like normal living organisms do, have always done, and will always do. If a population as a whole is unable to sustain itself through this incredibly basic function then their values have led them to an evolutionary dead end.
Sure, debt can be good idea when it's carefully considered and planned by a well run organization, preferably one where its leaders have their personal finances highly dependent on its success.
However the chronic issue almost every government has is that the government is neither well run, nor do the people running it suffer any financial consequences when things go poorly.
I don't have a realistic fix for this, of course, but it's fun to imagine annual performance reviews for politicians with guillotines available to HR.