Technological progress isn’t free.

I’m just not convinced progress scales 1:1 with increasing technological complexity. In fact, I think progress might be better achieved by lowering costs and complexity, rather than increasing them. Maybe more isn’t always better.

Extremely complex and expensive engineering and technology development for 400 MW of net electricity generation. Why not just build a 400 MW solar farm (with battery shortage, of course)? There’s a massive, natural fusion reactor in the sky blasting the Earth with petawatts of energy every day, for absolutely free.

Nah, the bubble will have popped by then. Honestly, most people will probably be using fewer resources because the post bubble recession could be severe.

When people finally realize that AI, robots, big space rockets, and self driving cars are not feasible and/or not enough to sustain our infinite growth economy, it’s going to be kinda like realizing you forgot your parachute just after you jumped out of the plane.

And so it begins…

So it’s kinda frustrating to hear people calling for others to go first.

That’s not necessarily what I’m calling for. I want us all to go together. But we can’t all go for a solution until we all agree on the problem.

I don’t want to be here and I live here.

The really frustrating thing is nobody seems to want to do anything about it.

Like so many things in America, education is very unequal. We have world class schools, and we have very poor and inadequate schools. The people who live in the areas with the very good schools think the people who live in the areas with the very poor schools should pull themselves up by their bootstraps and fix their own damn schools, and if they don’t, well, that’s a them problem not a me problem. Unfortunately, it actually is a you problem, because, turns out, all of us are likely to be negatively affected if large numbers of Americans are fucking morons.

This is partly why I’m interested in the Slate truck. Your car can’t spy on you if it doesn’t have the tech needed for spying.

Global heating is already estimated to be taking one life every minute, with the toll likely to rise unless emissions fall rapidly.

I think it’s going to be a while. We’re still committed to the infinite growth paradigm and infinite growth requires infinite energy.

There’s debate about the feasibility of green growth, but the fact is green energy is already helping to fuel growth. It’s a relatively small percentage of the overall energy mix now, but green energy will grow, and so will fossil fuel energy. We’ll have green growth and fossil fuel growth, and probably nuclear growth, too. As long as we keep growing, we’ll need it all.

The RVs are a symptom. Going after the symptom doesn’t necessarily do anything to address the underlying issue. But the underlying issue is systemic, which makes it very difficult to fix.

Real estate is the primary source of wealth for most people in the US. To bring down housing costs would necessarily mean bringing down home values, leading to many people potentially losing a considerable amount of their personal net worth. And I’m not talking about billionaires, or even necessarily millionaires. I’m talking mostly about people whose net worth is in the hundreds of thousands, with the vast majority of that coming from any equity they might have in their home.

There’s no viable solution for fixing this that doesn’t result in those people losing at least some net worth, at least initially. Not that I can see, anyway. We need to do it anyway, but I understand why those people aren’t enthusiastic about it.

What I cannot understand is how so many of my fellow Americans actually like it this way. And I get that a lot of it is ignorance and status quo bias, but you don’t have to visit, or even know about, the places with great transportation infrastructure to know that ours sucks.

You’re only options to get anywhere are drive or fly and both suck and are expensive, uncomfortable and inconvenient. I mean, I’ve never visited any of the world’s great transportation areas. I’ve never experienced that first hand, but I’ve sure as hell driven around the US and I absolutely fucking hate it. Traffic, asshole drivers, crumbling infrastructure yet somehow also constant road construction, getting anywhere in this country is a pain in the ass.

I think “renewable” has become a buzz word that people don’t think critically about, so a lot of folks don’t understand how important it is for an energy source to be renewable.

Once you’ve pumped an oil well dry, it stays dry. It doesn’t refill with oil, at least not on human timescales. But the sunlight that solar panels used to generate electricity today will be replaced with new sunlight tomorrow. And that daily renewal of sunlight will continue for many, many millions of years.

It seems so obvious to me.

This is the first I’m hearing about this “anti-weaponization fund.” This country is so cooked.

The state’s Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission fired biologist Brittney Brown in September after she reposted a meme on her personal Instagram account that claimed Kirk wouldn’t care about children being shot in their classrooms.

I mean, I’m sure he didn’t care.

With more dollars on the market chasing the same amount of goods (e.g. oil) the price of everything denominated in dollars would shoot through the roof.

Yeah, but that’s what I’ve never quite understood: how would it put more dollars on the market than there was always going to be anyway? I mean, the idea was always to pay back these bond holders. Weren’t the dollars that will be needed to pay back bond holders going to have to be created at some point regardless?

The total Federal debt is $39 trillion, but there’s only something like $20 trillion actually in existence, if I’m not mistaken. Even if we collected every single existing dollar out there through taxes, we’d still have a shortfall of almost $20 trillion.

It does feel like flushing money down the toilet, doesn’t it? Then again, I’m not a Medicaid, Medicare or Social Security recipient, nor am I a member of the armed forces. They might disagree.

But why shouldn’t I want to get something for my money? If I pay Medicare taxes, why shouldn’t I get Medicare benefits, for instance?

States must set their own guidelines. The Federal government has become unreliable so we shouldn’t rely on it.

We’re fucked because the only solution is raise taxes and/or cut spending, and neither are politically feasible.

We could try printing our way out of it, but people will swear up and down that would cause runaway inflation. Maybe it would, but it’s always made we wonder. I mean, I’m not talking about printing money and sending everyone in America a check. I’m talking about printing money and using it to pay bond holders. Obviously not all at once, not all bonds come due at the same time. And, in theory, wouldn’t that cause bond yields to go down? If treasuries were essentially guaranteed investments (and weren’t they kind of seen that way for a very long time, up until recently?), yields would drop and the cost of borrowing for the Federal government would go down. Right? In theory, anyway. I’m sure I’m missing something, so please someone enlighten me.

Public interest!? What are we, communists? It’s all about private profit. That’s how you know you live in a free country. True Freedom™ means prioritizing the maximization of profits for a relatively small number of owners and executives, over public interest, the environment, and even basic human decency and well being in general.