gottorf

18 ms·

241.
by gottorf 1y ago
This description still applies to Big Island (if we stretch it a bit): > You can drive less than an hour and go from desert to snow and snow to tropical. You can drive from the beach on the leeward side, going past dry ranchland with an
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by gottorf 1y ago
> I’ve had plenty of downright rude drivers who feel inconvenienced by my presence This is my general observation about life (at least in the US) these days: the seeming prevalence of people who think they're doing you a favor by do
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by gottorf 1y ago
> If you tax profit, a 100% tax rate leads to shifting profits to reinvestment and salaries and benefits. There wouldn't be any money to reinvest into salaries and benefits, because capital would not be deployed on a risky, potentia
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by gottorf 1y ago
I didn't bring it up, a commenter above did. I was adding color in response to another commenter saying that unpleasantries experienced (of various levels) in the NYC transit system is an outlier. You and everyone else of course has th
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by gottorf 1y ago
Not common. From what I've read, each year, 50-80 people are killed on the tracks (either by hitting trains or touching the third rail), with only a handful being caused by somebody else pushing them onto the tracks.
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by gottorf 1y ago
A few points. 1. A <1% risk of loss, if catastrophic (e.g. thrown off the platform into an oncoming train), is unacceptable to bear, when there exist alternatives. 1b. Of course, people get in car accidents all the time. However, rightly
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by gottorf 2y ago
Fitter, happier, more productive...
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by gottorf 2y ago
Probably would take an engineer to answer this question. It's entirely possible that building the first few floors with wood would be more expensive than steel due to the additional lumber needed for strength.
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by gottorf 2y ago
To be fair, LA County includes mountains (Angeles National Forest among others) and a desert and a whole lot of nothing on the other side of those mountains. Nassau County is almost all developable land. I bet if you compared like to like,
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by gottorf 2y ago
> I'm not sure how costs of sewage etc. change with increased population density. Pipes have to get wider per person, but low-density also means they're longer. Probably accurate to say that in general, the great majority of th
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by gottorf 2y ago
> It seems that they're willing to let vacancies happen instead of lower rent rates Anecdotally (as well), no small-time landlord I know wants vacancies over accepting lower rents. Almost all of them, however, would prefer a vacancy
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by gottorf 2y ago
> Those changes spread through the whole southeast and have made wind almost a non-factor This is great, but ugh, I live along the Gulf Coast and for the life of me I don't understand why more people don't build with concrete (
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by gottorf 2y ago
I see. Droll.
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by gottorf 2y ago
> one of those countries has a president who basically tried to stage a coup, and now are back in power ignoring any rule of law President Yoon of South Korea has been suspended since December, as a result of the martial law incident and
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by gottorf 2y ago
It's easy to paint a rosy picture of an imagined better alternative. > the trillion dollar companies who traffic in fossil fuels are way more politically powerful than the future renewable energy companies Do names like Solyndra or
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by gottorf 2y ago
> The UK doesn't have enough renewable energy and storage yet. As with everything else, the marginal cost of additional renewable energy and storage will rise. At some point, all the low-hanging fruit is picked; there are only so ma
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by gottorf 2y ago
> I'm not sure how you create a better world I go into more depth in my other comment, but the short version is that building everything nice that you listed takes energy, and Net Zero just doesn't have a viable story for how t
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by gottorf 2y ago
> diseases don't respect imaginary border walls A non-imaginary border wall might work, then. Control the movement of the vectors of disease and you control the spread of the disease.
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by gottorf 2y ago
> comes with massive future costs Again, the investments required in the present day to hopefully and potentially reduce those massive future costs you're speaking of are resources that have alternative uses. One can compare, say, t
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by gottorf 2y ago
Never let an article about e-bikes used for delivery distract you from fostering a socialist revolution!
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by gottorf 2y ago
The comparison doesn't have to be with homicides. "Every demographic does X at about the same rate" is such a flat-out wrong assumption that you'd really have to cherry-pick X, with lots of caveats and conditions, for it
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by gottorf 2y ago
> for nothing In the actual world we inhabit, everything has a tradeoff. A more accurate description would be "what if we spent an untold sum of resources that have alternative uses, each of which may have resulted in an even better
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by gottorf 2y ago
Yeah, pretty gross of the American taxpayer to not work harder to make you feel better about yourself being an American.
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by gottorf 2y ago
> not even too hard steps, the COVID shock has shown the possibilities What? There's a good argument to be made that the current geopolitical instabilities would never have happened without the collective shock of Covid to everyone&
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by gottorf 2y ago
It's disingenuous to mention that without all of the other nonsense that disincentivized investment into energy abundance.
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by gottorf 2y ago
Extraordinary claims require evidence.
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by gottorf 2y ago
Insofar as "socialist politics" make it harder for the supply of housing to rise to match demand, it is not moronic at all. Places in the UK where housing stock grows with population don't have it as bad as places that don&#x
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by gottorf 2y ago
> Good, well-funded public services make productive citizens and a strong economy. Austerity leads to a dead country. Most Western European nations have a government expenditure as a percentage of GDP of roughly 50%; half the economy is
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by gottorf 2y ago
> Only idiots think immigration is uncontrolled. Practically all immigration is from government granted visas. "Uncontrolled" in this context doesn't mean people hopping the border unbeknownst to the authorities. It means
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by gottorf 2y ago
> The irony about being anti-immigration is that immigration fuels economic growth. The UK has had increased (net) immigration for decades, including a huge jump in the past few years[0]. The population grew commensurately, likely mostly

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