Physically separated bike lanes are even worse. You can't get out of them easily if you come across a lot of debris. And they are harder to street clean, so debris accumulates more.
2,130 karma · joined September 29, 2011
I think there's an argument that this is impossible to sustain, politically. Once there is a huge new tax, it will be too tempting to redirect growing portions of that funding to other projects. California, for example, has an energy rebate, but the money has also been diverted to bail out the high-speed rail project, for example, and if the state faced a fiscal crisis who knows where the money would go?
Well, I read both books, and Isaacson's is much better. In fact, Doudna's book was largely written by her coauthor, her then-graduate student Sam Sternberg, based on long interviews. This is the same process Isaacson used. But, in my opinion, Isaacson does it better, incorporating more of Doudna's personal anecdotes with similar levels of science.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30971755-a-crack-in-crea...
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54968118-the-code-breake...
Your second link shows that the pharma companies spend almost as much on R&D as on stock dividends and buybacks. Is there any other industry that spends as much on R&D? Apple, for instance, seems to be spending ~6x as much on stock buybacks and dividends as on R&D (approximately, based on the first Google hits).
Even your own links contradict your claim that very little goes to R&D.
Gyms are expensive, and there is a pandemic.
But even then, it will always be easier to put it off till later. What generation is going to take a significant, and eventually massive, charge in order to help their grandchildren? It seems not unlikely that no generation does, the problem gets worse and worse, wealth stagnates and then starts to decline, and eventually the problem is unsolvable. This could happen even without any climate tipping points.
I think that perhaps strong shame requires a social interaction. (However, I would also be ashamed to pick up my child late from daycare, so maybe my feelings aren't broadly representative.)
http://www.californiaislands.net/argentine-ants
The page was last updated in 2016. I'm not sure of the current status of the project.
> It turns out that Lemaître, who had translated his paper himself, had left out certain findings because he preferred not to distract readers from Hubble’s results, which were based on more extensive data. In his supreme modesty, Lemaître was little interested in what history would think of him. He only wanted the most accurate estimates to be available—which he believed were Hubble’s, not his.
Beyond the personal, on the broader political scale, I also don't know that targeting any particular thing makes sense. All emissions, from all contributors, need to fall. Something like a carbon tax would cleanly attack the least efficient carbon emitters first.
The alternatives are worse. They use much more energy, and you can't go outside without seeing how bad global warming is now, and how devastating it soon will be.
We need to forget plastics recycling entirely, and spend all that effort on redirecting trash to landfills.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/02/08/a-closer-lo...
Your link doesn't support this. How many police have drawn their weapons?
If you worry that plastic recycling is sent to third-world countries and thence into the ocean—and you should worry—there's an easy solution. Don't recycle your plastic. Trash it; send it to a landfill. In the big picture, drilling for oil, making plastic, and then burying it again is its own sort of recycling. And in developed nations, landfilling plastic is environmentally benign. Landfills are lined and covered.
I know this isn't a perfect world, but it doesn't seem to be asking a lot for a doctor to know this. (Especially for a drug that currently costs $56K/year and presumably will cost more next year.)
It doesn't look like it. The UN predicts the population will be ~10.5 billion in 2070. Of course, there is a large range of uncertainty. [1]
Given sustainability limits, the cost to the environment (and to humans) of going from 10 to 11 billion is a lot worse than the cost of going from 5 to 6 billion, say. (For example, there's only so many fish in the sea.)
[1] https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/Probabilistic/POP/TOT/9...
The same argument applies to cars, and to everything else we make or harvest. Should we ban all exports? (Please, no, it is a bad idea.)
It is a major factor why Blacks have lost ownership of farmland in the United States. Rather than try to explain it myself, here is an excerpt from "Mine!" by Jacob Heller and James Salzman:
> Currently, Black farmers constitute less than 1 percent of American farmers, and Black families continue to lose farms at a rate three times that of whites. The cause of this dramatic farm loss starts with inheritance law, in particular the consequences for family ownership when someone dies without making a will. Many poor Black farmers in the South were suspicious of local white lawyers, and for good reason, so they never made wills. This suspicion continues today, even among some wealthy Black people. Aretha Franklin and Prince could well have afforded the very best attorneys, yet both passed away without making wills. Overall, three-quarters of Black people do not have wills, more than double the percentage of whites.
> The result for Black-owned land in the Southeast is that over a quarter is now heir property, averaging eight co-owners, five of whom live outside the region. Amazingly, more land in Mississippi is owned by Black people living in Chicago than by those living in Mississippi itself. …
> Inheritance law imposes enormous costs on Black people—indeed, on anyone who does not write a will. When you die without a will, the state splits ownership among people the law designates as heirs, in a specified priority: spouses and children, grandchildren, parents, siblings, and then more remote relatives.
> Partition sales … are the primary way that most heir property is lost. Partition sales are not just of historical interest. Across the South, heir property currently makes up a third of remaining Black-owned farmland—roughly 3.5 million acres worth about $30 billion. …
> In 1887 John Brown bought eighty acres of land in Rankin County, Mississippi. He was part of the great wave of freed slaves who invested their life savings in farmland. … When he died in 1935, he did not leave a will. Ownership of his land split among his wife and nine children. In time they all died, also without wills, so the land was split further among grandchildren. … In 1978 Ruth Brown asked a court to divide the farm so she would own her share of the land outright—a manageable forty-five acres out of John’s original eighty. The other sixty-six Brown heirs would still co-own the balance, in shares ranging from 1/18th of the farm down to a tiny 1/19,440th. The court agreed to partition the parcel, but not by physically dividing the land. Instead, the judge ordered the entire farm sold and the money partitioned among the heirs according to their ownership fractions.
> As often happens in such forced partition sales, a single outside company was the only bidder. In Brown’s case, it was a local white-owned lumber company that wanted to cut the timber.
> Even though the family collectively valued the farm far above its auction price, neither Brown nor any other heir placed a bid. Why? Partly because state law often requires the bid to be fully or substantially paid in cash on auction day, a rule that makes bidding impossible for most ordinary owners. Partly because there was no simple way for the Brown heirs to organize a joint family bid that pulled together resources from the scattered owners. Many heirs did not even know they were owners. And no single Brown heir could top the lumber company’s lowball bid. This is commonplace. When a judge orders land auctioned on courthouse steps, the deal is final, even though the price is usually far below what is considered fair market value in an ordinary transaction.
> In 2017, the U.S.-based VW executive Oliver Schmidt, who oversaw emissions issues, was sentenced to seven years in prison and fined $400,000, the maximum possible under a plea deal the German national made with prosecutors after admitting to charges of conspiring to mislead U.S regulators and violate clean-air laws.
The US has charged nine people, and Germany at least five, though they aren't moving quickly with the prosecutions.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-volkswagen-emissions/u-s-...
It is also difficult because of the two tiers of labor. A farmer will try increasing wages by $1/hour, and still struggle to find enough workers. Wages would probably have to be doubled before new workers—Americans—would start to enter the industry.