heartbeats

Surely they could just have a system to filter out bad sites?

For example, if I want information about some programming stuff, I only really want

* Wikipedia

* StackExchange

* MDN

* cpp-reference

* whatever official docs

There's absolutely no need to have

* geeksforgeeks

* w3schools

* cyberciti.biz

* random wordpress blogs

This takes all of 5 minutes to code, you could even have a userscript for it.

It would take mere months to open back up those plants recently closed. Back in the 70s they could construct plants in 2-5 years. Chernobyl 1 began and completed construction in the same year!

Has our technology gotten worse since then? Or is it just permits and bureaucracy impeding us?

That's a misrepresentation of what they did. They said it was OK if it replaced certain stuff temporarily, not that you could just keep on building gas plants for ever and ever.

The recent attention that "the environment" has been getting is a direct result of this, and you mustn't confuse it for a general interest in green politics.

Frankly, I really do not care about "the environment". I care about people, and they obviously have a need for the environment. But the reason we have to take climate action is that it would be unpleasant for people's lives if we did not, not because it would hurt the trees.

If you suggest to reduce people into poverty so that they do not suffer extreme weather, is this really an improvement? Or are some people to be reduced into poverty, so that some other people do not suffer extreme weather?

If the trade-off is that I do not have a job, a place to live, heating, electricity, etc, but the weather is normal, I think I would prefer to have wildfires and flooding but otherwise a normal life. Most people would sooner live in California or Florida or Australia than Belarus or Moldova, no?

(That's not to say all action on climate policy looks like this. But when you have people talking about "degrowth" or blowing up oil pipelines, that very much seems to be the ethos. Lebanon had to make an unplanned transition away from oil on short notice. Should we strive to be like them?)

Nuclear materials yes, waste no. Chernobyl was an active reactor, for example.

There's an inverse relationship here with the half-life. The most dangerous waste is stuff that burns up in a few decades, the type that lasts for millions will emit very little radiation per unit time.

> What led us to climate change is going for short-term benefit and leaving the problems to the future. We shouldn't repeat that mistake even though we'll be long gone by the time the problems come to light.

That's how anything works, though. You replace the giant bleeding wound with a bandaid, and then you take it off and there's a scab, and then the scab goes away and you have a scar. It's always about replacing something with a lesser problem. For the past few years people have been trying to replace fossils with imaginary clean power, and it hasn't exactly gone great.

Who are all of these people who will be hurt by it?

There's nothing interesting (e.g. terrorism, bombs) you can do with nuclear waste, and it's not especially poisonous.

If you just loaded it up in barrels and dropped it at the bottom of the ocean, what's the worst that could happen?

Sure, some fish would die, but where are the millions of deaths?

Because we have specific environmental problems right now, that are quite serious and worth focusing on?

You do this stuff because you want to accomplish something. If animals go extinct, that is obviously unfortunate, but it pales in comparison to the prospect that we do so.

The EU isn't trying to accomplish some type of perfect environmental justice, they're trying to keep the world habitable.

Can't you just impose chained liability?

If I get a robocall, my carrier owes me $100. They can then collect $100 from the peer they got it from, etc.

This will cause carriers to only peer with good carriers, not fly-by-night VoIP clown shows.

> Is there a difference? Or do you think both are unacceptable?

Loans by themselves are acceptable; loans with interest are not, because you're making a profit from what could potentially be slavery.

A licit way to do it would be to have a purchase-repurchase agreement. I pay $5000 to "buy" a car, and I'm guaranteed to be able to sell it back for let's say $4000 a week later. That way, if I default on it, I can never end up in debt.

Loans backed by people's ability to earn income are a form of slavery, and earning interest off this is not licit.

Personally, I think the real value is in the brand.

If it's a medical degree, they could certainly strip you of all the formal licensing.

Yeah, see, I would personally contend that indentured servitude is ipso facto immoral, and so if your "fair deal" includes that, it is not actually fair.

Specifically, you're selling future labor in exchange for an asset that you can't immediately liquidate to pay off the debt. This is not acceptable, if the counterparty makes a profit from it. (If you could immediately liquidate it, at that point there would be no need to make recourse to your earning power)

If your peering is that poor, how are you not failing to uphold your end of the contract?

Why can't you just seize the degree? If I go to college and default on my loan, the elegant solution is to just strip me of my degree. If I want it back, I would have to go to college for another five years.

You can't. What you're describing is textbook indentured servitude, which is a form of slavery.

If you're suggesting that some things are only possible to fund through slavery, may I humbly submit that slavery is still wrong, and things which cannot be funded except through slavery have no right to existence?

That's true, but the usury back in the day was usually about loans to individuals. These days, you can bankrupt out of it.

Traditionally, the Catholic Church has made a distinction between loans ultimately backed by an individual's ability to sell their labor for money (mutuum loans), and loans ultimately backed by assets (societas loans).

For societas loans, such as a non-recourse mortgage or a business loan, there is no regulation whatsoever. This is just equivalent to moving property around.

For mutuum loans, these are considered as a form of slavery. If a profit is being made on it, it is illicit. The reason it's slavery is that it allows you to sell your time before you have it. If that money is spent, you are now in a position where you are being forced to work for nothing, i.e. textbook slavery.

There's a good FAQ at https://zippycatholic.wordpress.com/2014/11/10/usury-faq-or-..., but I would like to learn more about this topic. Any good books?

Illegal loans are harder to collect on. Sure, you have mob tactics, but there's a limit on how far it can go.

You're assuming that credit is only available at that price. If he has a car and a credible case to make that he'll be able to give them the money next month, surely he could get it cheaper than that?

> that has DMCA

Do you mean DRM?

How accurate a map did you end up with?

That still doesn't show it's impossible, only that nobody is doing it at present.

I remember talking to some exchange students from Greece. There, college is 100% free (no debt). This is guaranteed by their constitution, and the system simply has to adapt. For example, nearly everyone lives with their parents, books are free because they have to be, etc.

More broadly, all of these costs seem like they could be reduced, if you had the proper incentives.

"Food and housing" comes to $900/month, living with parents. Are they suggesting students are eating $900 worth of food ($30/day!), or does this include some type of rent paid to their parents as well? I spend about $300/month on food, and I'm not even that stingy. Where does the extra $600 go?

The average high school in my country spends $4/student/day on providing school lunches. This includes labour costs - we're talking basically catering. Naively extrapolating this, we get $12/day ($360/month) for three proper meals a day.

For that matter, why are the dorms so expensive? Isn't it their land? Why don't they just lower the rents? $1200 food+rent implies $900 rent, which is obviously way more than you need to maintain a dorm room.

If they're living on campus, why do they need to spend $135/month on transportation anyway? Isn't the entire point that the place they need to be is right there? A bicycle works out to $50 one-time cost, plus let's say $10/year in repairs.

What's the $1000/year on books get them? Why can't the university simply use cheaper books? Wikipedia tells us: "East Bay has a student body of almost 15,000". That's $15 million per year. For that much money, couldn't you just buy up the rights for all the books you needed and put them into the public domain?

I just don't understand why you couldn't simply make the schools more effective.

Couldn't they just tell universities to-

1. Forgive all loans, or 2. Never receive any federal funding ever again

Surely, they would be able to get their education somewhere?

It's not like it's physically impossible to provide education at $10k/year. I live in Europe, I went to a normal university, and I think the "market rate" for non-EU students was something like that.

If you capped it to $10k/year, are you saying there simply wouldn't be anyone around to give you an education at that price in the whole country?

That's true in the United States, but not in other countries:

https://www.pnas.org/content/118/36/e2105709118

There were statistically insignificant increases in Slovenia, Norway, Denmark, South Korea, Finland, Sweden, Germany, Netherlands, and Switzerland.

Going by this, I also think that you may have the correlation wrong. If the study is correct (more generous welfare systems => less decrease in birth rates), that seems like it would mean that people who can afford it will keep having kids.

Granted, so will people who aren't in the planning business. But it's hardly cut-and-dry like that.

(extra confounder: Northern Europe had less harsh lockdowns, maybe that plays a role?)

The goal is simple: for nobody to ever die of COVID-19, or any other cause, ever again.

Any less than this, and you'll lock down again.

I think the problem you're missing is that these are two different groups. Mortality is decreased, sure, and people get social problems, sure, but the people getting the increased social problems are not the ones getting the lowered mortality.

What risk did Verisign take, and how would the Internet change if they weren't rewarded for it?

Will China bother to defend their fishing boats, though? Are they that entrenched in the governmental structure, or are they basically just petty thugs?

Sick, miserable people make terrible revolutionaries. Desperate and hungry people have nothing to lose. Poor people in the US are miserable, but not miserable enough to be desperate.

This costs a lot of money, though. If it costs too much money, it won't be done. So the solution has to be cheap to be put into place.