I've changed my default search engine to Bing for a while. Before I did that, I did compare the results with Google search and found that the clickbait websites that keep pissing me off are shown only by Google search. Those content farm sites have been on Google search as the top results for years to the extent I think it literally cancels any advantage Google search provides.
Hardware defects are often worked around by firmware. It can be things like adjusting current drive or lowering the clocks conditionally to mitigate EMI. It can even check the serial numbers of the hardware to determine what to do for the pieces with inferior quality in order to pass QA and increase yields. If customers get to find out what kind of defects or which batches are inferior, that would imply costly consequences for business.
I do wonder if it would be much cheaper to capture CO2 by investing technology and capital into 'building' forests. What if we can irrigate Sahara and cultivate some fast-growing plants like bamboos there? Maybe that has ecological consequences but it doesn't seem to be much different than the agricultural land expansion that has happened in rainforests in the first place.
The sahara seems like a bit of a hassle compared to the taiga (russia to canada). The real problem with growing forests is that they do not store significant amounts of carbon after they reach maturity. They did during the carboniferous, but after fungi figured out how to decompose cellulose they haven't, and wont. Fast growing plants only capture carbon faster, but the total storage would be less per area.
However, we do know of how the deposits of fossil fuels formed in the first place, and most places newer than the carboniferous, formed at the bottom of deep lakes and especially oceans. They form from the anoxic compaction of marine snow. Either during massive algae booms, or more slowly from slightly larger corpses.
This process is slow for several reasons, but a significant, in particular for the latter category, one is the lack of surfaces for attachment on the open ocean.
The creation of large floating artificial coral reefs could provide this, and with it a highly productive rich ecosystem. We could further fertilize these, with iron in particular being rare, but also regular fertilizer.
Land’s share in economies’ nonfinancial assets equals between 40% and 60%, and in the US currently equals over 50%. This constitutes a very large base for a non-distortionary tax. This column suggests that a 5-percentage point or larger increase in the tax rate on the value of US land, excluding buildings and equipment situated on the land, balanced by decreases in the tax rates on incomes from labour and from buildings and equipment (and in the limit by their complete elimination), would increase output by 15% to 25%.
I assume that inflation (CPI) can be reflected by the increase of money supply only when people can't find a way to transfer the money to somewhere inflation-proof and can only spend it on consumer goods. That's absolutely not the case in modern days. Look at the housing price, that's where the money's gone.
Basically that’s my understanding. Anywhere you stick the money with low velocity will have the same effect on the left hand side of the equation to absorb increases in money supply. You’re right that people pick durable assets like houses to put it in, but it would have a similar effect on the velocity of the money supply if they buried cash in garbage bags for 15 years en-mass. People don’t do that because they expect reasonable and small inflation; you could imagine if that expectation went away though (either expecting deflation or very high inflation) how the money supply lever could stop being effective.
Through the velocity lense, the fact that QE and stimulus checks have very different inflation effects also becomes apparent- if you give a check to someone living paycheck to paycheck, they will spend it in their local community nearly immediately and it will be passed around quite a bit before getting locked into an asset price somewhere. If you edit the banks accounts at the fed or have the fed buy assets though, it seems to go quickly into asset prices where it sits for years before leaking into the economy as a whole, with a much much lower velocity. So $1 there != $1 here in terms of increasing prices.
The point is there has to be someone to make the final decisions, be they talented or not. You could vote on everything, but I don't think that would be efficient or even make sense for all circumstances.
Exemption of principal residence isn't a bad thing for LVT. It still disincentivizes people from treating housing as a store of wealth, which is literally the root of all evils about various social/economic issues.
The cost of housing would have to infinitely keep growing if we expect every generation of homeowners are guaranteed a lucrative ROI when they retire. I don't understand how that would be sustainable other than a "Après moi, le déluge" mindset expecting the later generations to pay the bill (yeah, literally our pensions included). This problem is even compounded when considering the consequence of the HGT (the Henry George Theorem).
I am already getting a bit struggling to afford a home that is not as good my parents' even though I have a much higher-paying job. But I can't imagine how my children are going to afford it without my financial aid or they have to move to somewhere cheaper.
That said, I somehow agree with you regarding the political aspect, which probably needs a profound wisdom to figure it out.
I’m afraid it could easily be the biggest mistake made by Apple over the last decade. The bloatedness and slow build time just aren't justified by the shiny, convenient language features.
