> But there's no simple way, and in particular no cheap way from a budgetary perspective, to get there even if the motivation existed to get around the monumental collective action problem, which it doesn't.
It seems like maybe there is though.
The first problem is the "use it or lose it" provisions where someone has the rights to use water but not sell it, thereby encouraging waste. That one has a solid solution: If they have the right to use it, they get the right to sell it. Make sale inalienable from use. Then you don't have to pay them anything because you're giving them something instead of taking it. But you get higher water availability as now all these people wasting "free" water start selling it because the opportunity cost of not selling it is now worth more than the wasteful use. The only "problem" here is that they get a windfall, but we can solve that in the same way as the second "problem".
Which is the takings clause. The purpose of that is to prevent unequal takings. If the government needs your land to build a railroad, they have to pay you for it, because they're taking yours but not anyone else's. Whereas when they take everyone's property at the same rate it's called property tax, and that's allowed. So if you just got a windfall of water rights in a dry place, congrats, you now have a valuable property right which is subject to property tax. Not using the water and don't want to pay the tax? Then sell the water. Since the buyer values it at more than you do, and the tax is less than 100% of the value, everyone comes out ahead compared to the status quo. The previous inefficient user gets $100 in money instead of $10 worth of inefficient use, the government gets some proportion of that in new tax revenue (variously property tax on the rights and income tax on the sale), the buyer gets water it values at >$100.
That's a bad argument. There are gasoline trucks with a GVWR of ~20,000 pounds and diesel cars that weigh less than a Honda Accord. If you actually wanted to do that then you'd instead do something like tax based on axle weight and miles traveled, e.g. by reading the odometer during inspections.
The better argument is that diesel is worse for air quality and then it's a pigouvian tax in proportion to how much you burn.
The realpolitik argument is that fewer people have diesel vehicles and democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner. But taxing commercial trucks is also a pretty sneaky way of taxing ~everything while pretending to not, so it's also the principal/agent problem. Legislators want to spend money while pretending not to take it from you.
"Someone captures the market" is the thing that happens when the government micromanages them. Laws that charge more per unit to high users aren't anti-trust laws. A farm doesn't have higher market share in food than Google has in a tech market just because it uses more water.
> You can reverse the charges on debit cards, but the money is withdrawn at the time the charge is made. This is not the case for credit cards.
In a sense it is though, because it lowers your available credit by the amount of the charge. And the fraudsters are going to try to run you right up to your credit limit, so you end up at the same problem: You now have legitimate charges being declined because the fraudsters locked up your payment card.
You have a debit card backup though in that scenario. Arguably, you can just do the reverse and have a credit card backup, but some things don't accept credit card as payment.
Having multiple credit cards in the US is quite common, since there's no practical downside (unlike having multiple checking accounts, which locks up liquidity at usually no interest payment) and it can even be beneficial for your credit score.
That's not the problem. After all, if it happened to your debit card you could likewise make purchases on a different card, regardless of whether the other card is a debit or credit card.
It's also not that hard to get two debit cards. There are credit unions with no minimum balance requirement.
The actual problem is that if it happens to any card, all the stuff configured to use that card is now failing. You have a toll tag and the company goes to charge your card for a road toll, it's a perverse unaccountable bureaucracy that has captured the government so enjoy your $50 declined payment fee. You have autopay on for several services which will naturally suspend your account if you don't pay them. That's an inconvenience for something like Netflix but for your various information services it can be a big problem even if all they do is turn it off temporarily, and an even bigger problem if the turning it off involves deleting your stuff. Likewise for things like insurance where a gap in coverage can cause you to get fined or negatively impact your future rates.
Some of that can be mitigated by chasing it all down and switching them before the charge comes, but the labor to do that is a significant cost in itself and plenty of people aren't going to recognize the need to do it until it's too late, or try to and still miss some.
But then you need to have money in the other checking account too.
Still, completely agree with your larger point. It's a big hassle having to switch cards, and the status quo (i.e., the industry being in a multi-decade transition period towards acceptable security) is sometimes the worst of both worlds:
Half of all merchants don't support automatic card updates and need to be manually fixed, while the other half do and have a chance of keeping your card alive in a fraudster's account where it's on file if your issuer is not careful.
Geekbench is basically trash. People keep using it for comparing Mac performance because many of the things people usually benchmark don't run on Macs.
But single-number outputs like that are useless. Is the number ~10% higher because it's consistently ~10% faster at everything, or because it's 100% faster on a minority of things and slower at everything else? The first one is pretty unlikely when comparing processors with different designs, and indeed that isn't it:
The CPU in those charts with a similar TDP to the M4 is the Ryzen HX 370. You can see that the M4 is ahead of it in a few of the tests (C-Ray, DuckDB, PyBench, FLAC) but in even more of them the M4 is at the bottom of the stack. (Only a third of those charts are actually performance; each performance chart is followed by two power consumption charts.)
And the ~20W TDP is a nice parlor trick (the HX 370 is the only one on the list that competes with it there) but in a desktop CPU that's pretty irrelevant. Whereas if you compare it to the CPUs that can be had for a similar price (e.g. Ryzen 9700X, 65W), it's only ahead in C-Ray and FLAC while losing quite badly in most of the others and subjecting you to unupgradable soldered memory that the PC hardware doesn't.
Meanwhile doing ray tracing on a CPU instead of a GPU isn't much fun, and FLAC is an audio codec so a ~10% improvement there is probably not going to be a big part of your day if you're not a full-time sound engineer. So does averaging those kinds of things in to make a single benchmark number make sense? Or should you be looking at the results on applications you actually use?
How are we supposed to trust these charts when it can't even be bothered to specify which Apple Silicon chip it's testing? The Mac Mini comes in two versions.
The different versions have different names. One is called M4, the other is called M4 Pro. The name tells you they tested the former and it has only the one CPU configuration.
The Pro has more P-cores and fewer E-cores (8/4 or 10/4 instead of 4/6), but even the 10/4 configuration starts at $1399 instead of $799 and for the extra $600 you can move from the 9700X to the 9950X3D (16 P-cores) and have $200 left over.
Chernobyl was supposed to be an economically viable means of generating electricity. Comparing a tiny billion-dollar submarine reactor to a power plant simply doesn't make any sense.
The reactors on aircraft carriers have a similar thermal output to many commercial power reactors. The ones on submarines are around a third of that size, about the size of SMRs like NuScale VOYGR or the Xe-100 reactors proposed to be built at Long Mott in Texas.
Chernobyl was supposed to turn low enrichment uranium into plutonium for Soviet bombs. They made design choices that compromised safety to make plutonium production more efficient.
> So nuclear plants, by and large, get the market price whenever they produce (which is most of the time) and this does not equal the average price as they will be producing a higher share of total production at times of low demand (and low prices), and a smaller share of total production at times of high demand (and high prices).
The assumption here is that the price is set by only demand rather than the combination of supply and demand. Under that false assumption, generating power when demand is lower (i.e. at night) is bad. But how much solar generation is there at night, and what does that change in supply do to prices if you make solar a higher percentage of the grid?
It does the oppose of this:
> whilst the capture price for solar is often higher than the average price (thanks to power demand generally being higher during the day)
Because solar generates only during the day, in order to supply power with solar at night, you would need it to oversupply power during the day and then pay extra for storage to resolve the undersupply it leaves at night. So once you have a certain amount of solar, you end up with lower prices during the day, when solar is generating a higher proportion of the power, and higher prices after sunset.
And solar is double screwed by this. Not only does it get the soon-to-be-lower daytime prices for all of its output rather than half, its output is further regionally correlated, so that on sunny days when its output is highest, even the daytime price is lower than it is on cloudy days, because higher or lower solar output is a cause of lower or higher prices, i.e. the daytime price anti-correlates with its output.
The fossil fuel industries and their shills? Probably not lamenting the delay in moving way from fossil fuels the same way the environmental groups ought to be.
Notice that it was also them (specifically Russia, a major petroleum exporting country) funding those anti-nuclear environmental groups:
Well, the marketing brocure said "too cheap too meter" but the result is often a White Elephant. Please explain how the nuclear folks missed the "too cheap to meter" target on account of some external shills. That is: how does one ensure that the next round of nuclear will not White Elepant like many of the previous rounds did? Besides the taxpayers taking it on the chin, as they usually do.
The shills do fear mongering to scare people into passing regulations that increase costs independent of the cost/benefit ratio, require costs to be internalized that other generation methods aren't required to (it should either be everyone or no one), and file lawsuits against construction projects to induce delays and increase costs again.
The premise of accelerationism isn't to destroy the world, it's to escape a local maxima.
You have some medium-okay but clearly sub-optimal status quo and then a bunch of defenders resisting all change because "things are fine" even though they should be better than fine, or institutions that have been captured by corrupt interests but that situation is stable as long as they continue to provide bread and circuses. If it stays mediocre then everyone muddles along; if it gets worse then people stop ignoring the issue and actually address it so that it gets better.
The problem is, it's not just bread and circuses. People have been divided into camps for the purpose of directing their dissatisfaction against each other instead of the entities responsible.
So people get mad when things go wrong but the perpetrators convince them that the enemy is their neighbors and they need to direct their resources to defeating each other instead of working together to solve the actual problems.
For example, when SOPA/PIPA was defeated, it not only wasn't just along party lines, there was more opposition to it from Republicans than Democrats:
So who we like here are e.g. Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Rand Paul (R-KY), because they both opposed it, even though they're in different parties. But then the "parties matter, not candidates" people would have you trying to oust everyone with the disfavored letter next to their name even if they did the right thing there. Which helps the baddies win by convincing you to oust good candidates from the "bad" party in favor of bad candidates from the "good" party, and over time makes both parties worse even as people become increasingly dissatisfied with the way things are going.
The first is the anti-trust angle. Some subset of bank apps don't work because of attestation and that's a significant barrier to adoption for switching to competitors, so it ought to be an anti-trust violation for the platform to do that.
The second is, you try it and discover that your bank doesn't work. If you want it bad enough you can switch banks, and the fact that it doesn't work is a signal that your bank has a weak security team who is just cargo culting deleterious vendor nonsense without evaluating whether it has any real security value.
(The use case for attestation is completely orthogonal to bank apps because it can't prevent credential stealing from compromised phones running a fake app since the fake app won't require attestation, and it can't prevent attackers from using stolen credentials to transfer funds because once they have the credentials they can just use a normal phone, and that's the case even if the attestation was completely airtight, which it isn't. Meanwhile the devices that can pass attestation are generally more vulnerable because it implies they're running the more-likely-to-be-outdated OS that came with the device rather than a third party upgrade with more recent patches, so they're essentially encouraging their customers to not upgrade their OS. Banks that do this are wearing clown makeup and you have to ask if you trust them with your money.)
It seems like maybe there is though.
The first problem is the "use it or lose it" provisions where someone has the rights to use water but not sell it, thereby encouraging waste. That one has a solid solution: If they have the right to use it, they get the right to sell it. Make sale inalienable from use. Then you don't have to pay them anything because you're giving them something instead of taking it. But you get higher water availability as now all these people wasting "free" water start selling it because the opportunity cost of not selling it is now worth more than the wasteful use. The only "problem" here is that they get a windfall, but we can solve that in the same way as the second "problem".
Which is the takings clause. The purpose of that is to prevent unequal takings. If the government needs your land to build a railroad, they have to pay you for it, because they're taking yours but not anyone else's. Whereas when they take everyone's property at the same rate it's called property tax, and that's allowed. So if you just got a windfall of water rights in a dry place, congrats, you now have a valuable property right which is subject to property tax. Not using the water and don't want to pay the tax? Then sell the water. Since the buyer values it at more than you do, and the tax is less than 100% of the value, everyone comes out ahead compared to the status quo. The previous inefficient user gets $100 in money instead of $10 worth of inefficient use, the government gets some proportion of that in new tax revenue (variously property tax on the rights and income tax on the sale), the buyer gets water it values at >$100.
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