> The report doesn’t identify these “super emitters,” but notes that landfills give off more methane than any other source in the state. NASA’s equipment found that a subset of these landfills were the largest emitters in California and exhibited “persistent anomalous activity.”
Is the problem here that the trash is breaking down, or it's breaking down in a suboptimal way (such as anaerobic activity) that's causing methane to be released instead of a more benign gas?
Exactly! I have so many side projects I like to tinker with while I'm at home. I use them as a way to learn a new skill. Eventually those skills will come home to my employer, either with new ideas, frameworks, experience, etc. But for that to happen I need the time to self-explore and follow my own ideas.
Sometimes I wonder if we were just a different type of people 100 years ago. People were standing in the balcony while it was being lifted? Going to work as normal!? Society would never tolerate such risk these days.
I would follow the money to find the answer. People aren't less risk averse, but companies are because the huge financial toll of potential litigation.
not only that we unfortunately live in a society of fraud, where our mass transit system has to resort to their cameras to prove who wasn't on a bus when a car bumps it.
You think? I think most of them were wondering if that shit is safe. Tell me you'd work on the sixth floor thinking it's absolutely fine that you don't know the qualifications of the engineers who cooked this up, nor the odds of this going horribly wrong with you under a pile of rubble.
Or would you rather be thinking, like I imagine most of the workers were, "doesn't matter what I think, boss said if I don't get my ass to work, I'm fired. And no one wants to get fired during THE GREAT DEPRESSION."
Depends on the country. In a place like India or Mexico, people everywhere are doing things every day that would make headlines in the US.
An entire family of 4 riding on a single motorcycle without helmets in heavy traffic? Normal in India. Would generate new for weeks if done in the USA, parents would be arrested for child abuse.
Back in the 1990s there was a crew taking down a building on the block where I worked. Early on, they needed to remove a section of cornice so that a debris chute could drop straight. How do you cut through a concrete cornice? Well, you lean out the full-height window, hang on with one hand, and operate your jackhammer with the other. It didn't look safe to me. On the other hand, the guy was wearing a hardhat...
why would they pay for someone else to use their energy? It just eats into their profits and means that their normal customers have to pay more for the solar energy.
I think the power grid should be socialised and electricity handed out for free, especially given our increasing dependency on it. Solar is technically "free" energy given there's nothing to setup and maintain except the infrastructure, versus coal/oil/gas which requires mining, refining and transportation of materials before you get to the generating and delivery parts of the process.
It may be almost free to produce the energy with the infrastructure you have, but it's still limited: there's only so much power available. So how would you allocate it?
I paid $11k for my used 2015 leaf about 2 years ago. I charge it every other day (90 mile range) by plugging it in at work or at home into a DC charger that’s connected to my dryer outlet.
For these cars they work great but you have to accept that they usually have to be charged every other day.
> huge money source for local home owners, who are the demographic setting the local policies.
And why do you think this? A home is one of the least liquid assets one can own. It’s not a huge money source. It’s not even a money source home owners at all.
Because a housing crisis leads to skyrocketing home values. They benefit from increased housing prices.
Further, any countering increase in property taxes is dampened by Prop 13. So there is very little reason to sell and cash-in vs just holding on for longer as the problem worsens.
When you are a homeowner with an expensive house, you don't want more homes built. That will increase supply and lower price.
> Because a housing crisis leads to skyrocketing home values. They benefit from increased housing prices.
That’s the point I’m trying to make. A home’s value is NOT liquid. You can’t extract any portion of it until you move. And you have to move AWAY to get that value.
The best you get is a relatively low interest HELOC but that’s hardly a money maker.
In fact a lot of people are stuck in their homes for that reason. Any move would be a 5x or 10x change in property tax bill.
You have an asset. It's worth $1000. You borrow $1000 against it. The next year, after taxes and interest, you owe $1050. Meanwhile, the asset is now worth $1100. Your net worth has gone up and you have turned that appreciation into extra money to spend. You can do the same thing the next year, and your asset will be taxed as if it's worth $1010, and your net position is still in the black.
What you've perhaps missed, I think, is that property tax rates in CA don't scale with appreciation.
As a Bay Area single-family home owner, I do not see how I am benefiting from increased housing prices. I have lived in my home for almost 10 years and expect to live in it for another 20. I don't rent it out or derive any income from it. My home is not a "money source".
The only visible effect of increasing home prices in my neighborhood is a slight increase in my tax bill every year. It's arguably unfair that Prop 13 means my tax bill doesn't go up more proportionally, and that people who bought 20 years ago pay a tiny fraction of what I pay, but that's a topic for a different thread.
I don't even know how much my house is worth anymore. I don't care. It doesn't affect my life at all. I'd oppose a 100 unit high-rise apartment being built next door to me not because of housing prices, but because there'd be 100 more cars on my street which is made for far fewer. There'd be 100 more noisy neighbors partying at all hours. There'd be 100 more kids in my daughter's already overcrowded school. I'm not a real estate investor. I don't care about supply and demand and market prices and all that crap.
> As a Bay Area single-family home owner, I do not see how I am benefiting from increased housing prices. I have lived in my home for almost 10 years and expect to live in it for another 20. I don't rent it out or derive any income from it. My home is not a "money source".
Most people buy a larger house while raising a family, then sell it for a smaller one after the kids grow up. The increase in price funds much of their retirement. (This is basically a pyramid scheme, but when the population actually looked more like a pyramid than it does now, it mostly worked. This is now breaking down but a lot of people haven't accepted that yet.)
Moreover, even while you continue to live in your house, having more equity allows you to take out a home equity loan to e.g. send your kids to college.
> I'd oppose a 100 unit high-rise apartment being built next door to me not because of housing prices, but because there'd be 100 more cars on my street which is made for far fewer. There'd be 100 more noisy neighbors partying at all hours. There'd be 100 more kids in my daughter's already overcrowded school. I'm not a real estate investor. I don't care about supply and demand and market prices and all that crap.
Nobody is saying that there shouldn't exist single family homes. The problem is that the landscape is covered in them and we need to convert some percentage of that land into higher density housing. You may not like that to be your house, but take consolation in the fact that if it is, the value of your land will increase significantly (because someone will want to buy it and put up a high rise), and then you can take the money and buy a different single family home in an area still zoned for lower density. And have hundreds of thousands of dollars left over to use for whatever you want as compensation for your trouble, because a single family home in the area still zoned for lower density won't cost you as much as you got for your existing one which is now zoned for higher density.
The 100 units don’t have to come with 100 cars, if we fixed parking demands and appropriately fund public transportation we could allow more travel with less single occupant vehicles.
> The increase in price funds much of their retirement.
What increase in price? Your “profits” were simply transferred to the other home owners profits. To extract real benefit you need to move out of state which is not what a lot of people want to do.
The increase in the value of the land when it's rezoned.
Suppose you have a house currently worth $500K because it's only zoned for single family homes. Rezone that area for higher density and developers could be willing to pay you $700K or more for the land so that they can build a dozen condos on it, sell them for $300K each and get back $3.6M. It's worth more after the rezoning because they weren't allowed to do that with the land before.
Then you take your $700K, buy a $500K home similar to your original one in an area still zoned for single family homes and have $200K left over for whatever you like. Or maybe you have $300K left over because you only have to pay $400K for that single family home once there is less housing scarcity because there are now lots of new condos ten miles down the road where you used to live.
That's not true. More homes require more/better infrastructure (e.g. water, sewage, roadways). Infrastructure improvements cost massive amounts of money meaning tax increases.
Infrastructure costs far far outweigh tax increases. Portland's East Side Big Pipe built to reduce the amount of sewage going into the river cost $1.4 billion paid by real-estate taxes.
You don't exactly day trade houses but it's not that difficult to sell one, otherwise we wouldn't have so many real estate agents. It's a HUGE money source in two ways: who got to a heavily gentrified area first and bought a cheap house, reaped the benefits of good jobs and increasing values for years, especially with how California sets real estate taxes. After 20-30 years of tax-free appreciation they can sell their once 500k house for 2.5M and move to a lower cost of living area.
IF you're from around here and didn't notice this pattern then you need to be paying a little more attention.
Anecdotally, since I purchased my house in the summer of 2016 in the PNW, it has appreciated nearly 50%. That's a 6 figure increase just because of the area I live in, and I've done virtually nothing to the home
Personally I wouldn’t surprised at all. The people working in HFT are some of the smartest in the world, and they have the smarts, tools and the algorithms to smell blood/weakness from thousands of miles away.
It only took one or two of these smart people to identify a weakness in the system, and then they raked in I’m sure millions from it.
Free tiers usually only give you a paltry amount of egress bandwidth, like 1GB. This site is serving 6,000,000 hits a day, according to the author. At 2.8kB/hit, its using a little under 17GB/day. Still, that shouldn't cost $2000/year - one would think serving a couple hundred hits/second of static, easily cached data could be done with something like lightsail for $10/month or less.
> Most people seem to agree with this statement, which is the very definition of a pyramid scheme (see my point about hysteresis above). We've defined the goalposts such that this statement is in some sense tautologically true, but it leaves me with a profound sense of "so what?"
For countries with any kind of social / welfare programs, there is no option available but to grow population. Even here in the USA programs like social security are only solvent to 2037[1]. Many state programs (such as public pensions) are in way worse positions...
I don't think that actually holds. I hate to trot out the typical example, but Norway seems to be doing pretty well on the social welfare side with a fertility rate much lower than that of the US. They just have very different priorities than the US does in terms of taxation, wealth distribution, and of course deficit spending vs. creating a sovereign wealth fund.
I don't see any reason why the US couldn't maintain social welfare programs in a decreasing population scenario provided the decrease is gradual, productivity rises as fast as the population goes down, and we actually taxed people appropriately and got our expenditure priorities under control.
Why not? You could have a welfare system that redistributes any excess return from the fund above long-run inflation rate, and it would be sustainable.
A significant fraction of the historical rate of return on capital is attributable to the combination of population growth and inflation. Without those the size of the fund you would need to cover a material fraction of government spending would be implausibly large.
Sovereign wealth funds also aren't all that different economically from taxation, in the sense that the profits from what the fund is invested in go to funding government programs rather than being reinvested in private enterprise. If the fund was large enough to be relevant, that would become an issue for the economy.
Norway is also very homogeneous. We are more willing to be generous to those related to us; and I'm not talking just about race, but also culture, values, and ideology. In all these respects, the United States is far more diverse.
So I guess I agree with you, but I don't think those conditions can be replicated here.
Why? Productivity continues to increase, regardless of population increasing. It's like saying we can do more with less everywhere, except when it comes to taking care of people and the elderly.
Taking care of the elderly is a labour intensive business. Automation doesn't clean an old person's glasses (real life example), make their bed or cook their meals.
Automation doesn't need to do any of those things (even though it eventually could). It could simply make other industries so cheap and efficient that more labor flows into elder care.
Specifically, if there are socialized "assisted living" facilities, or even in-the-community caregiver visitation, then the amount of caregiving work-hours per day per elderly person is X. If the only possible arrangement is getting a live-in personal care-giver, then that figures is 2X or 3X (or some factor, I don't have the figures); and most people probably just don't get care.
No. That's obviously the case for countries whose welfare system has been designed as a pyramid system.
But saying that any kind of welfare is necessarily unsustainable is as absurd as saying that spending on video games or Ethernet cables is necessarily unsustainable.
I may be wrong, but sqlite is used a lot on Android which uses bionic, not glibc right? So it seems like there should be hope of switching to another libc if you need.
Is the problem here that the trash is breaking down, or it's breaking down in a suboptimal way (such as anaerobic activity) that's causing methane to be released instead of a more benign gas?