Sapere Aude
Tag: us
The regulation comes in 3 un-American guises: permitting, code and tariffs — and together they are killing the US residential market. Modernizing these regulations, primarily at the local and state level, is the greatest opportunity for US solar policy
Rooftop solar in the us costs 2x as much as in developed countries due to inconsistent, super-local “regulations”. why we can’t have nice things.
More and more the sphere of individual action shrinks and that of collective action grows. Thus, I do not laugh at the Oregonians and their fear of gas pumping freedom. We are all Oregonians in one form or another.
We employ millions of incompetent creeps who are failing at their jobs because they’d rather snoop around in classified information instead of using the copious open source intelligence.
Icahn eventually succeeded in gaining control of the Trump Taj Mahal casino. In 2014, a bankruptcy-court judge expressed concern that Icahn Enterprises would just close the place, and insisted that company executives testify that they had no plans to shut the casino down. Initially, Icahn promised to invest $100M in the ailing facility. But he ended up embroiled in yet another bitter union fight, and refused to yield on demands from casino employees for better pay and health benefits. Eventually, Icahn shuttered the casino. The casino’s demise put 3000 people out of work. In March, 2017, Icahn found a buyer: Hard Rock International. 1 day earlier this summer, former employees queued up alongside treasure hunters and curious passersby on the boardwalk outside the beleaguered casino. A liquidator had arranged a fire sale of the items inside. People carted home used bed linens and scuffed armchairs and statuary of fake gold. They looked for souvenirs bearing the Trump name, but there weren’t any.
Hospitals and pharmacies are required to toss expired drugs, no matter how expensive or vital. Meanwhile the FDA has long known that many remain safe and potent for years longer. such squandering eats up about $765B a year — 25% of health care spending.
more harmful & expensive FDA nonsense
A computer projection of how the law would work showed that in all states with at least 3 House seats, there would be no single-party districts. That means there would be rural Democrats and urban Republicans. Members of both major parties would share districts, with new incentives to collaborate on legislation addressing their shared constituents’ needs. Candidates would be forced to reflect a greater mix of views and voters would have real choices, including third party and independent candidates. A more representative and functional Congress would regain legitimacy.
if most countries will not be able to tax ultra-profitable AI companies to subsidize their workers, what options will they have? I foresee only one: Unless they wish to plunge their people into poverty, they will be forced to negotiate with whichever country supplies most of their AI software — China or the United States — to essentially become that country’s economic dependent, taking in welfare subsidies in exchange for letting the “parent” nation’s AI companies continue to profit from the dependent country’s users. Such economic arrangements would reshape today’s geopolitical alliances.
Ryan should have trusted his instincts. Johnson and his colleagues were not documentarians. They were undercover FBI agents posing as filmmakers. By the time they sat down with Ryan, Johnson and his team had spent 8 months traveling to at least 5 states to film interviews with 24 people about the Bundy standoff, all part of an FBI effort to build criminal cases against the Bundys and their supporters.
the fbi is more incompetent than a bunch of inbred farmers
why we can’t have nice things, or why education / health care / housing / public transit costs several times more than it did 40 years ago (inflation adjusted)
Oscillating between the America of Kenosha and the America of Mar-a-Lago, Trump is neither fully a revolutionary nor an establishmentarian. He is ideologically indebted to both Patrick Buchanan and Goldman Sachs. He is what the political scientist Stephen Skowronek calls a “disjunctive” President, one “who reigns over the end of his party’s own orthodoxy.” Trump knows that Reaganite ideology is no longer politically viable, but he has yet to create a new conservatism beyond white-nationalist nostalgia. For the moment, all he can think to do is rekindle the embers of the campaign, to bathe, once more, in the stage light. It lifts him up. But what of the public? Does he understand that all citizens will have a hand in his fate?
Gregor J. Rothfuss 