The political messaging here from Wyden is *chef's kiss*. "We've been waiting years to raise taxes on the middle class!"
The fact that Democrats' Plan B for "let's build out abundant clean energy" is "here's a tax to make you all drive less and wear a cardigan" does not fill me with confidence.
Looking forward to whatever creative way the Democrats find to screw up the messaging around free universal pre-school
"Although you'll have to pay more for energy, we'll be using a lot of that money to give handouts to the poor" is real galaxy brain stuff from a party that knows how to connect to rural America.
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Okay, I think there's an Apple event? Let's do this. God help us all.
The Apple Music guy has some thoughts on R.E.M.'s uneasy embrace of mainstream success
The new AirPods have a thing called spatial audio, which will make it sound like you're listening to a band playing somewhere even though in reality you're on a bus
The part west of the mountain chain is Transylvania, where the Hungarians hid after they decided to stop marauding. They even hired Germans to build cities in the mountain passes to protect them from the next set of nomadic steppe raiders to get a gleam in their eye and head west
The strategy held until the first Mongol invasion. By that point the settled Hungarians had gotten soft and forgotten how to steppe nomad, so the Mongols ate their goulash. After that, Hungary doubled down on the "make Germans come and build fortified cities" strategy. It worked!
These fortified Saxon cities built as Mongol repellent are the reason Transylvania is called "Seven Cities" in many languages. The point of all this is that you should visit Transylvania if you can, because you can eat Hungarian food in lovely Saxon cities with Romanian wine.
Here's the actual chart when you're not trying to make a ridiculous point. The key lesson in the chart is that the future of climate mitigation depends on either convincing 2/3 of humanity to stay poor, or orchestrating a massive global clean energy development program.
Put another way, we can continue to sell climate mitigation as "the good times are over" in the rich countries, or make it into a decarbonization gold rush that makes a lot of people rich (and hated on this site) while electrifying the poorest and most populous countries.
The unintentional lesson in this map is that for Boston, it doesn't really matter much whether we stop emitting greenhouse gases tomorrow or just relax and keep on going. The 1.5º C of warming responsible for most of the flooding is already baked in.
This fallacy comes up a lot in the discussions of climate change. Because so much warming is already locked in, the baseline for comparing various future scenarios should not be how things look today. That is an unattainable future goal unless we start doing crazy geoengineering.
When you stop framing the climate question as "can we save Miami?" and replace it with the more correct "can we save West Palm Beach?", it becomes less motivating. People have done a poor job communicating how much future impact is already irreversible.
The web3 concept that is slowly congealing is an interesting inversion of web 2.0. Back then the idea was "build social websites and figure out the money part later." Today it's "build money stuff and figure out some non-speculative use for it later."
There are three non-fraud foundational problems with "web3":
1. No way to reference anything in the real world (oracle problem) 2. Immutable code makes any smart contract its own bug bounty. 3. Everything breaks (more) unless expensive distributed systems are run in perpetuity.
You can't write this off as idiotic because there may be serendipitous discoveries waiting, just like happened with the web 2.0 hype. But the money element is new and quite toxic. It's a set of legos where every lego is also an unregulated casino, ponzi scheme, and ransomware kit
Meanwhile on this site we're locked in some kind of conceptual battle over @Davidshor Thought when the actual Democratic governing strategy, almost a year after winning power, is "do nothing". I'd like to at least see a robust defense of that by a true believer.
Our political leaders created a huge buildup to bills that were supposed to make the New Deal look like chump change, went all-in on debt ceiling drama, and then just said "meh" about it all. That seems like a bigger political emergency than the specific content of these policies