Energy has an environmental cost. If the energy required to recycle is more than the environmental cost it's not worth it.
If the moon is a folding chair, then pigs can fly.
Readit Newsahf8Aithaex7Nai commented on Ask HN: Why are electronics still so unrecyclable? · Posted by u/alexandrehtrb
It's raining anyway. If I piss on your face, I can at least try to make the experience as positive as possible for you.
I apologize for the obscenity. I hope it's clear that I was trying to make a point in relation to the article.
ahf8Aithaex7Nai commented on If you tax them, will they leave? theatlantic.com/economy/2... · Posted by u/JumpCrisscross
> That's conceivable. But I don't see the space science fiction of Le Guine or Asimov being realized in the activities of Musk and Bezos. To me, the whole thing seems more like an awkward dick measuring contest. The awkward situation with Shatner was a good example of how hollow and superficial this whole thing is. These people could go down in history as benefactors and heroes of humanity. But they don't have the guts for that.
SpaceX has done a huge amount of engineering work in making the cost to get mass into orbit significantly cheaper, more reliable, and more routine. Elon Musk is, on a personal level, because of the sort of company he chose to build after becoming wealthy, absolutely responsible for bringing humanity closer to a future imagined in space science fiction.
That hasn't aged well in the last few days, has it? Unless your space science fiction is of the dark variety.
Apparently, there's this guy who's really good at optimizing computer performance and makes a lot of money doing it. At the same time, he writes mediocre school essays that are actually a bit embarrassing. Guys, if you have the opportunity to land a very well-paid job, then do it. Take the money. Live your life. But please spare us the public self-castration.
He interviewed everywhere and took the biggest offer. Good! Don’t piss on my face and tell me it’s raining.
It's raining anyway. If I piss on your face, I can at least try to make the experience as positive as possible for you.
ahf8Aithaex7Nai commented on If you tax them, will they leave? theatlantic.com/economy/2... · Posted by u/JumpCrisscross
> I cannot understand this conclusion at all. Why should the structural relationship to other species be reflected within the species itself?
It's all an interpretation, never claimed it to be anything beyond a thinking model I like.
> To me, that doesn't sound like an observation, but rather an interpretation. We could apply various epistemological carpet beaters to see what remains. One would be the critique of ideology. A few others can be found in the philosophy of science. It also seems to contradict your reference to thermodynamics. Wouldn't that mean that personality traits don't play a role at all? We don't look at individual particles, and certainly not at their personality traits.
No we don't, but I don't think it's necessarily because we don't want to, but because we often can't. Nevertheless, I think my rationale still applies. For example, if you take a bunch of matter, for example water, you'd find out that the distribution of Deuterium and definitely Tritium is really "unfair". Why only so few particles get to have that extra neutron and others do not?
> I cannot understand this conclusion at all. Why should the structural relationship to other species be reflected within the species itself?
It doesn't necessarily have to but: 1. It seems to have been very favorable trait evolutionally to force your will on other species. I'm no brain nor social expert but it seems to me that in order to stop this trait internally, there would need to be some pretty strong inhibitors to counter that. 2. Regardless of the species claim, you can see the pattern of exceptional individuals with disproportionate influence in many other places in nature: queen bees, pack leaders, and human kings of sorts. in I think practically every culture on earth in recorded history?
I really struggle to think of any mass systems, in human society or nature in which power is not distributed disproportionally to a relatively small portion of individuals.
> never claimed it to be anything beyond a thinking model I like.
Sorry, but if that's your yardstick for acceptable models of thought, then only nonsense can come out of it. No one has any reason to take any of your thoughts seriously if you don't question your own thinking more critically.
> Why only so few particles get to have that extra neutron and others do not?
This has nothing to do with thermodynamics and even less to do with unfairness. It's a completely meaningless analogy. You might as well just flip it around and say that it's good that so few particles have to carry around that annoying extra neutron, or whatever. If you're going to draw any conclusions about humans from this, you might as well read coffee grounds or clouds or animal bones scattered on the forest floor. That's not thinking!
I have people like that in my personal circle. They're not exactly the brightest minds.
Edit: A queen bee is simply fed in a special way during the larval stage. Ultimately, it doesn't matter which larva is selected for this purpose. That said, it is also wrong to imagine her as an actual queen or as the CEO of the bees. She does not rule over the other bees but is simply responsible for laying eggs. If you wanted to, you could see from this example that your thinking does not proceed from premises to conclusions, but rather begins with conclusions and then rather loosely gathers together premises that might fit.
ahf8Aithaex7Nai commented on If you tax them, will they leave? theatlantic.com/economy/2... · Posted by u/JumpCrisscross
No country which I am aware of taxes companies for reinvesting profit and for growing. On the contrary, some countries instead give tax breaks to industries if they are large enough. And these are socialist countries.
Thinking about how incredibly many factors have to come together right for a giant business or industry of any kind to be able to exist, I understand that governments are very careful to not poke them with too many sticks. Their products and services exports (and imports) are an incredibly valuable bargaining chip in foreign politics. The only other significant bargaining chip which nations usually have are military threats, and that isn't a pleasant road to travel.
Yes, I understand what you're saying, and I agree with you: promoting growth and reinvestment are essential parts of a functioning economic and industrial policy. But that doesn't mean we have to tolerate massive and harmful wealth inequality, or that the only alternative is an aggressive foreign policy. I mean, what is the implication here? “Leave the super-rich alone, otherwise the economy will collapse like a soufflé if we don't go to war instead”? If that is the final conclusion of economic competence, then everything is going down the drain anyway.
ahf8Aithaex7Nai commented on If you tax them, will they leave? theatlantic.com/economy/2... · Posted by u/JumpCrisscross
I'm mostly trying to make sense of the world and so far I found out that looking at it as a chaotic thermodynamic-like system makes the most sense.
So in regards to this economic issue, it seems that human personality traits that lead to disproportionate power/influence/money are distributed non-uniformly to an extreme extent.
We can try and moderate it as a system (e.g some forms of democracy, socialism, etc.) to maybe lower the amplitudes, but it would be ignorant to deny that this might be a core part of current human nature. Humans themselves are a specie with disproportionate power & influence compared to other species, so I think it would only make sense if this trait would also apply within the specie.
Now imagine, there'd be some alien government, who'd be like "whoa humans are making way too disproportionate progress compared to the other species, let's tax/prune them so they don't get too much power".
> ... so far I found out that looking at it as a chaotic thermodynamic-like system makes the most sense.
What do you mean, you found that out? And what does that have to do with anything?
> So in regards to this economic issue, it seems that human personality traits that lead to disproportionate power/influence/money are distributed non-uniformly to an extreme extent.
To me, that doesn't sound like an observation, but rather an interpretation. We could apply various epistemological carpet beaters to see what remains. One would be the critique of ideology. A few others can be found in the philosophy of science. It also seems to contradict your reference to thermodynamics. Wouldn't that mean that personality traits don't play a role at all? We don't look at individual particles, and certainly not at their personality traits.
> Humans themselves are a specie with disproportionate power & influence compared to other species, so I think it would only make sense if this trait would also apply within the specie.
I cannot understand this conclusion at all. Why should the structural relationship to other species be reflected within the species itself?
ahf8Aithaex7Nai commented on If you tax them, will they leave? theatlantic.com/economy/2... · Posted by u/JumpCrisscross
If we remove from life everything that people have access to by industrialization and mass production, then many or most people would say that "society" has collapsed.
That would be the consequence of taxing ownership in companies, since there would be no reason to invest to create big companies. And for industrial society you need big companies. You need giant companies, and taxing owners on the size of the company means that people will not invest their money or effort build industrial scale companies.
The other way to have industrialization is to instead have a command economy, where the government mandates what is to be done.
> If we remove from life everything that people have access to by industrialization and mass production, then many or most people would say that "society" has collapsed.
I agree.
But I'm not convinced by the next paragraph. You present it as if it were a matter of 0 or 1. But I don't see any good reason why taxation shouldn't be used to make adjustments without immediately collapsing the entire incentive structure for investment. Less profit is still profit. If this argument were valid, there would be no large industries in countries that tax companies more heavily than the US.
I don't know anything about chips and boards, but in the EU, a regulation will come into force in 2027 that requires batteries in portable devices to be replaceable by the user without special tools.