He’s paying a person $47 for every registered swing state voter that that person refers to the SuperPAC and that follows through on signing a petition to support first and second amendment rights.
It appears to be lawyered loopholes around paying people to register to vote directly. Which is illegal as you mentioned.
Sure plenty of people will sign it for the money and then forget about it, but some sliver of people that sign will feel some sliver of obligation to vote for the candidate that the petition obviously wants them to vote for. A sliver here and there could be enough to turn this currently close election.
You may be putting the cart before the horse. Wouldnt pumping out tons of anything create forcing functions for efficiency, as in, exactly what happened but on a longer timeframe?
Building external combustion cars in the 1880s might have given Britain an economic edge over the US in the period, but the market would have still collapsed when internal combustion matured enough. And being a specialist in one technology usually means you're not able to move to a different one when it becomes obsolete.
Those are not the same kind of subsidy. there is quite a lot more ambiguity and uncertainty in the type of subsidy because it is claiming mispricing of externalities (i.e your usage caused x harm and you didnt pay for x harm) rather than the variety the renewables industry mostly gets which is a direct injection of cash through grants and various price supports.
Much of the forced and child labor used in solar panel production, mining, and transport, as with everything else in China's production systems, goes completely unacknowledged and unaccounted for in these navel gazing expeditions.
With all those corners cut to mass produce cheap materials like batteries and solar panels and computers and so forth, China is able to undercut production that utilizes ethical and sustainable production. I don't think you can look at China's production "costs" as legitimate data, and the problem doesn't seem to be one that anyone outside of China will ever fix. The extent of the influence the rest of the world has over the problem lies entirely in our ability to not do business with China.
When you look at all the savings you get when buying electronics and solar panels and infrastructure related products coming out of China, you're getting a human suffering discount. I don't think it's a good thing to include those numbers when considering long term things like fossil fuel dependencies and so forth - let's not bake in the human suffering discounts and at least try to price in human rights and humane labor practices.
It turns out a lot of things are way more expensive when factory workers and shippers and everyone in a supply chain get paid fair wages and work fair hours.
This isn't to say anything in favor of fossil fuels, I just think the immediate plight of China's factory workers might be an important factor relevant to the actual costs in play.
Do you know of any credible sources/references that have attempted to quantify that "human suffering discount?" I'm genuinely curious.
My impression is that China simply has the Solar industry established. It's a bit like semi-conductors in Taiwan, the knowledge, practice, and facilities are present. It takes a significant investment to build factories. To that extent, it also raises the question what percentage of solar panel costs is labor, vs capital investments, vs raw material.
I do not discount the statement/concern. At the same time, I don't think the other end of the spectrum is true where we could say "we could do it too if we also used child labor." I do think it's the case where Chinese manufacturing capacity of solar panels is simply superior compared to any other country. It's a massive capital investment and commitment to enable that much production capacity. At 80% the global production of all solar panels, China has an army of solar production factories.
From what I could find (none of which was satisfying conclusive), it looks like there is a very considerable raw material cost for solar panels, and the manufacturing process is also complicated. [1][2]
Yes, things would be more expensive if workers had more rights. I don’t see how that is an argument against or in favor of any particular energy source.
Further, if workers’ well-being are your main consideration (admirable), we should be moving away from coal as quickly as possible.
> if workers’ well-being are your main consideration (admirable), we should be moving away from coal as quickly as possible.
I'm pro renewables and I'm happy to see the back of coal . . .
however ...
Australia is the second biggest biggest exporter of coal, uses no child labour, is heavily mechanised with a small number of workers compared to tonnage moved, has excellent worker conditions in terms of safety, paid overtime, holidays, etc.
You point appears to be based in some Appalachian romance notion of tunneling out coal with pickaxes and coal carts pulled by children.
I find this an interesting statistics, in 2023 there were 36.5k total people employed in the US coal industry. [1] It's simply just not a lot of people in the grand scheme. That speaks to how industrialized coal production is in the US - it doesn't take that many people to do mountain top removal and drive heavy machinery.
FWIW & for comparison, Circuit city at its peak employed 40k people, that's more people than the US Coal industry employs today [2]
Proponents of renewables often cite the price and use it as an argument against nuclear energy. Nuclear energetics uses highly regulated local labor, giving it an inherent disadvantage against unregulated foreign labor. If renewables rely on underpaid or even child labor, it's not sustainable nor realistic, the numbers in that calculation have to be updated and the decisions reconsidered.
The entire U.S. tax code is one big Central Planning committee. Who should get subsidies? Who should get taxed? The capitalists who celebrated the luxury of American supermarkets over Soviet grocery stores failed to mention the significant farm subsidies given then (and still given).
There’s an old joke of a woman who agrees to sleep with a man for a million dollars but refuses for a dollar (“what kind of woman do you take me for?”), the punchline being that it’s no longer a question of principles but of price.
I guess the point here is that as soon as some amount of subsidies is acceptable, it’s no longer a showdown between unbridled capitalism and a command economy. The question really just becomes one of degree.
Climate change itself is an unintended consequence of pricing the well-being of the commons at zero.
There is a fair discussion regarding regulated vs free market to be had, but people at least need to understand market failures first (externalities being one of them).
Of course there is. The subsidy would be on watts output, not on number if panels. Therefore any way to make the panels cheaper to produce and/or more efficient brings more revenue and more profit margin.
I cant tell if you're being sarcastic but the protocol was developed as the result of his teams reading the latest published literature. I'm not being snarky here but if you have a problem with it, it's the result (by definition) of you not being up to date on what the corpus of science is telling us about nutrition.
His protocol was developed as a result of his team trying anything and everything that might potentially help. "The definition of what the corpus of science is telling us about nutrition" is overselling it. There's a reason the site is plastered with "this is not medical advice" disclaimers.
You're choosing to pick the negatives but the potential upsides (even excluding personal desires) are monumentally massive.
How about not having 25% of the population walking around with an underdeveloped pre-frontal cortex at any one time, that need 30 years of education before they have the wisdom to do anything halfway useful. How about government policies that operate with a decades long view instead of just one election term. Global ID's would rise massively and decisions would have a far more balanced outlook.
Yes of course there are positives. Don't worry, we have never let negative consequences hold back progress before.
But the blind optimism is staggering, and let's get philosophical: what's the ultimate good, objectively? (Subjectively obviously _I_ and _you_ think it's that we get to be around for longer.) But objectively, from a humanity standpoint, is it (1) the most people in existence, (2) the most people to ever have existed, (3) the most consciousness, (4) the most happiness? Etc.
If we start letting people live forever, over a long time, because of resources, fewer people will ultimately exist. We'll also have slower progress because old ideas will live longer. It's very hubristic to think we've peaked, and it's inevitable that the first live-forever generation will put the brakes on progress/change.
I'd say those downsides far outweigh the upsides you've proposed.
>However, what is not mentioned, is that this result, while impressive, is not so extraordinary.
The lesson here is that not all phenotypes age at the same rate. Bryan doesn't have a choice in that, like none of us have. He mentions that his hair started falling out in his 30's while I have a full head of hair in my 40's. He's promoting a lifestyle and being an experiment, he doesn't need to caveat his work in any way.
I mean, I'll admit I've watched the tech industry promise the moon and deliver a user-surveilling mud pie a few too many times to particularly care for their hype anymore.
It's 2023. I'd like to buy a car, TV, phone, or computer that isn't, by default, "slurping as much behavioral data as it thinks it can possibly get away with, routed out whatever connection it can find, to be sold to others who want to influence my thinking." It's hard to find.
Panel cost is probably 10-20% of a total install cost. What you're paying for is labour, inverter, cabling and metal mounting equipment. Mostly labour. If you're able to self install you can shave years off ROI.
I got my equipment through a local wholesaler. I built a BOM using solardesigntool and submitted through them. The wholesaler called me and accommodated me as a DIYer. CED Greentech was the company.
But presumably it’s cheaper for the average HN reader to hire a skilled tradesman to do the install than to take the, say, 2% chance of a debilitating fall from the roof?
It would still wind up in the liver. In a 1966 paper -- "the metabolism of intravenously injected isotopic cholic acid in Laennec's cirrhosis," by Blum et al. -- it was discovered that "when isotopic cholic acid was administered intravenously to normal subjects, there was a rapid and permanent disappearance of isotope from the systemic plasma, reflecting the essentially complete localization of bile acids in the liver, biliary apparatus, intestinal content, and portal blood."
Bile acids might be less toxic if administered via IV infusion, in comparison with oral administration. Then again, they might be more toxic. (Due to rapid excretion or poor absorption via the oral route.) I don't know offhand if one delivery method or the other would be preferred in this regard.
But though most bile acids are toxic, not all of them are. TUDCA and UDCA are not only liver-safe, they're first-resort drugs for resolving drug-induced liver damage and promoting liver health. If these "healthy bile acids" can combat MS, that would be a very interesting result. TUDCA and UDCA are very cheap, and their safety profiles are well established.
I have no idea what its metabolic pathways are, but it's possible that by bypassing first pass metabolism might mean that more of the substance reaches the liver versus its metabolites.
Please correct me if i'm wrong but wasn't the initial research on this conducted on animal models where they were essentially starved to the point where they went into hibernation mode?
The point that I'd like to make is- if you think a comparison between hunter/gathers and the modern human is illustrative for a diet where our phenotype thrives best, sure, their food arrive at more irregular intervals than the modern human and they probably binged on what was in season at the time (which might give us pointers for our own diet) but I think the concept of perpetual calorie restriction as a full time human diet is infantile and quacky.
