Can we stop with taxing everything you don’t like? Taxes should be equal and used to fund the government, not as tools to make people do things you like.
Can we stop with pushing all of the taxes into the work-consume economy and out of the invest-return economy? The latter is eating the world, would it really hurt it to help clean up its own messes for once?
Objectively no. For example carbon taxes or other environmental taxes have been proposed by free market advocates since the 70s and never been implemented (from the left you see advocacy for environmentalism but not related to taxation)
Also if we had enough taxes, the wealth inequality would not be ramping up to great depression levels and basic necessities like healthcare and housing would not be catastrophically related to bankruptcies in america.
If you are a worker, specially one in the upper middle class range of salaries, then yes. You are being over taxed. But that is simply because those below you have nothing to contribute and the system refuses to tax those above you appropriately. You are a local maximum in a system that is not globally efficient, so you have too much tax, the country doesnt
Vague assertions with no evidence don't really help the discussion. If someone is going to assert such a strong claim like "We have more than enough taxes on working people and not enough on the wealthiest classes.", they really need to at least define what they mean by "working people" and "wealthiest classes" and then give some evidence to show that "taxes are disproportionately applied" between these groups. (You say it was a "truthful comment" but how can you even be sure you are interpeting the comment the way the original poster meant?)
(In general, whether people agree or disagree with an assertion I would hope they wouldn't downvote something as long as the person contributes enough to the discussion that the reader can understand what they are asserting and can check for themselves if the evidence they give supports or doesn't support the assertion.)
Wealth inequality in the US is so bad that the statement is true with pretty much any reasonable interpretation.
The top quantiles of the population (10%, 1%, 0.1%, billionaires) are paying less taxes than they should in a fair system; and that statement becomes increasingly illustrative of the situation the smaller and richer the quantile you choose is.
The fact that wealth inequality is _accellerating_ should be enough to tell you that the taxation system is unfair towards the poorer end.
Crazy. It depends on the kind of software being built. Working on embedded systems for avionics is an entirely different animal than working CRM software development as an example. Even Wozniak didn’t have a degree until 1986, long after Apple went public.
Most of the people I worked with at Apple didn’t have CS degrees yet they built the thing many of you are using to read this.
Much of software development is deciding what to build rather than how to build it — that takes skills far beyond CS. We are building software for people to use rather than building it for its own sake.
CS people might know algorithms but do they understand why they even need it? How does it help the user? Some of the worst places I’ve ever worked had lots of CS degree people who spent more time complaining about framework defaults than building something people are able to quickly use and pay money for.
Inventors of Perl, C, Turbo Pascal, Typescript, Delphi, C#, FORTRAN, PHP, and COBOL pioneer Grace Hopper — no CS degrees.
Jack Dorsey, Peter Thiel, Zuckerberg, Chris Wanstrath (GitHub,) Arash Ferdowsi (Dropbox.) — no CS degree.
Stewart Butterfield (Slack) had degrees in philosophy! Reid Hoffman — also a liberal arts guy.
Avie Tevanian (Architect of MacOS,) — no CS degree. And while Steve Jobs wasn’t as technically astute as Wozniak — he still did tech and of course, no degree at all.
I could go on all day — I only mentioned the famous ones. At Apple I could list a hundred top engineers with no CS degree. I am sure most people here could.
The CS degree gatekeeping is complete ridiculousness.
I am biased though— I spent 7 years at Apple and have been in this business 16 years and my degree? Journalism.
CS people might be able to answer questions, but many times they don’t know the questions to ask. Tech has room for everyone and everyone brings a different skill set to the party. Not all doctors need to be neurosurgeons.
Add John Backus (FORTRAN) to that group. Like Grace Hopper, got his degrees long before CS degrees existed. His bachelors and masters are in math.
Dennis Ritchie (C) got his degree, bachelors in physics and applied mathematics from Harvard, after CS degrees came into existence but 20 years before Harvard offered a bachelors degree in the subject. At the time those interesting computing could study it as a special track in the applied mathematics program.
At a lot of research universities I think that was the general pattern. They start a CS research department which takes on graduate students and offers PhD and masters degrees. Then they start offering undergraduate courses, but no degrees. This can go on for a while. Eventually they add undergraduate degrees.
When I was a Caltech student (class of '82) they were in the "this can go on for a while" stage. My degree is in math but I took all of the undergraduate CS courses they offered. It wasn't until 2004 that they finally started offering a bachelors degree in CS.
I support solar. Democratize energy, everyone should have the right to produce and store energy.
1) Plug-in solar and batteries are plug-n-play. This is the first step to teach everyone energy literacy and numeracy.
2) Vertical panels immediately add 3 - 4 hours. Vertical panels have zero real estate cost and no need to build costly and slow transmission infrastructure. Every building in a city can produce energy.
3) EVs to store excess energy during the day and supply power back to the grid later.
1.8 billion vehicles connect 4 billion buildings. Buildings can produce clean energy and EVs can store energy. The lowest hanging fruit is to make sure all new buildings are built to produce, and all new vehicles are EVs. New buildings can be built with vertical panels and rooftop. The easiest thing to do is change building code, thats it. Then, we can deal with the built environment.
"The EOL batteries contain a wide range of toxic and hazardous materials that can leach into the soil and water, threatening human health and the environment. For example, lithium hexafluorophosphate (LiPF₆), a component in power batteries, hydrolyzes on contact with water to produce highly toxic hydrofluoric acid (HF). Additionally, cobalt, nickel, and organic solvents in the batteries can contaminate water and soil, leading to long-term ecological damage"
>I would like to note that batteries at end of life are chemical waste and have to be disposed properly.
As far as countries like the US is concerned we need to mirror our policies with lead acid batteries. Recycling chains need to be setup and monetary penalties for not recycling a battery when buying a new battery. Ideally I think this should be for lithium batteries from BEV & Home Storage, all the way down to disposable vapes.
"As the United States tightened regulations on lead processing to protect Americans over the past three decades, finding domestic lead became a challenge. So the auto industry looked overseas to supplement its supply. In doing so, car and battery manufacturers pushed the health consequences of lead recycling onto countries where enforcement is lax, testing is rare and workers are desperate for jobs."
This already happens. There are many companies recycling batteries. The batteries of tomorrow are the batteries of today. They are permanent infrastructure.
There are startups like Redwood Materials. I'm sure China will figure it out. They are willing to put in the right policies, incentives and research dollars.
Redwood recycles end-of-life batteries to recover lithium, nickel, cobalt, and copper — creating one of the largest domestic sources of these critical materials: https://www.redwoodmaterials.com/
The question of how to supply daily and seasonal storage requirements demanded by intermittent sources remains unanswered, even if we assume battery recycling is performed. The US alone uses 12,000 Gwh of electricity daily and about 30,000 GWh of energy daily (transportation, burning gas for smelters, heating, etc).
Even just a day's worth of energy is decades worth of global lithium ion battery output. For just one country. People rarely appreciate the scale demanded to make grid storage feasible.
Again, this glosses over the scale of grid storage. If the US decides to provision a day's worth of electricity storage then, that amounts to 12 years worth of global battery production.
Stronger: This particular brand of rhetoric ("So you support X?" and little more, in response to a post that was not at all about X) is just a "gotcha" game rather than serious conversation, and doesn't belong on this site. I see it far too often, and not just on nuclear. (Also, it makes the one doing it look like a jerk, at least to me.)
Behaving like that ought to get you shunned and persistence ought to get you marginalized the same way that overt racism or whatever would.
You get what you incentivize. And right now there's no incentive not to vomit dishonesty upon the public discourse so we've got a lot of idiots doing that.
In what world is simply asking if someone supports nuclear power confrontational?
It really is weird how many people are enthusiastic about stemming climate change but don't support one of the few non-intermittent sources for carbon free energy.
"Do you support nuclear power? I'm asking because I believe it's a requirement for grid stability/current battery solutions can't sustain demand during solar downtime"
That is a defensible question, that can be argued/countered, but it's not the question posed.
Solar can be deployed in months, produce immediately. Solar is dirt cheap and continues to get cheaper. 21 - 25% efficiency is normal now and most likely we'll have tandem (silicon + peroskvite) with 45% efficiency. With each doubling of production, solar costs continue to go down. In a decade or two, maybe we'll be able to print solar like paper or textile, or spray paint on any surface. Or grow solar from microorganisms (fastest and cheapest).
A nuclear deployment takes 3 - 5 decades, costs continue to skyrocket, actually needs nuclear scientists to design and run.
Which one do you think is a better choice? If you were an investor, would you put your money on a nuclear plant and wait 3 - 5 decades for returns?
It currently takes so long to deploy nuclear in the West, because the West mostly dismantled the nuclear supply chains, starting in 1990s. At that time coal and gas power plants were seen as better than nuclear power plants and no expansion of nuclear energy was expected.
For example Germany was still building new coal power plants in 2005-2007.
China builds more renewables per month than the nuclear target they’ve very slowly expanded over a half decade and aren’t scheduled to reach until at least 2030. 70% of China’s electric generating capacity will be renewables by 2027. You could replace current global nuclear generating capacity at parity with capacity factor with batteries and solar in under two years.
> Renewables Remain Lowest Cost New-Build Generation; All Generation Faces Increasing Cost Pressure: Despite rising and inflationary cost pressures across all generation technologies, renewables remain the most cost-competitive form of new-build generation on an unsubsidized basis and will account for the majority of near-term capacity additions in the U.S. Continuous upward revisions to demand projections have driven a sharp increase in announced new-build gas generation despite a 15-year high LCOE, which is expected to continue to rise, and historically long development and equipment delivery timelines.
> China set a 2020 wind target of 210 GW and finished the year with about 282 GW. Its solar target was 110 GW, while delivery reached roughly 253 GW. The later commitment to reach at least 1,200 GW of combined wind and solar by 2030 was crossed in 2024, six years early. By the end of 2025, China had about 640 GW of wind and 1,202 GW of solar, for a combined 1,842 GW. Nuclear moved in the other direction: about 50 GW against a 58 GW target in 2020, and about 62 GW against a 70 GW target in 2025. The current goal of 110 GW by 2030 may still be achieved, but the previous record gives no reason to convert it directly into a forecast.
> This is not evidence that Beijing has quietly abandoned nuclear power. China has the world’s largest reactor construction programme, continues approving new units and is building an increasingly domestic supply chain around designs such as Hualong One. The divergence lies between approval and operation. Another difference is that when renewables blow past targets China set much bigger targets, but when nuclear misses targets, the targets don’t change. That difference is harder to explain than the results.
China builds more new coal power to combine with renewables than any country in the world. With all implications for air quality, but the new coal development is concetrated away from most big cities, so air quality is slowly getting better in big cities.
"Operating coal power capacity in China has increased 44% since the Paris Climate Agreement of 2015."
"
Many of China's renewables-rich regions are also major coal-producing areas. While renewable development creates opportunities for economic diversification and industrial transformation, it can also provide a new rationale for expanding coal-based industries. The coal-to-chemicals sector illustrates this risk.
According to new GEM research, all coal-to-olefins projects currently under construction in China’s northwestern and northern regions include planned associated green hydrogen facilities, as regulators increasingly require renewable integration as a condition for project approval. However, in many cases, the renewable component represents only a small fraction of overall energy use."
China currently builds cheapest possible energy system based on renewables backed by coal power instead of expensive energy system based on nuclear energy.
China is using their coal plants as peakers until battery storage has ramped to replace them. Coal use has already dropped below 50%. They are building the largest hydro project in the world (60GW, Motuo / Yarlung Tsangpo project) in the Himalayas, with a 2k meter drop that will create more pressure than a nuclear driven steam turbine.
> China is rebuilding its industrial economy on a clean foundation as rapid renewable energy expansions begin to offload fossil fuels
> Hydropower remains China’s largest single source of clean electricity, contributing 13% in 2025. The share of wind and solar combined reached 22%, above the global and Asia average of 17%. Solar recorded another year of exponential growth, with 336 TWh of power generation, a 40% increase compared to 2024.
> The biggest shift in China’s electricity generation in 2025 was an absolute decline in coal generation. Coal output decreased by 71 TWh, the first such drop since 2015. Fossil fuels provided 58% of China’s electricity in 2025, down from about 62% in 2024.
> China could reach peak fossil fuel consumption by 2030, thanks to exponential renewables growth and electrification. In 2025, China’s fossil generation declined by 56 TWh (-0.9%), the first year without an increase since 2015. This represents a structural shift, and if current trends hold, China’s fossil fuel demand could begin falling soon, creating conditions for global fossil fuel demand to decline as well.
How about chopping down all of the London Plane trees next? Absolutely disastrous for public health. They are also all over Barcelona and cause nothing but respiratory misery.
I hate the tracking too. But how to websites monetize free content otherwise? Advertising doesn’t work if you can’t price it. Without tracking, everything becomes a paywall.
It seems a lot of people are doing amazing things with Patreon. Share some things for free (free as in beer) then have a paid tier for those who want more. Convince us you’re worthy, then we’ll give you money willingly.
100%. This is why many of us have a problem with the EU. And world governments in general — the more power they have and the further away from the elections that keep them accountable, the more tyrannical they become.
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