dylandrop

I guess what I'm saying is that a tax becomes a regulation at the point where you can't afford it anymore. Also you have to realize that a carbon tax is usually on everyone -- not just corporations. In most cases that affects the lowest people on the totem pole more than the higher ups. You have to realize that for certain people, what you say is "disincentivising" is actually materially affecting their ability to live. If you were to try to distribute that disincentivizing evenly across the totem pole, I'd be on board with it.

I could theoretically get behind some of that. However it doesn't look like Gary Johnson actually supports a carbon tax:

http://reason.com/blog/2016/08/26/gary-johnson-no-to-carbon-...

Perhaps the hard political position libertarians put themselves in is between the "no taxes, no regulation, ever!" conservatives and people who aspire to only have regulatory institutions where it makes sense (perhaps such as yourself). Moreover, at a certain point, it seems like market-based solutions and heavy handed regulations become essentially the same. Imagining an extreme scenario: what if you had a carbon tax of $1M per cubic meter of CO2 burned? It would certainly seem a lot like a regulation at that point.

I think those are completely reasonable things to like in his policies. And as a caveat, I don't personally dislike Gary Johnson (the man) himself. I just haven't heard a compelling argument for what he'd do to address corporate overreach, which I (personally) find the biggest problem average Americans face today, whether it is O&G companies destroying our environment or financial institutions causing global financial crises. I'm not saying (by any means!) Trump or Clinton would do any better, but I don't see how rolling back oversight on the private sector really solves the problem. I wish solving our problems was as simple as dismantling our governments but I don't see how that would help us, as it's our only (very flawed) leverage. I think doing so would decrease the little leverage we have. So to answer your concern, I think the reason people don't like Johnson is because he was running for a political office where they believe he would act against their own best interest.

• visit their website

• buying their product and looking it up the parts online

• talk to your vendors

For the last one, this is particularly relevant if you're buying in a market with few suppliers.

http://climatesciencedefensefund.org/

(I posted this as a reply to one of the comments but I want to make sure it's seen, given the gravity of the situation.)

Edit: Also, I don't know if you happen to be extremely wealthy, but this was an interesting read. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/02/business/energy-environmen...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divisibility_rule#Divisibility...

> "Finally what do you really care about: name brand or doing cool work?"

I did a lot of boring, mundane work during my time at some startups as well as interesting work at others. It's either subjective or not informed by enough experience to say that only startup work is cool work and you can't find cool work at a larger company.

Maybe not your opinion, but giving campaign contributions to bigoted causes would be considered making the world a worse place to many. All of this is morally relative. Maybe 15 years ago he would have just been seen as someone with a politically conservative slant, but we're moving closer and closer to a society that sees him as someone with bigoted views. While I agree that there are unfortunately much more evil CEOs out there than Eich, it's silly to say "oh, well, there are worse guys out there, so let's let the moderately-morally-reprehensible ones go."

"Dr. Messerli reports regular daily chocolate consumption, mostly but not exclusively in the form of Lindt’s dark varieties"

One speculation I have that might answer my first question is that they're going to spend this on lobbying and legal battles.

*By business-as-usual, I'm referring to your statement -- that someone can freely practice business no matter what acts they've committed, or wrongs they've perpetrated on humanity.

If they're trying to haul your friend off for something, the best thing you can do is say nothing about it, sadly. Otherwise you'll be brought in for obstruction of justice which will likely be deemed a misdemeanor (as opposed to an infraction, which is sorta bad news for you).

This being said, why does paying collectively $14.5B in taxes mean that you are exempt from attack if you commit a societal wrong? I think this is extremely backward logic, that perhaps Mr. Malchow by which feels threatened -- the belief of "why would there be a world where you can't pay your way out of being a good member of society?" This being said, I do not believe that Googlers and the like are necessarily perpetrating some great societal misdeed, but Malchow's argument is highly problematic.

Except you won't die from sitting home in your pajamas.

You will, however, be very to die for a multitude of reasons in a coal mine.

I'm a programmer. Yes, my brain is engaged constantly. But that's fun to me. It's not like I rue the day I became a programmer and I had to perform the terrible labor of sitting around with friends/acquaintances, sip free coffee, and make web apps. However, if you're in a sweatshop, forced to work many hours a day and likely suffer a variety injuries, you aren't doing as well.

See, this is problematic. If we don't have articles documenting the problem, no one will care. Right now the possibility of the Keystone-XL pipeline is on the president's table, and for those of you who don't know, the Keystone-XL pipeline will double imports of tar sands oil, thus bringing climate change to even a bigger problem than before [1]. If we stop this, we have a chance of improving the problem.

I realize that you said we should "[cut] back judiciously on fossil fuel usage", but when things like the Keystone-XL pipeline are a serious consideration, not being alarmist is a problem. The idea that the fossil fuel industry's thinly veiled "jobs creation" argument (when in reality, the pipeline would create very, very few jobs in the larger scale [2]) could be one that gets this pipeline built, puts us in extreme jeopardy. It's time that people are scared about the world changing, because there are certainly too many people who don't really care.

> I also don't think anything we do at this stage could slow down or stop the process, other than banning modern civilization.

This is just wrong, and part of why we're experiencing a problem now. Germany is installing tons of solar panels [3]. Buenos Aires is switching to LED lighting to cut down on electricity costs by as much as 50% [4]. We should also be investing in sustainable technology, because this is going to be a serious problem.

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/aug/23/tar-sands...

[2] http://www.livescience.com/38735-putting-keystone-pipeline-j...

[3] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/11/business/energy-environmen...

[4] http://www.treehugger.com/energy-efficiency/buenos-aires-swi...

In either case, this is really awesome. What sets this apart from Stripe's competitors, is that those companies (or at least Braintree) require you to set up a different account for each currency, which is a huge pain in the ass. Or at least this was the case last time I checked.

I think the most useful class I took that explained this (in my sophomore year) was a class on digital logic and micro-architecture. Just about every school I know teaches some class like this early on in your education (at least teaching the basics -- gates, latches, flip-flops, adders, etc.) In mine, it even carried up through some basic assembly code. This class gave me enough to know how computers are working at a fundamental level to be able to use that to my advantage when implementing projects.

Lastly -- you're getting a CS degree, not a programming degree from a vocational school. Does everyone who researches... quantum computing, or natural language processing, or graph theory have to know and communicate in C? I think there are other pursuits beyond programming that you get from a CS degree, and to say it's necessary to learn C pivots your school closer to a vocational school. Not that that's bad -- it's just different than what you signed up for.