weatherman2

All of the downsides you mention are not that bad in my opinion.

I don't feel bad that people buy a legacy. I believe that a legacy of being a massive philanthropist is a legacy worth having.

I don't feel bad that they "erase their past", because all people can still be judged by the totality of their actions.

The recognition does benefit the people that make the donations. Doesn't seem to be a problem to me.

Charitable organizations are dependent upon the whim of their donors regardless of whether the donors get any recognition.

The fraction of non-profit budgets that are spent on awareness seems to be a tangential point that I do not understand.

The drilling mud used to lubricate the equipment was a clay called bentonite with small amounts of a polymer additive, according to Facebook. It’s biodegradable and nontoxic, the company tells The Verge. Bentonite on its own isn’t usually bad for the environment, John Dilles, another professor of geology at Oregon State, tells The Verge in an email. It’s sometimes used to absorb toxic metal at sites that need to be cleaned up or where waste needs to be contained, he says.

In the case of an accidental release, however, the drilling fluid components used at the site should be prevented from “entering sewers, waterways, or low areas,” according to safety data sheets published by the state. Facebook opted to leave 6,500 gallons of mud in place to “minimize the risk of leaks,” it wrote.

Facebook also left behind a drill tip, tools, and 1,100 feet of pipe. It’s not uncommon for companies to leave behind pieces of broken equipment when digging it up is more costly or could cause even more destruction. There’s a risk of losing more equipment when working through hard rock, according to Goldfinger.

Not much to discuss here.

Modeling the growth does not change the results in any way that makes the tax seem more favorable.

Taxing away 1% of an asset that grows 0% every year leaves 45% of the assets that would be present without the tax after 60 years.

Taxing away 1% of an asset that grows 7% every year leaves 45% of the assets that would be present without the tax after 60 years.

However, to be more realistic, modeling growth makes the taxation even worse, because at times when your equity is at a high valuation, you need to sell some equity and then some extra on top of that in case your equity value crashes before the end of the year/ end of the tax period. You are forced to act defensively.

It has a smell of irony but I'm missing the reference :(

I'm going to read my children a picture book titled "Scraggles the Puppy Explores the Forest of Simulated Annealing."

I'm fairly convinced that the safety features that have been making the A pillars and C pillars of passenger cars thicker in recent years have heavily contributed to the trend of greater pedestrian deaths. Visibility on new cars is worse than it's ever been in my lifetime.

There's a lot of art out there in the world. A whole, whole lot.

If you want to make something artistically creative for people to watch, listen to, or read, you are competing with Mozart, the Beatles, Edgar Allen Poe, Tolkien, and countless other prodigies. Artistic creations made by individuals are a winner-takes-all market where a small fraction of the creators enjoy the majority of the revenue. Artistic creations made by large groups are somewhat fairer (but still often on the low end) in their compensation, if you manage to out compete other job applicants and get the job.

Regardless of whether you as an individual treat art as a commodity, you have to square your viewpoint as a artist with the fact that you have to put bread on the table. Society will very likely reward you very poorly for your artistic contributions.

The market you want to target is people who aren't software engineers but want to run a simple website. The gulf for someone who just wants to serve a static html site but wants to have some content that requires secure access is huge right now.

Consider the use case for a person buying woodworking plans from a website. Payment required to access pdf plans, but the owner of the website wants to set it up once and not worry about it, and not to have to learn anything more about coding than they have to.

There are examples that don't side-step the conversation.

Should it be required to wear a helmet when you are riding a motorcycle, for example? That's a pretty direct example that bifurcates freedom-loving libertarians from other folk.

In a broad sense indirect harm is OK. There are many activities that result in indirect harm. The argument about which should be banned should focus on the amount of harm and the degree of restriction required to be placed upon people's freedoms to reduce the harm.

A couple of reasons:

-As people grow old, they are economically dependent upon people younger than them.

-A growing population goes hand-in-hand with a growing economy. This tends to bring prosperity to many people.

And as a bit of a tangent: The argument that a shrinking population is good for the planet and is therefore better than a growing population feels to me like an extremely pessimistic argument, and the people that I personally know that embrace it have a much less human-centric moral intuition than I do. I put a lot lot lot more worth on human happiness than that of animals, and to me it seems that a cultural disconnect from the natural act of procreation implies an unhappiness that is rooted in how cultures are run nowadays.