Dang it, the term of art is “negative space wedgie.”

Solar capacity is cheaper than coal right now. But solar has intermittency issues—it doesn’t generate energy at night, and produces less when it’s hazy or near dawn or dusk. A gigawatt of solar capacity gets you a gigawatt of electricity only under ideal conditions, while a gigawatt of the less intermittent things…

Without a regulatory environment capable of charging USAen emitters for the negative effects of the USA’s emissions on China, as well as charging Chinese emitters for the negative effects of China’s emissions on the USA, the price—as in, the money exchanged in return for a good or service by real live human beings—for…

You don’t have a thing if you don’t have the machine that lets you capture and convert the thing to a useful form.

Great fun will be had when we have to move to the backup alphabet, and USAen anti-semites start keeling over from alef, bet, gimel, dalet...

Energy inputs are ALWAYS a huge issue, because power plants ain’t cheap and there’s no substitute for energy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source

It’s penny wise, pound foolish. We produce about 300 million tons of plastics a year. We’re burning about 8.5 billion tons of coal a year.

I know the trial you’re talking about. That sure wasn’t the theory of the crime I expected for a charge of misdemeanor vandalism.

Permanence is undone.

Might not be money laundering, but only because

My “You will be missed.  Still, onwards and upwards!” was inadequate before, and isn’t better the second time around.  But I still mean it.

That’s not my argument. I’m still back at: if we want to budget for social mobility, do that. (As we do: education, business loans, earned income tax credit, small business loans, etcetera.) Don’t take something essentially unrelated to social mobility, like taxi service—remember, this whole thing started with a…

Eh, ICBMs are rockets tipped with equipment incorporating highly enriched fissiles, and we’ve been securely building and operating them since the 1950s.   We can piggyback off that.

Even if it doesn’t take the final out-of-pocket price all the way to zero, it’s still public money spent on facilitating social mobility. (And in general, economists typically advise against schemes that take the out-of-pocket price of ANYTHING to zero; doing so sets up moral hazard.)

But, why do we need fake investments when we have plenty of real investments?

Matt Levine points out ( https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-11-22/be-careful-with-volcano-bonds ) (A) you can get a better financial deal by buying $25K of Bitcoin plus paying $75K fan existing El Salvador bond at 8.25% that was trading around $.75 when he wrote the column, although (B) the volcano bond…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casu_martzu

(From http://web.archive.org/web/20200221233035/http://creebobby.com/timestable.html .)

Yeah, I miss Carmageddon, too.

“With the blowfish chips, don’t be afraid, don’t be ginger,” advises Scherer.