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Showing content with the highest reputation on 09/20/21 in all areas

  1. There are several parallel issues here. One is that wealth acquired by the ultra wealthy tends to get put into tax shelters and nebulous investments so it grows (but remains outside the system), whereas that same money in the hands of the less fortunate goes IMMEDIATELY into the community around them. They spend it on groceries and vehicle repairs and school clothes for kids and paying the electricity bill so it’s not dark in their apartment anymore at night and their kids can read. The providers of those goods and services in that community where this money is being spent ALSO spend the money once received for THEIR groceries and THEIR service needs and on THEIR kids. Dollar for dollar / unit for unit… the money in the hands of the less fortunate does more net good than money in the hands of the already fortunate. Yes, spending from the wealthy also creates jobs and injects money back into the system, but very little relative to money used in “trickle up” stimulation packages. Also, a bit of extra money in the hands of someone who already has a bunch of it doesn’t tend to change their behavior or encourage extra spending. Getting $1,000 tax break when you’re sitting on $50M isn’t going to suddenly result in them finally making a call to a plumber or the purchasing a new dishwasher… but for the person living paycheck to paycheck that money literally changes lives, gets spent and injected back into the system quickly, and results in lasting reductions in poverty and suffering. When you’re living at the margins, every dollar counts. It also costs a lot to be poor. When the washing machine breaks, you can’t afford a new one but you can afford to pump quarters into the machine at the laundromat… but that ends up being more expensive on net. When the car breaks down, you don’t get to work on time and you get fired. The rich, however, have tax protected ways of growing their wealth and can afford tax attorneys to hide it. Paying more tax has more impact on their ego than on their lived experience. The anger at the rich is out of hand, though. We need better policies and enforcement mechanisms, not more hate and vitriol directed at those doing better than us. Sadly, the anger is probably in large part intentionally being amplified by the very people on the receiving end. If they can keep everyone mad and focused on the wrong things, then the status quo remains stable and no progress or change gets made. Like most issues in economics, we make a huge mistake by treating it as a moral failure when at its core it’s a policy failure. Fixing the policy is just super hard because the people with the power to change the laws tend to be the same ones benefiting the most from them… and also because focusing on wonky policy details is hard for a public who’s often just trying to survive through to tomorrow and who’d much prefer throwing stones and being distracted with us/them tribalism. Perhaps this thread could try focusing on wonky policy details instead of distractions like yachts and steel boats… or not.
    4 points
  2. Hydrogen is not a power source. It’s a storage medium. Hydrogen technology is akin to battery technology. Hydrogen can only be as green as the power that creates it.
    1 point
  3. Just asking. Isn't Au (gold) a precious metal? It is good to see progress on better electrolyzers and I hope it flows through to renewable Hydrogen production. It won't become widely used without better electrolyzers. I see iron smelting and chemical feedstocks as the uses of most significance. I am less optimistic for H2 as transport fuel and as transportable fuel; iron production and chemical feedstocks can operate with on-site production and storage at low(er) pressure and therefore cheaper than bringing it from somewhere else. Battery electric looks better for vehicles - overall much higher energy efficiencies and piggy backs onto existing energy distribution networks. Hydrogen as transport fuel needs economy wide infrastructure built from zero. One more halving of battery costs will make existing type EV's unstoppable. One more doubling of energy density will make EV's unstoppable - and open up aviation to battery electric. Achieve both and it is game over for fossil fuels. Hydrogen won't be in that game. I'm cynical and think that, important as clean iron smelting and fertiliser production is too much is being made of Hydrogen - and the reason it has such widespread political support is that it can't do much any time soon. Those looking for empty gestures to follow up their empty gestures on zero emission targets like renewable Hydrogen sometime in the future, but so does the fossil fuel industry, that currently make most Hydrogen like it; it uses empty gestures on Carbon Capture and Storage to justify competing (with aid of subsidies from sympathetic politicians) against emerging clean Hydrogen and other clean energy.
    1 point
  4. this is software of bank of Baroda how to take money from bank
    -1 points
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