I just looked at the Build Back Better bill for the first time. It's 2,135 pages. How many people actually read and understand such a thing before deciding whether it should be passed or not?
A bill like this probably has 0 complete readers and many distributed readers. About 1644 folks will read it (in part) to summarize for 538 folks... roughly split 50/50 (folks lookin to shoot it down versus folks that want to pass it).
There will untold numbers of folks with their own axes to grind, cherry-picking a sentence or two for/against their particular cause,
Just look at the summer of 2020. There were many many examples of protests that turned into riots. Some included federal buildings too. Dozens of people were killed and billions of dollars in damages. It's obvious partisanship to frame these events so differently.
It strikes me as environmental vandalism. Solar panels make sense on roofs, not so much on landscapes. Maybe the desert, but you have transmission loss and still have to deal with the large amount of toxic landfill they generate. Nuclear makes much more sense for anything approaching base load.
I assume you wring your hands just as much for mountain removal for coal? Or the coal ash ponds so toxic they kill workers by the dozen when they need to be cleaned up? Or the millions of lives whose health is damaged by fossil fuel externalities?
By all means we should have frank discussions of the externalities of various technologies.
Putting them in landfill implies is it harder to turn old PV into new PV than to build new PV literally out of rock. This does not seem plausible in long-term (short term, sometime has to actually build a factory to do it), and if it was true then we would’ve just substituted one polluting non-renewable (fossils) for another.
Bill Maher had a segment on this recently about progressives that don't acknowledge progress and are afraid of it in practice. A kind of willful blindness. Steven Pinker calls it Progressophobia.
I don't think the root problem is any one person, given that Twitter is even more destructive to society. It's the users, it's the incentives of the platforms, it's bad actors. There's low trust, a breakdown of institutions, a raging culture war. It's complicated.
When a company (like Facebook) or a nation state (like Russia) is deeply dysfunctional and it has for a very long time been ruled by only one person, it is in fact fairly reasonable to conclude that the root problem is, at present, that one specific person.
Right, it's where the mob is and where the journalists and politicians are. They use and watch Twitter very closely and it informs what actions they take. Companies too.
