We definitely will achieve Ferenginar if the EU succeeds at becoming the world government. The thing everyone forgets about the Ferengi is that they don’t have unbridled laissez-faire capitalism. They have one societal government with a vast bureaucracy, with one branch highlighted prominently in the show: the Ferengi Commerce Authority.

The FCA is so powerful within Ferengi society that their best comparison in historical human society is probably the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages and Renaissance.

Maybe not now, but noted right wing economist Milton Friedman was a supporter of LVT.

Depends on when you read HN. Right now, I see a fierce debate about the evils of AI at the top. On the one hand there are folks defending AI and dreaming of the end of human labour, pointing at Wall-E as a utopia. On the other hand, there are others pointing out that the ultra-rich in the tech industry have openly expressed a desire to build a techno-feudalism with themselves living as kings, while the masses die in unemployed squalor.

Fraughtdog too! That thing hanging on for dear life!

I appreciate the sentiment and I’ve felt similarly of late, but we don’t want to “empty the chamber” all at once.

One of the risks of escalation is that the other side may stop fearing what you’re going to do next. This is what happened with Iran: they no longer have any fear of the US whatsoever.

I know Trump is never going to fear anything Canada can do, but ordinary Americans may still worry. We should be trying to turn up the pressure slowly, and make sure that Americans keep turning against Trump rather than starting to see Canadians as the enemy, which is what he wants.

Prefer mindfulness over self-gaslighting!

The Japanese are incredibly stubborn for these things

They’re not stubborn, they don’t have a choice. The Japanese electrical grid is antiquated and stressed to the breaking point. A massive consumer migration to EVs would cause total collapse.

There aren’t any easy solutions either. The Fukushima nuclear disaster has made the situation even worse, both by reducing the amount of generation capacity and by constraining policy (new nuclear plants are politically untenable now).

Renewables seem like the obvious answer, but the grid infrastructure isn’t good there. There’s No storage capacity, nor is there any geographic redundancy. Japan is a country of 122 million people crammed into a few small islands. When the sun stops shining, it stops shining for the whole country. When the wind doesn’t blow, it doesn’t blow for the whole country. This means if they become dependent on a lot of renewables they become susceptible to multiple-day blackouts, with potentially severe consequences in the winter.