> By my back of the envelope calculations, we produce something like 300kg of CO2 annually simply by breathing. I would prefer to continue to live, however.

The CO2 that you exhale came from elements that were fairly recently part of an animal or vegetable - ie part of an active and ongoing carbon cycle, rather than deposited into the ground 100M years ago and pulled out to be inserted into the system.

Carbon cycles aren't bad - they're fundamental to life on Earth, obviously. It's making the system unstable by continuous addition that causes the problem.

> there has never been one since then

There was one in 2020, granted it was the shortest on record.

What are “your tools”? Many (most?) meaningful questions cannot be answered while you stall for time on a call. Or do you just mean ask an LLM the question and regurgitate its answer?

Do you think the root cause of social/civic failures has been an inadequate policy repository and lack of a map between policy representations? If so, I have a bridge in Alaska for you to encode into your representation scheme.

> Higher taxes go to the government, and therefore the interests that have captured the government.

There is at least a chance for it to be redistributed, unlike private wealth.

Let's have a quick look at the federal budget. The big ticket items are social security, medicare, net interest and military/VA. Together those are more than half the budget.

Social security is the biggest of them. Older people have more wealth than younger people on net and social security is structured to make higher payments to people who made more money when they were younger, which is significantly correlated with having more wealth right now. So it's a massive transfer payment system that transfers money from the poor to the rich. Meanwhile it uses its own special tax which is significantly more regressive than the ordinary income tax and doesn't tax corporate income at all. Notice in particular that we could instead be solving "grandma doesn't starve" with a UBI that makes uniform payments to everyone and not disproportionate payments to the rich, and comes from a tax which is also paid by corporations.

Net interest is a naked transfer to people with enough capital to invest in government bonds.

Most of the military and VA budgets go to government contractors who work hard to sustain an uncompetitive bidding process with thick margins.

Medicare uses the same bad tax as social security and those dollars go to the healthcare industry which has thoroughly captured the government. The AMA lobbies to limit the number of medical residency slots and sustain a doctor shortage and healthcare corporations have established a thicket of laws to limit competition, impair price transparency and promote over-consumption.

That's where the majority of the government budget goes, and the remaining minority of the money is also going in significant part to government contractors and regulatory capture industries. The government takes tax money from the middle class and gives it to the rich and huge corporations.

We don't need any more "redistribution" like that. If you think you can get the government to stop doing that and instead give the money the poor and middle class then first prove you can do it with the existing money before even thinking about collecting more. You have a nutrient deficiency because you're infested with tapeworms, not because you don't have enough food.

Age + years of service >= 70.

61 + 51 in your example.

I'm dumb—somehow I got it in my head it was your age when you started.

> I think it is important to distinguish talk intended to appease the public, that currently is very anti-US, from real policies.

It's pretty clear that governments engage in such two-sided talk at their peril going forward. This is exactly how you get populism - usually of the far-right variety, with its specific blend of parochialism, jingoism and nihilism.

Everything is written in the voice of a terminally online Twitter troll. Every single communication from the U.S. federal government should be assumed to be a lie until proven otherwise.

I wonder how long it takes (it took?) before Americans think this is how it all should be, and that this is how it is in every country.

From the article:

> You're part of a team, you're contributing, you're also (measurably) pulling less hard than you would if the rope were yours alone

There’s a perfectly rational reason for this. Success is collective, but failure is individual.

Rewards for the success accrue to the person who represents it to the right people (usually those with the shortest path to the organization root).

For all intents and purposes, the person who gives the presentation did the work.

As someone who once spent two months reworking a system because a 4GB Oracle instance was okay, but 8GB was verboten, I agree.