This fight not about the dysfunction of the USA government at the time, it's about a fight over the structure of the USA as it was founded. There have always been strong political forces trying to dismantle all "common sense" features of the welfare state, who have convinced the masses to vote against their own interests out of the American Dream of rugged individualism.

This is in contrast to the unique decentralized communitarian history of America with community activism, charities, NGOs and nonprofits filling the social holes between the government and private enterprise. The current healthcare system evolved out of this, and gradually received more patchwork of private and government involvement (Medicare/medicaid, and the ACA) which why it's an expensive mess. Most European countries post WW2 had a chance to design something more efficient and didn't centralized insurance as a threat to liberty.

The majority of damage is being done by climate denying citizens and their elected populist governments that are entirely dismantling climate policies and carbon taxation or alternative carbon pricing measures.

His research methods are the foundation of environmental economics, so he should not be ignored (and won't be, DICE remains one major lens used by governments). The disagreement is over the numbers and specific damage assumptions which have been revised by others in new DICE model variants.

Every economic model is fiction to some degree, what matters is the usefulness of the models to make policy decisions or predict outcomes. One can branch off into heterodox schools of thought like Austrian, Marxism, Chicago, or Behavioral... but students need to be grounded in the field's consensus to be able to know how to speak intelligibly across these areas if they're to have any effectiveness.

He is deserving of critique for being far too conservative in his approach, yes, but it's not like the biggest damagers of the environment are doing less because William Nordhaus told them to do less. Trump and populist right aren't ripping up the EPA, the Inflation Reduction Act, etc. because of Nordhaus. They ripped up the policies because they deny climate change entirely. Would adopting more aggressive measures in the 80s made things better? Possibly, but I think people over estimate the political will vs. the technological shifts needed to eliminate fossil fuels.

Only now is it obvious we are going to rapidly, exponentially, move to solar globally because the cost savings are undeniable, regardless of what deniers may want. And, contrary to your Berman link above, energy transitions are NOT a myth. They were not evenly distributed, but they were quietly, regionally happening (the UK, and California, for example). Now it's reached a tipping point, and going global.

https://www.thecooldown.com/green-tech/global-solar-capacity...

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2024/06/20/the-exponential...

I mean, he's absolutely deserving of critique, even harsh critique, but you're going to have try harder than "his analysis is awful" and he caused "immeasurable damage" when he co-created the movement.

The people do have significant power at the ballot box, and chose to give more power to corrupt leaders out of fear of the alternative.

Several Enron execs did go to jail: Kenneth Lay the chairman would have gone for 10+ years but died before sentencing, Jeff Skilling did 12 years, Causey did 5 years, Fastow did 5 years.

In the current environment of DOJ corruption I don't think this sort of thing would happen... unless the executives were conveniently non-supporters of the current President.

If the law was "you need to hire your own private investigators and external auditors to find deception in all the companies you invest in", then yes, shareholder liability would be reasonable.

According to haveibeenpwnd, my gmail address (which I too have had since invite-only) has been in 1 data breach. My Mac.com address which I've had since it was called iTools, 19 breaches. I've had to rotate my email account passwords I think 3 or 4 times over the last 20 years, and rotate most external accounts that use those email addresses a few times. I'm not sure what this proves other than "you should randomly generate your passwords & rotate them" which is what mainstream users have been doing for at least a few years now. Apple also notifies me if any password I use has been in a breach, and gives an easy link to rotate it.

SSN fraud predates the Internet and has little to do with online consumer services privacy (most don't have your SSN). When I was a young teenage cracker anarchist in the late 80s & early 90s, we got credit cards & SSN's through hacking the credit agencies, credit card companies, credit unions and regional banks (all of whom often had insecure dialup endpoints, or even better, insecure X.25 network endpoints), and through a BBS community that would disseminate these data breaches. Same as it ever was.

Mainstream end to end encrypted apps do not monitor your private messages. Cynicism is not wisdom. WhatsApp offering an on-app opt-in model to detect scans seems like a well thought through feature, though Meta's reputation is not good on this topic.

Clearly many do not care about privacy. But it is quite possible to be very online and have reasonable privacy. It requires discernment and discipline.

Overall the limits to AI productivity can be summarized in one word: discipline. If you're undisciplined in your security, your design constraints, your automated test coverage, your separation of the deterministic and indeterministic, you will be quite productive ... for a time. Until quite suddenly, you aren't, possibly due to catastrophe.

Similar to the early era of computers on the Internet, with lax security, we have a window where we can get away with this, but it will close quicker than many realize. Some things do seem to need to be learned the hard way.

Apple is trying to do the bare minimum here - not even introducing a new security model - and people are already freaking out. But a disciplined agent sandbox model is exactly what we need to get to.

The future is often rooted in the past that has been forgotten.

Many promising tech startups make these mistakes by thinking they're the first to come up with an idea, when really it was decades ago.

For entrepreneurs and explorers in this new AI age, rather than being kids again, which seems to be a way to quickly and repeatedly step on rakes, I might suggest being an old wizard. They retain playfulness and openness tempered by wisdom and experience and vast libraries of history. New things often rhyme with old things.

Root was also very good but I think is harder to master as the factions are so different and so runaway games are common IMO.