As a result, NYC like living is basically out of reach for the majority of the people who might otherwise want it. Nothing against Indiana, but if what you're looking for is bustling megalopolis living, I don't think Indianapolis is going to cut it. And your choices in the US aside from NYC are very limited.

I can see the appeal of an immediate refund check, but using the tariff refund to lower future prices for customers in a way that drives continued sales seems like both responsible thing to do from a fiduciary perspective and a not unreasonable compromise for the customer. Many companies would, and will, simply pocket the refund.

No, that's the entire point. As mentioned above, for ethanol you input the equivalent of 300 ethanol gallons worth of energy (which could also be ethanol) to get 100 net gallons out you can do whatever you want with. If you instead used that 300 gallons worth of input to produce solar panels, they'd produce 3,600 net gallons worth of equivalent energy over their lifetime. You get 36x more net energy building solar panels than growing corn for ethanol. Sure, you could spend 600 gallons worth of energy and do both, but then you'd still be better off switching the entire 600 gallons of input to solar panels until you run out of solar panel generation capacity or demand. That's the opportunity cost.

Also a minor point worth making is that ethanol is in no way a "waste product" from the corn growing industry that would otherwise go to, well, waste. Farmers aren't just growing a bunch of extra corn for no reason that we can conveniently use for ethanol. If demand for ethanol stopped, they'd stop growing all that extra corn.

It's really not when you compare it to the energy return you get from energy invested in other forms of energy generation. Solar power, for example, is typically estimated to produce 13x as much energy as it takes to make the panel. This is obviously a considerable improvement over 1.3x.

So why does it matter as long as the net energy output is positive? Because the whole point of the energy generating exercise is to do something with the output energy other than just make more energy and there isn't unlimited capacity on the input side of the equation. The 100 "free" gallons you get in the example sounds great, but sustaining that requires inputting (i.e. growing) 300 gallons worth, so you need to produce 400 gallons total to get 100 useful gallons. Looking at the math another way, an ethanol powered civilization would spend 75% of the energy it produces simply producing more energy, leaving only 25% to actually do anything useful with. This is bad, because said civilization will run out land to grow corn for ethanol well before it's generating enough useful energy.

It's sort of like the energy equivalent of the food explanation for why it took human civilization so long to advance out of the agrarian stage. Up until relatively recently, most humans spent most of their time and effort simply growing enough food to live. This left very little excess capacity for humans to do anything to move humanity forward. In the modern day, very little of our time and energy goes into growing food, leaving all sorts of extra capacity to build spaceships and AI and the Internet and whatever else. But only because we got really efficient at growing food.

Real introspection can be challenging and lead to some uncomfortable realizations about yourself, so it's understandable why someone might want to shy away from it. But rather than just admit that as a shortcoming and an opportunity for personal improvement, because admitting the need for personal improvement is also challenging, it's easy to concoct a reality where lack of introspection isn't just OK but actually the preferable alternative.

I don't think anyone has ever killed people or gone to war for a virtue, but they certainly have to enforce their moral code on others. Probably the worst combination is people with strong moral beliefs but few virtues, since their lack of virtue both fails to temper their moral fury and poorly guides the moral determinations they get so fired up about.

The problem with AI is that it's not obvious what the upper limit of capability demand might be. And until or if we get there, there will always be demand for the more capable models that run on centralized computing resources. Even if at some point I'm able to run a model on my local desktop that's equivalent to current Claude Opus, if what Anthropic is offering as a service is significantly better in a way that matters to my use case, I will still want to use the SaaS one.

The real question though is how close are we to the point where the pressure is more for efficiency rather than capability. Anecdotally I think it's a ways off. Right now the general vibe I get is that people feel AI is very impressive for how cheap it is to use, which suggests to me that a lot of users would be very willing to pay more for more capable models. So the tipping point where AI hardware demand might slow down seems a ways off.

I also think there's a very reasonable middle ground where people can still practically have and use a car but it's not required literally every time you leave your house. Personally I think giving up my car would be a bridge too far since I like road trips and drives out to hiking areas and things like that, but I also find it unfortunate that there are limited options of affordable places to live where I don't need a car to do everything.

Taking the DJB crypto path gave Wireguard some subtle advantages to implementation ease-of-use that are almost entirely overshadowed by the difficultly in building a new, secure cryptographic protocol from scratch regardless of what algorithms you're using. The tradeoff was that there are plenty of places it will never be used due to standards compliance requirements which as you point out also has significant implications for efficiency in hardware.

Wireguard is cool. I think very little of that coolness has to do with the DJB vs NIST cryptographic choices. And taking the DJB path unnecessarily limited the impact of its coolness at least for now.

In a lot of cases that probably won't matter since chargers can be installed in more places than gas pumps and for gas stations that serve mainly local customers I'd expect demand for an equivalent charging station to be lower since some people will charge at home at least some of the time. But things like highway rest stops could be more of a challenge since you'd expect customer volume for EV charging to be similar to the demand for fuel so you'll need more charging stations at each stop to handle the increased time it takes each customer.

I think the article is on the right track, but it misses also mentioning the conservative politics angle. The right-wing version of pronatalism also includes a pretty obvious implicit, if not entirely explicit, goal to return to the 1960s model of family life where the husband worked while the wife stayed home with the kids. Offering women workplace flexibility and giving them the option to both work and have a family runs counter to that societal vision.

This also explains the results specifically impacting the number of children per mother. Having to take time off to deal with kid related things is much more manageable with fewer children, while even modest WFH flexibility might relieve that logistical burden even for much larger numbers of children. Just one or two days a week of WFH hybrid flexibility could take the place of 10-20 weeks of time off, which is far more than any employee is likely to have or need to deal with even the largest of families.

To preemptively address an obvious complaint about my comment, I'm not saying WFH replaces the need for taking PTO when it comes to childcare. Some childcare situations realistically would not allow the parent at home to work. But a lot of scenarios just require a physical presence or the ability to duck in and out with short notice. In those situations, having the WFH option is dramatically better than having to take the entire day off and removes one more burden of trying to work and parent at the same time.