Scaling fines with income only works to hard stop behavior, at which point just make it illegal. Most fines are proportional to damages.

Criminalizing fossil fuels is insane. The fines should cover the externalities.

> Scaling fines with income only works to hard stop behavior,

No, it makes it so that the outcome is more equally felt across all income levels.

What does someone affluent care if they have to pay a $100 speeding ticket or a $20 parking ticket? That's just the cost of business for them.

>No, it makes it so that the outcome is more equally felt across all income levels.

Because you want to... hard stop behavior. Parking violations cause harm, so the fine should be a function of damage to society, not some weird fetish to make people feel pain.

If behavior is so unacceptable that you want to prevent it altogether, criminalize it.

TIL poor people can't pollute, so their market segment shouldn't be incentivized to cut pollution.

TIL that US car companies won't make smaller cars in the face of different regulations, even though they made larger cars in response to current regulations.

The only way to avoid perversions is to tax the problem directly. The market will adjust to all proxies in unintended and harmful ways.

A disincentive on a thing you don't want makes people choose another thing that you may or may not want.

The only way to avoid perversions is to incentivize the things you want.

Taxing cigarettes led to vaping. Maybe less bad but still a nuisance.

Are you agreeing with me, or did you drop a negative twice?

You're statement is not true.

Disincentives don't make people make good choices, they make them make different choices.

Incentives guide people to make a specific choice.

It is the role of a central planner to pick a particular outcome, and it's also the worst strategy of the modern era.

Everything which is not forbidden is allowed. Your belief that you should make the positive choice on behalf of others is the most dangerous philosophy of the 20th century.

Surely it's a lot easier to train the censorship out of the model than it is to build the model from scratch.

Brazil performs dependency resolution in a language-agnostic way.

https://gist.github.com/terabyte/15a2d3d407285b8b5a0a7964dd6...

Coronavirus lab leaks in China also had precedent. What's your point?

There was no evidence for a zoonotic origin other than it was possible.

There was little evidence for a lab leak other than it was possible, but at least there was some.

Doubt. You appear to be Canadian, and their major zoos all have polar bears. Plus you live in Canada, where polar bears run amok. How do I know you're not looking at a polar bear right now, with their iconic black fur?

Are you equally cautious with your opinions on zoonosis?

The problem is that huge swathes of the medical community politicized the pandemic for a specific political purpose, especially in the USA. For example, the Moderna vaccine trials were delayed 2 weeks to change the protocol to appease a political activist in the medical community accusing Trump of trying to ram an unsafe vaccine through. Naturally the trial results were available immediately after the election.

I have a question for you: do you trust the provenance, integrity, and completeness of data from the earlier stages of the outbreak in Wuhan?

"I have a question for you: do you trust the provenance, integrity, and completeness of data from the earlier stages of the outbreak in Wuhan?"

Nope.

And yes, I am equally cautious with my opinions about it being a zoonotic spillover event. I consider it the more likely of the two explanations, but far from definitive.

I would like to jump on the band wagon and point out that this is an absolutely minuscule shift in position.

> The C.I.A. has said for years that it did not have enough information to conclude whether the Covid pandemic emerged naturally from a wet market in Wuhan, China, or from an accidental leak at a research lab there.

From "we don't know if it was a lab leak or spread from the market" to "we think it maybe is". Sure, they started this investigation with Biden, but just released it a couple of days ago AND they have even low confidence on it. So, why release it if the confidence is low? Why now? The answer is: new government, new conclusions.

They went from uncertain to low certainty. It's hard to imagine a smaller shift in position than that, and thus the dog-pile. You're trying to drag me into some other debate entirely.

Unless there's another crime outside the scope of the pardon. For example, crimes within the statute of limitations prior to the pardon, new crimes after the pardon, or state level crimes during the period of the pardon.

All he needs to do is commit a federal crime right away.