Carbon tax is pure economic foolishness. Imagine there's one pipe with smoke coming out of it, and imagine there's another pipe with a lever. If you pull the lever, bags of money will come pouring out of the pipe. That's the carbon tax. The thinking is that the pipe with the smoke will stop belching, but it won't. There's no direct connection between the pipes. We HOPE drivers will drive less if the carbon tax hits their pocket book, but there is no guarantee. It's like changing the interest rate and hoping the economy will improve.
> There's no direct connection between the pipes. We HOPE drivers will drive less.
There are quite a few studies that show that this actually happens. You can have a look at Google Scholar if you want.
Don;t forget, its not just 'will drive less', it is 'will prefer lower carbon alternatives', etc. Fee and dividend basically makes it expensive to pollute and puts cash in consumers' pockets so that they can afford cleaner alternatives.
I think we should place a royalty on the pipelines, not the pumps. Take 10% from everything that flows down the pipeline, and use that money to drive us into the clean energy age. Where else are we going to get the funds to fix this enormous problem?
The problem with using consumer taxes to fund these things is that the consumer has to consume the planet in order to save the planet. If I don't pay enviro-levy taxes at the cash register, my district can't afford waste removal. If I don't buy enough gasoline, we won't collect enough carbon tax to pay for these wetlands we need to build.
> We HOPE drivers will drive less if the carbon tax hits their pocket book, but there is no guarantee.
Gasoline costs twice as much in India as the US, and the average income is far less. People drive a lot less, use public transport, build more densely, and purchase more economical vehicles - small cars, motorcycles, scooters. Liquefied natural gas (LNG) kits are very popular even on passenger cars (LNG being cheaper).
An SUV is virtually unheard of as a family car (unless you're a powerful politician, movie star, or other bigwig) and even a full-size sedan marks you out as rich. I've never seen a pickup truck being driven for passenger transportation.
Why do you think prices don't change behaviors? It's a pretty fundamental facet of human behavior.
> It's like changing the interest rate and hoping the economy will improve.
Don't central banks do exactly that? They cut rates in recessions (to promote spending) and increase them in boom times (to tamp down inflation).
Not really. The IBM Academy reported that open source software was the single biggest threat to their business model, so they "invested" in Linux to keep their foot in the door. They've had mindshare at Apache and Redhat for almost 2 decades now. I don't think they'll make any money from that investment.
IBM is a consulting company, and the open source business model is all about consulting, so I don't know what threat you're referring to. In any case, while you may use air quotes, they invested actual hard cash at a time when Linux was struggling to gain a foothold and was not considered a serious UNIX challenger. I'm not saying Linux owes them everything, but it sure does help when a giant company like IBM backs you.
I guess I should have said "When I was at IBM, the academy released a report, etc." No air quotes, required; I was there. I was on the open source community of practice core team at the time.
My point is that IBM didn't invest in open source to improve it, they invested to take advantage of it. Open source software was still frowned on since "free" was a dirty word in that culture. We never sold it in our deals. The explosion of innovation and creativity created by the open source community never reached IBM. We just kept selling Websphere and Domino. I think it was 2008 before CENTOS started creeping into our solutions. IBM did not buy Redhat because they believe in Linux. They did it to buy market share.
What about grinding it up into soil? They have developed techniques in British Columbia to grow fully mature forests in 10 years by laying down a mixture of soil and nutrients 6 feet deep and then planting seedlings very close together. The close competition causes the seedlings to grow faster.
Grind it up, soak it with nutrients and plant forests on it.
Grinding things up would be pretty energy expensive, which kinda defeats the purpose. Also That's kinda what landfills are: dig hole, fill it up until it's a mound, cover with dirt and grass.
I find it very ironic that AWS is behind this. Whenever I buy books from Amazon I am amazed at their broken search engines. Just search a topic on Amazon and then try to sort the results. LOL.
IIRC, most of that infrastructure is/was Oracle based and much of it going to another DB. I'm not sure if Elastic is even in the mix, or how well it scales to Amazon's levels.
Given the age of the offering, it might actually be the CloudSearch [0] product that is used by the Amazon.com search team.
FWIW, I've always found the Amazon store search to be pretty decent; normally I don't use a website's built in search system, opting for Google instead.
"Software methodologies are all about handling risk." Not even close. Methodologies should about creating working software with a short feedback loop between customer and engineer. That old blue cool-aid about risk doesn't fly anymore.
