redorkulated

Obviously you are something of a Renaissance man when it comes to trivia - your knowledge has a fair amount of depth but an unequaled breadth. I think it's fair to say that our culture is moving away from that kind of knowledge and towards intense specialization - people tend to define themselves as experts in increasingly small and specific areas.

Do you agree that that is a trend? If so, is it a good or bad thing for us as a thinking species? As a culture?

Would 100% publicly funded campaigns be good for our democracy?

I have observed what piaggio describes with some frequency - I think there are a lot of people out there who wonder if the climate intervention policies currently under debate will create positive impacts in the future that justify their costs in the short run.

The problem with climate policy is that we're talking (to a large degree, albeit not entirely) about impacts in centuries. The reason we discount (weigh less heavily) future impacts it that we cannot accurately predict what the future holds.

It's like a military strategist in 1800 being convinced that saltpeter shortages were going to render their country's armies ineffective by the year 2000. They were right given the information they had, but they didn't really predict the exponential shifts that would happen in warfighting technology in those two centuries.

That's a tough question - I think anyone who gets X number of signatures on a candidacy petition should be eligible to get their share of the pot.