How a $100M IRS website upgrade could slash $191B off America’s $650B annual tax compliance costs. Learn about potential 70% time savings, 90% cost reduction, and $76B in recovered tax revenue.
Many poor communities spend up to $740 per person annually on bottled water. A water sanitation plant could slash this to just $18. So why don’t they build one?
Exploring if COVID-19 emerged by chance near Wuhan’s virology lab, this analysis uses a Feynman estimate, showing a 0.1% probability, based on lab distribution and the Earth’s land area. It doesn’t consider population density or natural habitats, while China’s investigational opacity exacerbates speculation regarding a lab origin despite historic leak rarity.
The NET outcome of lives saved minus lives lost is likely between 11,000 and 115,000 additional deaths each decade due to added delays and costs of the regulatory process.
What We Don’t Know We’re only 2 lifetimes from the use of the modern scientific method in medicine. Thus, it’s only been applied for 0.0001% of human history. The more clinical research studies we read, the more we realize we don’t know. Nearly every study ends with the phrase “more research is needed”. We know […]
Federal Reserve policies are effectively stealing $54k from the typical family every year.
Much of the massive amount of new money the Fed is printing is going into Zombie Companies. How Zombie Companies Survive Zombie Companies are firms that don’t survive by producing value for their customers. Instead, they survive by parasitically draining resources from the overall economy by borrowing at near 0% interest from the Federal Reserve. […]
The $4 trillion created by the Federal Reserve as part of the 2020 stimulus program appears to have gone entirely to the top 1% wealthiest people in the world.
The primary recipients of newly created money are currently banks and corporations who are able to borrow from the Fed almost 0% interest and loan this to the public at much higher interest rates.
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Long-Term Trends in Human Well-Being
For millennia, everything sucked. Then something magical happened!
100 million trees and $178 billion worth of time could be saved every year by not subsidizing junk mail.
A 10 kiloton nuclear weapon can kill 1.32 million people. The 15,000 nuclear weapons globally could cause 19,500 megadeaths.
The cause of the US financial crisis is simple. It’s debt. This is a very simple and graphical evidence-based explanation of what caused the collapse.
The US spends more than $500 million per victim on anti-terrorism efforts. However, cancer research spending is only $10,000 per victim. Evolutionary psychology may offer an explanation for this irrational threat amplification.
Many Americans consider Iran to be a psychopathically violent nation that would be willing to commit suicide in order to kill as many Americans as possible. The statistics behind historical Iranian US relations do not support this view.
The financial sector receives more of the average paycheck than any other sector of the economy. Its share of the economy totals $2 trillion dollars. In 1985, the financial sector earned less than 16% of domestic corporate profits. Today, it’s over 40%. In the 1960s, finance and insurance accounted for only 4% of GDP, whereas in 2007 […]
There’s less than a 0.00001% chance that your vote will be the tiebreaker that decides the outcome of a national elections.You are more likely to be injured in a car accident driving to the polls (0.002% chance). Hence, if you are trying to make a practical improvement in your life and those of your loved ones, it is much more rational to just stay home on election day.
This is a rigorous analysis from the brilliant utilitarian mind of Brian Tomasik originally published at http://www.utilitarian-essays.com in 2005. I made this graph in 2007 to try to illustrate his point visually. Abstract. Consuming equal weights of different animal products may produce vastly different expected amounts of direct suffering. Farmed seafood may cause the most, followed by poultry products. […]
Dear President Obama, I know you’re very busy, so I’m very sorry to bother you with this. However, I think what I have to say too important for you to ignore. I appreciate that you are trying to make the world a better place. I respect you as a person. Against all adversity you have achieved some very amazing […]
Calculate the utilitarian ethical value of an action with the Felicific Calculus, developed by the philosopher Jeremy Bentham.
95% of suicide terrorist attacks are targeted at occupying foreign militaries. 0% of suicide terrorist attacks have been directed at countries not militarily involved in geopolitical disputes.
A clear examination of the true costs of the bailouts.
When faced with the decision of rescuing a cat from the pound or allowing it to be euthanized, the ethical considerations can be complex and multifaceted. This article explores the dilemma through the lens of utilitarian calculus, weighing the pleasure and pain generated by each action to determine its moral worth.
Guess what holds the solution to every problem in the world? It’s the human brain!