It seems like a silly idea at first, like something a 19th century car designer or Mike Trogg of cave man days might have imagined: increase the power and fuel efficiency of a car by reducing the workload on the wheels with several turns of car length composite-fiber pulleys before connecting to half-axles that turn the wheels. One might have expected Lance Armstrong to invent recumbent sit down trikes with unfair pulleys to beat the competition yet never the U.S. Postal Service struggling with rain, snow, sleet, hail and perennial deficits.
Basic physical principles are simple to build up and easy to take down with folly. Does gravity convert mass to energy for warping space simultaneously creating black holes and also accelerating Universal expansion? Does the presence of mass in a Higgs field base when increased affect the shape of the field creating the effect of warping spacetime as proportional perhaps clogging smaller dimensional ties? Aren't black holes empty at the singularity having converted all the mass input mass into warped spacetime energy?
Inventions and contemplative thought may be synthetic sides of the same process emerging into idea. The economy too is a concatenation of applications of myriad forms of capitalism selected for actualizations and sometimes evolved as an inertial compilation for good or bad. Dictators and kings may have capital and the slaves none. Liberalism at its heart is the denial of the right of anyone to coerce any other to do or be anything. The rectification of names such as north and south magnetic poles, male and female reproductive apparatus meaning particular ideas rather than anything at all, that is discriminating by not giving east the meaning of south or naming a bear an ant, is an essential attribute o the use of words in a coherent description of truth. With words and objects being reciprocally referenced by association it is valuable to keep language meaningful. North and south magnetic poles attract, males and females reproduce and that is socially recognized in marriage, inventiveness and economic construction occurs in a real global ecosphere with the health of each reinforced and conformed through intelligent analytical comprehension instead of explicit, incidental evolutionarily determined sprawl. One may have faith that God will direct one toward the most excellent developments as if the economy too evolved naturally, yet God's purposes are somewhat mysterious and economic determinism seems as uncertain as evolutionary determinism in a given theory of capitalism.
There was a time in the distant past when people believed killing sea otters and placing a bounty on them would improve shellfish quantity. It turned out that sea otters eat echinoderms that eat shellfish and kelp too, at the roots. A lot of sea lives including some fish start their life in salt-water kelp. When the kelp is gone so are the fish. Thus those sea otters were the defenders of saltwater fisheries and shellfish before maladaptive human interventionist predation. If there are good ways to reduce loss of biodiversity and increase transportation efficiency that can be found it's always a good time to apply them.
Unemployment should be triaged to create incentives to hire those jobless longest first. Social benefits from eliminating pockets of long-term unemployed would be significant while the process would be merciful and probably productive by introducing micro-capital to sectors of poverty running on empty. Some of those people might think outside the fossil fuel box a little more often than most and that could be productive.
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