Americans are babies

Or to be more precise, some Americans have mentality of teenagers. Most flagrant symptom is not being able to deal with things that you need to be dealt with.
Let me give you an example. Mr. W. is responsible for doing thing A. This thing needs to be done so that people XYZ can do thing B, which benefits Mr.W. and that he asked for. They are ready and waiting for Mr. W., yet he says "I'm not willing to deal with it right now". Or even worse "I don't feel like dealing with A right now". So he leaves other people waiting, which costs them time and money.
Other examples are credit card debts ("I don't want to think about it"), mortgage payments and so on. I have seen people to go on shopping spree after they lost their job and thus a significant amount of money and expected revenues.
Of course, you can ignore problems for a while. But they come back and then they are much bigger. In the meantime, the responsible people around you suffer...

Carbon tax and cap and trade

Some people seems to believe that there is a significant difference between carbon tax and cap-and-trade when permits are auctioned off.
The idea that

A carbon tax will never be high enough to do the job.

but

1. Carbon cap is gradually lowered 80% by 2050.

is plain silly.
Price of permits will be equal to the tax that would do the same job. So if the carbon tax will never be high enough, price of permits will have to be astronomical.
It might be possible that increasing carbon tax without limit would not work (politically). But reducing number of carbon permits so that their price is very, very high should be easy to pass?

As a side note - the idea that CO2 emissions can be lower by 80% by 2050 are plain silly. There are very likely to be significantly increasing costs of doing so - to stop emissions won't probably be that expensive, but each additional percentage of a decrease will cost significantly more than the previous. Of course, you can easily reduce humans' carbon emission by 80% - just kill enough of them. Somehow, I don't think this is what people have in mind.

Predicting future

Predicting future is hard, even in the short term. Yet, it is fun to read about old predictions. This one is 40 years old and quite interesting.
It would be great to see how the world will look like in 400 years, but I hope 40 years or so will have to be enough. For this generation

How you can tell you are living in the future

Well, it is sort of obvious when people start (plan) to teach crows to pick up trash. I guess no sci-fi writer guessed that crows will come before robots.

Future

Obviously, the future is closer than I thought. I'm not sure whether I want to go with the flow or try to resist it and end up like some of these loser in the science fiction stories...

The next small thing

Many people are trying to predict the "next big thing" - the invention that will change our world like computers, internet or mobile phones did. The successful ones will undoubtedly make big money on it.
But I have notice many small "big things" that are less known, probably less important yet very helpful, too. For example LED lights and reflective materials.LED lights are interesting because they have very large expected lifetime (around 100,000 hours) and they are very effective (no heat is generated). Notably, most trucks in the US use them already; they are also used in the street lights everywhere. The reflective materials are used on many things - street signs for better visibility in night, clothes etc. They are able to reflect the very little light that hits them back to the source (I'm not sure I understand how they work in detail), which makes them VERY visible in night.
The combination of these two is cool, too. I was riding a bike with a LED light that lasts more than 20 hours with three small AAA batteries, while generating so much light. And all street signs and warnings were so visible I did not have to be afraid of riding of the road etc.
These small things are pretty much trivial, right? Yet they improved our lives significantly for better, in certain areas.
This makes me wonder what will come next. Big hopes are on the carbon nanotubes, but something else might come first. For example, the mechanism by which certain plants (like water lilies) keep themselves clean using only water seems to be understood, allowing it to be replicated in factories. The secret lies in a special structure of their surface that makes cleaning very simple (using water and no pressure). Image the possibilities - easy to clean kitchen, shoes, cars, walls that can be cleaned from the dust or graffiti with just water hose.
This or any other small thing will not change the way we live (LEDs did not either), but it can make life much easier.