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nednobbins

@nednobbins@lemm.ee

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nednobbins ,

Why is that better?
It may not be ideal but governments have at least some accountability.

nednobbins ,

What makes governments any more susceptible to corruption than a private organization?

I'm not actually talking about governments having absolute control. That's a pretty extreme scenario to jump to from from the question of if it's better for a private company or a government to control search.

Right now we think Google is misusing that data. We can't even get information on it without a leak. The government has a flawed FOIA system but Google has nothing of the sort. The only way we're protected from corruption at Google (and historically speaking several other large private organization) is when the government steps in and stops them.

Governments often handle corruption poorly but I can rattle of many cases where governments managed to reduce corruption on their own (ie without requiring a revolution). In many cases the source of that corruption was large private organizations.

nednobbins ,

It's hard to draw meaningful conclusions form a single 4 year period.
There have been several instances of corruption (and significant externalized costs) in private firms that went on for much longer than 4 years.

I agree that there is a lot of corruption in government but there's a long gap between that and no accountability. We see various forms of government accountability on a regular basis; politicians lose elections, they get recalled, and they sometimes even get incarcerated. We also have multiple systems designed to allow any citizen to influence government.

None of these systems and safeguards are anywhere close to perfect but it must be better than organizations that don't even have these systems in the first place.

nednobbins ,

FOIA requests generally don't involve hackers or leaks.
The act exists because citizens insisted that government provides visibility into its inner workings.

What is the equivalent for Google, or any other private company?

nednobbins ,

They could have left out, "for LGBTQ+ people" and it would have been just as accurate.

nednobbins ,

There are many subcultures around food. It's not like the world is split between vegans and junk food addicts.

The Cheeto and McDonalds eating crowd may have crappy nutrition but they're an extreme. The other extreme is meal-preppers. They know exactly how much chicken, rice and broccoli they're eating.

There are huge communities of people who are very health conscious. Some of them focus their consciousness on science, some of them on other methods. Some of those people are vegans. Some aren't.

nednobbins ,

What is the best example of something built by anarchists?

For the sake of curiosity I'd leave this quite broad. Buildings, institutions, inventions, art. What's the showcase example of what anarchy has created for us?

nednobbins ,

I thought credit for both of those usually goes to unions. Which anarchists or groups of anarchists made the most significant contributions to the 40 hour work week or 8 hour days?

How did a philosophy of minimized government involvement contribute to the regulations and enforcement mechanisms around our labor laws?

nednobbins ,

Congratulations on 15 years together.

In the US, there are legal and financial advantages to marrying your partner. It sounds like you're in it for the long haul so it's worth thinking about.
Have a chat about it with your lawyer or accountant, they'll make the case much better than I can.

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nednobbins ,

As much skill as a 9 year old and a 16 year old can muster?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cottingley_Fairies

nednobbins ,

I took your advice and looked it up.
It seems to be a work of fiction, originally published as "The Hermit"
https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100322754

nednobbins ,

I wouldn't doubt that was his initial motivation for making the suggestions.

I also remember that he tried to back out of buying Twitter multiple times. While doing so he was pretty public about all the crazy crap he would do with Twitter.

Despite all that Twitter went to a judge and got them to force Musk to complete the sale. He's a crappy CEO for Twitter but it's kind of on the former Twitter leadership for forcing that situation.

nednobbins ,

The US DOE puts the US at 20% renewable energy.

https://www.energy.gov/eere/renewable-energy

nednobbins , (edited )

A lot of people don't realize how quickly China is changing. Things that were true just a few decades ago are often no longer true.

Once China decided that pollution was a problem they went all in on addressing it. China has massive reforestation projects, huge incentives to switch to EVs, and much tighter energy efficiency standards.

Solar isn't even their only renewable energy source. China gets about equal amounts from solar, wind and hydro https://www.spglobal.com/commodityinsights/en/market-insights/latest-news/energy-transition/013124-coal-still-accounted-for-nearly-60-of-chinas-electricity-supply-in-2023-cec together they make up a little less than half of their total energy production and the ratio keeps improving. correction: those are projected ratios, not current ratios.

Of course, on a per capita basis, China isn't even close to being a top polluter. Unless you think that people in smaller countries deserve to pollute more, per-capita is the better measurement. China looks a little worse if you do that but it's still far from a top polluter by that metric.

nednobbins ,

Production will always have some waste and pollution. China has high pollution because we do a lot of production there. As I pointed out above, on both a per-capita and a per-production basis China pollutes less than many industrialized nations (US. Germany, Japan, South Korea, Canada, Taiwan) and many developing nations (Singapore, Malaysia).

Given current manufacturing data, moving production out of China to other countries would likely increase pollution.

nednobbins ,

Do you have a better metric?

nednobbins ,

When you look at the data China pollutes less than the US both on a per-capita and a per-production basis.

nednobbins ,

Except when you leave out nuclear in 2020 and add it in 2023 you're not pointing out anything about Biden (or anyone else's) policies. You're just demonstrating that shifting your metrics mid sentence leads to a nonsense conclusion.

nednobbins ,

Why not? Have the facts changed since then?

nednobbins ,

Not sure why you're so hung up on dogs or 2 months. The thread still shows up in searches and you're clearly getting updates on it.
Unless there's some evidence to suggest the information in this thread is now obsolete, there's no reason not to respond.

@esteeyou made a claim and provided evidence. Unless there's better evidence to the contrary it's reasonable to accept the claim. My children sometimes still respond to arguments with, "Nuh uh." I generally expect more from adults.

nednobbins ,

So you're just going to spew out words without even checking the context of those words?

Brilliant!

nednobbins ,

Apparently.

That's too bad.

nednobbins ,

Remind you of the thing you could literally check by clicking on the "show context" link?

nednobbins ,

Because an informed response would have been more interesting.

nednobbins ,

OK It sounds like there's only one metric we can use to evaluate how much China pollutes.

The metric is widely used by various academics, government agencies and independent organizations. We have no better metric and that metric says that China doesn't pollute that much.

That leaves 2 possibilities; the metric actually provides no information at all or it still provides some information.

If it provides no information AND we don't have anything that does (ie a better metric) that means we literally have absolutely no information at all about how much China pollutes at all. That means we can't make any intelligent claims about how much China pollutes or how much they're fudging the number because there's no comparison to make.

If it does provide some information we're left with a situation where all of the imperfect information supports the claim that China doesn't pollute much.

Either way, the evidence as you've classified it, doesn't support the claim that China is, "one of the planet’s most polluting countries," which was the original claim of this thread. It is, by definition, a baseless conjecture.

nednobbins ,

I agree that CO2 is an imperfect measure and you don't seem to be making the claim that CO2 has an SNR of 0 (ie it carries no information at all). We seem to agree on the core of your central three paragraphs so I won't comment on them.

You've stated multiple times now that you don't know any better measures than CO2. So even if there are other measures they're just as bad or worse. Given this lack of any better metric, on what verifiable evidence are you basing any of your conclusions?

I’m assuming based on the time you responded to me that you are in China so maybe you can elucidate me on how I get this wrong.

The same way you got your conclusions about China's pollution wrong, by misapplying evidence and jumping to conclusions.

It's interesting that you should phrase your question that way. The cheap answer would be to point out that you're not using "elucidate" correctly. You're missing a preposition. It's also odd to use "get" instead of "got" here.
A corrected version of your sentence might be, "...maybe you can elucidate to me how I got this wrong."
It's cheap in the sense that personal attacks are easy and do little to advance a conversation. It would be just as silly of me to use your grammar error as evidence that you're a foreign national as it is for you to use the timing of my posts as evidence of my location.

You might then suspect that I might still be a foreigner who's studied too much English grammar. That would be correct. It turns out that when I speak my native language, other native speakers can sometimes pinpoint the exact district in Vienna where I was born. These days, none of my neighbors speak German. They love the Sox and rock their "Dunkies".

Just as in the case of estimating China's pollution levels, cavalier use of evidence leads to erroneous conclusions.

nednobbins ,

I can certainly agree that there is no evidence to suggest that China is "one of the most polluting countries in the world". I haven't seen a shred of evidence to support that claim. It is entirely baseless.

On the other hand, the claim that China's per capita pollution is lower than that of most industrialized nations is supported by evidence. It is the best evidence we have too, unless you've discovered a better metric in the last few days.

A claim that imperfect evidence is equivalent to no evidence is baseless and will lead to erroneous conclusions.

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