bookofsand
Joined 5 years ago
Karma
151
Submissions
92
Member since
May 26
Recent submissions
Comment · 5 years ago
Comment · 5 years ago
Speaking of US and China, obvious candidates are immigration policy and one-child policy. Other levers: female education, child mortality reduction, shift in cultural norms towards small nuclear families, access to contraceptives. The entire 'western' world is experiencing population decline, and not for lack of resources.
As a curiosity, I saw a few years ago an article from Africa: 'Meet the Ugandan Businessman with 13 Wives, 176 Children'. I hope we can agree that this kind of reproductive behavior is utterly unsustainable in a world that has learned about its limits (and sadly overshot them already).
https://face2faceafrica.com/article/mustafa-mugambo-mutone
Edit: Of course landmass is an approximation. Of course Alaska / Arizona are not Iowa. On the flip side, Tibet / Xianjiang are not Guangdong either. The core point that given that TotalEmissions = Population * PerCapitaEmissions and the Earth only cares about TotalEmissions. We've got to price for the Population term somehow, lest it becomes an unaccounted externality.
Comment · 5 years ago
We are comparing energy / sqmi. US and China have similar landmass. 3.8M sqmi vs 3.7M sqmi. Comparing their total energy consumption is, up to a constant factor, the same as comparing their energy / sqmi consumption.
Countries should decide for themselves if they'd like to be crowded, thus per capita energy poor or sparsely populated, thus per capita energy rich.
Comment · 5 years ago
US and China have relatively similar land masses, thus arguably similar levels of available resources. China happens to have a population 4.2 larger than US, thus 4.2 lower per capita resources. If US resource consumption is unsustainable, then so is China's.
Comment · 5 years ago
The author needs to familiarize himself with the concept of MTBF. It's surprisingly short for high order artifacts. Entropy will introduce errors and break down every single high order system out there. I am aware of two exceptions: the biosphere and, on a much much smaller scope, cloud storage. The core characteristic of both systems is redundancy and repair: every piece of the system is continuously monitored and replaced by a healthy clone before enough errors accumulate to render it inoperable.
Short of developing artificial life, the proposal will not work. Of course, developing artificial life is one of the big existential risks humanity faces. I'd rather we study gardening instead :)
Comment · 5 years ago
The solution to climate change requires indeed keeping large numbers of people poor and making existing people poorer. And it will fail indeed because of populist backlash. We should plan indeed for climate change, though not sure what to personally do beyond buying a praying book (100% dead serious).
Sobering: As of 2021, there is no 'western lifestyle' country on the face of the Earth that has emissions in line with the requirements of the Paris accord emissions, which is about 2.5 CO2 t/year/capita for a global population of 10 billion (2050 estimate). Even countries like Sweden, Switzerland of France, which are >90% nuclear & renewable in their electricity production, still have 4.5, 4.7 and 5.1 t CO2 t/year/capita. I have yet to hear concrete proposals of where the 50% cuts should come from, other than large scale technologies that have not been developed yet.
Comment · 5 years ago
To a first, second and third approximation:
poor = small energy footprint
rich = large energy footprint
Assuming the problem is that the global energy consumption is too large, the last thing we want is to increase the energy footprint of the people we already have. Moving people from poor countries to rich countries means greatly increasing those people energy footprint. It is in direct contradiction to the stated goal of reducing the energy footprint of humanity, and serves as a strongly visible signal that the ruling class is not serious about reducing global emissions.
Comment · 5 years ago
The Amazon rainforest is being destroyed to grow more money. Money is fungible, if beef were banned they's cut the forest to do something else with the land.
Comment · 5 years ago
https://matadornetwork.com/read/mapped-united-states-canada-...
The name sounds nordic. Oslo, Stockholm & Helsinki would end up with a climate similar to Northern Manitoba. I tried to drop a Google StreetView to get a sense of the landscape. It was not possible, there are simply no roads and no cities at those latitudes.
Even the richest of the rich need a supply and support network. Money won't suffice.
Comment · 5 years ago
While the SUV-driving crowd is stomach churning, it is also small in the big picture. The huge elephant in the room is global population size, moving apace toward 10 billions and possibly beyond. Industrializing 10 billion people turns out to be a very dirty business.
If US were to ban ICE cars and truck and switch go horse-and-buggy tomorrow, it will save 29% of US emissions. US accounts for 15% of global emissions. Thus the overall global savings will be 4.35%, or about 1.44 GT CO2/year. Fantastic. Yet 95.65% of emissions will still be going out every year. In 20 years, emissions have grown from 25 GT CO2/year to 36 GT CO2/year, or about .5 GT CO2 / year. The whole 4.35% savings would turn out to be a minor blip, overtaken in about 3 years by new emissions elsewhere in the developing world.
We are already 40+% above Paris agreement 1.5C emissions levels of 25 GT CO2/year. We need deep cuts on massive scale. If the world were even remotely serious about tackling CO2 emissions for a rough but perhaps survivable crash landing, we'd see:
* World wide moratorium on building new coal/gas/oil power plants and ICE vehicles.
* World wide moratorium on economic growth. Good bye lifting the third world out of poverty. Good bye western retirement.
* Gradual phasing out of industry in developed countries. Good bye middle class lifestyle.
* Ban of immigration from low emission countries into high emission countries.
https://www.c2es.org/content/u-s-emissions
https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-other-greenhouse-gas-emis...
Comment · 5 years ago
A. The per capita approximation means the whole world has to be brought at third world status.
At projected 2050 population levels of 10b, and 25GT/year emissions, per capita emissions allowance is 2.5t/year. There is no industrialized country with this level of emissions, the lowest being Sweden, Switzerland and France at 4.5, 4.7 and 5.13. These countries have moved >90% of their electrical production to nuclear and renewables and cut their emissions in half compared to the 1990s. Possibly they are also externalizing their food and industrials production.
B. What is 'fair' share? Population as of 2020? 2050? 1950? Land area? Forest mass?
The most obvious issue is population. Hard to believe, but in 1950, at the beginning of the current Golden Era, world population was a mere 2.5 billion people. At those population levels everybody on Earth could have had afforded the industrialized lifestyle of Japan, Germany or Netherlands, with about 10 CO2t/capita emissions.
Comment · 5 years ago
The vast majority of companies ask for a 'we own everything you breathe' agreement as a prerequisite for employment. The vast majority of employed software engineers don't have the luxury to work on side projects, unless they relinquish the IP to their employer for no additional compenstation, which renders monetization moot.
Comment · 5 years ago
See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event.
> Such negative values occurring shortly after the GOE require a rapid reduction in primary productivity of >80%, although even larger reductions are plausible. Given that these data imply a collapse in primary productivity rather than export efficiency, the trigger for this shift in the Earth system must reflect a change in the availability of nutrients, such as phosphorus. Cumulatively, these data highlight that Earth’s GOE is a tale of feast and famine: A geologically unprecedented reduction in the size of the biosphere occurred across the end-GOE transition.
Comment · 5 years ago
Your suggestion is probably the correct solution technically speaking, as it funnels the screen reader I/O stream through browser APIs.
The immediate objection is that most popular screen readers (JAWS, NVDA) are native apps and not browser extensions, (some?) extension-based screen readers being immature. mwcampbell articulated it as much in a different post, asking for a native desktop client as opposed to a browser based client. Alas, 'native desktop client' is a different technology than Cloudflare RBI, subject to different tradeoffs, which may well be at odds with the goals of Cloudflare RBI as a product.
A hypothetical browser accessibility protocol is likely to prove insufficient, as native screen reader apps will themselves become an attack vector.
Unlocking the situation requires a wider industry buy-in beyond Cloudflare. Screen readers must be rearchitected with security in mind. IT departments must manage accessibility apps. Advocacy groups must commit to roadmaps that include a lot of change, and that may even degrade the status quo for many years to come. Given that existing screen reader apps have decades of engineering already poured in, it will be hard and expensive to enact change. A good early step could be creating an industry standard various entities can rally behind.
https://www.afb.org/blindness-and-low-vision/using-technolog...
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/screen-reader
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28031514
https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-and-remote-browser-is...
PS. I pointed to one Mustafa Mugambo Mutone. The future that his descendants will inhabit will hopefully see a convergence of lifestyles across cultures and continents.