I mean, yeah, those changes do also tend to be somewhat generational, to be fair. But the point is that people who don't have the means definitely won't do that, while some percentage of people who can will.

Also climate is a factor. In a warmer area, give that 60-year-old pig farmer a single-room air conditioner vented through the window, and watch the power use jump up quite a bit — not just for that person, but for every other person in the area who experiences it on a hot summer day, as a whole bunch of other people buy their own.

In other words, it's not just individual poverty; it's also regional poverty that suppresses some types of consumption. People who don't know what they are missing don't miss it.

Repeat after me: There is no such thing as clean coal.

Note that China's coal production continues to grow.

Want to see what actual reduction in coal use looks like? U.S. coal production is down 50% since 2008. Coal's percentage of the power mix is down from 50% to 15%.

No, China is not doing the right thing. Like I said, they're paying lip service to reducing coal use, but the reality is that every year, they produce more coal than the year before. And whether that is being entirely used in China or exported, the net effect is the same.

Not sure how you read my post and interpreted it as entitlement. But people who have more money are more likely to buy things that cause pollution during their manufacture. They're more likely to buy things that cause pollution during their use. That's just reality, and pretending that it is not reality just guarantees that any policy you might come up with won't work in the real world.

That's more a poverty thing than anything else. As people earn more money, you'll see more people wanting cars, air conditioning, etc.

The thing is, they're also in the best position to take advantage of green tech to solve their power problems without horrible levels of emissions. Most of the technology is being physically built there, and they don't have two centuries of power plant infrastructure and steel smelting built around coal and coke. They're building up their industry *now*, in an era when it is possible for them to build it cleanly. It is way harder to rebuild existing plants to be clean than to build new plants in a clean way, and way harder to justify that retooling.

So there's a real opportunity for China to do this right. But as long as it is not in their best interest financially to do it right, they'll do it cheaply instead.

And the way you do it is by requiring imports to declare the energy mix that went into it, similar to how we require folks to declare what percentage of the parts of a product came from specific countries, etc., and then charge a tariff based on that number, and audit those numbers periodically. We wouldn't be telling them what to do. We would just be arbitrarily raising the cost of their products if they don't do it right, and providing an import incentive for companies that do things like build giant solar farms and battery banks to reduce their grid consumption.

China has a much higher carbon footprint per unit of production, though, and that's the real problem. All the folks living in rural areas that bike around everywhere because they don't have cars are interesting culturally, but they're not particularly relevant from a greenhouse gas perspective, because they're also not producing significant economic output.

Most of the countries with high CO2 per dollar GDP are tiny countries with minimal production. China isn't. The U.S. and India produce 0.26 and 0.27 kg CO2 per dollar of GDP. China produces 0.42 kg per dollar. They are nearly twice as bad pollution-wise.

Except that this isn't the case. A lot of manufacturing has moved to India, and it still manages to produce barely half the CO2 per dollar that China does. Because India actually has laws on pollution and enforces them. Thailand (another country that is getting a decent amount of new manufacturing) pulls of 0.24 kg per dollar, which is even better than the U.S.

China talks the talk, but doesn't walk the walk. They pay lip service to lowering emissions while spewing more and more CO2. The only way this actually stops is if the U.S. and the E.U. impose a carbon tax on imports that makes it cheaper to do the right thing than to continue to pollute. If we do that, the problem will magically fix itself.

... which is to say that despite China being the problem from a pollution production perspective, we're the real problem over here on the other side of the world, because we're continuing to support their excessively dirty production by buying goods from them because they're cheaper.

That could be interpreted in two possible ways. I'm assuming you meant by bringing the South back in, rather than by freeing the slaves.

You are correct. In your uninformed opinion those are reasonable assumptions. You don't know, you assume. What is clear or obvious from someone who has NEVER met me, isn't so clear if you have.

I've been addicted to drugs, had to dumpster dive, even sleeping in a park.

Meanwhile, the poor today have all their needs met, if they can manage a few simple steps. They can even have servants bring them food at all hours from a cornucopia of cuisines from around the world. In minutes.

Let me put it to you this way, why do people go to the gym? Because their life is easy, they have to "work out". Working out is "struggle" so you don't end up weak.

I have more scars (real and mental) than you can even imagine. What you think you know, is your own problem, not mine. I don't judge you, except for your stated biases. You're a bigot, you just don't know it.

And asking it for a good mayo recipe might cause you to eat something that would be suicide.

It also ignores that moving pictures are not the same as still pictures. When images are moving, you don't see each frame as clearly, so you can get away with lower resolution, and with a moving image, you can actually perceive far more resolution than the actual pixel resolution of each individual image, because things in the real world don't line up perfectly with grid lines on consecutive frames.

So with moving images, you would expect to perceive higher resolution above a certain point as a reduction in eyestrain and other physiological effects, rather than directly as conscious perception.

"Universe 25 was a 1960s-70s experiment by John B. Calhoun that created a "mouse utopia" with ample food, water, and nesting sites, but no predators or disease. The experiment demonstrated how an overpopulation of mice, despite a lack of material scarcity, led to a social breakdown known as the "behavioral sink". This collapse included social withdrawal, aggression, a breakdown of parental care, and a cessation of reproduction, ultimately leading to the colony's extinction." -GoogleAI created summary.

We don't want to admit it, but we're so successful and wealthy that we cannot see the value of struggle.

Or, if you want the Space version, WALL-E fat lazy human civilization.

The problem is, removing resistance makes us weaker not stronger.

I'm less likely to believe a lawyer working for Exxon than a homeless person on the street with a sign saying "The End Is Nigh!" At least the homeless person doesn't know that the things he is saying have no basis in reality.

Lawyers have a responsibility to represent their clients' interests no matter how bats**t they are. Their opinion is nothing more than the opinion of their corporate bill payers. And their bill payers are one of the more sociopathic corporations out there.

Exxon is a company that actively denies climate change even though their internal documents show that their scientists have been aware of the problem for decades. It's basically the cigarette industry all over again. There are literally no companies in the world that I trust less than oil companies when it comes to climate change.

No, they aren't. They are required to provide the numbers that the government demands. They're free to precede it with a wall of text that explains why they don't feel that blaming them for people choosing to burn their gasoline, rather than, for example, using it as a beverage, produces CO2 emissions all they want to. That's their choice. What they don't have the right to do is not provide the data.

Maybe you did, but I thought the poster's name was Thomas Jefferson. :-D

The fewer hours you work, the more productive you are during the hours you spend. There's a tipping point where it doesn't break even, though, and there's a point where you have so few hours that bulls**t like catching up on all the emails that people send about things you don't really need to know starts to dominate the time spent and productivity falls off a cliff again.

There are three factors that define productivity:

• Toil (T) - The time spent doing random s**t that nobody wants to do, but you have to do, but that probably doesn't contribute much to productivity. This is a constant reduction in productivity at the bottom of the graph.
• Energy level (e) - A curve that declines over time for each day and does not fully recover in subsequent days without days off.
• Error rate (E) - A curve that is inversely proportional to energy level, and becomes exponential at high levels of fatigue.

Raw output in a given time period is proportional to energy level. Useful output is raw output minus the error rate, because erroneous output has to be redone and cancels out its benefit. And the time spent is then reduced by the time spent on toil.

So the equation looks something like f(t) = (t - T) * (e - E). That's why small reductions in bulls**t make a big difference, and the sweet spot for time spent ends up being hard bounded by when the error rate exceeds the useful output, at which point productivity goes negative.

Hope that helps.

Same. But the difference between us is that I recognize that what made it worth spending that time was that it was something I chose to do because I wanted to do it, not because my boss told me to do it.

More to the point, every minute spent doing the things my bosses have ever told me to do was a minute I couldn't spend on those other things that are awesome and that I would gladly work crazy hours for.

So what happens when people's jobs try to take so many hours from them is that a tiny percentage of people for whom that's truly exactly what they want to do might love it, but the rest of the employees burn out and run away screaming, and you end up with not enough workers to get the product done.

And they burn out precisely because those bosses are putting their needs — getting what *they* think is an amazing and awesome project — over the workers' needs — having time to do all the stuff on the side that *the workers* think is amazing and awesome.

Not at all. Rapid progress requires adequate labor. It is less efficient with more people spending fewer hours, but still more efficient than if you burn out all of those people and you end up with only a few people spending a lot of hours and everybody else leaving the project and taking their institutional knowledge with them.

See that's the thing, I *do* work with fellow rock stars. Every single person I work with is a rock star at something. Some of them are also rock stars in their jobs.

I don't want anyone to ever lead me who doesn't acknowledge that their priorities aren't my priorities. Not if it's for more than a few weeks.

I'm not a 9-to-5'er. I just spend 56 hours a week sleeping, 40+ hours a week at work writing software, sixteen hours a week working on random projects, ten hours a week exercising, eight hours a week rehearsing in music ensembles, eight hours a week eating, five hours a week driving, 1 hour a week in church, a couple of hours of time waiting in between those things, various numbers of hours trying to find a girlfriend to spend the rest of my life with, and most of the rest of my time recovering from all of the above. Oh, and laundry once a month or so, performances once a month, lots of hours (bursty) doing planning for the ensemble that I actually run...

Sometimes it feels like I never stop working. But I have much broader interests than the one little thing that I do as my job to pay the bills. And I really feel sorry for people who don't. Because those folks aren't the ones who create the things that are amazing. They're the cogs, not the ones turning the gears.