Eh, fair- but it should have been obvious what I meant from the context of the paragraph- non-Residential-private-citizen-usage.

No, because it's the producer that's engaging in the level of inefficiency- not the consumer.
You can argue that the consumer is vaguely aware that buying shit from China is terrible for the environment, but if you're trying to argue that CO2 isn't an externality, this is going to get amusing.

So, if I get this right, Americans are responsible for Chinese fueling their factories with coal. Is that correct?

I'm not blaming China for anything- I'm pointing out the complexity of the situation.
I said you can't simply say, "per-capita", because the picture is insanely more complicated than that.
Chinese per-capita usage is going to explode (it's already exploding) as more and more of their 85 year old pig farmers die and are replaced by people who actually use their electrical grid. You can't compare the Chinese population's personal energy usage with any first world country.
The average for all of China is just a little over 1.1kW constant load for each person.
Think about that.
While all Chinese people may be connected to the grid (or so I read), many are obviously not using power at all.

And still twice as bad as the Netherlands, and the EU on average? 5x worse than the Netherlands!

Why do you guys suck so bad?

Well, I said victim of violent crime, not murder ;)

Speaking of which, you're almost twice as likely to be murdered in London than to be killed by a car. You people have funny priorities.

The part you don't fucking get about any of this, is the cultures are different.
You have a safety culture. Every fucking square inch of your country is covered in CCTV cameras that the police can access without warrant.
That's not the culture we have.
If we wanted that culture- we'd have it.
Our culture is probably not for you, and your culture is very definitely not for us.
I thought this was settled back in 1781 when Cornwallis surrendered to Washington, but who knows.

Your generalizations are stupid. The most dangerous state in the US for pedestrians is fucking New Mexico. It's not because of stroads.
Are stroads a good idea, or bad? Who knows- who's to say. There's arguments in either direction, but no strong evidence. But you call it objective. You need to pull your head out of your own ass, you limey fuck.

Even as someone who votes left more than any other way, I'd be entirely okay with killing the AMT. It is a huge pain to deal with.

The real problem, IMO, is that Congress needs to get off its a** and pass laws requiring brokerages and retirement plans to provide all of the tax data in a fully computed form so that you can fill in the boxes on your tax worksheet and be done, rather than having to look through every single line and figure out which ones were short-term, which were long-term, which had foreign tax, etc. Even with TurboTax, even with basically everything coming from Edward Jones, it *still* takes me two or three hours every year to fill in the information correctly for my taxes. I can't imagine trying to do that by hand on paper.

The real problem with requiring icons to be a specific shape is that it makes apps harder to recognize. Just look at how much confusion Google's icon rebranding has been, with every icon looking a lot like a multicolored square, and you'll understand what I mean. Now imagine every app icon on an entire operating system being a rounded square.

Certainly true for highways, yes. There's also next to no good alternative to individual cars for highway driving, though. Amtrak is very, very limited, Greyhound is slow *and* very limited, airplanes are grossly fuel inefficient and are generally limited to relatively long distances, and that's about it.

Not sure why you think people would drive fewer miles. Most people in cars are trying to get to a specific place, not driving just to drive. Would people plan shorter trips? Maybe for some small percentage of leisure driving, but leisure driving is already a small percentage of driving, so that's a small reduction in fuel use for a small percentage of a small percentage of trips. That's hardly worth the negative impact on everything else.

Incorrect.

No. Land owners that owned their mineral rights were able to lease them.

You're a fucking moron.

Educate yourself.
"Mineral rights can be severed from surface rights, meaning one party may own the land above, while another owns the resources below. This separation is common in oil- and gas-rich states like Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and North Dakota."

You fucking political ideologues are astonishingly ignorant of the things you have strong opinions on.

The environment doesn't care, of course.
Humans care. And that was made obvious in my example.

Per-capita is important to gauge- but people are not the majority of CO2 emissions. Industry is.
If you want to subtract all industrial CO2 emission, and then do a per-capita on what's left, then we can meaningfully compare "A Chinese Person's CO2" and "An American Person's CO2"
But once we do that, we also need to look at the value of the industry, because CO2 is universal, and we have a right to know what we're getting for that cost.
An MRI machine, or some GI Joe toys ironically made in China?
Pretending like the environment doesn't care about industry, but does care what polity some arbitrary division belongs to is laughably stupid.

You don't care about facts here- you a predecided belief, and you won't suffer it challenged.

I see- your arbitrary line is better than my arbitrary line.

Let's just look at it this way- you're more likely to be a victim of a violent crime walking in London than you are be killed by a car in the US as a pedestrian.
Your violent crime rate is downright impressive. Talk about murder streets.

That's not how stock grants work. That trillion dollars doesn't come from Tesla. It comes from the stock market through share dilution. The company can absolutely still be profitable no matter how much equity it chooses to give out.

Well, he renamed it and made minor changes around the edges so he could claim that it was broken and he fixed it. And then, of course, proceeded to violate the agreement he signed.

Excellent post, just a couple of comments.

First, it's interesting that Nikkos said "a previous administration", without naming it. It was, of course, Trump 1.0.

Second, international treaties on refugees don't require a country to accept every refugee and there are multiple examples where nations have made agreements that modify which county must handle asylum claims. For example, the US-Canada Safe Third Country agreement specifies that asylum seekers must make their asylum claim in whichever country they arrive in first. If the US and Mexico had a similar agreement, then refugees could not enter from Mexico at all. Trump tried to get Mexico to sign a Safe Third Country agreement, but Mexico refused -- and it probably would have been invalid anyway, since Mexico might not satisfy the requirements of a "safe" country under the US law that authorizes the signing of Safe Third Country agreements.

Instead, Trump signed the "Migrant Protection Protocols" agreement with Mexico, which was the "remain in place" agreement. You said that no other country should be willing to put up with it, but Mexico did formally agree to it, though only to avoid tariffs. Of course, Mexico has declined to renew the protocols in Trump 2.0 (though Trump announced they had, which Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum immediately denied -- Trump's habit of unilaterally announcing that an agreement has been reached obviously doesn't really work).

Anyway, there are lots of reasons why countries might agree to various limitations on asylum processes to manage refugee volumes, and these agreements are often perfectly valid under international and national law. Trump, of course, doesn't care about legality, or humanity, only what he can get away with.

No, I'm saying that all things being relative, the UK has murder roads compared to several countries in the EU as well. How can you not get it?
Your complaint about our roads is that we have 1.5 pedestrian fatalities per 100k population, which is 300% that of the UK.
Well, the UK is 200% that of the Netherlands. Why are you exempt from having murder roads, or have you drawn a magical line in the sand where roads are murdery? Where's the line in the sand for Poland's roads, or do they get a pass?

Your labeling is laughably inconsistent.

The 2x was for you and the Netherlands:
UK: 5.3
Netherlands: 2.3
2.3x if we're being exact.

I said that the US is ~3x that of the UK.
It turns you are right- and that is wrong.
I got it from the CDC, but it appears I didn't see what the date on it was:
"Between 2013 and 2022, U.S. pedestrian death rates increased 50% (from 1.55 to 2.33 per 100,000 population),"
So we'll have to revise that to 4.3x that of the UK.

Why did you leave Romania out of your list at 24.7 per million?
Ukraine at 23 per million?

I have already pointed out that you selectively chose Western Europe, which is simply safer in spite of sharing EU regulations with the likes of Romania.

We were comparing death rates without regard for miles driven. If you add miles driven, you only dilute your argument and move it in our favor since our accidents are spread over far more miles than yours. This is basic math. Sure- our "more miles driven" aren't enough to offset our high fatality rate, but still, it only served to dilute your argument.

No, it's an opinion held by a group of people. I think you perhaps need to look up the word objective and evaluate its proper usage.
Stroads with very low fatality rates exist.
And no, while most stroads exist in the US, most of the US is not stroads in the slightest.
Further, stroad density doesn't track pedestrian fatality rate per capita in the slightest.
To a rational person, that would disprove your argument- but I bet you'll beat that drum until your arms go numb.

I think that just about confirms the ethnocentrism.

Of course I cherry picked!
You made a gross claim, all I needed to do was provide a counterexample to prove you were full of shit, and I did. I'm glad you wasted so much breath demonstrating that fact.
I will allow you to revise your argument, though.

There's more of that ethnocentrism. You made an argument that was wrong.
It was an inappropriate generalization used to come up with some poorly-reasoned arguments. You have no fucking clue how I feel about the US, and are trying to stereotype.

Seriously, you are ethnocentric trash. Nothing more.
Rest well knowing that the US has the traffic system that the US populace wants, and votes for, and at the end of the day- at least we're not British ;)

Economic output isn't wealth.
I'd agree that pinning it to wealth is very wrong.

GDP isn't a useless measure in the slightest. It's true that for certain things, like getting your dick sucked, their are parity issues. PPP addresses some of those (though not that particular one) but also brings along a host of other problems.

For now, it's our best measure of what kind of activity that contributes to the world is on the other half of the cost of the CO2.

1t of CO2 gets emitted.
Is it better if it's used by 10 Chinese people, 1 American, $100 in MRI machines, or $10 in plastic toys?
Saying it was emitted by "China", or by "The US" is only useful as far as you can tell what it was really used for.

Ya, uncapped wells are a problem.
A Biden-era law provided almost $5B to find and cap them. Haven't really kept up on whether there has been progress on that, or DOGE decided that money was better spent on propaganda on my radio and TV from Homeland Security.

Yeah, your definition of "mega-mansion" definitely is a starter house. My parents' home was two stories plus a basement. I can think of plenty of three-story houses that aren't even remotely mansions (e.g. row houses in San Francisco).

Penalizing people for using space efficiently by building up just leads to more suburban sprawl and lower housing density. It's the opposite of what any sane urban planner would recommend.