JamisonM

People have been talking about conservation and re-foresting, and preserving the Amazon for at least 80 years. Governments all over the world establish national parks and I know some are actively working on wildlife corridors to improve ecosystems.

If we existed as a species at only slightly higher density and energy efficiency there would be a lot more space for wilderness - the good news is that climate change mitigation is also consistent with that goal!

Not to derail the conversation but I really am genuinely confused about the high level of concern about cobalt and lithium mining I often see in comments on HN. I understand that it is a dirty and difficult process but the entire petroleum-based supply chain is dirty and difficult.

Is there some solid research out there that indicates that the footprint of this mining practice is much worse?

I would dispute the idea that nuanced /messaging/ can't happen at scale (discussions are a different thing altogether). While I understand that everyone is up in arms about COVID-19 communications these days there are lots of instances around the world of effective communication that in the end had to be fairly nuanced.. most populations understand that vaccines are useful and effective but not perfect, most populations do understand that their particular risk is low but population-level risk is quite high.

I guess we can quibble about the definition of "nuance" but the idea that vaccine science and hospital capacity management is very direct doesn't hold much water with me, maybe others disagree, IDK?

Lead mitigation is pretty popular!

I think ESG scores and activists are concerned about greenhouse gases because they are inadequately regulated by the government and private initiatives are necessary to take action on them.

It is unfortunate that the previous US administration was rolling back air and water pollution standards and I agree with you that it should get more press, along with the dangers of microplastics - but I really don't think this is about "mega-corporation promoted value systems".

Sorry, what?

This is a misleading title here, there are as much as 70% fewer pollinators in circumstances where specific pollutants are present:

"Scientists studying air pollutants from both urban and rural environments found that there are up to 70% fewer pollinators, up to 90% less flower visits, and an overall 31% in pollination reduction in test plants when there were several common ground-level air pollutants present – including diesel exhaust pollutants and ozone."

That's just not going to be the most common interpretation of "Scientists find there are 70% fewer pollinators, due to air pollution" as a title.

Anyhoo, air pollution is very bad and governments should be laser focused on selling the benefits of reducing fossil fuel burning for transportation as a personal health benefit more so than as a climate change mitigation strategy.

The question you have to ask yourself about building an investment strategy around rising rates is: How much will they rise, how fast, and where does that quantity of increase on that schedule actually have an impact on my decision?

If you are looking at a 5 year time horizon will the changes in rates be enough, or fast enough to make a real difference? I personally doubt it unless an external shock acts on the market -- which of course could also cut the other way!

These interfaces are good because they are asynchronous, all the good things about old-timey terminal stuff but without the session overhead badness. If I message back and forth with a bot in a way that accomplishes a goal over a longer period of time but doesn't depend on me maintaining my attention, phone line, internet connection, or browser state for that entire period of time then in many cases it is a superior experience.

This is why I love chat-with-a-human interfaces on websites for support (although they mostly require maintaining browser state) because staying on a phone line absolutely sucks and the person helping you also doesn't have a real-time constraint so they often have the ability to get you better answers to hard questions.

I worked with some folks that did IVR systems and they were mostly doing their best with the resources and constraints they had to make the thing useful. They were measured by dropped calls, they did not like them.

The weaknesses were mostly just ordinary business stupidity.

The marketing department demands that the first option allow the caller to express interest in buying a product.. nobody ever does that but then it takes up the primest real estate in the system #1 on the first level of the tree.

Of course anyone with a billing enquiry needs to enter the account # so that the collections department has the opportunity to intercept.. but after the arrears lookup nobody in the call centre is willing to pony-up the resources to make the system retain the account number that was typed in so every customer has the then say the damn number after having just typed it in!

And in so doing you advocate that people read a book written by a British Hereditary Lord climate change denier and a Molecular biologist? I don't think there is a misunderstanding.

IDK, seemed like it was pretty important to clarify that a quote was used very deceptively!

Seems important to point out that Chan's co-author is a climate-change sceptic that is a hereditary peer in the British House of Lords after chairing the bank Northern Rock - famous for failing spectacularly in 2007. Very credible!

I feel like if it was many years ago lead pollution would be a nearly insurmountable confounder in such a study, but if you could find it I am sure it would be an interesting read.

> "the quality of the discussion would probably be significantly improved without you saying, "You obviously have no idea what you are talking about.""

Amen.

"How does this “harm users”?"

I don't know how sound this argument is but for me, as a non-Apple user I think I am harmed by people using iMessage, I can't text them without accidentally ending up in that technology ecosystem. I can get 15 context-free messages from other participants in an iMessage group chat. I freaking hate it. If it was clear that iMessage is not SMS then that same person wouldn't send an iMessage group message they would send a mass text, but they don't. I can't force that person to so my SMS in box currently has 15 messages at the top that read "Yes", "No", "Out", "Maybe", "My kid has dance so I will be late", "Sorry man, take me off this list Thursdays are no good for me now"... etc.

It sucks.

Agreed, but then the response to its infectiousness would have been different as well! And even Omicron wouldn't rise to anything close to an extinction event, it is like the opposite of MERS, way better at transmission, relatively bad at killing.

If the first wave of SARS-Cov-2 was Omicron we'd have seen a worse 1st wave on net, but a far higher survival rate, more population immunity pre-vaccine.. and part of me thinks that the response would have been better, the original SARS-Cov-2 hit a bit of a sweet-spot in terms of political accountability with respect to how slowly it moved across the world and the gradual build up of hospital crisis in most places (1st wave hot-spots excepted of course).

There are a lot of confounding variables in the question but if you look at the labour required to operate the average farm size in Iowa (360 acres) it is not a full time job, not close to a full time job.

Grain farming doesn't become a full time job until you reach over 1000 acres, if a guy farms one section of land and makes a decent living and chooses to spend that extra time enjoying life, more power to 'em, but farming in that 640-1280 acre pocket scales really well - it is a choice!

The over half of farmers in Iowa, most of which are row-crop farmers, that are running farms under 640 acres, are they dropping out because of economic pressure? Maybe some, but I think mostly it is old-timers that had a great run but they have a business that provides half an income to the next generation at the current scale and the next generation would rather do one thing than two. Either way, Dad's not retiring "poor"!

(This happens a lot in my neck of the woods, lots of 1,000 acre-ish farmers retiring with kids that are professionals that "love the farm" but have no interest in it at this scale.)

It is nonsensical but not because of the way the viruses evolved - if SARS1 or MERS had been capable of causing a genuine pandemic with their fatality rate then the response would have been different, so it wouldn't have been a mass extinction event! With SARS1 we actually managed to make a vaccine - we just didn't end up needing it.

Your grandpa is rich, yes.

The fact that many farmers choose to operate their business in a way that is under-leveraged and often over-work themselves instead of hiring outside help that they can certainly afford is an artifact of culture, not a measure of wealth.

Of course, coming from a rural community there is a pretty good chance that you engage in an unusually high level of personal savings and as such have converted a high income into high asset holdings, I know I do - it is something in the water I think!

I don't think this is an accurate characterization of the issue, if you are referencing the Schmeiser case then that wasn't the basis for Monsanto's complaint (although it was the basis of his failed defence).

Grain farmers are doing just fine, they are not being ground to dust by the system.

But it is certainly true that production subsidies serve to make landlords and suppliers rich just as they serve to make farmers rich - your tax dollars at work!

If the claim that "Suicide is not a quantitative measure of mental health" means that such large fluctuations in the suicide numbers across many jurisdictions with differing underlying rates can't be used to inform any opinions about the impacts of the pandemic on mental health then I emphatically disagree.

I don't know who said you can measure mental health without accounting for the environment, I never made that claim! I literally said "I don't think it is "safe to say" much of anything about suicide rates or individual motivations, it is a complex issue."

Disentangling pandemic effects from "normal" life is complex but overall in the US suicide rates are actually down for 2020, though slightly increased for younger Americans. The trend in the US was upwards into 2019 so these are positive developments.

It is very difficult to properly assess 2020-2021 survey data both because the "you should be depressed" messaging is very strong in the media and the bias in who responds to surveys is complicated by the pandemic.

I am a Canadian and we saw an enormous drop in suicides, 30+%, in 2020 despite survey data (and wacky conspiracies) to the contrary.

I don't think it is "safe to say" much of anything about suicide rates or individual motivations, it is a complex issue.

You can think without language, for sure, but the idea of a race - can you construct that without it? You almost certainly possess the idea from it being communicated to you via language and it is a social construct.

"Individual expectations needn’t be stored in linguistic form: you can have a feeling about which horse will win the race, without thinking up a sentence about it."

Are we sure about this? This sounds made up, I don't know. Does the idea of a race even exist in one's mind in a non-linguistic form?

All of which is unrelated to the idea of some sort of /global/ USD short squeeze, which is just a nonsense idea.

Holding debt in another nation's currency involves risks but it is also the case that bond issuers can mitigate that risk with financial tools at the time of borrowing. It is doubly true that the CNY has and still is trading within a narrow band over the life of these debts, currency risks are not a factor in this story in any way.

Absolutely crazy that the top comment on this story is a "USD short squeeze" idea after 5 hours. These amounts, 200 million, 150 million USD.. this is peanuts, a fart in the wind.

PROTIP: Anyone like Lyn Alden that is offering premium stock tips is by definition a fraud, if you can beat the markets you just beat the markets and Scrooge McDuck-it, you don't run a damn newsletter.

"If they're allowed to practice however, I suppose it gatekeeps for commitment / "how badly do you want this""

Yeah, this is absolutely the most generous interpretation I can come up with, and even then I find it a bit wanting. If you are the best on the floor at task X but have a complex and stressful personal life, or even just other interests, or simply not the dexterity for this particular task, you get shut out.

I get it, excellence and all that.. I have too many hang ups from hearing people make fun of folks for bad spelling or whatever, touches a raw nerve.

Heavily lopsided upside risk means they are never in danger of personal financial calamity. Nicholas M. Maounis looks like he is doing just fine even though he seems to have lost enough money for a hundred lifetimes.

All the incentives are aligned to go big on a theory and talk it up, and then if you are wrong just dust yourself off and try again- all the while cashing your paycheques.

"I rather listen to the hedge fund guys, at least they have skin in the game, don't they?"

Not really, right? They make a lot of money even after they get it wrong?

"Right now, it feels like the supply issue cannot be remedied or solved because of heavy regulations and a stagnant productivity."

This supply issue has existed for, what, a few months? We can literally see the containers piled up on the coasts, is there a good reason to believe that once the backlog is cleared there will be some kind of permanent problem? I have not seen a compelling argument, the original article here doesn't make much of an argument for sustained issues although they give that impression with the headline and the intro.

I will be very shocked if heavy sustained demand doesn't induce productivity gains (which have evaded the US economy for quite some time), but I will also be very surprised if the level of demand we are seeing from pent-up COVID-19 cash sustains itself much longer, a lot of goods demand is going to convert into services demand - if only because of shipping delays.