3,812 karma · joined September 24, 2010
https://ddebernardy.substack.com/p/a-natural-language
I help create abundant ecosystems.
There are plenty of good reasons to not like fossil fuels, mind you. But the carbon hockey stick is not one of them.
If you look into the atmospheric carbon dioxide data, you'll observe seasonal up and downs with the low point that takes us back to around where the high point from about a decade earlier. This means that we could resolve the issue very quickly in a scenario where farms keep enough plants around to soak up the soil emissions during tilling and harvesting operations.
Alley cropping is just one option to do so, btw. As I explain in a separate article [1], any well designed intercropping scenario should do the trick. The point is to not have a wide open field with no plants that could keep the fungi alive, block the wind to keep the carbon dioxide around, and soak up the carbon dioxide.
It can't be perfect because of night emissions and because trees eventually lose their leaves in the fall, but we can do far better than what we're currently doing.
[1]: http://ddebernardy.substack.com/p/stop-climate-agenda-soil-n...
TL;DR for those who don't click links:
- Corporate green solutions are shams
- Promote gardening if you care about fossil fuels
- An accounting chicanery keeps natural emissions out of view
- The hockey stick is actually about canopy loss
- Switching to alley cropping would reverse it
Happy to answer questions.
TL;DR for those who don't click links: Corporate green solutions are shams. Promote gardening if you care about fossil fuels. An accounting chicanery keeps natural emissions out of view. The hockey stick is actually about canopy loss. Switching to alley cropping would reverse it. Promote food sovereignty if you care about ending oppression. Share this if you’d like to do your bit. Also, we need some help: can you offer work, support, or a retweet [1]?
[1] https://twitter.com/ddebernardy/status/1591198286790418432
Happy to answer questions over the WE.
This is a TL;DR version for readers who only read discussions. The link is a summary of my short book, which you can read online at the same address.
What the book does is expose an accounting chicanery that underpins the fossil fuel narrative for climate change. In a nutshell, the carbon accounting framework separates land-based emissions from other emissions like fossil fuel, and builds on the idea that you can't do much about the former. This is actually false, as evidenced by forestry research, and it provides cover for land theft and ecofascism in developing countries. The book goes on to provide a soil-based explanation for the carbon hockey stick and its global desertification ramifications. Lastly, it puts bottom-up solutions in front of the problem that communities can implement now without depending on governments.
Dumb money is pouring in, and institutional investors are riding the dead cat bounce.
For Boeing specifically, it's because they fired thousands of workers to cut their costs. And to their credit, they're actually expecting a long slump. Many businesses are still deluding themselves.
That seems like a rather murky assertion...
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/pelosi-tweet-chinatown-tou...
That assumes your immune system wouldn't kick in during the asymptomatic phase or a time close to exiting the latter. But your immune system would actually kick in as soon as it detects the infection, which would plausibly be much earlier. That would effectively buying you time to figure out which antibodies to produce before things become out of control.
Might your search history be so that you're so contrarian that Google suggests contrarian results? :D
Not just higher. The original article (the one out of China) that mentioned that there might be some positive effects reportedly suggested using doses that were a whopping 5 times higher than the usually prescribed amounts: 500mg/day vs the usual 100mg/day.
What more, the same article put forward that the drug was considered generally safe and without any potentially troublesome side effects. That raised more than a few eyebrows amongst the medical staff who knew the drug.
Previous discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=utf8everywhere.org
The situation in France, for instance, is unenviable at the moment and absolutely not sustainable: albeit to a lesser degree as in the US, there's not enough PPE for essential staff, not enough masks for everyone else, and most crucially not enough tests to go about. Yet there's a full lockdown with fines and all, and insofar as I'm aware there isn't enough financial help for employers or employees or the self-employed or anyone else. It's only a matter of time before everyone realizes that they're going into this like it's 1914, expecting it'll all be over by the autumn.
It won't.
It won't, because of asymptomatic cases and because the virus is spreading in developing countries. Rich countries won't want to shell out the trillions that might be needed so the latter can cope with the situation. (And that will translate into yet another migration crisis to boot. Etc. Etc.)
For better or worse, the current lockdown measures in a growing number of countries are only postponing the inevitable mass outbreak by a few weeks. That is, unless countries get their act together and find a huge pot of money to tap into -- and in periods with a collapsing economy, the only sane pot of money to tap into is wealth. I'm not holding my breath.
[1]: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/11/11/exhaust-alternative...
[2]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/01/singing-stops-...
https://www.francetvinfo.fr/sante/maladie/coronavirus/bruno-...
J'invite (...) toutes les entreprises qui ont accès aujourd'hui au chômage partiel, c'est-à-dire qui ont leurs salariés payés par l'Etat, à faire preuve de la plus grande modération en matière de versement de dividendes"
Sounds about right. The US is heading for a rough ride, which is made worse by a combination of lack of universal health care and sane coverage being tied to having an employer (or lack thereof of late). To say nothing of leadership (or, there too, lack thereof of late).
That said, the real stories will be sub-Saharan Africa and other poor countries IMO, plus Brazil and India in all likelihood. I'm struggling to imagine Western countries doing the right thing and extending a couple of trillion dollars to poor countries before it completely gets out of hands over there, even though it would be the right thing to do. Short of that, there will be new waves, over and over, until we've a vaccine.
As I understood they took example on what Germany did in 2008, and learned from what worked over there. Whether all countries do the same is another story altogether, but at least in France they might save a good number of jobs (by inflating the public debt, but that's a separate issue).
Oh, that one's simple enough if you assume they're part of the reason why you'd leave the country. And while we're on that topic, the same two reasons might also get factored into deciding to not come to SF or any other US city -- alongside guns, overpriced education, and overpriced healthcare.
Of course. And to be clear I'm not quibbling about CEO pay being higher than the minimum wage.
The question that I've an issue with is how much larger. Back in the 1950s the answer seemed to be 20x the minimum wage or whereabouts. Nowadays it's more like 360x. [0]
CEOs were doing the same kind of job at the time.
And just think about it: it means the typical large company CEO earns in one day what his baseline employees earn in a whole year. That's just a recipe for a French or Russia style Revolution to erupt.
Plus, who actually needs $1M/year? I've earned fairly good money for years -- but still a fraction of that -- and I'd have no idea how to spend that much without investing up the wazoo. And in case you're thinking "I'd know how", sure, the answer is yes, everyone does -- for a few months. As a salary, $1M/year is ludicrous. And $10+M/year is sociopathic. No one is worth that much.
[0]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/dianahembree/2018/05/22/ceo-pay...
But that's besides the point. What on earth do they need to get paid that much for? Even if you assume they're contributing 100x what line workers are doing, they'll do just fine earning under $1M/year.
Plus, you then pinpoint the bigger issue. Yeah, the investor class exists because, you know, someone shaved $32 off of everyone's salary so 5 people could get paid a total of ~$70M/year.
Remote: Ideally -- but not necessarily -- with a team that is mostly located between US Central and India (i.e. Europe compatible).
Willing to relocate: Depends on the opportunity.
Technologies: Management, Marketing, Sales, Finance, Python (mostly Scrapy, a bit of TensorFlow), Ruby (mostly scripting), PHP (~10 years), JS (~10 years), CSS (~10 years), MySQL (~10 years), Postgres (~10 years, among the top StackOverflow users), Network Engineering.
Résumé/CV: upon request
Email: ddebernardy@gmail.com
To my mind, the parent post was referring to lengthier, more complicated scripts. Speaking as one who wrote and routinely maintained such scripts at one point, I cannot agree more with the sentiment that most if not all of them could and should have been written in Python or Ruby or some other scripting language instead.
And in fact, they did. By the time I was reaching adulthood, that was that hard limit built into Win95, give or take boot errors if you had a quarter of that (which was gigantic at the time; 64MB was more than enough to boot it).
Fast forward another 25 years to today, and laptops routinely have 16GB of RAM, and higher end Mac Pros can apparently get a whopping 1.5TB of RAM.
Put another way, the high-end went from .1MB to 1TB in 40 years or so.
I get that we're reaching the physical limits of miniaturization, but I'd still be surprised if my grand kids don't have exabytes of RAM or equivalent on whatever the hell their main devices will be by the time they reach adulthood.
IMHO you won't fix it with technology as it runs much deeper. But you can remove comments to sweep a big part of the toxicity under the rug.
If you'd like a good overview of the longer story, Ezra Klein, who just released a book on the subject, was on Chris Hayes' "Why is this Happening?" podcast earlier this week ("Why we're polarized, with Ezra Klein").