Per capita the US is leading. The numbers are even worse when you consider China is the "workbench of the West".
India could catch up faster if the US would share technological advancements, or better yet, help secure the capital necessary to build out renewable infra.
The developing world is being asked to hamstring their own growth by the countries that are responsible for the bulk of historical emissions. The US, UK, and western Europe in general used cheap fossil fuels to industrialize, mortgaging our global future for quick growth. It would only be equitable (and in everyone's best interest) for us to help mitigate further harms. We need net zero. In reality we need negative emissions, but that's unproven at scale.
Got laid off February of last year. Was hired 7 months later at a job I worked at during my undergrad, for much lower pay. It beats being unemployed.
Considering going into the electrician trade while coding as a consultant/freelancer. I have ADHD (combined type), and find I much prefer working doing something a bit more physical. My previous and current jobs are both remote, which has posed some challenges despite the flexibility. Would much rather a hybrid or in-person experience at this point.
It's really telling that you used the normative framing rather than talking about how common it is. I get it. We're abnormal, atypical freaks. Aberrations. Being redheaded is uncommon; being trans is abomination.
You're free to choose your words and framing as you wish. But don't pretend teaching people about sexuality, gender identity, and how society sorts humans into two boxes is the real division and inaccuracy.
I think it's really close-minded to stereotype millions of trans people and treat them like a monolith. Culture shapes behavior sure, but trans people globally operate under similar constraints. Whether or not you consider yourself part of the global or <insert country> LGBTQ+ community is pretty irrelevant to bigots. There's no way for you to appease or become "respectable" in their eyes, even if you throw trans people under the bus. You're always gonna be a f*g to them.
> There is nothing similar between the lives of a trans person in the Middle East or South Asia and those in the West.
I don't have first hand knowledge, but actual trans people I've heard from who have lived in both South Asia and the West and are in community with trans people on both sides of that divide do not echo that sentiment, and particularly this upthread idea, "These are not trans people like you see in the anglosphere", has been attributed to a combination of a extremely similar (but with different local names used) process of third-sexing in both South Asian and anglo cultures plus orientalism applied by anglo observers to South Asian cultures and the third-sexing going on within it.
Perhaps your version of bigots, but I can handle the ones I interact with much better personally with a different approach than -- paraphrasing -- "fuck all bigots."
I think the absolutionist path is wrong. I don't care about the respect or acknowledgment of the monolith of the "other." I do care about the people in my community and those I interact with on a regular basis. In that vein, I have found it useful to not be so inflexible about things. The majority of people are open to getting along if you get along with them. The rest are either working from a memory of bad experiences or have just simply been surrounded too long in a dogma they've adopted as their own. But these are not intractable problems.
What is an almost intractable problem is having all of my efforts be made moot, when a bunch of hell-raisers with nothing else on their mind besides "me and my problems" decide to make noise and drive even greater decisiveness.
I would like for Western individualism and cultural imperialism and disintegration to leave me and my people the fuck alone. I don't need your help or your ideas or to be saved from my foolishness -- thank you -- I'm doing well with my own devices.
Were you on the front lines of the pandemic? Respectfully it sounds like you weren't. When nurses and doctors are using trash bags against a novel disease because supplies have run out—that's posing a problem to the health system. When they have to move ventilators from upstate NY to NYC—that's posing a problem to the health system. You're not going to find a source from an epidemiologist saying 100% of exposures lead to an infection. Otherwise you would have already posted it as part of your conspiracy theory.
They even deployed the national guard in areas to set up tent hospitals because the local hospitals couldn't keep up. The reason saying "not everyone gets sick!!!1!!" attacks the narrative is not because it's correct (although it is). It attacks the narrative because people can be asymptomatic carriers. Can't believe the same shit is being rehashed now, several years into a new endemic illness that could have been overcome with a global version of the lockdowns that Vietnam and China did (until realizing literally no other country cared enough).
Lastly—how the fuck is a government supposed to get the IFR absolutely 100% correct for a novel virus without rolling out mandatory testing and reporting? I don't know what people expect from the government. Magic I guess. Didn't lock down but you should have? Right to jail. Locked down but things weren't as bad as we thought? Right to jail.
The real criticism of the US government should be for the economic policy it chose to pursue over the real lives and health of its citizens. Don't expect that conversation on here.
Also note that in Washington State we had originally received a field hospital, but the quarantine was so effective at preventing our health system from collapsing that the army redeployed it to California by April.
There’s this constant misconception that the quarantine was about keeping people safe from COVID. It wasn’t. What it was about was preventing our hospitals from being so overwhelmed they could no longer treat emergencies or acute medical problems. The trigger for a lockdown here was pretty straightforward: over N% bed occupancy in the state hospital system was the trigger.
This kind of attack on people for disagreeing is what most of us come to HN to avoid. Conspiracy theories are fun entertainment but anathema to discussion.
I'll just quote from Adam Smith as to the problem. I think the proposed solution is good. I think "best option" is needlessly specific, and subjective. No need to let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
“As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for its natural produce. The wood of the forest, the grass of the field, and all the natural fruits of the earth, which, when land was in common, cost the labourer only the trouble of gathering them, come, even to him, to have an additional price fixed upon them. He must then pay for the licence to gather them, and must give up to the landlord a portion of what his labour either collects or produces. This portion, or, what comes to the same thing, the price of this portion, constitutes the rent of land, and in the price of the greater part of commodities, makes a third”
Fair, I didn't intent to zero in on the word "best" there. I think its still important to know why its the best of the options we have today though.
There's a huge blind spot in only applying that Adam Smith quote to private landlords - the government. Functionally they own all land, between property taxes which act much like rent, and more extreme measures like eminent domain, the government has staked a claim to all land and offers us the privilege to live on it as long as we play by their rules.
We have to pay rent in the form of property taxes. We have to pay taxes on any value crested from the land, and often have to get licensed and/or inspected when doing so.
Adam Smith's writings are much better used as an argument against many of today's government structures rather than against private land owners renting it out to other private citizens. And it makes sense, Smith was writing in opposition to the monarchy of his time.
I'm not saying that there aren't plenty of terrible private landlords or that our housing market seems reasonable. But if we stop complaining about private land ownership at the point of the individual we haven't gone far enough. The government shouldn't be claiming ownership over everything and everyone within its borders. Fix that, then we can really worry about what any one land owner does with the smaller pieces of land they own.
Fundamentally that's the problem of allocating scarce resources. If they're not allocated to whoever pays the most, it would be some other way which still excludes people. Maybe it's to the people who promise to fight for the king, or the winners of a lottery but at the end of the day, those other ways aren't better because someone still misses out.
It also creates disincentives for letting land lay unused. Why would we have forests or parks or homesteads when we have to pay taxes based on what someone else thinks the potential value generation of the land is?
And how to we make sure that such a tax doesn't just push us further down the path of using as many natural resources as we can? A land tax is based on the assumption that all land should be used to its maximal financial value. I don't know about you, but I fundamentally disagree with that and don't want to live in a world where we've codified the need to use up whatever we have.
The western US states all have urban growth boundaries for this reason.
> just push us further down the path of using as many natural resources as we can?
Using more surface area is using as many natural resources as we can.
Energy = mass * distance. The further people live away, from each other, the more energy is consumed, for doing everything.
A land value tax would incentivize density, and density reduces the use of as natural resources.
The people living in 10x10x10 homes in Honk Kong are using magnitudes less natural resources than hundreds of millions of people in US suburbia and exurbia.
> Energy = mass * distance. The further people live away, from each other, the more energy is consumed, for doing everything
That only holds if things stay just as centralized as they are today. If people live further from each other they have more potential for producing their own goods. That also means everyone around then has that potential as well. For example, living in a dense area means any lumber you buy was shipped in, and likely even crossed national borders. Living in a less populated area can mean access to lumber from a local lumber yard that processes trees grown locally.
I think the real challenge we have today is that we are stuck in the middle, our society is neither designed for dense populations or low density populations. There's nothing that I've seen that can definitively show that dense populations will always work better than less dense, more independent populations. Either can work well and either can be much better utilized than what we have today.
What I really take issue with is a central authority forcing one approach on us. Because we can't show why one path has to be the best, and because we don't know what we don't know, the decision should never be made at all by those in charge. The beauty of a federal model is to allow smaller regions to go their own way and try different approaches. I wouldn't balk at all if Los Angeles wanted to try a land value tax, let's see what happens. I personally don't think it will work well and I think there isn't a good answer for how to appropriately value the land, but I also don't live there and as long as my federal tax dollars aren't given to LA I have no dog in that fight.
> If people live further from each other they have more potential for producing their own goods.
I think this is extremely unlikely because it is so much cheaper to mass manufacture and ship things across literally half the entire world than to make them locally.
Energy/resource usage is not dominated by low frequency lumber trips, it is the every day push and pull of the mass of people, water, sewage, garbage, food, etc.
Without reverting to 1400s lifestyle where you only consume stuff made within a few hundred miles of you, I don’t think there is any way a modern populace consumed less by using more space.
So you would push for centralization and higher density not because its the only good solution, but because you think people wouldn't want the alternative, right? I don't see anything wrong with your guess that people wouldn't want it, but should that option be effectively removed from us through programs like a tax that incentivizes high density?
There's a sawmill I get lumber from about 10 minutes from my house. He gets all his logs from arborists within a few hours of here. They all give him the logs for free because the alternative is either burning them or having to pay by the truckload to take them to the dump. I don't live in the 1400s but I do very much appreciate the ability to get lumber that was milled locally and would otherwise have just been dropped in a hole with a bunch of garbage.
I don’t see why your lumber mill has to be affected?
Land value tax proposals would mostly just change things in urban areas, where land is scarce and valuable. There are no lumber mills there, just rich people who own the land from either having inherited it or an REIT owning it, waiting for it to appreciate.
I’m assuming you live in a rural area, which have (relatively) low land values.
It’s the strip mall suburbs that are highly inefficiently developed due to no penalty on the inefficiency (caused by low density).
I wasn't trying to say my lumber mill would be affected by a land tax, though presumably they would if a land tax was imposed here and a different business could theoretically extract more value from that land.
I raised a local mill as an example of how a less dense area can also lead to higher efficiency and lower resource use.
I was responding to the idea that we need a land value tax to push us towards higher density living because that's the most efficient. Its only efficient if we have centralized infrastructure that will always have to be shipped across the country or around the globe to get basic goods to people. I used my local mill as an example of how lower density can lead to resource efficiency that will simply never be beat no matter how efficient a centralized industry and shipping is.
Does it scale? Well I have no idea. Do people want the life in a less dense area? Again, no idea and I think most people living in a dense area don't really know what that life would look like to answer that question. I have plenty of uncertainties for either approach, what I don't want is for a central planner to push one path on us when its not clear the right way to go
>what I don't want is for a central planner to push one path on us when its not clear the right way to go
It is not possible to not have this. Land plots and road grids and design have to be designed for dense living, or less dense living, or rural living. You can’t mix and match.
What we have now is the worst of all worlds, where a little, tiny bit is dense, and then there is an unsustainable medium density where people want to have their cake and eat it too (but physics does not allow for it). And that is where 95% of the population of the world is.
That's absolutely false, humanity existed before central planners drew property lines and build state-run roads.
It might be reasonable to say that we can't have what we have today without central planning, but that's a very different discussion. You don't even have to go back that far, most roads were created by people just trying to get from point A to point B, there was no central planner.
The pandemic complicated things greatly for physical businesses. Bowlero started buying up during the pandemic when these businesses had no alternatives. And throwing up some flat screens while cutting hours and removing janitors isn't renovating "dark, dingy, non-updated/maintained" locations.
Ah yes, the well known phenomenon that reality comfortingly aligns with our exact political opinions and not that of those pesky idiots on the other side of the aisle. Totally rational and bound to be true.
India could catch up faster if the US would share technological advancements, or better yet, help secure the capital necessary to build out renewable infra.
The developing world is being asked to hamstring their own growth by the countries that are responsible for the bulk of historical emissions. The US, UK, and western Europe in general used cheap fossil fuels to industrialize, mortgaging our global future for quick growth. It would only be equitable (and in everyone's best interest) for us to help mitigate further harms. We need net zero. In reality we need negative emissions, but that's unproven at scale.