Great point. I have a comment below that goes into some of the difficulty with this distinction.
To be fair, many small/mid-sized companies that act as suppliers to larger companies would basically have the larger company doing the carbon accounting for them.
For large companies, I think it would look more like an accounting capability than a climate/energy science one. The carbon credit market might become regulated with some accreditation system after these wild west years.
Well that would drive up demand for fossil fuels and profits for extraction companies, leading to more extraction. Is this a real idea (proposed policy in a country) or just something you wrote down?
I go back and forth on the push for carbon neutrality for large companies (as opposed to some form of carbon tax). I'll give a few examples that I've seen first-hand in my work as a consultant.
1. A large state-owned African agricultural company is using satellite and soil-sample data to measure the carbon sequestration potential of agricultural land if certain farming techniques are used (no-till, etc). They use satellite and soil-sample data feeding into a biological model implemented in fortran (from some academic paper that may or may not be replicated) for the estimation. The plan is to go to farmers and ask them to switch the technique. The company would sell carbon credits, give the participating farmers a cut and keep the rest. This has great potential! but the large-scale implementation is very difficult manage. The company would at least need to randomly check in on participating farmers. It should also take soil samples over time to make sure the technique is working. Carbon credit sellers should be auditable, but the government relations and size of the company might make that difficult to do rigorously.
2. An analytics tool hopes to help large companies identify the parts of their supply chain that can reduce the overall carbon emissions of a product with the lowest price increase to the end-consumer. Think about BMW sourcing steel from China for example. If this helps companies actively manage their supply chain in order to lower emissions, then suppliers will adopt to low-carbon techniques over time. The problem is that it requires suppliers to disclose their emissions accurately. Many supply chains in carbon-intensive industries are global and fragmented. If a bad-actor supplier on the other side of the world lied and got caught, they could just change their name and carry on.
3. Global supply chains also present issues with carbon taxes at the drilling/mining site. You can't force foreign countries to tax this (and if you did they would be incentivized to cheat), and you can't force foreign companies to accurately disclose energy use. A domestic energy tax would make local manufacturing uncompetitive, which is something most countries are not willing to sacrifice.
The debate between carbon neutrality vs carbon/extraction taxes is the choice between inventing an entire new bureaucracy of enforcement (carbon audits, carbon disclosure, etc) or the impossible task of rallying and enforcing global action (every country imposes the same tax, no exceptions). As an engineer, I understand the seeming beauty and efficiency of the second option, but I think the first is ultimately going to be our best bet.
Krugman also claimed in the same article that Capital in the 20th century was not fully read by most "Like A Brief History of Time".
He is right that Piketty's first book is probably just worth it for the introduction and most non-economists never read the rest, but if he cant get through A Brief History of Time then he's got other problems. Hawking made that book very readable and accessible!
Interestingly, the moment when property was supposedly deemed sacred was the end of the 18th century ("Life, liberty, estate", derived from Locke but was codified in society with the US Constitution and French Revolution). This idea is deeply ingrained in our values, but let's investigate what those founders actually believed.
At the time of the Founding Fathers, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson were in agreement about playing down the protection of property. Franklin saw property as a "creature of society"[1]. This is why they changed the language of the Declaration of Independency to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness". The last is not meant to be a stand-in for "property" or "estate," it actually derives from a separate clause in the Virginia Declaration of Rights[2]: "life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety." Jefferson intentionally dropped the property clause in the Declaration of independence, reflecting how he saw property: not an inalienable right.
Entering into the early US, the majority of fiscal revenue was based off of taxing property (there was no income tax). This aligns with Franklin and Jefferson in basically saying that the state has a claim to the property that is possessed by citizens.
> the engineering-related department consuming the ETL’s output should likely be the ones writing/maintaining it.
This is exactly the author's point. The Data Scientists are consuming the ETL's output, so they should learn how to write and maintain ETL since it isnt very hard or time consuming with modern tools.
Though this backfires sometimes for the engineering department in that then the engineers get forced into an "inner-platform effect" problem that they instead have to build an ETL platform abstracting enough ETL abilities for their company's data scientists' skill level, yet generic enough for their company's data scientists' arbitrary questions/needs.
That is its own soul-sucking experience. "Can't we just hire people that can learn Power BI better? Why are we still writing data tools for people that think they know Access but barely know Excel?"
Many muslims also believe that the beauty of the Quran's poetry is proof of the existence of God. Although they believe it is explained by the prophetic status of Muhammad, I've always found the belief to be surprisingly humanist for such an old religion, in the same sense as Kreeft's quote.
I'm seeing a lot of comments about the lack of non-MNIST neural network tutorials. Well here's mine. It uses financial data and the goal is to build a trading strategy. Its a work in progress and comments/criticism is welcome.
Anyone have an argument (or the argument Tainter provides) for whether the "trick" that a civilization exploits has to be (1) singular, (2) original, or (3) not exploitable by contemporary civilizations?
And who wants to chime in their two cents about what the USA's "trick" is in maintaining its global pre-eminence?
The trick isn't necessarily singular. Tainter's argument is actually that what happens is complexity (roughly: technology, though it's a bit more involved than that -- enumerable parts with distinct structures is a good first approximation) increases because it solves problems. The second order problem is that that complexity itself has a cost, and perhaps an accruing technical debt. When you reach the point of not being able to pay those, not only do you lose the complexity incurred but its capabilities -- you're in a worse hole than you started from.
On the question of whether there's a singular trick that's exploited, I'm not aware of anything in Tainter's writing that suggests this at all. There is the concept of Leibig's Law of the Minimum -- the idea that for any system (Leibig is speaking of ecosystems or populations) there's some one factor which imposes a constraint on the system. In that regard, you could could likely look at a single technology which is the operative constraint. But if you're looking at a complex system with multiple modes of failure, you'd be arguing precisely the opposite: that there are multiple technological tricks which aren't presently binding constraints but which, if any one of them failed, would rapidly become one.
There's no basis that the trick need be unique. I'd argue that they're anything but. Basic modalities include agriculture, construction, fire, transport, arms or weapons, and control over hygiene factors.
The United States' trick was in large part massive overwhelming self-sufficiency in resources, most especially energy.
See Vaclav Smil, Energy in World History, Manfred Weissenbacher, Sources of Power: How energy forges human history, or Robert Ayres, The Economic Growth Engine: How energy and work drive material prosperity.
To be fair, many small/mid-sized companies that act as suppliers to larger companies would basically have the larger company doing the carbon accounting for them.
For large companies, I think it would look more like an accounting capability than a climate/energy science one. The carbon credit market might become regulated with some accreditation system after these wild west years.