It's not a mystery. The US and EU have year on year been decreasing emissions for fifteen ish years now (yes, including during trump I, even if you account for the COVID drop).
That's a cool story you can tell your kids before bed but the reality is that when you include imports the US/EU emissions are stagnating or going up. It's easy not to pollute when you import most of your things from abroad.
Those data are moment in time. See one of the child posts for what you're talking about -- and in terms of trade corrected emissions the US and Europe turned the corner even earlier.
The countries most talking about net-zero are indeed reducing their emissions. China is meanwhile trying to catch up to the standard of living of their Western counterparts, driving up emissions massively (while still having great per-capita values, there are just a lot of Chinese that previously lived on basically nothing)
As an aside, I'm working at a QC chem lab now, with results that have a direct impact on revenue calculations for clients. Therefore the reports go to accountants, therefore error bars dont't exist. We recently had a case where we reported 41.7 when the client expected 42.0 on a method that's +/- 1.5... They insisted we remeasure because our result was "impossible" The repeat gave 42.1, and the client was happy to be charged twice
Even cheaper is the DIY Corsi-Rosenthal box. We make a couple every few months and it does make a huge difference! Worked wonders during the wildfires a couple of years ago
You know billionaires personality traits are probably normally distributed in most aspects, except they have a (much) higher tolerance for risk. So do homeless people.
That's yet to be seen. Going for a limited government would require closing a lot of these agencies down, that requires congress.
If the fear of fascism raised by some is accurate, it seems more likely we'll see these agencies gutted and rebuilt as whatever the Trump administration wants them to be instead. No smaller government, just a different one.
I live in D.C. and many of my neighbors are non-political civil servants of all kinds. All signs point to a dramatically smaller and weaker federal government without congressional action.
Whether these agencies that congress created and funded for decades will continue to exist in any meaningful way is de facto getting decided by congress right now.
The Vought/Musk group has fired 200,000 employees already, and is offloading real-estate as quickly as possible. That action is consistent with gutting, but not rebuilding, these agencies.
So congress either has to exercise its power over the executive to prevent this in the next few weeks, or the loss of capacity will have occurred and rebuilding will take many years and be dramatically more costly than maintenance would have been.
> The Vought/Musk group has fired 200,000 employees already
Were those full-time employees or contractors of some type?
Normally I would just look this up myself, but things have been moving so quickly that the info I find is all over the place and I haven't found a short list of sources to trust.
My understanding was that they "offered" early retirement, not sure how much of an option it was versus a demand. I had also heard they cancelled a lot of contract work, I wouldn't consider that being fired but yeah it does still impact people similarly.
"My understanding was that they "offered" early retirement"
That was an earlier wave, but things are moving so quickly it's understandable people are getting confused. The two hundred thousand terminated I referred to above are (roughly) all the employees in their probationary period (which is typically two years, but it varies by position) across the whole federal public sector workforce.
If we were to include contractors (e.g. USAID contractors), more than two hundred thousand people have been terminated by executive action since the start of the administration.
That's definitely more serious than I had heard clear reports of, thanks for the details.
Unfortunately this kind of comes with the territory when granting power to an authority - jobs can be created, they can also be taken away.
Whether this is "right" for our country is probably a matter of perspective, but I do feel for everyone impacted directly. This is a pretty shitty situation to find yourself in and I don't know what the job market will look for them short term - if its anything like tech the last year or so its pretty miserable.
Elon is literally closing agencies like the CFPB and USAID down, in defiance of congress and the law. They are working under a legal theory that the president can do that, and are expecting their stacked supreme court to agree with them.
Is he? I mean this as an honest question, things have moved quickly enough that its hard to keep up.
My understanding that they have been temporarily closing offices or stopping work. I wouldn't consider that as "literally closing agencies" though, at least for me that reads as closing them down permanently rather than temporarily closing the doors.
I don't ask this to defend what they're doing at all. I think we could be much worse off if they're only gutting the agencies without closing them completely.
The executive branch has been given an immense amount of authority over the last half century or so, if that is used to rebuild different agencies technically still fulfilling congressional mandates for USAID or CFPB we could be in for a rude awakening.
Authority is fine when you agree with it, but as soon as the wrong person has that same power you may find you wish it was never granted in the first place.
That wouldn't necessarily be true. Congress could better, more clearly define what they require of these departments and services.
Most of them were pretty weakly defined and they were given legal precedent to define what their own authority was (unless specifically defined by Congress). The departments could be kept with more clear definitions of what they need to do and what success looks like.
That isn't clear yet from what I've seen. Destroying or knee capping departments is one thing rebuilding them as private or functionally private organizations is another level.
If they are planning to do this I don't think we've seen any direct signs of it yet, though I don't know how it could be anything other than fascism at that point.
I don't see why the supreme court couldn't rule a lot of these departments unconstitutional. The justification for many of them is flimsy at best, and seems to be to be in direct contradiction to the "only those rights specifically enumerated" deal.
"I don't see why the supreme court couldn't rule a lot of these departments unconstitutional."
Because they are, in fact, obviously constitutional. The mechanism for eliminating them contemplated by the constitution is for congress to pass a law eliminating them.
If you disagree with my view on this, perhaps you'll be persuaded by voluminous case law over decades upholding the constitutionality of all of these Federal government agencies in face of challenges of precisely the kind you're motioning toward.
> If you disagree with my view on this, perhaps you'll be persuaded
At this point I feel like anyone who disagrees with this should explain how things work in the alternative. If the executive can just unilaterally declare laws invalid, how does anything get done? Why pass laws at all?
The executive doesn't have to declare a law invalid here. From where I sit the question is whether a budget approved by congress must be spent or should be considered a "do not exceed" spending cap.
There is gray area when Congress says we need a department to manage our education system, for example, and sets a budget. Congress is only approving the spending there, at least to me that means it can be spent but doesn't have to be spent in full.
Now it is the executive branch's job to execute on that department. I think it would be a stretch for them to just not create the department. Their job is to properly and effectively implement what congress asked for though, and it is reasonable for someone coming in to say that what was done in the past isn't meeting Congress's request.
That isn't to say Trump is making a legitimate or reasoned argument in that vein, but the power is there at which point you have a weird legal battle attempting to decide who can make a better case for the success of any specific department. With congress defining little to no metrics for success that battle seems largely to be in the eye of the beholder.
"From where I sit the question is whether a budget approved by congress must be spent or should be considered a "do not exceed" spending cap. There is gray area when Congress says we need a department to manage our education system, for example, and sets a budget. Congress is only approving the spending there, at least to me that means it can be spent but doesn't have to be spent in full."
You are welcome to imagine an alternate legal system from first principles, but please do not present it as U.S. law. The question of whether president has to "[spend] in full" has been settled by legislation and litigation.
Keep going. If the executive doesn't have to spend all the money, why do they have to spend any of the money at all?
> Their job is to properly and effectively implement what congress asked for though
No it is not. Their job as laid out in the Constitution is to faithfully implement the laws. Not "properly and effectively", where what's proper and effective are determined by them. "Faithfully" is the word used in the Constitution.
They are to implement the laws for Congress, and if the executive finds those laws sloppy and wasteful and not proper, he doesn't get to just not do them. Again, I ask you, why pass laws at all if the executive can just decide to not do them?
> but the power is there at which point you have a weird legal battle attempting to decide who can make a better case for the success of any specific department
There is no battle -- it's there in a plain reading of the Constitution, and the impoundment act of 1974 makes explicit. And even what you say is true, there should be more of a process for the Executive branch to do these things; because the power is so broad, in the spirit of checks and balances they should be conferring with the Congress rather than asserting blanket and unchecked authority.
> No it is not. Their job as laid out in the Constitution is to faithfully implement the laws.
Sure, we can debate semantics here if you want. I'm fine swapping in "faithfully execute" into my prior comment though, that's basically what I meant without going word for word constitutional.
My point remains though. "Faithful execution" is in the eye of the beholder and is up for debate. One person may see the Department of Education as faithfully executing the congressional mandate while another could see it as poorly run, inefficient, or point to our education level relative to other countries. Both would have good arguments to make.
Further, I don't read Congress's power to approve the budget as part of the mandate for a department. Congress isn't saying "spend XX billion and build an education department," they're saying "build an education department and don't spend more than XX."
That can surely be debated in a legal context, but I think you would be hard pressed to find many average people that would read a budget as a "spend every penny" mandate. Many corporations operate this way, and while in my experience people will spend their full budget to avoid a decrease next year they are also well aware of the absurdity of that.
The impoundment law itself was/is controversial and this will surely be challenged in court on those grounds. The question still remains, though, whether any miscarriage of the law us found in departments being shut down. Its too early, mainly because they at least appear to be acting rashly, but that doesn't mean these departments have been faithfully executing to date.
> "Faithful execution" is in the eye of the beholder and is up for debate.
The semantics here are everything, it's the debate. What does the Constitution mean and what was the purpose of America? We've reached ground zero here.
To me, the purpose of America is a government for the people made possible by checks and balances -- separating powers so that they can't be abused, and giving the people ultimate choice.
Maybe you disagree, because that's not what you are suggesting. If we give in to your reading of the Constitution, the executive has the most power of all branches, which shifts power away from the people in a dramatic way.
I've asked you three times now, and you have evaded the central question -- if the executive can pick and choose laws to enforce, defund departments at whim, what is the point of laws at all?
I suspect you haven't answered it directly because you'd have to admit your reading of the Constitution implies a monarchy. And that's why we are debating semantics now, depending on how the words are interpreted we either have a system of checks and balances, or we have unbalanced unchecked power in the executive branch.
> The impoundment law itself was/is controversial
Yeah, it was controversial among people who didn't want to follow the law, and instead wanted to use their power to go around it. The concept of checks and balances is not popular with the people being checked.
My company contracted one of these LLMs to give us a bespoke chatbot. Works great for translation, and that's what I've been using it for. I popped in the line "Table 1 (etc, etc)"
It perfectly translated the line, but doesn't it also give me a completely made up 2-column 10-row data table! I asked it why, and the response was along the lines of "I am designed to make your life easier, and I thought providing this table would reduce your workload"
Right, especially bad since this is Google. Their brand should mean more than this.
I've been writing about how the greatest weakness of LLMs is their gullibility for ages. This right here is a great example - see also the Encanto 2 thing from a few weeks ago: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/29/
AI results should be better than this, but there will be hallucinations from time to time. That is entirely foreseeable.
The true failure here is by the humans who couldn't be bothered to do the bare minimum to protect the brand. This would be a major failure if it where any an sort of ad, but it's utterly unfathomable for a highly expensive and absurdly visible Superbowl ad. Why does anyone involved, from intern to CMO, at either the agency or Alphabet, have jobs that they seem ruthlessly indifferent to performing with any sort of attention or care?
I had the same thing happen to me, except for Cars 4! Google AI picked up a fan fiction trailer summary for Cars 4 from somewhere akin to Fandom and reported it as true.
Meta already does that to themselves every year or so, deleting all internal communications.
They've thrown away a huge amount of communication to source code commit reinforcement training data as a result. They do it to avoid emails making it into trials like this.
When there is a specific order after proceeding starts, but not before. There can sometimes be other orders as part of govt settlements like Google was recently accused of violating.
You may be thinking of certain financial institutions where it is a hard requirement, and maybe there are some other regulated industries too that have it.
Yes, they are. But I can imagine the fine/impact for this being much, much lower than the consequences of all their nefarious communication being used in trials.
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