71–80 of 258 posts
I wonder why the numbers are varying so wildly.
I'm not a botanist, but if they are experiencing drought then how will these newly planted trees survive? According to the article they are so low on water they are slashing output on their hydro-power system and ceasing electricity exports.
An example would be olive trees, but hey there's a whole wikipedia article about it that definitely knows more than me:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_greening
"Trees store water, raise water from underlying aquifers, reduce evaporation after a rain, attract animals (and thereby fertility through feces), and they can cause more rain to fall (by temperature reduction and other effects), if the planted area is large enough."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wouldn't say it's that stable or that the rest of Africa is instable, especially compared to Europe. It's just that Europe industrialized earlier and got to reap rewards that can only come from most simple needs being met easily. In general, the developing countries are mostly "behind the curve", meaning their economic growth mostly wasn't that much lower for most of history, but rather they started somewhat later,…
> I wouldn't say it's that stable or that the rest of Africa is instable, especially compared to Europe. It's just that Europe industrialized earlier and got to reap rewards that can only come from most simple needs being met easily. Europe's industrialization as well as other Western countries heavily depended on the exploitation of third world countries in Asia and Africa, especially after WW2. Sweatshops and slave…
If colonialism was necessary for industrialisation the European powers with no or smaller colonial empires would have had lower growth. Germany would have been behind the U.K. and France. Austria would have been obviously suffering compared to Germany. This didn’t happen. The evidence is ambiguous as to whether Empire had any effect on economic growth and what it had certainly wasn’t large. You can not detect decolonisation’s effect on historical GDP by eye. That’s how significant colonialism was to economic growth in the developed world.
If actually being the government and in charge of other countries, being able to loot them more or less at will, and being able to direct their populations’ labour and economic development did basically nothing why would trade immiserate Asia and Africa?
More to the point, literally every decade since WWII has been the best ever, on every continent, since WWII. Lifespan, healthy lifespan, education and literacy go up on every continent. Every continent but Africa sees growth in GDP per capita and they look like they’re joining that trend now too.
As far as Foxconn goes they have a lower suicide rate than the general Chinese population.
> ABC News and The Economist both have done some simple comparison— although the number of workplace suicides at Foxconn is large in absolute terms, the suicide rate is actually lower when compared to the overall suicide rate of China or the United States. According to a 2011 Centre for Disease Control and Prevention report, the country has a high suicide rate with approximately 22.23 deaths per 100,000 persons. In 2010, the worst year for workplace suicides at Foxconn with a total of 14 deaths, its employee count was a reported 930,000 people. The total number of Foxconn employee suicides in 2010 is unknown.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I wouldn't say it's that stable or that the rest of Africa is instable, especially compared to Europe. It's just that Europe industrialized earlier and got to reap rewards that can only come from most simple needs being met easily. Europe's industrialization as well as other Western countries heavily depended on the exploitation of third world countries in Asia and Africa, especially after WW2. Sweatshops and slave…
You realize that the European powers of 17th and 18th centuries "exploited" the Americas to include the U.S and yet here stands the U.S head and shoulders above these "exploiters".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I wouldn't say it's that stable or that the rest of Africa is instable, especially compared to Europe. It's just that Europe industrialized earlier and got to reap rewards that can only come from most simple needs being met easily. Europe's industrialization as well as other Western countries heavily depended on the exploitation of third world countries in Asia and Africa, especially after WW2. Sweatshops and slave…
You realize that the European powers of 17th and 18th centuries "exploited" the Americas to include the U.S and yet here stands the U.S head and shoulders above these "exploiters".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Waste of time, money, and resources. Appearance of fixing a problem without doing so reduces motivation to actually fix it. Global support might wane because "they fixed it". Seems like there are many reasons not to do a fix unless you know it works to some reasonable extent.
Again, the issue they want to address is not climate change but retention of soil and improving their regional climate and water cycle.
Why would they not do this is often a question I've been left with after talking to climate change nihilists. No, it won't fix global warming. But it doesn't cost very much, helps their population and economy, and makes a dent in global warming.
At least they're not turning off perfectly functional nuclear power plants like in so-sophisticated Germany. They're reforesting. Do what you can and try not to make things worse.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It took suicide-level conditions in places like Foxconn to get us our gadget at Not that I disagree with the rest of the post, but it's time the suicides at Foxconn story dies a fiery death. https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/07/10/apples-c... The juicy quote: At the time of that spate of suicides Foxconn had nearly 1 million workers in its plants. There were up to 14 suicides (it depends whose count you w…
The difference is those suicides at Foxconn are for one reason only, working conditions. Meanwhile the general suicide rate in China is for any number of reasons. Playing a pure numbers game with peoples lives is distasteful.
That's a pretty wild assertion.
Is there a reason to believe that the folks working at Foxconn have otherwise 100% idyllic lives with no divorces, deaths of loved ones, clinical depression, etc.?
Numbers about Ethiopia's forest cover vary greatly, I see 4% in the year 2000 mentioned on Wikipedia, I see 14% in 2018 mentioned in this Bloomberg article and I see some numbers in between in a 2015 paper by Abraha Hatsey http://wiki.awf.forst.uni-goettingen.de/wiki/images/e/e9/6_3... I wonder why the numbers are varying so wildly.
Not to discourage, but even reforesting entire land that could possibly be covered in forest will not arrest climate change noticeably. The reason is because forest do not change CO2 levels noticeably, in the long run. The reason is because there is roughly constant amount of carbon in Earths biomass. Planting treas only increases the amonut of biomass by a little bit but has no lasting effect of scrubbing CO2 from a…