571–580 of 666 posts
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I added up the 2023 numbers from here: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-co-emissions?t...
You must have made a mistake in doing that. If you add “world” to the selection, Our World in Data adds them up for you, and you only have to divide 27253/181000. That gives you 0.1506, very close to 15%. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-co-emissions?t...
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Not to glaze unelected uniparty governments, but this is what you can actually achieve if you don't have to focus on your new election the moment you enter office.
I know it sounds insane but I wish Germany had such a stable government that actually DOES something. For as long as I can remember German govs have been absolute dogshit. Not to say the CN gov hasn't done no wrong. But they are moving with incredible speed in the right direction.
I really like a book by Foucault that discusses the origins of the modern state. He argued that the modern state could only originate in the West because only there did a balance of power among large states form, generating sufficient competition. In contrast, during China's Ming and Qing dynasties, it maintained an overwhelming advantage over its surroundings, thus lacking the impetus for reform. But now everything is different. The world is not a rational free-trade world. The EU has only two choices: either re-integrate into a unified empire, or disband and learn the survival strategies of smaller states—not taking sides and cooperating with both China and the US, or something like ASEAN. Its current loose alliance is the worst possible choice.
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I wouldn't think the Roman empire was a good thing if we had it today. We can "respect" those older cultures in their context while still recognizing that they were in many ways horrifying by modern standards.
In what way would they be horrifying? The Romans advanced public works, infrastructure, and other such things on an absolutely monumental scale. Many roads built by the Roman Empire are still even in use today! And I think Marcus Aurelius is perhaps the best example in history of a genuinely socially motivated leader. And the lands under their rule were completely able to maintain their own unique identity so long as…
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I’m really curious to better understand what aspects of China’s government would hurt your day to day life. From what I read online the people there are free to rant and get things fixed. Their local government representative is held accountable if the people in his/her province are unhappy. Not too different from a typical democratic setup I guess? But this could be off because I don’t know anyone personally there.
I can answer this question. I’m a native-born Chinese, and I’ve never studied abroad. This year I just completed my first trip overseas, visiting the UAE. First of all, I don’t think China is a fully democratic system, but it’s not an outright dictatorship either. At the same time, I don’t think the two-party voting system in the U.S. qualifies as democracy either. One of the biggest drawbacks of Western criticism of…
So you have only ever visited a country that is very definitely NOT a democracy, and you have never lived in a democratic country.
> In the end, a large number of the responsible personnel were punished or sentenced. The problem was resolved, and it did not implicate the Party itself.
How is that "gaming many other freedoms". If the party was not to lame fine, but what happens when they are to blame?
> China doesn’t have problems like California’s high-speed rail, the UK’s HS2, or the charging stations under Biden that were barely built and with almost no one held accountable.
You said you cannot criticise the party and its leaders. So if something like HS2's cost overruns happen would you even know about it? Does everything get done at the planned cost?
> Our social media is full of reviews about being stolen from or robbed while traveling in Europe, and the same applies to Southeast Asia
That is not the reality of living in Europe. I lived most of my life in the UK and those sorts of crimes are rare.
I don’t know how it is in other countries, but nearly thirty years ago when I was in elementary school, a Chinese propaganda slogan stuck with me: “If you want to get rich, build roads first; have fewer children, plant more trees.” Every part of that slogan has been put into action, continuously, for decades. Although low birth rates have now become a problem, back then it seemed like a solution. Xi Jinping may be a…
Are low birth rates a problem? The job market keeps being published about lack of employment. Recent was this UK having a 1,200,000 plus college graduates and less than 100,000 job placements. The USA market is also bad with very limited economic mobility based on years past. Is the job market too restrictive with maximize profit over maximum knowledge transfer and upkeep? Not properly balancing older and newer labor…
The UK is producing too many graduates, often doing low quality courses at low quality universities, who then cannot get the graduate level jobs they aspire to.
The UK does not have enough people to work in many other areas - tradespeople, care workers, doctors and nurses, archeologists, chefs....
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This is opposite to everything I've ever read. A brief "greening" period was expected (and is now nearing its end) as climate change started taking off due specifically to this effect. Edit: to clarify, I'm saying the greening thing already happened due to increases in CO2 levels (though it's possible this is due to heat and not CO2 itself, I guess?).
So, it turns out that there are two types of plants: those whose growth is rate-limited by available CO2, and those whose aren't, as the latter evolved a more efficient pathway during a previous era of low CO2 concentrations. So depending on which kinds of plants, you can both be right.
We will get a change in the mix of plant life.
I think they’re doing a great thing. My area has seen some wildfire smoke season near the end of summer. It never happened when I was a kid. Now every summer there’s wildfire smoke for several days or several weeks. The climate appears to be changing and heavily forested areas of midwest US and canada are on fire every summer. Planting trees could be great for the environment, but without the moisture it could become…
I suspect many governments are spending less on prevention because they can blame the consequences on climate change - whereas if climate change is increasing the risk they should be spending more on reducing it.
> Planting trees could be great for the environment, but without the moisture it could become a tinderbox for wildfires.
Trees also change the climate locally so might be part of the solution for that too.
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Don’t you think you’ve been influenced by propaganda? You have admitted yourself that you couldn’t even find information on Naomi Wu. I’ve lived in Europe my whole life. I’ve never been robbed or felt unsafe. It’s also a very diverse region so it’s hard to generalize. But the supposed “decay of the west” is mostly internal propaganda from our very own anti-migration right wingers. But regardless, I’d take having a 0.…
> I’ve lived in Europe my whole life. I’ve never been robbed or felt unsafe. Really, where? I have been robbed in Belgium and in France, have had a knife on my throat on a Sunday morning, and have had burglars twice (once in Antwerp, once in Leuven). About five of my bikes were stolen, and I've been conned by construction workers several times.
Anyhow, sorry to hear about your experience. That’s how statistics work I guess. For any particularly unlucky person there’s a correspondingly lucky person that averages them out.
Conning is definitely more of a thing, but I wouldn’t place it in the same league as pickpocketing of tourists. Which of course is a thing, I don’t want to deny it. Just that using it as a reason to avoid Europe is absolutely blowing it out of proportion.
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In what way would they be horrifying? The Romans advanced public works, infrastructure, and other such things on an absolutely monumental scale. Many roads built by the Roman Empire are still even in use today! And I think Marcus Aurelius is perhaps the best example in history of a genuinely socially motivated leader. And the lands under their rule were completely able to maintain their own unique identity so long as…
> In what way would they be horrifying? When Julius Caesar conquered Gaul it was said he killed one million people and enslaved another million, and was celebrated for it. The actual numbers may not be accurate, but the sentiment probably was. Moral relativism aside, would you like to live in a society where killing civilians during war and enslaving survivors were both acceptable? Or how about the the abandoning of…
Post-industrialization (kind of assuming they'd have access to modern tech here), slavery makes very little sense - even completely ignoring the ethical issues. Pay a negligible hourly/monthly cost to hire a skilled worker that can be easily replaced or dismissed as desired, or pay a huge up-front cost to take on somebody who is probably low skill, may or may not work out, and then be 100% responsible for all of their needs and other costs going forward? They'd likely outlaw it just like every other country that's gone through industrialization has.
Similarly exposure (which began to be phased out and moving towards adoption once Christianity took hold in Rome) was once again largely a product of technology. Abortion was extremely dangerous in those times for the mother, and exposure was one way it was done relatively more safely. And children were often exposed because of various deformities or their sex which, again, can now be detected at a prenatal stage. Though the sex issue again gets back to a lack of technology. Son's worked and essentially were your pension, whereas daughters joined the house of whoever they married, to say nothing of dowry related issues.
Obviously we have to do a lot of speculation to imagine what a Roman Empire in modern times would look like, but I don't think many of the knee-jerk reactions to it are really justified.
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SOEs maybe, but not Chinese private companies.
Whether a private company can get a loan however depends more on whether it is in a sector that Beijing wants to encourage than on the company's expected profit margin or expected return on investment--according to Shih.