11–20 of 151 posts
Poverty is not just about a lack of money. Someone who was gifted $1 million on the day he was born preaching about poverty is like someone who has never written a line of code running an I.T. department.
"Poverty is not just about a lack of money. It’s about the absence of the resources the poor need to realize their potential."
Paul Graham would disagree with you on that definition of Poverty. In his world poor people can wake up one fine day and start a business. Aaron : What drove the decision to go start a business? Paul : Poverty. Aaron : Poverty. Paul : I was tired of being poor. I was working as a freelance programmer, and it was this sort of boom/bust thing where I would get money and then I would run out of money, and then it would…
Paul got tired of being broke. When you're tired of being broke, but you're educated, young, healthy, and/or from a privileged class-- you go to school, open a business, hustle, whatever.
People living in poverty live the lives they do for various reasons-- born into poverty, low education, mental illness, substance abuse, poor health, elderly, single mothers raising children, or some political or historical context (e.g. slavery, discrimination, unequal access to education/healthcare, language/cultural barriers, recent migration).
Poverty (in my mind) means you are stuck on an island where every nation around has guns pointed at you so you cant leave and there are only dirty cookies to eat.
This seems like a great opportunity for African countries to build on their energy infrastructure which would both generate revenue for governments and provide a stable industrial environment for development. It sounds like a critical missing component in Africa's economy. Although this would also depend on the public's ability to pay for monthly/yearly energy fees which might depend on subsidies. I've read a few art…
Well without going into the specifics of which industry outputs the most CO2, I think it's a fairly uncontroversial statement to make that (particularly on a per capita basis), the poorest people on the planet output the least CO2. Whereas we, the richest, output the most CO2, but will not be hit as hard (at least in the short-medium term) by climate change.
I think that's the gist of his statement.
In places like Mali or Malawi, the CO2 emissions are roughly 2 orders of magnitude lower than some of the highest places like Qatar or the US, in China it's roughly one order of magnitude. And that doesn't even factor in that China doesn't 'consume' a significant portion of the end products that generate the emissions. i.e. it emits a lot, in part, because it produces for consumers in the west, meaning they're really our offshored/outsourced emissions.
What about nuclear power? Isn't that pretty much the cleanest, most efficient power source we know of today?
"Poverty is not just about a lack of money. It’s about the absence of the resources the poor need to realize their potential."
"Poverty is not just about a lack of money. It’s about the absence of the resources the poor need to realize their potential."
Paul Graham would disagree with you on that definition of Poverty. In his world poor people can wake up one fine day and start a business. Aaron : What drove the decision to go start a business? Paul : Poverty. Aaron : Poverty. Paul : I was tired of being poor. I was working as a freelance programmer, and it was this sort of boom/bust thing where I would get money and then I would run out of money, and then it would…
Maybe he's thought about it, and as a famous geek thinks that the number one thing he can do is champion tech innovation.
But he specifically talks about increasing energy efficiency. An obvious opening to talk about carbon taxes that bake efficiency decisions into everything we buy (and provides a ready made market for new, low-carbon tech).
Or he talks about coal, again a great opening to talk about removing subsidies from that industry and getting the workers retrained in something else.
And he seems dismissive of solar, like those will only help African farmers when the sun is shining and so are barely worth even thinking about.
In general he seems too focussed on getting carbon to 0, and not enough focussed on the low hanging fruit which, if solved with todays existing tech and policy instruments, would extend the runway we have to find breakthrough tech before our world descends into anarchy and global warfare.
Just swapping natural gas for coal gives us much ability to burn fossil fuels, since it halves the carbon per energy output. Might not be as cool as a fusion reactor, but every carbon molecule counts.