That’s exponential growth, for yuh. Fossil fuels could decline significantly as a percentage of total, global energy consumption but we could still be emitting several tens of billions of tons of carbon dioxide every year, if global energy consumption continues to grow.

Here’s what I mean: between 2013 and 2023, global energy consumption increased 14%. As of 2023, fossil fuels accounted for 77% of global energy consumption. Now, let’s say that between 2024 and 2034 total global energy consumption increases another 14%, but over the same period the percentage of our total energy that comes from fossil fuels DECREASES from 77% to 65% (a fairly significant decrease, I think), the amount of energy that comes from fossil fuels would have only declined 3.2% between 2024 and 2034.

I think the consensus is that it’s mostly as a result of women having greater reproductive choices, greater access to family planning services, and more women choosing to delay having children or choosing to not have children at all, often so they can instead focus on a career.

Edit: I want to point out that what I’m describing is the consensus, as I understand it, of mainstream experts in the US. However, I believe there is evidence that this consensus opinion is not entirely accurate. If I’m not mistaken, surveys indicate that there are a fair number of people who would like to have children but are not because the right circumstances are not present for them to feel secure enough to have children. Many of the people who are not having children would have them if they felt more financially, romantically, and/or emotionally secure. Therefore, it’s possible that it’s not so much that people are choosing not to have children as it is that the necessary conditions for making people feel secure enough to have children are not present for a large number of people.

Right? They must not think AI and automation can replace very many human laborers, otherwise they wouldn’t consider declining birth rates to be such a crisis.

"A reduction in the share of workers can lead to labor shortages, which may raise the bargaining power of employees and lift wages — all of which is ultimately inflationary,” Simona Paravani-Mellinghoff, managing director at BlackRock, wrote in an analysis last year.

And while net immigration has helped offset demographic problems facing rich countries in the past, the shrinking population is now a global phenomenon. “This is critical because it implies advanced economies may start to struggle to ‘import’ labour from such places either via migration or sourcing goods,” wrote Paravani-Mellinghoff.

This is just mask-off capitalism. They want people to have a lot of babies, and/or large numbers of poor and desperate people migrating into the country, so that they have a constant, reliable source of cheap labor.

If it’s a secret that Israel wants all of the territory that was Mandatory Palestine, including the West Bank, then it’s the worst kept secret ever.

I’d rather pour hot sauce in my eyes than watch another debate between Biden and Trump.

I’m sorry but I’m going to have to stick with Windows for gaming.

That’s ok, I forgive you.

Seriously, Windows works better for a lot of people, and that’s fine. I went back to Windows several times before I made the switch permanently to Linux. You just gotta do what works for you.

If you decide to try Linux again, I would recommend a distro like chimera OS, nobara, or just vanilla fedora. I’ve personally had a lot of luck with those distros.

As I’ve said many times: I don’t hate Windows, I hate Microsoft. If Windows were owned by a not-for-profit, or a consortium or some other democratically run organization of interested groups, I don’t think I would have any need for Linux. But, as it is, Linux is absolutely necessary. I hope some day that Windows is replaced by a Linux distribution that is owned and maintained by an organization that gives all stakeholders, including and especially end users, a tangible voice in its management.

I think we need a LOT more of this kind of housing, to make housing as affordable as possible for everyone.

I don’t think the US needs more single family homes, I think we need more, or at least more affordable, multifamily housing. Suburbs are expensive, inefficient, and bad for the environment. What we need to be doing is bringing down the cost of housing in cities, as well as making cities as pedestrian friendly as possible, with walking and biking infrastructure, and public transportation.

Enforcing US hegemony and funneling money to the US military industrial complex are related causes.

…the Nato chief also announced that more than 20 nations are expected to meet a defence spending target of 2% this year - more than any other year since it was pledged in 2014.

“This is good for Europe and good for America, especially since much of this extra money is spent here in the United States,” he said.

And their true motivations are revealed.

I don’t think it’s as much ignorance as it is tribalism. Humans are highly tribal, by our nature. People believe what they are told by trusted authorities, by the trusted leaders of their “tribe.” People will be skeptical of anything that doesn’t come from a member of their own tribe, even if what they’re being told is based in facts and evidence. Politicians have known this for a very long time, and they use it to their advantage. They just have to convince a group of people (usually one that feels alienated or disenfranchised) that they are “one of them,” and then you can steer them in the direction you want them to go, usually by pinning them against some other, opposing tribe.

Conservatives and liberals are opposing tribes. They don’t like each other and they don’t trust each other. All Donald Trump and other conservative politicians have to do is present positions that are in opposition to liberalism, the ideology of their hated enemy tribe, and members of the conservative tribe will quickly adopt them, not out of ignorance but out of tribalism.

That certainly is evidence in favor of Musk’s ability to manage a large scale, vertically integrated supply chain, assuming he is the one primarily responsible for managing and overseeing the VI supply chain at SpaceX. However, given his controversial public persona and some of the accusations that have been levied against him, I think someone else would be better suited for the job.

I’m sure a more vertically integrated supply chain comes with its own problems. I don’t think there’s a perfect solution. Even if the current US model better promotes competition, that doesn’t seem to be making EVs more affordable.

I don’t think Elon would be very good at managing a vertically integrated, domestic supply chain. I definitely think someone better qualified for the task should do it.

The solution requires a new ideological paradigm, but transitioning into the right paradigm would be extremely difficult and it would likely take a very long time.

I think the US is already in the process of transitioning to a new paradigm, away from neoliberalism, which was the dominant paradigm over the past half century or so, to something else. However, I’m not sure we are transitioning into the “right” paradigm. I think the paradigm we are transitioning into is more protectionist than neoliberalism. We are moving away from globalization and towards something more like the cold war era, where the world was divided along ideological lines into a “first world” and a “second world.” I expect the new paradigm we are shifting into to be more antagonistic toward “unfriendly” nations. I wouldn’t be surprised if this were to lead to some kind of major conflict.

The price difference between foreign and Chinese producers is because Chinese producers get more subsidies than foreign ones, even though both get support from the Chinese government. Also, Chinese companies are more vertically integrated, meaning they handle more parts of the production process themselves, which lets them buy things at lower prices than foreign companies.

For example, BYD not only makes cars but also owns lithium mines, builds its own batteries, develops its own e-motors, owns large ocean carriers for export, and even owns a vehicle insurance company.

This sounds like a model we should be emulating and adopting, but instead we are fighting to keep our existing model, that is less efficient and less effective at making affordable EVe available to the public, all because the Chinese model doesn’t align with our ideology. I say, fuck ideology. We should do what works, even if it doesn’t necessarily pass some ideological purity test.

I haven’t read the book but I wonder if it should have been called ‘Why the global free market would save the world’. It sounds more like the author is making philosophical arguments for global free market capitalism, that they are stating why global capitalism should be the globe economic paradigm, rather than providing evidence that global capitalism will weather the current storm and reassert itself as the dominant global paradigm.

The tide certainly seems to be turning against globalization, and not just from the far right or far left, even the moderate establishment seems to be revaluating globalization, to at least some degree. This speech by president Biden’s national security advisor, Jake Sullivan, to the Brookings Institute outlines some of the problems that have arisen as a result of globalization.

“The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere today is comparable to where it was around 4.3 million years ago during the mid-Pliocene epoch,” NOAA said, “when sea level was about 75 feet higher than today, the average temperature was 7 degrees Fahrenheit higher than in pre-industrial times and studies indicate large forests occupied areas of the Arctic that are now tundra.”