A good portion of NA is literally choked in forest fire smoke.

No one except most Canadians, the West Coast, Midwest, and Northeast of the US.

And Texas too apparently: https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/environm...

Is there anywhere in the continental US not affected by wildfire smoke? Hawaii is probably doing alright.

Erm. We are choking on smoke.

Its also the case that HappyMemes are very much as profitable (if not more) as home air filters.

Liars may not know they are part of the zombie horde .... but they do their master's will anyway.

I wish I shared your optimism, but I feel like we're running out of road while accelerating.

This link is the parents speaking, nonetheless another data point [0}

I'm respiratorily at risk to particulate matter in the air (partially my own fault for cigarette smoking for many years, partially happenstance via a house fire/smoke inhalation), and the air quality has been a bastard in ON Canada this summer. It certainly has affected my outdoor activities.

[0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/nine-year-ol...

Now do Beijing.

> The mean just isn't a useful metric for human emancipation.

For those at the top of the foodchain it is a very useful metric: it allows them to sleep at night.

That this even needed to be said on a forum like HN baffles me. I suspect it's a result of decades of mainstream political/cultural doom-and-gloom propaganda.

But that linked paper does mention near the end:

> At the same time, the drop in global poverty after 1995 is the largest observed, despite the low correlation with GDP per capita. This implies a “lost opportunity”, for even faster poverty reduction could have been achieved if measures had been taken to contain increasing within-country income inequality

Which I feel this is the topic at hand.

Income inequality clearly impacts both local and global poverty.

Production efficiency also has a positive impact, you can produce and serve more people for cheaper. Yes, but that implies the efficacy of production benefits people equally, otherwise there are "lost opportunity" in poverty reduction.

This is what the "outrage" is here. It doesn't seem like AI support benefits the merchants or the workers, but exclusively the executives and shareholders.

And this is the challenge that face AI. At face value, it's great technology, that could help everyone, but will it benefit everyone equally, or will there be losers here?

If we want AI to be more positively received, that question needs to be addressed seriously.

As somebody with a degree in economics who did research in this area, I strongly disagree. I cannot stress how important is to not equate poverty data with quality of life. Let me give you an example of how economic statistics can be misleading. In colonial India, economic production and GDP skyrocketed. Forests were razed, waterways were privatized, communal granaries were destroyed, etc. Agricultural production increased massively, yet hundreds of millions of Indian people starved and died.

It is absolutely not clear-cut that poverty has actually decreased on a long term scale. The real wage evidence shows less poverty and higher incomes during precolonial times in several countries. The datasets are woefully incomplete and flawed prior to 1900. Furthermore, the global poverty line is still set at $1.90 (!), and reexaming the decrease in poverty using more realistic costs of living results in very little change. Compounding on that, the vast majority of poverty reduction in the last century has been in China, a non-capitalist country. Removing them from the dataset results in almost no change in global poverty in the last 50 years. I can go on.

While quality of life has improved percentage wise for a small percentage of the earth's inhabitants, it is also a completely unsustainable way of living - it's a quality of life built on fossil fuels and debt. It's all a complete facade - if fossil fuels and access to effectively free money were wiped out tomorrow, quality of life would revert almost overnight... The fragility of it all is just extraordinary.

Frequency distribution I think - normal, not uniform.

What does "U-shaped" mean or imply? I searched, but am still unclear.

Will the distribution be more even or more uneven?

My parents bought a house and went on multiple family vacations every year and never really were too concerned about money, saving up a decent amount for retirement. My mom was a teacher in a poor inner city school and my dad was a low level insurance salesman. My mom never had to worry about student loans, they were easily paid off. I think trading fiscal peace and security for an iPhone is a bad trade.