Biologist123

> The boss can fire the employee but not the other way around.

When an employee severs the relationship it is called “resigning”. This makes me wonder why the difference in language and if it’s part of the power play whereby companies seek to frame the relationship as sponsor/beneficiary rather than straight contract (which is what it is).

Back in 2006 I left a career in law because I was excited by the idea of carbon offsets. With a partner, I ran tests providing fuel efficient stoves to schools which used wood fuel from non-sustainable sources in southern African countries.

The logic was the new stoves used less fuel than old stoves, thereby creating offsets which we could sell to tourists. We folded after the pilot for the following reasons:

1. We couldn’t prove the schools didn’t plough the money saved on fuel into other items with a carbon footprint, eg fuel for buses.

2. We started to wonder what the availability of offsets did to offset buyers psychologically and whether offering our offsets may give people a sort of licence to continue over-consuming fossil fuels. As an example, I started justifying to myself taking flights because we were running the pilot. That wasn’t good!

I found the Sylvera analysis interesting because - obviously - they say that 70% of the offsets they examined did not achieve their intended effect. As a lawyer, that sounds like a massive misrepresentation problem and some class action lawsuits are incoming.

Secondly - because all the questions about legitimacy focus on quality of a limited number of model assumptions for the future. But not on whether modeling precise deliverables like offsets is possible at all at the interface of complex human and environmental systems.

It is my contention that offsets can’t accurately model their impact within these systems (eg Javons paradox is a potential issue for offsets never acknowledged in offset models) and the offsets as modeled reductions - sadly - will always be chimeric at worst and directional at best.

Yes - trich, you’re right. I still feel a wave of disgust when I think of consuming raw pork. But as shown in Germany, trich is low probability if the animal is raised right - and thus the disgust is a cultural thing, not universal standard.

Good point re root of meat. Although it appears there is a joint root to both. https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Mett

Q: How was the raw chicken? A: Foul (pun intended:))

Some time ago, I prepared Beef Wellington for German friends and served it pink in the middle. They were most uncomfortable with it. I was surprised in light of the high consumption of raw pork locally.

In Germany, raw pork is consumed. As a non-German, this was an extremely surprising thing to learn as in the Anglosphere it seems that consumption of raw pork is possibly a stronger taboo than consumption of dog or horse meat. I spoke to a German doctor about the issue who explained that all pigs are inspected for parasites at slaughter and it’s relatively rare - but not totally absent - for consumers to get a tapeworm.

I had a visit to Wageningen and really enjoyed it. As a gift for delivering a lecture I received a cookbook for insects. I never used it, but the cookbook has pride of place on my shelf.

I appreciate the risk adjusted returns are poor. My question then is why farms as assets are so valuable. Seems like a disconnect somewhere.

> It is very rare for someone to have a sound argument from first principles as to why inequality is worse than equality for society as a whole.

Rare to find sound argument does not equal absence of argument.

I’m not sure what a first principles case would be here, but I guess it would need to start with an agreement about what a person is and what a society is, and the interaction between those two. Difficult as these are not agreed upon, even in the west.

On a relatively orthodox view on these points, your argument might be that beyond a given level of inequality, there are diminishing marginal returns to even the beneficiaries of the inequality. Tinbergen, a relatively well-known economist, thought this was around 5x disparity in income (ignore assets). You might argue about the precise figure, but having lived in places where there is high inequality, the crime rate put a serious cap on my perceived quality of life.

If environmental costs are included, it might be more than “some”, such is the structure of the economy.

My request would be for a button which saves the article to a form which I can read on a kindle or remarkable at a good time, for example on the commute home.

> Systems like ChatGPT are enormously entertaining and even mind-bogglingly human-sounding, but they are also unreliable and could create an avalanche of misinformation.

It sounds like it could be used as a “flood the zone” machine in some ways, and led me to wonder whether this capacity was a feature or a bug.

“Grocery _story_ bag filler”. Love the typo in the context of the post about artificial jobs.

Seriously though: other factors may create these needs: wage costs, security needs, cultural expectations.

It’s certainly an enchanting explanation. Of course some act on those hallucinations as if they were spellbound - and the Capitol riots had a definite feel of tweet-induced chaos. Interesting idea.

If you have a moment to elaborate please do!

Most professional environmentalists (broadly speaking: ecologists, economists etc) I know believe we are not able to bring these problems under control or that the UN is able to do any good. As an example, the UN climate conference has failed to address reducing fossil fuel production across 27 annual meetings. At some point the UN will need to ask itself if it is part of the cure, or part of the disease.

Good response. Toxic organisations (at whatever scale) fail to maintain an atmosphere where bullying is rejected and people are helped to be their best. Children should be taught to recognise toxic organisations and be given courage to exit them. And internalize that you do this as an adult too. There are situations where assault or battery could arise, and it is good to have some training in how to deal with those situations. Bullying, assault, battery are all abusive: it’s just bullying is legal and the others are not.

My experience is that I sort of ran out of energy for the true start-up experience once the children arrived. My priorities also shifted: I wanted to spend time with my family not wrestle some alligator that had small chances of success. The upside though is that I didn’t take investor money and I’ve ended up with a small bootstrapped business that actually serves my objectives quite well.

Entrepreneur or investment visa to Europe I wonder?

I was interviewed for YC and not accepted for the reason that I didn’t have a cofounder. The rejection email said that otherwise it was very close. I was obviously a little disappointed to be rejected, but (1) I’d had experience of co-founders before - they create as many problems as they solve, and (2) after some reflection after the YC rejection, I ended up bootstrapping the business and I’ve been able to create something free of the stresses of investors and more aligned to my own personal objectives.

Kind of uncool to use the w-word. Partly because it’s offensive and partly because it’s really outdated, Alf Garnet-style language. Made me wonder if the author understood its connotation.

Both Dempsey and Lynch are second generation Irish immigrants. There’s no criticism, but I’ve recently started to notice the outsized and extraordinary impact of Irish immigrants on mainland Britain. We’re lucky to have them.

Yesterday I watched the COO of TikTok, Vanessa Pappas testify to a US Senate committee.

https://youtu.be/meWM8d4Uz7Q

I appreciate there’s politics going on, but also felt Pappas did not help her case at all with answers which were really evasive.

I don’t understand though: at what point is a decision taken that national security is more important than the business model of a few companies?

I don’t know. But maybe you should ask the question of the international policy community who put the entire focus on the emissions problem.

You’re precisely right and it’s not a small problem.

Overall, the focus is on emissions as “the problem” rather than “producing and burning fossil fuels” as the problem. Although subtle, it is misdirection, as it pushes our attention in the direction of the emissions problem (hence offsets etc) rather than solving the fundamental problem, which is stopping fossil fuel production.

I’ve been told that engineers spend a long time on problem definition, as it avoids creating fake solutions to fake problems. I’m not an engineer but I love them.

What they don’t mention is that money given to offsetters is then used for activities which cause emissions, eg an off setter uses the money for transport etc. So the offset is undermined.

I do wonder what the AI enabled-writing tools are going to do to our ability to think, arguably already in decline!

I had a play with this copy.ai recently, was shocked by how good it is, and worried by what it will do to our ability to think.

app.copy.ai

I wonder if there’s anything else that started happening in the late oughts that might explain the trend (to socialism) the author claims to see.

I’ve noticed that signage in Germany is generally poor. Roads, stations, airports. I haven’t been able to ascertain why. Any thoughts welcome!