102 karma · joined August 6, 2013
It's also been really interesting to see how regulations play into this. Getting utilities to value reducing their topline revenue through user energy efficiency requires regulation, and our customer base mostly reflects which utilities are under such regulations, though we also have a customer experience play for when that's not a primary driver.
Like layoric, I would also recommend working in this space for similar reasons. I would also add my experience is that the people are great. It's not get rich quick, so the people here are driven mostly by mission and interesting problems, which leads to a generally high level of positivity.
I grew up around hunting and farms and also don't find it surprising that animals are fairly intelligent.
While your statement about pasturing being good for the environment is partially true in that there are some forms that do some good, by and large meat production is actually one of the largest causes of GHG emissions.[1] A lot of this land would actually be used more efficiently for production of non-animal proteins like legumes, especially considering the land that is used to supplement pasturing through production of animal feed in most modern agriculture.
To the point of exploratory analysis in some of the parents ,I prefer statsmodels for that purpose. It's not quite up to where the similarly purposed tools are in other languages, but for most of my work where I care about interpretation, it hits the right spot between usability and providing the standard statistical outputs.
To the point of exploitation, why not use tariffs as a way to enforce standards AND protect economic interests? Instead of targeting specific countries, it could be a points based system where "Long hours without overtime?" +5%, "Poor safety standards" +10%, and so on. Not to say the US is necessarily perfect here, but as far as I can tell, it's a long way ahead of the typical places it outsources production to. Enforcement might be hard, but any resistance to inspection etc. could be met with automatic application of the suspected tariff.
This seems like it would satisfy the goal of advancing human rights, but also give a more incentive to just hire workers in the developed countries.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_re-education_camps
[edit, cleared up who this is targeted at]
I think there is an underlying assumption that the general world cares about things like "primary sources" and "logical fallacies" enough to bother hovering over the text or viewing the content, and that there isn't an intentional manipulation of these things by media organizations to fit a narrative. Maybe if this was a browser plugin that came with <major browser> by default and automatically highlighted fact checked statements in exiting articles. That way folks wouldn't have to opt in, but as it is, whats the incentive for either the populace or the media to participate? Think of it this way- how did the fact checking in the examples get done? Someone spent 2 minutes on their favorite search engine. People willing to do that will do it if they have the time, and people not willing probably aren't interested in information that would contradict their opinions anyway - unless it comes from a source they already trust, like someone in their bubble. My own experience with this is that the folks who will care exist but are rare. Others, you can literally watch their eyes glaze over the moment you introduce a little cognitive dissonance.
Edit: remove "interpret" from last sentence to clarify
If they were talking about greenhouse gases, then the answer seems to be that it depends on where you live and how/what you drive, but an electric vehicle almost always produces less emissions than an equivalent gas powered one. [2] does a decent job explaining though I feel he leaves a few parts out for the sake of clarity. For example, driving a P100D isn't the equivalent of driving the average car. It's more like driving a sports sedan (like a BMW M5), so those sorts of vehicles would probably be a more fair comparison. In the same vane, the whole US car fleet includes lots of SUVs and other trucks, which if there were equivalent electric models, would obviously not go as far as a Leaf. It would be great if there was a US calculator that worked like [3] does for the UK so that we could do the same sort of comparison based on the mix where we live.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_generation#Product... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RhtiPefVzM [3]https://www.nextgreencar.com/tools/emissions-calculator/
Edit: typo "of" to "if". Somewhat serendipitous if you think about it.
[1] http://www.fao.org/docrep/003/t4890e/t4890e03.htm
Edit: A couple of extra spaces removed