ddebernardy

Per the linked article, the problem is misdiagnosed. Forestry research shows that a) patches of tree stumps emit on the order of 10 tons of CO2 per acre, and b) these emissions go away when loggers thin forests instead of clearing them. Why are we not hearing about such huge yet trivially avoidable emissions? They are an order of magnitude larger than fossil fuels.

There are plenty of good reasons to not like fossil fuels, mind you. But the carbon hockey stick is not one of them.

For the longest of times I thought the same way. Realizing that the actual issue was almost entirely tied to topsoil loss is what made me change my mind.

If you look into the atmospheric carbon dioxide data, you'll observe seasonal up and downs with the low point that takes us back to around where the high point from about a decade earlier. This means that we could resolve the issue very quickly in a scenario where farms keep enough plants around to soak up the soil emissions during tilling and harvesting operations.

Alley cropping is just one option to do so, btw. As I explain in a separate article [1], any well designed intercropping scenario should do the trick. The point is to not have a wide open field with no plants that could keep the fungi alive, block the wind to keep the carbon dioxide around, and soak up the carbon dioxide.

It can't be perfect because of night emissions and because trees eventually lose their leaves in the fall, but we can do far better than what we're currently doing.

[1] http://ddebernardy.substack.com/p/stop-climate-agenda-soil-n...

Author here.

TL;DR for those who don't click links:

- Corporate green solutions are shams

- Promote gardening if you care about fossil fuels

- An accounting chicanery keeps natural emissions out of view

- The hockey stick is actually about canopy loss

- Switching to alley cropping would reverse it

Happy to answer questions.

Author here.

TL;DR for those who don't click links: Corporate green solutions are shams. Promote gardening if you care about fossil fuels. An accounting chicanery keeps natural emissions out of view. The hockey stick is actually about canopy loss. Switching to alley cropping would reverse it. Promote food sovereignty if you care about ending oppression. Share this if you’d like to do your bit. Also, we need some help: can you offer work, support, or a retweet [1]?

[1] https://twitter.com/ddebernardy/status/1591198286790418432

Happy to answer questions over the WE.

Author here.

This is a TL;DR version for readers who only read discussions. The link is a summary of my short book, which you can read online at the same address.

What the book does is expose an accounting chicanery that underpins the fossil fuel narrative for climate change. In a nutshell, the carbon accounting framework separates land-based emissions from other emissions like fossil fuel, and builds on the idea that you can't do much about the former. This is actually false, as evidenced by forestry research, and it provides cover for land theft and ecofascism in developing countries. The book goes on to provide a soil-based explanation for the carbon hockey stick and its global desertification ramifications. Lastly, it puts bottom-up solutions in front of the problem that communities can implement now without depending on governments.

Can someone help me understand why the broader stock market is actually up compared to six months ago despite all these dire numbers being thrown around? Heck, Boeing stock is up today!

Dumb money is pouring in, and institutional investors are riding the dead cat bounce.

For Boeing specifically, it's because they fired thousands of workers to cut their costs. And to their credit, they're actually expecting a long slump. Many businesses are still deluding themselves.

Bay Area politicians including the speaker of the house Pelosi were encouraging lots of people to come to Chinatown parades.

That seems like a rather murky assertion...

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/pelosi-tweet-chinatown-tou...

I kind of assume the virus grows exponentially inside the body and would dwarf the initial constant.

That assumes your immune system wouldn't kick in during the asymptomatic phase or a time close to exiting the latter. But your immune system would actually kick in as soon as it detects the infection, which would plausibly be much earlier. That would effectively buying you time to figure out which antibodies to produce before things become out of control.

That, and the fact that they're still advertising 12 job openings...

https://lambdaschool.com/careers#jobs

No idea where you're from or what you did...

https://imgur.com/a/XBzfOsF

Might your search history be so that you're so contrarian that Google suggests contrarian results? :D

The correct query would have been "shirt -stripes". That works fine, or at least does on Google. But yeah, sentence parsing fail.

Actually the doses given for COVID are often higher.

Not just higher. The original article (the one out of China) that mentioned that there might be some positive effects reportedly suggested using doses that were a whopping 5 times higher than the usually prescribed amounts: 500mg/day vs the usual 100mg/day.

What more, the same article put forward that the drug was considered generally safe and without any potentially troublesome side effects. That raised more than a few eyebrows amongst the medical staff who knew the drug.

(2012)

Previous discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=utf8everywhere.org

Yeah, I only kept the second part of the title when submitting it because it was a) too long and b) too clickbait-y.

Sure, but for how long will it remain sustainable? The lockdown hasn't lasted a month in Italy and they're already seeing early signs of food theft that could potentially degenerate into food riots. I'm struggling to imagine how any country will make it sustainable for more than a month or two. Yet on paper, a prerequisite for stopping the lockdown seems to be that you've been testing on a fairly large scale, which only Korea seems to have pulled off.

The situation in France, for instance, is unenviable at the moment and absolutely not sustainable: albeit to a lesser degree as in the US, there's not enough PPE for essential staff, not enough masks for everyone else, and most crucially not enough tests to go about. Yet there's a full lockdown with fines and all, and insofar as I'm aware there isn't enough financial help for employers or employees or the self-employed or anyone else. It's only a matter of time before everyone realizes that they're going into this like it's 1914, expecting it'll all be over by the autumn.

It won't.

It won't, because of asymptomatic cases and because the virus is spreading in developing countries. Rich countries won't want to shell out the trillions that might be needed so the latter can cope with the situation. (And that will translate into yet another migration crisis to boot. Etc. Etc.)

For better or worse, the current lockdown measures in a growing number of countries are only postponing the inevitable mass outbreak by a few weeks. That is, unless countries get their act together and find a huge pot of money to tap into -- and in periods with a collapsing economy, the only sane pot of money to tap into is wealth. I'm not holding my breath.

As the saying goes, you can depend on Americans to do the right thing when they have exhausted every other possibility. (Not by Churchill [1].) Plus, it's not a given that it is the right thing to do, especially if there's no plan for what comes after; and there reportedly are early signs of social unrest on this side of the pond [2]. A shutdown can't last until there's a vaccine. At best it buys you time.

[1] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/11/11/exhaust-alternative...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/01/singing-stops-...

It seems macOS could use virtualization or permissions to run these scripts in some throw away environment to get rid of the problem altogether. Preflight check programs shouldn't be able to write anything to disk.

Bruno Le Maire said so himself this morning on TV:

https://www.francetvinfo.fr/sante/maladie/coronavirus/bruno-...

J'invite (...) toutes les entreprises qui ont accès aujourd'hui au chômage partiel, c'est-à-dire qui ont leurs salariés payés par l'Etat, à faire preuve de la plus grande modération en matière de versement de dividendes"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQnzcCyh7Bc

He is adamant that we are at the very bottom of the beginning of the curve

Sounds about right. The US is heading for a rough ride, which is made worse by a combination of lack of universal health care and sane coverage being tied to having an employer (or lack thereof of late). To say nothing of leadership (or, there too, lack thereof of late).

That said, the real stories will be sub-Saharan Africa and other poor countries IMO, plus Brazil and India in all likelihood. I'm struggling to imagine Western countries doing the right thing and extending a couple of trillion dollars to poor countries before it completely gets out of hands over there, even though it would be the right thing to do. Short of that, there will be new waves, over and over, until we've a vaccine.

If someone accepts your -$10 bid the house will totally be worth that by definition. Remember the $1 houses from Detroit a decade ago. They weren't even worth $1 due to the tax liability that came with them, and they didn't sell for that reason.

Yes, at least in France. They passed (or merely announced?) a number of measures so that SMEs don't collapse due to treasury problems: postponed/cancelled taxes and contributions, paid time off for the staff without the usual delays, etc.

As I understood they took example on what Germany did in 2008, and learned from what worked over there. Whether all countries do the same is another story altogether, but at least in France they might save a good number of jobs (by inflating the public debt, but that's a separate issue).

Care to share in what positions such companies make such hires? I've looked around a few times over the years and have never found the slightest hint that they did such a thing.

thus i’m curious how conservatives or Trump have anything to do with one’s departure.

Oh, that one's simple enough if you assume they're part of the reason why you'd leave the country. And while we're on that topic, the same two reasons might also get factored into deciding to not come to SF or any other US city -- alongside guns, overpriced education, and overpriced healthcare.

Thus if you find a good CEO they are well worth a much larger salary

Of course. And to be clear I'm not quibbling about CEO pay being higher than the minimum wage.

The question that I've an issue with is how much larger. Back in the 1950s the answer seemed to be 20x the minimum wage or whereabouts. Nowadays it's more like 360x. [0]

CEOs were doing the same kind of job at the time.

And just think about it: it means the typical large company CEO earns in one day what his baseline employees earn in a whole year. That's just a recipe for a French or Russia style Revolution to erupt.

Plus, who actually needs $1M/year? I've earned fairly good money for years -- but still a fraction of that -- and I'd have no idea how to spend that much without investing up the wazoo. And in case you're thinking "I'd know how", sure, the answer is yes, everyone does -- for a few months. As a salary, $1M/year is ludicrous. And $10+M/year is sociopathic. No one is worth that much.

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/dianahembree/2018/05/22/ceo-pay...

Redistributing 100% of these 5 executives' salary to all 2.2m workers would be a raise of... $32/year.

But that's besides the point. What on earth do they need to get paid that much for? Even if you assume they're contributing 100x what line workers are doing, they'll do just fine earning under $1M/year.

Plus, you then pinpoint the bigger issue. Yeah, the investor class exists because, you know, someone shaved $32 off of everyone's salary so 5 people could get paid a total of ~$70M/year.

Location: Currently France/Hungary

Remote: Ideally -- but not necessarily -- with a team that is mostly located between US Central and India (i.e. Europe compatible).

Willing to relocate: Depends on the opportunity.

Technologies: Management, Marketing, Sales, Finance, Python (mostly Scrapy, a bit of TensorFlow), Ruby (mostly scripting), PHP (~10 years), JS (~10 years), CSS (~10 years), MySQL (~10 years), Postgres (~10 years, among the top StackOverflow users), Network Engineering.

Résumé/CV: upon request

Email: ddebernardy@gmail.com

My Physics classes are rusty, but if you've 400GPa across a 1mm^2 surface, and the back of the two opposing diamonds is e.g. 1cm^2, then you've a straight pressure reduction then and there -- not unlike what might happen with a lever or a pulley. So you can then apply a smaller force on the outside, allowing you to use a less sturdy/expensive cristal or metal (or liquid, apparently [0]).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond_anvil_cell

Correct me if my first impression was incorrect, but scanning through your scripts they all seemed like sub-kilobyte one-liners. Which, yeah, just use Shell for those and you'll be fine.

To my mind, the parent post was referring to lengthier, more complicated scripts. Speaking as one who wrote and routinely maintained such scripts at one point, I cannot agree more with the sentiment that most if not all of them could and should have been written in Python or Ruby or some other scripting language instead.

I dunno. Having lived through the days where having 128kB of RAM was an eye popping upgrade, you could easily have made the argument back then that 2GB of RAM was future proof for as long as the eye can see.

And in fact, they did. By the time I was reaching adulthood, that was that hard limit built into Win95, give or take boot errors if you had a quarter of that (which was gigantic at the time; 64MB was more than enough to boot it).

Fast forward another 25 years to today, and laptops routinely have 16GB of RAM, and higher end Mac Pros can apparently get a whopping 1.5TB of RAM.

Put another way, the high-end went from .1MB to 1TB in 40 years or so.

I get that we're reaching the physical limits of miniaturization, but I'd still be surprised if my grand kids don't have exabytes of RAM or equivalent on whatever the hell their main devices will be by the time they reach adulthood.

Tech isn't innocent but you can't blame it all on tech either. Polarization has been a thing for decades upon decades. In the US a major shift occurred around the Civil Rights movement, after which Southern voters basically drifted away from the Democrat Party and coalesced towards the Republican Party. US politics has been polarizing along party lines ever since.

IMHO you won't fix it with technology as it runs much deeper. But you can remove comments to sweep a big part of the toxicity under the rug.

If you'd like a good overview of the longer story, Ezra Klein, who just released a book on the subject, was on Chris Hayes' "Why is this Happening?" podcast earlier this week ("Why we're polarized, with Ezra Klein").