peacetreefrog

So the only misleading thing is "keep 99% of what you make", it's really "96.1% of what you make - 30 cents" or "keep 99% of what you make after payment processor fees".

Still cool, though obviously depends on volume. I use sendowl which is as cheap as $9 a month + Stripe fees (2.9% + 30 cents).

I used to use gumroad, but had issues. I think they've gotten a bit complacent (see https://medium.com/@atrigol/gumroad-review-things-they-need-...) so prob room in the space. Good luck!

All else equal, being in an area susceptible to climate change related flooding lowers value about 7% on average according to some research:

https://www.axios.com/sea-level-rise-costing-billions-in-hom...

Full table of contents: https://ltcwff-toc.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/ltcwff_toc.pdf

I think this is seriously naive.

Does anyone else view this as good news? I had heard speculation that the large insect die offs were due to climate change, but this seems much more treatable.

The profit is all based on lumber sales too. If profits really were that high it seems like capital would flow in until there were so many of these trees that prices would go down (though I'd imagine they're a small part of the global lumber market), especially if you can only use their wood for a limited number of things.

On the other hand, if they really do such a great job storing carbon, seems like there is potential for them to make money on the fact people are willing to pay to offset their emissions.

Agreed. Though it's tough to square the fact that bad things happen sometimes with desire to do something. The Onion actually had a good video on this a few years ago:

https://politics.theonion.com/truck-accident-that-killed-raf...

The problem with that is there are a lot of transaction costs to individuals selling their personal emissions.

Like the comment one higher up mentioned, one way to get around that and do effectively the same thing would be to split the revenue among citizens. This is what a bunch of economists have called for doing: https://www.econstatement.org/

I don't think it's a straw man. Look at the two examples I cited.

This is the first thing that comes up when you google 'green new deal':

"A Green New Deal is a big, bold transformation of the economy to tackle the twin crises of inequality and climate change. It would mobilize vast public resources to help us transition from an economy built on exploitation and fossil fuels to one driven by dignified work and clean energy."

https://www.sierraclub.org/trade/what-green-new-deal

And here's AOC's chief of staff on the green new deal: "“Do you guys think of it as a climate thing?” Chakrabarti continued. “Because we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing.” "

Second is Jay Inslee, the democratic running for president who has made fighting climate change the centerpiece of his campaign.

https://www.jayinslee.com/climate-mission

Look at his four points. Point three is "fighting for environmental justice & economic inclusion". Two of the other points are subsidies, one for clean energy, the other for a jobs program. The last one -- getting rid of subsidies for fossil fuel industries -- is a good idea. Control f'ing for the word tax (as in carbon tax) gives no results. Neither does cap, nor trade.

The government is already is regulating carbon. California has a cap and trade program, for example, and this court case in 2007 forced the EPA "to regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases (GHGs) as pollutants."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massachusetts_v._Environmental...

Well, depends what you mean by "at fault". I agree it's better to believe in global warming than deny it exists, but I agree with Cochrane that many of the attempts at at fixing it so far are basically "worthless value-signaling gestures".

Cochrane thinks (not sure I agree with him) that the onus right now is more on the traditional left than the right.

"...climate policy advocates have gone far beyond a technocratic idea of simply, well, reducing carbon. 'And nuclear energy' is usually noticeably absent. Carbon capture technologies, equally good at reducing carbon are usually noticeably absent. Other agendas like 'climate justice' creep in -- worthy or not, anything else that creeps in means less carbon reduction per dollar. A carbon tax reduces carbon any way that reduces carbon, which is really good at, well, reducing carbon, and not getting distracted with other agendas. That is a strong reason why carbon taxes, and especially such taxes in return for less regulation are resisted on the left."

Whether you agree re: who is at fault, given that most people on HN are prob on the "do something about climate change" end of the spectrum, if you are personally skeptical of a carbon tax vs something like the green new deal or Jay Inslee's climate change plan, I'd encourage you to look into it more.

Cochrane's blog post and and also this would be good places to start:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/01/17/this-is-n...

We need a carbon tax stat IMO. Economist John Cochrane had a good blog post about this recently (I actually posted to HN a few days ago but it got buried):

https://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2019/05/ip-on-carbon-tax....

From the end:

"Climate policy was headed to this kind of bipartisan technocratic resolution in the 1990s before it became a tool of partisan warfare. The challenge, from both sides, is to remove the political baggage that climate policy has accumulated."

He then makes that appeal to both sides:

"To my climate-skeptic friends: Given that the government is going to regulate carbon, this is the way to do it with least damage. To my green-warrior friends, if the government is actually going to reduce carbon, not just subsidize cronies and engage in worthless value-signaling gestures, a trade of carbon taxes for absurdly costly regulations and subsidies is the only way to get anywhere."

From the article:

"To my climate-skeptic friends: Given that the government is going to regulate carbon, this is the way to do it with least damage. To my green-warrior friends, if the government is actually going to reduce carbon, not just subsidize cronies and engage in worthless value-signaling gestures, a trade of carbon taxes for absurdly costly regulations and subsidies is the only way to get anywhere."

Good comment, I agree with most of the spirit of it (though not sure it's realistic to expect people to have a coherent story on this just yet -- part of the reason it is alarming is because no one really knows what will happen).

I thought this was a decent discussion on the types of issues you raise (vs the wailing and gnashing of teeth in most of the other comments here):

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KwB9jA9FrsNczWr5F/global-ins...

I meant non-tech like non-programming, start ups, Rust etc, the stuff you usually see on HN.

It's interesting to me how often this story shows up on HN:

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=insect&sort=byPopularity&prefi...

Edit: a lot of down votes, I'm not saying it's bad that it's frequently posted or isn't a very serious or alarming problem, or that it's showing up here so often due to some conspiracy or something.

It's just interesting, given the non-technical nature of the topic. I wonder if environmental Armageddon is of particular interest to engineers/hackers, or whether it's just an alarming story to humans generally, or what.

Pithy, but wrong.

Agree, it's minor but I find the headline annoying.

They used it in June for a statewide race and they're using it today for the federal congressional races.

Maine voted on using this system for some elections in 2016.

It passed, but -- perhaps not surprisingly -- many current, established politicians weren't happy. Maine's governor called it "the most horrific thing in the world" and the state legislature refused to fund implementation and voted to delay it until 2022.

So this year the the citizens of Maine voted again to confirm instant runoff voting, overruling the state legislature and vetoing their delay. It passed by an even bigger margin this time.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/06/maine-l...

Luckily, you can decorate your own house/apartment however you want.

I have some sympathy for people being kept up late at night be noise, although it seems like there are other, more direct ways to deal with that (i.e. cracking down on the people being too loud).

The rest of it seems like another form of NIMBYism though.

Agree. It's the same with anything, when push comes to shove and it means getting by or laying off writers etc the NY Times is going to fall back on basically the same behavior these cough drop or chicken noodle soup or whatever co's are using this health data: targeted advertising, whether that's displaying ads on its site or advertising elsewhere to try and get subscribers.

Good. More and more, reducing GHG gas emissions politically or through any sort of international agreement looks like a pipe dream.

I think Kyoto is a good example. Take (liberal and environmentally enlightened) Canada -- their Kyoto target was 6% reduction (compared to 1990 levels) in emissions by 2012. Did they come close to meeting it? No, instead they were on track to be 25% over their 1990 emissions and dropped out in 2011 in order to avoid paying billions in fines.

It's even more depressing when you consider that even if Kyoto HAD been fully implemented (by every country), it wouldn't have done enough actually stop global warming.

IMO, basically any political/collective effort is doomed to fail, even if the alternative is disaster. It's going to take something like this -- carbon/albedo reduction/capture technologies that can be implemented by smaller groups of people (not nation states) and probably will be if things get really bad.

I happen to agree with all of these, on some level they're even obvious, to the extent that 99%+ of all environmental economists would support it.

However, it's naive to think anything close to resembling this could happen politically IMO. That's why we aren't at all close to doing it, even though it's "obvious".

"... stupid to contemplate while we're still increasing carbon emissions."

Ok, let us know your plan for reducing carbon emissions and when and how we can expect it to happen.

To me, it looks like he's doing the exact opposite and is agreeing with Stripe.

"Companies like Square and Stripe would be taxed at a significantly larger total contribution than much larger companies like Salesforce."

I think the book Traction by Gabriel Weinberg is really good: tractionbook.com

For example: assume in China that people in cities generally have more opportunities to get educated.

That'd mean if you live in a city and have not had much education, it might be because you are less intelligent (on average). While if you're in a rural area, a lack of education might not mean anything, because you have less opportunity to get educated in general, regardless of intelligence.

If you did a simple regression in this case with years of education and air pollution (more common in cities) in the model, I think you'd find that -- controlling for education -- air pollution would be correlated with a reduction of intelligence, even if the air pollution itself wasn't causal.

There are ways of controlling for this, and I'm not at all saying the study didn't take this into account, but it'd be useful to know more. There are a lot of ways (as in any model) the relationship could be correlated without being causal.

I'd be interested in how reading more about how they're controlling for non-air pollution factors, particularly since they say the effects are most pronounced among the non educated.