Thanks for the insightful post. And to build on your survival instinct misadaptation point, consider that our preferences were tuned through evolution or a scarcity of certain things (salt, sweet, fat, excitement, novelty, startling, etc) and work against us when there is abundance of those things made possible by modern technology (e.g. ultraprocessed foods, algorithmic feeds, several scene changes a second in Videos, etc). See:

https://www.healthpromoting.co...
"Dr. Douglas Lisle, who has spent the last two decades researching and studying this evolutionary syndrome, explains that all of us inherit innate incentives from our ancient ancestors that he terms The Motivational Triad: the pursuit of pleasure, the avoidance of pain, and the conservation of energy. Unfortunately, in present day America's convenience-centric, excess-oriented culture, where fast food, recreational drugs, and sedentary shopping have become the norm, these basic instincts that once successfully insured the survival and reproduction of man many millennia ago, no longer serve us well. In fact, it's our unknowing enslavement to this internal, biological force embedded in the collective memory of our species that is undermining our health and happiness today."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose is a book by Deirdre Barrett published by W. W. Norton & Company in 2010. Barrett is a psychologist on the faculty of Harvard Medical School. The book argues that human instincts for food, sex, and territorial protection evolved for life on the savannah 10,000 years ago, not for today's densely populated technological world. Our instincts have not had time to adapt to the rapid changes of modern life. The book takes its title from Nikolaas Tinbergen's concept in ethology of the supernormal stimulus, the phenomena by which insects, birds, and fish in his experiments could be lured by a dummy object which exaggerated one or more characteristic of the natural stimulus object such as giant brilliant blue plaster eggs which birds preferred to sit on in preference to their own. Barrett extends the concept to humans and outlines how supernormal stimuli are a driving force behind today's most pressing problems, including modern warfare, obesity and other fitness problems, while also explaining the appeal of television, video games, and pornography as social outlets."

https://tlc.ku.edu/
" "We were never designed for the sedentary, indoor, sleep-deprived, socially-isolated, fast-food-laden, frenetic pace of modern life." - TLC Principal Investigator Stephen Ilardi, PhD"

And to take that even one step further, see my sig: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."

China's population is starting to fall, as they have the same problem every developed nation does with low birth rates.

That's based on an assumption that as their electricity consumption increases, so will their per-capita emissions. They won't, they are falling and will continue to do so. The momentum of the reduction is higher than that of the increase in output.

China's per-capita emissions have peaked, as have their overall emissions. Their population will continue to make gains in quality of life and move to urban living, but their emissions (both metrics) won't ever exceed the peak seen earlier this year.

Which country is unwilling to do anything about climate change in this discussion?

I mean from a point of view of addressing the problem and figuring out who needs to do better.

Comparing US and China on a total emissions basis makes no sense, unless you are saying that China's brutal one child policy wasn't brutal enough.

Many Chinese citizens enjoy a very modern lifestyle, similar to Western ones. Their emissions have peaked too, and as the rest of them move away from the agrarian lifestyle they are not going to reach the peak level, let alone US ones.

What is the point of looking at total emissions if you are unwilling to do anything to address them specifically?

Per-capital is the only thing that matters, and in China it matters a great deal because they are proving that they can develop into a modern, industrial economy, with a high standard of living, without having to replicate developed nation's high emissions. In fact, the way they are doing it is giving them huge advantages like abundant cheap energy.

Welcome to Slashdot. Anything that suggests China may not be the biggest bad doesn't tend to fare very well.

IKEA stuff is usually decent quality, and being a big popular brand is usually well supported too. Using Matter means no internet connection needed, should work with Home Assistant.

Hopefully this shakes up the market a bit and drives down costs. Their air purifiers are good too, and are disrupting the market with their much lower prices.

Per capita is the only measure that matters, unless you are willing to suggest culling billions of people as a solution.

Even in the US it's a bit more complicated than that. Most jurisdictions only allow trademarks on common words in very narrow markets, so e.g. Microsoft's claim on "visual" only applies to development software products, and not other types of software, or anything that isn't software.

Lower wages were only a small part of it. The next logical step in mass production was to combine products from different brands. Why make socks for just one brand, when you can make socks for a hundred brands, mostly identical except for the logos and dye colours? And why ship the cotton from where it is grown to the US, and the re-export it to Europe for sales, when you can just have a factory next to the fields and then ship directly from there to retail?

Now we are into the next phase, which is the factories selling direct to consumers.

It's not just that, it's that too many industries don't want to modernize, and too many people don't want anything near them to change (NIMBYs).

Take the cheap energy issue. There is loads of cheap energy. We have a massive fusion reactor that is fuelled for billions of years, providing more power than we could ever use, and the technology to harvest it. Some countries are taking advantage of that, but many European and US ones are stuck with high energy costs because they refuse to. That's a choice, not an unfortunate reality we can do nothing about.

That wouldn't help with Cloudflare and similar CDNs. DNS just doesn't propagate fast enough to work with dynamic caching.

It's better we don't try to come up with a technical fix for what is a legal problem anyway. The issue is site blocking on copyright grounds, initiated by private corporations.

Also, it's not like the US manufacturers aren't heavily supported by the government either. Bailouts when things go wrong, favourable laws, tariffs and import bans, and of course the coal roller in chief helping to stifle competition and keep their legacy fossil vehicles popular.