I mean, yeah, those changes do also tend to be somewhat generational, to be fair. But the point is that people who don't have the means definitely won't do that, while some percentage of people who can will.

Also climate is a factor. In a warmer area, give that 60-year-old pig farmer a single-room air conditioner vented through the window, and watch the power use jump up quite a bit — not just for that person, but for every other person in the area who experiences it on a hot summer day, as a whole bunch of other people buy their own.

In other words, it's not just individual poverty; it's also regional poverty that suppresses some types of consumption. People who don't know what they are missing don't miss it.

Repeat after me: There is no such thing as clean coal.

Note that China's coal production continues to grow.

Want to see what actual reduction in coal use looks like? U.S. coal production is down 50% since 2008. Coal's percentage of the power mix is down from 50% to 15%.

No, China is not doing the right thing. Like I said, they're paying lip service to reducing coal use, but the reality is that every year, they produce more coal than the year before. And whether that is being entirely used in China or exported, the net effect is the same.

Not sure how you read my post and interpreted it as entitlement. But people who have more money are more likely to buy things that cause pollution during their manufacture. They're more likely to buy things that cause pollution during their use. That's just reality, and pretending that it is not reality just guarantees that any policy you might come up with won't work in the real world.

That's more a poverty thing than anything else. As people earn more money, you'll see more people wanting cars, air conditioning, etc.

The thing is, they're also in the best position to take advantage of green tech to solve their power problems without horrible levels of emissions. Most of the technology is being physically built there, and they don't have two centuries of power plant infrastructure and steel smelting built around coal and coke. They're building up their industry *now*, in an era when it is possible for them to build it cleanly. It is way harder to rebuild existing plants to be clean than to build new plants in a clean way, and way harder to justify that retooling.

So there's a real opportunity for China to do this right. But as long as it is not in their best interest financially to do it right, they'll do it cheaply instead.

And the way you do it is by requiring imports to declare the energy mix that went into it, similar to how we require folks to declare what percentage of the parts of a product came from specific countries, etc., and then charge a tariff based on that number, and audit those numbers periodically. We wouldn't be telling them what to do. We would just be arbitrarily raising the cost of their products if they don't do it right, and providing an import incentive for companies that do things like build giant solar farms and battery banks to reduce their grid consumption.

China has a much higher carbon footprint per unit of production, though, and that's the real problem. All the folks living in rural areas that bike around everywhere because they don't have cars are interesting culturally, but they're not particularly relevant from a greenhouse gas perspective, because they're also not producing significant economic output.

Most of the countries with high CO2 per dollar GDP are tiny countries with minimal production. China isn't. The U.S. and India produce 0.26 and 0.27 kg CO2 per dollar of GDP. China produces 0.42 kg per dollar. They are nearly twice as bad pollution-wise.

Except that this isn't the case. A lot of manufacturing has moved to India, and it still manages to produce barely half the CO2 per dollar that China does. Because India actually has laws on pollution and enforces them. Thailand (another country that is getting a decent amount of new manufacturing) pulls of 0.24 kg per dollar, which is even better than the U.S.

China talks the talk, but doesn't walk the walk. They pay lip service to lowering emissions while spewing more and more CO2. The only way this actually stops is if the U.S. and the E.U. impose a carbon tax on imports that makes it cheaper to do the right thing than to continue to pollute. If we do that, the problem will magically fix itself.

... which is to say that despite China being the problem from a pollution production perspective, we're the real problem over here on the other side of the world, because we're continuing to support their excessively dirty production by buying goods from them because they're cheaper.

That could be interpreted in two possible ways. I'm assuming you meant by bringing the South back in, rather than by freeing the slaves.

Harvard has also become more selective in the last 20 years. The US population has grown by 16% in the last 20 years but Harvard's undergraduate enrollment has stayed the same. And the number of foreign students has increased 60% over the past two decades. These factors alone could explain most of the grade inflation simply because the student body is smarter on average today than they were 20 years ago.

And asking it for a good mayo recipe might cause you to eat something that would be suicide.

As per Mozilla's announcement, I've just set

browser.urlbar.quicksuggest.online.enabled = false

It also ignores that moving pictures are not the same as still pictures. When images are moving, you don't see each frame as clearly, so you can get away with lower resolution, and with a moving image, you can actually perceive far more resolution than the actual pixel resolution of each individual image, because things in the real world don't line up perfectly with grid lines on consecutive frames.

So with moving images, you would expect to perceive higher resolution above a certain point as a reduction in eyestrain and other physiological effects, rather than directly as conscious perception.

If I pay on one site, every single other site still has ads. So this locks me into the viewpoints preferred by the curator of one site and to the production values that one site's business model enables.

I'm less likely to believe a lawyer working for Exxon than a homeless person on the street with a sign saying "The End Is Nigh!" At least the homeless person doesn't know that the things he is saying have no basis in reality.

Lawyers have a responsibility to represent their clients' interests no matter how bats**t they are. Their opinion is nothing more than the opinion of their corporate bill payers. And their bill payers are one of the more sociopathic corporations out there.

Exxon is a company that actively denies climate change even though their internal documents show that their scientists have been aware of the problem for decades. It's basically the cigarette industry all over again. There are literally no companies in the world that I trust less than oil companies when it comes to climate change.

No, they aren't. They are required to provide the numbers that the government demands. They're free to precede it with a wall of text that explains why they don't feel that blaming them for people choosing to burn their gasoline, rather than, for example, using it as a beverage, produces CO2 emissions all they want to. That's their choice. What they don't have the right to do is not provide the data.

Maybe you did, but I thought the poster's name was Thomas Jefferson. :-D