Words have meanings. China is not fascist. In fact, the fascists fled to Taiwan, which fortunately managed to become a democracy.

China does very bad stuff. The UK does very bad stuff. The US does very bad stuff. The EU does very bad stuff. Take your pick. Or rather, don't. Be pragmatic. China is doing more than any country to address climate change, which is objectively good, regardless of what else they are up to.

More than that, we are falling behind because we refuse to compete. Not just economically, but ideologically. There is a reason why so many of gen Z have little faith in our democracies, and why they look at places like China and wonder if there is a better way. Not necessary exactly like China, but a government that is at least not actively trying to shaft them at almost every opportunity. They inherited broken countries, broken economies that concentrated all the wealth away from them, and a looming disaster that the people with the power to do anything about seem to think is not going to affect them personally so they only need to pay lip service to addressing it.

This is about us being honest with ourselves, realistic about how the world is, and finding a way to make things better. Right now we are slipping backwards, fast.

I'm not arguing that Americans should have more children. But also, if you want to argue that having too many people is an issue, China had a brutal one child policy for a long time.

I tend to look at it as we are where we are. We should be planning our economies for a falling population, but that is easier said than done.

The main thing though is that we need to be competitive with China, if only to prove that democracy is capable of dealing with these big issues.

I sometimes wonder if it's because they actually want the controversy. It creates engagement. Like toxic social media thrives on strife.

Marketing likes to call bog standard machine vision "AI" now.

I just hope that it is properly enforced and there aren't loopholes. I know someone who bought a new house with so solar, and it was literally one 250W panel.

I also read abut someone who bought a new build with an EV charger, only to discover that it wasn't wired to her house, but instead to some extremely expensive service. Last I heard she was trying to get the developer to remove it and install one connected to her home, but it was curb side so I don't know if it was possible or not.

Around here a load of new flats just had gas boilers installed too, with the rads way too small to easily upgrade to a heat pump. The developers will do anything to save a few quid.

Currently we are arming a genocidal Israel. Now is not the time to be pointing fingers though, we need to do what we can to address climate change.

There are 1.4 billion Chinese, and about 350 million Americans. So if China was comparable to the US, its economy would be about 8x larger, and it's emissions would already have pushed us past 3C.

Fortunately they seem to be taking a more responsible route and have already peaked, at about half the per-capita emissions of the average US citizen today, let alone where the US peaked. If they had decided to just follow the other developed nations, even Europe, we would be completely screwed.

Now we just need to get over ourselves and try to match what China is doing. Work with them on this.

China's CO2 emissions per capita are a fraction of what we emit today, let alone where we peaked. The average Chinese citizen emits about half what the average US citizen does.

It's even worse if you consider cumulative emissions since the 1880s, in which case the US has about double those of China, which adjusted to per capita is about 8x as much.

They are also installing clean, renewable energy faster than the rest of the world combined. They are leaders in EV technology and sales.

Even if you want to argue that population size is an issue, theirs is shrinking.

By any reasonable measure, the developed nations contributed the most to this crisis, and also benefited the most from it. That may change as China comes to dominate green tech, but we are getting protectionist about that too now.

Indeed, China hit its agreed Paris target 5 years ahead of schedule. The EU is struggling to stay on track with its. If there is any lack of ambition, it's on the EU side.

It's really sad that the UK has dropped its Green New Deal ideas as somehow "unaffordable". They boost the economy, they don't cost anything. Borrowing to invest, with a massive pay back of several times what was put in.

The American distributors are partly to blame. They decided they were only going to target the teenager/young adult, male audience, so you only got violent and fan service filled stuff being translated. And badly dubbed too. It also gave people the impression that anime was simply violent soft porn.

Nowadays there is much more variety in the stuff that gets translated, and it appeals to a broader audience. In Japan the longest running series are mostly about families and are comedy dramas.

They are mostly talking about the cost of mitigation now. All that CO2 we dumped into the atmosphere, vastly more than people in developing nations, is affecting their countries now. It also means that because we already did it, for there to be any hope of keeping climate change under control, they have to transition very rapidly away from fossil fuels.

Even the younger generations in developed nations can make this claim. To limit climate change to something only moderately catastrophic, the average millennial needs to emit about 1/10th the lifetime CO2 as their boomer parents/grandparents did. Gen Z needs to reach net zero. They aren't able to benefit from cheap fossil fuels and emissions.

We had a few similar schemes in the UK, one in 2009 after the financial crash, and then multiple more when places like London introduced charging for high emission vehicles.

They didn't have any real effect on used prices, not least because to qualify you had to have owned the car for at least six months so could not just buy an old one to get the discount. Air quality has markedly improved though, with corresponding health benefits.

It's because of when the environmental regulations changed. The law probably says "cars not compliant with X", which gets translated to an age cut-off by journalists.

They are in a difficult situation. Pollution is harming everyone's health, but loss of access to a vehicle could also really hurt some people. In the UK they did a scrappage scheme, where if you have a non-compliant car you could trade it in for a fixed price well above market value, and use the money to buy a better one.

It's mind boggling that they even attempted it in the first place. Windows Vista had glass effects that were soon toned down, but apparently Apple doesn't learn from other people's mistakes.

A light curtain wouldn't be able to differentiate between a ball and a player or part of a racket going over the line.

Sumo figured this out ages ago. They have a referee in the ring, four guys sat around the ring, and another guy sat off to the side with access to video from multiple cameras. Any of them can challenge the referee's decision, and the video evidence is always conclusive. They tend to err a little on the side of caution when both wrestlers were in unrecoverable positions, that sort of thing, but generally it works pretty well.

For some reason tennis and football can't seem to get it right.