Nooo... we have a bunch of metrics and logs reporting systems at my company. Some of them are in UTC, some of them display my local time, some of them display China Time, and I'm trying to collaborate with colleagues in London and Australia who get data displayed in their local times as well. When I'm working to address an incident and combing through multiple systems to try to correlate events, it's a pain in the ass having to constantly double-check which time zone this data is in.
Zephyr Teachout wrote an early article critiquing Abundance, the book by Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein. She appeared on Ezra's podcast and (IMHO) did not appear to have thought very deeply about the problem of housing affordability; instead defaulting to "monopoly in housing construction" as the problem. Stoller and Musharbash are re-iterating the position that had been staked out by Zephyr Teachout in March.
> Let’s assume that reforming rules on setbacks, parking, single-family zoning, and local input would achieve what they desire (the evidence is not straightforward; cities that have these reforms have lower costs, but they are rising at the same rate as in other cities). It would still seem relatively small-bore as a novel solution: Half of the 10 biggest cities in America—many in Texas—already have a zoning and procedural regime fairly close to what Klein and Thompson want. Are they simply arguing that Dems embracing Texas zoning approaches would transform national politics? That can’t be it.
Much of the criticism of Abundance from prominent pundits on The Left (including Teachout and Nathan Robinson) has been along the lines of "the actual problem is corporate monopoly" rather than zoning. (Or maybe: "zoning is an easy problem to fix and a distraction from the real problem of corporate monopoly".)
I remember in 2015 watching this great tsunami video at a harbor. It was about 11 minutes long.
At the start, there's just a white line at the horizon. Then the fishing boats in the harbor start rocking and jangling. Then water starts pouring over some walkways and sea walls.
Eventually the cameraman backs away and starts climbing a concrete tower; water starts to flood over the area where they had been standing. I think they climb a couple stories and are safe up there.
I haven't been able to find the video in years, but I remember being fascinated by it and I'd love to watch it again.
Edit: I never expected to find that video again, but here it is. A little more terrifying than I remember.
If China is manufacturing solar panels for us, that doesn't give them control of our energy supply.
It's not like being dependent on Saudi Arabia to supply oil. If China cuts us off from new solar panels, the solar panels we already have continue to provide electricity. It would only slow the rate of deployment, which we're already doing to ourselves by imposing a tariff on solar panel imports.
Some of the housing regulations were legitimately put in place for safety reasons to protect people. Others were put in place to keep black and Asian people out. Especially after government initiatives to prevent discrimination in housing like the 1968 Fair Housing Act, efforts to keep out minorities became cloaked in the garb of "public safety", and minority-excluding regulations were sanitized into affordability-excluding regulations.
but it's a lot more than that. Blue cities are by far the worst offenders at anti-housing regulations. part of it must be that people are funadamentally extremely conservative when it comes to housing.
The energy efficiency initiatives of the 1970s significantly reduced the energy cost of economic activity. (Ironically, this helped kill nuclear, by undercutting the expected increase in demand that utilities built all those nuclear power plants to meet.)
The ongoing clean energy transition could bring us cheaper energy and divorce grid energy usage from greenhouse gas emissions.
I disagree. Efficiency gains lead to more economic opportunity and therefore increase demand. People are not content to "do the same with less;" they will instead "do more with the same."
I will leave it to say that there's no evidence that any kind of "energy transition" is or will take place any time soon, at least not at the global scale. Pick any source of energy you like; our peak consumption of that energy source throughout the entirety of of human history is today.
Today is peak oil; today is peak solar; today is peak nuclear; today is peak wood burning stove. We can't even "energy transition" people off of open flame kitchens! Whatever belief you hold that that things are in motion that will fix this -- they seem to be very much not.
Okay, sure, if you look at geologic timescales then eventually Africa will move and the region of northern Africa will cease to be desert.
Within a human timescale, I think "never" is an acceptable term.
Atmospheric circulation means that the latitude of the Sahara is blasted with cool dry air from the upper atmosphere. Humans planting trees might slow the spread of the desert, but will not vanquish it.
To disrupt the effects of atmospheric circulation (ie Hadley cells) creating deserts at those latitudes, you'd need mountain ranges and oceans.
"For several hundred thousand years, the Sahara has alternated between desert and savanna grassland in a 20,000-year cycle caused by the precession of Earth's axis (about 26,000 years) as it rotates around the Sun, which changes the location of the North African monsoon."
It is cultural human hubris to bother, in any way whatsoever, to be worried about the sun burning out. It’s an interesting curiosity but we your life, if you lived to be 2000 years old (you won’t), you will have moved yourself 0.0000571428% closer to the time when that will happen. We DO need to actually be worried about our planet overheating, our agricultural spaces becoming despoiled, and other things that can actually happen in our lives. One of these things is not like the other.
Because this project is about humans and the environment's impact on them, and what they can do to improve it. So naturally human timescales are the measure on which we judge it. What happens in 10 million years is not something we can even pretend to comprehend or influence in a meaningful way. But what happens in the next 100 is.
The goal is to eliminate trash in the environment. Thin plastic bags get discarded carelessly, then catch in the wind and get strewn around a wide area.
Plastic bag bans have been sufficiently successful that people have forgotten this was a problem.
The cost of solar dropped by 90% between 2010 and 2020, and the cost of panels fell by 14% last year. Batteries were just straight up not a thing until 2019: California's grid-scale battery storage capacity has been doubling every year since then.
Putting together the solar panels, the battery, the desalination plant, and the brine plant, he's proposing a $42 billion dollar project that has only been economically feasible for a year or two now. I'm not surprised that it hasn't been built yet.
