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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 2nd, 2023

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  • It’s hard to draw meaningful conclusions form a single 4 year period. There have been several instances of corruption (and significant externalized costs) in private firms that went on for much longer than 4 years.

    I agree that there is a lot of corruption in government but there’s a long gap between that and no accountability. We see various forms of government accountability on a regular basis; politicians lose elections, they get recalled, and they sometimes even get incarcerated. We also have multiple systems designed to allow any citizen to influence government.

    None of these systems and safeguards are anywhere close to perfect but it must be better than organizations that don’t even have these systems in the first place.


  • What makes governments any more susceptible to corruption than a private organization?

    I’m not actually talking about governments having absolute control. That’s a pretty extreme scenario to jump to from from the question of if it’s better for a private company or a government to control search.

    Right now we think Google is misusing that data. We can’t even get information on it without a leak. The government has a flawed FOIA system but Google has nothing of the sort. The only way we’re protected from corruption at Google (and historically speaking several other large private organization) is when the government steps in and stops them.

    Governments often handle corruption poorly but I can rattle of many cases where governments managed to reduce corruption on their own (ie without requiring a revolution). In many cases the source of that corruption was large private organizations.




  • I can certainly agree that there is no evidence to suggest that China is “one of the most polluting countries in the world”. I haven’t seen a shred of evidence to support that claim. It is entirely baseless.

    On the other hand, the claim that China’s per capita pollution is lower than that of most industrialized nations is supported by evidence. It is the best evidence we have too, unless you’ve discovered a better metric in the last few days.

    A claim that imperfect evidence is equivalent to no evidence is baseless and will lead to erroneous conclusions.


  • I agree that CO2 is an imperfect measure and you don’t seem to be making the claim that CO2 has an SNR of 0 (ie it carries no information at all). We seem to agree on the core of your central three paragraphs so I won’t comment on them.

    You’ve stated multiple times now that you don’t know any better measures than CO2. So even if there are other measures they’re just as bad or worse. Given this lack of any better metric, on what verifiable evidence are you basing any of your conclusions?

    I’m assuming based on the time you responded to me that you are in China so maybe you can elucidate me on how I get this wrong.

    The same way you got your conclusions about China’s pollution wrong, by misapplying evidence and jumping to conclusions.

    It’s interesting that you should phrase your question that way. The cheap answer would be to point out that you’re not using “elucidate” correctly. You’re missing a preposition. It’s also odd to use “get” instead of “got” here. A corrected version of your sentence might be, “…maybe you can elucidate to me how I got this wrong.” It’s cheap in the sense that personal attacks are easy and do little to advance a conversation. It would be just as silly of me to use your grammar error as evidence that you’re a foreign national as it is for you to use the timing of my posts as evidence of my location.

    You might then suspect that I might still be a foreigner who’s studied too much English grammar. That would be correct. It turns out that when I speak my native language, other native speakers can sometimes pinpoint the exact district in Vienna where I was born. These days, none of my neighbors speak German. They love the Sox and rock their “Dunkies”.

    Just as in the case of estimating China’s pollution levels, cavalier use of evidence leads to erroneous conclusions.


  • OK It sounds like there’s only one metric we can use to evaluate how much China pollutes.

    The metric is widely used by various academics, government agencies and independent organizations. We have no better metric and that metric says that China doesn’t pollute that much.

    That leaves 2 possibilities; the metric actually provides no information at all or it still provides some information.

    If it provides no information AND we don’t have anything that does (ie a better metric) that means we literally have absolutely no information at all about how much China pollutes at all. That means we can’t make any intelligent claims about how much China pollutes or how much they’re fudging the number because there’s no comparison to make.

    If it does provide some information we’re left with a situation where all of the imperfect information supports the claim that China doesn’t pollute much.

    Either way, the evidence as you’ve classified it, doesn’t support the claim that China is, “one of the planet’s most polluting countries,” which was the original claim of this thread. It is, by definition, a baseless conjecture.




  • Not sure why you’re so hung up on dogs or 2 months. The thread still shows up in searches and you’re clearly getting updates on it. Unless there’s some evidence to suggest the information in this thread is now obsolete, there’s no reason not to respond.

    @esteeyou@lemmy.world made a claim and provided evidence. Unless there’s better evidence to the contrary it’s reasonable to accept the claim. My children sometimes still respond to arguments with, “Nuh uh.” I generally expect more from adults.





  • They do it to make you spend more time browsing. Shoppers typically get the same stuff every time they get groceries. Over time people learn the layout of their local store and develop efficient patterns to move through it and get everything they want. When the store shuffles everything around they force shoppers to wander around the store and to look at all the shelves carefully for the stuff they actually want. Some percentage of them end up finding new things to buy and spend more money.


  • I have to applaud David Nolan on some next level marketing for this one.

    He invented the predecessor of that chart as a way to promote libertarianism. It’s very clever in how subtly it introduces a loaded question.

    The phrasing asks the viewer to consider if they want more or less political freedom and if they want more or less economic freedom. Obviously, most people want more freedom. Therefore Libertarianism is the best form of government. QED!

    But that makes two big assumptions that are almost certainly incorrect:

    1. It assumes that choice of government is entirely, or at least predominantly, determined by your views on economic and social regulations. Questions of military, legal process, environmental policy, etc are all either irrelevant or can be entirely described within the economic and social regulation factors. That doesn’t even pass the sniff test. If two people agree that they want social and economic freedom, do we really believe that they necessarily have identical political beliefs? No, because we know that in real life they’ll define those freedoms differently.
    2. It assumes that complex topics such as economics and social regulation can be entirely described on a single axis of “more vs less". If you look at the disagreements that people actually have, it’s almost always about the types of regulations, not on the degree of regulation.

    It’s a little frustrating that unabashed marketing is so frequently trotted out as though it were an established fact.


  • nednobbins@lemm.eetoMemes@lemmy.mlPlease don’t nuke me
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    10 months ago

    Primarily because it’s really difficult to move countries. Even when an other country is “better”, by whatever metric you may choose, the high switching cost makes the move worse for individuals unless staying in a country is really really bad. That threshold is typically when subsistence in the country of origin becomes untenable, often due to war or famine.


  • Didn’t know it had a name.
    That once stopped me from registering a video game title.

    I was feeling silly so I figured I’d go for a nonsensical contrast. “Evil Grape” got rejected. After several failed attempts it eventually dawned on me that some dumb algorithm thought it was a reference to sexual violence.

    It kind of annoyed me but I just picked an other fruit. It wasn’t until later that I considered that “Evil Banana” was probably more sexually evocative but it was too late by then.

    So if you’re ever playing a video game and shoot (or get shot by) “Evil Banana”, know that, if it weren’t for the Scunthorpe Problem, it could have been “Evil Grape,” but either way, it wasn’t intended as a sexual reference at all.



  • This isn’t about own vs rent, it’s about house vs apartment.

    Open flames are dangerous and smoke is annoying to neighbors. Condos and coops typically won’t let you grill. Some of them have designated grilling areas and those often have restrictions on how you can use them. Even many apartments with fireproof balconies won’t allow them because not all the neighbors want a balcony full of smoke.

    Every house I’ve ever rented, allowed grilling. Even the cheapest one, a row-house in Baltimore, let you grill in the back “yard”.