Victim of Communism

  • 47 Posts
  • 1.38K Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • China had too many people for it to have the highest per capita amount

    It has too many people to avoid the economics of scale that blunt per-capita emissions rates.

    the amount of people you have has no bearing on the per capita amount of anything

    As the number of people using a public service increase, the per-capita waste declines. A bus takes roughly the same amount of gasoline to move 5 people as 50. Cooling an apartment block during a heat wave is more efficient than cooling an equivalent number of stand-alone houses. And as the apartment approaches 100% occupancy, the net benefit is spread over more people. Industrial scale refrigerators consume less energy overall than individual freezers.

    The more people using a piece of capital, the less energy is wasted through its continuous operation.


  • Large populations tend to have a lot of shared utility and a lower per capita emissions standard as a result. Countries with lots of mass transit and dense housing enjoy significant efficiences of scale. One reason why India looks so good on paper, despite having some abhorrent ecological policies in practice.

    Smaller countries - especially small tourist countries - tend to have emissions far higher than their native population size would suggest. Places like Qatar, the UAE, and Kuwait regionally top the emissions per capita chart as a result. Canada and Russia also score badly in no small part because of how spread out the population ends up in countries with enormous amounts of wilderness.







  • I would expect something time-senstive to be solved quickly be the State Department’s IT department.

    I can’t imagine why. It’s a slow-moving ship with numerous levels of authorization between The Guy Hitting The Buttons and The Guy Making The Decisions.

    They should have been able to do something like this in less time than “days”.

    Again, I can’t imagine why. This information isn’t so time-sensitive that they need to respond to it in hours, much less minutes. And the cost of reacting swiftly but clumsily far exceeds the reward for opening a document in a weird format on a State Department computer.

    I am quite certain that they are extremely lacking in skilled IT workers lol

    I haven’t seen any evidence of this. Unskilled IT workers will just blindly click and install shit without any gatekeeping or cybersecurity. It’s the skilled ones that go slow and steady, verify within sandbox environments before taking any big risks, and deliver a product that isn’t going to blow up in your face after it’s been configured.


  • Calling it shit is reductive and inaccurate

    Anything North Korea does is default assumed incompetently executed, maliciously intentioned, and/or the result of stolen work from a more skilled (western) developer/designer. The American Brain cannot comprehend the existence of a Soviet computer science expert. Certainly not one from a country where the prevailing wisdom is “These stupid foreigners all believe the President has a perfect golf score and never poops. Everyone eats grass because they’re always starving. And their army feeds their Olympic Soccer Team to wild dogs every time a player misses a goal in a qualifying match”.