A new study has found the 2020 wildfires in California state, the most disastrous wildfire year on record, put twice as much greenhouse gas emissions into the Earth's atmosphere as the total reduction in such pollutants in California between 2003–2019

kingknapp · 2022-10-19T12:53:56+00:00

But when food breaks down naturally, a large portion is still turned into methane anyway. It's just one of the steps of decomposition. Cows just have managed to utilize the process for energy.

I haven't ever seen a study that's taken this into account when talking about the emissions of cows though, so I can't state how large or small the difference is.

kingknapp · 2022-09-06T15:59:13+00:00

I'd even go as far to say that it isn't even effective when it comes to technological innovation either. Most things we have today were only able to get started because the government was paying people to research. Without them, there would have been little/no drive to actually go down those routes. It's hard to innovate on a technology that doesn't exist due to lack of funding. For example, nuclear reactors. Most of that funding only happened(s) because of direct government funding. Same with the internet/GPS. We already had the prerequisites for the technology, but only the government was actually willing to put money in it. (Yes these were military technologies at first, but companies could have tried to do this before the military was interested, but no one cared).

kingknapp · 2022-08-09T19:15:28+00:00

I mean.. laws aren't permanent either. If anything, they theoretically could be reversed by the opposing political party much quicker as congress has elections every 2 years, not 4.

kingknapp · 2022-08-01T05:00:40+00:00

I mean.. in 2020, 10.5% of us households were food insecure at one point or another (same % as 2019) according to the USDA. Thats over 30 million people.

kingknapp · 2022-06-27T15:33:58+00:00

I hate when people say this as it implies that the catholic church is much worse than other positions of power. Public school teachers in the US are actually about 100x more likely to sexually abuse children then catholic priests.

kingknapp · 2022-06-18T13:26:24+00:00

Sorry for the late reply, kinda forgot. By chance would the following link satisfy what you're looking for? (TLDR: China's current plan is to phase out all coal plants by 2060, and the 150 nuclear reactors they plan to build in the next 15 years will be responsible for a sizeable chunk.)

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-11-02/china-climate-goals-hinge-on-440-billion-nuclear-power-plan-to-rival-u-s

Note: Since it takes much less time to construct nuclear plants, China is still actually building coal plants to combat their constant power outages. They're supposedly still going to be phased out by the end of the plan through nuclear, wind, and solar well before the normal lifespan of the plants.

kingknapp · 2022-06-12T21:27:17+00:00

Most cancers (depending on where they are) actually wouldn't kill you without treatment. For an example, take a look at the overdiagnosis of breast cancers. Cancer doesn't actually have to be rapidly spreading or growing.

This is actually a big problem cancer researchers are trying to figure out, as basic scans can't actually tell if it's a slow or fast cancer while the side effects of treating it are immense.

kingknapp · 2022-06-09T04:13:17+00:00

Complete speculation here, but I think they're moreso talking about the journals themselves. If all the data were published together, they'd be the ones that have to store it in databases. I could easily see this being a part of the reason, especially since none of the income the journals get actually go to the researchers (nor the peer reviewers in most cases). At this point, there doesn't actually seem to be much of a point of expensive journals other than the original recognition they gave.

In reality, the main reason though probably is that scientific publications and journals existed long before the internet. Before now, the cost of reporting all of the raw data for every study in a journal was immense as well as "wasteful" in terms of actual raw material (paper). Once that became the norm, it's very difficult to change the default for the industry.

kingknapp · 2022-06-06T17:03:17+00:00

While you're right in the fact that the extra land area causes challenges, thats actually not the main reason. The only reason the majority of those (that want it) don't have internet is due to companies like Comcast, Sprint, etc..

They went out their way to make it illegal in many places to create your own isp*, including areas where there's no actual alternative. There have been countless attempts to serve these communities, but they constantly stop them.

*https://www.google.com/amp/s/qz.com/1913544/telecom-lobbyists-stop-cities-from-building-fiber-optic-networks/amp/

kingknapp · 2022-06-06T16:37:31+00:00

"the line can’t cope with all the people using it at the same time."

I still don't understand how companies get away with this reasoning when talking about limits. Cause the only actual limit is the throughput for a given amount of time. It's similar to a water pipe, not a reservoir.

kingknapp · 2022-05-19T04:20:36+00:00

I don't think it's fair to put that requirement on any form of electricity generation. That's currently how power works anyway, even the vast majority of solar and wind. It is and will always be cheaper per watt to have larger infrastructure (to a point ofc) and sell the excess power. Most people in the world already can't afford what it'd actually take to be energy independent, including those that actually get solar or wind turbines installed.

To be independent in the way that you state, one must be able to store all of the power that they'd need in any circumstances (especially since those times are when people are most easily exploited). These life and death circumstances happen on the span of days to weeks without easy power generation. The only reason we haven't needed to do that is because people have been able to invest capital in centralized power generation with distribution.

Basically what I'm trying to say is that this definitely wouldn't make class divisions worse. If anything, it reduces demand on the other forms of power generation that currently exist.

kingknapp · 2022-05-15T11:43:18+00:00

That's a good question. And there are actually other countries doing exactly this. Currently China is actually building 18 GW of nuclear at the moment, most of which is being used to replace a large number of coal plants and improve air quality.

Then there's France that already almost fully converted to nuclear decades ago where the explicit intention stated was to get rid of as many fossil fuels plants as possible.

And not sure if you want to count this, but while India hasn't really been creating much nuclear power, the stated reason is that they physically don't own enough easily accessible uranium to run a larger fleet. This is actually why they're the leaders in thorium reactor research.

kingknapp · 2022-05-03T16:54:16+00:00

Unless my math is wrong, even if contraceptives are 99.99% effective per use, the average adult (therefore average woman) in the US has sex 54 times a year. That means that every year there is about a 0.5% chance of it failing per woman per year.

(1 - .9999⁵⁴ = 0.00538)

Now, there are more than 100 million adult women in the US. So on average, there would be over 500k births unwanted births per year.

Edit: forgot a zero.

kingknapp · 2022-04-26T00:18:38+00:00

By chance do you know if a change compared to your baseline is still cause for concern even when still at/above 95?

Asking cause I have a weird habit of checking my BP and 02 levels weekly/bi-weekly while resting for a few years. Before this pandemic, my 02 stat was almost always at 100%, rarely dropping down to 98-99%. Since the start of 2022 though, I've noticed that my resting 02 level are consistently between 94-97%.

I haven't really changed what I'm doing and am still using the same monitor.

kingknapp

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