The front page of the web site is excellent. It describes what it does, and it does its feature set in quick, simple terms.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone to a website for some open-source software and had no idea what it was or how it was trying to do it. They often dive deep into the 300 different ways of installing it, tell you what the current version is and what features it has over the last version, but often they just assume you know the basics.

I’d still be interested in what you find if you do research it. Maybe there’s something I’m overlooking.

I just wish it wasn’t 2 steps forward, 1 step back. Lina Khan and Jonathan Kanter were really scaring the billionaires, but not only did they lose their jobs when Trump won, it seemed likely that Harris was going to ditch them if she won too.

AC is actually pretty efficient from the point of view of thermodynamics. The Coefficient of Performance of just about any air conditioner or heat pump will be well above 1. That is, Watts of cooling/heating provided per Watt of power. For a purely electrical heater the coefficient of performance is 1. 1 Watt of electricity results in 1 Watt of heating.

If you’re using a heat pump in winter, it’s essentially the same efficiency as using an air conditioner in summer. But, there are differences. For one, if it’s 25C people might feel comfortable. If it’s 35C people are almost certainly using the air conditioner. But if it’s 10 degrees in the other direction, 15C, people might just have warm sweaters on. So, naturally, no heating being used is infinitely more efficient than turning the AC on.

Another difference is that every device in your house generates heat. Your fridge moves heat from the inside to the outside, meaning it moves heat into your kitchen. Plus the pumps your fridge uses to circulate the coolant generate waste heat. Your stove, oven, microwave, kettle, coffee-maker, etc. all generate heat. Your computer, phone, TV, etc. all generate heat. Lamps generate much less heat than they used to. A 100W bulb used to generate 100W of heat, but modern LED lights use only about 4W for the same amount of light – but that 4W still eventually becomes waste heat. That means that in summer your AC needs to dump all that additional heat outside, whereas in winter your heating system has to do less work the more gadgets you have on.

If you have a purely electrical heating system (which are hugely inefficient) every watt your gaming computer uses to generate awesome graphics is a watt your heater doesn’t need to generate to heat the place up. But, in the summer, every watt of heat you generate indoors is a watt of heat your AC unit needs to dump outside.

But, IMO, the bigger deal is that people live in some really cold places. In Fairbanks, Alaska, the daily mean temperature in January is -22.4C. In Phoenix, Arizona the daily mean in July is 35.3. But that means that in Phoenix in the hottest month, the average outside temperature is only about 10 degrees away from a comfortable indoor temperature. Whereas in Fairbanks the average outdoor temperature is a full 45 degrees colder than a comfortable indoor temp. So, my guess is that even if you’re someone who bakes things in the oven daily, even in summer, you have a powerful gaming PC running at up to 1000 Watts, you blow-dry your hair every day, etc. Even then, someone with that lifestyle in Phoneix is probably using fewer watts of overall power (electricity + heating) than someone in Fairbanks.

In the end though, it probably comes down to how you’re generating the power, and how you’re generating the heat. If you live somewhere where your electricity is fully environmentally friendly, then your AC or heating might have zero CO2 cost, unless you include the entire lifecycle of the solar panels, the air conditioners, the heating system, etc. Then the manufacturing process will generate some CO2. But, your use of the system won’t. If you’re heating using heating oil or natural gas, then of course you’re going to generate a lot of CO2 as a result.

No one is holding a gun to the owners of industry and forcing them to over produce

They’re not overproducing, and when it happens by accident their shareholders punish them for wasting money.

The onus of responsibility is on the producers to produce sustainability, not for consumers to not buy their products

Bullshit, that’s a way to avoid responsibility for your own decisions. Your purchasing drives their production. If you stopped buying they’d stop making.

People need things

People need some things, but people need less than they buy.

People will have to buy things that are available

People need less than they buy, and should be conscious of how much they buy, what they buy, etc.

Systemic forces dictate what they can afford and what is convenient for them.

True, and it’s hard to change the entire system at once, but you can slowly bend it. In the 1980s Apartheit was just how things were done in South Africa. Since they were a sovereign country nobody could force them to change without invading them. But people boycotted them and shamed them. By people thinking about whether or not their money supported the Apartheit regime, they managed to change it.

Your position is incredibly ignorant to the systemic forces

Your position is extremely lazy, using those systemic forces as an excuse to do nothing, or to do whatever you want because you pretend you can’t change the system.

just being on a shelf is a chance for profit, even if people don’t buy it

Sure buddy. Things on a shelf turn a profit when nobody buys them. If that’s the kind of economic analysis you do, no wonder you’re so confused.

I’m going to stand outside the system and analyze it.

But you’re not going to make them scared by publishing made up news stories like this. What will make them scared is politicians who they haven’t bought being in power.

if they generate a million people’s world of CO2 each, that’s the pollution of 3 billion people!!!

Which is why I doubt that that’s true. For it to be true, you’d probably have to do some kind of calculation like “if this privately owned company is owned by a billionaire, then assign all CO2 emissions from its entire operations to that one individual”. So, if you eliminated them, you actually wouldn’t eliminate those CO2 emissions. Someone would take over that business and it would continue putting out CO2 as long as someone was buying its products and/or services.

If everyone’s to blame, nobody’s to blame. So, that’s not very useful.

A lot of the “oil lobby” is suburban dwellers who rely on their cars for everything and oppose anything transportation-related that isn’t a subsidy for cars and roads.

I was thinking that maybe this has to do with “flag of convenience” status. If a Singapore-flagged ship burns massive amounts of fossil fuels but the owners are Australian and the crew is Filipino, does the country of Singapore get the CO2 bill?

But, the list of biggest flag of convenience countries does (sort of) include Singapore, but not Trinidad and Tobago. And, if shipping mattered you’d think Liberia would be higher on the CO2 per capita list.

As for making people feel like we’ve done our bit. Yeah, I don’t fly around the world in a private jet. Or, like some billionaires, fly around with 2 private jets, the second one on standby in case there’s an issue with the first one. I just don’t think that’s a good excuse for not examining how I live. There are hundreds of millions of people like me, and only about 3000 billionaires in the world.

The thing is, even if it’s true that the average billionaire uses 1,000,000x as much energy as the average person, there are so few billionaires that most of the world’s CO2 is still emitted by the other 8.2 billion.

We definitely should make it so there are no billionaires. Tax them out of existence, and if that doesn’t work, axe them out of existence.

Having said that, we also need to take responsibility for our own wasteful lives. Just look at how inefficient cars are. In North America it’s perfectly normal to jump into a vehicle and haul around multiple tons of steel just to go get coffee. Another major source of CO2 is electricity and heat. Thankfully solar cells are getting so cheap that within a few decades (if the oil lobby can be defeated) most electricity will probably be solar. But, should we really be living in places where the heat needs to be turned on for 6 months of the year?

Canada is bringing in hundreds of thousands of immigrants per year, and the total population is growing at something like 1 million more people per year. Each one of those people becomes one of the most energy-using people on the planet, partially because the North American lifestyle is wasteful, partially because Canada is insanely cold half the year and requires massive energy for heating. Every new Canadian, whether a birth or an immigrant makes the world’s CO2 footprint much bigger. Maybe Canada should start shrinking and not growing, and the population should move to places where such a massively energy intensive lifestyle is not necessary.

Articles like this always seem like they’re people looking for a way to shift the blame to someone else. This time it’s the billionaires. Other times it has been corporations. People never take responsibility for their own lives.

The worst countries for energy use per capita are mostly middle-eastern oil and gas producers, and places that are very cold and energy producers (Iceland, Norway, Canada), and for some reason Singapore and Trinidad and Tobago.

If you look at just fossil fuel use per capita the picture is slightly different. Iceland drops way down the list. They use a lot of energy, but it’s mostly geothermal and hydroelectric. After the middle east, Singapore and Trinidad and Tobago it’s USA and Canada at the top. Canada is basically USA with cold winters. Then it’s South Korea, Russia, Australia, etc.

I think what they mean in this case is “the average person”, i.e. divide all the CO2 produced by 8.2 billion. Since half of those people live in massive poverty and have virtually no carbon footprint, the per-person number is much less than any Australian, Canadian, American, etc.

Industry wouldn’t be making anything if people weren’t buying the goods and services they produce.

If you buy a huge firework that you use at a gender reveal party, who gets assigned the CO2 from the entire production pipeline of the item you bought? Is it the company that made the firework? Is it the company that dug up the raw materials that were refined to make the contents of the firework? Or is it you because you bought the firework? I’d say it should be you.

There are exceptions to this. For example, during COVID some of the airlines were flying empty planes around because they had deals with airports that to keep their slots in the system they had to be using them. In that case the company was polluting but no consumer was directly to blame. But, those are rare. And, you could argue that anybody who bought a flight on those airlines after that ended up paying them back for doing that and thus shares responsibility for it.

This is amazing. PDFs full of redacted legal docs are so far from people’s daily experiences. Even if they’re printouts of emails, it’s hard to slog through them. Pretending you’re logged into gmail as Epstein and can just browse around in his emails, that’s just a brilliant way to make this information more easily accessible.

I’ve noticed some glitches in how it presents things. It often doesn’t get the order of things right , like in one case one of Epstein’s flunkies emailed him asking “Have you seen this?” forwarding an email from someone else. The jmail site rendered it as Epstein receiving the forwarded email, then lots of replies to that. Often the order of things is wrong too. But, you can always click on “view original document” to see what it actually looked like.

Regardless of the content, whoever came up with this way of presenting the information deserves some kind of UI/UX award.

Or if you’re from New Zealand and your cow-orker Margaret prefers you to use one of its rarer diminutive forms.

On a somewhat related note, people may know that Pittsburgh is one of the top places in the US for medical research and treatment. It’s the home of Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Pittsburgh, and many others. It has “the second-most hospitals and second-most doctors per capita of any in the nation”.

But why would the “Steel City” have such good medical care? It turns out that for a while, steel worker unions were really powerful, and one of the main benefits the unions fought for was good health care for their members. Now the steel industry is long gone, but what remains is a great medical system that was essentially founded by those unions.

Moral of the story? If you’re a worker in a dirty, dangerous industry, you can either vote for someone like Trump who will gut your healthcare and strip you of government protections, or you can form a union and get the protection you deserve.

I see that as support for Newsom.

Then that’s your issue. You shouldn’t.

Who’s supporting Newsom?

“Liberals like you”, that’s a real asshat thing to say.