The air pollution in Pittsburgh isn’t caused by things under the control of the local government or even the state government. It accumulates and blows in from west of there. Only the US federal government can fix it.
In the NYC area we get a lot of pollution from coal burning power plans in the Midwest. Air currents take all that pollution and dump it here. Probably similar for Pittsburgh.
Clearly. So many also pointing right in the middle of the US, Brazil and Australia.
I’m not sure if the poll was portrayed to be serious.
Also, as someone who was in the US for quite some time, I found that (very much contrary to national stereotypes), Americans were quite knowledgeable about geography and global current affairs. This was evident from the multicultural societies where people knew about their friends, social meetups talking about a lot of different subjects across the world, etc. I refuse to believe that most people are bad at pointing out roughly where different countries are, unless they are countries which genuinely aren’t very well known.
> I’m not sure if the poll was portrayed to be serious.
Indeed, Politico used a survey company that claims they apply "rigorous scientific methodology, trusted by leading organizations across business, policy, media, and tech."
But I find it very difficult to believe that someone identifying Iran by pointing into the ocean, Greenland, or the USA is taking the survey seriously. I mean, American education is certainly horrible, but come on!
Yeah. They probably paid for completion of the poll, and completing the poll required some selection of a location, so a ton of people did exactly that without even reading what the question was.
Yup. Why is this even posted on HN? Seems really low brow, honestly. I see this as the exact sort of click bait, anger inducing content a lot of people here want to avoid.
Why do we trust the poll if it doesn’t publish the survey contents and describe the methodology for participant selection? Survey design is extremely important, it’s like Stats 101. 2% margin of error, oh I’m sure.
Fun anecdote time: my high school was selected to take a survey on extracurricular activities. It was taken over a couple of days in the period before lunch and took like 2 hours total.
My memory is that everyone in the school used it as an exercise in creativity, with lots of people making themselves out to be drug abuser or gang members on paper, just for the novelty. I distinctly remember being surprised because so many people I didn’t expect(because they were typically honest, straight and narrow type folks) were laughing at their made up character who took meth every day before school and did heroin on the weekends, or whatever. Maybe it’s for this reason that the extreme importance of test design and method has stuck with me, but it seems like most people forget it after they pass Stats? hmmmm.
Because we’re all idiots and waited too long, we need to cut emissions by 15% annually, not 2%. 2% does not even offset the increase in US emissions in 2018. 2% is a disaster.
We don’t need to do anything. We’re responsible for only 15% of worldwide emissions, but nearly all of the new green energy tech and research.
If anything I expect us to increase in CO2 while we retrofit buildings with better technology, build clean power generation and grid tech, and continue in our research.
There are nations that need to drastically cut CO2 but it’s not the United States.
> We’re responsible for only 15% of worldwide emissions, but nearly all of the new green energy tech and research.
That's like trying to sell someone a $10 carrot by saying it's 50% off, or an over-weight person thinking it's okay that they're eating a bag of chips because they went to the gym.
I get this point and am mostly in agreement with the intent. However, the US is also more of a service economy, which would lead me to believe we should tend to have lower emissions/productivity compared to other countries that mostly produce goods instead.
So I am curious if there's a way to associate emissions to different categories of productivity and see if we're more wasteful, on average, when it comes to specific parts of our GDP (e.g. using personal automobiles).
I'm not saying this in the self-hating way that I think is trendy for people in the US, but I am curious in the way that, if we want to improve, we could focus on specific parts of the economy that are more wasteful than others. (Driving would be an obvious one, hence the example.)
In 2018, 69% of the US GDP was Personal Consumption. The contribution from Net Exports was -5%. Yes, minus 5.
All you're really saying here is, "it's alright that our CO2 emissions are so high because we're also such greedy materialistic bastards". That's not a great argument.
GDP is a bad metric. It mostly measures how "good" you are at tracking wealth. Much of value in society is not captured by GDP.
I was raised by parents who loved me a lot and did a pretty good job raising me. Had they been delinquent and raised me poorly, value would have been lost, but the GDP would have been none the wiser.
>There are nations that need to drastically cut CO2 but it’s not the United States.
You can't be serious. There is no plural. There is only one country that emits more than the USA and it has four times as many people, 14% of its emissions are caused by manufacturing products that are consumed in other countries and it has invested more in green technology than any other country on earth.
Not insignificant portions of the rest of the world's co2 is devoted to supporting the US's consumption. Whether through shipments, production of goods, or disposal of waste we offshore a huge amount of our carbon emissions.
> We’re responsible for only 15% of worldwide emissions, but nearly all of the new green energy tech and research.
Is "we" the US? laughs
This sentence becomes more true if you replace "we" with "China". Because China actually contributed significantly to green energy tech by making solar panels dead cheap to produce. Or replace it with "Germany". In that case the number is way off (it's more like 2% of worldwide emissions) but the tech contribution holds up if you look for example at wind power plant tech development and having provided monetary incentives for decades already to deploy solar power at large scale (which in turn allowed China to drive down solar production cost by creating the necessary demand for products).
Where is this significant contribution of the US to green energy tech? Because I mostly see significant contributions to keeping the fossil fuel economy alive (large scale research and deployment of fracking tech, cheap gas prices, inefficient car designs and A/C installations anywhere).
The incredible irresponsibility here really earns the downvotes.
As other commenters pointed out, the US still #1 in cumulative emissions, so the warming we see today and for the next ~10 years is mostly due to the US. Second, the US is absolutely terrible when it comes to per-capita emissions. This is not an example for the world to follow. There is zero moral high ground in telling developing nations to cut emissions and yet gluttonously continuing BAU. If they follow the same carbon intensity curve, the planet is absolutely f*ed. The US and western countries have an obligation to demonstrate how to run a complex developed economy with low, or eventually, no emissions.
It's going to require significant CO2 investment (upfront payment for long term material benefit) if we want to reduce CO2 output materially.
The thesis is for us to get there, we need to increase CO2 output, not reduce it. Let's think about how much CO2 investment would be required to fulfill these projects in the "Green New Deal":
* Coast to coast high-speed rail.
* Retrofitting all major buildings in the USA with better technologies.
* Decommissioning dirty power plants.
* Building nation-wide wind and other green power generating infrastructure.
And we should put our foot on the gas for new green energy research. Inventing better and more efficient technologies has the benefit of reducing global CO2 output.
> if we want to reduce CO2 output materially and continue with our current standard of living.
ftfy.
The truth is that we could reduce emissions by living less affluent lifestyles, like, say, the 1950s. Smaller houses, fewer per capita miles driven, little or no intercontinental or transcontinental flights, less meat. But we won't. We cannot step off the hedonistic treadmill, even for a second, or the economy will collapse. And we can think of nothing worse than the economy collapsing. So we create a false dilemma, an impossible constraint system. So we will fail.
There is no need to fail. Just stop investing in obsolete technology. It's basic economics. Increase the energy efficiency of transport 3 fold by switching to electric cars. Increase the energy efficiency of electricity generation three fold by not wasting it on inefficient turbine based powerplants (coal, nuclear). Fossil fuels are downright disgusting in their inefficiency. There is a reason why we need so much primary energy. It's because when we burn coal 2/3 of the energy turns into useless heat. Heat is so useless you even get it for free by circulating water in black pipes exposed to the sun. The only advantage fossil fuels have is energy density and that they can be used as a chemical feed stock.
The US is using, per capita, way way way more carbon than other nations. If we used the same per capita rate as India it would be a 90% reduction. That would be unbelievable. There would be parades in the streets.
Right now, in India, there is sewage in the streets and profound and extreme poverty. Aspiring to Indian emissions is necessarily aspiring to an Indian quality of life.
Just back of the envelope calculation, according to my link the US emitted 400B tons total and China is emitting ~10.8B annually now, so that'd be 37 years with no growth. So yes, the US is in a really deep hole here.
This shows the US having per-capita emissions of roughly twice the EU and China (2017). I imagine it will be a good while until China catches up by that metric...
If it helps, that's not how the English pronoun `we` generally works in writing: it doesn't include "you the reader" by default, it simply implies some group to which the writer belongs. If the writer were trying to imply every reader of HN they might more specifically try to use language more resembling `all of us` or `HN`.
While I'd say it's generally been successful, the experiments with housing first programs here in Canada have failed some specific categories of people pretty badly.
In Calgary and London, people with serious mental illness in particular would get an apartment, only to end up facing eviction before long because of conflicts with neighbours or property damage. Some were housed for less than a month before eviction.
Someone with active psychosis, someone with substantial market income but fleeing an abusive partner, and someone with a stable social and personal situation but who simply can't afford rent on their fixed pension, all require different interventions to keep them stably housed in the long run.
"Housing first" has a habit of being "housing only" support, which works for many people but not for everyone.
Why do Americans [anything]? Because in short they are ignorant.
Americans lack perspective on virtually all topics. They don't read enough, they don't travel enough, their educations are overwhelmingly technical and occupational at the expense of philosophy and ethics, and their domestic brainwashing apparatus has left them collectively unable to think.
Transportation is just like any other topic American's are unqualified to comment upon, like healthcare. They've been indoctrinated by propaganda campaigns to believe and repeat a series of false statements: their cities are too spread out (they aren't); their cities are exceptionally far apart (they aren't); their weather is somehow unprecedented (it isn't); you can't take groceries/children/lumber home on the bike/bus/tram/train (you obviously can).
So the answer to the headline's question is the obvious one, the one with the most hard evidence and the one with the broadest explanatory powers. The reason Americans believe these things is because of ignorance.
Nationalistic flamewar is not ok on HN. You can't post like this here, regardless of which nation you have a problem with. It poisons the commons and provokes much worse from others.
Europeans plundered and enslaved the world for centuries and now act incredulous that anyone does not have the wealth at their disposal to dole out to their unproductive citizens.
Are you seriously implying the reason America doesn't have public transport or the other public amenities Europe does is because they don't have the money?
The killer application for this technology is a bicycle bell you can use to break the trance of phone-staring pedestrians who are randomly staggering down the pavement.
Once you can do that the killer app will be intrusive ads.
And those people who drive down the street blasting loud music (err, I mean "sharing their stereos")? They'll be able to share directly to the people on the sidewalk!
(I loved your comment -- I think we both know this won't be supported).
In Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel/Claptastic Voyage there's an enemy called an Adbug.
"While technically hostile, Adbugs do not directly attack Vault Hunters. Instead, they follow their targeted Vault Hunter around and beam a semi-transparent advertisement at them, which is placed in a random position on the field of vision, obscuring part of the field of view."
You can tell when you're being attackd by an Adbug because they beam audio advertisements into your head.
Yes, they can be extra dangerous if they have, say, a curious dog on a long leash on the other side of said trail while they’re busy counting Facebook likes
Ah, you must be related to the person from the other day who told my TEN-YEAR OLD to get off the sidewalk because it's illegal.
By the time he rode back and shakily told us what had happened, I had no choice but to inform her at the top of my lungs (since she was 600ft down the path) that, no, it's legal if you're under 16 (in our state).
I’m sorry you were held down and forced to scream at someone two blocks away in public. Hopefully somebody some day will invent a kind of faster-than-foot travel you could use to catch up to someone instead.
I imagine the downvoting is due to your erroneous projection of the customs of your locale to the entire larger world. Even narrowly considered, your links don’t really support your point of view (eg there are numerous shared pedestrian/bicycle paths in California, children are allowed to cycle on sidewalks in California, etc).
Riding on the road is even more dangerous in some areas, though.
If a cyclist and a pedestrian collide, someone might go to the hospital. If a cyclist and a car collide, someone is likely to die, and it's basically always the cyclist.
That kind of reasoning wouldn’t make me feel better if I were the pedestrian who had to go to the hospital. You make it sound like bicycles are just an inherently bad thing to have around :)
If we're fantasizing about eliminating some mode of transport, my vote is for cars. Most of my initial parent comment's concerns would go away if there weren't any cars, and pedestrians would be safer on crosswalks too.
In reality, though, we all have to get along. And those concerns are addressed by cyclists not riding at breakneck speed and going blindly around corners. I don't see either of those behaviors very often in my area.
It's worse now that Lime and other bicycle rental startups have littered the sidewalks with bicycles. When I'm not running around a bike left on the sidewalk, I'm getting run over by somebody riding one on the sidewalk.
I'm amazed at how often a bicycle rider on the sidewalk will actually warn me to get out of the way. I haven't knocked anybody off of one yet. It's only a matter of time before somebody bumps into me on one and gets hurt.
Everybody should build everything with a reasonable setting of march. Debian Linux still builds everything for K8, a microarchitecture that lacked SSE3, SSE4, AVX, AES, etc. Even building with march=sandybridge seems petty conservative and gives significant speed improvements in many common cases.
ThinLTO was written by people responsible for peak optimization of very large programs at Google. I honestly can’t call it “fast” but it’s a lot faster than GCC LTO. You normally only peak-optimize your release builds so it’s not like developers are sitting there counting the seconds.
> You normally only peak-optimize your release builds so it’s not like developers are sitting there counting the seconds.
Sometimes you do want to debug a release build because the optimizations have gone wrong, though. In that case, it's helpful if release builds build quickly, and especially if they rebuild quickly as you turn various sub-optimization flags on and off.
Yes, and sometimes you want to validate a performance change and you need the release build to run in the benchmark fixture, and then it's irritating that the build takes forever but what can be done? ThinLTO's real benefit is that it uses so much less memory than legacy LTO and can be applied to larger programs (like Chrome).
