nednobbins

Do you have a better metric?

Production will always have some waste and pollution. China has high pollution because we do a lot of production there. As I pointed out above, on both a per-capita and a per-production basis China pollutes less than many industrialized nations (US. Germany, Japan, South Korea, Canada, Taiwan) and many developing nations (Singapore, Malaysia).

Given current manufacturing data, moving production out of China to other countries would likely increase pollution.

A lot of people don't realize how quickly China is changing. Things that were true just a few decades ago are often no longer true.

Once China decided that pollution was a problem they went all in on addressing it. China has massive reforestation projects, huge incentives to switch to EVs, and much tighter energy efficiency standards.

Solar isn't even their only renewable energy source. China gets about equal amounts from solar, wind and hydro https://www.spglobal.com/commodityinsights/en/market-insights/latest-news/energy-transition/013124-coal-still-accounted-for-nearly-60-of-chinas-electricity-supply-in-2023-cec ~~together they make up a little less than half of their total energy production and the ratio keeps improving.~~ correction: those are projected ratios, not current ratios.

Of course, on a per capita basis, China isn't even close to being a top polluter. Unless you think that people in smaller countries deserve to pollute more, per-capita is the better measurement. China looks a little worse if you do that but it's still far from a top polluter by that metric.

The US DOE puts the US at 20% renewable energy.

https://www.energy.gov/eere/renewable-energy

As much skill as a 9 year old and a 16 year old can muster?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cottingley_Fairies

What was the post?

I wouldn't doubt that was his initial motivation for making the suggestions.

I also remember that he tried to back out of buying Twitter multiple times. While doing so he was pretty public about all the crazy crap he would do with Twitter.

Despite all that Twitter went to a judge and got them to force Musk to complete the sale. He's a crappy CEO for Twitter but it's kind of on the former Twitter leadership for forcing that situation.

The FCC has a lot of regulations on it. From what I remember active jamming within the home is still wildly illegal. Depending on the size of your house/room, a far as at cage wouldn’t be too difficult, especially if you did it during construction. If you’re on a budget and don’t mind looking crazy you can line a closet with tinfoil and connect it to ground.

I can’t guess what individual people will do but, as a group, shoppers end up spending more this way. Supermarkets and grocery stores typically sell many things besides food; toys, magazines, beauty products, etc.

The store also doesn’t need you to eat all the food you buy. If you throw out a bunch of food, as many people frequently do, the store still gets paid for all of it.

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.

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.