The USA, China, and India are the leaders on Climate Change emmisions, and have to make real changes for global results. Until us three get serious, progress is nil.
India is not in even in the top 30 countries that can realistically reduce emissions. They have per capita emissions lower than any European country, except maybe Iceland. Lower than the Nordics, much, much lower than France or Germany or Spain. There's no way for them to reduce their emissions without severely impacting lifestyle even more drastically - which is not at all the case for us here in Europe.
To quantify this, India had a per capita CO2 emission of 2.07 tonnes per year, while Sweden had 3.43 (2023). Sweden used this to achieve a 58,100 USD per capita GDP (2025) compared to India's 2,878 USD all while using a non-unsignificant part of it as heating in the winter. It would be great for all of us if India could do better on a per capita basis since the resulting effect would be huge.
You're forgetting the fact that Sweden (like other European countries) has had >100 years of much higher emissions than India, and has built this wealth through that. Wealth compounds - so if you want to make these sorts of arguments, you should look at total historical emissions per capita.
So because others made an unknown mistake, now India should be allowed to perpetrate known, deliberate, and intentional harm? It makes India that much worse, it makes India evil!
This is just unsophisticated and uncivilized excuse making and primitive rationalization.
No, the point is that the fair way to look at this is that every country has a total carbon budget, based on population. Since atmospheric CO2 is a cumulative resource, that doesn't really decay at human time scales, looking at current emissions is misleading. It's taking an arbitrary moment in time as a 0 basis and saying "it doesn't matter how we got where we are now, from now on you shouldn't emit more than we do".
The reality is that European countries (including Russia) and the USA are disproportionately responsible for the massive amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere today. So, they should be more responsible for fixing this - either by investing some of the wealth they accumulated through this massive energy accumulation (that resulted in the CO2 emission) into carbon capture technologies, or by subsidizing the need for other countries in the world to build energy without so much pollution.
These arguments are frustratingly stupid. It's as if 100 royals were eating a quarter of the food, 10,000 peasants were eating the other three-quarters, and the royals were telling the peasants that their greed was causing the stores to run dangerously low.
I gave you the numbers, if you want an honest argument then use the numbers. It's as if 10.5M "royals needing heat" used 3.6 MT (0.12%) while 1450M "peasants" used 3000 MT (99.88%).
India started around 40 new coal power plants just in 2024.
Per capita is irrelevant in this matter. The presumed impacts on the environment and the planet do not care that India has long had an unsustainable, reckless population size. Per capita use in situations like this is simply ridiculous and evasive lying.
Sounds like something a country with extremely high per capita emissions would say. Somebody else would say that the imaginary line drawn around a bunch of land and given a name matters a hell of a lot less.
I actually don't worry about emissions at all because I compare my personal emissions to the emissions of the entire continent of Asia. It's not my fault that the inhabitants decided to be more than one person.
What did you not understand about “per capita is irrelevant”. You make my very point and don’t even realize it though. It is an incomplete measure and a bell curve distribution relative to productivity, especially when talking about one civilization that produced all the advances and one that not only uses all those advances, but has not contributed any advances.
If you want to use per capita, you need to look at the qualities, make a qualitative determination; per capita net value, per capita quality score, etc.
Or maybe you would suggest that Europeans should start having 20+ children per woman and that will then magically improve things because their per capita measure by moronic means will improve immensely?
So get to it, Europe, have 20, 30, 40+ children per woman, because low intelligence people will then celebrate how wonderful you’ve improved your nonsense, meaningless pollution numbers.
Every human on earth has the same right to use the planet's resources as every other human - so per capita emissions make natural sense.
Countries are just arbitrary collections of people, so looking at per-country emissions is actually entirely arbitrary. Would you say that the USA should emit no more than the Vatican?
The same argument can be made for us here in Europe. And it makes even more sense, since we're trying to live in this extremely northerly place, where large amounts of energy are required yearly to even make it habitable, and solar is quite inefficient.
I could see an argument for trying to impose a per-population cap (it’s our shared world so we should share the capacity to do damage to it equally). Or an attempt to use the market to figure out the best expenditure of emissions for economic activity; some kind of carbon tax and credit scheme.
But, by whatever metric we want to use, India is with their huge population is going to end up with a lot of it. Unless is it some sort of per-country cap, which would be totally unfair, right?
So you suggest western countries should get birthrates up and that will fix climate change by offsetting the main producers in the country? How is per capita relevant.
No, I think it would be most fair to split the remaining carbon budget (to the extent that there even is one) evenly, or maybe try and account for the fact that regions that have been industrialized for a long time have already used up a lot of the cap.
However, I think the fair plan is impractical and would meet a lot of resistance from major economies. So, out of pragmatism I prefer a carbon credit system.
Not sure if this statement is correct. One consequence of India's population growth is that millions of Indians are emigrating. So the rest of the world helps solving the population problem. If one even wants to call it a problem.
Then there's is no progress to be made. Developing using cheap energy regardless of emissions, i.e. the harm/ethics (positives) of poverty reduction > pollution any day. US/west sets the baseline for historic not just annual per capita emission - annual doesn't capture historic emissions for building infra/capita base. Many countries still have magnitude more steel to smelt and concrete to pour. If developing / low middle income countries does most of the growing/developing on clean generation, better, if west wants to subsidize that like prior climate pledges, they're welcome to. Until then, their per capita is floor of what everyone should aim for. Ultimately, global emissions isn't really worth worrying, as in even if it's existential for some tiny islands or climate death zones, there's shit all do because most of the world who desires to be rich and comfortable will just chug along.
Stuff. Indeed it's mostly about stuff we buy (which is mostly from China).
If you want to lower emissions, not flying and not eating meat is important. But stuff we buy - clothes, electronics, cars, furniture, even solar panels: consider if you really need it, for how long will it last, and why can't it wait. Don't click "buy now"
I'm an industrial electrician. I have zero fears of being replaced by any any sort of AI. Maybe by someone younger and smarter, but I have 38 years experience. The trades are a decent living, and lots of people could do worse.
> The trades are a decent living, and lots of people could do worse.
I sure hope this remains true after the number of people trying to become electricians quintuples in size.
I feel like in a lot of these discussions, people think about themselves first and go “I’ll just become an electrician if my white collar job goes away, how bad could it be?” But then you need to realize that many many people are going to have this problem, and the phrasing “Well, we’ll all just become electricians if our white collar jobs go away.” doesn’t have the same ring to it.
It’s not enough for there to EXIST non-automatable jobs. The demand for those jobs must be so massive that a gigantic number of currently well-paid people can take jobs in the sector without massively depressing wages.
I think locality is the difference. Electricians and Plumbers are needed basically everywhere. Conversely, there’s not much of a local market for bespoke software development in random towns in the US. While, yes, there are various contractors with statewide coverage, Joe-with-a-pickup-truck who treats the neighbors right in town still wins out many times.
But you need to realize that both professions aren’t valued the same everywhere.
In my childhood in the Soviet Union “plumber” was what parents scared their kids with “if you don’t study, you’ll become a plumber”. And that profession was extremely undesirable and didn’t pay well.
Also in many SEA countries both professions aren’t paid well.
I think in North America it’s different because it’s highly regulated and barrier for entry is high.
I think a lot of people in America talk about plumbers as this sort of “aspirational blue-collar job” because they forget how dirty it is. Like, the usual boomer framing is to talk about how you know a guy who makes $100K as a plumber, mumble something about unions and then go “100K to fix sinks sure sounds nice”.
What that framing misses is that a lot of plumbers have to fix situations where a sewer line ruptured and someone’s basement is covered in shit. Or like, you get called in because someone’s garbage disposal is clogged with something nasty, and the person won’t tell you what it is. Plumbers definitely should get paid a lot for what they do, though whether that’s actual true varies.
This is why being a septic guy seems like a good gig. I paid my septic guy $10k for one day's labor, with about $4k in materials to come in with a massive excavator and one helper.
I'm sure the cost of his excavator ran into ~$1k of wear/depreciation over that day but two men basically cleared $5k in a combined 20 man hours.
If you can deal with poop you can make a lot of money. Doesn't seem to be much interest in that trade either, no one thinks to become a septic installer.
I can't believe nobody has brought this up, but the threat isn't even that there will be too many electricians. The threat is the question: "who is going to pay for these electricians at all?"
It's such a privileged first world attitude to just assume that no matter how bad it gets, we'll always have all this money to pay for expert labor for our homes and businesses.
The idea never even comes up that if the economy gets pushed too far and the middle class truly disappears, nobody can afford a plumber or an electrician. You either make do or go without. And that entire sector of work crumbles too, which creates a feedback loop for economic failure.
The big upside here is that more web designers make more web sites, but more electricians and crafts people make more houses eventually (whatever is most valuable) and we can use more of that.
More tradespeople don't make more housing, capital and legislation do. Both capital and legislators (a disturbing number of whom are either landlords or realestate tycoons) are perversely incentivised to keep housing supplies low because that creates a market in which housing appreciates and generates more income than a market in which housing is plentiful.
People need to stop with this whole “more people on $job means more of $product” thing. I know that’s what they teach in freshmen economics, but it’s almost never true in reality.
The reality is that if you have a skill and there are no jobs, if the skill is something you can practice on your own as a freelancer or entrepreneur, you will do it. And if your skill allows you to make something that disproportionately earns a lot of money, like housing, you will see people doing it. I come from the future - Eastern Europe, a place that endured extreme hyperinflation, poverty, and started generating growth again not long ago.
Same here, however with the new meta glasses or the augmented reality glasses you're going to see people with no knowledge of our field actually troubleshooting machines with technicians remotely. They will be paid a lot less than us.
I wonder who will be held at fault when the low-paid in-person troubleshooter discovers 15kV with his fingers (I do not wonder who will be killed) while his lock opens the wrong breaker.
The business is not broken and does not need "fixing."
But it is broken. There is a shortage of every type of trades worker. Sure it's been great for existing trade folks because there are plenty of jobs and the pay is great more demand than supply. But the lack of supply has meant that it's too expensive to build/fix stuff. If you're in the US look around. It looks like we literally stopped building in the 1950s. Every renovation/building project is multi-year. Why? The lack of plentiful skilled trades people is one of the reasons the US building and infrastructure are deteriorating.
My grandpa was a master electrician. My father was a master electrician. I am a software engineer. I am sweating. I feel like we have another 2 or 3 years and then it might be over. I will go work in the mines.
Brief anecdote: A friend hired an electrician to wire some things and he asked how the electrician's business was going. The reply was (paraphrased): We hired seven people two weeks ago, now only one is left because the rest either didn't show up, couldn't show up regularly, or couldn't focus on tasks long enough to get work done. We let them go because this is electricity. We are not going to pay for anyone's funeral!
Home electricians will always be fine. But if you work under a manager, I guarantee you some in your business will start to use AI to micromanage you if nothing is done. Hopefully I'm too negative.
I sell and run electrical work and I don’t see any good use for LLMs for what I do on a day to day basis.
LLMs don’t understand constructions drawings so they’re no help when it comes to doing a takeoff. Construction specifications are already well-organized and able to be searched so LLMs don’t help there.
They can’t synthesize information from different sources (words from a person spoken on a phone conversation, napkin sketches, information that is embedded in an electricians head about a specific facility, etc) or coordinate multiple parties through a variety of communication methods (email, text, phone calls, RFIs, in-person meetings, etc)
About the only use I’ve found for them in my line of work is cleaning up data from outside sources. YMMV. Construction is a very relationship and trust based business that has been around longer than almost every other profession.
That's arguably the most interesting about the discussion on LLMs. Can't they reason? If they do, reason is an emerging fonction. 2 years ago, before inference was truly added to LLMs,a Honk Kong university paper wrote that ChatGPT 3.5 reasoning was correct 64% of the time on a specific task (you asked it to make the same reasonning 100 time, 36% of the time it would be wrong for no reason). I'd like to see how modern LLMs with added inference matrices and a lot of helpers before the actual transformers perform on this test.
If a consensus arrives in 5 years and we decided that yes, LLMs can in fact reason, reasonning would be an emerging capacity, and that would be incredibly interesting.
I don’t think LLMs have zero applications, I just haven’t found any for my specific use cases. If someone is able to figure out a way for LLMs to interpret construction drawings, it would be immensely useful, I’d be able to price substantially more work.
I think back to a 1991-1992 when someone stood over my shoulder watching and telling me what a waste of time it was and who they hell is ever going to use it :)). I remind them from time to time and we have a good laugh.
Maybe, but with youtube I ran the service entry, underground secondary, a multi-structure multi-panel electrical system distribution and the residential inside. I have zero electrician training.
Our county eliminated building codes, licensing requirements, and inspections so now everybody just does it themselves. The electricians here are going to the wayside unless they work for the power company. Us 'DIYers' have mostly replaced them by sharing knowledge and accumulating the wealth of knowledge prior held tightly by tradesman who have attempted to overplay their hand by charging exorbitant rates and refusing to hiring apprentices and are at a dead end.
Doesn't seem like much. We eliminated electrical (and other) inspections and paperwork 20+ years ago and none of the paranoid delusions of the nay-sayers came true.
All else equal it seems healthier for society to have a strong professional electrician trade, but if an area is struggling to have that, it definitely seems better to have the DIY knowledge publicly available. Somebody has to keep the electrical working!
> Train tracks are normally not precise to within 4mm anyway
Yes they are. Of course practical tolerances including allowances for wear and there are large enough that things can be made to work, but in terms of nominal construction tolerances for example, 4 mm can easily eat up all your construction tolerances or even exceed them.
I obviously don't have a in depth knowledge of Finnish rail, but have you ever looked at rail in the US? I can show you tracks with completely missing ties. Tracks that move vertically by a foot when the train goes over them. Tracks that visually snake all over the place. The difference is made by slowing down the train. Derailment at 3 mph rarely matters. The biggest risk is the conductor doesn't know it happened & continues to drag the car along the tracks
My dad, his parents and all his siblings were in the grandstands but escaped uninjured. He was 7 years old. Mltiple decades later he would become emotionnal and angry if we, as adolescents, would mention dead bodies in a very casual manner, for exemple while commenting on a video game.
I knew about this accident and them being close to be hit by some of those parts that day but it took me years to make the connection between this and how his reaction. This must have been a huge war scene.
I'm playing roulette with Mother Nature today. She's a wily player.
The "Stay open at all costs" mentality is dangerous to employees. All but one restaurant was closed today that I could find. Their workers have personal nneeds, too. Such as waiting in lines for hours, boarding up their home, filling sandbags, packing up, and running away, all of which I did, too. Except waiting in lines for hours for sandbags. Nonetheless, that one diner, Recipe Box, was slammed, 'cuz we all wanna eat on the run. I don't know what the right answer is.
As others have noted, they have teams of people they bring in to staff the place in case of disaster. They are, as far as I can tell, very good to their employees, who are mostly low-skill workers dealing with an often drunk and raucous clientele. But if you want to get paid in cash every week, they will do it.
Waffle House isn't a great meal, even for a cheap diner, and it's not meant to be. It's hot and freshly cooked, though, and in the middle of a disaster that's something you might not be able to get at home (cf. the Mellow Mushroom owner in Asheville giving out pizza a couple of days after Helene - people like the pizza, but the quotes were all saying "it was just so nice to eat something hot"). And it's always open.
People starting companies who want to build loyalty: look at them. And learn. There's no southerner who doesn't know that you can get a cheap, fresh, and adequate meal from WH when everyone else is closed. You don't have to wonder if it's a 24-hour location: they all are. You see the sign, you can go.
Can confirm; Waffle House is almost never what I want, but damned if I’m not excited every time I go because it’s 3am, I’m drunk, and I don’t have to eat Taco Bell.
The reliability really is a thing. I don’t even look for hours on a Waffle House, I just assume that if I can drive there they’re open.
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