The boring answer: criminal investigative files generally aren’t released, so they’re compiled in a way that mingles information about victims with information about suspects and witnesses and others potentially involved in criminal activity, intentionally or unwittingly, directly or tangentially.

If you want to export a list of all names in the files, you’ll want to filter out victims for sure, and probably mere witnesses. You definitely don’t want to out informants and make them vulnerable to retaliation.

So most law enforcement agencies simply will keep everything secret. The idea of releasing names from the file was unusual, and it’s not surprising that Trump’s own people refused to follow through, especially when it’s highly likely that Trump was in that list of names.

I fear that the likes of Trump in charge will only reverse any progress we’ve made in the West.

It may end much of the progress towards people voluntarily sacrificing for the environment, but I think certain technologies are already on a runaway self sustaining cycle:

• Heat pumps and electrification of residential heat is starting to make financial sense, even without subsidies and tax breaks.
• Electrification of cars makes transportation cheaper. In some countries, much, much cheaper.
• Solar power, during times of day that it is plentiful, is basically the cheapest energy source known to mankind. There is plenty of financial incentive to try to shift supply (through grid scale storage tech) and demand (time shifting things like heating/cooling and car charging) to meet this super cheap source of energy.

Trump can rant about carbon-free replacements for fossil fuels, but he can’t make them more expensive, especially not outside of the U.S.

That’s a good chart, and probably a better metric to use.

Still, you can see the same overall trends: the western world peaking around 2000, with India and China catching up. The question, then, becomes whether and how much the rest of the world can follow the West’s playbook:

• Switching from coal to natural gas for electricity generation (easy for North America, more difficult for Europe)
• Switching from fossil fuels entirely to carbon-free sources like nuclear, solar, wind, geothermal (depends heavily on geography and access to nuclear materials and engineering).
• Switching from fossil fuels to cleaner electrified drivetrains
• Improving energy efficiency in residential, commercial, industrial applications.

This is where the difference is made. Not in changing birth rates.

The big assumption is that the child you have will likely consume carbon-emitting goods and services at the same rate as whatever average they’re assuming.

Breaking down by country shows that people’s emissions vary widely by year and by country:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita

So if the UK spent most of the 20th century, and into the beginning of this century, emitting about 10 tonnes per person per year. Now it’s down to less than 5. Since your linked article was written in 2017 to the latest stats for 2023, the UK has dropped per capita emissions from 5.8 to 4.4, nearly a 25% reduction.

During that same 125 years, the US skyrocketed from about 7 tonnes to above 20, then back down to 14.

The European Union peaked in around 2001 at 10, and have since come down to 5.6.

Meanwhile, China’s population has peaked but their CO2 emissions show no signs of slowing down: https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions-metrics

So it takes quite a few leaps and assumptions to say that your own children will statically consume the global or national average at the moment of their birth. And another set of assumptions that a shrinking population will actually reduce consumption (I personally don’t buy it, I think that childless people in the West tend to consume more with their increased disposable income). And a shrinking population might end up emitting more per capita with some sources of fixed emissions amounts and a smaller population to spread that around for.

If the US and Canada dropped their emissions to EU levels we’d basically be on target for major reductions in global emissions. If we can cap China’s and India’s future emissions to current EU per capita levels that would go a long way towards averting future disaster, too.

It can be done, and it is being done, despite everything around us, and population size/growth is not directly relevant to the much more important issue of reducing overall emissions.

Those companies are creating the pollution to make the things we buy. They know how to reduce output when demand goes down (see March and April 2020 when COVID caused lots of canceled flights and oil drilling/refining to reduce to the bare minimum to keep the equipment maintained).

Yes, ExxonMobil and American Airlines pollute, but when I buy from them, they’re polluting on my behalf.

Amazon is worse for those communities, though. They undercut retailers by even more, and then don’t hire local employees at all. In the communities where they do set up warehouses, the working conditions are even worse than Walmart.

That kit is $40 on their site. Weird that it’s cheaper on Amazon in the first place.

No, Amazon does this on purpose. If you want to sell on Amazon, the search and recommendation algorithms will make your product hard to find unless you have Amazon fulfillment. But if you sign up for Amazon fulfillment, not only do you have to give Amazon a bigger cut of the price, you have to agree to never sell your product for less than Amazon does, even on your own website with your own fulfillment.

The FTC sued Amazon for this practice, and that case is progressing. But who knows if the Trump administration is going to maintain the lawsuit, or if the court will rule against Amazon.

Yeah it’s a somewhat standard reporting structure, of an intro paragraph about the stat, 4 paragraphs about a specific person’s journey from unemployed college grad living with parents and mowing lawns for extra cash to becoming a CFO in the span of 15 years, and then a longer description of what the stats show, then placement of those stats in context comparing to Gen X and Boomers, and important caveats in what the stats actually mean (unclear whether this makes millennials better off when they’re expected to face higher lifetime costs on housing and healthcare). Then it dives back into the anecdotes, including how most rich millennials perceive the fragility of their own financial position.

Here’s an archive.is link:
https://archive.is/Gr6qG

I’ve read the article. It goes into detail in the stats across the entire generation. It talks about the big rise in both median and average household wealth for millennials between 2019 and 2022. It also acknowledges that the gap between 20th percentile and 80th percentile for millennials has grown to the largest in history for any generation.

It’s the rise in house prices and the stock market. For millennials who already owned that stuff before the pandemic, and in a position to take advantage of the huge salary gains from the great resignation, the last 5 years have been a financial boon.

I’m more than willing to buy products elsewhere, but it’s so easy to default to Amazon.

One of the practices that the FTC sued Amazon over was their requirement that sellers list their lowest prices on Amazon and outsource fulfillment (and give up a huge cut) to Amazon in order to qualify for Prime and good search results.

The result is that even though most sellers can afford to sell on their own store and keep a larger percentage of the sales revenue, they’re not allowed to actually undercut Amazon’s prices. And so Amazon has shielded itself from price competition, despite engaging in pretty expensive practices (free 2 day shipping for most items and places, free 1-day or even same day shipping for some items in some places). And they did it with contracts instead of actually competing.

That’s why the county level data makes the trend that much more obvious, because the states tend to clump big groups together. Here’s an example.

There, you can see that Colorado is special in that its rural counties tend to be low obesity, compared to even its neighbors in the Rockies. You also see a sliver of green following the Appalachian Mountains.

And obviously it isn’t the only factor. Poverty is really important, as are lifestyles (and the intentional and unintentional features of any given community in incentivizing or disincentivizing things like walking, regular exercise, eating healthy, etc.).

Altitude is an appetite suppressant.

The trend of altitude being inversely correlated with obesity rates is really obvious from county-level data. That trend persists across multiple countries, but the specific correlation varies from country to country, in a way that suggests that rich countries have a stronger inverse correlation between altitude and obesity.

Yeah, evolving lungs ended up clearing the way to make use of the much more plentiful oxygen in the air compared to what is dissolved in water. Amphibians and reptiles have pretty low metabolisms, but birds and mammals basically evolved endothermy (aka warm bloodedness), probably in support of much higher muscular power output. Ectotherms (aka cold blooded animals) have metabolisms that are correlated to temperature, which means they can’t exert themselves as well when it’s cold. Endothermy allowed animals to be warm all the time, and therefore use higher muscular power output in any environment, especially sustained.

That means mammals and birds were able to cover more distance, and survive in places where reptiles and amphibians can’t, and all the advantages that carries.

This article estimates at a 40kg sailfish uses about 2.7 megajoules per day of energy when hunting. That’s about 650 kcal.

An 80kg human weighs about twice as much and needs about 3 times the energy, without even exertion.

Warm blooded animals spend a lot of energy just maintaining body temperature. Plus water doesn’t have very much oxygen in it, compared to the atmosphere.

There’s not enough oxygen in water to support our metabolisms, even if we had gills.

Fish are adapted to conserve and use less oxygen, from slower metabolic rates to more options for anaerobic respiration that doesn’t poison oneself from within.

20 years ago it was the people who worshipped Jack Welch, not realizing (or not caring) that he was running GE into the ground.

They’ve got a good, but not perfect, track record of actually uncovering illegal conduct by their targets.

• They exposed Nikola’s fraud (including exposing the video they published pretending that their prototype rolling downhill was moving under its own electric power) and their findings led to the Nikola founder’s indictment about a year later.
• They alleged fraudulent disclosures and financial statements by Nigerian conglomerate Tingo Group, and the government ended up indicting the founder for securities fraud.
• They showed that Lordstown Motors was drumming up fake demand by literally paying potential customers to sign letters of intent to join the waitlist for their not-yet-created electric truck. The SEC ended up charging them with misleading investors, and brought action against their auditor who had conflicts of interest.
• They exposed the obvious fraud of EbixCash, a gift card network, and tanked its IPO, by showing that they were lying to investors about the existence of their partners (using photoshopped buildings and fake addresses and phone numbers), lying about app downloads, and almost all of the revenue was from their own sister companies. This exposure brought down its parent company, which ended up in Chapter 11.

They’ve had less success accusing two huge well-connected investors of fraud:

• They published a report that billionaire Carl Icahn was manipulating the share prices of his fund by using a sophisticated ponzi scheme structure that paid old investors using new investors’ cash. The SEC ended up investigating and settling for a disclosure violation about failing to disclose their pledge of more than half the stock as collateral, but didn’t actually find facts confirming the meat of the Hindenburg accusation.
• They’ve gone after India’s Adani Group for accounting fraud and stock manipulation, but that hasn’t led to anything actually uncovered. India’s security regulator has concluded their investigation without findings of wrongdoing, but Hindenburg has doubled down and says the regulator is compromised by corruption. Adani’s founder is close to India’s Prime Minister.
• They alleged that Block/Square was aware of, but doing nothing to stop, widespread fraud in its Cash App and debit card transactions. That wasn’t enough to actually move the stock price, because it was kinda a weak accusation, they didn’t really show that Cash App was any different from any other similar fintech product, and Block is a much bigger company that has lots of other business units.

The problem is that most of us on the outside looking in just see accusations, some of which are proven years later, and some of which never get proven, so we don’t have a good sense of which ones are real or not, whether anything is overstated, or whether it actually makes a difference to the underlying company.

This is a counter to the Democratic party supporters you see everywhere who always get irrationally upset at third party voters, not about Republicans.

Plenty of us Democrats are very much in support of a ranked choice voting schemes, or similar structural rules like non-partisan blanket primaries (aka jungle primaries). The most solidly Democratic state, California, has implemented top-2 primaries that give independents and third parties a solid shot for anyone who can get close to a plurality of votes as the top choice.

Alaska’s top four primary, with RCV deciding between those four on election day, is probably the best system we can realistically achieve in a relatively short amount of time.

Plenty of states have ballot initiatives that bypass elected officials, so people should be putting energy into those campaigns.

But by the time it comes down to a plurality-take-all election between a Republican who won the primary, a Democrat who won the primary, and various third party or independents who have no chance of winning, the responsible thing to make your views represented is to vote for the person who represents the best option among people who can win.

Partisan affiliation is open. If a person really wants to run on their own platform, they can go and try to win a primary for a major party, and change it from within.

TL;DR: I’ll fight for structural changes to make it easier for third parties and independents to win. But under the current rules, voting for a spoiler is throwing the election and owning the results.

Racists would pay quite a bit of money to be able to target certain ethnic groups.

$83 billion per month is almost $1 trillion per year. That sounds about right.