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ddebernardy

Re:The Science Is Wrong: It's Soil, Not Oil (Climate) on Sunday November 20, 2022 @12:56AM (#33678707)
Per the linked article, the problem is misdiagnosed. Forestry research shows that a) patches of tree stumps emit on the order of 10 tons of CO2 per acre, and b) these emissions go away when loggers thin forests instead of clearing them. Why are we not hearing about such huge yet trivially avoidable emissions? They are an order of magnitude larger than fossil fuels.

There are plenty of good reasons to not like fossil fuels, mind you. But the carbon hockey stick is not one of them.

Re:The Science Is Wrong: It's Soil, Not Oil (Climate) on Tuesday November 15, 2022 @10:42AM (#33610521)
For the longest of times I thought the same way. Realizing that the actual issue was almost entirely tied to topsoil loss is what made me change my mind.

If you look into the atmospheric carbon dioxide data, you'll observe seasonal up and downs with the low point that takes us back to around where the high point from about a decade earlier. This means that we could resolve the issue very quickly in a scenario where farms keep enough plants around to soak up the soil emissions during tilling and harvesting operations.

Alley cropping is just one option to do so, btw. As I explain in a separate article [1], any well designed intercropping scenario should do the trick. The point is to not have a wide open field with no plants that could keep the fungi alive, block the wind to keep the carbon dioxide around, and soak up the carbon dioxide.

It can't be perfect because of night emissions and because trees eventually lose their leaves in the fall, but we can do far better than what we're currently doing.

[1]: http://ddebernardy.substack.com/p/stop-climate-agenda-soil-n...

Re:The Science Is Wrong: It's Soil, Not Oil (Climate) on Tuesday November 15, 2022 @10:21AM (#33610192)
Author here.

TL;DR for those who don't click links:

- Corporate green solutions are shams

- Promote gardening if you care about fossil fuels

- An accounting chicanery keeps natural emissions out of view

- The hockey stick is actually about canopy loss

- Switching to alley cropping would reverse it

Happy to answer questions.

Re:Help Stop the Climate Agenda: It's Soil, Not Oil on Friday November 11, 2022 @05:42PM (#33567848)
Author here.

TL;DR for those who don't click links: Corporate green solutions are shams. Promote gardening if you care about fossil fuels. An accounting chicanery keeps natural emissions out of view. The hockey stick is actually about canopy loss. Switching to alley cropping would reverse it. Promote food sovereignty if you care about ending oppression. Share this if you’d like to do your bit. Also, we need some help: can you offer work, support, or a retweet [1]?

[1] https://twitter.com/ddebernardy/status/1591198286790418432

Happy to answer questions over the WE.

Re:A Natural Language: Exposing Environmental Big Lies on Thursday May 12, 2022 @09:05AM (#31353538)
Author here.

This is a TL;DR version for readers who only read discussions. The link is a summary of my short book, which you can read online at the same address.

What the book does is expose an accounting chicanery that underpins the fossil fuel narrative for climate change. In a nutshell, the carbon accounting framework separates land-based emissions from other emissions like fossil fuel, and builds on the idea that you can't do much about the former. This is actually false, as evidenced by forestry research, and it provides cover for land theft and ecofascism in developing countries. The book goes on to provide a soil-based explanation for the carbon hockey stick and its global desertification ramifications. Lastly, it puts bottom-up solutions in front of the problem that communities can implement now without depending on governments.

Re:Boeing, expecting a long slump, will cut 16k jobs on Wednesday April 29, 2020 @03:00PM (#23022814)
> Can someone help me understand why the broader stock market is actually up compared to six months ago despite all these dire numbers being thrown around? Heck, Boeing stock is up today!

Dumb money is pouring in, and institutional investors are riding the dead cat bounce.

For Boeing specifically, it's because they fired thousands of workers to cut their costs. And to their credit, they're actually expecting a long slump. Many businesses are still deluding themselves.

> Bay Area politicians including the speaker of the house Pelosi were encouraging lots of people to come to Chinatown parades.

That seems like a rather murky assertion...

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/pelosi-tweet-chinatown-tou...

> I kind of assume the virus grows exponentially inside the body and would dwarf the initial constant.

That assumes your immune system wouldn't kick in during the asymptomatic phase or a time close to exiting the latter. But your immune system would actually kick in as soon as it detects the infection, which would plausibly be much earlier. That would effectively buying you time to figure out which antibodies to produce before things become out of control.

Re:Lambda School lays off 19 employees on Wednesday April 22, 2020 @04:26AM (#22943387)
That, and the fact that they're still advertising 12 job openings...

https://lambdaschool.com/careers#jobs

Re:Shirt Without Stripes on Monday April 20, 2020 @04:32PM (#22928179)
No idea where you're from or what you did...

https://imgur.com/a/XBzfOsF

Might your search history be so that you're so contrarian that Google suggests contrarian results? :D

Re:Shirt Without Stripes on Monday April 20, 2020 @12:58PM (#22925766)
The correct query would have been "shirt -stripes". That works fine, or at least does on Google. But yeah, sentence parsing fail.
> Actually the doses given for COVID are often higher.

Not just higher. The original article (the one out of China) that mentioned that there might be some positive effects reportedly suggested using doses that were a whopping 5 times higher than the usually prescribed amounts: 500mg/day vs the usual 100mg/day.

What more, the same article put forward that the drug was considered generally safe and without any potentially troublesome side effects. That raised more than a few eyebrows amongst the medical staff who knew the drug.

Re:UTF-8 Everywhere on Tuesday April 14, 2020 @02:01PM (#22869257)
Yeah, I only kept the second part of the title when submitting it because it was a) too long and b) too clickbait-y.
Re:Bill Gates calls for nationwide shutdown on Wednesday April 01, 2020 @03:20PM (#22752574)
Sure, but for how long will it remain sustainable? The lockdown hasn't lasted a month in Italy and they're already seeing early signs of food theft that could potentially degenerate into food riots. I'm struggling to imagine how any country will make it sustainable for more than a month or two. Yet on paper, a prerequisite for stopping the lockdown seems to be that you've been testing on a fairly large scale, which only Korea seems to have pulled off.

The situation in France, for instance, is unenviable at the moment and absolutely not sustainable: albeit to a lesser degree as in the US, there's not enough PPE for essential staff, not enough masks for everyone else, and most crucially not enough tests to go about. Yet there's a full lockdown with fines and all, and insofar as I'm aware there isn't enough financial help for employers or employees or the self-employed or anyone else. It's only a matter of time before everyone realizes that they're going into this like it's 1914, expecting it'll all be over by the autumn.

It won't.

It won't, because of asymptomatic cases and because the virus is spreading in developing countries. Rich countries won't want to shell out the trillions that might be needed so the latter can cope with the situation. (And that will translate into yet another migration crisis to boot. Etc. Etc.)

For better or worse, the current lockdown measures in a growing number of countries are only postponing the inevitable mass outbreak by a few weeks. That is, unless countries get their act together and find a huge pot of money to tap into -- and in periods with a collapsing economy, the only sane pot of money to tap into is wealth. I'm not holding my breath.

Re:Bill Gates calls for nationwide shutdown on Wednesday April 01, 2020 @10:38AM (#22749014)
As the saying goes, you can depend on Americans to do the right thing when they have exhausted every other possibility. (Not by Churchill [1].) Plus, it's not a given that it is the right thing to do, especially if there's no plan for what comes after; and there reportedly are early signs of social unrest on this side of the pond [2]. A shutdown can't last until there's a vaccine. At best it buys you time.

[1]: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/11/11/exhaust-alternative...

[2]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/01/singing-stops-...

It seems macOS could use virtualization or permissions to run these scripts in some throw away environment to get rid of the problem altogether. Preflight check programs shouldn't be able to write anything to disk.
Bruno Le Maire said so himself this morning on TV:

https://www.francetvinfo.fr/sante/maladie/coronavirus/bruno-...

J'invite (...) toutes les entreprises qui ont accès aujourd'hui au chômage partiel, c'est-à-dire qui ont leurs salariés payés par l'Etat, à faire preuve de la plus grande modération en matière de versement de dividendes"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQnzcCyh7Bc

> He is adamant that we are at the very bottom of the beginning of the curve

Sounds about right. The US is heading for a rough ride, which is made worse by a combination of lack of universal health care and sane coverage being tied to having an employer (or lack thereof of late). To say nothing of leadership (or, there too, lack thereof of late).

That said, the real stories will be sub-Saharan Africa and other poor countries IMO, plus Brazil and India in all likelihood. I'm struggling to imagine Western countries doing the right thing and extending a couple of trillion dollars to poor countries before it completely gets out of hands over there, even though it would be the right thing to do. Short of that, there will be new waves, over and over, until we've a vaccine.

If someone accepts your -$10 bid the house will totally be worth that by definition. Remember the $1 houses from Detroit a decade ago. They weren't even worth $1 due to the tax liability that came with them, and they didn't sell for that reason.
Yes, at least in France. They passed (or merely announced?) a number of measures so that SMEs don't collapse due to treasury problems: postponed/cancelled taxes and contributions, paid time off for the staff without the usual delays, etc.

As I understood they took example on what Germany did in 2008, and learned from what worked over there. Whether all countries do the same is another story altogether, but at least in France they might save a good number of jobs (by inflating the public debt, but that's a separate issue).

Re:Ask HN: What job can a “jack of all trades” look for? on Saturday February 15, 2020 @06:14PM (#22338711)
Care to share in what positions such companies make such hires? I've looked around a few times over the years and have never found the slightest hint that they did such a thing.
Re:Why I’m Leaving San Francisco: Meta study on Monday February 10, 2020 @06:03PM (#22294377)
> thus i’m curious how conservatives or Trump have anything to do with one’s departure.

Oh, that one's simple enough if you assume they're part of the reason why you'd leave the country. And while we're on that topic, the same two reasons might also get factored into deciding to not come to SF or any other US city -- alongside guns, overpriced education, and overpriced healthcare.

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