I find it really baffling that climate change denial is so strong in America given the ectreme effects the country is already seeing.

In case anyones looking at this and asking question like "Why has Cambodia been dunked with 49% when they're clearly not a competitor to the US" or "Why is Trump claiming that the European Union has a 40% tariff on the US when the actual mean tariff on US goods into the EU is less than 5%", here's your answer to how these figures have been calculated.

• Take the US trade deficit with a given country (eg. China is $292bn)
• Take the total good imported by US (for China that's $439bn)
• Divide the first figure by the second! Why? Who knows! It's a number! Less talk more first grade arithmetic (if you're still following that gives us 67%)
• That gives us a random number which we'll pretend is that country's tariff of US goods even though it's completely unrelated in every way. We'll divide it by two to get the new tariff rate for imports from that country. Why? Honestly if you're still expecting there to be an answer to that question I'm wondering if you've been following. (that gives us 34%, well actually it gives us 33.5% but I'm not sure the Trump administration understands the idea of fractions so we'll just round it up from there)

The "reason" behind this is that Trump seems to think trade deficits are really bad, which is bad news for the US because it's had a trade deficit for the last 50 years. We'll ignore the fact that based on GDP it's been the wealthiest country in the world for that time though.

Anyway, just to give everyone an idea of how completely, utterly unrelated to anything meaningful that figure is, let's take Cambodia. The country is very poor compared to the US so can't afford to buy anything that the US manufacters (Cambodians aren't driving round in Teslas or IMessaging each other). Some US companies use it for clothing manufacture because labour is cheap in Cambodia (see the previous bit about Cambodia being much poorer than the US). This means that Cambodia imports close to nothing from the US compared to what it exports, giving it a close to 100% trade deficit, so we wind up with a 49% tariff on Cambodia.

I genuinely don't understand the mindset that looks at the US's explotation of cheap labour in Cambodia and interprets the US as the victim in that relationship, but hey-ho maybe I'm just not biggly-smart enough to understand the 4d chess moves at play here. . .

Reference (because unfortunately none of what I said was made up and that geniunely is the calculation): https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/03/trumps-idiotic-and-flawed-tariff-calculations-stun-economists

Edit: After making fun of Trump for not understanding the enconomy, I went and conflated per capita GDP with GDP. Doh! Now corrected.

Joke aside, giving homeless people isn't actually illegal right? That'd be almost as insane as half the stuff the US has inacted lately.

Edit: oh wow, that is disgunstingly inhumane and I have no idea how someone can support policy that bans charity and still sleep at night.

Later on, George swipes when she shows a picture to get even, finds out she supports the wrong baseball team, and spends the rest of the episode trying to break up with her without revealing whybecause she'd find out that he swiped.

I find this whole "it's not milk if it's not dairy" argument really hard to take in good faith.

I'm not an expert at all, but when I've heard people talk about these kind of decisions, it sounds like it's normally meant to come down to consumer benefits.

Who's gaining here (aside from dairy lobbies)? I don't think there's any reasonable argument that UK citizens are confused by the term "oat milk", and buying it because they were tricked into thinking it was a dairy product.

I'm guessing you expected the downvotes to be fair, but I'd try and actually engage with what you said, since you clearly took the time to think it through and express it well.

What you're suggesting (that the wealthy classes play an important role in wealth distribution, that's hampered by tax) is pejoratively referred to as "trickle down economics"[0] and slightly less critically referred to as "supply side economics"[1].

You might want to reduce taxes on the wealthy for some other reason, but the idea that it helps the economy is very poorly evidenced, and there's quote a lot of evidence to the contrary.

It also seems to miss the fact that a lot of poor countries (take Nigeria[2]) have very low taxation, and many very wealthy countries (take Sweden[3]) have very high taxation.

My two cents are that, sure the rich might spend some money on things that benefit everyone, but it's probably a lot less than the amount of infrastructure development taxation can fund.

There's obviously complexities, but the idea that "people will just move" doesn't seem to happen in reality. I'd also say that, excluding perhaps billionaires, being moderately wealthy in a equitable society with good healthcare, transport, roads, etc, is a lot more desirable than being more wealthy in a society with less of those things. But I guess that's just my take, I don't have any evidence for it.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trickle-down_economics

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trickle-down_economics

[2] https://taxsummaries.pwc.com/nigeria/individual/taxes-on-personal-income

[3] https://sweden.se/life/society/taxes-in-sweden

By the power invested in me by, well, nobody whatsoever, can I just take a minute to say, let's all cool down a little in the comments!

There's a lot of arguing against:

• The idea that acknowledging the tragic reality of climate change makes you defeatist
• The idea that because we have had some great advantages in green tech we can sit back and let climate change fix itself

I don't see anyone making those arguments here though! Just lots of people concerned about climate change with different skews of how positive/negative we should feel.

Personally, I swing between powerful optimism and waking in terror at 3:00am for the future we're hurtling towards. I'm sure other people are the same, so let's just be friendly to the fact that other people are in different vibes to us.

There are some people working together very well right now to dismantle the climate, so let's all remember that when we're talking with each other.

Peace and love!

Off topic, but any other non-US people here, how are you reacting to the USA's facism on hyperdrive streak?

I don't think the US has ever been the most popular country, but now the president is trying to eradicate palestine, disrupt European security from Russia, and plunge the world into a climate apocalypse at an even faster than before rate, I feel a lot worse about any interactions with the USA. I've been trying to move away from using anything US produced or owned, which isn't particularly easy.

Is it just me? Was I naive to think US was any better before? Am I naive in singling out the US?

Public transport would be a much more effective and cheaper solution, but we're all looking at EVs because it means not having to change anything about the status quo.

Tbf we don't know how many columns there are /s

It doesn't split, but I'd guess 99.9% of those online meets are dating apps (rather than other ways of meeting online).

That's kind of sad, not because there's any one way people should meet, but because meeting people is now mostly mediated through for profit companies.

To be fair, VW is a company that had ties to fascism during WW2, if you buy a Tesla today, you're putting money in the pocket of fascism. There's definitely a difference.

Can't pretend I'd be sad to see them crash out completely, although it does make me feel a little uneasy for repairability of existing Teslas.

Nazi or no nazi, it isn't gonna be good for the planet to have a whole bunch of cars deemed irrepairable, although my guess is a buy out would stop that happening.

I'm a data engineer, and have seen an ungodly ammount of 200-but-actually-no-stuff-is-broken errors and it's the bane of my life!

We have generic code to handle pulling in api data, and transforming it. It's obviously check the status code, but any time an API implements this we have to choose between:

• having code fail wierdly further down the line because can't parse the status
• adding in some kind of insane if not response.ok or "actually no there's an error really" in response.content logic

Every time you ignore protocols and invent your own, you are making everyone sad.

Will take recommendations of support groups I can join for victims of terrible apis.

This is the dumbest bet you can make and more or less the definition of lose/lose- if we fail to move off greenhouse gasses, what kind of mad max style future are you hoping to be rich in?

Trump crashes the US economy and deters consimer goods, especially oil. Alternative conspiracy that he's really an environmentalist? /s

I'm not American so nobody got my vote, but seems to me like the issue is with the swathes of people choosing facism rather than progressives who chose not to vote.

Choosing how to act in a world like ours is tricky, anyone following a sense of right and wrong (even if I disagree with their judgement) instead of fear, hate, greed or whatever gets a gold star in my book.

on average, Canadian EVs have up to 77% lower emissions than conventional models

That's quite a bit less. The headline sounds like "Do ICE vehicles pollite less than EVs ?" is a valid question, is there any argument that's the case? I'd have guessed EVs were obviously better, and you'd be hard pushed to argue otherwise?

(obviously I'm thinking 'new ev' vs 'new ICE' - putting second hard vehicles introducrs all sorts of caveats)

I work in the UK energy sector, and that's definitely not true! About 1/3 of our energy comes from wind which is somewhat but mostly not stored.

Fossil fuels end up doing the work of balancing the grid during times when wind and solar are low. That's not ideal, but a world where fossil fuels are used to balance renewable provision is much better than a world where they're the primary energy source.

We're running out of time to prevent the worst effects of global warming, and any increase in renewables provides some mitigation to the impact. Very few, if any, countries are at the point where current battery tech should stop them increasing their renewables.

Man, I sure wish cybertrucks had been around to deflect when I spent 7 years driving a Fiat Panda.