98% of all recent environmental claims and commitments from the world’s largest meat and dairy companies can be categorized as “greenwashing”, or intentionally misleading
The claim that "ExampleCo will be net zero by 2028" is intentionally misleading if it's going to be an accounting trick rather than an actual real reduction in emmissions within ExampleCo's footprint.
That's aside from many of the carbon offset schemes being bandied about really don't bear much in the way of close scrutiny. The "all talk and ineffectual action" in carbon offsetting is classic greenwashing though, surely?
It’s really only “misleading” to the extent that any offset/credit scheme is also misleading. Inherent in the words “net zero” is the fact that emissions will continue, but the claim is that something else will be done to make the total effect the same as if zero emission occurred.
It’s no more misleading than “my net income was $X” is misleading because my gross income was $X + $Y.
What could "net zero" possibly mean other than "zero as a matter of accounting"? I definitely think meat and dairy companies should reduce emissions to the extent that they can, but you're not going to convince the cows to stop burping. If you accept the premise that people are going to keep on eating animal products (I'm aware that the authors may not!), offsets are the only option.
Could be a language thing, I'm Australian and that quote from my comment in full was
if it's going to be an accounting trick
My intenty there was to distinguish between "net zero as a matter of legitimate above board easy to follow accounting that can be audited (and pass)" and "net zero via a smoke and mirrors accounting deception with a few divide by zeros and some of the same logic from the proof that 1==2".
> but you're not going to convince the cows to stop burping.
Well, no - but you / we can introduce kangaroo gut biota to cows.
( the six green squares don't render on HN ) ... which is still a string that can be readily edited.
It's more resources your end to save game results for a specific play and generate a unique checksummed hash key for a third party URL lookup, sure, so I guess the question is how important is it for players to reliably share their results in a manner that is hard than a simple edit to 'cheat' on?
Most people share their result with friends and family in text threads. It’s for fun and starts discussions, many times out of a solution being surprising or tough. The best times are when one of us can’t figure out a solution and we give each other hints.
very good question. My take is that once the result becomes this easy to manipulate, like simply editing the result string, it kinda defeats the purpose of doing so :D . If anyone can do it then it kinda loses meaning and there’s not much point to doing so in the first place
It's not a chart of investment by patriotic US citizens seeking to better the country such that the country "wins" .. more like a chart of military and motte and bailey investments made by individual feuding Norman clans each seeking to be the last castle standing and in control of all the throttle points and gates across the country and ideally the world.
This is a good time to reflect on the etymology of "Banana Republic" [0]. I suspect most people don't see fruit companies as a major threat, but they'll kill and ravage to get people cheap bananas.
This idea that the morals of the people making investments is in any way relevant is a bit of a misframe. Investors are capable of any evil, the default position is of surprise if one of them is investing out of some sense of responsibility. The point of the economic system is it channels some of the most ghoulish and horrible people to do good as an accidental side effect of their mad rush to wealth and power. Works really well, on average everyone wins.
Slightly off topic but the Vice banana documentary is a surprisingly interesting 15 minutes https://youtu.be/2Bm5NWCMlPo Some on banana republics and also much other stuff.
I'd say that we might both agree that the US economy is currently heavily dependent on the circular jerking of numbers between AI boosters .. remains to be seen what the average person gets to eat from slops.
How can you claim that just after speaking of Banana Republics? These clearly show that free markets alone are terrible for the vast majority of people.
> The point of the economic system is it channels some of the most ghoulish and horrible people to do good as an accidental side effect of their mad rush to wealth and power. Works really well, on average everyone wins.
When there is a functioning justice system that enforces the law, rather than a corrupt oligarchy/kleptocracy/kakistocracy.
> The point of the economic system is it channels some of the most ghoulish and horrible people to do good as an accidental side effect of their mad rush to wealth and power. Works really well, on average everyone wins.
Now imagine how much money you have to invest in order to convince people that this weird theory makes sense.
First amendment prevents the federal government from preventing speech or punishing for speech (subject to a few exceptions).
This was not that.
This was a civil defamation case; the parents bought a case of actual material harm and harrassment of epic proportions before two seperate judges in two seperate states and both courts made the finding that Jones had indeed caused harm and harrassment .. and continued to do so over years.
With regards to defamation law, the first amendment does result in the USA having a higher bar for prosecution than most countries- GP still has a valid question.
The word "prosecution" implies criminal case brought by the government. This was a civil case brought by the victims.
If you mean higher bar for litigation, then maybe this lawsuit and its outcome shows that the bar isn't as high as you think when it comes to defamation?
Yes I did mean litigation (didn't know that that term was a distinction learned something today).
To my understanding the case outcome is pretty much what I would expect, even considering the first amendment raising the bar. It's also interesting that there's been so many legal shenanigans in the case that it's hard to even keep track of them all.
The principal legal shenanigan came from Jones and his team - stubbornly refusing to engage with either court via a kind of sovereign citizen "I know my first amendment rights, F- you" vibe.
That sealed the case outcome as, IIRC, at least one of the judges just ruled against them for not mounting any defence.
As a drive by reader that votes, I can guess why you copped a few whacks;
The tone is off and it appears to carry the implication that you might believe that none of the above (Jones, Piker, Owens) should be landed with fines despite on the face of it saying the opposite.
A cleaner comment would be better; just explain what it is that Piker has done that is equivilant to Jones' multi decade harrassment of the Sandi Hook parents, ditto Owens.
( for record, I'm non-USAian and unfamiliar with either Piker or Owens )
It would have been far more interesting to read your reasoning instead of having you click that down-vote button. I don't agree with your reasoning but that is the point: we could discuss it, I could explain who Piker (a left-wing icon being pushed as a 'bro' by the party while he spouts utter tripe and nonsense, calling for murder of political opponents) and Owens (a right-wing podcaster who used to be part of the right-wing establishment until she went fully anti-Semite and general conspiracy theorist). I'm not American either but whatever happens there affects us directly or indirectly so I do keep check on the news from the west.
> It would have been far more interesting to read your reasoning instead of having you click that down-vote button.
Ahhh, I read https://news.ycombinator.com/newcomments feed and saw your "Can the down-voters for once let go of their pacifiers" which prompted me to look at context.
As a general rule I prefer to engage with things I disagree with rather than simply downvote or flag.
I note now (I'm GMT +8 and have been asleep since last here) that both your comments above are [flagged] and [dead].
The HN mods, dang and tomhow, really do like to push content, engagement, curious discussion, etc. over snark, partisan whiplash, cranky shit, etc.
Re: Piker .. the name came up again in some other context (some speculation about a recent interview in or with the NYT) and so I watched a recent (last 14 days IIRC) interview with him with someone from Mother Jones .. on the bases of that single exposure I personally wouldn't dot point summarise him as "spouting utter tripe and nonsense" - he is capable of debating his opinions, has a good grasp of the political landscape, and is clearly a devisive figure in the US political landscape that would get a lot of hot takes and slanting.
Again, I've only a 20 minute exposure, but he does have a good point that he has literally thousands of hours of live twitch streaming, discussion, and in the moment rambling through hypotheticals before landing on a position - ie. he's someone that anyone can build a rolltape of short clips of and easily misrepresent and take out of context.
Addendum: from your peer comment:
> just like Hasan Piker ('the Jews are behind all it all'),
uhh, my take from a 20 minute discussion is that he's strongly against Israel "the aparthied state", the zionist attitude, the current holders of power in Israel.
Piker is the "progressive bro" version of Carlson: both can produce cohesive narratives based on faulty premises, in Piker's case it mostly revolves around "thirld-worldism", i.e. all the woes of the world are due to the "west" being bad while Carlson used to come from the opposite direction but has moved to a sort of arch-conservatism where authoritarian rules and rulers are preferable over that messy (small-D) democratic system. Piker and Carlson unite in their anti-Jewish rhetoric, where they differ is in their icons. Piker hails communist leaders as heroes, terrorist organisations like Hamas as 'freedom fighters' while Carlson sees autocrats like Putin, (Qatar's) al Thani and Xi Jinping as examples of "strong and steadfast leaders protecting their culture".
He's being pushed as the fresh face of "democrat resistance" with all the right attributes: young, "edgy", anti-west, pro-palestine, "anti-zionist" (which translates to anti-Jew). He travels in the "correct" circles, went on the pro-Cuban trip to the island where he stayed with an the other champagne socialists in a luxury hotel while professing the virtues of socialism versus the sins of the west, etcetera. He seems to have a number of skeletons in his closet related to his treatment of women, his 'fans' and his dog which can be used to ditch him once he has outlived his usefulness in more or less the same way as the party 'suddenly' realised Swalwell was a creep when his candidacy for the position of governor of California made it less likely for a "democrat" to win due to the open primaries in that state where too many "democrats" in the race make it harder for one of them to end up in the top 2 for the final round of voting.
The influence America and most things American have on us here in Europe. Also, the way our state media and state-sponsored media here in Sweden report on it which is anything but objective. If you want to know what really happens you need to go and look for it yourself.
Australia’s uranium resources are expressed as Economic Demonstrated Resources (EDR), Subeconomic Demonstrated Resources (SDR) and Inferred Resources. Refer to Appendix 3 for definitions of these terms and further information on the National Classification System for reporting of Identified Mineral Resources.
Based on 2023 production rates, Australia’s uranium reserves have an estimated life of 71 years.
What's all this fuss about words? What are resources, what are reserves? Do we really only have 71 years worth of uranium in Australia?
I just wanted to signify that there is so much available hydrocarbons and coal underground that humanity will run out of atmospheric CO2 budget before it runs out of hydrocarbons.
> humanity will run out of atmospheric CO2 budget before it runs out of hydrocarbons.
I agree that is very much all that's needed to be said.
I confess to a shuddering dislike of statements of the form "we only have {x} left", a dislike exceeded by my revulsion to statements of the form "we have {X} amount left in the crust or ocean - we can just use that".
Call it a side effect of a couple of decades of geophysical exploration work across the globe :/
The reserves of any mineral are basically the amount someone spends the effort to find and document. And spending that effort is an economic decision. There's little economic incentive to find reserves beyond a certain period of time so the reserves of any mineral are going to be only fairly limited amount of years out.
TBH I had a chuckle at the Elon -> Frank-N-Furter example that transcends any specific love or hate for either Elon or the Rocky Horror Show.
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