citizen of morbhlok

I have bio

[Handre @Handre]

Switzerland has 26 cantons, each with its own constitution, tax rates, and laws, and the result is one of the wealthiest, most stable countries on earth. That is not a coincidence.

You want to understand why Swiss GDP per capita sits around $92,000 while the EU average hovers near $37,000? Start here. Cantons compete for residents and businesses the same way firms compete for customers. Zug kept its corporate tax rate at roughly 11.9%, attracted commodity traders and crypto firms, and watched its population and tax revenues grow. Cantons that taxed aggressively lost mobile capital and productive citizens to neighbors with lighter burdens. This is Tiebout competition working in real life, not a textbook diagram.

The federal government in Bern handles defense, monetary policy, and some foreign affairs. Everything else defaults downward. Cantons set income taxes. Communes set property levies. Citizens in Appenzell Innerrhoden voted on local laws by a show of hands in the Landsgemeinde, an open-air assembly, until 1990 for most matters. The feedback loop between decision-makers and the people paying for those decisions stays tight. That tightness disciplines spending in ways no central auditor ever will.

Free market thinkers have stressed this for generations: political units must be small enough that exit is credible. When the cost of leaving a bad jurisdiction drops, politicians face real consequences for bad policy. Switzerland kept that cost low by design. A business or family in Basel-Stadt dissatisfied with cantonal policy drives forty minutes to Baselland. No visa. No language barrier. No bureaucratic labyrinth. Just a move.

The EU spent decades building the opposite architecture, consolidating regulatory power in Brussels and eliminating the jurisdictional diversity that forces governments to stay honest. Switzerland refused to join. Its per-capita wealth, its low public debt, and its functional civil society arrived because the Swiss preserved the one institutional feature every centralized state destroys first: the credible right to leave.

[citizen of morbhlok @maxcrichter]

@ImtiazMadmood Now also include when those famous inventions were made.

[citizen of morbhlok @maxcrichter]

@uMarhobane Why not both?

[citizen of morbhlok @maxcrichter]

@benryanwriter Ironic that one obvious word from that puzzle is TOUGHEN?

[Ivan Burazin @ivanburazin]

Mac search has been broken for 2 years, and nobody at Apple seems to care.

- I open spotlight search
- Type "calc"
- Calculator appears
- I hit return

But in the 0.2 seconds before I hit return, it swaps to a random file with the word "calc" in it somewhere. And I open a file I didn't want.

This happens to me every single day.

Very unbecoming of a $5T company whose customers are still obsessed with its products.

[citizen of morbhlok @maxcrichter]

@martinmbauer @EricsElectrons Well, you wouldn’t force novel and risky contraceptive methods on a pregnant woman to avoid further pregnancy either. That’s pretty much where the analogy breaks down though because analogies aren’t the real thing, which you know.

[citizen of morbhlok @maxcrichter]

@dieworkwear A little bit of doubt concerning one’s perfection and humility regarding one’s shortcomings never hurt the drive for self-improvement. Expecting the world at large to be your morale booster is delusional.

[citizen of morbhlok @maxcrichter]

@dieworkwear The outer self is a reflection of the inner self to some degree. Not everyone is required to admire your ephemeral beauty. Find those who do and don’t burden the rest of us with your unsolicited demand for validation.

[citizen of morbhlok @maxcrichter]

@suntoshpillay @African_Spring It isn’t until the voters demand that it is

[citizen of morbhlok @maxcrichter]

@NadiaFerreira85 Outsource the management too, because we don’t seem to have competency anywhere. When you don’t appoint technocrats (or even dedicated problem solvers) but cadres, you will
become outsourced to the hilt and double(at least) pay for everything.

[Nadia Polony @NadiaFerreira85]

Get a job at R5,5m, then appoint 4 consultants for R10m. Why not just appoint the Consultants and dispense with the seemingly unnecessary R5,5m ?

[citizen of morbhlok @maxcrichter]

@skdh This is probably why inherited guilt is effective.

[Karabo Khakhau MP @KaraboKhakhau]

🇿🇦 Is this an admission of guilt? So the SG of the ANC knows that ANC Mayors have been stealing the people's money? So, when is he laying charges against his criminals?

[Chris Martz @ChrisMartzWX]

My position on climate change in a nutshell:

1⃣ 𝐇𝐚𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐩𝐥𝐚𝐧𝐞𝐭 𝐛𝐞𝐞𝐧 𝐠𝐫𝐚𝐝𝐮𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐲 𝐠𝐞𝐭𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐰𝐚𝐫𝐦𝐞𝐫 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐥𝐚𝐬𝐭 𝟏𝟕𝟓 𝐲𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐬?

— Yes, but it has been warming since at least 1750. Only since ~1950 or so has there been any potentially significant anthropogenic influence. How can anyone on the alarmist side explain the previous 200 years? What caused the initial warming? What caused the warming between 1910 and 1945, which is ~40% of post-1850 warming, but only ~10% of emissions? So, if natural variability hasn't contributed to any warming since 1850 (which is assumed in the climate models), then you are ignoring that.

2⃣ 𝐈𝐬 𝐫𝐞𝐜𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐠𝐥𝐨𝐛𝐚𝐥 𝐰𝐚𝐫𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐦𝐚𝐧-𝐦𝐚𝐝𝐞?

— I think at least 𝑠𝑜𝑚𝑒 of it has been. I don't know how much exactly because it cannot be measured. Perhaps 25% or 50%. Maybe 75%? Carbon dioxide (CO₂) is in fact a “greenhouse gas” (GHG). All else being equal, adding more of it to the atmosphere should cause at least some warming; that is, ~1°C (~1.8°F) per doubling of its concentration, plus any positive feedbacks that act to amplify it (the Planck feedback, which makes the sum of feedbacks net negative, is already accounted for in the RF2xCO2 calculation).

In theory, this explanation makes sense. It's radiative transfer physics. Some of it is basic math, some of it is more complicated, but it is well-understood. But a challenge in actually attributing GHG emissions to all recent warming is that the natural energy flows in and out of the Earth's climate system cannot be measured with the accuracy and precision needed to ascribe all recent warming to GHGs. The uncertainty on the TOA flux is about 5-10 W/m², which is much larger than the estimated Earth energy imbalance (EEI) allegedly from CO₂ on the order of 0.8–1.2 W/m². What's more, the climate models are artificially tuned such that there can be no natural causes of warming, CO₂ is added, then it's declared that CO₂ is the only cause of global warming since 1850.

3⃣ 𝐖𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐚𝐛𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐮𝐫𝐛𝐚𝐧𝐢𝐳𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐥𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐮𝐬𝐞 𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐞?

— I think that urban sprawl and land use have been significant contributors to local + regional warming trends. Theoretically, this could explain part or even most of the warming globally outside the north polar region, which is mostly rural. We are investigating this in more detail because we are convinced that urban influences have not entirely been removed from the temperature record.

4⃣ 𝐈𝐬 𝐫𝐞𝐜𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐰𝐚𝐫𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐮𝐧𝐮𝐬𝐮𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐲 𝐫𝐚𝐩𝐢𝐝 𝐨𝐫 𝐮𝐧𝐩𝐫𝐞𝐜𝐞𝐝𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐝?

— I don't think so. Alarmists always bring up the “rate of change” argument in threads, but the idea that the recent warming spike is unprecedented in the last few thousand years is based on Michael Mann's infamous tree ring-based “Hockey Stick” graph from MBH (1998, 1999) and the alleged independent look-a-like “verifications” that followed (e.g., PAGES2K). But the attempts to verify it with different proxies all used the same (or a similar) methods that will generate hockey stick-shaped graphs from red noise. The shape of the graphs are largely a statistical artifact, not an accurate representation of global climate variability over the last 2,000 years. I tested this myself using random data. Ex-post correlation screening always produces a hockey stick shape.

5⃣ 𝐈𝐬 𝐞𝐱𝐭𝐫𝐞𝐦𝐞 𝐰𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐛𝐞𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐬𝐞?

— Not really. There have been no increases in floods, droughts, thunderstorms + tornadoes + hailstorms, tropical cyclones, winter storms, or wildfires that can be attributed to GHG emissions at a global scale.

There are definitely regional increases and decreases in some of these event types that are within the bounds of natural variability. In the case of certain drought types (e.g., hydrological and ecological) and wildfires that have increased regionally, that is usually attributable to land use change + poor water resource management and poor forest management, respectively. Evidence that GHG forcing has led to an increase in said events is, in my assessment, weak.

You can maybe argue an increase in heatwaves and heavy rainfall since 1950 globally, but the increase in heavy rainfall occurred suddenly around 1990, which is largely an artifact of the change to automation and more efficient rain gauges. There is also a lot of data (usually legitimate extreme Tmax and precipitation values) that get falsely marked as “missing” in the digitized data, which means they get missed in every analysis published in journals and on databases. We are finding that when you look at the original paper forms, most “missing” data aren't actually missing and so we have to go in and correct the records. This is a major problem in the U.S. (in fact, filling all of the missing 20th century rainfall data in Texas in turns an increase in the top 1% of heavy rainfall events per station to a slight negative trend since 1900).

I assume this problem exists outside the U.S., but at this point in time, I can't be too sure. I haven't looked into it yet.

6⃣ 𝐀𝐫𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐞 “𝐟𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐞𝐫𝐩𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐬” 𝐨𝐟 𝐦𝐚𝐧-𝐦𝐚𝐝𝐞 𝐰𝐚𝐫𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐠?

— No, not really.

All global warming, natural or man-made, will result in higher latitudes warming faster than the mid-latitudes and land heating up faster than water (and by extension, the Northern Hemisphere warming faster than the Southern). So, while these changes would be consistent with GHG forcing, it's also consistent with changes in solar activity, cloud cover changes, etc.

The cooling in the stratosphere since the late 1970s is probably due to CO₂. So, at least some of the warming in the troposphere since then is due to CO₂. But not all of it can be attributed to CO₂ necessarily because the physics of heat transfer in the troposphere are far more complex than that of the upper atmosphere where radiation is king and the physics are simpler. In the troposphere, you have convection and precipitation processes (latent heating) that are highly uncertain and these processes can change naturally. The fluxes on these are larger than the relatively small EEI estimated by CERES instrumentation and assumed to be due to CO₂.

7⃣ 𝐈𝐬 𝐠𝐥𝐨𝐛𝐚𝐥 𝐰𝐚𝐫𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐝𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐞𝐫𝐨𝐮𝐬?

— As far as I can tell, no. The quality of life on Earth has never been better than it is today, and it is only projected to improve through 2100 by almost every measurable metric. We can adapt to whatever climate changes there are just like we always have. But just like with any climate change that has ever occurred, natural or man-made, there will be pros and cons to it depending on where you live.

I am what you call a “lukewarmer.”

I do not deny that there is anthropogenic influence on the climate system, but I'm also not running around like a hysterical chicken either.

There are far more important environmental problems that need to be addressed that are within our control.

[𝚂𝚗𝚘𝚠𝙱𝚛𝚘 @MeltingSnowBro]

Leftists be like "The American government is so evil, I wish it had more money and power."

[Vusi de Villiers @Finnthehuman80]

Yes @MbalulaFikile you daft fucking moron. The problem is now water because once again you fucked it up.
If you and your comrades had any comprehension of forward planning, infrastructure expansion and maintenance, and you were not a cohort of thieves, none of these challenges would have been impossible to overcome.

Your weak excuses are laughable. Your thievery and incompetence have been laid bare and you are reduced to a clown making word salads for a living.

[citizen of morbhlok @maxcrichter]

@sentle22 @destiny_ndlovu If you can do it cost effectively, you may play, if you can be undercut by others you should go. Government spending is just so disconnected from caring about inefficiency, because spending other people’s money and colluding for a kickback are lucrative and no one gets arrested.

[citizen of morbhlok @maxcrichter]

@destiny_ndlovu Insourcing ftw

[La-Ndlovu @destiny_ndlovu]

Correctional Services Minister Pieter Groenewald says he stopped a bread tender where taxpayers were paying
R24.50 per loaf to a contractor who didn't even own a bakery. The contractor was subcontracting the bread for about R15 and pocketing around R1 million a month.
Groenewald launched a plan to make prisons self-sufficient by building internal bakeries. Now inmates bake their own bread for about R8 per loaf, and prisons are 97% self-sufficient.

[citizen of morbhlok @maxcrichter]

@DrKnowItAll16 @skdh If the community isn’t geared towards truth seeking but rather status games, the incentives don’t line up either. Universities aren’t seeking to be elite anymore, hence the “teaching”
declines to match the aptitude, knocking effects follow.