Well, that's close, but there is a limit to how much cash equivalents you want to keep on hand. The reason is opportunity costs. At some point the marginal value of another month of security is less than what you'd get from putting that cash to work in a more productive (although less liquid) investment.
The board has stated they want to keep at least a year of operating expenses on hand as cash. Apparently the board sees Wikimedia as particularly vulnerable, and I suppose if you're in the business of legal blackmail someone with an eighty million dollar war chest isn't an attractive target.
Amassing a giant cash reserve is an unusual treasury management choice, but it's not an ethical red flag. . When you enrich yourself off a charity you do it by transferring assets out of the charity, not let them pile up. That shows up as low program spending, high overhead, and high salaries. Wikimedia has none of those things. It just has mountains of cash.
Not if you count downloading popular javascript libraries like JQuery. That's 258 KBytes/page refresh right there. A lot of ad-related stuff follows you around too.
Instead of a grant, how about a federal investigation to determine where the money is actually going?
Or... you could read the audited financial statements which Wikimedia posts on its website. It's not that hard.
The financial statements paint a picture of a financially healthy organization. Very healthy. But having solid financials is not a crime. The thing that sticks out about these financials is that Wikimedia has a huge amount of cash on hand. Now it's normal for charities to keep more cash on hand than a for-profit business. If you're Proctor and Gamble, well, things would have to get pretty bad before people give up on buying soap. You can count on future cash inflows. If you're a charity those cash inflows are a lot more volatile, so you keep more on hand.
How much? Well, normally a well-run charity keeps enough current assets to run for six months; Wikimedia has about eighteen months. However you have to take into account that Wikimedia is growing rapidly. It was almost 25% larger in FY 2016 than it was in 2015. It's normal in this situation to have more cash reserves than one that is a stable size.
And note -- we're talking cash or cash equivalents held by the foundation, not Jimmy Wales personally. If you look at the foundation's IRS 990 form, Jimmy Wales gets $0 in compensation from the foundation either in salary, in-kind, or (important to check as this is a common dodge) compensation from related organizations. The highest compensated executive is Lisa Tretikov, at $308K. Fundraising expenses, overhead, and executive compensation are all quite low for a charity with $82 million in income, 70% of which is spent on program (also a very good metric).
Charity Navigator gives Wikimedia Foundation a 91/100 combined score for transparency, accountability, and financial management. This puts it in the top tier of charitable foundations, roughly on par with the American Heart Association. Kind of like the charity equivalent of a blue chip stock. Your local food bank is more like a growth stock; if things go as planned your donation will have a bigger impact, but if things go south your donation may just go to pay off the debts of the defunct organization.
So when Wikipedia asks you to chip in $5, should you? There's no simple answer. Wikipedia won't go away if you don't, but on the other hand it provides something you probably use every day. In general a healthy charity will manage without your donation, but it still can't manage without any donations.
You're right, Beijing is not the worst. Ranked by PM2.5 concentrations, it's only the 57th worst. The worst is Zabol, Iran, although that is in fact a natural phenomenon caused by persistent winds carrying in fine desert particulates. The worst man-made pollution is the Indian city of Gwalior which hits PM 2.5 concentrations of 325 micrograms / m^3, roughly 3x the levels of Beijing's nightmarish.
While it's true that Beijing's problems won't be fixed until Heibei gets its act in order, I suspect Beijing contributes more to its pollution problems than you are suggesting. Many cars and trucks don't have the mandated emissions equipment, so they might as well be old ones. And Beijing still has a couple of operational coal plants, although they've been switching over to natural gas.
China has had tough-sounding pollution laws for years. The problem with those laws is that nobody was in charge of enforcing them. For example cars and trucks are suppose to have emissions equipment like US cars do, but nobody checks to see that the equipment is actually installed.
Two years ago the Journalist Chai Jing released a blockbuster film about air pollution in China; you can watch it on youtube. The format is Chai presenting data and video segments to an audience in an auditorium. At one point she shows them a video of a routine roadside truck inspection in California, and the audience is just floored. It's as if you were watching a film from a foreign country in which the cops pull over a truck driver and administer a calculus exam. And the driver passes.
11.5 million people. It is also dense: 11,500 people / km^2. That's roughly six times as dense as New York City. It has a street food scene on a scale that is unimaginable in a US city. A lot of those stands are powered by charcoal.
So yes, cooking is a real air pollution problem there. It may not be their worst problem, but it may well be their toughest.
I see it as a mixed bag. If you are extending the addition operation to non-built-in types like matrices or complex numbers it's a good thing, although you can obviously screw it up. If you're implementing some kind of Abelian group or algebraic ring it's a good thing. Even if you're just using operator overloading in some way that makes intuitive sense, like string concatenation ("a" + "b" == "ab") or repetition ("a" * 3 == "aaa") or comparison ("a" "b" == true), I see it as a good thing.
But operator overloading obviously gives a great deal of scope for sloppiness and obscurity.
I'm well aware of this, but it doesn't change the fact that C++ is a different language with a fundamentally different philosophy. Adding features to a language is not some kind of neutral operation; it can affect users that have no intention of using those features.
Were it not for operation overloading the argument that C++ is simply C with classes would be a lot stronger. Then if you came across the expression "a + b", you would know it means exactly what "a + b" means in C: either integer addition, floating point addition, possibly with an implicit typecast on one of the operands. In C++ the "+" might be something else altogether; it might even have side effects.
This is neither good nor bad, but it's unquestionably different.
The unit cost doesn't begin to capture what's going on here. Meat is amazingly cheap if you consider what a meat animal is: an extraordinarily complex, balky, and inefficient converter of commodity crops like feed corn to concentrated protein. I don't say this because I'm anti-meat -- I love meat and eat a lot of it. But boneless pork chops for $3.99/pound are a by-product of federal agricultural policies that include over twenty billion dollars of subsidies.
The influence of industry political contributions distorts the US food supply, making commodity crops like corn, soy, and sugar beets over-plentiful and cheap and actually discouraging farmers from growing vegetables and fruit to be marketed directly to consumers. So it turns out that high quality produce, which is not subsidized, can actually cost more than meat.
Consider an apple. Unlike a peach (if you've never had an actual ripe peach off the tree you don't know what you're missing), apples ship and store extremely well. So it's not particularly remarkable that a Red Delicious apple cost only 25% as much on a weight basis as a boneless pork chop if you consider the labor inputs. It ought to cost even less.
The real problem is that "Red Delicious" as a term is a triumph of marketing mendacity. A Red Delicious is indeed red, but it tastes like Styrofoam. If you want a good eating apple, say a Honey Crisp, you'll be paying as much on a weight basis as you would for a pork chop. Last year Honey Crisps hit $4.50 a pound. And the tomato -- normal market price is about $0.75 per pound, but if you want a tomato that is marginally tastier than the plastic it's packaged in you've got to go for a hothouse tomato that cost twice that. And for a good tomato you're paying almost as much as you would for a piece of meat.
No wonder people hate vegetables. Very few people will buy a tomato if it costs as much as a pork chop, and since the pork chop is subsidized and tomatoes aren't, that means most people have never tasted a good tomato. Or a really good peach. Many have never even tasted a good apple.
C was conceived as a portable shorthand for assembly language. It has evolved into its own beast over the decades - especially when you include C++.
It makes no sense to include C++, just because C++ shares certain elements with C. The design philosophy is completely different. C is a minimalist language. It has acquired more features over the years, like unicode support, but based on demonstrable need. C++ is more prescriptive in its philosophy: these are the features you should be using if you want to be doing object oriented programming.
Africa is a rich continent. The fact that most people living on that continent are poor doesn't change that. It just means a lot of the countries are run for the benefit of a tiny elite at the top. It doesn't matter in those countries that the resources of the country a squandered as long as a few people do well.
Actually if you don't know what you're looking at, you can't really draw any conclusions at all about what it is doing. It might not be flying. It might not even be an object.
Let's take the "not flying" case. I have personally seen meteors appear to do impossible things -- like falling and then suddenly shooting upwards. But just because an object's angle of elevation above the horizon increases doesn't mean that object is actually increasing altitude. An airplane flying at constant speed and altitude will increase it's angular elevation as it flies overhead -- and will appear to accelerate upward as well. A meteor will do the same even as it is in fact falling, not flying. Add odd air-induced changes in trajectory (think of them as God's knuckle ball), and dramatic turns as parts of the meteor split off, and you get some very (apparently) un-rock like aerial behavior.
The ultimate example of an unidentified not-flying-object was a news broadcast I saw which showed a telephoto video shot of what it called a UFO: a bright disk of light trailing sparks. I almost fell out of my seat because I instantly recognized the thing as Jupiter with the four Galilean moons lined up to one side.
The category of "not an object" is extremely broad; basically any visual phenomenon that appears to the observer as above the horizon. This could be refraction phenomena like mirages, or reflections. I think reflections probably explain a lot of the high speed level flight reports, e.g. a pilot sees a reflection on his canopy and thinks it is an object on the horizon; because he thinks the object is far away he interprets its apparent motion against the background as extreme speed, but in fact he's looking at something a few feet away as he's changing heading.
In this case the fact that the "object" in this particular did not appear on radar suggests to me that it is not an object at all, or if it is an object it is not where it appears to be. It might of course be a stealth aircraft.
By the way "conspiracy theory" does not mean what you think it means. It refers to a particular social phenomenon in which people believe implausible stories in a way that is impervious to disproof because that belief is emotionally satisfying. Yes, there is a well-supported theory that there was a conspiracy to attack the US on 9/11, but that is not a "conspiracy theory", any more than a mirage is an object, even though we can call it an "unidentified flying object". That's just the way language works, by convention rather than logic. Tacking on an adjective to a noun doesn't always produce a narrower ontological category (e.g. the way "black cats" is subset of "cats"); sometimes it changes the sense of the noun altogether (e.g., a "cat's paw" isn't a kind of "paw", it's a kind of person).
There's a fine line between stranding for something and trying to make people identify that thing with you. But that line is important: it's the difference between having integrity and building a self-serving cult of personality. Integrity means accountability; cult of personality means getting a free pass because of who you are.
Assange would like everyone to believe that disagreeing with him means disagreeing with the very concept of transparency in the exercise of power by the powerful. It's not.
Speaking of E-6, this would be why they chose to revive Ektachrome but not Kodachrome. Ektachrome is developed with the E-6 process which can easily be done in a home darkroom. Kodachrome is developed the more elaborate K-14 process.
But any professional or even many amateurs know that given a good linear sensor and quality lens, you can recreate any color warmth or feeling of film you want, after taking the shot, and you don't have to wait 3 days of dunking film in a developing tank to find out how it turned out.
If you knew exactly what you were aiming for, perhaps you could. But would you know what to aim for?
Here's the thing about artistic freedom and convenience: the process matters. A lot of creativity comes from struggling with the limitations of your tools. Imagine you had a technology that allowed people to effortlessly capture exactly what they see, as they see it; then effortlessly manipulate that image in any way they could imagine. While the number image creators would no doubt go up, would the number of accomplished visual artists go up? Simple intuition would say yes, but my own forays into various art forms suggest not. Time, care, and frustration all send your imagination in unexpected directions.
So I see people trying to revive film photography as similar to people who continue to paint portraits when photography would allow them the freedom to experiment with much less effort. It's not that a painted portrait is inherently artistically superior to any photographic image; it's just that the limitations of paint are part of those artists' creative process.
America is the third most populous country in the world. We also enjoy an educational and technological legacy of the post-Sputnik era. So we have a great deal of momentum; we're going to be an important innovator for decades to come.
The problem is that Americans today see technological leadership as a birthright, not a national objective -- the way we did in the 1960s. While I think we can take significance as granted through mid-century at least, I don't think we can take leadership for granted.
Well, I don't know whether they're doing it because of AGW, but they certainly have good reasons to move away from coal.
While they could probably do more in the short term by switching to natural gas, renewables hits a couple of points that are important to the Chinese government: national independence and the development of indigenous technological capabilities. Public funding for applied R&D is a lot more controversial in the US.
This isn't just true of PPP GDP, any kind of GDP or price comparison over time needs to take inflation into account. I used a World Bank analysis prepared from ORNL data and presumably the bank knows to adjust for inflation. The reason to use PPP is what matters is the amount of consumption enabled per CO2 emitted. If a bushel of wheat costs 10x in Syria what it costs in Russia, should we value a bushel of wheat produced in Syria 10x as much as one produced in Russia? For some purposes, yes, but for this purpose no.
It's impossible to do a precise comparison of standards of living across time periods because things change. How do you compare the value of computers from 1990 to the value of computers today? However if you look at the major industrial countries of Europe in general they've reduced per capita CO2 while increasing per capita GDP, often dramatically. So it's safe to say they're getting more CO2 efficient, even if we can't be entirely sure how to precisely calculate that.
Slashdot Mirror
In other words he's complaining about people complaining. And there's always people complaining.
Well, that's close, but there is a limit to how much cash equivalents you want to keep on hand. The reason is opportunity costs. At some point the marginal value of another month of security is less than what you'd get from putting that cash to work in a more productive (although less liquid) investment.
The board has stated they want to keep at least a year of operating expenses on hand as cash. Apparently the board sees Wikimedia as particularly vulnerable, and I suppose if you're in the business of legal blackmail someone with an eighty million dollar war chest isn't an attractive target.
Amassing a giant cash reserve is an unusual treasury management choice, but it's not an ethical red flag. . When you enrich yourself off a charity you do it by transferring assets out of the charity, not let them pile up. That shows up as low program spending, high overhead, and high salaries. Wikimedia has none of those things. It just has mountains of cash.
Not if you count downloading popular javascript libraries like JQuery. That's 258 KBytes/page refresh right there. A lot of ad-related stuff follows you around too.
Instead of a grant, how about a federal investigation to determine where the money is actually going?
Or... you could read the audited financial statements which Wikimedia posts on its website. It's not that hard.
The financial statements paint a picture of a financially healthy organization. Very healthy. But having solid financials is not a crime. The thing that sticks out about these financials is that Wikimedia has a huge amount of cash on hand. Now it's normal for charities to keep more cash on hand than a for-profit business. If you're Proctor and Gamble, well, things would have to get pretty bad before people give up on buying soap. You can count on future cash inflows. If you're a charity those cash inflows are a lot more volatile, so you keep more on hand.
How much? Well, normally a well-run charity keeps enough current assets to run for six months; Wikimedia has about eighteen months. However you have to take into account that Wikimedia is growing rapidly. It was almost 25% larger in FY 2016 than it was in 2015. It's normal in this situation to have more cash reserves than one that is a stable size.
And note -- we're talking cash or cash equivalents held by the foundation, not Jimmy Wales personally. If you look at the foundation's IRS 990 form, Jimmy Wales gets $0 in compensation from the foundation either in salary, in-kind, or (important to check as this is a common dodge) compensation from related organizations. The highest compensated executive is Lisa Tretikov, at $308K. Fundraising expenses, overhead, and executive compensation are all quite low for a charity with $82 million in income, 70% of which is spent on program (also a very good metric).
Charity Navigator gives Wikimedia Foundation a 91/100 combined score for transparency, accountability, and financial management. This puts it in the top tier of charitable foundations, roughly on par with the American Heart Association. Kind of like the charity equivalent of a blue chip stock. Your local food bank is more like a growth stock; if things go as planned your donation will have a bigger impact, but if things go south your donation may just go to pay off the debts of the defunct organization.
So when Wikipedia asks you to chip in $5, should you? There's no simple answer. Wikipedia won't go away if you don't, but on the other hand it provides something you probably use every day. In general a healthy charity will manage without your donation, but it still can't manage without any donations.
You need to understand operator overloading, even if you don't use it.
The point you are missing is that you have to maintain other peoples' code.
You're right, Beijing is not the worst. Ranked by PM2.5 concentrations, it's only the 57th worst. The worst is Zabol, Iran, although that is in fact a natural phenomenon caused by persistent winds carrying in fine desert particulates. The worst man-made pollution is the Indian city of Gwalior which hits PM 2.5 concentrations of 325 micrograms / m^3, roughly 3x the levels of Beijing's nightmarish.
While it's true that Beijing's problems won't be fixed until Heibei gets its act in order, I suspect Beijing contributes more to its pollution problems than you are suggesting. Many cars and trucks don't have the mandated emissions equipment, so they might as well be old ones. And Beijing still has a couple of operational coal plants, although they've been switching over to natural gas.
China has had tough-sounding pollution laws for years. The problem with those laws is that nobody was in charge of enforcing them. For example cars and trucks are suppose to have emissions equipment like US cars do, but nobody checks to see that the equipment is actually installed.
Two years ago the Journalist Chai Jing released a blockbuster film about air pollution in China; you can watch it on youtube. The format is Chai presenting data and video segments to an audience in an auditorium. At one point she shows them a video of a routine roadside truck inspection in California, and the audience is just floored. It's as if you were watching a film from a foreign country in which the cops pull over a truck driver and administer a calculus exam. And the driver passes.
11.5 million people. It is also dense: 11,500 people / km^2. That's roughly six times as dense as New York City. It has a street food scene on a scale that is unimaginable in a US city. A lot of those stands are powered by charcoal.
So yes, cooking is a real air pollution problem there. It may not be their worst problem, but it may well be their toughest.
I see it as a mixed bag. If you are extending the addition operation to non-built-in types like matrices or complex numbers it's a good thing, although you can obviously screw it up. If you're implementing some kind of Abelian group or algebraic ring it's a good thing. Even if you're just using operator overloading in some way that makes intuitive sense, like string concatenation ("a" + "b" == "ab") or repetition ("a" * 3 == "aaa") or comparison ("a" "b" == true), I see it as a good thing.
But operator overloading obviously gives a great deal of scope for sloppiness and obscurity.
I'm well aware of this, but it doesn't change the fact that C++ is a different language with a fundamentally different philosophy. Adding features to a language is not some kind of neutral operation; it can affect users that have no intention of using those features.
Were it not for operation overloading the argument that C++ is simply C with classes would be a lot stronger. Then if you came across the expression "a + b", you would know it means exactly what "a + b" means in C: either integer addition, floating point addition, possibly with an implicit typecast on one of the operands. In C++ the "+" might be something else altogether; it might even have side effects.
This is neither good nor bad, but it's unquestionably different.
Oh, and by the way, moderators: troll? Really?
The unit cost doesn't begin to capture what's going on here. Meat is amazingly cheap if you consider what a meat animal is: an extraordinarily complex, balky, and inefficient converter of commodity crops like feed corn to concentrated protein. I don't say this because I'm anti-meat -- I love meat and eat a lot of it. But boneless pork chops for $3.99/pound are a by-product of federal agricultural policies that include over twenty billion dollars of subsidies.
The influence of industry political contributions distorts the US food supply, making commodity crops like corn, soy, and sugar beets over-plentiful and cheap and actually discouraging farmers from growing vegetables and fruit to be marketed directly to consumers. So it turns out that high quality produce, which is not subsidized, can actually cost more than meat.
Consider an apple. Unlike a peach (if you've never had an actual ripe peach off the tree you don't know what you're missing), apples ship and store extremely well. So it's not particularly remarkable that a Red Delicious apple cost only 25% as much on a weight basis as a boneless pork chop if you consider the labor inputs. It ought to cost even less.
The real problem is that "Red Delicious" as a term is a triumph of marketing mendacity. A Red Delicious is indeed red, but it tastes like Styrofoam. If you want a good eating apple, say a Honey Crisp, you'll be paying as much on a weight basis as you would for a pork chop. Last year Honey Crisps hit $4.50 a pound. And the tomato -- normal market price is about $0.75 per pound, but if you want a tomato that is marginally tastier than the plastic it's packaged in you've got to go for a hothouse tomato that cost twice that. And for a good tomato you're paying almost as much as you would for a piece of meat.
No wonder people hate vegetables. Very few people will buy a tomato if it costs as much as a pork chop, and since the pork chop is subsidized and tomatoes aren't, that means most people have never tasted a good tomato. Or a really good peach. Many have never even tasted a good apple.
C was conceived as a portable shorthand for assembly language. It has evolved into its own beast over the decades - especially when you include C++.
It makes no sense to include C++, just because C++ shares certain elements with C. The design philosophy is completely different. C is a minimalist language. It has acquired more features over the years, like unicode support, but based on demonstrable need. C++ is more prescriptive in its philosophy: these are the features you should be using if you want to be doing object oriented programming.
Africa is a rich continent. The fact that most people living on that continent are poor doesn't change that. It just means a lot of the countries are run for the benefit of a tiny elite at the top. It doesn't matter in those countries that the resources of the country a squandered as long as a few people do well.
Actually if you don't know what you're looking at, you can't really draw any conclusions at all about what it is doing. It might not be flying. It might not even be an object.
Let's take the "not flying" case. I have personally seen meteors appear to do impossible things -- like falling and then suddenly shooting upwards. But just because an object's angle of elevation above the horizon increases doesn't mean that object is actually increasing altitude. An airplane flying at constant speed and altitude will increase it's angular elevation as it flies overhead -- and will appear to accelerate upward as well. A meteor will do the same even as it is in fact falling, not flying. Add odd air-induced changes in trajectory (think of them as God's knuckle ball), and dramatic turns as parts of the meteor split off, and you get some very (apparently) un-rock like aerial behavior.
The ultimate example of an unidentified not-flying-object was a news broadcast I saw which showed a telephoto video shot of what it called a UFO: a bright disk of light trailing sparks. I almost fell out of my seat because I instantly recognized the thing as Jupiter with the four Galilean moons lined up to one side.
The category of "not an object" is extremely broad; basically any visual phenomenon that appears to the observer as above the horizon. This could be refraction phenomena like mirages, or reflections. I think reflections probably explain a lot of the high speed level flight reports, e.g. a pilot sees a reflection on his canopy and thinks it is an object on the horizon; because he thinks the object is far away he interprets its apparent motion against the background as extreme speed, but in fact he's looking at something a few feet away as he's changing heading.
In this case the fact that the "object" in this particular did not appear on radar suggests to me that it is not an object at all, or if it is an object it is not where it appears to be. It might of course be a stealth aircraft.
By the way "conspiracy theory" does not mean what you think it means. It refers to a particular social phenomenon in which people believe implausible stories in a way that is impervious to disproof because that belief is emotionally satisfying. Yes, there is a well-supported theory that there was a conspiracy to attack the US on 9/11, but that is not a "conspiracy theory", any more than a mirage is an object, even though we can call it an "unidentified flying object". That's just the way language works, by convention rather than logic. Tacking on an adjective to a noun doesn't always produce a narrower ontological category (e.g. the way "black cats" is subset of "cats"); sometimes it changes the sense of the noun altogether (e.g., a "cat's paw" isn't a kind of "paw", it's a kind of person).
There's a fine line between stranding for something and trying to make people identify that thing with you. But that line is important: it's the difference between having integrity and building a self-serving cult of personality. Integrity means accountability; cult of personality means getting a free pass because of who you are.
Assange would like everyone to believe that disagreeing with him means disagreeing with the very concept of transparency in the exercise of power by the powerful. It's not.
In other words, so's your old man.
There's a big difference between pure fabrication and opinions about intrinsically uncertain facts. Do you judge from evidence or wishful thinking?
Speaking of E-6, this would be why they chose to revive Ektachrome but not Kodachrome. Ektachrome is developed with the E-6 process which can easily be done in a home darkroom. Kodachrome is developed the more elaborate K-14 process.
But any professional or even many amateurs know that given a good linear sensor and quality lens, you can recreate any color warmth or feeling of film you want, after taking the shot, and you don't have to wait 3 days of dunking film in a developing tank to find out how it turned out.
If you knew exactly what you were aiming for, perhaps you could. But would you know what to aim for?
Here's the thing about artistic freedom and convenience: the process matters. A lot of creativity comes from struggling with the limitations of your tools. Imagine you had a technology that allowed people to effortlessly capture exactly what they see, as they see it; then effortlessly manipulate that image in any way they could imagine. While the number image creators would no doubt go up, would the number of accomplished visual artists go up? Simple intuition would say yes, but my own forays into various art forms suggest not. Time, care, and frustration all send your imagination in unexpected directions.
So I see people trying to revive film photography as similar to people who continue to paint portraits when photography would allow them the freedom to experiment with much less effort. It's not that a painted portrait is inherently artistically superior to any photographic image; it's just that the limitations of paint are part of those artists' creative process.
You could take GP's advice too.
Do you mean
(a) Samsung hates Google more than Samsung hates Apple,
OR do you mean:
(b) Samsung hates Google more than Apple hates Google?
Keeping in mind both could be true, of course.
Sure. Take care.
America is the third most populous country in the world. We also enjoy an educational and technological legacy of the post-Sputnik era. So we have a great deal of momentum; we're going to be an important innovator for decades to come.
The problem is that Americans today see technological leadership as a birthright, not a national objective -- the way we did in the 1960s. While I think we can take significance as granted through mid-century at least, I don't think we can take leadership for granted.
Well, I don't know whether they're doing it because of AGW, but they certainly have good reasons to move away from coal.
While they could probably do more in the short term by switching to natural gas, renewables hits a couple of points that are important to the Chinese government: national independence and the development of indigenous technological capabilities. Public funding for applied R&D is a lot more controversial in the US.
Sure. You're too profound for me. Enjoy.
This isn't just true of PPP GDP, any kind of GDP or price comparison over time needs to take inflation into account. I used a World Bank analysis prepared from ORNL data and presumably the bank knows to adjust for inflation. The reason to use PPP is what matters is the amount of consumption enabled per CO2 emitted. If a bushel of wheat costs 10x in Syria what it costs in Russia, should we value a bushel of wheat produced in Syria 10x as much as one produced in Russia? For some purposes, yes, but for this purpose no.
It's impossible to do a precise comparison of standards of living across time periods because things change. How do you compare the value of computers from 1990 to the value of computers today? However if you look at the major industrial countries of Europe in general they've reduced per capita CO2 while increasing per capita GDP, often dramatically. So it's safe to say they're getting more CO2 efficient, even if we can't be entirely sure how to precisely calculate that.