That is unfair. The largest co2 producers are also large in size. I think 1km resolution is more than sufficient to identify the source of the majority of emissions - e.g. factories, power plants, buildings, etc. Even if the resolution is not fine-grained enough for definitive identification it reduces the scope to manageable size for more detailed investigations.
"Clickbait is Unreasonably Effective", 2021 - Veritasium's apologia for clicbait titles and and thumbnails, and statement of principles.
Veritasiuk has at least stuck making soldi educational videos, as Mark Rober has let slip away his past effort to educate in addition to demonstrate his cool toys.
It doesn't even make sense. I think you meant to say "efficiently" perhaps but even arguing that is an uphill battle - at most you could say that is true for some types of projects.
I agree with your overall position but I disagree on the first point.
Wealth is ownership, ownership is control of value. Allocating more (not all) value away from SaaS companies and into food security or education is a good thing and would make things better for everyone.
I agree with that. I only mean that it’s not as simple as “if we gave everyone Elon’s money then we could all afford homes.” But you’re right, the higher concentration of wealth means there’s less investment into producing more resources that people need, so indirectly it does mean there are less homes to go around.
I do agree with what (I think) GP might have been trying to say though. Conspicuous spending itself is not a problem. Way rather have the ultra wealthy buying yachts that deciding to be a wealth-proportional amount of everyday commodities.
> Allocating more (not all) value away from SaaS companies and into food security or education is a good thing and would make things better for everyone.
You are already doing that with your votes, the American government is already investing massive amounts into education and food security. Private investments would never do this, even poor people wouldn't invest in poor ROI endeavors, poor people invest in the same things as rich people they just invest less, so the wealth of the rich doesn't matter.
It's not about what non-0.001% people invest in, but what they spend on. More evenly distributed wealth would mean more money for people to spend on education, food security, and housing, which in turn would spur increased production of those goods. Below a certain wealth threshold, people aren't putting every additional dollar into "investments" in the financial sense of the word. There's more ROI by sending your kids to college or moving to a better neighborhood.
The American government gets that money from taxes. If wealthy people are using that wealth to avoid taxes and put the burden on to the worker then the worker is being hurt twice - first by the lost power in their vote, and second by paying an unfair share of public infrastructure costs.
There are a couple of nuanced issues with what you are saying.
1. In our current political system, wealth translates into political power, which can (and is) used to change laws to secure more wealth - just look at the portfolio performance of members of US Congress. Democracy is about putting political power in the vote.
2. Many if not most of our important problems are beyond the ability of one person (or a small group) to tackle - climate change, food security, etc. Having wealth more distributed means that more economic participants are involved in deploying it, and thus greater predictive power per dollar spent.
About my own money, I worry. About other people's money, I rather try to think carefully. "Worrying" about money is the emotional basis that fuels a lot of populist rhetoric. And It seems to me economics is often counterintuitive to our emotional intuition of how things should be.
I would agree here if our political systems weren't vulnerable to capture by wealth. Inequality drives more inequality, it has to be counterbalanced by laws.
The majority of human civilisation has been feudal. We recently got democracy for everyone. We are not yet out of reach of our local civilisational attractor.
But the reason that when talking about the 1% they suddenly stop looking globally and only look within countries is that everyone in the UK and US is top-1% worldwide. Equalizing would make the average wage $500, or 375 pounds. And when you start discussing what countries are the problem ... immediately you see there are very few poor democracies. There are some, but not much.
To make matters worse, this year's Nobel prize in Economics went to research showing that the problem is governments, and specifically that a lot of populous countries don't create institutions to improve the welfare of people at all, but rather focused on stealing from the population. This makes it an unfixable problem in those countries. More than that, a lot of these countries' populations don't want to fix it, or even want to make it far worse (like Egypt, or Iran, or Pakistan, or Sudan) for a whole host of reasons.
Oh and most of those governments are "captured by wealth" only in the sense that the current rulers exploit the population for their personal wealth. This is what you see from Afghanistan to Venezuela, but those governments didn't come to power with wealth. Various ideologies brought these governments to power, and the governments steal the wealth of the people, even to an extent that people start dying in pretty large numbers like in Afghanistan. I also find it strange that when discussing capture by wealth no-one ever takes Venezuela as an example, despite how obvious it is that that's the problem there. Nobody discusses how Chavez came to power as a "communist" and died a billionaire.
So if you want to fix poverty, one of the things it looks like you'll have to do is to overthrow the governments ruling, actually more than half of humanity, and convince their populations to stop caring more about religion and other ideologies, like pride, or a mostly imagined enemy (like Pakistan), than about prosperity.
