Stability is indeed a strength of EU - effectively averaging over all the countries smooths over political oscillations - which is useful for tackling long-term policy problems (like climate). I'm not advocating majoritarian voting where 51% overrides 49%. However with ± 30 countries, one or two should not block the rest - the current system leads to transactional brinkmanship where the last hold-outs get some prize in return for postponed obstruction. I've seen similar (worse) problems in UN climate negotiations - also due to "consensus" principle.
benjhm
joined 1 year ago
Moi j'ai fait du vin ici en wallonie - 50 bouteilles en 2023 avec seulement trois vignes - un grimpant sur la facade de ma maison, les autres pendant entre arbres at bambous, donc ils prennent peut d'espace et donnent de l'ombre fraiche en été.
Interesting - especially regarding the linguistic isolation factor, making it easy to dominate media.
Although even among many similar slavic languages, I wonder how many people are listening to other country's media.
And if we look at other isolated languages in Europe, eg. Finland, Basque, Albania, it's hard to see a pattern in political consequences.
I agree. The key symbiosis between coral and microalgae depends on fundamental thermodynamic equilibria of the carbonate chemistry of seawater - which are highly sensitive to temperature and atmospheric CO2, in very predictable ways. When living in coral becomes unprofitable for the algae, they leave. My instinct, from some experience with this system, is that introducing new species won't do better than nature, nobody can beat thermodynamics. We have to reduce the CO2.
I wonder to what extent the western powers in Trianon were also motivated to punish the experiment with communism during summer of 1919 ? And how memory of this continues to influence modern views?
Later, the Soviet union extracted products and resources cheaply from its satellites - did this contribute to resentment of Ukraine as the transit country (I heard similar from Romanians)?
Today, the rural - urban political divide is similar in many other corners of europe, or even usa. I just wonder why the power balance in this case seems to be skewed away from the younger educated 'city people' in Budapest - maybe also specific demographics relating to those borders ?
Key message makes sense. But seems odd to use a photo of a Russian train to illustrate an article about Australia ...
China by now has made a large contribution to CO2 in the atmosphere - which leads to sea-level-rise, ocean acidification etc., imposing adaptation costs on these islands. These cause-effect links can be calculated quite accurately, so a case could be made to swap financial debt for climate debt (within, of course, a context of global deals where all big emitters contribute reasonable shares). In these specific cases it would be peanuts for China's budget, it’s more the diplomatic precedent they'd oppose.
Orban is not forever - whereas integrating a country to EU is a long slow process. Also Budapest is geographically a hub city (whose inhabitants didn't - mostly- vote for fidesz anyway). I find it hard to believe that hungarian people are so fundamentally different from their neighbours. So does it make sense to undo citizens' EU membership for this? Rather, we need some kind of suspension of rights of the current government based on specific behaviour, such as persistent obstruction, distortion of the national media, etc. (although such criteria could apply to others too which might get embarrassing). And in general, to remove all vetos (aka "consensus") from EU processes.
Africa is huge- many people underestimate it, although in this case it is a bit too large compared to India in the middle. Also the colorscale makes Sahara and other low desert areas too green - the habitable part is not so great.
Cool. I guess it's different in cities - with more members per constituency - than in the sparsely populated west? Anyway I'm wondering how can the irish help influence the US - which seems to be the origin of this community (?). Also could help France - if they used a STV like Ireland, they wouldn't need all those uncomfortable coalitions and désistements (withdrawals) before the second round (which wouldn't be necessary). France also needs MMCs (as they had in the past) to help reduce the urban-rural polarisation.
Ireland uses ranked-choice voting - specifically Single Transferable Vote in Multi-Member-Constituencies, in the republic for all levels of government, and even in the north for local and Stormont.
Voting-system nerds reckon the irish found one of the best compromises, at it gives some kind of proportionality among the main parties, while also giving a good chance to maverick independents with local support.
Note that in the irish system there are no wasted votes - as the surplus (excess votes above the number needed to elect a candidate) are also transferred to later choices - this gets complicated when there are multiple steps... An obvious downside is that counting takes a long time (even several days following recent european elections - but there must be technical ways to solve that?)
Any Irish here to comment ?
Key message remains that methane is "the strongest lever we can quickly pull to reduce warming".
It's not runaway, but there is a positive feedback of methane increasing its own lifetime by using up atmospheric oxidising capacity. I note also, new to me - "an increase in decomposition rates from wetlands as higher temperatures interacted with La Niña conditions in the tropics" - so during El Niño we get more CO2 from forest fires, but during La Niña more CH4 ... - how to lock-in that carbon ? I also wonder how much methane is coming from Russia recently, whose government cares the least of all.