Ben Matthews

  • New here on lemmy, will add more info later …
  • Also on mdon: @benjhm@scicomm.xyz
  • Try my interactive climate / futures model: SWIM
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  • 44 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 15th, 2023

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  • 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.


  • 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.





  • Ben Matthews@sopuli.xyztoOpen Source@lemmy.mlThe Death of Decentralized Email
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    4 months ago

    I don’t buy this. I’m still using SMTP on my own domain and it’s working fine, a bit of spam but not unmanageable, real messages get read. Main challenge is digesting so many potentially-interesting list messages, indicating email’s continued dominance for professional topics. Seems this author has another agenda.
    Having said that, it’s a pity the world never agreed a protocol for micro-payment for emails (and for many other services), which would resolve the spam problem, and not be a burden for honest users.






  • As it happens I’ve been calculating per capita emissions for 28 years, since COP2. You can see my model here.
    No I certainly don’t include Russia nor Turkey, although europe is more than EU. Korea is indeed notable. Regarding what they call ‘consumption emissions’, you can get such data from Global Carbon Project, on that I’m less an expert but my hunch is that industry emissions are dominated by heavy products like steel and cement for construction (made with help of gigatons of coal), rather than light consumer goods for export. Over-construction is the root of the problem, global emissions will peak (maybe now) as that bubble bursts.