again, if drugs is what you need to "treat" depression then you probably have a much bigger problem in life that needs to be addressed rather than looking for another band-aid. depression is not some random disease you catch like a bad cold, it stems from personal or systemic issues that will only continue to feed into said depression until fixed.
Can you imagine how idiotic someone would sound if they were saying that about type 1 diabetes, or maybe schizophrenia?
Robin Williams lived a pretty pleasant life, but he died of depression. If Robin Freaking Williams couldn't beat it, what chance do the rest of us have for successful self-treatment?
It -can- be messed up brain chemistry despite what all the "only therapy helps" folks who are out to make a buck and prevent people from at least trying it.
>This year's economic shutdowns have done little to reduce the world's carbon emissions.
This is misleading. 2020 saw a 7 percent drop from fossil emission levels in 2019 [1]. That is a huge number YoY which only exposed mass consumerism as the true culprit for the increase in CO2 emissions. Not to mention that China and India are the number one polluters and as usual the UN and other supranational organization will look the other way. Goes to show how our central planners are simultaneously waving the contradictory specters of global warming and deflationary economics.
From previous discussions I've seen on pollution, but possibly not CO2 specifically, the global shipping industry is one of the bigger contributors. While we may have driven and flown less in the past year I'm pretty sure we didn't buy significantly less so there are still lots of ships out there.
Concrete production also takes a lot of energy. Based on the current costs of other building materials in North America I doubt we've slowed that down either.
Even if everyone in the top global 1% was driving electric cars right now we'd still be contributing a lot to CO2 emissions in other ways.
>the global shipping industry is one of the bigger contributors
Well, what are they shipping? Goods that supply the consumerist chain at every level. We definitely did buy significantly less given that money velocity has plummeted in 2020, and I would argue this was reflected in the global shipping industry slowdown.
>Based on the current costs of other building materials in North America I doubt we've slowed that down either.
Current costs reflect the reopening boom, not last year's slowdown which witnessed a commodity drawdown!
Maybe we should require that retail get 80% or more of their products from shipping locations that are in North America or the country of origin.
Globalization as always seems to cause a lot of major pains for the world. Global Warming, lower wages in the USA, legal sweat shops in other countries, etc...
> China and India are the number one polluters and as usual the UN and other supranational organization will look the other way
US: 16t per capita
China: 8t per capita
India: 2t per capita
I think it is pretty clear who is fucking things up right now. Yes, there are a lot of Indians, but that only means that the US (and their rich peers) have to move even further to stop being the bad guy.
I wrote pollution, e.g. what goes straight into the ocean [1,2] which is a good proxy for pollution at large, not carbon dioxide emission alone. I mentioned that in passing to illustrate the hypocrisy of the UN and other environmentally conscious organizations. CO2 is just one component, and if those organizations can't even get the rest right there is no reason to expect them to be consistent on that issue either. I hope this makes sense.
Per capita is meaningless, the Vatican could pollute more but only has 500 people. I do not trust calculations of hard to measure items like the CO2 footprint of an entire country (which could easily be an order of magnitude worse or better). In any case the effects are so far removed from the cause that many politicians and business leaders will simply ignore making any rational changes, since demanding change will affect them sooner (no votes or less money) rather than later (their grandchildren suffer, maybe the human race vanishes). Rational discussions are unlikely without immediate reaction (even then as in India with Covid an in your face nightmare can't motivate some people).
He's referring to political censorship actually, which in a world where avenues of public discourse are almost entirely controlled by private entities is obviously going to manifest itself in the private sector.
You cannot blame CBs. I despise the current monetary policy as much as the next person but this is a function of society. We have stopped believing in “no pain no gain”. We think that everyone should be gifted a painless utopian existence in which nothing bad ever happens.
I'm not sure you fully understand the experience of the typical young adult in this country right now. I'd say the phrase 'all pain no gain' is closer to reality. Compared with even the last generation (who had it pretty bad compared to the generation before them) the opportunity to have a reasonable standard of living is greatly reduced.
No it doesn't. It is not within the purview of this supranational bureaucracy to be the gatekeeper of the English language. Bulgarians can stick with Bulgarian. There is a lot to do in that country to make it prosper on its own.
