It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.

graph one: total CO2 emissions, NOT per capita, by region. By 2020, China, the US, the EU, India, and Russia are the largest players, with the entire rest of the world barely surpassing China's emissions.

Graph two: The same regions but weighted per capita.

If you look at the median individual across the OECD, take out their taxes, and adjust for cost of living by using purchasing power parity to the US dollar, the US median individual has $46,000 of disposable income a year. Only Luxembourg surpasses that (within the OECD)! Germany is at around $33k, the UK at around $25k, Japan around $21k, Mexico around $6k, and the two most populous countries in the world come in with China at $4.5k and India at $2.5k!

(I do need to note that this is disposable income and doesn't account for the value of services provided with tax money, so countries with a stronger investment in public infrastructure look worse here relative to the US than their inhabitants experience.)

I need to emphasize that while purchasing power parity isn't a perfect measure, its goal is to allow comparison of how much someone can afford given both cost of living and currency conversion rates.

"Sabotage the War Machine"

"I had not touched a cat in 15 years when an orange kitten wandered over to sit with me in the grass one day. I was left without adequate words to describe that experience. It reminded me that I am alive. It instilled in me a raw, unbridled happiness that I had never felt before, not even as a child. 

I have spent many hours with those cats, and still I am amazed at how perfectly they reject everything it means to be in prison. They are playful and unselfconscious, curious and silly, soft and cuddly.

Sometimes it is even more interesting to watch my fellow prisoners interact with our cats. All those hard cases doing hard time melt like butter on a summer sidewalk when they visit the felines, feed them, watch them chase the birds and bees, and when they make toys to entice the cats to play with them. 

I don’t think about the past when a cat hops in my lap. I don’t think of what I should or could have done. I don’t think about courts or life sentences or parole boards. What comes to mind is peace, and a sense that everything is going to be OK. What’s in the past needs to stay there if I want to have a future, if I want to be grateful for today and for the fact that I am no longer the person I once was.

I never really realised how much difference it makes until I went to England and realised that here the change of seasons is an obvious, visible, physical change in the world. Like, everything REALLY IS orange and foggy in autumn! In spring there are flowers EVERYWHERE, so much more than any other season, and the trees really do have all blossom and no leaves. Even if it doesn't snow, in winter there's frost all the time and the trees are bare and the sky is visibly greyer all the time. You don't need to be told "this date is the first day of spring", you can SEE IT (although this is getting way messier and less precise due to climate change).

By contrast, most places in Australia the seasons we're taught feel like arbitrary categories - and is it any surprise considering they're colonial constructs? Orange-leaved autumn and blossom-covered spring is a cartoon stereotype with no relevance on a continent where ALL NATIVE TREES ARE EVERGREEN!! Snowy winters are a joke in the desert, and even sunny summers don't ring particularly true considering that much of the country is in the tropics, where summer means monsoons - not that I've ever seen the concept that WE HAVE A MONSOON SEASON taught at an Australian school.

the 4 season model as you and i know it is a european invention, though 4 season models aren't unique to europe! most notably china has the same type of season subdivision.

oh wow the glass-tower office buildings we constructed when we thought air conditioning and central heating would never have downsides...have downsides?

and we're still building them?

while the Victorian house museum where I work, with thick walls and small windows and big wooden shutters stays ~10 degrees above (winter) or below (summer) the outside temperature for days on end with no help at all?

uh. okay then

Link to the article