# politics

## The greenhouse effect, calculated again

New version: draketo.de/wissen/greenhouse-effect-calculated

PDF (drucken)

Org (ändern)

I did not want to talk about the greenhouse effect without having checked the math and physics. Therefore I calculated it myself.

## If one dozen people will stop eating beef, how much will this help to slow down global warming?

If one dozen people will stop eating beef, this will reduce the yearly global CO₂ emissions by around 48 tons CO₂-equivalent1 (about one quarter of their total emissions, and half their emissions from food).

1. For beef part of this CO₂-equivalent is due to methane which has a lifespan of only around 10 years, so the actual improvement isn’t as long-lasting as actually planting a forest: You won’t see much of

## Equality and Prosperity go hand in hand

A reply to the common argument for inequality:

Much better to focus on growing the economy than on increasing equality.

This is the old trickle down theory. Homeless people in the US could tell you that growing the economy without increasing equality does not help the poor. The reality is:

Increasing equality increases longterm growth of the economy.

The trickle-down theory goes against research results. Even the IMF has accepted that equality and prosperity aren’t opposites but rather go hand in hand: The higher the equality, the more sustained growth a country experiences (PDF).

## power and blindness: the tragedy behind systemd

→ comment to The Tragedy of systemd where Benno Rice said that he’s impressed by the way how systemd was spread into most GNU/Linux distributions and that systemd was a source of ideas for BSD.

Looking at the methods used to force distributions to adopt systemd, i.e. by adding hard dependencies in the biggest desktop environment or by bundling udev and continuously tightening the dependency from udev on systemd, that’s a form of power-play against the distributions. A dependency I really don’t want.

## Reproducible build of Freenet do-it-yourself: verify-build demystified

You might know the reproducible-builds project, which tries to allow users to verify that what they install actually corresponds to the released source. Or GNU Guix, which provides transparent reproducible binaries — along with a challenge-function.

Given that Freenet is made for people with high expectations for integrity, it might not surprise you that Freenet has been providing a reproducible build and a verification script since 2012. However until release 1481, it was a hassle to set up, and few people used it.

But now that we’re on gradle, verifying that what I release is actually what’s tagged in the source is much easier than before.

The following instructions are for GNU/Linux, and maybe other *nixes, allowing you to verify the test release of 1482. You can easily adapt them for future releases.

## The Freenet Web of Trust keeps communication friendly with actual anonymity

In the past decade there hasn’t been a year without a politician calling for real names on the internet. Some even want to force people to use real photos as profile pictures. All in the name of stopping online hate, though enforcing real names has long been shown to actually make the problem worse.

This article presents another solution, one that has actually proven that it keeps communication friendly, even in the most anonymous environment of the fully decentralized Freenet project.

And that solution does work without enabling censorship and harassment (as requiring real names would).

The European Copyright directive threatens online communication in Europe. On September 12th the European parliament takes the crucial vote which can still fix it. But the parliamentarians (MEPs) need to hear our voices.

## Relicensing a project from GPLv2 or later to AGPLv3 or later

Switching from GPLv2 or later to AGPL is perfectly legal. But if it is not your own project, it is often considered rude.

This does not relicense the original code, it just sets the license of new code and of the project as a whole.

## Please accept the signatures from the petition against Article 13

Dear Antonio Tajani,

Please accept the signatures from the petition against article 13.1

In 2014 I contributed to the Public Consultation on the review of the EU copyright rules.2

I publish music online, I write online, I publish Free Software, and I share links to news.

Last month I wrote to my representatives in JURI and asked them to preserve internet freedom. 15 of them nontheless voted to destroy online freedom. I cannot understand how they could vote for a system which will enforce the widespread establishment of technologies which can form the foundation for censorship which lets chinese censorship appear like a paradise of free speech.

Therefore I now beg you to accept the signatures from the petition against article 13.

The best of wishes,

Dr. Arne Babenhauserheide

1. The petition against Article 13, currently with over 654,000 signatures: https://www.change.org/p/european-parliament-stop-the-censorship-machinery-save-the-internet

## You cannot afford 1% predators

The discussion about sexual assault at conferences has been going on for a few years now. Moral reasoning has been discussed a lot, and I will not repeat that.1

Here I will give a dispassionate, cold and calculating reason why your community cannot afford to tolerate 1% predators:

If in a community of 50 men and 50 women, one person is a predator who attacks one woman every year and causes her to leave, and every year either a man or a woman joins, the community will be male-only after 100 years.

Even 1% predators is far too much.

1. Just read the following twitter thread if you need a refresher on the moral issues: So I was at an academic conference this weekend and had to physically intervene to prevent a sexual assault by a male colleague on a female colleague who was drunk to the point that she was clearly not in control of herself, and unable to exercise judgment or consent.Brad Simpson (@bradleyrsimpson) (June 22, 2018)

## New Horizons for Science

Farewell to friends -- and a love.

New recording 2019 at Intermezzo with Rika Körte and Steven Macdonald as recording engineers: mp3 audio

Goodbye my love, I leave tonight,
I know you’re in new hands,
Though I would rather follow you,
That’s not the way that this is planned,
Our destiny will now be watched
by different eyes than mine,
I wish you just the best,
be sure we’ll meet again in time.

## The princess is the ultimate representation of social and hierarchical power

Knight, do my bidding.

A girl told my son “I’m a princess, you’re a knight, fetch me a glass of water!”. It was then that I realized that a princess typically isn’t someone to save. I was so proud of my son when he said “no”, because I suddenly realized how hard it is to escape the shackles of that special story.

A princess is the one person in the country, who reigns surpreme in both hierarchy and social standing. People in stories might hate the king, but the princess is beloved by most. Remember princess Diana.

## the zen of tolerance

• You are entitled to voice your opinion.
• You are not entitled to force it upon everyone.
• You are not entitled to force it upon a subgroup repeatedly.
• You are also not entitled to hurl hate towards participants, since that would disrupt communication.
• If you cannot stay respectful and friendly after being asked to, I will unsee you and advise others to do the same with a clear and brief explanation, so they can take an informed decision.

I will use technical means to realize the zen of tolerance.

Tolerance for intolerance is self-defeating. Continuous disruption of communication is censorship.

## Towards a deterministic upper bound for the network load of the fully decentralized Freenet spam filter

Goal: Re-design the decentralized spam filter in Freenet (WoT) to have deterministic network load, bounded to a low, constant number of subscriptions and fetches.

Originally written as a comment to bug 3816. The bug report said "someone SHOULD do the math". I then did the math. Here I’m sharing the results.

This proposal has two parts:

1. Ensuring an upper bound on the network cost, and
2. Limiting the cost due to checking stale IDs.

## Two visions of our future

by Mike Perry (http://nodicemike.com)

Update 2018-09-03: As by Aengenheyster et al. 2018, we’re now at “⚀ or ⚁” (1 or 2): »However, reaching the 1.5 K target appears unlikely as MM would be required to start in 2018 for a probability of 67%.« MM means getting a 2% increase of the share of renewables every year.

I don’t know what we rolled, but I sure hope it’s not a 1.1

For the robust science behind the green future, see Hansen et al. 2017:

Young people's burden: requirement of negative CO₂ emissions.

1. Not every place will become this uninhabitable. But almost every place will have huge adaptation cost. See Hansen et al. 2016. Let’s hope we rolled a 2-6; and let’s stop ruining our odds. We need to go green.

## Unwanted pregnancy hits at random

If you do not want to have a child right now, but you want to have a fulfilled heterosexual sex-life, pregnancy is a risk which can hit anyone, however careful he or she is to avoid it. This is an answer I gave someone who equated unintentional pregnancy with questionable morals.

According to "How effective are condoms against pregnancy?":

If you use condoms perfectly every single time you have sex, they’re 98% effective at preventing pregnancy. But people aren’t perfect, so in real life condoms are about 82% effective — that means about 18 out of 100 people who use condoms as their only birth control method will get pregnant each year.

Other means of birth control are around 70-91% effective, with the sole exception of the implant which has 99% effectiveness, so even if people are perfectly hygienic and careful, there will be many pregnancies: if you are perfectly hygienic and careful for 10 years, there will be around one pregnancy per couple (on average).

## propagating changes; comment on "Time To Rethink Retractions And Corrections?"

A comment on Amending Published Articles: Time To Rethink Retractions And Corrections? (doi: 10.1101/118356) which asks for making it easier and less of a matter of guilt to change published articles.

Update: Leonid Schneider from forbetterscience notes that there’s a whole dungeon of misconduct which might be facilitated by “living papers”. We need investigate problems in depth before changing established processes. Scientific communication is a complex process. Publication is an important part of it.

Firstoff: The underlying problem which makes it so hard to differenciate between honest errors and fraud is that publications are kind of a currency in science.

## You can train to become really, really good in almost anything you decide to do.

Should you do what you’re good at, or rather do what you love? Should you use your talents or follow your passion?

To answer this question, let’s look at actual research instead of gut feeling.1 Is a talent how good you are at doing something? Then it is a function of training time. Is it how fast you move forward? Then you likely already learned from other tasks many of the things you need for your task at hand.

1. The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance, K. Anders Ericsson, Ralf Th. Krampe, and Clemens Tesch-Romer, Psychological Review, 1993

## arctic unraveling

Report: Arctic Is Unraveling, discusses assessment Snow, Water, Ice and Permafrost, notes the article rising tide — sounds more like Hansen was right.

## Distributed censorship-resistant Wikipedia

Thanks to doublec, there are now distributed censorship-resistant Wikipedia mirrors in Freenet: Distributed Wikipedia Mirrors in Freenet

The current largest mirror is the Simple English Wikipedia (the obvious choice to fight censorship worldwide: it is readable with basic english skills).

With this mirror, information from Wikipedia can be accessed in high-censorship countries:

freenet:USK@m79AuzYDr-PLZ9kVaRhrgza45joVCrQmU9Er7ikdeRI,1mtRcpsTNBiIHOtPRLiJKDb1Al4sJn4ulKcZC5qHrFQ,AQACAAE/simple-wikipedia/0/

## AlphaGo uses more power than 3000 humans

Update 2017-11: Alpha Go Zero consumes just about 1-2 kW. I definitely underestimated the speed of development — by around factor 20. Alpha Go Zero only consumes as much energy as 10-20 humans.

Update 2017: OpenAI used a single machine to beat a Dota champion → DENDI 1v1 vs BOT AI - TI7 DOTA 2. I may be underestimating the speed of development.

AlphaGo recently defeated the world Go champion.

## Organize!

Organize! … That’s the thing that has a chance of preventing all of this, and of saving the most lives when that fails. — Yonatan Zunger

Thank you for this article, Yonatan Zunger. This is frightening, but in an important way. And organized well enough that the essential ideas stick. Important ideas.

With images of cute animals. Added with reason.

## Thanks for all the fish

AGU publications published "The world's biggest gamble", a short commentary on how to go on with climate change.

I am hard pressed not to become sarcastic. Not because the commentary is wrong. It’s spot on. But because we, as a species, are …

I’ll stop speaking my mind for now. Let’s hope that hope wins against frustration and our children don’t have to pay too dearly for the idiocy of my generation and the generation before.

Oh well, Happy Halloween and enjoy Samhain.

## If you do what you love doing, it becomes what you are good at

comment to You’re Not Meant To Do What You Love. You’re Meant To Do What You’re Good At. by Brianna Wiest, who arguments that the skills of people are "a blueprint of their destiny". For support she describes experience with people who try to do something they do not actually enjoy doing.

This whole argument sits on the assumption that skills develop somehow on their own.

Skills develop, because you use them. So if you do what you love doing (note the nuance!), then — except in rare cases — this becomes what you are good at.

## BitBucket got big on Mercurial — until they got bought by Atlassian

A comment on largefile support missing in BitBucket, despite being a much-requested feature since 2012.

Note that it’s not Atlassian which got big with Mercurial. It’s Bitbucket which got big with Mercurial, and it was later bought by Atlassian.

## I agree with just one of the 10 commandments of judaism and christianity

Many christians and many people who talk about “western christian values” like to say that the 10 commandments are universal: everyone can agree with them. So I checked that. I take them by their name: are they suitable as commandments? Not as a fuzzy general guideline, but as binding rules and a foundation for a shared culture?

(1.0) I am god who lead you from slavery in egypt → uhm, no?

(1.1) You shall not have other gods → uhm, why?

## power and deception

A religious leader is nothing more than a media-star who managed to convince people that the tale, in which he or she is special, is actually true.

Just like aristocrats managed to convince people that what their ancestors did gives them the right to control the lives of other people.

And like the rich convince people that money gives them the right to control a larger part of the world than others.

## “If you like what I do, why don’t you help me?”

Almost every free software developer made the experience that many people like his or her work, but very few actually provide help. If you experience this, don’t let it disheart you. Verbal support without practical help sounds inconsistent at first, but it actually is the result of limited time.

Most people who have the skills to help are already committed to other projects, so they cannot help you on yours. They can encourage you from the sidelines (“This is cool!

## My answers to the Public Consultation on the review of the EU copyright rules.

The following PDF and ODF contains my answers to the Public Consultation on the review of the EU copyright rules.

If you want to comment, please use the contact form.

## The translation of NSA is Stasi

Just to give you a short note, if you have been surprised by the NSA acting like the Stasi in former DDR (German Democratic Republic).

Here’s the translation of NSA:

• N: National = Staatlich
• S: Security = Sicherheit
• A: Agency = Ministerium

Let’s put that together:

NSA = Staatliches Sicherheitsministerium
(in more regular German: Ministerium für Staatssicherheit)

Well, that’s long. Shorten it to Staatssicherheit. Still to long for casual discussions. So shorten it once more: Stasi.

NSA = Stasi

Do you still wonder why the NSA acts like the Stasi?

Willkommen im Weltenwald!
((λ()'Dr.ArneBab))