Monthly Archives: June 2017

The Mental Load

Emma: You should’ve asked.

“When a man expects his partner to ask him to do things, he’s viewing her as the manager of household chores. So it’s up to her to know what needs to be done and when.

The problem with that is that planning and organizing things is already a full-time job.

At work, once I started managing projects, I quickly stopped participating in them. I didn’t have the time.

So when we ask women to take on this task of organization, and at the same time to execute a large portion, in the end it represents 75% of the work.

Feminists call this work the mental load.”

Link via MetaFilter.

Trump: “I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris”

Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO): . (YouTube, 20:57min) “Donald Trump plans to withdraw the United States from the Paris agreement on climate change. That’s bad news for anyone who happens to live on this planet.”

President Trump: “The Green Fund would likely obligate the United States to commit potentially tens of billions of dollars, of which the United States have already handed over $1 billion. Nobody else is even close.”

John Oliver: “It would have been equally as accurate for him to say “Compliance with the Paris agreement would likely require all ducks to wear jean shorts and that it would potentially cost each and every American citizen five fish and a dump truck full of hamsters.”

Is he stupid or simply a liar?

NPR: Trump’s Speech On Paris Climate Agreement Withdrawal, Annotated.

Trump: “For example, under the agreement, China will be able to increase the emissions by a staggering number of years – 13. They can do whatever they want for 13 years. Not us. India makes its participation contingent on receiving billions and billions and billions of dollars in foreign aid from developed countries. There are many other examples but the bottom line is that the Paris Accord is very unfair at the highest level to the United States.”

Comment:”Under the Paris Agreement, China has pledged to halt the growth in its carbon emissions by 2030, 13 years from now. But China is on track to beat that target date by many years, according to the Climate Action Tracker. India is also ahead of schedule in meeting its Paris commitments.”

Trump: “We have among the most abundant energy reserves in the planet, sufficient to lift millions of America’s poorest workers out of poverty. Yet under this agreement, we are effectively putting these reserves under lock and key, taking away the great wealth of our nation. It’s great wealth. It’s phenomenal wealth. Not so long ago, we had no idea we had such wealth. And leaving millions and millions of families trapped in poverty and joblessness. The agreement is a massive redistribution of United States’ wealth to other countries.”

Comment: “During the campaign, President Trump regularly blasted the Obama administration for holding back domestic oil and gas production with excessive regulations. The fact is the United States extracts more oil and gas than any other nation in the world. That’s been the case every year since 2012, and is largely due to a domestic oil and gas boom powered by hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. Solar and wind energy has surged as well, due to government incentives, as well as increasingly cheap production costs.”

Thanks, Trump, for ruining the planet for all of us.

“[Trump’s] speech was packed with make-believe numbers from controversial or disproven studies. It was hypocritical and dishonest.”

Der Spiegel: Paris Disagreement Donald Trump’s Triumph of Stupidity. “German Chancellor Angela Merkel and other G-7 leaders did all they could to convince Trump to remain part of the Paris Agreement. But he didn’t listen. Instead, he evoked deep-seated nationalism and plunged the West into a conflict deeper than any since World War II.” By SPIEGEL Staff.

“Renewable energies, said the chancellor [Angela Merkel], present significant economic opportunities. “If the world’s largest economic power were to pull out, the field would be left to the Chinese,” she warned. Xi Jinping is clever, she added, and would take advantage of the vacuum it created. Even the Saudis were preparing for the post-oil era, she continued, and saving energy is also a worthwhile goal for the economy for many other reasons, not just because of climate change.

But Donald Trump remained unconvinced. No matter how trenchant the argument presented by the increasingly frustrated group of world leaders, none of them had an effect. “For me,” the U.S. president said, “it’s easier to stay in than step out.” But environmental constraints were costing the American economy jobs, he said. And that was the only thing that mattered. Jobs, jobs, jobs.

At that point, it was clear to the rest of those seated around the table that they had lost him. Resigned, Macron admitted defeat. “Now China leads,” he said.”