NOx is also the biggest product of animal agriculture. It also has an effect on climate change. Global warming potential is around 300 times larger than CO2. [1]
It might also be hamstrings. For example, while sitting on the chair try lifting one of your legs so you make L shape with your torso (without flexing your lower back).
I can't do that, my leg can't stretch fully. This prevents me from squatting properly.
I've been slowly stretching the hamstrings but I'm still not there. I remember having the same issues when I was a teenager.
It is very unlikely that hamstring is preventing you from squatting properly. Hamstring is nowhere near the end of it's range of motion in squat because it crosses both knee and hip joint and knee is bent during the squat - therefore hamstring is not considerably stretched.
Ankle flexibility is more frequent cause of not being able to squat properly. Hips also, but not because of hamstring.
I couldn't do that at first either, but I learned to do it. The key is stretching exercises and practicing wall facing squats. You can progress in a few ways, like sitting on a low couch and then trying to get up without supporting yourself with your hands. Hint: place knees wide and move your head forward (but not pas your knees).
Of course you wouldn't be able to do it on the first try, that's a fairly "advanced" position for someone not used to that sort of movement. It's like everything else in fitness, you have to (very) slowly work your way up to it.
As a comparison I've been doing karate for 15 months, I'm over 40. I can now kneel down for long enough to do a seza (kneeling bow) but still can't sit back on my feet; it's still painful for me however, not as much as it was.
Mind you, even as a child I was unable to sit cross-legged (without holding my ankles and arching my back) and found floor sitting immensely awkward and uncomfortable.
My impression is that amongst the different "races" we have different ranges of body shapes; I am relatively convinced that this makes some actions and positions more difficult. Maybe squatting is such a movement.
The key to seiza is increasing the range of motion in your ankles. Definitely different people start at different places in terms of that range of motion, but unless you have an injury, you can eventually get there. A couple of quick tips: warm up before you do it -- even going for a quick walk will help. Don't force it. Try to stretch the ankles out a bit, but if it starts to get painful, stop. If you do it too much, you'll get inflammation in the joint, which will just make things take longer. Try to do seiza for short periods during the day. Ideally do it once an hour, but because you might feel self conscious doing it at work, etc, just try to do it whenever. Definitely every day. You can easily go from not being able to do it, to being able to sit seiza through a whole raft of boring speeches from the CEO at a Japanese staff party in only a few months :-)
Interestingly, the squat is a very similar problem, but in the opposite direction -- your ankles need to bend the other way. Lack of range of motion makes it so that you can't position your weight forward enough to stay on your feet. There is also the compounded problem of needing the flexibility in your hips.
Finally, sitting cross legged is also related to ankle range of motion -- but in a kind of diagonal way. To sit comfortably cross legged you have to be able to put the tops of your feet flat on the floor. Of course, this requires flexibility in your glutes as well, but if you don't have the range of motion in your ankles, your feet/knees are always going to hurt. A full lotus position is actually easier on your joints, but requires a lot more flexibility.
Anyway, like I said, there is definitely a range of starting places for flexibility for each person, but no matter where you start you can get there (barring injury, or other kind of unusual mechanical problem). Strangely, I find seiza to be the easiest of the three positions even though I initially found it to be the hardest (after you fix the range of motion problem in the ankles, there isn't really any flexibility you need).
I didn't know what I was doing was called seiza, but I've been getting better at it thanks to jiujitsu. My knees are the biggest obstacle due to untreated osgood-schlatter during my teens, but I'm working on it. Hopefully I'll be able to seiza and squat comfortably by the end of the year.
Interesting tips, thanks. I do have ankle stiffness, but can 'point' well (was a swimmer as a youth). We warm up fully before seza at our dojo too. Will have a look at it. Oss.
In similar ways, majority of people that believe in climate change do nothing (or barely anything) to fight it. No one is reducing their heating/cooling, no one is changing their diet, no one is measuring their heating patterns and trying to optimize it (by no one I mean barely anyone).
People still want their 24/7 AC, their steaks, their huge cars, their big heat inefficient houses, their plane flights etc.
No one does a thing.
Believing in climate change, or not believing, when reflected in the actions of people, is in my eyes completely equivalent.
That's not true. Many people in "developed" countries reduce their energy use, and their use of energy-intensive products, in order to help reduce climate forcing. And they've done so for decades.
However, it is true that too few people in "developed" countries do that. And it's also true that too many people in "less-developed" countries lust after energy-intensive lifestyles. So overall, its unlikely that overall climate forcing will decrease. Unless solar energy and battery usage take off exponentially enough.
Even worse, there's already enough CO2 in the atmosphere to drive substantial climate change. And the poles are warming fast enough to drive substantial CO2 and CH4 outgassing from melting permafrost.
So maybe it's just too late. And so maybe the rational option for those alive now is to party hearty. Russia and China probably like that path.
Or live wisely so you have the financial means and health to move you and your family elsewhere when need arrives, probably in our lifetimes for 80% of the world.
Right. That's arguably the prudent take on "party hearty". There's always the tension between "do fun stuff now when you can enjoy it most" and "save for later when you'll have more free time and less likely income".
Ah understood. You were looking at the national level with countries like China and Russia "party[ing] hearty" by not significantly curbing C02 emissions. Those individuals who benefit directly from oil and coal (as they do in the US) will extract gains and use it to pad offshore bank accounts. Meanwhile the rest of us should take a prudent life and be prepared for shocks ahead (like land and cost of living soaring in climate-friendly cities). On a more personal level, ideally savers find ways to extract more late-life enjoyment out of their deferred-enjoyment lifestyles.
The US is still partying hard. At least, relative to much of Western Europe. Much of Eastern Europe still has too much inefficient Soviet-era infrastructure. And yes, China has had slack in most climate agreements.
A good comparison would be FOSS. Richard Stallman inconveniences himself to the point of absurdity, but I'm pretty sure barely anyone does anything close to it.
I changed my diet, I live in good housing, but when I put the numbers on paper, I'm not doing much at all, and could do much more.
> Richard Stallman inconveniences himself to the point of absurdity
I'm not sure that's an apt comparison. rms simply has a workflow that doesn't require the use of proprietary software. It's not that inconvenient for him.
In on-topic comparison, it would be having a lifestyle where you'd simply have no use for a car: you live close to work, enjoy riding a bicycle, etc.
Of course, finding that workflow or lifestyle might limit some options, but once you accept that, it's not all that inconvenient.
So do vegans have a workflow that makes their diet convenient. The thing is, one has to start somewhere, and no one starts anywhere because they see the change as inconvenient.
"Eat your vegetables" is never the answer. In climate change, because of the coordination problems, "Eat your vegetables" is so emphatically not the answer that it shouldn't even be discussed as anything except a desperate, ineffective stopgap.
People will keep eating candy. They will never eat their vegetables, unless they taste like candy. It's pointless to imagine worlds in which they eat their vegetables and everything is great because, although it's possible to write a plan to get from here to there, those worlds are strictly fantasy. The plan can not be followed. I could also write a plan for the sun to rise in the west—and it would also fail, for largely the same reason.
If you want to solve the problem, make a better, cheaper vegetable that tastes like candy.
Sorry, I don't follow. Are you extending the metaphor or answering literally? Candy is the fossil fuel-intensive lifestyle and eating vegetables is choosing to cut back.
I thought candy was delicious CO2 intensive food. Not a complete lifestyle.
Although, food is just one part of the equation. I've never said diet is the only change necessary to make. A person in the first world would do more by not using AC and heating than switching to a different diet, so one might optimize there. Although, not many want to optimize there, so it's easier to change the diet if they wish to lower their footprint.
"Eat your vegetables" at least works for some people, myself for one. It's not like climate change where being good helps only if everyone is. Anyone who internalizes the reasons vegetables > candy will want to eat vegetables and be personally better off.
It's even worse than that: the small percentage of people who have changed their consumption patterns out of concern for the environment are probably having zero or negative impact.
For instance, the following products are worse for the environment than their alternatives:
There are also simple things that one can do, that have an impact. For example, one could go on holiday to a local destination rather than flying half the world. Or you could cycle to work rather than traveling by car every day.
(Sure, in the grand scheme of things, these will make small differences, but we have to cut our use of fossil fuel everywhere.)
Or you could try to affect the things that do matter in the grand scheme of things: E.g , demand more regulation for CO2-heavy industries, find ways to support CO2-neutral energy production, demand anti-deforestation clauses in trade agreements, etc.
Extrapolating that out environmentally concerned people should have as many children as possible and outbreed those not concerned about greenhouse emissions?
Such a statement seems to assume that the mind is an immutable object only created in childhood.
While it certainly causes cognitive dissonance for some, an SUV driving redneck carnivore with no children has created far less emissions than a public transport using vegan environmentalist with 2 kids.
Mostly I’m just saying that, given that most aspects of personality are 30-80% heritable, I think people should really think twice before contributing to a future with less long-term thinkers in it.
I think this advice can be simplified greatly: reduce your expenditures. If you're spending less money, then you are consuming a smaller share of the world's bounty.
Reducing energy use doesn’t necessarily mean reducing expenditures. I mean, reducing expenditures can be good if you’re saving for something else, but you don’t have to.
Instead of buying and fueling the car, you can buy the luxury bicycle.
Instead of flying to Venice, you can rent a sailing yacht. Or whatever is local to your area.
It’s like dieting. The impulse is to reduce, naturally because you’re cutting things out, but eventually you figure out that you can fill your life with other experiences.
Factory farming is very resource intensive, but it is less resource intensive per unit of food produced. Just look at the prices at your local grocery store!
It's not insignificant. Bitcoin mining already consumes as much energy annually as Denmark – that means the entire country, heating, cooling, industry, everything:
Exactly. What more, it "only" consumes as much energy annually as a whole country because the bulk of the mining is currently done using specialized hardware.
If websites begin to crowdsource mining on their visitors' PCs using JavaScript, the energy consumption will be even higher.
In the grand scheme of things (context being the carbon footprint of humanity) it is insignificant, just like Denmark's carbon footprint is.
Let's optimize the real stuff, not some trivialities (like the Christmas lights in the USA pointed out as a reply).
There's 24/7 AC in USA and China in the masses. There's Brazilian and Argentinian agriculture removing rainforests to grow food for the USA or EU that grows cattle. (EU takes unbelievable amounts of rainforest grain/legumes to feed its livestock, an absolute travesty and hipocrisy)
The footprint of these developments is insanely large, yet somehow coin mining is an issue.
We could then jump to optimize the Internet infrastructure too, despite being 1-2% of CO2 equivalent footprint.
Yes, I understand coin mining seems a bit useless but I'm pretty sure heating and cooling is wasted in magnitudes more amounts, being applied in badly designed buildings, or cooling the streets of Las Vegas.
The cost of building a nuclear reactor in the West is in the ballpark of $10 billion these days. It's not a trivial expense.
If we're going to soon need dozens of nuclear reactors to power cryptocurrencies, that's worth discussing at least. You can't brush it away as something insignificant in the grand scheme of things.
No one is going to build nuclear reactors in the West for cryptocurrency mining. Just like no one is building nuclear reactors for powering christmas lights or Amazon servers, or Internet servers.
Last months bitcoin trade volume was $273 billion.
Let's say a reactor works for 10 years.
That would give $32,760 billion in trade, and reactor cost would be 0.833% of that.
Not a big fee if you ask me.
Of course, if cryptocurrencies would scale so they become significant between other trades, we can't just built thousands of nuclear reactors. This is where proof of stake will come into play.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming_potential#Value...