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Oh, 2022

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Re: Oh, 2022

#501

Post by throwaway2331 »

rektide wrote: post #314
ninkendo wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does anyone owe you their eyes and ears? If somebody doesn’t want to read what you have to say, it’s fine that they block you. It’s fine. Stop worrying about it, it’s not “cancel culture”, it’s just human beings being overwhelmed by the number of people that piss them off.

It's pathetic beyond words that there's no other moderation systems available. To take remorseless, infinite action against someone who may be having a bad day, or who may feel strongly against something: it's a drastic drastic overreaction. But we have literally no choice; on most sites blocking/muting are the only options available to us to de-espouse incoming comments. This is a technical fault, heartlessness is b…

Buddy, you're missing the forest for the trees.

This is not technology thoughtlessly trampling over human dignity; this is human nature expressing itself within a certain environment.

This is me realizing I cannot suckle off the financial teet of my parents and the state; and I actually must go out, make money, and keep my "work life" balance in-check -- because I'm a bag of meat with a reward-behavior system that needs certain things to remain functioning.

Online discussion is where I get my "fix." It's one source of stimulation that keeps me functioning at my best, and prevents me from degrading into a certain state of being that my biology considers "not good" -- one where I cannot meet the goals my entire mind and body have decided are "to be done."

I'm not some nobleman's son living in utter luxury and leisure. I do not have the resources available to live in an "ideal" world where I can spend my time worrying about the ultimate repercussions of blocking someone. I live in the "real" world, where I have to manage the repercussions of my own actions against my goals, and take into account how seriously engaging some nitwit on an online shit-flinging message board is going to affect my goals, and therefore my feelings and behaviors.

One could make an argument here that material inequality (and its great disparity between the two ends) has lead us to such a state of affairs; and that man's greatest faults are caused by his greatest sufferings: a system that breaks him down, and grinds away at this soul, preventing him from living a life predicated on ideals, and some greater cultural values.

But to disparage the tools which man made to try and adapt to the circumstances of his environment is silly.

I could choose to become a hermit, and live a life of anarchist pacifism, in order to live an exemplified life of idealism; but I don't want to.

Re: Oh, 2022

#502

Post by tm-guimaraes »

occz wrote: post #485
tm-guimaraes wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ICE cars are still needed because battery tech is not good enough. There are plenty of studies showing that an hybrid car is much better for the environment on the long term than the current state of lithium battery electric cars. Long range EV are a pest. Lithium mining is way worse for the environment than people believe, and there is the whole other issues related to mining in general. We still need ice cars

Cars are a bad option for long-range transportation anyway. I'm not convinced at all by this argument.

That is true, but it's also true for EVs.

Changing every car to EVs is missing the point. We need much better transport for both inter-city transportation, and for intra-continental goods transportation.

EVs are just going to change the location of the pollution.

Re: Oh, 2022

#503

Post by erosenbe0 »

mekkkkkk wrote: post #471
erosenbe0 wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe because Silicon Valley is the ultimate location for maximizing race and class exclusion. It is a de-facto exclusionary zone with minimal accessibility for Black workers and Black families, often by designs, covenants, zoning, and hostility going back 100 years. In order for those entities to opportunity hoard for their own children they need a class exclusive, car-dependent community with low access for 'others…

How did you manage to get a race angle into this? And which "designs" and "covenants" are you talking about?

We are piling on tech companies that purport to care about climate and diversity and other such things while locating their HQ in Silicon Valley, which is obviously not the optimal strategy if those are really priorities. I refer to the [once legal] housing deeds that literally excluded sales to Blacks, developers who did not sell to Blacks as a way of marketing to whites, extreme zoning designed to limit working class residents, allowed discrimination against Blacks at Stanford, overt racism against Blacks by noted founder of Silicon Valley, and so on.

Re: Oh, 2022

#504

Post by erosenbe0 »

krageon wrote: post #477
erosenbe0 wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The total cost of ownership for an EV is still pathetic in a certain sense if I need to allot even 10 extra minutes waiting for a charge somewhere on a weekly basis. Especially a small business owner like Joe Plumber -- that's around 10k in lost job time over the life of the vehicle. If I'm well-off with thousands of watts wired to my garage then great but that's not so many people especially in denser cities as well…

> business fleets In every case that I am aware of, a business takes care of this (i.e. I've seen it done). It's not exactly complicated - it's just a bit of work.

In most cases that I am aware of, small businesses have zero ability to deal with this. For example, the local HVAC company has 12 or so vans that are just parked in some lot with a small office. There is no garage and no infrastructure for charging. Same with my landscape person and snow removal person and so forth. They just park their vehicles in some warehouse lot.

Re: Oh, 2022

#505

Post by erosenbe0 »

occz wrote: post #486
erosenbe0 wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recharge time needs to be under 10 minutes or you have a pipe dream. 5-7 minutes would be better. Too many renters, condo owners, and small businesses with fleets don't have time to deal charging.

Given that the average car spends 95% of its lifetime being parked, I don't think this is as big of an issue as you make it out to be.

Working class mothers with small children who live in apartments don't have time to jockey for a time or position to charge. It's a regression for them compared to gas. We're going to need a lot more infrastructure. A lot.

Re: Oh, 2022

#506

Post by marcosdumay »

ponyfleisch wrote: post #405
tick_tock_tick wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> COVID tells me that’s highly unlikely. We literally have a movement rejecting known-to-save-lives technology for non-scientific reasons. COVID is different because you need a massive majority, 80%+, to follow certain guidelines (vaccine, masks, etc). For carbon it just needs to happen, anyone can do it. If the tech gets cheap enough Bill Gates will just setup shop in the desert and start sucking.

I think your perception of the ease of/effort required for atmospheric carbon capture is off by a few orders of magnitude.

I don't get what you want to say.

Decarbonizing is happening, at least to electricity generation and transportation. There is a group insisting on denying this, but it's just your usual form of denialism.

There is reasonable freedom to debate the last 10% of emissions. Those are not being replaced right in front of our eyes. There is also room to claim that decarbonization is not enough. But then you'll have to claim that stopping things as they are is either catastrophic or won't stop the consequences from changing. That's not unthinkable, but not a reasonable default assumption either.

I imagine you are talking about that last one assumption. If so, starting from it is kind of an extreme position. Anyway, it's not clear what kind of cost you are classifying as insurmountable and why governments that are used to spend real amounts of money on all kinds of projects just can't spend on those.

Re: Oh, 2022

#507

Post by slg »

supperburg wrote: post #481
saalweachter wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So at the end of the day we're both just referencing different authorities here. Why do you trust this guy's assertion on how many excess deaths there have been over the last two years, and their cause, more than the CDC's numbers?

Excess deaths != Covid deaths. I listened to the podcast again and he said he conducted serology studies pre-vaccine that indicate an overall lethality of 0.2% but 0.05% for everyone who isn’t 70 years old or whatever. That’s detection of antibodies with 0.05% false positive rate and then a follow up on death early on in the pandemic. So one might point out that I changed my number from 0.02 to 0.2 and this is true.…

>So one might point out that I changed my number from 0.02 to 0.2 and this is true. But what’s also true is that there’s a huge difference between 4% and 0.2%. And I was right to point out that 1-4% is bullshit.

Let's for a moment assume your source is correct. If you were "right" to call out someone's "bullshit" because they were an order of magnitude high in their numbers, do you recognize that we were right to call out your bullshit for being an order of magnitude low with your number?

Re: Oh, 2022

#508

Post by rcxdude »

throwawaylinux wrote: post #202

> But this is all predictable. (Except for COVID19 which was wide-screen WTFery, like the second world war—September 1st 1939 was not in fact predictable from September 1st 1929, for example: all that was predictable was that another European war would sooner or later see France and Germany at loggerheads.) I can't understand what this is saying. Not sure what 'wide-screen WTFery' is, but lots of people were predicti…

You could predict a pandemic at some point (and given the parameters of a pandemic say it would have to look something very much like COVID), it's very difficult to predict any given pandemic. In the same way that you could predict that there would be another war in europe, and roughly who would be on each side, but not the exact circumstances by which it would break out. And it's usually easy to find someone predicting any given event after it happens, because there's a lot of people saying lots of different things about the future (see market crashes for another great example).

Re: Oh, 2022

#509

Post by lproven »

j0057 wrote: post #61

> low-lying coastal nations like Bangladesh And lots of other places. About 1 billion people live along coastlines at 20 meters or less above sea level, and 200 million at 5 meters or less. I live in a wealthy country but well within the 5 meters range and am already having to think about whether it wouldn't be more prudent to sell my house today, now that it's still worth something, and emigrate to somewhere with a…

Import fact to remember: it's not about melting.

Ice is less dense than water... but only just. If an ice sheet collapses into the sea, it doesn't need to melt. The ice will displace seawater perfectly effectively just by floating. Most of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet sits on rock that is well under sea level – in places, a kilometre under sea level. It doesn't need to melt: it just needs for the seawater to get underneath it, allowing it to slide off into the sea and break up. Seawater is, obviously, salty and warmer than ice.

The resultant sea-level rise will only take on the order of 12 days to stabilise world wide.

I looked at the figures for this and it was a factor in my decision to sell my house on the outskirts of London and move to Czechia, which is above the level of any possible sea-level rise. Its lowest points are ~120m above mean sea level.

I couldn't afford Austria or Switzerland, and most of the other high-and-dry countries don't have the employment prospects (or beer as good) as the Czech Republic.

Re: Oh, 2022

#510

Post by oblio »

barry-cotter wrote: post #403
oblio wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You didn't address my direct point (speed of propagation) plus guess what, those wiped out several civilizations in the New World, directly contradicting your entire subthread.

We're vastly richer than the Inca or Aztecs, the most technologically advanced New World civilizations and we know about quarantine and infectious disease, which they didn't. The Inca almost survived getting multiple diseases ten or more times deadlier than COVID at the same time, while being assaulted by people with vastly superior weaponry. It's possible for diseases bad enough to end human civilization to emerge b…

Yes, we agree. That's why in my other comment I mentioned SARS-1.

COVID can be considered a warning shot. If we don't get our house in order, something like SARS-1 or worse will set us back a century (depending a bit on location, but still).

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