owning your data is powerful
I put my whole life into a single database
231–239 of 239 posts
Re: I put my whole life into a single database
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
What you write doesn't make any sense. You say it's "silly to expect a comment to be neutral" but the comment is "as neutral as possible" and then answer if the commenter was neutral with "yes". Those aren't consistent. I don't know what definitions of neutral or value judgment you're using, but I hope you can use this as a learning opportunity. The original comment has the obvious implicit judgment that a greater CO…
> The original comment has the obvious implicit judgment that a greater CO2 footprint is a bad thing. No it did not contain any judgement. That is your reading and not the comment. > This is shared context. The world is a large place and different people share different context. > The purpose of the comment is clearly to shame the person for having such a high carbon footprint, otherwise there's no purpose in bringin…
> That is your reading and not the comment... different people share different context.
That makes as much sense as saying that the comment being written in English is just my "reading" of it, and that in a different context all the words could have entirely different meanings. That is technically true, but also completely useless when you're engaged in a real-life conversation with the rich context of the year 2026 on planet Earth... I tried to explain to you the shared context in case you were somehow ignorant of it. If you insist on denying that, then you're going to have a very hard time communicating with others, as you seem to be having with this conversation. Good luck.
Re: I put my whole life into a single database
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
Couple of things: 1) NO ONE is suggesting any one forego flying altogether, or skipping their once-a-year overseas vacation or periodic family visit. 2) THIS level of flying is not normal and is exactly the kind of harmful behavior people have in mind when they complain about frequent flyers. 3) Whinging about summits and Taylor Swift is just a bad faith red herring argument. Obviously less flying is better, no matte…
I don't know why someone going on a vacation would have moral high ground over someone that HAS TO travel for his work. If you are scientist you absolutely have to fly a lot to visit lots of conferences, disseminate your work, provide lectures etc.
Understand this is both an individual and systemic critique. We have the internet. Much of the travel you describe can and should be done remotely. The top 1% of flyers account for 50% of emissions. I would argue most of that probably is unnecessary technically, but there is both a push and pull factor from people expecting some things to take place face to face.
We're adults, we can keep many things in our minds at one time: We should all reduce flying. Regular working people should not be shamed for taking a holiday and flying there. The most frequent fliers for work should make a personal effort to reduce their flying. And companies, conferences, etc. should work much harder to facilitate remote participation and reduce stigma around it, as well as encouraging other modes of travel. Governments should improve alternative solutions such as rail and high-speed rail.
Re: I put my whole life into a single database
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
Couple of things: 1) NO ONE is suggesting any one forego flying altogether, or skipping their once-a-year overseas vacation or periodic family visit. 2) THIS level of flying is not normal and is exactly the kind of harmful behavior people have in mind when they complain about frequent flyers. 3) Whinging about summits and Taylor Swift is just a bad faith red herring argument. Obviously less flying is better, no matte…
28 flights per year. That's 14 round trip flights. A little over once a month. Not at all surprising if once a month. Or divorced and kid is in another state. If we're generous and assume each trip is actually 2 flights (i.e. connecting flights), then it's 7 per year. Yeah, more than typical. But not insane.
For this particular person, the inordinate factor is not the frequency of flights, but the distance: 40 flights in 2019, mostly from the US to Austria via Frankfurt. Now, there are some jobs that really do require such travel (though the business should probably consider hiring locally even though it might be more expensive?), but probably fairly few. The individual doesn't show flying stats after 2021, but presumably the work did get done even in the pandemic years when they couldn't fly as often.
Re: I put my whole life into a single database
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
But you didn’t spend hundreds of hours on it, so when it did happen to be useful it seemed like an outsized benefit. I would wager that for most people, most data about themselves will be useless and not worth collecting. Of course you can’t know what data will be useless or not, so unless the cost of collecting it is minimal or nil (wearing a smart watch, writing down your weight each day/week), it’s probably not wo…
Right, but you don't necessarily need to spend hundreds of hours to capture most of this; the data is already out there. If there were a tool that could collect it all in one place and give you insights with minimal effort that would be pretty neat.
Yes, I developed Health Hub https://biomarkeroptimizers.com/tools/health-hub/ to visualize and analyze my blood work, food, exercise, and sensor data from various sources, thinking it can be also useful for others.
Re: I put my whole life into a single database
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't this a drop in the ocean? Why would any 'normal' person forgo flying? How much CO2 emissions have 'world leaders' produced going to summits, or Taylor Swift and her fans flaying to concerts or war flights?
Couple of things: 1) NO ONE is suggesting any one forego flying altogether, or skipping their once-a-year overseas vacation or periodic family visit. 2) THIS level of flying is not normal and is exactly the kind of harmful behavior people have in mind when they complain about frequent flyers. 3) Whinging about summits and Taylor Swift is just a bad faith red herring argument. Obviously less flying is better, no matte…
Check your attitude if you want a discussion
Re: I put my whole life into a single database
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
Couple of things: 1) NO ONE is suggesting any one forego flying altogether, or skipping their once-a-year overseas vacation or periodic family visit. 2) THIS level of flying is not normal and is exactly the kind of harmful behavior people have in mind when they complain about frequent flyers. 3) Whinging about summits and Taylor Swift is just a bad faith red herring argument. Obviously less flying is better, no matte…
I don't know why someone going on a vacation would have moral high ground over someone that HAS TO travel for his work. If you are scientist you absolutely have to fly a lot to visit lots of conferences, disseminate your work, provide lectures etc.
Vacation is living life. Work should be done remotely.
Re: I put my whole life into a single database
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't this a drop in the ocean? Why would any 'normal' person forgo flying? How much CO2 emissions have 'world leaders' produced going to summits, or Taylor Swift and her fans flaying to concerts or war flights?
Why do anything for the greater good at all then? (Also there's a big gap between "forgo flying" and "fly every 2 weeks for 7 years")
But there is no greater good if you don't fly and Taylor Swift (etc) still does. You're just disadvantaging your own life for no reason.
Re: I put my whole life into a single database
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't this a drop in the ocean? Why would any 'normal' person forgo flying? How much CO2 emissions have 'world leaders' produced going to summits, or Taylor Swift and her fans flaying to concerts or war flights?
The general concern around Taylor Swift's emissions has always struck me as shortsighted. Her Eras tour is estimated to have generated around $5bn in economic uplift in the US, at an estimated 10,000 tonnes CO2e for her personal travel. Even if the total footprint is higher, that is thousands of times lower than the emissions intensity of an industry like fast fashion. From an environmental point of view, attending a…
Taylor Swift is just an example of the activity I was talking about. Both an be bad - no need for whataboutisms