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azertyfun

@ azertyfun @sh.itjust.works

Posts
1
Comments
210
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Removed

    People Would Rather Have Nuclear Power Plants In Their Area Than AI Data Centers

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  • Biogas and hydrogen are both greenwashing products. Neither is better than electric alternatives where they are being sold. They have major major flaws that the fossil fuel industry (y'know, the one selling both of those products) won't advertise to you:

    • Biogas is derived from agricultural products. All the agricultural waste we produce can't cover a meaningful part of even just our heating needs. This inevitably leads to a major misincentive to grow crops just to turn into methane, like we are doing with bioethanol, which has catastrophic land-use and environmental impacts.
    • Hydrogen is very inefficient to produce. Most often produced with gas (lol), but even if produced through electrolysis it's less efficient to have a double conversion than just use the electricity directly. It is also very hard to store/transport safely and efficiently.
    • Regardless of any of the above, heat pumps have a COP of 3-5. A boiler has a COP of 1. I don't care how clean your fuel is, it will always be more efficient to burn it in a regular power plant to power a heat pump than to burn it in a boiler.

    And even if the above wasn't true and biogas was awesome (it's awful), the simple fact that they are selling trace amounts in order to promote fossil gas as their main product is an obvious act of greenwashing unto itself.

    Greenpeace knows all of the above very well. I can't say for sure that they are corrupt and bought out by the fossil fuel industry. All I can say is that I don't have a better explanation for their stupidity.

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    People Would Rather Have Nuclear Power Plants In Their Area Than AI Data Centers

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  • Greenpeace Energy sells fossil fuels while fighting nuclear power. After it became a scandal, Greenpeace officially divested and changed the name but they still share the same office building in Hamburg so I think it's more than fair to say they are strongly ideologically aligned.

    I'm sure on paper they would rather renewable than fossil, but they clearly are willing to compromise with them, unlike with nuclear. When they combine forces with the openly pro-fossil fuel lobby right wing, you get the exact mess Germany is in: inexcusably high reliance on gas and a consistently worst-in-class CO2 footprint per kWh for Western Europe.

    Yes, I'm extremely bitter about this. The environmentalist political class being unyielding on nuclear but soft on gas set us back more than a decade with the green transition.

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  • Oh boohoo. Chocolate will be more expensive for westerners. Cry me a river.

    What the discussion was centered on is famine. Actual famine. Which will only affect poor countries and will kill millions. Whether or not individual Canadians stockpile grains in their basement (OP's actual suggestion) has literally no bearing on anyone's food security.

    I'm sorry but I just can't equate the economic struggle of a few more percent of inflation for mostly middle-class westerners with that of Global South subsistence farmers who are actually going to have to find out how far they can stretch out a grain silo or a fertilizer bag.

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  • Both your examples are pre Haber-Bosch. Not that it entirely invalidates your point, but daily calorie consumption for a Westerner is orders of magnitude cheaper than it was for a Victorian coal miner. In fact what we generally struggle with nowadays in rich countries is an overabundance of (poor quality) food.

    It's not out of the question for poor people to lack calories in rich countries, but that's a monumental policy failure. And critically it happens to socioeconomic classes that have neither the time nor the land area to dedicate to things like doomsday prepping (i.e. poor and marginalized communities in urban areas). The only solution to food insecurity is social programs, not doomsday prepping or grain hoarding.

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  • This will only affect poor countries. Rich, industrialized countries have more than enough capacity to make or buy their own fertilizer. Yes prices will go up again, but it's an economics issue, not anything close to an existential threat. There is simply more than enough calorie production for everyone even with strong perturbations in global shipping. Fertilizer is only a marginal use for methane in terms of volume.

    If you live in a poor country however, things are a lot more dire. The price of fertilizer is indexed on the price of gas, of which there is still enough for everyone; but your country will be competing with AI datacenters for the fucking stuff which means millions will have to die so Musk can continue to jerk it to AI child porn.

    It's not a gas pricing issue, it's a wealth hoarding issue compounded by the aimless crusade of a demented manlet commanded by religious fanatics.

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  • Gardening and foraging won't get you anywhere if you live in an urban area. You need an absurd amount of arable land per capita if you want to survive. A vegetable garden is useful in times of war not for raw calorie input but for supplements (either for specific nutrients not commonly found in rationed food supply or for taste).

    The good news is that food production is a "solved" issue. Any industrialized country is capable of producing enough calories to feed itself and then some, even without gas imports. Worst case you just stop growing bioethanol and beef to double the amount of available arable land at no tangible human cost.

    Those who'll get fucked by Trump's war are not Americans or Europeans, it'll be poor economies that can barely support industrial agriculture in the best of times. Their ability to buy fertilizer is very price-sensitive, which we already saw in 2022, though at the time the US had leadership willing to intercede and guarantee grain shipments.

    This time, millions will die, but not in a prepper fantasy kind of way, but in a "they live in a 'shithole country' and we won't care to help because our money finances ICE and bribes now" kind of way.

  • TIL there is no agreement on how many continents there are.

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  • You seem to be assuming that continents are defined based on plate tectonics? Which they definitely aren't since they predate our understanding of plate tectonics by centuries.

    Yes it's a flawed system. In particular it's Europe-centric and kind of breaks down with Asia's borders with Europe and Oceania being relatively arbitrary. But trying to retroactively make it fit some kind of "objective" definition is IMO the wrong approach. We don't need the 5-ish continents to be "fixed" because their definition is unserious and of little consequence. As long as we're cognizant we can just move on with our lives and use more precise descriptors (e.g. "The Middle East") when needed.

  • Former Trump official admits that their goal is to impose their Christian values on other Americans - LGBTQ Nation

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  • As opposed to the traditional catholic values of murdering brown people, burning apostates, progroming Jews, policing every aspect of sexuality, and most importantly enforcing a rigid belief in social hierarchy and the divine rights of nobility?

  • sloppy one

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  • Every time they add the feature, half of the product breaks. The other half start using twice as much memory and compute, somehow.

    They've got a pile of technical debt disguised as a product and the development velocity of the snail as a consequence. Very typical. The real question is "why hasn't the competition eaten their lunch already".

  • Workers who love ‘synergizing paradigms’ might be bad at their jobs

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  • The purpose of a system is what it does.

    If an organization rewards empty bluster and ChatGPT-driven corporate drivel, then that it is because those things are the organization's purpose.

    Corporate lingo is a social filter for humanoid shitweasels to identify their peers and control eventual threats.Nothing is more menacing to an incompetent manager than an underling speaking the truth. Thankfully corporate lingo allows underlings to be dismissed out of hand because either:

    • they didn't use the correct lingo ("Steve fired the only guy who knew how that machine worked and ain't nobody got time to figure it out because every other machine is falling apart as we speak" -> you get muted on teams and a meeting is booked with HR)
    • they did use the the correct lingo which is - entirely by design! - devoid of negative turns of phrase ("our rightsizing efforts mean that other team members will have to step up and synergize" -> sounds fine, deal with it, next topic).

  • why hard exit editor? Nano say at bottom.

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  • Real answer: those things matter to me because a quick frictionless experience very heavily dependant on muscle memory really helps with my ADHD. Laggy interfaces, having to hold left key for several seconds, and similar issues quickly pull my out of my train of thought.

    It's not about shaving 2 minutes off my day, it's about not interrupting the flow.

  • U.S. historian Robert Kagan: "We are watching a country fall under dictatorship almost without resistance"

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  • "We're too poor to afford to risk anything" is insulting to all the popular revolutions which happened because people were actually poor. Like, sorry not sorry, but the median American proletarian may live paycheck-to-paycheck but still lives in untold luxury compared to a 1917 Bolshevik who had to go to war sharing two boots and one rifle with multiple people, or the median revolutionary in Nepal last year (one of the poorest countries in the world).

    Americans really have it too good to risk it all, that analysis is correct. They could have it a lot better, sure, but threat of not having it so good anymore is what keeps them complacent.

  • Couple left with $200k bill after baby born in US

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  • Convict you in absentia then use the judgement as an excuse to freeze your bank account and ban you from all forms of banking (something that the US has the power to impose on foreigner because they hold every western bank by the balls due to their reliance on the fed)?

    I don't know if they would do it, but it certainly wouldn't be unconstitutional; the US have long made it clear that foreigners on foreign land don't have any legal rights whatsoever. I would be having a long conversation with lawyers to get some hard assurances before going down that path.

  • Pretty much 🤷

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  • The complete fracturing of children's education post-war cannot be understated as a society-wide catastrophe.

    Ironically stay-at-home mothers were already not the norm pre-war for the poors/minorities. Which participated in generational poverty as those children had a worse access to parenting and education. But the post-war middle class suddenly fell into that pattern as well, with similar results.

    On top of that you've got the meteoric rise of car-centric urbanism, fracturing communities. It used to take a village to raise a child, now they can't even walk across their neighborhood unsupervised because the roads aren't safe for children. Indirectly, parents trust fewer and fewer community members to watch their children, making the task of raising small children unusually difficult and tiring.

    Countries with more socialized childcare and better working conditions were better off overall, but the entire western world is facing a natality crisis because it truly is harder to raise a child now than it used to be. Which is absolutely bonkers because the world is also richer and more productive than at any other time in history.

  • What's a piece of Media that is so underrated you must mention it?

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  • Or it's the opposite. I refuse to watch shows without giving them my undivided attention, but that kind of pacing begs to be background noise while you do something else.

    Sometimes there is nothing significantly plot-relevant happening for entire episodes at a time, both for bad reasons (the incentive structure for children's show rewards empty filler slop with zero plot value because it's easy to re-run) and less bad reasons (children like repetition). Both of which are painfully evident throughout the whole experience.

    Good for you if that's your jam, if you find it comforting or like it as background noise or like it because it leads to better paced seasons down the line or whatever, but I refuse to accept that it's an issue for me to dislike objectively horrendous pacing.

  • What's a piece of Media that is so underrated you must mention it?

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  • I tried but like most children's shows I just can't deal with (at least the early seasons') pacing. It's excruciatingly slow, full of obvious filler content, and doesn't seem to be trying to get anywhere.

    Typically those children shows' pacing tends to get a lot better in the latter seasons as the audience ages out and the showrunners are trusted with bolder story arcs, but that doesn't change the fact that there are tens of hours of slop to get through before that point is reached.

  • Why Isn't News of Trump Building Vast Concentration Camps Being Treated as a National Emergency?

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  • Wait wait wait wait, where does this idea come from that the German people weren't to blame for Nazism? They were to blame. They were blamed. Their country was partitioned, their army was dismantled, their families were torn apart, and they endeavored to teach future generations what they did wrong. It did not even remotely make up for their nation's crimes against humanity, but they were "lambasted".

    Do not weaponize history to justify your own apathy. These lessons were paid in blood. Yet new blood is being shed, and every American who does not fight against the regime is responsible. Yes, it's an unfair ask; no-one wants to live through troubled times. But you are living in them so stop cowering behind historical wrongs to feel better about your inaction.

  • Why Isn't News of Trump Building Vast Concentration Camps Being Treated as a National Emergency?

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  • "yet"

    Just as a thought exercise, can you fathom and put into words a hypothetical breaking point that would wake people up to the madness around them?

    Because here's my prediction: the regime will commit atrocity after atrocity, each one somehow more monstrous than the last, and nothing will happen, because your first paragraph will still be true. They will start wars and nothing will happen because your first paragraph will still be true. Then suddenly WWIII will happen and the regime will be unstoppable. Then, some manner of nuclear exchange, potentially marking the end of human civilization, because all fascist regimes end up destroying themselves -- too bad this one has the power to take the entire fucking world down with it.

    If you are right that Americans won't fight for decency now (and I think you are), then all hope is lost. All historical precedent says that we are past the point of no return and you've forfeited your - and quite possibly humanity's - future.

  • Billionaire Ehud Laniado dies during penis enlargement surgery, surgeons banned

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  • Extra bonus: their vetting process doesn't involve a willingness to fuck patients over for extra cash.

    Funny when here in Belgium, the government put a couple decades ago a cap on the number of doctors who were allowed to graduate medical school (numerus clausus). The goal is to reduce the number of doctors to pay for (with the support of existing doctors who want less competition).

    The predictable result of artificial scarcity? I live a major city and if I want an appointment with any specialist it's a 6+ months delay or a 1-2 months if you can justify a daytrip to Brussels. This is having real tangible impacts on quality of care.

    Obviously I would not trade my healthcare system for the American one but let's not pretend that money and greed aren't factors.

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    azertyfun @sh.itjust.works

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