lopmotr

54 ms·

511.
by lopmotr 7y ago
100's of millions is not necessarily an existential crisis because it already happened in the 1900's due to war, disease, and famine. Even if that absolute scale of deaths happens again because of climate change, it will be propor
512.
by lopmotr 7y ago
Before you get too worried, remember that positive stories about climate change are politically forbidden in most mainstream publications. You're only getting the gloomy side of it. The harm it will do is still finite and not even real
513.
by lopmotr 7y ago
It's not an existential crisis. That's not what the science says. There's no evidence that climate change will make humans extinct or end civilization. If that's not what you mean by existential crisis, then don't u
514.
by lopmotr 7y ago
Reusable cups and paper straws aren't for climate change. They're for the quite unreasonable landfill scare. The people who subscribe to that belief have no idea beyond "plastic = bad" and "landfills = bad". So
515.
by lopmotr 7y ago
It's not a quantity that has any natural zero, nor is time (year since Jesus?). So you can start it wherever you want.
516.
by lopmotr 7y ago
I used to work in a school system where numerical answers weren't required in physics. Usually, the only reason you'd calculate a numerical answer was to help you check it for reasonableness. If you calculated a wrong numerical an
517.
by lopmotr 7y ago
It makes the UK like the rest of the world. Are you mocking the rest of the world (including USA) for not wanting to copy EU laws?
518.
by lopmotr 7y ago
They obviously can change them whenever they want. So no.
519.
by lopmotr 7y ago
A crude way to estimate embodied energy is just from the cost. It had to take less than $1.25 worth of energy to produce and distribute. That might have been something cheap and polluting like heat from coal, but it's still not much. Y
520.
by lopmotr 7y ago
It's not clear that these are really tech workers who voted for it. Half of Kickstarter's employees are designers/coders and the other half work with the community [1]. Since one of the unionization organizers worked on Trust
521.
by lopmotr 7y ago
I live in New Zealand and most of what you say already exists. Yet we still have all the normal social ills. So I think that's proof you're wrong. > If everyone needed to expend less and less of their day working as things got
522.
by lopmotr 7y ago
This whole language choosing thing seems to be an unsolved problem. It would be great if users could specify their preferred languages somehow in their browser/OS and websites and apps could respect that. But I guess users won't s
523.
by lopmotr 7y ago
They're not feelings. Anger isn't on the list either but "facial expression for anger" is.
524.
by lopmotr 7y ago
Actually, a lot of values can be obtained from other, more general, values. Not everything of course or we'd all agree on everything! But I wish people would do this more often when they make arguments about rights and wrongs. Somethin
525.
by lopmotr 7y ago
The essence of NIMBYism is wanting to make the value of your own property increase, not by adding any value, but by restricting others from competing with you. That's a net harmful behavior so I think it's fair to describe it as &
526.
by lopmotr 7y ago
The owner of your detached house would have been very happy though, wouldn't he? The issues you listed wouldn't affect him, but the opportunity to sell to an apartment developer would.
527.
by lopmotr 7y ago
While not America, I live in a minority white suburb. I don't want to have a school-age child here because it's, not coincidentally, one of the poorest places in the city and thus is only in zone for the worst schools. Poor people
528.
by lopmotr 7y ago
Google search already faces that problem. Is that unsafe too?
529.
by lopmotr 7y ago
Can you explain your reasoning? It's easy to imagine a new invention or idea will revolutionize everything because it's never been done before and feels powerful, but even if it works, it might not. It sounds like you believe NLP
530.
by lopmotr 7y ago
Kind of, but I wonder about niche articles with nobody keeping an eye on them. I have notifications for a small page that contains some empirical formulas which contain arbitrary constants. Every now and then, somebody will modify one of th
531.
by lopmotr 7y ago
Yes, that does seem to be true. Though I wonder if the incredible amazingness of the first moon trip together with a sense of competition with USSR actually gave workers throughout the project more personal motivation to put in real effort
532.
by lopmotr 7y ago
I don't know, but I would reject all anecdotes. If somebody measured the temperatures around the world for many decades, I could accept that shows global temperature rise. Turns out they did and I do. That's data, not anecdotes. A
533.
by lopmotr 7y ago
You can't notice it personally without doing science. You can't just remember how hot it was when you were a kid and know that global warming is happening. That's what the GP was talking about and what I'm responding to.
534.
by lopmotr 7y ago
You understand that proving causation is extremely difficult in a complex system where you can't run controlled experiments? You essentially have to have a correct model. But how do you verify your model is correct? You still can'
535.
by lopmotr 7y ago
No. See the enormous volume and consistency of anecdotal evidence for ineffective medicine. Most of China has believed and recreated the same false anecdotes about their TCM for thousands of years! Remember bloodletting? astrology? praying
536.
by lopmotr 7y ago
Wow, people can be spectacularly ignorant of even simpler things like probability: 1) Scientists predicting the probability of an earthquake in a region that just had one. "If it doesn't occur, they'll say it was only a proba
537.
by lopmotr 7y ago
No we shouldn't! You don't give up the principles of science just to expedite your political ideals. If you were going to do that, why bother with science in the first place? Just declare it so and shout it until everyone believes
538.
by lopmotr 7y ago
But what is the seriousness of these issues? We're inundated with articles pointing out small unimportant changes and unquantified waffle about serious future changes. But never any actual predictions of global disaster. What's th
539.
by lopmotr 7y ago
Something requiring human labor doesn't make it impossible! There's no lost scientific knowledge. Engineering details may be lost but we can design a new rocket that works just as well. We send unmanned probes to the moon all the
540.
by lopmotr 7y ago
When they have that much freedom, can you really call it "perpetuating the issue" instead of "doing what they want"? It's not an issue for the women who prefer to do it, or they wouldn't be doing it.

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