Really because I'm a GCP customer also and earlier this week they arbitrarily shut off Looker on us with no explanation leading to tons of pissed off customers. Our account executive responded with no help and a link to file a ticket. I expect a lot more from a service we're paying $10k+ a month for and my experience with Google has been so bad we're considering migrating everything to Microsoft.
The "research chemical" community on Reddit is fascinating and horrifying. People setting up scientific sounding LLCs to virtual offices and ordering all sorts of not for human consumption chemicals that are variations of Ritalin, alzheimer drugs, and more in the name of cognitive enhancement. It's basically legal pharma abuse without even needing a shady doctor but actually even more risky since these chemicals haven't undergone human trials and these people could well be doing permanent damage.
In this case they do not. These are research chemicals already in various stages of trials and are intended to help serious scientists conduct experiments. The promotion of potentially very damaging pharmaceutical level drugs is concerning.
I take plenty of supplements, including not particularly well known ones like Agmatine, NAC, etc. but research chemicals is a whole other level and has serious potential for lifelong issues. It shouldn't be promoted imho.
It's not really research unless it's blind. Plus who knows what long-term side-effects may come up down the road (some people were discussing cancer risk of BPC one peptide reddit thread)
That sounds like the usual "big businesses get extra considerations that small businesses do not". And since small businesses are the vast majority in number, negotiation is absolutely not something they can rely upon.
Or, to put another way, someone selling handmade goods at a fair using Square will never have more negotiation power than "if you don't like it, leave".
You negotiate by not using square and using an alternative system in that scenario. There are price competitive options even for small businesses. The UI might be clunkier and the equipment more dated but that is the tradeoff.
> In practice, [switching vendors] is an extremely weak signal, is swamped out by market changes, assumes zero cost of switching, ignores network effects, etc. One of many reasons why I distrust economist’s assertion of fairness.
I hate to break it to you but the SEO industry is as big as advertising generally and organic results are heavily gamed. As it relies a ton on link building and many of those links are paid for it's hardly the meritocratic process many think it is.
Anecdotally I removed all social media from my phone recently and I only am using Twitter for work on desktop. My mood has improved dramatically and my focus is improving. Towards the end I found myself getting angry at posts that showed curated idyllic lives and realized that it's all really a facade.
To that end the last post I saw on Tiktok before deleting it basically said that social media is so insidious because it is both the sickness and the cure. You feel bad and then you feel better ad nauseum and that rang very true for me.
Anecdotally, I think using social media requires a sense of emotional intelligence in order to not be adversely affected. You have to be cognizant that the highlights of other people’s lives aren’t comparable to your own life. Otherwise, you go down the spiral of thinking that your life is so much worse than others’.
HN falls under work for me (in the sense that I learn things, I have a company that employs engineers so there's a networking element etc) but point taken. I guess I don't think about it as much because it's significantly less problematic than say Instagram and at least I learn things here.
Notably I did cut out reddit which imho is the most toxic social network I was a part of.
Got it. Wasn't trying to call you out; just curious. I've read the "removing social media has made me much happier" claim so many times but haven't been able to do it yet. But I think I'm close.
I lived in Aribnb's for roughly a year and a half. They actually did a profile on our family on the Today Show on NBC about it.
I think the thing I hated about it the most was the system of hosts rating the guests. It was always stressful especially when our ability to simply secure our next place to live was dependent on, to some degree, a hosts subjective evaluation of how they felt the stay went. For instance I have a toddler, at one location my toddler played with some toys that were in the house. We put them back where they were but they were incorrectly arranged (not damaged just put back not the way they wanted) and the host left us a negative review. We disputed it and airbnb sided us, but the whole feeling of constant judgement makes it difficult to relax in a space. I wish they had some better / more objective system as you never know when you'll encounter an unreasonable person. To me this is the single biggest negative. A sort of cloud of social credit hanging over your head.
At this point I would never use Airbnb except for long term (30 days+) type of travel. Between the extremely intense chores you're basically given plus huge cleaning fees hotels are superior in nearly every way for short term trips. The significant % reduction for staying a month too makes it a lot more palatable. I think Airbnb sees this too which is why they're leaning so heavily into the digital nomad / long term travel user segment. It's a place they can genuinely win vs a hotel. For short term stays not dealing with unreasonable hosts, not getting surprise fees, and there not being a bunch of chores makes things significantly more enjoyable. As noted on social platforms by others getting hit with a massive cleaning fee and also then being expected to do chores also feels like a slap in the face.
It seems like the social credit system is actually quite good. The problem is it isn't page ranked or weighted. Low rated people should count for less and people who low rate everyone should count for less.
Dynamic range in your ratings should matter.
FWIW I use Airbnb and hotels extensively. They fill different needs for me. And sometimes I use the composites: Hilton Residences or whatever. So far mostly good. I generally don't do anything extensive. The most you'll get from me is putting the sheets in the dryer. If you want me to clean the shoe mat and stuff you need to have no cleaning fee.
Many Airbnbs don't let you do more than 30 days. In places like California, staying someone for over 30 days automatically turns you into a tenant, with tenant rights. There was a case where someone stayed in an Airbnb for over 30 days, became a tenant unbeknownst to the host, and then proceeded to squat there for months while the host had to go through the eviction process. It was a nightmare.
I am not in journalism per say however as I've spent a decade in advertising I work with media companies a lot.
Conspiracy theorists that push the idea there is some global cabal of people trying to control the narrative for their own enrichment / others detriment is simply false, and that narrative is damaging in a number of ways. Cynically most of these organizations are too dysfunctional to pull something like that off even if they wanted to.
There are however many internal and external pressures on organizations that shape narratives in a specific ways and journalists are human beings (they're biased based on their own experiences) so reporting always has a slant. That is worthy of critique and is healthy.
The debate on media generally has jumped the shark. IMHO it's not the answer that many folks (that tend to be conservative) want to hear, but meaningful diversity of opinion and experience would help balance this out. You want news with a working class, middle America viewpoint? Then you need to help some % of those people get into media. (This is just one such example of course).
"Global cabal" might be a stretch, but it is a fact that there are large-scale government projects underway to deceive, mislead, and control the narrative via journalism.
I recently came across an amusing connection [1] to Bernstein's piece and its highlighting of Joseph Alsop. The author of the following is Bernard Fall, who certainly is otherwise pro-West and anti-communist, later KIA while on patrol with American troops in Vietnam.
> [...] the American press gave a completely distorted picture of what happened in Laos in the summer of 1950, with the Washington Post and the New York Times being among the worst offenders. [...]
> Press dispatches bore such news as "Viet-Minh troops advanced to within 13 miles of Samneus city" (UPI), and even the staid British agency Reuters headlined on September 3 that "the Royal Laotian Army was today preparing to defend the capital of Vientiane"; while on September 5, an editorial of the Washington Post, citing the "splendid examples of alert on-the-spot reporting" of its columnist Joseph Alsop spoke of "full-scale, artillery-backed invasion from Communist North Viet-Nam." All this was just so much nonsense. [...]
> Two weeks later, the letdown began. Even the New York Times report in Laos, who, until then, had swallowed whole every press release circulating in Vientiane, noted on September 13 that "briefings have noticeably played down the activities of North Viet-Nam in the conflict. This led some observers to believe that Laotian political tacticians were creating a background that would soften the blow if the [United Nations] observer report on intervention by North Viet-Nam was negative." Indeed, the Security Council report of November 5, 1959, did fail to substantiate the theory of a Communist outside invasion of Laos. [...]
> There is, of course, not the slightest doubt that certainly North Viet-Nam and perhaps even Red China, gave military and political support to the Laotian rebellion. But their aid was in no way as overt as originally suggested in the alarming reports spread around the world by American press media, some of which went so far in their affirmations as to accuse almost anyone who doubted their stories as being either a blind fool or "soft" on Communism. Joseph Alsop's "Open Letter" to Henry Luce, the publisher of Time and Life (both of which refused to be stampeded by their less hard-headed colleagues) is a prime example of this attitude. [...]
> While the British and the French--whose sources of information in Laos already had proved more reliable the year before--awaited more hard facts to go on, Washington took up the cudgels in full, both officially and in the press. In a somber column, Mr. Joseph Alsop spoke of the "yawning drain" which Laos was likely to be engulfed in; compared the 1954 Geneva settlement to the Munich sell-out of 1938; and called our Canadian allies who had staunchly defended the Western viewpoint in the international cease-fire commission (the other members being India and Poland), "approximately neutral."
This was written in 1964, so over a decade before Bernstein's expose.
Conspiracy theorists that push the idea there is some global cabal of people trying to control the narrative for their own enrichment / others detriment is simply false, and that narrative is damaging in a number of ways.
Agreed, the problem is that there is also palpable, verifiable distortion of facts and "imposition of narrative" within a substantial portion of mainstream and "alternative" news.
We face the problem that many people can't go from "journalism is objective" to "journalism is a mixture of multiple agenda-serving narratives mixed with facts that still isn't a 'grand conspiracy'". Moreover, a substantial portion of media one step from the mainstream really like the "grand conspiracy" narrative because it binds people to them as "truthers".
Why do you say diversity of opinion and experience are not the answer conservative folks want to hear? It strikes me as strange, given that the vast majority of media outlets in the US are left-leaning.
I've been seeing content on Tiktok where even 100 miles away they're seeing small dead fish which is apparently according to the folks making the videos a massive red flag.
In general I grow super weary of companies and the government downplaying these sorts of things. It seems to constantly follow the pattern of people saying "It's not that bad" and then only years later do we actually see the horrific health and environmental effects of these sorts of things play out when it's too late for the folks that have been impacted. I feel so helpless like I wish there was a way to prevent this or create enough real accountability that people actually work to minimize these sorts of things but it never seems to pan out that way. My hunch is that the behind the scenes culprit of "why" this happens is rather banal, insurance covers it so people don't have to change, and it seems like those policies create a ton of moral hazard but I don't know the alternatives. I have no answers here it just feels like yet another weight on the side of the scale that the average person has very little control over their lives even for simple things like not being hurt by toxic chemicals in soil / drinking water. Feels easy to lose even more faith in the institutions that are supposed to protect us all.
> In general I grow super weary of companies and the government downplaying these sorts of things. It seems to constantly follow the pattern of people saying "It's not that bad" and then only years later do we actually see the horrific health and environmental effects of these sorts of things play out when it's too late for the folks that have been impacted.
This isn't really the same, but I've been thinking in similar areas a lot lately in the context of climate change, and the debate around climate change, although debating any topic doesn't change many minds.
If you bet on the scientific majority around climate change being wrong / non-existent / something we can't control, and end up being wrong, then the worst case scenario we make the planet uninhabitable (I'm going to the extreme here).
If you bet that climate change exists and is man-made and end up wrong, we've unnecessarily invested a huge amount of money into reducing pollution, more efficient buildings / manufacturing / transport, and reduce the dependence on a limited set of oil producers to be able to hold supply of oil over nations.
For something more immediate like health concerns with this derailment, is should the officials be more willing to be wrong? And message as such?
Unfortunately, the problem here is that for the individual politicians, if you bet that climate change exists, the worst case scenario is that the big money turns against you and you lose office.
If you bet that climate change doesn't exist or can't be fixed, so we might as well go on with the status quo, the worst case is that you get voted out by environmentally-conscious voters...after getting scads of campaign contributions from the big money, and with a good chance of getting a cushy lobbying post from them afterwards.
>If you bet on the scientific majority around climate change being wrong / non-existent / something we can't control, and end up being wrong, then the worst case scenario we make the planet uninhabitable (I'm going to the extreme here).
Have you heard of Pascals wager? What do you think of it?
The problem with your 2nd part is it hasn't been actually shifting away from oil, just shifting where in the chain uses more of it. 'Green' infrastructure and products are still overwhelmingly powered by oil & coal and require such significant amounts of emissions to extract that it is self-defeating in the majority of cases. The strongest advocates of 'Green' energy have been frequently silent on Nuclear Energy, which is an obvious and much easier solution to their own alarmism than wind farms (have you seen local eco impacts and blade disposal?) solar (works only where it's sunny with limited options for power storage which is its own can of worms).
>For something more immediate like health concerns with this derailment, is should the officials be more willing to be wrong? And message as such?
I think transparency is what is being requested, not wrongness.
> Have you heard of Pascals wager? What do you think of it?
If I have I don't remember it, thanks for bring it up. I'm still trying to absorb it, but I find it to be a fascinating insight. Part of it, is I often try to remind myself that I don't know what I don't know.
> The problem with your 2nd part is it hasn't been actually shifting away from oil, just shifting where in the chain uses more of it.
Well that's true today, but is also basically correct no matter what happens. Our society only operates because of the stuff, so today, any other energy types are going to be transported by oil, manufactured using electricity from hydrocarbons, etc.
> The strongest advocates of 'Green' energy have been frequently silent on Nuclear Energy, which is an obvious and much easier solution
What really changed my mind on this side of the discussion, was a point I heard somewhere that we would've really need to start this 15 years ago. Nuclear is so capital intensive and so long to build, we don't get the necessary impact for far too long if we start now. I'm totally onboard extending lifetime of current reactors if safe to do so, and think new nuclear should be some mix of future energy supplies. I'm keeping an eye on the industry here and totally want the startups to succeed, but I'm under the impression we need to pursue other options here as well.
This probably isn't the best thread to debate the nuances wind and solar and storage, you're right, there are real waste and safety problems with these technologies. But I don't know that also means they aren't the current best option for some mix of new investments.
In a civilized, democratic society that's always true. But it doesn't disqualify the original point.
And it works both ways... Other people have spent trillions of US dollars on, for e.g., the war in the middle east. Some of my tax money went to that. I didn't have the ability to veto it.
There should be a reasonable public debate and then people vote. Very often it involves spending other peoples money. That's just how it works.
Getting money from society doesn't come with a grant of immunity to it's rules. Are you saying that it should?
If you use your money to start a business involving a giant tire fire in your back yard then society will, rightfully so, have something to say about it.
> It seems to constantly follow the pattern of people saying "It's not that bad" and then only years later do we actually see the horrific health and environmental effects
Yeah but most of the time the panic spread on social media actually does get it wrong.
I am familiar with nuclear matter and the amount of insane social media post about any little nuclear thing is pretty crazy and have no scientific bases.
> It seems to constantly follow the pattern of people saying "It's not that bad" and then only years later do we actually see the horrific health and environmental effects of these sorts of things play out when it's too late for the folks that have been impacted.
I recently learned that smaller versions of this even happen in the Lasalle/Peru area in Illinois with some regularity. It makes the local news, and maybe some Chicago news, but hardly a blip on national news.
And this is people telling me they live miles away from the incident, and are experiencing fuzzy orange snow. It's curious, because this is getting more press coverage, and at the same time the conspiracy wingnuts are claiming the press is covering it up.
The cancer rates in that area are wack. I know a teacher at a local school and the amount of children who are lost to cancer is outrageous. Every year at least. The town is 10,000 people.
Yeah, exactly why this was on my mind. I had an interaction with some folks who mentioned the explosion and the fear in the community, and the response from the company and local authorities being not very satisfying.
Me: "The one a year ago?"
Them: "No, it happened again a few weeks ago. It happens couple years, seems like. Welcome to LaSalle!"
Better to be a labelled conspiracy wingnut, as someone who maintains justified suspicion of those who hold power in our society (media, corporate barons, politicians), than to be too trusting and assuming all is well.
> labelled conspiracy wingnut, as someone who maintains justified suspicion
If your suspicions were justified then by definition you wouldn't be a conspiracy wingnut. But most of the wingnuts think everything is a conspiracy, which makes them no more useful than a broken clock.
was I a conspiracy wingnut for thinking the war in Iraq was fought on dubious grounds? Don't have time to go down the rabbit hole. Let's just apply Mark Twain's quote and replace "read the newspaper" with "watch/read corporate news". He's still right.
“If you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed. If you do, you're misinformed.”
"The Four Stage Strategy:
Stage 1. Nothing is going to happen.
Stage 2. Something may happen, but we should do nothing about it.
Stage 3. Maybe we should do something about it, but there's nothing we can do.
Stage 4. Maybe there was something we could have done, but it's too late now."
Would ECP brakes have stopped this, a serious question? I don't know if the severity of this warrants blame on a lack of ECP braking. There is a study done[1] that compared different pneumatic vs electronic signal brakes and ECP brakes could have potentially reduced the number of cars in a derailment but I don't know if it's a significant decrease in cars that are derailed, 50 cars derailed. It does not seem that way to me. But I could be wrong.
It sounds like all administrations (especially those currently in charge) deserve criticism for not focusing on the correct regulations for train safety.
Requiring something that isn't needed doesn't help... It can hurt as it takes resources away from actual necessities, like sensors, and tighter maintenance inspections.
Well then, we’ll have to do with a hypothetical citation from a real universe.
The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) found that a train derailment near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in May 2015 was prevented from being a disaster thanks to the train’s Emergency Control Power (ECP) brakes. According to the NTSB report, the ECP brakes, which are activated when the engineer loses control of the train, stopped the train within 1.25 seconds of the engineer’s attempts to stop it, preventing it from derailing. The ECP brakes are the most efficient braking system available, allowing trains to stop within a very short amount of time. Without them, the tragic derailment of Amtrak Train No. 188 may have been much worse.
Read the link I posted above. It estimates braking distance with EPC vs pneumatic along with reductions in cars that derail. It DOES reduce breaking time in emergency stops which has fewer cars derail but I don't know if it is enough of a reduction to be worthwhile. I don't think it would have dramatically reduced the number of cars that derailed in this accident. I am willing to be proven wrong.
I’m not waiting y the brake failed. It can take minutes for air brakes to respond on a long train.
Once they become aware of the hot axle, if they could stop quicker, then the bearing doesn’t fail, which causes the axle to drop out, and thus the train to derail.
Think about pulling over as soon as you know you’ve taken a hit to a tire instead of continuing to drive until you’re on nothing but a rim and sparks.
Containing? Discs for braking are mounted and fixed to the axle. Bearings allow for rotation of the axle and are offset from the disc brake mount and constrained on other axes. I don't know what kind of train or brake system was used on this train, so I can't speak to whether brakes or Donald Trump ;) are to blame for this.
And Biden and Buttigieg didn’t make it a priority to re-implement the law while they had control of both houses, and instead shoved an unfair contract down railroad workers throats.
Sure, but it's a little more complicated than that. A 2015 act of Congress mandated that the Department of Transportation repeal the braking requirement if an analysis showed more costs than benefits. The act was mostly to address high profile oil tanker derailments, shipments which peaked around 2014. The Trump administration concluded, probably mistakenly, that an cost-benefit analysis justified it revocation. Of course there was much lobbying by the railroad and oil industries.
Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg’s department has no plans to reinstate an Obama-era rail safety rule aimed at expanding the use of better braking technology, even though a former federal safety official recently warned Congress that without the better brakes.
The Biden administration has had every opportunity to reinstate the safety rule in the past two years.
To be fair, besides the primary initiative of keeping all the wealth in the hands of a few, the secondary purpose of a Republican administration is to undo anything done by a Democratic administration. There was no way for Trump to know whether the legislation was good or bad. It could have gone either way, really.
It's felt like any republican 'rolling back' dem-initiated legislation tends to have more negative consequences for more people than positive benefits for others. I don't have any specifics in mind - if I think of any I'll edit/add here. But perhaps others have counter examples to correct my gut feeling?
1. Let's not pretend that this was a "crazy" Trump move. Any Republican would have done this.
2. Let's stop pretending both parties are the same. Yes, there are places where they overlap, but there are important places where there is NO overlap. Environmental action is the big area where there is little to no overlap.
And yet despite having a majority of the house and senate under Biden they've been unable to deliver almost anything except an unfair railroad contract.
So maybe, just maybe, the 2 sides are willing to shout about different things but at the end of the day are in fact the same.
Razor thin margin in the Senate and at least 2 of the "Democrats" are not really going to vote on anything controversial. They have been shills, so far, for business interests.
Have you ever considered that maybe the reason there’s always a Democrat or two willing to block progressive legislation is that the Democratic Party wants it that way? That way they can have their cake, by promising progressive reform, and eat it, by not delivering that reform and thus, not pissing off their donors. I’ve been hearing about these one or two non-compliant Democrats my whole voting life (remember Joe Lieberman?), and yet the party never invests resources in primarying them.
It’s always a popular conspiracy theory that either side has certain “renegade” members that are there mostly to prevent popular with people but not with big money laws from getting through.
If someone puts up a tent and someone else purposely burns it down, is the first person partially at fault for not rebuilding it when everyone gets rained on?
I'm saying the situation Biden has been in since he took office is very tenuous. There was a virtual tie on paper, with the VP breaking the tie, but 2 of the people on the Dem side were not at all cooperative with the agenda that Biden wanted.
To say "the Dems could have done it if they wanted it" is not at all true.
The Democrats had the option of doing nothing. The railroad workers would have had a strike for a variety of their issues (safety being high on the list), and the workers would have gotten a better deal than the one they got.
Unfortunately the strike would have to have lasted long enough and been painful enough for the train companies to accept that they had to negotiate with workers rather than trying to bargain with Congress. That's fundamentally why Congress caved - because THEY would be blamed for the economic disruption. But that doesn't change the fact that simply doing nothing would have been a better outcome for workers.
Both parties primarily serve the interests of the 0.1%, hence the reduction in safety protections under Trump and the imposition of an unfair contract and the removal of the right to strike under Biden. Got to squeeze out every last fraction of a percent of profit to keep Berkshire Hathaway's stock price up.
Anything involving government really. This is the decades old "starve the beast" [1] mindset. Let's make sure government is absolutely ineffective at every step of the way, and then later point out how ineffective the government is and propose an even more ineffective, under-resourced government. It's a vicious cycle, and a self-fulfilled prophecy.
This isn't a fair or useful comparison. The USSR was a command and control political and economic system which creates a kind of capture in decision making that is meaningfully different from what we encounter in the U.S. To put it simply, they got Chernobyl and the U.S. got three mile island which is a very different kind of nuclear (and governmental) failure.
Seems to me that the power of government or lack thereof is far less a factor than the nature of that government (eg corruption or other self serving tendencies) when it comes to man made disasters.
There are enough examples of man made disasters in countries with weak governments, and powerful governments without a history of these kinds of disasters.
The argument against hyper capitalism causing more and more derailments is credible if you look into 'precision scheduled railroading' practices, aka shaving expense by eliminating unnecessary costs and 'optimizing Assets'.
Sadly this has little to do with 'conservatives' or 'the left' and a lot more to do with our apolitical global oligarchy who own the politicians in power and many lobbying groups including 'climate change' and environmentalists who are strangely silent on this major disaster as they were when the Nord Stream pipeline was destroyed.
One thing on the ontology of capital: once enough capital (billions, trillions) is gathered in one single control point there is a phase transition: from a means towards an end (build X, destroy Y) it becomes a manner of escaping reality: with enough (crony or not) capital you can keep afloat a business no matter how bad it is, how badly run, how useless or how dangerous the products. Not that 'there is no skin in the game', but there is no skin, there is no game anymore.
Whereas with government, you can keep afloat a government no matter how bad it is, how badly run, how useless or how dangerous it is. Except, as opposed to a company, it can’t crash like Enron or be threatened by competition. It doesn’t even need to fight to stay afloat.
You can't. At some point disaster and dumb leadership conspire to push the people and elite to revolution. We're no where near that now, but don't be fooled that governments are untoppable. They aren't. Every former regime had its peak.
You can see how structural faults in US government could produce the tinder. The threefold and interdependent issue of the US Senate and subsequently Electoral College resulting in Presidential and Legislative and ultimately Judicial representation by a smaller and smaller group of constituents. The reason we have legitimacy narratives today stems from this very structural fault.
But tinder alone does not produce a fire. An unforeseen event poised to exploit the flaws of the fault and uniquely incompetent leadership conspire to make régime ancien.
By control point you can understand a corporation or a government, no need for false dichotomies: in the age of capital there is no beyond.
Enron was a weak company, nowhere near the escape reality velocity: at peak, in 2000, they had a market capitalization of $60 billion, at the same time Microsoft was at $600 billion [1].
Also, any company worth their capital knows very well that "competition is for losers" [2] and dreams of the ultimate consolidation [3].
Climate Change & the war on CO2 has sucked the oxygen out of the room wrt pollution with dangerous chemicals. Many in the environmental community are optimizing a single metric, CO2 emissions, & not focusing on the myriad of chemicals that cause widespread ecological damage. That coupled with the ongoing doomsday hysteria over CO2, it is easy to lose focus on pressing issues & the complexities in dealing with these other environmental issues. The core tension here is should we narrow focus on a single metric or widen focus on the entire system? Also, Que bono for the different approaches?
Instead of focusing so much on CO2, it would benefit humanity to adopt a more well rounded approach that addresses all pollutants, prioritizing the safe handling of extremely toxic chemicals & reducing the amount of toxic waste emitted by industry. Also, it would be helpful to take the approach that novel substances should be proven safe instead of assuming these substances are safe until proven unsafe.
I'd be really interested in why climate change is a hysteria and not well-founded fear. Well founded studies say we are currently on track to reach 4°C higher average temperature by 2100, and a plausible rise in sea levels of that would be around 40 meters. Completely ignoring all other effects, this would be a catastrophe on a level we can hardly achieve otherwise. And 2100 isn't an end date, it would be kind of nice if the planet was usable a fair bit after that as well.
'Climate change' is a hysteria because there is so much money involved in green tech. anyone with an ounce of common sense is an environmentalist, but there have been so many predictions of impending doom (which is your fault, repent and atone for your sins) that the genuinely important issues tend to get buried in the tsunamai of doomy junk science that is drip fed to Guardian readers and anyone else who will listen.
There is a real danger of the $$ cult of climate change $$ undermining important environmental issues.
Apologies for offending your religious beliefs but there are an awful lot of now very rich snake oil salesmen out there who are doing a lot more for their cronies wallets than for the planet.
Be more mindful of where trillions of tax payer money is 'invested' would be my advice and try to see both sides of the religious divide.
To your point, where are the sanctimonious green agenda pushers, like Greta Thunberg & AOC, on this environmental disaster? The crickets are easy to hear. I thought they cared about the environment...
> I'd be really interested in why climate change is a hysteria and not well-founded fear.
There are different types of criticism re: the claim of Anthropogenic Global Warming (which I'll refer to as APGW) & it's impacts. Mainly b/c APGW is a composition of claims, many of which are criticized to varying degrees.
My perspective is that throughout Earth's history, the climate has always been under a perpetual state of change, sometimes to far more drastic degrees than what we are witnessing today. About 200 years ago, we left a mini ice age (i.e. "the year without a summer"), which means that this point in the natural cycles is one of warming. I'm far more concerned about events coming from outer space & Sun, the current Geomagnetic excursion, & pollution than APGW. Other planets in our solar system are going through intensifying climate change right now.
I'm not confident that the state of climate science accounts for all inputs into the cycle...looking at the Sun's cycles, our changing position within the cosmos, cycles external to our solar system and the impacts on Earth's climate. Climate models have a terrible track record with predicting future trends. This complex system, where all of the inputs are not yet properly modeled, is not modeled in a way which gives predictive value. The media & politicians tend to sensationalize the most extreme "doomsday" models (i.e. Al Gore stating that snow will be a thing of the past & the glaciers will all melt by 2020).
The natural cycles (there are many factors) are also not properly modeled, as we have only had precise measurements & can only date ice core samples, for a period that does not incorporate a single period for each of the cycles.
The oceans are also a large reservoir of CO2 & CO2 escapes a liquid as the temperature rises. Given we have geologically recently left an ice age, CO2 will naturally escape from the oceans. I wonder if a large portion of the rise of CO2 comes from global warming (with CO2 escaping the oceans) and not the other way around.
There have been experiments that show that CO2 does increase the temperature of a system to some extent, but the warming has upper-bound limits & it is not a runaway phenomenon. I confirmed this by doing a PV=nRT & CO2 delta calculation on Venus & found that if CO2 is a runaway phenomenon, the temperature on Venus would be significantly higher than it is now.
That being said, experiments show that an increase of CO2 does increase the temperature of a system, but not in a runaway hockey stick graph sense, but in a logrithmic upper-bound sense.
My experience with many people is that they want to simplify their understanding of complex systems in a lossy manner. I feel like many of the fears around APGW is a lossy simplification that attracts people to make sense of nature's complexities. It is psychologically difficult to admit & consciously regard there is much that we don't yet know & are not accounting for..even more difficult to admit that Earth has had numerous widespread natural catastrophes that we would not be able to control. We want to be able to predict the future with our models, the simpler the model the better. The problem is sometimes the system being modeled is very complex & we have not yet recorded all of the cycles involved or accounted for all of the inputs. It is psychologically attractive & consistent with history for cultures to create a scape goat which must be sacrificed to appease the Gods & forestall impending doom.
The fact of the matter is that we had a rule to prevent this that was rescinded by conservatives. Further implementation of safety rules will always and forever be hamstrung by conservatives due to their ideology concerning deregulation. There is no need to cast blame onto shadowy oligarchs to avoid attributing the disaster to conservative ideology for the past 60 years.
You really don't see there being a very distinct difference between the beliefs of the left and right wings of American politics on this?
You think "global oligarchy" is "apolitical", at a time when the right wing is pushing harder and harder for the very wealthy to, essentially, be able to do anything they want, while the left wing (such as it is in this country) is pushing to restrict their power and tax their wealthy?
While I agree that there are, in general, significant differences in positions on these things, this seems like a bad example to choose: after all, US rail workers went on strike over the safety, long hours, and being expected to work injured or sick, and President Biden signed off on laws making their strikes illegal.
Unfortunately, at least in the English-speaking world, many nominal workers' parties have largely bought into worker-hostile policies under Blair, Starmer, Clinton, Albanese, and so on.
Honestly, I agree with you on this; however, the grandparent didn't say "Democratic or Republican politicians," which is very much the source of the problem you describe. Their wording was "conservatives or the left", which I think it is fair to say includes the people who identify with those political orientations—and I think you'd have a hard time seriously arguing that "the left" in America, to the extent that it even exists, is not strongly in favor of labour unions and worker protections.
I think the grandparent was really referring to extremities at the tips of the two wings - the cargo culting 'democratic socialist' movement the DNC pays lip service to, and the extremes of nationalist'USA first' 'patriots' the RNC pays lip service to and the DNC's coastal media corp friends love to endlessly frightened their viewers about.
Two wings of the same party. At this point because the DNC are currently so powerful they are parochially dominant (and extremely corrupt), the pendulum will swing soon and the power will shift to the RNC (who will no doubt also be extremely corrupt).
The unelected bureaucrats actually run everything in the US and at a state level. In California where I live we currently have a supermajority Dem state government, but regardless of this a handful of unelected bureaucrats from the Gray Davis era run everything in Sacramento behind the scenes.
The idea the DNC 'left wing' is pushing to restrict the local elite's power and tax them is laughable. They just have a few noisy straw men to placate voters and fill their air waves. (I'm a registered Dem FWIW. I loathe the party these days).
By and large the wealthy in this country vote D and donate to left-wing causes and foundations and colleges. The working class (including union members, not necessarily union leaders) vote R.
Management deferred replacement of a $6M battery and the cost of its failure was 100-150M.
>People are always calculating how others will see the decisions they make. … They know that they have to gauge not just the external … market consequences of a decision, but the internal political consequences. And sometimes you can make the right market decision, but it can be the wrong political decision.
> I've been seeing content on Tiktok where even 100 miles away they're seeing small dead fish which is apparently according to the folks making the videos a massive red flag.
It's interesting that you mention that you saw this on TikTok. In the last two days, the Ohio train derailment has become one of the hottest topics in ALL of Chinese social media (Weibo, tiktok, Little red book, etc), 10 days after its happening.
I was confused when my Chinese friends started asking me about this event, which I saw on the news the day it happened.
Why the huge lag? Oh yeah, because of the Chinese "balloons" -- nationalist citizens are mad that CCP has taken a "soft" stance in the face of US shooting down Chinese balloons. Chinese official statements are along the lines of "how dare you shoot down my balloons, they are just passing through on accident", then stating that American balloons have entered Chinese airspace previously and that's unacceptable.
This entire thing is a mess, so here comes the typical media manipulation to focus both Chinese and non-Chinese negative attention on America, even though American media has been giving this event no less attention than something like this usually receives.
Many peopl say that capitalism should be laidsez-faire and government should leave us alone. But actually, government is on the SIDE of capital and corporations, and they constantly work together to keep the public distracted and divided enough to actually force these corporations to change:
Absolutely. I live in a completely different state and I'm pretty unaffected by this whole tragedy/negligence. I could sit and speculate about what actually happened, but what does that do other than spend energy on something that I'm not actually involved with?
Well, first off, trains run everywhere. So if it happens in Ohio, it can happen near where you live too.
Workers have been pushing to get a single day of paid leave per month and threatening a strike - but rail bosses have greedily ignored them to give more money to their stockholders (ie, themselves too). Then Congress voted to force a bad deal.
What you could do is to get informed and see the results of this blatant corruption.
Yeah, There is something to be said about genuine curiosity, but in the face of a emotionally changed misinformation blizzard the best option is to take a step back.
If you decide you are curious and actually want to care about railroad safety, dont react to the current crisis, "hit the books" and read some actually informative material about past events.
100%. It's important to note that doing so also doesn't make you complicit. I have a general disdain for the "do your own research" type of people because often they're not trying to seek out actual education, they're just trying to bolster some sort of preconception they have.
> Then I realized that it is always a conspiracy theory until it is too late.
In one lens, what you say is true. But that is because {true, confirmed, and supported} information comes slow from breaking events. And especially when money / harm is at stake, someone is usually willing to lie or hide the truth.
But viewing what you said through another lens, it can be easy to see this as confirmation bias (or other similar cognitive biases) that underweights all of the times you suspected a conspiracy, but where no causality was proven. As the joke goes, economists have predicted nine out of the last five recessions.
Be careful to remain at least as skeptical of social media posts as you are of companies, governments, the wealthy, and those in power.
Belief in multiple conspiracy theories can erode a person’s ability to remain rational. It seems to me that lots of Flat Earthers, for example, base their belief system more around who they chose to reject, than necessarily being accurate about what specific ideas they choose to believe.
I agree with your last paragraph in the sense that we should all be forever curious and we should spend a lot of trouble to reevaluate our errors in belief. That said, “do your own homework” seems to be misinterpreted by many as “reject all information from official sources”, which is a terrible idea.
For real. This looks really bad. Authorities in the area seem to be playing it like "it's safe until we have evidence that it's not," but who wants to volunteer to become the evidence?
If you're in that area, it'd be prudent to get out if you're able. It's systemic contamination. You don't get to go back in time for a mulligan if it turns out to be bad.
It's always played down. Nobody ever says "we really fucked up this time so you ought to fend for yourself." It's been, what, 10 days? There's barely coverage, and there's no transparency.
That's because someone is pushing very hard for the after effects of the derailing to be believed catastrophic.
There's zero critical thinking being applied because they (whomever they are) have been building up belief leveraging mistrust of the government, mistrust of corporations, mistrust of science (related to the actual chemicals involved) and false information about the facts of the derailing.
It's very similar to the way that Trump and company brainwashed their followers into almost overthrowing the US government. I won't be surprised to find out it's being done by the same people as before.
This is it - if you hear the word "wary" and know the verb "to wear" before encountering the written word "weary" it's totally understandable to assume that is how "wary" is written and to mix them up.
What I wanted to do with my comment is show this without coming across as a mean or pedantic - especially since in the context both work ok. I've no idea if I accomplished that, I probably come across as a dick but I hope I don't.
You said it's not a thing. It is, in fact, a thing. I've heard it and said it often enough to be sure it's not so uncommon that it's reasonable to say it's not a thing.
You also need to keep in mind what Google Ngram is.
>> "When you enter phrases into the Google Books Ngram Viewer, it displays a graph showing how those phrases have occurred in a corpus of books (e.g., "British English", "English Fiction", "French") over the selected years."
It's a collection of books. Books remain relevant, but it tells you nothing of usage outside that. You only have to run a search on Google to see that it's used in a wide range of unrelated contexts. It's not some obscure anachronism or regionalism.
Much like how irregardless is now considered a thing. One of these days "mute point" will be a thing too :). I better not look that up, maybe it already is. I often wonder what people think they're saying when they misuse phrases like that.
Grow weary (tired of) and grow wary (suspicious of/concerned about) are different things though. Irregardless is a modification of the already useful regardless. I'm not sure how they're comparable.
That sure looks like a phrase used across a wide range of contexts and unconnected fields, too wide to support any notion that it's obscure. There's even a non-English news outlet using it in its English coverage.
Even if that's the case, it's very easy to hear "grow weary" and conflate it with the similar word "wary", coming up with "grow wary" as a malapropism.
Those pronunciation guides confused me a lot before I scanned back, and read the words themselves (trying to ignore the pronunciations I'd already seen!) - so let me proffer:
- weary 'weir[in a river]-(r)ee'
- wary 'wear[clothes]-(r)ee'
Which just goes to demonstrate how weird and multi-sourced English is, doesn't it. And also maybe we just pronounce these very differently (I'm British) - 'way-ray' is way off to me.
I add the '(r)' because being British (and I believe some of the US) an 'r' following a vowel is under-pronounced (in the opinion of some other accent holders), as in 'wear', but not when followed by another (pseudo)vowel, in 'weary' - but that may not be the case for you.
Scotland - and the emphasis is on the first syllable ("wea-" is about 1.5-2x longer than "ry", with the "r" short and rolled). But remember mapping pronunciation of spoken-English to Latin characters is a little bit ambiguous due to accents. For example you use the word "where" to help describe how you pronounce "wary", but for me that "wh" in "where" is slightly aspirated.
"I've been seeing content on Tiktok where even 100 miles away they're seeing small dead fish which is apparently according to the folks making the videos a massive red flag."
I wouldn't bother watching a Tiktok video unless the video maker is an environmental professional. Otherwise this is just the blind leading the blind.
a current Professional Engineer's or Professional Geologist's license or registration from a state or U.S. territory with 3 years equivalent full-time experience;
or
a Baccalaureate or higher degree from an accredited institution of higher education in a discipline of engineering or science and 5 years equivalent full-time experience;
or
have the equivalent of 10 years full-time experience.
There are plenty of other people who you might expect to give a reasonable update on how nature (in general) is dealing with something like a chemical spill. Gardeners, birders, fishers, even some walkers or runners are outside regularly and tend to have a feel for what is going on in the environment around them. There are people I trust when they say the fish are hiding in the afternoon because the river is too hot and they stop fishing to avoid causing too much stress. If one of them told me they were seeing dead fish more often after an event I would file that away as a mostly trustworthy source of information.
Tiktok is unverified with no reputation attached to it. People can and do fake things happening on Tiktok for views all the time. The parent comment claims "people have been showing" without linking any of the video evidence, which if it exists which makes this 3rd hand rumor already.
"Prove it." would be my first respones. Followed by "Why are they dead?" and "Did you kill them yourself?" and "How often have you found dead fish anywhere?" and "How often do you look?" and "What killed these fish specifically?" etc
I guess falling back to "show me your degree" might be an easy way to answer all those questions at once.
I wouldn't assume the dead fish weren't there yesterday just because someone on Tiktok says so, for one thing.
Would you believe a random Tiktoker if they told you Elvis came back to life and camped with Aliens at the local park, the other day? If not, why is a video about dead fish more credible?
How do we know they’re dead from something specific? An expert could tell us the evidence for that. Some dipshit who posts a picture of some dead fish on TikTok can’t.
You are correct about that, but it's also worth noting that there's also no point listening to a corporate press release that's telling you everything is fine, either, because we don't put press officers in prison for lying.
We also usually don't have environmental professionals also working as press officers. If the press person even consulted with an environmental professional, the content has been filtered by both their lack of domain knowledge and their desire to put a good spin on things.
I will say the same thing about an environmental professional on the company payroll.
The problem I'm concerned about isn't ignorance, it is cynical CYA-ism and a giant conflict of interest.
You need a culturally-trusted institution to handle this sort of thing. I am not sure Ohio currently has one that can handle this, so I expect to not know anything until the lawsuits settle over the next decade.
I think it was Antonio Garcia Martinez where I read some content he made that drew a bunch of parallels to the US as very similar to LATAM in a lot of ways. I was fortunate enough to spend some time doing the digital nomad thing in Panama and personal security is way more explicit in places like that. Barbed wire around houses, big security systems, armored vehicles, etc. etc. because people didn't particularly trust the government to take great care of them. I some of these things happening in the US and its a bit concerning. I often and harshly criticize the police but they have a lot more accountability than a private security detail does. Feels like as a society we are making decisions taking us down a path of low trust and more violence. I don't pretend to know the answer though.
I'm aware this is a joke and also am aware that NYC is largely safe. It clearly struck a nerve however and I think thats for a reason which is things are heading that way generally.
