Yet we have Microplastics, PFAS, & a slew of other dangerous contamination across the planet. And the military industrial waste is rarely mentioned.
It seems the EPA cares more about enforcing CO2 production & making sure a homesteaders doesn't build a pond...than it does about extremely harmful & destructive chemicals dispersed across the planet by industrial & military waste.
So I suppose the research is good but the emphasis & enforcement is what really matters. And while there have been historical wins, the agency seems increasingly like a political revolving door to entrench industrial incumbants.
> They want decisive and ambitious action, you can't get that if we all turn to doomerism.
What if "doomerism" is a key component to demoralize people to accept "decisive and ambitious action"?
Note that most of the environmental policy talk is on a global level...blaming living people who aren't wealthy enough to benefit from financial capital. Making everyone who doesn't make their living off of financial assets have a worse quality of life...while those who benefit from financial assets even more wealthy.
Environmental policy talk is not on a local level. Never mind the water usage of the AI centers & how it affects communities. The farmers will have to sell their land so big capital to buy it on the cheap. The money pump always leads to accumulation of Capital.
It sure seems like the rhetoric goes one way. Making the rich richer...so they have all the carbon credits to do whatever they want...transcending the "tyranny of morality" while they fly in private jets to "save the climate". Making the working/middle-class poor..."you will own nothing & be happy". Making the poor radicalized & pointing their finger at each other.
This seems like a global scale psychological experiment more than anything. At some point the true believers in climate science will be disappointed by the contradictions of their heroes...because at the end of the day...it's about money & power. There is no "we". There is only "you will have to sacrifice so I can be more wealthy & hold more leverage over you".
I learned to consider that if one brings up Dunning-Kruger...projection/irony may be at play.
Anyways...I've had a few reoccurring issues with libraries. Note that the language is framed on a case by case basis...not general rules.
1. The essential implementation is a small amount of code...wrapped in structures just for packaging essential code. The wrapping code can be larger & more complex than the essential code.
2. There's small differences between what's needed & what's provided. Which requires workarounds for the desired outcome. These workarounds muddy the logic & can be pervasive at scale.
3. There can be dissonance between the app architecture & the library api.
4. Popular libraries in particular...create a culture of thinking in terms of the library/framework. Leading to resource inefficiencies...And outright dismissing solutions that are a better match for the domain. In short, the library/framework api frames the problem & solution...Which may not match the actual problem & optimal solution.
5. The library/framework authors are concerned about promoting the library/framework. Not solving the actual problem. Many problems need to be solved. The library/framework just be the "Golden Hammer" to pound in your screw.
With all that being said...there are many useful libraries that define & solve problems in their particular domain. Particularly with common, well defined, appropriately scoped requirements.
I imagine a good example for 4 would be the Tidyverse. It's very nice, but R with and without Tidyverse packages are very different experiences with different syntaxes, conventions, and even communities.
Though the addition of pipes to the base language is helping fix that.
Because America has been the paragon of health over the past few decades...because America spends the most per capita on Health Care. What a super effective system. Obviously everything was working out so great before this JFK guy came.
America has excellent healthcare if you have money. We've lead more medical advances than any other country and our doctors have the longest and most extensive education and training requirements.
I work in healthcare - most problems we see in the hospital are related to chronic illness caused by poverty and the gutting of social services. Many other countries spend more on social services than healthcare, but in the US it's flipped.
Harvard received the "worst score ever" clamped at 0.0 in 2023. By the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. The actual score was -10.69.
They were particularly oppressive on anyone espousing opinions on the political right...Both leaning toward Individual liberty & stateist inclined.
While I believe that freedom of speech is a right not to be infringed on. Their current stance is selective. They have a massive endowment. So Harvard doesn't need subsidies. Since their endowment benefits private parties, Harvard can be funded by private parties.
Alcoholism happens to people who have jobs as well. Though there's a policy of being sober at work which limits drinking to off hours.
Another possibility is that Basic Income alone doesn't solve all problems. Life direction & perceived opportunity to better oneself is needed. Basic Income may enable destructive behavior. But the underlying root cause may still be present even if the person is employed.
Most people need more than mere "opportunity to better oneself". It's almost always a shortage of motivation. UBI would reduce this motivation, I believe.
This is why many people don't trust "The Science". It's the positivist materialist institutionalist gaslighting. If the conflicted institution hasn't published the opinion or the measurements then it doesn't exist. Don't believe your lying eyes or ears. If you notice somethingnot published, you are automatically wrong. All whistleblowers must be discredited.
Isn't this a tactic of con artists & cult members who have much to gain from public perception & policy?
> If the conflicted institution hasn't published the opinion or the measurements then it doesn't exist. Don't believe your lying eyes or ears. If you notice somethingnot published, you are automatically wrong. All whistleblowers must be discredited.
It’s striking how many wrong things are packed into that paragraph. Science isn’t trustworthy because of the institution, but because it challenges its theories and anyone can review and repeat it. In contrast, the claims being made here started from someone’s belief that they have a financial benefit to not having windmills nearby and work backwards to construct a supporting narrative.
> If the conflicted institution hasn't published the opinion or the measurements then it doesn't exist.
More accurately, we’re asking for those measurements so anyone else can review them. We’re asking for the methodology so anyone else can review or replicate it. Emotional reactions like yours tend to be a great sign that someone has a strong interest in a particular outcome and humans are notoriously bad at critically evaluating things they want to be true. Scientists are no different, which is why they put so much effort into looking for ways to test their work.
A great similar example are the “electromagnetic hypersensitive” people who claim to have all kinds of health problems caused by wifi or cellular signals. They’ll claim that they’re not being taken seriously because they’re starting backwards from the position that their health issues are caused by EMF and anyone who disagrees is “suppressing” them. The problem isn’t “lying eyes and ears” — their headaches or sleep problems are real - but that they have made a wrong explanation part of their self-identity and are unwilling to reconsider that. Repeated double-blind studies have shown that these people can’t identify EMF at better than chance, and that they’ll report health issues caused by EMF which never existed, and that’s a tragedy because there is a real cause they’d likely be able to find if they were willing to give up on that theory. Many of the wind power opponents are arguing in bad faith trying to make their aesthetic tastes sound scientific but I’m certain that some of these people have real, non-psychosomatic medical issues which are not caused by turbines but could be localized if they put their effort into broader investigations.
So what are the sources for people driven insane by it?
(I have no opinion, but find it mildly suspicious given that I happen to sometimes drive through Germany, and the country seems to be currently less insane than, say, US)
This as a sarcastic rallying cry of conspiracy theorists has always amused me.
You ARE aware of visual and auditory illusions right? Or the various ways your brain outright lies to you in order to save a few calories worth of thinking?
How much of your vision is real? Do you know? Can you prove it?
> Which somehow convinced ~49.8% of the country that the richest man in the world somehow has their interests at heart.
Well...when you consider the competition you get what you get. In this case the richest man in the world positioned to be the "savior" from the previous regime.
> its bureaucracy is roughly the same size to that of other developed nations.
Slashing the bureaucracy is not the full story. Basically, most Americans have umbrage against the previous regime. So the enemy of my enemy is my friend...or at least useful.
> Basically, most Americans have umbrage against the previous regime.
80% of all of features in Word are useless to me, but for each user, it's a different 80%.
The same with government. There isn't a person alive that doesn't have issue with some part of it, but start going down the list, and you'll very quickly discover why so many parts of it are important, and why you shouldn't delegate picking and choosing to an unelected billionaire narcissist with no skin in the game, no consequences for bad behavior, and most of all, no legal authority to make any of those arbitrary choices.
It seems the EPA cares more about enforcing CO2 production & making sure a homesteaders doesn't build a pond...than it does about extremely harmful & destructive chemicals dispersed across the planet by industrial & military waste.
So I suppose the research is good but the emphasis & enforcement is what really matters. And while there have been historical wins, the agency seems increasingly like a political revolving door to entrench industrial incumbants.