I don’t follow, stamping every function with : any lets you merge the branch and deploy it… trying to properly type everything extends the initial migration time likely to a level where management just says no.
Use a combination of allowJs and ts-ignore, do progressive enhancement, and convert your codebase file by file. Adding any everywhere literally turns off type checking altogether codebase wide, including type inference. It also means a huge PR that’s both just noise that needs to be fixed later, and messes with your git history (good luck getting anything useful out of blame or bisect now).
Just getting a green build doesn’t mean things are okay. You’re worse off than before doing that.
I disagree that you’re worse off (the core of my comment was that even a shitty migration encourages better practices)… but I wasn’t super familiar with TS hinting - using ts-ignore would be preferable.
Personally, I mostly work in PHP and we use a similar system. Strict typing is default off so we’ve slowly propagated declare(strict_types=1); to enable compile and runtime checking on a per file basis.
using any is actually much worse than using TS, because you’re basically telling the compiler “don’t help me here”… at least with JS the IDE is gonna help you… :/
Vast majority of it is just cheap coffee labeled to be this and marked up for tourists / gift market. Have tried it, just tastes like cheap old coffee. It’s not something genuinely sought after by coniseurs.
That makes this even dumber. If it actually had a good taste i could sort of understand it, in a honey sort of way. Sounds like it’s just a silly novelty.
It’s always about the story. Same reason restaurants get 2 and 3 michelline stars. It’s about how pretentious and fancy you can make everything surrounding the meal and not about the meal itelsef.
I’ve eaten at a 2 star Michelin restaurant. It was definitely theater and not a meal. The Menu is one of the best dark humor movies I’ve ever seen because it’s honestly not that far off lol
One star restaurants are the way. They usually have been so focused on their cuisine at that point they haven’t yet become super pretensious. Plus you actually have a shot at getting a table at these.
Everyone is saying Piracy but I say Public LIbraries, which often have CDs/DVDs/BDs/games now (depending on your locale). They’re taxpayer funded, so you might as well get your money’s worth, and they keep track of how often stuff gets borrowed which determines future financial support.
(And if you are tech-savvy enough to be on Lemmy, you probably know how to make a … permanent copy … for yourself to keep)
Libraries are great. Just think about it, if libraries as a concept hasn’t already exist, there is absolutely zero chance it will be invented in our time due to our overly restricting copyright law.
And also due to a rightward shift in the Overton window. A place where people just get to borrow books for free? That’s socialism. And it will completely kill the entire books industry
Which is exactly why big corporations are lobbying hard to get public library stripped of funds by any means necessary. I mean you can even 3D print spare parts in many libraries for free by now! The super rich cannot have that.
I mean shit, I don’t even have a DVD burner in any of my computers. Haven’t for a decade and a half. You expect me to grab my external drive to burn a copy? I can download anything on my gigabit connection in 5 minutes.
What part of Florida? I know there’s different wind speed ratings depending on how far north you’re building. In South Florida I only ever saw cinder block or full concrete exteriors.
I’m actually living in California now. Very different structures to the buildings. Houses are much smaller overall too. But the landscape is so much nicer to look at and explore. I never realized how boring and flat Florida was until I left.
In California we use wood because it flexes during earthquakes. There may be damage during a big one but at least the house is less likely to collapse on you.
I don’t know about that. I’ve lived in a typical “flimsy” American wooden house in an area that had a lot of crazy weather with extreme winds and even a couple of tropical storms. That house had absolutely no issue with those. These houses are a lot stronger than they look. They flex but don’t break.
My house is 80 years old, I’ve personally seen 3 feet of snow on its roof, it weathered hurricane Fran with no damage, hurricane Matthew caused a leak around the chimney that stained my living room ceiling a little.
I’m ready to take anything this area is willing to throw at me except tornadoes. A direct strike by tornado will pull it down.
I live in the Pacific Northwest where it rains quite a bit. Wood houses are fine in the rain as long as the moisture barrier and roof have been installed correctly.
I’m pretty sure those wooden houses in Canada are built differently from wooden houses in California. The ones I’ve seen are thin wooden struts covered with some drywall.
Edit: and just saying “flimsy” by comparison to the usual reinforced concrete structures back home. I now own a home in California and it’s definitely solid.
So funnily enough, 2x4 exterior walls meet code for 3 stories, but where I am, it doesn’t meet the insulation requirements of minimum r-20, so it’s normally built with 2x6.
That’s a weird take, I was raised in the Midwest which suffers blizzards, tornadoes, thunderstorms, ice storms, you name it. Never did I hear someone complain about their “flimsy” wooden house fall down, and a lot of those were built at the end of the 1800’s.
I know it is possible to build solid houses out of wood. The ones I’m talking about would 100% not withstand blizzards or tornadoes.
Like most in my native country, I grew up in a building made entirely of solid reinforced concrete slabs, including most interior walls. I could not hear my upstairs or downstairs neighbors and when I saw people punching holes in the walls in American movies I thought it’s just an exaggeration, not something that can actually happen. Wooden houses were culturally associated with poor rural people who couldn’t afford living in a nice solid apartment. That culture persists today, and even in isolated villages new homes are built with concrete structures and brick walls.
When I bought a piece of land and was looking at options for new houses, I found a company making very solid wooden homes (still a lot more solid than the average Bay Area home) for reasonable prices and both my and my wife’s families were outraged at the idea of building a house out of wood.
Just some random background to why I’d use the word “flimsy” for wooden struts sandwiched between drywall sheets.
i was so sure it was, i looked it up after seeing your comment and… you are right. even double brick which ive always been told was great, apparently isnt all that good. TIL
See how there are as few direct connections between inside and outside as possible. The whole thing is very light too, so it has very little thermal mass. This is combined with a white surface outside and that transfers very little heat. My 200m² house requires maybe 1.5kW of heating at -10°C outside in the winter. I have no AC, in summer we just leave the windows open until 6am and then shut the blinds automatically when the air heats up.
Pretty neat, I’ve never seen masonry like this before.
I’ll point out that the webbing is likely strong, but considering the lack of ductility, this seems likely to fail during an earthquake. What’re these called, I’d like to look into them more.
That's because Europe has had many more centuries worth of deforestation. The greatest resource the Americas had to offer to Europe was essentially unlimited lumber.
Once you’ve destroyed an ecosystem, it takes a lot of effort to bring back. Often you can’t just expect to plant the same type of trees as before and expect it to take.
There are ways to introduce things gradually, but it’s not an on/off switch.
Plus there are entire keystone species of trees that blights drove to actual or morphological extinction. I don’t know about European species, but the mountains of appalachia used to be covered in massive American Chestnut trees that were so big around at the trunk they were on par with west coast species. After the blight, you can still find groves of chestnut trees, but its like they’re a different species - they live 7-9 years and die basically around the time they first mast. They never live long enough to really leave the sapling phase.
If we did that in the US west coast, they would crack and fall apart from tectonic plate shift. You need to build things to be flexible for earthquakes and general shift.
I live in a 100 year old farm house in California and every spring and fall we have to move the strike plate (thing the door latch nubbin goes into) on the front door up or down about 3/4 inch due to seasonal house shifting. The door stops closing and we know it’s spring time!
That’s a really poor argument to pass down to people.
Solutions exist to make buildings earthquake resilient and the USA created a good part of it.
Vibration dampeners, structure stress relievers, special mortars and concretes, specific structural geometry, etc.
There is no reason why the US should keep its attachment to wood construction. Tornado alley would vastly improve if house were to shift from match sticks and hope to brick and mortar with reinforced concrete foundations.
Tornado alley is a completely different part of the US than the West Coast, which is specifically what I was talking about. It’s like 2000 miles away. Tornado alley doesn’t have earthquakes, so this discussion doesn’t even apply to that. Bust now that were talking about it, in tornado alley, houses at least do have a brick exterior around the wood.
I picked Tornado Alley because it’s low hanging fruit; I’ll get to that again.
USA has a fixation for wood construction, completely unreasonable and unjustifiable. There are several countries and regions in the world with sysmic activity that do not opt to build in wood.
Japan sits atop a zone of tectonic plate subduction. Hearthquakes are not unknown to them and they build with modern materials. Tokyo, with its extreme population density, is built to withstand earthquakes and hurricanes. Are the USA dumber than Japan?
Regarding Hurricane Alley, wrapping a woodframe with brick doesn’t make the structure sturdier, just makes it heavier and more prone to break under stress, as the brick work won’t have structural role.
A properly built modern brick or block structure has a super structure reinforced with rebar and concrete, which then receives the brick/block work to finish the building, with some walls being part of the superstructure of the building. This forms a monolithic construction that tends to be very stuborn and stays in place unless something blows it to pieces. Older buildings used other techniques, usually tied to the brickwork itself to create load bearing structures.
I understand a lot of homes in Europe are not well insulated, and weren’t built with it in mind. Climate change is causing problems with this design deficit.
It’s not like it’s a “wood house” though just the framing is softwood lumber. The foundation is reinforced poured concrete, there’s steel support braces, the ties and hardware are likely zinc coated steel, roof is asphalt shingles or steel, wind bracing is lumber or steel rods depending on code, could even have exterior brick or vinyl siding.
Wouldn’t the inside of your house still have wood framing structure like this though? Looks like this neighbourhood uses vinyl siding, but you could easily have a brick/stone/stucco exterior.
Isn’t it way harder to run plumbing/electric through cinder blocks, let alone hanging drywall? Or do you build a cinderblock box first and then frame the inside with wood?
This place looks like it doesn’t have a basement, which is a must in Canada, and all our basements are generally concrete pour or cinderblocks, but we still have framing on the inside walls, and usually everything above the basement is wood + facade
Typically, yes. In the US at least, cinder block houses are common particularly in Florida and coastal regions. The inside would still likely have a moisture barrier and insulation on modern homes, so you will typically have wood framing for interior walls to allow for wiring, plumbing, and insulation that is then drywalled over.
Wouldn’t the inside of your house still have wood framing structure like this though?Extremely rare. Most houses built until the 1959s are made of stone and mortar, with walls at least 2 feet wide. In Northern Europe, i.e. UK, Belgium, Netherlands, parts of France and Germany, you would fund brick and mortar walls. Interior walls were built with thin hollow bricks assembled with mortar. These houses are a pain to renovate and most people just put everything agaisntbthe existing walls and then glue their drywalls on top of it with adhesive mortar. Since then, it is mostly cinder blocks or hollow brichs that are then filled with concrete. Modern building regulations impose steel reinforcement in regions prone to earthquakes. Interior walls are built with a framing of steel railings that are very light and flexible when handled but very sturdy when assembled. The drywall is screwed on each side of these rails which gives room for electrical and plumbung.
Isn’t it way harder to run plumbing/electric through cinder blocks, let alone hanging drywall? Or do you build a cinderblock box first and then frame the inside with wood?
At least in South America (where most buildings are made of brick and mortar) there’s no drywall. The internal finish is a smooth layer on top of the bricks and that’s it. That makes it easier to hang heavy things on the wall but also makes it impossible to run wires of any kind. It also makes repairs more difficult.
Our schools in North America are mostly built like this. I think the bricks are hollow, so they can run power, but most things reside inside the drop ceiling.
Meanwhile most of your energy sources are not renewable and per capita the average emissions of the American is double or even triple of the average European.
Why the aggressive tone? Each technique has its advantages. I guess brick and mortar houses would burn less in California, which has the same climate as Italy and Spain
Whether or not the house burns to the ground is irrelevant when the damage caused by the heat alone would condemn a brick/stone house in the US. At least wood frame houses can be easily tore down and rebuilt.
Places generally build with whatever sensical building material they have most widely available. If there are a ton of forests, they probably build with wood. If there’s a ton of stone, they probably build with stone.
I live on a fault line along the pacific ring of fire, and so building with wood was an absolute necessity for us so long, as they were structurally more lenient to the constant earthquakes. Even now I believe our old government building is the largest wooden building in the Southern hemisphere (and it’s only 4 stories tall). These days as construction techniques have changed, we’ve obviously built things with concrete, steel, brick, etc., but the wooden tradition remains strong, with a huge majority of modern houses here still being built like this.
That aside, wood was also just a much cheaper material to build with, so it was the most economical material to use for a long time for much of the “new world”.
Right. Buildings were mostly wood and mud in Europe until the 18th Century. By then, cities became so dense that big fires were extremely deadly. Little by little people started building in stone, then bricks and now reinforced concrete.
It didn’t really have anything to do with fires. Pretty much every hardwood forest was cut down in Europe and any remaining were protected so they could be used to build ships.
America was colonized late enough that it never really became an issue.
Yeah exactly they basically stripped their continent bare of lumber during that period and it’s all at the bottom of the ocean now. The materials used are just as much determined by economic conditions as practicality.
I’m genuinely curious. I am in the southern US, Alabama specifically with the heat and humidity that entails. There are cinder block homes here, but they’re mostly looked down upon and almost always have mold and mildew problems. How is that handled with brick and mortar or concrete construction?
I don’t see why brick and mortar houses should be extra susceptible to those problems if build well. But of course Europe didn’t use to see the same extremes of heat and humidity as the US does, perhaps it will become a problem in the future.
You got it right I suspect. Most of these that I’ve seen are a single course of blocks with no discernible vapor barrier or anything. And maybe a thin layer of paint.
Double walls, with thermal insulation, external vapor barrier and built in ventilation ducts. Special additives for the mortars prevent moisture from seeping into the walls. Double or even triple pane windows and good quality, properly applied exterior paint reinforces the insulation.
I’ll risk the ones you’re used to see are single wall, probably bare block and perhaps poorly cobbled together, as if they were sheds or something alike.
There was even a movie made about that. It’s kinda bad but entertaining, Tim Robbins as the Gates/Jobs amalgamation is the saving grace, it’s worth watching for his performance alone.
Last season iirc, when Kim moved to another city and changed her name & style in order to keep out of the radar. She was together with some guy that kept repeating YEP rhythmically during sex.
Well yeah they’ve had 20 years to pad courts with corporate-sympathetic judges and neuter any other forms of government oversight. Course it’ll work out this time.
I like to shit on Microsoft as much as the next guy, but it is really weird what they got fined for compared to what Google and Apple are doing now. Ideally they should all be forced to stop.
Microsoft was the original tech-bro poster child. They grew up and became a household name in a much different economic and regulatory environment in the 80s and 90s that gave more of a shit about antitrust stuff.
Apple and Google had a much more favorable, and more lax, environment in the post-Bush era during their big growth years in the late 2000’s/early 2010’s. By the time they got around to doing the same shit Microsoft did, antitrust was already dead.
They won’t. Those lawsuits took years, and MS have been practicing the same shady business model for years since. It only got worse. Probably since the EU (and other governing bodies) are busy fighting Google, Apple and Facebook.
Bitcoin: 4.7% believed to be in the hands of a single person, another 3.1% in the hands of four addresses. Deflatory so no incentive to use it to make transactions. Value depends on the network effect (i.e. a pyramid scheme). Small transactions now too expensive to be realistic. 24% of the supply was created in the first year, 35% over two years. Movement of funds takes too long to be useful. Those who got in early are guaranteed to be richer than those who got in late without having made any effort…
Crypto would be great as a replacement of the stockmarket but it’s fighting to be cash instead and it’s doing a bad job of it because it’s cash as envisioned by tech bros, not actual economists.
I love posts like this, it lets me know most people still don’t have the first clue what they’re talking about. It’s honestly a bit impressive how nearly every point you tried to make is either misleading or straight up wrong.
I love posts like this, it lets me know most crypto lovers don’t have the first clue what they’re investing in. It’s honestly a bit impressive how you didn’t even try to actually argue against what I said because it’s just a list of facts.
If Bitcoin is only good for speculation and has no other real use because it’s too cumbersome then it’s like investing in tulips, and we all know how that ended :)
Real currency is backed by the work, goods and economy of a country. Gold is a mineral with intrinsic value because it’s useful to make things with. Bitcoin is backed by the hope of making profit by selling to a sucker that will pay more than what you paid… And it was meant to be electronic cash but people got greedy, it’s better for early adopters pockets to make people believe it’s a store of value that’s hard to trade (like physical gold, funny that) instead of something you can easily use to transfer real world money from one person to another without parking that money there forever…
But then you realise that the point of a store of value is that you invest X in it and you know that it will store that value and you’ll be able to withdraw whenever you need to and still have X or very close to it. A store of value isn’t something you speculate on, it’s somewhere where you put your money when you’re close to retiring or if you live in a country where inflation is very high.
Lol, you want me to spell it out for you dumb-dumb? Ok
4.7% believed to be in the hands of a single person,
You’re talking about Satoshi Nakamoro here. Other than a few test cases, no Bitcoin has ever been moved out of these wallets and Satoshi disappeared in 2010. People have continued to donate to these wallets over the years as a kind of tribute and to burn coins. While it’s technically possible he’s still alive, the fact that there has been zero movement from those accounts and that any movement, no matter how small, would immediately be seen and reported on makes it unlikely that these will ever be touched.
3.1% in the hands of four addresses.
Those are exchange addresses. It’s like trying to say that 4 entities control a percentage of all US currency and then it turns out you’re just talking about banks.
Deflatory so no incentive to use it to make transactions
Except of course the security, the fact it can be used across borders by anyone with an Internet connection, in poorer countries it can be more stable than their own currency, and just general preference.
Value depends on the network effect (i.e. a pyramid scheme)
This is absolute nonsense with “pyramid scheme” attached to the end. As more people use it, the value goes up because it’s accepted more and more places and has a higher liquidity? That’s literally part of every currency ever.
Small transactions now too expensive to be realistic
You show your hand that you haven’t bothered to update your views on Bitcoin since 2019. Not only are fees back to being low on the main network, with the introduction and adoption of the Lightning Network, fees are down to pennies or less.
24% of the supply was created in the first year, 35% over two years.
Yes, that’s how halving works. You present that with an insinuation that any point they could just mint more btc. This is ignorance at best, but more likely intentionally misleading.
Movement of funds takes too long to be useful.
Again, guess you haven’t been paying attention for a few years. This issue has been solved with the Lightning Network with transactions usually going through faster than tap-to-pay transactions with a regular debit/credit card.
Those who got in early are guaranteed to be richer than those who got in late without having made any effort.
Welcome to every investment opportunity. Those who get in early take a higher risk for more reward.
So yea, every point either misleading, or straight up wrong.
We’re blindly trusting this person not to do anything with their fortune!
Exchanges have never done anything shady and (for a second time) we’re trusting them even though they’re all established in countries with as little regulations as possible.
If something that can fluctuate by 50% of its value is more stable than your local currency you’re not investing in it, you’re buying USD, or in the case where you have access to Bitcoin you’re buying stable coins.
What the network effect means is that the only reason it keeps its value is that more people buy it at a price where people who were there earlier are making profit. If there’s no new buyers then it’s worthless. See the pyramid drawing itself now?
So the technology is bad enough that it requires a separate tech to work properly? Going back to your people in poor countries, how do you expect them to deal with the transaction cost to move their funds in and out of the L2 when required if they can only afford to buy a couple of dollars worth at a time?
It just shows how much early adopters could pocket and how unfair it is if it was to become the default currency, even more unfair than regular cash.
See #5 and let’s add that the reason fees are lower and transaction speeds faster is only because demand is low at the moment, Bitcoin’s network hasn’t changed. Still, when transactions were taking an hour or more to go through, how would you have dealt with paying for something if you had realized you didn’t have enough funds on the LN and you needed to transfer from your regular wallet? Or very simply, if you’re paying for something and the person at the receiving end is a true maximalists that sees how flawed the LN is, do you pay them hours ahead for something they’re selling you? That’s what I call a trustless transaction!
Oh so as pointed out in OP’s meme it’s not ok for traditional rich to be rich because they jumped on opportunities, but it’s ok for the Bitcoin rich to be rich because they jumped on an opportunity, got it 👍
The biggest difference imo between bitcoin and USD is that participation in bitcoin is completely voluntary whereas participation in USD is mostly not, especially when you look at the things done to maintain global USD hegemony and the consequences of leaders who try to, for example, trade oil in currency other than USD or create a hard currency for their country when the de facto currency is USD. Were someone to print (which i can’t believe ppl in this thread don’t realize is a turn of phrase) a bunch of new BTC then it would only affect people who voluntarily chose to participate in that system, whereas if someone printed a whole bunch of USD and injected it directly into the stock market, those affected worst by this are not in the system by choice, and many times they participate only by coercion.
I’m not a crypto guy by any means. But your point 5 doesn’t make sense. Almost all of our digital infrastructure is systems being supported by other systems.
If you want to look at debit/credit card processing that is legitimately “bad enough that it requires a separate tech to work properly”. The banking systems that existed before cards needed new systems to process those payment methods. From the outside looking in, your critique could literally be applied anywhere for anything.
Again I don’t even use Bitcoin. That’s just a bad argument.
Thing is Bitcoin maximalists are always defending Bitcoin as being perfect, that’s a major difference in the attitude of those who use the technology vs everything else (except Linux maximalists that are pretty much the same type of people).
To expand on that point and explain WTF I’m taking about:
Bitcoin’s network is so slow and transactions so expensive when demand is high that people now need to move their funds to a parallel network (called a Layer 2) where transactions happen in isolation and when people close their “account” the funds are moved back to the main network with balances being updated based on what happened on the Layer 2.
A problem is that it doesn’t eliminate the speed and fee issue completely as people still need to move their funds from Bitcoin’s network to the lightning network (and back eventually). That means during busy periods you’re still paying 30$+ to move your funds to the cheaper alternative and you still have to wait, potentially for hours, for that transaction to happen if you didn’t have enough funds in your lightning wallet to pay for whatever you’re buying. All of that means it’s not worth it for someone who doesn’t have a lot of money in the first place to buy Bitcoin to use it as cash, when the whole point of Bitcoin was to be trustless electronic cash (see Bitcoin.org for the whitepaper).
When transactions fees are low enough on the main network that small transactions aren’t as issue anymore? Well the Lightning network isn’t as useful anyway because transactions also happen quickly enough that it’s not an issue in most cases.
The point of crypto is to have a trustless decentralized system. Not Lighting network has watchdogs making sure fraudulent transactions don’t happen (not trustless) and a tendency to centralize: medium.com/…/mathematical-proof-that-the-lightnin…
There’s a whole lot of info out there about the flaws of both the main and the parallel networks and there’s even maximalists that believe Bitcoin is perfect as it is and the Lightning network shouldn’t exist.
You’re right. But they don’t want to hear it. Just like how most of the world believes in sky people and don’t want to face reality.
The world has been living on FIAT currency since WW1 when virtually every country left the Gold Standard. It’s been ingrained into everyone that deflation = bad, inflation = good. Yet at the same time every single financial advisor recommends dumping your savings into deflationary assets (houses, stocks, etc)… Okay. Makes sense to me.
39% of Americans do not invest in the stock market. Fuck them I guess.
Having 2% deflation instead of 2% inflation would be good for the economy. It would be a baseline to compete against for companies and mean less people would invest in bad investments that just beat inflation.
We also need to stop this ludicrous idea of infinite growth of the economy forever in order to be able to afford to retire. It’s detremental to the environment and to the quality of products the economy produces to expect such.
Inflationary policies and fiat currencies are the fuel behind both world wars lasting as long as they did.
Ancient Rome prospered with a strong currency, when they started debasing their currency it started the fall of Rome. The same will happen to us.
I agree that there is an unhealthy attitude to capital growth. That definitely needs to change.
As for the 39% of Americans not investing, how many have pension funds or other retirement schemes that do the investing for them? Regardless, they are free to choose what they do with their money. If they want to hold it, so be it.
A period of deflation might make for a good break, but not as a permanent solution. Investment inspires innovation, and innovation in new technologies will be vital in combating climate change.
I can’t comment on the wars or Rome but I think there are multiple factors there, fiat maybe being one but of what significance?
I’m not pro crypto per-se, but your argument is only valid for bitcoin, not crypto. Most of it is even worse to be fair, but there is a future for sane crypto IMO.
Since nobody else responded to the stock market argument: it’s how cash is envisioned to work by Austrian school economists, not the economists currently in charge. The average person needing to trust strangers with their money is not good.
It’s an entirely different perspective on how money should work (that was de facto illegal for decades), and only now can we put our money where our mouths are.
Also wastes energy and hardware (which includes rare earth metals mined by slaves) to endlessly compute hashes. Great solution for a post climate change world let me tell ya!
There were also early coronavirus vaccines being developed with mRNA tech to fight SARS and MERS. I have a friend who got the MERS vaccine as part of a test group.
And it came together with new rapid prototyping technologies for vaccines, and far better computer modeling than anything anyone has ever had before. Like, there were a bunch of technologies that just happened to be coming into maturity at almost the same time, and between those technologies and the combined powers of most of the major vaccine labs on the face of the planet, and the near-infinite money to tie all of that in a nice package, a vaccine was developed in 10 months
It’s really a story of humanity actually pulling their shit together and deciding to throw all their chips in a pile, as it were.
I was already amazed by the vaccines’ development but this really put into perspective just how fortunate we were and how Herculean the effort was to do it. It truly is awing what can be accomplished when the tools and our collective will are combined for a singular purpose.
They scream about it, but MRNA tech & the other advancements involved enabled us to get from zero-to-vaccine in record time, and I’m convinced that because of that, my 84yo mother with COPD is still here!
Some years ago, employees sued Amazon because the company had a lengthy security scan when people left, to prevent theft. Apparently it could take half an hour to go through, and they argued that this was unpaid overtime.
They lost, which seems like bullshit: as far as I can tell, the sane way to look at it is, if you’re obligated to do what the company tells you and go where the company says, then you’re on the job and should be paid for it. Once you’re out the door, you can choose whether you want to go home or go to a bar or just sit on the sidewalk; you’re not on the clock and you’re not getting paid.
If the company wants you to work 8 hours in the warehouse, then spend half an hour in the security scan, then you’re doing company business for 8.5 hours.
“Voting doesn’t matter. They’re all the same.” “Things can’t be solved because the global elite won’t allow it” “I don’t have to do anything because it won’t matter” “This is all big industry’s problem, why should I do anything”
have been manipulated/influenced/radicalized by a combination of paid media shills, RW billionaires and Saudi/Kremlin/Iranian propaganda.
Snap out of it and let’s all pitch in to save our children and world.
Agreed, at least in principle - but your statement is so reductive it really could be said about anything.
It’s so hard to motivate people to vote, people are exhausted and finding ten minutes in the day to feel good about oneself, much less performing a (seemingly futile, thanks to those poisonous ideas you’ve mentioned) civic duty is bordering on impossible. When 1 in 15 people in the UK need drugs just to keep their desire to live one more day in check - and a good chunk of the remaining population from that statistic are barely holding on - fighting the futility for someone else is an insurmountable goal.
I don’t know if we can afford to wait for climate to get worse for people to take action. People are dying preventable deaths, if it weren’t for the very evident effects of man made climate change being politicised or obfuscated, maybe it’d be just a warm Summer in Europe right now.
How long can we wait for a peaceful solution to form?
If we don’t wait - how many heads would we need on pikes next to Mortimer Buckley or Larry Fink before we start seeing positive change? When would be the tipping point for the guillotine to become the most ethical solution?
Sorry, I’m rambling. I just feel so hopeless sometimes, and putting a X in a box 2 or 3 times a decade doesn’t do anything to make me feel like we’re making progress…!
“Reductive” is the exact word that popped into my head, while reading PP’s comment.
I have come to suspect that we can look forward to continued basic survival being monetized, as VC-funded startups enter the space to disrupt breathing and skin-based evaporative cooling, and just generally making it to the next minute.
This doesn’t address your entire post/point but make sure to vote in every election, not just 2 or 3 times a decade - local and state (assuming USA, sorry?) elections definitely matter!
Voting is still good, but it’s the bare minimum. Not everyone has the time, but if you do, you should try to advocate publicly, and preferably in a group. Just like with unions, collective action is more effective. If I give feedback to my city individually, I’m a data point. But as part of an advocacy group, they reach out to us.
Voting matters, but unfortunately it appears to be an incredibly sub-optimal solution for dealing with climate change for the following reasons:
Just because you can vote, doesn’t mean that the option you need is even on the menu. It often isn’t.
Through hard work you can get the option on the menu, but that doesn’t mean your politician won’t do “deals” after they are in power.
Lobbyists get access to politicians 24/7 and have a lot of influence, you have one vote every 4 years;
Even if politicians do what you want, it is unlikely that your country by itself will make a difference, this is a global problem.
Meanwhile we are all fucked. It is likely too late already for preventing severe climate change. Our only hope now is geoengineering. The USA and EU are already considering blocking the sun.
The people who (rightly) have a sense of urgency about this are taking more radical action. They are blocking roads and throwing soup at famous paintings. These are desperate acts that seem rational in the face of the horror that we should strive to avoid, but the majority opinion of our species seems to be that these people are “too radical” and that common folks just trying to get by should not be inconvenienced, and that these radical eco-terrorists should be thrown in a cage.
To be honest, I’m not sure that our species deserves to survive.
Frankly, the biggest blame lies with Russia. They saw climate change coming, right after coming out of COVID-19, and they said “Y’know what would be a good idea? To go full conquest mode given our short-term advantage in the oncoming crisis’ and force the rest of the world to have to cut back on their climate change pledges to defend against our imperialism.”
I mean, not that the climate pledges were doing much, but Russia went in the completely opposite direction and gave countries the perfect excuse to give them up. I’m definitely not claiming other countries have no blame, but even China and the US were at least posturing against climate change.
No, they’re not rational in the face of anything. They’re stupid virtue-signalling that does nothing to reduce climate change. The only way they could possibly be rational is that they get people talking about them, but climate change is not some little-known issue. The entire world has been screaming about it for the past 20 years. If you haven’t been listening, some cunt with soup isn’t going to change that.
“Virtue-signaling” is just another though-terminating cliché of the current culture wars. It implies that the action has no cost to the person and provides some social credit. These people are risking their lives, violence, prison time, etc. Everyone hates them. Nobody knows their names. They keep doing it. Your hypothesis doesn’t hold. If we all decided that we don’t give a shit about this civilization-ending event, might as well through some soup at a van Gogh painting. Why not? It won’t matter anyway.
Even if these people were horrible “virtue-signaling” vandals, it is a microscopic problem in comparison to the real one: clime change. And yet the media focus on the former. Why? You do the math.
But you’re not talking about the people who are already doing everything they can you’re talking about the people who aren’t, and they haven’t, and they won’t, so it is industry and government who needs to do the things for them, because they won’t. If our votes aren’t enough then there is nothing more that can be done under the current system.
Its super important that Government info NOT be hidden behind paywalls, forced log-ins or even CloudFlare puzzles. People need to be able to freely click through to the official information.
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