Siddarth1977

Heat pump water heaters are drastically more energy efficient. Also, there are immediate air quality improvements from not burning fracked gas in your home. Also, recent research has shown that methane leaks happen far more than previously realized at every stage of the natural gas ecosystem, from initial extraction to pipelines to refining to residential usage, and every gram of methane is equivalent to something like 30 grams of CO2, so you need to consider the massive savings in warming from reducing that systemic leakage.

Finally, it's important to get these processes started immediately. It's still going to take decades for this policy to result in the millions of houses updating their equipment, and we might be down to a far smaller percent of grid power coming from fossil fuels by then.

No it's not a function of those two things, that's bullshit talking points from fossil fuel interests to deny climate change as being the dominant factor.

The value in regular small fires was understood science 80 years ago and has been a part of forest management for decades. Only in very limited places, generally wooded suburbs, has accumulation of fuels been a meaningful factor.

Talking about fire suppression in the current context is absurd. It's pointing the finger at the 0.01% cause and ignoring the 99.9% cause, which is climate change due to carbon emissions.

I'd treat the 3.5 from UCF, Maryland and UNC as roughly the same, but think MIT probably was slightly harder to achieve. Maybe UNC I'd view with a bit more suspicion since it's more likely that someone got by there due to one form of privilege or another, whereas the Central Florida student I can feel more confident they probably survived only by merit.

One funny aspect of the very phenomena that this article is about, is that it highlights how little difference where you go to school matters. Whether you go to "super prestigious Ivy league school" or "non-prestigious flyover country state school" you're probably using the exact same textbook, syllabus and have a professors who were classmates and peers at the same "prestigious" university.

Basically, the difference between a student at a midwestern public school and an Ivy league is about 99.999% how privileged they were in terms of either having rich, well-connected parents or matching a diversity criteria the school was seeking and at most, a 0.001% difference in merit.

This is such a hilariously evil comment.

The article is about how disenfranchised Swedish citizens are tired of being victimized by crime and violence and having their legitimate concerns for safety be invalidated and ignored by false accusations of racism... and you turn around and continue to ignore what they're telling you to instead insinuate some other imaginary real reason for their voting changes.

Maybe try actually listening to people and trying to help, instead of making up a cynical reason why they're bad people whose complaints can be ignored? If you read an article about a women's group concerned about sexual assault, would you be so quick to disregard their statements and try to find a hidden "real issue" to shift blame to?

> Do we have double the population we did in 2016? Double the resources? Double the technology? If not then why is the stock market twice as high?

One easy answer is that the "value" of a dollar is half what it recently was. And that seems to hold fairly true whether you want to use that dollar to buy groceries, a house, a hotel room or a share of a company.

If I measure my investments not in dollars but in say, days of vacation (so hotel, food, gas/airfare, tickets to things, etc) then my S&P500 investment is about where it was in 2016.

Agricultural use of water is actually productive though. Most of us prefer having food to starving. Having a lush, green front lawn in the desert however helps no one (and actively harms the natural plants and animals that belong in a given climate).

Additionally, while some water issues are over very large areas (eg, piping water from Colorado River to LA) lots of places have far more local water issues, where a given aquifer or reservoir provides water to a single city (but no agricultural users) and lawn watering really is a major drain on that local resource.

That said, yes, the situation in California is a mess in large part because people are growing ridiculously water-intensive crops in the desert because someone in the 1800s acquired senior water rights which our government granted in perpetuity.

Just you.

Humans are pretty good at seeing in the world whatever is on their mind or that they have fears or insecurities about. Sometimes that's the face of Jesus on a piece of toast, sometimes that's a scary figure that turns out to be a shadow, sometimes it's interpreting an innocuous word as reminiscent of injustices centuries in the past.

The same reason people buy crypto.

They expect to resell it at a profit to a bigger sucker before the whole thing collapses.

From HN guidelines:

Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies, generic tangents, and internet tropes.

My experience is the polar opposite. I quit eating meat a few years ago for ethical reasons after learning more about the industry (fun fact, when widespread animal abuse and unsafe, unsanitary conditions were revealed to be common across the meat processing industry, rather than crack down on the companies or introduce reforms, many midwestern states instead created laws making it a felony for employees to record their working conditions, the treatment of animals or the handling of meat. Literally protecting the abusers by outlawing whistleblowing).

Ordering a classic "veggie" burger at a restaurant, often some sort of bean/mushroom/lentil/whatever amalgam was clearly a massively different product than a beef burger. I thought of it less as a true "substitute" and more of just an acceptable thing to eat. The introduction of beyond meat has been a huge game changer for me. I probably eat 4+ servings of beyond meat products per week now and don't miss meat from my diet at all.

Maybe take a break from the conspiracy theory blogs?

You have everything here so completely backwards it's going to be tricky to unwind. Meat production has been massively subsidized in America for decades, resulting in terrible outcomes in every way- massive emissions contributing to climate change, polluted rivers and lakes, antibiotic resistant bacteria development, obesity, heart disease, colon cancer. As people have become aware of all these negatives, more people are choosing to eat less meat. There have been no meaningful regulatory changes to feed crops, although the world would surely be a better place if some of the existing subsidies were removed.

The meat industry has long relied on (often illegal) immigrants to work in butchering and meat packing plants, under unsafe conditions for low pay. Covid and increased border patrolling have disrupted this labor supply, making them cut back even further on safety, resulting in a couple plants experiencing predictable problems from years of cutting-corners.

Finally, Americans drastically overestimate their need for protein, due to decades of marketing campaigns, going back to steroid-injecting bodybuilders & athletes claiming that their muscles were due to "eating protein" because they couldn't publicly admit it was due to injecting anabolic drugs.

You're grossly underestimating the power of "progressives" within the overall governmental and administrative structure.

Sure, to win in 2020 the Democrats had to go with a more pragmatic candidate. But behind the scenes, the legion of government employees, aides, administrators, lobbyists, and bureaucrats are implementing policies and interpreting rules with more or less the exact set of values and beliefs that you're attributing to "weirdos" on twitter and in academia.

You're not going to see Biden give a speech where he says "Give minorities preferential access to covid treatments to compensate for systemic racism against them" but some committee of people appointed by his office will write the rules as such. So does it matter that Biden publicly claims moderate, centrist positions if all his appointments and policymakers put racial progressivism as their top priority?

One simple step towards a solution would be to mandate green steel for government projects. Bridges, guard rails, buildings, snow plows, school busses, etc. You'd create a multi-billion dollar market instantaneously and have all the VCs and private equity folks piling into new research and development. That would help drive down the price for future non-governmental purchases.

Also, at a large enough scale, your concerns about makers steel products going out of business if they can't use high-emission steel go away. If the entire EU mandated it, or the US, it would still work.

Comments like this make me wonder if other posters are living in an alternate universe from me.

The engineers I've known and worked with were more likely to judge someone as being "like them" for their usage of Emacs vs Vim than their race, and everyone is always trying to recruit more women.

The ageism is more tied to actual technology things. The young engineer thinks the latest blog post they read about how to do async programming or manage deployments is the greatest thing in the world and only wants to hire people who think the same. The elder engineer recognizes it all as slight tweaks and rehashes on older ideas, frameworks and systems and is more ambivalent and not as excited to dive into learning their hundredth new way to accomplish the same task.

If management cares about business outcomes, the elder engineer is great. If management cares about vanity metrics and using the latest, coolest frameworks, the younger engineer is great.

I agree there is a frustrating tendency to get into deflecting blame and pointing at different things, the situation with water is perhaps not a great example.

If you focus on household water usage, you'll have many people oppose your effort because they don't want to take shorter showers or buy a new washing machine. If you point out that some corporation is paying pennies to drain an aquifer to grow a water-intensive crop like almonds in the desert, it's easier to get the political base to affect real change.

Basically, you can try to get the majority of people to choose the greater societal good over their own comfort and convenience (good luck, humans suck) or you can try to convince enough of them to not let the almond farmers continue pillaging the shared water supply, which feels more politically viable.

> "I couldn't run into a burning building if I can't regulate my temperature," she says. "If I can't control having hypertension, I can't lift up a patient or I'm going to pass out."

> Bishof was terminated from her job for not meeting performance-related probationary standards. Bishof recently filed a discrimination lawsuit against the city

I don't understand how this can possibly be "discrimination". The person freely admits that they can't do the job, and that the nature of the job (fire rescue) means there are no reasonable accommodations that would allow them to do so. Then they turn around and sue for discrimination.

The form of social support this person needs is disability. Suing for discrimination because you can't do the job is a mockery of justice.

It would be great to see this happen in the opposite direction.

The next time someone intentionally misinterprets something as offensive when that clearly wasn't the intended meaning, or goes searching for ever more obscure terms to deem problematic, or tries to silence and shame people who try to do anything other than fight for social justice, we all just reply with "We don't do that here".

Someone starts to lecture you about how referencing "winter" is non-inclusive to Southern Hemisphere readers? "We don't do that here". Someone says you need to rename your firewall "whitelist" of IP addresses? "We don't do that here".

It would be glorious. Everyone could treat each other courtesy, grace and assume positive-intent. Instead of walking around on eggshells and always worrying about what the most cynical, negative interpretation of a word or phrase could be, everyone could relax, treat one another as friends and allies and focus on solving real problems.

Or, we could continue down our current path of Orwellian new-speak, where a new group of religious extremists deem ever more language as blasphemous and everyone joins the witch-burners for fear of being labelled a witch themselves.

I have a degree in computer science and a couple decades of experience with software development for, and deployment on, the internet.

I think the metaphor of comparing internet bandwidth to pipes/tubes carrying water is perfectly apt. It seems like a very simple, direct and effective way to describe issues of bandwidth, connectivity, congestion and overall infrastructure.

I've never quite understood why we all pretended like that was a bad analogy. I guess just because it came out of the mouth of an old, white Republican.

One aspect of that which is a bit apples to oranges, is that the US is both incredibly easy for foreigners to enter and travel throughout, as well as being diverse enough that such travel wouldn't raise any eyebrows.

At any given moment there are a million foreign people freely traveling around the US- some on vacation, some visiting family, some for school, some for work, some for medical treatment, etc. It's relatively trivial for a nefarious organization to find a person who speaks English and can legally enter the US.

For Russia (among other places) none of this is true. Visas to enter the country are harder to acquire, movement within the country on such a visa is still constrained, a smaller number of foreigners means easier for intelligence to monitor, and far fewer people have the language skills or physical characteristics to blend into the local populace.

I'm not sure why you're attacking me with this random, unrelated statement. I didn't "blame the working class" in any way, and re-reading my comment I can't come up with any interpretation of my statement that could be read as such.

Are you trying to suggest that the working class is the root cause of inflation, and that by me pointing out inflation it was an attack on that group? I genuinely can't figure out why you're angry here. Is this trolling? I'm confused.

Despite being oft-repeated, that educational claim isn't really true.

In 2016, Trump beat Hillary in white college-educated women, despite all the claims about gender and education popular in certain sections of media.

I think one big problem with discussion about American politics today is that we all pretend like "Republican" and "Democrat" are in any way logically consistent groups representing two opinions. The truth is, they're both completely absurd coalitions of diverse groups, bound up out of necessity by America having a two-party system.

Instead of trying to split people into two groups along whatever line - education, income, urbanization, race, religion, we should just accept that the parties are a hodgepodge of many different groups. For instance, the Democrats have as a coalition both Black voters and LGBT voters, despite the fact that Black Americans have been far less progressive on LGBT issues than White Americans. Republicans have as a coalition both "small government" fiscal conservatives and Christian social conservatives, despite these groups often having polar opposite policy goals.

I'm curious how old you are and where you grew up.

In the 90s I would have considered $56,000 per year as rich. In the 2000s it would have been upper-middle class, or "senior white collar professional". In the 2010s probably down to "office job" or "good blue-collar job".

There's something funny about seeing people point to a salary that I grew up thinking was a best-case scenario dream as being insufficient. Maybe if our policies focused more on quality of life rather than nominal wages, we could help people instead of just having decades of inflation.

Sweden isn't socialist.

Sweden has welfare benefits slightly more titled in favor of the benefit receivers relative to the US. California unemployment lasts 26 weeks (182 days) compared to Sweden's 300 days. The USA provides free education from K-12, and then subsidized post-secondary education. Sweden provides citizens free tuition through college (international students pay similar tuition to American universities).

Everything a Swedish citizen might receive from the government, an American would have an analogous program, it just might have a lower payout, shorter duration or have more bureaucratic hassles to get. But it's not like these are fundamentally different systems, they're the same system with some numbers tweaked.

So hurray, people learned from the horrors of the 20th century that socialism inevitably leads to rampant corruption, suffering and genocide? Socialism caused 100 deaths for every death the Nazis caused, I don't understand how we don't see someone advocating for it as equally appalling to someone making pro-Nazi statements.

Whether you look at the Soviet Union, China, North Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Yugoslavia, Venezuela, anywhere in Africa, you inevitably find that socialism brought horrific suffering, extreme poverty and widespread death. It doesn't matter whether the country is big or small, has lots of natural resources or none, is ethnically diverse or homogeneous, in literally every single data point we have, the empirical truth is clear, that private property and competitive businesses create better outcomes than centralized socialist systems.

If this is what you believe (and not just rhetoric you're employing to sway people that you know to be untrue) then maybe it's time to take a step back and widen your world view and broaden your sources of information.

It's of course always problematic to oversimplify the thousands of different issues and perspectives into simple "left vs right" or "conservative vs liberal" buckets, but overall, it's completely accurate to say that America has moved massively to the left, or alternatively, that liberals have been winning for decades.

The right-wing ideals of individual liberty & responsibility, of meritocracy and free choice have been completely obliterated from academia, media and public opinion. The entire narrative is owned and controlled by a left-wing view of race-based collective groups (which would have be class-based in Europe, but American left focuses more on race than class), along with an assumption that luck or privilege is the sole or at least primary driver of inequality.

On essentially every issue the left has not just won, but moved the goal posts of debate. You may just not notice it because you either agree with the moves or because which issues get focus aren't the ones you care about. The American left is doing little to solve climate change, pollution, affordability of middle class lifestyle, etc, but that's because they don't "really" care about those issues. They're winning on LGBTQ+, winning on race-based initiatives, winning on government-controlled access to healthcare, winning on federal power expanding and state power receding, winning on narrowing free speech, winning on reducing religious freedoms and winning on government-controlled land use, government-controlled economy, etc.

I was a left-wing radical in college. Without really changing my stances since then, I'm now a left-wing radical on only environmental issues but basically a centrist on others and occasionally on issues of free speech or free association it's only the right defending those freedoms.

The people in government (and/or lobbyists and special interest groups controlling them) absolutely do not "have your best interests a heart".

I'm way less concerned about someone who just wants to sell me more than about the government. It's trivial for me to not buy a new package of sugar-snacks no matter how much they advertise it, whereas governmental actions can ruin my life.

Characterizing the firms who defender homeowners from abusive hikes in their tax rates as being akin to "ambulance-chasers" seems completely backwards to me.

My tax rates seem essentially fraudulent and designed to bleed me dry. My comparisons include houses twice as large, in better school districts, with views, with pools, etc. The firms who help protect me from getting robbed by this bureaucratic exploitation are more akin to an honorable defense attorney protecting a wrongfully accused victim.

And of course, the whole notion of increasing property taxes is absurd. The government budget for next year should be roughly the same as this year. If house prices went up 10% that doesn't mean that the entire state government budget went up 10%.

A flat "resident" tax would obviously be the most fair. Everyone has equal rights to the roads, the firefighters, the libraries, etc so simply divide the budget by number of people and everyone pays their fair share.

Obviously that wouldn't be tolerable in contemporary America, but there is still something absurd about suggesting that because some houses in my neighborhood sold for more last year, that I should have to pay thousands of dollars more for the local government.

The massive inflation in city and state budgets due to soaring property taxes is a huge abuse of the middle class and transfer of wealth to the pork barrel of connected insiders profiting from government contracts, grants, etc.

There's no need for this sort of snarky trolling.

Systemic discrimination against Black Americans both historically and today is well documented and understood. I could have written a long preamble about the many elements of society that factor into racial disparities, but I assumed I could skip that for brevity since everyone on HN is already well aware.

You need to look at this data with an intersectional perspective. An overly generalized label of just "Black" as an identifier does little to help and may actively mislead in certain situations. Considering multiple attributes- race, educational attainment, location, industry, job function, seniority, etc is critical because the intersection of these may cause dramatically different experiences.

Consider this example to maybe make it clear. Imagine a gay man pursuing a career as a Broadway dancer versus a gay man pursuing a career as an elementary school teacher in Alabama. Will being gay have the same risks and challenges for each man? Is it fair or useful to try to group their experiences into one "score" for if that attribute is an advantage or disadvantage?

Wow. Fascinating that you're unable to see them, but I guess I also read about people in Russia not seeing anything amiss about their media so I shouldn't be shocked.

Here's a handful of "woke" things I've grown tired of, more because they're such overused cliches or unrealistic things that break my suspension of disbelief than any opposition (I'm a far left, pro-LGBT+, progressive atheist feminist to disclose any biases), but in no particular order:

Every show having an "overcoming sexism" or "overcoming racism" narrative, where inevitably a white guy is the evil villain who underestimates, mistreats or is unfair to the protagonist and then the female/poc character gets to overcome this systemic injustice. (Sometimes this is central to the whole show, sometimes it feels like just an obligatory scene in an otherwise unrelated story).

Casts that have an unrealistic "forced diversity" element. You might call it token representation, but if the scene is a random office in middle-America and the 6 characters are 6 different races or when each character is designed specifically to be the inverse of a stereotype, it makes the show feel less authentic and genuine. Related is changing characters from existing stories to be more diverse according to contemporary American notions of identity.

Men being depicted as so absurdly rapey, or the general overuse of sexual harassment or threatening behavior.

Exaggerations of nepotism, sexism and racism in most shows.

As to your question of "whats wrong or what should be done differently", I think there are a few challenges. For instance, we all sort of accept action movies being full of guns and explosions while recognizing they're not at all representative of reality. However, there does seem to be some evidence that these movies contribute to European misunderstanding and to greatly overestimating the likelihood of encountering gun violence in America. The current set of media might bias a generation of young women to fear there's a rapist in every room and that every career disappointment is a manifestation of systemic discrimination.

An easy parallel might be looking at the over-use of depictions of Black men as gang members, drug dealers or criminals in 1980s and 1990s Hollywood. Any one particular movie scene or tv show might be fine on its own with such a character, but when similar characters and scenes show up in dozens of unrelated titles and as a disproportionate representation it becomes problematic. It's different groups now being the recurring villains, recurring fools, etc, but it's the same fundamental issue.