chki

>I think most "crisis" are developed for election marketing and grifting. Horrible situation such'n'such is an existential threat! Vote for me or give me money to save all of humanity!

I think that's much more reasonable. I wouldn't agree with you that it's "most" but sure, that's certainly happening to some amount.

>Keeping people divided stops them from focusing on the real issues that politicians can't/won't tackle, and it prevents them from uniting against politicians/corporations/etc.

This part however, I don't buy. That's a conspiracy theory. Who exactly is carrying out this nefarious plan? And how do they manage to have that much influence to be able to do that in most countries?

Sorry, but the difference between "rule" and "control" seems more like a play on words and less like a coherent argument. Also, "divide et impera" might be reasonable if you are in the business of ancient roman foreign policy but I would need to be convinced that it holds true for the inner workings of modern democracies. I don't have the feeling that the people around me are particularly afraid all the time and if they are, it leads to them wanting change instead of being paralyzed.

The connection between - media producers make money by grabbing attention - grabbing attention is easier if you create threats and crises --> the media tends to overblow things

seems so much more straightforward.

"There seems a pile of circumstantial evidence that the rotating series of crises may merely be a device for controlling the masses through fear."

And who is doing the controlling? Wouldn't it be easier to control people if they are happy and content, given that in human history revolutions were almost always a product of suffering and unhappiness?

Isn't it much more likely that the many crises we perceive are a product of imperfect human perception and the enormous development of mass media instead of an enormous conspiracy theory?

Why can't drug dealers claim to sell recreational tea products?

But what would be the motive? As Jon Stewart said: If this was about funding for scientists, the oil and gas companies would have already made it rain in nerd-town.

As discussed above, that claim is not supported by anything. The study you cited doesn't give this as a result.

The author of the opinion pieces you cited is apparently relying on this study regarding cold deaths:

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5...

But his interpretation is dubious at best because the study is not about climate change! The reduction in deaths attributed to cold or heat might not be connected to climate change at all, the study doesn't say anything about it. That's solely the author's interpretation. From the actual study (which is also pure speculation because their method doesn't provide this causality): "The results indicate that global warming might slightly reduce the net temperature-related deaths, although, in the long run, climate change is expected to increase mortality burden."

He also doesn't provide a clear source for his claims on economic development, so I'm still sceptical.

First of all: to prove Hansen wrong in the articles you picked you would need to prove that we haven't already reached the tipping points he describes. Climate change is not a nuclear explosion, you can't see it explode but it might have done so with the effects being 50 or 100 years in the future.

Secondly, the temperature is actually rising steadily, which is very different from Zeno's thought experiments.

And thirdly you are not actually making an argument at all. People being wrong about tipping points might be the one's who cried wolf but in the end the wolf will still be there according to the best science available – even if there are not tipping points at all! Climate change alone is set to harm us and especially the poorest people on the planet, even if there are no additional tipping point effects.

Can you provide a source for that number? I didn't find it in the IPCC reports and googling the impact of climate change on GDP gives _very_ different results: https://www.reuters.com/world/climate-change-putting-4-globa...

Edit: to be clear, that's not the only thing dubious about your comment. The IPCC does not study climate change but aggregates climate change studies. Asteroids are obviously less "likely" than climate change which shouldn't even be a category because climate change is already happening and already has a real impact. "The world won't die in a fireball" is a red herring, the world will be fine but people will be far worse off, especially poor substance farmers in sub-saharan Africa, who also – to come back to you original point – don't contribute a lot to global GDP but are still humans that matter and shouldn't starve to death.

While that is a nice story, there are apparently not many actual records supporting this. https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/43461/is-there-a...

Or by learning the meaning of the word "scrambled".

Just to make this clear to everybody: there are no signs at all that this fire was arson. There are multiple explanations for the cause of the fire involving the construction site and some sort of negligence, which seem highly likely to be true.

If what is presented in this article is actually true that would be a systemic failure of epic proportions, right? Not just in this concrete case but don't these fundamental papers get reproduced before everybody takes them for granted and pours in enormous amounts of research grants believing in them? Is this article an exaggeration?

Actually where I live (EU) the law is pretty forgiving – at least in my opinion.

I think the comment in and of itself is not very substantiated but that's not why I commented. The comment I was replying to is a complete non-sequitur. The top-level comment only mentioned "non western immigrants" in passing by saying that they were _less_ likely to be unemployed. To follow this with ranting about "non-western immigrants" is simply not acting in good faith and not adhering to the site guidelines, especially

>Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.

Please don't do this here.

Maybe if we had leaned in on nuclear 40-50 years ago. (Even then, Uranium does not grow on trees). But right now, that's not a viable option for the next thirty years. Industrial and Regulatory challenges are impossible to overcome in the timeframe that's needed.

>And there's still no sign of serious efforts to build charging infrastructure on a 'for the masses' scale

It's not enough but there are 2,000 EV charging stations installed in the EU every week. 10,000 would be better but we're not even one order of magnitude off the target.

Not sure whether I'm smarter than you but I have studied EU Law. There are provisions in the EU Treaties that give citizens of member states an "EU citizenship" (see Art. 20 TFEU). Those EU citizenships give EU citizens – among other rights – the right to live and work in any other EU country and vote in local elections [1] Before Brexit British citizens had this EU citizenship as well.

The question that arose after Brexit was, whether British citizens would possibly retain this citizenship, which could have meant that they would retain the rights that come with it as well. There are different arguments why British citizens might have kept this EU citizenship, for example it might be argued that the withdrawal of a _state_ from the Union can not mean that _individuals_ loose their rights or it could be argued that such a loss of rights would be disproportionate.

The CJEU has now interpreted the treaties in such a way that the withdrawal does indeed mean that individuals loose their EU citizenship, arguing that "the authors of the Treaties thus established an inseparable and exclusive link between possession of the nationality of a Member State and not only the acquisition, but also the retention, of the status of citizen of the Union".

So this ruling might have had a big effect if the CJEU decided in a different way. The way they decided now, everything stays the same. If you are in possession of another EU member states citizenship (Slovakia) this will not change anything for you, you will remain an EU citizen.

[1] Technically many of those rights were already in the treaties before the introduction of the EU citizenship, so it is a bit "declaratory" in nature.

> Ballots need serial numbers that trace back to a person that we can pick up a phone and confirm their vote when elections are contested.

That would mean that elections are no longer secret. There are many good reasons why elections are secret in most (all?) democracies. It makes it impossible for people to be pressured into voting a certain way or payed to vote a certain way. It also means that you can't be prosecuted for voting a certain way. Giving up all of this would open up so many new avenues for voter fraud.

Edit: This is not necessarily an argument but secret ballots are part of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

> Because Germany is still producing 6× more energy with coal than Poland

That's already not true.

> In 2020, Poland produced 152,208 GWH from primary energy sources, relying heavily on coal and fossil fuels. Hard coal, accounted for 47% of primary energy production in 2020, followed by lignite (24.9 %), natural gas (9.1 %), crude oil (1.6%) and renewables (10.75 %). More than 6% of Poland’s energy was produced by industrial power plants.

In Germany there were 560,000 GWH produced with 16.2% from lignite and 7.5% from hard coal.

According to my napkin calculations that means Germany produced approximately 1.4 times the amount of energy by coal.

I'm living "there" and it really doesn't bother me a lot.

That's a red herring. The danger to birds has been shown to be almost negligible when compared to other concrete structures, cars, cats etc. Birds will get killed by a lot of things, it's not reasonable to draw the line at this point.

It's not about copying or perfect emulation. It will – probably – be very difficult for you to paint something that looks like it was made by Picasso to yourself. There is no need to involve any experts in this, you can be the judge of your own painting.

> you lose the white key/black key distinction

I'm not sure what I think about this new system but the "black key = accidental" association is probably not very helpful to anybody playing on/after an intermediate level as there are cases where accidentals mean white keys (for example f flat or g double sharp). It might be helpful if you're a beginner though.

That either means you guessed a lot and got too many wrong – or you were extremely good. If you only took 10 minutes that means you only had 17 seconds per problem; I'm not too bad at pattern recognition (I think) but for some of those questions 17 seconds (or even 30 because it's an average) would be way too short for me.

I don't use a lot of emojis privately but I especially do not use them in a professional environment. I think one of the reasons being that I dislike the aesthetics, which plays into another reason, which is that they "feel" unprofessional. (Although there is probably nothing inherently unprofessional to them, it's basically just a novel way of communicating).

The blog post mentions increased interpretability and adaptability but I think making emojis more professional and aesthetically pleasing "in a professional setting" might be a big step as well.

> Actually disagree, plug-in hybrids will run on battery for most short trips in the city. It’s cutting out all the low hanging fruit for pollution.

That's true in theory. Unfortunately in practice - at least where I live - Hybrids don't get charged at home. People buy hybrids for the tax/other benefits but just park them on public roads. Which means that you get the worst possible state where you have pseudo-green ICE vehicles that run with a lot of extra weight in the form of a basically useless electric motor. (Except for recuperating but that's not worth it)

Maybe that's part of his art? To show where music and experiencing something as music "ends" and where art "begins". Exploring the boundaries of what constitutes music or art is interesting to me.

> I don't think any of that sort of music will survive long, because the concept is no longer clever after it loses its novelty.

At some point it stops being a novelty and becomes a historical event, where a piece of music has already been playing for 400 years. Wouldn't it be interesting to visit a place where you know that people hundreds of years ago have listened not only to the same piece of music but to the same performance as you are experiencing right now. That listenership spans centuries?

This is an absurd position to take with regards to new legislation that will in almost no way benefit corporations. Sure, it might be watered down and not as effective as it could have been – as alleged in the article. But it's still legislation that corporations would much rather not have and be able to do what they want.