Funderpants

An Olympian lecturing in personal responsibility is a sure demonstration of lack of self awareness. Between government funding of athletes directly, venues, infrastructure, security, logistics, and of course a stable society where one can dedicate themselves to sport there is no Olympics without collectivism.

But like all Conservatives the lesson he took away is “I did it all myself”.

Racist, racist is what it is. A conservative excercise in power, in service of reenforcing the racist hierarchy of white people over black people that Conservatives love so much.

Leasing people…

Liberal economic theories beleive the free market is the best solution generally, but allow the free market to be intervened in or even entirely supplanted in cases of market failure or where significant social problems arise from private ownership. There is a lot of debate inside liberalism as to when a market has failed, or when a social issue requires intervention, which is why sometimes you will see centrist liberals and left liberals arguing. Just look at Canada with our Liberal Party, its a big tent party with a small social democrat rump(since most social Dems are NDP), a larger social liberal / left liberal group, as well as some centrist and “blue liberals” (these would be right liberals, who are harder to convince about market failures).

Liberalism can be progressive, especially when the main thrust of a liberal party is left liberal or social liberal. Some Liberal parties are progressive sometimes, then more centrist at others as members and the membership changes over the years (or often on the strength and leanings of their leader). All still liberalism.

Employee discount.

The paper I linked doesn’t look into all possible aspects because it’s a peer reviewed scientific work, which unlike blog posts tend to have narrow scopes and aren’t written to debunk every aspect of random peoples thoughts on the topic.

The long and short of this is that people need to be much, much more discerning in which information to trust and which to disregard. The author of your article had a Ph.D. , they could seek to publish their research in serious journals, but they’d need to actually do the hard work of finding reliable, evidence based , peer reviewed sources to do that. Instead we get a blog post the links out to other blog posts that link to yet more blogs, occasional draft papers, and decidedly non scientific works.

If I were to trust this author writing in this medium, why not trust anti-science fossil fuel interests who use the same mediums and communication strategies?

Are you familiar with the concept “the medium is the message”?
For me, it’s a big no thanks, especially on important issues like the adoption of BEVs.

I want to point out that the author of the article you are citing is not an environmental scientist or a climate change expert, but an economist with an interest in the field. The article is not a peer reviewed piece of work, it is more or less equivalent to a blog piece with citations. She is not citing peer reviewed research as far as I can tell, but instead a series of linked ‘studies’ (including drafts and organizational white papers) of questionable scientific value.

After reviewing, I would not be inclined to put much if any stock in her analysis.

Here is a peer reviewed article for nature, that finds BEVs are actually much , much lower in CO2 production even during pre use than ICE vehicles.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-27247-y#Fig3

I heard a man once say, no shit, no kidding, that he bought his wife the biggest vehicle they could afford because she was a bad driver.

I think you’re mistaking VanZants’ self-awareness of his southern pride and conflicting knowledge of the south’s troubled history with an intentional caricaturization .

The song was certainly written in response to Young , as Van Zant thought Neil had been too broad. However, he obviously was aware that Neil had a point, so walking the line between pointing out Neil’s generalization (as Van Zant saw it) while expressing pride was difficult and I think, ultimately too difficult a challenge.

Sweet Home Alabama really grinds my gears. Neil Young sings about systemic racism in the south and Skynard retorts ‘yea some people here are racist ♪ but not all of us are ♪ frig off Neil Young♪ whoa now look at the sky’. Horse shit lyrics, sick composition.

People are arguing with you because they don’t want to take responsibility for themselves or pay the true cost of their consumption. As long as they see someone worse, they don’t have to do anything. The top 1% make 16% of the emissions, sure. But the top 10% are responsible for 52%. That’s 34% belonging to the 1.1-10% . Much of that is due to transportation (in dumb Suv and trucks), inefficient home heating, aviation, and dirty power generation.

We simply don’t solve this problem by focusing on the top1% alone . Which, like you said, is why carbon taxes should be effective. Especially how Canada did it, with the tax being redistributed to the bottom 90% or so. Unfortunately, bringing in an effective system of carbon taxation just gets you voted out for a science denier.

I swear, if I was the fossil fuel industry this exact kind of class anxiety is what I would exploit to stop progress. Get people paying attention to Taylor Swifts jet so they’ll refuse the systematic changes needed avoid this actual crisis.

https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/carbon-emissions-richest-1-percent-more-double-emissions-poorest-half-humanity

I’ve been using the new GPT feature of ChatGPT to improve my own feedback on student work. If you don’t know, GPT is like a customized, purpose driven ChatBOT. So I set one up with the purpose of evaluating my feedback and recommending ways to improve it. I can provide the GPT with ‘knowledge’ about a topic in the form of word files and PDFs , then as I grade I simply give it my feedback and instantly receive suggestions for improved feedback that are based on my original feedback and the knowledge base.

It’s flawed, and occasionally messes up, but more often than not it improves the quality of feedback a great deal, expanding a 2-3 sentence piece of critical feedback into a 2-3 paragraph piece of critical evaluation, references to the knowledge base and relevant examples of why the students should take the advice.

Anyway, this relates back to the article with the concept of RAG (result augmented generation) , I give the GPT knowledge to work from, and I have found that it still gets it quite wrong, quite often, especially in some use cases. For example, I generated a GPT for creating quiz questions from a knowledge base, and it was wrong more often than the feedback GPT. The feedback GPT is , as this article says, brittle. If I give it multiple students work, or pieces of feedback, it will start confusing them very quickly. Which is notnideal since you want feedback to be customized per student. Once I realized that, it was solvable by simply starting a new instance of the GPT. But any instructors not paying close attention would see feedback meant for one student end up on anothers paper.

Yes, this rubbed me the wrong way. The average person can’t afford a “reasonable” 2 door Wrangler Rubicon.

Miss me with that shit.

Reasonable would have been a Mazda 3 Hatchback for half the price, and 30% better fuel mileage. Don’t like Mazda for some reason? Fine, how about Corolla, Civic HB, Impreza, Elantra, Golf, Forte? Shit, need a mid size? For a bit more you’ve got the Camry, Accord , Sonata, K5.

Tossed starships and scrambled sith. I think it went.

I hate this with all my being.

Yes but how will they recover socially from peeling the 'I heart Oil & Gas" stickers off their bumpers?

Better to just keep creamating our children.

There are a few mistakes worth pointing out here. I’ll try not to “flame you” and just get to the mistakes or misconceptions. First, just because time has passed does not mean the impact of slavery is gone, not for the countries that were sources of slaves nor the families descended from slaves nor the states that benefitted from slavery. Think of the way wealth and influence get passed down between generations. In a similar way the King and the house of Windsor accumulates intergenerational wealth on the backs of slavery, the decendents of slaves accrued an intergenerational debt that is still weighing on many of them. The whole idea that historical wrongs “impacts nobody today” is, frankly, just false.

Another issue is this idea that slavery doesn’t continue to impact these countries seeking or reccomended for reparations. There areany lingering impacts, but let’s just look at population impacts. Conservatively,1833 was 8 generations ago. Take just 2 people out of a slave source country 8 generations ago, and assume they would have stayed behind to have children, assume 3 kids per pair, that’s 3281 people just missing from that country. 3281 people that would have worked, farmed, conducted trade, produced art and conducted academics for every 2 slaves taken in 1833. How many slaves were taken? Just based on the population math how can anyone deny the impact.

Another mistake is to conflate you, personally, with the state. The state is permanent, its human members ephemeral. You may not personally be responsible for slavery, you may not benefit in any way, but the state did and the state is still responsible today for its historical wrongs and the continuing damage. You’re worried about your £569, but a bigger concern is that the state can freely commit attrocity, then avoid culpability by just waiting out the directly impacted. Honestly, you should be focused not on denying the damage of slavery, historical and current, and focus more on which rich asshole the state should tap to make pay. Got any old money arristocratic families hanging around the UK that could use lighter wallets?

Hahaha yup.

Me: Yes I went to the store yesterday, yes I paid by credit card, No I don’t have a receipt.

Google: great, here’s 47 cents.

You can read about their pricing structure (both sub and one time purchase) and decisions regarding that here : https://help.niagaralauncher.app/article/104-price-of-niagara-pro

I locked in the lifetime price years ago, I have been with them through the beta. I know the lifetime price is higher now but I think they still offer it. I think it’s worth the price, subscription or lifetime.

I bought the lifetime pro for $12.99 CAD way back in Jan 2020. Worth every penny. I’d pay double to be honest, now that I’ve had a chance to use it for years and years. The dev really works at it too.