anon

This is just gesticulation ahead of the Camp David summit on August 18, involving the US, South Korea, and Japan; and the military drills involving the same countries the following week.

Something about it clicks for me

You must be a Cherry MX Blue fan

L’avion n’est pas trop cheap

Je réagis juste sur ce point car l’avion est indéniablement trop cheap pour une raison simple : il est indirectement subventionné. Environ 15% des humains en vie aujourd’hui ont pris l’avion, mais 100% paient le prix des externalités négatives (essentiellement le réchauffement climatique auquel l’aviation contribue environ 3–4%). C’est donc une subvention déguisée par tous ceux qui ne volent pas mais en subissent les conséquences malgré tout (coût d’adaptation au changement climatique, perte d’activité agricole, décès surnuméraires, migrations forcées, etc).

Si l’on devait réintégrer le coût de ces externalités dans la structure tarifaire d’un billet d’avion, selon le principe pollueur-payeur, ce serait environ $180 dollars par tonne de carbone qu’il faudrait facturer aux passagers. On serait alors plus proche du coût réel du transport aérien.

Ok now you’re just being a troll. Instead of contributing meaningfully to the discussion, you picked up on three words each from the parent and myself, ignored the entirety of our respective arguments, and derailed what could have been an intelligent discussion about Aaron’s actual contributions to early Reddit and turned it into a superficial joust about some words you unilaterally proclaimed to be verboten.

Be better. Be more charitable and thoughtful. Otherwise we’re just pushing people back to Reddit.

I for one don’t see the issue with that “to be fair” statement here. The parent used it merely to announce that they were going to take the counter-point to the most likely community view, i.e., they were going to defend Reddit’s action of not naming Swartz as co-founder. They then proceeded to do so by explaining that Swartz never really played a co-founder role. The comment implied “to be fair [to whoever at Reddit made that decision] and then went on to provide supporting argumentation.

It’s quite different from the lazy use of the phrase, e.g., “to be fair, both sides suck” that you may find in political discussions without supporting arguments, for example.

It’s not just the loss of brain white matter and myelin with age, it’s also the “generational thinking” that the parent eluded to at the end of their post.

The world has changed radically from the time that you (or I) went through our formative years. We may still perform cognitively, but eventually our software is from an obsolete and bygone era, and we must admit that we’re just not in tune with the more contemporary zeitgeist.

It happens with every generation. Science has a saying for it: that it progresses one funeral at a time, because established ideas must physically die with their owners to make space for disruptive thinking.

Henry Ford used to disallow “beat practices” in his factories because he wanted new guys to repeat the same failed ideas and experiments that had been tried before, without being discouraged to do so. The practical reason is that the world changes, and things that were brushed off as not working some 20 years ago can suddenly start working due to a context change.

A generation lasts 20–30 years, and yet in politics it lasts 40–60 years. Those dinosaurs in politics have no actual grasp of how the rest of the world has evolved around them. They don’t understand tech, or climate issues, or academic inflation, etc. They still apply recipes from a bygone era in which they were actually skillful and successful policymakers, but that era ended long ago.

What an odd title. WorldCoin never masked its biometric collection effort as “public art”. There was never any mention of art anywhere in the white paper or anything. Art has literally nothing to do with any of what WorldCoin is doing.

The concerns about WorldCoin are absolutely genuine and worthy of public discussion, but this particular title is just clickbait from an art publication trying to draw traffic about a trendy but unrelated AI and crypto topic.

Al Gore was definitely prescient in naming his documentary inconvenient.

Climate change is as much a human problem as it is a geophysical one because that psychological defense mechanism that you anecdotally describe in the face of existential gloom is universal to our species, and the cause of so much ill-placed skepticism and hostility toward climate science and its communicators. Don’t Look Up also did a good job at portraying this unfortunate human bias.

We as a species are too smart for our own good; smart enough to geoengineer our world to the point of threatening its existence, but not smart enough to address our own resistance to change and take collective action where and when it’s urgently needed.

For those who study climate change and those who try to mitigate it, there is this double burden of not only losing sleep over the magnitude of the existential threat, but also facing the moral and psychological failings of those who refuse to see reality for what it is and argue against it. It’s tiring.

Finalement, ça paie d’avoir un boulot qui fait profondément chier !

Another voice for the Brother laser printer, a truly dependable workhorse.

Je compatis, j’ai deux masters et un doctorat, donc la méthode scientifique et la recherche, je connais bien.

Après, je vis et bosse dans un pays Anglo-Saxon depuis très longtemps, et dans ma tête le mot était “evidence”, que j’ai maladroitement traduit par preuve, qui est excessif dans ce contexte.

In the timeless wisdom words of George Carlin,

Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.