Since he mentions a "token", I don't think he means the recycling system, but rather than whenver you visit a festival/sports events etc., you typically have to pay a deposit of €2 for the cup your drink is served in. Before you leave you have to return the cup for a refund.
Sometimes you also get issued a "token" and the refund is only possible with the token, so you can't return other cups you find lying around.
It's measurable biological certainty that reaction times as measured in milliseconds and fine motor control degrade with age. Vision and hearing also degrade. The nature of hands on control of flying a plane means there are no ways to compensate for this.
None of this applies to a politician making decision in a time span of hours, days or months and who can delegate tasks as they wish.
Yet Biden (and for some reason not Trump, who's well documented to have the same kind of senior moments but they rarely make it to the news) is raked over the coals for them all the same. Why do we ask the president to be able to walk a stairs, remember pointless ceremony, and all the other things that have nothing to do with performance in office (on which there has been next to zero discussion this cycle)?
I can see that age is a risk factor you don't want for a commander in chief, anymore than you want it in fighter pilots. If so, age limits seem reasonable.
Donald Trump doesn’t need to be nuanced, or even marginally informed, so his cognitive decline is hardly relevant to his role as Head Performatively Outraged Xenophobic Tax Cutter.
The way these things work(so far as I know) is that for the data to be passed along the chain the gap between transmissions can't be greater than 50 microseconds.
Of course a skilled engineer could write a tight output loop that computes and outputs every value on the fly with a guarantee that the time budget won't be exceeded, but your average Arduino user probably doesn't have the knowledge to do this. So all the control libraries that I know allocate a memory buffer for the whole output stream and let the user update it whenever they want.
A while ago they made a change to an existing law to increase the minimum sentence from 6 months to 1 year, probably mostly for reasons of political posturing rather than any deep analysis. They were warned it would have absurd consequences, but did it anyway.
Now it was changed back to how it was before, because of exactly what was predicted.
It's doesn't reflect well on the German government, but it also doesn't deserve the amount of histronics it generated.
No other railway has to deal with with so much traffic on infrastructure that is so old and out of step with the demands placed on it.
People tend to obsess over DB and it's management, but they only control maintenance. All decisions about renovations are made by the government.
So what do you want?
- Wait years for large renovation projects on all major routes, including lengthy closures for work(the current strategy)
- Cancel 25-50%% of all trains permanently, if then people can't travel because it's impossible to get through the door, tough
The latter one is the French solution - just run very few trains, regardless of demand. The last time I wanted to travel by train in France, I simply couldn't because all trains on the route for the entire day were 100% sold out.
Then there's Spain. The last time I wanted to travel there, I didn't because the first(!) train of the day left at lunchtime and arrived mid-afternoon.
I don't see any point in even trying to change any more. There is too much damage already, international cooperation has always been primarily driven by national interests, and I don't see there ever being a global movement significant enough to make a difference.
What I don't get is why people are still having children in societies where it is not necessary to have offspring to provide you with income and care in your later years. Anyone approaching middle age can still look forward to a relatively comfortable life, but it's the babies being born today that are truly screwed.
Climate change isn't binary. If we limit it to 2-3C that's a lot less suffering, war and devastation than 4-5C. And I think we have a shot at achieving that thanks to the miracle of economies of scale driven cost declines we are seeing with renewables and batteries.
I think about this more than I probably should, but people have always had hope for the future in spite of certain (personal) doom. In some sense it's just the human condition. I do wonder how people will behave if/when more and more come to the same conclusion.
That care will be provided by other people's children. The people who invested in raising those children will miss out if they're not rich enough to pay yet other people again's children to look after them. This goes beyond aged care and applies to generally running the whole economy. Even before retirement, the older you get, the more you depend on younger people to support your life.
What happens if/when all countries are close to western levels of wealth? There'll no longer be a readily available underclass to support the less capable old-people in rich countries and they'll effectively be poor again.
In New Zealand, we already rely heavily on immigrants for aged care, health care and various trades.
What evidence do you have that babies born today are screwed by climate change? If they live 80 years, they will see the end of most predictions (2100), which aren't actually a disaster for people in rich countries. It might be a problem in Bangladesh but not America.
It seems likely that 2023 is going to be the highest CO2 emissions ever. If not 2023, 2024 definitely will be. We're pretty much at the point where CO2 emissions are dropping. We have a long way to go, but don't lose hope, we are making progress.
This sentiment was was represented in probably any generation ever.. fact is we don't have any clue what will be in 50 years.. be it a positive or negative development.
There could be as much as there couldn't be one. Betting on a black swan event like a yet unborn baby that will become the Tesla/Edison/Newton/Einstein/Mozart of climate engineering to solve an issue that will destroy the fabric of modern society while taking a lot of Earth's life in the process is just stupid.
Wishful thinking won't take us anywhere, we need to work with the reality we have right now not with extraordinary potential saviours might provide if they ever exist...
I feel like that would actually be a white swan event. But yes, to me it essentially sounds like an alcoholic with a failing liver saying they can keep drinking because someone is going to invent a cure for cirrhosis any day now.
No. An Einstein would be giving us the technology to do so practically. Telling us to cut down on CO2 emissions is, quite frankly, useless. We don't exactly have a shortage of pundits in 2024.
I don't think this hope is warranted. Our species is doing awful things to the planet:
* Animals and plants are dying at a mind-boggling rate. This has consequences for us eventually too, but on it's own, this is an atrocity.
* We're stuffing the air, sea and water with plastic, PFAs, insecticides, herbicides, etc. This will also have consequences for us.
* Our polar ice is melting, our vital weather systems collapsing, our topsoil eroding, our old growth forest near forgotten. As noted above, our oceans are doing some terrifying shit. Consequences are imminent.
* Inequality exacerbates all the above, and gives me serious doubt as to how our children will actually fare. Climate refugees are already a thing, and it could get soo much worse if our current path is maintained.
A stunning proportion of our leaders, megacorps, media, banks, and institutions are making this all worse. They subsidize and invest in fossil fuels, arms, big agri etc. They provide cover for them, enable them, and profit from them. They savagely beat anyone fighting against their acts into submission; sometimes with mortal methods, sometimes just with smears and legal abuse.
Have you considered any of this in your declaration of "we're in the best place ever"? I feel like we have a responsibility to our children and grandchildren to be honest about our fuck-ups.
If we're not in the best place now, when in history was humanity ever in a better place?
I don't think you realize where we're coming from. Poverty, famine, violence, child mortality etc are all globally lower than ever and on a downward trend.
Yes climate change is a huge challenge, but it's not likely that we fuck up so bad that we undo all the progress from the last few hundred years (but also not impossible either, I'll give you that)
Mandmandam has made many good points. I feel that we won't be able to fix climate change until we reduce the political power of corporations and make them liable for their actions that have negative social and climate impacts.
Or they won't and it might take a long time for societies to recover from the costs that climate change is bringing.
Societies having to spend more in dealing with effects from climate change have to spend less in other stuff that are investments, stuff like education, R&D, healthcare, transportation; to build dikes, pumping stations, purchasing ever increasing food products after crop failures, rebuilding cities destroyed by climatic events (or moving whole cities/population centres that aren't possible to be rebuilt nor protected), building border defences to stop millions of climate refugees from immigrating to dwindling inhabitable spaces. All of that will have massive costs that will make life much harder for future generations.
We don't know what our children futures will be because as humanity we never been through a truly global catastrophe affecting every single corner of the planet at the same time, not even World Wars were any close to the potential destructive power that fucking up our climate is.
Yes. People seem to have forgotten what a catastrophe the 20th century was. WWI, WWII, Spanish flu, famine in China, famine in USSR, Pol Pot. I've never seen predictions that climate change will be as bad as all that, yet people still kept having kids despite all those risks that actually eventuated and humanity overall flourished.
None of those are close to the potential destructive power that a truly global catastrophe like climate change is. Pol Pot? Soviets? WW1 and WW2? Famines in China? You are comparing political events against the laws of thermodynamics in a global scale. Even the Spanish flu has an understandable/predictable time period for the tipping point where it will be stopped due to how viruses and adaptations to it occur.
I don't think you comprehend the level and degree of difference between all of those events against the effects where laws of physics dictating how a planetary-level of change in energy retained will mess up with every single thing we as humanity need to survive on this Earth.
You haven't quantified that comparison so you really don't have a clue. Just saying physics is more powerful than politics doesn't mean the outcome will be worse.
Do I really need to get you figures for how many gigajoules are required to heat up the whole world by 3-4C on average, studies on the effects of that energy added to the atmosphere and oceans, and the second and third order effects on the biosphere or are you smart enough to figure that one out?
I assume folks on HN are smart enough to understand the basic premise of what I said, if needed I can track the data for you but you could probably do the same instead of a stupid rebuttal dressed as snarkiness.
Of course that part's simple. What's not is "a planetary-level of change in energy retained will mess up with every single thing we as humanity need to survive on this Earth". Yes, you need to specify what that means because it's just emotional language that could mean anything.
You probably don't know. I've never found anyone who knows what that means, or can even provide even the crudest estimate of the human impact of climate change such as number of deaths, financial cost, etc. that comes close to 20th century disasters.
I must live in a bubble, the top rated comments here are all depressing.
I don't know a single person that believe or thinks this way (that we're doomed). Maybe they do, but they don't say anything about it.
Fwiw, I live in a rural area, have kids and most of my friends have families. We all are good people, that recycle and try to conserve and not be wasteful. But I spend almost 0 thoughts on this topic and it causes me no worries.
Call it head in the sand if you want but I'd rather live this way than most of these comments.
Many of the top level comments here are made by people who are fetishizing doom through intelligent-sounding but mostly unfounded and entirely speculative scenarios that they love to talk about as if they knew what they're talking about.
It's common on this site on many topics way outside of tech and if you add in the popularity of making the worst out of climate change, it's only magnified for that subject among a certain social subset that predominate here.
Many of the completely despondent, "we're fucked" opinions here don't even reflect the actual latest scientific consensus on what climate change will likely do, and some HN comment opinions are outright irrational on claiming apocalyptic scenarios.
Nobody who is serious about the good science around the effects of climate change should take them seriously.
Group dynamics of doom are an interesting thing. At one point I worked for a company that was taken over by private equity who worked quite diligently to send all the jobs to India. Joining team meetings was a bit surreal; we all seemed to be trying to put a happy face on the situation (myself included) but occasionally there would be cracks. I'd also hear about people breaking down and crying in more private moments.
> Call it head in the sand if you want but I'd rather live this way than most of these comments.
I think denial is an important human quality; ultimately, we are all doomed anyway. It's something I've never been all that good at. I certainly see the dichotomy between those that have children and those that don't. I'm sure there are selection affects there regarding optimism, but if you have children, it's very hard to believe that they will face terrible hardship in the future. But the data is the data, regardless of our belief.
I would say it is more of a mindful philosophy. Worry about the things you have control over, don't worry about things you don't. Do what makes you happy and don't harm others.
The problem with these comments here are that some people suggest that having kids, having a car, a house, or occasionally flying, etc... is harming other people. Humans are not wired for this risk calculation, even so most are doubtful this is a forgone conclusion.
Further, most people (That I know) are not choosing a path based on data and charts. They are happy if the bills are paid, kids are in a good school, little crime and plenty of food TODAY.
So I don't think it is denial, it is a philosophy that allows us to live a fulfilled life, not one out of denial and dispair.
> Worry about the things you have control over, don't worry about things you don't.
Yes, I've never been good at this, but in my defense, it doesn't really make sense to worry about the things you can control since you can... you know... control them. It also doesn't make sense to worry about the things you can't because you can't control them. Then why every worry about anything? I suppose it's just the way some of us are built.
Anything that adds carbon to the atmosphere is indeed harming other people; that is the what we have learned. To some of us, living beyond our sustainable means is the opposite of fulfilling; only living for today can cost you your future. Obviously the actions of an individual are nearly meaningless in the sense that no one drop of water makes the flood, but our own actions are the only things we can control as you say and so perhaps the only thing we should worry about.
> Further, most people (That I know) are not choosing a path based on data and charts. They are happy if the bills are paid, kids are in a good school, little crime and plenty of food TODAY.
Every time I read one of these threads on HN I simply cannot believe the doomsaying, condemnation of the heretics, and repent preaching that goes on in these rabbit holes. It’s like someone transported me to an ‘80s tent revival meeting.
I live my life, do my best to be a good steward of the earth and community, but I am certainly much more worried about the now than what might happen 100 years from now.
Simple, I'm on Mastodon, Substack, Threads and Bluesky.
And they are all barely breathing.
The community density is low (because of the split), the discovery sucks (because of decentralization and no algo to suggest content), the culture is homogeneous (I encounter people mostly from one political side) and the publication of limited quality.
You can't start new communities from old users. Communities are built by the young, they are the ones with the creativity, motivation and free time to do it.
That's why twitter, made mostly by young people from 20 years ago, still got the inertia of it, are is more interesting and active.
And that's why tik tok and roblox are full of life. I'm sure the kids are also elsewhere, where we are not looking, creating the communities of tomorrow.
I’d argue with that bit about creativity and youth.
In sports, for instance, if you are talented and 15 there are pipelines into established and pro sports that make sense to follow. If you are 30 and missed your chance for that you can still be a pioneer in an emerging “extreme” sport.
A lot of young people seem to think creativity is 99% asking for permission and 1% “just do it”, it takes some experience before people realize it is really the other way around.
I've never seen more people use it, as in being actually active on it, and it pops up everywhere due to the community note memes. But yeah I really need to get around creating a Mastodon account since some very good posters moved there too.
I'm amazed people like yourself care so much about it to write a post like this. Doesn't your brain have something better to think about beyond artificial outrage?
Like most large social media sites, pre-Musk Twitter had some combination of algorithms and bureaucracy that act as a chaos monkey to shadowban and suspend accounts apparently at random, often with an inability to comprehend satire or under incoherent or undisclosed pretexts. The site's users and staff were predominantly left-leaning, so right-leaning accounts were disproportionately the victims of these false positives because of human bias in which posts are flagged and how they're subsequently moderated.
Musk bought the site under a claim of doing something about the bias after Twitter suspended the account of a right-leaning satire site. Many of the existing users were displeased by this, because they liked having a site whose moderation system was biased in their favor, so some of them left. Meanwhile new right-leaning accounts were created as you might expect. This affected the ideological balance of the site, so even though it's still somewhat left-leaning it's less than before. And now when the drunk chaos monkey suspends an account on the left, people are finding new satisfaction in their ability to blame Musk in particular.
Musk has personally bragged about banning a lot of left-leaning accounts and unbanning right-leaning. What is your evidence that the site still leans left?
Bans in either direction are only a small percentage of accounts. People with large followings have a large disincentive to leave (have to start over), and new users haven't had long to build followings, so most large accounts are the same ones they were before he bought the company.
Musk is not actually a right-wing figure -- he smokes pot, makes electric cars, isn't religious, etc. But he isn't a left-wing figure either, which confuses people who can't contemplate that the same person could simultaneously e.g. support gay marriage and think peculiar pronouns are silly.
The result is that he's more inclined to ban accounts he doesn't like, but what he doesn't like isn't inherently associated with any particular party. And if you look at the "left-leaning" accounts he's suspended, it's the likes of Aaron Rupar and Taylor Lorenz, who... well, here it is:
Erm, what? Your statement makes no sense whatsoever.
It's perfectly reasonable for the default setting of a phone to forbid sideloading apps. And anyone who doesn't want to can leave it that way. That's the 'option of safety'.
Until such time as a big player like Epic or Facebook decides that the only way you’re getting their apps is by using a store they control and can bypass all permission controls on. When that happens it’s going to become 2000’s browser toolbars all over again
Oh no! People will have to install a store from a developer they trust which contains products from that developer they trust in order to install those products from that developer they trust! How unsafe! This is absolutely removing options from the user!
It has already happened on android in the case of Epic. They require that you side load their launcher/store in order to play games such as Fortnite. There was a big lawsuit about google’s fees which precipitated this.
My hypothesis is that it’ll happen to both iOS and Android once iOS has been forced to allow third party app stores in most major markets.
Why? Because historically, iOS has been the more profitable platform for mobile developers by a large margin. The payoff for building and maintaining an alternative app store for Android only is questionable, but improves significantly if the store can exist on iOS too.
The view of Broadcom is that VMWare has low growth potential and the route to maximum short term financial returns is to extract as much money as possible from the largest customers.
So the strategy is to squeeze the 600 largest customers until they bleed, knowing they are so entrenched they cannot easily migrate. If the next couple of thousand stuck around as well that would be nice, but not essential. The long tail of hundreds of thousands of customers paying a few dollars a month they would gladly be rid of.
The last project I was working on at a major telcom before jumping ship was a project to migrate off of VMware onto KVM systems managed by Cloud Stack, they already have a major Open Stack environment but that's only for SDN stuff now.
We're talking over 10,000 ESXi hosts in the current footprint and at least 50% of them will be off VMware by the end of 2026.
If they were smart, the people they would be focusing on squeezing are the mid-sized shops that don't have the in-house skills or top level cost focus to force a migration. The small shops can't afford to stay on vmware, the very large shops will have the in-house skills or contract to the right people to get moved, it's the mid-sized people that are most stuck.
How do you know this is their view? I don't have any strong opinion or evidence to argue, but I'm curious if this is conjecture or inference or actual knowledge?
A parliamentary system as used in Germany works rather differently than the three-way bun fight in the US.
The government wrote the law, not individual parliamentarians(for that reason we don't call them "lawmakers"). The first lines at the top of the PDF say "Reference Draft of the Ministry of Digitalisation and Transport".
The government is made up like it is, because it has majority control of the parliament. The members of the parties usually do what they are told, partly because they won't get a job in the government if they rebel against party policy.
If the government couldn't get it's own laws through the parliament, this would be extremely embarrassing for them and the government would probably collapse and be replaced by a new government, so they will not introduce any bill unless they have resolved conflicts which would prevent it from passing.
There is a second house. Similar to the US, it has a handful of representatives from each federal state. However, these representatives are appointed by the state governments and are required to vote according to instructions received from the state governments. Also, they only have to be consulted about certain types of laws. It is extremely rare that they veto anything passed by the main parliament
So there will be some debate and probably some amendments, but the chances that the government tries to do something and completely fails is low. Conflicts are solved through negotiation and it's in no-ones interest to grandstand.
Bear in mind that almost all governments in Germany are multi-party coalitions, so the best way to ensure you never have any power is to refuse to compromise.
Sometimes you also get issued a "token" and the refund is only possible with the token, so you can't return other cups you find lying around.