I really hope you guys are getting propper help, this state of being must be horrible, especially since nothing happened in the end. Nothing happened because your wife after all made sure to not be too far away and was alert enough to hear her call. We're all 2 minutes away from death should we somehow stop breathing, best we can do is to minimize risk.
Me and my wife had a horrible experience ourselves where our 2 year old daughters best friend(also 2 years old) drowned in their family swimming pool after figuring out how to open the door herself. I know this wasn't nearly as close to heart as the other stories in this post, but receiving that text on a Saturday evening was super tough and me and my partner was crushed for months after it happened. It's now been 10 months and we rarely think about it anymore although we did end up in a house WITHOUT a swimming pool, so in a way it's still with us.
One of my childhood friend lost his little brother in a similar accident. 25 years later, I have a similar phobia of private swimming pools, ponds or any unsupervised water surface. I cannot see a private swimming pool and not think about him. He was a happy toddler, just like my kids today.
can't remember where i read this, but significant and big leaps in evolution seem to often happen in times of crisis when the environment forces it. that's not to say that evolution doesn't happen all the time with little pressure it's just very slow when things are more stable. by extension big leaps in evolution can really be down to a low number of individuals. read an article about a genetic study claiming the human population was down to a few thousand individuals around 90k years ago.
Crisis presumably doesn’t affect the rate of mutation, so is the mechanism here just that there is a tight filter that from the perspective of future animals made the species more like themselves, because by definition the future animals have passed the filter?
Like the traits must have already been present in some lower frequency pre crisis, and the crisis distills the traits which are selected for by the crisis.
So probably less evolution moves faster during crisis and more that there is an interesting survivorship bias related to crisis when analyzing the change of a species over time.
Evolution is not primarily driven by the mutation rate. It's primarily driven by differential success of already-existing genetic variation. Over the very, very long term, you need mutation to be the source of that genetic variation, but over the short term mutation is mostly just harmful, and this:
> Like the traits must have already been present in some lower frequency pre crisis, and the crisis distills the traits which are selected for by the crisis.
is correct.
> So probably less evolution moves faster during crisis and more that there is an interesting survivorship bias related to crisis when analyzing the change of a species over time.
This is conceptually wrong; in this context "survivorship bias" bears a technical name you've probably heard of, "natural selection". A stronger survivorship bias means faster evolution.
I think i misread your comment a bit. i thought you where making the point that evolution was only about mutations on a large scale and that individuals doesn't really matter. But what you are writing is true even though populations can become very small where these small populations that survive have sometimes been selected for because of traits that mutated in a larger population earlier. Sometimes though it's just the lucky ones that weren't in the wrong spot at the wrong time.
No no yeah that might explain why I attracted some other weird comments as well.
I only mean, natural selection is the survivability of e.g. a nose shape trait across generations, which can happen via reproduction, early death, etc and it’s not about survivability of the person WITH the nose except to the extent that facilitates the former
you are right that hydrogen is a fantasy.. but wait.. what is this solar and wind plus storage you speak of that overdeliver, specifically what storage are you talking about? the wind industry has heavily been pushing hydrogen as this storage at least in Germany and Denmark and as far as i know there's absolutely zero success here despite maasny years of trying
hydrogen definitely not the only way for long distance sea, nuclear would just make so much more sense. and for place travel it also such the same as batteries, first of all its an explosive gas and second we only get less than 20%. hydrogen is just not a good solution to anything other than being a byproduct in the natural gas industry.
Though it may never prove viable, hydrogen from electrolysis of water creates no emissions other than oxygen. While large ships may be able to use nuclear power directly, the risks of a tenfold increase in small floating nuclear reactors in civilian hands are not trivial. Hydrogen provides a way to keep power generation centralized, secure, and efficient while also distributing it where needed. But this assumes an extreme excess of power, something only possible with nuclear or large-scale renewables, which may never come to pass in sufficient quantities or without even bigger problems.
I don't disagree that nuclear propulsion has a long way to go before becoming safe enough for civilian use and might require extra security and regulation forever, but we need to do something other than dumping bunker fuel waste into the sea and atmosphere even coubting in several terrorist attacks and accidents it might still end up killing less people using nuclear. As you say going with hydrogen and by extension ammonia, which is probably the only viable way to fuel ships, will require unthinkable amounts of renewables which is mostly intermittent energy meaning hydrogen electrolysis plants will have to be ramped up and down as the wind blows or the sun shines. this makes the efficiency calculations even worse for an already super wasteful undertaking. i guess we could potentially use nuclear but why waste 80-90% of the energy created by converting and then using hydrogen ? My opinion is that we need to throw much more money at making nuclear fission safer.
I think most of the heat and fuel will get wasted anyway. A nuclear-powered cargo ship is going to be closer to a nuclear-powered submarine than a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, in terms of the number of people being supported and the needs beyond propulsion. That means running the reactor below its optimal fuel efficiency, and then intentionally discarding a portion of its heat most of the time to retain some spare capacity for demand spikes and emergencies. Of course, small-scale nuclear reactors are an active area of research, but AFAIK the results haven't been promising yet. So it's an avenue, but not the only one.
Running a reactor full-bore on shore, pumping ocean water, desalinizing it, electrolyzing it to hydrogen, cryogenically separating nitrogen from air, and combining the result to produce ammonia, might look really inefficient in isolation, but might be efficient enough when compared against the alternative. When the costs of logistics, personnel, and capital are accounted for, it might even come out ahead. That having been said, the amount of waste oxygen this would produce is immense, and could create risks of its own. Ammonia is also more likely to produce NOx when combusted in air than hydrogen is, so that's not great, either.
Nuclear would not make sense at all for long distance sea travel. Naval reactors require highly enriched fuel in order to be compact enough, so they could never be widespread on civilian ships for fear of proliferation. They're also extraordinarily expensive and require a specialized crew, and their power output is overkill for a cargo ship (but they can't really be scaled down much further).
The only real synthetic alternative is ammonia which brings it's own host of problems and potential for malicious use. while your arguments are valid, i think we can overcome most of the problems you mention with more research. at some point we'll need to make the hard decision to either give up on the environment or go nuclear and accept the extra cost of safeguarding it. It simply seems there's no other realistic alternative.
Maersk launch a commercial 172-metre container ship running on run entirely on green methanol a bit over a year ago and has 25 more new green methanol ships in the build pipeline.
Australian companies have already contracted to supply green methanol sourced from solar farms after their build and trial of methanol shipping (tugboats) in Singapore.
> It simply seems there's no other realistic alternative.
Biofuels are carbon neutral. They require land, but a single engineered biofuel crop could grow on land that other crops couldn't. It's a promising use for the Canadian tundra that's melting.
Sails are very promising - a cargo ship would need enough fuel to maneuver in port and to generate electricity en route, but for most of the trip it could rely on (computer-controlled) sails.
Neither of these options are mature today, but they're a lot closer than nuclear-powered cargo ships.
wait.. really ? please share some links with info. I've had this several times in my life and i don't think I've ever been an alcoholic but i have had a relationship with several substances but I'm not really sure I've ever had withdrawal symptoms from any of them
I think these are just really common hallucinations that can be caused by a lot of things. I've had them when nearing heat stroke, but also from various substances. I write it off as brain doing what brain does best; over active pattern matching due to stress or the like. Hearing music in white noise, "whispers in the walls" etc. Very different from actually hearing personified voices.
Yep. I've had this happen to me since I was a kid, and it's ramped up slightly over the past few years. Background noise especially at night, will seem to form music, or the sound of dialogue of a television through a wall.
Usually just sitting up and accurately identifying the source of the sound (ceiling fan, radiators, passing train, cat water bowl) makes it go away.
My brain is very bad at identifying what people are saying with background noise, but at least I get free night music.
I only get this with very faint white noise in very quiet environments. Humans can actually sense things under the noise floor, so the line between hallucination and truth is blurry.
Denmarks agricultural performance is not great at all. it's way too expensive to produce stuff. if it wasn't for EU subsidies the agricultural sector in Denmark would loose over 50% of their profits. To drive the point home the agricultural sector in Denmark only makes up 3.6% of the bnp and 4.3% of exports while taking up 60% of Denmarks total area and employing around 3.9% of the working population. i think Denmark can easily let go of 10% while only having miniscule effects on the economy. Denmark is a very small country and technically has no truly wild nature.
> Denmarks agricultural performance is not great at all. it's way too expensive to produce stuff. if it wasn't for EU subsidies the agricultural sector in Denmark would loose over 50% of their profits.
Agriculture in the EU is renowned for not being financially unjustified. For decades it's been a finantial no-brainer to import the bulk of agricultural products from south America and Africa. This is not new or the result of some major epiphany, it's the natura consequence of having an advanced economy and a huge population with high population density. The EU already imports 40% of the agricultural products it consumes.
EU subsidies were created specifically to mitigate the strategic and geopolitical risk of seeing Europe blockaded. Agricultural subsidies exist to create a finantial incentive to preserve current production capacity when it makes no finantial sense, and thus mitigate a strategic vulnerability.
Interesting way to frame "Russian gas being cut off" instead of "most likely US orchestrated biggest ally to ally sabotage in history".
I'm still mad about it, yes. Germany's dependence on Russian gas was a terrible thing, but risking my livelihood for 4D geopolitics chess is much worse.
> Blizzards, record winds, red weather warnings and biting cold. The long winter of 2023/2024 has featured heavy precipitation and a number of extreme weather events.
> Large parts of Europe are starting the 2023-2024 winter season with an abundance of snow and cold, a stark contrast from last year, which was abnormally warm and snowless.
Sure it does. The goal is keep the farmland available and productive along with keeping agricultural infrastructure. The USA helped win WW2 because our car factory lines were retooled to make war machines.
That’s limited by the country’s basic requirements not the total amount of farmland available. People may prefer wine and beef in surplus resulting in an obesity epidemic, but that’s not required here. You don’t want 350 lb soldiers or recruits.
In the case of the US, we turned much of the richest farmland into subdivisions. The breadbasket of the nation is powered by an aquifer that will be depleted in my kids lifetime. Most of our green goods come from the deserts of California and Arizona, and won’t exist if the Colorado River water system breaks down.
No, if you expect farmland to produce 0 food then having extra farmland is pointless. 0 * 2 X = 0 * X = 0.
The point of extra farmland is to make up for some expected shortfall, but you’re better off stockpiling food during productive periods than have reserve capacity for use when something else is going wrong.
PS: It is common to have quite large stockpiles of food. Many crops come in once a year and then get used up over that year. But that assumes a 1:1 match between production and consumption, a little extra production = quite a large surplus in a year.
The government has all sorts of policy goals. Resilience, employment, etc.
In the US, Nixon era policy and legal thinking drives all things. Price is king, except it isn’t. Our crazy governance model means that corn is better represented than humans, so our food is more expensive, less nutritious, and our supply chains are incredibly fragile.
Let me get this right. To save the planet Denmark wants to stop producing food locally and instead import more? So those pig farts gotta go but the bunker fuel used to ship grain from a slash and burn rainforest farm in Brazil is a-ok.
Utterly brain dead. So much so that you know someone’s getting paid from these decisions.
you got it.. and grain is not the only thing we get shipped from Brazil.. to look green, we've replaced most our coal burning for energy with bio fuels, essentially wood and that gets shipped in from Brazil as well.. very green.. because fuck nuclear, because of.. checks notes.. reasons
> No, its because far lobbies are an important political block
Wrong. If you try to educate yourself, you will notice that EU's common agricultural policy even went to the extent of paying subsidies to small property owners to preserve their properties as agricultural land. This goes way beyond subsidizing production, or anything remotely related to your conspiracy theory.
Just because someone benefits from subsidy programs that does not mean that any conspiracy theory spun around the inversion of cause and effect suddenly makes sense. I recommend you invest a few minutes to learn about EU's common agricultural policy before trying to fill that void with conspiracies.
They can write all they want. The fact is, the countries wouldn't cant get rid of their farm policies because of voting. And the EU, is an outgrowth of those already existing countries. EU policy is not handed down from a white tower. Of course you can't actually say that.
Farmers and people supporting farmers are still a small minority and while they can probably swing some election in some country if they were to massively support only one party or coalition, the money comes for the strategic importance. It would be naive to think it's just "for the votes".
It was a long time ago that I have looked into this. My understanding from the political science is that countries where farmers votes aren't as important, also have far less subsidizes.
Groups that already have subsidizes are better at defending them. Even if in absolute terms their numbers aren't as big.
They are totally going to defend themselves, mainly through boycotts, barricades and varying degrees of riots.
That can totally cause a vote issue, but it's because the rest of the population is pissed off by the road blocks etc
You are posting literal propaganda from the biggest agro lobbyist. That number is about the "Danish food cluster". That is all food related business output. Enzyme production and such. They have tried for a long time to conflate the farming sector with the whole food industry to muddy their importance.
and also that this source is probably biased toward minimizing the numbers while your source might be pulling in the other direction. the true number is probably somewhere in between and depends on what you include. like, could the raw products be imported instead and the refined in Denmark without those 22% taking a hit?
3.6% of bnp seems like little but I think agriculture counts for more than, say, management consulting that goes through 5 intermediaries (does it get counted towards the bnp 5x then? I'm not sure). At the end of the day money is only an abstraction while food, you can actually eat it.
yes, but like 50-70% of the crops grown is animal feed. if Denmark really needed efficient food for the population i think the whole thing could be done more efficiently and those 10% won't be missed.
Yea because churning out or changing code is the only imaginable productive thing a software engineer can do ? what about planning, helping others out, researching all this stuff is super difficult to measure. It all depends on the work, the team and the size of the company i guess.
I totally agree with you, but there've been employees I've managed in the past who loved to go off and get distracted with anything they judged "useful", often at the expense of their actual work. That's something to be managed rather than measured by metrics.
did i say that? that's why i said it's an indicator, one of many. if you are producing zero code vs your peers and your job is to program it doesn't mean you are unproductive, but at least someone can talk to you about it and clarify vs. just guessing with zero data.