"Not to be rude" my hole. What @CalRobert said is 100% accurate - only we are allowed to criticise Ireland, and criticism is especially unwelcome from Brits and Yanks
I disagree. Irish are _much more_ receptive to criticism of the country from immigrants than most countries.
In my experience, the United States and England (not the entire UK) have the thinnest skin and some people will straight-up tell you to f-off home on the slightest criticism, especially on the subject of human rights or the expeditionary wars.
There are of course the usual suspects, the racists and "Pro-Irish" crowd, who will blame everything on immigrants and accept no criticism of their imagined Ireland, but this isn't true in general.
However, if you make grand pronouncements from a position of profound ignorance and overtly judge the life choices of your new compatriots - a speciality of the GP - you will find yourself alienated at best. This is true everywhere, not just Ireland.
> I disagree. Irish are _much more_ receptive to criticism of the country from immigrants than most countries.
Unless, of course, the criticism is someone making a personal observation about how they saw tipping culture expand during their time in Ireland, right? Then the appropriate response is to generalize that Americans love making ignorant comments about other cultures.
> Unless, of course, the criticism is someone making a personal observation about how they saw tipping culture expand during their time in Ireland, right? Then the appropriate response is to generalize that Americans love making ignorant comments about other cultures.
Unless they're factually incorrect, which is the case here.
Well, they say they did experience it. You cannot possibly know otherwise.
There’s also another commenter in this thread who says they’ve lived in Ireland for their entire life and says they’ve experienced the same thing.
Then, there’s you.
There are two likely explanations I can think of for your behavior here. 1, you are arguing in bad faith. 2, you are unable, for whatever reason, to understand that others might have a different experience in the world than you.
In either case, I don’t see any point in continuing this conversation. Have a nice day.
> Honestly something that was a bit galling was that the Irish would moan about Ireland morning day and night but the instant a foreigner made _any_ observation that wasn't rainbows and sunshine we were out of our lane and needed to shut up
Haha nail on head here. On behalf of my fellow Irish people - sorry!
If it's half, it may be worthwhile on an energy basis in a narrowly defined sense. But there are far-reaching secondary energy costs beyond this explicit accounting. How do you account for the fuel burned in the jetski that your combine operator uses in his free time, or the cost of forging the steel that went into his combine blades? We live in a global economy and in this sort of analysis, there are probably hidden emissions not noted in the study that make 2:1 EROI insufficient.
There are non-EROI issues as well. What happens if we devote all our land to biofuel production? People starve. What happens if we devote all our land to 10:1 biofuel production and it doesn't cover 1% of current demand?
We have crops with higher Energy Return on Investment, just none (so far) that are economical to produce in Iowa in order to win the Iowa caucus.
Brazillian sugarcane ethanol is perhaps 5:1.
Daytime, immediate-use solar is something like 30:1. Less when you factor in batteries.
Wind turbines around 20:1.
Hydropower is maybe 100:1.
Oil varies enormously. Used to be, sweet light Saudi crude from the Ghawar field might break 100:1. Most fields globally more like 10:1-20:1. Alberta heavy oil sands are something like 5:1. If you dip all the way down into ultraheavy kerogen fuels, solid at room temperature and demanding lots of processing, there are certainly deposits that are less than 1:1.
There was a bit of an obsession in the mid 2000's with the concept of a global "peak oil" production, limited by supply-side constraints involving all the low-hanging fruit effectively being picked. While this is often dismissed as neo-malthusianism catastrophism, most of the ideas involved are unscheduled eventualities rather than some defined apocalypse. It introduced a lot of people too young for the 1970's OPEC embargo to the concept of energy scarcity, and effectively ironed out a great deal of the discourse using a fairly active forum.
The major errors of that community's consensus were:
A) The particular shape of the Hubbard Peak bell curve is somebody's fit, not related to fundamentals, and extrapolating sigmoid / logistic curves have both huge error bars when the reasoning is sound, and little merit if the reasoning is not fundamentally sound. You simply can't predict a peak well in advance based on inflection points of this wide of a variety of sources, central limit theorem be damned.
B) Natural resource reserve estimates are both highly subjective and something that suffers from game-theoretic problems. If a speculator 'knows' that the ridge on the horizon is probably full of gold, but has an incentive to work the claim he already started a few miles away, he has no reason to report it. The same applies to countries and companies. Honest reserves estimates are also always quoted in terms of "Economically extractable at current prices", but prices can change and dramatically shift the number.
C) While the underlying fracking and injection technologies to expand the horizons of what constitutes an extractable reserve date to the 60's, they were not ubiquitous or as readily controllable until recently.
D) There is more than enough long-tail low-payoff hydrocarbon fuel out there for us to boil the planet in a CO2 oven, unfortunately.
Soil too eventually reaches an equilibrium where carbon injection and carbon oxidation are in balance.
If what you thought was true, imagine a forest sitting there for millions of years. Where would this permanently sequestered carbon be going? Soils do not become unboundedly thick.
This was true in the carboniferous period, when the organisms able to metabolize the lignin in trees haven't evolved yet, so the dead trees ended up as coal.
!!!
Where are you from?