> TikTok, the fast-growing social network from China, has used unusual measures to protect supposedly vulnerable users. The platform instructed its moderators to mark videos of people with disabilities and limit their reach. Queer and fat people also ended up on a list of „special users“ whose videos were regarded as a bullying risk by default and capped in their reach – regardless of the content.
I'm certainly not privy to all the inner workings of other platforms, but this doesn't sound like what happens on other social media sites...
How common? It seems like it would be cheaper for most parts of the country to install electric baseboards than to ship in the coal you'd need for the winter.
You’ve clearly never paid the electric bill for a house that used electric baseboards for heat in the winter. 5k cad/yr in BC for a 3000 sq ft house with 6 occupants. Bill for June and July is only $100, it’s all winter heating load.
Comparitively natural gas bills are about $200 for two months in the winter. Many people heat with wood and the air quality goes to shit.
Holy hell $100 in the mild BC summer?! According to Google Vancouver varies between 14 and 22 degrees Celsius in June and July. That's t-shirt weather - don't even need heating at night if you've got good insulation.
I think your problem might be your general usage patterns (running clothes dryer, dishwasher too much or at peak times, inefficient lighting or leaving lights on everywhere, zombie draw from electronics) and the efficiency of your insulation, not merely the cost of electric baseboards. Or maybe power is just crazy expensive up there, I dunno.
The US has had a money hoarding problem for the last three to five decades.
You're not going to get very many high cost infrastructure problems solved when the government doesn't force the issue. Socialism is a red herring, the real greatest enemy of capitalism is the unregulated free market.
Sure, and that must be frustrating to an extent. My 2018 MacBook Pro’s GPU does well enough for my purposes with my HTC Vive, so I guess I’m not in the market.
Fracking might be helping with CO2, but it's also releasing a ton of methane which might not be as bad in the long term but is really really bad in the short term. If we've got a few decades before the point of no return... great! If not.. oh well, it's been a good run I guess?
Not to mention the absolute havoc it's wrecking on local environments.
It's also only good if it's a stop-gap for renewables.. so I'll thank a republican once they stop blocking measures to improve and subsidize solar, wind, and other clean energy solutions.
These are going to occur anyway (along with freezing permafrost, lowering sea levels, stable weather patterns). These are ordinary problems that we adapt to.
The problem I'm talking about is the idea that these are preventable. They're not. It's an imaginary problem. The US , for example, can _eliminate_ CO2 production and those things are still going to happen. The imaginary problem is that climate change is a problem to solve.
You make it sound like we've been through this before.. When?
> The US , for example, can _eliminate_ CO2 production and those things are still going to happen.
So, we cranked up the emissions, and these things just RANDOMLY started happening at the same time? Even though our environmental models and knowledge of physics agree with our observations??
Like.. it's just MAGIC or something? What is causing it if it's not CO2?
For example permafrost thaw - we have no idea how widespread it is. The areas we do observe have a valid, natural explanation for thaw via gas cavities. Some of these cavities get enlarged thermal-erosional piping, which can expand the cavity due to seasonal temperature changes, which can make the cavity large enough prevent re-freeze.
Neither is my car, but something has to happen to make it move.
You addressed none of my questions. What, in your opinion, is the trigger for the shift?
Edit: You edited in the part about permafrost. I did some quick googling because I had never heard of the causal link of gas cavities causing the melt. I've only seen the papers on the melt causing gas to escape which then exposes underground cavities... Still can't find any sources on cavities causing surface temperature to rise - care to share some sources? That sounds interesting!
The thing to worry about is the rate of change. I'm a fan of the visualization that XKCD did here: https://xkcd.com/1732/
When the rate of change is too fast, life struggles to adapt. Feedback loops are so tight that it accelerates even more. For instance, a slow permafrost melt means some trees die and rot, but new ones grow to replace them at similar rates. A fast permafrost melt means all the trees die and rot quickly. Their carbon is added to the atmosphere. The other plants and animals that depended on them lose all their habitat.
Think of climate like a car going 100 MPH. Climate change is changing the speed of the car. Do you want to be in a car that goes from 100 to 0 in 0.5 seconds, or in 20 seconds? The climate is changing quickly and we don't even have proper seat belts for everyone.
Eh, it's really about the relevance of temperature fluctuation to civilization. Sure humans existed earlier, but we know less about their relationship with the world around them the further back we look.
That might be what it was about, but it could've been about more. I don't think anyone claims humans were significant to CO2 or temperature more than 200 years ago, why go before that to 20,000 years and stop there?
> Ignoring pain is akin to ignoring the "check engine light".
I had surgery to remove a cyst that resulted in some scar tissue developing that presses on a nerve when stretched or compressed. Pretty acute pain when that happens - and pretty constant low level pain otherwise. No real "cure" as the odds are very high that the scar tissue will just re-form when excised.
In my case it's more like the "check engine light" was rewired to also light up when you press the clutch pedal. Sometimes all you can do is put some electrical tape over the light.
I worked in a grocery store for 5 years in the produce department and we sold a loooot of unpackaged food to customers that came to us in a lot of packaging. From stabilizers to keep produce from jostling and bruising - all the way to the shrinkwrap the pallets came in with...
I dumped a lot of plastic into the trash compactor. I dumped a ton of styrofoam into the trash compactor.
Sure, it might show a desire to the producers of food if we shop better - but I doubt your food is as plastic-free as you imagine. And I tossed more plastic daily than the average household did in months.
The supply chain needs to be plastic free before we stop having a problem.
It makes me think of a smaller scale example I witnessed as a cashier. I saw cashiers throwing away plastic bags by the hundred regularly, because they failed to load them onto the holding racks (you've seen them, but probably paid little attention to them) properly and it was simply easier to toss dozens of bags in the trash and load a full package of bags.
Meanwhile, at home my mom rebuked me for throwing one used and damaged bag in the trash instead of recycling.
I feel like we all can help with rising sea levels by filling a jar with sea water and keeping it in our house. That's a little less water in the seas. I'm helping.
Instead of hoping 7 billion people change their habits, we should change the habits of a few hundred companies. Everyone will pay the price somehow, but companies are vehicles of large scale change, and our markets can efficiently make the changes if we shape them correctly.
agree, I'm pretty frustrated with the notion that end-consumers are entirely responsible for somehow reversing the trend of pollution by voluntarily opting out of the packaging system. Firstly, it is mostly impossible to do completely without enormous effort and sacrifice, secondly, only a tiny fraction of the population is actually going to attempt to do such a thing, and thirdly, as you said, manufacturers and industry will continue to produce and discard the majority of waste in any case. From a political point of view, putting the blame all on consumers is the perfect story for polluting industries to hide behind - "it's all your fault!". It's a scam, and only legislation and interruption at the supply chain will have any impact. The only genuinely good thing about consumers engaging in voluntary source reduction is that they raise their own political awareness, since the main thing they need to do is vote.
"Even as their ad was inducing guilt in viewers for spreading trash, Keep America Beautiful’s members were fighting legislation that could have done much to address the problem."
Every major city I've ridden mass transit in does this. They're not called conductors though, they're called transit cops. They're also still woefully ineffective.
I'm certainly not privy to all the inner workings of other platforms, but this doesn't sound like what happens on other social media sites...