That’s a pretty weak argument. What percentage of people actually have the qualifications to understand and verify a research paper? And how much can you even trust the raw data? At the end of the day, it’s just a matter of faith—whether you choose to believe the guy in the church or the guy at the university.
You don't need any advanced science to understand climate change. The basic chemistry and physics of it are readily accessible at a high school level.
Current research papers are far more advanced, but they're about the details of climate change. The basic facts of it were established two centuries ago.
We know that we are putting CO2 into the atmosphere. We know that CO2 absorbs heat. That's not a matter of believing an expert. At this point, anybody still denying it is deliberately choosing what somebody else tells them.
The economic effects of that are harder to model, but denialism is still stuck on whether the effect is real. There is no way to include them in any coherent discussion of what to do about it.
But it's a proven fact. Less educated people are poorer. The less educated tend to have more children. And children who grow up in poor families receive a lower quality of education.
Is that because of some heritable presence/lack of intelligence or because scientists feed their children well early in life, have books in the home, and take the time to follow up on their children's education?
Incorrect analogy. Bridge construction is a clearly algorithmic process. All bridges resemble each other, and from an engineering perspective, designing one is not rocket science. Construction itself is a set of well-studied steps that can be easily calculated. If I were to write my operating system 100 times, I could give an estimate accurate to within 10%, but every task I’ve ever done in life is unique, and I have nothing to compare it to except intuitive judgments. Returning to bridges: there is 1% of projects that are unique, and their design can take decades, while construction might not even begin
Software engineering isn't some magical, special branch of engineering in which no one piece of software resembles another, no well-studied steps can be replicated, and the design of which is equivalent to rocket science.
If you're truly creating such unique and valuable software that it is to be compared to the world's engineering megaprojects in its challenge then perhaps it is beyond being beholden to a budget. Who am I to say?
But 99.9% of this industry isn't doing that and should probably be able to estimate their work.
I’m not talking about difficulty; I’m talking about uniqueness—uniqueness for me personally. There are people who spend their whole lives designing bridges. I, on the other hand, have been writing software for 15 years, and almost every task I encounter is unlike the previous one. I’m not saying it’s difficult, but solving it requires gaining new experience that will be useless for future tasks. Sometimes, I have to do something similar to a previous task, but in 90 percent of cases, I first need to create documentation on how it currently works, figure out how to turn a task description consisting of a 15-word headline into a set of concrete actions, and then test it.
I watched a video on the Vertasium channel, and I got the impression that this story is completely different from the story of PFAS. The actual links to diseases are very weak; it wasn't even labeled as carcinogenic, but rather listed as possibly carcinogenic. I have a theory that this scandal was caused by the company itself because its patent was expiring, and if not for the scandal, competitors would have been able to use this extremely effective herbicide.
Crypto is 99% gambling, tax evasion scam, sanction evasion, steal energy on mining, or financing criminal. I suppose big countries may totally forbid it quite soon.
Unfortunately, all such calculations are egocentric. People assume that everyone can use solar panels for 13 days 2 weeks, and when needed, we’ll just get electricity from the grid. But what they don’t take into account is that when there’s load today but none tomorrow, the grid becomes unstable.
2) This also increases costs. You might save electricity consumption in 14 times, but your expenses for grid electricity can increase in 14 times, because the grid still needs to be maintained — staff must be kept at power plants to ensure you can be supplied with 100% of your energy at any moment.
The tricky thing in cold climates is the part of the year when solar power is lowest but electricity use, for heating, is highest. Sometimes they have hydro or something.
Unfortunately, there is a lot of ideology in the issue of restricting car traffic in cities, for example, the Netherlands is often cited as an example, but they forget that it is one of the most motorized countries in the world (80% of families have a car, and 33% have two), and has one of the densest networks of motorways in the world, and 78% of trips in the Netherlands are made by car, and the average distance of a bicycle trip is only 5 kilometers. I do not argue that local restrictions or a ban on cars, especially in the center, make life more comfortable, but this does not mean that it is necessary to restrict it everywhere.
I often ride a bike, but it is generally surprising that after a century of development of the car, the creation of comfortable climate control systems, noise insulation and multimedia, I am seriously asked to take children to school in the rain, wind or snow on a bike. For me, this sounds like regression
The problem is, as my wife says, accounting is a very creative field. Depending on how you calculate it, the cost of renewable energy can vary by a factor of ten. I suppose that if it were profitable, big businesses would have a monopoly on green energy and installed solar panels and batteries instead of offering them to homeowners.
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