Pine needles may be calorie-negative and unpleasant to eat, but they're very high in Vit C and available in the dead of winter. I would hardly call them inedible. You can make an oxymel to extract the vitamins & make it easier to eat.
Perhaps we agree as a society to pay for universal access to the digital "town square" - collectivize Facebook, Google, etc and pay for it through taxes.
Have you had the unfortunate necessity to use the IRS web site? It's actually fantastic. Getting logged in and authenticated is pretty weird, because you have to put in a credit card number or a loan number, but it's pretty good authentication for the audience.
The web site itself is snappy, well written, and I could do everything using Firefox on Linux. No "IE only" bullshit. Downloads are fast.
I'd give the IRS 10/10, except for the fact that I owe them money.
I had to use the social security website the other day and it wouldn't let me log in after working hours. Told me to try again at 9AM the next day. It's a joke.
This is awfully reductive of "government." State unemployment offices are shit because no one cares. There are plenty of military and IC data processing web applications that scale just as big and just as reliably as Facebook and Google. It's a matter of priorities. There is nothing inherent about public funding that dooms you to a poor implementation.
> If customers do not care enough to stop using the product then there is no harm.
Facebook users (notably not customers) are the ones being harmed here, and they don't exactly have free reign to choose the platform their communities talk and organize on. If I choose not to use Facebook then I'm isolating myself from my community.
Relying on one irresponsible for-profit organization for your communications is a disaster waiting to happen. By using that service, you enable them to continue. It takes two to tango.
Yes, so people would use Insta. Then it gets bought by Facebook. Then WhatsApp, also bought by Facebook. Etc. Everywhere you run, Facebook and friends is waiting with a warm, privacy suffocating hug.
What the hell is the FTC and DOJ doing allowing these obvious anti-competitive mergers and acquisitions? How is Amazon able to sell physical and digital products, control distribution channels, and sell significant infrastructure? I am no monopoly expert, but in my opinion, AWS is a significant competitive issue. Did we learn nothing from US Steel and Standard Oil? Has the Clayton Act been ignored? It seems like the Sherman Act matters as well: companies all agreeing, within hours, to ban certain apps or content. That’s not competition.
You're ignoring the comment you're replying to. It's not 'two to tango', it's the network effect Facebook deliberately set up and perpetuates thru growth and acquisition.
Bolivia. The US-backed coup against Evo Morales may very well have been in part because of his intention to implement state control of lithium extraction, preventing foreign companies from ransacking the country's natural resource. https://www.humanrightspulse.com/mastercontentblog/bolivian-...
You shouldn't believe every conspiracy theory you read.
Basically one guy claimed lithium is the reason for a US backed coup. This is not proven and most expert don't believe this is true. Its neither proven that it was a US backed coup, and even if that was proven, lithium is very, very unlikely to be the reason.
Lithium is not gold or oil, lithium is everywhere, the reason you produced in this region of South America is because it is cheap to let the sun do a lot of the work. But the reality is, its still more like a complex chemical, more then a metal. The technology to refine it and get it to the grade needed to be valuable, is very difficult, and the outlandish claims made by the president about the government doing all of this extremely advanced processing (and even build cars) were simply political BSing.
It seems what is going on her is that a president made a lot of claims about the value of this resources, over-hyped its value and potential, and when opposed claimed lithium is the reason and its all the evil US fault. This is what I would call narrative building.
Lithium projects are happening literally all over the world, the waste majority of expansion of supply is not happening in South America anymore. If Bolivia ever wants to make real money from this resources they need foreign company that have DLE technology do it and tax them. With DLE much less manual work is required so it will not be an industry that creates massive amounts of jobs.
> salt flats that stretch across Chile, Argentina, and Bolivia and hold over 75%
This is flat out false.
> Bolivia’s Salar de Uyuni salt flat alone holds an estimated 17% of lithium globally.
I live in Chile so I know a thing or two about mining. 20% of fiscal income stems from copper exports and the majority of that from the state owned mining company Codelco.
There are many mining operations of foreign companies which don't generate nearly as much fiscal income so putting mining under state control is completely understandable. This is exactly how we and oil countries got rich. We destroy the environment so at least we should be compensated instead of exporting profits as well.
A US-backed coup against Bolivia makes no sense, Chile is a muppet and does whatever the US needs done. There is no need to intervene in Bolivia if you can just ask Chile to expand lithium mining and we will happily do it.
I have seen the lithium mining sites in Chile, compared to copper it is clean. The mining operations are still small in comparison to copper and investment is slow.
Fires, hurricanes, extreme heat, and drought are made more frequent & severe by climate change, and they certainly kill people. Climate change also disrupts food systems and will cause civil war and mass migrations. Millions will need to migrate just from coastal flooding, which I'd imagine will cause plenty of geopolitical strife and ultimately lead to many deaths.
"Existential threat" in my mind means humanity itself is threatened. The species will likely survive but millions if not billions will die due to climate change.
Current projections of the effect of an RCP 8.5 scenario (a “do nothing” approach) suggest severe impacts to the Florida and gulf coasts, creating significant migrations inland. But the projected GDP hit will be an estimated 5%—i.e. losing a few years of growth.
It will be bad and disruptive and many people will die. But based on what we know about the “science” it’s not going to be “existential.” For example the wildfires on the west coast killed 35-40 people. We could have a dozen of those a year and it wouldn’t threaten the existence of humanity or really even civilization as we know it.
I'd passed this over on Netflix, assuming it would be too introductory. Is it interesting enough for someone who's already familiar with the premise from having been around on HN?
Definitely. There wasn't a single idea in it that was new to me, and you'll easily pick up on where they're going with certain plot points long before they get there. (And yes, there's a "plot"!)
However, there were so many amazing ways they articulated things for non-technical audiences, in a cohesive way, that you'll get a ton out of it.
I especially recommend watching it with non-tech friends or family! Led to a ton of great discussions for me.
Last month I read a bunch of academic papers on modern surveillance theory (Zuboff, who appears in the film briefly, only represents one stand of contemporary thinking about surveillance, the field is much richer), and, like others, I still found this movie interesting even though it is fairly introductory. The presentation is both entertaining and effective, which I think is a major reason this movie has early signs of having been far more successful than previous attempts to highlight the same problems.
The fact that many of the voices in the film had a hand in developing the technologies they raise the alarm about also adds an intriguing edge--especially since it's easy to interpret their participation in either a positive or negative light.
I reacted the same initially, yet watched it on a whim.
The answer is sort of yes, in the sense that they provide you with more succinct explanations and analogies. This is useful if you want to explain this stuff to other people (who are not on HN).
Roughly no, if you’ve followed this topic, it will be the same drumbeat. It still might be worth watching since it’s an important issue and this is the most high profile exposé.
I assume local food is more well-studied than local fashion, and may have similar environmental cost profiles. This study: http://www.iufn.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Making-local-... found that transportation is actually less important than other factors.
On the other hand, local food has other important advantages: resiliency (perhaps less important for clothing), and supporting the local economy.
