Speak for yourself

Recently? I’ve been hearing about a possible large trans-Pluto object since before Pluto lost its status as a planet.

I still watch his main videos (when they actually happen…), but with a much higher degree of scepticism than I used to. And I stopped listening to his podcast (singular…).

My disillusionment with him started with a few issues with his videos. The blatantly ridiculous “royal family is good actually” video. The less obvious but no less egregious touting of Guns, Germs, and Steel. The AI techbroism of his automation video. Then he just killed off the podcast with no explanation, leaving his cohost Brady to put out a note saying “yeah we’re just on hiatus for now”. Over 4 years ago that was. There was the fact that he sided very vocally with Kurzgesagt in the CoffeeBreak drama, despite CB obviously being in the wrong at every step of the way.

Then the final straw where I was no longer willing to say I was a fan of his was when he did a video about some missile silo in America, in which he used the name of a submarine-based missile instead of a land-based missile at some point. Shortly afterwards he put out a massive mea culpa video saying it was a “catastrophic” error that he could not live with himself for, and that he holds himself to too high a standard to let that stand. All while still not acknowledging the problems with those earlier videos. So one nitpicky detail gets a massive hullabaloo and a retraction, but fundamental flaws in the underlying thesis of the video gets nothing? Give me a break.

I assume that means the primary equivalent of the electoral college gives its votes out proportionally. But honestly even then that’s absolutely nonsensical. The end result has to be just one winner. That’s how a presidential system works.

It really should be runoff voting. Whether full multi-round runoff or just IRV depends on the logistics of it. But wow. Even the UK—which joins America in failing at democracy by using FPTP on national elections—manages to use a runoff process when selecting the leaders of its 3 largest parties.

Wait, are even primaries FPTP in America?

Wtaf

I dunno if it’s “family sharing” or some other thing, but I can play games from my sister’s library through some means that I set up a couple of years ago.

It turned out to be from a “satire” news company (scare quotes because I just don’t see how it was satire…it’s not poking fun at any institutions or beliefs or advocating for any particular action), and not a real story.

But it’s worth investigating how we feel about it anyway, because stories where something similar has happened have also been true.

I think the people doing the interviews are the lowest scum-tier “influencers”. I hate that they exist, I can’t understand who’s watching them. They’re not producing anything of value. But they’re not doing anything morally wrong, in my opinion.

The blame here lies 100% on the employer. What she’s doing when not on company time or in company uniform are none of the company’s business. It should not be legal and is definitely not ethical for an employer to take any disciplinary action for something an employee does that has no connection to their business.

Nobody wants energy stored for months. Whatever storage is used needs to get through temporary decreases in efficiency. In places that use solar, that means from one afternoon to the next morning. In places that use wind, it means until the wind picks up. We’re talking storage on the order of tens of hours at the most.

I don’t think I like the idea of relying entirely on post-game punishments and cutting back on sin bins.

Bennett wants to go two giant steps further by abolishing the sin bin for anything other than professional fouls, while revamping the send-off rule so teams get a replacement player after 10 minutes.

the answer is heavier penalties post-match. We need to have a mature discussion about the send-off and the sin bin.

If anything, I think the problem here is with them being too reticent to sin bin people. There were multiple occasions in this week’s Origin game where sin bins could have been used, but weren’t. And the one time it was used, there was such a transparently obvious attempt to “both sides” the issue. In that game specifically it was part of a bigger problem that Bennett doesn’t address with refs obviously being told to try and equal up the series to make game 3 a decider, but even more generally, the problem is with inconsistency of using the sin bin and send off, and the answer is not to get rid of sin bins. I worry that if the penalty isn’t immediate (in the form of an immediate sin bin), too often players will think it’s worth the risk of missing a game or two, if it takes out the opponent’s best player.

Other than that though, I think Bennett raises a lot of good points here. They need consistency, and they need a greater focus on player safety. And most of all they need to acknowledge that there are serious deep-rooted issues with how reffing is done.

Connections
Puzzle #383
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Not could, will. These days it’s considered unethical not to debrief explaining any deceptive elements of the study. It can also be valuable because the people conducting the study can use it as a chance to find out if the participants knew about the deception, in case that knowledge might have affected the results.

Does this actually work?

The fantastic thing about renewables is how much they lend themselves to a less centralised model. Solar collector? Sure, why not‽ Rooftop solar on people’s houses? You bet! Geothermal? If local conditions are favourable to it, absolutely!

Instead of a small number of massive power plants that only governments or really large corporations can operate individuals can generate the power for themselves, or companies can offset their costs by generating a little power, or cities can operate a smaller plant to power what operations in their city aren’t handled by other means. It’s not a one-size-fits-all approach.

This contrasts with nuclear. SMRs could theoretically do the same thing, but haven’t yet proven viable. And traditional plants just put out way too much power. They’re one-size-fits-all by definition, and only have the ability to operate alongside other modes with the other modes filling in a small amount around the edges.

• Tor, from Old English torr, meaning hill.
• Pen, from Celtic *penn, meaning hill.
• How, from Danish hoh, meaning hill.
• Hill, from English hill, meaning hill.

^{Unfortunately, it’s not actually a real official name for a hill, though it could be…}

fwiw I recommend stopping watching this once he starts talking about the hostile comments. It’s just pointless drama. But the first 13 minutes are good.

tetrapods are fish

I like this particularly because it allows you to tell people that whales are fish, which is generally going to get a much stronger response than if you said “people are fish”. Because in the latter, they know you’re up to something weird, but in the former they’re not sure if you might just be wrong.

Yikes, bitten by a wild animal? Did you see a doctor?

Nuclear doesn’t mean anti-renewable, both can exist.

Not easily, for the reasons explained in my reply to @[email protected].

The people who I talk to who are pro nuclear seem very well informed

I doubt it, because the science itself is against nuclear. Evidence says it would be too expensive and take too long to deliver compared to renewables.

You can’t cut the red tape. The red tape is why we’re able to say nuclear is safe.

the weird part is most people do think nuclear fusion plants are a good thing and can solve stuff. But they have almost all of the downsides nuclear fission plants have in terms of red tape, complexity and cost

Huh? Nuclear fusion doesn’t have any downsides or upsides. Because it doesn’t exist. We’ve never been able to generate net power with fusion. (No, not even that story from a couple of years ago, which only counted as ‘input’ a small fraction of the total energy used overall. It was a good development, but just one small step on the long journey to it being practical.)

Being anti-nuclear was a poor stance to have 20, 30 years ago. At that time, renewables weren’t cost effective enough to be a big portion of our energy generation mix, and we should have been building alternatives to fossil fuels since back then if not earlier. But today, all the analysis tells us that renewables are far cheaper and more effective than nuclear. Today, being pro-nuclear is the wrong stance to take. It’s the anti-science stance, which is why it has seen a recent rise among right-wing political parties and media organisations.

First, no, that’s not what I said. If you’re only going to be arguing in bad faith like that this will be the last time I engage with you.

Second, baseload power is in fact a myth. And it becomes even worse when you consider the fact that nuclear doesn’t scale up and down in response to demand very well. In places with large amounts of rooftop solar and other distributed renewables, nuclear is especially bad, because you can’t just tell everyone who has their own generation to stop doing that, but you also don’t want to be generating more than is used.

Third, even if you did consider it necessary to have baseload “until we have adequate storage”, the extremely long timelines it takes to get from today to using renewables in places that don’t already have it, spending money designing and building nuclear would just delay the building of that storage, and it would still end up coming online too late.

I used to be a fan of nuclear. In 2010 I’d have said yeah, we should do it. But every time I’ve looked into it over the last 10 years especially, I’ve had to reckon with the simple fact that all the data tells us we shouldn’t be building nuclear; it’s just an inferior option to renewables.