I used an iPod 5th generation for a few years as a phone (it's basically an iPhone 5 without a baseband chip). I used the Skype app to ring people and send messages.
Whatsapp is not compatible with iPods which I always found annoying. This is because Whatsapp requires a SIM, which iPods don't support.
Skype nagged me to update, which I couldn't since 5th generation iPods are tied to iOS 9.3.5 forever and can't update. The 7th generation iPods however have a later version of iOS and support more apps.
Currently I have two phones. One is a dumbphone for normal calls and SMS (You would be surprised at how much business is conducted with SMS and calls). Then a smartphone which I NEVER use for calls, just use it as a mini 'tablet' for surfing the web and using Maps etc
Everyone going on about lung disease when you can just vaporize it or use edibles. Edibles are tricky since you can either add too much or too little so you get an unexpected high.
Vaporizing doesn't produce harsh carcinogenic smoke and it's the best way to consume cannabis IMHO. By not combusting the plant material, you use less of it to get high and it's better bang for your buck. You can make 25g of hashish last 6 months if you want to.
> "Climate change impacts are contributing to wildfires that are increasingly dangerous and destructive across the Western U.S.,"
It's baffling that here we are in the full motions of global warming, and we can find all manner of distractions to take our mind off it, and divert attention. Yes, there is a movement to halt global warming or slow it down, but it needs more traction. The topic needs to be the frontpage of every newspaper. The world is burning before our eyes.
In practice, you can't attribute a single fire to climate change. You can only attribute the overall number and intensity of fires to climate change. It's rather like asking which specific cigarette gave you lung cancer.
However, like any scientific theory, it must be falsifiable. In other words, we can't just jump to "it's climate change, but you can't pinpoint it." Because otherwise, how do we prove that there is not a different potential cause?
Trying to jump into these huge, world-scale theories comes with the risk of blinding us to alternative explanations that might be more valid.
This is my quibble with reporting on weather events lately. Over in Germany, where they had massive flooding due to a ton of rain in a short period, everything about it is pinned on climate change, to the exclusion of discussing any other problems that can lead to disaster.
How much could also be other human factors, like building up levees and flood control systems that aren't up to snuff and/or shift worse flooding problems downstream (this has been the case in many parts of the US for decades now; can we presume Europe is better in flood control management than the Army Corps and thousands of small river towns?).
> Over in Germany, where they had massive flooding due to a ton of rain in a short period, everything about it is pinned on climate change, to the exclusion of discussing any other problems that can lead to disaster.
Germany has had "once in century" floods every decade for a while now. It's a densely populated country, meaning people can't just move somewhere else and there are not large swaths of unpopulated/unused lands that could be repurposed for massive flood control systems.
It's also not like we are talking about towns that have been built recently in risk-areas, we are talking about towns that have been in those places for centuries, sometimes over a millennia, which is a testament to how out of the ordinary these floods are.
The cause for the failures have been unprecedented rainfall. There are a million possible factors that can influence the situation, climate change is the leading one. Let's fix it instead of discussing if climate change represents a 90% of the problem or just a 78%.
Let's also spend trillions adding more safety for a worsening and more hostile climate. We could have saved that by taking action earlier, now we need to pay to keep ourselves safe. Let's act before it costs more money and more lives.
doesn’t really matter what the problem is attributed to when not enough is being done about either way (at least in the case of the US, can’t speak for Germany)
I'd be all for attributing it to not sweeping forests well enough if that actually got the funding to start seriously combating the issue, it’s a positive feedback loop that needs to be mitigated
No, how about we be honest with ourselves first as to what the real root cause is? Answering "Yes, but...climate change!" to "Is the cause actually due to poor forestry management over the past 50 years?" doesn't actually solve anything.
If it is bad forestry management, we can fix that and it's much easier to hold the people responsible for that job because it's a defined role that they failed at. Compared to how much climate change will supposedly cost us to fix and that it's much more arguable who is responsible for what...
Not hopeful in that, because it wasn't like California did good forest management with what we knew, but there were better strategies available. They did bad forest management, even compared to what we already know, and somehow they're going to do what they should have done already...
this is the problem… “california didn’t do this” “it’s not X it’s Y” - meanwhile forests burn; we’re going to die arguing. I’m going to go call my congressperson and end this frivolous argument! no offense!
Nothing has been done about “poor management” either so why exactly does it matter? Blame it on me for all I care, just convince half of congress do actually do something
This is a hard question because there are multiple factors, but temperature is a known factor. And the recent temperature highs are generally considered to be related to the climate crisis. 2020's historic heat and fires caused a shift toward a stronger climate attribution, and 2021 seems to me to be sealing the deal. If there were record heat waves and less fire this year, then I think the evidence would have pushed things away from climate attribution, but that didn't happen. The scary part of this is that forest fires have not been part of the climate models because scientists hadn't reached a strong enough confidence, but they are becoming a positive feedback loop as they release more carbon each year. And the climate models were already dire without forest fires.
Prof. Scott Stephens UC Berkeley College of Natural Resources; dont phone for an appointment, he is busy right now
Secondly, after crazy disasterous, world-headlines fires three years ago, Calif. Governor Gavin "perfect hairgel" Newsom appointed a blue-ribbon committee on tracking and dealing with these fires from a forestry point of view.. that committee publishes online and in fact as a Github repo. That committee has to work with aggressive, self-serving entities well entrenched in govt money and commercial licenses, which benefit from "us-vs-them" language and tactics.
In this writers opinion, these are truly historic events, not in the good way.
I didn't dispute climate change's existence, and if your graph doesn't show what the Average is (where is your source that it is 25 years?), my point stands that your graph by itself is not proof.
We're approaching the point where we'll be scrambling to deal with increasingly regular natural disasters, heat waves, etc and too busy dealing with the immediate problems (because that's what constituents are crying out for help with) to solve the underlying problem.
What kills me is An Inconvenient Truth came out in 2006 and we've chosen to ignore the issue until it radically changes the planet.
But the problem with An Inconvenient Truth these days is that it was made by a politician who is not a scientist. You might agree with that politician or think his grasp of the science is solid, but it is not helpful if you are trying to bridge the divide because opponents will easily grasp those errors.
Why would you trust a politician on science when he has a political agenda (allegedly) and isn't a scientist to begin with?
If it had been made by the head of NASA or similar, that might have done better. Even if that doesn't mean people would believe it more, it's just the principle of the thing. It made the issue come out the gate as more partisan than it had to be.
I'm saying it was a bad choice in principle. If I was funding a movie about climate change or trying to convince the world... I'd get some PhDs and scientists of notable standing. A politician is the last, worst choice I would have done.
It’s not like people got together and said, “let’s have Al Gore do it!”
That movie happened, and the public is aware of it, largely due to the fact that Al Gore — whether you hate his politics or not — was in a position where he was exposed to the science, cared deeply about the issue, and dedicated himself to getting the message out. Public messaging being kind of a big part of being a politician.
Nope. Like I said, I don't know if it would increase belief in any major capacity. I'm just saying it's a bad look and, in my opinion, was a bad choice for trying to convince people in principle.
If I had to make a movie about Climate Change, out of principle, I wouldn't choose a politician and I would choose someone with a scientific degree. That's what I'm saying.
The pandemic has made it very clear that the response to "climate change is going to kill a bunch of people and cause a lot of damage" is "I'm going to pretend I didn't hear that".
It seems a good amount of folks on HN are fine with the world burning as long as their paychecks and vesting schedules aren’t affected. Just look at the recent thread about the Google guy moving to Twitter and the mental gymnastics on display therein.
Until it is burning literally in front of people, they won’t change their behaviour - the most important behaviour of which is how they vote. I am sad for those impacted by these fires but if this is what it takes to change voting behaviour and overcome lobbyists then so be it.
I think "distractions" is an unfair way of putting it. Most people (at least in America) are focused on working enough to survive. Even though a significant portion of the population is aware of climate collapse, what can they do about it? Without a direct confrontation to global capitalism, emissions will continue. Even if emissions were halted completely today, we're still going to be dealing with a collapsing biosphere with unpredictable consequences for generations. I just don't see how awareness of the issue will do anything to improve our situation.
There's also the risk, according to some scientists, that if we cut our emissions overnight (I don't know how, like we all got together collectively and did at once or something), the climate could be significantly adversely affected by the shock drop. Cutting emissions entirely is also a no-win. So where's the balance?
There's also the issue that some countries (the US) are a lot more concerned about it than other countries (not naming names). Those other countries have every incentive to watch us flail around making the lives of our citizens harder (through taxation, meat reduction, other proposals) trying to cut emissions while they sit back and egg us on, and maybe pay lip service once in a while with the occasional inconsequential project.
If humanity cut all of CO2 emissions today, it's going to take hundreds of years for accumulated CO2 to drop significantly! It's mostly excess CO2 and doesn't drop beyond seasonal cycles.
I think he is (somewhat confusingly) talking about global dimming, i.e. particulate pollution, masking warming effect of CO2. But we can't really do much about that if we want to stop global warming at all. And it's not even completely clear whether that theory (of dimming) is valid or not, clouds can have a varying effect on temperature.
Thank you, that's probably it. It's all very complicated.
The scary thing with theories is that reality doesn't change whether your theory is considered proven or not. We might have no evidence that "global dimming" would be a thing, but then it absolutely could happen. Or, admittedly, vice versa, where we thought it could happen but it doesn't. We need more research as usual...
> The scary thing with theories is that reality doesn't change whether your theory is considered proven or not. We might have no evidence that "global dimming" would be a thing, but then it absolutely cold happen. Or, admittedly, vice versa, where we thought it could happen but it doesn't.
This is just denialism of prediction as a concept. A universal excuse to not do anything. After all, why work to extinguish the fire when it could go out all by itself?
That wasn't really my point. I'm more just saying that there is the risk that, let's say "climate dimming" is a thing, and we somehow pressed forward and cut all the emissions, and then it happens when we didn't expect it. What does that mean for us?
We're playing with the world here. If scientists mess up and their reaction to climate change causes other problems, nobody will listen to a scientist ever again on this issue, and that comes with its own risks.
There can't be. The amount of lag in the system is huge. Ceasing industrial CO2 emissions instantly would simply start a slow downtrend in the amount of atmospheric CO2. It would take decades to return to, say the 1900 level.
I don't know where that person got their idea from but it's clearly a very bad source.
There is literally no reason to pin this one on climate change. There are a million more likely explanations (lightning, gasoline spill, electrical fault, campfire) mixed with other explanations (lots of dead brush, bad forestry management). Take your pick. Don't automatically pin it on something that, day to day, without our scientific readings most people would be completely unaware of.
For the most part climate change is not the spark, but it makes the tinderbox larger and drier - easier to ignite, and much more fuel when it does.
And honestly it's not even fully correct to say "climate change is not the spark" - having stronger storms with more lightning results in more chances for ignition as well. But afaik most fires are attributable to human causes - the problem is that climate change is making the fires much larger and more destructive than they otherwise would be.
By that argument no fire can be pinned on climate change until climate change gets so severe that the surface temperature of the forest is above combustion point of whatever has the lowest combustion point in the forest.
> This fire is going to continue to grow -- the extremely dry vegetation and weather are not in our favor," said Joe Hessel, an incident commander for the Oregon Department of Forestry.
So clearly they acknowledge that the weather is a factor, and that seems pretty related to climate change.
Why does it have to be an either/or thing? If a fire magnitude becomes newsworthy because several factors aligned to make it that way, it seems silly to point fingers at scapegoats as an excuse for continuing to do nothing on any front.
Of course it could be. The problem is that there's no proof that "dry vegetation and bad weather" can only be caused by climate change, or that the cause of these events is climate change. There has been bad weather before humans walked this planet according to scientists, and dry vegetation also.
> There has been bad weather before humans walked this planet according to scientists, and dry vegetation also.
Oh sure, but climate change deniers also like to say temperature changes have existed since the dawn of time (while conveniently ignoring magnitude[0]).
The thing is forest management people have been warning about increasing risks of large fires for years and fires have been consistently getting bigger and worse (just off the top of my head, there was big basin last year, lytton, yakutia, dozens of others, and now this). There's literally hundreds of peer reviewed studies showing correlation between our polluting ways and ice cap melting and correlation between that and extreme weather events.
Besides, climate change is a symptom of a larger problem. Depletion of water sources for example is also related to dryness and is also a byproduct of human activities. I think it's shortsighted to say "onoes climate change, throw carbon offsets at it, problem solved!" just as it is to say "onoes forest fires, do better forest management, problem solved!"
Solving eco problems is going to require a lot more than cherrypicking and addressing only darling themes. Ignoring whichever factor you don't understand the underlying data for is pretty much the same as inaction where there should be action.
No, it doesn't. It only mentions climate change once in a quote that contains no scientific measurements. Just the claim that climate change is doing something, and that's it.
“The greatest minds of my generation…” As long as our society is structured to reward crypto gamblers and other parasites over all others, this phenomenon will continue.
There is something similar to this: `Spotify granted patent to use mic to infer emotional state, age, gender, and accent`[0]. Not surprising, given how data hungry most tech companies are now. Without data, they are dead. But how much is really needed to serve ADs? Do we really need to be doing creepy things like 'sentiment analysis' or peering inside the brain? How much access is too much access? I think we are slowly learning the threshold piece by piece.
We arnt slowly learning the threshold. It's known, and we passed it a long time ago. People turn off tracking when given the choice and told what is being tracked already. Much less some future peering inside the brain.
> Transactions made using cryptocurrencies can provide more anonymity to senders and recipients of money
Well, yes, providing you use something like Monero. We all should know by now that Bitcoin has a transparent ledger and your kids in 20 years time will probably be able to see what you spent your Bitcoin on.
The statement isn't incorrect. The majority of cryptocurrencies (including Bitcoin) are anonymous since they don't assign an external identity and unless you manually attach one, the only way an identity is attached is if it can be inferred by the activity on the account.
Monero and zk proof based networks are private (distinct from anonymous) because the interactions between the accounts and funds are largely obscured.
While these zk proof based networks are also anonymous, most networks are not also private.
It's a small distinction but it's important none-the-less. Privacy improves anonymity but it's perfectly possible to remain anonymous without privacy.
This isn't really a thing, not without huge visibility of the bitcoin network to correlate 'first time transaction seen'. Transactions are relayed by peers -- just because you saw some gossip from IP 'A' does not imply the transaction came from IP 'A', it could have been relayed through 'B' and 'C'.
Furthermore, with dandelion routing, you cannot find the true origin of the tx by sight, even if you find the true first IP relaying the transaction.
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Whatsapp is not compatible with iPods which I always found annoying. This is because Whatsapp requires a SIM, which iPods don't support.
Skype nagged me to update, which I couldn't since 5th generation iPods are tied to iOS 9.3.5 forever and can't update. The 7th generation iPods however have a later version of iOS and support more apps.
Currently I have two phones. One is a dumbphone for normal calls and SMS (You would be surprised at how much business is conducted with SMS and calls). Then a smartphone which I NEVER use for calls, just use it as a mini 'tablet' for surfing the web and using Maps etc