Yep I learned the skills of how to take better care of my children! It improved my bond with them massively. Use the leave for that. It's what it's for. If you waste it 'learning' you won't get it back.
I have compiled Fortran programs from the 70s on modern platforms without changing a line. The compiler, OS, and CPU architecture had all disappeared but the programs still worked correctly.
I've 'modernised' such an old program then come back a few years later, realised the 'modern' ones don't run anymore and reverted to the old Fortran version.
Well, it is open source. I'm not expecting Python 2 to get completely dropped from Linux distros in the near future. (I could be wrong; I will be disappointed if I am.)
There was an article the other day about problems mixing different python versions on Mac. I admittedly didn't read much of it—but I was somewhat baffled by the problem. I have Python 3 installed on my mac as "python3", and Python 2 (which comes with macOS) as just "python". I think that's the right way to treat them—as different, independent interpreters which can co-exist, as do, say, Python and Ruby.
Even the Amish use real nappies rather than messing around with reusables.
Real nappies are better for baby and toddler bums, easier for already stressed parents and more hygienic.
Reusables result in massive energy and water waste, they are a health hazard if not washed properly (many manufacturers washing instructions are very inadequate. They must be washed at a minimum of 60°C whatever your manufacturer said), release loads of microplastics and are a lot more work.
The argument for and against reusable is pretty much undecided. There also services which do the washing for you. And they are probably way more efficient than people washing at home in terms of energy used.
Anyhow, real eco-parents go diaper-less as most parents in the world. Google split-pants, elimination communication! Compared to this letting children sitting in their own feces in reusable or not-reusable nappies is pretty unhygienic.
Downvotes? I know it is a big leap for the western mind, that most human ever lived have never seen a nappy. There is a lot of problems with diapers e.g. rash etc.
... and I know the technic and I know it requires more time. And the people I know applying it .. were only partly succesfull. With the result of shit around. And pee.
Obviously for pee it is the same. Does not mean you have to do it everywhere. I would not get in an airplane without a diaper. And obviously western nursery does not work without it either.
About accidents:
And then what is more unhygienic?
Feces, urine on the floor or feces, urine all around your bottom? For the first you can use almost any cleaning liquid you want, for the second even to much soap is not good.
Well, with poo it is quite easy. If you pay attention to your baby, you know, when he wants to, I can imagine it, doing without (we simply lacked the time).
But peeing he just do without warning. I would have to pay attention to him 100% the whole time - and this is not what I want or can afford.
And what happens outside in the urban areas other people also happen to live in?
It evidently is a problem though considering the entire Chinese middle class seem to have switched en masse to disposables, turning China into the largest diaper market in the world over the past decade or so.
They do a serious assessment of every new technology to decide if it adds value to their society. Disposable nappies are one of the few technologies they decided to use.
The Amish didn't start evaluating new technologies in the stone age. If you look at technologies invented after the hammer, of course you'll have a hammer. But you won't necessarily have a smart phone or an Echo.
I have encountered it -- but, the way I read the original post was more about individual usage rather than computer license, e.g., I don't need a license for every computer I have my personal copy of BBEdit installed on, because they're all "my" computers, even including my work computer. And, any computer or device that uses my Apple account can download and use applications purchased on it.
I believe that latter condition is actually true for Microsoft 365 Personal[1], too -- it's tied to your Microsoft account, and the one "seat" you're buying is that user, regardless of the number of devices you have. Business editions tend to be licensed differently.
[1] I know that looks like I got the name wrong, but apparently in April they changed "Office 365" to "Microsoft 365."
Assuming some negative feedback mechanism kicks in. There is a chance a positive feedback occurs, global warming spirals and Earth becomes uninhabitable. See Venus for an example.
You realize that all of the carbon in fossil fuels was once in the atmosphere right? The earth spits out a little bit of CO2 naturally, and the sun is a bit hotter than it was 100 million years ago, but we aren't turning into Venus anytime soon.
Back then the continents were configured rather differently. That has a huge effect on hothouse vs icehouse regime. Right now we are in a continental configuration that should be icehouse (circumpolar currents with cold deep water). If we force the climate into hothouse against its natural state what will happen?
It's very much not settled how balanced the mantle vs surface carbon cycle is. How much carbon is in MORB? Is subducted sediment actually entrained into the mantle?
A major store of CO2 is sedimentary dolomite. We did't even really understand how that formed! (Last time I checked but I'm no sedimentologist so that might have been solved.)
Speaking as a geologist your statement is dangerously naive. I'm not saying Venus and the end of all life is definite but it is the worst case scenario of a situation that we don't understand and that will soon be (maybe already is) out of our control.
>Speaking as a geologist your statement is dangerously naive.
I'm skeptical of you being a working geologist because I haven't seen any credible claims that there is any reason to believe Earth could turn into Venus. But even outside of that, scaremongering with incredibly unlikely scenarios is also dangerous and detrimental to fighting climate change, because somebody is going to call bullshit on you and will result in your and even the general credibility of climate scientists, to be diminished.
You should speak to some more Geologists then. We really don't understand the systems of our planet and we are currently sticking a big spanner into them. Many of us are more concerned than we can publish - precisely because we don't want to scaremonger.
Will the Earth definitely turn into an out of control hothouse with a Venus - like climate? Very probably not there are many differences between Earth and Venus.
Can we be sure than some positive feedback mechanism might make life as we know it untenable on Earth? I'm not sure myself and I don't think anyone can know.
"We really don't understand the systems of our planet and we are currently sticking a big spanner into them."
There's a presumption that man is somehow an unnatural creature divorced from nature here.
If only we had multiple Earths to experiment with. One without humans as a control, another with humans as we are now and a third with humanity following whatever dictates the warmist technocrats prescribe.
Hypothetically speaking, I wonder how one would measure the utility of humanity existing at all? Some environmentalists may suggest that the Earth without humanity is the "best" of them all. There is a proximity between warmists and population control advocates.
Unfortunately, we don't have that luxury. From my perspective the "spanner in the works" analogy better fits with the economic centralization & suffering the warmist dictates may cause.
I'm politically very in favour of personal liberty. Climate change being a real and causing problems is a fact at this point (we are mainly working out how big the problems will be). I wish that some liberterian politicians would start to accept that so we can get some freedom respecting solutions!
Humanity created agricultural systems. Likewise beavers modify their environment and create ecological systems. The Internet only moralizes about the former.
I'm inclined to agree that climates change. Whether the weather is wrong, correct or otherwise undesirable due to immoral actions of men seems like a separate issue. As you mentioned, we don't fully understand the systems involved. Consequently, I prefer to err on the side of humility rather than judgement.
That said, responsible forestry management and storage of carbon in the form of cut lumber has a profit incentive. For those inclined to accept the premises of global warming, this is a solution which respects freedom. Interestingly, it is downplayed and dismissed as untenable. Even further afield are environmentalists who oppose logging and propose regulations which set the stage for CO2 emitting forest fires.
I don't see climate change as a moral issue. To me it's a practical issue. Best case climate change will seriously mess up our way of life. Worst case is very bad.
I'm not sure that we can grow and store enough trees to bring CO2 levels down to non dangerous levels in time. If we could it would certainly be worth doing. Can you point me to any calculations?
Even if this specific solution isn't viable, it is an example of what we need to do to solve this problem. Fundamentally we need to scrub a huge amount of carbon out of the atmosphere as soon as possible. Everything else is just moving the deckchairs.
There's several of these if you look. I believe one outlines how much land exactly needs to be used.
I see it as a philosophical issue. For me the warmist perspective is incoherent.
A bug's lifetime is measured in weeks. He cannot see beyond the next tuft of grass. His world is few meters in diameter and inches in height. If the aforementioned beaver floods the meadow, is it "unnatural" for the bug? Does this qualify as "sticking a spanner into a natural system"? Clearly the bug would be justified in doomsaying from his perspective.
Luckily, we are not bugs. We have the ability to adapt and gain larger perspectives than just looking at the next hedge. What we don't have is an omnipotent ability to understand the complex details of nature. Thus, we are ill qualified to make statements like, "putting a spanner in the works". Who are we to say that man's activity is worse or somehow different than nature's?
There's so much doomsaying. As you admit, we don't understand the complex systems of the Earth. A warmer period might be better for us all. We don't know. If you ascribe to the apocalyptic vision it is hard to claim that controlling other's consumption habits is not a moral issue. Either they follow the advice of their betters or are complicit in manifesting the climate apocalypse.
If we start with the moral premise that men are free, then restrictions upon that become a moral issue.
Maybe I'm just a cynic, but "cui bono" provides a more coherent explanation of the warmist agenda. It also explains why solutions like tree planting are not more popular. Carbon credits issued by a supranational entity raises alarm bells for me.
>Many of us are more concerned than we can publish.
Maybe you should be a little braver? As in, let your work be actually scrutinized by your peers (isn't that what tenure is for?) instead of scaremongering anonymously and accosting others for not understanding the science you are not willing publish? Seriously, what is the public supposed to take away from that kind of statement? Especially given that the public cannot ascertain the truth value of your Earth-will-turn-to-Venus theory. Are you trying to convince the public (on this forum no less) that this is a reasonable hypothetical situation to worry about? Come on. Put it to your peers and if they agree, then sure, let's talk policy.
>Will the Earth definitely turn into an out of control hothouse with a Venus - like climate? Very probably not there are many differences between Earth and Venus.
Didn't OP say that? Didn't I say that? What is it that you're arguing? Saying that we don't understand fully how our climate works and how many of the systems that drive it works is reasonable and nobody will dispute that. But you can't just use a lack of knowledge around an low probability event to drive global policy that could potentially be disastrous in all kinds of other ways. That's all I'm saying. We have a well-defined problem of ecosystem collapse and climate change, such as it is, don't muddle the water by coming up with new hypothetical problems.
I think I get what you are saying but maybe you could reformat it in a civil way rather than berating me.
I listed some very simple examples of places where we don't understand the Earth's carbon cycle fully. No one will publish a study saying, 'Hey guys we don't understand this yet'. We know we don't! That's why we do research to chip away at the problems.
> But you can't just use a lack of knowledge around an low probability event to drive global policy that could potentially be disastrous in all kinds of other ways.
The way I think about it like this. When I do an experiment I (am supposed to) do a risk assessment. If a proceedure has a low probability of causing a huge hazard like death I should take steps to reduce the risk of that hazard occurring as much as possible. Similarly climate change has a none zero possibility of causing humans to become extinct (and a much more than none zero chance of cause society as we know it to breakdown). Shouldn't we lower that probability?
I don't want to defend the original commenter's tone, but you must understand how frustrating it is to ask for evidence and get only a confident declaration that there's secret evidence hidden where it can't be checked. We can't drive global policy based on unverifiable insinuations about what the worst case is.
1. We don't really understand how these systems work. (The evidence for that is basically a lack of evidence and the type of thing we are still working on...)
2. Certain outcomes in the system could be very very very bad.
3. We are changing part of the system massively.
4. Because of (1) we don't know what (3) will do.
I'm not alluding to any hiden knowledge here. I'm not a climate scientist. My published work is related to other parts of the Earth's carbon cycle.
I'm sure you can see why "many of us are more concerned than we can publish" could be read as alluding to secret knowledge.
The problem with the argument is, well, why doesn't this apply to everything? Massive changes happen all the time in the world, and anything could be a disaster if our only standard for "could" is lack of knowledge that it won't be. If someone said "we need to focus our global efforts on stone-faced office buildings, because humanity might go extinct if we keep building so many all-glass ones", we'd demand more than a lack of evidence.
Luckily we were able to discuss it further and clear up some of the confusion.
> The problem with the argument is, well, why doesn't this apply to everything? Massive changes happen all the time in the world, and anything could be a disaster if our only standard for "could" is lack of knowledge that it won't be. If someone said "we need to focus our global efforts on stone-faced office buildings, because humanity might go extinct if we keep building so many all-glass ones", we'd demand more than a lack of evidence.
I can't think of any comparible examples where human activity is known to be causing massive problems... Various forms of pollution maybe? But I would argue for action there too.
Sure, but getting rid of life seems to be quite hard and for it to happen it must be some extraordinary event like the surface getting as hot as the surface of venus.
People still believe there can be life on venus in it's clouds, most likely bacteria or something like it but it's not impossible that life will find a way.
There has been extinction events where the surface of earth pretty much became uninhabitable, but bacteria lives in the earth and underground and life spirals back as soon as the surface or oceans are habitable again.
I use both MS and Google at various locations. The result is also dismal... But we can all be exasperated together and vent about how awful it is without upsetting anyone.
Some people really hate GDPR. It has crushed the AdTech industry in Europe - I'm not sad about that but I do hope those people found other employment fast.
There was a thriving industry harvesting and processing personal details about people. I think if the true extent of it were known most people would warmly embrace GDPR. But some people have lost a lot of money and they are pissed, but again I kind of feel there is a lot unscrupulousness involved so it's hard to feel sympathy.
To a lesser extent, there are people that are concerned about "all the extra work" this entails, and the cost it adds to their bottom line. But this stuff is important nowadays. You really should be taking care of it.
There is some scaremongering about small firms being blown out of the water for noncompliance, but really, unless you're doing something you shouldn't be doing you should be fine. The terms of GDPR though still not completely clearly specified are flexible and reasonable. The main thing is now, that you can't say you weren't aware of it.
