They didn’t fail. They didn’t even try. Not even with a super-majority.
I am sick of such important issues like health of people, let alone half the population, being used as mere strategic play. So please push them to do the right thing, after they’re elected. They don’t seem to respond without pressure.
Hate to be that guy, but it is also the present (hopefully not future) the Democrats have allowed Republicans to build:
Bill Clinton promised to codify Roe v. Wade into law. He didn’t.
Obama promised to codify Roe v. Wade into law. He didn’t despite having a super-majority in his first two years.
Biden promised to codify Roe v. Wade into law and didn’t. The Dobbs decision was taken in June 2022, so before the midterms when Democrats still had a simple majority in the house and a tie + VP in the senate. When there were rumors/leaks a month or so before the decision that the USSC would take that decision soon. Again: Inaction.
Many reasons. One major factor imho is the belief or illusion to be living in a meritocracy. Which would mean, that someone who’s rich has to have earned it and therefore criticism must stem from envy or jealousy. The same belief fuels the ideology of thinking of poor people to just be lazy leeches on society.
Never have I ever watched/read anything relating to Lord of the Rings.
To be fair, business development wasn’t the main hangup for many of the people I know. The two main reasons I heard (and partly raised myself), was firstly the detrimental effect on expanding solar- & wind-energy-production. And secondly overreaching, i.e. not limiting the protection to the environment, but also include townscape protection and historical sites, essentially further restraining residential development (including changing them into more dense usage) in a time where living space is scarce and expensive.
When the pro-side has its reservations, then of course it doesn’t help that the executive (Federal Council) is dominated by pro-corporate ideology and have brought forward arguments of “damaging the business location”. But making it out to be the only reason is just dishonest.
Generally yes, but I believe it is best done on a case by case (meaning type of sports, level and skillset) basis.
Generally on the recreational level, the differences between the sexes are much smaller than the differences within one sex. The best example that comes to mind is Tennis. Although it is physical in that it requires a lot of high-speed strength, which theoretically should be an advantage (on average) for young men, the skill difference between a man and another is far greater than that between an average man and an average woman. Go to a public court and you’ll see a non-ignorable amount of women outplaying men (if they even dare to play each other) and what’s even more baffling, older people beating younger people. On the absolute elite level though, they seem to almost play a totally different sport. Ball speed, running speed, ball spin and variety in spin on average are very different on the WTA compared to the ATP and therefore similar but different tactics and even technical styles are employed in the two. The difference within the Top 100 ATP or Top 100 WTA is much smaller than the average Top 100 WTA and average Top 100 ATP. So on that level, imho the segregation is merited.
As some others have already suggested, there might be better criteria to judge this separation on, like with weight class for martial arts. It is not always clear where that divider should be, though. As for tennis: Is it body weight or height? Maybe your fastest or average first serve? Maybe your fastest or average ground stroke? 30m Sprint time? Wherever you put that line might change the nature of the game played in that group and not even eliminate the de facto separation on sex or age, but in turn make it unattractive for some people to engage in a competition in the first place.
Which comes back to my initial statement of judging it case by case depending on the average difference between sexes and the difference within sexes.
edit: replaced gender with sex. Didn’t think of it because in my native language this distinction isn’t made.
As an engineer I can attest that it is also useful for quick calculations and illustrations, especially at the concept stage. We also ran process “simulations” in it for fun, but of course something like SciLab would be better suited for it. The possibility to simultaneously work in the same spreadsheet was also a godsend during lock-downs.
I aim to motivate understanding, not assign blame. So I apologize if the tone was a bit aggressive here or there.
Please understand though, that personal and local experience with something so complex and global is the analogue of using anecdotal evidence to then ignore all quantifiable and statistical evidence. E.g. Because it snows where I live, the planet can’t be warming. Because Aspirin give me nausea, it must be bad… And from that standpoint hurling the accusation of being sheep blindly following some agenda driven group (of which I’m not disputing the existence), well, it’s not very scientific to say the least. And cementing that with that you have done your due diligence with talking to climatologists, and reading articles etc. can lead one to not see this as “just an opinion” but that you add alot of weight to it.
Please help me understand, how you formed the opinion, that climate change isn’t “a serious concern”. What kind of evidence led you “to different conclusions”? And what suggests the earth be cooling?
Sidenotes: Science in its essence is a pursuit of objective truth. Politics is not. Neither is the economy. And even if the scientific community faces its challenges, let me illustrate this over the mask issue during the last pandemic. We were faced with a new virus on which we didn’t have data, hence why there were things believed true at first, which got corrected later, when more data was available. Add to that, that mutations changed properties of what we initially had to deal with. Opposed to that are politicians. In more than one country, the health ministers lied intentionally to the people, claiming at first that masks don’t work, because they didn’t want a run on that limited resource due to their failings in preparation. The data didn’t suggest it. When availability improved, we then had mask mandates. It was not because of science, but politics which have to weigh several interests at the same time and where the agenda comes into play.
Journalists in today’s sensationalist and outrage culture also misrepresent studies to generate clicks. This is why one can get the impression, that studies contradict themselves until one goes to the original text and sees that the claim being made in a news article (probably its title) is mentioned as one, that explicitly cannot be made without further research.
Yes these are all good and valid arguments as a bridge technology used when we can’t meet demands through other, already availabe, often better suited technologies. With the power structures today though, it often gets pushed as the ONLY future. Which is what I’m pushing back against. We should use it where it makes sense, not where it serves some particular interest group to consolidate power to the detriment of us all. I mean H2-cars? Really?
Note, that in writing down this post, you haven’t brought forth any objective argument to justify your skepticism. Your argument that because people have agendas, you should be skeptical could be ok if the goal is to get objective information, not form a reactionary opinions.
A strong scientific consensus over this topic is not the result of some political agenda but of the scientific method. One of the central parts of it, is that any claim must be falsifiable through experiment. When anyone comes with a claim, others will try to reproduce or falsify it. Depending on the results the claim is either rejected or used in further research. With vasts of experiments explaining the effect or verifying the effect to better explain what was previously known, a consensus is formed. Politicians are only involved when it comes to appropriating public funding for research. That doesn’t corrupt the research itself, but hinders it if research can’t be done. When industry funds it though, then it does degrade the research very often (see tobacco industry in the 1920s-1980s, the food industry until today, or oil&gas industry which have known about the effects for at least the 1970s through their own research and have not published it).
For some more factual things you can read up on:
That CO2 gets warmer when subjected to light is known since the 1850s when Eunice Foote did experiments with water vapor and CO2 and made this observation and roughly quantified it.
John Tyndall did incorporate this effect into a first, very rudimentary, climate model of the atmosphere in 1862. The global temperature projections of that model for 1950 aren’t perfect, but still astonishingly precise.
Planck in 1900 formulated the Planck Postulate as part of his work concerning black body radiation. Quantization he thought of as a mathematical quirk. Einstein a few years later proposed that the energy of light or photons to be more precise is itself quantized. Einstein got his Nobel Prize in 1923 adopting this to not only explain the Plack Postulate (radiation) but also the photoelectric effect, i.e. that a molecule such as CO2 can absorb energy from the electromagnetic radiation interacting with it.
The scientific community was not convinced of the anthropogenic nature of the warming of the climate until in 1957 Roger Revelle and Hans Suess use the C14-method to show that the ratio of C-isotopes in the atmosphere is shifting towards those of fossil fuels. Since then more measurements have been done using this method to date things and reconstruct atmospheric composition (e.g. through ice-coring).
Since then technology such as satellites have improved the overall quality of measurements. And all of them show a clear tendency. With more computational power climate models have become more powerful and the projections are very good. The differences to measurements, when they happen are usually underestimating because the models are conservatively developed. You can refer to the IPCC reports which show you the data pretty clearly. If you want, then look at data from your local weather station, if it existed over 100 years ago, but even if only 50 years and you’ll probably see a difference even locally. Do that for all stations in the world and you can see a clear trend.
These are only a fraction of topics which anybody can read up on to form an informed decision, rather than opposing something just because it is consensus.
edit: A word.
no dispute there. The thing is, it wasn’t advertised like that. It was advertised as: Here’s this scientifically sound tool to measure your impact and judge what you can do. Which in and of itself wouldn’t be a bad thing if it wasn’t burying the lead.
The main problem with Hydrogen is the efficiency. If we want to get off fossil fuels, we need to talk about primary energy, not only the electricity consumed today. That alone means that we need multiple of the electric production (the physicist in me shudders at that word) of what we have today.
So instead of the finite resource of oil or gas, there’s a bottleneck in energy production and its infrastructure, which means that we need to be efficient with the energy we have. With Hydrogen, you first need energy for Hydrolysis, then cool it down and pressurize it which uses a lot of energy. And then converting it back in the fuel cell to usable electric energy is again lossy. On a good day that’s an overall efficiency of about 30% (which is around the peak efficiency of the combustion itself in modern ICEs). A good LiPo Battery (which comes with its own problems, and for industrial applications energy density is less of a problem) has a roundtrip efficiency of 98%. So you’d need triple the production infrastructure (PV, wind mills, geothermal, etc.) for your storage, if you’d do everything with H2 compared to everything with batteries.
Which means, that if there aren’t major breakthroughs, like a totally different technology (e.g. photosensitive bacteria) to produce H2 at a multiple of the efficiency of today’s tech, then H2 and E-Fuels in general have to be reserved for the applications, where energy and power density are un-negotionable (like airplanes, some construction equipment, or for some agricultural applications).
I’d add an overlapping step sponsored by BP in 2004: “Climate Change is real, and here’s a calculator to show you, that we have nothing to do with it.”
For the uninitiated: The Carbon Footprint Calculator was introduced by BP in 2004 as what can only be described as a successful attempt to shift attention and blame to the general public.
Just no. This is not about both sides in any shape way or form. This is about agency. Fact is: There were ways to do this and the last three Democratic presidents (including the sitting president) have campaigned and outlined plans to codify it into law and didn’t. Yes it may have taken people by surprise that the country and the world is regressing as early and fast as it is, but that doesn’t take away agency, especially when they didn’t even try to spring to action after mere lip service to garner votes.
The thing is: The conservative, religious right, openly formulated and has been following their plan of judicial activism for decades. The lower courts haven’t become this biased towards Republican policy over night. It was due to bad luck, bad faith acting of McConnel and the other Republican senators and stubberness of some involved people on the other side of the aisle that Trump was able to nominate this many people to the USSC. It would have happened at some point.