>That it is due to a vocal minority doesn't mean it is due to this vocal minority. Not all vocal minorities are equal, and nor should all vocal minorities be treated alike.
This is obvious and should go without saying. The parent comment gave an example of a positive consequence of an instance of this so-called "vocal minority", since the grandparent comment left no room for any positive angle on this.
I'm seriously confused how this translates into treating all "vocal-minorities" equally or that they all result in a positive.
>since the grandparent comment left no room for any positive angle on this.
I do not see this. Grandparent said "a vocal minority", which I interpret as a specific vocal minority. Like when someone says "there is a vocal person in my team who is obnoxious" - it does not imply that all vocal people in all teams are obnoxious.
My point was the example given by the person I responded to is kind of irrelevant. Yes, vocal minorities have done great things for many, many people. The GP to my comment was not talking about those, and listing positive vocal minorities that exist or have existed is irrelevant.
My interpretation of the initial comment you replied to was that pointing out that there are consequences of "vocal minorities" in the past that have led to great improvements and considering such examples almost always have significant pushback implies the possibility that perception is misplaced.
However, I see where you are coming from and thank you for clarifying.
It's not irrelevant at all. The ex-Google poster was using the fact that only a minority of Google employees are fighting for those causes to dismiss their views.
I countered by saying that vocal minorities were able to achieve great things in the past, so implicitly their arguments should be evaluated on their merit.
With this topic it's important to remind people that while individual actions to address climate change are good, and encouraged, it's going to take serious systemic action and cooperation to address this to the degree it should be.
There was a climate scientist not long ago calling for a "world war-like mobilization" in regards to addressing climate change and that's exactly what needs to happen. Buying an electric vehicle and slapping a solar panel on your roof simply isn't enough.
Transport is a third of emissions, most of that road transport, so if everyone bought an electric car it would certainly have an impact.
I think people have to bear in mind this is also about industrial scale. One person buying an electric car brings down the price for another, each new person brings down the price more and opens up the possibility to more people, and at some point you’ll get a mass transfer. Electric cars are only something like 0.3% of cars on the road but already have the scale to get quite close to competitive. They're already cheaper for high mileage cases.
Although I do agree we will need concerted effort, it’s likely this will be in conjunction with, not opposed to, these kind of individual decisions.
Why? Electrification of grid electricity is comparatively easy, and may even substantially happen (say, to 60-80%) without government action because of the relentlessness of the learning curves for wind and solar. But that’s only a third of emissions. The core challenge is to electrify transport and heating to tackle the other two thirds. Replacing combustion cars with electric cars might involve a lot of mining (as does all of industrial civilization), but it will almost certainly be a benefit for climate change. Just plateauing the number of cars would be an achievement, reducing them by 90%+ globally, as would be needed without electrification, is cloud cuckoo land.
EVs still have big co2 lifecycle footprints, more than is sustainable, so a dead end. Bonus: each new EV will put another low cost used gas vehicle on the market to guzzle gas for another 20 years.
Their lifecycle is almost all dependent on the grid, most of the rest is the battery, which are already being manufactured using renewable energy. Even mining is being electrified. In the UK I can already buy a car which will reduce emissions by 40%, and by the end of its lifetime probably 80% as the grid decarbonises. Or even more if I have solar panels. How many decades of campaigning would we need to halve car ownership? Your perfect outcome from this is not going to happen, not quickly enough to tackle the problem, don’t make the enemy the perfect of the good.
That's bad math. If you add EVs to a grid that's in the process of decarbonizing, the marginal impact is all that extra power comes from whatever would be shut down next.
EVs are still worth it if they're powered by coal or natural gas. But quoting them as getting cleaner as the grid decarbonizes is wrong, until the existing load is satisfied with renewables (even instantaneously).
The only exception is if EVs allow you to increase the renewable share beyond what you'd otherwise be able to do eg with demand dispatch.
Campaigning is not going to cut it, private car use will need to be regulated with clear YoY reduction targets and big enough incentives to reach them (eg high gas taxes, supplemented with income transfers if social fairness is desired by voters).
I agree that perfect is the enemy of good, but I think EV production is net harmful and your numbers overoptimistic, so the argument does not apply in my view.
The only pro ev argument that still has legs IMO is that since we'll have to stop the remaining oil and coal from being exctracted and burned in any case, EV availability can provide popular support for it. But it's much better if we can just rein in car dependency.
Yes, but do both of them. Eat less meat, minimize flying, get the electric car, get the panels. Just know it's not enough and push for coordinated response.
Buying an electric vehicle and slapping a solar panel on your roof simply isn't enough.
Perhaps, but in your comparison folks still grew "victory gardens". [0] Personally, I'm reminded that I need to call the installer back about putting those "victory panels" on my roof.
We’re going to need both approaches: ground up and top down. People will need to learn to do with less. Better to start a mass movement towards popularizing minimized consumption so that people are used to the idea and embrace it when the policy changes (such as a carbon tax) begin to incentivize specific choices.
We can either do this now, in an organized and equitable way, or later in a chaotic and unfair way.
Making energy more expensive makes everything more expensive. Those at the margins will find themselves even closer to the edge, while those who thought they were secure find themselves less so. The vouchers and whatnot that were supposed to offset the effects are mostly captured by the same type of rent-seekers and parasites that capture nearly any other form of aid. Widespread unrest and starvation result.
The unwashed masses you speak of, those that are struggling, simply don't use that much 'energy'; or at least the most polluting forms. They live in small flats, eat whatever's in the shop, sit in and watch TV, and walk or get the bus to work.
If they pollute, they do so as a side-effect of misallocation - e.g. food is shipped halfway across the world not because it has to be or should be but because low fossil fuel prices make it viable; electricity has high carbon impact (e.g. UK ~0.3kg/kWh) for historical reasons; etc.
They certainly don't fly about or do anything that has no replacement at present.
A country letting things get become "too expensive" in these silly monetary coupon terms and so everyone starves would be a complete governance failure.
Then again, some countries are currently failed states in that sense; in the UK we don't care if people get enough to eat, we give them some pictures of the queen's face if they jump through a ton of hoops and hope it works out. That likely wouldn't be viable.
Can you elaborate on how you came to the conclusion that global warming == extinction? To discuss the question of what would be "as bad" as global warming, me need to ~agree on what those bad outcomes actually are.
Im skeptical that climate change will ever make humanity extinct. Lead to highly undesirables states, yes, but extinction, no.
I've been what many would call a climate change alarmist for a couple of decades now.
I think it's also quite unlikely that climate change, or even results from it, will make humans extinct. Even if climate change triggers some kind of global thermonuclear war, which I think is a small possibility, I'm pretty convinced that humans are here to stay.
Maybe not many of us, but some.
In my opinion, extinction isn't the main worry. Collapse of civilization should be what we're trying to avoid. And that is a real possibility I think.
Thank you. Regardless if I can follow you to "collapse of civilization" being a likely consequence or not, this is a step in the direction of a nuanced discussion.
(As an aside, Im not convinced humans are here to stay, but for very different reasons.)
>I really doubt anyone times their quitting to the start of the month. People just up and quit because they don't want to work.
I won't defend the specific scenario given but the second sentence there is a huge generalization.
You're correct that insurance plans don't start immediately, but that also leaves people in a difficult, even if temporary, situation.
Europeans however are correct to think that the healthcare system in the US is abysmal, because it is. All this goes without saying that employment-tied insurance puts people in precarious positions, which is obvious.
So this has mostly to do with a non-complete clause. The author is pretty explicit in their view:
> This clause is, to be direct, abusive.
As far as I'm aware this is something that has been apparent for quite some time, and isn't limited to just Amazon. I can't personally conceive of why anyone subject to one of these would have any reason to believe that this isn't just another tool that benefits the company alone, and could perhaps even be used against you.
A discussion about clauses such as this is well needed in general, not just the tech industry. Honestly, the real story that perhaps has more relevancy to tech is having (as the author correctly recognizes) the kind of privilege to turn down a job with Amazon. I'm no fan of Amazon but that would be something very difficult to turn down.
And their ability to voice themselves is related to how much money they have. After all, nearly all forms of mass communication are directly controlled by said corporations.
For everyone claiming bias, it's pretty clearly stated in the first sentence:
>...according to a new study by New American Economy, a bipartisan pro-immigration group.
What I'm not seeing much of in the comments is how the debate around immigration has come to a very alarming place, with most of it having nothing to do with what actually occurs in reality. In my honest opinion, that discussion is far more important than the specifics of this study.
I'd actually describe that as the worst part, at least insofar the way you contextualized it. That's literally a moment where they are faced with overwhelming evidence against their "theory" and still cannot accept they are wrong.
That guy is still a flat earther. He kept trying the experiment again and again until he was able to get the opposite result (by messing around with the set-up enough to make results meaningless).
I used to work at a med school, and often I would be in the classroom. Once the Dean gave a presentation over the true cost of healthcare in the US. What was his final conclusion to the class? No one knows the true cost of healthcare. It's nonsensical.
The situation with healthcare in the US has been beyond ridiculous for quite some time. Often the conversation centers around those without insurance, but being under-insured is just as much of an issue.
We need to decouple healthcare from employment. We need a single-payer system. This would save everyone money on healthcare in the long run.
My partner works at a hospital billing insurance companies and nobody there can even figure out what prices are. They can't optimize their work based on price because a $700k bill might end up bringing in $30k in revenue, while a $45k bill might bring in $35k.
Hospitals basically need an army of lawyers to renegotiate costs on a per-patient basis. Talk about efficiency!
Medicare/Medicaid literally keep most hospitals afloat. They are basically the only insurer who is fair and pays consistently.
Why could I not buy my own insurance? Or why can't I self-insure? If I want to pay for the best, I ought to be able to buy it (again, if I will pay).
There's a difference between actual single-payer (in which there is a single entity which pays, the government) and a government health-care plan. For which are you advocating?
These are not leading questions. "Single payer" definitionally means there is a single entity which pays, meaning no insurance or private pay. You're using it like it means a government plan; it doesn't. The reason I'm asking is because some politicians are crazy enough to want to prohibit any thing but a government plan, and I don't know where you fall.
They are leading questions. You're assumptions about single-payer, based on what you think "some politicians" said, are baked into your questions. Again, there exists hybrid systems. Take a look at Spain or Australia. Canada almost exclusively works off it's public system, yet private insurance still has a minor role.
Maybe I'm "crazy enough" to think that there should be zero profit-motive in health insurance, but even I can confidently say that a public policy scenario wherein all but a government plan is prohibited just isn't realistic, nor does it reflect what many other western countries have done for 30+ years.
Private or not, the kind of attitudes shown in the group are directly associated with their employment and the people they interact with through that. They condemned their own integrity when the individuals decided to engage in such awful behavior while simultaneously attempting or pretending to have any sense of actual professionalism in said line of work.
Not only that, it's not as if it's just a few bad apples. This Facebook Group consisted of roughly ~9000 members of current and former agents. US Border Patrol employs roughly 20,000 agents.
This is obvious and should go without saying. The parent comment gave an example of a positive consequence of an instance of this so-called "vocal minority", since the grandparent comment left no room for any positive angle on this.
I'm seriously confused how this translates into treating all "vocal-minorities" equally or that they all result in a positive.