>> i've noticed that anyone who no longer does that thing is typically quite vocal and negative towards said thing.
Well ya? Is that not self-evident?
See, there's this thing I enjoy very much, but I was forced to stop because of evidence of the negative consequences. Now, since I am a kind person, I can share the knowledge of those negative consequences so may be you could avoid them, too.
Said another way, if I were not negative to said activity that I enjoy, I would still be doing it. And if I were indifferent to the well-being of others, I wouldn't be vocal/share.
Also, when viewing/listening remotely, I will record the session -- especially if they're assigning a complex task or series of tasks. This allows me to playback and get things exactly right.
In person, I would have to smuggle in a recorder and it's often awkward or infeasible.
Nomenclature aside, they're somewhat predictable in the sense that if the most dangerous rogue waves will typically happen in or near low preasure systems, and especially around strong currents, where you have wind-over-tide type nastiness.
So in the sense of trying not to die, avoid the Gulf and Agulhas currents, especially when a low blows through.
This coming from an amateur sailor. I believe freight shipping etc just plows through most weather systems in order to avoid delays.
For any interested, here[1] is the late Milton Friedman's take on how we might protect against quacks, frauds, and snake-oil salesmen posing as doctors if government didn't step in to limit the supply of medical doctors in the name of quality control.
I realize it's not exactly what the article is discussing, but it's certainly relevant for all the same reasons.
This is during the Q&A of his lecture "The Economics of Medical Care", given to the very people who would most object to his ideas:
No I don't recommend -- and I am a daily vim user for years. I program mostly in C, sometimes C++. I use i3 on my desktop and tmux when remote/ssh'd into a vm. Inside vim, I use the bare minimum of plugins to reduce dependencies/complexity. I use ctags for getting around, as well as the built in features. gdb in a terminal window next to my vim window source. It's fine and snappy and does everything I need.
I live in a terminal except for the browser. Of course my xterm bindings are always vi-mode and tmux too. I have key bindings to unite all my i3/tmux/vim 'getting-around' keys and also fought that fight to unite the clipboards, even across VMs etc.
Getting back to why I say 'no' is because once you're used to the modal, and getting around with the usual vim motion keys, it makes using anything else near impossible and clumsy. I have great difficulty composing text in browser (like right now) and also emails, etc. And if any editor online allows vim keybindings, you must make sure that you are used to defaults otherwise the vim-mode won't do you much good. Like escaping with CTRL-[, or delete word with CTRL-W, which closes the tab in the browser (firefox and chrome and I never found a way to turn that off, so I lose a lot of work that way). For instance godbolt and leetcode both had vi-modes but there's enough of a difference, even though I try to use nearly all defaults, that I still end up composing any code/english in another terminal window.
I am completely hopeless using a mouse or arrow keys. If I have to go to on-site interview and have to use something other than vim, well it makes me look like I haven't sat down at a computer in 15 years. I am a hostage now to my habits and am very wary of hopping over to VSCode/CLion/jetbrains whatever else because I will be a fish out of water.
Oh please it isn't that hard. Mildly annoying maybe but you can't possibly be that "handicapped" by it. If you're using all that crap and "fought the clipboard unification battle" then you're a bigger geek than 95% of programmers and never had to ask the question "should I learn vim?"
I don't feel the need to use vim exclusively. I like IDEs too, but will probably continue using vim in some capacity so long as it's useful.
>> In many ways, high energy prices are a positive thing for society (in the long run).
If you don't mind, I wonder if you might expand on this? For me it seems a bit blithe. For instance, we know that higher energy prices cascade into many, if not most, consumer end items, and so I think it follows this decreases the standard of living generally.
I understand the important consideration of negative externalities, and how fossil fuels negatively impact 3rd parties (the world generally/climate change). I think the economic argument that there should be a carbon tax to account for these externalities is quite right. This is true regardless of climate change. So let's assume for arguments sake, we're going to tax above and beyond that to account for climate change as well.
Are we hoping then, by hiking the cost, it ushers in a new discovery of lower cost energy, with fewer externalities? And if this turns out to be the case, then these austerity measures if you like, turn out to be transient, and the temporary lower standard of living sacrifice is made for the betterment of posterity. Or is it simply we must accept a lower standard of living permanently lest we allow climate change to continue unabated, as it were?
Sorry if this distracts from the main point you were making.
> Are we hoping then, by hiking the cost, it ushers in a new discovery of lower cost energy, with fewer externalities
Not just discovery. We already have plenty of measure to either use energy more efficiently (such as improved insulation in a home) or things like renewable energy. And as you say, the cascade of energy use into many more aspects of the economy than people expect should trigger a realignment of consumption to means that are less likely to have energy-based externalities somewhere in their supply-chain or operation.
> Or is it simply we must accept a lower standard of living permanently
Depends upon the implementation. If we are replacing existing taxes (like corporate or income tax), or refunding the amount (via a citizen dividend or similar) the net impact shouldn't be a lower standard of living, though the distribution will affect people differently.
If it's truly about externalities, the proceeds of a carbon tax should be distributed in the same way as legal compensation for damages. Compensation payments to people affected by climate change, proportional to the increment of damage caused by the amount of GHGs emitted. That's pretty much impossible to calculate though.
Right, and I agree to both. This also lowers their standard of living.
My question was probably too vague. Maybe more directly, is raising costs across the board as a matter of policy more effective in our fight against climate change than other interventions? Like subsidizing research into renewable energies, etc. Have we given up on those?
I am far from qualified in judging the effectiveness of alternatives, I just wonder if these taxes are draconian, and if so, have we given up hope on these alternatives.
This was besides the point the parent was making, however, so I am regretting my digression now.
Is not consuming energy you don't need really lowering your standard of living?
I mean, is being pressured into driving a 30mpg car vs a 20mpg car which serves your needs just as well - does that lower your standard of living?
If we don't reduce fossil fuel use will that negatively affect the ability of the planet to support humanity? If so, isn't that lowering your standard of living?
To your first question, yes I think it does. Government coercing my decisions is negative ( individually, not necessarily society/humanity ). In the same way, if government policy mandated televisions to be twice the cost because they deemed it hindered education, that would make me worse off as a consumer of televisions.
To your second question, I suppose I would argue that it lowers my standard living now, but _may_ raise the standard of living for posterity, since obviously climate change time scales are vastly greater than the effect of a tax now. However you could rightly argue that by UK citizens reducing their carbon footprint now, 3rd parties downwind directly benefit now by being less harmed by UK pollution, yes.
Think about how many people drive half a mile to the shop. They don't care about hidden costs even though all of those short trips might add up to $50 a month that they didn't need to spend.
Visibility of prices is OK on a Smart Meter but it is still disconnected from where energy is used e.g. not obvious that having your 80" TV on all night uses up a tonne of energy although only a little at a time.
And then you have a lot of people, as mentioned elsewhere, who are paying because their landlord won't spend the money on improving the insulation on the house. You can't always vote with your feet so although some people can and do sort things out, a lot of people don't.
Then they complain that the government should help them out!
Certainly high energy costs, in the absence of any action to reduce energy usage, reduce standards of living. Ultimately almost every aspect of our "comfortable" life comes from expending energy - heating, concrete, entertainment, transport, home appliances, fertiliser, mechanised farming - at the heart of everything is external energy expenditure to make us comfortable.
However, in most cases comfort isn't proportional to energy expended. For a given heat, a well insulated room is as comfortable as a badly insulated one - but with less energy input. A modern computer is as useful (more so) than a Pentium 4, but with less energy input. An LED bulb provides as much light as an incandescent, but with less energy input. When energy becomes expensive, it makes energy saving worthwhile, which makes the return on investment higher, which draws in R&D money.
Honestly - I don't know for sure whether high energy costs will drive innovation, or just lower living standards for everyone. However, it's pretty clear that relying on fossil fuels isn't a good long term strategy, and that at historical energy prices (which don't take into account externalities at all) there's essentially no headroom for new energy saving R&D. High energy prices make efficiency improvements and novel energy production highly lucrative - and then capitalism can do the rest.
"For a given heat, a well insulated room is as comfortable as a badly insulated one"
I actually disagree with this. There are factors beyond air temperature, such as air movement and radiation.
Air movement is pretty obvious, if your house is draughty, 20c may still feel chilly.
But radiation is commonly ignored and in my experience contributes more to comfort than air temperature beyond a certain level. If your room is at 20c and your walls are 12c, there's a good chance you will still feel uncomfortable compared to a building with well insulated walls. I've been in old buildings where even at 25c it still felt a little chilly. Worse, if only the exterior walls are cold, you might find one side of you is too hot and the other is too cold!
This is commonly experienced as "why is my house still cold in winter even though the thermostat is at 22c, when in the summer it's too hot even at 18c?".
> For a given heat, a well insulated room is as comfortable as a badly insulated one - but with less energy input. A modern computer is as useful (more so) than a Pentium 4, but with less energy input. An LED bulb provides as much light as an incandescent, but with less energy input. When energy becomes expensive, it makes energy saving worthwhile, which makes the return on investment higher, which draws in R&D money.
You're right, and I think these are compelling examples. And climate change need not even be considered for these to support a carbon tax.
For those interested in some of the history of immunotherapy, and cancer treatments more generally, I recommend Dr Peter Attia's excellent interview[1] with Dr Steven Rosenberg. Dr Rosenberg is Chief of Surgery at the National Cancer Institute, and was on the ground floor and helped pioneer the use of immunotherapy in fighting cancer[2].
Let's be careful not to conflate life expectancy and life span. The former being dominated[1] by improvements in reducing infant mortality and mothers dying during child birth, while the latter has remained largely consistent[2],[3].
‘… life expectancy in the mid-Victorian period was not markedly different from what it is today. Once infant mortality is stripped out, life expectancy at 5 years was 75 for men and 73 for women.’[1]
For me, it's because I want to gain some perspective, and in this case in particular, without experiencing it first hand.
For example, I will often read cancer patient message boards, or family members that have watched their kin succumb to Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Or watching old videos, re-mastered with color on youtube from the turn of the 20th century, and contemplating how their entire lives have gone by. Or the uncovered skeletons of people that died from the bubonic plague in the 14th century, and reflect on how they likely had very important personal matters and concerns. But now there they lie, and the world has long since forgotten them. Their names and stories are long gone.
As a recent example, I stumbled across a young women who died of leukemia almost 10 years ago now. She was a local news reporter, and had a youtube channel[1] and twitter account[2]. She unkowningly documented her demise online with her twitter updates. She even interviewed a cancer survivor in one of her youtube videos and said, "how scary it must be when the doctor tells you that you have cancer!". How very soon she would find out herself. Her videos have about a dozen views, and her tweets went largely ignored. She seemed like such a genuinely sweet woman.
It's both morbid curiosity and a grim reminder of indeed how short life is. What was their mindset in their waning time, and why is mine much different? As fast as time seems to go by, am I all that different? Why wait until your death bed to consider your mortality? Maybe it's right around the corner, or maybe not.
Well ya? Is that not self-evident?
See, there's this thing I enjoy very much, but I was forced to stop because of evidence of the negative consequences. Now, since I am a kind person, I can share the knowledge of those negative consequences so may be you could avoid them, too.
Said another way, if I were not negative to said activity that I enjoy, I would still be doing it. And if I were indifferent to the well-being of others, I wouldn't be vocal/share.