MudMan

Now who is confusing weather with climate?

It’s an article telling you that inflation wasn’t as high as intitially expected. Doesn’t mean prices went down, but it’s still good news against the alternative.

We’ve looped back around to arguing about the meaning of “positive”, which mostly tells me this is entirely a discussion about vibes, and maybe that’s the best takeaway anybody can get from it.

Yes, we do, you wonderful unique genius of an angsty fifteen year old.

It’s not that hard to understand, you are not possessed of a unique insight that somehow has eluded every economist on the planet.

You just haven’t figured out that getting angy on the Internet about how everybody is dumb is not the game changer you think it is. Turns out meaningfully altering the collective behavior of eight million people, each with their own individual set of incentives, is less responsive to an earnestly worded social media post that one may think.

Also, you may have to be more specific about who “we” is supposed to be. Whose economic model are we talking about? Everybody’s? Just how much granularity are you considering here, if any at all?

You think the pandemic shutdown was simple?

I mean, man, I am more of an introvert, too, but… yeah, I’m gonna say “humanity isn’t willing to transition to Covid rules permanently as a matter of climate change policy” is not the rhetorical killing blow you think it is.

You can’t enact global behavioral changes as solutions to economic problems. That’s the kind of adolescent social media thought process that ends with retirees radicalized into fascism. “If everybody agreed with me this would not be a problem” is not how large scale policy shifts happen.

On the plus side, you not quite grasping this is far less problematic than Elon Musk not grasping this, but the underlying issue is pretty much the same.

I mean, what’s the point of pipe rigate? Most of them are too small to eat a single one at a time by stabbing them and they are the perfect shape to wiggle free from any attempt to hold more than one on a fork. I’ve seen them slide right off of a large spoon. I’m pretty sure if you could make molecules in that shape you’d invent some perfectly frictionless hydrophobic material that would revolutionize several industries.

That is genuinely the most nonsensical, self-contradicting thing I’ve read this week, and you’re not even the only one pursuing this train of thought in this thread.

I have to wonder if some of this doomerist online climate activism thing is a misinformation psyop because… man, that’s some weird place to land on dialectically just by accident. Except it’s probably not (I mean, who would bother doing that on Lemmy) and that’s probably what happened. The set of incentives for opinions social media has generated is genuinely bizarre.

He was more the cause of the end of the world than the solution, but yeah.

I thought it was… fine? I mean, not the most well rounded thing in Trek history, but fine.

Discovery suffered from being just fine after having to deal with massive backlash for trying to be different. That and carrying a season-long arc while trying to be a Trek TV show in between the movie bits.

But I would absolutely watch any of the first four seasons of Disco than any part of Picard. Any day. Season five is a mess and I really don’t vibe with their take on spirituality, but that’s mostly just me.

So it was nihilism, then.

Look, I hate to break it to you, but you’re not that special. You’re not the only one who “gets it” and you don’t get to be done with the species.

You will have a much easier time at it if you at least try to factor in the concept of the issue being complex and ongoing as opposed to building your entire online footprint around the idea that we could fix this by flipping a switch if we were all committed enough. Not only that, but it would also be a lot more productive in terms of helping promote better outcomes instead of serving as a useful scapegoat for some fashy troll to show how all climate activists are emo kids or something.

Which is not to say that drastic, sometimes painful action won’t be needed. Alongside, I’m afraid, significant unavoidable human and economic cost from checks that we’ve already cashed in.

It’s data. Valid data, at that, that captures an important metric.

It’s a weird, paradoxic stance to claim that you are deeply motivated to push for genuine climate action while actively and publicly being mad at any report that may hint at progress because anything short of absolute doomerism is automatically a distraction tactic. By that standard you’ll have to be dragged kicking and screaming towards energy transition, complaining all the way that nothing is enough until the issue is entirely solved.

Which, of course, is never. Because again, this isn’t a problem to solve, it’s a situation to manage. Forever.

Man, there’s tons of bad news for you to latch on to when it comes to climate change. You really don’t need to spend your days actively mad at the few bits showing actual progress. Taken to the extreme, and this is close, it honestly feels just as much like a disinformation tactic, very much in line with the “climate change is real but there’s nothing we can do to change it” deflection.

Well, from where I stand it’s a useful number to understand the value of electrification. You hear a lot of misinformation along the lines of “why move to EV/heat pumps/whatever if the electricity they use is made by burning gas”.

Which is a big “if”, and knowing what the energy mix is in your country/area is an important rebuttal and answer to that particular question.

I want to hear the counterpoint to the progression being made. By all stats I can see, the adoption of solar power specifically is actually beating projections across the board. Overall CO2 reductions are not, and heating targets are out of the question, but this is the one element that is going better than expected, with the relevant asterisks.

You are out here raging virulently at the notion of acknolwedging that, so there must be a specific thing you want out of that process. Or, hell, at least some sort of mental model for what it is that acknowledging the reality of the changes in the energy mix towards renewables is doing to hamper the rest of the climate goals.

I just find it aggressively unproductive when purported climate activists make their online persona into outright denial of any and all possible steps towards curtailing climate change short of… well, I don’t even know short of what, which is my point. The implication here is that there is some silver bullet or a switch that we can flip to be done with the problem, as opposed to… you know the foreseeable future being some mix of increasingly sustainable generation and mitigation of the near-inevitable human cost of the processes that have started and can no longer be stopped.

Oh, man, where to start. I mean, the Kelvin Trek movies are definitely not the best Trek, but I do enjoy all of them. But speaking of contrarian appreciation, I think most of Star Trek Discovery is also pretty solid, barring perhaps the very last season.

I’m partial to Lynch’s Dune, too. Maybe I just got used to it over time?

In the least hip stance possible, I actually think there are very few bad Marvel movies and most are worth at least a cheerful watch (not you, Doctor Strange 2, you suck).

No toxic positivity here.

I will note, though, you haven’t met the brief. The closest thing to a target I see there is “great leaps, not baby steps”. I’m gonna need something slightly more specific than that.

This does nothing for my self esteem, but it does serve as a functional reminder that 1% is a large percentage of high numbers and many things have a much lower likelihood than 1%, even though humans tend to be biased to believe otherwise.

Okay, so beyond nihilism, what’s your point?

I mean, obviously this is at least an intermediate state towards whatever survivable endgame we want to reach. We need to be at this stage at some point to get to where we want to go.

Should this stage have happened sooner? Probably. Was it possible? Maybe.

But we’re here now, so… what’s your take? Because you seem concerned about good news discouraging people from something, but you also seem to be claiming there is no valid path forward, which seems way less productive to me.

I don’t accept the premise that “solar is only good because climate change is bad”. Where does that come from? Solar power is the longest-running energy source we have, it’s good for distributed generation, and climate change or not, most people don’t like to suck on a car’s exhaust, so it is cleaner for more reasons than the large scale effects of CO2 emissions.

And on the flipside it’s consistently inconsistent, has lots of challenges for storage and it mostly produces electricity, which then needs to be stored, sent and converted into useful stuff.

Solar adoption is good overall AND solar adoption is better than the alternative regarding climate change, all else being equal.

And since all else is equal, because climate change isn’t stopping to wait for renewable adoption, solar adoption is good regardless of the climate deteriorating faster than expected. Those two things just aren’t dependent on each other. Hell, if anything, faster man-made climate change necessitates faster renewables adoption.

What’s your premise here, even? Take an actual stance. If “fast solar power adoption good” is not a valid statement, what IS a valid statement?

I would not, under any circumstances, want to rely on the toxic waste pool of a codebase that is OneDrive. I have to genuinely use it for work at times and it’s randomly decided to forget crucial documents exist enough times I just want it gone.

Kinda, but I’m frustrated with both sides of the argument. There is a cohort of very online people at the ready to clarify how whatever initiative or proposal is “not it” or “greenwashing” and will not “fix” things.

The activist argument is not so much that this is an ongoing thing we’re going to be considering forever, it’s that this or that solution is a corporate trap or a fake solution or whatever else. Often there isn’t even an agreement on what the “real” answer is supposed to be, just a willingness to be the savvy, jaded one that calls out the latest snake oil handwavy solution.

So yeah, we probably don’t disagree on the first part, but that post really tickled my sensitivity to the second part.

The hell is “doing okay”?

I am so frustrated by the discourse around renewables and climate change. Everybody online seems to be treating it like a puzzle or a board game, where you “win” at climate change when you find the “right” solution.

That’s not how it works. I don’t care about the “carbon neutrality” of Germany any more than I care about the “carbon neutrality” of a patch of the Atlantic Ocean. It’s a global process that is never going to end. We’re always going to need energy, it’s always going to come from a mix of sources and we need to eventually find a global equilibrium we can strive to maintain.

Data is data, but taking issue with news, and particularly positive news, as if they were propaganda in a campaign where eventually people will have to elect the one source of energy they consume is kind of absurd. Yes, renewables are gaining ground, solar is moving faster than expected and no, that doesn’t make the issue go away and we still need to accelerate the process and remove additional blockers to that acceleration. There are no silver bullets and there never will be.

They launched Alyx exclusively, which didn’t do much for SteamVR.

In any case your argument is genuinely confused. You yourself estimated the value of Nintendo exclusives at the Wii U’s sales level, so if 13 million people will go to Nintendo to get their exclusives no matter what, then you still have to explain 90% of the Switch sales, because people really seemed fine with skipping Mario Kart 8 when it was stuck in a potato. On the Switch it is one of the biggest games of this generation… despite being a last-gen game. Ditto for Breath of the Wild.

Not that it matters. Obviously the two devices that provide the exact same function with a lot of the same games and comparable non-overlapping releases are comparable. An argument that they aren’t is either pushing or suffering from some sort of aggressive bias, but I’m increasingly unclear on what bias you’re even dealing with here, because none of the piecemeal arguments you’re making seem to make any sort of concerted case in favor of… anything.

Look, ultimately the point is that the Deck is a very successful handheld PC, but still a handheld PC, and still relatively niche compared to consoles and very niche compared to the kickstarter of the entire hybrid handheld space. Yes, you can compare the performance of gaming devices against each other and yes, that does recontextualize the success of the Deck. That’s all fairly common sense and we can skip relitigating it because the whole “but they have Mario!” thing is a borderline non-sequitur.

I was saying below that I wonder how much the work in modding VR into games, which has led to some very portable frameworks, would help support for 3D monitors if they were to return…

…but that said, that’s still a per-game mod thing, so I expect at least some work would remain, and you’d ideally want built-in out of the box support, rather than having to mod it in each time. Still, it’s a possibility. I’d love to find out in practice.