Sure, seeing well-to-do foreigners live an easy life when one struggles in one's own country can feel bitter but the issues in Portugal are structural and predate the 1926 dictatorship. Have you noticed the same handful of families have glided gracefully through the different political regimes? This is not a culture that fosters entrepeneurship or thinking outside the box, and being physically on the tail of Europe does not help. Corruption is endemic and considered part of everyday life, as is "it matters who you know to get ahead." People have become subjugated by this environment to the point they might not even consider it can change.
They'll probably start making them with sim card and modem at some point. I can picture it now on a future ebay listing: faraday cage for your tv - only 99.99!
It's a book that challenges some established views. If that makes it anti-science... It's up to a person whether they judge a book based only on a superficial understanding of it and without having read it.
I recommend it. I can't promise you will like it or find it interesting or agree with any of it. I find it important enough to recommend to people when this type of subject comes up.
What about the impact of EMF pollution? The book "the invisible rainbow' goes into that, though I don't expect this type of position to be well received in HN. I find it very healthy that this type of "invisible" pollution gets at least some discussion, however. We have to start somewhere.
Maybe it would be a good idea for Microsoft to split Windows into a version for business that supports all the cruft that has accumulated and is needed, and another version where they start from scratch. Something that is lightweight and respects the user. A man can dream.
There is a funny, deep observation made by The Good Place character Michael (a non-human) that has stuck with me since. He says that humans took ice cream, which was perfect, and "ruined it a little" to invent frozen yogurt, just so they could have more of it. There's supposedly a 'guilt' angle there somewhere but I never felt guilty for eating "too much" ice cream so can't relate.
Still, this "making something worse so you can have more of it" shows up pretty much everywhere in human experience. Sometimes it's depressing, other times amazing to see what was achieved with that mentality, and it seems AI is just accelerating it.
On that graphic -- under the heading 'Ice cores (from 800,000 years before present)' in case the link gets truncated -- one can observe regular peaks in temperature that took place before the current one. I'm happy to be explained what caused them, as it could not have been human industrial activity.
That's it. I'm open to dialogue but won't entertain any more lazy dismissals and unfair characterization.
Happy to be shown where I can learn more about this different rate of change and trend which sets our current climate change apart from the rest of Earth's history.
That's what I hear from mainstream media all the time. Do you have some information or argument that will help me see things differently?
>Of course you live in a 1st world country and it likely won't kill you, just cost you tons of money
A little presumptuous to assume my living conditions
>It's not about "take better care of the planet", whatever you think that means
Now that's just snarky and done in bad faith. If I didn't care would I have posted it, already antecipating the downvotes?
We humans got where we are much due to technology, but we have to start thinking seriously where we go from here or there won't be land or water (or air?) that isn't polluted by something the planet is not well equiped to process. Have you read on the kind of places that microplastics have been found already? In the human body?
Because this is HN, (in Allo Allo's Michelle Dubois voice...) "I shall say this only wonce": If you're curious, have a look at Earth's historical temperature and co2 data going back millions of years. What you'll notice is that there's always been oscillations, like a more or less predictable wave. Human activity is polluting the Earth, yes, but this fixation on co2 and other gases (cow farts, really?) is unhealthy to put it mildly.
I'd like to see the same attention being given to plastics (so much single-use crap and how much of it can be recycled?), synthetic clothing, and all kinds of other chemicals including the ones we put in ourselves (pharma, food) and the environment, like fertilizers or the byproducts of mining today's fashionable minerals like lithium. Not to mention the explosion in electromagnetic frequencies activity, which somehow is taken as normal and ok by the same scientific establishment which accepts thousands(?) of fake papers every year for publication. You just have to love the irony when something like Science is deemed 'settled'-- in that regard, it's almost as if we went back a few centuries.
There's certainly a lot to be said for humans needing to take better care of the planet. Co2 just gets a little too much attention for my taste. And don't take from this that I love oil. I find fracking to be abominable and another big factor in polluting the land and the water tables.
OP said "Ovo Energy made a clerical error and sent me a bill, leading to a dispute."
I don't see what a company in that situation hopes they can accomplish without a contract for providing the service. Even if they knew OP's meter number.
