That and that they closed their industrial heartland made me take COVID seriously at least a month earlier than anyone else.
Not much I could do but wait, but at least I didnt find myself rushing for toilet paper (I learned during snowdays in GA that Americans rush for the milk and toilet paper in emergencies)
Agreed, I'd be pretty pissed if letters I wrote to a lover were published even if I were dead for hundreds of years.
It's my private correspondence. Not all y'all's. It's the same reason why I'm annoyed that they disturb sarcophaguses and put a mummy on display. clearly Pharaoh didn't want to be on public display, or he wouldn't have built a pyramid full of traps to hide in.
And you're right. They choose the redacted love letters on purpose. To appeal to that basest of human instincts, gossip, to ensure more funding.
This is why on my will I clearly stipulate that I want my body interred in the most biodegradable material (I don't like cremation) and I plan to move all my personal information on an encrypted medium whose key only I know in case they disobey my orders to destroy it.
While true, this is a very dishonest view of the environmental impact of flying.
At best, assuming a full flight and a long route, say >500 mi, (taking off is a large, fixed, cost) an aircraft gets about 100 passenger miles per gallon.
Few ppl drive >100 mi by themselves. When I drive >300 mi, it's in a car full of five ppl. My big, mean, SUV gets 28 mpg * 5 passengers = 140 passenger miles/gallon. Or better than any fully laden airplane. The car is also fully laden, and I'm considering adding a hitch so I can attach a tray for more cargo (putting cargo on your roof kills your mpg)
Also, I think the pandemic has demonstrated that most flying is discretionary. Stressed out management class types unwinding in a paradise island thousands of miles away. Or traveling to a conference. Very few passengers are a specialist that needs to be onsite.
Add to that that flying necessarily means long distance runs, and it enables long distance travel. Meaning flying has enabled the transformation of society from a local, regional society, into a global one. One that consumes far more resources (for example, flying half way across the world to visit grandparents because your job is no longer available in your home country)
I didn't say I want Italy to be an economic island. Isolationism has been against Italian economic interests since, at least, the renaissance. Probably since Magna Graecia.
Italy doesn't need a Lisbon Treaty bound EU to trade with its neighbors. Italy didn't need it in the 1400s, and it didn't need it in the 60s. In neither periods was Italy under the Lisbon Treaty.
As an Italian citizen, I hope for Poland to leave so my country's net transfers less money to the eastern countries and will, hopefully, encourage Italy to grow a pair and leave
I lived in Europe. Add to that a general lack of cash liquidity of the middle class. I.e. when you're poor you're not sure you might not need those extra euro 60 next week for an unforeseen emergency.
When we lived in Europe in the 90s, my mother would never fill up past a quarter tank.
" I wouldn't expect an acute shortage to result from these reasons. (I mean clearly my expectations are wrong given what is happening but this doesn't match my prior understanding of how things are supposed to work.)"
Coal is actually pretty important to smooth out energy. There was something fascinating I learned during the Texas outage last year. At the time I was privy to private exchange emails among power engineers.
One engineer explained that one of the problems they were having is that, with the closing of coal plants, the reliability of the grid goes down. And with a very good reason: You can store a massive pile of coal next to the plant for (basically) free [1].
oil, by comparison, is expensive to store, natgas more expensive still. What happens is, in the winter, the pressure of the natgas lines goes down as consumers drive up their thermostats. Therefore, natgas plants can't deliver the power required beacuse the gas isn't there. So, in the N. East of the USA where there are nasty cold snaps, power operators have piles of coal ready to be burned in coal plants.
Most of the power is still from natgas throughout the year, but coal bails you out when it gets super cold (note, the midwest doesn't need this because it's always nastily cold there -> the natgas lines are built accordingly).
[1] Some, having read the popular press explanations of the outage, will complain that renewables delivered 90% of what was requested. That's true, but only half of the story. The 90% figure was a de-rated amount of energy [2]. Basically dispatchers knew that renewables weren't going to deliver and adjusted their predictions accordingly. The blackout happened, therefore, because the power source that was expected to show up and deliver in this situation tripped over itself. There's no doubt natgas can deliver - it does every winter in the North - but it can't if it's not implemented properly, or if there's not enough gas pressure in the lines to deal with a massive sure.
[2] None of this is meant to be a dismissal of renewable energy. Texas leads in renewables, and why shouldn't they? It's a resource that (can) cleans up our environment. But i power we can't treat things like panaceas and have to be realistic about where we stand.
The poor, in democracy, will vote for their interests. So, unless you abandon democracy, you won't get the poor to vote carbon taxes.
How about we start by putting a $1000/flight tax? Seems only fair that the rich, mobile class start reducing their emissions. After all, it's actually the upper classes that consume (by far) energy in gross terms.
You work from home and/or you make much more than an average person your age. Maybe you're a programmer.
Ok let's make energy more expensive. I think it's only fair that the pain is distributed equitably, so let's put a $0.1/Gb tax on bandwidth [1], the cloud being one of the largest growing emitters of CO2.
Frankly, I liked the 90s low bandwidth internet more than today's, everything valuable we can do today the 90s had enough bandwidth for. Everything that is unhealthy about the internet today typically takes bandwidth. So, I think $0.1/Gb is not enough.
Do you agree?
[1] $0.1/Gb for data flowing to the end user and $0.2/Gb for data crossing country borders. So the cloud folks don't syphon off all the personal data of my citizens.
[EDIT] I think only unethical_ban understood the point of this post. That's it's easy to propose a tax for the poor for their poor behavior. Tax yourself first! I disagree with unethical_ban that it's a bad example - its purposely a glib and capricious indirect carbon tax.
Not much I could do but wait, but at least I didnt find myself rushing for toilet paper (I learned during snowdays in GA that Americans rush for the milk and toilet paper in emergencies)