There is a line in 30 rock "I don't know anything. I get all my news from the radio in Grand Theft Auto” and I aspire to this level of ignoring the “News”.
Even when I go coldest turkey, I’ve found that actually important news will find me, often in a way that makes it easier to judge for myself whether it’s good or bad.
This article feels like a hit piece on Air Conditioning. Some groups seem to regard AC as somehow morally weak and even evil, and while the sentiment resonates with me - I grew up in Ireland! I never even saw the _point_ of AC until I moved to California! - attempts, like this one, to damn AC with logic always feel kind of, well, obtuse. They seem to deliberately miss the main benefits of AC. Which are:
1) AC literally saves lives. Continuing to reject it in hot countries is kind of evil.
2) AC is efficient. Each kWh of heat sucked out of buildings uses a fraction of a kWh of electricity.
3) AC's electricity use is strongly correlated with when the sun is shining brightest. It is the greenest (man-made) energy use I can imagine!
And, most importantly:
4) AC nowadays is almost always installed so it can work in reverse, as a "heat pump". So countries that currently heat their buildings with natural gas or other fossils, would actually _reduce_ their total carbon burden by installing AC everywhere! Because they can use these instead of burning fossils in winter! Doubly so in countries avec lots of nuclear generation, but even if they don't, burning natural gas or even coal to make electricity to drive a heat pump emits less carbon than burning the same natural gas to heat a house! (Citation needed!)
I have a pet conspiracy theory that the anti-AC lobby in Europe is funded by Big Fossil. It seems silly, even to me, but it's not totally illogical: widespread AC installation in mainland Europe will inexorably reduce dependency on oil and gas for heating, first by burning less of it to make electricity to drive a heat pump rather than by burning it directly, and second by making it _possible_ to substitute renewables for it.
Humans seem to be wired to weigh negative news much more strongly than positive news.
(The most plausible hypothesis I’ve found for this is that bad news - fire, predators nearby - has historically been much more likely to kill you than good news to benefit you, so we are descended from people who over-weighed bad news, and survived to reproduce.)
Modern media seems to really lean into this. All takes on everything are The Worst Possible Take. I heard Twitter described yesterday as “gain of function research for takes”. It’s not that the takes have to be bad, they just have to provoke a strong reaction, and bad news just gets a stronger reaction in humans.
“Cure for death found - social security bankrupt!!”
We have become more anti-fragile: and good things are way more likely to benefit us than before, and bad things less likely to harm us. Eventually we will evolve into this, but it will take literally generations!
Anyway, given people’s tendency to give bad news more weight, and given that most media is strongly negative, it is no wonder that people can come to believe that everything is terrible and that we are all doomed and that humanity has never had it worse. This seems absolutely ridiculous to me, comically so, but it seems almost tautological to many people. And telling them that things are actually great can seem like an attack!!!!!
If people don’t carefully curate their media environment, it is almost inevitable that they’ll become negative about the future. I don’t know what to do about this in general, but I know that I have to be very careful about what I consume. (And be gentle toward people who have been harmed by consuming too much negative for too long. I don’t think a psychologist can help though!)
I remember an interview with Margaret Atwood [0] in which she joked that while Quebec might vote to leave Canada, the first nations own the bit of Canada where all the hydroelectric power comes from, and _they_ won't want to secede. And wouldn't have to, because Canada has treaties with various First Nations that among other things require Canada to come to their aid if attacked.
ATWOOD: I think things will stay kind of the way they are. But think about this very carefully, as people did when it was a distinct possibility. You have Quebec there. The people to the north of Quebec are not French-speaking Quebecers. They’re indigenous people. And they said — and that’s where the hydroelectric power comes from, by the way — they said, “If you separate from Canada, we’re going to separate from you on the same grounds. Different language, older culture, etc.”
And Quebec said, “Oh, no, you’re not.” And they said, “Oh, yes, we are. And by the way, we happen to have a treaty with Canada that says that if any foreign power invades us, they have to defend us.” So if Quebec separates, north of Quebec separates from Quebec, Quebec invades them, Canada invades. You see what I mean?
When I renewed my H1B visa (I think after three years), I had to leave the US to do it. I couldn't renew it from inside. The permission to work got renewed just fine - I could just keep on working for another three years - but if I left after the first visa expired, and wanted to come back, I would need a new _visa_ (thing stuck into my passport) to come back, and I could only apply for that while outside the country.
I read that it used to not be like this, that it used to be possible to renew the _visa_ itself from inside the US, but that got changed before my time. I can only imagine that the reason for that was that non-citizens inside the US are entitled to due process, but non-citizens outside the US are not. And denying a visa to somebody outside the US is therefore a lot easier than denying it to somebody inside the US, and essentially cannot be appealed.
When I applied for AOS form H1B to Green Card, I didn't have to leave the US. With this change, I would have had to. The only reason I can think for this change is that denials of AOS would now become unappealable. I hate this.
Yes, many things are slightly - a few percent - cheaper than many other stores, per unit weight/volume, but it’s not a a big difference. Some things are more expensive though, like meat and fish. It seems “cheap” only if you do most of your other grocery shopping in premium grocery stores (eg Whole Foods). I do most of my grocery shopping in Market Basket, and it’s about the same as Costco for most things I buy. And everything comes in normal sized portions!
Costco’s real benefit is that everything they sell is pretty good stuff, and nothing is outrageously overpriced. Eg They sell Goya beans, for more per can than supermarket brand beans, but less than Goya beans in supermarkets. Many things are like this. You can assume that the things Costco sells are The Good Brands, but you can get most things cheaper if you’re not brand sensitive.
There are many things for which buying in bulk is a false economy: I will *ever again buy Costco-sized containers of eg yogurt covered raisins, or praline covered almonds! I suspect that every trip to Costco used to raise my average body weight for the next year by half a pound. Especially if I went to Costco hungry! Never go to Costco hungry!
I admire what this person is doing, but some reasons I prefer raw + lightroom over eg camera jpeg are:
* Lightroom’s noise reduction is WAY better than what my camera (a D500) can do. I shoot sports, usually indoors, with highish iso, so NR’s gonna have to happen at some point.
* If I’m going to lug around a dedicated camera, I’m gonna have it do its best. I have my iPhone for everything else.
* I can apply today’s lightroom NR to raws I shot years ago. Similarly, I expect to be able to apply future lightroom’s NR to today’s raws.
* Lightroom Classic is a superb program - it has many warts and clunks and oddities but it achieved product market fit and it stayed there, doing what its users want. Adobe keep making small improvements, and yet they don’t fuck it up!! This is vanishingly rare in big tech!!! (Promos gonna promo!) I grudgingly pay for this.
(My theory as to how they have managed to resist the institutional imperative to destroy Lightroom classic is that they created a fork, named just “Lightroom”, on which the promo can wreak its destruction, it’s kind of a second golgafrinchan ark, leaving Lightroom classic alone. I pay for Lightroom classic as a way of saying: keep leaving it alone!)
I have heard that the combination of self-driving and mandatory 30-60” breaks every few hours is very relaxing. I look forward to trying it some day. Meanwhile…
I would be very wary of taking my bolt on a long journey. I have no confidence that what few fast chargers are out there would actually work, or be available, and I wouldn’t want to plan my journey around charging stops, with copious backup plans! It would be very stressful!!
Not to mention that my bolt has only 300mi range in summer, and less than 200mi in winter. And fast chargers are rare enough that I’d be scared to get anywhere near the limit.
By contrast, my Elantra hybrid has a ~600mi range. And I can “charge” it anywhere.
The past is still here. It just isn’t evenly distributed.
Ok, so how about: we made about as much in batteries last year as all the A380s in the world can hold fully loaded in jet fuel. (There aren’t many of them!) Not as impressive, but still.
Gas pumps in the US are artificially capped at 10 gallons per minute, and a gallon of gasoline is about 33kWh, so petrol cars in the US “charge” at 330kWh/min ~= 20MW. But most cars only turn about a third of that into motion, so let’s say 7MW equivalent? While BYD’s 1.5MW is amazing, it seems a stretch to call it “almost as fast as gas pumps.”
Diesel pumps for trucks typically pump much faster too. And diesel is nearer 40kWh/gal. We have a ways to go!
(The energy density of oil is amazing: a fully loaded A380 with 84,500 us gallons of jet fuel at 37.5 kWh per, that’s over 3TWh. Which is about twice the capacity of all the li-ion batteries made in 2025. We have a ways to go!)
A joke I read recently: "A fortune teller told me I was going to experience the most terrible heartbreak in twelve years time. This totally bummed me out, so I got a dog to cheer me up."
The radius is too big. This monitor is R4200, 4.2m. I have a Samsung odyssey something 49” monitor and it is glorious. It is R1000, and since my head is about a meter from the screen, it works: even the edges are usable.
I used to use two 27” 1440p monitors, which together are about the same size as the Samsung 49”, and also the same resolution, but the edges were further enough away from my head that they were annoying to use. Not to mention the bezels in the middle. While this dell wouldn’t have the bezels, the edges would still be too far away.
The only drawback of my giant R1000 monitor is that I can’t easily use my laptop’s camera. So I don’t; I use an iPad for video conferencing, it sits happily below this monitor.
My only regret is not getting the 57” 2x4k variant!
The biggest advantage of NG is that we can store months of it. (Currently we can store only seconds of electricity, if that. Citation needed!)
I have a dream that some day we will come up with an efficient process for generating methane from atmospheric CO2, water, and electricity, and we’ll be able to take advantage of our extensive natural gas grid. (Natural gas is essentially methane.)
Even when I go coldest turkey, I’ve found that actually important news will find me, often in a way that makes it easier to judge for myself whether it’s good or bad.