clairity

national geographic is entertainment (read: misinformation, owned by disney). this article uses dramatic photography and liberally employs weasel words like "could" and "might". even "linked" isn't as strong as you might think, as that only implies correlation, not causation. it mentions no counter-factuals or alternate hypotheses, just drives boldly forward with the messaging.

as for the second, i agree that pollution and climate change are linked, but why address the boogeyman when we have the villian right in front of us? [insert tribal, mediopolitical reasons unrelated to making lives better.] pollution is clearly a problem now. climate change might be a problem in decades/centuries. and the causation is pollution -> climate change, not the other way around, so fixing pollution (not simply CO₂) is win-win, but not the other way around.

a long arc of digesting and triangulating information has led to my understanding of the problem, which doesn't easily link to a study or two. i'm a proponent of sensible environmentalism, not tribal bandwagoning. i was a member of https://netimpact.org/ in business school and took courses on sustainability (i.e., i've studied the problem using primary sources rather than relying on mass media to tell me what to think).

apology accepted! and sorry if it came off a bit harsh.

to be fair, the all-or-nothing suggestion isn't practicable on the face of it (otherwise you'd get more troll postings, or more unhappy users), so it was more an opening gambit than a fleshed out suggestion.

however, it's pretty clear that implicit biases strongly and unflatteringly drive[0] what gets flagged and what gets popularized (largely by hn users of course). is it hn's job to address implicit bias? that's certainly debatable, but i'd think you'd want the widest reach possible and potentially turning away upwards of 80-90% of the world's population isn't a long-term winning strategy for yc.

most entertainers (singers, actors, celebrities, etc.) are stale topics of conversation (mostly rehashes of what they did/said), but way too many make the front page anyway (or conversely, far too few of the more interesting ones make it).

[0]: it'd probably be an interesting exercise to analyze what obit posts gets flagged, uncommented/unpromoted, and popularized. i've casually observed (and even tested a bit) that nearly all the black/brown people and most women don't make the front page, many of whom are fascinating historically, otherwise they wouldn't have cleared the higher bar for getting noticed in the face of bias in the first place.

this was apparently posted a couple months ago but got no traction.

ultrecht is actually piloting vehicle-to-grid tech, that we here in california (and much of the US) are too mired in fighting over resources (i.e., who accrues the benefits) to enjoy.

and in general, you won't, since we're each quite able to do our own research ourselves, and also because sources aren't ace-in-the-hole smackdowns but rather extended information that typically doesn't fit into a discussion post. no source, especially not recent research out of an academic journal, is by itself invulnerable enough to criticism that it can wholesale end a discussion, and therefore has limited utility in these circumstances.

but it's easy enough to verify that there have been at least dozens of papers (and at least hundreds of news stories) on coal by itself having killed millions of people over the past century and a half, and having nothing to do with CO₂ or climate change.

> (a) the story was on-topic, and (b) it's such a big story that we couldn't get rid of it if we wanted to—people would just repost it until one got past us.

but somehow the dozens of kobe bryant posts didn't get past you, even though it was just as big of a death and just as on-topic (anything piquing curiosity, right?). i'd suggest being even-handed about these kinds of posts, rather than allowing some to be flagged off the front page because [black, athlete, relentless winner, investor, entrepreneur, oscar awardee, loving father, ... ], would help temper the backlash.

none or all such posts should be allowed, but not the picking and choosing that happens currently, which is highly disrespectful in the same way you're criticizing others here.

i'd happily get rid of rent control right after we get rid of prop 13, all the nimby-supported regulations, building codes, and zoning laws, and a whole raft of homeowner and real estate investor subsidies. rent control doesn't dampen new construction, because rent control laws typically exempt newer buildings (like 25-30 years) to allow investors to recoup their investments first.

so you're right, rent control doesn't exist in a vacuum, but exists in response to all the above advantage given to homeowners/investors. let's get rid of those advantages first, then we can unwind rent control.

i'm no fan of the dmv, but do you riot over having to register your car or getting a driver's license too? registration is equivalent, and a license is certainly more intrusive, with the biometric data they tend to collect.

yah, for that, we'd need complete social graphs for public servants, which would quickly run afoul the congressional staffs' civil liberties, because they'd try to hide as much as possible behind other people. you'd need that to appropriately apportion attributions back to the public servant.

i'd be ok pushing for a legal carve-out for this social graph however, as i'd posit that greater governmental transparency overrides the potential encroachments of the ~tens/hundreds of thousands of partisans and lobbyists (<0.1% of population; though slippery slope could be invoked here). you'd start with staffers and move out to anyone paid directly by the office and their affiliated political organizations, then move to large donors and their PACs. obviously the current supreme court would try to block this as an antecedent to the citizen's united case.

that's motivated reasoning leading to hand-waved figures, driven by the desire to capitalize on the climate change frenzy.

you've been lied to. climate change has not killed millions of people[0]. pollution has.

the core problem with the climate change mediopolitical narrative is the focus on CO₂, which as i've noted before, is among the least important and most nebulous environmental issues, and therefore among the most attractive for political distraction and do-nothing gridlock. you see the effectiveness of this narrative all over hn, via the casuistry with which climate change is discussed.

in contrast with pollutants, which have squarely been introduced relatively recently by human industry, CO₂ is a gas on which life depends and has been abundant in our atmosphere for hundreds of millions of years. rising CO₂ levels is a long term issue, to deal with over centuries and millenia, not a short term one. pollution has been killing people for centuries now.

edit: to answer your question, there are many policy decisions that differentiate the two. what to tax, what to incentivize, what to regulate, what to evangelize, etc. we should be characterizing the externalities caused by each pollutant and then applying a tax or market-based solution (or whatever else) to address them.

[0]: to be precise, "more people", since our ecology inadvertently kills people all the time, throughout history.

archived version: https://archive.ph/WvMZn

the productive conversation is to compare that to millions of deaths per year from pollution.

no, see, that's exactly the problem. CO₂ is a mediopolitical wedge issue designed to trap us in partisan gridlock, not bring meaningful change to the global population. that's why it's so fickle and formless, perfect for sowing discord, because it can be shaped in any number of desired directions.

and it's clearly not threat to anyone living today and probably not for many generations to come, no matter what the 'trust the science' rhetoric claims. pollution, however, has been and will continue to kill millions of people every year. it has the potential to unite all sorts of factions (something vested interests fear) and actually make meaningful progress.

CO₂ and climate change is a sideshow, but it's been brought front and center because it serves a powerful purpose for those vested interests. anyone jumping on the climate change train is only furthering those interests, rather than solving real problems. instead, we should focus on the actual problems like pollution, and discard the chosen mediopolitical narrative.

doubt they'd support that. it's surely technically possible, but apple & the carriers like to gatekeep the eSIM provisioning process to make you reveal your identity.

yah, the move to eSIM is about consolidating control for apple and the carriers at the expense of the consumer. it's also an anti-privacy move (you can buy SIMs anonymously with cash, but not eSIMs), but of course, apple didn't announce that little nugget of information.

dual eSIM[0] has been available from apple already, but more than that is in question, though they did use the term "multiple eSIMs" in the presentation. i'm bummed about the removal of the sim tray too.

[0]: Using Dual SIM with an eSIM ( https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT209044 )

the dynamic island does actually look like a neat UI/UX that transforms what would be a weakness into a strength (of course it's not enough by itself to upgrade for though). edit: it also looks like it would be a fingerprint magnet for the front camera (though i don't really do selfies, so not a big deal for me).

the higher 2000 nits outdoor peak brightness also piques my interest, as brightness has become a problem on my old iphone.

mediopolitical narrative is driving hard on this topic right now since covid left a void that ukraine can't fill (though they're trying, with the nuclear plant[0]). i'd support a framing around pollution, but not climate change.

CO₂ (a gas that life co-evolved with and depends on) simply isn't our most important environmental issue. let's focus instead on pollution: CO, NOₓ, SO₂, VOCs (PAHs & petroleum hydrocarbons, phthalates, alcohols, aldehydes, terpenes, ketones, formaldehyde, etc.), lead, mercury, ozone, radon & other radioactive elements, fertilizers/pesticides, plastics, and especially particulates, which are things that kill millions of people right now, every year (not to mention all the harm to everyone else as well).

the focus on climate change is fashion, but with a little tweak we can actually address impactful environmental problems instead.

[0]: nuclear, by the way, has the potential to help significantly, principally by removing coal, our biggest categorical polluter, from the energy mix. incidentally, that would also measurably reduce CO₂ emissions.

yup, i wrote a dynamic simulation using this technique in the late 90s, using java to implement a rk45 ODE solver and js/html canvas for visualization and controls.

besides the standard bandwidth improvements, it's pretty clear that this is why the major telcos were pushing 5G so hard, so they could sell that more precise location data to any and all comers.

nuclear is not scaling fast enough because it's been subject to 40 years of negative mediopolitical narrative reinforced by poor market and technical regulation. nuclear easily gets to cost parity with renewables when you consider the needed storage for baseload usage and the more advanced grid control variable generation requires.

in the US, had we continued to build nuclear at the rate we were between the 70s and 90s, we'd be at over 50% nuclear for electricity generation, which would have knocked coal completely out of the equation, leaving only nuclear (baseload), gas (variable demand), and renewables (opportunistic generation). over 70 years, fission-based nuclear has caused 99+% fewer human deaths than fossil fuels have.

and yes, there's no need to pin any hopes on fusion right now, which is decades away at best.

right, it's the most optimistic possible scenario, if all of the assumptions (of which there are a lot) are correct and as you point out, all omissions (of which there are a lot, despite the length) are negligible. there are some citations, but the narrative project a certain future way beyond what the meager research suggests.

the article does provide a nice survey of clean tech, but the conclusions should be disregarded.

a quick skim suggests this guide is largely motivated reasoning rather than being objective, as it immediately jumps to solar, wind, and batteries as its conclusive remedy. that's unrealistically simplistic, despite its length. something as large and complex as our global energy supply will need us pursuing every option simultaneously. and the most immediate thing to tackle is coal (being the most polluting, estimated to kill millions per year), for which nuclear needs to be a significant component (being baseload).

i didn't examine deeply but it seemed to me the backend is running on node, and that it was meant to be the implementation, not just a reference.

it didn't even require a "great declaration" to realize, as a thinking layperson, in ~april 2020 that this pandemic was serious but not nearly as deadly as the bubonic plague or the spanish flu, and that the elderly and unhealthy were disproportionately affected. that in turn made it obvious that targeted efforts were the right approach, but both parties were unwilling to do the right thing and let the opportunity pass for wielding and centralizing political power.

js has come a long way but i'm skeptical that it's maturing fast enough for this to be the right medium- to long-term language/platform choice for something that's meant to be more infrastructure than just web app. and while php[0] is long past the hype cycle, it's more proven in this role than js, but even that is usually superceded, or at least augmented, by more "industrial" languages when approaching amazon's scale. for instance even mid-market WMS systems are often written in compiled languages like C# because of the need for speed and robustness.

[0]: nowadays i prefer ruby/rails, which can also get you pretty far before needing extra help.

that only works for network requests that use dns. some (including a number of apple & google services) go directly to an ip address, which is why a firewall like little snitch is still valuable beyond dns-based blockers like pihole, nextdns, and adguard (this is what i use on ios). you used to be able to install an application firewall on jailbroken iphones, but i don't think that's an option any more.

on macos, i used to use hands off! from one periodic (and before that, metakine), but they've since disappeared. i now use lulu with pf firewall via murus lite as a backup, but may switch to little snitch again (used to have a license but was unable to upgrade it so switched to hands off! via a promo) for the better UX.

a clump of fetal cells is the textbook definition of dependent and inseparable. you're otherwise projecting what they might become if everything goes well, not objectively perceiving what they are in the present. if we projected every human that way, we're all dead, and therefore worthless.

neither our subjective nor objective experience of those cells today is equivalent to that of any human being around us. you just can't get to the conclusion you want with only biology and objectivity, because your key premise is neither an objective nor a biological axiom.

yes, objective. bodies (i.e., independent beings) are required to invoke bodily autonomy, which brings with it the direct corrollary that non-bodies cannot invoke bodily autonomy. that's rational and objective, as in, it's beyond culture, beyond 'taste', towards 'truth'.

you countered with a subjective opinion hanging off an ultimately irrelevant legal triviality (that's also cultural, not objective).

haha, i would too. let's prefer all the things!