~20 years ago my parents bought us(me) a new computer. A Pentium 2. For almost the exact same price(not adjusted) as the fairly well specced gaming computer i bought last year.
Prices drop for a lot of stuff. Thinking youtube for $15/month is expensive doesn't seem wierd to me. But i think its worth it just to avoid ads.
Norway is in the middle of trying to figure this out. Or we are where we have always been: Pretending to do everything we can to protect the climate while actually doing almost nothing that would impact our standard of living. Its hard to tell if we are actually moving the discussion forward or not.
We are happy to spend billions funding rainforrests around the world, but we won't make any hard choices that affect us at home.
Stopping the national subsidies for oil exploration is something that would probably stop it dead in its tracks. But we are not doing that. We are instead in the process of opening new areas for explorative drilling. There might be some truth to the "clean oil technology" talk, but it doesn't change the fact that oil == carbon.
The only reason we havn't started drilling in "Lofoton"( our famous fishing grounds and home of a lot of magnificent scenery constantly posted on reddit ) is that a few small swing parties are putting their foot down. All the larger parties want to drill. As they always have. Its depressing.
We do have the fairly new(in terms of actually being voted for) "Green" party which is basically a single-issue party. I'm hoping they can steer the conversation to a point where will be able to make hard choices.
Not to derail too much, but this also applies to everything else we do or dont do. Like not cutting arm sales to the saudies etc. Its money talks all the way.
Edit: and don't get me starte on wolves. Even while the majority of norwegians seemingly wants wolves in our forests, we seem to be dead set on limiting their numbers to a population which is not going to sustain itself genetically. Rip wolves.
What? I'm in the industry and believe me, Norway is making transitions. Statoil -> Equinor. Your SWF no longer will invest in fossil fuels. Wayyy more mandates regarding emissions/pollution during extraction.
They shouldn't just stop drilling. It is a moneymaker for the country and gives the government lots of money to spend on policies which reduce the country's emissions. Norway produces lots of oil relative to the country's size so if they took it off the market, it would just come from somewhere with less standards and less commitment to the environment. They should make calculated moves which don't risk the country's economic future. Taking the biggest sovereign wealth fund in the world's money out of FF stocks is a good way to start, and doesn't jeopardize much, if anything.
Green's only purpose should be to change the dialogue, not to be given any legislative power whatsoever. They will make drastic moves which will yield economic consequences felt by the public. Reality is, people have to be in good economic circumstances to care about altruistic goals like curtailing climate change. Take those good economic circumstances away from them - and suddenly the environment is no longer much of a priority.
Changing their name is not really changing what they do. I realize they are diversifying into other areas(which is only sensible), but they are still also doing what they have always been doing. Push for more drilling. And i'm not sure i buy their argument that since someone else will just pick up the slack we should keep doing it. I realize that oil is what has brought us our wealth, but this is what i meant by hard choices.
> Taking the biggest sovereign wealth fund in the world's money out of FF stocks is a good way to start, and doesn't jeopardize much, if anything.
This is also what i mean by hard choices. In this case it wasn't really that hard.
I don't know why you insist on a choice being "hard". What matters is the outcome. Taking billions of dollars out of foreign FF stocks has a good outcome for the environment and leads the way for even more to be taken out. The economy is unaffected. Government gets their petrorevenues to spend on reducing the country's emissions.
Stopping drilling just means another producer fills the void, and the Norwegian economy suffers as a result. People rightfully react to that and often elect someone on the other end of the political spectrum. Not only do other producers have less env. regulation, but the backlash from the Norwegian populace could elect a government within Norway who slashes this regulation and restarts production. History is replete with reactionary governments, especially when the Overton window is shifted too fast.
My point is, keep diversifying the economy, keep diversifying energy sources. Just because drilling continues does not mean alternative energy is slowing down. Take it slow, else you risk backlash.
Its not that they have to be hard choices. Its rather that we are only commiting to try the easy ones.
And i do agree that what matters is the outcome. I just don't think we are changing the outcome as much as we should be doing given our beneficial position in the world. There are only so many easy "things", for lack of a better word, we can do. The rest are hard. And it seems to me that we are stopping short of committing to doing anything "hard".
I could be wrong about what produces the best outcome with regards the environment considering wether to stopping or continue drilling(edit: in norway). But our carbon emmisions are still climbing while most of the europe that we should be comparing ourselves to has either stopped or reduced their emmisions. We are still not contributing to a carbon negative world other than not being as bad as we could have been.
>But our carbon emmisions are still climbing while most of the europe that we should be comparing ourselves to has either stopped or reduced their emmisions. We are still not contributing to a carbon negative world other than not being as bad as we could have been.
What now? Your emissions have remained flat for the last ten years, you have a carbon tax, your country was one of the first to implement CCS technology [1]. You guys have by no means been sitting on your hands.
Can't remember either, but your recollection is close to what mine is.
But given that Moff knows who/what Darth Vader is it is not supprising that he takes a subservient stance when talking to him. Kind of the same way i'm very careful around american cops. I would never address a norwegian cop by sir, but i don't even think twice before using sir/mam when talking to a us cop.
But in these cases its fear. It has nothing to do with pleasentries. It's the gun in the holster or the knowledge that he can forcechoke you if he wants to. ( at least thats my interpretation of that encounter in rotj ).
So no. I don't think they would say that in any normal encounter. I know i wouldn't other than in jest.
This makes sense - I'd assume "I know my place, don't hurt me" is a sentiment that arises in basically any culture as long as somebody involved has lots of power and no accountability.
> Massive wood walls and structural beams and columns comprised of engineered panels have demonstrated fire performance equal to concrete and, in some cases, superior to steel
one big difference seems to be that once the critical point is reached, even if the threshold very high, the wood contributes to the fire and nourishes it, unlike concrete or steal. a skyscraper with proper sprinkling should be fine.
Subsidizing personal vehicles sounds completely insane and irresponsible to me.
The problem is that everyone ends up with their own vehicle and this gridlocks any road in/out of a city. Which ~big city in the world does not have trafic problems? And what is the average passenger count in those cars. One bus can replace MANY cars. But for some reason i cannot comprehend taking the bus or train seems oppressive to some people. I get this is not an option everywhere but where i live it most definatly is and people still complain about the tolls drivers have to pay to commute into the city and refuse to take the bus/train.
Taking the light rail from Renton to Seattle costs twice as much (or more) than gasoline to drive there. And takes 3 times as long. Not including parking.
And the train doesn't run on Saturday nights, so if you want a fun night in the city, you're driving anyway.
> Many people who program in PHP learned it as a first language, hacked together programs in it, and probably used hack together libraries and tooling.
This describes me very well, and i don't think i'm alone. When i look back at my(very early, first language) PHP code it looks horrible. A lot of it is just copy pasted code from random websites telling me that that it does what i wanted it to. Which is a pretty good description of me at a young age trying/learning to program by internet. I don't use PHP today, and i really don't want to, but i suspect that is in some part due to me struggling with stuff i never understood when i was doing it and developing a distaste for it looking back at my bad code from that time without realizing it could be done differently/in a way fairly close to what i do in my current work-language. I just wanted to make my WoW dkp page work and searched the internet when wondering how to and ended up writing really bad code. It still worked pretty good and i had fun doing it but i never considered writing PHP again once i moved on.
This debt, at least in Norways case, is probably mostly due to a very large portion of people buying their own home. Its a lot more common here than in other countries and when growing up, at some point buying your own home is almost expected of you. It is also heavily incentivized by the government through tax policy. This is probably creating a housing bubble of sorts, so i guess we'll see how well that turns out at some later date, but i assume that is the reason Norway is where it is on that chart.
I doubt Norwegian homeownership culture is anything as militant or debt-fueled as America's. Remember how the US nearly tanked itself with mortgage backed securities a few years ago?
I really really really do not share that nostalgia. I live in a city center and the only amount significant source of noise is from cars/buses. Sure you will have sirens or people shouting every now and again, but there is a constant buzzing sound from motors that goes on throughout the day and most of the night. I moved from a relatively quiet neighbourhood to where i am a few years ago, and the sound of motors ( and the smell. Lets not forget that cars smell ) is the only thing i about living here. This would be a great place to live if it wasn't for the constant sound and smell of motors.
Oh hell, I live rural, and it's just as bad. Constant industrial type noises from neighbour's skid steers, trucks, tractors, snowmobiles, quads, and dirt bikes.
Amen. I’m hard of hearing, and traffic noise makes conversation impossible practically anywhere outside in any city. The idea that electric cars aren’t loud enough infuriates me.
I've been using c++/Qt for quite some time now, but i really prefer to work in go. Feels like i'm a lot more productive while writing, and i don't have to spend doubledigit minutes waiting for stuff to compile.
I recently stumbled over this project and have been using it quite a lot since. It works really well and coming from Qt-land it was really easy to use the provided bindings and generate the 'classes' for signals/slots. AND the docker images are great for cross compilation. They just work :). Thank you so much for working on this.
I recently tried out gold linker in a c++/qt project, and it nearly halved my compile time. I don't quite have incremental linking working yet, but I expect it to be even better.
Prices drop for a lot of stuff. Thinking youtube for $15/month is expensive doesn't seem wierd to me. But i think its worth it just to avoid ads.
> mad max furry road...
What a movie that would have been :)