cf498 | 6 years ago | on: Aldous Huxley Foresaw America’s Pill-Popping Addiction
cf498's comments
cf498 | 6 years ago | on: Canadian provinces band together to develop nuclear reactor technology
And we are far from just storing that stuff cheaply in a safe and secure storehouse we have moronic ideas like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine where we have to dig out old longterm storage.
cf498 | 6 years ago | on: Canadian provinces band together to develop nuclear reactor technology
So the question whether we should go full nuclear is, what is the real price on nuclear per kwh with what liabilities? How does it scale? I think the post i responded to first was on an excellent path if it hadnt ignored the waste management problematic. I think research into bringing down cost of power plants is a field worth researching, as well as how to drive down the price of long term storage. But first we have to actually decide on the basis of realistic data and not just hope the future will figure it out for us.
edit: My comment is coming across a bit to hostile, just so there are no misunderstandings, i dont think this societal discussion can be approached by convincing individuals on the internet who are to lazy to google themselves(meaning me), but in parliament. I wasnt really trying to start a discussion but giving my 2cents of where i think the problem in the discourse we currently have lie. And thats more the lacking factual basis in arguments on the topic then the actual costs.
cf498 | 6 years ago | on: Canadian provinces band together to develop nuclear reactor technology
We are currently looking for a replacement that doesnt externalize costs through environmental damages. I dont think nuclear is an alternative here today from a price point, and looking at the few times pro nuclear people talk about waste management costs, they dont seem to think so either. They mostly tend to give the same answer you did, which isnt an answer. Even if we were to decide today that nuclear would be the lesser evil, we cant do that without a cost overview. We have to at least understand what follow up costs we are leaving the generations after us and look what alternatives we have at that price point. And i dont think many taxpayers understood that Fukushima was an actual liability of more then half a trillion dollars and to how much that adds up to for nuclear all together.
And again, we are in an emergency situation with fossil fuels, and sure, we can talk about how much it would cost in liabilities and actual damages to switch completely to nuclear. It might be worth it for all i know. But if you arent even gonna give me an approximate cost to the taxpayer i will assume you are trying to scam me out of money. Unless we can have an honest discussion on a societal level about the realistic costs on taxpayers its an absolutely horrible idea to build even one more nuclear power plant. While i would love for the German nuclear power plants to run till the end of their planed lifetime to not waste the initial investment into relatively safe reactors, not allowing the building of new ones is the right decision as long as the costs are not transparent. If we should have learned anything from fossil fuel and all the other horrible side effects of technological development, we should at least have learned to make a proper technology (consequences) assessment (Technikfolgenabschätzung) and deliberately act on actual data instead of doing stuff that seems without alternative.
cf498 | 6 years ago | on: Canadian provinces band together to develop nuclear reactor technology
Dont get me wrong, i am not anti- nuclear. It just doesnt make sense to me at this point from an economics perspective. When factoring in the cost of waste management and decommissioning the power plants after the end of its lifetime, they are absurdly expensive. All this not to mention the absurd follow-up costs of having to dig out collapsed long time storage yet again. I dont see how nuclear today is not just another technology that offers a unsustainable, quick and cheap energy source that externalized the costs to the next generations. The running costs of all those waste management failures is starting to add up, and when looking at Germany, who set an exit date for nuclear power, the cost of decommissioning the power plants themselves is going to be a massive loss for the tax payer, even if everything would work as planed. Which, when looking at the history, we can be sure it wont.
I am not convinced yet that nuclear doesnt just look good on paper. Get me a realistic calculation for the actual energy price without externalizing the cleanup costs to the tax payer and we can talk. Dont factor in waste management at a fixed price the state offers and dont just assume that no meltdown cleanup will ever be necessary. But i have yet to see anyone make the argument that way, which lets me assume, that nuclear is a wonderful technology to research until someone finds out how to run plants economically viable without just externalizing costs.
cf498 | 6 years ago | on: Drive drunk twice in Quebec, get ignition breathalyzer for life
cf498 | 6 years ago | on: The Neues Museum claims copyright over 3D-printing files of the Nefertiti bust
cf498 | 6 years ago | on: Drive drunk twice in Quebec, get ignition breathalyzer for life
If they dont want help and keep repeating then the second is absolutely needed. The problem isnt that they are addicts and self destructive, but that they carelessly endanger other peoples lives. One would imagine what an apocalyptic outcry it would be if any other drug, that large parts of society consume daily, was found responsible for people starting to kill people in their surroundings. Do you all remember the PCP scare? Or the Spice Horror stories?
cf498 | 6 years ago | on: Drive drunk twice in Quebec, get ignition breathalyzer for life
cf498 | 6 years ago | on: How to Buy Drugs
cf498 | 6 years ago | on: Pine64 November Update – ANSI Pinebook Pro and PinePhone Preorder
cf498 | 6 years ago | on: Pine64 November Update – ANSI Pinebook Pro and PinePhone Preorder
https://forum.armbian.com/topic/7783-cant-install-pine-a64-l...
Do you have any more information or a link where to follow up on this? Skimming the threads in the forum
https://forum.pine64.org/forumdisplay.php?fid=67
has more then one person saying that they managed to boot from the EMMC.
edit: nevermind found it
https://www.reddit.com/r/PINE64official/comments/df6yxz/pine...
edit2: Are you sure you didnt run into a problem with Armbian? Did you test it with any other OS? There seem to be more people who had an issue which sounds similar, not being able to boot from EMMC but from SDCard with armbian.
cf498 | 6 years ago | on: Twitter to ban political advertising
edit: Since we came to recommendations, I would suggest you actually talk to some Nazis to see what they are all about. Not some troll on a board but people who show up to a rally of a far right party. Ask their voterbase why they are there.
cf498 | 6 years ago | on: Twitter to ban political advertising
cf498 | 6 years ago | on: Twitter to ban political advertising
Since you brought it up, lets look at the topic of ethnic cleansing and how deplatforming would treat different people and what the result is. Say someone was never interested in politics or isnt that old and has some naivete left traveled to an area with extreme ethical or religious conflicts witnessing it first hand. An intimate view of decades old conflicts where parts of the civilian population are at each others throats and in some places even the threat of massacres is still very real if it werent for massive police or military presences. Take your pick from northern Ireland to some places in the Balkans to the variety of African conflicts with an unimaginable level of hate in some areas. Picture school children needing a police cordon on their way to school to escort them through screaming protesters because they have the wrong ethnicity or religious affiliation. Once people are personally affected or witness something they find atrocious they get motivated to think about it. How could the situation be improved? Talking with the people in the region he hears a specific mantra very often. As long as we still live door to door this conflict will continue. So the persons asks himself what could be possible solutions? The current situation is clearly intolerable to anyone with a sense of empathy. The person reads up on the conflict and its a decades or even century old issue. Quite alot was already tried, you can read books upon books of articles how the situation might be improved and about the numerous campaigns that were already completed. And still here we are today. So what were other regions that had the potential for ethnic conflicts but which are now resolved peacefully? A short look into the history books and you learn this was often achieved by deportations. You might not even have to look far, the formerly German provinces in Poland or Czechoslovakia dont have a any conflicts today, on the contrary. So apparently moving one of the groups is the solution. Sure this was often accompanied throughout history with atrocities, but back then horrible regimes and dictatorships were in power, now we have a properly functioning governments, those atrocities are a day of the past. Just horrible stories from the darkest days of humanity. We never had such a peaceful period in Europe and everyone knows we reached the end of history. So why not relocate one group and ensure permanent peace? So he asks, why dont we just deport every xyz in zyx?
My worry is, how many people on the left are still capable to explain to him why deportations and ethical cleansing are not just not a reasonable thing to do? Why his conclusion is wrong? Instead of just screaming Nazi and publicly shaming him? Could you? With deplatforming he is told that what he is talking about is called ethnic cleansings and he is a horrible Nazi for even mentioning such a thing. So he gets banned and has to look elsewhere for a solution to the problem he witnessed. He finds one of the isolated fringe boards. They are the only place to talk about it. While granted there are alot of Nazis, who cares, you find morons everywhere and they get banned on the platform as well, so he is obviously not in a Nazi board himself. He talks a while and finds some people who agree with him, who tell him that the mixing of inherently different groups is the core issue. He saw it himself after all. You just have to look as far as the Identitarian movement who put a lot of effort into discussion guidelines on how to convince people. Believe me if i tell you, they do know how to debate with someone, you cant cling to the cliche of the drunk skinhead.
That is of course a rather unbelievable story, who witnesses one of those conflicts after all? They are often shitty holiday destinations. But how many have had negative personal encounters with people who fit the role of a migrant or Muslim? The story is the same everywhere with every topic, we dont live in a perfect world and the far right is readily available with easy convenient answer for perceived or real problems. Are you still able to convince someone in a discussion about refugees and womens rights? And with convince I dont mean explaining someone why it is wrong to say something. What deplatforming is is peer pressure. You dont convince anyone with that. You just convince them that you have no answers yourself and to keep their mouth shut till an opportune time arrives. Before the internet that meant never being able to talk with anyone about that in your village or town because the neighbors might find out, with the exception of maybe a more extreme pub round. Your only real option was to look for a straight up Nazi Kameradschaft in the wider vicinity. That was a big step to take. Today they can easily look for more "reasonable" people or even join a major party. Deplatforming at its core leads to people getting targeted for what they say. The people get combated, the ideology behind it stays untouched. If we want any hope for the future that doesnt include a civil war or living in a fascist dictatorship we should look hard at switching that. Combating the ideology and convincing the people. Granted those debates are difficult and furthermore, a horrible past time. Most people dont want to talk about such atrocious things and dont want those discussion to happen in their living room. Just not having these discussions and excluding people who want to talk about it is much easier. Especially if you can feel good about yourself by going the easy way. The person vanishes from your view and becomes someone elses problem. Until they are all our problem.
You have a hypothesis, that deplatforming stops the spread of far right ideology. Thats a hypothesis we can easily test, we dont have to rely on your gut feeling how your policies affected the rest of the world around you. I think we can agree that we are just witnessing for the past few years an extreme rise of the far right across the globe. We are faced with openly far right parties which have made unbelievable rises in parliament and are in quite a few places on the way to becoming the strongest party and with that, will someday likely be the government. They already are the government in some places. Openly authoritarian politicians get elected and unthinkable thinks are happening like separating children of migrants from their parents and putting them in prison camps. And children dying due to lack of care in those facilities. I am sorry if i have to burst your bubble, but the current situation is a fucking emergency, the house is on fire and what we are currently doing is clearly not working. That leaves us with the question why deplatforming, exclusion and public shaming currently doesnt work? There are basically a few options as i see it (shamelessly stolen from a infamous German blog for people who are bored at work).
1) The strategy is valid and would work if it wasnt for those traitors in our midst who dont go along.
2) The strategy is valid and would work we just have to convince more people to join in.
3) The strategy is fundamentally broken and does not work.
4) The strategy is working, we just have to wait to see results.
If you see more options, please do share. I mean it. The situation is to damn severe for 4) we cant go on pretending like everything is fine and the situation being no different from combating the emergence of a Nazi youth club in small towns in the 80s or moderating a voluntary association in form of a board. If you have hopes for 1 or 2 i have to disappoint you. As an anti authoritarian myself let me tell you I sure as hell wont rally behind censorship. There is no authoritarian solution to the problems we face. While my view of the state of the world is granted horrible, I am sure i am not the only one who thinks this way. While the divide in the left between authoritarians and anti-authoritarians was not really a topic for the generation after the fall of the Soviet Union it is very real.
cf498 | 6 years ago | on: Twitter to ban political advertising
cf498 | 6 years ago | on: Twitter to ban political advertising
I would like a source on that. Dont take it personal, but I dont see how this is anything but tanky signaling to feel better about yourself. Here in Germany people were rather active in making sure the new far right party AFD wasnt given a platform. By now they are very close to being the strongest party in multiple states. All that deplatforming did there was giving them a quicker rise. You cant deplatform a large sections of society, you are only creating a stronger echo chamber for them by trying. And i have to remind you, the echo chamber only exists because we didnt want to talk to these people. Deplatforming attacks the people not the ideas behind them. Nothing good can (or ever did) come of that. On the contrary, it only strengthens the community under attack and gives them an enemy to connect over. The only reason its attractive again as a tactic is because its easier. Convincing people through a discussion is hard work. I am very much afraid of the day when people are no longer capable to have a discussion because they have forgotten how due to living in echo chambers their hole life. I dont have high hopes that large parts of the left still know how to convince people with arguments, which in turn doesnt give me high hopes for the future. So yes, pls dont fuck us all over I am really not interested in another Reichstagsbrand because people liked how they viewed them self when working on deplatforming.
cf498 | 6 years ago | on: I Miss the Old Internet
cf498 | 6 years ago | on: Mass cellphone surveillance experiment in Spain
cf498 | 6 years ago | on: Mass cellphone surveillance experiment in Spain
The problem starts when this social shaming of illicit drug use swaps over from American suburbs to the rest of the world. And we are, yet again, faced world wide with American fundamentalists who are going on a crusade on necessary medication that could spare millions of pain patients world wide an existence of utter torture. In case anyone isnt aware of the situation, morphine based pain medications is what the large majority of the world population is using for pain relief. All those fancy analgesic the pharma industry pushes as an alternatives are too expensive for the majority of countries out there.
The direct result of the absolutely thoughtless scapegoating, that millions of people are suffering an easily treatable existence that amounts to torture. About 20 million people that live without access to pain medication in “untreated, excruciating pain” and could be treated with cheap-ass morphine. With no patent and a production price of cents.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/sep/18/us-attack-wo...
If this is all to abstract for you, my grandmother recently passed away. Cancer and the painful kind. I unfortunately only later found out that she wasnt given proper pain medication until she had to be moved from her home to palliative care. Because it apparently was thought to be too risky for the doctor in charge to give it to a dying women at home, since who knows who will clear up the estate afterwards?
So if you want share your opinion about opioids, please think about the consequences of your action. You having a fuck up in your family or watching too much TV doesnt make you an expert on pain treatment worldwide.