houseofleft

• Am driving into a wall
• Turning or breaking in time sounds tricky
• Might as well accelerate, maybe car will take off and fly over wall?
• Woops, I died!

Thanks for such a well reasoned response 😁 My knee jerk "public transport good" response did miss a lot of the subtlety you've captured here!

AI: "Have you tried funding public transport and regulating the carbon industry?"

Ok, now we need to make a new AI so that AI can solve global warming but without using an existing solution that might marginally inconvenience the mega rich.

Public transport would be a much more effective and cheaper solution, but we're all looking at EVs because it means not having to change anything about the status quo.

I don't agree they're looking at all areas at once, solar, wind and the net zero per mw by 2030 goal only relate to energy, not things like gas heating reduction, or public transport etc. Energy is also one of the few areas where as a country we've already made quite a bit of progress. There are points where only 10% of the UK's energy comes from fossil fuels.

In fairness, I did share the wrong article, sorry! Here's the actual opinion piece it's referring to (which was written in the Sun, I agree it's a shit rag, but Kier Starmer chose to publish in it, so here we are): https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/30853358/keir-starmer-great-british-industry-net-zero/

Specifically, the bits I'm referring to are:

This ground-breaking technology, known as Carbon Capture Usage and Storage, is a game-changer in our efforts to fulfil our legal obligations to reach Net Zero by 2050 in a sensible way, while supporting jobs and industry.

Shifting focus onto onto bare minimum meeting of legal obligations and positioning carbon capture as a central part of that strategy.

To those drum-banging, finger-wagging extremists I say: I will never sacrifice Great British industry.

Said in opposition to people wanting regulation of carbon emissions over carbon capture investment.

But this is a third way that brings industry with us on our path to Net Zero

Again, in opposition to regulating emissions more strictly.

To be 100% clear, this is speculation from Labours messaging that implies they're gearing up for a massive backslide, we won't know for sure until their budget is announced over the next few weeks. I think this is where a lot of objection comes fron though. If we see large investment in public transport and heat pumps, and regulation of emissions, then I'll be extremely happy to be proved wrong.

I 100% agree with you! But I think you're missing some key context on why people are angry about this:

• The new UK government is from the center left Labour party, who were elected under the promise (amongst others) that they would do more about carbon change that the previous government

• They recently announced funding for carbon capture as the central part of their climate change plan

• Their plan to achieve the UK's legally obligated net zero targets (they no longer plan to reduce emissions by anything more than international law mandates) depends on the success of this very unproven technology

• The UK prime minister referred to critics of this scheme (which should include pretty much anyone who wants climate policy to be based on scientific evidence rather than lobbying) "finger wagging extremists" in an opinion piece[1]

So, although I'd support investing into climate capture research as part of a much broader carbon reduction plan, this policy is really an incredible backslide and a massive betrayal of anyone who voted for the party on the basis of their climate change policies.

Edit: spelling!

[1] https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/30855560/keir-starmer-ignore-climate-extremists/

Ok really tangential rant here!

I find societal attitudes to art and morality really crazy.

I don't necessarily disagree with the idea that art and morality should be linked, but it only ever seems to happen in a negative capacity of "don't listen to x because they did y".

There's a whole strain of:

• Artists who are not necessarily bad people, but whose art is aggresively immoral (I guess an obvious example would be Biggie Smalls or someone who frequently raps about sexual assault and violence in a positive way, but also the ammount of mainstream pop or country that has sexist or racist undertones)
• Artists who try hard to inject their morality into their work (such as Becky Chambers' climate positive fiction, or Giancinto Scelsi's anti-facist music)

On the whole, I don't see anyone care very much about the above two points, people just "like what they like", which is as if we think morality and art are two seperate things.

That makes sense, but then there's this wierd category where "oh that person did this bad thing, so now their art is invalid".

So, what's the overall attitude? Like, art isn't related to morality generally, but there's some mysterious line where if it's crossed art moves into the "forbidden zone"?

I'm all for calling bad people to account for their moral behaviour, but the way we do it in art is so jumbled and inconsistent.

It's good to see some JSO court news that isn't peaceful protesters going to jail with crazy harsh rulings.

I know this isn't the important issue, but my brain is really forcing me to ask:

How did this protest work? What kind or glue? Was it some super strong glue or something? How did they get unstuck? MY CHILDISH BRAIN NEEDS MORE INFO ON THE STICKINESS OF THE GLUE!

If the government actually want people to install heat pumps (I hope they do) they really need a lot more policy.

The current £7,500 grant sounds great, but when you look at British Gas' installation estimates[1], it costs about £5,000 more than that on average to carry out an installation. That means even for customers who have to install a new heating system (i.e. their current boiler is broken beyond repair) it is still substantially cheaper to install a combi-boiler (less than half the price on average).

And that's people who have to install a new system- if we want to move from fossil fuels we need people to replace working boilers with heat pumps.

Honestly, the government has a tonne of levers it can pull, but any serious plan needs to not rely on people making hard to afford decisions because they are environmentally justified. They beed to actually do something so that the relstive emissions of heating get reflected in the cost of systems and fuel.

[1] https://www.britishgas.co.uk/heating/air-source-heat-pumps/carbon-cruncher.html

Short answer is no, I think because what tools you need for programming change so much based on the development you're doing. C++ developers need compiler toolchain stuff that Javascript developers would never need to look at and vice versa.

Curveball answer is that modern extensible IDEs with the power of language servers and plugins have kind of become this. I'd massively recommend properly getting into one of the following and learning how to configure new languages and plugins:

• VScode
• Neovim
• Emacs
• Helix

(Sure I've probably missed some great options, feel free to flame me on why notepad++ should be OPs first choice)

This, combined with the fact that global emissions have skyrocketted since the late 80s, which is also (not coincidentally) when UK hugely ramped down it's national coal production, really make me wonder the total mass of fossil fuels burned (not just produced)!

I wish I'd read this years ago! I've nearly bankrupted myself buying a new machine each time, thanks!