omg Toad, you can’t just ask people why they’re purple!

Referenced study, from 2013, requires journal access: https://doi.org/10.1111/1556-4029.12359

If there was a government-mandated monopoly on coffee and it was sold in L/s, we probably would.

Surprised not to see any posts referencing the Arbitrary List of Popular Lights or !flashlight@lemmy.world.

One of the requirements to make it on the list is:

A user interface where a single click turns the light on in a reasonable mode, and another single click turns it off.

Four minutes for a cup of coffee? Yesterday it was three!

That assumes “you” are just the conscious part. If you accept the rest of your brain (and body) as part of “you”, then it’s a less dramatic divide.

I think transforming “it’s possible to think without language” into “language is not a tool for thought” is an overreach. Definitely a lot of our internal voice is post-thought, but crystalizing those thoughts into words can provide footholds for further thought. Some would argue it’s not possible to think through a complex issue without writing:

• https://paulgraham.com/words.html
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtIzMaLkCaM&t=312s

I guess the argument is that they will raise rent by the maximum, even at excessive risk of losing tenants? Because if the tenants will pay that much, why wouldn’t the landlord charge that anyway?

Definite agree with the core of what you’re saying, though for US and EU (and to a lesser degree “High income countries”), the numbers are quite close, as clean grid energy is significantly outpacing electric vehicle adoption (and EVs rely on a clean grid to be clean).

Every presidential election is important, and it never makes sense to make a “protest vote”. That’s just not how voting works.

I’m sure somebody has cried wolf at every election, but McCain and Romney never aimed to become dictators. Republicans currently have a published plan to institute fascism. It’s pretty obvious that these elections actually are exceptional.

Oh man, don’t stop

You got it! Here’s some other consumer protections the administration has introduced recently:

• Direct filing with the IRS
• Price limits on asthma inhalers and insulin for seniors
• Requiring ISPs to provide consistent up-front information and pricing
• Restrictions on college junk fees and disallowing witholding of transcripts

Hungry for more? Check this out:

White House Statement on Junk Fees

That’s from October, so some of it overlaps, but among other stuff there’s still a “Click to Cancel” rule working its way through the FTC.

Sadly Biden has been spending a bunch of time on lame crap like climate change, human rights, health care, infrastructure, election integrity, etc., so it might take a bit longer for him to single-handedly usher in consumer utopia.

This seems entirely opposite to my observation. I’d say Biden and his administration are unusually focused on unfair or annoying business practices. In just the past two weeks the Biden administration:

• Set clear rules requiring cash refunds for flight delays
• Banned non-compete clauses
• Set new rules on “junk fees” for credit cards
• Increased the minimum salary for overtime exemption
• Expanded fiduciary duty to retirement “advisors”
• Announced a lawsuit against Live Nation (TicketMaster)
• Re-instated net neutrality

The complete rules are here: https://www.transportation.gov/airconsumer/refundsfinalruleapril2024

The meat of it is the table on pages 9-14 and mostly comprehensible.

Worth noting:

• A change to your flight number is always a “cancellation” and you may choose to accept a refund
  • The expectation is most people would not, for the same reason most don’t cancel their refundable tickets - they want to go on the flight
• There are no carve outs for weather, etc.
  • I am really glad to see this because airlines could claim “weather” for connecting flights, so any weather anywhere meant they could delay your flight

Funny running across this article after reading https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

Spoiler: the author does not have a high opinion of Raghavan.

NHS to discontinue delivery of babies until double-blind study is done vs just leaving it in there.

I don’t think it’s fair to call Slay the Spire (StS) a clone. While Card Quest introduced a lot of the key elements years earlier, StS adds enough innovation that it feels like a totally different game. Definitely would be more fair to say StS popularized a lot of the mechanics rather than invented/pioneered them though.

So to most effectively address climate change we need individuals to change their behavior. So we can just tell everyone to do that, and we are all set, right? Clearly not. We need to:

Tax Carbon

Taxing “carbon” (really all GHG emissions) creates incentives for individuals and companies to use less, making trade-offs and choosing less carbon-intensive products. It moves the threshold for switching over to cleaner and more efficient technologies. People who refuse to acknowledge climate change will still change their behavior for personal benefit. People who want to make the world better will have more options and less reliance on company marketing/greenwashing.

Read what 28 Nobel Laureates and thousands of other economists have to say: https://clcouncil.org/economists-statement/

As mentioned on that page, the best use of this tax is to give it back to everyone equally. Those who pollute less than average come out ahead. Those who pollute more pay for it in (indirect) taxes.

This is wrong on top of wrong. First off, it’s 57 entities (including “Former Soviet Union”) producing 80% of the emissions tracked by the database – which covers “88% of total fossil fuel and cement emissions,” and totals 251G tonnes of CO2 equivalent gasses (CO2e) from 2016 through 2012 [1]. So with that we have 200Gt making up 70% of the global total over that 7 year period.

But fossil fuels and cement emissions are not the only source of greenhouse gasses. Human-caused global emissions are roughly 53GtCO2e annually during that time [2], for a total of 370Gt across all sources. So 200Gt is about 54% of that.

Most importantly though, this is a ridiculous measure in the first place. Who cares how many people are responsible for digging up the fuels that people are directly burning themselves in their homes and cars? If every oil well had its own company, how would that improve emissions? Nearly half of emissions are from individuals, and much of the rest is directly driven by consumer demand (e.g. power companies burning coal and gas).

Sources

• [1] https://influencemap.org/briefing/The-Carbon-Majors-Database-26913#briefing_section_bullet-26926
• [2] Our World in Data

According to Times of Israel, the jets are F-15IA (Israeli-variant F-15EX), which are quite capable of carrying over a dozen bombs equipped with the JDAMs also being provided.

The description of the fork incident is pretty misleading. Maccani stormed up to the officers undeterred by multiple bean-bag rounds, holding the fork reversed so that it looked like a knife. Take 20 seconds and see for yourself:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwXjrS9bPQ4

A better trained / equipped group may have been able to de-escalate / disarm him, but – unlike many other cases – they didn’t just wander up and shoot him for existing.