We used mercury in fur clothing and lead in gasoline also because they were nontoxic.
We are seeing population-scale effects exactly identical to what we see in animal models and in Petri dishes. Hormone disruption, which you’d expect to see metabolic disorders (like obesity), changes in sexuality (in animals we see a reduction in sexual dimorphism — plausibly connected to gender dysphoria), and fertility problems.
We don’t know for certain this stuff is bad, but I am absolutely sure that your confidence is unwarranted.
Don't talk too loudly about this stuff. You'll be roped in with the "Alex Jones" crowd because any talk like that implies biological determinism, which is deeply against the "acceptable ideology list" in our overton window.
God forbid if you connect the massively increasing youth LGBT identification rates to any biological or environmental factors - it must be 100% due to cultural change!
OP won’t be categorized as such, because they haven’t added some bullshit, which would make it immediately obvious that the argument is used only to back a prejudice. I quite rarely see an accusation where the prejudice is not obvious, and facts are used to just back feelings.
> Hormone disruption, which you’d expect to see metabolic disorders (like obesity)
I would suspect consuming multiples more dissolved sugar day and night and sedentary lifestyles way before hormone disruption. Especially considering reducing caloric consumption leads to losing weight.
I think most major problems in the world are both overdetermined and multicausal. If we spend our time trying to isolate “the” culprit before taking action, we’ll solve roughly zero important problems.
sure, the plastic molecules are non-toxic, they don't have any chemical reactions with organic molecules. they're inert. safe.
but when they clump together, or when large sheets of them fall apart, you get particles. microplastics. still inert, no chemical reactions. but they get stuck in places like tiny blood vessels or tiny pockets in your intestine. not inert. not safe. not toxic, but not good
Polymers are the result of chemical reactions. Some of the feedstock chemicals & other reaction products inevitably wind up in the plastic. Even if a tiny %.
Then there's additives. Last I read, some ~10k different ones. A good % of those known to be harmful. Or lacking data on their safety. I suspect some of those additives are way more harmful than the polymer itself (or its feedstock).
Never mind that we're ingesting a whole cocktail of these things. Interactions a go-go!
For me this is also a major failure of poor competition policy.
If Google's smart home system were an independent company, it would love or die by its ability to do its job. But Nest can just piggy back on Google's brand power.
BestBuy killed their IoT HomeKit compatible switches and stuff years ago, but they 1. still work and 2. still work with HomeKit if they were installed/connected before they took down the IoT servers.
Doesn't really cover a lot of things you'd want to know like price, satisfaction, reliability, etc. - all of which, I believe, are strongly negative compared with 30 years ago. Also doesn't tell you if it's long distance or commuter or both - which is an important distinction since many more people commute these days.
In summary, it's a meaningless piece of chartjunk [edit: in the context of nationalisation vs privatisation, at least.]
Prices were so heavily subsidized they were ruining the government's finances, so that's not a valid metric to compare on because it wasn't sustainable. Even when being bailed out by massive amounts of tax (a regressive tax!), ridership was falling because the services sucked so hard that they couldn't compete with cars/trucks, despite the latter being a source of tax revenue, not a sink.
Dunno about satisfaction but clearly, when people were truly dissatisfied they stayed away and now the primary causes of satisfaction and reliability problems are simply that the network is so in demand it's at capacity all the time, especially London commuter routers. Some of that is driven by the huge increases in population via immigration in the last 20 years but some of it is just that privatized services are better, so people use them more.
If they're not a proximal cause, no. If they are, yes.
But if ridership is going up even whilst prices are offensively high, satisfaction is at an all-time low, and reliability is a joke, then you can't assert that ridership is going up because of privatisation, it's more despite privatisation because people have few other options (cf London where driving is slow because of congestion, buses are often stuck in the same congestion, cycling is still sketchy in some parts, high prices have forced people out of walking distance, etc.)
It's certainly possible this was caused by who owned what; but I'd just add the decline on the graph begins around the UK's pyrrhic victory in WW1 which IMO marked (in tandem with Irish independence) the beginning of the decline of the British Empire; while the rise at the end is roughly congruent with the increasing wealth from exploitation of the North Sea gas deposits and (depending how much you accept the possibility of noise in the data making it hard to tell exactly which year it changed direction) joining the precursor to the EU.
North Sea came on-stream at the start of the 80s. The rise in rail traffic clearly starts around the time of privatization in ~95 and the huge plunge followed by decline starts around the time of nationalization.
Certainly there were other problems: the nationalization was downstream of the socialization of the British economy between the end of ww2 and Thatcher, and as can be seen rail traffic (a general proxy for economic health) is in steady decline from then until it rebounds slightly in the 80s before taking off again once put in (mostly) private hands in the 90s.
The reason the graph seems to run a few years ahead of the changes is that actually privatizing and nationalizing something on the scale of a national railway takes a few years to implement between politicians floating the idea and the final handover of power, but the effect on people's motivations and incentives begins almost immediately.
The infrastructure (railways and stations) is still publicly owned under Network Rail. Only the trains themselves are privately owned (often by foreign state-owned enterprises, funnily enough)
There is a big problem with this graph. Its highly misleading.
Because in other parts even of Great Britain, like Norther Ireland, it was always public and it shows the exact same pattern. And many other countries had the same effect too.
It just so happens British Rail happened right at the time when the basic understanding of governments in Britain and most the world were anti railway and pro building an absurd amount of highways.
Lots of the increase in early part of semi privatization period in Britain happened and were only possible because of investments done by British rail. It very likely that the same effect would have happened under British rail. In fact the whole system basically operated on many of the same principles set up by British rail for quite a while.
In reality the government in the 'private' period still determined what prices and schedules were. And the same prices and schedules could and would have been done by British rail.
Next up, in this private period, Network Rail, they private company responsible for infrastructure so mismanaged and the infrastructure was about to collapse (they managed this in less then 10 years), so it was emergency reacquired by the government who then had to do lots of delayed infrastructure maintenance at high cost.
Rail nationalization in Britain made no sense. Even the people that did it didn't really have a good plan or reason why they wanted do it other then privatizing things seemed popular with right wing parties. They basically threw together a haphazard plan with a bunch of consultants who had little knowlage of railways.
> I'll let you draw your own conclusions
Yes feel free, but don't do it based on a single highly misleading graph without understanding the context.
If anybody is actually interested in the British railway network and history, I would recommend the RailNatter podcast.
Nobody should be drawing any conclusions from a graph like that, since it provides no useful information allowing anyone to draw any conclusion about anything.
If you do choose to draw a conclusion from this, you’re doing nothing except reinforcing whatever bias you may already have.
Fracking for all it's bad press has been immensely helpful in reducing greenhouse emissions.
If it weren't for natural gas we would still have massive coal fired power plants.
If you look at UK emissions which have been declining steadily since the 1990s, this has been in no small part due to the move to natural gas.
While it would be great to move to carbon neutral immediately, we can't do that without driving up energy prices massively and causing widespread poverty and disruption, so there is definitely room for some middle ground compromises.
As far as I know, South Africa hasn't been involved in anything since Angola. The current military probably couldn't find enough working vehicles to even get to a conflict let alone fight one.
Of course and that needs to be factored into renewable supplies which massively increases their cost. When you have periods of Dunkelflaute you potentially need to have full grid redundancy either through inter-connects, other energy generation sources or battery backup, none of which are cheap.
It's rare to see flaute all over Europe at the same time. You just need some ways to transport energy as well as supplement that with storage and you can compensate most of this.
If this sounds too complicated an engineering challenge then let's not even start to talk about the engineering challenges that would make nuclear safer than it is today. That's a whole different ballpark.
What if Europe is at war and some infrastructure gets destroyed. Don’t we need extra buffer capacity in case we’re experience what Ukraine had where power stations are actively targeted. Or undersea windmill park power cables are threatened to be cut.
Unlikely but there is someone with aspirations somewhere in Russia.
Good example with Ukraines power station that's actively targeted. What type is that one? It's a nuclear plant as I'm sure you know. Which basically the whole country depends on. I think if anything then that's a counter argument. The more centralized your infra is, the more vulnerable it is. Nuclear is the most centralized of all power sources.
That doesn't matter because it's not like you can double renewables to increase redundancy (no wind is no wind no matter how many turbines you have)- you need another more expensive energy source as well.
To cover the drop in generation for the night of April 15, even 400% wind capacity would not be enough.
It was a rather regular, quiet, night in a nation of 80 million people in the middle of Europe. Which means that it was a quiet night across much of Europe.
As if there would be just one way to compensate this.
- More renewables can be added
- Storage can compensate for this
- Power can be distributed across large areas
- The amount needed at night is not fixed. It only appears fixed because we don‘t care so much. It can be reduced significantly by using devices and processes in a smarter way depending on the availability of power.
Oh and while we're about it interconnects just increase the systemic risk of multiple regions experiencing Dunkelflaute at the same time. And it's not enough to say that this almost never happens because in a system that expects many 9s of availability almost never is just not acceptable.
Storage can provide base load and for anything non-critical you have flexible pricing that automatically lets people stop doing things that can be done later the week, like charging your Tesla. Markets work. Use them.
Indeed, on all counts; it's just that the easy-obvious-and-suboptimal solution (LiIon batteries which are the worst solution you don't have to explain to anyone) are on-par with the cost of nuclear.
The more egalitarian countries show more differentiation across career choices than less egalitarian ones. I.e. men show a greater prefence for thing based careers and women show a greater prefence for people based careers.
If you've ever watched kids playing you'll realise how self evident it is, from a very early age before kids are remotely aware of cultural norms.
This flies in the face of all predictions that roles of sex are purely cultural.
That's a complete non-sequitor. I said that cultural roles should not be gendered. You responded that people have things they prefer to do. That is 100% orthogonal. People absolutely should be able to follow their preference so long as they take direct responsibility for the results of their actions. And cultural norms shouldn't add expectations for what people do based on their genders.
No conflict. These things work together in harmony.
