alvvayson
@alvvayson@lemmy.world
- Comment on buying coffee 8 months ago:
Waiting for SBF to respond to this.
- Comment on Why did we give up on insulation? 10 months ago:
Heating the past few decades (or even century) was simply too cheap. Cheaper than insulating on the short term.
In cold countries, they didn’t have this option. they had to insulate.
Proper insulation is best done when building a house. Afterwards, it’s a little bit more complex.
- Comment on Are MRNA vaccines any riskier than other vaccines? 10 months ago:
It’s basically the flu vaccine in my opinion.
People at risk stand to beneffit most, but it doesn’t need to be mandated .
- Comment on Are MRNA vaccines any riskier than other vaccines? 10 months ago:
Yes, you could argue that, but it would be an extraordinary claim.
I might still get indigestion from that taco I ate in 1999.
But it’s really unlikely, since that Taco cleared my system way back then.
mRNA also clears the body quite quickly.
So to have side-effects after so many years, one would need to explain a mechanism.
Otherwise it’s really just very speculative. Might as well believe 5G causes cancer. After all, it’s new technology.
- Comment on Are MRNA vaccines any riskier than other vaccines? 10 months ago:
So how many years does it take to no longer be new?
The Polio vaccines are also new compared to the Smallpox vaccines.
But that doesn’t mean we don’t have sufficient data on their safety and effectiveness. And we have comparable levels of data on the mRNA covid vaccines.
- Comment on Are MRNA vaccines any riskier than other vaccines? 10 months ago:
Is your friend stuck in 2021?
The covid vaccines are three years old now. Millions of people have had 3 or 4 shots. In what world are they “new”.
- Comment on New Study: At Least 15% of All Reddit Content is Corporate Trolls Trying to Manipulate Public Opinion 11 months ago:
Corpreddit.
Lemmy feels very much like the old, old Reddit. When it was mostly IT folk and tech savvy people (talking about 2005-2010).
I think reddit peaked around 2015 or so. A much broader audience had found it. There was interesting content from a lot of people.
Now, it still has a lot of good content. But it is definitely past its peak
- Comment on [deleted] 11 months ago:
Way too often, news sites primarily rely on twitter.
For example, yesterday I wanted to know which countries voted against the UN resolution. I used Google, found a news site with the info, but it was an embedded tweet with an image.
And to enlarge the tweet, I had to click on it and it opened the tweet on Twitter.
Same is also true for a lot of videos on what’s happening in Gaza or Ukraine.
- Comment on Ifixit gives fairphone 5 a 10/10 on repairability and maintanence 11 months ago:
Thanks, today I learned.
How do Calyx and Graphene compare?
I see Calyx does support Fairphone.
- Comment on Ifixit gives fairphone 5 a 10/10 on repairability and maintanence 11 months ago:
The Fairphone 4 supports /e/.
It seems graphene is limiting itself to Pixel devices. The developer is also mostly a one man show, so I don’t think he has the capacity to support many devices. He’s probably just busy keeping up with Pixel devices as-is.
What I would like to know is, how do /e/ and GrapheneOS compare.
Can’t really find info on that.
- Comment on Politically-engaged Redditors tend to be more toxic -- even in non-political subreddits 11 months ago:
Up until a few weeks ago, it seemed these bots were mostly absent on Lemmy.
But recently, I have noticed they have arrived here, too.
I fully agree with your analysis.
- Comment on Fear of cheap Chinese EVs spurs automaker dash for affordable cars 11 months ago:
You are literally contradicting yourself.
And it’s childish to downvote someone who is actually responding to you.
I’m not going to waste my time on someone who can’t be reasonable and civil.
- Comment on Fear of cheap Chinese EVs spurs automaker dash for affordable cars 11 months ago:
I have no disagreement on this argument.
But C-suite compensation is not a significant part of prices.
Energy prices, tax, labour costs and the cost of capital (i.e. returns to shareholders and creditors) are what drives prices.
- Comment on Fear of cheap Chinese EVs spurs automaker dash for affordable cars 11 months ago:
The sad fact of the matter is… math
A corporation might have 10 C-level guys dividing $50 million amongst themselves and 10.000 workers earning $70K, which costs about $100K due to overheads (health insurance, retirement, etc). Together, that’s a billion, which is 20x more than the C level guys.
The C level guys aren’t the big expense, not by a long shot.
Labour, government and shareholders divide most of the earnings amongst themselves.
For the record, I do think we need to tax the wealthy more and the workers less.
- Comment on Fear of cheap Chinese EVs spurs automaker dash for affordable cars 11 months ago:
Read what I said. Labour Unions, not corporations.
- Comment on Fear of cheap Chinese EVs spurs automaker dash for affordable cars 11 months ago:
Dude, I’m old enough to have lived through it.
Making toys and other plastic shit was never a high paying job in the West.
And no, it wasn’t charity, it was a win-win that increased living standards on both sides.
But it did have an impact on low paying manufacturing jobs in the West and that impact was accepted by Labour unions for the two reasons I gave: we (rightfully) concluded there were enough other, better jobs available and didn’t want to keep Chinese workers poor.
- Comment on Fear of cheap Chinese EVs spurs automaker dash for affordable cars 11 months ago:
While that is part of it, the other, bigger part is that Western countries actually do have higher labour costs: better salaries and conditions for our workers.
When China was outcompeting us on undesirable, low productivity, jobs, we accepted that. It was better to raise a billion Chinese out of poverty than to protect our lowest productivity factory workers. And those workers mostly transitioned to other jobs with higher productivity.
But now China is richer and their labour force is shrinking, so they will compete with highly productive factory jobs.
Politically, it is unlikely that car workers will accept unemployment. Nor will other highly paid workers.
So a trade war is brewing, you better brace yourself for it.
- Comment on Pluralistic: "If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing" 11 months ago:
I spend way more money on streaming services than I ever spent buying DVDs or CDs.
To say that “I don’t intend to buy anything” is a BS accusation. You have no clue about another persons motives.
- Comment on Pluralistic: "If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing" 11 months ago:
If there is no easy way to own what you buy, then piracy becomes a moral obligation to preserve culture for future generations.
- Comment on Reactionaries have you used the same talking points to shun progress throughout history. 11 months ago:
That’s what they mean and what they hope you do.
In reality, only a small amount of people make that transition, and usually it is because of brain rot combined with propaganda like Fox news.
Most people do get milder and more realistic as they age, but not necessarily more conservative.
You can still find a lot of leaft-leaning old hippies. I guess Bernie Sanders would be the most famous one.
- Comment on Heat-pump water heaters are a winner for the climate — and your wallet 11 months ago:
No, you are wrong on electric tankless heaters.
Their only redeeming quality is that they take less space.
You can’t power them directly with solar power. They need way too much power for that. They put a high strain on the grid during peak hours and therefore impede progress on decarbonizing the grid.
A water heater tank is a thermal energy store. Technology Connections made a video on that.
- Comment on Heat-pump water heaters are a winner for the climate — and your wallet 11 months ago:
I have a tankless gas heater, too. Very common in Europe.
But let’s not pretend they are good for the environment.
They are not.
- Comment on Heat-pump water heaters are a winner for the climate — and your wallet 11 months ago:
Sorry, tankless is the worst.
You will always be using peak electricity, which comes from the least efficient gas peakers.
With a tank, you can heat with much greener and cheaper off-peak electricity.
- Comment on Is the right to abortion a "negative right" or a "positive right"? 11 months ago:
Are you implying that Roe v Wade is religious? Cause you aren’t making much sense.
- Comment on Is the right to abortion a "negative right" or a "positive right"? 11 months ago:
One could also argue that legally allowing unrestricted abortions past 24 weeks is counterproductive, since it galvanizes the pro-life movement. Look at any rally and most protestors are showing pictures of very late term abortions. I remember being in school as a teenager and the pro-life activists coming to our classroom to graphically describe partial-birth abortions that suck out the brains of babies. I was pro-life for the next ten years or so.
Obviously, that’s not representative at all of what a normal abortion looks like. But it’s much less galvanizing to show a 6-8 week old bunch of unrecognizable bodily fluids, which is much more representative of the average abortion.
A clear timeline also puts a healthy pressure on pregnant women to make a difficult decision earlier, when everything is easier, less impactful and less risky, instead of postponing it.
I’m not an expert, but the happy balance seems to be with easy accessibility up to 12 weeks and progressive restrictions after that.
- Comment on Is the right to abortion a "negative right" or a "positive right"? 11 months ago:
Once you assign rights to the unborn, you very quickly end up in an “no abortion except to save the life or health of the mother or prevent unnecessary suffering of a non-viable fetus”.
And this is exactly why most jurisdictions have limits on abortion.
In my country, elective abortions are only legally allowed up to 24 weeks of gestation and the doctors only perform it up to 22 weeks.
Above that, there needs to be a serious medical situation that falls in the exceptional categories.
- Comment on I fixed my toothbrush (fuck you, Philips Sonicare!) 1 year ago:
A long time ago, I tried to repair a Braun toothbrush and encountered the exact same problems you describe.
Welded tabbed batteries and booby trap hair wires. :(
Sadly, I have up and bought a new one.
This should be illegal.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 year ago:
You people have to do your research and read his biography.
He wakes up at 5 AM, works 7 days a week and never takes a vacation.
He co-founded PayPal and that is where he earned all his money through hard work.
/s
(Yeah, he claims a lot of things, but others around him have told the truth, including his first wife. He had a lot of money as a kid from his dad and was never at risk of having to live an average middle class life)
- Comment on Canada's Carbon Price Working, So Of Course It's Being Attacked 1 year ago:
For one, Canada isn’t closing perfectly good nuclear plants prematurely. Germany could have saved a billion tons of CO2 emissions and billions of euros by just letting the last six plants run to their end of life.
Second, Canada didn’t risk their whole industry on Russian pipeline gas, which everyone warned Germany against and now the worst case materialized with the Ukraine war.
Third, Germany is pumping in a huge amount of free carbon credits into the EU ETS. And Europeans don’t get any benefit of the ETS fees.
The Canadian scheme directly kicks back part of the benefit to citizens, which makes it much more palatable
And fourth, the amount of subsidies that Germany is pouring into wind and solar energy just isn’t sustainable. It’s better to have carbon pricing and letting markets transition to low carbon energy, paid for by private capital.
- Comment on Canada's Carbon Price Working, So Of Course It's Being Attacked 1 year ago:
I’m Dutch, and German energy policy is truly brain dead.
The Canadian policy is much better and more effective.