benjhm
@benjhm@sopuli.xyz
- Comment on What are you brewing? 2 days ago:
Thanks for the tips. Indeed i noticed they become gradually more digestible (inulin->frutcose) as spring approaches, but then you can’t store them - they grow…
- Comment on What are you brewing? 2 days ago:
Does anybody know how to make a brew from topinambours aka sunchokes aka ‘jerusalem artichokes’ (silly name) - that’s all i’ve got too many of at this time of year ?
- Comment on Will solar panels overrun farmland? The two are more likely to coexist. 1 week ago:
I saw somewhere a neat idea to align the panels vertically along N-S axis, two sided facing both E and W to catch morning and evening sun at low angles. This helps to top up the grid at periods of higher demand and lower supply, while leaving a wide open strip in the middle for growing normal crops, benefiting from the midday sun (a time when we already have plenty of electricity).
- Comment on Fear abounds as M23 fighters close in on DR Congo's Goma 1 week ago:
IIrc this has been going back and forth for years. Does Rwanda ever explain what they are trying to achieve - permanently take over both sides of the lake ?
What kind of government would local people without guns prefer ? (Goma is far from Kinshasa, closer even to Indian ocean). - Comment on French NGOs to quit social media platform X following Trump inauguration 2 weeks ago:
OK good, but to be really pioneering change in francophone world, they need to leave Meta too, that’s what dominates.
- Comment on Nigeria admitted as partner country of multinational Brics bloc 2 weeks ago:
Ok, so now they have enough other big countries, time to kick out Russia which doesn’t fit in a ‘south’ block anyway.
- Comment on African troops 'forced to Ukraine frontlines' while Russians stay in camp 2 weeks ago:
Modern slave trade. Russia is also driving wars in Sudan, Libya, Niger, Mali, etc. - hope the loss of their Syrian base will reduce their capacity on the ground. Yet their biggest trick has been manipulation of social media algorithms in Africa (with apps made in usa, and anti-european rhetoric), it’s too easy to continue.
- Comment on Richest 1% use their entire annual carbon limit in just 10 days. 3 weeks ago:
What’s that got to do with the topic ? But since you ask, no. I came to lemmy from mastodon where many people use their real name. Anyway sometimes I refer to my interactive model, from which site my name is obvious. I respect that some people here need to be anonymous for professional or safety reasons, but would prefer people used at least more memorable names, to encourage careful thinking and sense of community.
- Comment on Richest 1% use their entire annual carbon limit in just 10 days. 3 weeks ago:
It’s good that Oxfam analyses and publicises such data - for too long global comparisons focused on national average per-capita. However, maybe even 1% is too large a group that obscures the diversity within - I guess the 77m people (int that analysis) include many relatively old people who are nominally wealthy by owning a house in an expensive city, but don’t (any longer?) travel much. Heating such houses emits some tons, but not 76tCO2/yr, a figure which must be pushed way up by the fewer jet-set types.
- Comment on Vietnam to build $67 bn high-speed railway 2 months ago:
Makes sense, rail is ideal for such a long thin country.
Probably a nine-hour overnight trip is preferable to a five-hour day trip, but of course there are shorter distances too.
I recall the last time they were thinking about this ±15 yrs ago, a delegate to a COP told me they were already concerned about adaptation to sea-level rise affecting part of the route along the coast. Seems better future-planning than some more ‘developed’ countries. - Comment on He'll try, but Trump can't stop the clean energy revolution 2 months ago:
Indeed there is huge momentum in renewable costs. I recall 20 years ago climate economists starting to model endogenous technological change, but they just had to invent ’ learning curves’ with magic numbers. Now it has happened.
On the other hand, I still wish heat pumps were cheaper. Where I live, the cost is inflated by the requirement for installation by people qualified with refrigerant gases. - Comment on He'll try, but Trump can't stop the clean energy revolution 2 months ago:
Some sense to this - global emissions probably just peaked because China’s housing bubble burst - responsible for much more CO2 than AI/crypto, and even a communist government can’t effectively control such crashes. So no, we are not f****d, but not always saved for noble reasons.
Also regarding crypto - how much of that was sustained by russians evading sanctions - which new team in US is likely to remove ? - Comment on China's push for more babies as demographic crisis deepens lacks real incentives, analysts say 2 months ago:
Your first sentence is correct. But if you look at the historical data, the sharpest drop in chinese fertility rate was several years before they introduced the one-child policy, which also ended several years ago without apparently making any difference. Also, fertility rates in Taiwan, South Korea, Japan are even lower. As these rates are also lower than europe, that maybe related more to housing affordability and density, possibly combined with some common evolution of ‘eastern’ values.
- Comment on BHP, Vale agree to pay $30bn damages for Brazil dam disaster 3 months ago:
Back in 2011, I with my young family took a local bus north from Mariana, which diverted through several villages including that one Bento Rodrigues just below the dam, soon to be washed away. Through gaps in the trees we could glimpse those huge orange lakes just behind earth dams - it was obvious even to a casual tourist that it was a disaster waiting to happen. But the bus was run by the mining company, like all services around there, I suppose that’s why people didn’t complain more.
By the way I was told Brazil didn’t even make much from iron mines, as most of raw ore was exported to China, which got the real value. - Comment on Carbon emissions are now growing faster than before the pandemic 3 months ago:
Emissions grew in 2023, that’s not the same as ‘are now growing’. There is a good chance global CO2 emissions fall in 2024, mainly due to trends in China. Of course it takes time to gather data, but NS should be more careful with the headline.
The spinscore link has useful refs - but keeps mixing up CO2 emissions with “CO2 equivalents” including methane, landuse and minor gases. Methane rising is a big issue, but might potentially be turned around faster. Regarding landuse, deforestation was exacerbated last year by El Niño feedbacks - it’s hard to separate the anthropogenic part of these fluxes.
Rather than simple headlines which encourage fatalistic doom, it’s more useful to explain how some factors progress better than others. They are right to highlight growth in road transport and aviation (even if some growth still covid-rebound), although more effort still needed in all sectors. - Comment on The two most upvoted comments on any Lemmy instance are on Feddit.dk, but you won't see them on your own instance 4 months ago:
Interesting observation and analysis, and illustrates the potential of more lemmy-mastodon interaction.
Indeed mdon like-federation seems weird but I presume it was setup this way for efficiency, to reduce the number of small communications? Although Lemmy has a backend in rust - more efficient than mdon’s ruby - still I wonder whether the lemmy system of federating all upvotes would scale well if the number of users grows to that of mastodon and beyond ? Could there be some intermediate compromise solution (e.g. federate batches of 100 likes)? - Comment on Lemmy wouldn't really takeoff to replace Reddit until it's content is search indexable 4 months ago:
I didn’t discover Lemmy through search, nor did I ever use reddit - I found it from mastodon where a few people promote lemmy posts. Then gradually realised I preferred the community-focus here, compared to the individual-focus of mdon (although combining both could be good). As mdon has many more users, improving this inter-op would help to bring people here.
- Comment on Ireland’s datacentres overtake electricity use of all urban homes combined | The Guardian 6 months ago:
Although not an expert on that specific country, I can be sure that ’ almost all ’ is very misleading, even if it gets a lot upvotes because people find it convenient to blame some big bad other. Even if you have specific data for electricity, don’t forget a lot of CO2 is emitted by cars, and also by fuel to heat homes (including some peat in special case of ireland - and in that country a large fraction of GHG emissions is also methane from agriculture).
- Comment on France | Paris mayor swims in Seine as river is cleaned up just in time for Olympics 6 months ago:
Reminds me of time when, during the Beijing olympics, the sky miraculously cleared of smog and turned blue - showed what they can do when it’s a priority, but didn’t lost long.
- Comment on Analysis: China’s clean energy pushes coal to record-low 53% share of power in May 2024 - Carbon Brief 6 months ago:
That’s great, I’m optimistic about the peaking. Nevertheless 53% coal is still far too much, and May is easy compared to cold winters. A lot of coal is also used to make steel and cement, maybe also declining, but could be good to see relative numbers.
- Comment on I just had an idea that people smarter than me have probably had long before I heard of Lemmy.....but I don't see it implemented, so I'm sharing it anyways!!! 7 months ago:
I see that says ‘has to be local only, not federated’ (same issue also discussed on github).
‘Local only’ suggests to me front-end, i.e. info stored by browser. In that case people who are often switching devices would have to re-organise on each one, which could be tedious.
So isn’t there something in between local and federated - i.e. saved by the instance as user-settings, but not pushed to other instances?
Maybe there could be some manual copying mechanism, so a user who organises a big set of communities could share with others. (This reminds me of mastodon ‘lists’ and various ways of organising and transferring them). - Comment on I just had an idea that people smarter than me have probably had long before I heard of Lemmy.....but I don't see it implemented, so I'm sharing it anyways!!! 7 months ago:
Nearly 200 upthumbs, more ?!
But the discussion explores broader and narrow variants, need to coalesce. - Comment on Poland-Belarus: Tsikhanowskaya warns against closed borders 7 months ago:
Ukraine is huge and has loads of track and trains that gauge, so do Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Moldova. There’s even a ukrainian-gauge line running west to Katowice, could make sense to extend it, and make another to Gdansk. Otoh a transversal standard-gauge line connecting Romania to Poland via Chernivtsi and Lviv could also make sense.
Western europe should welcome the technical expertise of Ukraine and Belarus railways, they move a lot, efficiently.
Hey, not so long ago, there was even talk of a canal linking the Dnipro to the Wisla, recreating the old ‘viking rus’ trade-route (although have to consider also impact on wetlands… I recall used to sit next to the IPCC rep from Belarus - he was passionate about methane emissions from wetlands - but suffered from politics …) - Comment on Poland-Belarus: Tsikhanowskaya warns against closed borders 7 months ago:
Sure, she’s right, more people in Belarus voted for her than Lukas* and his pals, they shouldn’t suffer for p’s tricks, although it seems to me the majority are rather too passive (with some great exceptions, of course).
Anyway isn’t there another factor here - are there still long freight trains with chinese containers frequently arriving in Brest? If not, how else are they getting to europe? If so, I’d guess both belarus railways and polish lorry drivers get a lot of money out of that trade, isn’t that a factor of leverage ?
Belarus is good at trains, I hope not so far in the future we’ll see them run again from Odesa to Riga via Minsk, and with people free to move. - Comment on Lemmy Active Users looking good 11 months ago:
I’m using Alexandrite, find it good
- Comment on Largest post-pandemic survey finds trust in scientists is high 11 months ago:
Of all the placard photos to choose to highlight, Nature could have found better than “science = fact” which seems to me more a proclamation of faith than encouragement of experiment.
Regarding the somewhat strange differences between countries, I suspect there may be a linguistic issue - words like “science” and “trust” have different scope in different cultures and systems - hard to ask the same questions everywhere. - Comment on Some Thoughts on Coupling 11 months ago:
I can relate to this, having developed a coupled socio-emissions-carbon-climate model, which evolved for 20 years in java, until recently converted to scala3. You can have a look here. The problem is that “coupling” in such models of complex systems is a ‘good’ thing, as there are feedbacks - for example atmospheric co2 drives climate warming but the latter also changes the carbon cycle, demography drives economic growth but the latter influences fertility and migration, etc… (some feedbacks are solved by extrapolating from the previous timestep - the delay is anyway realistic). There are also policy feedbacks - between top-down climate-stabilisation goals, and bottom up trends and national policies, the choice affects the logical calculation order. All this has to work fast within the browser (now scala.js - originally java applet), responding interactively to parameter adjustments, only recalculating curves which changed - getting all these interactions right is hard.
If restarting in scala3 I’d structure it differently, but having a lot of legacy science code known to work, it’s hard to pull it apart. Wish I’d known such principles at the beginning, but as it grew gradually, one doesn’t anticipate such complexity. - Comment on Mozilla lays off 60 people, wants to build AI into Firefox 11 months ago:
Vivaldi recently posted this -vivaldi-wont-allow-a-machine-to-lie-to-you.
See also vivaldi community - Comment on Half-Earth Socialism: The Game 11 months ago:
I like this game, has potential to help people think, especially about land-use, but also has issues.
However we discussed this in some detail 11 days ago (e.g. 22 comments on solarpunk),
it could be good to continue in further depth, but would feel odd to re-paste the same comments. It is a problem for Lemmy (and other social media) sites, that a ‘deep’ long-term topic loses prominence too quickly, compared to ‘breaking’ news. So my question is rather general, how could we blend /gather comments across communities and across time? Meanwhile, enjoy the game (I don’t want to discourage new comments). - Comment on Russian Dreams of De-Dollarization Stutter as Chinese Banks Threaten To Cut Off Putin’s Only Remaining Economic Lifeline 11 months ago:
There was talk, back in 1990s (iirc?) of europe from Lisbon to Vladivostok. I think it’s a pity we missed that opportunity. I’ve crossed the Russian-Chinese border on a few occasions, years ago, back then it felt culturally that was a european border. Now, the way it’s going, seems more likely Siberia will end up attached to China.
(by the way, wrt OP, China has many many banks…)