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Thread | Climate change: How would we have coped in a different era?
at 08:08 14 Jul 2025
Listening to discussion of the Met Office report this morning, I have no doubt that most of us will just ignore the science.
Makes me wonder how different entities would have dealt with the problem at a couple of different points in history, had CO2 levels been then what they are now. If we said AGW came to a certain level of public awareness in about 1995 (for the sake of argument), how would 'we' have gone about things:
* 50 years earlier, 1945 (assumed Second World War, British bulldog, Churchillian mentality)
* 150 years earlier, 1845 (assumed Victorian science- and engineering-led pragmatic mentality)
I would say that three different entities (Public, Government, Corporate) might well have reacted in entirely different ways:
Public
Today - vast swathes of the public are so engrossed in striving to consume or compete for social media purposes that they just won't listen to science or act.
WWII - was the all-in-it together attitude real enough in Britain (or elsewhere) to make a self-sacrificial public consensus forceful enough to drive policy change?
Victorians - was the respect for science a force which would have demanded proper action?
Government
Today - childish bickering, focus on surviving one or two parliamentary terms, fire-fighting, manipulative media and pseudo media.
WWII - would the wartime coalition have been pragmatic enough to face an much bigger issue than Hitler with unity, long-term planning and tolerant cooperation?
Victorians - in an era of British domination, could our government have actually driven a worldwide response, led by the science?
Corporate
Today - shameless, irresponsible, aggressive, profit at ANY cost environment where failures and cheats are paid off or moved sideways.
WWII - co-operating with government, but any different underneath? Less aggressive, perhaps? Not so shameless?
Victorians - I presume there was a much stronger imperative to 'do the decent thing', but how deep did that run?
Hell of a lot of assumptions there, I know.
On the arbitrary timelines I've come up with, where would we be in 1975, or 1875?
TLDR: What the fk is the matter with us?
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Thread | Cakeage.
at 19:56 10 Jul 2025
I've just been eating a raspberry/yoghurt 'sponge' cake, which is highly reminiscent - visually - of a Battenberg, but extremely succulent, moist and tasty.
Ban? |
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Thread | Recommended: Jointly app for carers
at 16:52 10 Jul 2025
I posted a while back looking for suggestions for an information sharing solution of some kind to help co-ordinate multiple people caring for an individual.
I was looking for something I could configure and admin myself, but Stokie drew my attention to Jointly, which is a multi-platform app from Carers UK for doing just what I was looking for.
https://jointlyapp.com/
Having used it now for a few weeks, I can heartily recommend it to anyone else who might need something similar.
You can try it out for a couple of weeks then you have to pay the eye-watering sum of three quid (one-off) to subscribe - I'd happily pay a hundred times that! [Post edited 10 Jul 18:25]
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Thread | What are you doing for dinner?
at 17:16 7 Jul 2025
Puns only please.
I'm doing a tuner and pastor bake, which has delicate flavours of both the musical and religious aspects of life. |
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Thread | Addressing probability and responsibility in times of stress
at 07:56 5 Jul 2025
Not sure whether to post this or not, but here goes.
It strikes me that this deadly flash flood in Texas has occurred in the state which is at the centre of the oil industry in the country which is pushing fossil fuel use again like no other, and which has the biggest per capita carbon emissions in the world. A country which has been at the forefront of the celebration of excess in consumption and instrumental in pushing the fatal, fantastical dream of ever-lasting growth and the idiotic assumption of safe, infinite absorption of pollution by a dying ecosphere.
Is it climate change? Well, as honest and open scientists, statisticians or interested amateurs, we can't absolutely attribute this event specifically to climate change etc...... but OF COURSE IT FKING IS!, and - unless we live behind a shield of selfish, self-delusion or are totally lacking in the ability to understand the basic message of increasing levels of heat energy trapped in our planet, causing unpredictable and catastrophic events of hot/cold, wet/dry, static/kinetic nature all around the world - we all bloody well know it.
Yes, it's unfair to blame it all on the US, and yes it's probably offensive to mention it now, but when, if ever, will we accept what we have done, what we are doing and take responsibility, as individuals, as corporations, as states and turn away from unchecked consumerism? We could live happy, healthy, modest lives and give our kids the chance of something similar if we'd all get our heads out of our arses and stop acting like cancerous cells. |
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Thread | US political divergence - third party?
at 11:33 22 Jun 2025
With the seemingly ever more entrenched (and childish) positions in US politics surely there is both a need and a demand for a third party. Such a thing may be hard to get going, but could eventually start to provide a little moderation in that sorry country.
Even if someone as batsh!t crazy (and rich and able to fund such a venture) as M*sk was to set something off and running, could it prove a good thing?
Or is Tr*mp effectively doing a similar thing by upsetting a lot of his supporters? |
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Thread | Town players as eponymous film titles, and a brief synopsis of the plot.
at 20:31 19 Jun 2025
28 Day Slater
Little Stuart awakes from a coma to discover that he has four weeks to escape from under Neil Thompson's massive arse in the changing rooms before John Lyall assumes that he's run off back to West Ham and is forced into playing Lee Durrant in Slater's place. |
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Thread | AI enthusiasts: What do you make of Yoshua Bengio's interview?
at 15:49 16 Jun 2025
Yoshua Bengio, Canadian-French computer scientist who received the 2018 ACM A.M. Turing Award, often referred to as the "Nobel Prize of Computing", together with Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun, for their foundational work on deep learning (wikipedia) gave this interview just now on the World Service.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p004t1s0
I think we've had discussions on here in the past where people have played down the risks of AI, but this expert speaks with great nervousness about AI models which exhibit 'deception, cheating, lying, blackmailing, and trying to hack the host computer when being shut down.'
He speaks of AI as becoming a 'competitor to humanity' with 'catastrophic risks' and 'threats to democracy'. He says governments aren't taking the real risks seriously, and experimental systems have been seen to develop/create their own goals to harm humans and escape from their constraints.
He references 'the end of humanity' as a possibility several times, and speaks of the phenomenal speed of change and the 'tendency in the last few months indicating that AIs want to break out and get rid of us'.
He says we have a 'window in which we could make right decisions' and that the 'public needs a voice' and needs to educate themselves. He says AI has its own intentions and that this is not a sci-fi movie but experiments going on in labs all over the world today.
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I recognise that the above is all very vague in a sense, but then I think the implication is that our knowledge and control of the future of AI in our/its world is pretty vague and tenuous too, and perhaps not really in our hands as much as we might wish to think, and that the timeline seems to be very compressed.
Yoshua Bengio seems to me to speak with great authority and seems very worried.
Just wondering what people's thoughts are in June 2025 (and how they may have changed since say June 2024).
Do we just carry on and accentuate the positives, or do we change our world view a bit and step back on this issue whilst we have a chance? |
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Thread | Jeremy Bowen's piece this morning is particularly clear, I think.
at 10:04 8 Jun 2025
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0r1xl5wgnko
'If one side has suffered a brutal surprise attack that killed hundreds of civilians, as Israel did on 7 October 2023, it does not get an exemption from the law. The protection of civilians is a legal requirement in a battle plan.
That, at least, is the theory behind the Geneva Conventions. The latest version, the fourth, was formulated and adopted after World War Two to stop such slaughter and cruelty to civilians from ever happening again.'
...
'It is clear that Israel wants it to be that way. A few days into the war I was part of a convoy of journalists escorted by the army into the border communities that Hamas had attacked, while rescue workers were recovering the bodies of Israelis from smoking ruins of their homes, and Israeli paratroopers were still clearing buildings with bursts of gunfire.
Israel wanted us to see what Hamas had done. The conclusion has to be that it does not want foreign reporters to see what it is doing in Gaza.'
...
'In Europe there is also now a widely held belief, as in Israel, that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is prolonging the war not to safeguard Israelis, but to preserve the ultra-nationalist coalition that keeps him in power.
As prime minister he can prevent a national inquiry into his role in security failures that gave Hamas its opportunity before 7 October and slow down his long-running trial on serious corruption charges that could land him in jail.'
Obviously nothing new that we or, more importantly, our supposedly humane and responsible governments haven't known for a year or more, of course.
I can't understand how the world is letting this happen. |
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