Blake

I don't understand how anyone can witness this and not realise that the issue we have is a systemic issue, rather than an issue specifically with the PM or even with the Tory party.

Politicians are literally giving the middle finger to a public inquiry with complete impunity. If they can get away with this, then what force can hold them accountable? The voters? They lie about their policies and positions, get voted in, then do whatever they want for years. The media, completely controlled by the wealthy ruling elite, makes it impossible for any politician who would be a threat to their interests to get elected by running constant smear campaigns and puff pieces.

Electoral politics is at a dead end. The best it can accomplish is avoiding the worst possible outcomes. For a truly better world, we need massive changes which happen outside the system.

I always wanted a big brother, though! I quickly checked your profile and saw you mentioned mid 30s, which makes you a little older than me, so I guess wish granted... although I am 6'4" and closer to 250lbs, so I guess we're both big brothers-es. :P

Hit me with your craziest, hottest take - I can handle it!

It's probably against the rules of this community and potentially against the law, so I'll just say that I disagree with a value which Gandhi and Martin Luther King share, and that I agree with some, but not all, of Malcolm X's beliefs.

Put it in the big collection of ADHD tips at the back of your brain that you immediately forget as soon as you think about something cool that you wanna say :D

I think you replied a bit too hastily - I agree that we do treat people differently based on appearance, it's actually in my comment:

In my experience, physical appearance is a factor for how people judge you

I try my best to treat people well regardless of their appearance or physical attributes, but you're absolutely right in that some of it is implicit (i.e. we have no control over it).

By the way, unhoused people often are in that position through no fault of their own, and should absolutely be listened to, and supported in any way that we can. Many of them are educated and have very insightful things to say. It's worth keeping in mind that it's absolutely possible that all of your property and wealth could be taken away at any moment, and think about how that might shape your perspective.

Thank you for being so open and honest about your experiences, I think that's very brave of you, and I appreciate that a lot.

I'm not going to invalidate your experience, of course, but it's not universal. I'm physically disabled and beyond obese, and personally, I feel that the rest of my appearance leaves much to be desired, but I haven't had big issues with rejection/isolation since I was a teen, I had some personality/behavioural issues which I have overcome quite well imo, and now I'm relatively successful socially, despite my appearance absolutely deteriorating.

Likewise, my experience is not universal, but I believe that your opinion, that your physical appearance is 100% responsible for how people interact with you socially, is completely wrong, and in some ways harmful. It plays a major part, I won't deny that, but if you're the most gorgeous person on the planet but have every personality defect known to humankind, I don't think you'll experience truly meaningful, long-lasting, loving relationships with others.

100% yes, it's so hard to kick that urge to just go on and on and on. I allow myself to do it here on Lemmy as a bit of a break from filtering myself in real life, so some of my comments are barely edited streams of consciousness :)

A lot of advice is given to people with ADHD for how they can make neurotypical people comfortable and seem more productive, but less is given to maintaining good mental health with ADHD - definitely make sure that you have ways of letting yourself loose and make sure not to be too hard on yourself when people don't appreciate your style :P

Be careful you're not mixing causation and correlation, if you have self-esteem issues due to your appearance, that might be affecting how you come across in conversation. In my experience, physical appearance is a factor for how people judge you before you open your mouth, but if you speak with confidence and make good contributions, people will look past your appearance.

Just in case you weren't aware, this is a very classic symptom of ADHD, you might want to check out the other symptoms and resources online to see if it fits you. There's medication for ADHD which may help? I have ADHD, so that's why I'm sharing.

A tip I once got was "three before me", which means every time you speak, you let other people speak 3 times before you add anything else. I find that helpful if I can remember to do it.

When I think of something to say, I feel a strong urge to blurt it out - partially because I am excited by this amazing thought I just had, and also partially because I'm worried I might forget it.

Another thing you can do is take notes of things you want to say, write them down - that also helps you evaluate if they're actually worth saying!

When it comes to generating electricity, nuclear is hugely more expensive than renewables. Every 1000Wh of nuclear power could be 2000-3000 Wh solar or wind.

If you’ve been told “it’s not possible to have all power from renewable sources”, you have been a victim of disinformation from the fossil fuel industry. The majority of studies show that a global transition to 100% renewable energy across all sectors – power, heat, transport and industry – is feasible and economically viable.

This is all with current, modern day technology, not with some far-off dream or potential future tech such as nuclear fusion, thorium reactors or breeder reactors.

Compared to nuclear, renewables are:

• Cheaper
• As clean or cleaner, in terms of emissions
• Faster to provision
• Less environmentally damaging
• Not reliant on continuous consumption of fuel
• Decentralised
• Much, much safer
• Much easier to maintain
• More reliable
• Much more capable of being scaled down on demand to meet changes in energy demands

Nuclear power has promise as a future technology. But at present, while I’m all in favour of keeping the ones we have until the end of their useful life, building new nuclear power stations is a massive waste of money, resources, effort and political capital.

Nuclear energy should be funded only to conduct new research into potential future improvements and to construct experimental power stations. Any money that would be spent on building nuclear power plants should be spent on renewables instead.

Frequently asked questions:

• But it’s not always sunny or windy, how can we deal with that?

While a given spot in your country is going to have periods where it’s not sunny or rainy, with a mixture of energy distribution (modern interconnectors can transmit 800kV or more over 800km or more with less than 3% loss) non-electrical storage such as pumped storage, and diversified renewable sources, this problem is completely mitigated - we can generate wind, solar or hydro power over 2,000km away from where it is consumed for cheaper than we could generate nuclear electricity 20km away.

• Don’t renewables take up too much space?

The United States has enough land paved over for parking spaces to have 8 spaces per car - 5% of the land. If just 10% of that space was used to generate solar electricity - a mere 0.5% - that would generate enough solar power to provide electricity to the entire country. By comparison, around 50% of the land is agricultural. The amount of land used by renewable sources is not a real problem, it’s an argument used by the very wealthy pro-nuclear lobby to justify the huge amounts of funding that they currently receive.

• Isn’t Nuclear power cleaner than renewables?

No, they’re pretty comparable in terms of emissions, and renewables are cleaner in terms of other environmental impacts. You can look up total lifetime emissions for nuclear vs. renewables - this is the aggregated and equalised emissions caused per kWh for each energy source. It takes into account the energy used to extract raw materials, build the power plant, operate the plant, maintenance, the fuels needed to sustain it, the transport needed to service it, and so on. These numbers generally show that renewables tend to be as clean or cleaner in terms of total lifetime emissions, and in addition, since nuclear relies on fuel extraction (mining) and has lots of issues regarding waste, renewables is overall cleaner than nuclear.

• We need a baseline load, though, and that can only be nuclear or fossil fuels.

Not according to industry experts - the majority of studies show that a 100% renewable source of energy across all industries for all needs - electricity, heating, transport, and industry - is completely possible with current technology and is economically viable. If you disagree, don’t argue with me, take it up with the IEC. Here’s a Wikipedia article that you can use as a baseline for more information: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/100%25_renewable_energy

Fuck building new lines designed for speed, invest that money in making the existing network better.

Building new, modern railway lines is one way to improve the network. I don't really understand why anyone who advocates for investment in the railways has a problem with building new lines. I agree that they shouldn't be private anymore and that we should massively increase funding, but building new rail and replacing old rail with new rail seems like a great way to improve the network

Theoretically it doesn’t really matter whether your connection is fiber or copper. Electricity moves through copper roughly at the same speed as light moves through fiber. The advantages that fiber has over copper is that it can be run longer distances without needing boosting, and that you can run an absolute fuckton more end-to-end connections in the same diameter of cable. More connections means less contention - at least at one end of the pipe. The problem then moves to the ISP’s routers :)

I’d say that the chances are actually quite good that you’ll get fiber internet within the next 10 years. Whether or not it improves your internet connection is another question entirely!

Even with fibre (which is slower than the speed of light)

This makes no sense. Are you referring to the speed of light in a vacuum? Fiber transmits data using photons which travel at the speed of light. While, yes, there is often some slowing of signals depending on whether the fiber is single-mode or multi-mode and whether the fiber has intentionally been doped, it’s close enough to the theoretical maximum speed that it’s not really worth splitting hairs (heh) over

There are additionally some delays added during signal processing (modulation and demodulation from the carrier to layer 3) but again this is so fast at this point it’s not really conceivably going to get much faster.

The bottleneck really is contention vs. throughput, rather than the media or modulation/demodulation slash encoding/decoding.

At least to the best of my knowledge!

you’re often back-tracking across the continent before your traffic makes it to the end destination, with ISPs caring more about saving money than routing traffic quickly

That’s generally not how routing works - your packets might take different routes depending on different conditions. Just like how you might take a different road home if you know that there’s roadworks or if the schools are on holiday, it can be genuinely much faster for your packets to take a diversion to avoid, say, a router that’s having a bad day.

Routing protocols are very advanced and capable, taking many metrics into consideration for how traffic is routed. Under ideal conditions, yes, they’d take the physically shortest route possible, but in most cases, because electricity moves so fast, it’s better to take a route that’s hundreds of miles longer to avoid some router that got hacked and is currently participating in some DDoS attack.