> Haha, no, it inspires motivation for finding a new job. Interview prep takes time
Everyone's circumstances are different. Many people - especially those with dependents - would reasonably be afraid. Whether that would inspire lasting productivity is questionable. It could also inspire less productive ways of getting ahead.
No - asphalt is bound together by bitumen, a sticky, waterproof byproduct of petroleum refining.
eg: You don't get asphalt without bitumen and you don't get bitumen save as a byproduct of a massive amount of fossil fuels being pulled up .. and inevitably increasing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.
> You don't get asphalt without bitumen and you don't get bitumen save as a byproduct of a massive amount of fossil fuels being pulled up
There are alternatives to virgin bitumen for binding asphalt, like recycled asphalt [1], asphalt blended with recycled rubber, etc. These could conceivably be used together with a smaller amount of virgin petroleum-derived bitumen.
Indeed. There are also paths to tackling the impacts from concrete, from steel making, from livestock generating methane, etc.
The figure that has to watched, reduced, and ideally if possible made negative for a time is the rate of CO2 addition to the atmosphere; pulling up additional hydrocarbons already sequestered will always(?) lead to some amount of additional CO2 being set free as a gas.
The very existence of any bitumen (derived from buried hydrocarbons) is just a sign of the horse (previously sequestered CO2) having already left the stable (buried for millenia).
> American solar installer companies do seem to charge way more than European or British ones
One of the reasons for this is that in many parts of the US, solar has sadly been market segmented as a luxury product, just like other high efficiency products like heat pumps or EVs.
This is enabled by both the prevailing cultural attitudes about efficiency and renewables as indulgences for the better off, and industries that are happy to keep captive high margin markets of those customers, i.e. the continued lack of a US produced low-cost EV.
The American cult of individualism is also at play, wherein collective solutions are shunned vs private ones, which is why renewables and storage are so popular among off grid libertarian types.
In the US you can find truly wild places, but it is pretty hard to find places untouched by man. Humans have been here for at least 15000 years, and from the very beginning were having huge impacts on the ecology.
> Already in the 5th century BC, Herodotus reports about the ‘Hyperboreans’ (Folks from above the North Wind), and how they regularly visited the island of Delos
> Can you think of a mass labor displacement that resulted in an overall erosion of living standards? I cannot.
The mass evictions of the Scottish Highlands [1] in which peasants were driven at the point of bayonets to the lowland city slums to make way for the British government to transform Scotland into a mass sheep/wool production monoculture economy.
The use of kidnapped Africans as slaves in the Americas was also an example of a labor displacement - by introducing a source of mass human labor with absolutely no human rights - to scale the agricultural commodity economy (cotton, tobacco, sugar), which resulted in horrendous living standards for the enslaved, and an erosion for the poor paid peasants whose labor they replaced. Slavery was a very "efficient" way to use labor.
> This is a fabulation, right. What kind of POS parent would instill self-worth on money and career into their kids?
They are not POS, they're trapped in systems and perspectives that push them to do this. Often they are the same kind of parent who had that instilled in them as kids and never had to self-examine those values or the systems that drove them.
If not a majority of parents, I'd guess a huge percentage fit this. It's a characteristic of the anxious middle class, some of whom still have the inter-generational memory of poverty. And yes, some of them are just that shallow but often it's a mix of both.
Ironically, the inclusion of career as a signal of self-worth is a relatively new and "progressive" change in the context of history, where in aristocratic or landlord-ruled societies, inherited or conquered (AKA stolen) wealth was primary signifier of self-worth.
In such societies, not having to work because of your wealth was the marker of honor and even moral superiority, to the point of being tautological.
Within the turbulence of recent technological advancements, we're now struggling to evolve to the next stage where self worth isn't attached to wealth or career, and we're potentially regressing.
What a world it would be if people were more open to introspecting, figuring out their motivations, and changing their behavior accordingly. So many people living in reaction to societal influences, not really asking if advice is true or even aligns with their ends.
I think its laziness. Having long difficult conversations with your kids takes effort. Chucking them into a STEM path they dont care about is way easier.
> their voters prioritize making people they don't like suffer over their own comfort.
> That probably doesn't seem rational but remember loads of these people think the Bible is a true story.
Those are the (sizeable) subset who are obsessed with a literal interpretation of the Old Testament rather than the turn-the-other-cheek teachings of Christ, who is little more than a totem for these fundamentalists.
Arguably there is less harm in believing that Christ's ministry was historical than believing that Sodom and Gomorrah were historical.
"Two thousand years ago there was this dude saying 'Be excellent to one another'" is certainly less dangerous, but to be fair the same dude described in the Bible does likewise say:
"I have not come to bring peace, but a sword."
Which like, you don't need to twist that very hard to get to a place where you're going around "bringing the sword" to people who you think need it...
The Old Testament is big on genocide though, "We should definitely murder these children" has a lot more justification at the start of the book, or if you're batshit and think that stuff about Revelation, right at the end is a concrete prediction of future events then maybe that too.
> Doing this to a work computer seem a bit questionable from the ethical standpoint.
"Ethical standpoint" seems like the wrong choice of words. I think you mean "equipment ownership standpoint.". Ethical implies a set of values, vs contractual terms of equipment use.
You can't be unethical to your employer, only to people like your coworkers and customers, or other living beings that your business activity impacts.
Why can you be ethical to your coworkers and not your employer? You boss is a living being too, and he is working for the company just like you are, even if his status is different. And your coworkers are the ones who make up the company, so being ethical to your coworkers is being ethical to your company.
And if filing your computer causes a problem to your IT department for whatever reason, and you do it without approval, then I think it is indeed not very ethical, it really depends on the situation. The IT department people are your coworkers too.
> Haha, no, it inspires motivation for finding a new job. Interview prep takes time
Everyone's circumstances are different. Many people - especially those with dependents - would reasonably be afraid. Whether that would inspire lasting productivity is questionable. It could also inspire less productive ways of getting ahead.
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