Yeah, and it’s also incredibly rude. Like, we’re having lunch together in person, and mid-sentence, they disappear into their phone for minutes at a time.
I stop hanging out with these types of people. If online bullshit is more important than actual real life, what is even the point?
I leave on notifications for calls and calendar events. That’s it. Texts are silenced but appear on the lock screen. Everything else is a red dot only.
My friends point out how weird this is. But when I see multiple stacks of unread notifications on their lock screens, it seems exhausting.
It's a natural reaction, but these people are actually suffering from an addiction and for at least some of them (those who can take remarks and act on them) it's better to tell them in a friendly way that you are having a discussion.
Most people are aware that cutting off a discussion is impolite and undesirable, they just don't realise they're doing it.
I admire your positive attitude, but it's similar to smackheads, they're just no fun to be around. "Have you thought of taking less Heroin" won't cut it.
I think you're getting downvoted because of your comparison to hard drugs, but you're not wrong about the people.
That phone is more engaging to them than the conversation they're in, and if you try to tell them about it, they use all the same excuses that other addicts use, plus a few more.
Downvotes whatever. The analogy is apposite I think, you do see that addicts and non-addicts do tend to gather into groups, neither finds the company of the other very attractive. In pubs, you often see groups of phone people, each with a half-pint in front of them, each furiously texting away to people they'd rather be spending time with. Top night out!
How do you know it's online bullshit and not a time-sensitive message from family? I'd never do it mid-sentance, but if I hear my Whatsapp notification tone then I will make a mental note to check that fairly soon, because sometimes it is something important
At what point did society, unprompted and unquestioned, shift to using the Whatsapp phone app for actually important urgent serious things instead of, y'know, SMS or a phone call?
I happened because the phone operators made SMS a paid feature, while Whatsapp over wifi was free. Then the people for whom SMS was not free started using Whatsapp (or Messenger or other apps) and eventually those who used to use SMS switched to the same apps because their contacts were using them.
In some places the switch to these apps took longer (like France, because SMS had been free for a long time) but there is a fundamental asymmetry since SMS is free only for part of the users (so the others will never use it) while the apps are free for everyone. In the end, everyone ends up mostly using these apps.
From my experience in France at least, nobody relies on SMS anymore and less and less people on regular calls, it all goes through Whatsapp.
Even I am guilty of that for both SMS and calls, having a single featureful app with contacts ordered by the most recent discussions descending (as in my country SMS is largely replaced by Whatsapp) leads to less friction than having to scroll through my actual phone's contact.
I can answer this! The moment that one tenant in my house didn't have an iPhone, so couldn't be in the house group chat on iMessage. It would take too many calls to coordinate the six people we have at home. Group messaging is the best option, and of those, WhatsApp is the best option.
Around the time smartphone and widespread data coverage made it feasible. It, and other services like it, offered a clearly superior experience to SMS/MMS, and RCS arrived way, way too late. As for why a particular service succeeded in a particular market, I imagine it all comes down to marketing, luck, and network effects. WhatsApp is probably not my ideal service (mostly because it uses somewhat device-tied accounts) but it's what 90% of people use
Almost all phone calls I receive are "actual" phone calls though. And SMS still gets plenty of use as the lowest common denominator for new recipients, but in practice over 95% of my received SMS are from computers now
Vote out any policy maker who impedes the response to climate change.
This is not something we fix as individuals, with feel-good home solutions, recycling, or planting trees. Large industry is destroying our world, on purpose, because of greed.
This only gets fixed through policy and regulation. Vote.
You are implying there are candidates who do not impede response to climate change: even the Greens are against nuclear, which in my understanding, is totally unproductive.
They are also still debating "décroissance", that is "de-growth".
I find crazy that no one even mentionned the word "efficiency" as in "we might not need all the resources we consume to produce everything we do today. Let's set a realistic efficiency goals and try to achieve them"
I guess you could see de-growth as efficiency, lower useless production/necessary production for a good life-ratio.
If we just reduced the resources needed to produce todays consumption, why wouldn't the savings just go to producing more of the same stuff? Ie. growth?
If we reorganized our way of living to utilize tool libraries, maybe 1 large garage per x blocks, in it have power tools, cleaning supplies, outdoor tools, recreational vehicles etc.. if you don't use it 3 or more times per week do you really need to own it outright?
I think also using tiny homes and more insulated and cheaper earth bag homes could help but also would help with the housing crisis. There's a lot we could share, and if we did maybe we could also build smaller homes and lots as we wouldn't need as much storage.
Great point. Finding consensus on a solution is problematic.
I was referring to people who deny that climate change is even real. I would love to get to the stage of debating how to fix things, instead of being stuck in the stage of complete denial.
Climate change or anthropogenic climate change is a starting point for this issue.
We have had climate change since day one of earth. We can see it in the charts, data, etc. the issue is how much impact do the humans contribute?
If people were serious about carbon footprint, nuclear power plants would be built. But we are not serious, instead we have grifting policies that lead to wasted solutions: Solyndra, wind farms, solar farms, etc.
Then on top of all of this, the people in charge find ways to encourage coal, look at how Germany and the rest of the first worlds tried to bankrupt Pakistan by driving up the price of natural gas. Pakistan, China, and every country who saw that are going with coal.
The people who say climate denialism should not be tolerated are not serious about what they propose, because their solutions are not based in reality.
Voting will do nothing. Even if you could audit the voting system and prove it wasn't fraudulent, have you met any of your fellow humans on planet Earth? You are a teeny, tiny minority. They will continue to vote to destroy this planet.
You'll have to be more clever on solving this problem. I would suggest against parroting false feel good phrases that will result in absolutely nothing changing, and start thinking outside the box you and many others seem to have found themselves in, if you actually want to see our planet survive.
We are talking about the death of this entire planet being perpetrated by a specific group of people. What sort of solutions did our ancestors come up with for significantly smaller stakes, to simply safeguard things like freedom? When speaking of saving an entire world with the potential to spread life throughout a galaxy, there are few conceivable solutions which cannot be easily morally justified if they result in safeguarding that future.
We are a species with an infinite cosmic destiny. I might suggest we all start acting like it.
Understand the context first instead of believing the simplistic memes pushed by climate change denialists. For example, in India the reason is that there was a shortage of natural gas which became scarce and super expensive because of world events, so they had to build more coal power plants to not have blackouts. Solar is still growing fast, 82% of new capacity in 2022 was solar, and there's a lot more in the pipeline.
How is China a problem? The way of life and the energy intensity of a single individual living in the developed world is the problem. Do I have to point out the US and Europe? (I live in the UK).
India is emitting massively under their fair share of the world's CO2 emissions under any sane allocation. So the first thing to do is not vote for policy makers who try to deflect from their country emitting way more than its fair share by bringing up India.
By providing education and awareness, change can only come from within those countries. The citizens of China and India are probably on the same page as you.
Given this is a discussion forum with global reach your suggestion on implementing change to global industrial policy via voting may or may not be viable (not everyone gets to vote, and most of the countries lack global impac. US is really unique along with few other countries being able to influence global industry trends).
Policy won't change unless the two party gridlock does. Even when the Dems take power (like now), nothing really happens. It's just lip service at best.
Republicans are in favor of dismantling and eliminating the EPA and clean energy initiatives, for instance. Democrats aren’t great either, but Republican policies are measurably at least an order of magnitude worse.
I'm just being realistic here. Two decades of flip-flopping party power, and has the climate gotten any better?
Every single election cycle we have this discussion. "Well, at least the Dems are better than the Republicans. They're the best we can get." It's not enough. Hasn't been enough for a long time.
Large industry keeps a lot if people alive and provides abundance of a sort - nothing wrong with that. Mixing fighting climate change with some redesign of societies and creating the "new human" is an unproductive move, I think.
Are you a Chinese troll? If not, you're doing a great job of advocating for China.
At this point it's inevitable that solar power and EV's are going to win. They don't need any subsidies to win. But without the subsidies China will take the entire market and we'll be much more dependent on China in the future than we are on Saudi Arabia now.
Could you elaborate on your world view or are you just trolling?
Progress and capitalism optimize for value or $, and have no attention for the environmental cost as long as those are not put into regulations. You don't agree with that?
Capitalism could work, if the framework was setup to allocate the environmental impact to the company using that resource.
A 'credit' system worked to stop NOX and Acid Rain, no reason it couldn't be used to reduce CO2.
Have to separate "Capitalism" the concept, from the "I'm changing the rules just for me to profit".
"Capitalism" can work well with regulations. The people that are against regulations are not "pro-Capitalism", they are "pro-Greed". Nothing in capitalism says you can't have regulations to prevent things society doesn't wan to happen.
Just current interpretation of capitalism is wrong.
My understanding is that in US, they used Emissions Credits, and this allowed a 'market' for those credits. This was more palatable to the segment of the country that are against regulations of any kind. But once there is a market, then it is ok.
There are some good points to an emissions market, it does allow accountants and corporations to determine a 'cost' that can be used in budgeting, and they can then us that as justification to purchase equipment. And it does allow the shifting of the 'cost' to the worst polluting plants. So in some ways markets are good, they steer the allocation of funds. The anarcho-capitalist types just need to understand that capitalism can be guided in this way, we know it works.
Completely Agree, Capitalism combined with right boundary conditions ie. limits, regulations, credit systems, or whatever, have to be used. The current system rewards those that manage to make use of the 'commons', and by that way socializing the costs (pollution, waste, etc.) while privatizing gains.
Because the current climate spending is extremely inefficient and stupid. For example, if we put all this effort into making more energy, e.g. making nuclear actually work, we could soon make the climate do what we want, not the other way around.
And of course anything the government gets involved in will get screwed up, so just stop screwing it up and let the bright people do what they are passionate about.
Imagine regulatory asphyxiation disappears. Imagine energy tech gets its own Moore's law. Imagine cheap abundant energy, say 10 orders of magnitude from now in a few decades. Heating up or cooling down the planet at will doesn't sound impossible then.
So we should just hope this all away? That's a deeply childish viewpoint, and hoping is not a reliable plan. It will require many things: Carbon regulation plus geo-engineering plus improved power systems plus personal sacrifice. But where that starts is legislation. This is how we solved acid raid, the ozone layer, lead-based fuels and paints, and oh so many other environmental externalities. Individuals cannot solve this problem themselves. I could convert my house to solar and buy electric cars tomorrow and the problem is not solved, because I account personally (through my own choices) of only 20% of the issue.
https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...
No, absolutely not! Where it starts is invention and invention is currently severely hindered by regulation, alarmism and skewed incentives. Why would a bright mind work on nuclear physics if you can make more money as a lawyer?
But that's not where we are. Without $$ incentive, nobody is going to build what is needed to remove the carbon or mitigate the effects of warming. The market is not magically going to solve anything if we simply remove regulation, that is a strawman. The market needs incentives, as well as restrictions. When we solved the ozone layer, we first restricted chloroflorocarbons to stop the bleeding, then we added incentives to create replacements. And it worked. It's not alarmism that's the issue here, it's heads in the sand.
I stop hanging out with these types of people. If online bullshit is more important than actual real life, what is even the point?
I leave on notifications for calls and calendar events. That’s it. Texts are silenced but appear on the lock screen. Everything else is a red dot only.
My friends point out how weird this is. But when I see multiple stacks of unread notifications on their lock screens, it seems exhausting.