PaulWay

PaulWay, 6 months ago

@cstross @jkcheney how much of that do you think just boils down to "some people just want to criticise"? People doing critiques will pick a hole in anything, even if it means blatantly misquoting or misusing what you said. Is that what's going on there?

PaulWay, 6 months ago

@cstross @jkcheney #insert <witty_misreading_of_cstross.txt>

PaulWay, 6 months ago

@simon Are you saying that if you said that to a human it would not also get them to put more effort into trying to give you the right answer?

PaulWay, 6 months ago

@dgar The subeditor saw that and said "Yep. That's going in as is."

PaulWay, 6 months ago

@EndemicEarthling I agree with your ask here. I'm just simply about two steps removed from the actual people who are dealing with this.

I believe they know why it's happening and what the other side's view is. I don't know how much they're actually able to talk to this other group but I get the impression from what I've seen of those discussions that it's not something we and they can easily agree on any more. There's probably been bad actions on both sides but I think it's important to distinguish the actions of the people who play the game from the infrastructure of the game itself. Attacking the whole infrastructure just because certain people on that infrastructure are being difficult isn't a great way to gain friends.

In the mean time the public communications I've seen from the FAF team have been pretty even handed. They've simply said we're under a DDOS and we're doing what we can to restore services. No accusations, no blame.

Again, I'm just picking this up third hand. I trust the people who are much closer to this actual saga to do the right thing. My lack of interest in the causes of this conflict are due to lack of proximity, not a lack of willingness to collaborate.

PaulWay, 7 months ago

@TheCoolest @Valkyrie I also think it's worth looking at what you do already 🙂

I mean that as in: tell people about how you're trying to reduce your carbon footprint. Make the future sound positive and make the change look easy.

You're probably doing good things already! Share those. We need positive stories - that make reducing our climate impact sound easy and fun - out there to counter the negative stories.

I also agree that talking to your local members of parliament - local, state and federal - is a great way to get them thinking. But it's a slow process.

And yep, sure, there are always things we can be doing better. Some changes - reusing shopping bags and keep cups, say - are easy. Some - like getting an electric vehicle - may be out of your reach at the moment. Some - like taking public transport or cutting out some foods - require a bit more effort of will! But these are all ways we can help get our country to take action.

Because it's not just you. You influence everyone around you. If you make "taking action on climate change" sound easy, fun and practical then you help other people change too. And when you start doing the small things, the next things start making themselves more obvious and don't look so hard either.

And if you feel like you are actually making a difference then you're more likely to want to keep going 🙂

PaulWay, 7 months ago

@Valkyrie @TheCoolest

Look, I agree that there's a lot of big companies that are responsible for a lot more emissions than any one single person will contribute.

But my view is: we've got to stay positive. We've got to bring people along on the path to renewable energy and burning less stuff. It's the people's opinions that change this. We can all help change those opinions - not by confronting some climate change denier head on, but by making that transition look easier for all the people that the climate change denier might otherwise sway.

Absolutely we should be writing to the companies we use and pushing them to use more renewable energy and renewable resources. Yes we should be going and seeing our politicians. Yes we should be marching in the streets. Yes, we should even be posting on social media! 🙂

But we need action to match the talk. People resist because they think that taking action is hard. They think it's all "don't use electricity and live in caves". They think it's giving up driving or going vegan. And while there are people on that extreme that are really reducing their emissions, the rest of us can actually do meaningful things to reduce our emissions without giving up all those things.

We've got an electric car. I've got an electric motorbike. We've got an induction cooktop. We're replacing our gas heating with reverse cycle AC. All of those things have involved a bit of change, but in the main they have been easy to do and fun and cool and enjoyable. We drove to Griffith recently without a hitch. So it's all possible!

My other view is: don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Yes, EVs aren't going to - by themselves - save the planet. But they help! Catching the bus helps too. Choosing to work at home a couple of days helps too. Not using plastic straws and using reusable shopping bags all helps.

What those things do as well - in my view - is make us more focused on the doing! And we encourage other people. We make the nay-sayers look a bit ridiculous. It all helps. When people see an EV charger in every shopping centre and at every service station and they realise they've got an EV charger in every power point in their home... that's when getting an EV looks a bit easier 😃

Anyway, I've said enough on this. All the best, and keep up the good work!

PaulWay, 7 months ago

@feather1952 @sjbone

I think I'd disagree that the majority of Australians see through their dirty tactics on this particular issue. The majority voted "No". And the reactions I've heard on various news programmes - things like "I'm not really sure what this is about" and "Do we even need a referendum" and "I don't really care about this" - show that the FUD worked very well.

I think the real problem is that there are clear links between Price and Mundine and the other No campaigners and big business elites forming shady organisations like the Centre for (Truth-)Independent Studies, the Advance Group, and Atlas. The whole "inner city elites" argument is pure projection - the big business elites in their big mansions with their big mining companies are the ones funding patsies like Price and Mundine.

A couple of newspapers and independent news outlets like the Klaxon tried to dig into these groups and they are shady and dodgy as f. Nonexistent offices, voice mail phone lines, fake directors.... they are trying to be as secret as they can. In the mean time the Murdochracy is merrily telling everyone it's all too easy, everyone should pat themselves on the back because they're not really racist...

The problem, I fear, is that people who are on the bread line and under rental pressure don't have time to digest the arguments and think altruistically. They're too busy thinking about cost of living pressure to really care about other people. And those people get taken for mugs all the time.

PaulWay, 7 months ago

@ppossej Slug pellets are good, but apparently mice love them and are immune to them.

PaulWay, 8 months ago

@decryption I'm behind on online security, obviously - how did your form allow them to launder emails? Was it checking that the addresses were correct, or something else?

PaulWay, 8 months ago

@alexkidman

All the world seems in tune
On a spring afternoon
When we're poisoning pigeons in the park...

PaulWay, 9 months ago

@melissabeartrix I have to say I just feel sad.

Sad that there are 13-year old boys out stealing and committing arson. They should be in playing computer games, or kicking a football around, or practicing their trumpet, or studying. They should be loved, and cared for, and have a safe place to be. Kids don't wander the streets and commit crime just because - they do so because they grow up in a society that doesn't help them and doesn't help their parents and families. They do so when they grow up in a society that alienates them and sees them as dangerous.

We need to find better ways of helping these kids, and kids like them, before they ever get to this stage.

PaulWay, 9 months ago

@melissabeartrix The problem is: we don't know.

Were they privileged kids playing up?

Were they down-and-out kids escaping an abusive household?

Were they migrant kids trying to fit in with the local gangs?

Were they aboriginal kids sick and tired of everyone expecting them to do something wrong?

I think it's interesting that you and I have different initial pictures of where these kids came from and why they were doing what they did. But I think it's more interesting that we agree - this is something we as people and we as a society have to reach in and help on. We can't just look on and criticise those kids without also taking some of the blame.

PaulWay, 9 months ago

@BackFromTheDud @melissabeartrix I feel like this is pessimistic.

I think of the work of Iain M. Banks with his "Culture" series of novels. The Culture is an advanced space-faring civilisation and people within the Culture basically never want for anything, but that means they are not greedy. They have a saying: "Money implies poverty" - and I take that to mean that if you have any system of rationing resources, because they're somehow scarce, and you do that by putting a value on them and creating a thing called 'money' to keep track of who owns what and who gets what resources ... then you will always have people who do not have enough.

And I would contend that in his work he also shows that by having money you also create the conditions for greed - that people want to accumulate more just because it means they're somehow better than other people. When everyone can have anything, there's no value on having the 'bigger' house or the 'better' clothes or the 'more expensive' meals.

There are a few situations where people do 'anti-social' things like cheating or murdering. Most of the time the presence of machine intelligences far beyond their scope, combined with powers beyond the human, mean that pre-meditated acts like murder or abuse simply get stopped. At worst you get a "slap-drone" - a drone that follows you everywhere and watches everything you do and prevents you from murdering again. But usually (it's implied) whatever plot you were hatching gets noticed and someone - the ship's avatar or another human or a drone - sits you down and works out what your grievance is and solves the problem.

So "people commit crime" is true in our society where we have limited resources and limited money and people with more resources and money have better (and longer) lives than people without. But my contention is that that is not "human nature", that is the product of that society.

And even now we can see some of those effects. Divorce is not the terrible thing it once used to be, when women were treated more as the property of the man than as individuals in their own right. We've moved away from private armies roaming the landscape extorting money from city-states to not pillage them (look it up, this used to happen). Most people in say Australia do not have to literally hunt and kill their own food. And we are in general more peaceful, and we live longer, than people from centuries and millenia past.

So I don't accept that we are just 'bad' by 'human nature'. To me it sounds a lot like the "original sin" argument of religion: that we are "bad" people and only by believing in this or that religion can we become "good" people. Just doing "good" isn't enough, one must also believe enough. I don't agree with that view.

PaulWay, 9 months ago

@Kels_316 @evcricket not sure about that.

I've certainly heard that GM and Ford are going to use the Tesla plug for their cars and are going to pay Tesla for use of the Supercharger network.

I'm not sure it's a 'national standard' though.

I think fundamentally there's going to be a direct conflict between the USA (going Tesla), Europe (standardised on CCS-2 and not going anywhere on that), and maybe China (with their own "GB/T" standard). All three (AFAIK) are based on the same underlying communications protocols so it's not particularly difficult for a car to be made more or less the same and just fit a different socket for the charger.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEC_62196

https://blinkcharging.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/7-Blink_InternationalPlugTypes.pdf

I doubt Tesla, or China, is ever going to be large enough to directly take on Europe and force them to use their proprietary standard. In Australia we're using CCS-2 predominately, with some Teslas using the old style proprietary connectors and Nissan Leafs predominately using their more or less proprietary ChaDeMo plug and socket.

PaulWay, 9 months ago

@otte_homan @evcricket @Kels_316 That would make perfect sense for a 'get me the last 10 kilometres to a charger' rescue.

PaulWay, 9 months ago

@neoluddite @Kels_316 @evcricket @otte_homan A friend of mine does exactly this. Charges his Ioniq 5 from solar during the day, then charges his wife's Leaf from the Ioniq 5 during the night.

PaulWay, 9 months ago

@cathywilcox For some reason I can't help but sing this in my head to the Queensland tune, not the NSW tune...