When did we fail going forward? As humanity, I mean.
There have always been people who opposed progress for various reasons, and sometimes their reasons were understandable and even forgivable. Nobody can care about everything at once in equal measure and sometimes the safest default is "let's not rock the boat when things seem to be going well."
There's one current obstacle to progress that I have a harder time forgiving, though. Every time there's discussion of the possibility of doing some research into geoengineering as a means to counteract climate change a whole pile of people come out with "but that will only encourage more burning of fossil fuels" and "haven't you seen Snowpiercer?" counterarguments. It's wearying. The same people usually love the "we've passed an irreversible tipping point" articles that go on about how doomed we all are and how futile any further attempts to reverse climate change are.
If they really think we're doomed and nothing more can be done, then get out of the way of the people who are still trying to come up with solutions. A generation ago the same problem prevented nuclear power from being a useful solution.
What’s sad is nuclear power is still a useful solution. It’s not a perfect solution. Not by a long shot. But as far as non-renewable power sources go, nuclear is by far the most efficient. Yet today the US has virtually no nuclear power development going on.
Well, I sort of push nuclear power back from the "useful solution" slot at this point in history because now the problem is no longer preventing global temperatures from rising - that's a done deal now. Drastically cutting our carbon dioxide emissions are still a good idea but no longer all that's necessary any more. Plus solar and wind power are really coming into their own, so nuclear's good but no longer the only game in town on that front either.
I fear that eventually geoengineering will have been put off for so long that we'll be in a situation where "yeah, reducing global temperatures would be nice, but vast regions of farmland already turned to desert so the real problem we're facing these days is how to rapidly spin up new farmland and that old problem of lowering global temperatures is no longer all that's necessary any more. Maybe if we'd seriously investigated doing it back in the 2020s it would have made a difference then."
Just don't believe this is anything new. Back in time, people used to seriously believe in faeries, trolls, deamons, angels and other supernatural phenomena.
That's how you could lead people to carry holy wars and consider serfdom and slavery as natural order of things.
Back in the 80's, I remember a report from an ethnologist going to Nepal and meeting people who seriously believed that Russians had goat feet.
If anything, the internet has revealed the credulity of the general population, and provides means to fight and contain superstitions of various kinds.
It's really so sad and frustrating for those under the age of 45. Millennials were raised during a time of prosperity and possibilities, only to find out it was all a sham by the selfish, stupid and mostly older generations. Now Millennials, Gen Z and Gen A will reap the outcomes of all that while those who caused it will die off before things get even worse. I harbor no resent towards Gen X, but their refusal to fight the tide certainly didn't help.
as a genXer we were promised and viewed all that could be done and was being done. then they voted in Reagan and was all stripped away. any glimpse of prosperity during the 90s was GenX optimism that was destroyed in 2000 when it was all stolen from everyone again. GenX doesn't do anything anymore because we were told to shut up as we grew up in the 80s and then had it stolen again in the 2000 election.
@thesebits Definitely. I remember as a kid in the 70s all of this innovation and research into getting us off of fossil fuels being taught to us and a real sense of optimism about the future and science. So much changed for the better or was moving in the right direction then fucking Reagan and the Bushes and greedy cronies like Gingrich come into power and ripped all of that away.
I feel like you’re doing Gen X a huge disservice here. Like there’s a chunk of history you’re not familiar with.
Gen X was the first generation to go to college only to come out saddled with debt and only “mcjobs” to show for it. We graduated into NAFTA and globalisation.
There were some hardcore protests, movements, and mobilisations around the issues that matter… Economy, environment, women’s rights, employee rights, animal welfare rights, etc.
It has very obviously continued to deteriorate, but I’ll admit there was optimism because we did see some gains and some promise… I can’t remember the last time I felt any optimism about this world.
I harbor no resent towards Gen X, but their refusal to fight the tide certainly didn't help.
@Ganondorf While growing up, GenX was vastly outnumbered by Greatest Generation, Silent Generation & Boomers. The stereotype is that they cynically opted out but I think a lot of that was because there were limited democratic options available and it was deeply frustrating to many.
It's really so sad and frustrating for those under the age of 45. Millennials were raised during a time of prosperity and possibilities, only to find out it was all a sham by the selfish, stupid and mostly older generations.
I share your frustration. The US is still the wealthiest country on earth by a large margin, with many possibilities if we can convince ourselves to share it equitably. We could make our systemic incentives virtuous rather than destructive. We don't need to squeeze everyone and reward bad actors to have abundance.
I harbor no resent towards Gen X, but their refusal to fight the tide certainly didn't help.
Not all of us were apathetic; there were many who tried to fight for what was considered really progressive ideas at the time, like fighting for equal rights and against climate change, but there weren't enough of us. We're a smaller generation anyway, didn't have a good way to make our voices heard since the internet was still in its infancy, and were turned into a punchline by the media. And everybody believed it. Slacker, freeloader, tree-hugger, JFC it's no wonder why nobody took us seriously. I mean, frick, in the 90s everyone got their news from four network channels and a few cable channels on tv, so America believed the hype and largely wrote us off.
We tried, man. We did the absolute best we could with a shitty situation, and it stings to think about how we weren't able to accomplish more in our youth. Please don't write us off as a useless apathetic generation, we've already been through that before. Besides, you're probably thinking of our parents, the Boomer generation (born 1945-1965). They aren't entirely to blame for the country's problems, but they held (still do in many ways) most of the power and chose to throw their support behind rich wealthy conservative assholes, and we're still feeling the affects of their decisions. Again, they don't deserve all the blame, but the sheer amount of Boomer shit contributions to society dwarfs what the worst of Gen X ever did.
People are selfish and stupid no matter the age. My city is full of people driving gas guzzlers, traveling all the time, and ordering UberEats for every meal. They are all under 45. Then gen Z are particular bad and refuse to use public transit.
It's not about age. It's about class/wealthy. The poor use far fewer resources than the wealthy do. Rich young people are living in 5000sq ft homes by themselves and burning through natural gas and oil. They aren't living in 500sq ft apartment like ordinary folks.
Agree with everything you’re saying, but one slight problem with public transit is just how ridiculously unsafe it feels. People might be much more likely to get injured in a car crash, but the fear of being attacked or otherwise molested on public transport is simply bigger.
In my neck of the woods,if I have to choose between getting stuck in traffic for 10 minutes or wait for a bus to be late (if it shows) for a 2 hour roundtrip, I'll just get in my car.
That's not even the real issue imo, just the symptom. Public transit needs to be an actually viable alternative to driving which is hard to do when it's underfunded and we bulldozed our cities to build low-density car-dependent hellscapes we now call cities. If I get out of the states at some point I want to go somewhere walkable with nice transit so badly. Not Just Bikes has me wanting to go to Amsterdam, that looks heavenly
Your comment makes me feel self conscious as a mid 30s bachelor lol. After I got divorced…and kept the house I bought for us and our future family, I now live alone in a 3500sqft house.
It’s a god damn burden more than anything. There’s so much wasted space, and everything is more. More expensive to maintain, more expensive to heat and cool, and so much more to clean. Otherwise, I live a pretty modest life; cook, clean, and maintain everything solo.
I really just like my location and workshop. I’d be more than happy to have 800sqft living… the thing is that this house was cheap relatively speaking ($245k in 2017).
At this point, it would cost substantially more for me to downsize and move… I kinda feel trapped but more in an analysis paralysis way. So many variables and too many decisions.
My mom is in a similar situation. We all grew up and moved out of the 5 bedroom house, then Dad died and now she lives in it alone. She doesn't want all the space, but selling and buying a small home would actually not net her any profit and it's a huge hassle.
Which is what the app on my phone is based on already. I manage it most days easily by walking from the bus station to work and back, which is ~1 mile. And that doesn't include the time I'm actually at work, because I can't wear my smart watch actually in the office.
Or 7,000, or 6,000-8,000. If we’re going to nitpick there’s a lot of numbers tossed out in the article, but then somebody who reads it doesn’t really need to be saved a click.
the optimal number is probably closer to 6,000 steps per day, depending on your age.
In 2021, Paluch and her team published research based on a cohort of more than 2,000 middle-aged individuals living across the US. They found taking at least 7,000 steps a day reduced chances of premature death by 50 to 70 percent.
For adults aged 60 and older, this reduced risk topped out at around 6,000 to 8,000 steps a day. Pushing further might have other benefits, but a reduced chance of death isn’t one.
The study found that those who are younger could do well to walk a little more, but there wasn’t evidence that they’d necessarily live longer by walking more than 8,000 to 10,000 steps a day.
But if nothing else, setting our sights on at least 6,000 to 8,000 paces before bedtime could be a far easier step towards a longer life.
Don’t know what the standards are for this science page, but unless there’s no rules here, this doesn’t fit the bill. Not science. It’s an anecdote, and one posted on fox news nonetheless. I expect a sub like this for the most part to discuss peer reviewed works.
It's also basically a laundry list of every talking point transphobes use. I feel very bad for the adult (not a child, as they try to paint him) here, but this is an anecdote being spun into a dishonest propaganda piece.
I study environmental science and I can believe it, every model I've used all the sources I've used that predict have been conservative in numbers compared to what's going on.
The problem is we are never going to do what needs to be done because capitalism is the literal cause and the world is addicted to capitalism because none of the companies are going to do what they need to do unless it's profitable.
It's greed or commercialism. Capitalism is synonymous to them in popular discussions, but even if you picked a non-capitalist stance like communism, they'd produce greenhouse gas anyway.
As long as all the air-conditioning is chugging along, most people won’t even notice. Thank god the texan electric grid is stable enough to never cut out. Wait…
Oh god don't even mention it... I was already afraid it would break down last year (when we didn't have this extreme heat). I'm planning to leave Texas as early as possibly can partly because of all this craziness, meanwhile some of my coworkers don't even notice what kinds of nightmarish scenario is happening down here
My power just went out again. It has failed 3 times in the last 2 weeks. I'm in Houston. The storm that blew through took me out for 3 1/2 day. A week later another storm downed us for 3 hours and now I'm typing this in my powerless house once again. I heard a pop this time so I'm assuming it's a transformer. Centex says it will be back in a few hours. The only reason I'm still in this sh*t hole state is because my husband's parents are here. Thank God I have an appt with a generator company tomorrow. Eff this state in the A
Wild that he blames "gender ideology" for this. "Gender ideology" didn't make him hate himself for being an effeminate gay man. A culture of homophobia and toxic masculinity did. He thought transitioning would help him escape the toxicity of that culture and it didn't and that's a tragedy. But he was pressured to be something he's not, not by "gender ideology," because that seeks to affirm the rights of individuals to be whomever they want, but by the overbearing traditionalists who wrecked his mental health trying to make him fit into a neat gender confirming role.
Let’s make sure we don’t just automatically believe this is real, until it is verified in some way. It would be very easy to entirely fake this, and Fox has a history of running plenty of unverified everything.
Isn't it weird how knee replacement surgery has a dissatisfactory rate 100x that of gender transition surgery but Fox News doesn't write any articles about the millions of people that are dissatisfied with their new knees?
Scientists are bearing the brunt of this, but it is very much everyone’s problem. The people being harassed are doing things we urgently need them to do. That includes things like warning us about about immediate dangers, telling us what precautions we need to take, and doing research that could lead to workarounds and solutions to the problems themselves.
We need to speak against this. We need to act against this. And we need to change the system to provide protections and remedies. Otherwise we are all going to suffer.
Speaking does not stop those who are willing to harass and intimidate those who are working to improve our world. They cannot be reasoned with because they are categorically unreasonable.
I will leave what actually DOES work to your imagination. Cowards are cowardly.
I think you underestimate the degree to which they are cowardly. They gain confidence from superior numbers, but one-on-one, or crowd vs crowd, a lot of them can be put off by speech or other non-violent means. I think that deep down a lot of them know what they are doing is wrong, even though they tell themselves otherwise.
Non-violent resistance has a long history and has often been effective. As an example, the fight for civil rights was not won because the progressives usually managed to beat up the racists. The progressives were largely non-violent. The racists were routinely violent, but they still lost.
It takes a lot of bravery to oppose someone who may try to hurt you. Some of us will get hurt. It shouldn’t be necessary, but if we want this to stop we will have to take some risks. (There’s nothing wrong with avoiding high-risk situations, but some risk is necessary.)
Personally, I am also okay with defending yourself if you are attacked. Non-violence is always better, but I doubt I could remain passive if faced with physical violence.
All of your points are absolutely valid because it's definitely difficult to find the gumption to stand in the way of raucous bastard.
Once you find it, it just becomes a righteous way to become the raucous bastard.
Dont get me wrong, I'm no billy badass that goes looking for trouble, but SOMEBODY has to do it - and after the first guy does it, you'd be surprised how many somebodies will help.
I love chaos, and will gladly spend the night in jail, or a couple weeks in a cast to cause the people who inflict fear to become fearful. It's the only way they learn.
Interesting read. A few years ago I developed, seemingly overnight, an intolerance for red meat. Which sucked cause I really like it. But I developed it while working in the arctic, where there are no ticks (but like trillions of other biting insects). Doctors just did the usual rotation of antibiotics and then said IBS and patted themselves on the back. It was a terrible cop-out, but when living in the arctic you don’t get much choice for doctors. Over time the problem largely tapered off and I’m no longer a firehose an hour after eating meat. I feel for anyone who gets this.
I’m hoping that AI really helps within the field of medicine. Doctors cannot be expected to know every possible cause of every illness – they’re human after all. But I’m hoping that the weird stuff can be detected and at least diagnosed properly.
I’m so mad at Elizabeth Holmes. Any startup in this space will face such an uphill battle.
you should see what the eczema community put up with. Essentially it’s a community of just talking each other out of committing suicide because of how much pain they live with every day and the entire medical industry has failed them so miserably by dismissing them.
“Try the elimination diet” is the best they are given with absolutely no “why” or extension to find a better solution to allergies than either avoid the triggers (if you’re even lucky enough to find out what they are) or try a life threatening injection if your allergy gets severe.
Then you have the celiac community and what they have to put up with doctors: “eat gluten for 3 weeks without killing yourself so I can diagnose that you actually are intolerant to gluten”. The community has lovingly referred to this now as “the gluten challenge”….. which the medical community went as far as to take offence to the name. I wish empathy was taught as part of the curriculum for being a doctor.
Eczema: For years I was dependent on prescription topical steroids. Then I tried giving up soap. I no longer suffer from eczema.
Briefly went back to using soap during COVID. Had a flare-up within a week. Haven’t used soap since, except in the rare occasion I have something specific on my hands (machine grease or something) I want to get off.
Oh yes, the gluten challenge, one doctor asked me to eat gluten for half a year before he would be willing to check me out. DUUUDE, I only need to eat gluten once and you can watch the results in real time…
I work in drug development, and have done a lot of work in topical drug development, specifically for skin diseases. Psoriasis gets most of the attention, but there's a lot of work being done on other skin diseases, as well
"Eczema" is kind of a catch-all term for a group of diseases, which is one of the reasons treatment is so difficult. One kind is often mistaken for (or even indistinguishable from) another. The most common, though, is atopic dermatitis (which is hilarious when you look up the etymology).
So that said.... Have you tried JAK inhibitors? Ruxolitinib is one of the best ones, formulated as a cream called Opzelura. It's at least good for flare ups.
Unfortunately, there aren't really any good drugs for preventing it. If you want company on that one, talk to the asthma community.
But.... There is work being done. I've worked on it. I've had companies spend millions on the work. I haven't seen anything very promising, but maybe you can take some comfort that there are frustrated scientists working on it, and pharma companies poised to take all of your money once something is found.
I’ve never been to the Arctic but the same thing happened to me. I don’t think I was bitten by a tick but all of a sudden I started getting sick after eating red meat. Cutting it out of my diet fixed that issue. It’s been about 1.5 years since then and I’ve cut all meat out of my diet. It’s nice having a healthy digestive cycle but there are some things I miss and the plant based meat alternatives don’t always do it for me.
I feel for you and anyone suffering with a meat allergy, but I dunno how much I’d trust AI for any serious purposes after seeing the garbage it can spit out.
Seriously, I’ve managed to get AI to write me instructions on how to inflate a phone and how to shave alligator hair. Rather that say “I’m sorry, that doesn’t make any sense, but here are some related topics”, instead it literally wrote out actual instructions for that nonsense LOL!
So yeah, I have no reason to trust AI for anything serious, it’s about an ignorant joke of a language model is all it really adds up to.
Yeah, I’m not talking about a language model AI. But rather something like the stuff the insurance companies are using to assess risk – they take a lot of data in and cluster them together. Humans are sometimes really bad at recognizing patterns if you don’t have enough data. A pattern that goes: “oh, all these people in this region with this specific digestive problem spatially maps to this insect” is the sort of thing ML should be good at. But where it will be really good is in turning proteins into diagnosis: “if this protein is detected in the blood in an general scan, combined with symptoms, then diagnose X” – right now you only get tested for the things the doctor orders. Even more promising yet: with enough data, the AI should figure out which proteins actually do specific functions in the body, which will advance the research side (see, for example, Alphafold).
In a use case like this, AI would be less about a final diagnose and more about getting the doctor or patient pointed in the right direction, especially with rare cases that few doctors are aware of. You no longer need to visit a hundred specialists in the hope of finding the one person who's seen something similar to your case before.
Agree in this case AI is just WebMD symptom checker but with the ability to take in infinite data points and narrow it down with prompting questions and hopefully being able to upload images for further diagnosis.
People still don't understand that AI is an all encompassing term like "tool" and not a single thing.
Just like we use thousands of vastly different and specialized tools, in a decade we'll be surrounded by medical AI, engineering AI, accounting AI, design AI, research AI, life coaching AI, etc.
Right now we have a few LLMs and generative AIs, but that's like having a pen and a spray gun.
Of course you wouldn't ask any of them for a medical diagnosis.
It's the "peer-reviewed" part that should be raising eyebrows, not the AI-generated part. How the gibberish images were generated is secondary to the fact that the peer reviewers just waved the obvious nonsense through without even the most cursory inspection.
Peers are People and if you have papers published you know it can mean very little. People can and will accept or deny papers on their own biases. If you send an article to be reviewed at a journal that is about X and the study suggests X isn’t that helpful for a specific situation. They could absolutely reject it from a smaller journal. You will get reviewers who will reject your paper for contradicting their paper, even if you have the evidence to back it up.
In another article, it said that one of the reviewers did being up the nonsense images, but he was just completely ignored. Which is an equally big problem.
I read another article which quoted one of the peers as saying they mentioned the image but it wasn’t what they were reviewing, apparently the content was fairly standard and I haven’t seen anyone imply the research itself was invalid
I’ve heard some of my more senior colleagues call frontiers a scam even before this regarding editorial practices there.
It’s actually furstratingly common for some reviewer comments to be completely ignored, so it’s possible someone raised a flag and no one did anything about it.
Frontiers has something like a 90%+ publish rate, which for any “per reviewed” journal is ridiculously high. They have also been in previous scandals where a large portion of their editorial staff were sacked (no pun intended).
They sent me an email once inviting me to be a guest editor. I thought it would be a cool experience and a neat thing to have on the CV.
I mentioned it to my advisor at the time and they told me that frontiers does that pretty often and that these special issues don’t amount to anything.
Frontiers isn’t alone of course. MDPI is notorious for shitty editorial practices too.
The biggest problem with Frontiers for me is that there are some handy survey articles that are cited like 500 times. It seems that Interdisciplinary surveys are hard to publish in a traditional journal, and as a result 500 articles cited this handy overview article for readers who would need an overview.
The article I checked was in a reasonable quality, and it's a shame I can't cite it just because it's in Frontiers.
Some of the reviewers have explained it as the software they use doesn’t even load up the images. So unless the picture is a cited figure, it might not get reviewed directly.
I can kindof understand how something like this could happen. It’s like doing code reviews at work. Even if the logical bug is obvious once the code is running, it might still be very difficult to spot when simply reviewing the changed code.
We have definitely found some funny business that made it past two reviewers and the original worker, and nobody’s even using machine models to shortcut it! (even things far more visible than logical bugs)
Still, that only offers an explanation. It’s still an unacceptable thing.
Yea, “should be”, but as said, if it’s not literally directly relevant even while being in the paper, it might get skipped. Lazy? Sure. Still understandable.
A more apt coding analogy might be code reviewing unit tests. Why dig in to the unit tests if they’re passing and it seems to work already? Lazy? Yes. Though it happens far more than most non-anonymous devs would care to admit!
(Distant Binaries orbit many astronomical units from each other, Alpha Centauri A+B, are a distant binary system)
The orbital data for these systems shows a lot of variance that should not be there. One issue is there could be a third (or even forth) smaller star (brown dwarf) also present but undetectable that is causing the errors.
The research team tried to eliminate the possibility of these bodies causing the observed errors in the two body data.
They have found there is still something else happening even when this is done.
This has been published in a very respected journal so it will be interesting to see where this leads.
Ooh, fun fact! Did you know the It Ain't Much But It's Honest Work meme guy was a proponent of no till farming and was a leader in the movement advocating for and utilizing the farming practices suggested in this article?
Dave Brandt passed away in May this year, but his honest work? It meant so much.
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