Wem genau hast du zugehört, der dir von diesen Leuten erzählt hat, die sich nur deswegen als Frau identifizieren, weil sie ‘kein toxischer Mann und Täter’ sein wollen?

Das hast du Dir aber schön zurecht philosophiert.

Leider ist es nur kompletter Blödsinn. Transsexualität ist weder Illusion noch Flucht in eine Opferrolle. Das weiß man, wenn man sich ein bisschen über die Materie informiert, und vor allem den Leuten auch mal zuhört, anstatt sich nur seine eigene Version der Dinge zurechtzulegen.

Die Interessen von Minderheiten sind kein Nullsummenspiel, auch wenn Rechtskonservative gern so tun. Im den allermeisten Fällen haben neue oder zusätzliche Rechte für Minderheiten keine Auswirkung auf die der Mehrheiten. Aber es wird halt gern so getan, als ob z.B. ein durchschnittlicher heterosexueller Mann auf einmal weniger Rechte hätte, wenn man die von Trans-Personen erweitert.

Das ist geschichtlich gesehen auch überhaupt nicht neu, dieses Muster wurde schon immer dazu verwendet, sozialen Fortschritt aufzuhalten. Und Leute fallen immer noch drauf rein, also wird weiter so vorgegangen.

That should put paid to the myth that Trump is ‘the antidote to all the wars’.

I always thought that the argument ‘no wars were started during his presidency’ was bullshit.

Die FDP hat die gesamte Legislaturperiode damit verbracht, in der Ampel querzuschiessen und den beiden (grösseren) Koalitionspartnern ihren Willen aufzuzwingen. Lindners Rausschmiss wundert mich nicht im geringsten, aber das bedeutet natürlich das Ende der Ampel, da sein Nachfolger wohl kaum aus den Reihen der FDP kommen kann und wird.

Allerdings glaube ich auch nicht, dass Scholz die Vertrauensfrage überleben wird. Und bei Neuwahlen dürfte erst mal Schluss mit SPD und Grünen sein.

Good on this kid for going to such lengths to verify his hypothesis and show a serious weakness in railway infrastructure. I hope he goes on to become a serious railway enthusiast and advocate for safe, efficient rail.

However, there are way too many factors in the number of derailments and safety incidents in US rail operations to pin them down to this one issue. Once the major operators embarked on a journey to squeeze more and more money out of the business, a lot of things happened. Trains became longer - excessively so. Used to be that a train 1.4 miles long was considered massive. These days they are the norm. Can you imagine a train so long that, in hilly terrain, sections of it are being dragged uphill while other sections are pushing downhill?

Reductions in staff, motive power fleets and maintenance have led to trains being badly composed, with loads being distributed in a less than optimal way. An old railway man once told me that the only time he broke a train was when he, in a rush and under pressure, agreed to attach a rake of fully loaded freight cars to the end of a train of empties. Unequal load distribution played a role in a number major derailment incidents, among them a derailment in Hyndman, PA, which required the town to be evacuated for several days.

ProPublica have a series of articles regarding rail safety, and specifically one about the dangers of long trains. So while the worn out springs certainly don’t help, they are only one of many things that are impacting rail safety, and probably not even the lowest hanging fruit.

Ich bin 2004 ausgewandert, und habe beide Stücke noch in Erinnerung als vor meiner Auswanderung geschehen.

Scheisse, ich werde alt…

Ja, ist schon ein bisschen eine ‘Wasser macht nass’ Meldung. Wenn die Politik nur endlich mal ernsthaft was dagegen unternähme, und zwar nicht nur Verbote, sondern auch richtige Hilfe für Suchtkranke. Wir wissen schließlich, dass diese Spiele aufs perfideste darauf zugeschnitten sind, Leute süchtig zu machen. Diese Branche sollte eigentlich nur in strengstens regulierter Form existieren.

Glücksspiel ist in Australien eine ernsthafte Krise, aber weder Staatsregierungen noch der Bund unternehmen bislang etwas ernsthaftes dagegen. In fast jedem Pub gibt es Spielmaschinen (im Prinzip elektronische einarmige Banditen - ‘Pokies’ genannt) sowie Keno, ein andauerndes Tippspiel. Überall wird man mit Werbung für Sportwetten zugeschüttet. Und ständig liest man in den Medien Berichte darüber, wie sich Leute immer wieder um ihre ganze Habe spielen und wetten, wie gefährlich die Spielsucht ist, und was da für Unmengen an Geld im Spiel sind.

Thing is, I am actually Gen X. Early even. And I look at the Boomers and see the generation who kept pulling up the ladder. They got free education and privatised it to make it expensive for us. They got free healthcare and privatised it to make it expensive. They got into the housing market for cheap and started using it as an investment and speculation vehicle, making it harder for each subsequent generation to get into it. They were pretty much the last generation in which it was possible to raise a family on a single income. Climate change is front and center of mind in my generation, we’ve known for over 30 years what’s coming. When you look at those who most fervently oppose climate change action - all old fogeys, and I say that being very conscious of the fact that I am approaching ‘old fogey’ status from the perspective of Gen Z and Gen Alpha.

I can only imagine how todays teenagers and young adults feel…

Teenagers today were born in the aftermath of a global financial crisis, are seeing war after war after war, grow up with the knowledge that the world is going to shit and the older generations aren’t willing to do anything about it. They see everyone pull up the ladder behind them, the ‘fuck you I got mine’ mentality is everywhere.

And TikTok is to blame for their mental health?

Specific to subway surfing: I’m 46, and I know this stuff happened when I was a kid. There were no social media back then to show you, but somehow kids still these got stupid ideas. It seems like social media is just the new video games are the new comic books are the new heavy metal is the new whatever scapegoat society wants to use to blame for its own deliberate shortcomings in bringing up the next generation.

A decade ago 1TB SSDs were rare and, like all new things in tech, expensive.

It’s because they think only other people’s feelings should get fucked, not their own.

SSDs were relatively new in 2010, and priced accordingly. Now it’s just about increasing sizes and (hopefully) reliability. I just don’t think that all of a sudden we’ll have huge cheap SSDs - people are used to a certain price point and manufacturers will take advantage of that.

The prices will stay the same. Manufacturers will just make more profit.

And the thing is, unlike someone’s sexual orientation, which they are born with, someone’s religious beliefs are actually a choice. A lifestyle, if you so will. They’re not something you’re born with, but something you’re taught.

Equally then, the nuclear disasters shouldn’t count, right?

Deaths from an accident at an active nuclear power plant are not the same as deaths caused by a burst dam that was originally intended to produce electricity one day, but has never produced any. Especially if you call the statistic ‘Deaths per unit of electricity production’. At the time of the accident, it was just a dam, construction of any hydroelectric facilities was nowhere near beginning, so calling it a ‘hydropower accident’ is highly debatable (probably as at least as debatable as calling nuclear ‘conventional’). Without the inclusion of those deaths, hydro would be shown to be even safer than nuclear, given that it has produced nearly twice as much electricity in the time span covered by those statistics, while having caused a similar number of deaths (if you continue to ignore the increased miner mortality, otherwise nuclear will look way worse). The article also does not cite how they determined the number of 171000 deaths, given that estimates for the Banqian dam failure range between 26000 and 240000. The author mentions (but does not cite) a paper by Benjamin Sovacool from 2016, which analyzes the deaths caused by different forms of energy but, crucially, omits the Banqian dam death toll. I will try to get hold of that paper to see the reasoning, but I suspect it may align with mine.

How do you assume it’s ignoring their increased mortality?

The article makes zero mention of any such thing, and the section about how the deaths are calculated (footnote 3 in this section) only calls out the deaths from Chernobyl and Fukushima. Direct quote from the footnote:

Nuclear = I have calculated these figures based on the assumption of 433 deaths from Chernobyl and 2,314 from Fukushima. These figures are based on the most recent estimates from UNSCEAR and the Government of Japan. In a related article, I detail where these figures come from.

No mention at all of any other deaths or causes of death, nothing whatsoever. It’s the deaths from two nuclear accidents, that’s all. The figures from the cited study alone would multiply the number of nuclear deaths in this statistic. What’s worse, the author has published another article on nuclear energy which essentially comes to the exact same conclusions. But if you include deaths from a burst dam that has never produced electricity (but was planned to do so eventually), then you must include deaths among people who mine the material destined to produce electricity in a nuclear plant.

To me it simply looks like the author of this article is highly biased towards nuclear, and has done very selective homework.

Edit: It’s also the cleanest and nearly the safest source of energy, including the disasters. https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

I love how the ‘Death rates per unit of electricity production’ graphic highlights deaths from a 1975 dam break in China, therefore making hydro seem less safe than nuclear, when the dam in question up to that point hadn’t produced a single megawatt of electricity (and by the looks of it, still hasn’t to this day). At the same time it appears to conveniently ignore the increased mortality among uranium miners.

Nuclear falls under ‘conventional’ - the PWR design of TMI is one of the oldest and most common types of nuclear reactor. It’s just another way of creating steam to drive a turbine which then generates electricity.

Nuclear is also anything but clean. People love to call nuclear ‘clean’ because its low in emissions, but that’s ignoring the requirement for either safe storage of radioactive material or reprocessing thereof, as well as the emission of radioactivity in the water cycled through the reactor.

Three Mile Island is the epitome of

conventional dirty energy