I'm calling for people to stop believing nonsense and to think for a couple of seconds before signing onto some political agenda. If there are in fact 950 more knuckleheads at Google who are planning to disrupt the workplace like the last 50, then everyone benefits if they get shown to the door.

They built the wall to protect themselves from Hamas, not to keep Palestinians in. Before Oct. 7th, people who lived in Gaza could commute to jobs in Israel.

You mean donate the water and power, not "control" it. Look, if Hamas were to release the hostages and lay down their arms, this conflict would be over in an instant. Hamas has rejected what, four consecutive deals for a cease fire? This isn't on Israel. This is on Hamas.

From the No Tech For Apartheid website:

"We’re heeding the call from over 1000 Google and Amazon workers to rise up against the contract, known as Project Nimbus.Technology should be used to bring people together, not enable apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and settler-colonialism. Following in the footsteps of those who fought to divest from apartheid South Africa and won, it’s our responsibility to rise up in support of Palestinian freedom. The Amazon and Google execs who signed this contract can still choose to be on the right side of history."

Frankly, the only reason groups like these continue to exist is because people believe their BS. Israel isn't engaging in "apartheid", they evacuated the Gaza Strip in 2005, and it has been run by Hamas ever since. They aren't engaging in "ethnic cleansing", they're not the ones stockpiling weapons and command centers in hospitals, schools, and homes, that's what Hamas is doing. Nor are they "colonizing" the Gaza Strip, they literally built a wall around it to separate themselves from it.

I'm no Israel apologist, but BS is BS, it smells the same all over the world. It's a lot more important to use the brain God gave you than to be "on the right side of history". Stop listening to these guys.

I don't give a fig about "Net Zero". It's not an scientific concept, it's marketing-speak. I want to know about value, price vs performance, robustness, longevity, carrying capacity, how EVs change workflows and delivery schedules. A different powertrain than the one we've been using for the past 150 years might be useful. It might change the equation, provide different sweetspots. It's worth a large scale experiment.

But it's not going to SAVE THE PLANET because that's a silly, stupid goal that only politicians talk about to make you vote for them.

There's a big disconnect here. OK, sure, Google is a "workplace", but a place for doing what kind of work? They talk about being on a mission of social change. Their list of Commitments is long on sociology, but very short on engineering.

What normie Google consumers want is just solid products and services. There's a lot of excellent work in the Google product lineup, but there's still so much farther to go. Just yesterday I ran into another brain-dead limitation: regular expression replacement groups only work in Google Sheets. That is just completely inexcusable.

I would give up 8 people working on "sustainability" at Google just to have one competent engineer go through the technical debt list and make some genuine headway.

I'm very happy to see a "climate change" article that is consistent with geologic facts, that is an excellent development. Land subsidence is naturally occurring and happens all the time, but it can be significantly accelerated by draining aquifers, which lowers the water table and compacts the soils. This is definitely a direct consequence of urbanization, especially in arid climates.

Subsidence is typically quite localized, if by "localized" we mean an entire geographic region. For example, all of the land surrounding the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay in the Eastern US is subsiding much more rapidly than the rest of the coastline. That's because the mouth of the Bay is the epicenter of an ancient meteor strike 60 miles wide, and all of that land is essentially just ancient in-fill.

Apart from not draining aquifers, there's probably not much that can be done to stop subsidence, we'll just have to adapt. But since the process is blazingly fast in geologic time -- 5mm/year -- it's still relatively slow by human standards. Still, fast enough to have to be figured into land development engineering plans.

They can have my smartphone when they pry it from my cold, dead fingers. Oh. Wait.

We told you that forcing people to return to the office was a bad idea! But did you listen? No. :0

Ok, all you climate sleuths, here's your assignment:

1. Find out which scenario this study is based upon.
2. Find out how likely that scenario is

Without looking, I'm guessing it's RCP 8.5.

How I wish it was hard to "prove government doesn't work", but, man, this thing just proves itself, it needs no help from us.

Name me a government-run anything that is being done better than the private sector could have done it -- to say nothing of how much it costs, which would be in the territory of a joke by way of comparison.

We don't have a government because it works better, we have a government because we want it to have monopoly power over certain things such as police, military, infrastructure, etc. We put up with government.

I challenge you to look again at the original summary statement, and tell me you think it is an accurate, defensible description of the problem.

I say it is not. I say it is marketing-speak that really has no place whatsoever in a discussion forum targeted towards engineers. I say it is yet another low-quality statement that relies on hand-waving and alarmism.

Since I am an old fart and have been on this site for decades now, I am willing to put my name to my objections. I know in advance that I will be moderated down; moderation on /. has been broken by activists for many years now. But I have nothing to lose, and nothing to prove. I just want a competent discussion on the facts.

For example, I would like to know what caused the detected reduction. I suspect the study authors have some ideas, where are they? I would like to know where the measurements were taken. Were they in a field? In a city? Next to a factory? Next to a factory that recently shut down? I would like to have some intelligent discussion on how these results might be extrapolated to the world at large.

But we get none of this. We get more alarmist claptrap. I'm done with giving that a pass. I want some minimally competent science in these discussions. There are other forums where the PR types can ply their craft.