Swede here. If you think building times in Sweden and China are about the same, I have a bridge to sell you.

Until you check up on the delays of the big infrastructure projects in Sweden, I urge you refrain from posting anything about building times relating to Sweden. You just look silly to anyone that has even the faintest idea of what you are talking about.

In China the government say that something needs to be built and millions of citizens will be displaced (Three Gorges Dam displaced 1,3 million Chinese, about 1/8th of Swedens population to put something into perspective) and a ridiculously large work force can be employed. In Sweden individual citizens can appeal in a building process. Some projects have been held up in the legal system for decades because someone objected to it being built.

Sweden have had plans for final disposal of radioactive waste since I was a kid. The current time table to construct it is 70 years (this is the official site for the Swedish government)!. This means that from planning to finished storage it will have taken over five generations, more than once century. Nuclear project is Sweden does not run on a Chinese time table.

At the time of writing, Sweden is exporting 4725MW of power, and the current generation from the nuclear power plants is 5793MW. That is, we are exporting power equivalent to 80% of our nuclear production. For comparison, Sweden uses 17349MW. These numbers change all the time, but you can track them and history here: https://www.svk.se/om-kraftsystemet/kontrollrummet/. Not saying that we shouldn't export energy, just that we already are the biggest energy exporter to our surrounding countries.

Also note that Sweden do not have any uranium mining. The nuclear fuel is imported through Euratom Supply Agency (ESA). Please check where they source their uranium and and see if you think there might be some problems there.

This whole article is on building nuclear power in Sweden. What they are doing in China is totally irrelevant.

Well, the Swedes to not burn coal so that simplifies your equation.

Is this one of these "Tell me you are not a computer geek without telling me you are not a computer geek"-moments? :-)

ACM = Association for Computing Machinery, an organization that has been around since 1947, hence the arcane name. They publish journals and books, have lots of SIGs (Special Interest Groups), hold conferences, hand out awards and offer educational resources. If you have read any computer related technical articles in the last few decades or so, you are more or less bound to have run into them occasionally. All this can of course be learned if you go to their site, linked in the summary. But yeah, yeah, I know this is Slashdot...

Let me stop you right there. When you start your conversation by putting the word vaccines in quotation marks, you have already show that you are not here for an open and honest discussion on the topic. You have already stated your position very clearly. Please just drop the act, no need to pretend that you are interested in a real debate.

Podcasts on Apple Music? I don't think so. Perhaps on Apple Podcasts (another service). At least get your facts right before you post.

And Spotify did something entirely different from just listing Joe Rogans podcast. They paid him $100 millon for exclusivity. That is more money than I and everyone I know would earn over a lifetime. Combined. So Spotify isn't just another podcast listing service in this matter, they are pushing his podcast hard and they paid him ridiculous amounts of money to keep doing what he does.

And I understand Neil Young and Joni Mitchell, part of the streaming fees that Spotify collects is used to pay Rogan (or did you think Spotify conjured up $100 million out of thin air?).

So cut the "whataboutism", the day Apple or any other podcast service pays a schmuck that promotes misinformation that much money, I will drop them like a stone. You feel free to be my canary and tell me when it happens. Until then, stop the false equivalences, whataboutisms and misinformation.

There is quite a lot of research into the causes of obesity, and it is not understood very well. Some factors might be psychological, others biological. This morning I heard about interesting research into the gut bacteria and their effect on obesity. But start wherever you want.

But yes, for most cases I think the GP is right. You might want to get rid of the obesity, but actually getting there is far harder than if you decide to get vaccinated and then actually get vaccinated. For the anti-vaxxers, that first part is the hard part. If they clear that hurdle the second one is trivial. For the obese it is the second part that is the really hard part.

I would claim that the second part for the obese is the really tough one out of these for one simple reason - committing to something, with a big chance of of relapses, for the rest of your life and sometimes having to resort to really invasive procedures that have significant medical risks.

Yes, you say that, but that doesn't make it mental illness. There is a clinical definition of mental illness, and just because you think someone is stupid doesn't mean that they are mentally ill in the clinical sense.

So what do I call it? Stupidity? Indoctrination? Fooled? Take your pick.

I don't think empathy is the right term to use here.

Sorry, but that won't work. I have a collague at work who refuses to take the vaccine and is pretty quiet about it. Now some of my vaccinated colleagues have gotten the omicron strain or have family members that are confirmed cases. They are in quarantine. But we are pretty sure that this non-vaccinated colleague will refuse to test himself if showing symptoms. He has already said that this is just a big collective hysteria. He considers any kind of restrictions to be infringements on his personal freedoms.

Your suggestion only works if everyone follows the rules. But when people are more concerned with their perceived "personal freedoms" than anything else, it won't work. Sadly.

Where does this fit into this discussion?

To my knowledge obesity is not contagious in the same way as Covid. And if there was a vaccine for obesity with about the same level of side effects as the Covid vaccines, I am willing to bet that the degree of vaccination would be significantly higher than that of the Covid vaccines.

Getting a Covid vaccine is free everywhere I know and requires a limited amount of your time. The side effects and risks are statistically lower than if you get Covid. Getting rid of excess body weight is a huge undertaking, especially if you are obese, requiring lifestyle changes (that might tie into other factors like mental health) and for some requires professional assistance for a long period of time. So I don't see how bringing up such disparate things would further the discussion.

But it is true that making fun of, or shaming obese people, is not constructive. Many of them suffer greatly from their condition and would like nothing more than have a more normal body weight. I have yet to meet, in person, someone who wants to be grossly overweight (although I once saw a documentary about people having a fetish for obese people). But that is an entirely different discussion IMHO.

No, it is NOT the most complete post, far from! It is a hodgepodge of reasoning; mixing ethics, religion and popular psychology together and end it with an incorrect linguistic analysis of what "mocking" is (there is no requirement for humor or laughter for it to be mocking). And that claim of it being "officially" is totally incorrect BS.

LKM has a much more nuanced reply that shows that the concept of right and wrong isn't something you easily can define and quantify in a way that is universal. Study a tiny bit of ethics and see that the different schools of ethics can answer these questions in wildly different ways.

You start to talk about good and evil, where as the article and earlier posts talk about wrong (and consecutively right). So why do you insist on turning the discussion onto good and evil, since you yourself say that they aren't interchangeable?

No. There are a lot of jobs where most of the time they are enjoyable if you are the right person for the job, and only a minor parts of the job are ones you have to do but not like. I know, since I switched careers to such a job and huge parts of my working day is really good and rewarding.

And then there are jobs that seem like fun at first, but when you start to do it full time and realize that you need to do stuff "around" what you like, it doesn't become as much fun anymore. 20 years back or so I was heavy into photography, and got quite good at it. People wanted to pay me for jobs. I did a few but decided I didn't want to spoil my hobby. Later on I met a photographer working for a major international publication visiting my home town. I was out on town with a friend taking some blue light photos. We had a great conversation with the photographer. He confessed that he envied us, taking the pictures we wanted to take, as opposed to him, taking the pictures his clients wanted to pay for. Every picture he took for himself was one he risked not being able to sell.

Also, I don't understand the cold-heartedness of some posters: "cry me a river". Just because you are stuck in a dead end job with no happiness doesn't mean everyone else deserves the same. If you hate it, do what I did, quit and find a job that makes the day better. Life is too short to spend on jobs you don't like.

You are just trolling, not playing the devils advocate. The Quran doesn't promote terrorism, just as the Bible don't tell Westboro Baptist Church that US soldiers deserve to die and you must hate homosexuals. It is some people interpreting religious texts are the villains, not the scripture, no matter if it is the Bible, Torah or Quran.

The day QAnon becomes a major, world-spanning religion and where the majority of religious practitioners are non-violent, then I will support their religious texts to be sold on Amazon... which means never. Stop your feeble whataboutisms.

And idiotic conspiracy theories should NOT be treated equally with anything else than perhaps other idiotic conspiracy theories.

No, the government is the client, by definition, in a project that was supposed to be for the benefit for the public. That does not mean that the public is the client, not even indirectly. You don't become a client by proxy just because you are a taxpayer, that is not how projects work.

And yes, I shudder at the thought of uncounted number of backseat drivers trying give feedback. Letting more people look into something isn't trivial and it costs. What government projects should we allow full and instantaneous insight (aka absolute transparency) into and to what cost? What is an acceptable overhead cost for adding absolute transparency to every project? How much do you want to pay in extra tax just to humor this 'need' of yours? I rather prefer to pay less taxes and let the politicians heads roll if they get out of line, and that the money I pay in taxes go to healhcare, education etc. If we add overhead costs, we should make sure that we save money in the long run. Anything else is much more irresponsible than a failed project.

I do think we need transparency, to a certain degree. Absolute transparency only exists in utopia or where there is no regard for cost. Even if we have transparency things can slip through. Every project is a gamble.

If the UK taxpayers see that there has been something wrong going on, make 'em pay. Use your democratic vote.

Someone please mod parent up.

Just because taxpayers somehow pay for something doesn't mean that every taxpayer should be able to get full real-time insight into or control of it. I shudder at the thought of the extra cost when gazillions of wannabe software developers consider themselves to be the clients of a government project and mess it up.

I didn't see the following tweets until Major Nelson put out the apology, and I was rather horrified by the way Adam Orth expresses himself to a potential customer. Still, I am not sure kicking someone is the right way to go, but I do think they need to give at least the management some media training and make sure that everyone is aware of a company media policy. So many people are ignorant of how the internet ecosystem works and how things spread.

Personally, I refrain myself from publicly commenting on matters regarding the organization where I work. We have people whose job is to take care of these matters. When I see something I can tell them, say what I think and let them decide the correct course of action. I am entitled to my opinion, but that doesn't mean that I need to express it at all times. I know that my word might be taken for the official position and that might not be true, anyway I am not paid to comment on my employers decisions.

Yesterday I summed up some of my thoughts in the matter: http://mzomborszki.wordpress.com/2013/04/05/how-to-be-an-insensitive-clod/.

One of my first lecturers at the university said that the traditional lectures are the worlds worst Xerox-machine. One guy standing by the blackboard and 200+ students copying everything verbatim.

In his classes we got all the slides he used at the beginning of the course, so we had no need to copy everything down. Most of the time the topics were covered in the textbook, but if he chose to cover material that wasn't in the textbook, it was in the hand-outs. The notes I took in those classes were mainly writing down some extra words on a slide printout if I thought something could use extra clarification.

I don't see *why* the lectures should give you something that is *only* available to those attending the lectures. The lectures might give a different angle on the same subject, but essentially everything you need should be in the material you are already given. (Why on earth should the professor withhold information from the students? Isn't s/he interested in them learning?) This way, lectures can focus on trying to explain that and allow the students to ask questions for clarification of that material. Since we were given hand-outs and slides for all the classes for the whole semester, I could easily browse through next class in advance to be more prepared and ask more relevant questions in class, improving my learning even further. Each lecture was followed up by a smaller class with a TA, digging deeper into the subject of the day and possibly preparing for a lab session.

Attendance in a class should not be a goal in itself, learning is the goal, and the classes should facilitate that.

This method of course requires the lecturers to prepare the classes well in advance. Not all lecturers seem to have the ability and focus to do that. I wonder why they require any more of the students then.

This class was one of the best I attended to at my university, and the following four years I returned as a TA in that class, teaching a total of six classes of EE and CS students. For me it set a standard of teaching which I still today find exemplary. (The course in question was modeled on MIT 6.001 but had gone through a number of revisions throughout the years.)