Calling Belgium 3rd world isn't fair at all. It's a fledging 3rd world country at worst, nothing at all similar to the imminent 3rd world country that (say) the UK is.

You spend a lot of time on X, huh?

but I don't really consider women with 20% bodyfat in their 50s overweight..or men with 15% bodyfat at any age.

Well, you'd be wrong. BF% of >15% for men and >20% is overweight.

The reality is that most women over 50 are closer to 40%, and for any age it's >30%. Over half of women over 30 are obese. (Men aren't great but it's nothing as dire as this.)

This is even with our greatly-loosened criteria for what is considered obese - it used to be even more strict. People today are disgustingly unfit.

Coal isn't 'dirty energy'. Particularly with EPA regulation, it's considered "green" now. It's overall ecological impact (that is, in terms of total lifecycle cost) is significantly lower than wind.

Saying "wind is green" is myopic and short sighted, and doesn't include the massively disproportional material and ecological cost of producing the disposable steel and concrete towers with large, easily damaged fiberglass resin blades.

Wind isn't the lowest cost for baseload - if it isn't subsidized. It's not even competitive with natural gas, and is markedly less reliable.

It's subsidization which makes it cost competitive. And even then, it's only competitive per kwh, it's not competitive for primary base load (which is 100% what a datacenter needs) because wind is cyclical and periodic. It isn't always windy in WY, and it's often too windy for wind power (35mph+ winds). I'm really tired of the tripe propaganda about wind/solar. I LIKE wind and solar, conceptually (and for the ability to run it off-grid), but let's be real.

The solution here, long term, is likely SMR generation at-scale. You've got many datacenters, and the capacity scales rapidly. A single large reactor doesn't make fiscal sense, but a national program to produce industrialized SMRs at scale which could be deployed as needed over a period of years would, enabling cheap power generation. When you build at scale, you're able to drastically drive costs down.

Fission is also now on the horizon.

But in the interim, green coal and NG are likely to be the thing.

(I'm not looking forward to the massive impact that this is going to have on the regional NG market; NG has already gotten significantly more expensive, and so many people use it for heating.)

I do accept it. CO2 is 0.042% of our atmosphere. It has not been shown that CO2 is primarily or even significantly contributory to the greenhouse effect, however.

Even if it would, an increase of 500ppm (which would make the atmosphere itself terminally toxic to most mammal life) would only increase the global temperature 0.18C (according to original calculations I had chatgpt just do), which is hardly consequential in and of itself. And CO2 isn't going to increase that much from human action alone.

Nothingburger.

Almost all of them are deceit through omission, deception, or outright fabrication. So much of their data is falsifiable, particularly when it gets to the media as some sensational datapoint - like "The Gulf of Mexico is 110F! Climate change disaster!" or some such nonsense - when they're getting the data from the reading from one buoy inside a single marina. Happens all the time.

The thing is, there hasn't actually been an increase in extreme climate events. There's actually been a decrease.

Our infrastructure has simply become more intolerant of them, because we haven't been maintaining it or building it towards the possibility of exceptional weather. The result is more damage and more death, but it isn't caused by an increase in either the frequency or the severity.

You can quite quickly see there's a strong correlation between solar activity and the status of our severe weather events, too - it's well known and established fact - so I'm unclear how this in any way relates to (human-caused) climate change. Someone explain this to me?

It's relying on LLMs being able to search the internet for things. It goes somethign like this:

LLM searches for something, ends up on a site.
Site has multiple links embedded in it with said DNS payloads.
DNS lookup occurs.
LLM 'reads' said payload.

It actually is that hard, sometimes.

Often, jobs have a culture which have become structured so that you must be responsive, if not 24/7, then at the least during your work hours, to IMs. Step away from your desk for 30m to eat lunch or whatever? People are going to start calling you in many of these (IMO toxic) environments.

And frankly, it's required for some jobs (like in support roles). You've got to be available and IM is used for coordinating on the ground.

I've told people I am simply not available on IM platforms on my phone, I won't even install them if I can avoid it. This has caused some backlash, admittedly, but it's sanity worth preserving. If it's important, think it out a bit more and send me an email.

There's no good solution for this, unfortunately, particularly when everyone's set on using Slack for everything.

The only rational extension of this, then, is to get into that business.

Get experience welding/fabricating/cement work/construction, and figure out where that tech is going. Build a small nestegg as you rent and be intentionally poor.

Start a business doing what you now know, but automated - and ask your parents to help with collateral. Get investments and funding. Buy into a franchise making future-looking technology that can do the trade you now know.

The 3d printed structure equipment is one such vertical I can think of. Being able to run cable in those structures? You're going to need to learn how to do that, or hire someone to do it, because that's sometime off from being automated. There are still human elements which will remain such for the foreseeable future.

This will, unfortunately, undercut most people who do not have a combination of an IQ over 110-120, drive, and grit - which includes most of the people who are currently "programmers", unfortunately.

Because photosynthesis produces oxygen, and increased CO2 would lead to a higher oxygen production rate. It's pretty basic science that one learns in middle school.

I picked 25% arbitrarily, it could be higher or only marginally lower, and presumably it'd take a great deal of time for the entire planet's oxygen levels to stabilize to newer CO2 levels.

In a word: yes. (And no, I don't understand the mechanism here.)

The studies on both have been pretty conclusive. Masks have had zero measurable impact over baseline on viral infection rates in anecdotal studies, have been shown to significantly increase bacterial infections in the wearer, and they contribute to increased blood CO2 levels for the wearer. Rhetoric - yours or mine - aren't really factors here, it's merely what we've been able to prove scientifically.

"What makes you think there will be increased plant growth?"

Because it's literally what's happening throughout the world as we speak. Higher CO2 is leading to a regrowth of greenery, making deserts more habitable throughout North Africa.

That was literally the point I was making.

People breathe, and output CO2. There are more people in China, and thus, more CO2 production in aggregate (when you combine breathing + production).

What're you talking about?