What fuck up? If we were doing our own manufacturing, we’d be using the coal instead. We just wouldn’t be able to blame other countries for our consumption.

This happened to me this morning. And because the link was from a work email but I was logged in on my personal account, Edge wanted me to sign in to view it, requiring time-wasted on a 2FA process for no good reason whatsoever (obv I just closed Edge and copied the link over to Firefox).

The loss of productivity is large regardless of which method you choose to view the link. May this be the beginning of the end for Microsoft. I am fuming.

It’s difficult to get China and India off coal because they’re doing most of the world’s manufacturing and some processes are currently impossible without it. But ‘we’ exported manufacturing to Asia and ‘we’ buy the products the coal is used for. ‘We’ don’t get to wriggle out of responsibility by pretending that a couple of low and middle income countries are somehow responsible for ‘our’ excessive consumption.

It isn’t really nature vs nurture, it’s nature interacting with nurture. Steve Jones, the biologist explained it beautifully with reference to Siamese cats:

Siamese cats are light brown with dark brown fur at the tips of their ears, feet and tail. But if you raise one in a very warm environment, they will be light brown all over. A very cold environment, they will be dark brown all over. There’s a gene switching the fur colour but its action depends on the temperature.

There are many different ways genes and environment interact, there’s no real ‘argument’ here. It is simply true and, because genes and environment are often so closely linked, it’s often complicated and sometimes impossible to tease out what’s causing what.

I have not found a way.

However, if you have one monster thread running, clicking on any notification will clear all of the notifications from that thread but not any others. So you do at least have a quick way to get rid of them and you won’t miss anything you care about.

I might. But ferry companies are not generally allowed to.

The dose makes the poison. It is carcinogenic but current estimates are that you’d need to drink several litres a day to meaningfully increase your risk.

There are other good reasons to find a healthier drink but this isn’t one of them. Most artificial sweeteners have some kind of risk attached so there is no point switching to a different diet soda.

You wouldn’t stop to think about it. But how is it even possible for a 7 year old to fall overboard in the first place? Ferries are full of kids running around, something must have been very wrong for this to happen at all?

Why are you driving traffic to reddit?

If you must post reddit content, post a screenshot. No need to send traffic their way.

It’s a bit more than that. Cancer is caused by copying errors. Just the right errors, in just the right order. The longer you live, the more chances these copying errors get to happen in just the right order. If nothing else kills you, cancer will.

So, wealthy countries have a lot of cancer because they have a lot of people living longer. And the media loves to run stories on how terrifying this is.

The main risk factor for cancer is old age. Wealthy countries have a lot of cancer because a lot of people live long enough to get cancer.