It was a UPS I bought on Amazon.

It arrived damaged in the box, almost certainly because the driver dropped it.

My experience with Amazon customer service was umm… fun.

1. click the request return button.

This item is not returnable.

2. call customer service

Them: “This item is not returnable”

Me “it arrived damaged”

Them: “We’ll send you an email, reply to it with evidence of damage”

3. reply to email sending pictures with close up of the damage

Please send the email from the same address associated with the Amazon account

4. resend reply from my other email

The pictures you sent are in the wrong format please resend as jpeg or pdf

5. convert the images and resend

The pictures you sent do not show the entire product

6. take new pictures from farther away

Please send pictures that clearly show the damage

😡

In high school one of my classmates was named Benjamin Dover.

Also had a classmate named Ma Deek.

We call it the “Mens” category, but for all intents and purposes it is the same as an “open to all genders” category.

Female athletes don’t compete in it because they’re physically not strong enough to even qualify to compete in it at the world level. The gender they identify as or were assigned at birth is irrelevant. There’s no genetic testing requirement to compete at the men’s level.

In almost every sport, the world record performance from a women isn’t even good enough to meet the minimum bar for quality to compete in the men’s competitions at the world level.

Even sports like diving where you’re judged more than measured, the male athletes strength makes it possible for them to do things the female athletes simply can’t.

There was a time when they only was open to all competition, adding a protected women’s only category was to make it fair for women. And then we started calling the open category the men’s category.

We could call it the open category and the low-T category instead, and it would have the exact same participants in each.

Found the Canadian.

I got a 2400 baud modem and thought it was so cool that I didn’t need to use an acoustic coupler

The fastest a woman has ever run the 100m dash is 10.49 seconds.

The Olympic qualifying time, that all runners needed to beat to even complete in men’s 100m dash this year was 10.00 seconds.

If we didn’t have a women’s division, there couldn’t be women in sports.

It depends on the jurisdiction, but in most cases if you have a salaried position with say 3 weeks of PTO but you only take 2 weeks of it. The employer is usually required to pay you over and above your salary for working during your “vacation time”.

If there’s an unlimited PTO policy, they don’t have an obligation to pay you extra for working during vacation time.

It’s a lie.

By making it “unlimited” they don’t need to pay you out of you don’t use all of PTO days.

If you use it more than they think you’ve earned you get terminated.

Employees end up afraid of taking their PTO days and typically end up taking even less time off than if they knew there was a expectation of 3 weeks or whatever.

My favourite thing ever seen in source code was a comment that read “this code is temporary” with developer initials and a date that was at the time about 5 years ago.

Followed by another dated comment from about 3 years later that read “Temporary my ass”

😂

I’m an expert in consequential greenhouse gas accounting. Which is the sub discipline of GHG accounting that specializes in understanding how policies and decisions impact global GHG emissions.

I feel genuinely bad for any democrat supporter with an ear injury right now.

Lots of great answers here.

I think one under mentioned cause is the effect of social media algorithms.

All major social media platforms use machine learning algorithms decide what to show in your feed. The algorithms are programmed to show you the things that have historically kept you on the site longer.

It’s human nature to upvote/read/support/engage with the things that agree with our world views, and downvote/dismiss/disengage/discredit the things that disagree with our worldview.

These two facts combined result in you seeing more of the content that aligns with your worldview, and more of the content from people who share your worldview. We’re all funnelled into communities of like minded individuals that repeat what we already believe, reinforcing whatever that is regardless of how factually correct it might be.

Dissenting information that might cause you to reconsider your position or become more politically aware is automatically filtered out.

And it’s not just social media either, even the algorithms behind search engines display this behaviour.

Long before social media existed, Google was tailoring search results to match the things you tend to click on. If you searched for news and typically clicked on the headlines biased towards one side or the other Google would start ranking site with that bias higher.

This wasn’t intentional (at least not originally) it was just a side effect of the algorithm, trying to figure out what you were most likely looking for.

For someone who, for example, believes the Earth is flat. If they were to type “is the Earth flat?” Into a search engine. They are much more likely to get results that “prove” the Earth is flat, then a person who believes the Earth is round, because the algorithm knows that they tend to click on articles that “confirm” the earth is flat.

Algorithms used by social media and search engines today, make it genuinely difficult to maintain a balanced worldview and find unbiased answers to any question. They are all designed to keep you engaged, And it is human nature to engage more with the things we agree with, regardless of truth.

Sandford Fleming (the guy who invented time zones) actually made it easier.

Before timezones, every town had their own clock that defined the time for their town and was loosely set such that “noon is when the sun is at its highest point in the sky.” Which couldn’t be measured all that accurately.

If it wasn’t for Fleming, we’d be dealing with every city or town having a separate time zone.

I don’t know, but it’s bad.

At this point even our best case scenarios are still pretty bad; barring some massive breakthrough in carbon sequestration tech.

And the “business as usual” scenarios are down right scary, millions of deaths annually. Never mind the economic consequences.

In my other comment I talked about what needs to happen on the macro level.

But the micro level is another story.

I’m worried because the paths to mitigating the worst of it depend mostly on countries, people, corporations etc… making major changes to drive reductions.

I seen the strategies the big companies have… they’re not coming close to making the difference needed. And the small companies aren’t even trying to measure their emissions let alone reducing them. It’s that lack of data that’s a part the problem. The data needed for decisions at the micro level isn’t available. It’s difficult to even identify what changes to make because you don’t know what impact a change might have outside of your control.

So far it means we haven’t even got emissions to start going down. At best, they’ve just slowed the rate at which they’re going up.

Governments should be pushing harder to mandate emissions reporting, but it’s politically unpopular so we’re still largely guessing about what decisions to make and that’s what leads to us all pulling in different directions making little progress.

Thanks, this made me laugh, hard.😊

(Sorry for the length here… this is actually my shortened version)

89% of climate change is because we took carbon that was permanently sequestered underground in the form of oil, gas, and coal and burned it for cheap energy. We need to stop that entirely but you can’t “just stop oil”, you need to remove the demand not try to disrupt the supply.

There are 4 broad strokes to making that happen:

1. We need a metric fuck ton more carbon-free electricity generation asap. Not just enough to replace all existing fossil fuel-based electricity generation, but enough to supply double to triple the current generation capacity. Only about a quarter of the energy we get from fossil fuels is used to generate electricity, so as we switch things over to electricity, demand will increase exponentially.

Renewables are great and we need to build as much as we possibly can, but what people don’t get is the sheer quantity needed. No matter how much money is thrown at new renewables projects we simply can’t build enough of them fast enough due to bottlenecks in supply chains, raw material mining, grid interconnection times, and other limits.

New nuclear is the only other major option to speed up the transition away from fossil fuels. People resist it because of safety or waste concerns (neither are backed by data, nuclear is tied with solar for the safest tech, and it generates less radioactive waste than coal). Or they think nuclear has a big carbon footprint when you include the manufacturing and disposal (also not what the data says, nuclear is tied with wind for the lowest full lifecycle carbon emissions and is about half as much as solar). Or they argue renewables are cheaper which is at least mostly true, but it isn’t as clear cut either when you factor in the costs of connecting that many renewable power projects to the grid. Connecting one nuclear power plant to the grid is significantly cheaper than connecting the 100+ wind and solar farms needed for the same quantity of electricity. Not to mention the cost of storage.

We want to be building renewables, but we can’t wait around for renewables to save us that’s just not going to happen fast enough, our best option is building as many renewables as possible and a bunch of new nuclear and anything else carbon free at the same time.

2. We need to electrify everything that runs on fossil fuels. Cars, furnaces, industrial uses, everything needs to switch from burning oil, gas, and coal, to being electrically powered.

But deciding what to electrify, when and in what order is complicated too…. adding to electricity demand before we’ve removed fossil fuel power generation from the grid, results in the scale-up of the fossil fuel generation to meet the increased demand. Until fossil fuels are gone from the electric grid, we should only electrify something if its efficiency is sufficient to still reduce emissions when we assume it’s powered by the most polluting form of electricity generation on the grid.

Battery electric vehicles have reached that point including factoring in the high-carbon footprint of lithium-ion manufacturing. Even if charged exclusively with coal power a BEV has lower lifetime emissions than an ICE car. Even discarding ICE cars before their end of life to replace with a BEV will generally be a net win.

Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles on the other hand (pretty much anything hydrogen-powered for that matter) aren’t even close. Using Hydrogen to power vehicles is not a tech we should be investing in right now.

Even if you’ve built a dedicated solar or wind farm to power something you want to electrify that hasn’t reached that efficiency threshold, you need to ask if it’s better to use that solar farm to displace current coal or natural gas-based electricity generation than to power your newly electrified whatever. This is why even so-called “green hydrogen” is a counter-productive tech to be investing in right now.

It’s also why some DAC and CCS techs shouldn’t be built yet. Even if you plan to build a dedicated solar or wind farm to power it. It’s often more impactful to just connect that solar/wind farm to the grid instead to reduce fossil fuel-based generation than to use it to power CCS. DAC and CCS is a rapidly developing space, we’re all hoping for some new breakthrough techs here that changes this story… so don’t criticize research in this area as a dead end… we don’t know that.

Hopefully, you’re starting to understand why so many of these discussions are more nuanced than people on Reddit/Lemmy claim…. a lot of new electrification technologies are just on the borderline here for not causing more emissions, and it often depends on where you live and what will be scaled up to meet the added electric demand.

All of this points back to why we need massive quantities of carbon-free electricity. Without clean electricity, these other techs aren’t a net win. Many things will cause a net increase in emissions if they’re electrified before carbon-free electricity is abundant. We need more new carbon-free electricity generation built in the next two decades than all the fossil fuel generation we’ve built in the last century put together. Even with ridiculously optimistic exponential growth projections of renewables, it is just not going to be enough. Until we’ve sequestered so much carbon that we’re back to pre-industrial levels, there will always be new techs that are “unlocked” by any additional carbon-free electricity generation.

3. We need society to transition to lower consumption of everything in general. Every product or service you buy has a carbon footprint of some kind. There’s a LOT to be done around making smarter choices about what you buy, yes an EV is better than an ICE car, but public transit, electric scooters, bicycles, and ton of other things are better than any car, and not buying things at all if you if you don’t need them is better still.

Capitilizim’s tendency to push towards ever more consumption is the largest driver of the problem here. We can’t have circular economies if the only metric we’re looking at is the bottom line. Our modern mentalities of disposable products, planned obsolescence, fast fashion, and other things we’ve come to associate with a “high quality of life” in wealthy nations need to be re-evaluated.

4. We need better data to make better decisions. Corporations aren’t required to measure and report their emissions. We’re still largely making educated guesses at the carbon footprint of things because the only data available for most things are broad estimates and industry averages. Our supply chains are so interconnected, that trying to calculate how much of an impact a particular product has requires data from potentially thousands of companies that they’re not even collecting, let alone publishing.

The EU is starting to mandate carbon reporting, but the US and Canada are lagging in this area. The US SEC proposed last year making reporting mandatory for publicly traded companies but caved to a bunch of pushback from corporations. They did pass a mandatory reporting rule a couple of months ago, but with significant retractions on what needs to be reported and how soon. They dropped a provision that would have required companies to report on emissions they’re causing to occur in their supply chains (known as “Scope 3” emissions), which would have put significant pressure on smaller and non-publicly traded companies to also report on emissions.

Until the vast majority of corporations are tracking emissions, even the corporations that are trying to reduce emissions are limited in effectiveness because they are basing decisions only on how it impacts them directly and not what impact it might have elsewhere.

Anyhow… that’s the “big things”….

There are a lot of interesting little things that could be happening but aren’t, usually because they clash with a particular political ideology. For example, the government could pay contractors to go from house to house and upgrade the insulation, and it would have one of the best emission reductions for the dollar than almost anything we’ve quantified. But politically there’s a “It’s not fair to take money from my pocket to pay for someone else’s insulation” mentality that some people have that prevent many low-hanging fruit things…

And on the flip side, some of the things that we’re doing that generally aren’t working include:

Most carbon offsets on the market are bullshit, including a lot of nature-based offsets. The mentality of “don’t reduce just offset” emissions doesn’t work. I’m not saying there isn’t a place for offsets, there is, but the carbon offset market in general is full of bad actors. It’s trivially easy to misrepresent creative accounting as a carbon offset, even if it’s not intentional. And since there’s no tangible product delivered, some companies will sell the same carbon offset to multiple buyers. If you don’t believe me, I have a bridge carbon offsets to sell you.

Another thing that isn’t working is most (if not all) RECs, GOs and similar market-based instruments for purchasing “green electricity” from the grid. You’re not changing the net emissions, you are literally just paying for the privilege of claiming your electricity consumption isn’t generating emissions. You’re not making more renewable get built, renewables are already cost-effective, they don’t need someone voluntarily paying extra for them for them to happen. If you pay extra for them, you’re just increasing someone’s profits.

Note that RECs and GOs are not the same things as private PPAs, like when Amazon or Microsoft pay to build new nuclear to power their data centres.  Again lots of nuances here, but PPAs are causing additional carbon-free electricity to be built. RECs and GOs where you’re selling renewables that have already been built aren’t changing anything, just upping profit margins.

LOL, I work in climate science.

Specifically in consequential carbon accounting analysis. Which is the branch that specializes in quantifying how much impact decisions and policies will have on greenhouse gas levels.

We are fucked. We are so incredibly fucked.

I comment regularly on social media about what actually needs to happen if we’re to limit the damage from WW3 to just seriously fucked. You can imagine how that goes.

People advocate for things on Reddit or Lemmy about what we should be doing to avoid the disaster. Most of the time these things will have little benefit, and often will make things worse. I try to educate people but everybody has their pet issues usually based on whatever article they read last and they don’t actually want to seek the truth, just defend their opinion.

It’s tough because they are all very nuanced issues, every decision has trade offs, makes things better in one way worse than another. People aren’t wrong about the small part they’re looking at, just its impact on the bigger picture.

Everyone is pulling in different directions on this issue because the waters have been so incredibly muddied by the people who stand to lose from real climate action.

Genuinely curious where do you draw the line?

Like honest question: Do you think we should ban every activity that is as risky as consuming marijuana? If not, why not? Why marijuana and not everything else.

If we’re banning marijuana to save lives because it’s too risky we should be banning driving a car, and climbing a ladder, and hundred other common everyday activities that are more likely to kill you then smoking pot.

You’re not wrong, there are health risks to weed. But there’s risks with literally everything, and weed is really far down on the list of most risky activities.

I think you may have misunderstood friend. You’re not wrong and I’m not arguing against any of your points.

A wind or solar farm is indeed much faster and cheaper to build than a nuclear power plant. Wind and solar farms take 8-18 months on average. Recent nuclear power plants have been taking 7-10 years.

The nuance isn’t the time required for a single project, it’s the sheer number of renewable projects required that is the issue.

I live in Canada, a single digit number of nuclear power plants here could replace all of the fossil fuel based electricity generation in our grid. That’s something that could be built within 10 years.

We’d need ~1000 new wind and solar farms (not to mention storage) to do the same. We can’t make that happen within 10 years due to supply chain and grid interconnection bottlenecks limiting the number of concurrent projects we can do.

I would ecstatically overjoyed to be proven wrong about this. But we need to get off fossil fuels as quickly as possible, and we can’t do that quickly with renewables alone.

Frankly we’re fucked either way, but we’re less fucked if we build nuclear power in addition to as much renewable power as we possibly can make happen.

You’re correct about renewables being cheaper… but faster is a more nuanced discussion.

In the Canadian province I live in we generate 70% of our electricity with natural gas fired power plants. Roughly 20 TWh annually.

To replace that 20 TWh/yr with solar power, we’d need to build ~150 more solar farms the same size as the largest solar farm in Canada. Plus enough storage to cover the grid at night or when the weather is cloudy.

To replace that with nuclear power, we’d need 2 plants the same size as the smallest nuclear power plant in Ontario.

The nuclear plants are significantly more expensive than the solar, that much is certain.

But there are logistical limitations on how many new sources we can interconnect on the power grid in a given year. We simply can’t connect that much new renewables quickly.

It doesn’t need to be a choice, we can do both renewables and nuclear. But if we want to get off of fossil fuels in the next decade, nuclear will get us there sooner.