its_ethan

Is it bullshit?

If you're using your 2a rights to fight against the government (tyrannical or not), it does not free you from facing the consequences if you don't "win", or prevent the government from fighting back (in self defense, or otherwise).

It's an incredibly serious thing to say "the government is so tyrannical that we need to use violence to overthrow it" (see: history).

We are already massively investing into renewable energy... to the tune of about $1trillion since 2020 in the US. In 2024, 95%+ of all new electricity capacity was solar/wind/batteries.

Seems like you believe the current system is not conducive to clean/sustainable infrastructure, but the world I think you want is actually the one we're already in.

The example I gave is for sports. Not politics. My point is specifically that the politics side of twitter is probably giving people a weird/not fully accurate view of the site as a whole.

Is it dead? I feel like this is more of a "you" thing than you might realize. At least for sports, twitter is 100% still the dominant medium for reporting.

I'm looking at the same post on a players status for this weekend from 2 hours ago on 3 platforms:

- Threads: 5 likes, 2 comments, 15 shares

- BlueSky: 19 likes, 3 comments, 3 shares

- Twitter: 1500 likes, 105 comments, 281 shares

Doesn't really seem like twitter is the one that's almost dead...

"cre-" is a latin root meaning (more or less) "make" which is where we get "create" - both are likely drawing inspiration from that (as would be the case for Creo, a common CAD software).

> If I just add a few more parameters to my model I can make it fit anything!

Dealing with people wanting to do this is story of my current professional life lol I would love to get them onto the same page that chasing down a final <1% improvement isn't (always) worth it

"All models are wrong, some are useful" - this is what I was trying to say, I was just being a bit snarky/pedantic because the commenter above seemed to be trying to pull a "gotcha" saying that the "truth" of something overrides the utility of it.

Thanks for doubling down on being facetious and making me feel better that I didn't just jump to conclusions about you, and that I made the right assumptions lol

This is the mindset I'd expect from a toddler - "it hasn't happened to me yet so it's not a problem and people who think it is are overreacting".

Should we also treat drinking and driving a no-big-deal thing since you haven't been affected by that either? Can you let us know what else your fellow countrymen are doing wrong in your estimation, based on your own narrow slice of lived experiences?

Can you really not put yourself in the shoes of, say, a young woman walking home in the dark feeling intimidated by a group of men wearing masks? Like it takes half a second of self-reflection and critical thinking to come up with a very believable, commonly occurring scenario that would lead to someone thinking differently than you. Give it a try sometime.

Another user a level up in this thread has also linked articles to 2 hospitalizations and a dead dog that are the result of e-bikes being used in places they're prohibited, so clearly it's an issue that needs addressing. Being smarmy and self-aggrandizing about it is a really bad look for you.

My "we can't do that with the sun" statement was re: being able to use diplomacy to avoid it, not that there aren't theoretical (albeit far fetched) solutions. We can't create the conditions where the sun doesn't "want" to solar flare us - it's random chance and uncorrelated to anything we do. We can influence the "odds" for something like an EMP (or LEO nuke detonation) happening.

If we had an unlimited budget to prioritize science fiction projects like this, then sure man, I guess there's solutions that could exist that shield the planet entirely lol

True. It would admittedly be a much different and more challenging problem to stop something coming back in from Space as opposed to an ICBM - you're right there.

But yea the mutually assured misery that it might cause in LEO for everyone would make this only likely form a truly rogue state. Maybe NK, but trying to identify who the threat would be changes this from a solar flare risk/mitigation discussion fully to a geopolitical theory one ;)

That's a valid point. I guess in my mind an EMP is an act of aggression that has viable ways of being stopped (as opposed to mitigated) whereas a solar storm is agnostic to anything happening on Earth. Even if the mechanism is similar, they are different problems with different solutions.

I believe the US already tracks (or attempts to track) anything resembling a missile headed our way, and there are systems that can take these down before they detonate and cause problems. You can't exactly "stop" a solar flare from hitting Earth. Additionally, we can also use diplomacy to create the conditions where China (or anyone else) won't want to EMP us (or at least won't benefit from doing it, even if they do want to), but we can't do that with the Sun.

And that's where my point on prioritization comes into play. We're more likely to invest in technology like Israel's Iron Dome to prevent an EMP from another nation than we would a full scale re-build of the grid to mitigate what amounts to an act of God from the sun.