presentation

I thought that DST was dumb until I moved to Tokyo and find it sad that sunset is at 4pm in the winter

Also developing countries are adopting solar panels and batteries at a surprisingly fast pace, since they just buy them for cheap from China rather than waiting for a dysfunctional government to build out a proper grid to rural villages.

Well the solution is just that green energy is already cost competitive with fossil fuels, so we just need to let the market do its thing and have people buy the cheap thing, which is increasingly green energy.

Yeah, which is what makes me think that environmentalists are one of the biggest groups blocking the protection of the environment. Mostly concerned with whatever makes themselves feel absolved or at least have a pretty view from their window, while fighting tooth and nail against anything that can actually make a real difference for conservation. The actual saviors of the environment will be the capitalists who manufacture the green revolution at scale for profit, as it always has been for the last centuries of poverty reduction and social progress.

The problem is that most people do care about the environment but are hopelessly misinformed about what to do about it.

They think that personal acts of minor inconvenience like tolerating soggy paper straws saves the environment while fighting things that actually make a difference, like blocking transit to save a nest of bats; or blocking urban development to provide an extra 3 minutes a day of sunlight on a surface parking lot; or that somehow them flying across the USA to visit a national park and connect with nature or something is offset ecologically by token actions like reducing how many plastic grocery bags they use throughout the year. Most ordinarily people don’t understand the tradeoffs of their choices in the slightest.

And on top of that culture wars and geopolitics is getting in the way of progress - we could be blanketing the world in solar panels and batteries and EVs on the cheap right now, but it’s dominated by enemy #1, China, so we won’t; not to mention that the right in the USA seems to think that renewables are for girly sissies. And the alternatives we have, like nuclear power, are being shut down across EU countries because people have no idea of just how self sabotaging that action is, given that the alternative is going to be fossil fuels coming from Russia and the Middle East. They’d rather die of heat stroke than use energy efficient air conditioning, so the powers of most people’s imagination are shockingly weak.

Popular opinion wants to blame everything on capitalism when the reasons for these problems don’t actually stem from there. Capitalism will be the way out if it’s given the chance, but it’s not popular to say that, so it won’t.

Hm weird I’m a programmer and I herniated a disk while working out…

Agreed - my social life has frequent gatherings only because my wife is, despite working and having kids, extremely motivated to meet up with friends. If she didn’t have that motivation we probably wouldn’t be seeing anyone, and if she weren’t working then that could compensate.

Surely you could still meet people outside of home while living in a small apartment? At least that’s what everyone here in Japan does.

I think the point of the article is more about meeting with others at all, as opposed to it specifically being at home. So hang out with friends outside!

I did debate in the 00s though and my experience differed - it was already a highly technical affair that didn’t really require strong communication skills, but rather was more about playing logic tricks to be technically “correct” and saying so much that your opponent couldn’t counter all of it during rebuttals. That was enough to get me into the final playoffs at the national championships, and to this day I’ve been told that I focus too much on being “right” rather than being empathetic or persuasive, so debate was not the social panacea that it might have once been.

Just want to chime in that I have had the same experience and am similarly appreciative!

Dinners don’t necessarily have to be big though. My wife hosts friends over all the time but usually it’s still small intimate affairs, like average 1-2 people (and their kids if they have any) - don’t need to invite everyone at once. Maybe it’s more normal here in Japan to do small groups - when my American friends come visit they always come in giant groups and it makes everything logistically challenging (which my wife also complains about, alongside the fact that it’s impossible to have a deep conversation when 12 people are in the room).

Plus they also don’t have to be polished. Don’t bother cleaning up the house and order a pizza, and everyone will still have a good time. Or just go out to a restaurant and not worry about any of that.

Same here in Japan

Basically only true in the Silicon Valley bubble. Professional services are Microsoft Office/SharePoint all in.