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Joined 3 months ago
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Cake day: August 16th, 2024

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  • I think there’s a lot of focus on minimizing individual’s impact, and don’t get me wrong, that’s a great thing to do, but it puts burden and guilt on people for things that are out of their control

    If your government (wherever you are) held fossil fuel companies and the agro-industrial complex to account and encouraged investment in renewables, public transport and ground sourced heating, you would be living a low impact lifestyle just by going to work, buying your groceries and living normally.

    If you have the money to invest in solar panels, EVs etc, that’s fantastic, but don’t feel guilt for not being priviledged!

    The most impactful thing you can do is put pressure on your government to recognise the impact we’re having on our ecology. Sign petitions, write to your representative, fund and/or join activist groups.

    Importantly, try not to feel shamed, as an individual you didn’t cause the situation (unless maybe you are a fossil fuel lobbyist, or oilcompany CEO) - go easy on yourself and just do what you can.



  • By the power invested in me by, well, nobody whatsoever, can I just take a minute to say, let’s all cool down a little in the comments!

    There’s a lot of arguing against:

    • The idea that acknowledging the tragic reality of climate change makes you defeatist
    • The idea that because we have had some great advantages in green tech we can sit back and let climate change fix itself

    I don’t see anyone making those arguments here though! Just lots of people concerned about climate change with different skews of how positive/negative we should feel.

    Personally, I swing between powerful optimism and waking in terror at 3:00am for the future we’re hurtling towards. I’m sure other people are the same, so let’s just be friendly to the fact that other people are in different vibes to us.

    There are some people working together very well right now to dismantle the climate, so let’s all remember that when we’re talking with each other.

    Peace and love!






  • Yes, for sure!! I hope my call for policitcal action didn’t come across as “don’t do anything and wait for politicians to sort it out!”.

    I was trying to get at the need for collective discussion and action, over the idea of a climate change fix that’s based on people’s feeling superior for their individual actions, especially because without political change, a lot of even the individual changes we need to make (more heatpumps, EVs over ICEs, etc) are only accessible to those with sufficient wealth.




  • I have advice that you didn’t ask for at all!

    SQL’s declarative ordering annoys me too. In most languages you order things based on when you want them to happen, SQL doesn’t work like that- you need to order query dyntax based on where that bit goes according to the rules of SQL. It’s meant to aid readability, some people like it a lot,but for me it’s just a bunch of extra rules to remember.

    Anyway, for nested expressions, I think CTEs make stuff a lot easier, and SQL query optimisers mean you probably shouldn’t have to worry about performance.

    I.e. instead of:

    SELECT
      one.col_a,
      two.col_b
    FROM one
    LEFT JOIN
        (SELECT * FROM somewhere WHERE something) as two
        ON one.x = two.x
    

    you can do this:

    WITH two as (
         SELECT * FROM somewhere
         WHERE something
    )
    
    SELECT
      one.col_a,
      two.col_b
    FROM one
    LEFT JOIN two
    ON one.x = two.x
    

    Especially when things are a little gnarly with lots of nested CTEs, this style makes stuff a tonne easier to reason with.


  • I find meat eaters ask me “would you eat grown meat?” a lot, but my response is always just “I guess maybe? I honestly don’t miss meat that much”. I haven’t come across any vegetarians/vegans who are particularly psyched about it either.

    This is all speculation, but I’m not particularly convinced there’s much of a market for lab grown meat over soy based products given how much more expensive they need to be.



  • I sorta have three not entirely coherent and increasingly cynical feelings about this.

    1. That’s neat! If redesigning bottles helps a little with emmissions then that’s cool!

    2. Even though it might reduce emmisions, sometimes I worry that people think this is what ecological stewardship looks like. “Keep on burning fossil fuels and running an economy based on the exploitation of the earth, just change the shape of your wine bottles and we’ll be ok!”. We’re not ok and this isn’t enough, small actions like this don’t cut it and we need to hold fossil fuel companies to account for the destruction they cause because it’s too late.

    3. Wait, it’s plastic!?!? Are we gonna pretend like CO2 is the only issue and killing millions of fish with plastic a year is something to ignore? Also, doesn’t that effect the global carbon heat pump? Seriously, why is it plastic!?!? My only thought here now is that this is some cynical greenwash of a decision that was made to maximise profits and reduce costs.