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A lot of it is truthful information for sure. But sentences along the lines of “the west has never forgiven Haiti” are quite obviously biased and tell of a rather black-and-white view of the world. The west is not monolithic. Haiti is so far away from those countries that most of the west probably couldn’t care less about what’s happening in Haiti. Just like most South American countries couldn’t care less about what’s happening in Ukraine.

With the former colonial powers of Haiti, especially France, that’s of course a different case and they contributed a lot to the sad state of affairs in Haiti.

Or “if I were president of Haiti, first thing I would do is remove Haiti from Caracom”. Yeah… Okay why? Whatever the history was, why would someone think that less regional cooperation would improve anything for Haiti? Also what kind of undemocratic mindset is that? You could at least say “I would do a referendum.” Alright, she was probably joking… But she’s definitely far from unbiased or objective.

In any case I think if you asked the average Haitian what they would like to see in their country it’s probably the same thing people need and crave everywhere: Peace, and a good economical perspective to improve their livelihood. And for that it doesn’t matter if you’re part of an empire or not. You can very much be free and be part of an empire.

Ultimately you need stability to achieve peace and prosperity and the chances for that are often even higher when you’re part of an empire. Most people on earth would always prefer peace and stability over revolution if there’s any alternative to the latter.

Lol, sounds totally unbiased to me…

After all, why wouldn’t you believe in unbiased reports from a channel named “neutrality studies”?

The problem is not that one has to communicate the significance of research. However since the people with money don’t understand the science, they can easily be mislead. And there are also big trends when it comes to funding so you can participate in the buzzword olympics to secure your funding. And this is where you leave the path of just communicating your research and its potential honestly.

The second point where this Nobel prize winner is very right is that it’s all about networking, all about names. I don’t know why we can’t just publish research under a pseudonym, a number would suffice. This would make publishing and reviewing less susceptible to bias.

Sorry, my irony detector must be malfunctioning.

And which reviewer or publishers verifies how “significant” a contribution is beyond seeing some initials matched with tags like “visualization” or “experimental design”? That’s right, nobody. It’s not even remotely traceable who did what if you’re a reviewer.

Academia is full of fraud and people trying to secure their share of credit because in academia it’s all about names, as the twitter exchange above illustrates so profoundly. And the other driver for the sad state of academia is of course having the quantity of published papers as the most important criterion for academic success. The more papers, the more citations, the bigger your name will become. It determines your chances of getting funding and therefore your career. If you want to make a career in science you have little options but to comply with this system.

Well that’s not the type of emotional argument that I was referring to lol. I don’t know why you would think I’m talking about myself. I don’t own a car.

I’m just trying to understand others that don’t live like me in order to find the necessary compromises. Because that’s what needs to happen in a democracy.

I understand that you’re desperate but not much good will come out of that emotion. It’s not that people are evil and care about nothing and that this is the reason why they don’t act in a meaningful way. This line of thinking is just plain wrong for the vast majority of the population. Yes, people are also lazy but they also have many many everyday problems and can’t make changing their lifestyle right here right now their top priority. Yes we have to fight for changes, in the media, on the policy level and also make the good alternatives a good deal to choose. But that won’t happen with accusations and self-righteousness, I’m sorry.

You can try to teach people what a good consumption decision is w.r.t. global change. But it won’t work in 99% of cases. People are often emotionally attached to their way of living and many have tied a part of their identity to it.

I don’t care about what counts as excuses because there is no ethical consumption in capitalism. What I care about first and foremost is reducing GHG emissions effectively, within the system that we’re currently living in. And for everything else you have to offer people real alternatives if you want them to change their behaviour. And changing that behaviour will not come true by only making factual arguments but by understanding people’s emotions and identities and accounting for those in your argument. It’s clear that people in rural communities (and a large share of the population lives there) will drive cars for many years to come and these cars have to be EVs.

Thanks for telling me again. Very helpful but besides the point.

Well it’s baffling to me to have “pollution” as the first point of that list. It’s just beyond my comprehension how one could state that a non-combustion car doesn’t help with pollution problems. Yes alright, there’s still microplastics… But hey, please visit a city like Beijing and tell me again that EVs don’t combat pollution on a massive scale.

It’s nice to be critical and yes, cars are shit for our society. Nevertheless our society has been built around them and people will drive cars. They might do so less in 50 years but right here right now with the way society is organised EVs do definitely play an important part in reducing emissions. Change takes time. And people like the ones protesting against the Gigafactory prefer to ignore this context. To me this line of thinking is naive to say the least and can also be seen as self-righteous and delusional by those for whom no alternative is available now. Lecturing people about their lifestyle is not going to change anything.

I hate that people try to lecture others on how bad the last pandemic was handled but they haven’t even understood this very basic and intuitive property of infectious diseases.

To me it’s just ridiculous to somehow speak for “rationality”, “facts” or “the science”, only to proceed to ignore basic facts and evidence and resort to fearmongering instead.

Tongue brushing is underrated.

Is the data access exclusive for that one company? If not then it’s no miracle they’re opting for a subscription-based model lol

G R O N D

Okay not like any RPG. It’s a special kind of RPG. And as a game it has many elements that make video game RPGs so addictive.

I agree with you on the ethics. Maybe Palworld in that sense is more honest than Pokémon. In the Pokémon anime however I always had the impression that they try to depict Pokémon as having humanlike character tendencies, e.g. some liking to get into fights and others just working as nurses in the Pokémon center…

It’s a fun game with a nice mixture of looting & leveling, survival, base optimisation and progress, exploration and fighting.

I also like the humor of paldex entries hahaha.

Sounds like any RPG to me. Except that your party consists of the same creatures that you’re fighting. In that sense it’s maybe more egalitarian than RPGs featuring classical enemy races like orcs or goblins.

In Pokémon the concept of evil comes in the Form of Team Rocket and other shady exploitative organisations. Interestingly Palworld also has a counterpart organisation called Syndicates. But I still don’t know what their crime really is since you’re really doing the same thing of fighting and catching Pals. Nevertheless you have to treat the creatures in your party right, if you want to make progress in the game.

So some parts go up and some go down? Makes sense :)

I though land masses float upward after the weight of the glaciers is gone.

It’s not that simple. The aerosols ejected into the stratosphere definitely have a cooling effect. Then again a cooling event like the year without summer would pose major challenges for humanity. And the Tambora eruption was of small magnitude in comparison to much earlier events. In any case, there’s nothing we can do about it…

We should never forget that it’s not an evil country or evil people, but evil or mad leadership.