Bonam

Quoting is more glitchy and annoying now. It has nice features for quoting that are cool when they work, but it also has a lot more problems. The most annoying problems with quoting are: 1) If you quote something and then trim the contents of the quote box, then sometimes it is no longer possible to click outside the quote box in order to type a response. This is super annoying because there's no way to fix it besides deleting your quote box, deleting your reply, and starting over. 2) If you quote something and then decide not to bother replying and exit that thread, the next time you come back to it that same quote will show up again and you have to manually delete it. I'd prefer if you leave a thread or close your browser and then come back to it later that it cleared its memory of your previous quotes or responses. 3) You can't get rid of quote boxes with backspace or the delete key and have to ctrl-right click and go through a menu to do so. This is way more annoying if you want to quickly edit something. 4) Sometimes if you click somewhere in a thread it will randomly quote a portion of that post and move your screen down to the reply box. This is a result of when you highlight text in the thread, a little "quote this" banner appears that you can click on, but it's very easy to accidentally click for a moment too long and the site will misinterpret that click as a click + drag + click. The "quote this" banner should be moved further away (to be a fixed position button at the bottom of the page or something) rather than centering over the highlighted text.

It would be runaway past about 15-20C change relative to now. Right now, ocean surface temperatures max out at about 35C. If ocean surface temperatures started to exceed 50-55C in some areas, the evaporation rate of water from those areas would increase rapidly, as the evaporation rate of water is nonlinear with temperature and increases rapidly above 50C. Water vapor is also a powerful greenhouse gas, meaning that as the oceans started to evaporate, heating rate would only increase further, causing a runaway effect. But hopefully we'll never get anywhere close to the 15-20C increase relative to now, so hopefully the evaporation of the oceans will never be a real threat.

Agreed.

So you're totally cool with when Muslim extremists kill people who drew a cartoon that "provoked" them?

They can be upset all they want. And they can express being upset however they want, so long as they don't commit crimes in the process. But you apparently seem to think that if someone burns a flag it's ok to set them on fire.

Indeed. I'm honestly puzzled at all the people on here who don't think this is the obviously correct position. I guess decades of censorship and language police has really eroded people's support for free speech.

No, it's not on you, it's on the murderer who killed you by causing you to be burned to death.

Freedom of expression trumps sensitivity over national symbols.

With absurdity like that in the last linked article, it's hard to tell the sarcastic comments from the sincere ones.

Indeed. I've said before that the ideology of social justice is just as dangerous and potentially destructive as that of communism and fascism. They share a common disregard for individuals in favor of ideologically-motivated collective "good", and they share the desire to blame all evils found in society on a particular group of people. I only hope it can be relegated to the dustbin of history with less loss of life than it took for communism and fascism.

Ah, the utopian progressive vision of our peaceful future world of racial harmony.

Right, clearly you can't run the batteries down to zero since people don't want to wake up in the morning and find their car discharged. Presumably, the system would have a method for vehicle owners to specify the maximum discharge allowed and their allowed schedule of charging/discharging. I'd expect the available capacity of such grid storage would maybe be on order of half of the rated capacity of the batteries in the vehicles. As for getting from here to there, it's actually relatively straightforward... the mix of renewables will gradually increase over time, in concert with the growing mix of electric vehicles available for grid storage. EVs naturally lend themselves well to working with renewable power sources. Besides road trips, they can be charged at any point in time when they are not being used, during the night while their owners are sleeping (using wind power) or during the day when they are at work (using solar). That means that fluctuations in the amount of power available from minute to minute or hour to hour matter a lot less. But yes, irrational energy policies based on ill-informed opinions or hysteria are certainly a potential problem as we build out future energy infrastructure.

An electric car in every garage is a good amount of distributed grid energy storage. Charge them in their parking spot while the sun is shining while you're at work, discharge them at night to run your home appliances. There are 250 million cars/trucks in the US, if each one had a 100 kWh battery, that's 25 TWh. Meanwhile, daily energy usage across the country is 11 TWh. So just electrifying people's vehicles can provide up to 2 days of power smoothing. I used to be totally with you and TimG in being skeptical of renewables being able to contribute more than 10-15% of electricity needs due to variability, given the need for reliable power and the lack of viable large scale storage solutions besides pumped hydro. But I think electric cars with their potential as smart storage for the grid are going to be changing this equation big time in the next 20-30 years. People will just buy them as cars, and the storage function will be a side bonus, but before long there will be a huge amount of storage in the grid.

There's nothing progressive about the regressive left. It uses all the tactics of far right authoritarianism... institutional propaganda, blaming all ills on a scapegoat group, silencing non-conforming opinion, indoctrinating people from a young age.

Weak, cybercoma. No defense of how the professor really is the embodiment of racism and "misogynoir"? No explanation of how his walking out of a meeting is indeed an act of "violence"? No statement about how they are justified in "refusing to allow this behavior to continue"? The tide is turning, all the politics of identity and victimhood, virtue-signaling and race-shaming, will have to be re-examined by their proponents. People have had enough and all around the Western world refuse to stand for it any more. They'll even elect people like Trump if they think he champions the charge against "political correctness" now. They'll leave the European Union to reject it and send a message that they've had enough. All kinds of "far right" parties are surging towards greater popularity in Europe as a backlash against decades of this crap being forced down their throats.

No, they really aren't. They really are that brainwashed.

You've basically said that all Trump supporters are racists/sexists/bigots ("they're a lost cause"). That's about half of US voters. Although I know that social justice extremists basically consider any white male to automatically be an evil racist sexist oppressor, that view does not hold water among the vast majority of the population. No, these people are not Nazis and likening the political disagreements in America to the worst war the world has ever known is stupid ("Godwin's Law"). If you want to get anywhere rather than just quivering in impotent rage at the supposed tide of racism, you need to realize that it's the same country that elected the first black president 4 years ago and 8 years ago. Many of the people that voted for Obama didn't bother to vote for Clinton, and it wasn't because of sexism. It was because the media and the Clinton campaign spent a year calling all these voters racist, just like you are doing now. The American left has lost its way in becoming mired in divisive identity politics driven by a lunatic fringe, and you've fallen for the same thing. Promising jobs and infrastructure wins votes. Calling people racist doesn't. Simple as that.

Yeah, that's clearly stupid as well. People should obviously be able to speak whatever language they want without fear it will cause problems for them. A dumb call. Yes, airlines should have clear policies so it doesn't fall on befuddled staff to make potentially very controversial decisions. In particular, anyone making a scene should be politely told to shut the f### up, and if they fail to do so, escorted off the plane for failing to comply with instructions. But they should always be given the opportunity to comply first.

Hmm, standing up and saying some stuff loudly hardly seems like a lifetime ban level offense.

We are the safest we have ever been in many ways. Cars are safer than ever. Death rates due to disease are lower than ever. Etc etc. As society becomes more advanced, the expectations of safety get ever higher. Crime rates may be lower than ever but they are not yet zero, and until they are we should keep working to reduce them.

Excellent point. If there is a productive way to use resources in a way that would make the thousands of new coal plants that will be built in China, India, SE Asia, and Africa in the coming decades cleaner, that will have certainly have a much larger impact than reducing Canada's emissions.

That's fine, but given that the Democratic party just lost the election, if they adopt that mindset they are gonna lose a lot more.

You disagree that class identity is stupid? You take someone seriously who, when asked about their identity, answers not with their name, or their profession, or their lifestyle/passion, or their place of origin/citizenship, but with their freaking economic class? Who the heck feels a sense of kinship with and identity as a member of an economic class? "Hi, I'm middle class". Getting back to the topic at hand, identifying with one's economic class is nothing but Marxist nonsense.

Who gives a crap? All the people who now how to live under a president Trump because their side was too stupid, too trapped in their own intellectual, to use effective messaging that could have won the election. All those groups that might actually suffer under president Trump care. In 2012, Romney ran and the Democrats called him racist and he lost. In 2008 McCain ran and the Democrats called him racist and he lost. And in 2016 Trump ran, but the village had gotten tired of coming out every time the boy cried wolf, and when the real big bad wolf came, the boy got gobbled up.

There's a big difference between the tiny sliver of the population who are actually "racist pieces of garbage" and the giant swathe of people that are labelled as such by social justice ideologues. For example, as discussed in the other thread I linked, a professor who made a specific and nuanced statement about the use of made-up pronouns was compared to "racist pieces of garbage".