That is not accurate, and doomerism only helps those who want us too demoralized to put up a fight. If you want to be part of the solution to climate change, I recommend doing some reading on what the range of projections and outcomes actually look like.

Is it fair? Probably, yeah. But I don’t think it’s an effective way of framing or addressing the problem.

The challenge is always getting enough people to do enough of an action that it makes an impact. It is certainly more effective, in terms of reducing emissions, to target policy interventions at leverage points - like forcing energy companies to adopt renewables by law and banning further fossil fuel extraction.

Personal action can be useful to live in alignment with your values and to provide examples to others for ways to get involved in the climate movement, but we can’t consume our way out of this.

I do a lot of data analysis and visualization in my job, and you are correct. I use Excel when I need to share data with co-workers, but I prefer to use Python for just about everything else. I see no reason to embed Python in Excel.

Yes, and that should be changed, imo

Billionaire wants a totalitarian state, who’s surprised?

No, I just never feel good after using it

Maybe it’s just me, maybe it’s the algorithms, but I do notice a difference in how I feel after spending time on the Lemmy or Mastodon vs Instagram or LinkedIn

I use Proton and really like it, but I don’t know how to go about using my own domain (though I am interested in it). How difficult is it for someone without webdev and self hosting experience to get set up?

It’s not so much that I can’t make phone calls, as much as I don’t want to. 75% of the time you just end up playing phone tag, and I’d rather just email so they can reply at their convenience and there’s no question about who said what

My position isn’t in a bargaining unit :(

Still a commendable act

Why am I not surprised? In the words of the Wu Tang Clan - “cash rules everything around me”

How so? I already use both, I’m just curious

In grad school, I was talking to an Econ professor and mentioned that I had been reading a paper from another economist. He said that he’d edited a book chapter the other guy had written and found it so incomprehensibly wrong that he didn’t know where to start lol

All totally true! It’s definitely not great, but I try to find the silver linings rather than beat myself up about the hard parts. Good point about my ADHD being different than others’

What do you typically use your computer for? That’s going to have a major impact. If it’s pretty basic stuff (web browsing, text editing, etc) you shouldn’t have any issue. If it’s something that’s more complicated or unusual, then sometimes it’s easy to do and sometimes not, depending on what you want to do. In general, a little bit of comfort searching the web and working in the command line helps a lot with troubleshooting Linux

Phoenix is a testament to man’s hubris.

A new administration might not like it, but they can’t claw it back. The money is distributed to multiple national green banks that will fund clean energy projects. They designed the program this way explicitly to protect the investment from interference from hostile federal or state administrations

I think you missed the point of the post.

Do you think I don’t know that life can be hard? I’ve had bad things happen to me for no reason. I know what crippling depression feels like.

I’m also committed to finding joy and beauty in life, because it’s always there, if you know where and how to look.

• Ecotopia - Ernest Callenbach
• The Dispossessed - Ursula K LeGuin
• Walkaway - Cory Doctorow
• The Lost Cause - Cory Doctorow
• Sunvault - multiple authors
• Psalm for the Wild Built - Becky Chambers

Oh shit, thank you for telling me! Need to make sure I mention that whenever I need a filling next. I already get really anxious going to the dentist, extra pain would not be a good time

As someone who is solidly left and visibly queer, but doesn’t particularly like living in big cities, that’s the question- how do you live near trees, but not Republicans?

I hope future generations know that amidst all that is happening, there are those of us who are fighting back, even against terrible odds. There have always been people like that, and I hope there always will be

That’s all really interesting, i need to learn more. I don’t know tons about Carter, but I do know he put solar panels on the White House in the 70s, which is pretty rad. Of course Reagan took them right off, that fucker

If i remember right, he said if he won he would go to places like WV and hold rallies demanding senators help his agenda or he’d back their primary challengers. That’s the kind of guts I’d like to have seen

Becoming more educated about politics and the world around me has not been good for my mental health either. Ignorance is bliss

Excel is definitely not useless! Learning a little Python (especially the pandas package) can go a long way in making data analysis easier though

Now you’re speaking my language!

Every time I’ve asked ChatGPT for help coding, I’ve wound up needing to rewrite it all for myself. LLMs make baffling design decisions (because they are just paraphrasing Stack Overflow, not making actual decisions).

I have found them helpful for turning error messages into more legible explanations of what went wrong, but AI-generated code has not been effective, in my experience

I’m not a power user, so I’m often frustrated by Excel trying to do things I don’t want it to and by its abundance of features that I’ll never use.

And at least at my workplace, a lot of work processes use poorly-designed Excel spreadsheets for critical tasks, because it’s such a simple way to manipulate data.

I also find that when I need to do more complicated data analysis, Excel starts to become limited, and I find Python to be a more powerful and flexible tool.

My employer is negotiating with one of the unions right now, and they keep sending everyone email updates on the negotiations that very clearly are trying to get those of us that aren’t in a bargaining unit to feel annoyed at the union for asking for more in raises than the rest of us got. It’s having the opposite effect - it’s making us feel like upper management aren’t negotiating in good faith, and making me wish my position was eligible to be in the union

That’s a good point! How much energy gets lost through the generator, do you reckon?

Sometimes I want something bitter. If I want hot and bitter, I’ll drink coffee. If I want cold and bitter, I’ll have an IPA. I also like dark chocolate. Must just be something about bitterness that I enjoy.

Of all the words in the world, those are certainly some of them

Same in Michigan. Voters here passed a ballot initiative with a bunch of voting rights protections in 2022, and now you can sign up to be mailed a ballot once, and they keep sending it for every election if that, if you check the box saying you want that. It makes it SO easy to vote, especially for smaller elections that I ordinarily probably wouldn’t pay attention to

Sure. For one, the growth imperative means that any business must return a profit as its primary function. If profits are hard to come by, that can lead to things like predatory lending and higher fees for consumers, not to mention investment in environmentally destructive, but profitable, activities. Second, by commodifying human necessities like housing and turning them into investment vehicles, housing is increasingly unaffordable for working people as prices go up. I could go on, if you’d like, but I think those are both fairly compelling arguments.

That’s interesting, I never knew that! Makes sense though