[HN Gopher] The polar vortex is hitting the brakes
___________________________________________________________________
The polar vortex is hitting the brakes
Author : bryanrasmussen
Score : 244 points
Date : 2025-03-22 19:31 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.climate.gov)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.climate.gov)
| rohan_ wrote:
| from March 6th
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| yeah, did it happen or not?
| macintux wrote:
| What are the odds that NOAA has been forbidden to write
| anything about climate since this was posted?
| lwansbrough wrote:
| Is the author still employed?
| 3eb7988a1663 wrote:
| That's the beauty of the current chaos-driven model. No
| explicit marching orders required. Just let it be known
| that inconvenient facts/actions can be punished at any
| time. Self-censorship takes care of the rest.
| labster wrote:
| But how do you own the libs if they just start doing what
| you want? How does that make any sense? No retribution,
| no payoffs, nothing?
|
| Nope, the firings will continue until America is made
| great again.
| Terr_ wrote:
| Half-disagree: Firings aren't their goal (nor,
| demonstrably, are cost-savings.)
|
| The goal is coercive power over a culture. Firings are
| just one tool in the toolbox.
|
| ______________
|
| Tangentially, loyalty-oaths are another case where the
| purpose goes beyond the immediate effect.
|
| Fascists presenting an allegiance-or-else choice aren't
| extending any of _their own_ trust to affirmative
| pledges. They _know_ it 's coerced, and the fact that
| everybody else knows it too is a feature, not a bug.
|
| Why? Because the real goal is not to create trust for
| themselves, but to _destroy it for everyone else_. To
| survive the purge, victims must scar their own
| reputations, making it harder for anybody--even other
| victims--to trust them in the future.
|
| Ex: Even if I'm totally certain Mr. Smith was lying to
| the fascists when he pledged loyalty to keep his job,
| there's a "damaged goods" aspect: Would he lie _to me_ if
| his job was threatened again? What other compromises
| might he make to other threats from authority?
| ericfr11 wrote:
| Despotism does not lead to greatness. Instead we will
| have big Corps (oil, pharma...) owning, benefiting, and
| hiding public knowledge. Even China does better these
| days
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| I wondering if the authors were laid off from NOAA.
| frereubu wrote:
| From the dates on https://www.climate.gov/news-features/blogs
| it looks like this is / was a roughly weekly post, so it
| might take a while if you're waiting for them specifically.
| pc486 wrote:
| I'm not an expert, but it looks like the predicted wind
| reversal did occur.
|
| In the article there's this figure:
| https://www.climate.gov/media/16838
|
| The March 13th 10hPa forecast with the wind reversal and lobe
| is visible on measured data: https://earth.nullschool.net/#20
| 25/03/13/2100Z/wind/isobaric...
| zeagle wrote:
| Interesting article. We are past the usual -20 or lower six weeks
| where I am so feels like a typical year. If I choose a random
| northern place like Rankin Inlet NU it is still cold up there
| with a low of -33 tonight.
|
| It is a sign of the times when I think huh, climate.gov... is
| that a reputable source?
| jMyles wrote:
| .gov sources being disreputable is not new. My generation grew
| up with the food pyramid.
|
| The silver lining is that understanding of this disrepute is
| nearing universality.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| The food pyramid is notable _because_ it was so wrong for so
| long, which is very unusual. Most gov agency science is
| actually quite good .
| mistrial9 wrote:
| sorry - the US Federal Forest Science has been a dumpster
| fire in the Sierra and other areas.. arrogant, wealthy,
| immovable and it turns out, dangerously misguided plus very
| willing to enforce their worldview.
|
| In another comment there are bitter words about the nature
| of Monarchy, but it appears that it does not require a
| Monarchy to get things badly, seriously wrong.
| jMyles wrote:
| Indeed.
|
| In case you've not read it, I suggest this brilliant
| compilation of interviews about fire management practices
| of indigenous nations in California; the degree of
| documented anthrogensis is much higher than I imagined
| prior to reading.
|
| https://tendingthewild.com/tending-the-wild/
| mmaunder wrote:
| Probably is. NOAA and other gov sources help us predict things
| like clear air turbulence related to the jet stream. One
| probably doesn't want to politicize those kinds of predictions
| too much or risk scraping passengers and their dinners from
| ceilings.
| wonnage wrote:
| I doubt that'll stop the current administration from trying,
| even unintentionally
| ketzo wrote:
| There were a bunch of headlines last week about DOGE firing
| half of NOAA then rehiring them. I don't think you should
| consider anywhere sacrosanct.
| transcriptase wrote:
| To be fair there have been a bunch of headlines about a
| great many things, like office closures without mentioning
| the minor detail that the offices haven't been used in
| years, the workforce is remote, and there is no impact on
| service delivery or staffing. Doesn't stop journalists from
| dancing around the implication if it makes the orange man
| and mars man look bad though.
| ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 wrote:
| Yeah? Is that why this list went from 400+ to 10?
|
| https://www.gsa.gov/real-estate/real-estate-
| services/real-pr...
|
| Are these the journalists you have an issue with for
| reporting on it?
|
| https://apnews.com/article/gsa-federal-buildings-doge-
| fbi-do...
| guelo wrote:
| how do you know that the offices haven't been used in
| years and there is no impact unless a journalist told
| you? Is there any reason to trust rando twitter accounts
| besides the fact that it makes you feel better about
| "your side".
| dingnuts wrote:
| he probably just believes a source that didn't turn out
| to be directly funded by the US government, one you would
| likely dismiss as not a real journalist
|
| I'm all for free media but the legacy outlets currently
| screaming about cuts are primarily upset because THEY
| just lost a ton of government funding but that's good
| because I don't want government run news, even if it
| comes in a bunch of brand names, and it's funny that all
| the "reputable" outlets just happen to be the ones with
| the closest relationships to the CIA and FBI and
| historically have covered for their worst injustices.
|
| no, I do not shed a tear for what is happening to the old
| government controlled legacy media.
| DrillShopper wrote:
| > he probably just believes a source that didn't turn out
| to be directly funded by the US government
|
| One probably sponsored by the Russian government:
| https://apnews.com/article/russian-interference-
| presidential...
| ForOldHack wrote:
| Simple. There is photographic evidence, and eyewitness
| accounts, by a celebrated journalist ego happens to be a
| friend of mine.
| croes wrote:
| Musk is suddenly a fan of remote work?
| dylan604 wrote:
| Musk is suddenly a fan of anything that directly benefits
| him even if it directly contradicts previously made
| comments. I thought this was pretty much self-evident at
| this point
| arunabha wrote:
| I think you're trying to impart a political motive where
| it can be argued that none existed. I understand that
| _your_ mind is made up, however consider that the whole
| initial effort by DOGE was clearly poorly planned and
| resulted in a _lot_ of chaos.
|
| For a journalistic perspective, when events are moving
| fast, you report what is known at a given time.
|
| Hindsight is always 20/20 and no doubt there are some
| cases like you point out. However, are you sure that
| those are the _only_ cases? The fact that the govt is
| scrambling to hire back fired people would suggest
| otherwise.
|
| The desire to impute political bias to everything is not
| a useful way of viewing the world.
| ForOldHack wrote:
| It is a realistic and accurate way to see the
| politicization of climate science. Bush, and the head of
| NASA Goddard is the documented and publicized example
| sans vacuum of disinformation.
| chneu wrote:
| Most of those people are silent quitting or refusing to go
| back to work.
|
| This applies across the board to these firings/rehirings.
| Why would anyone go back to work for real when you know
| you're just gonna be fired again?
| cdblades wrote:
| > Most of those people are silent quitting or refusing to
| go back to work.
|
| Come on, you know you can't just throw that out. Support
| your claim.
| daveguy wrote:
| I would have said the same about the postal system, but DeJoy
| has been fn around with it for years.
|
| If you doge it, you can sell a private version.
| ericfr11 wrote:
| US science will go down big time. Big Corp (oil, pharma,..
| ) will get richer
| jacobolus wrote:
| "Big corp" will be massively harmed in the medium term,
| like everyone else. The NIH is critical for the pharma
| industry, and the USGS is critical for natural resource
| extraction industries (etc.). Blowing up federal agencies
| _might_ juice profits for a quarter or two, but even that
| is pretty questionable /risky. If the whole economy goes
| into recession, many basic resources obtained from
| overseas get taxed, retaliatory tariffs slam US exports,
| many Americans lose jobs and whole regions lose
| industries, etc., it's generally bad for companies
| selling things.
|
| Biggest potential winners are anyone willing to directly
| pay the President a kickback for massive corrupt payments
| from the government, anyone facing severe legal liability
| for past illegal actions who can buy a get-out-of-jail
| card, and foreign autocrats who want the US to stop
| protecting its own interests.
| ashoeafoot wrote:
| There are no vibrant monarchys or aristocracys or
| oligarchys. What do these people think everyone fled from
| Europe to the us for? In a monarchy everything fouls and
| rots.. look a trumps buianesses, the us is his last
| casino to bankrupt..
| mike_hearn wrote:
| Are you sure the NIH is critical for the pharma industry?
| Pharma companies generally conclude that replication
| rates of academic grant funded medical research are so
| low as to not be worth bothering with. From Amgen:
|
| _" Over the past decade, before pursuing a particular
| line of research, scientists (including C.G.B.) in the
| haematology and oncology department at the biotechnology
| firm Amgen in Thousand Oaks, California, tried to confirm
| published findings ... scientific findings were confirmed
| in only 6 (11%) cases. Even knowing the limitations of
| preclinical research, this was a shocking result."_ [1]
|
| and from Bayer:
|
| _" To mitigate some of the risks of such investments
| ultimately being wasted, most pharmaceutical companies
| run in-house target validation programmes. However,
| validation projects that were started in our company
| based on exciting published data have often resulted in
| disillusionment when key data could not be reproduced.
|
| only in ~20-25% of the projects were the relevant
| published data completely in line with our in-house
| findings
|
| Surprisingly, even publications in prestigious journals
| or from several independent groups did not ensure
| reproducibility
|
| Our observations indicate that literature data on
| potential drug targets should be viewed with caution_
|
| If the stream of research that came out of NIH-grant
| funded work was genuinely useful, venture capitalists
| would be falling over themselves to commercialize it. In
| reality [3]
|
| _[Atlas Venture partner] Booth said that the "unspoken
| rule" among early stage VCs is that at least 50% of
| published studies, even those in top-tier academic
| journals, "can't be repeated with the same conclusions by
| an industrial lab. Atlas now insists on external
| validation studies of a new company's basic science as a
| precondition to further investment."_
|
| He went on to say that the NIH should have higher
| standards and do more to vet the data. That never
| happened. He also said that due to the low quality of NIH
| output, _" there's such a scarcity of venture firms
| willing to take on early work, you rarely find yourself
| having to jump in quickly."_
|
| That was 15 years ago. There was no serious effort to
| improve, and VCs are still much more interested in
| computing startups than biotech.
|
| [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/483531a
|
| [2] https://www.nature.com/articles/nrd3439-c1
|
| [3] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1038/scibx.2011.
| 416#pre...
| convolvatron wrote:
| I'm not well enough versed in the level of
| commercialization of NIH research. But even assuming it
| was all trash, currently that's where all of the
| commercial researchers come from - NIH funds research at
| universities, that funds grad students through their
| practicum, and provides a candidate pool for Pharma.
| whether or not the current system for producing
| researchers is optimal, there doesn't seem to be another
| candidate lying around.
| graemep wrote:
| >"Big corp" will be massively harmed in the medium term
|
| Most big corps are run for the short term. Management's
| biggest concern is how the market will react to results
| in the next few quarters.
| ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 wrote:
| In the 2025 Presidential Transition Project, a number of
| members of the current administration proposed eliminating
| NOAA completely.
|
| https://www.politico.com/news/2024/02/25/second-trump-
| term-0...
|
| Based on the way things have been going, that seems to be the
| goal.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOAA_under_the_second_presiden.
| ..
| chneu wrote:
| It's absolutely the goal. There has been a push from places
| like weather.com to privatize much of NOAA for years.
|
| Noaa's free information is really good so it makes the
| playing field a bit too level for private companies. They
| don't really offer a substantially better product than NOAA
| so it makes their product less valuable.
|
| A few years ago we had a company reach out to us saying
| they could give us hyper-localized forecasts for our ultra
| endurance events. After our first event using them I
| checked their data against NOAA. Surprise, their data was
| far less accurate than weather.gov.
|
| Every private weather service is using NOAA's dataset and
| then tweaking it or adding their own data. All of them.
| joezydeco wrote:
| Too late! NOAA's budget is getting slashed and they're
| stopping weather balloon launches, starting with the plains
| states. Good luck with those turbulence forecasts!
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/marshallshepherd/2025/03/21/wea.
| ..
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| That's not what the poorly written article actually says.
| They are launching one baloon a day instead of two. You
| might think the article is being intentionally misleading
| with working like, "NWS issued a public information
| statement announcing that is is temporarily suspending the
| frequency of weather balloon launches at some of Weather
| Forecast Offices".
| ForOldHack wrote:
| Dinners were the least of the problems that Bush's admin had
| with NASA Goddard. It was the climatology, and long term
| predictions.
| leke wrote:
| Disclaimer
|
| Climate.gov's Polar Vortex Blog is written, edited, and
| moderated by Amy Butler (NOAA Chemical Sciences Laboratory) and
| Laura Ciasto (NOAA Climate Prediction Center), with editorial
| and graphics support from the Climate.gov team (NOAA Climate
| Program Office). These are blog posts by subject matter
| experts, not official agency communications; if you quote from
| these posts or from the comments section, you should attribute
| the quoted material to the individual blogger or commenter, not
| to NOAA or or Climate.gov.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| If they're making the blog posts in their capacity as NOAA
| employees, on an NOAA web page, wouldn't that imply that
| these are "official agency communications"?
|
| Or is there some distinction I'm missing?
| hnaccount_rng wrote:
| Yes, an official agency communication would have to go
| through deliberations and consensus finding from ~all parts
| of NOAA, most blog posts will only have the input of those
| experts. While that will mostly not lead to significant
| deviations since all of the discussed areas are subject to
| scientific rigour there is always the human nature of all
| actors.
|
| Back in university we would publish news entries for all
| our publications without any input from the university. But
| for some papers there was also an official press release by
| the university. That came both with additional restrictions
| (length, language level, flashiness) but also with
| additional reach (getting picked up by newspapers
| directly). I assume that pre-Trump this would have been a
| similar setup. No guess as to now though
| epicureanideal wrote:
| > It is a sign of the times when I think huh, climate.gov... is
| that a reputable source?
|
| Some have been wondering that for years already.
| timzaman wrote:
| Very interesting article, but since it's 16 days old, seems like
| quite irrelevant news to hit the frontpage.
| icegreentea2 wrote:
| Polar vortex collapse leads to cold polar air mass moving south
| over the course of the next few weeks. At least where I am,
| this article is coinciding within a day or so of the end of
| "fake spring".
|
| In fact, this might help explain the concept of fake spring in
| general. The final collapse of the vortex is ultimately caused
| by warming of the northern hemisphere as spring kicks in. This
| implies that the pattern of "get pretty warm, then the polar
| vortex collapses, then you get one more surge of winter
| weather, and then you get real spring" is actually typical.
| xeromal wrote:
| Had no idea what led to fake spring so thanks for this
| tidbit!
| downrightmike wrote:
| Ultimately the Earth will warm up, the ice caps melt, the coasts
| lose as the seas rise 10m
| mempko wrote:
| And potentially organized human life collapses
| erikpukinskis wrote:
| Is that possible? Can you describe the chain of events that
| would lead to that?
|
| Seems vanishingly unlikely to me, on the face of it, but I
| admit I am not read up on all the possible doomsday
| scenarios.
| aorloff wrote:
| it all started with the invention of Ice9
| ForOldHack wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat%27s_Cradle
| nntwozz wrote:
| Oil wars.
|
| We are killing for guzzoline.
|
| The world is running out of water.
|
| Now there's the water wars.
|
| Once, I was a cop. A road warrior searching for a righteous
| cause.
|
| My name is Max. My world is fire and blood.
| h4ck_th3_pl4n3t wrote:
| How great that all large cities in the US are not at the coasts
| and none of them are even below sea level. Oh, wait...
| ineedaj0b wrote:
| i see someone didn't enjoy the trip to venice.
| gosub100 wrote:
| Not that it changes the outcome, but I swear I remember reading
| that the majority of sea-level rise actually comes from the
| thermal expansion of liquid water, not displacement from
| thawing of ice caps. Can anyone confirm/refute this?
| ForOldHack wrote:
| https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/resources/lesson-plan/whats-
| cau...
| tim333 wrote:
| I think it's 90m? It's pretty slow though like 1m/century and
| probably like 50cm this one.
| fredsmith219 wrote:
| I'm amazed that climate.gov hasn't been taken down yet.
| neuroelectron wrote:
| Seems like the DOGE cuts were overhyped after all. Honestly,
| anything connected to Trump is overhyped. He has a protective
| aura of noise. You're not going to figure out what's going on
| by just reading headlines.
| sebmellen wrote:
| They successfully took down large portions of the CFPB site.
| gortok wrote:
| The damage is real even if the dollar amount of the cuts is
| overhyped.
| tdhz77 wrote:
| You offer no evidence, but you have convinced yourself so
| obviously abstracted from the ground that time will prove you
| were right. It's a foolish path and I urge you to listen to
| what is happening. Within the last week government data is no
| longer accessible to researchers. Long standing government
| groups and private that study these areas are locked out.
| Overhyped? No. Like the manager that cuts the budget, gets
| the raise and sees the fallout much later. Your foolish
| comment falls flat Carly in line --- there are consequences
| and they are deadly. Overhyped? No. To suggest a thing is
| foolish beyond comprehension, it should ruin careers for such
| a bodacious and absurd point.
| neuroelectron wrote:
| Palantir seems to be chugging along just fine.
| tdhz77 wrote:
| Pentagon is next.
| stevenbedrick wrote:
| I'm here to say that the cuts to the NSF, NIH, DoE (both
| energy and education) and IRS are not overhyped at all; if
| anything they are badly underhyped.
|
| What is overhyped is the actual "savings" that they are
| producing with all of this.
| hallway_monitor wrote:
| What would you cut? I don't know what I would, but I do
| know that the United States is heading for a financial
| apocalypse unless drastic measures are taken now.
|
| I know there's a lot of hysteria around this, but I'm still
| at the place where I can be optimistic that the US will
| come out ahead. At least they're doing something besides
| spending more money and acting like everything's OK. From a
| long-term financial stability standpoint it's really not.
| righthand wrote:
| > but I do know that the United States is heading for a
| financial apocalypse unless drastic measures are taken
| now.
|
| Do you have proof of this? Otherwise you are spreading
| propaganda and lies. "We need to cut stuff because the
| party I support says so" isn't proof of a financial
| apocalypse and is only fear, uncertainty, and doubt. It's
| the very hysteria lying in which you refer.
| p_j_w wrote:
| > I do know that the United States is heading for a
| financial apocalypse unless drastic measures are taken
| now.
|
| Asserted without evidence, dismissed without evidence.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > What would you cut?
|
| Were I concerned about fiscal balance, I wouldn't view
| cutting as the best way to solve the problem, I would
| raise high-end taxes.
|
| > I do know that the United States is heading for a
| financial apocalypse unless drastic measures are taken
| now.
|
| Insofar as that's true, it is a direct result of the
| actions taking thus far this administration, not
| something they are correcting--and not through fiscal
| imbalance causing wider problems but by a broad economic
| collapse directly (which, because the broad economy
| drives revenue, has fiscal balance problems as a second
| order impact.)
| bruce511 wrote:
| It's worth noting that this "financial crisis" (which I
| disagree with) has been brought on by Republican
| governments. Bill Clinton left a budget surplus which is
| the easiest way to pay down the debt.
|
| Secondly, if I had to cut something, the obvious target
| is the military. (Oh boy, ring on the downvotes there...)
| But hear me out.
|
| Firstly, the adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq cost more
| than the current debt. With pretty much zero achieved.
| Focusing less on projecting power, and more on self-
| defense might deliver better returns.
|
| Of course the military budget can't (and wont) be cut
| because it's not about the military. It's a carefully
| controlled jobs program that moves money from the federal
| piggy bank to pretty much every district in the nation.
| So it becomes a game of "cut x, but not y, because y is
| made in my district. It's easier to cut less-specific
| programs (like Medicare) because that isn't district
| specific.
|
| Then again maybe the tide has turned, and they could cut
| military spending. The CHIPS act funneled tons of money
| to Florida and yet Floridians hated it.
| hallway_monitor wrote:
| Thanks to you and GP for a reasoned response.
| Appropriately taxing the wealthy is 100% something we
| also need to do and yes, I am skeptical that the current
| administration will move in that direction. Ditto cuts to
| the monstrous military industrial complex.
|
| I think I'll refrain from responding to the more
| inflammatory replies but what really sounded the
| financial alarm for me personally was this talk [1] given
| to the house on February 5th by Arizona rep David
| Schweikert. He makes a really compelling case about the
| dire state and future of the government's financial
| position. If indeed I have been hoodwinked as other
| comments seem to think, I am open to being convinced
| otherwise. But this talk is well documented, and seems
| like a plea from a man who is desperate to sound the
| alarm so we can prevent disastrous consequences for
| millions of people in this country.
|
| [1] https://youtu.be/TCyysMU66VA?si=Fjhx2xgYZ0upkxeo
| bruce511 wrote:
| Alas I can't watch the YT link right now, so I can't
| comment on that.
|
| However I will point out that the goal of the current
| "effeciency drive" has nothing to do with the deficit. I
| confidently predict that the deficit will be larger, not
| smaller, at the end of this administration. Primarily
| driven by tax cuts on the aristocracy.
|
| While personally I don't think the deficit number is
| terribly concerning (it behaves very differently to
| personal debt) its interesting to note that Republicans,
| not Democrats are responsible for most of it.
| mindslight wrote:
| Talk of "financial alarm" for a government with monetary
| sovereignty is specious. It will mislead you into
| analyzing government finances as if they were household
| finances, whereas governments use newly created money
| rather than going bankrupt. And for our government, this
| really just means less newly created money going directly
| into private pockets.
|
| It's only this martingale of the "Federal Reserve"
| neutering the government's own monetary sovereignty that
| has even allowed for this "debt" narrative. The part of
| government debt that is owed to private parties is
| essentially _savings accounts_ for institutions and other
| countries who believe that USD will hold future value
| better than other assets. The other part of the
| government debt that is owed to a different branch of
| government (Federal Reserve) is nothing more than a sham
| accounting measure to support the political martingale.
|
| The actual threat is the global demonetization of the US
| dollar because the US is no longer in a leadership
| position when all of our industrial, scientific,
| military, foreign outreach, law enforcement, etc
| institutions have been destroyed. It won't matter whether
| the "budget" is balanced if/when foreign countries are
| offloading US Treasuries. That's the real threat, and
| "our" "leadership" is now in the process of outright
| facilitating that destruction.
| telephone4 wrote:
| I don't think you understand how money works. Federal
| debt doesn't matter beyond its relationship to taxes and
| inflation. The US needs to raise taxes and address
| inequality through _greater_ investment in public
| services and infrastructure, as well as stronger
| regulations on consumer goods pricing, not less.
| tbrownaw wrote:
| > _Federal debt doesn 't matter beyond its relationship
| to taxes and inflation_
|
| Much like household debt doesn't matter beyond it's
| relationship to household income?
| ncallaway wrote:
| National debt and household debt are very different
| things, because most households aren't able to print
| money
| marsovo wrote:
| Macroeconomics is very different from microeconomics.
| Your spending is my income and my spending is your
| income. If the government spends a dollar, where does it
| go?
|
| Presumably it goes to some sort of goods and services.
| The employees pay income taxes. The businesses pay
| corporate taxes. And so on.
|
| Similarly, when a business lays off 10,000 people, it's
| not their problem anymore. Whereas from a macroeconomic
| policy perspective, "everybody" is the government's
| responsibility.
| abootstrapper wrote:
| > What would you cut?
|
| Nothing. Tax the billionaires.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| It wouldn't raise enough money. Probably better to say:
| "Tax the multi-millionaires", or even people who earn
| more than 1M USD per year.
|
| What if we change the tax code such that passive income
| (capital gains, dividends, coupon payments, etc.) is
| taxed at a higher rate than active (employment) income?
| josephcsible wrote:
| > What if we change the tax code such that passive income
| (capital gains, dividends, coupon payments, etc.) is
| taxed at a higher rate than active (employment) income?
|
| Doing so by lowering the active income rate wouldn't
| raise more money, and doing so by raising the passive
| income rate would kill investment and job creation and
| send us into a depression.
| gortok wrote:
| That already seems to be happening. Business leaders with
| capital are actively trying to replace workers with AI or
| offshoring; so what would be the extra damage from
| codifying that we want folks to put their money here?
| acdha wrote:
| > I do know that the United States is heading for a
| financial apocalypse unless drastic measures are taken
| now.
|
| The people you get your news from are lying to you,
| trying to get you to sell out your future to their
| profit.
|
| The economic issues we're facing right now were created
| by the current administration installing heavy taxes on
| imports while simultaneously creating a nationwide shock
| with federal spending. This is like declaring that you
| should save money and doing so by not paying your rent,
| skipping the doctor, and pushing your car into the sea.
|
| If we rolled back to January 19th, when the economy had
| been growing steadily and all signs projected that trend
| to continue, the long-term problems still weren't
| catastrophic. The primary problem was that Republicans
| broke our balanced turn of the century budget when they
| cut tax rates and started a couple of recreational wars,
| setting a pattern which has continued where we're told
| that we have to give up things the public benefit from
| because the alternative of rich people paying taxes a few
| points higher is too miserable to even consider. That
| debt is a concern, but not as a fraction of the massive
| American economy - it's like the difference in medical
| concern between noticing that you're gaining 10 pounds a
| year versus 10 pounds in the last week.
|
| The reason the lying about the crisis has ramped lately
| is that some of the tax cuts which racked up trillions of
| additional debt in Trump's first term expire this year
| and others in 2028, but the Republicans want to cut taxes
| even further. It's mathematically impossible to do that
| without unpopular cuts to things people like, such as
| Medicaid or children's health insurance (CHIP), which is
| why they're trying to distract with gross exaggerations
| of the currently-negative DOGE savings and trying to
| manufacture this air of impending disaster so people
| don't think there's a choice. While the choice is no
| longer as easy going back to Biden's economic growth, it
| could simply be letting tax rise to the levels we had
| 20-30 years ago when the economy was thriving.
| sanderjd wrote:
| If your plan doesn't include passing bills through
| Congress that increase tax revenue and cut popular social
| entitlement programs, it is not targeting this problem.
|
| A few dudes firing a bunch of people entirely through
| executive action has absolutely nothing to do with the
| financial problem you're worried about. The federal
| payroll is not a significant cost, and the executive
| branch doesn't control the budget.
|
| It is no different than a magician doing misdirection.
| It's up to you whether you want to buy the act.
| stevenbedrick wrote:
| First of all, I don't accept the a priori premise that
| cutting is needed. But if I _did_ want to cut, I would
| want to have an actual plan for how to figure out what
| could be cut and what tradeoffs were involved, and then
| to execute that plan in way that balanced as many
| equities as possible and was done in a way that followed
| some sane and transparent process (as well as relevant
| laws).
|
| Part of that might involve being able to show some kind
| of financial analysis about what was being cut, to
| justify it and to get buy-in from congress and other
| relevant stakeholders, and to do the cuts in a way that
| minimized their impacts, gave everybody who was going to
| be affected adequate time to be part of the process, and
| to plan for how to manage their side of the situation.
|
| Needless to say, what we are seeing now is... none of
| those things.
|
| A good example of what a saner process might look like
| would be the federal workforce reductions that followed a
| big analysis on government efficiency that Al Gore and
| his team led during the first Clinton presidency; look up
| the Federal Workforce Restructuring Act of 1994 to see
| how it all went down. They spent six months making a
| plan, then got it through congress to fund buyouts (it
| passed with major bipartisan support).
| kulahan wrote:
| I honestly figured it'd be one of the first. That being said,
| France, UK, and USA are all moving towards more nuclear power.
| It might be at the point where it's no longer possible to
| pretend we care about solar/wind, and can no longer
| realistically ignore climate change.
|
| I've been saying for years that we'd know when governments were
| finally getting scared of climate change because we'd see real,
| very fast moves to install nuclear and, if possible, enhanced
| geothermal.
| OKRainbowKid wrote:
| I don't understand why acknowledgment of climate change would
| lead to nuclear over solar/wind.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| There are no "unsolved problems" for nuclear (because the
| safe storage of fissile waste for 10k years isn't a problem
| we need to solve, apparently). By contrast, getting
| solar+wind fully up and running requires totally solving
| the storage problem. Plus the libs love it. Hence ...
| nuclear.
| lesuorac wrote:
| > because the safe storage of fissile waste for 10k years
| isn't a problem we need to solve, apparently
|
| We never solved it for the other material that we dug up
| and burned (coal). So coal ends up emitting a ton of
| radioactive waste because uh when you dig up the ground
| you also dig up radioactive uranium (there's no 100% pure
| carbon deposits).
|
| It's also only a self-inflicted problem. You can
| technically re-use the waste until it only needs to be
| stored for ~300 years before it decays to "normal"
| levels. The US doesn't allow you to do that though while
| say France does.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > We never solved it for the other material that we dug
| up and burned (coal).
|
| Oh yes. Having fucked up this badly with long chain
| hydrocarbon combustion, lets do it all over again with
| fission, because ... well, we did it once already, right?
| tnecio wrote:
| The orders of magnitude are different here. Replacing
| something that becomes a huge problem within two hundred
| years with something that (potentially) becomes a problem
| in a few thousand years -- really is better than spending
| valuable time on developing an "ideal" solution
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Neither you, nor I, nor anyone else has any truly
| authoritative knowledge on when (or if) fissile waste
| will become a problem, and if it does, just how large
| (time, space, populations, ecosystems) of a problem it
| will be.
| defrost wrote:
| Fissile waste has been a health problem _even before_
| first mining uranium in the DRC well before WWII.
|
| Hanford has a standing legacy problem of fissile waste
| from both weapons and energy work.
|
| * https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-
| fuel-c...
|
| * https://www.icanw.org/hanford_s_dirty_secret_and_it_s_n
| ot_56...
|
| Human activity aside, every valley with a substantial
| amount of granite rock about the planet pools with radon
| gas on a daily basis until the wind clears it out.
|
| While this is just one of those things that's a risk on
| the order of a pack a day smoking habit to those who live
| there, radon is a fission by product from the breakdown
| of the uranium within the granite.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| I read this as just an attempt to rationalize fissile
| waste issues as "more of the same". Maybe you truly feel
| comfortable doing that, maybe you see it as something
| else.
|
| I, in contrast, view the development of fission-based
| nuclear mechanisms (whether for explosives or for power
| generation) as a distinct break with the past, and a
| point in human history where an entirely new problem was
| brought into being. And not just a new problem, but one
| that would last longer than any human civilization has
| ever lasted.
|
| So, to me, you comparison of envionmental radon issues
| with the problems posed by storing and managing the waste
| produced by fission reactors is ... well, I scarely have
| words for it.
| defrost wrote:
| I spent a few years in exploration geophysics.
|
| You stated "[No one] has any truly authoritative
| knowledge on when (or if) fissile waste will become a
| problem".
|
| I informed you that fissile waste is already a big
| problem at multiple sites across the planet, several US
| sites and Russian sites more so than anywhere else, and
| has been a problem for > 50 years.
|
| You're welcome.
|
| > you comparison of envionmental radon issues with the
| problems posed by storing and managing the waste produced
| by fission reactors is ... well, I scarely have words for
| it.
|
| That's clearly a minor aside .. you ignored the 70+
| tonnes of plutonium waste at Hanford.
|
| Billions have been spent dealing with it to date and
| there's much left to do and spend to clean up that one
| site.
|
| Don't strawman the issue, it's a large problem and there
| are tomes on the subject filling shelves.
|
| Humans do need to deal with radioactive waste, this
| includes the large dams of radioactive waste created as a
| by product of rare earth and lithium processing.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > I, in contrast, view the development of fission-based
| nuclear mechanisms (whether for explosives or for power
| generation) as a distinct break with the past, and a
| point in human history where an entirely new problem was
| brought into being.
|
| Radiological material that decays after tens of thousands
| of years is not a unique new problem, for _three_
| reasons.
|
| First, half life is inverse to radioactivity. The longer
| the half life, the less radioactive it is. There are
| isotopes with a half life of a billion years. Human
| biology requires potassium and natural potassium is
| radioactive, but it doesn't kill you _because_ the half
| life is so long.
|
| Second, the material with ten thousand year half lives
| doesn't actually have to be stored for ten thousand
| years. Nuclear reactors convert elements into other
| elements. You put it back into a reactor and it turns it
| into something with a shorter half life. Meanwhile that
| process produces energy with which to generate
| electricity. It's absurd that we're not already doing
| this.
|
| And third, the half life is a red herring. Traditional
| long-standing toxic waste from industrial processes
| doesn't have a half life because it persists _forever_.
| Plutonium is toxic for thousands of years; heavy metals
| are toxic until the sun burns out. The fact that it
| eventually decays is an advantage that propaganda has
| turned into a problem.
| Krssst wrote:
| Nuclear waste is a local problem. They're solid not
| gaseous. GHGs are a worldwide problem.
|
| Years don't matter if climate change puts an end to human
| civilization.
| lesuorac wrote:
| > lets do it all over again with fission
|
| You can look at it this way.
|
| Or you could can look at it as we reduced radioactive
| emissions by switching to nuclear from coal.
|
| Everything has trade-offs. It's not like solar has no
| side-effects.
| Krssst wrote:
| Climate change is a decades-order problem. Worst case is
| end of human civilization.
|
| Waste storage is a problem for once climate change is
| solved. Worst case is local degradation of environment.
|
| A grid powered almost-fully by nuclear and water is
| proven feasible by France. A grid almost-fully powered by
| renewables for a full year in an industrialized country
| is yet to be seen. Renewables do work well when combined
| to fossil fuels, but we need to get off them.
|
| The Republicans programs for electricity is completely
| insane and renewables is a much better alternative than
| drilling more fossil fuels. Nuclear is more realistic but
| the political will is not there unfortunately.
|
| > Plus the libs love it. Hence ... nuclear.
|
| One can be supportive of Democrats and liberals while not
| agreeing with one policy point.
| defrost wrote:
| * Renewable energy sources collectively produced 81% of
| Denmark's electricity generation in 2022, and are
| expected to provide 100% of national electric power
| production from 2030.
|
| * Renewable energy sources collectively produced 75% of
| South Australia's electricity generation in 2023, and are
| expected to provide 100% of state electric power
| production from 2027.
|
| -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_Denmark
|
| - https://reneweconomy.com.au/from-zero-to-100-pct-
| renewables-...
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| These are very likely misleading stats
|
| > Renewable energy sources collectively produced 81% of
| Denmark's electricity generation in 2022, and are
| expected to provide 100% of national electric power
| production from 2030.
|
| This doesn't say anything about how much of Denmark's
| consumption this covers, only their production
|
| It turns out they import a bunch of their electricity
| from neighbors
|
| This is a sneaky way to pretend you don't consume fossil
| fuels
| defrost wrote:
| These are locations heading for 100% renewable supply in
| the very near future.
|
| The capital of South Australia is some distance from the
| border, even further from the Victorian capital
| (Melbourne) and is weakly linked compared to EU
| countries. In South Australia, the
| current connection to Victoria allows for just 25 per
| cent of its maximum demand to imported or exported.
| "So what that means for South Australia is we have to be
| a lot more self reliant. And ultimately, South Australia
| is the test lab for the whole NEM (National Electricity
| Market,"
|
| Or _exported_ .. SA actually exports a great deal of peak
| renewable energy, it over produces in the daylight and
| uses that to charge a battery farm or to feed to the
| neighbouring state.
|
| The stats are no more misleading than the GP claim this
| is in response to, namely "A grid powered almost-fully by
| nuclear and water is proven feasible by France."
| France derives about 70% of its electricity from nuclear
| energy, due to a long-standing policy based on energy
| security.
|
| ~ https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-
| profil...
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > These are locations heading for 100% renewable supply
| in the very near future.
|
| I don't have a gas powered generator attached to my
| house. Therefore, if I put a solar panel on my house,
| then my property would have a 100% renewable supply of
| electricity
|
| Unfortunately that solar panel wouldn't meet my house's
| electricity demand, so I would have to import the
| difference from my local power company. But that doesn't
| change the fact that on my property the supply is 100%
| renewable
|
| > Or exported .. SA actually exports a great deal of peak
| renewable energy, it over produces in the daylight and
| uses that to charge a battery farm or to feed to the
| neighbouring state.
|
| Peak generation hours are almost never aligned with peak
| demand hours. Unless those battery farms are capable of
| meeting the supply during their peak demand (very
| unlikely, I don't think there is any country with this
| sort of battery capacity built), then they must be re-
| importing electricity from those same neighbors who are
| still burning fossil fuels (or have other more consistent
| power supply like nuclear or hydro)
| ars wrote:
| There is no storage problem.
|
| A breeder reactor plus reprocessing means there is no
| waste in the first place, and also gives us 100 to 1000
| times as much usable uranium.
| sanderjd wrote:
| The "unsolved problem" for nuclear is doing it time- and
| cost- competitively with solar.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > because the safe storage of fissile waste for 10k years
| isn't a problem we need to solve, apparently
|
| It literally isn't. There are two known solutions
| already. The stupid way, which is to put it in a dry hole
| in a geologically stable desert, and the smart way, which
| is to use it as fuel because it isn't actually waste
| anyway.
|
| Neither of these things are currently happening for only
| one very specific reason: The global fossil fuel industry
| (including Russia) lobbies against them because they want
| to retain a piece of political rhetoric to argue against
| replacing fossil fuels with nuclear.
|
| But that's a self-solving problem, because if you
| actually do replace fossil fuels with nuclear then the
| fossil fuel industry goes away, stops lobbying against
| anything, and then you can use either of the known
| solutions. Which means we'd only have to store the
| material for a few decades until that happens. The
| solution to _that_ is what we 're already doing at
| existing reactors, which is largely to keep the spent
| fuel rods at the power plant.
|
| It may also give you some indication of the scale of the
| problem to realize that you can hold all of the spent
| fuel ever generated by a reactor that has been in
| operation for decades on the site of the reactor itself.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| There seems to be a delusional part of the Internet that is
| convinced that nuclear is the only future, and solar and
| wind aren't. To settle this, you basically need to look at
| what China is doing --- which is to build a lot of nuclear
| and then exponentially more solar and wind. We're a huge
| percentage of the way down the slide to a mostly renewable
| world with storage, and some nuclear at the edges.
|
| But it isn't a competition. I'd be just as happy if things
| were going the other way. Having a clear mental model of
| the world is just useful.
| https://cleantechnica.com/2024/01/12/nuclear-continues-to-
| la...
| cyberax wrote:
| > There seems to be a delusional part of the Internet
| that is convinced that nuclear is the only future, and
| solar and wind aren't.
|
| "Exponentially more" means literally nothing. 1 is also
| an exponent.
|
| China is building literally everything. It's also a
| geographically diverse country, with wide ranges of
| different climates. Solar is appropriate for Hainan, but
| makes little sense for Harbin.
| tfourb wrote:
| Have a Look at the statistics, before nitpicking. Solar
| and wind dwarfs nuclear in China and increasingly so.
| ForOldHack wrote:
| "Once again, China's nuclear program barely added any
| capacity, only 1.2 GW, while wind and solar between them
| added about 278 GW."
|
| Dwarfs is the most apt description. (~250x)
| cyberax wrote:
| Nope. The devil is in the details.
|
| You're looking at the nameplate capacity. However, for
| solar the actual capacity factor can be anywhere from
| 10-25% of that. So you're looking anywhere from ~25-70GW
| of the average capacity. Nuclear reactors can operate at
| 90-95% capacity factors.
|
| And the unsolved problem is storage. Right now, solar can
| partially replace natural gas and, to a lesser extent,
| coal.
| tfourb wrote:
| Even considering the capacity factor solar and wind still
| grows by 60x compared to nuclear. And storage is no
| longer an ,,unsolved problem". You could manage the
| current grid with current chemical battery technology,
| levelized cost of electricity of that solution is cheaper
| than nuclear. And foreseeable technical advances will
| improve that while no comparable development is on the
| horizon for nuclear.
|
| The real tricky thing will be stuff like chemical
| processes that depend on hydrocarbons, but nuclear is no
| help for that.
|
| Nuclear didn't deliver on an every revolution in the 50s
| and it won't today. It's nice for submarines and to have
| an industrial base to build bombs but it inherently can't
| solve the world's energy demands.
| zamadatix wrote:
| I don't get all that either, though I don't mind if
| nuclear is the future we'd just need to let go of the
| brakes on it. The other thing to look at is overall
| growth of each type - China is going ham on wind, solar,
| hydro, and nuclear yet they've still had to increase the
| total amount of power generated by coal, oil, and gas
| anyways. Graphs always predict something like https://www
| .eia.gov/todayinenergy/images/2017.09.27/main.png but we
| really always end up with https://upload.wikimedia.org/wi
| kipedia/commons/thumb/1/18/Ch...
|
| Whatever the cheapest (clean) option deployable is people
| should be wanting to throw it in as fast as we can until
| we actually hit a technology limit with its usability
| instead of worrying it won't be able to get us to 100% or
| not. Instead, the conversation tends to read like we've
| already succeeded in deploying clean energy fast enough
| and we should stop looking or that we are still looking
| for a technology which can cut our current emissions and
| waiting for an answer. Neither are true, we're still
| burning more fossil fuels during the day. The US at least
| managed to hit break even growth in electricity
| generation https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons
| /a/aa/US_Elect... even after stalling nuclear outputs but
| there's still a lot to go there all the same. I'm not as
| familiar with Europe.
|
| About the only stances I've been able to make sense of
| (even though I don't personally agree with them) are the
| concern nuclear is a step back rather than a step forward
| and that's why we shouldn't deploy it and the people that
| just want the cheapest power regardless of source.
| Everyone else doesn't seem to have a reason to worry
| about "what" as much as "how to deploy more" for the
| moment. The dirtier power tends to be the one that's
| easier to spin up/down very rapidly anyways - "keep the
| capacity for now and just run it less when you can" is
| still a great thing.
| qball wrote:
| Because it's the one green solution that actually works as
| base load (other than hydroelectricity, but that's terrain-
| dependent), works 24/7 without any other affordances, and
| doesn't open you up to dependence on other nations to
| anywhere near the same degree.
|
| Solar and wind are only cheap because a foreign nation
| makes the parts (if they were made domestically they
| wouldn't be cost-competitive, obviously). So in 20 years,
| when your PV panels are degrading and your turbines are
| wearing out, that foreign country's going to be able to
| charge you a lot more to replace it.
|
| And if you want to see the results of cheap industrial
| inputs becoming expensive one only need look at the post-
| Nordstream German/European economic forecast. Even the poor
| should be able to afford to keep the lights on and the A/C
| running once the sun has set.
| bruce511 wrote:
| One minor counterpoint;
|
| Solar panels won't start degrading in 20 years. Their
| degrading is linear and starts when you install them. As
| a very rough guide you can think of it as 1% per year.
|
| The 20-year horizon therefore is not fixed. It's just a
| round number. There's a point at which it makes sense to
| add panels (or replace them if you are space
| constrained.)
|
| Once large numbers of panels start getting replaced you
| may see them reused in space-available places, or
| potentially 'reconditioned' to extend their life. Think
| of it as similar to second-hand cars.
|
| Of course if the price keeps dropping these avenues are
| less attractive. And if you are space constrained there
| are already space improvements that may make changing
| desirable well before 20 years.
|
| Finally, lots of things we use are made elsewhere. And we
| make things others use. By trading our excess for their
| excess we create a trading relationship where both sides
| operate in good faith because it is in their advantage to
| do so.
|
| The current climate, where the US operates in bad faith,
| and seems intent on damaging trade relationships, does
| not encourage other countries to behave well in the
| future (regardless of the motivations you (project?
| expect?) from them in the future.
| timewizard wrote:
| I don't understand why people think a diversity of power
| generation options is somehow not something you would
| desperately want in the first world.
|
| Your fashion sense is awesome; however, this is
| engineering, and we need as many options as we can get.
| There is zero sense in playing favorites here.
| kulahan wrote:
| Because solar and wind are extremely inefficient and
| dangerous when compared with nuclear. Nuclear and enhanced
| geothermal are both closing in on their dream forms (fusion
| and supercritical fluids), and are already sufficient as
| they are.
|
| It's not necessarily "over" them, it's that it will get
| tons of attention because that level of power generation
| would take wayyyyy too long to build out and take wayyyy
| too much space before even getting into the fact that
| neither solution can work anywhere at any time.
|
| Nuclear got a bad rap, but it is way too essential to
| ignore in this problem we're facing. When the focus shifts,
| you can tell people are getting serious. Simple as that.
|
| Edit: I did not realize this had somehow become a
| conservative viewpoint? I am a leftist.
| renewiltord wrote:
| One of the best things to come out of destroying
| environmentalism is that we can finally get working on
| renewable energy instead of being blocked by suicidal
| environmentalists who find wind farms too ugly.
| acdha wrote:
| Environmentalists have been pushing wind, solar, etc. for
| the last half century. There are a few shortsighted people
| who oppose wind farms but they represent a large, complex
| multinational movement in the same way that any one of us
| represents the tech industry, which is to say not at all.
|
| In many cases, if you look at the complainants it's also
| reasonable to question whether they're fully honest about
| their motivations. For example, the big Martha's Vineyard
| project was backed by the biggest environmental group in
| the area but by the opposition were people like commercial
| fishermen and various rich cranks like RFK Jr. and the
| Kochs who thought the change in view would affect their
| property values but do not otherwise live lives full of
| obvious strong environmentalist views.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Environmentalists push renewables the way homelessness
| activists push housing: It's a great idea if it is near
| no one, hurts no one's views, impacts zero birds, affects
| zero animals, and is not built for profit by the rich.
|
| I suppose I could use their terminology, though:
| responsibly sited, balancing conservation priorities, and
| protecting local communities.
|
| I recall, in my college years, being told how Real
| Communism hadn't been tried yet. It seems that Real
| Communism never did get tried and no matter who tries
| Communism they never try the good Real variety. After
| years of watching top environmental organizations
| repeatedly oppose nuclear power as a whole and renewables
| often, I think I have to say: Real Environmentalism
| Hasn't Been Tried Yet. No True Environmentalist Would Do
| What These Guys Do.
| tfourb wrote:
| I am an ,,environmentalist" and I'm in full and public
| Sport of the hundreds of windmills in clear view of my
| town and the solar on every new residential development,
| including my own house. As are all other
| ,,environmentalists" I know.
| renewiltord wrote:
| I'm comfortable restricting my position to the US. Things
| may be different elsewhere, even in Canada.
| acdha wrote:
| If you're going to make that kind of sweeping claim
| representing many different people and groups, I'm going
| to need to see some data. What you're describing sounds
| more like the mechanism I described, where rich people
| use the language of environmentalism to make their NIMBY
| activities sound less venal but that's saying that those
| specific people are hypocrites rather than a general
| commentary on the entire field.
| renewiltord wrote:
| What evidence would convince you? If I know the bar, I
| can see if it can be met.
| codr7 wrote:
| Have you ever lived near wind turbines?
|
| They take quite a toll on both wild life and people living
| in the area.
|
| And are often abandoned as soon as they don't generate
| enough profits/are too expensive to maintain, with no one
| wanting to pay for cleaning up the area.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| > They take quite a toll on ... people living in the
| area.
|
| How?
| casper14 wrote:
| Honestly, it's the sound. If you live close enough, it
| will drive you insane.
| jmb99 wrote:
| A buddy of mine has two on his property, one within a
| stones' throw of his house and barns. Not only does the
| sound not drive him insane, I couldn't hear it (at _all_
| ), nor any of the other ~600 in the area.
| codr7 wrote:
| It depends a lot on geography and (obviously) winds in
| the area.
|
| I can assure you that it's very real, and very harmful on
| a daily basis.
| bee_rider wrote:
| How close were you? I've been on a campus with a wind
| turbine, don't recall any sound. But I didn't get
| directly under the thing.
| wingworks wrote:
| I used to live down the hill from 1, and 99% of the time
| could hear nothing. But on a lucky day when the wind was
| in the right direction and right strength, you could just
| hear a faint woosh woosh woosh.
|
| Personally I liked the sound. But we only had 1, so maybe
| different with many more. Though never heard the wind
| farms I've stopped by.
| codr7 wrote:
| Wind, and moving shadows when the sun is behind them.
|
| I find both annoying to live with daily.
|
| And it's not like its a problem that couldn't be solved;
| I like the idea of wind turbines, just not at any cost.
| acdha wrote:
| No, it won't. This myth was started in the 2000s by Nina
| Pierpont who was looking for reasons to oppose wind farms
| near her property but it's been studied repeatedly and
| there's no credible evidence of any significant impact.
| Roads are at least as noisy, and have other forms of
| pollution, but I've never seen the same people call for
| banning cars.
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-025-04645-x
| codr7 wrote:
| Right, so people who claim to have this experience are
| lying, for no good reason.
|
| While people who have a lot to gain from hiding problems
| with wind turbines are telling the truth.
|
| Isn't that always how it works?
| acdha wrote:
| All of the people advancing those claims also think they
| have a lot to gain, too. Those claims are hard to
| evaluate because humans are famously subjective and prone
| to misattribution, which is why we invented the
| scientific method. Every high-quality investigation has
| been unable to find support for them.
| briantakita wrote:
| This is why many people don't trust "The Science". It's
| the positivist materialist institutionalist gaslighting.
| If the conflicted institution hasn't published the
| opinion or the measurements then it doesn't exist. Don't
| believe your lying eyes or ears. If you notice
| somethingnot published, you are automatically wrong. All
| whistleblowers must be discredited.
|
| Isn't this a tactic of con artists & cult members who
| have much to gain from public perception & policy?
| rob74 wrote:
| I think you're confusing environmentalists with NIMBYs who
| use (among others) environmental arguments to argue against
| projects they don't like.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Scratch an environmentalist and a NIMBY bleeds. I think
| we've seen the effect in America in general and
| California in particular. The Sierra Club is against
| infill housing to protect views.
| Supersaiyan_IV wrote:
| Doing climate research in Fahrenheit in 2025 gives me second hand
| embarrassment.
| artursapek wrote:
| Celsius is useful if you're a beaker of water. Fahrenheit is
| useful if you're a human.
| inetknght wrote:
| Nah, Celsius is useful if you're a human. Fahrenheit is
| useful if you're an American.
| artursapek wrote:
| 0 is cold as fuck, 100 is hot as fuck. Perfect human scale.
| Stay jelly
| beAbU wrote:
| -40 - cold as fuck, 40 - hot as fuck. 0 - shit freezes,
| better drive carefully.
|
| I don't understand why this is always breought out when
| farenheit is criticized, as if the 0F-100F thing is the
| "killer app" for temperature scales.
| artursapek wrote:
| In what country do people encounter -40 degrees
| timschmidt wrote:
| We had a -40F windchill day here in Michigan a few years
| ago.
| labster wrote:
| -40degC feels pretty much the same as -40degF
| werdnapk wrote:
| Because it is the same.
| nukem222 wrote:
| Russia, canada, sweden, norway, finland, us... probably
| missing a few. Edit: mongolia too, I think.
|
| curiously, nothing in the southern hemisphere?
| olddustytrail wrote:
| Antarctica
| zeagle wrote:
| Parts of Canada for sure. When it's below -35C my garage
| stored vehicle's cold engine light turns after a bit on
| while driving!
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| As an American I'm biased, but Fahrenheit matching the
| 1-100 scale used in so many other things just feels nice.
| Maps cleanly to 0-1.0 in a float/decimal type in
| programming which is neat too. Feels less arbitrary even
| if it actually isn't.
|
| I prefer metric otherwise but for temperature Fahrenheit
| just "clicks" in ways that Celsius doesn't.
| taberiand wrote:
| Fahrenheit doesn't match the 1-100 scale, though -
| Celsius does. 0 water freezes, 100 water boils.
| hollerith wrote:
| Herr Fahrenheit measured the temperature many times over
| a period of one year in some town in Germany. He defined
| 0 degrees as the coldest measurement, 100 the hottest
| measurement.
| taberiand wrote:
| Ok but Celsius works wherever you are (adjusting for
| pressure)
| briHass wrote:
| Anytime your scale has to go into negative numbers to
| represent common scenarios, it's not human friendly.
|
| If you're not tying your scale to human-specific temps,
| why not just use Kelvin? At least that won't go negative.
| cyberax wrote:
| 20F is also cold as fuck. 90F is also hot as fuck.
| chrismcb wrote:
| If you are used to Celsius, sure. But the point the op was
| making is Fahrenheit was designed with humans in mind and
| Celsius with the changes of the state of water. Your
| average person didn't really care what temperature water
| boils at, just that it is hot.
| nukem222 wrote:
| > Fahrenheit was designed with humans in mind
|
| If there was a design, it's not clear what the intent
| was. It seems about twice as precise as it needs to be (i
| certainly can't perceive 1Fdeg--for all intents and
| purposes, 70 feels about the same as 69 and 71) and
| doesn't seem to correlate to any scale that is
| immediately based off the needs of humans. At least
| compared to celcius.
| timschmidt wrote:
| This is very interesting, because I absolutely can feel
| one degree F difference in house temperature.
|
| I wonder if using a lower resolution scale dulls the
| senses like other forms of
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity
| nukem222 wrote:
| I live in the US and can't change my thermostat, so I
| don't think that's it.
|
| I'm sure I could feel the difference if i split myself
| between two rooms with one degree difference. I just
| don't think this is a useful granularity--I typically
| move the thermostat by 2-5 degrees at a time.
| throwaway657656 wrote:
| Farenheit set 100F to be his wife's internal temperature.
| 0F was the freezing point of brine and humans are mostly
| brine. F is human centric.[0]
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit
| tremon wrote:
| So basically, Fahrenheit chose 100degF to be the
| temperate when he gets hard and 0degF to be the
| temperature when his wife gets hard?
| technothrasher wrote:
| He says in his original paper that the top point of his
| reference scale is 96, not 100 for the point where
| "Alcohol expands up to this point when it is held in the
| mouth or under the armpit of a living man in good
| health". He originally based his scale on 12, and then
| got more precise by increasing each division by two
| several times, ending up with 96.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| 0F .. 100F is about the range of temperatures a human
| living on earth could reasonably expect to experience
| without deliberate adventuring. It's not a precise range
| - plenty of people live in Doha (way above 100F) and in
| Alberta (way below 0F) - but it's a pretty reasonable
| approximation.
| djtango wrote:
| I'm not convinced the people of Doha or Alberta would
| consider their day to day lives adventures
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| My comment ends with a note that "it's a reasonable
| approximation".
|
| The percentage of global population where the 0F..100F
| range is not a reasonable approximation of the
| temperature range they will experience is small. It's not
| perfect - no such range could, when humans live almost
| everywhere on the planet. But it's not bad ...
| cyberax wrote:
| No, Fahrenheit was not designed with "humans in mind".
|
| Neither 0F nor 100F are anything special for humans. It's
| "very cold" long before 0F and "very hot" long before
| 100F. 50F is nothing special either.
|
| Room temperature is 72F.
| timschmidt wrote:
| Who needs 2x the effective resolution at human temperature
| scales? Or useful temperatures without significant digits
| beyond the decimal?
| mass_and_energy wrote:
| Agreed, there's a reason most of the world uses it.
| tremon wrote:
| What significance does 0degF have to a human?
| rpastuszak wrote:
| ?
| asciimov wrote:
| 0degF was the outside temperature with 40 mph winds (60mph
| gusts) the time I had to venture to the middle of an empty
| field to break the ice on water tank with a hatchet so cows
| could get water.
| fernmyth wrote:
| I thought at 0degF you're supposed to bring the cows
| inside! Also at 100degF
|
| I guess it depends on the cows
| bongodongobob wrote:
| Exactly. Where I live we have temps from -20F to 110F,
| which is -30 to 43C. Idk, seems to me the hottest normal
| temp being 90ish and coldest normalish temp at 0 is a
| decent scale.
| ikiris wrote:
| It's cold.
| NortySpock wrote:
| 30 is hot.
|
| 20 is nice.
|
| 10 is cold.
|
| 0 is ice.
|
| Not hard to remember for converting Celsius to how humans
| typically perceive temperature.
| artursapek wrote:
| Cool yeah let's compress the entire scale to 0-35 and waste
| the other 65 up to 100 lol yeah what a great scale
| werdnapk wrote:
| The "entire scale" has no maximum. So your waste of the
| Celsius scale from 35-100 is Fahrenheits waste of the
| scale from 0-32 or whatever you're trying to base your
| comments on.
| timschmidt wrote:
| My problem isn't remembering the scale, it's that
| Fahrenheit offers me double the effective resolution and
| descriptive accuracy without awkward decimal points in the
| numbers used.
|
| I like my room at 73F, not 72F or 74F, and I can feel the
| difference. That's 22.77C. :-/
| ttepasse wrote:
| My main observation in temperature scale and imperial
| lengths discussions om the Internet is that Americans
| seem to have a strange aversion against fractional parts
| of numbers, as if those were irrational.
|
| (On the other hand a lot of Americans consume fava
| beans.)
| timschmidt wrote:
| Au contraire base 12 measurement is _all about the
| fractions_. 12 can be divided evenly by 2, 3, 4, and 6.
| Metric gets 5 and 2. By that measure it's y'all that are
| afraid of the small numbers.
|
| US units are pinned to Metric standards anyway. We're
| just using the most creative ratios. :)
| bgnn wrote:
| Most temperature sensors are accurate to 0.1C. Most
| weather forecast is 0.5C resolution. So yeah only
| explanation to Americans behavior is an aversion against
| fractional numbers as you said.
| briHass wrote:
| I found this take from 'Torque Test Channel' (tests
| battery tools) humorous:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QUum9NymZY
| timschmidt wrote:
| Brilliant and hilarious.
| 3eb7988a1663 wrote:
| American, I think we use fractions all the time: 7/8 inch
| hardware tools, 3/4 measuring cup in cooking, etc.
| Especially awkward when you have human distances, because
| you have to mix feet + inches: 3 feet 4 and 1/4 inches.
|
| It was a dream once I got a metric tape measurer and
| realized that using centimeters eliminates the need to do
| annoying conversions.
| timeon wrote:
| I like my room exactly at 21C. Any F number is Greek to
| me.
|
| Remembering is more about what you are used to here.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Perceiving temperature involves dew point and relative
| humidity, not just temperature.
| k_roy wrote:
| Okay. Or, hear me out.
|
| On a scale from 0-100, you have very cold and very hot.
|
| Or you've got from 0-45. Where 0 is "meh" cold and 45 is
| incredibly warm.
|
| So you've got a nice little 0-100 scale that all humans are
| going to experience just living that goes from very cold to
| very hot.
|
| Or you've got a useless 0-100 scale that the bottom just
| means freezing, and ignores every pain point of being
| really cold below that, and anything really greater than
| 50C only has practical applications in cooking.
| adammarples wrote:
| 0 isn't the bottom of the celcius temperature scale,
| there are negative numbers
| typewithrhythm wrote:
| Humans cannot reliably determine the difference in one degree
| c, even though it's bigger... Fahrenheit is too fine grained,
| and has no interesting points relative to the things I
| interact with. I freeze an boil water often, however
| crazygringo wrote:
| This is false. I frequently find myself annoyed at my AC
| because it only has settings of 72degF and 74degF, and they
| are a little too cold and a little too warm for me. I want
| 73degF. When it's around room temperature, you can
| _absolutely_ tell the difference.
|
| The further away from room temperature, the less we can
| distinguish. All our senses work logarithmically like that.
| djtango wrote:
| I grew up during the F to C transition in the UK and F is
| not intuitive.
|
| 0 = ice 100 = steam
|
| That is pretty intuitive if you ask me. And for gravy
| comfortable room temp is about 25
| bee_rider wrote:
| Fahrenheit is sort of intuitive if you think of it as
| somehow, impossibly, a percentage scale. 0C/32F is still
| decently comfortable anyway. 0F is, like, not at all
| comfortable. 100C is dead. 100F is the most unbearably
| hot temperature that isn't immediately deadly.
| jltsiren wrote:
| 100degC is somewhat uncomfortable, and it usually
| indicates that someone is trying to show off. 80 to 90 is
| much better. (In a sauna.)
| k_roy wrote:
| Just curious on what planet you exist where 100C is only
| "somewhat uncomfortable"
| bee_rider wrote:
| It does kinda depend on humidity, fwiw. In New England,
| the 90's are _hot,_ unpleasant sticky weather.
|
| I guess it doesn't happen often, but I saw some
| upper-90's temperature in the Portland, Oregon area. It
| feels relatively mild actually, compared to New England
| 90's, I'm pretty sure because it is so dry. The lighter
| air just carries the heat away, rather than having it
| stick to you.
| hnaccount_rng wrote:
| I think GP was talking about saunas and not ambient
| temperature. So 100C not 100F. Still the argument remains
| the same: Low humidity (and reasonably short durations)
| bee_rider wrote:
| Oh jeez, I totally missed the C, haha. Silly of me given
| the topic of the thread.
| defrost wrote:
| Our maximum day time tempreture in January 2025 was 113 F
| ( 45 C ), 12 days or so were over 100 F ( 37.7 C )
|
| http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/dwo/202501/html/IDCJDW6136.
| 202...
|
| This is in the cooler south west corner of a large state
| ( 3x size of Texas )
| bee_rider wrote:
| Of course, the experience of heat does depend on humidity
| as well. But, how was it? It sounds... too hot!
| hnaccount_rng wrote:
| Fahrenheit is very intuitive if you are in Danzig in one
| particular year... [0] otherwise.. It's a historic
| accident. If you want to root your measurement system in
| human experience your measurement system will be outdated
| in a couple of decades. Because humanity changes! That
| way there will always be old/antiquated/historic units.
| Metric basically accepts that and uses easy to convert
| units and leaves the intuition forming to the humans
| gathering the experience
|
| [0] Apparently the story is disputed.. But the way I was
| taught it was: 100F == typical healthy human and 0 F ==
| lowest temperature in Danzig in the winter 1708/1709.
| This makes it (by construction) a more natural fit to
| human experience (especially one in northern Europe) http
| s://web.archive.org/web/20131015045624/http://www.deutsc.
| ..
| oriolid wrote:
| It's missing one important distinction: Below 0C:
| Freezing, probably slippery, not raining water. Above 0C:
| not freezing, probably not slippery, rain comes as water.
| They are as uncomfortable as you make them.
| y33t wrote:
| The base units of the metric system are often not very
| ergonomic. Why is a meter so damn big? And why is a gram so
| damn small? I can barely detect a gram. And a meter is
| frickin huge, causing people to usually divide it into
| hundredths of a meter, which you can hardly picture in your
| mind unless you already know what it looks like, especially
| arbitrary counts of cm. Metric's only real advantage is
| that it shares the same radix as our counting system.
|
| What we really need is a new system of units...
| defrost wrote:
| Using metric has never been an issue in trades or
| sciences in metric countries.
|
| A metre is much the same as a yard or an adult arm span.
| Not a problem.
|
| Pretty much all carpentry and cabinet making is done in
| mm alone, the width of a fat pencil mark.
|
| 1400mm is shy of a metre and a half (1500mm), cross piece
| spacing might be 300mm (about a foot).
|
| No need to have feet, inches, quarters and thirds mixing
| up the page, just use mm everywhere.
|
| A gram is fine for small mass measurements, a kilogram is
| a good unit for heavier masses - very human scale being
| the same as a litre of water and more or less a litre of
| milk.
|
| It really comes down to familiarity, there's nothing
| intrinsically difficult about metric (and much that is
| more intuitive than odd imperialial units and the whacky
| intra unit conversion factors).
| dagss wrote:
| As a metric user: This is about your lack of familiarity.
|
| E.g. can picture lumber expressed in cm or mm very
| easily. E.g., if you work with beams that are 48mm / 5 cm
| or 98mm / 10cm a lot then those sizes becomes second
| nature. Just as easy to picture as 2 inch, 4 inch, 1/2
| inch, 3/4 inch etc that is in use in US.
|
| And saying that something is 200m away is exactly as
| intuitive as however many feet that is. A large meter has
| a usecase.
|
| I feel square metres for houses is very natural unit and
| square feet sounds awkward (each patch of house area is
| so small you can do nothing with it, a square metre gets
| you somewhere..).
|
| Making yet another system of units sounds like massive
| pain and as someone who are used to metric I see no
| advantages.
| ddingus wrote:
| As a user of both Imperial and Standard International
| units, I agree with you.
|
| As a kid, one of my science educators spoke about the
| many benefits people gain from becoming familiar with
| basic units. I bought in and did so during the big metric
| push that happened around that time.
|
| I ended up more familiar with Imperial units.
|
| Then, later in life, I entered a young industry, with
| strong users of metric, Standard International units.
|
| So I did the work to build familiarity just as I did long
| ago. Took half a year and today I enjoy the benefits.
|
| And those are:
|
| Ease of understanding unit values meaning in my daily
| life.
|
| Ease of expression of same to others.
|
| Greater accuracy estimating.
|
| Easier computation and unit checks.
|
| And so on...
| dwighttk wrote:
| Ah but are 48x98s nowhere near 48mm and 98mms like our
| 2x4s?
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| We'll be doing it in caves before long, if present trends
| persist.
| AngryData wrote:
| Why? Celsius is just as arbitrary a choice as Fahrenheit. It
| brings nothing extra to the table. You might as well complain
| that tapered pipe threads are in US inches or that astronomers
| use AUs and light seconds rather than meters.
| anthk wrote:
| In Science, global standards matter. Such as Metric and
| Celsius.
| pgkr wrote:
| What makes you think the research was done in Fahrenheit? This
| is a blog post by a science communicator who's trying to reach
| a wide audience of American-English speakers. It stands to
| reason that they'd use units that their audience is familiar
| with.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| So, Kelvin then?
| timeon wrote:
| Sure, 273.15K +- something.
| AbstractH24 wrote:
| It's almost like there are better indicators of spring than
| groundhogs.
| Spivak wrote:
| So the thing was Groundhog Day is actually really interesting.
| The prediction doesn't really have to do with groundhogs but
| instead has to do with whether it is cloudy or not on Groundhog
| Day. It's kind of funny about it is that they kinda got it
| backwards. If you bet against Punxsutawney Phil you'll be doing
| better than random chance.
| deadbabe wrote:
| Is this good or bad
| ForOldHack wrote:
| It's good if you are looking for clearer weather, and bad if
| you follow the science of stratospheric ozone depletion. (
| Counter intuitive. )
| xg15 wrote:
| > _Second, though the impacts of March sudden warmings are very
| similar to those in mid-winter, spring is coming, so any Arctic
| air brought down in the US won 't "feel" as cold compared to if
| it happened in January because we are in a warmer part of the
| year._
|
| This part seems really handwavey. Could someone explain what they
| mean with "warmer part of the year" if not air temperature?
| Increased warming through more sunlight?
| mathgeek wrote:
| > so any Arctic air brought down in the US won't "feel" as cold
| compared to if it happened in January because we are in a
| warmer part of the year.
|
| I read this pretty simply as "March is warmer than January".
| More hours of daylight, more direct angle, etc. Anyone living
| closer to the tropics knows that feeling of "it's cold but the
| sun is out" compared to being further away in winter.
| xg15 wrote:
| Yeah, that makes sense. I was tripped up a bit because "march
| is warmer" sounds to me like an effect, not a cause - and it
| becomes paradoxical if there is a massive cold front underway
| at the same time.
|
| But if they mean, there are other seasonal factors - such as
| daylight - that counteract the cold spell, which aren't there
| in winter, it makes more sense.
| avianlyric wrote:
| Imaging increased warming from sunlight raising ground and
| building temperatures probably impacts "felt" temperature quite
| a bit.
|
| There a few different heat transfer mechanisms, with conduction
| and radiation being the big ones we care about here. Cold air
| impacts heat transfer via conduction, but temperature of
| surrounding surfaces (like buildings and the ground) impacts
| radiative heat transfer, which makes us a significant portion
| of your bodies heat transfer into it's surrounding environment.
| Which is the reason why a clear night is colder than an
| overcast night. The clouds above reflect a significant amount
| of radiant energy back at you on a cloudy day, and on a clear
| night you're directly exposed to cold emptiness of space which
| will radiate effectively zero heat back at you.
|
| Good place to experience the difference between conduction and
| radiative heat, is being near a camp fire on a cold night. The
| camp fire doesn't really warm the air around your body, but the
| emitted IR has a huge impact. Hence you end up with a very warm
| front, while still having a very cold back.
| ilove_banh_mi wrote:
| The _observed range of variability_ on the two first graphs is
| quite something to behold.
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