This month, the ace journal club discussed an article about gender detachment. And I wrote an article on the game design of my game.
Epstein Files Reveal How Pathetic Richard Dawkins & Other Men Are | Rebecca Watson (video + transcript, 27 min) – I get readers from outside FTB who have little background with the skeptical and atheist movements, and who don’t get what that means for us. Here it is. This is where we came from. This is what we rejected. These pathetic thought leaders who were enraged by a woman speaking, and turned around to seek bad advice from then-convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. First we wanted better, and then eventually we just wanted out.
The Fascists are Lying about ICE Murdering an Innocent Women | Rebecca Watson (video + transcript, 27 min) – Another cathartic video from Rebecca, also featuring a cameo from Michael Shermer. Fun fact: Michael Shermer got me into the skeptical movement, and fun fact two: he’s a terrible person.
You are being misled about renewable energy technology | Technology Connections (video, 1:31 hours) – A rundown of the modern efficiency of solar power, and the powers that oppose it. Yeah so it turns out that the fascists definitely do not make the trains run on time. Judging by current events, they just repeatedly lie that they do.
Debanking (and Debunking?) | Bits about Money – I read this novella-length discussion about banks, all the while exclaiming to my husband “banking is such a scintillating subject!” to which he nodded in pretend agreement. So debanking, that’s when a bank involuntarily closes your account. Often debanking occurs because a bank is unable to cover your use case, or because there’s some regulatory risk that the bank would rather avoid. There are also cases where policy-makers have indisputably used debanking as a way to accomplish policy goals with relatively little accountability.
Crypto firms and founders point to these practices and complain that they too are unfairly subject to debanking. It’s true that they are frequently subject to debanking; however, it does not appear to be unfair. Banks are judging crypto on its track record, and crypto has blown up banks’ faces many times.
The author doesn’t touch on it, but it also seems relevant to payment processors being unwilling to deal with any pornographic media. As I’ve said before, the purpose of financial regulations is to create a panopticon. Financial firms are constantly trying to predict what regulators will have a problem with, because if the regulators need to tell you then you’re already in trouble. Regulatory institutions can exercise power by merely hinting that a certain practice is questionable. This can be unfair, but in other cases it is socially desirable, so it’s a tool you can’t throw out entirely.
I don’t watch many videos, because I prefer to read, but that renewable energy video sounded interesting and it’s great. Thank you for sharing!
I think the video is slightly optimistic on our (future) technological ability to recycle various materials as well as our ability to handle high power in end user applications (e.g. efficiently and robustly switching high current in EVs seems to be a challenge without a easy solution), but that doesn’t invalidate the video’s points. IMO it is missing one important thing: the world wide Total Final Consumption of energy is only about 20% electricity and of the remaining 80% some can’t be easily converted to directly use electricity (e.g. the processing of iron ore), but may require hydrogen created from electrolysis. That means that actually more than 5 times the current amount of really cheap electricity (and as the video says, the cheapest electricity by far is renewable) is required. IMO that is an important consideration, because having that much electric power capacity (that also creates lots of hydrogen – with 70-90% efficiency – that can be burned on demand in power stations) turns meeting the electricity demand of end users mostly into a non problem (at least compared to how it is played up by the misleaders). It requires a capable power grid and that’s what should be put into focus for public policy more than energy storage (storage will pop up automatically as long as sufficiently large fluctuations in energy price make a strong business case for it; just like the business case to build solar power plants).
And it’s important to reiterate that nuclear energy is not only not necessary, but proposing nuclear power also is misleading. There still might be a few cases where it is an acceptable solution (but AFAICT only if you like to build nuclear weapons), but pretty much always it is prohibitively expensive and much too slow to build (and requires refined fuel, even if that arguably isn’t much of a problem currently).
@Jürgen Rühle
I didn’t know most of the energy consumption wasn’t electricity, though I was able to quickly confirm. Thanks for sharing.
“I read this novella-length discussion about banks, all the while exclaiming to my husband “banking is such a scintillating subject!” to which he nodded in pretend agreement.”
this is the biblical definition of marriage