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zvaigzdelasas · 3 months

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[Calcalist is Private Israeli Media]

"We have a huge deficit of ammunition not just in Ukraine but all over the world. We understand we should produce this here in Ukraine because all around the world it’s finished, it’s depleted. All the warehouses are empty," said Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal to the "Financial Times" in October of last year, addressing the ammunition situation of the Ukrainian army, which is interconnected with the challenges faced by the IDF.

The increased ammunition usage in the wars in Gaza and Ukraine has led to an unprecedented global shortage of ammunition of all types. While the IDF tries not to address the issue publicly, Major General Eliezer Toledano admitted last month that the IDF is reducing air attacks, emphasizing the necessity to "manage the economy of armaments" because the war will last a long time. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also commented on the matter, stating that "we need three things from the U.S.: armaments, armaments, armaments." At a press conference two weeks ago, Netanyahu announced that Israel is preparing the Israeli defense industries to "cut off dependence on the world," a goal that is not realistic in any way.[...]

[L]ast week the Director General of the Ministry of Defense Eyal Zamir concluded a huge deal with the American government for the supply of aerial ammunition in the hundreds of millions of dollars, and so far over 25,000 tons of weapons have been sent to Israel since the beginning of the war in about 280 aircraft and about 40 ships. The Israeli defense industry is also tasked with filling the IDF's stocks. About two weeks ago it was published in Calcalist that the Israeli companies postponed the supply of weapons worth more than $1.5 billion to their customers across the world to divert resources for the IDF's combat needs and that in the last three months, the Ministry of Defense ordered more than NIS 10 billion ($2.7 million) worth of weapons from them. It should be noted that the shortage does not stem from a lack of budget but from a lack of supply, and the Treasury does not restrict the IDF from purchasing ammunition of any kind.

The tremendous need for armaments stems from the unusual amount of bombings that the IDF has carried out in Gaza since the outbreak of the war. Two weeks ago, the army announced that 30,000 targets had been attacked in Gaza. A security source told Calcalist that the rate of fire the IDF is using in the current war is similar to that of a "superpower," is comparable only to the capabilities demonstrated by the U.S., and probably also exceeds the number of armaments of the Russians in the campaign against Ukraine.[...]

Another reason [for the increase in targets bombed] is that in the current war, the IDF adopted a policy of a lighter finger on the trigger [sic] regarding damage to infrastructure and Hamas operatives who are in a civilian environment, thus increasing the ability to hit targets that were not previously attacked. In addition to these reasons, there is also the added pressure from the political level, as well as from the [Israeli] public, who demand an increase in air force bombing to prevent as much as possible a risk to the forces on the ground.[...]

[O]ne should ask whether, considering the existing ammunition stockpile, this policy may not harm the IDF's readiness to carry out future missions, especially given the existing security challenges and the probable scenario in which the IDF will be forced to [sic] carry out an attack in southern Lebanon as well. The IDF may be forced to better clarify its limitations to the politicians to avoid reaching an extreme scenario of an ammunition shortage, or in the words of General Toledano: "There is no infinite army."

28 Jan 24

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probablyasocialecologist · 19 days

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Reducing the steel output and using more common steel grades would not bring us back to the Bronze Age. As noted, global end-of-life ferrous scrap availability was approximately 450 Mt in 2021, which would allow us to produce roughly one-quarter of the current steel output. Furthermore, the scrap supply will continue to rise for the next 40 years, enabling us to produce more and more low-emission steel each year. By 2050, scrap availability is expected to rise to about 900 Mt, almost half of today’s global steel production. All that extra steel could be invested in expanding the low-carbon power grid without raising emissions first. There is a lot of room to reduce the steel intensity of modern society. All our basic needs – and more – could be supplied with much less steel involved. For example, we could make cars lighter by making them smaller. That would bring energy savings without the need for energy-intensive high-grade steel. We could replace cars with bicycles and public transportation so that more people share less steel. Such changes would also reduce the need for steel in the road network, the energy infrastructure, and the manufacturing industry. We would need fewer machine tools, shipping containers, and reinforced concrete buildings. Whenever steel intensity is reduced, the advantages cascade throughout the whole system. Preventing corrosion and producing steel more locally from local resources would also reduce energy use and emissions. The continuous growth of the steel output – the increasing steel intensity of human society – makes sustainable steel production impossible. No technology can change that because it’s not a technological problem. Like forestry can only be sustainable if the wood demand does not exceed the wood supply, steel is sustainable or not depending on the balance between (scrap) supply and (steel) demand. We may not be able to escape the Iron Age, but we have an option to escape the catch-22 that inextricably links steel production with fossil fuels.

#steel #degrowth #renewable energy

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materialsscienceandengineering · 2 months

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Over 100,000 individuals in the United States are currently in need of organ transplants. The demand for organs, such as hearts, kidneys, and livers, far exceeds the available supply and people sometimes wait years to receive a donated organ. Approximately 6,000 Americans die while waiting each year. Tissue engineering to create lab-grown organs and tissues aims to close the gap between the availability of organs and the demand for transplants. But one big challenge in tissue engineering is creating blood vessel networks in artificial organs that work like natural ones, from tiny capillaries to larger arteries. Traditional artificial blood vessel designs often don't mimic the natural design needed to function properly in the body. However, new research shows the possibility of using 3D ice printing to help create structures that resemble blood vessels in the body. Feimo Yang, a graduate student in the labs of Philip LeDuc and Burak Ozdoganlar at Carnegie Mellon University, will present their research at the 68th Biophysical Society Annual Meeting, to be held February 10 -- 14, 2024 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

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shadycomputerpolice · 6 days

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Is Tertiary Education Education a Scam?

While I am very pro knowledge and skill acquisition and would not declare that higher education is a waste of time, I understand where the "tertiary education is a scam" crowd is coming from.

For many people, myself included, we went to university believing the "go to uni, get good grades and a good well paying job is practically guaranteed" promise. We bought into the idea but upon graduation we realised that the promise was exaggerated or some might say outright false. That promise was true when the world's population was lower

Some of us, myself included, fell for the "it is because you have just a bachelors degree, get a masters then the well paying job is guaranteed". We did that and heart break. We got jobs but not as well paying as we expected.

The truth is many people attended university with the intention of getting lucrative jobs so when we don't get those jobs, we feel duped. The people who had to go into debt to acquire their degrees with the hopes of getting a well paying job are understandably very bitter.

The truth no one told us is that there aren't enough lucrative jobs to go around. There are more qualified candidates looking for high paying jobs than there are high paying jobs; supply exceeds demand. This is the case in all industries and sectors as when people notice an industry or sector is lucrative, they switch to that career or put their children in that career and eventually you have a lot of people in that field that causes unemployment and lower wages in that area. A perfect example of this is the tech industry: Many people believed the IT Industry was the path to financial security but alas the mass layoffs. I know unemployed and underpayed Software Engineers/ Programmers.

Is this a "do not go to university" post? No, absolutely not. This is a if you want a well paying job, you might need to consider a career in healthcare although

#labour market #job market #self improvement #self help

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mariacallous · 1 month

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Gaza faces an increasingly dire humanitarian situation: Some 80 percent of the population has been displaced; food, medicine, and shelter are all in short supply; the United Nations estimates that some 576,000 people are on the brink of famine; and the World Food Program has concluded that some 70 percent of northern Gazans face “catastrophic hunger.” To get aid into the enclave, the United States and other countries are now turning to increasingly creative measures, including airdrops and floating piers off the Gazan coast. As the Washington Post recently opined, the United States seeks “a logistically complicated workaround to … a fundamentally simple problem: Getting aid into Gaza by land.”

But as with everything in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the problem is rarely as straightforward as it might seem. In this case, the humanitarian disaster in Gaza is not one problem, but at least two. There is the throughput problem—getting aid into Gaza—and then there is the distribution problem, which involves getting aid to those who need it most. Both problems come with their own unique challenges, but the latter—which has attracted far less attention—will be more difficult to solve.

Before the war, roughly 500 trucks passed into Gaza every day from Israel and Egypt. Now, according to United Nations data, that number stands at roughly 150. In February—during the height of the fighting in Khan Younis, which the Israeli military described as a Hamas stronghold—the number of truckloads slowed to a trickle; on some days, fewer than 10 trucks made it into the enclave.

From these basic facts, two dueling narratives have emerged. Humanitarian aid groups, as well as various governments around the world, allege that this slowdown of trucks in Gaza is due to arbitrary and time-consuming inspections by the Israeli military. In addition to the Kerem Shalom crossing on Israel’s border with southern Gaza, some aid also flows across the Egypt-Gaza border at Rafah—but this is insufficient to supply Gaza’s needs. If Israel was only to relax its inspections, open the Erez border crossing to northern Gaza, and allow aid to flow through Israel’s nearby deep-water port of Ashdod, the humanitarian problem would be solved, these critics argue.

Israeli government officials counter that the inspection regime is necessary, given Hamas’s documented penchant to hide military supplies inside humanitarian aid. The Israelis also note that not all of those 500 daily prewar truckloads were filled with humanitarian supplies. The U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine (UNRWA), which oversaw much aid distribution, only averaged 100 truckloads a day before the conflict began.

By some measures, humanitarian aid into Gaza has actually increased from its prewar levels. Much of the humanitarian catastrophe currently unfolding in Gaza, the Israeli government argues, is due to Hamas diverting the food and other supplies being trucked in—instead of distributing these goods to the civilian population.

On closer inspection, however, key aspects of the Israeli narrative begin to fall apart. Even if aid convoys are up from prewar levels, demand has shot up much more. With more than 32,000 Gazans killed and another 71,000 wounded, the need for medical supplies alone has increased dramatically compared to peacetime. Fighting has also destroyed warehouses and stores—and with them, many of the existing food stockpiles. At least three-quarters of the housing stock in Gaza also has been damaged or destroyed, exponentially expanding the need for temporary housing. By even the most cursory analysis, the humanitarian needs today in Gaza vastly exceed those prior to the conflict.

By contrast, Israel’s reticence to move aid into Gaza seems to be driven less by strategic reasons than it is by political ones. Just days before the attack on Oct. 7, 2023, Israel reopened the Erez crossing after it had been closed for two weeks due to violent protests instigated by Hamas. But on Oct. 7, Hamas attacked the newly reopened crossing, killing 10 Israeli soldiers there. To an Israeli public still reeling from Hamas’s atrocities, reviving this failed olive branch would carry a serious political cost for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s hard right government.

Admittedly, there are other, more tangible constraints on the Israeli side for humanitarian relief. As has been widely reported, Israel has been consistently surprised by Hamas’s military capabilities. Simply put, decades of Israeli border restrictions did not prevent Hamas from assembling thousands of rockets and building hundreds of miles of tunnels. While this rationale does not absolve Israel of some of its seemingly arbitrary restrictions on aid convoys over the past several months, it does mean that the Israeli inspection regimen on everything going into Gaza—humanitarian, commercial, or other deliveries—will be tighter than before by strategic necessity, not least because the old rules failed.

Further complicating matters, Gaza is a small place with a limited number of border crossings. At least half its roads have been damaged after nearly six months of war, according to the World Bank. Those that remain also need to support military use. Militaries of any size—the Israel Defense Forces included—consume vast supplies of food and petroleum and spare parts in the field in order to sustain combat operations. So the Israeli military must move its personnel and materiel on some of the same roads that humanitarian aid convoys would use. Given that Hamas ambushes Israeli convoys, the last thing that any military would want is for its vehicles to be snarled in a traffic jam.

Most of these bandwidth constraints are fixable. New routes for aid are already being developed. Israel has also demonstrated that it can build new roads in Gaza despite the war, if it wants to. And some of the outside-the-box solutions—from floating piers to air drops—can augment the land routes into Gaza as well.

But even if the Israeli narrative on getting aid into Gaza is not entirely convincing, that does not mean that aid does not also have a distribution problem. Israel alleges that Hamas operatives have attacked aid convoys and stolen food from them. But even bracketing the degree of direct Hamas involvement, Gazan civilians have rushed aid convoys, ransacked warehouses, and even stormed private houses to get to the airdropped packages. None of this should be surprising. After all, people will go to great lengths to avoid starvation.

The lack of security impedes humanitarian aid in other ways as well. The sheer physics of parachuting aid out of moving airplanes means that these packages stand a high chance of being diverted, especially if the drop zones are not secured on ground. Distributing aid also requires warehouses to store these supplies, but the UNRWA reports that more than 150 of its facilities have been damaged or destroyed in the fighting.

Given that Israel alleges that many of these warehouses were also used by Hamas for weapons storage, Israel likely will not allow these facilities to be rebuilt or promise not target them again, absent some sort of credible guarantees that Hamas will not exploit them. And as the United States’ pause on UNRWA funding demonstrates, donor countries may also be reluctant to provide aid in the first place if those supplies risk being diverted to Hamas or other militants.

Without restoring law and order in Gaza, then, getting aid to the most vulnerable will remain a challenge, even if Israel and the international community increase the amount of aid entering the enclave. Aid effectiveness will thus prove a far thornier issue to solve.

Ideally, the Palestinians themselves should provide the security to enable aid distribution. But right now, it is not at all clear just who those Palestinians would be. Before the war, Hamas largely controlled Gaza’s local authorities. Giving those same individuals power over a vital resource such as food will, by default, also help reestablish Hamas’s hold over the enclave.

Israel has so far eschewed the idea that the Palestinian Authority could control Gaza, citing the West Bank government’s payments to Palestinians whose relatives have been imprisoned for terrorism. But even if Israel dropped its objections, it is not clear if the Palestinian Authority’s security forces are up for such a mission.

Israel has also floated the idea of turning to non-Hamas-aligned Gazans to run Gaza. But given Hamas’s success in crushing all political opposition and independent civil society since the 2007 fighting between Hamas and Fatah over the control of Gaza, this would very likely empower organized crime syndicates—hardly the people you want caring for the vulnerable.

Alternatively, Israel could turn to an external actor to protect aid distribution. Israel has talked about hiring private security contractors to protect aid shipments. But as we saw in Iraq and elsewhere, the use of contractors can be a risky, resource intensive, and not always successful proposition—not to mention the new controversies such a step would surely generate.

More likely, a state would need to provide a peacekeeping force. The Biden administration has explicitly ruled out U.S. “boots on the ground” in Gaza, and so far, no other country has stepped up. That’s because inserting troops into an ongoing war is guaranteed to be a losing proposition: Israel would likely blame this third party for any residual Hamas terrorism, while Palestinians and their supporters around the world would likely accuse the country of collaborating with Israel. And all the while, the peacekeepers would be caught in the crossfire, and any hiccup in the flow of aid would now become the peacekeeping forces’ fault.

Finally, the Wall Street Journal reported on March 21 that some Israeli security officials have proposed an all-of-the above strategy. The plan foresees a mixture of non-Hamas Gazan leaders, as well current and former Palestinian Authority security officials, taking over aid distribution—and ultimately, governance in Gaza—with the support of Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, and other Arab governments.

But so far, the plan has gotten a cold reception. Hamas obviously opposes being cut out of governing Gaza, but even some of the Palestinian leaders in question have stated that they do not want the job. The Netanyahu government is only lukewarm to the idea because it includes the Palestinian Authority.

All that is left is the Israelis themselves. Unlike the local Palestinian option, the Israel Defense Forces certainly have the capability to provide the security necessary for humanitarian actors to do their work. Unlike external security guarantors, the Israeli military is already in Gaza, and by default, it already owns the humanitarian problem, whether it wants to or not.

But if the Israeli military takes over providing security for aid distribution, that means that it will end up patrolling Gazan streets for at least the next few months—and more likely for the next few years or however long it takes until a Palestinian force is ready to assume the same role. All of which leads to an outcome that nobody wants: the reoccupation of Gaza.

And this, in turn, leads to another basic truth: While there are few straightforward problems in the Middle East, there are even fewer straightforward solutions. In this case, if the international community wants to solve the humanitarian problem in Gaza, it will need to go well beyond thinking of the issue strictly in terms of trucks, roads, and floating piers. It will instead need to choose between a series of bad options: offering up some sort of external peacekeeping force, accepting a temporary Israeli reoccupation, or doing nothing at all and letting aid fall into the hands of a variety of nefarious actors.

None of these are particularly appealing outcomes. But in the Middle East, nothing is ever simple.

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fursasaida · 8 months

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If you have a bunch of trees, and you chop them down to make paper or lumber or whatever, you can sell the paper or lumber or whatever for money, but on the other hand trees store carbon and cutting them down is bad for climate change. If instead you do not chop down the trees, that is good for the environment, and it is a great innovation of modern finance that, now, you can get paid for not chopping down the trees. This is called “carbon credits.” There are measurement problems.

If you mine Bitcoin, you use a lot of electricity to run computers to perform calculations to get Bitcoins for yourself, which you can sell for money. But this is bad for the environment, because it uses electricity that is probably generated in ways that release carbon.[1] If you were to stop mining Bitcoin, conversely, that would be good for the environment. Can you get paid, though, for not mining Bitcoin? Oh yes, modern finance has solved that one too:

Bitcoin miner Riot Platforms Inc. made millions of dollars by selling power rather than producing the tokens in the second quarter as the crypto-mining industry continued to grapple with the impact of low digital asset prices.

The Castle Rock, Colorado-based company had $13.5 million in power curtailment credits during the quarter, while generating $49.7 million in mining revenue. Riot booked $27.3 million in power curtailment credits last year and $6.5 million in 2021 from power sales to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which is the grid operator for the Lone Star state. …

The company had $18.3 million in power credits in June and July based on its latest monthly operational updates, including $14.8 million in power curtailment credits received from selling power back to the ERCOT grid at market-driven spot prices under its long-term power contracts and $3.5 million in credits received from participation in ERCOT demand response programs.

Here is the 10-Q; this stuff is described in Note 8. Some of what is going on here is that Riot has a long-term power supply agreement in which TXU Energy Retail Co. has to supply it with electricity at fixed prices through 2030, and Riot has the option to sell the power back to TXU, at market rates, for credit against its future electric bills, when the spot price exceeds the contract price. But part of it is demand response, where ERCOT pays Riot cash for using less than its typical electrical load during periods of peak demand.

As with carbon credits, there are measurement problems; I have never mined a single Bitcoin, yet ERCOT has never sent me a penny for my forbearance. Still, how great is modern finance? Twenty years ago, if you had told people that one day they could get paid for not mining Bitcoin, they would have said “what?” But now it is possible. Modern finance created the problem (Bitcoin mining) and the solution (paying people not to mine Bitcoin); the overall result is that nothing happens and yet people get paid. Just a miracle of financial engineering.

Also: Riot is getting paid for not using electricity, but if you are an enterprising Bitcoin miner surely you should look into getting paid for not using carbon when you are not mining Bitcoin. Riot is not there yet, but it is possible to imagine a warming world in which energy prices go up and Bitcoin prices go down and Bitcoin miners can get paid more for not mining Bitcoin than for mining Bitcoin. Giant fortunes will be made by people who got in early to the business of not mining Bitcoin. The future is so good, man.

This is from Matt Levine's "Money Stuff" newsletter (which yes is under the Bloomberg masthead), which I highly recommend if you want some kind of awareness of what the finance yahoos are doing but want to feel like you're hearing it from a human person

#crypto #finance

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fatehbaz · 1 year

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The “death map” tells the story of decades of sickness in the small northwest New Mexico communities of Murray Acres and Broadview Acres. Turquoise arrows point to homes where residents had thyroid disease, dark blue arrows mark cases of breast cancer, and yellow arrows mean cancer claimed a life.

Neighbors built the map a decade ago after watching relatives and friends fall ill and die.

Dominating the top right corner of the map, less than half a mile from the cluster of colorful arrows [...] : 22.2 million tons of uranium waste left over from milling ore to supply power plants and nuclear bombs. “We were sacrificed a long time ago,” said Candace Head-Dylla, who created the death map with her mother after Head-Dylla had her thyroid removed and her mother developed breast cancer. [...]

Beginning in 1958, a uranium mill owned by Homestake Mining Company of California processed and refined ore mined nearby. The waste it left behind leaked uranium and selenium into groundwater and released the cancer-causing gas radon into the air.

State and federal regulators knew the mill was polluting groundwater almost immediately after it started operating, but years passed before they informed residents and demanded fixes. [...]

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Uranium mining and milling left a trail of contamination and suffering, from miners who died of lung cancer while the federal government kept the risks secret to the largest radioactive spill in the country’s history. But for four decades, the management of more than 250 million tons of radioactive uranium mill waste has been largely overlooked, continuing to pose a public health threat. [...] At Homestake, which was among the largest mills, the company is bulldozing a community in order to walk away. Interviews with dozens of residents, along with radon testing and thousands of pages of company and government records, reveal a community sacrificed to build the nation's nuclear arsenal and atomic energy industry. [...]

In 2014, an EPA report confirmed the site posed an unacceptable cancer risk and identified radon as the greatest threat to residents’ health. Still, the cleanup target date continued shifting, to 2017, then 2022. Rather than finish the cleanup, Homestake’s current owner, the Toronto-based mining giant Barrick Gold, is now preparing to ask the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the independent federal agency that oversees the cleanup of uranium mills, for permission to demolish its groundwater treatment systems and hand the site and remaining waste over to the U.S. Department of Energy to monitor and maintain forever. Before it can transfer the site to the Department of Energy, Homestake must prove that the contamination, which exceeds federal safety levels, won’t pose a risk to nearby residents [...].

Part of Homestake’s strategy: buy out nearby residents and demolish their homes. [...] Property records reveal the company had, by the end of 2021, purchased 574 parcels covering 14,425 acres around the mill site. This April, Homestake staff indicated they had 123 properties left to buy. One resident said the area was quickly becoming a “ghost town.”

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Even after the community is gone, more than 15,000 people who live nearby, many of them Indigenous, will continue to rely on water threatened by Homestake’s pollution. [...]

At the state level, New Mexico regulators waited until 2009, 49 years after first finding water pollution, to issue a formal warning that groundwater included substances that cause cancer and birth defects. [...] Other uranium mines and mills polluted the area’s main drinking water aquifer upstream of Homestake. [...]

More than 500 abandoned uranium mines pockmark the Navajo Nation [...].

Leaders of communities downstream from Homestake, including the Pueblo of Acoma, fear that wishful thinking could allow pollution from the waste to taint their water. The Acoma reservation, about 20 miles from Homestake’s tailings, has been continuously inhabited since before 1200. Its residents use groundwater for drinking and surface water for irrigating alfalfa and corn, but Donna Martinez, program coordinator for the pueblo’s Environment Department, said the pueblo government can’t afford to do as much air and water monitoring as staff would like. [...]

Most days, Billiman contemplates this “poison” and whether she and Boomer might move away from it [...]. “Then, we just say ‘hózho náhásdlii, hózho náhásdlii’ four times.” “All will be beautiful again,” Boomer roughly translated. [...] Now, as a registered nurse tending to former uranium miners, Langford knows too much about the dangers. When it’s inhaled, radon breaks down in the lungs, releasing bursts of radiation that can damage tissue and cause cancer. Her patients have respiratory issues as well as lung cancer. They lose their breath simply lifting themselves out of a chair.

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Text by Mark Olalde and Maya Miller. “A Uranium Ghost Town in the Making.” ProPublica. 8 August 2022. [Some paragraph breaks and contractions added by me.]

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religion-is-a-mental-illness · 22 days

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Like so many areas of social media, the conversation of gender equality has fallen down a rabbit hole of juvenile bickering, pedantry, and cringey catchphrases most appropriate for playground bullies.

The war drum of the self-righteous beats on.

Once a noble movement, steadfast in securing women’s financial freedom, their right to vote and work, their bodily integrity, and other non-negotiable rights, each essential for women to be seen as fully autonomous humans…

The baton has since been passed to an army of terminally-online social-media-nit-wits, narcissists, and overgrown babies, who have lost sight of their own priorities, and turned the baton into a steel bat to hit men with.

For many the battle has changed to:

Women don’t have enough pockets. Siri is misogynistic. Are bearded men more sexist?

I’m not saying such issues should be ignored; but over here, the boys are dying younger in every country, in every age group, are behind at every stage of western education, and the cavalry have still not arrived.

But yes, let’s close the gap on iPhone games. On Wikipedia editors. On pot smokers.

So, whilst many advocate for equal pockets, men are left to die, fighting for the basic right just to live as long as women.

Have we lost sight of our priorities?

Have we ceded the steering wheel of advocacy to a corrupt captain?

And what might it look like, if I were to adopt such a world view?

When the demand for sexism exceeds the supply, and you've run out of real problems, but the grift needs to keep going. They'll often trot out the unfortunate women in places like Iran, Afghanistan and so forth, but never want to talk about the real problem there: Islam. They don't actually care, they just want to hide behind them and pretend they're the same, when they're not.

#The Tin Men #western feminism #first world problems #petty shit #imaginary problems #first world privilege #sexism #misogyny #religion is a mental illness

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anarkittyuwuuniverse · 1 month

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"There is a lot of room to reduce the steel intensity of modern society. All our basic needs – and more – could be supplied with much less steel involved. For example, we could make cars lighter by making them smaller. That would bring energy savings without the need for energy-intensive high-grade steel. We could replace cars with bicycles and public transportation so that more people share less steel. Such changes would also reduce the need for steel in the road network, the energy infrastructure, and the manufacturing industry. We would need fewer machine tools, shipping containers, and reinforced concrete buildings. Whenever steel intensity is reduced, the advantages cascade throughout the whole system. Preventing corrosion and producing steel more locally from local resources would also reduce energy use and emissions.1014

The continuous growth of the steel output – the increasing steel intensity of human society – makes sustainable steel production impossible. No technology can change that because it’s not a technological problem. Like forestry can only be sustainable if the wood demand does not exceed the wood supply, steel is sustainable or not depending on the balance between (scrap) supply and (steel) demand. We may not be able to escape the Iron Age, but we have an option to escape the catch-22 that inextricably links steel production with fossil fuels." -How to escape from the Iron Age?

#god how many times do we have to prove that reducing production and consumption is the only way #let's just do it!!#low tech #environmentalism #sustainability

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copperbadge · 2 years

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Just in case you haven’t stumbled across this fact elsewhere, you should be aware that pharmacies are often out of adderall and it has nothing to do with the pandemic. Or, at least, it USUALLY has nothing to do with the pandemic.

My understand is that there are multiple and fluctuating reasons for this, all stemming from the fact that the drug is highly regulated, and—yes—all of them at the expense of the people who actually need the meds. That said, the most consistent explanation I’ve received from more than one pharmacist over the years is that they’re limited in the number they can actually stock at a time, and demand exceeds that quota.

Yes, this is rage inducing. It’s also been a problem since the early aughts and I don’t see it going away, though it’s improved somewhat.

I recommend talking to your pharmacist and finding out whether this is a consistent problem at your pharmacy specifically. It can also help to have your psychologist reach out to your pharmacy ahead of time and confirm the meds are available—if not, there may be a generic available that they can prescribe instead. You can also see whether it’s possible to get your prescription a few days early, just in case.

Yeah there are some yikesy stories in my comments about access to Adderall and the other stimulant-side drugs for ADHD. It does seem to be a combination of "can't stock much at once" and "can't refill your prescription for you until two days before it needs it" and "But so like...are you an addict?" It's the typical bar to entry that people with disabilities face getting medication -- which I was prepared for, given I know people who struggle to get their meds each month and I've handled a lot of RFM issues surrounding them as well. I was honestly braced to spend several days getting that initial prescription filled, I was shocked when it just...went through.

In multiple ways I'm fortunate -- I don't face physical access issues, and I've spent long enough without the meds that I'm capable of wrangling the prescription without having to be ON the prescription. Like, I was actually able to fairly easily call the pharmacy about the length of delay, and that seemed to spur them into locating at least sixty of the little blue fuckers. I am also a middle class white guy in my forties, so I don’t get profiled as drug-seeking.

I've booked out my psych appointments so that I'll generally see him on day 32 of a 30 day prescription, and my diagnosis is mild enough that there are days where I feel the meds wearing off and go "Well, I'm ok without the second dose" so even my first 30-day supply lasted me 40 days. Next session I may speak to him about the automated mailed-to-home service that his clinic is partnered with and if that would simplify matters -- a genuine question given the recent scandals about some of those services overprescribing.

The most common thing I've heard -- here and from other people outside of tumblr -- is that a lot of people have convinced their prescriber that they need a slightly higher dose than they do, so they can get a 30-day supply of 20mg doses and split them, thus turning it into a 60-day supply of their actual dose which they can stockpile. Which is ripe for a satirical novel of some kind, because while none of the people I'm talking to are addicts, they're forced to behave like addicts in order to maintain a consistent supply of a necessary disability aid. I don't think I'm the one to write it -- at any rate, not yet -- but there's content in the idea of our cultural fear of addiction being so epic and hallucinatory that we actually force people into addictive behaviors because you can't exist as a disabled person within the letter of the law.

#sam has adhd #addiction

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stupittmoran · 8 months

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The demand from Far-Left politicians and MSM for “White Supremacists” far exceeds the supply

so, they create their own 🤡🌎

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centrally-unplanned · 3 months

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could you explain more about the incentives for universities not to hire candidates unless they got academic jobs immediately upon graduation? I don’t know much about academia and this is fascinating

Sure! It definitely doesn't have 'one' answer or anything, but most of it stems from the fact that universities, pretty-much uniquely, are hiring people for lifetime appointments. The idea of a tenure-track position is that you will work at the university for your entire career. This pretty radically changes what you are looking for in hiring - you care way less about what they are going to do for you now, and instead care about their 'potential' along that 30+ year trajectory. A few things flow from that, and different people think different things matter:

Some would argue that one's talent is both locked-in by the time you are a ~30 year old graduating academic, and that said talent is visible to hiring committees. Essentially, if someone is going to be a rockstar academic, you can tell right out the gate, they would have shown the signs already. There are no "diamonds in the rough" out there who don't get hired, so you shouldn't really bother with them. As such hiring committees spend their time going through the pool of unclaimed talent to find the next crop of high performers. Since I, as a uni, can capture the *entirety* of your career output, I only care about that full potential - if someone is a bit better at this-or-that today by being 3+ year more experienced, I don't care.

The above is probably a factor, but imo its not the full story by any means. Another factor is institutional fit - think of who is doing the hiring. Budget committees and managers? No, they only have advisory say - faculty are hired by other faculty. Which means you are hiring a coworker, co-author, co-teacher for the next several decades. You want someone who is essentially fresh and impressionable, who is going to mold into your organization, adopt research interests that align to your dept strategy, and make all that easier for you. This is a bit of a principle-agent problem moment, but also for something as personality-based and locked-in as academia having a department that gets along is valuable.

For my own perspective, I personally think for a lot of places in academia success is a bit arbitrary. Talent matters ofc but at the margins everyone is talented, and people get their prestige from the institutions they work at as much as their ideas themselves, and those higher-ranked institutions give them greater resources to make their ideas work. As far as this is true, then who they hire kind of doesn't matter, right? They just have to be good enough. As such if the committees have weird opinions about this-or-that thing, they never suffer for it, it never gets 'punished' by reality. They could choose any of their candidates and be fine. Like the first belief, about how 'talent outs quickly' - is that true? Probably to some extent, but also it doesn't matter as long as uni committees believe it's true - they don't have to be right.

Finally, academia in most places is an employer's market; the supply of candidates always massively exceeds demand. This works similar to the last point - they never need to challenge their own ideas about what is optimal hiring because they have their pick. In particular, why was someone not hired for 3 years? Luck? Probably, honestly. But what are the odds it's because they have some defect that is hard for me to see? Its possible, right? So why take that chance, I don't have to. I have total control. In unbalanced markets marginal issues can be elevated to dominant concerns because there is no price to paid for that.

I'm sure there are more issues, it's a diverse world after all and each academic discipline has its own norms. Just some of the factors at play!

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