wynott dunn posted:

I’m going to maintain my current level of drinking until 2050 when I plan to rapidly and suddenly move to net-zero drinking right after new year’s eve*

*ive accumulated a lot of drinking credits from times when I could have been drinking but did not so I expect to be able to maintain my current level of drinking for some time after 2050

quote:

Man announces he will quit drinking by 2050
Nov 09, 2021

A Sydney man has set an ambitious target to phase out his alcohol consumption within the next 29 years, as part of an impressive plan to improve his health.

The program will see Greg Taylor, 73, continue to drink as normal for the foreseeable future, before reducing consumption in 2049 when he turns 101. He has assured friends it will not affect his drinking plans in the short or medium term.

Taylor said it was important not to rush the switch to non-alcoholic beverages. “It’s not realistic to transition to zero alcohol overnight. This requires a steady, phased approach where nothing changes for at least two decades,” he said, adding that he may need to make additional investments in beer consumption in the short term, to make sure no night out is worse off.

Taylor will also be able to bring forward drinking credits earned from the days he hasn’t drunk over the past forty years, meaning the actual end date for consumption may actually be 2060.

To assist with the transition, Taylor has bought a second beer fridge which he describes as the ‘capture and storage’ method.

actionjackson posted:

how do they get the measurements for those maps at such a granular level? is it read from the ground, or from elsewhere? Because you even have a lot of detail for very sparsely populated areas.

Minera posted:

i wonder how much energy it takes to keep that shack heated in the winter

Cup Runneth Over posted:

Just watched Don't Look Up. Sirota is seriously crack pinged, holy poo poo, lol. Love that man.

Notorious R.I.M. posted:

I was mixing some music recently and spent a lot of time working on the 10khz+ range. I ended up with something that reminded me a lot of the symphonies of jar flies and other insects that I used to hear all the time as a kid - the soft, zippery buzzing of thousands of tiny filter sweeps tuned to their own little shapes and resonances. It made me realize I don't hear them any more, but it's not because of my age-related hearing loss, because I can still hear it if I synthesize it. I wonder if it's just because of where I live now, or if they are also disappearing like the bugs on windshields.

Notorious R.I.M. posted:

I was mixing some music recently and spent a lot of time working on the 10khz+ range. I ended up with something that reminded me a lot of the symphonies of jar flies and other insects that I used to hear all the time as a kid - the soft, zippery buzzing of thousands of tiny filter sweeps tuned to their own little shapes and resonances. It made me realize I don't hear them any more, but it's not because of my age-related hearing loss, because I can still hear it if I synthesize it. I wonder if it's just because of where I live now, or if they are also disappearing like the bugs on windshields.

quote:

But I am haunted by the knowledge that these creatures are in decline. It is 50 years since I first collected those caterpillars in the school playground, and every year that has passed there have been slightly fewer butterflies, fewer bumblebees – fewer of almost all the myriad little beasts that make the world go round. These fascinating and beautiful creatures are disappearing, ant by ant, bee by bee, day by day. Estimates vary and are imprecise, but it seems likely that insects have declined in abundance by 75% or more since I was five years old. The scientific evidence for this grows stronger every year, as studies are published describing the collapse of monarch butterfly populations in North America, the demise of woodland and grassland insects in Germany, or the seemingly inexorable contraction of the ranges of bumblebees and hoverflies in the UK.

In 1963, two years before I was born, Rachel Carson warned us in her book Silent Spring that we were doing terrible damage to our planet. She would weep to see how much worse it has become. Insect-rich wildlife habitats, such as hay meadows, marshes, heathland and tropical rainforests, have been bulldozed, burned or ploughed to destruction on a vast scale. The problems with pesticides and fertilisers, she highlighted, have become far more acute, with an estimated 3m tonnes of pesticides now going into the global environment every year. Some of these new pesticides are thousands of times more toxic to insects than any that existed in Carson’s day. Soils have been degraded, rivers choked with silt and polluted with chemicals. Climate change, a phenomenon unrecognised in her time, is now threatening to further ravage our planet. These changes have all happened in our lifetime, on our watch, and they continue to accelerate.

Few people seem to realise how devastating this is, not only for human wellbeing – we need insects to pollinate our crops, recycle dung, leaves and corpses, keep the soil healthy, control pests, and much more – but for larger animals, such as birds, fish and frogs, which rely on insects for food. Wildflowers rely on them for pollination. As insects become more scarce, our world will slowly grind to a halt, for it cannot function without them.

Fame Douglas posted:

Global emissions are still rising, but it's very obvious the peak is just around the corner. Maybe a few more years. And at that point, we're still emitting a ton of CO2, but it's building towards a future where we will colonize our solar system because it is our birthright. Technology is magic and can do anything we set our minds to.

LibCrusher posted:

watching home alone with the gf and saw that Chicago was a frozen winter wonderland of snow and ice at Christmas time. looked up the current temp and it was 56 degrees.

Real hurthling! posted:

its hollywood tho.

chicago temperatures can be warm into winter and cold into summer cause the lake temp lags the air temp in changing.

Slavvy posted:

I’m late to the party but I hate seeing the idea that we haven’t made any progress because that simply isn’t true, a ton of positive things have happened over the last decade. More importantly trends have remarkably changed with emissions, renewables becoming affordable and cost competitive.

Xaris posted:

nah they're getting obliterated. a lot of studys have shown various small insects have been wiped out over 80% all across the globe. massive industrial and agricultural run offs, topsoil that's been sterilized for farming, wide clear cutting of forests, tract-housing development over previously unfucked land, and yeah just increasing extreme climates gently caress with them; heat waves that bake top soil and kill off eggs and larvae, early cold snaps that do the same, rain is even borderline toxic now, and prob throw in some nano/microplastics for good measure. and it's a whole ecosystem pyramid collapsing from the bottom up. so bugs that used to eat very tiny things are dying, bugs that eat them are then dying, etc.

Slavvy posted:

I’m late to the party but I hate seeing the idea that we haven’t made any progress because that simply isn’t true, a ton of positive things have happened over the last decade. More importantly trends have remarkably changed with emissions, renewables becoming affordable and cost competitive.

Ruggan posted:

lol

500 good dogs posted:

500 good dogs posted:

Ihmemies posted:

So uh we make tons of this that poo poo in thousands of different varieties and use it everywhere, but we really don't know how much of it is around and what it does

Xaris posted:

hell yeah

idk how anyone can go around with doom mindset. everything is far too interesting to be going about your life in doom, and we're so lucky. it's a treasure trove of scientific curiosity and marvel with global genetic history being rewritten in real time; the inner workings of the planet being unraveled and exposed for study. think of how few sapient life there is, and then think of how even fewer sapient life, across the universe and whatever other alternate universes, will ever experience complete self-made biosphere collapse going from nearly 0-to-100 within their very lifespan. like it's like winning a super megamillions lotto thousands of times consecutively.

Slavvy posted:

I suppose two individuals is a fair catch in these severely oxygen depleted acidic waters.

Rime posted:

There's like 5cm on the ground in Vancouver BC tonight, another 20cm forecast over the next few days, and it's going to hit -30c in the mountains by Sunday.

Merry Goonmas, indeed.

T-Paine posted:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jul/25/the-insect-apocalypse-our-world-will-grind-to-a-halt-without-them

Sorry, kids. We hosed it, hard

Real hurthling! posted:

jeff bezus gonna put the factories in space he said so after using as much carbon as the poorest 1 billion people on earth use all year to go just below space for 2 mins

Thorn Wishes Talon posted:

WTF

I thought Vancouver BC weather is supposed to be...

...

mild

T-Paine posted:

I’m late to the party but I hate seeing the idea that we haven’t made any progress because that simply isn’t true, a ton of positive things have happened over the last decade. More importantly trends have remarkably changed with emissions, renewables becoming affordable and cost competitive.

silicone thrills posted:

Lol Don't Look Up is amazing.

Just loving spot on