IDiscMan

"land based flight" isn't that a train?

It's ok you don't live in Canada so the stats are different

I was reading something about demographics in Canada, and then something hit me.

I am precisely the median age.

I am, in the most literal possible way, middle-aged.

Hammy. Unprecedented hamster name, I know

Climate Change Concern Near Its High Point in U.S. The 44% of U.S. adults who currently worry "a great deal" about climate change or global warming is near its 46% high point from 2020.

US elites decided, like a school of fish, that climate concern is old, boring, "woke," square, not hip & popular any more. As usual, it was based almost entirely on internal elite dynamics. It had nothing to do with the actual public, which is more concerned than ever.

The time I saw him speak/get relatively warmly received was Dec 8. His "go to the wall" speech was two days after. So I guess that was the couple day period where everything happened in the back rooms.

As recently as December he got a pretty warm reception (at least it seemed as such) at the FN Energy Summit. It's wild how fast this has happened.

Relevant article for BC politics too, quite frankly.

That would be my impression too. The idea that tests are best when they're positive, but a waste if negative, seemed to really spring up during the big waves of COVID but I'm just a layperson here

bsky.app/profile/bret...

Oh and because I'm stepping on all my own points I should clarify what I mean by the first bullet... You'd have to prove that self-selected scans find more lesions *and* those lesions are not concerning to find. In that case, then yes scanning more may be unhelpful

Also and just to be 100% clear I do not, at all, trust the motivation and intention of the government of Alberta. They probably just want to privatize testing or find new ways to blame the victim ("oh you didn't get a scan? WELL THEN")

Im commenting on the manner at which we argue about this

..up being benign?

My hypotheses would be that it's the *missed cases* that cause bigger harm at the system level.

This thread isn't to dunk on Meddings by the way, but I'm commenting on a sort of genre of public health arguments

..most of the time, a scan is benign...

Sorry that's just not going to resonate with people, particularly for those who tilt towards distrusting the health care system in the first place.

My Q is: what, on average, causes more harm? Undiagnosed cases, or increased detection of stuff that ends...

I am sympathetic to the argument that enabling voluntary screening (this is Alberta we're talking about) will have all kinds of negative effects (inequity and system strain chief among them).

But the path that public health twitter is taking - basically, it's better to miss real cases because...

If you want to argue more screening is bad, you have to produce evidence that any of the following are true:
- the detection rate of lesions is higher during self-selected screens
- the false positive rate is higher in self-selected screens
- concern about having lesions at all is overblown

There's a thread going on over at twitter where medical experts are saying voluntary screening is bad. But they aren't stating their case effectively

If all lesions must be investigated, isn't it *good* to find lesions more frequently?

Waking up to discover that evidence has been released proving something we all knew. The Supreme Court's efforts to stop the Obama clean power plant rules were rooted in explicit, corrupt efforts to protect the fossil fuel industry.

Sometimes it's hard to understand the causes of climate change. While the basic idea -- we emit greenhouse gases, which warm the planet -- is well known, it's easy to get lost in the details.

But here's a summary with some more detail -- showing the fundamental sources & sinks of warming pollution.

"Science compels us to explode the sun"
- Pye, Sun Station

It's the Invisible Hand, not the Invisible Bicycle

Why is it that price signals, the manifestation of the free market, are some innately wise force when it comes to housing or groceries — but when gas prices rise, we should do everything we can to blunt it? Are drivers exempt from the free market? Are there no alternatives to driving SUVs?

WORLD VIEW 15 April 2026 Why more fossil fuels won’t fix the Iran energy crisis Climate-friendly technologies are the best way to stymie rising inflation — and will get better and cheaper over time. By Gernot Wagner Spend any time discussing solar and wind power as a solution to climate change, and you are sure to encounter someone who asks about reliability. The Sun does not shine at night and the wind does not always blow, so fossil fuels will be needed forever as a back-up, they argue. But how reliable are fossil fuels? In the past two months, conflict in Iran has created an energy crisis — the latest in a series. Oil prices spiked within days of the start of US, Israeli and Iranian bombing in the Gulf region on 28 February. Fuel prices remain high and volatile, and the ripple effects are set to increase inflation in the coming months. Isabel Schnabel, a member of the European Central Bank’s executive board, memorably named this effect fossilflation in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. There was, and is, one clear winner: renewables and other low-carbon technologies, from batteries to electric vehicles (EVs) and heat pumps. That is what distinguishes this Middle East oil and gas crisis from the Arab oil embargoes of the 1970s. Then, renewables were mostly unavailable, and industrial decarbonization was on few people’s radars. Solar power cost at least 500 times more than it does today, and EVs, heat pumps and induction stoves were a pipe dream. Ditching fossil fuels is not all smooth sailing. In 2022, European natural-gas prices spiked to ten times their levels before the Ukraine invasion, resulting in long waiting times for solar panels and heat pumps. Prices for these rose as demand outpaced supply, an effect Schnabel dubbed greenflation. She used a third term, climateflation, to describe the economic effects of climate-induced weather extremes, such as food-price rises from crop failures (M. Kotz et al. Commun. Earth Environ. 5; 2024).

The Iran War has once again led to a bout of what @isabelschnabel.bsky.social memorably dubbed 'fossilflation'.

It's en vouge to talk about the solution as some massively complex undertaking. It really isn't. Get off fossil fuels faster.

My latest just out @nature.com

rdcu.be/fdxig

A striking difference between the 2021-22 and the current fossil fuel crunches is the IEA's response. This time, not a mention of the actual solutions to cut dependence on fossil fuels - clean energy and electrification. This expert letter calls them out for it.

Now excuse me while i enjoy a gummy containing precisely 2 mg of THC and play video games, which thanks to the regulated supply I have full confidence in not exceeding my desired intake.

All this pseudo-academic mumbo jumbo is just distracting from that fundamental question.

How does having unregulated drugs of unknown concentration, possibly tainted with other substances, help in any way?

If you can't answer that sensibly, then the debate is over.

Again, this is the bottom line: how does having a toxic drug supply, combined with removing places to use in a supervised manner, encourage anything other than death and chaos?

It makes no sense on its face. Yet here we are politically!

In my most charitable possible read of this statement, I still can't make it make sense

If I'm addicted to alcohol, how does it help me if a can of beer might be 5% alcohol one day, 95% the next? Or even poisoned?

What purpose does that serve aside from making me more likely to die?

Update: it brings me no pleasure to say this, but I anticipate we are going to have to deal with at least 4 or 5 more Nintendo Cinematic Universe movies

How am I doing, @realfollowers.bsky.social