Indie iOS app developer with a passion for SwiftUI

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Cue the nuclear shills that will handwave away any legitimate concern with wishful thinking and frame the discussion as solely pro/anti fossil, conveniently pretending that renewables don’t exist.

    ETA:

    Let’s look at some great examples of handwaving and other nonsense to further the nuclear agenda.

    Here @danielbln@lemmy.world brings up a legitimate concern about companies not adhering to regulation and regulators being corrupt/bought *cough… Three Mile Island cough*, and how to deal with that:

    So uh, turns out the energy companies are not exactly the most moral and rule abiding entities, and they love to pay off politicians and cut corners. How does one prevent that, as in the case of fission it has rather dire consequences?

    So of course the answer to that by @Carighan@lemmy.world is a slippery slope argument and equating a hypothetical disaster with thousands if not millions of victims and areas being uninhabitable for years to come, with the death of a family member due to faulty wiring in your home:

    Since you can apply that logic to everything, how can you ever build anything? Because all consequences are dire on a myopic scale, that is, if your partner dies because a single electrician cheaped out with the wiring in your building and got someone to sign off, “It’s not as bad as a nuclear disaster” isn’t exactly going to console them much.

    At some point, you need to accept that making something illegal and trying to prosecute people has to be enough. For most situations. It’s not perfect. Sure. But nothing ever is. And no solution to energy is ever going to be perfect, either.

    Then there’s the matter of misleading statistics and graphs.
    Never mind the fact that the amount of victims of nuclear disasters is underreported, under-attributed and research is hampered if not outright blocked to further a nuclear agenda, also never mind that the risks are consistently underreported, lets leave those contentious points behind and look at what’s at hand.

    Here @JohnDClay@sh.itjust.works shows a graph from Our World in Data that is often thrown around and claims to show “Death rates by unit of electricity production”:

    Seems shocking enough and I’m sure in rough lines, the proportions respective to one another make sense to some degree or another.
    The problem however is that the source data is thrown together in such a way that it completely undermines the message the graph is trying to portray.

    According to Our World in Data this is the source of the data used in the graph:

    Death rates from energy production is measured as the number of deaths by energy source per terawatt-hour (TWh) of electricity production.

    Data on death rates from fossil fuels is sourced from Markandya, A., & Wilkinson, P. (2007).

    Data on death rates from solar and wind is sourced from Sovacool et al. (2016) based on a database of accidents from these sources.

    We estimate deaths rates for nuclear energy based on the latest death toll figures from Chernobyl and Fukushima as described in our article here: https://ourworldindata.org/what-was-the-death-toll-from-chernobyl-and-fukushima

    We estimate death rates from hydropower based on an updated list of historical hydropower accidents, dating back to 1965, sourced primarily from the underlying database included in Sovacool et al. (2016). For more information, see our article: https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

    Fossil fuel numbers are based on this paper which starts out by described a pro-nuclear stance, but more importantly, does a lot of educated guesstimating on the air-pollution related death numbers that is straight up copied into the graph.

    Sovacool is used for solar and wind, but doesn’t have those estimates and is mainly limited to direct victims.

    Nuclear based deaths is based on Our World in Data’s own nuclear propaganda piece that mainly focuses on direct deaths and severely underplays non-direct deaths.

    And hydropower bases deaths is based on accidents.

    So they mix and match all kinds of different forms of data to make this graph, which is a no-no. Either you stick to only accidents, only direct deaths or do all possible deaths that is possibly caused by an energy source, like they do for fossil fuels.

    Not doing so makes the graph seem like some kind of joke.



  • There’s not much for him to be concerned about currently, given that he is dead.

    As for 16 yo Aaron who wrote that list of hot takes in order of controversy, is it really surprising that a kid that developed an opinion of free speech extremism penned that down?
    Especially after being inspired by this article as per his own admission?

    The article also helps provide context for the time period this was written in.
    Simple possession was still a relatively novel concept and simulated CSAM wasn’t criminal yet in the US.

    Don’t misconstrue my own position on the matter, I originate from, and was legally trained in, a jurisdiction that criminalizes hate speech, imposing a significantly broader limit on free speech than the US currently does, and I think that’s the better path to take.
    So I personally don’t adhere to free speech extremism.

    Nevertheless, while not agreeing with his take, I can see the logic that persuaded him.

    It’s essentially the facetious version of “Why stop here, why not also ban hate speech/guns/drugs/etc?”
    All of those can be argued to be gateways to the harm of others, perhaps even disproportionately children.

    To me it reads as him challenging the logic, not condoning the outcome much less the subsequent consequences. Very edgy indeed.

    As for those who bring up that he reinstated his blog multiple times and with it this particular post from when he was 16, as a way to posthumously attribute this to a more older adult version of him; I’m not sure it’s that cut and dry.

    As a fundamentalist such as himself it could also just be an exhibition of his free speech extremism perhaps combined with an effort to maintain transparency.

    After all, it could suggest an eroding of his beliefs on free speech if he would remove it “now” with little benefit to him since the cat’s already out of the bag, even if he disagreed with his former self at the time of restoring the blog.

    A better indication of his opinions later in life would be comments that reaffirm the prior expressed beliefs or, if the suspicion is that he practiced what he preached, one would expect this to have come out during the FBI investigation, considering they went through all his data.

    Do I think it’s healthy to consider him a hero, or anyone else for that matter?
    No not really, if only because the likelihood of heroes having irreconcilable blemishes is extremely high just by the very virtue of their, let’s say, unique thinking producing the things we love about them but also the things that might cause pause in many.


  • Most of these services are US-centric because a lot of the necessary records to provide the information isn’t public in many countries outside of the US.

    Birth records, death records, marriage records, divorce records, voting records, criminal records, etc. is considered public information in much of the US. Even address information can be found publicly and immigration records become available to the public after a certain time.

    In a lot of countries, especially in many European countries, these are hard to access for people that aren’t the subject of these records, if accessible at all.

    For example while court records are public in much of Europe, often times the names of private persons are censored because it’s not deemed necessary to know who the parties are to be able to check if the courts make fair decisions.
    This automatically excludes criminal and divorce information from disseminating into the public.

    Some countries will make some records public once the subject of those records have passed for X amount of years, but that’s still pretty rare.

    As such services like these have limited use outside the United States.