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  • Thought Provoking: =?UTF-8?B?V2XigJlyZSBCdXJuaW5nIE1vcmUgQ29hbCBUaGFuIE

    From ltlee1@21:1/5 to All on Wed Dec 18 17:00:42 2024
    https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-12-18/we-re-burning-more-coal-than-ever-thanks-to-china?

    "The UK celebrated Oct. 1 as the first day in nearly 150 years when its
    power plants didn’t burn a single lump of coal to generate electricity.
    The moment was hailed by politicians as a sign of the progress against
    fossil fuels. It was also completely irrelevant.

    The very same day the UK went without coal-fired electricity, the world
    burned roughly 24 million metric tons of coal. Let me put the statistics
    into perspective: The world consumed on Oct. 1 in one single day nearly
    five times more of the rock than Britain used during the whole of 2023.
    Yes, five times more in one day than in a year1.

    Coal demand set a record high in 2024, according to the International
    Energy Agency’s annual report published on Wednesday. Considering the commodity is the most important contributor to global warming, its
    consumption trends matter enormously for the fight against climate
    change. The report makes for a depressing reading: The planet is losing
    to our unquenchable demand for king coal. Forget all the slogans about consigning coal to history. We’re on a path to consigning the planet to history.

    As the IEA puts it, “coal is often considered a fuel of the past, but
    global consumption of it has doubled in the past three decades.” Worse,
    not only has usage grown a lot – particularly in China and India – but demand will keep rising for the foreseeable future."

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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  • From ltlee1@21:1/5 to All on Sun Dec 22 17:46:09 2024
    The author had produced a perfect cassette:

    "There is a sense in which we moderns are inundated with facts to the
    detriment of understanding.

    One of the reasons for this situation is that the very media we have
    mentioned are so designed as to make thinking seem unnecessary (though
    this is only an appearance). The packaging of intellectual positions and
    views is one of the most active enterprises of some of the best minds of
    our day. The viewer of television, the listener to radio, the reader of magazines, is presented with a whole complex of elements—all the way
    from ingenious rhetoric to carefully selected data and statistics—to
    make it easy for him to “make up his own mind” with the minimum of difficulty and effort. But the packaging is often done so effectively
    that the viewer, listener, or reader does not make up his own mind at
    all. Instead, he inserts a packaged opinion into his mind, somewhat like inserting a cassette into a cassette player. He then pushes a button and “plays back” the opinion whenever it seems appropriate to do so. He has performed acceptably without having had to think." (How to Read a Book,
    2nd Edition)

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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  • From kgugg87y@21:1/5 to All on Sun Dec 22 13:41:14 2024
    On 12/22/2024 12:46 PM, ltlee1 wrote:
    The author had produced a perfect cassette:

    "There is a sense in which we moderns are inundated with facts to the detriment of understanding.

    One of the reasons for this situation is that the very media we have mentioned are so designed as to make thinking seem unnecessary (though
    this is only an appearance). The packaging of intellectual positions and views is one of the most active enterprises of some of the best minds of
    our day. The viewer of television, the listener to radio, the reader of magazines, is presented with a whole complex of elements—all the way
    from ingenious rhetoric to carefully selected data and statistics—to
    make it easy for him to “make up his own mind” with the minimum of difficulty and effort. But the packaging is often done so effectively
    that the viewer, listener, or reader does not make up his own mind at
    all. Instead, he inserts a packaged opinion into his mind, somewhat like inserting a cassette into a cassette player. He then pushes a button and “plays back” the opinion whenever it seems appropriate to do so. He has performed acceptably without having had to think." (How to Read a Book,
    2nd Edition)


    Do 1 pushup.

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  • From ltlee1@21:1/5 to All on Mon Dec 23 16:12:10 2024
    Don't know what you mean.
    But if you need to exercise, try an analogy as a warm up:

    "More people struck by lightning Thanks to the US."

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