Rather than looking at different letters, perhaps look at different font families. Clearly sans-serif I-beams are structurally much worse than avec-serif I-beams.
It's interesting to see the number of deaths caused by pollution. But everyone will die of something. Could it be that many of those people whose death was caused by pollution may have been frail and close to death anyway? I wonder if it would be more useful to talk about quality-life-years (QUALYs) lost as a result of pollution. Probably much harder to get that data though.
I, along with other asthmatics, did notice a marked improvement in symptoms during the Covid 19 lockdowns as there was less traffic on the roads - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8011425/
This is the problem with "Well, these people are frail, and you have to die of something" assertions. See also, Covid 19 and "most people who died weren't healthy, they had other conditions!".
There's something to be said about quality of life, too. Just because something doesn't outright kill you (sooner) doesn't mean it's fine to live with it.
I'm not asthmatic, but last summer I had an eye-opening moment about pollution. I live in a very dense city, and I regularly go for short runs in a local park. Last summer I spent a few weeks at my parents' house, who live in the suburbs of the same city, only farther away, in a small town surrounded by fields and forests.
When I went running in the forest, I couldn't believe how easier it felt to breathe and how all-round easier my session felt, event though I ran faster and longer. I don't usually run so fast that I'm out of breath, but that particular time I felt a marked difference in how easy breathing felt. It was as if I needed to breathe in "less air" to get the oxygen I needed.
I had already felt a similar thing after the first covid lockdowns coming back to the city. I had sensation of something "rough" in my throat and had short bouts of coughing. This was a few days after the lockdowns lifted, and people were still weary of public transit so everyone on their dog were sitting in gridlocked cars on the roads.
I think it's the same thing with ambient noise. After some point, we just don't notice it any longer, but it does take its toll in stress and all-round irritability.
But from my understanding most deaths attributed to pollution, specially indoors, relate to fireplaces, cooking, oil lighting or other "I'm making smoke indoors" activities which will cause lung issues later on. Even having candles on all the time isn't good for you.
The rest as far as I understand is all estimated by putting a finger in the air and subdividing lung cancer deaths into what they feel like the causes were.
Pollutions impacts people across all age groups, including children and otherwise healthy adults. Many pollution deaths aren't inevitable near-term deaths.
Health effects include:
- Respiratory diseases developing in otherwise healthy people
- Cardiovascular damage at an early age affecting long-term health
- Developmental impacts on children with lifelong consequences
- Cancer and other conditions with substantial life-shortening effects
Exposure to air pollutants increases our risk of developing a range of diseases. These diseases fall into three major categories: cardiovascular diseases, respiratory diseases, and cancers.
It makes sense to think of these estimates as ‘avoidable deaths’ – they are the number of deaths that would be avoided if air pollution was reduced to levels that would not increase the risk of developing these lethal diseases.
Yeah, but there's a big difference between dying a few months earlier when you'd already be bedridden with your mind mostly gone and dying 50 years early.
> Yeah, but there's a big difference between dying a few months earlier (...)
What leads you to believe that's the case? And again what's the point of ignoring health risks because some victims might possibly have lower life expectancies?
You make a good point but I think adding QALYs to this discussion is unnecessary complication, for one reason: like most public health menaces, pollution will impact lifespan and healthspan proportionatly, ie you’ll die sooner and also live worse years if you’re exposed. There is a proportionately better chance of ageing well and dieing later if you avoid it.
QALYs really shine when measuring a one-off risk, such as an operation or cancer treatment that might add lifespan but decrease healthspan. If QALY data exists for pollution that’s great, but I think we can easily extrapolate the impact in healthspan from the toll in lifespan.
You're right, "everyone dies of something" is technically true, but the key issue with pollution isn’t just that it shortens life, it's how it does it. Chronic exposure doesn’t just tip over the already frail, it increases the burden of disease across the board
I think pollution is better thought of like starvation, as something that makes you frailer so that you end up dying over something that a healthier person would have survived. Pretty much the opposite of the perspective you take.
You don't see a lot of people arguing that starvation doesn't mean much because the deaths of starving people are more directly caused by disease or injury.
As you said, everyone will die of something and those who die are close to death. Therefore you can now justify abandoning any treatment that increases lifespans. The new baseline lifespan is shorter, therefore everyone is closer to death, let's abandon the next treatment.
Try going to a heavy polluted city, something like Delhi in the Winter.
You would honestly have no doubt about how bad it is for you health. Because you will feel it within the first 24 hours.
A more important question is what would the world look like if we didn't waste resources[0].
Some would consider raising cows and sheep to be bad idea too, given how inefficient it is in terms of input resources for output calories -- not to mention it has very detrimental effects on ecosystems.
The calculations paper talks about the water cycle and explains that fresh clean water isn't well distributed. I wonder whether big evaporators like data centers might actually help to redistribute water across the planet.
Considering the size and momentum of drone props, this is not in any way whatsoever auto-rotations. It's just some rando trying to sound technical.
Considering they don't have collective or clutches as well he just sounds like a dumbass. (Or maybe I am and they called auto landing auto-rotation since I stopped building drones myself about 2 years ago).
I don't think "Protein Poisoning" is of serious concern. The dietary guidelines people could find no suitable upper limit for protein. But I agree that it would be better to know more about these diets.
I currently use a Google sheet, but I'm looking for something better.
I have many automatic payments (credit card, telephone, utilities, etc) from a transaction account. I also have a loan with redraw, and I want to have most of my funds keeping the loan balance low, but I don't want my transaction account to go negative. So I need to forecast future transactions.
Future transactions may be annual, monthly, four weekly, two weekly, etc. It's a real mess. Some are easy to predict accurately, others can only be estimated.
I have a column to keep track of which future transactions are predictions/estimates/allowances, and which ones have been confirmed.
I also have a column to keep track of which transactions have been reconciled with the bank. (This is currently a manual cross-checking process, since my bank doesn't have API access.)
My preference would be a text-based system (https://plaintextaccounting.org/), but haven't found one that neatly allows estimates of future transactions that can be modified once the details are known.
I'm you like Google Sheets and automation, check out Tiller - it's pulls your daily spending and transactions directly into you spreadsheets. It also has auto-categorization. It is a paid service.
I think the journalist is calculating load capacity. A 1500A @120V kettle requires 0.18 MW. Rounding up, 60 kettles requires 12 MW. It's not how much water you can boil, it's how many kettles you can run at the same time.
Did you factor in the inefficiencies of the power distribution grid and the heating element of the kettle? I'd say the journalists are just repeating what they've been told by the scientists, and the scientists factored inefficiency in on a calculation similar to your first.
There may exist inefficiencies in the transfer of heat from the element to the water, but there is no such thing as an inefficient heating element. All of the power it uses will be converted to heat. Take a light bulb for example. When used to light a space, the inefficient part would be the energy that is lost to heat. The rest is converted to light, but as soon as that light hits an object, it's converted to heat. So even a light bulb is a perfectly efficient heating element.
With this in mind, you aren't saving any money on your electric bill by turning off lights when your furnace is on.
The internal heating element isn’t strictly speaking 100% efficient on AC as it’s producing a changing electric field etc. It’s just generally ignorable in practical terms.
Nope, I didn't factor in anything like that. Also kettle's don't actually heat every ml to 100C so there's some fudge in the other direction. I mostly was just getting nerdsniped.
