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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   29663 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 16, 2024

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I've never seen anyone unable to grasp the concept of return on investment before. That's the line! If you are making decisions about energy usage, determining whether an activity or idea returns a net positive amount of energy or a net negative amount is extremely useful.

Do you count the energy content of the fuel?

I think the best interpretation of your current statement is whether we are investing anything on keeping something burning. So, like, if our ancestors had built an oil tap, and it was producing a flame, but we didn't have to do anything to keep that flame going; just the oil comes up itself with some pressures and such, and the flame keeps going, then we don't count the energy in the fuel?

You didn't address this question.

yes, you should care about calories - but you should care about nutrition as well.

Ok, interesting. So now, calories aren't the only metric. Seems like it's starting to get fuzzy and complicated...

Where was the spike of 'old' pollutants?! Why did we have to completely abandon the old predictions?

Look out the window...

...why don't those things show up in the data? Where are they in the figure?

How can we tell the difference? What sort of test could falsify your theory?

You wait a bit and watch the trend-line on the graph.

We've been waiting for decades. At what point can one conclude that a theory has been falsified?

If you have a bank account with 5000 dollars in it and which will only be refreshed with another 5000 dollars in 10 years, there is a big difference between having a yearly expenditure of 1000 dollars as opposed to a yearly expenditure of 400 dollars.

Right. This is precisely what I've been asking about. Presumably, consumption rates matter, but it's not clear how they're coming into play in your view. It's just calories, except for when it's fuzzy not-calories, on your view. And it's only calories in compared to calories out, but that doesn't really have any term in there for a consumption rate. Is it normalized by something? How does it work?

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