Not being a hypocrite is not really that important compared to solving the problem at hand.
You also get into absurd situations like how former colonial powers can’t say that up-and-coming colonial powers can’t develop in that particular way. Some things are just bad to do.
Of course, I believe the climate crisis is the most important problem in the world. However I don't think former colonial powers have any right to say or rather lecture former colonised countries on their obligations, when the colonial powers haven't properly addressed why the colonised countries are in the state they are in. It is also not just at the feet of former colonial powers, the US wasn't a coloniser but did have a tremendous imperial influence throughout the Third World that has stymied progress and thrown Third World countries into a debt trap that they cannot escape (unfortunately China is doing the same these days). This needs to be addressed too.
And until these issues are addressed, the Third World countries who rely so heavily on coal power cannot get off their reliance on it. It will need a global effort led and on the financial burden of the First World, to support the economies of the countries that are using coal to progress. I believe that is the only way we will turn this issue around, otherwise we are just putting a plaster on a stab wound.
Let's not forget Africa and India's growth over the next century is going to eclipse anything we've ever seen before, and without the correct structures in place we will have no chance of combatting this issue.
> Of course, I believe the climate crisis is the most important problem in the world. However I don't think former colonial powers have any right to say or rather lecture former colonised countries on their obligations, when the colonial powers haven't properly addressed why the colonised countries are in the state they are in.
Words and lectures are irrelevant. Only what the First World can do—including influencing the Third World—matters.
> It is also not just at the feet of former colonial powers, the US wasn't a coloniser but did have a tremendous imperial influence throughout the Third World that has stymied progress and thrown Third World countries into a debt trap that they cannot escape (unfortunately China is doing the same these days). This needs to be addressed too.
I guess “stymied progress” is a way of phrasing it.
Kind of a tangent to your main point but Africa doesn't have much coal, and what it has is mostly in South Africa. As a result their transition should be a bit easier.
What-ifs about how the world operates are non sequiturs. They apparently got their way in Germany even though nuclear is greener than petroleum energy (according to the premise of the GP comment).
I guess it’s effective because it is similar to Markdown and other lightweight stuff: things like bullet items are just written like bullet items, with hyphens (or similar). You write it how you want it to be displayed. Granted for a diagram it’s more complicated since it’s a graph and not a tree, and you write it with declarative arrows rather than as ASCII art, but perhaps that in practice strikes a nice balance between being non-finicky and at the same being simple enough (syntax-wise) in order to deal with.
That aside the “unreasonable effectiveness” allusion to “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences” is clearly overwrought. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
> Reaching for code to solve my code problem seemed like something that would only appeal to someone that loves code so much that they're probably no good at visualizing.
OP here, did not know of the existence of “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences”! I agree, that's a whole other level.
> That aside the “unreasonable effectiveness” allusion to “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences” is clearly overwrought. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
My point was it was no allusion to the original at all. The format took a life of its own, and is now a meme, and the author himself confirms it was the case in the sibling comment. No need to pull that scary ellipsis out.
There are some teachers of Samatha meditation, a Buddhist concentration meditation, that teach that you at any point are meditating at one of ten stages. This is both about skill as well as about factors like how agitated your mind is in general. And these stages seem to have very well-defined descriptions: for example one stage might be differentiated from the previous one by overcoming drowsiness. This is very helpful since some people teach meditation by just telling you how to do it but not (in fact sometimes actively avoiding) how you can evaluate where you are and how you are doing. Then the practice becomes just about “being present” and other slogans that might be wholly non-actionable.
It’s also very difficult to protest this kind of approach (edit: the non-goal approach) since merely mentioning things like "goal" or "evaluation" will trigger someone’s knee-jerk you’re-doing-it-wrong reaction, even though what they practice might be completely different to what you are doing or trying to achieve.
Flagged for that reason.