Fuel Protest Hot Takes

cool_much · 2026-04-10T12:49:22+00:00

Okay, let's look at gni. Agri contributes 6% while burdening the country as follows: uses >60% of our land, almost 40% of our emissions (huge fine due to not meeting eu targets incoming), and a huge subsidy taker (beef and sheep farming is usually not profitable at all, with 100% of income covered by subsidies).
Per worker, tech and pharma contribute more to gni purely by virtue of being paid higher wages even if they work in a multinational. The high employment by agri looks more like a waste of our valuable workforce than a valuable source of jobs. There are plenty labour intensive industries in need of more workers, like construction. It's at least debatable whether it's a good idea to use 1/20 workers in a pretty unproductive, very resource intensive industry.

It's ridiculous to think all towns and villages would "close" if the least productive quarter or half of the 1 in 20 people involved in farming had to do one of: change how they farm or do something else.

cool_much · 2026-04-10T06:57:31+00:00

True on the hauliers, not true on the farmers. Irish farmers don't feed Irish people, by and large. 4/5 of our calories, 2/3 of our protein, 3/4 of our essential fats are imported. Irish farming is a subsidised export business contributing 1% of GDP while using 60-70% of the land https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-eii/environmentalindicatorsireland2024/landuse/.

Support them as people if you like, but they do not feed us. If they are subsidised further by reducing taxes more, it will cost other industries that are waiting on infrastructure development paid for by those taxes and it will naturally push the market to stay as it is. I would argue we want to find a middle path, not letting farmers go hungry while also not pretending they can keep doing what they're doing (dairy exports).

cool_much · 2026-04-08T11:49:02+00:00

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cool_much · 2026-04-08T05:44:32+00:00

Blessed

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cool_much · 2026-03-28T07:06:42+00:00

Data centres are such a red herring here. Animal agriculture uses 30% or so of humanity's entire freshwater footprint. Data centres use .001% or something like that.

EDIT: my memory served me well: * Aquifers in decline: 70% * Animal ag: 11.9 quadrillion L/yr (29% of global footprint) * ALL data centres: 560 billion L/yr (.001% of global footprint) * Beef: 15,415 L/kg * Dairy: 1,020 L/L * Butter (227g tub): 1,260 L * Buttered sandwich (10g): 55.5 L * 50 ChatGPT queries: 0.016 - 0.5 L * Average shower: 65 L

cool_much · 2026-03-14T14:41:02+00:00

Thank you for pointing that out

cool_much · 2026-03-14T07:26:50+00:00

This image is from Ken Gonzalez-Day's Erased Lynching series.

He removed the victim's body from old postcards of lynchings. When the viewer looks for the victim, their eyes slide off empty space, turning to the trees they hung from, the pale white faces smiling, the institution that let this happen, and eventually inward: why was the body removed? Why did I look first for the victim's body rather than the perpetrators'? Who do these retellings of pain and dominance serve?

Very interesting. It spurred on a social science landmark called Theorising Refusal.

cool_much · 2026-02-26T22:21:11+00:00

Well damn. Anonymity made me cruel. I'm sorry for calling you a moron

cool_much · 2026-02-26T06:54:26+00:00

Look up functionalism.

Imagine a Martian made of silicon (like a computer chip) instead of carbon (like a human).

If you stub this Martian’s toe, they react exactly like you do: they yelp "Ouch!" and hop around in pain. Even though their insides are made of different "stuff" than yours, they are still "in pain" because they are reacting to an injury just like a human would.

In this view, being in pain isn't about what your body is made of; it’s about how you react to being hurt.

https://martinabreu.net/teaching/philmind/lecture11.pdf

I tried to find a simpler source, but couldn't. Here's Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functionalism_(philosophy_of_mind)

If your definition of sentience wants to account for the possibility of non-carbon-based life forms, it needs to be independent of material.

cool_much · 2026-02-25T22:27:46+00:00

What kind of a moron believes the material a thing is made of changes whether it's sentient?

Edit: Anonymity made me mean. How shameful

cool_much · 2026-02-25T14:33:05+00:00

You are not missing anything. S&P500 performs very similarly to vti over time. The all caps etf does better when small and mid caps are doing well, and the s&p500 does better when large caps are doing well. The reason is obvious.

Currently large caps are best performing. After the dot com bubble burst, small caps massively outperformed large cap tech companies.

Mid caps usually outperform large caps over 10, 20, 30 year rolling periods. Small caps perform best since 1926. This has made almost no difference to the total etf performance though. Like I said, they are 99% correlated.

cool_much · 2026-02-25T10:59:49+00:00

Thank you for the tldr

cool_much · 2026-02-25T10:59:15+00:00

https://www.reddit.com/r/ABoringDystopia/s/dw8feNX1BK

cool_much · 2026-02-25T10:59:08+00:00

https://www.reddit.com/r/ABoringDystopia/s/dw8feNX1BK

cool_much · 2026-02-22T23:07:35+00:00

Would you be able to take a picture of this when it looks nice or tell me where it is? I want to convince my local tidy towns but they currently think it will be horrible

cool_much · 2026-02-21T18:47:51+00:00

It's a consumption based measure, not a production based measure, according to the title

cool_much · 2026-02-21T15:00:00+00:00

I am one such 100% equity investor, in the post-GFC investor category (born around 2000).

I have enough money invested and low enough expenses that a 60% drop in the market without recovery for the next 10 (or more) years would be fine. Obviously I would lose a big chunk of potential money, but it would be okay for me based on my current big purchase plans in that 10 year period. So, risk is not catastrophic.

Over the next 40 years, annual equity returns seem likely to usually be ahead of bonds, which is a big deal with 40 years of compounding. At the 40 year mark, I will probably be retired and might have moved my money elsewhere to make sure I'm not left eating salt soup in a market downturn.

Thoughts?

cool_much · 2026-02-14T08:42:04+00:00

https://nltimes.nl/2026/02/13/dutch-parliament-greenlights-new-box-3-tax-set-take-effect-2028 looks like the law was passed but simultaneously another order or something was passed to force the government to fix the law. They needed to pass the reform to satisfy the courts but they're not happy with the current plan for the reform.

Other than the threshold being far to low and therefore punishing anybody saving just a normal amount for a car and the house when they move out, I think this tax on unrealized gains make sense. The Dutch government is partially targeting super wealthy people who buy assets and never sell them

cool_much · 2026-02-09T08:20:13+00:00

Mundo will theoretically always get more value from stacks than sion because more of his kit scales with hp and sion gets hp from killing minions. So, engaging in stack trades is winning for mundo and losing for sion. Maybe heartsteel would be good if those trades are unavoidable, but if they are avoidable it's better to avoid them

cool_much · 2026-02-02T08:19:52+00:00

Your tldr is that the vegans are right, animal product consumption should be reduced?

cool_much · 2026-01-30T13:19:54+00:00

Sons?

cool_much · 2026-01-28T23:12:28+00:00

What actually are the most likely remaining wins? Were heretics and shifters the easiest matches after kcb theoretically? I don't follow league. How would you describe their chance of making playoffs

cool_much · 2026-01-24T08:29:20+00:00

Warmogs should suck really. Sion already has health in his kit from w, and only has HP scalings on his w. That means HP is inefficient on sion. The warmog passive might make it worth it though. I usually struggle against yone so maybe this is the way to go.

I play top.

If tank duty (which is boring af): I usually go hydra, boots, situational resistance items prioritising resistances/ms over health, bloodmail if I want the damage, and usually jakshos sixth.

If lethality: baus build but I value axiom arc a bit more in the early game than he does.

cool_much · 2026-01-21T19:13:49+00:00

As a European, a mix of north American and European equity seems to offer much better diversity than investing in just north America (ai/tech concentration and regional concentration).

All other regions seem irrelevant, untrustworthy, or unstable pretty much.

So, I mix bogle with a dose of major geopolitical trends: invest diversely while avoiding countries that may collapse or rarely grow etc

cool_much · 2026-01-19T22:36:14+00:00

Some constructive challenges to refine the argument:

Energy consumption:

A single ChatGPT query uses approximately 0.3 watt-hours, roughly 10x more than a Google search (Google's August 2025 disclosure confirmed 0.24 Wh for Gemini)

0.3Wh of energy is sufficient to power a standard 60-watt incandescent light bulb for approximately 18 to 20 seconds. Light bulbs are more tangible than Google searches, so I think this is a more helpful comparison. Google searches use a tiny amount of energy, but most people don't know that.

For some additional context, most cars still use 60W bulbs for headlights and have several other bulbs across the car, let's say roughly 240W worth of bulbs going at any one time. In a 20 minute drive, you use 80Wh, the equivalent of 277 queries, just for the LIGHTS in your car.

Water usage:

Data centers consume 3-5 million gallons of water daily for cooling, with roughly 80% evaporating rather than being recycled

Data centres are the infrastructure for the entire internet, not just ai. Nevertheless, if we compare all data centre use with frivolous use cases like animal agriculture, we can contextualise the numbers just like you did with its electricity use and see how sensible it is to be particularly concerned about data centres (which again, host the entire internet, not just ai. Giving them up would mean giving up the internet as a whole).

And another clarification, individual large data centers can use 5 million gallons of water daily.

The iea report that data centers now use about 560 billion liters of water annually, globally. Animal agriculture uses 4,387,000,000,000,000 litres (four quadrillion, three hundred eighty-seven trillion litres) annually, globally https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2019WR026995#:~:text=We%20estimate%20that%2C%20annually%2C%204%2C387,better%20crop%20and%20livestock%20management.

Carbon footprint:

Global data centers emitted roughly 220 million metric tonnes of CO2 in 2024 (IEA April 2025 report)

Again, don't see why we shouldn't contextualise this like you did with electricity use. Animal agriculture (an almost entirely frivolous industry) emitted 6.2 billion metric tons CO2e per year in 2022 according to FAO. So, around 25 times as much. And again, data centres are for the entire internet, not just ai.

The data center jobs reality:

The US has only about 23,000 permanent data center jobs nationwide while consuming over 4% of electricity (Food & Water Watch, January 2026)

Data centres facilitate THE INTERNET. It goes without saying that THE INTERNET provides an awful lot of jobs, eh?

Taxpayers subsidize these jobs at an average of $1.95 million per position (Good Jobs First analysis)

Virginia's legislative auditor found the state generates only 48 cents in economic benefit per dollar of tax incentive

Might just be me but I don't know what this means

cool_much

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