What fuck up? If we were doing our own manufacturing, we’d be using the coal instead. We just wouldn’t be able to blame other countries for our consumption.

This happened to me this morning. And because the link was from a work email but I was logged in on my personal account, Edge wanted me to sign in to view it, requiring time-wasted on a 2FA process for no good reason whatsoever (obv I just closed Edge and copied the link over to Firefox).

The loss of productivity is large regardless of which method you choose to view the link. May this be the beginning of the end for Microsoft. I am fuming.

It’s difficult to get China and India off coal because they’re doing most of the world’s manufacturing and some processes are currently impossible without it. But ‘we’ exported manufacturing to Asia and ‘we’ buy the products the coal is used for. ‘We’ don’t get to wriggle out of responsibility by pretending that a couple of low and middle income countries are somehow responsible for ‘our’ excessive consumption.

Oh

More sense than what? No one’s claimed they learned it from us and we’ve only just found out about it, so we didn’t learn it from them.

It isn’t really nature vs nurture, it’s nature interacting with nurture. Steve Jones, the biologist explained it beautifully with reference to Siamese cats:

Siamese cats are light brown with dark brown fur at the tips of their ears, feet and tail. But if you raise one in a very warm environment, they will be light brown all over. A very cold environment, they will be dark brown all over. There’s a gene switching the fur colour but its action depends on the temperature.

There are many different ways genes and environment interact, there’s no real ‘argument’ here. It is simply true and, because genes and environment are often so closely linked, it’s often complicated and sometimes impossible to tease out what’s causing what.

I might. But ferry companies are not generally allowed to.

The dose makes the poison. It is carcinogenic but current estimates are that you’d need to drink several litres a day to meaningfully increase your risk.

There are other good reasons to find a healthier drink but this isn’t one of them. Most artificial sweeteners have some kind of risk attached so there is no point switching to a different diet soda.

You wouldn’t stop to think about it. But how is it even possible for a 7 year old to fall overboard in the first place? Ferries are full of kids running around, something must have been very wrong for this to happen at all?

It’s a lot more practical? Cheap to build and minimal footprint on the ground so existing buildings can stay put.