The ignorant part is claiming we have workable alternatives to AC. Now you one-up your previous statement by claiming people thrive(d) in these temperatures. Even if you had mistaken thrive for survive, it would still be incorrect, indicated by excess mortality during high temperatures.
I'd grant you that you didn't explicitly advocated for restrictive AC regulation, but I claim your dismissive attitude is implicitly part of the reason AC regulation remains restrictive.
"An unusual feature of Japanese housing is that houses are presumed to have a limited lifespan, and are often torn down and rebuilt after a few decades,..."
This is the kind of ignorant comment we thankfully see less and less.
You can no longer shift your activities when the weather reaches 35C (95f) every day for weeks without noticeably cooling down in the night.
And even if activity shifting was possible, which again, it is not anymore, the authoritative, fatalistic poverty mindset required to demand that one does not actively cool during hot hours is a European mentality not many other cultures, if any, understand.
I am not into cars and I will certainly not pay for a luxury car anytime soon, so not the most relevant opinion. Still, when I buy a car again, I'd love to have this interior design. The exterior on the other hand, I don't know what they tried to achieve here.
Designers seem to struggle with exterior electronic car design in general. Are they trying too hard to be iconic?
I've always had excellent model building functionality for abstractions and got the "physics" of a subject rather quickly, be it economics, biology, certain mathematical subjects and more.
Then, I met software and computer science abstractions, they all seemed so arbitrary to me, I often didn't even understand what the recipe was supposed to cook. And though I have gotten better over time (and can now write good solutions in certain domains), to this day I did not develop a "physics" level understanding of software or computer science.
It feels really strange and messes with your sense of intelligence. Wondering if anyone here has a similar experience and was able to resolve it.
I'm in the opposite camp. Programming has never been fun to me, and LLMs are a godsend to deal with all the parts I don't care for. LLMs have accelerated my learning speed and productivity, and believe it or not, programming even started to become fun and engaging!
Not sure why you are downvoted. Social market economy is the self-description in Germany, it's what you learn in school and how German politicians name the system.
The goal of social market economy is to 'correct undesirable effects' of free markets. Depending on your perspective, you categorize it as capitalist, socialist or in-between system.
To be honest, I do understand some people preferring pastures in front of their home. But we can't have nice things if individuals are capable of blocking projects for that. Personal preferences should not be a valid reason to block projects. Unmitigated negative externalities are reasonable objections, but even then, you have people "finding" this one protected snail type living there and - boom - project can't be realized due to environmental protection laws. There needs to be a re-balance of the commons, but try getting that through legislation.
To add to this, I know person a farmer who wanted to use part of his farmland for solar panels. The project failed. Reasons: lack of power grid connection, no one wanted to takeover the costs for added capacity; and local resistance from residents. „I want to see the nature in front of my home“ is all what’s needed to fail consent.
I made no argument, merely tried to explain why he is viewed favourably by some. I could have left out the second and last paragraph, that was more about me showing that I didn’t agree with his performance either.
He has been well received among left-green voters, civil servants and alike. He communicated without the usual empty political phrases, that alone brought him sympathies. He also managed the Ukraine crisis well, for instance, he was involved in quickly finding alternative gas sources after one of the Nord Stream pipelines had been destroyed. I'd say he embodied the values, policies and mannerism of his electorate better than anyone else.
And yet I agree with you. Economically, he disappointed through and through. Same for climate change, which ironically is at the heart of the Green party he belongs to. For example, to more conservative voters, he's will mostly remembered as the politician who wanted to bring a central planning approach into their homes, forcing everyone to install costly heat pumps, with their own money, without much regard to their specific household situation. All to achieve no effective carbon emission reduction.
But to his left-green electorate, he remains sacrosanct, his critics are dismissed, often as far-right.
Every time I've looked into the arguments for this being a genocide, I saw, at best, a description of urban warfare. Maybe I am wrong. If anyone is still reading this thread, could you write what you believe will happen after Israel won the war?
Coming from the other side of this argument: In my degree, rote memorization was required for a surprising amount of courses. It required students, me included, to memorize huge quantities of things we knew were utterly irrelevant to anything but being graded. (This prediction remained true). Committing irrelevant course work into memory over and over again almost burned me out, certainly made me lose all interest and fun in learning for over a decade afterwards. To be honest, I still feel slightly burned and that might never go away.
You might have attended a good degree, where the learned information was actually beneficial. But I'd bet for most degrees out there, rote memorization is the consequence of professors wanting easily gradable exams, existing for their benefit, not the students.
Which means the actual problem is low quality education and degrees and we might find common ground here.
Me and most of my peers in college had the choice between two courses. Course A was interesting, yet vastly more challenging and therefore time consuming, with the additional downside of lower grade expectation. Course B was boring, a gentle breeze in comparison, yet with an almost guaranteed perfect grade.
Imagine which course most students choose?
Even if a student wants to take on the more interesting course, incentives matter, and the incentive is: better grades qualify for better compensated positions and prestigious degrees. Only students who didn't care about this or were confident enough in their ability did choose Course A. In the end, barely a handful of students out of hundreds went with A.
In my mind, this generalizes to the same problem with other non-stochastic (deterministic) operations like logical conclusions (A => B) .
I have a running bet with friend that humans encode deterministic operations in neural networks, too, while he thinks there has to be another process at play. But there might be something extra helping our neural networks learn the strong weights required for it. Or the answer is again: "more data".
What about the additional costs for delivery and online platforms? Both only apply for delivery and are quite significant. Takeouts should reduce costs, but delivery has significant costs added to each order.
I'd grant you that you didn't explicitly advocated for restrictive AC regulation, but I claim your dismissive attitude is implicitly part of the reason AC regulation remains restrictive.