Oldmandan

TBH my guy, while OP's comment was a non-sequitur and there is a lot of value to posting articles like this and making sure people are aware and stay vigilant of antisemitism and other issues within our own borders, your post history is kinda sus. Like, 90% reasonable and then 10% weirdly pro Russia/China.

The human propensity for ignorance should never be underestimated; I can also see the possibility (to use an example product from the antihate article) someone somehow stumbled into buying shotglasses with norse runes on them because they thought they were cool, not realizing the broader context of the site. Is that likely? No, but again, people are really good at doing dumb shit. :P

It feels like every time I go on the internet, I get reminded I need to be very explicit about what I'm saying. (Or develop a thicker skin. :P) Apologies if I sounded dismissive, I was just trying to say that I don't know exactly how it was approved as I haven't done the research to know, but that wasn't surprised it had been, given the overarching issue with medical studies from the last century failing to be replicated. I'm not trying to imply that I'll somehow dig up the absolute truth of the situation that was previously unknown, I just know I'm making a statement with incomplete information.

Eh... I'd need to look into this specific one more, and it's a bit weirder than 'normal' given this is a drug for a common physiological symptom, but there was a lot of bad medical science done from roughly WWI to the turn of the millennium that nonetheless still underpins some of our commonly available medicines. Clinical psych has it especially bad, but the replication crisis is a problem everywhere.

Yeah, post-shaving alopecia is a thing, especially in double coated breeds. (Which is part of the reason you're supposed to avoid shaving them.)

If you want Canadian but about nerdy things instead of politics, LoadingReadyRun (Victoria BC) has a few, some actual-play tabletop stuff, some Magic the Gathering, some sketch and improv comedy (although they haven't made a new one of those in a while, sadly), etc.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but I think perhaps you misread what I said (or I communicated poorly). I'm speaking about the funding incentive to purchase a heat pump. The carbon tax rebates, as you say, are designed to break even by or better for the majority of the population; I've got no issues with that. I was responding to the implication that a transition to electricity was trivial because households could purchase a heat pump for little to no cost. There are households for which the energy costs of resistive heating+heat pump are likely higher than their current heating costs, making this not the case. (Unless there are further rebates I don't know about for people who have a heat pump, beyond covering initial costs?)

That is a true statistic, yes. Without a ton of relevance to the discussion at hand unfortunately. Most of Scandinavia is coastal, and while cold compared to the rest of Europe, has quite mild winters compared to the northern Canadian interior. Additionally, popular in this context is about a 50% adoption rate by household, without much information (that I can find, at least) on distrobution; I suspect most of those are in southern and costal areas, and the (less populated) northern interior primarily relies on other heating methods.

While not representing a majority of Canadians, there are people living in regions that get regularly cold enough for heat pumps to be inadequate. Which means running a standard electric furnace (expensive and inefficient) during the coldest months of the year. Which... is not ideal, especially for lower-income rural persons. (IE, most people living in these regions of Canada.)

The rebate is great, but there are persons for whom it is insufficient.

Do I think that's a good reason to remove the carbon tax from heating fuels? No, not really. (Assuming I understand how the tax works, it really isn't the burden people expect it to be. (You can debate about inefficiencies, but as far as manipulating economics to incentivize transfer away from fossil fuels without harming the general public, it's reasonably sound.)) But people do have legitimate concerns that shouldn't be trivially dismissed.

Whoof. I know I shouldn't be surprised, but damn. "Yeah, we made 9 bil in profit last year, but we're too focused on the long term and transitioning away from energy sources that are actively reducing the habitabilty of our planet." Do you fucking hear yourself speak? As-is, if we manage to get things under control before literally rendering huge swaths of the world unlivable within the next century, it'll be near a goddamn miracle. I understand the need for a smooth transition and the capital to support green initiatives*, and that practically we will need at least some amount of oil for decades yet. Nothing here though gives me any confidence this is anything but a move to maximize shareholder returns.

(*as much as free-market solutions to problems related to common goods (like our goddamn climate) fundementally offend me, due to inherent inefficiency and misaligned incentives, an inefficient response is still better than waiting until we can fundementally restructure society >>)

Eh, common knowledge if (and only if) you are someone chronically online and in the habit of trying to understand current events. :P

That said, rage bait is a bit harsh; while I'm not sure there's much to be done (the calls to deport geriatrics into an active warzone are... a little silly, even if we can prove these people to be war criminals), there are questions worth asking wrt to the circumstances and legitimacy of the rulings and descisions around both their post war status and entrance to Canada. Some acknowledgement and reckoning with some of the questionable actions taken as a nation in the aftermath of WWII is likely past due. /shurg

I told myself I wouldn't read unrelated papers at work, but here we are. :P Yeah, as expected, the actual paper is way more informative about the structural properties, and about the limitations. (Difficulty fabricating larger samples without voids, said voids resulting in much lower strengths and much less plasticity, uncertain tensile strength, etc.) Fascinatingly though, (at least to me, not having known the details about DNA based metamaterials :P) the details of the properties should be tunable by way of changing the DNA lattice structure. Which makes it a two-part engineering problem, figuring out how to manufacture it at scale, and determining optimal lattice structures for different applications. Definitely exciting, and will be big once we figure these things out.

But that's not really what I was talking about. While I get that this is an article geared to laymen/the general public, I do think we should be holding science communication to a higher standard. What was discovered is exciting, but we don't know how it can be used yet, or if it will ever be practical to do so. Overview is fine, I'd just like some more qualifiers and less speculation. Maybe it's just me, but I feel like some more care would do a lot to improve overall scientific literacy and trust in the scientific community. /shurg