gishbunker

Interestingly, pyrolizing biomass produces energy and solid carbon that can be sequestered. So while it produces less energy than burning biomass, it's energy positive and carbon negative if you bury the carbon output.

So gathering and heating biomass as a resource isn't necessarily the wrong general idea.

100%. That's why I ducked out of the boy scouts, why I ducked out of Amazon, why I ducked out of my abusive family.

Some things you do have to step away from.

Exactly what it says on the tin. Where do rustconf/rust lang leadership diverge from rust users. If 40% of rust devs are women, but only 10% of leadership is women, they are an under represented group in leadership.

There might be reasonable reasons! The existence of an under represented group isn't wrong, it's just a time to ask, "why is it this way?"

To be clear, I'm not saying there should be no under represented groups. But if there are, we should just be deliberate about understanding why. Are there systemic reasons where merit isn't being considered?

It's a bug. Bugs happen. Systems are still systems whether they deal with people or code.

When big bugs happen, we evaluate why, and improve the system so it performs better next time. We don't blame people, we focus on what allowed people to make bad decisions. In this case, it sounds like a bad decision making process that needs a patch.

If someone is in the minority, it's totally reasonable to ask, "could their minority status be a factor in their disenfranchisement?"

Then you look at the data, and in this case come to the conclusion, "no, it was not a factor."

That seems healthy and normal, it's not outrage bait to acknowledge that yes, sometimes minorities are at a disadvantage or are under represented.

It's just as fallacious to say "of course race was a factor" as it is to say "of course race was not a factor". Much better to ask openly, evaluate the data, and make an informed conclusion.

I think it's absolutely reasonable to blame England for famines in Ireland and India, as well as blame Soviet style communism for famines in Ukraine and China.

I'm a (non Soviet style) communist, and it's frustrating to me to see both communist and capitalist posters say, "my side did nothing wrong, yours is the killer". Both communist and capitalist regimes have caused famine. We need to observe both and feel comfortable with the idea that even things we agree with sometimes do evil.

Why were they hoarding grain?

I'm a communist, and holy shit have both communist regimes and capitalist regimes killed millions upon millions in preventable causes.

People here generally jump on communists pretty assertively, but I think it's important to remember that autocracy is only one form of communism, and plenty of communist folks have a strong dislike of the Soviet model. (Just as, I'd imagine, many capitalists dislike the "use force to take food" model described in the article).

It drives me up the wall when people say, "communism/capitalism are unique in their killing of 100s of millions!" No, both have caused uncountable human suffering. We should be comfortable accepting that both need study and critique.

Stealing food from a nation, resulting in millions of deaths, is a pretty clear "bad guy" move.

There are plenty of clear cut bad guy moments in history, falsely equivocating and saying "it's complicated" is a way to undermine critique.

I don't read this as particularly deceptive, or suggesting that there were no prior famines.

That said, seeing rate of famines increase as technology for food production improved is a pretty glaring.

Churchill (and arguably capitalism more broadly) were absolutely extracting food from India in a way that hurt the Indian people.