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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • I watched the video a couple of weeks ago, I think, so my recall might not be exact. However, my takeaway wasn’t that the scientists expressed excitement about their ideas. Instead, I think her issue was that they continued to outwardly express excitement and hype their field even after it was obvious that it was an avenue of inquiry that could never be meaningfully tested. I think she found these later actions to be disingenuous and harmful to the larger field.

    Whether her assessment is accurate, I can’t really say since this isn’t my field. However, I recall many of the discussions she cites in her summary and her characterization seems fair. My gut says that there is at least some validity to her criticisms.


  • The discussion section of the paper is an interesting read (https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2023GL103509). While I am not in a position to critique the authors’ conclusions, they seem to indicate that their work is confirming other estimates of ground water depletion. So, I believe this is more about showing that previous estimates of 2,150 GTons of ground water depletion are plausible. They state that “neglecting groundwater depletion in the PM excitation budget leads to a trend that is more westward than observed.”

    In other words, they show that the amount of ground water depletion estimates by some climate models would be expected to have the same effect on polar motion that they have observed. Their paper doesn’t specifically address whether this depletion is anthropogenic–that is an assertion made by the models they are testing through their observations.



  • I don’t think there is anything wrong with paying for what you consider to be value. I pay for Nebula for similar reasons. Similarly, I don’t have a problem with free services including modest ads to cover their costs and even make a profit.

    I do have a problem with ads that have gotten so aggressive that the free experience becomes unusable. For many providers, I feel like they have lured in content creators by promising free access and then changed the bargain after the fact by making the free tier intolerable.



  • YouTube is a great resource…it just seems weird how precarious it is. You have all these creators who have spent countless hours creating high quality content for them (and even more low quality content!) and all of it could go away in an instant depending on the whims of a large corporation. Sure, some people have managed to make a lot of money from their YouTube content…but not as much as Google has! They can change the rules any time they want and most of their creators have no recourse.

    YouTube could disallow this kind of script any time that they wanted and what could Tom Scott do about it? I haven’t watched this video in a while, but I seem to recall it ties in with his thesis.

    High quality creators (of which, Tom Scott is one) need to find ways to own their own distribution or at least get firm contractual control over the terms of its distribution. They are the engine that drive the YouTube economy and my guess is that most do not get to share in anything but crumbs of the revenue they bring in.



  • I was a piker and just hit the delete button without doing any of these things. Did I lose some history that, in retrospect, I might have wanted to revisit…honestly, no! I never went back and visited my old posts and (and I’m embarrassed to admit this), none of them were likely to have any value to future generations.

    Some people post great, information rich posts about how to debug .NET applications or defuse nuclear weapons. I think my greatest contribution to Reddit was making a pun that once got 54 likes.

    The important thing to remember is to delete your Reddit account (and hope that AskHistorians comes to the Fediverse eventually!).