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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • dgmib@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.mlI hate the rich
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    1 month ago

    It depends on the jurisdiction, but in most cases if you have a salaried position with say 3 weeks of PTO but you only take 2 weeks of it. The employer is usually required to pay you over and above your salary for working during your “vacation time”.

    If there’s an unlimited PTO policy, they don’t have an obligation to pay you extra for working during vacation time.


  • dgmib@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.mlI hate the rich
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    1 month ago

    It’s a lie.

    By making it “unlimited” they don’t need to pay you out of you don’t use all of PTO days.

    If you use it more than they think you’ve earned you get terminated.

    Employees end up afraid of taking their PTO days and typically end up taking even less time off than if they knew there was a expectation of 3 weeks or whatever.





  • dgmib@lemmy.worldtoCanada@lemmy.caI mean, he's not wrong.
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    2 months ago

    What blows my mind 🤯

    The landlords game has two different sets of rules you could play with. One set of rules was basically the same as the Monopoly we know today. When the game ends when one player acquires ownership of everything and bankrupts everyone else.

    The other set of rules, called “prosperity”, involved a tax that redistributed wealth. The game ends when all players have doubled their original stake and everyone wins.

    The game was intended to show how unbridled capitalism ultimately leads to a few billionaires owning everything and everyone else being poor/bankrupt. (Sound familiar?)

    And compared it to the prosperity rules which were based on Georgism, a kind of socialism/capitalism hybrid that both rewards people for the value they produce while also creating surplus public revenue that can be used to create social safety nets.


  • This is the trolley problem.

    The trolley problem is a series of thought experiments that should be morally equivalent. In all variations, the reader can choose to take an action that will directly result in the death of an innocent person who was otherwise ‘safe’, or do nothing and allow a larger group of people to die, and ask what is the morally correct choice.

    There’s no right answer to the trolley problem. The interesting take away is that what most people agree is the morally correct answer depends how the problem is framed.

    When the situation is framed as “you’re deciding between one person dying and many people dying” most people will agree the morally correct choice is the one where the fewest people die.

    But when the situation is framed as “are you justified in murdering an innocent person to save many” most people agree the morally correct answer is no.

    There’s even one variation where is is considered by most morally correct to murder one person to save many, if the person you’re murdering is responsible for putting the larger group in harms way in the first place.





  • I work in this space. My focus area is consequential GHG accounting specifically, which is the process of quantifying the impact a decision will have on GHG levels.

    There is an internationally recognized methodology for GHG emissions account and for most other things you’d make environmental claims about.

    Hard part is most of those methodologies were designed for voluntary compliance. They tend to allow lots of estimates and average when better data isn’t available, because for someone trying to do the right thing, estimating data is better than nothing.

    But that leaves a giant gaps in legislation like this because someone with incentive to do so can make generously optimistic assumptions that ridiculously overstate their environmental stewardship while still technically following the methodology.

    While I think it’s doubtful we’ll see any major improvements in reporting for a while. The bill is still a massive step in the right direction.

    And there’s hope for the methodologies getting better too. The leading methodology for calculating GHG emissions is currently being revised with a new version expected to be published next year. Current proposals being considered include dropping several notoriously inaccurate approaches, that could be used to make false or exaggerated claims.


  • I respect you for doing your own research. People need to understand the scope of the problem if there’s going to be meaningful action.

    The reason I’m passionate about nuclear in particular is that only about a quarter of all fossil fuel consumption is from electricity generation.

    Most of the rest is burned in transportation, buildings, commercial and residential applications. We have the tech already to switch most of these things to electricity, and eliminate their direct emissions, but that’s not much of a win if we’re burning fossil fuels generate that electricity. Which is what happens today when electricity demand is increased, we can’t just turn up the output of a solar/wind farm in periods of high demand, but we can burn more natural gas.

    Switching to electric everything (Car, trucks, ships, heat pumps, furnaces, etc) will increase electricity demand by 2-3x.

    Even if renewables growth is held to the exponential-ish curve it’s been so far (doubtful) we still need 15+ years just to get to the point of replacing current global fossil fuel electricity production in the most optimistic case, never mind enough to handle 2-3x demand.

    Massive quantities of new carbon free electricity generation is needed to “unlock” the electrification technologies we need to deploy if we going to avoid the worst of the disaster. If we wait until renewables alone get us there it’ll be too late.

    The more carbon free energy we can build in the next 20-30 years, the more options we have. Even if we can reach a place of excess capacity, there are a lot of things like DAC and CCS, that we could use it for that today result in more emissions from electricity generation than they sequester.


  • Don’t take my word for it. Look up the numbers for yourself and do the math.

    Search for “National GHG inventory {your country}”.

    You find a report listing (among a bunch of other things) the amount of electricity generated each year by each method, and the emissions from each. Look up the total TWh of electricity produced by fossil fuels.

    Then look at the total TWh from renewables, and rate it has been growing Y-o-Y and extrapolate until it reaches the number needed to eliminate fossil fuels.

    You’ll find it will take decades to build enough renewable capacity to replace fossil fuel based electricity generation.

    And that’s before you realize that only about 25% of fossil fuel combustion goes to electricity generation. As we start switching cars, homes, industries to electric we’re going to need 2x-3x more electricity generation.

    Yes it takes a long time to bring on a new nuclear plant, roughly 7-9 years. If it was remotely realistic that we could build enough renewable power generation in that time to replace all fossil fuel generation then I’d agree we don’t need nuclear. But we’re not anywhere close to that.

    It’s also helpful to note too just how much power a nuclear reactor generates. I live in Canada, our second smallest nuclear power plant in Pickering, generates almost 5 times more electricity annually than all of Canada’s solar farms combined. It will take 1000s or solar and wind farms covering and area larger than all of our major cities combined to replace fossil fuels…

    …or about 7 nuclear power stations the same size as Pickering.


  • Yes and no. Renewables are now cheaper than other forms of energy but cost isn’t the only issue.

    There are practical limits on how many renewables projects we can build and integrate at a time. We’re not even remotely close to building them fast enough to save anything. We can’t even build them fast enough to keep up with the ever increasing demand energy.

    Nuclear is expensive as fuck but we need to be building more of it as well as renewables because we can’t build enough renewables fast enough to avert the catastrophe, and that’s about the only other tech we have that can generate energy in the massive quantities needed without significant greenhouse gas emissions.


  • The pro-lifers that think there should just be an exceptions when mother’s life is at risk need to also hear that the Texas law already has an exemption for when a doctor uses their “reasonable medical judgment” that the life of the mother is at risk or the pregnancy poses “a serious risk of substantial impairment of a major bodily function.”

    All pregnancies are a risk to the mother’s life, anytime a doctor performs an abortion in Texas they risk losing their license, and possibly even prison time. Which is why we have these case of mothers with unviable pregnancies that aren’t terminated until they’re almost dead.

    If you care about life, why on earth would you support a law that takes informed medical decisions away from doctors and their patients to put it in the hands of lawyers and lawmakers?


  • If BlackRock thinks that population growth in Canada is important, it seems to me they’re actually in a far better position to make that happen than the average Canadian.

    BlackRock owns a fuck ton of property in Canada, they are in a strong position to make rents and housing, much more affordable. Which will drive the economy up significantly.

    Families will be more willing to “grow the population’ if they’re not allocating 50+ percent of their income towards housing.

    Affordable housing also makes us a better destination people immigrating to Canada.

    But that would require BlackRock to be less greedy… so


  • We’re both correct.

    LCOE is based on total operating costs of new electric power generation station over a 20+ year operation life. There are obviously a lot of assumptions in these sorts of analyses but Nat Gas is projected to become cheaper than Coal over the life of a new project, which some of that is expected to be due to carbon taxes.

    LCOE has some flaws as a comparable number when comparing wind and solar to fossil fuels, but is good for understanding what will be cheapest to build of fuel based generation.

    For current existing power stations, coal is cheapest of the fuels. The EIA numbers are here and here’s Statista research here on the historical cost of nat gas vs coal specifically which is frustratingly why coal phase outs have been so slow. Keeping existing coal plants operating is cheaper than building new almost anything.

    And you are correct, price is specific to geography and availability of each. My blanket statement of “coal being the cheapest fuel” is over generalized and not universally correct.


  • It’s expensive and dirty fuel.

    It’s definitely the dirtiest fuel by a good margin. But coal is actually the cheapest fuel. Which is the main reason it still gets used.

    Uranium used to be cheaper than coal, but now that we all but stopped building nuclear power plants it’s gone up significantly.

    Wind and solar are now cheaper than coal for electricity generation, if we can limit growth in energy demand to a rate lower than the growth in renewables, economics will eventually push all electricity generation off of coal.


  • I know nothing about but was curious why they haven increased their residency positions.

    One of the first hits on was this article, it seems like the issue (at least for family doctors) isn’t a lack of available residency positions since 268 positions went unfilled.

    Sounds like it has more to do with the job basically sucks compared to other specialties, a few reasons mentioned in the article:

    • Provinces are effectively forcing family doctors to crank patients through at a high rate since they’re pay is based on the number of pts the see in a day

    • Family practice involves less collaboration with other physicians, less opportunity for professional growth.

    • Political climate, notably in Alberta, is outright hostile towards doctors.

    Doesn’t really explain what’s hindering doctors trained abroad from becoming doctors here.

    Seems to me that a program designed to help foreign trained doctors become licensed here would be a good investment.