They do not have time. Only realistic alternative is nukes (takes many years to build) or an LNG import terminal (started already, takes years to build). All the alternatives to depending on Russian imports require enormously complex construction projects.
The current situation is not in any way desperate. All claims that a desperate crisis exists are based on the assumption of feedback loops that do not yet show up in any actual data and in fact many temperature datasets e.g. from satellites, weather balloons or the USA's own state of the art surface temperature network show virtually no warming at all for decades. To see warming you have to look at heavily modified composite datasets that are constantly being revised using methodologies so extreme that they literally create entirely new trends where the raw data doesn't contain any.
In an environment with as much epistemic uncertainty as climatology has, it is madness to allow bureaucrats to control anything at all. They are in no way fit to make important decisions on scientific topics.
Used Jira at the last company. Use YouTrack now. YouTrack is better, hands down. Much faster UI, more keyboardable, better integrated into the IDE, integrating it with CI and mailboxes is easy.
Caveats: new job is small so it's a small instance. JetBrain's own YT instance is pretty fast though, so I guess it can scale well. Also, we don't use the new KB/wiki feature so can't comment on that. It's probably got less features than Confluence. We don't use the scrum features.
Biggest caveat - I speak as a developer. One of the biggest problems with Jira was the culture that surrounds it. Clueless PMs who had never written software in their life kept creating fixed workflows in which you couldn't transition tickets to arbitrary states (for no apparent reason, there seemed to be no benefit to these rules). So we were constantly being slowed down by the need to get the handful of people with Jira access to edit the workflows and add more transitions, which was pure makework, especially as even figuring out who the admins were was remarkably complicated. PMs also had a weird Jira fetish, they were like, if it's not in Jira it doesn't exist. So they forced the project to change from a more normal SW dev project early on to mandating that every commit had a ticket associated, and that ticket had to be scheduled into a sprint etc. It was just rank stupidity. Want to do a quick refactoring, as part of your current task? Roll it all into one giant commit because otherwise you'll need to file a ticket. New place doesn't work like that. YouTrack is used more simply, like a todo list. Git logs are the source of truth.
Latest versions of YouTrack come with a knowledge base and pretty flexible workflows support. I'm curious why YouTrack never seems to be listed as a Jira+Confluence competitor, given the similar target markets.
1. National governments do not have control. That implies that for each government, they could ensure the outcome they wanted, which is impossible in a shared legal system. In the era of the veto, you could argue that they had at least the very minimal level of control over change (by stopping it), but the EU has been systematically removing national vetos.
2. Even when vetos did exist, they were hardly 'control' as a regular person would understand it. That would be akin to arguing that as long as a car has a working brake you're in control even if you can't move the steering wheel or stop the engine.
3. We don't actually know the national governments control who becomes EU Commission President. We believe this to be the case because in theory the treaties say that's how it works, but the EU routinely violates its own treaties. For example the treaties say that the Commission gets Commissioners allocated and the national governments control those assignments. In practice the former president (Juncker) boasted in public that he vetoed any commissioner he didn't like. This is not allowed under the treaties but, happens anyway.
4. The actual process by which vDL became President is entirely and completely opaque. The national leaders walked into a locked room and ... something happened. Then vDL was announced as leader. How was that decision arrived at? Which countries voted for her or against her, and why? Was there even a vote at all? Are leaders being threatened or bought? The question may sound absurd but actually the EU has quite bad problems with corruption, and effectively buying support via massive subsidies to poorer countries is a core tactic.
The point is, nobody can answer these questions because the EU is completely opaque. vDL refusing to release critical negotiations in direct violation of EU law is entirely expected from this system; the EU has lots of laws and regulations but they are always ignored the moment they become inconvenient. No system that claims to be democratic can tolerate such levels of opacity.
One last point. The assumption in your argument above is that if voters elect a politician they will actually represent the people who elected them. At the individual / leadership level it is fairly well known that the EU routinely corrupts politicians into going against voter's wishes by offering to hire them into the Commission temporarily after they lose elections. These jobs come with absolutely massive "pensions" that are well out of line with any normal pension, which require virtually no work to obtain, which can be claimed before reaching retirement age and which can be rescinded if the recipient is disloyal! In effect these so-called "pensions" are legal bribes.
The extent of the pension bribes problem can be seen in the scale of EU payments to UK politicians (who of course all became strong remain supporters):
You could also say that directly elected members go against the electorate due to party influence like the party whip system in the UK. Look at Brexit, it has caused economic harm to the UK, and this has caused support for it to drop; but MPs are not looking to change tack and "make the best of Brexit" (as polls suggest the populace wants), they're doubling down to make it worse.
"Democracy is the worst form of government - except for all the others that have been tried". I would suggest the same holds for most of the variations, no system will keep all the people happy (or be perfect).
Personally I am prefer the grander bargains of democracy; transparency (vs back room deals), rule of law (vs corruption), and accountability (vs protection by / for the party). I also would prefer rationality over tribalism, but I suspect that might be too much to ask of humanity.
In the UK people vote for parties and not individuals almost all of the time, so the whip system is there to ensure people get what they actually voted for. A good example of where this disastrously failed is just after Brexit where a lot of MPs campaigned on a platform of respecting the vote, then did a 180 degree turn and refused to do so once in power. They all lost the whip and were kicked out of the party but then refused to call by-elections to let the voters re-decide. Eventually, Boris was able to call an election and every single one of those MPs lost their seats.
"Look at Brexit, it has caused economic harm to the UK, and this has caused support for it to drop"
Economic harm?! The impact of Brexit, if any exists at all, is unmeasurable because it's lost in the noise compared to lockdowns and trying to fight COVID.
What we can say for sure is that the people who claimed voting to leave would trigger an immediate recession were wrong. The economy grew in the years after the vote. Actual implementation was largely put on hold just months after leaving due to COVID and little has changed since.
So on the one hand you lament that EU commissioners are voted in by party blocs in the EU parliament. And yet on the other hand you say that people vote for parties in the UK (they don't they vote for MPs, regardless of their party affiliation is written on the ballot), and that this is good.
My point is that both systems are fallible and susceptible to both group influence (think peer pressure or the less charitable group think) and the influence of special interests; both good and bad.
As to economic harm, it is measurable and has been measured; even the Bank of England says that the UK will suffer more than other G7 and EU nations due to the current supply side inflation. The World Bank, the IMF, and many maket research firms have said very similar things based on economic data (FDI, trade flows, GDP, etc). If you want to eat a jam doughnut with extra cream and sprinkles, great, own it. Just don't be surprised if someone mentions that it isn't as good for you as a stick of celery. Sticking your fingers in your ears so that you don't need to listen to people telling you otherwise doesn't mean a doughnut is a stick of celery.
EU commissioners are not, in fact, voted in by party blocs in the EU parliament - they're picked by the President of the EU, who is selected by an opaque and dubious process behind closed doors. The description of it in the comment chain you're replying to is about right. In fact the winning party bloc in the EU parliament backed someone completely different as President and kinda ran for office on that basis but that didn't matter and van der Leyen got the job despite not being the chosen candidate of any party bloc, with the parliament merely reduced to rubber-stamping that decision.
People get confused about this because her predecessor Juncker supposedly got the job for this reason; in reality this was a ploy by well-connected EU insiders to make Juncker specifically President, and this rule has not been applied previously or since and likely wouldn't have been if some other party bloc backing some other candidate won instead.
You originally claimed "Look at Brexit, it has caused economic harm". A direct causal assertion. Now you've switched to "various organizations claim it will cause harm" which is a very different thing.
"you lament that EU commissioners are voted in by party blocs in the EU parliament"
Where did I say that? I said the opposite, right? That in theory they are appointed directly by national governments without EU parliament or Commission involvement (in theory, but apparently not in practice). EU Parliament can only fire the entire Commission at once, it doesn't select Commissioners and never has.
"you say that people vote for parties in the UK (they don't they vote for MPs, regardless of their party affiliation is written on the ballot), and that this is good"
No, because I didn't express any view on whether it's good or not, I described how the system works. Why do you keep putting words in my mouth like that?
"even the Bank of England says that the UK will suffer more than other G7 and EU nations due to the current supply side inflation"
Bank of England, IMF etc said a lot of stuff that turned out to be flat wrong about Brexit in the past. None of these institutions has any credibility. Every single one wanted Brexit not to happen for ideological reasons and created "expert" forecasts on that basis. A former BoE chief even said the entire profession of economics was in crisis, their prediction misses were so bad, and he's right.
At any rate, the more important point is that, again, trying to tease apart inflation due to fighting COVID from inflation due to Brexit is now hopeless. I'm not happy about that. I feel like COVID was a massive distraction and has largely prevented the government capitalizing on Brexit, and it also means we'll never be able to resolve this economic impact debate. The cost of lockdowns, mass testing, travel restrictions etc is so massive that Brexit is a mosquito in comparison.
"Sticking your fingers in your ears so that you don't need to listen to people telling you otherwise doesn't mean a doughnut is a stick of celery"
The people in question aren't neutral bystanders, they very much want certain outcomes (for ideological reasons). Brexit is neither a donut nor celery, it's merely a continuation of the long term trend towards decentralized governance - look at a graph of how many countries exist over time to see this. In such a way it can work out better or worse depending very much on your perspective and values.
Only a small minority of people actually think continent sized governments are a good idea, especially in Europe. Most people think this is self-evidently a bad idea, which is why the EU leaderships are never willing to let people actually have a referendum on the question - the UK being the lone exception, and look at how nastily the various pro-EU minorities in power tried to stop it being implemented!
"Americans manage to do it, after all."
Americans fought a brutal civil war to ensure the federal government would continue to enjoy supremacy over the states. In the modern era, about half of Americans currently think their country is heading for a second civil war, according to opinion polls. In recent days you're seeing elected federal politicians directly state that people should disobey rulings of the Supreme Court and laws of state governments. You've had federal agencies spying on and directly attacking elected presidents, with no consequences.
So it is absolutely not clear that Americans manage to do this, in a timeless/stable sense. They've managed it in the 20th century but for most of that time they had serious external enemies to bind the country together. Historically speaking, very large and powerful governments tend to collapse from internal decay, splintering into small countries. The number of countries rapidly increased in the 20th century as empires fell apart and new countries formed in their wake. Very few/no people regret this process - you don't see many people hankering after the Ottoman Empire or USSR, do you? A lot of the instability in the Middle East is a legacy of this process, for example.
The polls said the same for the British population before the referendum process started. The population changed its mind before the vote.
Actually, you have to be careful with polls. Polling showed a very clear and strong majority of the British population did not like the EU and were basically opposed to it, but a significant chunk of those people were scared of the threatened economic and tax consequences (which were in the end a lie - there was no emergency tax hike and no recession). If they had not been threatened with ruin then the Leave vote would have been much higher.
The EU has demonstrated it is willing to create essentially unlimited amounts of disruption in order to stop countries leaving. It won't play nice, or respect the wishes of the electorate. It will fight them. Inevitably that scares people, it did in the UK too. This does not mean that those people actually like their situation.
You have to be careful about referendums too, especially when the government organizing them disenfranchises a group of citizens that are very likely to vote a certain way (UK migrants in the EU).
People didn't vote to remain in the EU because they were scared, no matter how much you want it to be that way. There are real tangible benefits of EU membership that UK citizens didn't want to loose.
Last I checked the UK had left, it has not been stopped. That one thing caused a lot of problems for the conspiracy theorists and anti-EU crowd who were suggesting it was not possible for a country to leave. Now the goal posts have been moved on that argument to the EU trying to make it "as hard as possible".
I wonder if leaving the UK is harder than leaving the EU. We might get to find out soon.
Having once been a heavy user of emacs and then switched to IDEA, I'm not sure emacs actually is more extensible. The IDEA API is enormous and very powerful. Plugins don't seem particularly limited in what they can do.
We're talking about epidemiology though. Their papers routinely contain major, grievous errors that anyone can spot in five minutes. There might well be subtle errors too but it doesn't matter when the field is overrun with papers that are quite obviously invalid on their face to any outsider, yet none of the insiders care.
The primary COVID model that triggered lockdowns was full of programming errors. It had never been peer reviewed, and its prediction of deaths varied by 80,000 depending on whether you engaged a data loading optimization or not. It gave totally different results depending on available CPU features! There were no tests and the results had never been validated against anything. Outsiders pointed out these problems, and the team didn't care, nor did anyone else in the field of epidemiology.
That's just one example of many. Epidemiology is kinda like the phrenology of our era (one of quite a few). It's not built on a firm scientific foundation.
It's not facetious. It's quite the stretch to say that if you assume literally any injection could cure any disease, it's OK to describe any found correlation as a "link".
This sort of intellectual looseness is not free. People are learning to treat claims by scientists as untrue, and it's partly because of this sort of press release/paper hacking.
Finding a correlation between two random medical data sets does not mean there is a "link" in any English that normal people would use it. It definitely does not mean there's an "effect" or that one thing "reduces" the other. It might mean there's something worth a followup investigation there, though given the prevalence of non-reproducible p-hacked results in science, also maybe not.
Regardless, before doing press releases and going to the public with such a claim there is a large amount of work needing to be done to actually prove causality. Moreover you'd then want to ask why does such a thing happen when there is no prior reason to suspect such an impact.
> It's not facetious. It's quite the stretch to say that if you assume literally any injection could cure any disease, it's OK to describe any found correlation as a "link".
I don't see it that way. Nick Cage has nothing to do with Alzheimers. We're not finding correlations with Nick Cage movies and then saying "Nick Cage linked to reduction in Alzheimers".
They are suggesting that flu vaccination may have some 2nd order effect beyond protecting you from the flu. Which could be reasonable, science reporting and poor research notwithstanding.
Either way, the refrain "Correlation does not imply causation" is over used in my view. And I'd rather learn the specific ways the research is flawed.
It could be reasonable but like I said, it's a massive stretch. Flu vaccines are not designed to stop Alzheimer's. There is no argued or known biological pathway through which that might happen. Alzheimer's experts have not previously identified flu vaccines as doing anything that might help. And it probably isn't flu itself causing Alzheimer's because, as I've noted elsewhere in this thread, flu vaccines don't appear to have actually reduced overall flu mortality and some studies show negative effectiveness.
I don't think there's a really killer argument here in the abstract: I personally find it unreasonable to imply causation from any medical intervention to any possible outcome based on just a correlation. Yes, it's more reasonable than Nick Cage being associated, but not reasonable enough. That's a judgement call however. I am guided in it by the massive costs and problems created when scientists claim vaccines are miracle cures without sufficiently robust data.
> Flu vaccines are not designed to stop Alzheimer's. There is no argued or known biological pathway through which that might happen.
You might want to read the paper before saying untrue things like that so confidently:
“Mounting evidence indicates that systemic immune responses can have lasting effects on the brain and can influence AD risk and/or progression. A diverse range of microorganisms and infectious diseases have been associated with an increased risk and/or rate of cognitive decline, particularly among older adults, including influenzal respiratory infections [5, 6], pneumonia [4, 7], herpes infections [7], chronic periodontitis [8], urinary tract infections [4], gastrointestinal infections [9], sepsis [4], and most recently COVID-19 [10]. Prevention or attenuation of microbe-related inflammation may therefore represent a rational strategy to delay or reduce the risk of neurodegenerative disease. Consistent with this hypothesis, studies have found a decreased risk of dementia associated with prior exposure to various adulthood vaccinations, including those for tetanus, diphtheria, pertussis (Tdap) [11–13]; poliomyelitis [11]; tuberculosis [14, 15]; herpes zoster (i.e., shingles) [6, 13, 16, 17]; and influenza [11, 18–21].”
Unlike your Nick Cage theory, this has a clear mechanism and is compatible with the understanding of similar effects.
That supports my point, no? The paragraph you cited boils down to "there is an association between being less sick and not getting Alzheimer's (i.e. being less sick" + "there seems to be an association between literally any vaccine regardless of mechanism or target and less Alzheimers". These are not specific biological mechanisms of action, they're just correlations supported by an ultra-vague causal hypothesis of the form "maybe microbes cause Alzheimers". That's not actually a causal biological explanation.
