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  • 17 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: June 6th, 2023
  • gigachad@feddit.detoTechnology@beehaw.org•Consumer first; Citizen second
    34·
    8 months ago

    What you say is true and I can understand it is frustrating. But I really don’t know how to convince people. Convenience is king and you need to have strong political opinions to abstain. I am a nerd, but still I often need double the time to find the “alternative” way of owning things.

    I recently wanted to get the Harry Potter audio books for listening on my phone. I basically had two “official” options:

    1. Buying all E-books as mp3 download for 235€
    2. Amazon Audible for 10€ per Month

    You can clearly see that in reality, the industry gives you only one option - audible. For 235€ you can have 2 years of e-book subscriptions.

    Maybe you would say “hey, 235€ may seem expensive but in exchange you will get to own the stuff you pay for!”. The thing is: you can get the whole audiobook collection on mp3-CD for just 70€ on Amazon?

    In the end I bough an external CD-ROM drive and bought the mp3-CD box used for 40€.

    It’s not about that stupid Audiobook or whether the price is justified. The point I want to make is that the industry makes is so hard for individuals to own things, that I almost see this as a lost battle. The way I chose, took almost 2 weeks, days of research, a frustrated lemmy post, two online orders and 2 hours time to copy the mp3s.

    And the thing is, it’s the same for everything else - you want to buy a vacuum cleaner? Oh better look if it comes with special cleaner bags for 30€ per bag. Let’s not talk about printers.

    Every little item needs so much research, only for the aspects of planned obsolescence and true ownership. We do not even talk about social or environmental aspects…

    How the fuck should I expect others to spend so much time on energy on consumption things? Honestly, sometimes I am a bit envious of the people that just do not care. But only sometimes.

    Sorry, that somehow developed into a rant

  • gigachad@feddit.detoOpen Source@lemmy.ml•Is there any climate simulator for the coming years?
    2·
    8 months ago

    Absolutely understandable. Maybe there is some easy tool around, but I see some potential problems.

    Questions such as “Is this zone habitable in 2035” or “Will this area be ocean in 2050” are extremely hard to answer with our current knowledge and available data. As you probably know, climate scientists speak of probabilities, as projections e.g.for temperature are highly uncertain, especially in the more far away future. If there is a tool answering such questions, you probably can’t trust it. Then, you will likely not get a one does it all tool, as the questions OP asked are highly specific. All in all the matter is very complex and there are no easy answer. You need some kind of motivation to gather a certain amount of background knowledge about the topic.

    I think what comes closest to what OP wants is downloading model results from largely accepted climate models such as CMIP6. They usually come in special file formats that can efficiently store geospatial time series, such as netCDF or HDF5. There are tools like Panoply where you can do some very nice visualisations. You do not need to code neither is the software very complex. QGIS and ArcGIS are overkill here, as you would not want to do spatial analysis but only visualize.

    The work you would need to do is 1) understanding what you want - there is not a single result, instead you have climate projections under several different scenarios, model assumptions, input data etc. You need to figure out what to choose. 2) Have a decent feeling of geospatial visualization techniques. Cartography is a complex field, and correctly visualizing data is pretty hard.

    I am sorry I cannot provide easy solution. WhatI can offer is helping to acquire data if you what you want and also I can give technical support on visualization software. Maybe also give you some guidelines on how to interpret a figure.