Vida Enigmática

"Who speaks for Earth?"

Who speaks for Earth?

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Why “net zero” is a pipe dream that’ll never happen.

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Look, can I just say that this whole “net zero” and stopping all fossil fuels exploration thing is a bit of a pipe dream as currently you need it to make steel and other materials (cement, plastic, grease, solvents, synthetic clothing, wax, lubricants, etc).

Where do you people think all of this stuff (materials) comes from??? Mines. People need to consume far less, and doing that is probably going to wreck the economy, so we’re all fucked either way. I say this as a former materials scientist. It’s not as simple as stopping all oil and gas exploration, as that oil and gas isn’t just use for petrol and coal fired power stations, but many other industries too. Most people (leftists) don’t seem to realise that at all. They need to use less hair dye, get less piercings, less tattoos, less jewelry.

I already know that we’re going to miss all our targets. Because of basic human nature. People are too hooked on consumerism. People won’t even stop their car engines idling when they are parked. Stopping cattle farms won’t work as farmers will be more likely to simply sell up and the land that once had grass and trees on and it will then get developed for housing instead of being turned back into native forests.

We’re already on a set path, our entire civilisation has been built up on consumerism (which relies on fossil fuels, mines, and deforestation). Even if you buy services instead of products, you never know what other people are going to spend their money on.

I think leftists have singlehandedly taken (set back) the environmental movement back about 10 years I’d say. Because it became to woke, too much about political correctness. The best thing leftists can do today to help in the fight against climate change is to make their “movement” (if you want to call it that; it behaves more like a cult today) about the environment again.

Abandon all this complete woke nonsense. Forget gender. Forget trannies. Forget foreigners (I like cultures, I like languages, but islam not so much… I wonder why).

Forget wars. Forget illegal immigration. Forget victim inversion. Forget people altogether. Forget globalisation. Forget cancel culture. Forget deplatforming. Forget lawfare. Forget debanking and bankrupting people who you don’t agree with. You need to refocus your efforts. And take some of what the you keep calling “the far right” is saying on board. Because just as their are patterns in climate data, there are patterns with other cultures too, and not all cultures have equal set of priorites and values, and the sooner leftists realise that, the sooner we can all get back to caring about the planet again.

Leftists need to be able to convince conservative people that biodiversity is in decline, because a lot of them are in complete denial too. And calling them “racists”, “nazis” or “islamophobes” at each and every opportunity, wishing the bullet hadn’t missed trump and joking about that within your own circles is certainly not helping your cause in any way whatsoever.

We’re fucked!

Cyclist road safety advice in Australia

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Now it’s all fine and good to focus on alcohol and speeding and seatbelts and mobile phone distractions and fines as important causes to focus upon in order to reduce road fatalities. SUPER. GREAT. NO REALLY, IT IS. Good job. Well done, we get the message. But that’s not the only problem now is it? No.

Because, there’s one group of road users in particular that are WAY more likely to die per kilometre traveled than any car or truck drivers or even motorcycle riders.

And that’s on-road cyclists.

The annual number of people killed while riding a bike in Australia has not reduced for more than 20 years. On average, 37 people are killed while riding a bike in Australia each year. In Australia in the year ending July 2023, there were a total of 46 road deaths involving cyclists. Between 1999 and 2016, 651 cyclists died as the result of their injuries. Just let that sink in. SIX HUNDRED AND FIFTY ONE. 651. Jesus bloody christ that’s a lot of people considering how little you actually see cyclists on the roads now isn’t it?

And the reason?

Time and fucking time again cars pass WAY too close and they also travel WAY too fast. every. Fucking. Day. Every fucking 2 minutes!!!

They don’t seem to understand that they should MODERATE their speed while overtaking cyclists. Both! The worst part is that the cars that pass too close are ALSO the ones that don’t slow down even 1km/hr, so it’s a double-whammy now isn’t it.

I think many don’t even realise that it’s a legal requirement to give 1 to 1.5 m of space and that yes they can cross to the other side of the road to do it. Some people seem to think that a white line or a double white line represents a virtual brick wall that they cannot cross if their lives depended on it, then leave us sweet fuck all room as they squeeze past even though there is probably 5 metres of space there on the other side of them.

BUT ALSO! Some of them that do give space then go and overtake on blind corners or right on the a crest of a hill, and then they put the oncoming cars in danger. And guess who they’re going to swerve back into when there is an oncoming car. Us! That’s who!

Now it is getting [slightly] better than it was 30 years ago, but even so, I’d estimate that a whopping probably 40% of car drivers are not overtaking cyclists properly. And perhaps 5-10% are just downright fucking dangerous.

Some people are just downright morons, maybe one in 200 to 500 people (or less). But judging by how drivers treat pedestrians, I really don’t think 20-40% of road users are *intentionally* trying to be arseholes. THEY JUST DON’T KNOW ANY BETTER!!

What does that tell you? That tells you that people have to be both educated and re-educated. It’s the only way forward. No not by us cyclists. They need to be educated/re-educated by government, advertising campaigns, at the time of learning to drive and by the police. Plus road signs. Because motorcyclists aren’t the only ones dying out there on our roads (I do also ride a motorcycle).

I’ve had sandwiches thrown in my face. I’ve had firecrackers thrown at me while I’m riding my bicycle along minding my own business, lit ones that is mind you.

It always seems to be P-platers with their mates thinking that they are being ‘clever’, I’ve had MANY MANY MANY P-plater fuckers literally SCREAM at the top of their lungs, intentionally trying to scare and intimidate us into crashing.

Now please. I’m doing all the right things wearing a helmet, day time running lights, bright clothing, cycling not during dawn/dusk time periods of low visibility and so on. But some of them even see all that, especially on long straight roads, especially when there are more than two young male occupants, they see us and then they intentionally start plotting and scheming about how they are best going to scare us or provoke us some into some kind of reaction. Nice. Thanks. That shit has to be stamped out.

Would you like to be physically SCREAMED at while you are just riding along by a car full of people going probably 120km/hr with only one foot of room to spare? I don’t think so.

Do/did you the survey and road safety feedback people know all this? Are you even aware? Probably not, right? Well they do. That is what some particularly young people do. It’s shockingly bad out there, shocking. Something has to change.

That sort of anti-social behavior should be illegal. It probably is I’d say, BUT NOTHING IS EVER DONE ABOUT IT!!!

NOTHING IS EVER DONE.
NOTHING IS EVER DONE!
NOTHING IS EVER DONE!!

Cyclists are literally being bullied on our roads. Bullied. Cops never and I repeat NEVER do a crackdown on cars overtaking cyclists too closely. I don’t think it has ever been done. If it has I’ve never seen it. Not once in over 30 years.

If you people want to earn some money, and do some revenue raising for the state, think $10 million dollars or more, then that is how to do it, because you’ll catch 10 or 15% of all cars I kid you not.

Twice now I’ve been sideswiped by cars, crashed, and broken my wrists both times.

Something is massively fucking wrong in this country if pedestrians are treated like gods and yet cyclists are treated like the devil.

As a pedestrian, you can be 5 metres away from a pedestrian crossing and pretty much all cars will stop for you. Almost without exception. 90% will be politely stop. You only have to LOOK at the crossing and people will stop. Wonderful!

But cyclists on the other hand, for some reason are HATED. We are being overtaken with in many cases less than a foot of room while the car/truck/bus is traveling at well over 100km/hr. Is that safe? No it’s not bloody safe at all!!!

Now, if I went and complained about every single shonky overtaking manoeuvre that had ever been done to me, I’d be in the police station every 5 fuckin’ minutes, that’s literally how bad it is.

Something has to change, and pronto! Nothing is going to change by me getting a rear camera and whinging to my local policemen every time something happens. This all requires a government initiative. From the top down. Not the bottom up.

So there needs to be a massive and I mean MASSIVE re-education campaign because this is just RIDICULOUS.

When I learned to drive a car in Spain, there was a lecture session on how to overtake cyclists properly and SAFELY. Not here though. I think there was a 2 hour session on how to overtake bikes properly. I kid you not. What can we learn from that here?

SO IT’S YOUR JOB TO RE-EDUCATE PEOPLE SO THAT THEY CAN MODIFY THERE DRIVING BEHAVIOR ACCORDINGLY AND THUS SAVE LIVES. THAT IS NOT MY JOB. NOW IT’S YOUR TURN. YOU HAVE BEEN INFORMED, SO PLEASE PASS THIS MESSAGE RIGHT UP THE FUCKIN’ HIERARCHICAL SYSTEM AND KEEP RE-SENDING IT AND RE-SENDING IT UNTIL THERE IS SOME SORT OF ACTION. ATTEND YOUR BORING MEETINGS OR WHATEVER IT IS THAT YOU GOVERNMENT PEOPLE DO, AND THEN MAKE THE NECESSARY BLASTED CHANGES. ACTION IT. DO IT. THAT’S HOW TO SAVE HUNDREDS OF LIVES OVER THE NEXT DECADE. YOU’LL NEVER AND I REPEAT NEVER GET “TOWARDS ZERO” UNLESS THIS IS DONE.

You, the government, is meant to protect us the citizens. The road users. Not just vehicle occupants. Cyclists too!

What is the most difficult part of Finnish grammar in your opinion?

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I’m still somewhat of a beginner in Finnish. Maybe advanced beginner or lower intermediate. For some reason I do not find Finnish as difficult as expected. After learning Russian, it almost felt “easy”.

Sheldon cooper learning finnish

For example, Russian has three genders, for me one of the hardest parts to grasp about Russian (in practice) is that the “У” endings swap depending on the gender, for example dative masculine and accusative feminine both use the same “У” ending.🤯

Perhaps if I had skipped Russian and gone straight to Finnish it might have seemed a lot harder.

Finnish on the other hand seems to be more consistent.

Russian plural noun case endings are very different from singular noun case endings.

With Finnish, there is no gender. Also with Finnish, at least with these locative cases, plural cases more resemble their singular case case counterparts, they just include the letter “i” somewhere, that usually indicates plural.

If you understand how these locative cases work, and really they are not that difficult, then you are already half way there to understanding Finnish. It seems to me that remembering what the cases themselves are called (especially the locative cases) is harder than actually using them in practice.😅

More good news
I find (at least watching television) that some of the cases are not used anywhere near as frequently as others. For instance, the last three ‘marginal’ cases are rarely used in modern Finnish. The comitative is usually replaced with the postposition kanssa (“with”) [just put the other word in genetive case] and the abessive is usually replaced with the preposition ilman (“without”) [just put the other word in the partitative case].

Probably the most difficult thing is knowing when to use partitive and when to use accusative.
I’ll be completely honest here and admit that I still don’t know when to do this.

One difficult thing is also called “consonant gradation” (or the KPT rule). When words are inflected, the word stem may change: consonants may disappear, be doubled, or be replaced with other consonants.😨Some of these changes can be ‘predicted’, but honestly I think most Finns just remember it based on repeated exposure to the language and what sounds/looks right. I imagine Finnish kids don’t learn how to speak using KPT rule when they are young, they just copy.

I still haven’t completely mastered this either, no. I have learned to not expect too much from yourself when learning languages, it’s a slow process. Best not to try to be a perfectionist or you will drive yourself mad/crazy. At least in the beginning phase anyway.

As I said, I don’t pretend to know anything here, I’m not Finnish, or Russian, I’m not a ‘linguist’ either, so when I say “learn a language with leslie“, it’s more like learning with another student than learning with a teacher.😊