[AKN #124] It was a big week in our house
LIVE: Quote About Writing Essays And Appeal For Help, LAUGH: Actually YOU Don’t Understand MY Struggle, LOVE: Climate Tribes
Sup homies?
It was a big week in my household.
First of all, we are on the precipice of running out of salt.
Finally made it through a giant ass container from Trader Joe’s that I’m pretty sure we bought in 2019.
The world was a different place when we bought that salt.
Lewis Capaldi had the top song in the world. Taylor Swift still made good songs. And COVID was merely a twinkle in Fauci’s eyes.
(Just kidding. Having a little fun. Doing gain of FUNction research if you will.)
But seriously, do you understand how much commitment to having high blood pressure it takes to make it through an entire container of salt?
(As if my heart wasn’t already damaged enough by the experimental vaccine! Am I right?!?!1
Given my choices, I reckon I have about a 1 in 4 chance my heart explodes if I’m an athlete.
But thankfully I’m not an athlete so I like my odds.)
Secondly, we have a new addition to our household.
Yep, after 3 grueling hours of labor, we are now the proud owners of a TV stand.
Isn’t she a beauty?
And let me tell you, she made us earn it.
Like typically, furniture building is 5% following the instructions, 5% having the correct tools, and 90% emotional regulation.
But after the third time the manual actively gave us incorrect instructions, we found ourselves on the edge of sanity.
However, we pulled ourselves up by our bootstraps, finished the job, and at the end, we looked back fondly on the experience.
Just a dash of struggle in our otherwise struggle-free lives.
On to the newsletter!
LIVE: Quote About Writing Essays And Appeal For Help
Author and cartoonist Tim Kreider once wrote this about what makes a good essay:
I tend to think something might make a good essay if I haven’t figured out what to think of it, or how to feel about it. Things that confuse and bother me. (Maybe the sine qua non for a writer is being able to distinguish what you actually think, and how you actually feel, from the things you know you're supposed to think and feel, the opinions and reactions that are publicly sanctioned, and being brave enough to admit to them in print.) It’s more interesting for me as a writer—and also, I suspect, for the reader—if, in the first draft, at least, if I’m not sure where I’ll end up when I start out.
I would like to do more essays on things I don’t have an opinion on yet. Like the purpose of the essay is to form an opinion on it.
In fact, I have a piece I am working on about electric vehicles which falls squarely into this category.
I want to answer the question “how much better for the environment are electric vehicles?” where I take a comprehensive look at the supply chain of an electric vehicle and try to answer this question in an intellectually honest way.
Currently, I find myself in a state of “uhh honestly I have no idea where I am going to land at the end of this research.” It is actually quite a lot of fun.
If you have any resources you have read with respect to answering this question I would love to read them or even anything tangentially related!
Looking specifically for things which touch on the full lifecycle manufacturing of an electric vehicle.
Also looking specifically for either unbiased, dispassionate analyses or more preferably engineering or science based articles on the subject.
Most things in this space are written by neurotic lunatics who have fully immersed their personality in worshipping on one side of the climate altar.
Much more interested in someone who goes deep into the nuances.
LAUGH: Actually YOU Don’t Understand MY Struggle
LOVE: Climate Tribes
I really loved this piece by Nadia Asparouhova which goes over the different stances on climate which exist in the population.
She started out by pointing out the discrepancy between the way the climate field is perceived vs the reality:
…while the media still portrays climate as a simple question of beliefs, the climate field has long moved on to diversified solutions. Whether one believes in climate change is no longer the interesting question; now it’s “What do you think is the right approach?”
Then she summarized the tribes which is helpfully fleshed out in the following infographic:
Super interesting read which presents a lot of great nuance in something which is usually just painted as a field dominated by a bunch of pot smoking, hippies.
CLOSING TIME
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Disclaimer: Opinions expressed are strictly my own. Who else’s would they be?
Still Building Furniture,
K.Rapp
But in all seriousness, here is a good round up of the data as it surrounds COVID-19 vaccines and sudden deaths. TL;DR - you will probably be fine if you get the vaccine