Sorry if this sounds like a dumb question, but I legitimately don't know: does the thermodynamic argument hold up? (Broadly, I agree that humanity needs a healthier relationship with industrialism before fixing this is possible).
A few ways I can imagine it doesn't:
- We can reduce warming by other means, like changing the Earth's albedo.
- A lot more energy falls to Earth every day from the sun than we use via petroleum; a good amount of solar/wind would let us climb back up the hill via sequestration.
- We don't need to sequester CO2/methane into high-energy-density hydrocarbons; could an efficient sequestration process yield eventually net positive energy per unit greenhouse gas from the burn -> sequester process?
Yeah, this is all true! All of these things are also insanely hard, like, orders of magnitude harder than what we usually mean by “insanely hard,” and might be near-impossible in a similar way that unburning all the carbon is near-impossible, only… somewhat less so. I only talk about unburning all the carbon to emphasize the sheer scale of the problem. There are things you can “fix” or “clean up” or “undo” like, surprisingly, the ozone hole. This is not something we can undo. We can at best halt it, and even slowing it would be (will be) historically traumatic.
My college (Caltech) was pass/fail (no quantified grades) for the first couple of terms, and I thought it worked very well. It did alleviate the some of the stress of beginning a higher-expectations environment, but it also let students explore classes they wouldn't have if they had to worry about GPA. I know a few people that changed their whole field as a result; the geology department was known to pick up students this way.
Funny enough, I had some valuable stuff (including my passport!) stolen from my car, which I'd left unlocked because I was moving some heavy boxes. The police in my area (bay area) said they couldn't really do anything about it because they didn't break a window.
I don't know exactly what legal technicalities are involved, but this did actually happen to me in a de facto sense!
That's cops being lazy because they now don't need to write a report for your car insurance to replace the non-broken window. However, your homeowners or renters insurance may cover the stolen items. In general, there's probably nothing to do about stolen items from a car because literally anyone could have done it and it's not like your car was a sterile environment to begin with (millions of fingerprints and pieces of random DNA everywhere). To give them the benefit of the doubt, why should they expel manpower and resources over items that your insurance will replace when those resources could be put to use in investigating violent crimes? Although in reality, even with photographic evidence and location tracking of the stolen items, the cops still probably won't do anything other than write a report unless it's a very slow day.
The supreme court doubly proved that again recently ruling that the police have no specific duty to protect individuals or even respond for that matter.
As someone who also used to overthink memorizing the fretboard: this is a bad idea. You should strive to just plainly memorize the names of all of the notes, the relevant scale and arpeggio patterns, etc, without any kind of tricks or "system" (no, not CAGED either). This is the only path to real fluency; imagine having a neat system of remembering what each English word means and having to go through it every time you wanted to speak!
Agreed. OTOH, if the question is should I also learn some different way of thinking about music/fretboard, the answer is always yes. If it makes neurons fire, add it to the mix.
I started learning the guitar exactly 22 days ago and I came to the same conclusion. I know enough about music theory, notation, sound modulation and even the cognitive science of hearing* that I knew such a system existed and that I could have some fun times exploring one (no doubt the author had a fun time with this; I know I would). However, after thinking about it for a few minutes I decided against it.
And good thing I did, I went to my local thriftshop and bought Hal Leonard’s Method for a couple of bucks, and have been going through it on a daily basis (now on song 67 of 100) and I am already starting to get an intuitive feel for where to move my fingers and which string to pluck within a beat or two, or rather, my muscles simply know where to move after reading the note (albeit quite often a beat or two late; though I suppose this will improve with practice).
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* This comes from a) having played the trumpet when I was a child (including reading standard notation), b) tried to learn the guitar for a few months 20 years ago and then give up, c) BSc in psychology, and d) done some hobby projects which involved modular analogue synthesizers and the low level Web Audio API
That phrase is smuggling in a LOT of work that systems like CAGED help to simplify. I say this as someone who has played guitar for decades and slept on CAGED for too long.
100% agree. CAGED is extremely underrated. The starting premise is so simple, that most intermediate players go "yeah, yeah, sure...that's cool but it's not very insightful". It's when you start hanging all the basic (and probably more) scale/arpeggio patterns off it that it starts to become more and more valuable.
A few ways I can imagine it doesn't:
- We can reduce warming by other means, like changing the Earth's albedo.
- A lot more energy falls to Earth every day from the sun than we use via petroleum; a good amount of solar/wind would let us climb back up the hill via sequestration.
- We don't need to sequester CO2/methane into high-energy-density hydrocarbons; could an efficient sequestration process yield eventually net positive energy per unit greenhouse gas from the burn -> sequester process?