The headline is about "alarming" amounts of CO2 emissions. The comment is pointing out that these CO2 emissions are essentially meaningless. They did not imply that the demise of the lake is unimportant.
Every one of those things was incremental. Of course women never had a partial right to vote which grew stronger all the time. They suddenly had all of that right at once. But the process that got us there was incremental change in people's perceptions and attitudes. And that whole issue was one increment in the broader picture of all rights and protections for all people.
I'm very grateful to be alive today (and in the US) rather than 150 years ago. I owe most of that thanks to folks who worked peacefully, often in the face of terrible violence, to persuade good people to rethink their bad policies.
I didn't mean Walz in particular is socially conservative. I meant that when people say midwesterners are sensible in general, they mean "not a bunch of weirdos like on the coasts."
your boss isn't allowed to fire you because you are gay
your boss isn't allowed to fire you for religion
we got the 40 hour work week and weekends
child labor is (mostly) outlawed
women can go to college
prohibitions like on alcohol and marijuana are slowly fading away
the grocery store has avocados all year long
But yeah, nothing ever changes incrementally. All those activists who worked their whole lives to peacefully bring these things about, well, that was a waste.
ETA: I'm aware that the end of slavery was not quite "peaceful." I stand by the point that things are getting better all the time, and that it is mostly from incremental gains.
I'm not taking this side, but just pointing out: there is an argument to be made that the artist's choices are irrelevant once they're dead. By becoming a public figure in life, they have made their life's work the property of the culture. This idea was hotly debated after Kurt Cobain's private notebooks were published after his death. I'm still not sure what I think about that.
I have a printing of Einstein's private notebooks too, and I'm so glad that was possible.
The word average is used to signify mean, median or mode freely, depending only on context. For example, "he's just an average Joe" is to say he's like most other men in his demographic. In that case average means mode. In Carlin's joke, average means median.
That's not the point.