Excuse Me for Being an Optimist in “The End Times” of Our Current World

This Doreen person has a lot of posts that surface on HN, but it always seems to be a different website, with different styling. How many websites does this person run? What's the point? I say this because the writing and perspective is often interesting and a centralized collection would aid with discoverability.

> We aren't all doomed and, please, kindly, stop wasting my valuable and limited time and energy on listening to your crap about how we are all doomed, as if the world has never had serious problems before. Either roll your sleeves up and be part of the solution or at least get out of my way.

This is the conclusion. Don't even get me started on the "I'm a military wife" paragraph.

The environment is not getting better day by day, despite this woman's stressful parenting career.

The Kuwaiti oil fires were indeed an environmental disaster [0]; the main lasting effect is increased acid rain from sulfur dioxide. The fires produced half the USA's entire sulfur dioxide output daily while they burned for months. The incident is considered one of the worst oil spills ever [1].

I didn't really like WarGames; I preferred Hackers. In Hackers, the world is not naturally poor or unpleasant, but is made that way by the systems which humans build. Those systems are used to oppress and control users, leading to hackers insisting that their rebellion is no less grand than one which will "hack the planet" and destroy these planet-scale systems of control.

There will be another Y2K. The year 2038 [2] approaches. The amount of work that we must do to rewrite the past and prepare our entire civilization for overcoming our mistakes is exponential with respect to time; the longer we put off doing the needful work, the more effort we will need. Worse, it's possible to become locked into patterns of just barely doing enough to prevent the problem from getting worse over time, but still requiring growing amounts of effort.

The problem with positive thinking is that it obscures reality. I sympathize; reality is harsh and unpleasant.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuwaiti_oil_fires#Environmenta...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_spill#Largest_oil_spills

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem

This author has commented before about not wearing a mask, apparently not believing in the science behind it. Ignorance is bliss.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24152591

I 100% share this sentiment, very well said.

It’s action oriented and optimistic but not naive.

Pessimists sound smart, optimists make money.

The doom and gloom mainly comes from the news media needing to sell ads to eyeballs. CNBC talked about the action that businesses were taking to increase face mask supplies while the mainline media did nothing but complain.