Comment by neaanopri | Hacker News Reader

Comment by neaanopri | Hacker News Reader

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Yup, the means to solve climate change and electricity the US already exist, but people don't like them for stupid reasons.

US has an irrational dislike for overhead wires, for both trains and trolley buses (ubiquitous enough they have Unicode)

This isn't a problem of technology, and we can't "innovate our way out". Our dispersed suburban land use pattern is simply a mistake, and impossible to make efficient.

Efficiency comes from:

* Electrified freight rail for cargo transport into and between cities and buildings

* High speed intercity electrified passenger rail

* Frequent, automated subway and heavy rail in cities and their peripheries

* Frequent, ubiquitous trolleybuses to bring people to rail stations

* Dense apartment buildings with good noise cancellation which share heated walls, and use heat pumps for heating and cooling

* Renewable electricity

* Flights for trips >500km, taking passengers from several nearby cities who take high speed rail to the airport

ALL OF THESE TECHNOLOGIES EXIST TODAY, we just need to be willing to adopt them. Because these technologies exist today, there is no sense in "waiting for technology to save us". We need to choose to adopt them, and abandon our inefficient policies now. These will always be the solutions, and we are just in denial that we need to adopt them.

Completely overhauling the entire built environment, housing stock, supply chain, energy flows, and air transportation network of the world's 3rd largest country is not matter of "just" choosing or "just" anything.

How about people want to live how they want to live and we should innovate to accommodate that not restructure society?

Innovation is still finite per unit of time. People's wants are infinite.

Everyone wants to live in a sprawling castle far away from pesky neighbors, they want to have an entire forest as a backyard and at the same time they want to have access to the same urban facilities as those in Manhattan.

There's no amount of innovation we could muster at least the next 2 decades to make that a financially feasible reality.

> Innovation is still finite per unit of time. People's wants are infinite.

That's what I say to people afraid AI will steal their jobs. No way we run out of jobs before we run out of desires. We can always imagine and want more, and it's so easy to become entitled to what you already have and think nothing of it.

People are not necessarily afraid of AIs on their own (though they are afraid of them, too, at least a bit, see Skynet).

I think the bigger fear is that of AI ownership. In a "winner takes all world" where people have a hard time sharing effectively, if there's no need for human labor for many fields and AI owners can just buy lawmakers, some people can just become infinitely powerful. Creating a permanent underclass of those who missed their chance.

See what's happening with coal mining, for example. People keep talking about reconversions but frequently what happens with these people is... Nothing. Their kids are the ones that move away or work in new fields, but most adults over 40 or 50 don't radically change their field of work en masse, or if they do, it's towards even crappier jobs.

Use it or lose it - this new technology will also be available in open source, easy to use format for everyone to empower their lives, but those who refuse to partake will be at a disadvantage.

It used to be that you needed a large dataset and a custom architecture for each individual task. Now you can use a general model and a few examples, it will catch on much faster on what you want it to do. Sometimes it's just as simple as telling it in free language what the task is.

What took whole departments multiple years to achieve will become something regular people could do. We learned to live with internet and cell phones, we can learn to program AI that is by design especially easy to program.

For example, how easy is it to make an image classifier with CLIP. https://openai.com/blog/clip/

What if you don't work in IT? So probably 95% of all workers out there?

Is everyone supposed to work in IT in AI-related fields?

Suburbs were not created out of a natural desire people had. There was a combination of federal financial incentives and racist motives in the 50s that created them, and they are far less efficient than cities by basically every metric.

Not Just Bikes series on Strong Towns: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJp5q-R0lZ0_FCUbeVWK6OGLN...

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-federal-governmen...

There are reasons people like having a yard, more space, less noise, and an automobile, other than racism.

Yes. Many people. Issue is lack of alternative and how the whole society is built to cater to this lifestyle so many people are forced into it if they want anything more than a shoebox 1 bedroom. That’s why understanding why this option became the only choice is interesting to study.

Because climate change is quickly killing our planet as we know it.

We don't have that now (and never have). There are always constraints on what we can do.

Written on the website whose reason for existence is innovations that restructure society.

We have to stop with this toddler mentality. Wanting something isn't nearly enough to make it a sustainable reality.

Tragedy of the Commons.

> US has an irrational dislike for overhead wires, for both trains and trolley buses

but oddly, not for neighborhood electrical delivery.

I have what I believe to be a rational dislike for overhead wires for neighborhood electrical delivery: They're unreliable (multiple outages every winter because snowstorms take out trees), unsafe when they're knocked down but still live, expensive in the long run due to pole replacement and tree maintenance, ugly, and all it takes is a slight increase in capital expenses for installation to replace them with underground utilities. I don't think I'm alone in this.

>expensive in the long run due to pole replacement and tree maintenance,

Not compared to burial. The cost is up front (not amortized) and is a big enough multiplier that it won't overcome maintenance costs, especially when including buried repair/maintenance costs, which are significantly higher than overhead, even taking into account the lower frequency. (Tree roots, dug-up lines, cathodic decay and leaking conduits, necessary relocations, etc, all happen.)

There's nothing preventing the adoption of buried electrical today except the customer's willingness to pay for it.

New neighborhoods and houses that want it, pay for it. Simple as that. And nothing prevents replacing existing overhead except it becomes a 100% unnecessary cost, once overhead has already been installed.

>...and all it takes is a slight increase in capital expenses for installation to replace them with underground

>slight

4-10x upfront install cost. Higher in urban environments. Not slight.

If it paid for itself as you claim, why are companies almost universally making an irrationally expensive decision?

To compare fairly, you'd also have to take into account relative fire risk and difference in frequency of outages.

> If it paid for itself as you claim, why are companies almost universally making an irrationally expensive decision?

I don't think he made such a claim. There's an implication that it's 'worth it', but not that it's necessarily less expensive to implement.

Companies aren't making irrational decisions. They just haven't historically been paying for the externalities.

Not at all, but it's totally beside the parent's point, which is the hypocrisy of scapegoating overhead lines to restrict public transportation options, while simultaneously letting them proliferate unchallenged for residential electric delivery.

You're not alone. The EU generally has underground wires and where it doesn't yet have them it's actively planning to move them there.

What does efficient mean, objectively?

Like is it efficient for me to live in a place I don't like?

CO2 emissions per mile traveled.

> Like is it efficient for me to live in a place I don't like?

Is it more efficient to accommodate hundreds of millions of climate refugees rather than simply internalize the costs of climate change?

I doubt we need to move to trolley based cities to get to low emissions.

Not trying to be too dismissive, but americans like big houses, and I'm not sure how you can get around that.

Americans would like mansions too if they were massively subsidized to the point of affordability.

If you stopped subsidising the suburbs and suburbanites were forced to pay the 5x higher property tax rates it takes to maintain infrastructure, people's preferences would change.

The people who currently live there have chosen where they live based on their budget. They likely cannot afford the 5x in taxes, so the practical result is that infrastructure would be left to crumble. This is what is currently happening with a lot of post-war infrastructure in the US right now.

No, the practical result in the US is a huge Federal bailout every few decades, labelled "Infrastructure."

Not to mention that they are subsidised within their own municipalities by commercial property and what little climate friendly housing is not NIMBY'd, typically by loud car sewers.

A gas expands to fill its container.

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