Ma8ee

If you instead imagine the perspective of anyone from 16th century, you’d realise we are already living as kings. We have way more food and clothes than we can eat and use, we have self driving carriages, magic devices with entertainment in our pockets, not to mention that almost all our kids live to adulthood.

At what point do we say that we don’t need to waste more of earth’s resources and instead find time to enjoy our current enormous wealth?

I think part of the point is that Einstein’s genius was only partially the brain. It was also a unique upbringing in a specific point in time that made it possible. We would have many more geniuses if we game more people the opportunities.

I like that idea.

I'd rather let Archive block access to that specific article for a while, but still archiving from the start.

I remember a discussion whether it was rude to lit a cigarette at the dinner table before everyone had finished their meal or not.

Exactly. It's just that they mix up the steps. The last step, the assembly, is highly automated and usually very fast in software production, since it is done by a compiler (and the aptly named, assembler). The people involved are doing engineering and design, which is much harder to control.

The advantage would be that I know beforehand, and have the opportunity to test and, possibly, reject, what the advertiser want me to send to someone’s browser.

I guess you never tried to speak French in France.

My meaning clearly got lost when I droppen an r. Will you still be happy when they sell youR software, that is, the software you wrote, and make a lot of money while you get nothing.

Here is how the cost of insurance has changed in recent years:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/dec/05/climate-...

And remember, climate change is not something that happens and then it is done. What we are seeing now is just a start of much worse to come.

I would be in the second to last group if we actually did something when there still was time, and more was done to actually do something now. Yes, there's a lot of energy efficiency measures that could be done, and much more clean energy could be build, and we will be forced to adopt whether we want to or not. (Carbon capture from the atmosphere is a fucking joke though, which should be to everyone when you know that CO2 in the atmosphere is measured in parts per million!)

But we didn't start when we had to, and we are still doing only a fraction of what must be done. So, we are screwing ourselves over majorly. And this is not some fringe hysteria, this is the scientific consensus and has been for a long time. You can almost hear screams of frustration and desperation through the lines if you pick ut the latest IPCC report.

> can we actually do anything about it that is not just letting go of a comfortable life

Yes, no doubt! And actually doing something about it will impact our lives much less than trying to continue as usual. If we would have started 30 years ago, the transitions would have been smooth, but now it is going to be harsher. The problem is that doing something about it will affect the profits of some very big and influential corporations, and they are doing everything they can to sow FUD.

Which of course is obviously false. There’s no center right in the Republican Party, only extreme right. The Democrats try to preserve democracy, the Republicans are working very hard to dismantle it.

The POTUS is well known for screwing over contractors and lenders. It clearly didn't damage his reputation enough.

They are also building more solar panels and wind turbines than the rest of the world combined, and are the biggest investor in renewables. Their emission of CO2 just recently peaked. But they need a lot of power, and most of the new coal plants are there for days when there’s neither sun or wind.

Are you still glad when AWS starts selling you software as a service and make hundreds of millions and you get nothing?

It’s really hard to come up with better examples of the exceptions that prove the rule than Marie Curie and Ramanujan. How many more names can you come up with?

I’d even argue that still today women and minorities are strongly disadvantaged at many institutions. I’d say that as a white male that recently left academia myself. I have seen how some of my colleagues have been treated.

A few centuries of science of white males. While I agree that the system with ”objective metrics” has a lot of problems, but just removing it would bring us back to the old days when almost all science was done by a few privileged white men.

What do you mean? If it is the research required, it is such a tiny fraction of the cost of the cost of possible damage to society and the environment that it is completely insignificant.

I think that certainly can provide a valid point in a discussion, without being any attempt to shut it down.

And for some of us, with some specific personality traits, using it as a mantra is how we get anything at all done some days.

Why do you think the app they call a clone of Reddit do all of those things, or most, or any?

In this particular case, it is likely that it started as a genuine campaign. But the reason it actually was successful I suspect that some corporate strategiests realised the many things this could do for them:

1. Give them some goodwill for doing something for the environment.

2. Distract from the things that did matter. They were happy to replace the straws in their drinks if that meant that people thought less about the burning of Amazonas to create graze-land for their hamburgers.

3. It made the environmentalists look like fools.

I don't question the "in-group stupidity" (I can think of some other examples of, let us say, misdirected campaigns.) On the other hand, considering what we have learned from the actions of anything from tobacco to fossil to pharmaceutical, you don't need to be particularly paranoid to suspect conspiracies both here and there.

I've long suspected that the ban of plastic drinking straws was a manufactured distraction to turn people against environmentalists. The environmental and economical effects are so small, while it so distinctly affects so many Americans every day.

The Montreal protocol contains exceptions for essential use, and many thousands of those were granted for many years, so I'm not sure what exactly you are whining about. Did some poor company make less money than they would have if they were allowed to destroy some more?

It is fair and reasonable to demand that releasing a substance with new and unknown effects into the environment justify its existence with hard, scientifically verifiable data that it is safe, or else get chopped.

I think people's health is more important than corporate profits. If corporations played fair, I'd be more tempted to agree with your formulation than with mine, but history has shown that that isn't the case. Take a current example like PFAS, where as soon there is enough evidence to prohibit one variety because it is harmful, the industry just starts using a very similar one that the legislature hasn't had time to collect evidence against.

He'll be gone. The trust in the US won't come back. If your constitution and political system allow such a moron to wreak so much havoc in such a little time, why would we ever trust you again?

> but vendors are just as fallible as the rest of us

Isn’t the point that they shouldn’t be. They should have specialists dedicated to running these kind of things, test upgrades before rolling out, et c., while for the rest of us it’s just one of many things we try to handle.

The energy demand doesn’t decrease.

They do quite soon after they have become managers or product owners or “architects”.

Yes, hardware has become cheaper, but services all enshittify the moment the investors start to ask for some return.