salt-thrower

Fossil fuels are failing our very immediate need to stabilize climate change and survive for the next century. So yes, we should be considering other options, even if they’re not perfect.

I actually agree. I’ve tried to like Stumptown so many times, but the flavor is too sour for me.

Sisters Coffee Company is my favorite Oregon brand so far.

Check out the track “Coffee In Portland” by John Craigie on your music app of choice. It’s a great folksy bit about attempting to order coffee at a trendy coffee shop. Hilarious. (I say this as a Portland resident myself).

Even if that’s true (debatable), it’s important to not use it as ammo to slam renewables as a whole - which republicans are keen to do. We need to wean off of fossil fuels asap, and this sentiment is easily manipulated to hurt that cause.

> They have some immense challenges in DHS

Racist abuse of migrant kids and breaking the bones of unarmed protesters really eats at the soul over time, I'd imagine. Those poor DHS agents - won't someone think of their stress levels?

https://theintercept.com/2020/10/06/homeland-security-dhs-mi...

> What happened to correct that culture?

You probably already know the answer to this and are asking it to spur discussion, but of course the answer is: absolutely nothing.

Sadly I think you’re right, assuming business as usual continues until it can’t. But a potential foil to that timeline would be technological civilization grinding to a halt, such that we couldn’t deploy geoengineering even if we wanted to. At that point it’s anyone’s guess.

> How many people have been killed in US wars

Easily in the millions. And that’s innocent civilians, not combatants. Not to diminish the suffering that happened there under Mao - but the lives ruined by US wars continue to add up. People are still born to this day with birth defects and cancer due to the chemical weapons we used in Vietnam, for example. And if we’re counting the 20th century, how about the fact that Hitler was inspired by America’s treatment of Native and Black people when he started the Holocaust? Eugenics got its start in the US. Genocidal forced sterilization of minorities was still happening here well into the 20th century. The list of atrocities goes on.

> Remind me where the US has implemented a concentration camp of about a million individuals based on ethnicity alone

Native Americans for the entire history of our country, until we finally put them on land that white settlers didn’t want. Japanese during WW2. Prison/torture camps all over the world during the “war on terror” which scooped up Muslims indiscriminately under the guise of fighting terror. These were all either officially denied, or admitted and openly justified at the time.

And forget corporate espionage - how about the well-known fact that US intelligence agencies have outright overthrown and assassinated democratically elected leaders all over the world? We even did it to Australia, an ostensible ally.

I’ll give you that China has a horrible record of harassing and imprisoning people who criticize their government, as well as censoring media. That’s one thing the US has going for it.

But as far as democracy goes, the things we’re talking about here - data collection, spying, extralegal evil acts committed by governments in secret - aren’t things that we get to vote on in America. Not one of us idiots arguing online has any say in what data the NSA collects and how they use it. Neither does any elected representative even bother talking about that anymore. Most of them don’t know what the NSA does, either. Them and the CIA are entirely unaccountable to democracy and that’s by design. It’s marginally better because we can at least talk about it, but that’s only because we’re powerless to stop it, so our opinion really doesn’t matter.

I have the same take as you, and reading all these comments makes me feel like I’m on crazy pills.

Google and Meta apparently get a pass because they’re “American companies.” Even though we know that they collect personal data and manipulate people en masse as part of their core product offerings. And of course, through PRISM and other programs, the US govt has access to much of it.

I think people are just scared because now China is doing the same op, but more overtly.

Google is on nobody’s “side” but their own. They’re an amoral bureaucracy trying to make money. Nothing more or less.

I can’t find a single reputable scientific organization that argues in favor of ambitious climate engineering. The Union of Concerned Scientists, for example, is wholly against it. I recommend reading their explainer on it. “A lot of people and species will die” - you gloss over that callously like it’s all fine and dandy.

You’re not wrong, but also: the electorate’s opinions are shaped by the media they consume. And media is easily bought by disinformation campaigns from oil companies to muddy the waters and convince voters that climate change isn’t a big deal, or is an outright hoax.

You only need to propagandize about 40% of the electorate to completely sink the chances of making real political action on an issue.

Add to that the fact that elected leaders don’t really represent the majority of their “constituents,” they represent the interests of whichever corporations fund them. Democracy has been bought and sold and is controlled by an unaccountable minority, at least in America.

That’s because they outsourced all their dirty manufacturing to China, which has since picked up the pace of emissions. No country exists in a vacuum - the global economy we all participate in is financing the climate crisis.

“… according to convicted fraudster Martin Shkreli.”

This is the classic trope that psychology studies in general don’t reveal truths about humanity, they reveal truths about (mostly white) American college students.

Thank you for this. I feel the same way. I hate the performative theater of office life. Pretending to care, pretending that our work matters at all. But the pay is great, and I can’t afford to live without it, so… that’s how it goes.

The worst case scenario is still a mass extinction event unlike anything witnessed by the human species, plus global food and water shortages, and certain areas of the world becoming unsuitable for human life during the hot months.

That means mass migration and conflict over resources, and a deteriorating ecosystem that we still very much rely on to produce food and healthy living conditions.

https://www.vox.com/22620706/climate-change-ipcc-report-2021...

Basically, scenario 4 or 5 outlined in that article is what I see happening. Sure, it's not a guaranteed extinction, but it will devastating, and it's far more likely than a GAI takeover.

Paywall; unable to comment on that article.

I don’t think humanity will literally go extinct in 100 years. But no action is being made against climate change. None. The conferences and non-binding pledges made so far are political theater, with deadlines far enough in the future that the people making the pledges will be dead or out of power by the due date.

Not only are we failing to decrease emissions, we are actively increasing them year over year. The CO2 that already exists in the atmosphere has guaranteed a difficult future on its own, and we keep adding to it. The worst case scenarios outlined in the IPCC report are therefore pretty likely to happen, and I think they’re much more apocalyptic than you give them credit for. 10% of humans dying in a century might not be an extinction in and of itself, but it certainly brings us closer, and will have countless side effects that will disrupt society as we know it.

In a nutshell, it's far more likely that climate change will bring humanity to its knees before some kind of GAI takeover. Not saying it's guaranteed (though it's gonna be very bad); just saying Skynet isn't what I'm worried about.

This type of thing used to scare me a lot more. But after the events of the last few years, the latest IPCC climate report, and the fact that AI has fallen on its face repeatedly despite expectations, I'm more convinced that we'll destroy ourselves before AI has the chance to take us out.

But now that I think about it, the idea of a super intelligent AI simply waiting for humanity to die off naturally instead of going to war with us would be a funny premise for a short story.

I think the argument is that it's already out there. Companies, with no directive to even pretend to serve the public interest, already have all that data. The government does too, because security agencies mandate that they get backdoor access. "Once it's out there, it's out there forever" - that already happened.

Given that it's already out there, there's not much more to fear in terms of a slippery slope. All that's left is to at least force the public sector to disclose more of what's going on and regulate how private interests are allowed to use it.

Otherwise, we already have the dystopia you're imagining, we just don't see it as well.

Same here. I have felt completely left behind and burnt out by the WFH shift. I simply don’t care enough to hustle and grind from home to achieve career advancement. Networking has to happen naturally in-person for me; everything on Zoom feels forced and fake.

I truly believe a hybrid schedule is best. 5 days per week in the office is overkill, but 2-3 days a week would help me tremendously. I’m gearing my career towards finding that balance now.

Very true. The headline is misleading though. The actual article is framed as the inverse: "does spending more on cancer care give the US better outcomes?" and the answer is no. We're on par with other wealthy countries that spend half as much per person on cancer care.

So yeah, the exorbitant costs of US healthcare do not correlate with better health outcomes. Just worse financial outcomes.

Cynicism is warranted for the reason that the other commenter pointed out: the fossil fuel industry (and by extension, any Big Industry) will use moonshot ideas like this as ammo for their PR machine. "Don't worry about our lobbying against viable solutions right now - soon we'll have this new silver bullet idea." That sort of thing.

But it's definitely worth exploring those moonshot ideas, so I'm not shutting that idea down. It's just good to be aware of how these sorts of headlines are used in the service of greenwashing.

Agreed. I generally assume that any headline with the structure "X new thing could solve Y," where Y is a massive problem that everyone wants a silver bullet for, is clickbait. I've seen too many of them at this point.

Everyone wants a quick fix for climate change and pollution because it will absolve us of doing the hard work that the problem really requires. By all means, we should pursue such moonshot ideas - but like you said, it will be used to virtue signal some false idea of "progress" while the problem gets worse.

Am I the only engineer who does miss a hybrid office schedule? My productivity has cratered over the pandemic with WFH becoming constant. My motivation is nonexistent. In the past, having one or two WFH days per week allowed me to get solid focus time to crush tasks that required deep thinking. But that effect only lasts a few days tops. Going on three years of this, even the simplest tasks feel like pulling teeth. I’m burnt out and I really feel like being in a room with other engineers is the only solution.

It’s to the point that I’m thinking of leaving my fully remote company to find an in person office. Something I never thought I’d say.

> How doctors of all professions lost their professional agency to do-nothing administrators within a generation is quite puzzling

The profit model of the U.S. healthcare industry might have something to do with it. The fact that hospitals are run like businesses and have shareholders is insane to me. I know other countries' healthcare systems got hit hard by the pandemic too, but it seems like the uniquely capitalist nature of healthcare in the U.S. sets it up to mistreat workers and cut corners for the benefit of administrators and executives.

The amount that was stolen in that case is worth billions now, but at the time of the theft it was only a couple million. It has since increased in value which led to the “billions” headlines.

> Moreover, it’s easy to criticize Cold War eta interventions when the stakes were very high

Were they, though? Which nation was primarily responsible for escalation of tensions during that time? And for whom were the stakes high enough to justify overthrowing democratic governments in favor of brutal dictators?

Correction: the history of the global south has long been, and will continue to be, instability and exploitation at the hands of the global north.

Colonialism never ended.

And how do "we" change the profitability equation? If it were more profitable to do more social good, then more companies would be doing more social good. It seems like we agree on that.

Why, then, isn't it profitable to do right now, and what solutions exist to make it so?