warcher

I think putting internet usage in the west and the developing world into the same bucket is… of questionable utility. I bet access to the wider world is in fact a benefit in many parts of the planet.

But why on earth is that comparison worth examining as evidence that the internet is good for wellbeing in the west?

Tires are a fair point, but kind of a goal post shift isn’t it? The problem with tires is not disposed tires, it’s tire wear.

If there’s a plan for remediating tire shavings over the course of tires wearing down in any of these threads I must have missed it. Please correct me?

As far as the rest it’s just not true. Landfills in the west are fine. Nothing is perfect but they’re not impactful at all ecologically. (Developing world not so. Lack of robust waste management contributes massively in the developing world.)

“Where it ends up” is not a problem in the developed world. Everybody complains about it but there are zero problems with our landfills.

All the environmental degradation is in the developing world, where they… do not value the environment in the same way. We didn’t either when we were developing. It took a while.

But western advanced economies dispose of their trash well. It’s not even close to the top of our list in terms of what we could do for the environment. Seems to capture our collective imagination tremendously though. Maybe because of guilt for consumer culture, maybe because making a meaningful impact would hurt too much.

Hey I don’t think you’re a bad person, just that that point didn’t land.

Me, I’ll take my L too. I wasn’t really contributing to the conversation.

But those more durable goods have a cost in hydrocarbons as well, don’t they? Lot of energy input in a hunk of steel. Are we really saving any fossil fuel conversion by swapping over? Has anyone measured?

The aversion of unions to performance based pay always put me off. I think the fear is that management will rig performance metrics to punish union members in general and “troublemakers” in particular, but seniority systems always seem to reward the worst kind of coworkers.

Watch into the spider verse sometime if you want to see what modern tech can be when it’s fully unleashed, versus kept under budget.

Honestly the places that did it successfully didn’t try to make transit cheap, they didn’t subsidize cars. Requiring amenities like parking by law seems to be working at cross purposes to spending money on transit. For desirable real estate it seems the only way to make affordable housing it to take away expensive upgrades. I think we can agree that safety is not a luxury, but parking spots, private laundry, private kitchens, even private bathrooms, these are things that many people live without every day. I remember some of those times in my life fondly even. Making it illegal by force of law to live like that seems… counterproductive to me, if our stated goal is affordable housing.

In the end the murder rate cannot be fudged, and it is quite favorable.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/us-city-rankings/cities-wi...

There’s a lot of dudes on a lot of roofs for solar. A lot of electrical work done, maybe by electricians, probably by mildly upskilled roofers.

I would be highly skeptical that solar is safer than nuclear. There’s just so much poorly regulated low skill low accountability construction work going on keeping it all running.

I think the unsaid story is all the coal plants that got built at “unsustainably low levels of utilization”. For whatever reason regional governors reallly liked building coal power plants, needed or not.

And if the only factor is cost, coal is the way to go. So so cheap if the pollution is somebody else’s problem.

Even that second thing is fair game in my opinion. You got some people with valuable thoughts in their brains, maybe you go to great lengths to keep them happy.

I mean didn’t you just describe every performing artist ever?

Last I heard there was speculation that the CPU was vulnerable to an alpha particle flipped bit error and fixing that was the eventual patch. A one in a million shot happens ten times a year (sic) when you ship ten million cars a year covering many billions of miles.

I mean at the very minimum there lies a great deal within our locus of control that can influence overall attractiveness. Are you in shape and well groomed? So many are not, and it’s weird that people don’t at least try to hit that Pareto inflection point within their own possible range of attractiveness, knowing, as we all do, that it makes a difference.

Wondering how that gets measured— the gig economy could skew this by a lot. In general it’s a tough road no matter the paycheck though.

That was just getting fired for cause homie. If they catch you, you are definitely getting fired.

Commercial leases are typically five years.

It is 2024. COVID was 2020.

If you don’t own your building you should be thinking hard about your new negotiating position with your landlord.

There is nothing in the world stupider than driving into the office to get on a video call.

There’s a lot of strange psychology at work in the plastics packaging media zeitgeist. It’s hard to think of comparable examples of stuff that matters so little in the grand scheme but gets so many people so bothered. People really really want to be heated over plastic packaging, all evidence indicating that it just doesn’t matter relative to our real environmental issues.

Yeah, I'm just saying-- a big desalination plant is a solved problem. Grid scale energy storage has been ten years off for almost as long as nuclear fusion. The original author just hand waves their way through what would be the biggest energy breakthrough in a hundred years to save a couple bucks running a desalination plant.

What I'm saying is that the freshwater reservoir is a totally free grid scale battery for a desal plant. No need to save it, just make fresh water while the sun shines and drink it whenever.

Batteries have proven extremely resistant to the scaling of solar panels. I would love to be wrong about this, but overwhelmingly people with an agenda just kind of hand-wave past grid scale energy storage problems that we have generations of evidence against being easily or cheaply solvable.

The thing about this plan that I love though, is that who cares if the desal plant runs at night? Desalination can take all of the power you can feed it and then some, and if it shuts off after sundown, who cares? Stop filling your freshwater reservoir until morning, at which point you just run flat out all over again.

“The intermittency problem is lessened when large geographical areas share their generation capacity.”

Are we having a serious discussion here? We’re pretty darn good at transmitting power and there are physics problems at work here that are really frustrating to have to explain over and over to people who desperately want to believe there is some silver bullet around the base load problem.

There isn’t. There is no grid scale solution. There is no mix of renewables that is going to get around the base load. It doesn’t exist.

We. Can’t. Afford. To. Wait.

You were insisting that we stop burning fossil fuels, withijt a suggestion on how to replace the base load. The base load must be replaced.

I inferred you didn’t like nuclear power because most folks who are focused on climate do not. EVs and nuclear power plants aren’t a panacea but they can make a dent, a big one, they’re politically possible, and we can start today.

Yeah this is that thing you’re talking about. This is us stopping burning fossil fuels for energy.

We can talk about everybody just riding their bike, which I agree would be better for all involved, but so far the data coming back from that experiment has been absolutely dismal.

At this point I think ignoring peoples reluctance to bear any inconvenience, and the consequences that has on policy in a democratic society, is dangerously negligent if you take the climate crisis seriously.

The data is emphatic and unambiguous. We could do more, but we refuse to, and the steps we could take to force the issue would be catastrophic and extremely risky. War is not carbon neutral, and victory is far from assured.

Building some nuclear power plants is arguably the least bad option. I don’t expect that medicine to taste good going down but I, as well as a great many around here, am in the solutions business. And this will take a bunch of coal plants offline in a fashion that we could get people to choke down.

I’m genuinely curious whether the outlier is the baby boom generation (extending to a lesser degree to the Xers). The macroeconomic factors that caused the boomers to thrive are pretty extreme and unsustainable.

Is there any reason we expect sustained growth in that degree?

It might be, but it also might not. If you're just cowboy chording, sure, but if you're playing chord melody you'll find the chord you choose is highly contextual based on what you're playing and where you're going. An Am chord is a continuum of notes going up or down the neck A-C-E (G?) over and over-- wherever your hand sits, there's an Am available to you. It just might sound better (or more interesting!) or play easier to grab one set of A-C-E versus another.

There's always been a tendency towards shorthand-- medieval manuscripts elided certain parts of the harmony/accompaniment because it's just known to be there by the musicians of the day. Same for jazz lead sheets-- they give you the melody and a general sense of the harmony, with the understanding that specific voicings and reharmonizations will be left to the discretion of the performer in the moment.

Wasn't this an anonymous tip, precluding the possibility of any form of dialogue?