Worse, they have a "i want to flee responsibility" drive.
You can see it in there eyes, when they hold press conferences, while having on the paper the verbose "you are absolutely right". They want the perks, not the responsibility that comes with power.
Also the terminally online crowd blaming rising prices on greedy billionaires, and global warming on the same billionaires. Tell them about carbon tax and they will non-ironically ask "Why should I pay more when it's the billionaires' fault?"
I'm not saying billionaires are victims, but everybody wants it to be someone else's fault and none of their own fault. It's exhausting.
Interestingly enough, consumers will pay for (and will be able to earn money off of) emission rights in Europe soon. People charging their cars will earn certificates (which companies are already "graciously" offering to sell for them).
Its sign of a immature society- one of those unwilling to mature to adulthood and say : "I did this, out of my own free will and with no coercion!" . Easier to hand power and responsibility to others, become a ward of the state!
What I'm saying is, people will still complain when the "ruling class" try to drive the progress because it does not conform to their worldview.
Like, Canada once tried to implement carbon tax, which was even revenue-neutral. If you're a Canadian and you emitted less CO2 than others the government will literally give you money.
It was widely unpopular and the plan was scrapped in 2025.
A lot of people think "billionaires are at fault" means "we just get rid of the billionaires and everything will become better, if it doesn't then the billionaires are still at fault." They don't want progress, they want someone to blame.
Every time I've seen such taxes proposed or implemented, it seems to be followed by waves of misinformation washing through most media outlets. Even verifiable lies keep being repeated, and are slowly picked up by broad strokes of the population.
Is there a chance that something similar happened in Canada?
Unfortunately in this real life iterated prisoner's dilemma, half of everyone is vocally defecting, so you not using the chatbot is hurting you whilst others get ahead.
Which is why we have just paid billions of dollars to cancel a renewable power project. And are imposing extra fees on cars that can be driven on renewable energy.
It's also great if boiling the planet is your actual goal.
I wouldn't have thought that it would be so popular, but apparently it is, and people can't get t done fast enough.
I'm kind of a misanthrope so philosophically I'm good with working on wiping ourselves out. The fact that we're doing it in the dumbest possible way should feel poetic. Instead it's just kind of embarrassing.
Hyperbole does not help. Many countries are retreating from renewable promises. Make an argument for them and for instance, Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam who are all turning their backs on renewables and increasing fossil fuel use. The Philippines are already using 60% coal and are making easier to increase production.
Indonesian Energy Minister: "I decided, let coal continue for now. This is about survival mode and efficiency. We must not sacrifice our people with high electricity prices.”. Fair to say that, given some of the highest electricity prices in the world, a popular wish in the UK is for Miliband to do likewise.
Show a route to renewables plus survival and there will be progress.
> I'm kind of a misanthrope so philosophically I'm good with working on wiping ourselves out. The fact that we're doing it in the dumbest possible way should feel poetic. Instead it's just kind of embarrassing.
There is something tragic about the human potential being wasted in the most retarded of endeavors, but I wouldn't be able to imagine of a more apt way for the horde of morons that inhabit this planet to go extinct.
I mean, it's not a hard conspiracy theory to fabricate that space-focused billionaires like Elmo and Butthead would want Earth to become increasingly uninhabitable to justify more outside investment in their "solutions" of space race-ing to Mars or colonies that they can then rule over.
It's a conspiracy theory, but the best ones are always rooted in some morsel of truth (Elon/Bezos wanting more investment in their space firms).
It does matter because of the side effects (pollution, etc.). The environment and how it affects humanity is a complex system with many variables. Both generation and consumption are in there.
There's an easy 19th century solution to cars and planes - public transport. It could reduce the usage significantly, save people lots of time, reduce pollution, make people healthier through making the environment more walkable, reduce crime. We don't do it not because the technology isn't there, but because it's more profitable for people to induce consumption by planning our cities and suburbs around cars.
There's lots of rotting low hanging fruits ignored for decades because politicians are paid by the ladder-sellers.
> Public transit is rarely a time saver for people who give up their cars in favor of public transit.
It saves time when you don't put 10-lane motorways and in your cities nor turn them into parking lot wasteland.
> In what way? Car break-ins presumably go down when there when fewer cars, but does overall crime drop?
Public transport reduces inequality, which is the main cause of crime. If you have whole groups in society that cannot get what they need working within the system - some of them will work outside the system. Public transport makes working within the system easier (barrier to entry to work/study in the good places gets lower). It also smooths around the strict urban class divisions (it makes sense for rich people to live in the city, which makes the elites more likely to invest in the city, which makes it more likely for non-elites to be able to work with the system).
The opposite is car-dependand suburbs + crime-ridden inner cities with no way out other than crime.
> It saves time when you don't put 10-lane motorways and in your cities nor turn them into parking lot wasteland.
I missed the part where this has anything to do with saving time.
I’m not saying that public transit doesn’t have major benefits. I’m totally in favor of strong public transit, but saving time is generally not one of those benefits.
> Public transport reduces inequality, which is the main cause of crime.
If feels like a big stretch to say public transit reduces crime. I wonder if there’s actual data to support this notion.
> I missed the part where this has anything to do with saving time.
If you make cities more concentrated without balooning them with parking lots - everything's closer. If you restrict cars - there's less traffic jams, which makes commute faster.
> If feels like a big stretch to say public transit reduces crime. I wonder if there’s actual data to support this notion.
US has much higher crime levels than other developed nations. It's also the most car-dependant of them.
People often think public transport creates crime, because criminals use it to move (like everybody else). But public transport mainly lets non-criminal people to move, which reduces the number of criminals overall.
> I missed the part where this has anything to do with saving time
It lets you put the non-car stuff closer together, so you're traveling less
distance to get to the same place. It requires urban design, not just a single person switching between modes of transit.
(Although switching to cycling can often make transit both faster for you and the people around you in a city because you aren't as affected by traffic and don't create as much traffic)
Not when AI is directly resulting in increased greenhouse gas pollution. It's all of the above. Any source of greenhouse gas pollution is bad. Cars, planes, ships, AI data centers running on fossil fuel energy. It's all bad.
No. This is disingenuous. Something that consumes electricity doesn't care where the electricity comes from. Fix the power source, and you automatically fix every single consumer in existence at once.
narrowing the topic, that is exactly the quality that energy transition theorists are leaning on. The electrical grid is uniquely able to maintain a stable engineered and market place while inputs and loads change quite a bit.
I think your comment is the disingenuous one. We have no time left and "Fix the power source" is happening way too slowly in the real non-theoretical world. But what can happen in zero time is to not build another data center for something that nobody really needs.
This is an issue though. Netherlands is / has invested heavily in e.g. offshore wind parks, but their capacity has been bought up by datacenters (= new energy consumers) immediately.
My point is that if demand only increases, then they won't be able to shut down carbon-emitting power plants. The first objective should be to replace non-renewables with renewables, and only then scale production up.
Granted, there will likely always be non-renewable power generators running to maintain a baseline / frequency / etc, at least until very-large-scale power storage is a thing.
That’s what solar energy does when it hits the ground or the oceans. It turns into heat or evaporated water. The latter is why it rains.
Harnessing it and piping it through extra steps only to end up as heat does nothing to the planet’s heat balance. All human energy use is tiny compared to total global solar flux. Like not even 1%.
The data center water issue is a municipal management problem. The problem is that evaporative cooling is cheaper. If data centers are using too much water to the point that it’s causing problems for homes or agriculture, it means they are not being charged enough for that water. Charge them more and they will suddenly shift toward more closed loop cooling.
Waste heat from human energy use is a real problem, it does influence Earth's temperature, minimally for now, but it will only grow. And it will be MUCH harder to solve than global warming.
If we tame fusion at scale this could become an actual issue in the far future. As it stands we have nothing that can out-scale solar or wind. Fission maybe if we went all in on breeders and stuff but that would not be cost competitive with renewables plus batteries. Breeder cycle fission is complex and expensive.
Hopefully if we get really good at fusion we will go LARP The Expanse with it instead of boiling the ocean.
Only if exponential growth continues, but population growth is already falling off a cliff and that is the ultimate driver.
If population stabilizes or contracts, then the only way this could happen is if per capita energy use continued to increase exponentially to the point that we were radiating enough heat to do this. That seems unlikely.
The only scenario I can imagine where per capita energy use goes that high is the "The Expanse LARP" scenario where people are rocketing around on fusion rockets, and that's not on Earth anymore so it doesn't matter.
What terrestrial products or services would demand power use per capita across the whole population that high?
This assumes the chips don’t get exponentially better.
GPUs are actually bad for AI. TPUs too. They’re available and general purpose but what you really want is something like a specialized tensor FPGA that can be loaded with the model. Memory and compute colocated.
There is research on this and a huge market but it takes a long time to go from design to prototype to production for something really novel. It’s also very expensive.
A lot of people are afraid AI is a big bubble. The more it becomes apparent that financial bubbles or not the tech is here to stay the more people will be comfortable making long term investments in building chips that are really optimal for it.
Even general chips get more efficient. Ten years ago my laptop was a lap roaster when I ran a big build on it. Now it’s barely warm and it’s twice as fast with four times the RAM.
Of course if there’s infinite demand for AI that won’t matter, but there isn’t infinite demand for anything.
This is the thing I don't get - lots of concerns about water shortages, but for some reason the price of water doesn't go up accordingly. In fact, large consumers of drinking water get a discount.
It should be the other way around: consumers and public interest things like hospitals should get preference and low prices for water, corporations should pay more and invest in their own water systems, like collecting rainwater, cleaning surface water (thinking of NL here), or desalinating seawater (and handling the waste responsibly instead of putting it back in the sea).
Those are less of a problem. The heat was coming from the sun anyway. The water condenses out, so long as you haven't also increased the overall temperature in other ways.
The CO2, by contrast, is the gift that keeps on giving. It absorbs extra heat every day and hangs onto it. It doesn't condense or break down.
If that PV went to displacing sources of greenhouse gas, it would be a benefit. If all it's doing is running the plagiarism machine while we burn more and more "clean" coal, then we are in deep, deep trouble.
Not all heat from the sun stays in the atmosphere though. How much does photovoltaic impact albedo and radiance through the atmosphere compared to natural landscapes? Of course that's infinitely better than GHG emissions and we have a lot of opportunity to put PV over asphalt and such, but it should give us pause in the pursuit of more and more consumption.
Yes, but you're missing the point, I'm not debating that. Renewables aren't free, we should care about consumption just as much as production, and we don't know (yet) how to sustain the current consumption with renewables only, that includes being able to manufacture renewables.
This doesn’t matter that much. Solar and batteries will last for decades with minimal maintenance and no input.
Any kind of fossil fuel generation means constantly going out and digging up new oil sources, shipping them around the world, and then burning them. So you invest a lot of time & money into something that disappears immediately and also heats up the environment.
Meanwhile, a solar panel just sits there for decades passively making energy with very few externalities.
Not to mention, recycling solar panels & batteries is getting cheaper & more effective by the day. The metal (and even oil!) you dug out of the ground to build them didn’t get burned up; a lot of it is still usable.
The information from scientific literature is much more realistic.
"All the current recycling methods of lithium-ion batteries have advantages and disadvantages concerning environmental impact, efficiency, and economic viability. However, a significant gap exists between academic research and industrial application. Researchers, policymakers, manufacturers, and recyclers should focus on greener methods with high recovery rates, low emissions, and minimal waste towards zero emissions. "
Everything you wrote is plain obvious to anyone who looked into the topic. But come on, we don't have to change anything about our consumption because we'll eventually reach some solar punk utopia? That's the comment I was replying to.
Nothing for now tells us we can power our current needs with renewables only, however we know we can drive around in much lighter vehicles, fly much less, eat more local, buy less clothes, use compute for less stupid things in data centers.
Imagine if all the vehicles that run of fossil fules is converted into EV. What are the incentives in place to properly recycle the batteries? Does a new battery technology go into production before the technology to recycle it is production grade/economically viable? What happens when we are getting like a million EV batteries, globally per day, to dispose off? What happens when these batteries use vastly different chemical composition (because they are from various stages of battery evolution) and need vastly different methods to process? What happens when these things pile up and poison the land? dumped in ocean or rivers? burned up releasing god-knows-what into air?
How long before the regulation (often times toothless) kicks in to handle these things?
I am all for getting rid of pollution, but there should be some caution in rushing onto new things, which is exactly what got us into this mess in the first place.
“Caution” does nothing except ensure we keep spewing more co2 for longer and cooking the planet. There is no practical alternative to EVs. So let’s go all in as fast as possible please
There is no practical alternative to air, water and earth as well...So let us please consider the possibility of pollution of those that could be caused by a global dumping of EV batteries
It depends on what you mean by EVs really. There is an alternative to big electric individual cars, we've been building for 70 years car-centric urban areas for big vehicles doing 30km+ of commute every day. Good luck with a hellscape like Dallas but electrifying Utrech or Tokyo will scale to 9B people just fine.
The alternative is rebuilding 100 years of urban areas? For unimaginable trillions of $, and monumental construction emissions? Nah I’ll take EVs please
Not rebuilding, but at least not building more of it. But this exact mindset is why the US can't be helped and will be the last one to go low on carbon. The whole culture is built exclusively on unlimited space and resources.
Then it shouldn't be a crime to lie to the officer.
I genuinely don't think certain charges relating to preserving one's freedom should even be a crime in of it self.
Unless you endanger others in an extreme manner, things like "resisting arrest", running from police, or attempting to escape prison shouldn't be charges within themselves.
People love the phrase "you can beat the rap, not the ride", but that essentially gives broad power to harass and damage one's life without recourse sans extremely expensive legal routes. In this example, a man lost his freedom for 37 days over a bogus charge and was paid by the taxpayers to essentially shut up.
I believe in certain Scandinavian or northern European countries, there is no crime or additional punishmented meted out for attempting to or escaping from prison, as "the desire to be free is inherently human". You will be looked for, and retrieved and returned, to be sure, but you won't then be charged with escaping from custody.
I thought that might be where it was from, but I hadn't seen it and its been so long since I've seen the skit that I forgot where it came from. Thanks :)
I'm sorta here too. I'm right handed, no external pressure to use one hand or the other in early age. Mother is a lefty, father is a righty. As a result I often used the computer mouse on either side as a kid, really wherever it was left by the last user.
Learned to shoot a bow as a kid but only learned as an adult I'm left eye dominant, and to take advantage would require re-learning the bow in my left hand(many many strikes on my arm sent be back to a righty). Shooting guns is a similar situation, but I'm a fairly good shot regardless. It definitely makes using sights weird.
I'm semi-ambidextrous too, with enough focus I can somewhat cleanly write with either hand, and I'm generally good with my hands in fine tasks, with only a minor preference to pick up a tool with my right hand.
I wonder how common this is. People seem surprised when I demonstrate my left handed writing.
Is android auto still available with Graphene? AA is genuinely one of the few life-changing features introduced in the last decade that I'd prefer not to go without.
Yep and works flawlessly via USB for me. That was a deal breaker for me for the longest time too.
Allowing it to connect over Bluetooth requires granting AA plenty of additional permissions which I didn't want to do (but hey, on GOS at least you can muzzle that thing).
Organic Maps works. I have not tried any other alternative.
You may have to enable developer mode in the Android Auto settings, then enable Unknown Sources in the developer settings.
> bringing the cost-value equation back to a defensible reality.
I firmly believe looking at academia through this lens is part of the reason why it has been so firmly exploited as a business.
To treat the school as a business in partnership with corporation treats the student as the customer and product. Like everything in our time, the push for profit leads to optimization and enshitification.
The student experience, student outcome, and quality of academia have all been sent through the enshitification wringer.
We can point to the lowering in quality of research to this, the reliance on poorly paid grad students, which end up producing worse work, worse research, and less effect on industry.
I firmly believe there needs to be a degree of separation between academia and corporate interests.
To optimize for profit finds local maxima and limits the ability of academia to do real research.
What is the point of this convenience when it really seems to just be making people miserable and isolated?
We're driving off a cliff, and our elected government has a death drive.
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