I never imagined how to pronounce it until now, "commander taco", isn't? I remember the old days of Slashdot all pools included CmdrTaco in one option.
I do care. I see a species ending disaster hanging over the future. I recycle, I have solar panels, a heat pump, an EV (that I leave on my driveway whenever my bicycle will do the job). But the planet is being ruined by greed on an unfathomable scale and aside from doing what I can and voting for parties that see the problem, I feel like there’s not a god damn thing I can do about it.
This consumer/suburbia-level checklist of individual eco merit is more of a scapegoating ritual than something that makes a difference. This is not a job for solar panel rebates. It’s more of a job for things like Extinction Rebellion; political demonstrations and activism that forces the issue. Which in turn (if successful) will lead to real organized work towards and ecological future. One where we are chipping in together rather than hunking down in our single-home bunkers with our plastic recycling and electric bicycles.
Although things like adoption of EVs does probably have a great positive impact on the local pollution levels.
I agree, you can’t shop your way out of political issues and joining a polity is probably the best thing you can do. Still, having to make a choice I’d opt for buying the more sustainable option.
The UN sustainability index once listed Cuba as the only sustainable economy. Another year it was Ecuador. Cuba might be eligible again because of the embargo. My point is that you can't convince folks in rich countries to be truly sustainable and you can't convince the rest to not aim for a higher standard of living. Putin said something like that and he was right.
And we keep coming up with ideas to make it worse: blockchain and now AI.
Bingo. A lot of what passes for solutions are fairly anemic. We will swap out any technology for a similar less intensive alternative but the instant we have to actively change our lifestyle it is largely ignored.
It isn't because people are malicious, it is that people tend to normalize the conditions they are raised in even if they are wildly exceptional.
All individual solutions (“lifestyle”) are inherently anemic and impotent. You don’t avert an extinction event with public service announcements and solar panel rebates.
The only thing it is useful for is scapegoating (cf. this thread).
I think if you should be able to at least have the peace of mind that you did all you could (within reason, short of pulling a Ted Kaczynski or his modern equivalent Luigi Mangione). Maybe it’s inevitable - history shows tons of species go extinct and maybe unbridled capitalism is how we go, maybe seven million years give or take is all humans will have. Maybe I absorbed too much of Meditations by Aurelius.
Eating meet, beef especially, with fish a close second, is insanely impactful on the planet. Cows use tons of food, fresh water and release tons of methane, a gas 200 times worse than CO2.
Do you use AI?
Just saying, we could care but being light on the planet is very difficult without dramatically changing our life styles.
I know I do so much, but honestly an emission tax is the very first thing we need out there.
Because we can't be blamed into being eco-friendly as individuals, it's up to taxes to regulate consumption.
You don’t use a tax on consumption for things that are destroying the planet. You ban it or ration it. How can “lifestyle” even factor into this? It doesn’t because it’s not about lifestyle at all.[1] We will keep criss-crossing container ships across the world and maybe pass on the extinction event tax to discipline the lower classes. Then we can use that money to transfer the wealth to the single home owning class in the form of solar panel rebates and EV discounts.
[1] That people drive to work is the tip of the iceberg. Just when it comes to cars alone, you also have all the transportation of goods that need to be dumped off more locally than the closest harbor or train freight station. But only the tip of the iceberg is discussed as far as “blame” is concerned. (How curious.) The “ban” here is quite loaded as it would implicate the whole supply chain.
If you turned off all LLM’s tomorrow I doubt anyone outside of a bunch of rusty programmers would notice, whereas if AWS, GCP or Azure were switched off, or access limited, things would immediately catch fire around the world.
This article has the implicit assumption that the Machine God will rear its head soon and those with the reigns will rule. I don’t think so, we’re better off focusing on technological sovereignty full stop.
If you’re doing that anyway you might as well install a hypervisor and layer your OS on top. That way you can snapshot before your LLM with root fucks everything up again.
I’ll never forgive the US for pulling out of the Paris accords after we had gotten China to come to the table. That was our moment to get a real grip on this problem and we blew it. It’ll never come back, I’m convinced.
Why do you deny blaming Trump? Most other republicans wouldn't have done that. He's opened up a new ability to ignore standards of behavior, but without him I really think it wouldn't have happened. And average voters have never heard of treaties like that. They voted for idiocracy realized, and they got it, but they didn't know what they voted for.
So voters are responsible (and I never convinced my dad even to this day that trump was bad, how much am I at fault), but he's an out there candidate in many ways too.
Its not about not blaming Trump, its about making it clear that its also the fault of every US American to even allow this in the first place. Not standing up, not fightning against it etc.
I think that's a fair comment. We are all responsible for our collective actions as a country, even if we are a tiny voice in the nation, even if whatever side you are on is small. We can all dare to speak our thoughts to others, share our views.
In 2016 Trump got 46.1% of the popular vote vs Hillary Clinton's 48.2%.
Expressed as fractions of the total US population in 2016:
- about 28.5% of the population was not eligible to vote (due to age or other reasons)
- about 31.6% of the population was eligible to vote but did not vote for either candidate
- about 20.4% of the population voted for Hillary Clinton
- about 19.5% of the population voted for Trump
If approx 1 in 5 is 'tiny' then support for the alternative was also 'tiny'.
I quote myself 2 years ago, forgive me if I’m stating the obvious:
I'm going to set up two axioms to arrive at an extrapolated conclusion.
One: Human psychology tends to ascribe more weight to negative things than positive things in the short term. In the long term this generally balances out, but in the short term it's more prudent in a biological sense to pay attention to the rustling in the bushes than the berries you might pick from them. This is known as the [negativity bias](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negativity_bias).
Two: The modern gatekeepers of social interaction, Big Tech, employ blind algorithms that attempt to steer your attention towards spending more time on their platforms. These companies are the arbiters of the content we experience daily and what you do and don't see is mostly at their discretion. The techniques they employ, in simple terms, are designed to provoke what they call 'engagement'. They do this because at the end of the day FAANG have not only a financial interest, but a fiduciary duty to sell advertisements at the behest of their shareholders. The more they can engage you, the more ads they can sell. They employ live A-B testing, divide people into cohorts and poke and prod them with psychological techniques to try and glue your eyeballs to their ads.
Extrapolated conclusion:
These companies have a financial and legally binding interest to divide the population against itself, obstructing politics and social interaction to the point where we might not be able to achieve any of the goals that we need to reach to prevent oblivion.
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