A third option is to air your grievances on that same public space and find people who feel similarly and care enough to raise their voice, and hopefully spread awareness and affect change. Which is also totally valid and what these users are doing.
Get politically involved, vote and and volunteer for local pro-climate candidates. Talk about and promote public transport, cycling, better zoning and infrastructure etc. People underestimate the power of local politics.
On a macro scale all you can really do is vote for national level candidates that care about these issues. Luckily it’s not hard to see which ones do and which ones don’t.
Individually you can't do anything. You can drive an EV, set your AC to 78, or whatever makes you feel good but only national governments can make the regulatory changes that will really have an impact.
I even roll my eyes at my city council spending even one second on climate change policy (and they have spent whole meetings on it). Our city of 80,000 people could disappear from the face of the planet and it would not make a bit of difference.
Working at the level of 80,000 people is a lot more effective than working at the level of an individual.
Working on your own carbon footprint is a $100M marketing trick played on you by oil companies like BP.
Leah Stokes' new book offers instead a "carbon wave" -- how to evaluate and maximize your impact at a local, state, national, and global level. Here's a LinkedIn post. She's got a new book coming out about this: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:share:7496265286...
Yes you can but you'll have to vote against your immediate self interest and comfort. The sort of changes that will have an impact on the climate will mean giving up a lot of what makes modern life convenient and comfortable.
Best the corresponding parties can do is banning plastic straws (no impact but feels great) and massive bureaucratic hurdles for air conditioning in private homes (because it's an "unnecessary luxury" and if your apartment is unbearably hot during a heat wave where the temperature doesn't drop below 25 even at night, you're just not correctly using shades and windows).
This is far too complex a conversation to have at the level of abstraction you're trying to have it.
Just say what you're trying to say. I don't know what "green parties" refers to across the entire globe of climate efforts, but quite obviously yes, most of the positive climate policies have been pushed by people who care about the climate.
Just as obvious, most of those policies were not successfully enacted by the fringiest and most extreme versions of pro-climate people.
Not to mention there are plenty of environmental improvements that are vast and near-term quality of life improvements. The only penalty on many of these things is financial, but even that is only in the near-term, and in the medium to long term become financial wins.
Not that much of a difference for the average or lower classes of people that outnumber the rich by quite a lot. It would have a great and positive impact for them.
Carbon taxes can be implemented such that average folks benefit from them, e.g. by paying everyone back the average tax amount. Wealth generally correlates with carbon emissions, so wealthy people would pay more than they get back. This would greatly incentivize less emissions-intensive products and services.
Unfortunately there's no way the rich would ever let this go through.
> Wealth generally correlates with carbon emissions
That may be true but there aren't enough wealthy people to just attack their consumption. In aggregate, regular people use a lot more energy. There's no way out of this that is going to be popular.
> That may be true but there aren't enough wealthy people to just attack their consumption.
Not sure I understand, the goal isn't to attack anyone's consumption? The whole idea is to stop costs from being externalized. The concept doesn't require wealthy people to make sense, but existing wealth disparity makes it even more attractive for regular people.
> In aggregate, regular people use a lot more energy.
Why would the aggregate matter? Individually, regular people use waaaay less energy than the upper class. That means these regular people would, on average, come out slightly positive. And the "cleaner" someone's lifestyle is, the better this scheme would leave them (which poor people necessarily tend towards, since they cannot afford spending much on consumption).
Changes can be phased in. For example that's why places phasing out ICE cars are generally doing it by phasing out new ICE sales over many years and letting any cars already on the road when new sales stop stay on the road, and are concurrently building public charging infrastructure.
Thermodynamics; your convenience and comfort (CnC) are merely externalized on others not eliminated; someone else makes your stuff, deals with the environmental toll in the future.
Happy to sacrifice some of your CnC to ease obligations on those you give no assurances to.
Both parties in the United States are pretty much turning a blind eye to climate change. What we need to do is start boycotting parties, telling them we won’t vote for them unless they have really strong climate platforms. We need to make them want our vote.
This is some “both sides” absolute bullshit. The Biden administration passed the IRA, huge incentives for personal and commercial renewable energy production, EVs, all kinds of things.
Trump is paying people to burn more coal, blocking solar, canceling wind.
Could the dems have done more, sure. Are those programs perfect, absolutely not. But one party is moving in the right direction and the other is actively trying to accelerate climate change. Gtfo with that both sides crap.
They are both not doing enough. Yes, the Republicans and Trump are much worse, I was not saying they were same at all. But what needs to happen is far from anything the Biden administration has done or proposed. IF you think what Biden has done was good enough then you do not understand what is happening with the climate right now. Yes I will vote for a Democrat over a Republican, but I am not expecting change to come from them, it needs to come from us. The Democrats get money from the same corporations.
> I even roll my eyes at my city council spending even one second on climate change policy
Every meeting minute spent on discussing climate change is another minute not spent on authorizing things like Flock or permitting data centers. That's nothing to roll your eyes about
You can do all of that, and then Elon Musk will use his hundreds of billions to install another pedofile in charge who won't give a shit about the environment.
He could use his assets/wealth to ensure everyone on earth has a functional, hygienic toilet. Would improve QOL for many who still live with open sewer systems.
H1B gives a lot of power over you by the employer, lose your job and you get kicked out of the country too, so there's a lot of pressure. So basically cheap labour and don't complain or else. And you have to live in a country that currently hates and demonises foreigners.
My manager (who is on an H1B in America) asked if I wanted to move there too. Lol :') No way. I'm not even visiting for a meeting anymore.
For me to ever consider travelling there at least 2 things must be fixed: No Trump and no mandatory social media collection and device seizures at the border. Not that I have something to hide but I just don't want to and won't cooperate.
I don't think this will actually happen though (the latter parts, of course Trump won't stay forever). Because the privacy invasion is a bipartisan thing.
Elon Musk was never trying to make the world a better place. He was always a businessman and he was using that to con the government into giving him money so he can make more money.
I tried it a few years ago and it was just annoying enough that I went back to my phone after a couple weeks. If you search online I’m sure you can find write ups from people who tried this out.
How so? Each human is a different "model", and its constrained to the physical world. What are we going to do? Put whole corporations in jail, shareholders included?
Limit what they can do?
The "it went sideways" scenario for 100k agents spawned across the world using the same bad model is completely different from humans going sideways.
The power imbalance will ensure that this is unlikely to happen, in much the same way that people generally don’t trust that massive corporate entities have their best interest at heart but might have some regard for their colleagues wellbeing.
I was a technical artist for a series of feature films during the early '00s. At a good studio they'll have art and design classes for the tech origin staff and scripting and bash classes for the art origin staff. I was both, and that was a ton of fun.
Exactly, Technical Artist is a distinct position that normally bridges the gap between pure programmers and artists and their needs. All TAs I've ever worked with had this incredible skill of knowing exactly what tech thing they need to achieve the outcome that the artists want.
Any suggestion for paths into tech art? I'm very strong in traditional media, I know my way around photoshop & blender very well[0] and I've self-studied programming to a level where I can read lower-level (c/c++) code and know what it's doing. I even got a PR merged into blender once!
But I have no industry connection and my public portfolio is mostly charcoal and oil. The company that flew my drone animations is small & didn't get good video of them (there's a cellphone video or two from the audience, but that's not very good for a showreel). I've been thinking of just getting some good footage of a field & using blender to render & composite the designs, but doing that well will be time consuming and I feel like I might be better off doing something else.
Any advice on breaking in?
[0] I made a small blender workflow & add-on before AI to coordinate droneshow animations that I was selling to a small company, used renderdoc to insert gl.readcolors into the renderloop in a very ugly so I could get the benefit of the shader engine, which no commercial drone-animation software could do at the time. Almost worked for a bigger drone company but the contract was untenable.
If you're asking for video games/creative studios, unfortunately my best advice is have good connections and a strong public portfolio. Both of these are solvable problems.
Your skills aren't immediately applicable to a tech artist role. You need to learn about the graphics pipeline (high-level) and how 3D models and particle effects are rendered behind the scenes, plus knowing specific tricks for rendering different common visual effects. You can learn all of this from free online resources.
Good Technical Artists are one of the most sought after professions in game dev. But it's also an annoyingly broad role that means different specific things at different places. The one common trait is being able to bridge the gap between art and code in a way that makes both parties happy.
The same ratio of garbage to quality was available back then, there just wasn’t the same level of exposure to the range of output so the worst ones faded into history.
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