Law of conservation of energy can be applied here as well. So you can’t expect something else if you produce and consume more.
I don’t dispute capitalism and democracy.
Just trying to figure out what I (as person) really need.
Every weekend travelling by plane just to experience something else?
Ordering some stuff across the globe from Temu, Aliexpress just because it is cheap(er)?
Eating e.g. tuna because it is healthy that had to be transported around the globe?
Drinking wine from South Africa because I don’t like Californian? (Blind tests by Wine Spectator magazine confirm that even a sommelier doesn’t recognize cheap from expensive ones.)
Global export-import statistics is staggering… just a few: all metals, honey, fish, vegetables from Spain, avocados from Peru, almonds from California, cheaper than local milk transported across Europe , bananas from everywhere you can imagine… supply and demand - a lot of people have a much more money.
Vessel and plane trackers show so many vehicles moving around that I wonder how whales can handle this traffic.
There is chemical and industry that is real spin doctors.
(Almost) everyone wants to have house, car, cheap everything, travel everywhere. Those who can’t afford do everything to become rich.
Wealth is good. Plundering to get more money not so much. And mankind plunders like there is no tomorrow. All the CSR, circular economy etc is nice but brainwashing and stuff for distraction so people could feel better.
I do the capitalism part, or more specifically what form of capitalism because there is a vast range between "society should work for capitalism" and "capitalism should work for society".
I'd likely argue that on the whole capitalism in it's current form isn't working for society and the trend is towards that getting worse over time.
But we should. This is a taboo topic but pretending that these consequences are either disconnected from capitalism or that capitalism is some natural law of the universe that should never be challenged is, for lack of a better word, delusional.
These consequences are inherent to capitalism because people benefiting from it demand infinite growth and nobody is incentivized to care about the environment. People who care about it get outcompeted by those who don't in ruthless pursuit of "efficiency".
We can try to regulate it to the point that people wouldn't call it capitalism anymore but the nature of a system where the only incentive is maximizing profit will always have a natural tendency to harm the environment, so it should be disputed.
I personally don’t think either communism or capitalism will exist in 10 years from now. We are entering a period of total upheaval, where the very concept of a nation state has become obsolete. I expect global theocracy where robots and ai (incl nanobots) clean up the mess we made in this world, freedom becomes more limited, but abundance and security increases. There will be a renewed focus on community and human connection rather than the run away obsessive focus on materialism and innovation at a pace human beings cannot adapt to. Human labor, cognition, natural resources and policy have always been the elements that dictate whether a nation can develop into a first world country. Labor and cognition are respectively solved by robots and AI.
You don't have to accept it but seems like that's what is happening. Humans just don't seem to have the capacity for long term collective action against individual interests. Ultimately that may be what the Great Filter for us ends up being, maybe it'd have been different were we a hive mind.
Sure we do. Remember when the ozone layer had a massive hole in because of CFC use in refrigerators? It didn't fix itself out of some natural law of the world. Regulators in democratic societies restricted the use of CFCs and then engineers worked on alternatives due to the regulations.
We should also not forget that a lot of effort has gone into decarbonising, and there's plenty of work going on in international cooperation, engineering, urban planning, education etc. whose work has already decreased the potential warming of the planet. We're still on a very bad trajectory that still needs more work, and there are moneyed organisations trying to stop the transition, but we shouldn't be so doomer to believe that nothing is happening.
That was pre social media and the rise of nation state level actors pushing propaganda at scale. The same thing today would be impossible as we already see with climate change suppression efforts.
Regulators were able to restrict CFC use because the patents had expired and the manufacturers were ready to move on to the next compounds they’d already developed anyway.
Or: humans do have that capacity, but our system is explicitly set up to give the most power to the greediest among us, and these greedy people in power don't have that capacity.
On no other issue would this type of wishful thinking be accepted.
If I pour some water in a bucket and come back to find it's all leaked out, and do this every day for all of human history and always get the same result, I don't conclude the water wouldn't leak if it just tried a little harder.
It's ridiculous to imply that throughout human history, there has never been any long term collective action against individual interests. There are so many examples of such collective actions (especially on the local level), but even globally there are obvious cases like the ozone issue.
Of course, and I'm not saying that. Coordinated action is so stupidly effective that it barely even matters what you do, and long as you all do it together.
That doesn't mean it's possible for every problem. There's always a coordination cost. The larger your per-person cost times the number of people you need, the more unlikely the coordinated action is to happen. Spontaneous coordination is an oxymoron and improbable by definition. It's a situation where the system doesn't do what's energetically favored and instead does something else that isn't.
Ascribing agency to systems is a human bias. Ascribing it to groups of agents is both human nature and the fallacy of composition. Blaming individuals instead of looking at the system and the context is both human nature and the fundamental attribution error. This is one of many places where the bucket leaks.
Currently some groups with low coordination costs (and so high leverage) are coordinating to increase coordination costs for the groups that oppose them, using tactics that are independently high-leverage, multiplying their effect so much that they can make the opposition's costs effectively unbounded. Human nature makes the opposition wilfully, aggressively deny this and insist their costs are low and people are just bad and lazy. (Somehow, everybody being bad and lazy all at once does not reflect on human nature.)
The argument about coordination costs is more or less uncontroversial when projected into any other subject. It's only controversial here because of human nature. It's another leak.
Your opposition's agency is concentrated and yours is dilute. Human nature tilts the playing field, diluting yours and concentrating theirs. Accept this and adjust your strategy, or lose.
Your initial comment does literally say that collective action against individual interests has never happened. You might not have meant that, but that is the explicit implication of your bucket example "always get[ting] the same result".
But it seems you actually agree with my initial statement? Or what are you arguing against? Because in my mind, altering our social and political systems is the only way to adjust our strategy.
I am saying human nature is the reason "just coordinate" has not resolved this problem, and denying human nature keeps us from coordinating on this problem doesn't help.
Ugh, this is like my catchphrase now, but: "If everybody just" is a description of a problem, not a solution. Specifically a problem that exists because they haven't justed and will never just, no matter what could happen if they just.
Coordination metaproblems where coordination problems that exist cannot be solved because of human nature are a consequence of human nature interacting with the laws of nature.
But I'm not saying to "just coordinate", and I'm not denying any part of human nature? It feels like you're reading things into my initial statement that I neither wrote nor see when reading it again.
> humans do have that capacity, but our system is explicitly set up to give the most power to the greediest among us
My argument is that we don't have that capacity. The system that we have is what we have because it's what has self-assembled and would self-assemble every time if we ran it again.
I may be wrong, but that's what I'm claiming.
If we want a system different than what self-assembles, we should first admit what self-assembles, and admit it's not because of individuals not doing their part or whatever. The system is the way it is because the natural laws it follows lead it to that state. This is where the whole idea of coordination as a simple answer fails.
People won't spontaneously all accept an unappealing, morally unpleasant, complicated explanation of why things aren't better when a simple, pleasant, satisfying, even righteous explanation is available and fits their preexisting worldview.
I am tired of the moralizing arguments[0] from people sabotaging their own causes, blaming people who are doing something that might work instead of sabotaging harder. If I misunderstood and that's not you, I'm sorry.
I should have been less snippy at the top either way.
> The system that we have is what we have because it's what has self-assembled and would self-assemble every time if we ran it again.
But different societies have developed different systems over the course of human history, no? You're probably looking at the "system" from a different perspective than I do, so I'd appreciate if you could describe this in more detail!
> My argument is that we don't have that capacity.
If humans don't have the capacity for long term collective action against individual interests, there is literally no point in trying any other system.
> If we want a system different than what self-assembles, we should first admit what self-assembles, and admit it's not because of individuals not doing their part or whatever. The system is the way it is because the natural laws it follows lead it to that state.
I really think you're reading positions into my initial comment that I've never stated, because this seems tangential to my thesis.
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Edit: just saw the part starting at "I am tired of the moralizing arguments", not sure if I overlooked it or you edited. Either way I get your frustrations and agree that simplistic answers don't help. My initial comment was not meant as "it would be so simple if everyone just did X", but as a rebuttal to the idea that humans are incapable of long term collective action against individual interests. If humans fundamentally don't have the ability there'd be no point in trying, but I believe that we do have the capacity and should try, just as I understand you do too.
> If I misunderstood and that's not you, I'm sorry.
> I should have been less snippy at the top either way.
No worries, and thanks. I appreciate that you've explained your thoughts further!
Which means those greedy people don’t have power, but the illusion of power, and the positions at the top are gatekept by intermediaries that serve the one who actually holds the power.
Even if we assume hierarchy to be part of human nature, that doesn't imply that every system must automatically assign the most power to the greediest humans.
Could you explain how this holds for monarchies? The succession of power was mostly based on blood relations and frequently brought along major changes to existing power dynamics. Meanwhile the majority of the population was barred from gaining any real economical or political power, aside from very few cases.
As far as I can see, greed isn't automatically the biggest determining factor in such systems. It can be, but I'd need to read convincing studies by historians to believe you on this.
The monarch who's greediest gets to keep the power, otherwise they'd be overthrown or lessened by their nobles. See the shogun taking power away from the emperor; King John signed Magna Carta ceding more power to his nobles under threat of force; various executions of monarchs over civilizational history.
That is to say, it's not always a monarch versus their general, oftentimes peasant, populace, it's rich and powerful people against other rich and powerful people.
No, the greediest monarch is the most likely to get assassinated, because they take too much from their nobles and everyone else. All the money in the world doesn't help a noble who is so greedy they piss off all their potential allies, or all their peasants. And if you were a noble who overthrew a monarch - with familial ties to enough influential nobles - because someone else has more money, you'd still be dead in all likelihood. And so on and so on.
All these relationships were incredibly important to the power dynamics, and you don't get to redefine "greedy" as "greedy, except those who are too greedy to properly play the political game". Greedy monarchs didn't last, and the greediest non-monarch-rich were unlikely to have enough allies to become dangerous.
I'm talking about generally greedy, all else equal, where one who lusts for power is more likely to obtain it than one who does not, not necessarily specifically the greediest which I agree with you others will tire of quickly.
Leadership by the Tokugawa shogunate saved the forests of Japan. Leadership saved the ozone layer. Leadership can save the climate, although civil war(s) maybe necessary to overthrow corrupt elites who put us all at risk.
Earth has an immune system called the atlantic meridian overturning cycle. When meltwater dillutes the salt concentration too much, it collapses and creates an ice age. Short term catastrophe, long term it will be OK.
I think when people talk about stuff like this everyone realizes that the Earth itself will be a-okay in the long run (or hell even the short run), it's more that humans as a species are the ones that are going to go kaboom.
We saw during the COVID lockdowns that a few months of no cars and drastically reduced oil usage in general how much things improved for nature in general, in fact. Earth will recover very quickly once we're gone, the question is more how do we avoid the "humans gone" part because we presumably want to keep the human species going.
We're already in an ice age (there is ice at the poles). I suspect you mean this would make Europe cooler, but do nothing to reverse the trend of increasing global mean surface (land + ocean) temperature.
Correct. This is all planned. Colossal Biosciences has already brought back the Dire Wolf and is working on the woolly mammoth. It is no coincidence that these are younger dryas animals, because they are expecting these animals to thrive in the near future glacial period. Don’t feel guilt tripped into causing this collapse, you have no control over it even though you can do some marginal things to reduce your individual footprint. Whatever needs to happen, will happen. AMOC collapse greens the desert. It also happens to be the region that dictates how affordable fossil fuels are and thus how much of the stuff is burned due to OPEC. If you are religiously inclined, that is meaningful.
Funny how their plan to improve Windows 11 is basically to make it more like Windows 10.
Apparently they already brought back "never combine taskbar buttons" which is why I left W11 in the first place, but seems like they have a long way to go.
I really can't believe they thought W11 was a good idea. And putting copilot in notepad... Come on now.
If you were eating in a restaurant and the head chef came out from the back multiple times to loudly proclaim that the kitchen was deeply committed to the quality of the food, would you find that reassuring? Or would you start wondering why the chef felt the need to keep saying it?
I mean, a lot of the issues that they says they'll fix can be patched with third party tools. They won't get rid of ads or tracking, or anything significant. affect their bottom line.
As someone who has never owned a mac, the only reason I would buy a pc at this point in time is to install linux on it.
I honestly can't think of a single practical scenario where I'd pick Deno over Node + npm today. Bun, on the other hand, has pretty much claimed the performance crown for itself at this point.
Blue Origin's goal has been to move heavy industry into space, to realize the vision of Gerard O'Neill. For its first 5 years it was a think tank, trying to figure out the best way to get there. Neal Stephenson was one of the employees, and you can see echoes of their work in his writing.
Only after 5 years did they transition to becoming a rocket company, having decided that lowering the cost of access to space was the most important first step to realizing O'Neill's vision.
And they were right, it's just that SpaceX realized the same thing at about the same time and were much more successful at it.
Going from 0 to a large oxygen rich staged combustion engine and a heavy class rocket in 19 years is actually pretty good by industry standards. SpaceX is the exception, not Blue Origin.
I do wonder if they can continue improving interconnect specs as with Thunderbolt 4 the cable seems to be already the limiting factor. It’s thick, expensive and only available in very short lengths.
Who says fats are only in meat and dairy? They are in many plant based sources that contain large amounts of fats. Just to name a couple: Nuts, seeds, fruits(avocado, olives, coconut)
Interestingly social setups had 'billionaires' and 'everybody else' too, it was just way worse for everybody else. It's not like there was no unchecked ruling class there.
It absolutely can be, but that depends on how congested/well managed the network is.
I‘ve seen stable latencies under 20ms on some networks, but also absurd spikes of multiple seconds on others. (The same goes for cable/DOCSIS, by the way…)
