JubilantJaguar

joined 2 years ago
[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago

Unexpected take.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago

Yep I learned about that too recently. Encouraging.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 4 days ago (1 children)

This has to do with the terrifying shifting baseline theory. Every generation can only compare within its own lifetime. The baseline of what is considered normal can therefore slowly drift without anybody noticing. When the planet is 90% dead, people will only be whining about how much better it was a few decades previously when it was only 80% dead, oblivious that there was once a time when it was completely alive.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 4 days ago

This post breaks literally rules #1, #2 and #3 of this community. Crazy.

Mods please wake up and DO YOUR JOB.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago (7 children)

To be clear, the problem is a factor of total population and per-capita economic activity. So reducing either will logically mitigate the problem. (The X factor being technology.)

You seem to be advocating global genocide so your take is rightly unpopular.

But clearly population is a major part of this problem. The sheer figure for human biomass is totally unsustainable for any kind of healthy global ecosystem. Personally I find it irritating that there are so many who deny these inconvenient facts.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Completely agree. That one was a terrible take.

Growthism is a de-facto religion IMO. The obsession with this weirdly abstract indicator is obviously irrational.

 

Because relentless bad news breeds cynicism, which is demoralizing and self-defeating. In this community there's already plenty of that to go round. The full story is slightly more complex.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 days ago

Breaks rule #2 completely. Not a showerthought.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

THIS IS NOT A SHOWERTHOUGHT. This just an opinion. There already a ton of places to put your banal talking points like this. Why can't you put them there??

For examples of what a showerthought is, look on the right. Another one was posted 2 minutes after this very post:

"With all due respect" could imply that no respect is due and therefore none is given

That is a showerthought.

PS: Want more substance? It breaks rule #4 partially and rule #3 totally.

 

Do not click if you worry about your blood pressure. I hesitate to share this. Cynicism is corrosive and there's plenty of bad news elsewhere. But it's deeply relevant and it seems important that we at least know. My attempt at positive takeaways:

  • This kind of thing once happened across the world. It shows that the only way we will protect birds (and all other lifeforms) is by first solving the problem of economic and human development.
  • Non-commercial environmental reporting is a crucial part of the equation. We should support outlets like Mongabay if we can.
[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 days ago (2 children)

For info, in the EU you need an entry-level motorbike license to ride this. That means a one-day course (expensive) if you already have a car license, otherwise a 20-hour course plus exam.

That's for anything over 4kW and this thing does 8.

At 11kW you would need a full motorbike license. Which means passing a theory exam, multiple (hard) riding tests, and in some countries even an interview where you have to regurgitate accident statistics. It's all extremely expensive and inconvenient. I speak from bitter experience. That's how much they don't want young idiots riding powerful two-wheelers.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 6 days ago (1 children)

This is becoming a worrying problem. But it's hardly a surprise given that you can now buy electric "bikes" that weigh more than motorbikes once did and basically have pedals as decoration.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago

I always confuse this with hikikomori. Which in turn I always forget how to spell.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Source is one of the few mainstream outlets (Vox being another) that is still talking about climate as a problem to be solved rather an irritating distraction from today's shiny new crises du jour, namely superpower competition and "catastrophic" low birth rates.

Back on topic, there's a paradox here. The aviation industry is naturally dragging its feet at every opportunity, but really that's logical. Unlike other industries (even cars, to a point), there is literally nothing this industry can do to "succeed" except shrink. Due to basic rules of fluid dynamics, it is extremely inefficient to travel fast. Doing it by burning fossils is doubly disastrous, but solving this particular challenge with any technology is a massively tall order.

On a planet of 9 billion, air travel is just not scalable. If you can do it without frying the planet, that's only because somebody else is not doing it.

 

A heartwarming tale about the red-tailed amazon, a beautiful and surprisingly hardy parrot.

1
Americans Want to Be Rich (www.theatlantic.com)
submitted 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 

Update: Mindless downvotes will be taken as evidence that degrowthers (of which I am one) are not capable of defending their ideas. What's the point of a community where one only sees things that confirm one's biases? I don't get it. Maybe this lazy tribal attitude helps explain why degrowth is so deeply unpopular.

This seems as good a presentation as we'll get of the case against degrowth. Namely that it's a political loser, the environment be damned. People in this community probably want to read things they already agree with (update - they sure do). I'd say we'd do better by first taking seriously the arguments of the other side. Which appear quite solid, to the point that it's hard to know how to go about countering them.

Some choice excerpts:

Most Americans care deeply about building wealth: Roughly 79 percent describe their money as “extremely” or “very” important to them. Eighty-four percent say there’s “nothing wrong” with trying to make as much money as possible [...]

In 2024 [...] Trump made major gains in large, immigrant-rich urban counties, where service-sector employment is dominant. [...] Why did these previously stalwart Democrats break for Trump? Because they are all upwardly mobile groups, for whom pocket-book issues are central. More than progressive pandering, they want the opportunity to participate in the American dream—and Trump seemed to promise that. [...]

To their credit, some liberals have tried to fill the void created by this anti-capitalist conservatism. The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson and his co-author, Ezra Klein, have pushed for an “abundance” liberalism in their new book [...] [W]e now have two major parties infected by the gospel of no-wealth. Both parties embrace, in Klein and Thompson’s phrasing, a “scarcity” mindset rather than an “abundance” mindset.

 

Yes, the tone is a bit hyperventilatory and the author is not especially authoritative (on this subject), but the argument is really quite convincing.

The climate movement has been so focused on reducing emissions for so long, it’s lost all sight of the fact that there are other ways to bring carbon dioxide concentrations under control. [...]

Marine Carbon Dioxide Removal was always something we were going to have to do. In the new Trump era of not even pretending to try to curb emissions, the urgency to act is all the greater.

And, right now, seaweed might be our best hope.

1
submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/27088982

This book is creating quite a buzz. See the basics and one review among many.

People being what they are, there's no doubt that this is an election-winning agenda for the Democrats. And the authors are both very serious people. I'm reluctant to write off Ezra Klein, who IMO is not just very smart but also circumspect and fair-minded.

But all this also looks to me like an advanced case of deluded wishful thinking. Or of "cornucopian economics", as EO Wilson called it.

What to conclude?

 

This book is creating quite a buzz. See the basics and one review among many.

People being what they are, there's no doubt that this is an election-winning agenda for the Democrats. And the authors are both very serious people. I'm reluctant to write off Ezra Klein, who IMO is not just very smart but also circumspect and fair-minded.

But all this also looks to me like an advanced case of deluded wishful thinking. Or of "cornucopian economics", as EO Wilson called it.

What to conclude?

 
  • New research concludes that humanity would benefit more if it aims for ecological sustainability and stays within the limits of what Earth can provide, rather than pursuing relentless growth.
  • The success of capitalism depends on the push for growth, which requires the use of resources and energy, and comes at the cost of ecological damage.
  • Economists have proposed alternatives that focus on staying within a set of planetary boundaries that define the safe operating space for humanity.
  • The review, published in the journal Lancet Planetary Health, draws on more than 200 resources from the scientific literature.
 

This one really did happen in the shower.

 

Banks, email providers, booking sites, e-commerce, basically anything where money is involved, it's always the same experience. If you use the Android or iOS app, you stayed signed in indefinitely. If you use a web browser, you get signed out and asked to re-authenticate constantly - and often you have to do it painfully using a 2FA factor.

For either of my banks, if I use their crappy Android app all I have to do is input a short PIN to get access. But in Firefox I also get signed out after about 10 minutes without interaction and have to enter full credentials again to get back in - and, naturally, they conceal the user ID field from the login manager to be extra annoying.

For a couple of other services (also involving money) it's 2FA all the way. Literally no means of staying signed in on a desktop browser more than a single session - presumably defined as 30 minutes or whatever. Haven't tried their own crappy mobile apps but I doubt very much it is such a bad experience.

Who else is being driven crazy by this? How is there any technical justification for this discrimination? Browsers store login tokens just like blackbox spyware on Android-iOS, there is nothing to stop you staying signed in indefinitely. The standard justification seems to be that web browsers are less secure than mobile apps - is there any merit at all to this argument?

Or is all this just a blatant scam to push people to install privacy-destroying spyware apps on privacy-destroying spyware OSs, thus helping to further undermine the most privacy-respecting software platform we have: the web.

If so, could a legal challenge be mounted using the latest EU rules? Maybe it's time for Open Web Advocacy to get on the case.

Thoughts appreciated.

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