I almost feel like it doesn't matter if Joe-public is on board or not at this stage. For as much as capitalism kinda got us into this mess, at this point the flywheel is going in the other direction and it's a natural market consequence that renewables will win. Lack of priced in externalities created the problem but the same economics will now save us.*
The money men have no moral attachment to any source so given how cheap this mix has gotten it basically wins.
* I'd point out without China and its Leninist command economy (as well as publicly funded research) getting the price of these technologies down to where it is now we'd still be doomed, but we are where we are so now the system necessarily will act in its own self interest to use the basically free energy. Is it going to be enough at this stage? Who knows, but I see reasons to be optimistic.
China's Leninist command economy also burned (and still does burn) tremendous amounts of fossil fuels to generate energy, just as the command economy of the Soviet Union did, and just as the more-or-less free markets of the western world did and still do. People burn fossil fuels because the energy that they generate is incredibly useful for everything in the modern world, regardless of the economic system governing any particular jurisdiction.
There's a difference between informed speculation and uninformed speculation and most of the opinions so far fall into uninformed speculation where the writer implicitly blames those suffering for poor diet and lifestyle choices.
In addition a lot of the speculation assumes something specific to the US where this is a trend in multiple countries, predominantly high income ones[0][1], but this speculation that it might be 'chemicals' is fairly dull to read and adds nothing. Why this cohort specifically? What commonalities are there between countries with an observed increase? If it's diet why would it only impact the younger cohort?
I mean doesn't your take strain credulity as well? Let's actually think where most discussion happens these days, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, the few remaining newspaper comments sections. I'd struggle to list more off the top of my head.
Why wouldn't influence campaigns, we know every big country to be running, target this site? What reason would they have to leave it out from their list? Why not target a major news forum for the more wealthy and connected (predominantly) Americans in tech? This is not an uwu smol bean site anymore and the cost of (undetectably) botting any given site is rapidly approaching cents.
I just see the same thing over again. I flag some article, then later I look at the comments and everyone is saying "rah rah there's a cabal of vote bots that flag articles". Obviously not - it was me? Is it so unthinkable that normal people on HN are flagging political articles because they are explicitly disallowed by the site guidelines?
Indeed, and try suggesting there should be minimal accountability for flagging[0] and you'll likewise be flagged. Sure maybe the data says there's not some cartel flagging conspiracy but it starts to seem awful suspicious that even reasonable discussion of this misfeature gets flagged.
This site has always been easy to co-opt to fascism with their supposedly apolitical outlook. Flagging from unknown accounts easily kills stories of importance, even where they have relation to the supposed interests of the site. Such as the AI altered image being posted by the White House this week.
The idea we have to treat arguments in good faith like the other user in this story excusing fascist death squads show how well this moderation approach aligns with the Thiel-ite sympathies.
More Zhongnanhai-ology from our cold warrior correspondent.
As usual I feel like he overestimates the US' ability to impose rules and underestimates the Chinese ability to both circumvent those rules while developing self sufficiency. In addition we've all seen the Chinese ability to retaliate across a range of industrial sectors from rare earths to drug precursors. While these embargos would have some impact on Chinese chip development; initiatives like Huawei Ascend clusters and DeepSeek being trained on less powerful chips show that China will find a way to innovate whether or not they have access to the most powerful chips.
I feel like the piece overstates the importance of the AI race specifically. The recent field tests of the US' automated weapons systems are... not encouraging. [0][1] Unless you're an AGI booster that rather implies that crucial ability of US tech that China is missing is being able to generate Sora videos of fat people causing disasters.
In light of the 15th 5 year plan and its focus on self sufficiency without reference to the West these China hawks are increasingly irrelevant to the conversation unfolding outside the borders of the increasingly irrelevant and mistrusted US.
Correct, in every thread about BYD or other car manufacturers people seem to forget about the other 7.5 billion people in the world outside of the US and Europe. Sure the US' broken dealership laws and red-scare tantrums will stop these cars selling there, and in their economic satraps, but for the global majority countries there's no such barrier.
The cheerleaders for the current authoritarian coup that swarm around here are all too happy to conflate the Hunter Biden pardon and what's currently going on. As if we can't currently open a god-damned news website and read about the Comey, James and Bolton prosecutions and deduce that, yeah, Biden pretty much had no choice even though it was a shitty thing to do.
This is because these dipshits are eagerly carrying water for a vindictive dictator. They are not operating in good faith but due to the alignment of the owners of this site with those self-same fascists you are meant to act as if they're not trolls.
Funnily enough just like guns the reactions in this thread seem to more or less be "no way to stop this says only nation where this happens regularly".
The money men have no moral attachment to any source so given how cheap this mix has gotten it basically wins.
* I'd point out without China and its Leninist command economy (as well as publicly funded research) getting the price of these technologies down to where it is now we'd still be doomed, but we are where we are so now the system necessarily will act in its own self interest to use the basically free energy. Is it going to be enough at this stage? Who knows, but I see reasons to be optimistic.