yes some of the provocative imagery is non-productive in public spheres outside private circles.
As a remedy, I recommend everyone on the left read George Lakoff's book "Don't Think of an Elephant." It's a guide for how to communicate effectively, especially to people who have a vastly different worldview from themselves.
He's been consulting to organizations for a long time and these books are the distillation of his knowledge in plain language.
Preview:
1. He makes an (obv simplified) model of left vs right communication as "nurturing parent" vs. "strict father." There is obvious overlap - it's a model, but you can see how much this explains as he develops it a bit further.
2. He talks about a "staining" or "triggering" effect when communicating. what does that mean? people have key words that instantly shut down their thought, preventing useful discussion. For example, immediately upon hearing the words "trans," conservatives might picture a man in a dress molesting someone in a bathroom. Similar for leftists when they hear a word like "corporation" or "business." So he teaches how to communicate without stumbling on these.
Yes, it's important to leave the solar system...but we have 4 billion years to think about it.
We can do a little bit each year. We don't have to tap into all of our social services, cops on the street, clean water, and create an entire surveillance and surveillance capital infrastructure to get there by 2050 or even 2100.
We can aim to get there by, say, the year 100,000, and still have 4000x headroom.
Meanwhile we live healthy, safe, low-stress lives, where fun, outdoor activity, swimming in rivers, picking fruit from trees, having all night parties outdoors, swilling beer, reading great books, napping in hammocks, camping in the mountains are all freely available.
Genuinely not sure what you are trying to say. We as a species may collapse in the next few decades (that is, while I am alive). I couldn't care less about what happens in 4 billion years.
The fact is: we are failing to survive on Earth. I don't see how you can live a "low-stress life" given what's coming. Unless you have fun enjoying a nature where everything is dead. Maybe attaching the hammock to the cybertruck? I don't know.
I am generally agreeing with you. IIUC, your point is we can't survive like this, so why are we even pretending to go to Mars?
and i'm saying: let's not wreck ourselves trying to get to Mars/beyond the solar system in the next century. Let's background it. Live gently in the meantime.
I think the disagreement is you believe we're already kinda screwed? I haven't commented on that possibility previously. I'm not fully qualified nor informed enough to make a decisive opinion. But it does seem like it will very uncomfortable for a long time. And it's very difficult to get people to change their minds when the surveillance capital propaganda continuously shapes our conscious imagination to its own constraints.
> I think the disagreement is you believe we're already kinda screwed?
Well it depends on what we mean by "screwed". Society will change, that's a fact. Maybe we choose to change it to save as much as we can (e.g. drastically reduce our CO2 emissions, choose to degrow and adapt) or we don't, and we will end up drastically reducing our CO2 emissions anyway (we've passed/are passing peak production for fossil fuels, they are not infinite so emissions will get lower in the next years/decades, that is absolutely certain). And if we don't adapt, the day fossil energy becomes sparse, the degrowth will be harder.
Some say "no but wait, they (someone else, not me) will find infinite clean energy, so we're saved". Which is naive because probably they will not, even if they did it would take enough time to screw the climate even more, and that would not solve the biodiversity issue we have. We have lost 80% of insects in 20 years (we measure it), we are emptying the oceans. We are living in a mass extinction (we measure it) that is happening orders of magnitudes faster than the one of the dinosaurs. And this mass extinction is NOT due to climate change, only to the human activity (whatever humans do when they have energy, like destroying habitats). Climate change is just adding to the fun.
Right now we're losing insects and emptying the oceans, eventually it will have an impact on the crops we can grow, and hence on our food. "But wait, they (someone else, not me) may find a pill so that we don't need to eat anymore!" doesn't work for me: I don't want to live on a planet without nature like Mars, I want to live on Earth. Not to mention that the Amazon is pretty much lost at this point, most coral reefs are pretty much lost already (or will soon be?).
That's not super fun. Are we screwed? Depends on what it means. Life will get more complicated for most people, that's for sure.
I really like this...I've been trying to come up with a similar system, not necessarily for just gh, but for comms in general. And with groups so e.g. someone from my group can trust someone in the group of a someone I trust. And from there it would be neat to add voting...so someone requires a number of votes before they can be trusted.
yes and also no ;) Think of stirling engines as driven by "heat differentials" as opposed to "heat." At first when you fire up the GPU, it's hotter than everythign else and can start driving a stirling...but eventually everything heats up to the same temp and it stops moving. To get it moving again, requires a heat differential, so part of it would need to radiate, which is blatantly difficult in a vacuum(1), such as space.
In case it's not clear: Little-St. James Wannabe Invitee, Nazi-Saluter, Musk's full of it again, but to recognize it requires being halfway through college physics to understand it, so all the elites will be glazed over thinking they're onto the next big thing. grift, grift, grift, grift.
When someone can’t manage first-order thermodynamics or basic human boundaries, it’s reasonable to downgrade their credibility across domains.
re: thermodynamics....you can not feasibly dissipate GPU/LLM/Data center-level heat in space. You'd need radiators the size of football fields and you'd be highly susceptible to cosmic debris.
the writer really went into depth about the problem and...surprise...the answer is almost embarrassingly simple.
Everyone in the country needs to read this.
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