For the love of Earth, stop traveling
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
The French do 85% of their Electricity on Nuclear because they built a bunch of identical plants at the same time thereby saving massively on costs.
And then repeat in the Nevada desert.
Costs have a lot do do with 'insurance' 'fuel' massive overhead of bureaucracy. It's like building a tunnel in Boston - massive soft corruption, stupidity etc.
The actual, bare-bones costs of a nuke plant should not be that high.
Do 1000 at once, as an 'international project' ...
And then coordinate with major economies to do likewise: China, India, Europe & Africa (built in Sahara), Middle East (built in Saudi Arabia defended by American troops), Argentina.
Built in regional pricing mechanisms (i.e. guaranteed x% to Iran, Pakistan, Egypt, Vietnam, Brazil etc.)
And 15% goes directly to atmospheric CO2 capture.
Now there's a 'Marshall Plan'.
The problem is that the people behind this don't actually want to solve the problem. They just want to use it as an excuse for a power grab.
Australia, Russia and Canada have most of the known deposits.
If the market price of Uranium is literally $0, well, Russians get nothing directly out of digging it up.
The grand concern would be, once something like this got going, there would be copycat entites in places that are not ready for it, i.e. China, Russia, Iran. Maybe China is today, but they are always teetering on revolution, or some kind of massive upheaval. There's no place like Canada for a vast expanse of boring, stable, calm, political stability and basic (but never exceptional) operational effectiveness.
2) How are you planning to get the Russians to go along with this?
Edit to add:
3) Why shouldn't the Russians (or anyone else) get paid for digging it up? Mining uranium isn't something that people are going to do for fun.
Nothing would stop the Russians from doing whatever they please. If this 'massive project' done by private entities - Uranium prices would rise dramatically, thereby creating incentive for Russian gov/private entities to ramp up Uranium production.
But with a 'nationalization' - well, global Urainum prices might remain weak knowing ain't nobody in the 'Western World' going to pay crazy prices for something that's too dangerous and no government would allow the sale of.
The 'nationalization' by Western Governments would surely be accompanied by a ban on private sale of it.
So the market would collapse making Russian gov/private entities less willing to put any dollars behind it.
But of course they can do whatever they want whenever they please - as they can today.
By the way - even with governments notorious and dysfunctional bureaucracy - I still think it would be cheaper than buying it from private entities where most of the cost would be in the form of some kind of rent extraction, not very related to the cost of extracting it.
Traveling, especially without airplanes (which is perfectly possible in lots of parts of the world -- vacationing to a train/car-accessible country that is), is trivial compared to industrial production of crap.
Making advertising illegal would decrease needless consumption (and pollution) by a ton, plus all the benefits for our quality of life.
Might as well make money illegal.
* People who have an unmet need for product X at price Y.
* People whose need for product X at price Y is already met, but who can be manipulated into buying from you rather than someone else.
* People who don't need product X at price Y, but can be manipulated into needing it.
Advertising is only good for society to the extent it reaches the first group. Influencing the second and third groups can be profitable for you, but on a societal scale it's just a game-theoretic arms race that wastes resources, plasters our environment with ads, and makes people miserable with new needs. We should totally try to discourage it.
I may seem pessimistic and indeed I am. But like other people do their part by encouraging people to consume less, I try to do my pathetic part by telling them to stop wasting time on hopeless utopian ideas.
Actually, small business owners and small art house cinema operators would (or should) be delighted from such a change -- it means the films they play could get as much marketing revenue (0) as the blockbusters now advertised all across town.
This would TURN people towards the more quirky, smaller scale and generally the less able to advertise today, not the opposite...
No, that's just posting their events on their own channel that people have to subscribe to to see.
But even if we classify that as advertising we can still allow that -- we're inventive, as humans -- without still not allowing for 90% of what today is used for advertising.
The human race survived without computers for a couple of million years, so obviously we don't "need" them on an existential level.
In your scenario, who gets to decide what other people "need"?
In other words, most people spend their lives being unhappy about status of some kind. It's partly an innate need, but mostly manufactured by overexposure to images of abnormally high status people. Reducing such exposure (remember that Israeli law that said models should have realistic body weight?) would help reduce misery.
As to who gets to decide? We come up with guidelines and make them law. It's not harder than other stuff regulated by law. Anyone can tell when an ad shows an alluring life instead of selling the product on merit.
Who is "we"?
" Anyone can tell when an ad shows an alluring life instead of selling the product on merit."
"Product merit" largely lies in improving the user's quality of life.
In your opinion, people don't need to take joyrides in convertibles. I understand that.
But other people's opinions differ. Why should your opinion be privileged?
It means a huge half a trillion dollar industry is leveraging psychology, black marketing, covert paid endorsements, and tons of other things besides, plus plain old brainwashing from constant exposure, to make you crave and buy stuff in general, and stuff that they sell in particular.
Just read what kind of research and effort goes in things like the design of a supermarket, self placement, and tons of other things, with measured changes to consumer behavior -- and that's just the tip of the iceberg.
The idea that we're some perfectly rational, non manipulated, thinking machines that can decide for ourselves is laughably unscientific.
There are some books about how the advent of modern mass advertising (and a lot of pushing) made people turn to consumption. I've also remember reading some accounts about how tv strikes (that thus prevent ads being air) resulted in reduced consumption but don't have a reference.
I think it's the same idea behind banning cigarette ads to reduce smoking, and similar to banning very thin models to reduce anorexia etc.
Even if it doesn't work that way, banning advertising could be its own reward!
How much of flying is business travel anyway? You think people are going to tell their bosses they're not taking the plane for that sales meeting because of teh climate?
Maybe a tiny amount of virtuous people, but generally hell no.
The vegetarianism and animal rights movement has had many decades to convince people to give up meat and it's just not happening. People eat more and more meat.
Where are you getting your stats from? Vegetarianism seems on the rise to me. There are some stats to Back it up, too: 2.5% in 2009 to 5% in 2014.
[1] http://www.onegreenplanet.org/news/is-2014-the-year-of-the-v...
https://ensia.com/articles/these-maps-show-changes-in-global...
I first heard about it in Swedish statistics when all my friends were vegetarians or vegans and I really expected the trend to be reversing but Swedes were indeed eating significantly more meat (this was a few years ago).
From what I see in restaurants it seems obvious that meat eating is at no risk at all of declining except within a small enclave of virtuous herbivores.
And from what I understand of human nature, a juicy steak or burger is way more vividly satisfying than the idea of marginally improving the climate prognosis. It's like if sex turned out to be harmful to coral reefs—people would kill themselves rather than go celibate.
https://ourworldindata.org/meat-and-seafood-production-consu...
Many environmentalists, including the basketball celebrity Yao Ming, campaigned against it, highlighting how the world's shark population is collapsing.
Shark fin sales dropped by 70% in China.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/chinas-choice/2014/a...
That's probably not something the Washington Post is likely to advocate for though. Their relationship to the military industrial complex is eerily close, especially now that they're a big customer of Bezos: http://www.accuracy.org/release/cia-cloud-over-jeff-bezoss-w...
No one wants me as a role model.
Note how the guy lecturing you to cancel your plane tickets went to Morocco with his wife. He has a genius award. He is an award winning author. You generally don't get there by keeping your butt at home.
This is so very "Do as I say, not as I do." If this is such a great thing, why did you speak at the conference in Morocco? Why didn't you turn it down instead of bringing your wife and then calculating the total damage?
Edit:
Ah, a downvote. How ironic. "We don't want you as a role model and also shut up. No one wants to hear your opinion either. "
Weirdly validating.
I downvoted your comment because the first two paragraphs are off topic, seems like you just wanted to talk about yourself.
They deleted it before I could post the following reply:
Other people talk about themselves all the time on HN. That usually doesn't make a thing downvote worthy. But I get a lot of flak for it, presumably because people find something inherently disturbing about me.
I don't think it is off topic. If you really want a strong role model for how to live light on the land, you could admire me and follow my advice. Instead, my many websites get no traction and I get a lot of open hostility.
That is exactly my point. People only listen to and admire the type of people who fly to Morocco. People who actually walk the talk have no influence and never will.
"Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime."
― Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad
Sometimes there is no reasonable alternative to flying for a very important trip, but some people seem to not consider the problematic aspects at all.
Oh, give it a rest. You've been playing the "only x years left" routine for at least 25 years now.
As I recall, Manhattan was supposed to be under water by now.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/jan/18/obama-cl...
According to Al Gore, we had only ten years left in 2006.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01...
According to the World Wildlife Fund we had only five years left in 2007.
https://www.wwf.org.uk/updates/climate-change-five-years-lef...
More failed "only x years left" predictions can easily be found with a bit of Googling.