This reminds me of the story of how the USSR nearly made whales extinct to meet a quota for whale meat that nobody wanted to eat.
> They literally call it an "AI revolution."
People proclaiming an "AI revolution" seem to have inspired at least one song:
How are we sliding face first into “snowpiercer but dumber”?
> just for the sake of using the tokens
The problem with not burning tokens is when you not meet the performance KPIs, get labelled as luddite and off you go, even before the job gets taken over by AI.
I do agree with the sentiment, that and war mongers destroying the planet.
I see it a lot and assumed it was concern trolling from plastic manufacturers or libertarians funded by them but you seem genuine.
Have you just fallen for that concern trolling? Grown so cynical that nothing matters anymore? I don't understand the intention if you have a genuine desire to improve society.
What would we be doing differently in a world where we were still using plastic straws? Would that have freed up enough mental energy for a revolution? Would people be blowing up private jets while sipping their diet coke?
I don't mind paper straws (though I don't really use straws in general) but it is frustrating trying really hard to be sustainable and then hearing that Amazon is encouraging people to use as much computing power as possible.
Nah, one gets a cocktail with paper straw and feels like they are doing their part saving the planet.
Plastic straws aren't hard to find, by the way.
Reactionaries are often arguing against good things, which makes it difficult for them to directly attack them.
So they develop consistent techniques to attack them from oblique angles:
> Hirschman describes the reactionary theses thus:
> According to the Perversity Thesis, any purposive action to improve some feature of the political, social, or economic status quo only serves, perversely, to exacerbate the very condition one wishes to remedy (compare: Unintended consequences).[4]
> The Futility Thesis holds that attempts at social transformation will be unavailing, that they will fail to "make a dent" in the problem, and the motives of those who keep attempting futile reforms are suspect.[5][6]
> The Jeopardy Thesis states that the risk of the proposed change is too great as it imperils some previous, precious accomplishment.[6][7]
> He characterizes these theses as "rhetorics of intransigence" that do not further constructive debate.[8] Moreover, he says they turn optimism about social advancement into pessimism.[9]
The futility (and perversity) ones are what I think of when people are angry about straws on the internet.
I just don't understand how complaining endlessly about leads to solving any of the bigger problems. Each of which could be dismissed in the same way.
One of the real problems of greenwashing is that it's trying to sell an idea that with just a tiny, almost unnoticeable change to lifestyle, you can keep doing what you're doing and still have the peace of mind that you're not doing anything bad for the environment. Plastic recycling falls into this category--oh, just recycle this thing instead of throwing it away, that means there's no more guilt to be had over the environmental costs of plastic production (meanwhile ignoring the fact that plastic recycling is largely nonviable and so all of that goes straight to the waste stream anyways.)
The hope is that in the alternative world, instead of praising companies for taking what are ultimately only token steps towards environmental stewardship, we'd actually castigate them harder and get them to take real steps to improving the environmental aftereffects of their activities.
USSR barely accounted for 15% of the world caught amount (with Japan as the leader).
> that nobody wanted to eat
unsubstantiated.
Agreed for USSR, but I think the person you replied to is misremembering the country, I believe they are thinking of Japan. I heard it recently on Stuff You Should Know, which usually does a good job of researching their stories, and it sounds like it is substantiated but may be a bit more complex than presented, but literally true.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/save-the-whales/id2789... https://theworld.org/dispatch/news/regions/asia-pacific/japa... https://theworld.org/stories/2019/04/16/whaling-japan-2 https://japantoday.com/category/national/75-of-meat-from-jap... https://www.traffic.org/site/assets/files/3994/whale_meat_tr...
Luckily I work in app management and I know they can only see the last date used so if I just put in one query per day I'm good.
But I'm so sick and tired of this AI hype :(