banach

On the contrary. The less you have, the more you stand to benefit from appreciating other things than possessions.

It depends on ow you organize it, but ideally most decisions would be taken on the level of the people who are affected by it. If Joe doesn't understand before the election, he will understand after, and if he doesn't like the result, he can call for a new election.

However, modern DD systems should support delegator/liquid democracy (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delegative_democracy) which subsumes the benefits of representative democracy, while letting voters take back their vote from their delegate at any time.

Oh, they mean a "mail box".

Journalism and activism under dictatorships are easy examples, if you reject it as a fundamental value/right.

Rock climbing and (mostly audio) books.

What could possibly go wrong?

Can I host a blog that criticizes Putin on one of these servers?

I don't havet this problem with software that uses sensible typography. The availability of workarounds is no excuse for poor defaults.

Any text coming out of Wolfram for the past 20 years has been borderline illegible by default because it is so small. I have never needed glasses, but this has annoyed me ever since I was a child.

Good idea.

I think you are. Sprawl can be mitigated by regulation:

http://www.ted.com/talks/ellen_dunham_jones_retrofitting_sub...

https://ctr.utexas.edu/wp-content/uploads/pubs/0_4420_2.pdf

Sure, looks interesting!

I agree, and of course I would like us to do both, but in light of announcements like these:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/nov/22/nasa-ear...

all I am saying is that we need to keep our priorities straight.

Nice one. I will make sure to bring out entropy next time someone accuses me of not thinking of the long run.

I don't like to recommend books in these situations, but in this case you might find "Command and Control" interesting. It describes a huge number of near-disasters that I, for one, had never heard about (e.g. armed thermonuclear weapons accidentally dropping out of bombers in populated areas). Mind you, I am not even suggesting getting rid of the stockpiles, merely limiting them to the level required to constitute a reasonable deterrent. What we have today is far too great of a risk for the safety they are supposedly buying us.

I can assure you that I am not trolling. I am simply convinced that most of our problems are well within our control. Unfortunately, fatalism seems to be very chic today.

One of the main issues with the current societal debate is that simple issues are being presented as complex. This makes us incorrectly expect complex solutions to our issues.

I understand your concerns, but I am not taking my ideas out of thin air. Here are some references to corroborate my claims.

Ways to address climate change: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/people-still... http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264837709...

Way to address the supposed food crisis: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2012/aug/26/f...

> the social movements that youth were involved in during the 60's and 70's were far more widespread (and much more radical) than those of today

I am not sure that is the case. Contrast popular opposition to the Vietnam war, which didn't become widespread until many years into the conflict, with the opposition to the war in Iraq, where protests drew hundreds of thousands of people even before the actual invasion.

Your point being?

>Do you seriously think that any of the following global political challenges: > > - convince everyone on Earth to implement changes that are bad for them, like not eating animal-based foods, with only the promise of "maybe in 200 years your descendants, should your line not be extinct by then, will benefit" as compensation

Even if we assume that people are as self-centered as you portray them, eating meat is not necessarily good for you:

http://www.cancer.org/cancer/news/world-health-organization-...

> - reorganise every single human settlement and/or social structure on Earth to put people closer to their workplaces

Most of the world actually already lives like this. Yes, the urban sprawl of many American cities will have to go, but it can (and will) be done.

> - implement a global wealth redistribution scheme that doesn't start with North Korea conquering the planet through nuclear war

Such a system was implemented after WW2 (cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Plan). Worked out pretty well.

> - successfully convince every NWS to destroy their nukes and institute a worldwide ban on nuclear weaponry

If we elect politicians who are more interested in cooperation than in sabre-rattling, and more interested in the problems of the people they represent than in the needs of the military-industrial complex, they will have few incentives for maintaining anything even remotely the size of the current stockpile. Great though it may be, we do not need an all-out ban on nuclear weapons to ensure our continued survival, only a (large) reduction in the size of the stockpiles. That not only makes sense from a survival perspective, but also economically.

> Are easier than the engineering challenge of building a colony on Titan? If yes, please let me into whatever politics-free, single world government utopia you're living in.

My lack of cynicism may be due to the fact that I live in Europe, where I can see more progress than stagnation in all of the areas you mention above. Given how close it was that a politician who advocated all of the above policies was elected as president of the USA, I think there is reason to be optimistic there as well.

Do you really think that adopting a sustainable way of life is unfeasible, while establishing a self-sustaining colony on another planet is? Many of the changes I am talking about are already taking place. For example, renewables have recently become a viable alternative (http://www.sciencealert.com/india-says-the-cost-of-solar-pow...) and population growth is projected to taper off after 2050 (http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=98371). The only thing that can hold these solutions back is strong opposition from the beneficiaries of the current system. They will fight back, but I think that the odds are stacked against them.

It is not, and we can, but it seems like some of us need to re-evaluate their priorities: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/nov/22/nasa-ear...

OK, you had me at "because we can" :)

You are right, but in this case my friends are a pretty good sample of the over-all population. I live in Sweden, where 10% of the population is vegetarian: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetarianism_by_country. This seems to be a growing trend as well, also elsewhere: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/food-and-drink/news/number-of-veg....

These are orthogonal issues. You are right that avoiding these kinds of catastrophic events will require technology (many solutions other than colonization have been proposed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_impact_avoidance). My point is that there are issues that are more imminent, and thus deserve far more attention.

I think that the pursuit of knowledge is a really good way to spend your time, but I do not like when simple solutions to real problems are sidelined in favor of the latest buzzword-oriented technology fetish. In times when the president-elect has announced that he is shutting down NASA's climate change research, ostensibly to fund space exploration, I think we need to remind ourselves that any work we chose to pursue has an opportunity cost. I really believe that we can address the main issues facing our society with pretty simple means, but that will not happen if everyone is too busy looking for problems to solve using their favorite tool. In the terminology of Hacker News, I guess what I am arguing is that colonization is bike-shedding for the reforms that I have mentioned in my first comment.

I have actually seen a surprising trend to the contrary among my friends. These are people with very different backgrounds (anything from the hardly-ever-employed working class to researchers), but over the past year I can count at least five people who have started eating vegetarian most days of the week. Just like tattoos and beards, these things can become trendy, and then peer pressure takes care of the rest.

I don't think the issues that are putting Earth in danger are the result of some immutable, unfortunate human nature. I think they are the result of a system that could be changed as easily as it was put in place. Many of the pathologies of the modern society were consciously manufactured (c.f. "Propaganda" by Edward Bernays), and all we need to do is to realize this, and start changing things. Luckily, the young generation is far less bought into the current system, and I believe we will see a move to a saner way of life over the coming decades.