It’s somehow more grounding than every other human concern, if only for the fact that we have no ability to affect it even one iota (beyond our solar system). The greatest light show in all existence.
179 karma · joined January 17, 2022
My favorite meals are often thrown together in 20 minutes with zero planning, and certainly no recipe. Knowing a few fundamentals (see Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat) gets you a long way.
I see no problem with hunter-gatherers’ predation of wildlife, provided they act in ecological balance with their environment (and they do tend to, out of self-preservation).
That’s not the world the vast majority of us live in though. We kill on the order of 1 trillion animals every year. We’re devastating Earth’s biosphere for the sake of an unnecessary dietary choice.
We’ll reap what we sow, sooner or later.
To my mind, it’s hyperloop with all the nonsensical parts stripped out.
I think the obstacle to connecting trash receptacles to a subterranean logistics network would be just how much tunneling you’d have to do.
CST will connect to urban distribution hubs, with the last mile fulfilled by courier bikes, motorbikes or small delivery vans.
> Efficient micro-distribution in urban areas is a nice idea, but so far there has not been a single city logistics project that has functioned in reality. How is CST city logistics going to fare any better?
> In the CST system, the goods are already sorted and bundled by destination when transported in the tunnel. This bundling process means that they are optimally prepared for the subsequent micro-distribution process. At the hub, the goods simply need to be loaded onto appropriate vehicles – depending on the size, volume and destination, these are courier bikes, motorbikes or small delivery vans. This guarantees coordinated deliveries to sales outlets and end consumers, rather than each supplier delivering their goods individually.
Unbundling from containers to pallets only needs to happen at one end of the tunnel — at an out-of-town logistics center as a sibling comment suggests.
Switzerland has the advantage of being relatively compact, so I do wonder how the economic case would stack up with different geographies.
High capex, low opex. Lower capex with above-ground tubes as you suggest. I think Futurama was onto something.
To those who would downvote, I encourage you to read the following:
https://aeon.co/essays/human-exceptionalism-is-a-danger-to-a...
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/06/ho...
I wonder about induced demand. Presumably total freight volumes will not change drastically in response to the availability of this new system, in which case one could expect road traffic reductions to be stable.
The quieter roads may well induce more personal transportation, but then with Switzerland’s already very good passenger rail connections, maybe not.
Seems like a win all round.
If any would be shooter clearly sees that their message will go unheard, that they will die in anonymity, I think that could deter at least some.
Your point stands though, that the issue is societal.
In fact, the very notion is a dangerous and absurd one, that a corporation can do bad things without the individuals it comprises having done bad things.
Sadly that notion is enshrined in corporate law, and commitment to it is amply demonstrated by the impunity of bankers in the wake of the subprime crisis, to give one example.
In truth, I stopped working and gas prices are real high. That was the initial grounds for the car to sit idle. Then I got to thinking whether I should keep the thing or not — whether I actually need it. I happen to live in a place with extremely good public transport, so there’s that.
And the question was meant in good faith. With time on my hands, I’ve been scrutinizing my own life choices up to this point, and it’s honestly hard to discern what influenced them.
I’m genuinely curious about people’s motivations. I can surely understand the desire to relax on the water :)
Hmm, well Finland is building a spent fuel repository:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_re...
I know when I bought my car it was the sense of freedom it granted me that appealed, and some vague sense that cars are what “real” adults own. Now I look at it as a tool for our collective self-annihilation.
I would sell it, but then someone else would presumably actually use it. So instead, it sits there in the drive.
Yes, people are selfish. People also have a great capacity for cooperation and altruism, given sufficient cause to bind them together.
I rather hope that the impending collapse of the biosphere that sustains all life is just such a cause. Then again, we appear to be setting the world on fire at an ever greater pace.
But then, I think that’s where you’ll find your answer. This technology pacifies, or at the very least occupies.
Whether LaMDA demonstrates sentience is not even a clearly formulated proposition, yet the work bullishly charges ahead behind closed doors.
He is anyway trying to stimulate a broader conversation on AI ethics.
> Chang: Why does this matter? Why should we be talking about whether a robot has rights?
> Lemoine: So, to be honest, I don’t think we should, I don’t think that should be the focus. The fact is, Google is being dismissive of these concerns, the exact same way they have been dismissive of every other ethical concern AI ethicists have raised.
> Lemoine: All the individual people at Google care. It’s the systemic processes that are protecting business interests over human concerns, that creates this pervasive environment of irresponsible technology development.
> Chang: Big tech companies are controlling the development of this technology. […] How big a problem is that?
> Lemoine: It’s a huge problem because […] if you think about the pervasiveness of Google search, people are going to use this product more and more over the years […] and the corporate policies about how these chatbots are allowed to talk about important topics like values, rights, and religion, will affect how people think about these things, how they engage with those topics, and these policies are being decided by a handful of people, in rooms that the public doesn’t get access to.
If, on the other hand, you give homes to people who need them, unconditionally (and provide support for addiction and mental health problems), you get people off the streets and they can and do rebuild their lives [1].
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/jun/03/its-a-miracle...
For example, 3M and PFAS contamination. It’s a stretch to imagine workers local to the factories and very directly bearing the brunt of it, would go along with it.
Consider a worker-owned coal mining operation. It will have the same self-preservation drive that works to the detriment of all the rest of us.
Perhaps even worse than the energy requirements of animal agriculture is its land use. Today, a staggering 50% of all habitable land on Earth is used for agriculture, of which 77% is used for animals (this does include arable land used to grow fodder) [2].
(By comparison, pre-industrial society used ~4% of habitable land for farming. Of course, we’re far more numerous so we couldn’t expect to revert to that now.)
Vertical farming is most surely not the solution. We just need to end the grotesque industrial slaughter that we’ve become utterly perversely normalized to.
There is more than enough land on Earth for us all to eat in abundance, just not on omnivorous diets.