Ma8ee

That is often a different type of difficulties. I was thinking about decision like, should I buy car A or car B. I've done my research. Economy, safety, et c. are very similar. But it is a lot of money, and I don't know which is the "best", and of course I want the "best". I could spend weeks on a decision like this. Now I just acknowledge that they seem to be equal. Car B comes in a nice shade of red that I really like, so I buy car B.

Regarding your question, there's always going to be known and unknown unknowns down the line. My only advice in that case is to get to the unknowns as fast as possible. And from the start take into account that you most likely will have to rebuild a big part when you learn more. That is one of the reasons modularity and decoupling is so important. You want to be able to easily scrap and replace one part without it affecting everything. And keep it simple. Never try to build something that should be capable to handle all imaginable scenarios in the future. You'll be bitten by one of the unimaginable ones, and your complex "can handle everything" architecture will be too rigid to change.

If a decision is hard to make, its often because the differences are small, and therefore it doesn't matter much and you might as well decide by dice-roll.

My life became soo much easier when I had that insight. I used to spend so much mental energy on decisions that most often were inconsequential.

Apparently it is so slow and expensive to build nuclear power so no commercial entities are interested without extreme government subsidies and guarantees.

One thing that has struck me with our own solar panels is that they have to be very dirty before I notice any significant degradation in efficiency. And when they do get completely covered in pollen or leaves, a brief rain is usually enough to clean them.

I don't say we shouldn't do research. What I do say is that we do have all the technology we need. And more importantly, we don't have the time to wait for some future technology that potentially could solve all our problems. The climate disaster has already started (and this [0] is not "the new normal", this is just the beginning, a hint of what we should expect).

The only reason we are in this shithole is because of the lack of political will. It would have been comparable trivial to solve if we just had started 30 years ago when scientists started to yell about that it was getting urgent.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2026/jun/24/europe-he...

We don’t need any new and untested technology to solve to stop spewing out greenhouse gases. We just need to scale up current green tech. It’s not know how and technology that is lacking, it is political will.

You clearly have some hangups. Of course I know I am very lucky. The only people I judge are the even more lucky people who think they are entitled to destroy our planet just because they have the financial means to do so on a larger scale than most.

I don’t know what your point is. Of course some people have more choices than others.

(And btw, I’m faster with my cargo bike than the car drivers. I never get stuck in traffic chaos outside school and I never get stuck in traffic jams, and I don’t have look for parking. I hate the days when I have to use a car.)

No, I don't mean life satisfaction, I mean exactly what I wrote. Our material standards are unimaginable high compared to a few hundred years ago. I've never imagined kings to be particularly happy.

I am convinced there will be a point where humans will find other ways to compete than buying expensive goods. I thought the whole "humans are slaves to their genes" became quite out of fashion already 30 years or so.

I wouldn't call it poshy, but it is mostly inhabited by academics. And it is not in the US.

I genuinely don't understand why you think it is entitled.

What a miserable world view. What do you need a yacht to when you have two weeks of holiday every year?

While I agree that many people are status seekers, that can be different things. Where I live, a yacht is vulgar. Even a bigger car is looked down on if it isn't for some specific utility. Status is showing your care for the climate by leaving your kids in daycare with a cargo bike. Status is being able to leave work early to be able to spend time in the afternoon with your family, or do so some garden work. No one wants to be the one with an expensive car but not knowing your own kids.

If you instead imagine the perspective of anyone from 16th century, you’d realise we are already living as kings. We have way more food and clothes than we can eat and use, we have self driving carriages, magic devices with entertainment in our pockets, not to mention that almost all our kids live to adulthood.

At what point do we say that we don’t need to waste more of earth’s resources and instead find time to enjoy our current enormous wealth?

I think part of the point is that Einstein’s genius was only partially the brain. It was also a unique upbringing in a specific point in time that made it possible. We would have many more geniuses if we game more people the opportunities.

I like that idea.

I'd rather let Archive block access to that specific article for a while, but still archiving from the start.

I remember a discussion whether it was rude to lit a cigarette at the dinner table before everyone had finished their meal or not.

Exactly. It's just that they mix up the steps. The last step, the assembly, is highly automated and usually very fast in software production, since it is done by a compiler (and the aptly named, assembler). The people involved are doing engineering and design, which is much harder to control.

The advantage would be that I know beforehand, and have the opportunity to test and, possibly, reject, what the advertiser want me to send to someone’s browser.

I guess you never tried to speak French in France.

My meaning clearly got lost when I droppen an r. Will you still be happy when they sell youR software, that is, the software you wrote, and make a lot of money while you get nothing.

Here is how the cost of insurance has changed in recent years:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/dec/05/climate-...

And remember, climate change is not something that happens and then it is done. What we are seeing now is just a start of much worse to come.

I would be in the second to last group if we actually did something when there still was time, and more was done to actually do something now. Yes, there's a lot of energy efficiency measures that could be done, and much more clean energy could be build, and we will be forced to adopt whether we want to or not. (Carbon capture from the atmosphere is a fucking joke though, which should be to everyone when you know that CO2 in the atmosphere is measured in parts per million!)

But we didn't start when we had to, and we are still doing only a fraction of what must be done. So, we are screwing ourselves over majorly. And this is not some fringe hysteria, this is the scientific consensus and has been for a long time. You can almost hear screams of frustration and desperation through the lines if you pick ut the latest IPCC report.

can we actually do anything about it that is not just letting go of a comfortable life

Yes, no doubt! And actually doing something about it will impact our lives much less than trying to continue as usual. If we would have started 30 years ago, the transitions would have been smooth, but now it is going to be harsher. The problem is that doing something about it will affect the profits of some very big and influential corporations, and they are doing everything they can to sow FUD.

Which of course is obviously false. There’s no center right in the Republican Party, only extreme right. The Democrats try to preserve democracy, the Republicans are working very hard to dismantle it.

The POTUS is well known for screwing over contractors and lenders. It clearly didn't damage his reputation enough.

They are also building more solar panels and wind turbines than the rest of the world combined, and are the biggest investor in renewables. Their emission of CO2 just recently peaked. But they need a lot of power, and most of the new coal plants are there for days when there’s neither sun or wind.

Are you still glad when AWS starts selling you software as a service and make hundreds of millions and you get nothing?

It’s really hard to come up with better examples of the exceptions that prove the rule than Marie Curie and Ramanujan. How many more names can you come up with?

I’d even argue that still today women and minorities are strongly disadvantaged at many institutions. I’d say that as a white male that recently left academia myself. I have seen how some of my colleagues have been treated.

A few centuries of science of white males. While I agree that the system with ”objective metrics” has a lot of problems, but just removing it would bring us back to the old days when almost all science was done by a few privileged white men.

What do you mean? If it is the research required, it is such a tiny fraction of the cost of the cost of possible damage to society and the environment that it is completely insignificant.