Check out “radiative sky cooling”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDRnEm-B3AI

There might be some way to do something with this.

Dave!?

Save a slap for the leap seconds creator.

Or, we could collectively realize time is but an illusion and transcend this silly problem.

All the waste a plant ever produces in its lifetime can be contained with ease on site.

Won’t that create a bunch of targets all over the country? Then terrorists or enemy states can use simple small bombs to make whole areas uninhabitable for the next millennium.

I don’t disagree with you, but this is unrealistic.

But…we don’t have a choice if we are to survive. Continuation with any system like our current system (i.e. exploitation of nature for economic growth) will lead to obvious ecological collapse. Why is certain ecological collapse viewed as the more realistic choice?

This is akin to a person well on their way to a heart attack saying “well, eating healthy is unrealistic, so let’s switch to diet coke and pretend that’s enough”

Sometimes I use the term “psychopathic hoarder class” when referring to this group of people.

Larry Finger, your work has made a significant positive impact on my life and I’m sure many others. Thank you.

Now can you work on a driver to allow communication between the living and the dead?

I’m still on IPv3, haven’t updated yet.

USA! USA! USA!!11!!

That’s like half of the training I got to get my A+ certificate to work on personal computers.

I was shocked about this, I’d assumed it was well trained trauma doctors in the ambulance with you at your most critical moment.

Nate is amazing, he and some of his guests are exactly who I learned this from.

To some degree, fission also, though it has a few other problems like safety and security concerns around nuclear materials, locations of fuels and whether they are in friendly nations, other things the fuels can be used for and all the politics that goes with that, etc.

But we need more than just energy. At some point, regardless of our energy, we are going to destroy Earth’s ecosystems using up other resources, using this energy to mine unsustainably, etc. More energy just means we kill ourselves faster. We should not be looking for more or cleaner energy with which to kill ourselves with, we should be looking to continuity of our species and that requires living sustainably within the bounds of our environment.

I never understand this line of thought. The amounts of energy we use is never ever going to go down. It just isn’t.

If we don’t develop practical nuclear fusion before our fossil inheritance effectively runs out we sure will. It will also go down following ecological collapse caused by using all that energy. Infinite energy doesn’t make up for a collapsed ecosystem.

Isn’t “the state” just cultural mechanisms extended beyond familial or interpersonal ties?

This is “community”

“State” refers to a group of people that feel entitled to rule over others and use violence to do so. To help ensure their power they create laws that make their violence legal and give it names like “law enforcement” and make your violence, particularly violence to protect yourself against them, illegal. This typically goes along with enclosure leaving people nowhere to escape the state.

There’s a threshold where the group becomes too numerous for a member to form social ties with all other members.

This is true but does not on it’s own lead to the formation of state. Without dominator types successfully taking advantage of the situation, it could just as well lead to loosely connected communities. Also, the size of early non-state communities was limited to ecosystem provided resources (i.e. they were inherently sustainable), our populations are not because we found fossil energy.

Domination and “the state” are not equivalent, but it takes the former for the latter to come about. Domination without the state has always existed on some level, I think that pre-state societies had cultural mechanisms to prevent dominators from taking over.

I’d say exploitative (and dominant) behavior can be either biologically based instinct or learned trait.

Learned behavior could potentially become a trait if it spreads, is beneficial to the species reproductive success, and genetic mutations occur.

• A nice person can learn that to survive requires them to act in an exploitative manner, I’d not call this an instinct, this is a animal of an adaptable species adapting to a cruel environment.

• A person that is not nice because they are less adaptable and see exploitation as the default way of operating in life and would act this way even in a nice environment could be called an instinct. This could be the biological start of what could evolve into a stable instinct in a species should this person’s genes become dominant in the population (I believe this is happening now).

The reason I talk the way I do on this topic, is my belief that early humans did not have a desire to dominate others on a large scale, we were more like other animals. Not that everything was peaceful or tribes didn’t have leaders and inter-tribal battles, just that any individuals with a tendency to dominate and hoard were mostly taken care of by cultural mechanisms and didn’t get very far, i.e. they got their ass beat when then screwed over their brother and the community said “good, they deserved it”. Or a tribal leader that was dominant and coercive rather than a respected leader could get killed and there’s no state to stop this or punish those who did it. The tribe decided their leader was bad for them and took care of the issue.

But at some point, these cultural mechanisms were not enough to contain these individuals with a dominant instinct and they took over and colluded, and this eventually evolved into the concept of the state.

The thing that might’ve tipped the scales is money. Money provides a means to hoard wealth, something that is difficult without money as things rot or or too large, etc. By hoarding money that represents resources, they are simultaneously creating artificial scarcity and those willing to violently back up the dominant hoarder can have more than others setting up a class structure. This is a bit different than for example how Marx says classes came about.

tl;dr I think our society was stable for 200K years until a dominator instinct took over that was previously kept in check culturally, facilitated by the invention of money. This situation exploded when we found our fossil energy inheritance that we’re currently wasting on the equivalent on hookers and blow. And now society is built around the dominators, designed for easy exploitation and prevention of self-defense, it’s called “statehood”.

You’re right, to some insufficient degree, but that’s like reducing your meth habit.

It’s not possible to produce the amount of meat needed to feed our massive population while treating animals humanely.

There are really two options to deal with this:

1. Most humans in the world become vegan – sounds great but it’s not gonna happen

2. Reduce our population to sustainable numbers (by eliminating the driver of the population explosion, i.e. fossil energy) – maybe also not gonna happen

Edit: What (do I think) will happen? We’ll continue as we are now as hundreds of billions of animals are tortured until our civilization collapses. This will happen because we were all brought up under a state and told that defending ourselves, our communities, our animals, is wrong and illegal.

These problems are not all the fault of either the producers or consumers, we’re both part of a fucked up cycle within an exploitative economic system and influence each other.

It doesn’t make any more sense for the consumer to wash their hands of all blame and consume without concern and push all the blame on the producer than it does to say it’s all about our “carbon footprint”.