Also powerplants are quite (relatively) efficient in terms of heat-to-energy output, often >50% afair. So a 1GW power plant will generate something like 2GW of heat (or less), not 30GW.
Well then... make a matrix of such fuse-containers? (say every 20cm or whatever)
I guess manufacturing such a matrix would be pretty expensive though, you'd need to carefully automate its production I think. It would also definitely interfere with flow of fluid in the tank.
I was thinking multiple long skinny tubes with etchings that make them more likely to split lengthwise. Maybe with a spring loaded/powered agitator so when the tube breaks there's some mechanical flinging/mixing of the inner chemical.
But I'm not a chemical processes engineer, so I don't know how much mixing is needed. But the existing emergency plan was to inject the the chemical through a single valve, so it seems like the dispersion and mixing requirements in this case seems to be low.
I am imagining some sort of regulations that enforce the creation and installation of appropriate safety systems upon all similar sites in the affected jurisdiction.
And a standard to prevent similar danger elsewhere in the world.
Or is that too fantastic? Perhaps I should stick with the distopian fiction I so love. Why haven't flying cars taken off yet?
No. This doomer position isn't helpful at all. All reductions we can get will severely reduce suffering and mass migrations, and prevent an enormous amount of biodiversity loss. We're losing species left and right every day too.
From what I know it seems we're headed to about +3C (mean temperature rise above preindustrial). It's a pretty dire scenario. But it's far, far from "too little too late". It seems probably large parts of Earth will become difficult to inhabit (like e.g. Phoenix AZ is today) without things like AC, etc.. But that's very far from an extinction scenario or total doom.
Every little bit we don't emit today will prevent probably several decades up to a century of atmospheric warming before it's extremely costly to remove from the atmosphere back into some reservoir.
Reminder that some fossil fuel companies quite enjoy narratives of total doom and change being pointless.
Doomer position? You are aware that the climate catastrophe is a known fact since decades? People in the 70s knew about it, and what did humanity do about it? Spreading propaganda about how earth always had hot and cold periods. It's a narrative many still support today. Even +3C is a massive change resulting in many many catastrophes. As I wrote, we will witness water wars and mass migrations. You can call it a doomer position, I call it reality.
That there will be consequences either way isn't up for debate, I think you lot both agree on that.
The issue that is being taken is about "too little too late", which is being interpreted as "since even in the best case scenario we're going to have dramatic consequences, any action is going to be fruitless", the counterpoint being that the new best case scenario (which is not a good one because it is late to take action, and is mostly equivalent to what once was thought to be the worst case) is still much less worse than the new worst case one.
You're both correct. It's too late to stop dire effects like wars and global mass migration, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't do anything. It means we should start doing everything we can right now to prevent it from getting even worse.
I think there are many things people mean by "capitalism". I think a system where people buy and trade stuff, getting income from their job is basically fine and almost a given.
Some people mean "capitalism" to mean: a state should be minimal, everybody should be doing everything in their power to seek profits and become maximally rich, becoming rich is simultaneously the utmost absolute charity you could do, and also the utmost personal happiness such that you shouldn't lift a finger for anyone else (of course, unless to particularly impacts yourself). That's the corrosive part I think. I think hypercapitalism (or money is my God) might be a better name for this, or some other term.
There are a number of associated malaises: along with believing money is the ultimate measure or virtue, come the belief that poor people are worthless (or worth much less), that being "productive" (generating profit or income) is the most important thing in life, that consumption of goods and services (i.e. things you buy with money) give you ultimate happiness (you just have to pick the 'right things' to buy), that any technological development is always perfectly good and can do no harm because it increases productivity, and that civil participation is unnecessary because the market sorts everything out. To name a few.
I agree that if profits are always put about everything else, disaster for any society is essentially guaranteed. (I'll leave the proof as an exercise to the reader)
Irrespective of anything else, I think libertarians of any kind have to contend with that Corporations can be extremely powerful entities that can be just as bad as governments. At the very least, setting their sights on governments alone seems terribly inconsistent and incorrect. In no small part because megacorps can yield governments in their favor, and by the point they're extremely powerful megacorps, the libertarian calls against regulation (yielded by megacorps against interests of the population) tend to fail.
But it's not just regulation megacorps can use, the most frequent is just various forms of capturing and dominating a market, I guess.
For example, Google is on the process of deciding or severely restricting independent developers on Android. I think by reasonable interpretation, user freedom is being severely restricted. But most people have little recourse, it's either Android or iOS (and by now both are similarly bad in different ways). There are some alternative OSes and devices, but there's a significant chance you may rely on some real world service that needs one of the two major ones.
Without trying to overgeneralize everything, in this particular example I don't see how things could change without regulation.
(and, if you will, in that case you can generalize to the implication that regulation isn't necessarily always bad)
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I think the lesson to take isn't that the cyberlibertarians were 100% wrong and we need maximum government control and surveillance over the internet. The world tends to be complex and most simple stories we come up with (which are the ones that tend to sound good on our ears and be most comfortable) tend to be wrong in various ways. The world demands, at least, flexibility from ourselves. Sure, be inspired by one idea or manifesto or another, but don't follow it blindly always.
A relative freedom of communication and widespread access to information arguably is pretty good for civilization. When you can talk and relate to people from allover, the justification for war seem increasingly flimsy. But various forms of regulation preventing single megacorps from dominating the global internet (or simply local wired internet access in your region), can be important. Maybe we need to protect more discourse against bad actors and the incoming flood of LLM-generated, possibly propaganda-fed content. Keep an open mind. Whatever decisions we make we can walk back and change course.
The fundamental principle isn't this or that ideological current, but that people are living good lives. Happy, in peace, full of awesome possibilities. As someone wiser has once said, remember your humanity and forget the rest! :)
It makes sense when you understand the origins, "libertarian" as a phrase was coopted from socialist-libertarians (now called anarchists), and is full of contradictions and hypocrises, mainly the one you mentioned about private property (in the economic sense of the term), controlling economic organizations as a dictator and owning their collective output as property. Not to mention this type of property is pretty anti-social can only exist with a massive bureaucracy and violence apparatus (courts and cops) which also contradicts their ideology.
I mean, their foundational philosophy is Ayn Rand, a fiction writer? The whole right-libertarian ideology is a joke compared to the intellectual rigor of anarchist theorists like Kropotkin, Bakunin, Malatesta, etc.
Especially in a world where the entire global economy is controlled by capitalists, it looks silly and just ends up affirming capitalist rule, like the OP has pointed out.
> I mean, their foundational philosophy is Ayn Rand, a fiction writer? The whole right-libertarian ideology is a joke compared to the intellectual rigor of anarchist theorists like Kropotkin, Bakunin, Malatesta, etc.
Ayn Rand is not consensus within libertarian circles.
From the top if my head on the libertarian camp I think of Rothbard, Hayek, Mises, Menger, Von Bawerk who debunked Marx economic policies. Also arguably Kant and Adam Smith and many others who influenced it.
My guess is that since you know Bakunin and these others there might be a chance you are deep into the other extreme. I think it's okay to disagree but your comparison shows you probably need to do better research before putting things together to avoid the "our blessed homeland, their barbarous wastes" situation.
Most right-libertarians will point to Ayn Rand as their philosophical north star. It's the only "philosopher" name mentioned in the OP. It's comical and unserious.
Well, as a secondary consequence maybe, but then you could not set your kitchen on fire and still renovate it. Supposedly the first step you think of when renovating your kitchen isn't "Let me set my house on fire!"?
1) Sometimes a incident is the best way to get a project done. Working in FAANG I've seen a project get done in 1 day during an outage that was projected to take MONTHS during normal business.
2) Sometimes that renovation would never happen due to reasons. Sometimes you need some kindle to start the fire [pun intended].
If the user must click through a tons of disclaimers (including locked 60-second timeouts with huge WARNING: SCAM ALERT or something) in something buried in settings to get scammed, I think the few edge cases may be worth the tradeoff of being able to install apks.
Remember there is already malware-scanning by default (by Google play), apps need to ask for permissions, they generally can't read other app data or control say banking apps, modify system data (at all), etc..
The threat vectors seem already restricted. I haven't met anyone which has fallen to actual Android malware ever (that I can remember), but I can remember several close family members which were victims of simpler social engineering scams (mostly unsuccessfully) recently.
I agree. Although in this specific point, I would say we always had depletion (since the most basic microorganisms, after all otherwise life would replicate until it faces depletion limits; all the way to our close primate relatives and throughout human history; food depletes locally which drives competition), but rarely faced degradation or permanent depletion.
I'd say degradation involves a lasting depletion or lasting damage (potentially permanent until restoration efforts happen) to the environment's output and ability to support life. Permanent depletion is what can happen to e.g. shallow mines and fossil fuel deposits.
I think I'd agree the legal system was created mostly for the former, depletion, and only recently had to contend with degradation and permanent depletion. I feel like we still struggle collectively to coming to gripes with permanent depletion.
Permanent depletion is also usually the result of shortsightedness or a competition gone awry. Famous case where nobody wants the ultimate results but people may selfishly march towards it (tragedy of the commons).
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