Just an aside, but has anyone had the misfortune to have a quick look at the comments over on r/canada or cbc.ca around these articles? The amount of dumb (i.e. simplistic, low information), seething hatred for basically everything, is overwhelming. I can't tell if this is all bots, or if something weird is coming out of the woodwork, but it seems like we've passed some tipping point and I'm starting to feel alarmed at where we are headed. I get this is super embarrassing, but no serious person could think there was malicious intent in this Parliament incident. Fuck-ups and carelessness happen, the guy resigned, time to move on and focus on real issues.

Memento mori.

I haven't read the author's book, but I think her position in the article still misses the mark and is naively dangerous, having us all just look at the flowers and embrace market solutions while we collapse the biosphere at stunning pace.

Honestly I'm not seeing any 'solutions' that are on a timeline relevant to the crisis. But I think any first step will have us coming to terms with climate change not being the problem, but a symptom of our economic system and our relationship to the environment. We're going to have to reorient away from growth, because that growth is literally consuming the biophysical basis of our own existence.

Large-scale solutions aside, I think we're going to start seeing a growing desire in people to somehow 'exit' this system. I know I feel it in myself, deep in my bones, and it pisses me off to no end that I'm forced into destructive behavior because of the system I'm trapped in. All this waste, plastic and destruction just to exist each day, and I'm not even having a good time! If anyone has made some progress in this area I would love to hear about it. I imagine it must start with some rejection of what the market 'values', choosing not to participate in this whole game that is making us miserable, and somehow trade material wealth for greater awareness and connection to our humanity. If Elon and Jeff want it all, they can fucking have it, I just want out of this nightmare and to find peace with nature somehow.

We will all need to come to terms with the scope and scale of our predicament - climate change is not 'the' problem, it is one facet of the overall collapse of the biosphere that we are causing (see: planetary boundaries). Guaranteeing some livable future for our children will require revolutionary change in our economic systems and our relationship with the environment. Real mitigation will involve: reserving our remaining carbon budget for critical activities (heating our houses, food transport, etc), significant build-out of resilient systems (local sustainable/regenerative agriculture), and preparing for a less complex economy with much lower energy use. We can do this in a controlled way over the next few decades, or in a chaotic way when we are left with no other options. It doesn't seem like the public is ready or willing to have these conversations yet.

The number is kind of misleading. There's about $1-2T of direct subsidies, with the remainder being uncharged externalities (remediating environmental damage, etc) that's paid for later with public funds. I'm not sure how they come up with those numbers, but if they really wanted to count externalities, the number should be orders of magnitude higher, like what's the cost of actually removing that fucking carbon from the atmosphere, how do you price the inevitable mass starvation and collapse of industrial civilization, etc.

Looks like we'll still be doing TPS reports, right up until the very end of industrial civilization.

It will also have a very low attention span and not know anything of substance.

There may be an opportunity here for Lemmy to help solve part of the distributed blob problem, that is, what are the incentives for people to contribute bandwidth/storage? Instead of the dodgy crypto-reward schemes we see come up, it could just be an extension to the motivations already driving why people set up Lemmy instances or contribute hours to moderate communities.

Some brain-droppings:

• I have a few TB that I would be willing to contribute if I knew how, if it wasn't very time consuming, and if I was comfortable with what I was supporting.
• I don't really want to serve videos unrelated to my personal interests or that I feel are low value, but I would be happy to serve content that is important to the communities that I am part of.
• Lemmy can be a proxy for automatically deciding what content is worth storing/serving for people contributing resources. Blob is posted to this community I'm supporting -> I'll seed that. The post it belongs to has low interest or gets downvoted -> maybe that blob doesn't need to stay around for that long.
• All the complexity of the blob swarm underlying a community really should be hidden from the clients. If it's any more difficult than integrating an imgur-like service it'll never be implemented.
• This could (should?) be implemented outside of Lemmy core.

This is interesting, I've never considered torrents for this exact case before. Has anyone done any groundwork to figure out what this would look like from a systems level? I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around the big picture - where the seeders come from, what are the incentives to keep certain kinds of data resilient, how to keep complexity away from the clients, etc.

In my experience it's okay, but not amazing and slowly getting worse year after year for various reasons. Generally speaking if you have a life-threatening issue (heart failure, cancer, etc), you are taken care of as well as anyone could reasonably expect. But for anything else it can take forever to see a specialist and it's easy to get lost in the system that always seems to be running in capacity crisis mode. There are other countries that do a better job with the single-payer model, mostly those without provincial fiefdoms that insist on doing everything themselves and reinventing all the wheels for political reasons.

Ah, I posted above before I read your reply which basically said the same thing. I think this is a really cool idea (but probably doesn't need blockchain to work).

This sounds interesting. I'm wondering if you could go into any more detail about what you were trying to do with your opening, and what needs you are seeing out there around storage specifically. I have a small software company and I've been under the impression that storage is pretty much taken care of at all levels by the existing commodity services, but maybe I'm just talking to the wrong people or missing something important. Thanks.

Very detailed and helpful, thanks.

Great video, thanks for posting it.

I find 'metacrisis' more descriptive and satisfying for the reasons Daniel talked about in the video - that it's not just the many crises we face, but the underlying systems that are creating the crises (ie, Moloch). Also, it doesn't matter if AI is not effective at staving off disaster, as long as it creates value for the market it will be deployed with mind-boggling scale and resource use even as the world burns.

This, my friend, is an overly cynical take. You can apply it to your life in any way that serves you. You can imagine it as a good reminder to live life to the fullest, to not let your ego run away from reality, or to give perspective on all the little things we worry about when we consider how many weeks we have left on this planet.

Fall of Civilizations

I haven't seen this mentioned yet, but it's incomparably good (if stories about past civilizations is your thing).

Their greenwashed climate change videos really exposed them as a corporate propaganda outlet. I can't watch them anymore.

Okay, but this money basically IS going to people that need it, by way of affordable fuel prices. Ever wonder why fuel is so cheap in places like Egypt? It's because the government is subsidizing the cost and picking up a lot of the tab. What happens when people can no longer afford to get around, and food prices skyrocket because transportation is so expensive? Leaders are mostly concerned with keeping their heads attached to their bodies and they'll do anything to keep the economy growing, even if it destroys the environment and explodes the public debt. It's why climate change is such a gnarly problem, it's not just that there's a bunch of corrupt evil people preventing progress, our whole economic system needs to be overturned.

For a livable future, we're going to have to massively reduce our energy usage (like, yesterday) and figure out how to survive in a degrowth scenario, while we try to replace the entirety of our infrastructure and build out resilient systems, all without access to credit. Fun times ahead.

What do you think he's getting wrong about our predicament? AI wasn't really a focus in this talk, just showing how we knowingly develop dangerous tools and act against our collective interests because of our system of incentives and multipolar traps.