What's not safe about it? The truck drives itself, and on day one Tesla autopilot will have already statistically proven itself as a far safer driver than a human.
I would do this in a heartbeat. Life is too short to believe that we seriously need to spend 5/7 days working for our entire adult life, no matter the type of labor or how much you enjoy it. If you can live comfortably with 20% less income, do it. Money ain't everything.
I don't know how to feel about that subreddit. On one hand, they discuss the daunting reality of climate change in a way you don't see in many other corners of the internet (besides HN). On the other hand, reading it is definitely not good for one's mental health and they often don't propose any solutions, and generally the mood is a very "we lost, the game is over" attitude. That's not going to help anyone, even if we are too late to stop a large amount of warming.
Oh, we've certainly lost as a society, but we'll likely survive as a species for a few hundred or thousand years, albeit at vastly reduced population levels. We're scrappy as a species.
We kicked in a climate shift that's triggering an unstoppable mass-extinction event that'll wipe out 99.9% of all species. Historically, recovery from mass extinction events like these take 50 million years for a new ecosystem to develop. We might survive through that, but it's longer than we've even existed as a species so we'll be nothing like what we are now.
I was a Gen X'r. My 9-year-old has started saying that he's Generation Omega - something he picked up from youtube - He believes that he's a member of the last generation (and I think I concur... things will get bad enough that by 2030 or 2040, people won't want to have kids because the death of the ecosystem and civilization will be a lot more obvious and something that impacts their daily life)
In anticipation of this, I moved to a region of Upstate New York that prediction models indicate will handle the climate impacts a little more gracefully. The goal is to build a self-sufficient homestead with longevity and extremes in mind.
Humanity cannot survive as a species like that though. We really need to start thinking of how to build town-sized or city-sized "arcology" habitats while we still have the resources and energy to do so.
Arcologies should be viewed as a backup plan to trying to save the planet. A sort of civilization time-capsule. If we fail to save our ecosystem and climate, then arcologies could provide a shelter for a few million people for a few thousand years while we figure out what to do next (engineering our biology to handle the environmental changes? terraforming? going off planet? expanding underground? engineering a new ecosystem?).
Sadly, arcologies are too expensive and would take so long to build that they're politically untenable with governments that either don't believe in climate change, or change every 4 years. Norway could probably do it with 25% of their Sovereign Wealth Fund.
I know it's fatalistic, but I honestly only see our chance of survival at this point is if someone cracks inexpensive and easy fusion power. With that, we could power a lot of carbon sequestration concepts that are just currently impractical. That, or a benevolent AI that takes over and forces a lot of uncomfortable changes to our society "for our own good"
I stop by that subreddit every few months and it is frustrating that the only places people seem honest with themselves about the real impact of this is also filled with fatalism. Maybe they're right.
Even so, it's still worth _trying_ to fix it, or barring that, to try to save as many billions from a horrible death as possible.
The approach taken by Dark Mountain is a little better I think - they don't focus on false hopes, but a literary response to the catastrophe (apocalypse might be a better word) on the horizon and how to deal with it on a human level.
We're all doomed, after all, by dint of our mortality (or our sun's, barring that). Moments of joy can still be had.
Yeah, it's important for pessimists and pessimistic realists to have a place to talk about these things without the ever-pervasive prescription to hopium that seems to be tacked onto the end of every.single.article.
There can be an acceptance that things are too far gone for most people to impact positively, and that many people have consigned themselves to this. IMO as long as they aren't going out into public and trying to attack environmentalists who are trying to make changes, it's a good and healthy thing for people to have a community of like-minded individuals to talk with.
You can be certain the people on that sub throw plastic forks into their recycling for someone else to “sort”, drive so inefficiently their foot might as well always be on the brakes, order things from Amazon Prime they could get locally, spray pesticides and fertilizers on their lawn so they’ll have greener grass than their neighbors, make posts supporting climate change summits where everyone shows up in private jets....
Basically I’ve found extremely few people who make climate change their primary issue - walk the walk. They’ll be the first to tell you it’s tankers shipping all over the world of meat production that is the issue - while driving their aluminum and lithium Tesla (both shipped around the world for processing/production) to the store to get a New York steak for dinner and plugging in to their house which is powered by coal. There is no shortage of hypocrisy in this topic but I find it most ironic from the doom and gloomers of course.
Expertrec is not a Google Alternative and no where closer to saving the world like ecosia, but it helps site owners to save their users from forced ads by providing an alternative to google site search.
get a reverse osmosis system. Or buy RO filtered water from the local grocery store by the 3 or 5 gallon jug.
Edited to add: our household does this. we live in a rented townhouse, so we're unable to add our own plumbing or electrical stuff. Yes, it's an expense to buy our own drinking/cooking water, but we just don't trust city water. If you live in a nice area with a diligent water authority, that's fine, but those types of places are a vanishing minority in the USA nowadays.
Yes. I assume they're referencing the chemical spill several years ago, and the water has tested clean consistently since.
I've never heard of other issues with the water quality in Charleston (assuming it's city water and not straight from the Kanawha), and I consider it some of the better-tasting municipal water in the Mid-Atlantic region.
Maybe? The annual water quality tests for chemical contamination look reasonable.
But a quick check of boil water orders (i.e. bacterial infestations) suggests that Massachusetts needs five or six a year, and West Virginia needs five or six a week. That could be sampling bias.
