That needs to be weighed against the likelihood of a compromise (probably low), and the cost of such a compromise (probably quite a bit higher than $15k).
I think the second half of your comment argues against the first.
You're right that people are unwilling to make the basic changes that are obviously needed. But we only know precisely that those changes would work to fight against climate change because we are able to say with certainty that those behaviors are contributing factors.
Any suggested actions have to have some level of scientific credibility to be taken seriously. Without it, they are easily dismissed by claiming that the planet is too complex to know if our actions will make a difference.
That, purely by coincidence, I'm sure, has been the exact argument used against making any changes, and against the fact that warming was happening in the first place, and against tobaccos cancer risk, and any other public policy proposal that goes against the interest of those profiting from the status quo.
I'm actually arguing the opposite. We don't know precisely that any of the suggested changes I listed would make a clear impact on climate change. My point is that, regardless of what happens with climate change, we could cut oil use with little to no impact on our daily lives.
We don't actually know the extent of impacts from either our oil use or potential cuts. We have modeling data that we extrapolate out, the issue I'm raising is that we get stuck in a loop of people debating whether the modeling data is accurate, complete, or predictive.
There are changes we can easily make without knowing those answers. If we can make simple changes that at a minimum wouldn't hurt the planet and almost certainly would help it, why don't we? My read is that we simply must not care. We don't need to buy as many things as we do, or to expert those costs overseas. We don't need to travel the world by plane. We don't need the latest iPhone made on the other side of the planet. We don't need LLMs. We do it because we like convenience and novelty more that we actually care about our impact on the planet. And we avoid implementing real solutions by first demanding that we have a complete understanding of the cause and blame.
If the "basic changes" are more extreme than the COVID lockdowns, which made the entire world miserable, brought unprecedented economic destruction we'll be dealing with forever, and which also didn't cool the planet at all despite massive decreases in CO2 emissions... no thanks.
I'll keep voting against anything that makes me poorer and more miserable.
I sincerely hope that we aren't at a point where most people's guiding principles are minimizing their own poorness or misery. Those should be a given and self interest is backed into us, but we're in for a world of hurt if those are the only deciding factors take into account.
Bullshit. Nobody can factually, concretely state that climate change will go a specific, certain way to cause a specific certain amount of misery over the next century. There are too many technological, social, economic, and extremely complex climate variables at play for that to be a concrete assertion.
This isn't to say that measures to reduce carbon emissions can't or shouldn't be taken, they can and they should, but with a mind towards exactly what you deride, preventing as many people as possible from falling into draconian economic and social misery. That at least is something we concretely know to be possible if governments adopt the wrong control measures in a heavy handed way. The pandemic showed it clearly and concretely in many forms.
We're not talking here about the impending, concrete impact of a large asteroid, or a super volcano eruption that's definitely imminent, where mass economic sacrifice for the sake of saving humanity would be understandable. Climate change is, despite all the political fanfare, something that has too many variables to clearly define as a cataclysm.
Given that, there is nothing selfish about wanting to avoid misery and "dying" for yourself and your children in the face of ambiguous predictions about future events. If you're so convinced that "some things are worth dying for", what stops you from applying your own advice instead of preaching sanctimoniously to others?
I think we may have a difference in degree when it comes to what we think may be coming. I don't expect the planet to burst into flames over night, but we have already done unimaginable damage to soil, water, and life on this planet. It can probably bounce back and maybe humans will even be here to see it, but in the nearer term I don't see it as a question of mitigating pain while the systems we have today continue to chug along.
I could very well be wrong, and if core systems don't break then I do understand the goal of just being less miserable today.
That and those that dominate the narrative around climate change are the ones who sabotaged nuclear power in the first place. We don't understand the problem/solution space enough so the most sensible is to invest in climate research and monitoring.
To what end? What will more data do when it's inevitably going to be incomplete and largely based on modeling?
We won't ever understand the problem space of the entire ecosystem well enough to make a complete solution. But there are easy things that can be done if we actually cared to, and we certainly don't need to keep piling on more things that almost certainly make things worse.
Sure, like stopping subsidies to fossil fuel industry but I don't think cutting CO2 emissions is easy as you paint. How would we do that in a short notice? Through government? I'm extremely pessimistic towards "solutions" that require bigger government or new taxes as politicians almost always follow perverse incentives and don't care about long term consequences. My government subsidizes the coal industry using taxpayer money while making it hard for citizens to generate their own clean energy through laws and taxes. Government isn't the savior.
> We won't ever understand the problem space of the entire ecosystem well enough to make a complete solution.
More data and better models does nothing to prevent the planet from warming but help us plan mitigation strategies ahead and give us more confidence towards the efficacy/consequences of interventions. Right now we clearly understand that the planet is warming and that we are somewhat close to a cascading failure but what else? I don't like the prospects of downing living standards to the stone age so we may delay global warming. This isn't a solution and is a big sacrifice.
If there is a potion of the population that is "sitting on the fence about climate change", it is highly unlikely that they "can be convinced by a clear and well founded explanation of what is happening"
Anybody capable of that, would either no longer be sitting on the fence, or are highly unlikely to be reading this article.
Also, the basic premise of your comment assumes that the effects on the monthly temperature can be cleanly broken down categorically into "fossil fuel related" and "El Nino related", which presupposes that a stronger and more frequent El Nino events are unrelated to the burning of fossil fuels.
The facts the human impact on climate change are overwhelming, both in their abundance and scope of impact. Pretending that they don't exist, or treating them as a tangential issue to be put aside so as to appeal to a skeptical and/or ignorant minority, serves no purpose other than to undercut the facts.
There are people who are "in principle" accepting climate change but skeptical about the urgency and magnitude of adaptation that is required. This includes critical segments of the business and political worlds who weigh any action against their vested interests. These people will never panic. But they may plot a "changing of stripes" strategy if the signals from experts and society are strong and persistent.
This is discussion is really about how the experts (and, subsequently, mass and social media) popularize the explanations of weather events and what effect this might have on various segments of the population.
> which presupposes that a stronger and more frequent El Nino events are unrelated to the burning of fossil fuels.
I didn't pressupose anything, I qualified my statement. In fact people posted various interesting recent pieces of research in the thread and I learned that there are both additional potential factors that may be currenty overlapping and that understanding of a potential climate change / El Nino link is still elusive.
But that is beside the point. Even if there was a known link it doesn't change my remark that better framing is required. You would simply condition on the dependence, show the growing El Nino "diversity" against the underlying trend and indicate how this may have created an outlier realization.
There's too much currently unknown for any honest person to speak with the confidence the other poster is and that makes many people (myself included) distrustful.
Or maybe they don't trust people like you, who can say things with so much confidence despite the scientific consensus not being _nearly_ as clear as you claim.
Because you can doesn't mean you have to, especially when you don't actually have any knowledge on the topic at hand. (And, as people have pointed out, this is both a weird and incorrect assumption, adding nothing to the discussion other than confusion.)
There's certainly no requirement to use that (it's literally a separate app from the DJIFly app you use the control the drone), and I do know as I fly a DJI mini drone.
What's worse is that I don't think it actually works how you've assumed. The drone has no internet connection itself, the software is instead pulling the files down over wifi, which is something the standard software supports if the drone is close enough. This is the "no need to export from your DJI device" - LightCut can presumably access the drone files directly. None of this requires uploading the videos to anywhere, and doing that wouldn't even make sense - these are large video files, people would notice their data plans being ravaged by multi-gig uploads every time they flew their drone.
As far as being condescending, I think that's less of a negative trait than offering unbacked "I don't know, but" comments which add no value to the discussion.
I did consider the value of my own comment at the time, but I think there is a big problem in tech discussion with people with no actual experience or relevant knowledge feeling that their off-the-cuff suppositions are as welcome and useful as meaningful input from people with direct experience, and highlighting this behaviour as negative and unwelcome is worth risking the inevitable backlash in response.
Yes, based on my experience with the device I can extrapolate how that software could work. What experience did you base your assertions on? Nothing at all? Right.
The DJI Mini Pro 3 works without Wifi and using the expensive controller, without a phone app, so the opportunities to upload captured data to China are very limited.
What a strange assumption to make. No it doesn't work like this at all. The video is saved to the SD card in the aircraft, which you then remove and insert it into your computer to download the files.
I avoided reading up on it too deeply, because it seemed to be much bigger than I was expecting, and I didn't believe they'd get something that big through congressional gridlock.
I basically assumed there were some poison pills baked in, and nothing much would come of it.
And weirdly, their whole 'hurry and make a clone of this popular app' industry may be uniquely suited to creating new ways to interface with developing AI tools
So the top spot goes to someone with less than 10% of the market? That makes sense why it didn't seem dominant even if it was the brand that sold the most. At my local grocery store, it is all craft beers and such, I don't think they sell Bud anything. Is this kind of beer more popular in the midwest and/or south?
I gotta think this says more about the types of grocery stores you go to more than anything. I live just outside of Seattle and any random Safeway or QFC (Kroger) is going to have all the generic big corpo American light beers in it. Something more upscale like Whole Foods, less likely.
Interesting, I do my shopping out of the Bothell QFC so that's my frame of reference. It must be a more Seattle proper thing. I guess Bothell is also nominally a college town so maybe it's just students looking for cheap, bad beer. I admit I can't remember the configuration of the beer section of the U Village QFC back in the day, although I know they had a seperate entrance for harder alcohol.
> I guess Bothell is also nominally a college town
I haven't lived in Bothell in more then 30 years (graduated from BHS in '93, this is way before UW Bothell opened up, so I went to UW Seattle instead), and...it was more working class. But I don't even remember a QFC being around anywhere, even in Mill Creek (oh, the Safeway at Thrasher's corner, near where I used to live, turned into an Indian grocery store...times change).
The QFC in U Village is much larger than the one we have in Ballard. It is a tiny QFC, so I guess they just need to prioritize. Wine and craft beer make money (they also have a separate hard liquor store, but I rarely see it open).
I just checked and they have bud light and other mass produced brands in a back corner of the store, just across from the main beer cabinet. So they have it, just not as visible as the higher margin craft beers (even Modelo and Corona are at the very end of the main cabinet).
