There is no we. You can talk about what you accept or dont accept for yourself. Not for anyone else unless you take responsibility for their life if something bad happens. And currently when some unintended side effect happens or quality of life degenates guess what the health care system does? Just gives you more bills and asks you to talk to their lawyers.
Its very easy to talk about "we" have to do this and that. But the test is always who takes responsibility after things dont go the way they think.
Dementia is a terrible way to go, both for the people who get it and for their loved ones who are with them.
One day, my grandmother forgot English when my uncle was visiting and kept speaking in her native tongue and got so mad because nobody understood her.
That was one of the few amusing anecdotes from get decline. The rest are just depressing.
Watching your father cry because he went to the hardware store and couldn't remember how to get home and had to ask an employee to call his family for him, for example, was particularly tough.
You know why that happens? Because the health care system slows natural decay rate of some subsystems (via pills/surgeries etc) while having nothing to offer for other subsystems. So rather than all subsystems decaying together we produce this mismatched state.
You can't really blame the healthcare system for this. Alzheimer's and Dementia existed before modern medicine. The reality is that many fit, active, and otherwise healthy people will hit their 60s and 70s and will experience cognitive decline and Alzheimer's.
They hit their 60s and 70s because the health care system is good at fixing certain physical issues not bugs accumulating in the brain. The brain just like your OS cant just keep getting patched forever. So currently people just keep patching older wearing out hardware without any software upgrades available.
That would happen even if there was no medicine at all. It's not like in the natural world disease and dying is smooth. Individual systems fall apart and then the rest of the organism dies slowly or quickly.
Two loaves of bread off the same line are perfect substitutes for each other, and compete to be sold.
Lines of code within the same code base aren't competing to be sold. They either complement each other by adding new features, making the actual product sold more valuable, or one replaces another to make a feature more desirable- look better, work faster, etc.
The market grows if you add new features- your bread now doubles as a floatation device- or you introduce a new line of bread with nuts and berries.
So, the business has to decide- does it fire some workers and pocket the difference until someone else undercuts them, or does it keep the workers and grow the market it can sell to faster?
Adding new features doesn't necessarily grow the market. Your bread with nuts and berries competes with the regular bread for the customer's money. Other things also compete for the same money, such as medical, daycare, schooling etc. So increasing features won't necessarily grow the market because the market. Even in an optimistic scenario, those features only have a probability of increasing revenue, it's not certain.
OTOH, if you fire those workers, it is a certainty that your bakery gets more cash. You can then use that cash to reward your shareholders (a category that conveniently includes you) via buybacks or dividends.
Read the comment I replied to to see where the bread came from.
But on your point (which seems to hinge on wish thinking), this infinity of new features you propose for every product still needs those new markets you take for granted to justify their inclusion in the product. However cornering a new market isn't as straightforward as deploying a new feature - we all wish it was. The tech that makes it trivial for one firm to develop these features, makes it trivial for everyone else to build them. This means any new market will be immediately saturated.
Even if the leap of finding new markets was as easy as you think, you still need to explain why this hypothetical company would keep paying millions in avoidable salaries. Because whatever jobs you assign to AI, it won't be any less available to do the work of the human labor.
I remember interviewing someone who got hired by Facebook, sat around for a few weeks for a team to open up while they went through onboarding / Junior training, then was let go.
COVID did weird things to the industry, that's for sure.
Before Musk made it cool to mass layoff, there was a genuine belief inside of Facebook/Meta that great engineers were extremely hard to find or hold onto and if they weren't on the payroll at Meta, they would go somewhere else.
There was always a "clock" for junior engineers to prove they could handle the high pressure and high intensity work, and as long as they were meeting the bar, they were safe.
They called on-boarding, "Bootcamp", and was for every engineer, junior to staff, to learn the process and tooling. Engineers were supposed to be empowered to take on whatever task they wanted, without pre-existing team boundaries if it meant they were able to prove their contributions genuinely improved the product in meaningful ways. So, come in, learn the culture, learn the tooling, meet others, and then at some point, pick your home team. Your home team was flexible, and you were able to spend weeks deciding, and even if you selected one, you could always change, no pressure. Happy engineers were seen as the secret sauce of the company's success.
I remember that summer, vividly. They told the folks in Bootcamp, pick your home team by the end of the week, or you will be stuck in Bootcamp purgatory. At the same time they removed head count from teams, ours went down to a single one. A new-grad, who had literally just arrived that Monday, picked our team on Tuesday, and then had to watch as most of their fellow Bootcamp mates got left behind.
People wondered what would happen to them for weeks, and then, just like that, the massive layoff sent them all home. It was shitty because from where I sat, it was basically a slot machine. Anyone of the folks in Bootcamp were just as capable, but we had one seat, and someone just asked for it first.
I seem to hear often that Meta is perhaps the most egregious offender of "hire to fire". Seems really wasteful. But man, they pay their employees a lot.
Depending on the tree, freshly cut wood can have anywhere from 1:3 to 2:1 ratio of water to actual wood fiber.
So, unless we want to remove a massive amount of fresh water from the ecosystem, we also need to invest energy in drying out the wood well below natural humidity levels (transport to a desert maybe?) on top of electrifying what is currently a diesel and gas heavy industry (cutting and transporting logs with heavy machinery).
There's definitely lower hanging fruit for getting C02 out of the cycle.
Dumping wet wood--even very, very wet wood in a lake and sinking it to the bottom does not "remove a massive amount of fresh water from the ecosystem". It does not remove any fresh water from the ecosystem.
Sinking wood into a lake won't remove the carbon unless you have a very deep lake, and you'd need many, many of them to have any impact on the CO2 levels whatsoever. The scale of wood that would need to be harvested is far beyond dropping some logs in a lake.
They need to go into a deep enough pit where the methane produced from anerobic breakdown won't reach the atmosphere.
The conditions that created the lignite coal and peat simply aren't that easily reproducible, especially with large volume of wood (rather than ferns over thousands and millions of years).
So sink them in the ocean. Or better, burn off the hydrogen and use the energy to dry the wood, leaving the bulk of the carbon, and then mix that in with the soil.
Recreating the lignite era process could be as easy as genetically engineering an alternative,presently indigestable version of lignin.
But my point is that the claim above that sequestering wet wood will somehow take meaningful quantities of water (fresh or otherwise) out of the ecosystem is just plain silly.
> Recreating the lignite era process could be as easy as genetically engineering an alternative,presently indigestable version of lignin.
Ah yes, so easy. Why on earth have we been treating wood with chemicals to prevent rot in our structures when we could have just engineered them to not rot all along?
"Easy" is relative. If the comparison is completely abandoning fossil fuels, launching continent sized parasols into space, running a significant fraction of the atmosphere through a magic filter, etc. the bar is quite different than your moved-goalposts of "compared to spraying something on some fraction of our lumber".
You can make charcoal, you even get a little bit of energy out of it or can use the wood gas as chemical feedstock. It’s still completely impractical to scale to the gigatons we’d need to sequester.
People who are vegetarians are already engaging in a disciplined diet, so they are more likely to eat a restricted calorie diet as well.
Add enough ranch sauce, cheese, oil, refined sugars and carbs to your meals and you'll be just as overweight as someone who does that and has steak too.
There's an oversimplified assumption here that the plants will be less nutritious, and so people will eat more calories to make up for the deficit.
I suspect the presence of protein, fats and sugars influence the hormone production regulating appetite far more than these changes account for. I would expect the same health issues to be affecting other animal species in just as drastic a measure as humans if it were true, and also that global obesity happened at a more uniform pace rather than coinciding with the introduction of modern western eating habits and lifestyles.
More specifically, yes, protein content decreases with rising CO2 levels. Maybe not enough to cause obesity on its own, but enough to be a compounding factor. Especially when your staple is, say, rice -- which is what the paper linked above looks at.
The assumption is not the variation in the nutrient counts, but in the link to obesity.
The rise in obesity has much stronger correlating factors than CO2 levels- diet and sedentary lifestyle being far stronger.
This is especially obvious when looking at the cited study:
> The new study evaluated 18 types of commonly grown rice to see how they would respond to elevated levels of carbon dioxide. In the experiments, the researchers increased ambient carbon dioxide levels to concentrations between 568 and 590 parts per million. Currently, atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations hover around 410 ppm—but at the rate they’re currently rising, they could reach the high levels used in the study by the end of the century, if action isn’t taken to curb them.
The study examines the behavior at levels of C02 we don't currently have. The decline in nutrients has, thus far, been too small to have the impact on obesity we've already observed.
In the last sixty years, there has been an alarming decline in food quality and a decrease in a wide variety of nutritionally essential minerals and nutraceutical compounds in imperative fruits, vegetables, and food crops. The potential causes behind the decline in the nutritional quality of foods have been identified worldwide as chaotic mineral nutrient application, the preference for less nutritious cultivars/crops, the use of high-yielding varieties, and agronomic issues associated with a shift from natural farming to chemical farming. Likewise, the rise in atmospheric or synthetically elevated carbon dioxide could contribute to the extensive reductions in the nutritional quality of fruits, vegetables, and food crops.
The decline in nutrients isn't limited to rice and/or CO2 levels but spread across almost all varieties of fruit, vegetables and food crops with margins as high as 80% dilution and causes from chemical/genetical agriculture to rising CO2 levels.
As someone who has been pressured to take a book by random (mostly religious) people on a college campus, I wouldn't put the blame entirely on the person taking it.
If you choose to accept a book because you are too uncomfortable to say the word "no" then you should accept that it is your responsibility to dispose of the book appropriately.
Don't blame other people for your own bad behavior.
I've had linux on every laptop I've owned for years, and I haven't really had a problem with any of them running linux, except for display port support on a dell xps.
Aside from that one dell laptop, though, I generally avoid HP and dell entirely, so perhaps that's why.
Weird. I must have uncommonly good fortune, as I don't think I've had Wi-Fi or sound issues for longer than that. I remember when I first tried out swaywm and having some sound issues because I also started moving to pipewore from pulseaudio, but nothing from an out of the box install of a decent distro.
Death is inevitable, but that doesn't mean we need to accept that all the things that could kill us are also inevitable.
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