Comment on AI's Future Hangs in the Balance With California Law
5C5C5C@programming.dev 4 months agoI never suggested these problems are impossible to solve, but you haven’t solved them in your post because you haven’t laid out how to overcome the political and economic resistance to implementing any of this, and that’s where the biggest challenge is.
Although I think it’s naive to believe that nuclear power and renewable energy can allow us to keep consuming energy recklessly. Renewable energy technology still puts a significant strain on the environment, in terms of mining rare-earth elements, pollution produced during manufacturing, and material waste from devices that have reached end of life. Nuclear energy is rife with controversy… I used to be firmly in support of it, but I’ve grown skeptical, largely because of the ecological damage from the mining and construction processes, and we don’t have a clear story of what end of life looks like for a nuclear power plant. A plant can only be expected to operate for 40-60 years at which point it needs to be demolished and rebuilt, repeating the massive costs of material waste and construction all over again.
At the end of the day the only way for humanity to survive is for everyone to be reducing their consumption, but I honestly the think the vast majority of people today would rather die and take everyone else down with them than accept more responsible consumption habits.
afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world 4 months ago
That isn’t my job.
Misn showing me where I said that? Cause I am pretty freaken sure I mentioned a carbon tax and incentives for companies to generate their own power.
More tech. Let me know when you have an actual challenge.
So are vaccines.
Are you being serious right now? I am in infrastructure and 40 years is well beyond the scope of anything I build. Get me a freaken Bible and I will swear on it, your waste system in your area can never ever ever last 4 decades. They are constantly having to rip it all apart and rebuild. 11 years is what I typically hope for. Find me a wet well that is 4 decades old, find me a pump, find me a screw conveyor, find me a metering pump, find me a shredder, find me the UPS/generator, find me a DCS, that lasts 40 years. I am pretty tempted to share your comment with the office tomorrow, so we can have a good laugh at it.
Now you compare that to nuclear. Where everything is overbuilt everything is accounted for. No one improvises. Stuff in nuclear plants outlasts everything else. I have worked on very non-critical systems for nuclear plants and had to follow the strictest rules of my career. It takes a certain level of insanity to specify what type of tape should be used on a bundle of wires.
Guys at nuclear plants are freaken artisans, unionized, paid the highest in the industry for a reason.
Got to love this site sometimes. No where else can I hear people arguing against highly trained people getting paid very well being evil and instead being told that everything was so freaken perfect during the dark ages.
5C5C5C@programming.dev 4 months ago
So then you didn’t “solve” the impossible problems.
I hope you and your colleagues have a good laugh about how the work you do is contributing to the march towards the end of human civilization as we know it.
afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world 4 months ago
I did. Let me know which part was confusing to you. Unless of course you want to choose to, yet again, latch on to one sentence as a gotcha.
Is that what we are doing? I thought I built recycling systems, sanitation systems, and pumping systems. I wasn’t aware that helping make sure we don’t die in our own feces+garbage and providing fresh water was going to be the downfall of civilization. Damn here I am thinking that this is one of the most important parts of civilization. Well I don’t want to cause civilization to end. Tell you what, why not be the change you want to see in the world and stop flushing your toilet, stop using tap water, stop recycling anything, and don’t set your garbage out.
5C5C5C@programming.dev 4 months ago
The part where you left out any viable path for any of the hypothetical solutions to be realized 🤷♂️ You of all people should know that a blueprint is worthless if there’s no process available to build what it describes.
I mean yeah, I do agree that sanitation and water works are the crowning achievement of human civilization to this very day. But I’ve gotta say it doesn’t inspire confidence if the people running those systems think that concerns about sustainability are something to have a group chuckle about.
Just because the work you do is important doesn’t mean it’s beyond the scrutiny of ecological sustainability. All your good work won’t amount to much in the long run if we can’t find a path to reducing consumption and prolonging the viability of these systems. We don’t have infinite resources, and our ability to recycle is nowhere near what it needs to be up keep up with economic demand.
My partner and I are unironically taking the time to research subsistence farming and how to maintain very basic personal water collection and waste removal/reuse systems. We’re also learning about perma-computing so that hopefully we can preserve some of the knowledge that humans have accumulated into the future.
We see it as a foregone conclusion that human civilization as we know it will entirely collapse, probably sooner than anyone cares to admit, so we’re making contingency plans. People with your dismissive attitude are a big part of why we see it as a forgone conclusion. Because as far as we can tell you’re in the 95%+ majority of people on this planet, which means hardly anyone is putting effort into solving these existential problems that we’re facing. Problems which you have offered no viable solution to, despite your insistence otherwise.