> My view is that climate change is a lost cause, so instead I'm focusing on adaptation to the new normal.
I hate this attitude. You may be doing everything possible as an individual to prevent further climate change, but the majority of people I hear spouting this attitude do not.
It's based on the premise that there will actually be some sort of "new normal" that is worth surviving for. The ongoing impact of our actions is indeterminable - we could end up with something so inconceivably bad that all your adaptation efforts are pointless, or that you simply cannot live a life of any value when compared to the early 21st century.
Also, it smacks of "F*ck you, I've got mine". You assume that the impact of climate change are survivable, apparent by the fact that you want to focus on adaptation, but this attitude ignores the fact that there are billions of other people on the planet. Maybe climate change can be survived by us in our situation with all our first world advantages, but there are millions, possibly billions, who don't have that choice.
Focus on adaptation for all you like, but please don't forget that prevention is greater than cure and that it's not too late.
Last time I checked we breezed past the symbolic point-of-no-return at 400 ppm CO2... so it kinda is too late. We can try some damage prevention if you feel like it.
Well, here is the thing- our cooperate overlords have created the perfect system to shirk regulations by shifting production to whoever is the most desperat.
My money is not on goverments or companys here. My money is on some plague drastically reducing the number of humans capable to produce carbon dioxide. It looks containable now, but contain something like Ebola with millions on the move and the UN-Institutions collapsing under this circumstances.
You can not enforce quarantine, if a whole country decides to walk.
It seems over negative as well. There are a couple of simple things that may help with CO2:
1) Exponential improvements with wind solar and batteries. They are all getting like 50% better / year. Project that and you can fix things
2) Re the confusion over different approaches, we have a solution and its called the market. Just have a global $50/ton tax/credit on emissions/sequestration. Politically hard but otherwise would likely fix rising CO2.
> I hate this attitude. You may be doing everything possible as an individual to prevent further climate change, but the majority of people I hear spouting this attitude do not.
I don't like it either, but I think it's intellectually honest.
I live a fairly low carbon life, probably in the bottom 20% for people in the US. My main contribution is probably from flying a few times a year, which I don't intend to maintain long term. I don't own a car, avoid eating meat, and generally try to use less power when I have the opportunity.
From the left I hear a lot about how climate change is a major issue, but I see few efforts being made to actually address the problem. I don't count planning, by the way. We need action now, and we're not seeing it. And I also don't count efforts to make other people change their lifestyles when those promoting those efforts won't change themselves. That reeks of hypocrisy.
> It's based on the premise that there will actually be some sort of "new normal" that is worth surviving for.
No, it's not. It's based on the premise that the expected return for my effort would be higher for adaptation than trying to convince others to change their habits, making new technology to "solve" climate change, etc. That's not to say that the situation will be good in either case, just that one is better than the other.
I have little to no control over what others do, but I can control my own situation. I fully recognize that others may suffer enormously, but as far as I can tell I have few options to change much of that.
In focusing on adaptation, by the way, I'm thinking about things like offering engineering solutions to our changing world. This is not necessarily geoengineering, which by large won't work best I can tell. It might be things like flood resistant buildings, for example. As a mechanical engineer, I can help design things that will help others.
> prevention is greater than cure
I agree completely.
> that it's not too late.
This is debatable. As far as I'm concerned, the climate will change independent of any efforts I make. Some analyses suggest we're already beyond the point of no return. Even if that's not true, as far as I can tell there's been no practically significant slowing of greenhouse gas emissions, just mostly talk. Talk is cheap.
I totally agree. I deleted my facebook about 5 years ago and I now find myself extremely isolated socially. Friends made the effort for a little while, but eventually I'm sure I was just forgotten by the more distant friends and my social circle has dwindled to almost nothing. This doesn't really bother me though, it's sort of a natural filter whereby "low value" relationships are weeded out.
Probably more significant is the impact of not being able to make new friends in the same way. The communities that surround my hobbies seem to be concentrated on facebook. When I make new friends at the face-to-face events the friendship doesn't transition to anything more significant because there's no followup connection on social media. This seems to be one of the modern ways that friendships are built - meet IRL, connect via social network and then always have a connection of some sort which allows the relationship to grow if nurtured. In my case I don't see or talk to these people until the next physical meetup and so I'm "out of sight, out of mind". It seems to me that other newcomers join the group IRL and on social media and are quickly integrated, but I'm just some guy that occasionally shows up.
I also deleted my account several years ago, and I've since made the conscious decision to let relationships fade if the only thing that would keep them alive were passive 'keeping up' via Facebook. But that suits my needs - I'm really not interested in what hundreds of people I've met are doing on vacation or thinking about politics or eating over the holidays.
My wife, on the other hand, lives for this stuff. She is much, much closer emotionally to people she went through earlier stages of life with and she routinely moans and shrieks about the things I mentioned above. And this suits here needs, because she cares about that sort of information.
That said, even if we grant Facebook a monopoly on 'keeping up with old friends', every other 'social vertical' that currently relies upon Facebook for connection, networking, and event planning represents a startup opportunity with massive market potential. Big one: mommy groups.
I feel like most Facebook events are 'invite everyone.' Whether or not your friendship level is greater than mere acquaintance or working at the same place or studying at the same school.
I don't have Facebook and I have no issues making friends-because I get up and go out and talk to people. Sure they may not invite me to X events-but when I see them we talk, we have a good time, and we go on with our lives.
> meet IRL, connect via social network and then always have a connection of some sort which allows the relationship to grow if nurtured.
I think part of this is "they're just not that into you." Not in a relationship sense-they think you are a fine person. But people have family, work, other, older friends. The vast majority of "social network connections" went just as far for me as some of my in person encounters-that is, went nowhere. But a few did. People don't have the time to be friends with everyone so they simply outsource it to facebook. Sometimes they do things that are interesting and a friendship grows from it-most times, not, in my experience.
> This seems to be one of the modern ways that friendships are built - meet IRL, connect via social network and then always have a connection of some sort which allows the relationship to grow if nurtured. In my case I don't see or talk to these people until the next physical meetup and so I'm "out of sight, out of mind".
I don’t think that this phenomenon is attributable to Facebook. I.e., Facebook doesn’t necessarily steer you toward meaningful interactions, and even without Facebook you can nurture a friendship using SMS, email, and so on. Developing friendships takes more effort than a typical Facebook interaction allows (“liking” a pic of someone’s food or whatnot).
As a fellow endurance athlete who has experimented with fasting I would say don't waste your time. While I do think the response to fasting is somewhat personal, for me the impact upon long-term fitness, work/life stress (cortisol) [1] and ongoing metabolism [2] is just too severe to be ignored.
More likely because the masters guys have more disposable income and very little at stake if they get caught. With spare cash they've probably bought all the bike upgrades they can and are training as much as their spare time allows so doping is the easiest way to improve. Also, anything to slow the decline with age...
Beans and tofu are the obvious ones. Stuff like quinoa and nuts are good too. Even green vegetables are good, you just need to eat a lot of them which you can because the calorie density is typically so low.
I've gone through a similar process recently. I'm a stay at home dad at the moment but it's an equally large problem as when I'm working full time.
I ditched fb and Twitter years ago. I used to reddit a lot but I've deleted the app from my phone and used res to filter enough subs on my computer that it's very difficult to get lost in the rabbit hole. Getting rid of low effort subs (pics, aww, gifs, etc), click-baity and tabloid (politics, til, askreddit, etc) seems to make the place much less sticky and I quickly realise I'm wasting my own time.
For email i use tasker on android to disable my sync except for within 3 windows of the day. At 6am, midday and 6pm my sync turns on, grabs my emails and I can do what I want with them. The rest of the time I'm blocked out. I've also unsubscribed to heaps of lists accepting the inevitable that no matter what I do I will always miss something important.
I still HN though, but again it's harder to waste lots of time.
Interestingly, I feel like getting fewer little dopamine hits during the day leaves me more motivated to chase the big ones on the weekend or when i have more time.
Ultimately I need to find more productive tasks to fill my down time -no point "beating" a technology addiction and not replacing it with something worthwhile.
News is my weakness. I unfollowed all the news pages on Facebook and have made it strictly friends, which is so much less interesting that I only check it once a day. My problem is the HuffPo, DrudgeReport, FiveThirtyEight, GoogleNews cycling through again and again, desperately seeking those little dopamine hits when I get a scrap of gossip or bit of slightly novel information. This link has inspired me to reinstall the chrome extension StayFocusd, which allows you to flag sites as "restricted" and limit the amount of time you spend on them to 10 minutes or more/less. I've found it incredibly helpful in the past, but it's like calorie-counting, I have to remain vigilant as an interesting news cycle can make me disable the extension.
I agree with you completely about finding more productive tasks. Every minute I'm reading an article is a minute I'm not writing or programming. I'm currently trying to rewire my brain to open Google Drive on my phone instead of a news site so I can thumb-type some writing while I'm at the playground with my kids. If I can spend all those little moments typing out a few words of a story or novel or spend my lunch break knocking out a web app for my kids, they will all add up to mountain of productivity I can take pride in.
I'm curious what others here do to keep from websurfing all day? What are your productivity hacks to stay focused?
I've bought my last 2 cars without seeing or touching them.
Both were imported from Japan, inspected and purchased by professional buyers at Japanese auctions, with communications, importation, paperwork etc arranged by a professional broker. Selection of the vehicles was made based on photographs and inspection reports sent via email.
Ultimately a very simple and successful operation which I will almost certainly do again.
<<purchased by professional buyers at Japanese auctions>>
How did you find these buyers? Are these just auto brokers (e.g., these guys are popular in SV: http://www.hammerauto.com/) or is this something different?
The buyers conduct inspections, supply photos and place bids at the request of the broker. I pay the broker for their contact with professional buyers and their knowledge of the imports process (ie, paperwork, shipping contacts, etc).
I never had any contact with the buyers themselves - they may not actually speak english.
If I had to guess, I would say the buyers work for many different brokers.
I recently replaced an old HDD with a new SSD for my win7 install. I had over 100g of blockchains for various coins in my user app data folder. To rebuild from scratch would have taken days and a big chunk of my broadband data allowance.
I know it's centralisation and goes against one of the features of the blockchain, but having trusted hubs through which to interact would save a lot of wasted space, time and data.
I'm not sure why inserting a check-point and resetting the blockchain size to zero would not be possible - can someone please explain this? If the status at the checkpoint were agreed upon by 51% of all nodes then why not?
A Raspberry Pi running a Postgres database can handle about 10 times the transaction rate of the Bitcoin network. (Obviously this isn't exactly apples-to-apples, but it gives a rough idea of how totally out of balance the resources consumed vs the transaction rate is.)
https://www.academia.edu/7666373/An_Order-of-Magnitude_Estim... claims that the environmental cost of paper currency & minting alone is 10x greater than that of bitcoin mining and concludes that given the trend of Moore's law, bitcoin's relative environmental impact will continue to stay negligible.
The reason for the 10x difference is that paper currency is used at least thousands of times more than bitcoin. Thus it's several orders of magnitude more efficient. Heck quite likely it's something like million times more efficient.
Moore's law doesn't help bitcoin. Because if we produce a miner that has 10x the power efficiency of a current mining hardware it just results into everyone using that miner. Total hashrate would be 10x but the electricity consumption would remain the same. The difficulty adjustment in bitcoin guarantees that regardless of the HW the profit from mining goes close to the electricity cost of it. Thus we can simply ignore Moore's law and focus on the fundamental point of bitcoin mining: Producing waste heat.
Having to continuously produce waste heat to secure the network is a fundamental flaw in bitcoin. An attack against the network (51% attack, using waste heat) must be sufficiently expensive compared to the gains of such an attack. The benefits of an attack scale with the amount of value transferred in bitcoin network. Thus the amount of waste heat constantly produced by honest people also must scale in order to keep it secure.
All of this because one person got the bright idea to solve Byzantine generals problem via unforgeable votes. What kind of vote is that? Waste heat. The guy just figured out how to verify that some other person has produced waste heat. And the whole network rests on the assumption that honest people buy more votes than the dishonest ones.
The trouble I have is with your claim that cryptocurrency produces "nothing of absolute value at all." I don't know your definition of "value," but it's clearly not one I share.
I prefer to use the word "upkeep". Money is not something that has intrinsic value in itself. It's what we need because as a species we're too dumb to handle planetary-scale resource allocation. It's a waste we need to get what we want. But since it's a waste, it would be good to reduce it as much as possible.
On the other hand... the existing financial industry - even just the bits around creating and storing currency, and handling transactions - is rather a massive waste too. If it's possible to replace that with something that (a) gives more power to the people and (b) requires fewer people to run, that's probably a good thing - no comment on whether Bitcoin is that something.
I totally agree. Existing financial industry is a huge waste too (sadly, not many seem to see it that way). But Bitcoin, from what I read about it, seems to have an exponential hunger for power which doesn't lead me to believe that if it replaces current system, we'll be better off.
I think the problem is that you are predicting the viability not of Bitcoin itself, but of your specific assumption about how Bitcoin might be used. I presume you are implying that Bitcoin could not possibly replace the current system, in the sense that it could not efficiently handle all global monetary transactions. Of course this is true by design, and will always be true barring some significant changes to the software. But that is not the only conceivable sense in which Bitcoin could be considered successful and widely used.
> Bitcoin, from what I read about it, seems to have an exponential hunger for power which doesn't lead me to believe that if it replaces current system, we'll be better off.
Actually, it's capitalism in general that has an exponential hunger for resource consumption, Bitcoin is simply the first decentralised capitalist system, and it's so simple it's clear.
I have no problem with saying that traditional money and cryptocurrency has no intrinsic value, but mostly because I think the concept of "intrinsic value" is rather useless.
I hate this attitude. You may be doing everything possible as an individual to prevent further climate change, but the majority of people I hear spouting this attitude do not.
It's based on the premise that there will actually be some sort of "new normal" that is worth surviving for. The ongoing impact of our actions is indeterminable - we could end up with something so inconceivably bad that all your adaptation efforts are pointless, or that you simply cannot live a life of any value when compared to the early 21st century.
Also, it smacks of "F*ck you, I've got mine". You assume that the impact of climate change are survivable, apparent by the fact that you want to focus on adaptation, but this attitude ignores the fact that there are billions of other people on the planet. Maybe climate change can be survived by us in our situation with all our first world advantages, but there are millions, possibly billions, who don't have that choice.
Focus on adaptation for all you like, but please don't forget that prevention is greater than cure and that it's not too late.