The Associated Worlds

Yeah - but that's an argument for taking useful actions.

So kids doing whatever they perceive as working to force more immediate consequences on the politicians seems sensible. "Your externalities affect us, so we're going to make them affect YOU in the hopes that it changes your behaviour"

Only if their perceptions match reality.

that seems to be a safe negative in most cases

The ones sueing the government may have more success in terms of direct action

02:08

As, hopefully, will the high schoolers campaigning that all coal burning plants should have to pay a levee for the increased asthma cases occurring in their area.

In practice, everyone on the planet who isn't actually dead or incommunicado is aware of the issue, and isn't going to change their mind without something they deem substantive; and the politicians are all forming their current policies based on the information they're getting from all the bribes and polls to tell them what their opinions ought to be. Which makes this type of thing good for nothing but generating waste heat.

02:08

See, now that's more useful.

02:11

I am also reminded of a certain case from back in the days of Occupy Wall Street: Lots of protesters, park-occupiers, slogan-chanters, and window-breakers. Net effect: zero, except for making people think they're a right bunch of twonks. One small group: Collected money and used it to buy people's debt on the collections spot market for pennies on the dollar, then forgave it. Net effect: PEOPLE ACTUALLY HELPED.

Yeah

02:12

I guess I feel that telling the kids they're bad and doing worthless things = unhelpful. Telling the kids "hey if you do [x] it will help more, let me give you proof" = actually helping.

I'm of the school of thought that observes that the human brain promotes things that feel good, not things that do good, and our social wiring is such that protests and suchlike - between crowd mutual-validation and outrage dopamine - feel very, very good. So there's a very good reason to strongly discourage people from getting started on the path to ineffective altruism. Once you start down the dark path of collecting fuzzies rather than utils, forever will it dominate your destiny, etc., etc.

I guess I'm defensive because as a teen I spent my weekends doing conservation work - like weeding, tree planting, counting frogs, running education activities like nightstalks - and the arguments and rhetoric being widely used to say why these kids are bad is the same rhetoric that was used against me to tell me why I was wasting my time and I should be focused on "getting a job" instead

02:19

So I don't see those arguments as "we are trying to stop you doing an ineffective thing", I see them as "you are making us feel bad and you need to stop it"

except what you were doing was actually doing something productive (if tiny) to get your dopamine hit

See, now the people making those arguments are pretty damn metaphorically punchable, because those sort of activities actually are producing concrete results.

1 person going on the weekend planting and weeding for a year will do far more than thousands protesting

I think now may be a good time to point out that they probably thought they had the same point to make.

And should the kids involved in this protest instead decide, next time, to do that sort of thing instead, I will back them up 100% against any such critics.

Not so much to say you're wrong, as to say that one should be careful making that argument.

@0111narwhalz can I get a few more nouns, please? I can tell who you're referring to

"that point" -> "this sort of activity yields concrete results, that sort doesn't"

02:25

"they" -> the people complaining about the conservation activities

Even if I disagree with their ends or their assessment of the means, I have infinitely more respect for anyone who's willing to actually go out and create the improvement they want in the world than someone who just whines that Other People Should Fix It For Me. Hell, it's a better way of motivating other people to join in, too. Putting your back where your mouth is an intrinsically good argument.

02:25

@0111narwhalz Yeah, but the distinction I'd have to make there is that they're obviously wrong, and I'm obviously right.

:V

I'd argue that the nightwalks and such do far more for convincing people as well, since they're concretely seeing the issue instead of seeing a "bunch of useless commie kids out bitching that they want to ruin the economy so they can feel better"

1

@Morgrim Moon My bordering on jerk take: you probably achieved far more toward 'stop climate change tangibly' in one day of such activity than most of these kids will bother with in their entire lives (edited)

02:32

seriously

02:32

even picking up trash helps and it's not hard, I used to do it a lot

Well. Help the enviroment tangibly, yes. Stopping climate change, no.

Actually, in related other arguments I've had with the critics of such activities ( and the people online who talk about how individual action is futile and only massive central action can help us ) is the Starfish Parable, parts one and two.

02:36

1. "It makes a difference to that one."; and

Still highly valuable and something I wish I had time to do (but sadly, work takes up too much time and energy for that sort of volunteering these days), but it's a different sort of helping the planet.

2. "All big things are just little things added together."

Yeah. Fixing the water issues in australia needs big coordinated action. But doing all the little things will most definitely help and buy time to make the big actions.

Given that our politically allowed choices seem to be between "build more coal plants" and "dismantle 90% of the economy and give the socialists control of the remaining 10%" I'll take the pollution thank you very much. Survival odds are far far higher on that path, even if the worst fear mongering predictions are true.

08:12

The people who killed nuclear power deserve unspekable punishments...................... funny that is seems to be the same people pushing the most dire predctions. Almost as if the only problem they give a shit about is their lack of control.

That's... not the view I've seen most commonly?

08:18

Most people seem to be pointing out that at the moment coal + asthma costs is the same price as solar

08:18

So if we're going to build a fossil fuel power plant it should be NATURAL GAS, not coal

well of course they don't say it that way

But yes, nuclear would be better.

but the only alternatives to coal/oil that are allowed to be discussed are wind/solar. Mention nuclear and you get ree'd out of the room

Lucas Heights is vitally necessary for a lot more than power, and when it goes down it takes out emergency water microbiol testing for the whole continent, as well as cancer drugs, so having a backup would be really nice

which is pretty damn good evidence that they at best don't have a clue what they are talking about

(My job involves water testing. Microbiology test bottles are gamma irradiated. Which needs a nuclear power plant)

and in more recent years they have started admitting that their plans won't work, but we should do them anyway because virtuous or something

...actually, I should probably spread that tidbit more widely. Sure, the irrational non-greenies would think it's great that it knocks out all the mining camps, but the mining camps going down is the sort of thing that the big miners don't like, and they may be able to apply a little pressure

08:23

(I consider myself a greenie. I also consider myself a pragmatic one. Yes, chaining yourself a bulldozer DEFINITELY has a place, the Beeliar Wetlands was a great example. But business pays a lot more attention when you shove a dollar cost on their actions/point out viable solutions/otherwise make it relevant to enough of their customers to cause a boycott)

sadly a huge part of the eco movement got co-opted by the fucking malthusians. GODDAMMIT there are real problems but now everything they say has to be quadruple checked for sophophobia

08:27

And most of what's left just turns into virtue signalling

Yeah, it's frustrating

The only really reliable and eco-friendly power source besides nuclear is geothermal, and that can only be acquired in a select few places.

and for the darkest irony; the countries ran by the kind of political systems they want had by far the worst record on ecodisasters

I do not consider Hydroelectric as ecofriendly.

hydro is pretty good in the right place

doesn't matter any more: all the good hydro spots are long since taken

Dams can do a lot of damage to the ecosystem.

like geothermal it needs specific spots

the wave power plant at my home town just got cancelled, they couldn't get the technology functioning. Well, it worked, and it broke even, but the power generation was barely covering maintenance costs

2

Oof.

Yeah, it's sad.

08:31

I mean, 'breaking even' is doing a better job that most wave power attempts so far, so I do give them credit for that...

waves breaking even... there’s a joke in there somewhere.

grumble grumble mouse button starting to go out

South Australia is trying to "large desert solar plants + excessively large battery" approach, which seems to be working reasonably well so far

I can’t wait till fusion power is a thing.

It helps that they have the Nullabor. Which is a large, sunny, flat desert without big dunes or lots of sandstorms

I wonder if any of the supposed saviours of the environment involved with that project has bothered to look at the pollution in creating panels / batteries

08:35

nah, that would be crime think

most of the waste is poorly run mines or discarded batteries, though

I think geothermal would be the ideal power source, but it isn’t very available outside Iceland.

@Tassadar don't worry, they will be right there condeming it because remember: that would be like giving a machine gun to a toddler

08:36

*fusion

yeah, never going to work in "so what's a volcano?" australia

That would only highlight their ignorance of the nature of fusion.

seasteads might be able to do ocean temperature differentials

Somewhat late, but I don't think we don't particularly need fusion, fission is pretty good anyway.

actually it won't happen this time: part of how fission was able to be demonized was due to the near monopoly on controling the narrative. That is going away fast

and Chernobyl did NOT help

the one problem with fission is that the fuel is not freely available (like sunlight or air). It has to be extracted first.

08:40

Chernobyl was a debacle.

Sure, but it's far, far better than fossil fuels.

True. Current uranium mining is an environmental catastrophy

[see my earlier comment about which countries had bigger eco-disasters]

A Charlie Foxtrot, if you will.

it won't be a net benefit to the planet until we have better ways of getting it out of the ground

Doesn't making tritium for fusion need fission anyway?

IDHR.

?

I don’t honestly remember.

ah, thanks

fission or fusion, with geothermal where it’s available, is my vision for the future.

I think improved solar is here to stay as the small to medium scale power source. Especially if you couple it to hydrogen fuel cells

According to Wikipedia you get about a kilowatt per square meter of solar energy at the equator, which seems good.

I heard in a recent podcast that Africa tends to be used as a testbed for various “green” technologies a lot. Since they don’t have much of an electrical grid in the first place.

It makes sense. Tests tend to be small scale and decentralised, which are traits that are valuable there

Solar would probably be more widely used if energy storage was better.

@Tassadar The idea is that cheap energy would be bad anyway cuz humans evil

1

Huh, Love, Death, & Robots adapted an Alastair Reynolds story for one episode.

Tritium production requires ⁶Li and neutron radiation, but DT fusion produces neutron radiation.

Charles:"I don't see why everybody's afraid of anthrax as a biowarfare agent. You want to do some real damage, knock certain genes from e.coli and replace them with botulinum genes. It'll be like you get a cold, but you die instead of getting better."

I think that would probably kill its hosts before it spreads far, BTX is really toxic and E. coli is everywhere.

what you do is you take a retrovirus that modifies E. coli and distribute that

Problem is that would likely spread via E.coli, which means it would kill every endotherm in its path (edited)

bio-WMD

Not really, E.coli spread by fecal matter, BTX-producing E. Coli would likely kill most of its hosts before hitting the large intestine.

15:16

Might be useful for assassination.