Insect collapse • Hacker News Board

Re: Insect collapse

#161

Post by jelliclesfarm » Tue, Jan 15, 2019, 5:13 PM UTC

Regardsyjc wrote: post #43

titzer wrote: post #14

This planet will not support 7 billion humans. Certainly not 7 billion stupid-ass humans who swing massive sledgehammers into the pillars of the biosphere that support them in their hedonistic blunder in search of more "wealth". When I hear the words "economic growth", and then weigh it against the destruction of this magnitude, I often want to vomit. And how do I square the fact that I work on flipping bits in compu…

I used to feel this way and I found that it wasn't productive. What can you do? If you can do something, do it. If you think you can't change the future possible destruction of our ecosystem or millions of people, then you also need to make peace with it. I think you can either do or not do things without the negativity. I found that the negativity made me think emotionally and not rationally or productively, and als…

Reaching out and talking to people will help.

1. If everyone has 1/2 surviving child then in 150 years, our population will become stable.

2. It’s not transferable because we still need species diversity

3. People will be incentivized with ubi and all their needs taken care of if they agree to #1.

4.stop animal based foods.

5. Return half planet back to nature to reforest and rewind.

6.reverse acidification of oceans.

7. Find ways to restore polar ice caps and bring down planet temperature

8. Reduce fossil fuel dependence. Go nuclear.

9. Protect water.

Nature will rewild. We just need to stop being so successful with procreation because our highest achievement will result in our extinction.

My 2c.

Re: Insect collapse

#162

Post by skh » Tue, Jan 15, 2019, 5:15 PM UTC

Zoh0eich wrote: post #147

skh wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not genocide to not have children. At an individual level the best thing we can do is to not have children if you are in a rich country. Those of us who live in rich countries massively over consume (including myself in this). Going to a carbon neutral economy is not helpful if it isn't done on a world wide scale. Right now rich countries have a nice system whereby they can realistically become carbon neutral in…

Political reality in america is that there were multiple changes of ruling party in the last decade and MPs being voted out on specific issues. Of course a representative multi-party system would be preferable, but it's not that it's impossible to achieve anything at all.

...multiple changes of ruling party...

I think you don't understand the American political system. At present there are only two parties in terms of realistically getting elected. There is no such thing as a ruling party in the sense of European parliaments. Members of a party are free to vote as they please. Hence Lieberman famously derailing aspects of Obamacare. There is also the fact that both parties in the U.S. have shifted very much to the right the last 40 years. The reality in the U.S. is that even with our so called left leaning party in power in the legislative branch and executive branch no serious environmental accords were negotiated and passed.

Re: Insect collapse

#163

Post by Zoh0eich » Tue, Jan 15, 2019, 5:19 PM UTC

skh wrote: post #157

Zoh0eich wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question is what someone who is aware of the issues and willing to act can do. Just because there are those who act irresponsibly does not prevent you from adjusting your behavior.

It does actually prevent me for adjusting my behavior. I'm a victim of free rider thinking. I'm not going to fall on my sword so to speak and sacrifice whilst almost no one else does.

Please reflect on what you are saying. You stylize yourself as victim when you are actually benefiting from making harmful decisions and then rationalizing that harmful behavior with "but everyone else is doing it too".

Re: Insect collapse

#164

Post by toasterlovin » Tue, Jan 15, 2019, 5:25 PM UTC

skh wrote: post #94

otikik wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm still on the "affected by negativity" phase. May I ask what concrete actions are you taking (besides being optimistic). I spent one morning with a group which plants and looks after trees in a reserve near my place. We were putting protections around young saplings so cows wouldn't eat them. It took my team of three the whole morning to put protections around a single sapling. The whole thing made me sad. There i…

It seems to me the only thing we can really do is not have children. There are too many people on the planet.

It may seem counterintuitive, but if you care about the environment, you should have children. I wrote a whole blog post on this, but the gist is that people are going to have children whatever you decide to do. If people like you, who are thoughtful and conscientious about the future of our species, decide not to have children, then the world will just be filled with the offspring of people who don't really care about the future of our species. And those children will share both the nature and nurture of their parents.

My blog post: http://www.richardjones.org/kids-are-good-for-the-environmen...

Re: Insect collapse

#165

Post by skh » Tue, Jan 15, 2019, 5:28 PM UTC

Zoh0eich wrote: post #163

skh wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does actually prevent me for adjusting my behavior. I'm a victim of free rider thinking. I'm not going to fall on my sword so to speak and sacrifice whilst almost no one else does.

Please reflect on what you are saying. You stylize yourself as victim when you are actually benefiting from making harmful decisions and then rationalizing that harmful behavior with "but everyone else is doing it too".

I haven't stylized myself as anything other than a person who advocates not having children. I over consume. I've come to grips with this fact. I deal with it by not having children as a means of assuaging my guilt. I've got just one life and I'm going to enjoy it as much as I can. I'm not going to sacrifice for the greater good when it's just me and a handful of other people doing it.

Re: Insect collapse

#166

Post by toasterlovin » Tue, Jan 15, 2019, 5:29 PM UTC

skh wrote: post #128

linguistbreaker wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've thought this too but then you are leaving the future to those who breed more irresponsibly. Another way to look at it would be that we have a responsibility to raise more responsible people.

Yes, this is true. For me the way that I deal with the reality of a planet becoming a shitty place to live is to not have children. It is the best way for me to cope with the situation. People can choose to do otherwise.

Have you considered letting your children decide whether they want to be alive on whatever the future has in store for this planet? Life is optional; they can opt out at any time. But my hunch is that they'll appreciate being alive and decide to make a go of it, however tough it is. After all, there is no alternative; the only life they can have is the one you give them.

Re: Insect collapse

#167

Post by skh » Tue, Jan 15, 2019, 5:30 PM UTC

toasterlovin wrote: post #164

skh wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to me the only thing we can really do is not have children. There are too many people on the planet.

It may seem counterintuitive, but if you care about the environment, you should have children. I wrote a whole blog post on this, but the gist is that people are going to have children whatever you decide to do. If people like you, who are thoughtful and conscientious about the future of our species, decide not to have children, then the world will just be filled with the offspring of people who don't really care abo…

What you write makes sense but I don't feel right about having children. The world sucks and it will suck much more in the coming decades. I have no desire to put my progeny through that mess.

Re: Insect collapse

#168

Post by Zoh0eich » Tue, Jan 15, 2019, 5:32 PM UTC

open-source-ux wrote: post #38

xg15 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure about that. Sure, the software itself won't, but the hardware needed to run the software absolutely has environmental impact: It drives habitat destruction due to mining the raw materials, pollution from waste by the mining and production processes and than more pollution when the hardware is decommissioned and ends up on landfills. Then there is the enormous energy demand of IT systems, which in turn re…

...the hardware needed to run the software absolutely has environmental impact I agree. When I look at other industries I see efforts to reduce energy consumption. Most programmers, in contrast, couldn't care less. The most popular languages are the least energy efficient. But they make life easier for developers, or as devs love to say 'more productive'. Who cares if you need to add more and more server boxes to you…

It's not just the language though. It is also what's done with the language. Increased productivity also means all kinds of marginal convenience and monetization features will get implemented which gobble up additional compute cycles.

If everything were written in assembly we simply wouldn't have the human resources to implement 500 ad trackers on a web browser. Not to mention that the web browser would be far more rudimentary in the first place.

Re: Insect collapse

#169

Post by toasterlovin » Tue, Jan 15, 2019, 5:34 PM UTC

throwaway5752 wrote: post #153

tomp wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In your value system. It's easy to construct a value system where my own life and my future child's life are both worth more than 58 t CO2.

How do you reconcile the future warfare and famine risk to your N existing children caused by the additional carbon of your hypothetical N+1 vs your utility of having an N+1th child, though? Because that is the actual formulation.

You reconcile it by reading some history books and realizing that life has always been tough and that the future probably won't be any tougher than the past.

Re: Insect collapse

#170

Post by Zoh0eich » Tue, Jan 15, 2019, 5:35 PM UTC

nopriorarrests wrote: post #134

rollo wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JS is the most popular language. Thus most software is wasting orders of magnitude more energy than it should. The same functionality would require less than a tenth of processing power (and thus energy and physical hardware) if it were implemented properly.

Properly is like what, assembler? So lets spend 100x power on developers notebooks and 100x of their paid time and rewrite eveything in asm so it will work faster? Or what "implemented properly" means?

Properly in this context would mean achieving the same effect at the lowest possible overall expense of energy (including those of developer laptops) given specific hardware.

Google spends a lot of effort optimizing their software because they bear the energy cost of running it in their own data centers.

Websites do not bear the energy cost of running their code on enduser devices.

The lack of incentives turns energy waste into an externalty which means it is not factored into development.