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Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: July 16th, 2024

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  • I fear for induced demand. If electricity is cheap, why build more efficiently? Why not do bitcoin mining or AI training?

    It wouldn’t be so bad if there weren’t plenty of places around the world that could desperately use solar panels, that are building fossil fuel infrastructure instead. Climate change is a global problem, so the obsession with getting your individual emissions down to zero is selfish and sometimes even detrimental to the climate if “your emissions” don’t include the cost of manufacturing and limited availability.

    We should be sending solar panels to the developing world as fast as humanly possible, not making electricity so cheap in California that multinationals can open up a couple more data centers.


  • They’re using hydrogen to de-rust iron, and later let the iron rust again. I don’t have a degree in chemistry, but that sounds like a scam.

    There are basically two sources of hydrogen that matter at an industrial scale: fossil fuel cracking (not clean energy) and electrolysing water. In the first case, if you want power it’s more green to burn the fossil fuel directly.

    And if you’re electrolysing water and then using the hydrogen to chemically derust iron, it would (as far as i understand with high school chemistry) be strictly more efficient to electrolyse rust directly. The oxygen can dissipate into the environment or be reintroduced as necessary, like with a sacrificial metal for ship’s hulls.

    It’s undoubtedly innovative that they have a relatively efficient way to store the latent chemical energy of hydrogen given an excess of hydrogen, but in terms of energy storage that is putting the cart before the horse.





  • Hope and positivity are two different things. Hope dissociates from the present and the future, externalizing your care into an imagined future you can not affect. Empirically, people with hope fare worse psychologically than those without hope, because those with hope have no coping mechanisms when their hopes get dashed.

    What we need is not positive news, but a positive life. Sit in a meadow, share meals with friends, be kind and generous, work at things that mean something to you, make art with passion, and rage during political protests.

    When so much of the world’s news and media are pushing a narrative of unending consumerism and growth, it is good to keep reminding ourselves with factual news that this world will collapse sooner rather than later.

    If it helps, all life ends in misery, be it decreptitude, disease, ecosystems collapse, or all of the above. Life has never been about how it ends, it is about what we do while delaying the end. Everything we do for the future, we do for the future that will actually be, not for the future that gives us comfort to imagine.


  • Which revolutions were inaccessible to the poor?

    And honestly, yeah, revolutions like the American one where a bunch of rich people used propaganda, money, and threats to secede so they and an oligarchic “democracy” of white male land owners could pay lower taxes and privatize public land weren’t as radical or revolutionary as subsequent propaganda made them out to be.



  • So that’s a no? If Trump is people breaking from mainstream 2000s Republicanism, and Harris is mainstream 2000s Republicanism, then Trump and Harris must be different, right?

    Anyway, more on the content: You seem to seriously underestimate how bad the USA can get. There are limits to how much you can brutalize people politely, so “brutalizing politely” also means brutalizing less.

    The difference between Harris and Trump is whether or not being transgender in public carries the death penalty (project 2025 says trans = pedo and pedo = death).

    The difference between Harris and Trump is whether or not people with an ectopic pregnancy will bleed to death.

    The difference between Harris and Trump is whether the library has books written by feminists and Marxists or not.

    The difference between Harris and Trump is whether the internet lets you access lemmy and wikipedia or whether it only gives you access to a ChatGPT-generated world of lies engineered to drive people towards fascism.

    Harris means oppression, Trump means a suicidally fascist doomspiral.