That's right. We theorized the effects shortly after the first coal power plant, and we have observed the effects for a century now. Yet the response has been minimal, to say the least
The problem with cooperation and compassion is that it literally takes one dick to ruin it. If we could incentivize the psychopaths in society to collaborate for their own good, then at least we'd strike a nice balance, but our economies aren't structured that way.
A system that can be so easily destabilized is not a system that has planned for the long term. I think we're slowly getting there, as even the dicks in society are beginning to realise that they can be shunned for their public actions, and that shunning does come with real financial consequences.
I just can't subscribe to that idea. If it took 1 dick to ruin everything society would never have gotten off the ground in the first place. Hell, even today, our power grid pretty much operates off the principle of 'don't be a dick and shoot this with the guns we all have" and it took MAGA craziness for people to attack them. I'd say compassion operates within any given system in spite of people being dicks and thats why we have prevailed the way we have.
This, we moved from Tribes to towns to cities to be more efficient but lost the cooperative aspect of the tribe which made it more efficient in the first place. Now corporations do market research until they figure out exactly what we can afford to get our needs met and then charge that price instead of anything related to their actual costs. It's resulted in a situation to where most people live month to month and can't afford vacation or even an unexpected car repair.
Thats me. My car, teeth, hair, and some parts of my rental house (thanks landlord) are falling apart and I can't afford to fix any of it cause rent and bills are due each month and they keep going up. Its fucken madness, its making me insane.
We mine and manufacture nutrient dense fertilizer at massive environmental cost.
We use the nutrients to grow plants
We eat the nutrients in our food
We expel 95% of these nutrients in our waste
We dump our waste into the rivers and oceans with all the nutrients (often we purposefully destroy the nitrogen in the waste since it causes so much damage to rivers and oceans)
We need new nutrients to grow plants
Before humans there was a nutrient cycle. Now it's just a pipe from mining to the ocean that passes through us. The ecological cost of this is immeasurable, but we don't notice because fertilizer helps us feed starving people and waste management is important to avoid disease.
Poop indirectly on crops. Systems like this or the Aztec chinampa system, basically try to keep nutrients in the loop with fish and other aquatic organisms. Obviously, there's a disease risk if you do it wrong, but that's also true for modern water treatment.
You can sterilize waste pretty easily, we do it all the time, and you should before reclaiming not-water for reuse. Otherwise you're gonna end up with epidemics like it's the 1700s.
Like evasive chimpanzee said we need to poop INDIRECTLY in crops. Hot aerobic composting for example has excellent nutrient retention rates and eliminates nearly all human borne diseases. The main problem would be medication since some types tend to survive.
Also urine contains almost all of the water soluble nutrients that we expel and is sanitised with 6-12 months of anaerobic storage. So that's potentially an easier solution if we can seclude the waste stream. Again the main issue would be medications.
I don't have the answer, if it was easy we would have done it already. The main issue is we don't have a lot of people working on the answer because we're still in the stage of getting everyone in the world access to sanitation. Certainly the way we're doing it is very energy and resources intensive, unsustainable in the living term, and incredibly damaging to the environment. We've broken a fundamental aspect of the nutrient cycle and we're paying dearly for it.
The other problem is, like recycling, there isn't a lot of money in the solution, so it's hard to move forward in a capitalist system until shit really hits the fan.
we understand the implications, we just assume that the negatives will happen to others and that the positives will grant us a temporary reprieve in which to plug existing holes
For me, this post is right under the person who said "Agriculture" and the response "Because it lead directly to feudalism and other forms of autocracy?"
And if unqualified businessmen ruling instead of experts in their "given fields" isn't a perfect way to describe feudalism, I don't know if irony has survived.
Every time someone tried to make "a weapon so powerful it would make people not want to wage war".
Several weapons are on this list, from the cannon to the machine gun to, most famously, the atomic bomb.
The fact that this happened once would've been understandable. The fact this escalated to nuclear weapons because people just tried pushing this idea is nuts though.
This is not toward so much the technology, with all tech being no less inevitable, but more to do with the intentions/hindsight/foresight of the people making something that can only be produced by an assembly in a seemingly dire setting, as opposed to something like AI, which does not stem from that and which would've come around at some time.
By extension, this extends to populism in general, a mindset that from experience I refuse to compliment. I'm surrounded by people every day who come off as thinking with their feet and not with the methodological part of them, and my experiences with this have never allowed me to be fully at peace.
Opting for gasoline over electricity early on when cars started to become a thing, we were already going electric, but a smear campaign put fear into people's minds about electric and switched tk gasoline.
Batteries could have been standard for a bit longer, but it seems to me that eventually the need to go faster for longer would have forced combustion engines to be a thing. All they had were lead-acid batteries (or primary cells, but that would be dumb) and new more energy-dense chemistries didn't show up for a long time after. Maybe they could have found one if they really needed, but it's a tricky science even today, so I'm skeptical.
It's possible, I suppose, that infrastructure could have been rolled out for both en mass, but I don't see an even mix lasting through the whole 20th century. Probably not even past WWII.
Or, y'know, there's a war on and you can't stop to recharge, or you need to cross a desert, or you just want to do an express route with one vehicle...
Combustion is just a superior vehicle technology vs. lead-acid electric, assuming you don't worry about emissions, and that will show up in plenty of contexts. Eventually, lead-acid would go the way of the other workable-but-not-as-nice technologies like crystal radios or black-and-white film.
So... there isnt a war in the US right now, and there probablywont be one.
"Lead-acid electric..." when was the last time you looked at an electric car. Electric cars can now give you 400+ miles of range just like ICE vehicles, and I don't have to scavenge fuel from who knows where, all I need is a few solar panels and I'm good... eventually.
Also, IF this was a war zone, I'd rather be whisper quiet than to tell everyone around that I'm driving by with the sound of an engine. Oh and it's easier to remain undetected by food than on a vehicle anyway.
Yeah, I know, I'm not arguing against electric now, or even as a concept then. This was an alt-history exercise, remember?
Batteries could have been standard for a bit longer, but it seems to me that eventually the need to go faster for longer would have forced combustion engines to be a thing. All they had were lead-acid batteries (or primary cells, but that would be dumb) and new more energy-dense chemistries didn’t show up for a long time after. Maybe they could have found one if they really needed, but it’s a tricky science even today, so I’m skeptical.
It’s possible, I suppose, that infrastructure could have been rolled out for both en mass, but I don’t see an even mix lasting through the whole 20th century. Probably not even past WWII.
At least it was (mostly) dealt with. Cars generally don't need it anymore, and the few that do can reduce engine knock through additives. I don't think I've ever seen a pump offering leaded fuel.
One big exception to all of this is small general aviation aircraft. They mostly run on AVGAS100LL, but it's not because of the planes anymore. Just like cars, the few planes that need it can use additives. But regulation for fuel standards change slowly, and ICAO moves at the pace of glacial drift.
They were probably also alluding to the long term effects it had on likely the people who are still the most influential age group still running the world.
I remember one of my engineering profs describing Midgley as the most environmentally destructive organism ever, Dude also was involved in the creation of freon.
Investing everything in engines and abandoning battery development in the early 1900s. Lead-acid batteries were heavy but usable, and electric cars were more popular until electric starters were added to engines. A disproportionately big, short-lived reason was the lack of sufficient electrical grid for electric cars trying to go far.
Nobody in government was thinking ahead, so everyone was forced to trying to make their own money NOW, and that's how we get inhumane tech in general. Same thing happening in computers for decades now. We need centralised R&D free from market influence for the benefit of all life.
We need centralised R&D free from market influence for the benefit of all life.
So you're actually saying holding on to capitalism past it's useful point was the mistake because it created the conditions for these things to happen?
“Let’s just divide up Poland and keep the peace. We can focus our whole energy on the western front, you can save yourselves bloodshed by the tanker load, and in a few short years we can share dominion over a subjugated world.”
“You so right, that sounds like a great plan”
“Hey guess what I just decided”
The whole world would have been different. It was still a pretty close thing with help from the Soviets and with Germany fighting a ludicrous two-front war for literally no military or geopolitical reason at all.
There are many cars that have something worse; three wheeled things, Tesla design, the Renault dash mounted gearstick, etc.
But there is no other "modern" car which so significantly fails in every way as the 2CV.
It has nothing that could be described as performance or ride or comfort. There is nothing about it that can be called practical or stylish. It has zero properties that any sane person could find desirable in a car.
It's so bad that even the Trabant has less to damn it, and that really is terrible.
I think the best evidence that the 2CV is man's biggest failure, should you really need any, is that you are more likely to see them in the country they were made, repurposed as a chicken coop.
If that's not the ultimate failure, I don't know what is.
If memory serves, I think at least some versions of the Allegro had reasonably comfy seats. I'm afraid that can't be said of the 2CV.
Also, the use of a "double skin" body, dropped by almost every manufacturer a decade or so before the Allegro, is really just another amusing tidbit we can taunt it with.
There absolutely nothing even faintly comic about the 2CV, it is an abhorrence at every level.
But I'll grant you, the Allegro is definitely in the top 10.
0-40 km/h (25 mi/h) in 42 seconds…. That’s 42, not 4.2 in case someone thought I missed the decimal. How did this sell almost 92k units per year up through the 80s?
No 0-60, you would die trying. Even 40 mi/h is over ambitious. Clearly, the 2CV was spawned by Satan to destroy our will to live. I see no other reason for that many sales.
Human history, as a whole, is so depressing and meandering it's a weird question to try and answer. Were the great empires a success, or a failure? It depends on if you're measuring monuments built or social justice enacted, and if you're comparing against modern polities or whatever shitty local warlord they replaced. History doesn't really have an end goal, as much as we'd like it to.
Maybe you just meant a personal failure:
Thomas Midgley is one of my favourites, because he's famous for three things: Inventing leaded gasoline, inventing ozone-destroying PCBs, and inventing an accessibility contraption that strangled Thomas Midgley. He did nothing else of note; he's like the real life Bloody Stupid Johnson.
Pheidippides of Battle of Marathon fame is famous for running a long way just to deliver some news first, and then dying from exhaustion. People regularly make the same trip and are fine. He was regarded as a hero, and the races were originally in his honour, but I wouldn't want to be him. Edit: Maybe not a great example, actually. The story names a much longer distance than a marathon, although it's kinda mythical.
Muhammad II of Khwarazm received an envoy from Ghengis Khan, who wasn't bent on invading at all but wanted trade, and decided to steal their shit and kick them out instead. Then he killed the people sent next to ask for a nice apology. You can guess where that went.
The Soviets once tried to sextort Indonesian quasi-communist leader Sukarno with a tape. It did not work, because he was shamelessly proud of his "virility". In at least some tellings he misinterprets the KGB's presentation as a gift, although I doubt he could have been that dumb.
"Thanks bro/comrade!" would be a great way to play this off diplomatically with someone you still want to be allies with, so that could be the origin of that bit.