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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • You seem to be moving the goalposts.

    I am not. I elaborated what I meant. Life in all developed countries could be better than it is and less-resource-intense at the same time, even without further adoption of drop-in-replacements.

    My point is today’s cars […} and so on are far more efficient today than they were in years past.

    Cars could be much more energy efficient than they are. Not accounting for the inherent step up by going electric. E.g. in Germany a study showed basically all stransmission, combustion etc. gains where nullified by the weight increase by the fetishization of oversized cars. And these cars grew by a multiple-fold of the “nessecary”-weight increase due to safety, before you comment on that.

    Many also find city living stressful, living on top of other people and having less privacy.

    Well, even in this system you are directly profiteering of a ponzi-scheme, crippling your communities. .

    If the externalized costs are fully internalized (as in, indirect costs now and the climate costs, which are largely unaccounted), I have no problem with that way of living. But surburbs would be quite empty if their inhabitants didn’t live off urbanites.

    We have eaten animals for millennia. Saying that it is now suddenly a problem is ridiculous.

    Since you are such a fan of the idea of overshoot (e.g.: I got mine, keep the gates), I hope you are aware of all the fertilizer we use in the process. The % of animals only fed on non-agarable land is miniscule in the grand scheme of things. We are running out of fertilizer early because of unsustainable farming practices and animal-based eating practices.

    Have you seen how non-western societies live, especially the poor? You would not be calling our way of life mediocre.

    Mediocre compare to what we could do we the same resources, if used with a little more foresight.

    Actually, household electrical use has been flat to falling. And the largest users are Southerners with intense AC needs. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=49036

    Well, I meant US compared to Europe. Congrats on not drifting off even further, but you still use more than twice the amount of electricity we use, for a non-better standard of living.

    I am sorry, but I am not content with only first-order needs met.

    The first order needs I “coined” are not basic needs as defined by maslow. They can be more. But society is better off reducing it’s dependence of additional levels of cruft which are a burden to pretty much everybody. There is room for living in suburbs (when surbanites pay their share), off grid, or lavishly. Even for some kind of “unnessary” things, but not on this widespread of a scale. And this feeds nicely in the Carnot-cycle point you made: Every widely adopted, big layer of unnesary conversion translates to a loss of usable energy in the process. These are big wins, hidden in plain sight.

    Let’s stop the rich from flying private jets and building multiple mansions rather than go after regualr people. […] My point is, this planet has only so many resources to go around, and each person needs some to live a full life. So to provide that, we need to shrink the denominator so there is more to go around. Infinite growth is just not possible. We are in an overshoot: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Overshoot_(population)

    This is such an elitist argument. “Everybody” wants the carefree “Après moi, le déluge” lifestyle the US has. And if everybody lived like the average american, we would way more fucked now than we currently are. Remember, the US emitted ~1/5th of all co2 emissions our current global civilization has ever emitted. Offloading the production to China and plateauing in raw-usage is just not cutting it. Europe is doing the same shit. But since you started even higher, your transition is even easier. Patting yourself on the back your little improvements where so much is on the table is like being proud of not beating your wife to death every week anymore, only every fortnight into a coma.





  • First off: The App bugged out and I can’t be arsed to write this all again, so this will be terse.

    I’m aware of the Carnot-cycle.

    But we are doing far better than we used to.

    I wholeheartedly disagree. Or rather I pose the question: Efficiency in what regard? If we measure it as ensuring a good, nurturing life with minimal resource usage, we categorically don’t.

    As an example, cars and longish distance travel: The average American commuter has to travel long distances to get to work, to socialize and run errands. This is mostly due to sprawl/zoning laws/big cars and bad public infrastructure. Spending this long time in traffic increases stress and makes people time poor. A lot of their earning are spend on paying off the car, gas and maintenance. Even more is spend by the public to maintain and build roads. The roads are heat trapping and increase run off speed, pedestrians are put at risk, the commuter gets fat. There are many know-on effects which can be reduced or eliminated by creating density.

    Another example is food. A lot of it wasted (directly), much more is wasted by being “converted” to animal protein for human consumption (trophic-level).

    Another is housing size and electricity usage.

    The western societies - and the US in particular - waste a shit ton of resources to gain a very mediocre quality of living experience.

    Or asked another way: Should efficiency of something be measured by how resource-intense it is to satisfy a “first-order” need of people, or by the n-th-order demand we established and want a drop-in-replacement for now (similar to trophic-levels)?