14 ms·

What can a technologist do about climate change?

• Zach_the_Lizard 11y ago
  The best you can do is lobby for denser development and ending the rules that force a suburban character. Suburbs are more wasteful than cities. Riding a bike to work generates less pollution than a car. Buildings themselves are more efficiently insulated when it's 100 units on a block vs. 100 single family homes on 50 acres. Deliveries can use more efficient and less polluting forms of transport, such as rail, more often or for more of the trip. Delivery trucks can stop on the block While that's going on, lobbying for a carbon tax would be a great way to lower emissions from industrial or other sources.
  • therealdrag0 11y ago
    I totally agree with your sentiment. But what do you mean by "ending the rules that force a suburban character".
    • Zach_the_Lizard 11y ago
      >But what do you mean by "ending the rules that force a suburban character". In most of America, there are a number of zoning regulations in most suburbs that make building anything other than a single family home on a large lot illegal. Likewise the suburban strip mall or giant sprawling Walmart isn't just what people may or may not want, it's what the law requires. Let me use an example that I know of personally: Culpeper, Virginia. Culpeper is a small rural town that developed along the historic railroads as a place for farmers to bring their goods from the surrounding farmland, load them onto trains, and maybe get some goods while they're in town. It still has within the (expanded) town limits farming equipment dealers and a place to drop off crops to be shipped off. The downtown is historic, dating back to the late 1700s with buildings from that era and the 1800s still around. Here's a representative street view: https://goo.gl/maps/jJUUg2JZzEk https://goo.gl/maps/jJUUg2JZzEk As you can see, this place has a number of stores, some with housing on top, and nearby housing. This is what's known as 'mixed-use' development: instead of being purely residential or purely commercial, the two are both allowed to exist in the same space (or even the same building). The town is laid out on a grid, which disperses traffic and makes walking efficient. There is no parking other than street parking and a small parking lot or two the town has provided. Contrast this with the current zoning rules. In most of the town, the smallest allowed lot is something like 15,000 square feet, which is about a quarter acre. As you can see from the street view link, none of these buildings are on a lot that size. None of them would be allowed under this rule alone. OK, so maybe the buildings would be much bigger under current rules, but that could still result in a dense urban environment. Unfortunately, the town has added additional rules that require side yards (100 feet minimum, IIRC) and a large setback from the street. This means none of the buildings would be allowed to touch, meaning the historic walkable downtown core would be illegal under either of these rules. OK, you protest, maybe we could still have a walkable town that's dense even with both sets of rules. We could build taller to make up the density, though it would be more expensive. To prevent this, the town limits what's known as the floor area ratio, which is the square footage of the building (across all floors) divided by the square footage of the lot. So a FAR of 0.5 would mean that the total square footage of a building across all floors would have to be at most half that of the lot. This is the exact limit the town has imposed in most circumstances. This means at least half of the minimum quarter acre lot would be empty, and the largest unit possible on the smallest allowed lot would be about 7,500 square feet (using the standard minimum of 15,000 square feet), without taking into account setbacks and front, back, and side yard requirements, which would further restrict the allowed size, especially on a more narrow parcel of land. A 7,500 square foot house is huge, so you won't see too many of them. The town does provide an option to build townhouses and apartments more densely, but it's roughly 5 units per acre for townhouses or 8 units per acre for apartments if I'm reading the statutes correctly. For all uses, only 30% of the lot may be covered. Dense development is now out. But we could still build apartments next to grocery stores and shops, right? That would still allow people to walk to something, even if it's not particularly dense. Nope. Except for downtown, and then only for certain town council blessed kinds of businesses (like barbershops), mixed uses are illegal. Your residential area must not contain commercial. Your commercial area must not contain residential. No apartments over stores allowed, sorry historic downtown. Hope none of your buildings burn down, because it would not be legal to rebuild them. OK, so we can't mix uses, we can't build densely, but we still don't have to build strip malls, right? Wrong. Culpeper, just like many areas, has a dizzying array of parking minimums that require X number of spaces provided per unit or per square footage in commercial properties. It's randomly generated and not based on any market realities, just like in most areas. In many areas they also mandate that the parking be free. What this means is that a huge portion of land must be used for parking or businesses must provide parking garages. Both are hugely expensive; even in a rural town like Culpeper land costs tens of thousands per acre. Underground parking can cost $10,000 per space in construction costs. A large surface parking lot just in land in a place like Culpeper can cost $100,000 or more, and then you have to add on paving and maintenance. Who knows how much the environmental cost is? This isn't just some podunk town regulation; even New York City requires this outside of Manhattan in a lot of cases, even if exactly 0 people want the garages. Their land is expensive enough that typically parking garages are the preferred option and they might actually allow charging for parking. Too bad many garages will sit mostly empty. It makes it difficult to build on a small scale since the parking garage will eat up a huge amount of money and require entrances, reducing the developable land. Given the interaction between all of the various statutes, the strip mall and suburban Walmart style store is all that's allowed to be built in most of America. Even the places that get it mostly right, such as Arlington, Virginia (to use another familiar place) still have parking minimums and still force suburban living outside a narrow corridor. Right next to Metro stations Arlington has single family housing when there's an affordability crisis and declining Metro ridership. I can think of a way to fix that. There's also an office space crisis in Arlington; too much was built, not enough was rented out. Without single use zoning, the office buildings could be converted to residential and rented out quickly. Single use zoning forces them to sit vacant. If the opposite situation occurred, apartments would sit vacant while office workers are stacked on top of each other to make use of expensive real estate. There are other ways in which cities and towns promote sprawl. For starters, when developers build new subdivisions, they have the developers build roads. These roads tend to be cul-de-sac style roads because they are cheaper to build; less road surface is needed. They also are hell for traffic, reduce emergency response times, and make walking difficult. Rather than rejecting these designs as more costly and bad, the cities and towns gladly take over maintenance, knowing they'll have to widen every road a thousand times in a never ending circle of congestion. Virginia is actually trying to force a certain level of connectivity to prevent this, but the rules are not much better than what currently exist; the cul de sac can live on, just with a few more internal connections. Roads are heavily subsidized. The gas tax mostly covers highways and interstates (and even then does not actually cover them), so local roads are paid for mostly with local tax dollars. Non-drivers pay directly in local taxes. Drivers pay nothing for congestion costs even if they do actually cover the cost of building and maintaining roads. Free roads make transit, which used to be mostly profitable private businesses, unable to compete and thus require massive subsidies. Federally, transit is screwed from a regulatory standpoint. Transit systems are forced to provide paratransit services that can charge at most only twice the most expensive fare between the two points. The idea was to force systems to become more ADA compliant to cut costs, but the regulation actually forces a 100% ADA compliant system to shuttle around people within a half mile of station to a destination within a half mile of station. Part of the problem is that the regulation specifies that you must provide service to people who can't get to your system because local streets are not ADA compliant. So if your city never upgrades its streets, you as the transit system must pay for their failure. You can't rip them up yourself, so you're financially screwed. Congress could and should have put this mandate on cities, making them more likely to upgrade the streets. These trips are super costly: some agencies spend a third of their operating budget on these services. They've started contracting out to taxis to handle the work, and taxis aren't cheap (though are cheaper than paratransit vans). The user might pay $5 for a $20 cab ride. This forces transit to either raise fares and be less competitive or get a higher tax subsidy. Solo drivers face no such mandate. Somewhat related, intercity trains in the US basically can't use European or Japanese trains due to outdated 1920s rail regulations without all kinds of special waivers. This makes rail travel slower and more expensive than it would otherwise be. TL;DR lots of laws need to change
  • greggman 11y ago
    How do you convince the supposedly "green" SF population that SF should really look more like Hong Kong?
    • Zach_the_Lizard 11y ago
      It doesn't have to look like Hong Kong. Paris isn't as dense as Manhattan, but it's something like 2/3rds as dense despite relatively few tall buildings. SF could allow mid-rise European style development and grow quite a bit denser. If SF had Parisian density, it could fit something like 2.5 million people. Other places in the bay could also not make suburban living mandatory. Housing affordability and environmental problems are a national issue. IMO the best solution is a Federal law that makes it impossible for cities to mandate suburban living. That avoids the problem where one city liberalizes land use and then sees huge development while others keep their doors closed.
• masterponomo 11y ago
  First determine the ideal temperature and climate conditions. Then, if the ideal is cooler than the current temp, wear the same clothes twice as long between washings; if the ideal is warmer than the current temp, wear them half as many times. But I cannot overstate the importance of Step 1 before taking a potentially irreversible action. Coup de Grace: Apply the same calculus to your every energy-consuming/heat-generating activity, and lather/rinse/repeat (metaphorically).
• jf 11y ago
  This is a masterpiece. I'm excited and overwhelmed after briefly skimming through it. I'm looking forward to the hours it will take me to work through this web page and its hyperlinks.
  • skadamat 11y ago
    I legitimately hope this causes even a few technologists to shift their attitudes & how they approach their careers (the way Inventing on Principle did!)
• briantakita 11y ago
  On a fundamental level, one can learn the discipline of systems thinking. Permaculture is an example of systems thinking with the ethics of Earth Care, People Care, & Fair Share. It may also help you become a more effective & well rounded technologist.
  • jf 11y ago
    What books do you recommend for learning more about systems thinking? This is the list that I'm using: http://www.amazon.com/gp/registry/giftlist/11TF5E15VQZ82 http://www.amazon.com/gp/registry/giftlist/11TF5E15VQZ82
    • briantakita 11y ago
      Thank you for your list. The books on there look good. Here's some books that I read & recommend re: applied systems thinking & ecosystems. http://www.amazon.com/Permaculture-Principles-Pathways-beyond-Sustainability/dp/0646418440/ref=sr_1_1 http://www.amazon.com/Permaculture-Principles-Pathways-beyon... http://www.amazon.com/Edible-Forest-Gardens-2-set/dp/1890132608/ref=sr_1_1 http://www.amazon.com/Edible-Forest-Gardens-2-set/dp/1890132... http://www.amazon.com/One-Straw-Revolution-Introduction-Natural-Classics/dp/1590173139/ref=sr_1_1 http://www.amazon.com/One-Straw-Revolution-Introduction-Natu... http://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Columbus/dp/1400032059/ref=sr_1_1 http://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Colum... http://www.amazon.com/Guns-Germs-Steel-Fates-Societies/dp/0393317552/ref=sr_1_1 http://www.amazon.com/Guns-Germs-Steel-Fates-Societies/dp/03... http://www.amazon.com/Collapse-Societies-Choose-Succeed-Revised/dp/0143117009/ref=sr_1_1 http://www.amazon.com/Collapse-Societies-Choose-Succeed-Revi... http://www.newsociety.com/Books/D/Decline-and-Fall http://www.newsociety.com/Books/D/Decline-and-Fall http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel-Kahneman/dp/0374533555/ref=sr_1_1 http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel-Kahneman/dp/... http://www.amazon.com/Consciousness-Social-Brain-Michael-Graziano/dp/0199928649 http://www.amazon.com/Consciousness-Social-Brain-Michael-Gra... http://www.amazon.com/Sex-Scratch-Making-Relationship-Rules/dp/1934620130/ref=sr_1_1 http://www.amazon.com/Sex-Scratch-Making-Relationship-Rules/...
      • 11y ago
• IanDrake 11y ago
  >Climate change is the problem of our time, it’s everyone’s problem, and most of our problem-solvers are assuming that someone else will solve it. I would change that to say, "Climate change is a problem that will always be 50 years away".
  • jf 11y ago
    At the bottom of the page, Bret says "at least for the next century, the “problem” of climate change will not be “solved” — it can only be “managed”. This is a long game. One more reason to be thinking about tools, infrastructure, and foundations. The next generation has some hard work ahead of them."
    • tertius 11y ago
      I view this as a very short term problem (i.e. the artificial effect on the planet through our own doing.) And I'm not saying that it isn't a problem and that we shouldn't be doing anything. The planet naturally goes through warm and cool times. There's little we can do to mitigate that, we'll experience another ice age eventually.
      • cpeterso 11y ago
        Climate change isn't a problem for the planet; it's a problem for the people living on it.
• mkesper 11y ago
  I always wonder who might invest in and how much CO² could be saved by bringing the Americas to 230V. Due to half the voltage, the current needs to be doubled for the same power at 110V leading to much higher losses due to resistance (U=I*R²).
  • evanpw 11y ago
    Almost all of the transmission is done at much higher voltages (3-4 orders of magnitude higher).
  • brandmeyer 11y ago
    Very little. This isn't just the last mile, its the last 10-100m. Transmission losses at this level are miniscule, especially relative to the capital cost of changing over to a higher voltage.
• jessriedel 11y ago
  I'd think there are better sources for reading about climate change than an author one who must admit "I didn’t mention nuclear because I don’t know much about it."
  • jf 11y ago
    What would you recommend?
    • ommunist 11y ago
      When it comes to real climate change data - nothing can substitute glaciology data. This is a good graph for you. Holocene temperature variations. Ironically it was quite warmer just 8 thousand years ago. Look, no cars, no cows, no industry... and it _was warmer_.
  • skadamat 11y ago
    The guy has a MS in Electrical Engineering and knows his stuff. Bret maybe just doesn't want to discuss topics he knows little about. Doesn't mean the rest of the manifesto is somehow broken :)
  • vox_mollis 11y ago
    You consider an author honestly assessing the scope and limitations of his own knowledge, and disclosing it, a negative? Really? I'd wager that a good chunk of our problems today originates from policymaking on the basis of people who don't know, or don't admit, what they don't know.
    • skadamat 11y ago
      Spot on!
    • jessriedel 11y ago
      Huh? I'm not criticizing the inclusion of that sentence, I'm criticizing the claimed scope of the piece. It's great to know lots of stuff about renewable energy, but its impossible to have a sufficiently informed opinion on climate change to start making claims about how our industrial society should re-tool without knowing about nuclear. Proper intellectual modesty does not shield you from this. If the author wrote a long piece about how the best way to solve climate change was to quintuple the number of nuclear power plants and mentioned "I really don't know much about the solar industry", would you consider that an authoritative piece? Should we be reading it?
• cpr 11y ago
  I still like Burt Rutan's take on the AGW question (http://rps3.com/Files/AGW/EngrCritique.AGW-Science.v4.3.pdf http://rps3.com/Files/AGW/EngrCritique.AGW-Science.v4.3.pdf). He looks at it as an engineer, using generally-accepted data. His conclusion is that the alarmists are wrong.
  • epistasis 11y ago
    Wow, that slide presentation is a masterpiece in how to deceive engineers. He's not looking at it "as an engineer," he's looking at everything with preconceived notions and trying to cherry pick his way to his conclusion.
    • cpr 11y ago
      That's fairly ad hominem. Can you give some examples?
      • platz 11y ago
        It's pretty obvious that there is a clear bias from the beginning, and the tone is revealing as well.
      • epistasis 11y ago
        Interesting, you find my comment to be fairly ad hominem but you don't the slide deck you shared? Basically all the "data" and arguments that he's presenting are cherry picked to be on the edge of plausibility, but as soon as you poke at them at all they fall part. It's really just a standard piece of denialist schlock. For example on slide 4 look at his plot and compare to the wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Description_of_the_Medieval_Warm_Period_and_Little_Ice_Age_in_IPCC_reports https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Description_of_the_Medieval_Wa... It's a bunch of canned and repeated arguments that are easily shot down, but doing each one takes so much time. It's like "debating" a creationist, shooting down an argument means that many more easily shot down arguments come right back up, with the denialist side somehow never loosing credibility while trying to assail the credibility of others. If somebody finds that slide deck interesting, please read other data too, it's a completely biased picture, meant to trick people. Something balanced like the IPCC will be far more solid information, with proper citations, that can be backed up.
• tobr 11y ago
  Interacting with that graph of world carbon emissions and gradually realizing what it is showing me. Stuff of nightmares (and fantastic interaction design).
  • skadamat 11y ago
    If you liked those interactions, I'd check out the iPad app Al Gore / Bret worked on - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-edAGLokak https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-edAGLokak
• ommunist 11y ago
  Technologist can do approximately the same thing about the climate change, that our Sun can do about the average temperature in the Milky Way. Keep calm and carry on! Humanity is not a geological force on this planet. UPD: Lovely stockpile of relevant information though. But I have a better one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfeytbHBPFM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfeytbHBPFM. Snows always melt. Look at glaciology data, dudes!
  • bluehawk 11y ago
    The majority of science studies, papers and reports disagree with you. Humans can and do have a huge impact on the world.
    • ommunist 11y ago
      Since when number of publications became the measure of truth? There were numerous publications before Leonardo since Aristotle that flies have 8 legs. They all still have 6 though. Humans are nothing in impact comparing to a single volcano.
      • Daishiman 11y ago
        Well your evidence sure is overwhelming! Hundreds of man-years of research based on multiple, independent lines of evidence pointing towards a singular conclusion and you, the voice of reason, here to refute it all without the aid of satellite data, ice cores, spectrometers or computers models.
        • skadamat 11y ago
          I think this is exactly Bret's point that he makes in the essay. Citizens aren't empowered to find out for themselves and are instead asks to trust smart people: "And why trust them? Their rhetoric is catchy, but so is the horrific “denialist” rhetoric from the Cato Institute and similar. When the discussion is at the level of “trust me, I’m a scientist” and “look at the poor polar bears”, it becomes a matter of emotional appeal and faith, a form of religion. Climate change is too important for us to operate on faith. Citizens need and deserve reading material which shows context — how significant suggested actions are in the big picture — and which embeds models — formulas and algorithms which calculate that significance, for different scenarios, from primary-source data and explicit assumptions."
• guscost 11y ago
  While I don't really agree with the premise, my initial impression is that this should get ten upvotes for being so well reasoned and executed. Amazing work, I'm confident a lot of good will come of it. One recommendation, at your earliest convenience do something about this: > I didn’t mention nuclear because I don’t know much about it.
  • pc86 11y ago
    I'm struggling to figure out why nuclear is lumped in with fossil fuels.
    • nostromo 11y ago
      Nuclear is low-carbon, but it's not renewable. Earth has a set amount of uranium that is destroyed when creating energy. Currently we have about 200 years of uranium available for economical extraction. But if we tried to replace all coal with nuclear, we would be out within a few decades. Then we'd need to move to other non-renewable materials (thorium?) or start mining astroids. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-long-will-global-uranium-deposits-last/ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-long-will-glob... And the mining of uranium looks awfully similar to the mining of coal. (Of course you need far fewer uranium mines for the same amount of energy.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining#/media/File:Arandis_Mine_quer.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining#/media/File:Ara...
      • burke 11y ago
        Is that a problem (the non-renewability)? Even if we deplete our available uranium while transitioning to fully renewable energy, we've still quit dumping carbon into the atmosphere. At that point, economic pressures are adequate to force us to renewable energy, I think.
      • danieltillett 11y ago
        Nuclear is not really low carbon when you take into account the amount of concrete you need to build a modern reactor. Unless we have a major breakthrough in mining uranium or we actually manage to make breeder reactors safe and cost effective then nuclear is not really a viable option. Edit. I should have been more precise in my language. By low carbon I am meaning minimal carbon, not just lower carbon. Natural gas is lower carbon, but it is not low carbon. It really doesn't matter too much because there just isn't enough uranium to make it a viable alternative at the scale we need to have a significant impact on carbon emissions.
• nabla9 11y ago
  >Here’s an opinion you might not hear much — I feel that one effective approach to addressing climate change is contributing to the development of Julia. Julia is a modern technical language, intended to replace Matlab, ... Well that was awkward transition.
  • Pxtl 11y ago
    I have a friend who works in stratospheric research. He has to work with some hoary old Fortran stuff. Giving scientists better computational tools like Julia is absolutely something that would help fight climate change.
  • emcq 11y ago
    Completely agree. I like Bret's stuff and love Julia but that section seemed very weird and almost preachy. He seems a little out of his element because a lot of physicists doing earth modeling use compiled languages like Fortran and C/C++ for the big simulations and python for the smaller stuff. Julia is cool though and a great substitute for the python stuff. It won't implicitly solve distributed computing and the computational problems people have to create large models. Unfortunately being closer to the metal can give big wins in terms of communication (mpi), avoiding memory copies, using simd compiler intrinsics and gpus, etc. and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
    • tavert 11y ago
      > It won't implicitly solve distributed computing Why not? It's out to explicitly address distributed computing - http://docs.julialang.org/en/latest/manual/parallel-computing/ http://docs.julialang.org/en/latest/manual/parallel-computin... Julia is performance-competitive with C++ and Fortran, and productivity-competitive with Python. It's out to do both. Julia code compiles to LLVM and is incredibly "close to the metal" including SIMD, ref http://docs.julialang.org/en/latest/manual/performance-tips/?highlight=simd#performance-annotations http://docs.julialang.org/en/latest/manual/performance-tips/... and https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/vectorization-in-julia https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/vectorization-in-j..., and GPUs http://blog.maleadt.net/2015/01/15/julia-cuda/ http://blog.maleadt.net/2015/01/15/julia-cuda/ Try using Julia a bit before you talk about what it "won't solve."
• blondie9x 11y ago
  Beautiful. Thanks for sharing Michael. A really through look at how we can use data and technology to help in preserve stable climate.
• brandmeyer 11y ago
  I have a controversial opinion on this topic: I don't think it is morally ethical to use inefficient languages in high duty-cycle applications. By "high duty-cycle applications" I specifically refer to environments which consistently consume the bulk of available CPU resources: big web servers, caching intermeddiate servers, etc. The common rationale is to trade off engineering time for CPU time. But that trade also means trading engineering time for carbon emissions, too.
  • orangecat 11y ago
    You're going to need actual numbers for this to be a valid argument. Data centers use only 3 percent of global electricity production (http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2014/12/17/undertaking-challenge-reduce-data-center-carbon-footprint/ http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2014/12/17/under...), and it seems unlikely that a noticeable portion of that is caused by CPU-intensive software that isn't already well-optimized.
    • brandmeyer 11y ago
      This isn't world-changing by any means. Just as individuals can reduce our energy consumption with high-SEER HVAC systems, high-efficiency lighting, etc, I think that programmers as individuals can reduce energy consumption by using higher-efficiency computing languages.
      • orangecat 11y ago
        Amdahl's law applies here: some things are just not worth worrying about. If you're Google or Facebook, you already have entirely selfish incentives to optimize your code. If you're not, and the performance of your "inefficient" software is acceptable to you and your users, the net environmental benefit of rewriting it in C is likely indistinguishable from zero. It may even be negative, if the increased development cost prevents you from improving energy efficiency elsewhere.
• beatpanda 11y ago
  If you're an engineer and you want to help enable sustainable deployment of solar power infrastructure, my company Genability is hiring for all kinds of roles right now. http://genability.com/careers/work_with_us.html http://genability.com/careers/work_with_us.html
• DHJSH 11y ago
  Weather resistant building design, for example, concrete dome construction.
• haxel 11y ago
  I look at the human-caused part of climate change as a billion or so smaller and easier-to-solve (but still hard) problems. Each one of these billions of problems is a person like you and me who acts without truly knowing what they are doing. Not in the sense of faking our way through life, but that we have only a superficial awareness of the consequences of our habitual or culturally-driven actions. This makes climate change an information problem, and technologists do information splendidly. It's an information problem because we base much of our behavior on feedback loops. When we get a big electricity bill, we take a closer look and perhaps rely less on our heaters or air-conditioner. When we see the odometer on our car hitting big numbers too soon (and repair bills looming), perhaps we look into a job closer to home. There's thousands of examples, many of which have an impact our our environment. So if we focused on developing a tool whose sole purpose was to give us quantified feedback on the consequences of our actions - much like how we use utility bills - we might be able to make a real dent in the big problem of climate change and others like it. We already have the pieces for a tool like this (Internet, computers everywhere, software libraries) along with the skills of technologists, so what's needed is the vision and the demand. I recently wrote these ideas in long form: (https://medium.com/@SteveHazel/we-re-drowning-in-low-quality-information-cf9566d407a9#.v3nzyp18m https://medium.com/@SteveHazel/we-re-drowning-in-low-quality...)
  • geedy 11y ago
    Somewhat towards this end, the University of Michigan has built this: http://lab11.eecs.umich.edu/projects/powerblade/ http://lab11.eecs.umich.edu/projects/powerblade/
  • rmchugh 11y ago
    I think it's problematic to focus exclusively on individual responsibility for averting climate change. Climate change is a massive global problem, intimately related to the structure of the global economy. The scale of the problem and the changes needed to mitigate it are thus far beyond the reach of any individual consumer. Problems at this scale can only be addressed by nation states and transnational actors, as was done for CFCs for example. Unfortunately these actors have been dragging their feet for decades. I am skeptical that they will be able to get their acts together in time to avert catastrophe.
• lexcorvus 11y ago
  This is well-done, but I wish such treatments spent more effort establishing that climate change projections are (a) reliable and (b) catastrophic. Those two points are the essence of the case, and yet they're usually just assumed. (Note that whether climate-change is anthropogenic or not is utterly beside the point. That so much attention is paid to this peripheral issue is a major red flag.)
• ilaksh 11y ago
  I actually believe 'climate change' is a type of cover for geopolitical issues related to the petrodollar. I believe that humans affect the climate, but the real scientific basis for that being the primary driver of climate change isn't there. But they are using 'da earf is melting' as a substitute for another truth that is just as scary. That truth is that the United States and its closest allies use about twice as much fossil fuel as the rest of the countries, and being able to continue that is completely dependent upon a massive military campaign that stretches thinner as the years go by. https://www.mtholyoke.edu/~paul20i/classweb/AFP2008/middleastmap.jpg https://www.mtholyoke.edu/~paul20i/classweb/AFP2008/middleas... Technologists can work on education and preventing the spread of war propaganda, which is rampant in Western television and media. Notice how the terrorists always seem to be loudly explaining which currently most strategic middle east country they come from. If you want to believe the main problem is just that 'da earf is melting' or climate change or whatever, the root of the problem is still fossil fuel dependency. The massive amount of fuel used for moving 3,000 pound vehicles to and from offices everyday, for work that probably 75% or more can be done over the internet with Skype or whatever, is the most obvious low-hanging fruit. Another thing is, as the dollar hegemony fades, what replaces it, and what sort of conflict arises during that transition? Something like bitcoin might be a good alternative to WWIII. We can also look toward alternative technological frameworks for society that support decentralization. Named-data networking, IPFS, Ethereum, etc. Suburbia is a prime target for reform. Here is my idea: https://runvnc.github.io/tinyvillage/ https://runvnc.github.io/tinyvillage/
  • sloppycee 11y ago
    Shockingly, passenger vehicles make up 43% of US greenhouse gas emissions. [1] Your comment made me look into it since my intuition was that you were wrong (that personal transportation does not contribute _that_ much). 1. http://www3.epa.gov/otaq/climate/documents/420f13033a.pdf http://www3.epa.gov/otaq/climate/documents/420f13033a.pdf (page 2)
    • FiatLuxDave 11y ago
      Check your link. Passenger vehicles make up 43% of the 27% of US greenhouse gas emissions which are from the transportation sector, or 11.6% of total US emissions.
• Jemaclus 11y ago
  I've asked this question a few times but haven't really gotten a satisfactory answer. There are a lot of what I might call "epic problems" out there. Malaria, homelessness, HIV, refugees, war, climate change, income inequality, gender inequality, hate crimes. I don't know anything about creating vaccines or cures for malaria or HIV. I don't have a degree in social work or behavior science. I don't have any experience with economics outside of personal investment and filing my income tax paperwork each year. I don't have billions of dollars to fund a company to focus on these things. I make a small salary relative to what's required for these things and have very limited knowledge. I'm a programmer and a manager. So how do I contribute to these problems? How can I take the skills I have and get homeless people the help they need? How do I take my web development skills and reduce income inequality? How do I help stop the next Trayvon Martin incident? I have no idea. This article goes into great detail about climate change, but I finished reading it and still have no idea. I don't even know where to start.
  • Hytosys 11y ago
    > ...homelessness, refugees, war, climate change, income inequality These are all directly caused by an economic system which optimizes for profits instead of people. I would also argue that the other problems you listed are perpetuated by said system. You are looking to solve a social problem using individual means. You cannot do that. Join local fights, help replace this broken system.
  • sliverstorm 11y ago
    Especially for social problems, my working theory is work to make people's lives better. A rising tide lifts all boats. The poor of today seem to be better off than the poor of two hundred years ago, as many things (including food) are available cheaper than ever. How can technology specifically help? The first thing that comes to mind- The entry of women into the workforce and subsequent advances in gender equality were, in my opinion, greatly aided by advances in textiles & housekeeping (washing machines, dishwashers, etc).
    • danieltillett 11y ago
      Women have always been in the workforce - the only change over the last century that has occurred is middle and upper middle class women have entered the workforce. Working class women have never not worked.
• spenrose 11y ago
  (1) This is great. (2) Political economy is a much bigger issue right now than technology. Most of what we need to do is deploy, and the tech we have is good enough for that. (3) Low-hanging fruit for self-identified "Technologists" is to reconsider some of the blind spots caused by their social identities. David Roberts explains: http://www.vox.com/2015/8/27/9214015/tech-nerds-politics http://www.vox.com/2015/8/27/9214015/tech-nerds-politics
  • spenrose 11y ago
    Also, I'd like to see "Tools for problem finding" augmented with "tools for POLICY problem finding". The state governments of California and New York, for example, do amazing work transforming the big beast of legacy systems. Bret cites some of the former's, and notes the specific example of CAISOs plea for grid storage. Better visibility of techies into policy could help a lot. Dave Roberts has done great work on this: http://vox.com/authors/david-roberts http://vox.com/authors/david-roberts
• kushti 11y ago
  So what can I do as a software developer? Any OSS written in Haskell / Scala / Java / OCaml I can contribute to?
  • deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
• pdeuchler 11y ago
  This is really awesome, both layout wise and for it's data visualizations. I'm a huge fan of Brett's work and this seems like it fits right in with his other exposes. That said, anything that doesn't discuss the global shipping industry (or more abstractly, emissions due to globalized trade), nuclear power, and solutions for developing countries* is missing more than half of the discussion (I'd personally argue it's almost missing the entire forest for a couple of trees). I'd be very careful to follow any conclusions or suggestions that don't factor any of that in. * This is the biggest annoyance for me when climate change is discussed in general. Moving the US and other developed countries to clean/renewable energy is mostly a matter of time and money. But developing countries like, say, India, have neither the money, infrastructure, or time to do so (not even broaching the fact that some don't even have the human rights framework to maintain an environmentally sustainable economy). Furthermore there's a moral issue, in that US/China led development essentially set the stage for global climate change. Is it morally acceptable to punish developing countries for following the same route? Fossil fuels are essentially the only way these companies can begin to compete... and after all it's the developed countries that took us, at a dead sprint, to the edge of the cliff.
  • msvalkon 11y ago
    I mostly agree with you but at least India is trying to move to nuclear[1]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India's_three-stage_nuclear_power_programme https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India's_three-stage_nuclear_po...
  • HiLo 11y ago
    Sorry, but the global shipping/maritime industry is only responsible for like 5%, maybe less, of emissions, as nasty as bunkers are, so it looks like you're the one staring at a tree. Like you mentioned, the real concern here is China and India's ability to grow their power generation stack using renewables rather than fossil fuels. Whether or not some more voyages take place will be trivial compared to the impact of China/India's power generation.
• xigency 11y ago
  Honestly, reading even a little bit of this article leads to the conclusion that the only solution is to switch to nuclear energy as our primary source of energy. I'm sorry, but wind kites or wind blimps aren't going to substantially affect carbon emissions.
  • xigency 11y ago
    > Nuclear power > I didn’t mention nuclear because I don’t know much about it. > See Stewart Brand’s book Whole Earth Discipline for an optimistic > take from a recent convert. (Ironically published five months > before Fukushima, but his points still stand.) I haven't read the book (Whole Earth Discipline), but it seems to have been published at least a year and a half before the Tōhoku earthquake. In any case, advocating nuclear power before an earthquake or tsunami would only be ironic if the author were advocating building new reactors near coastlines or fault lines and allowing them to lapse on safety mechanisms. The alternative would be to argue for the whole city of Tokyo to drastically alter its energy profile so that an entire nuclear reactor weren't needed, in addition to other plants, to power the city.
• davedx 11y ago
  I did considerable research into jobs where I would have the opportunity to help with climate change while I was a freelancer. I came up with a short list of companies, evaluated on a somewhat subjective basis of "effectiveness". (I read an essay by Bill Gates where he explained his investment strategies to "making the world a better place" were based on applying financial input where it had the most leverage.) Most of the companies were here in the Netherlands, one was in the USA. I applied to them all, and got 3 interviews. I ended up choosing a utility startup called Vandebron based in Amsterdam. Vandebron (https://vandebron.nl/ https://vandebron.nl/) means "from the source" in Dutch. They're an AirBNB-style marketplace for renewable energy. Customers choose the supplier ("generator") they want to buy their energy from. They're growing quickly! I've been there a little less than 3 weeks, and I feel like it's the best career decision I've ever made. I've never felt so motivated before. I encourage anyone wanting to join the effort against climate change to dig deep. Find the company you think will make the most impact. Get yourself in the door. Most companies are happy to find talented IT people.
  • tomp 11y ago
    May I ask, how did you go around searching for companies like this?
    • davedx 11y ago
      Of course. 1. I Googled, a LOT. "cleantech jobs", "cleantech netherlands", "green tech jobs", etc. etc. etc. 2. I started reading sites like cleantechnica. 3. I got a few leads from this site: http://www.climate-kic.org/ http://www.climate-kic.org/ 4. Jobs I'd found already, I looked up the companies I already knew about then followed the "companies like this" links on LinkedIn. 5. Followed lots of people in clean tech/environmentalism on Twitter. Not sure if I found anything this way, though.
• Shivetya 11y ago
  I still think that in addition to storage work needs to be done with super conductors in order to one day circle the earth with various power lines that fed from where energy is being produced to being used where generation is currently lacking. Before writing it off, it would not have been that long ago that wrapping the world in cables for communication would have been seen as a pipe dream either. I am not a fan of the idea of lithium or current tech batteries being stacked in mass. I just think that there would be bigger environmental concerns long term with these as servicing is a big issue. Still as a technologist two things. First never consider the science of the climate as settled. As soon as you do you close so many doors in your own mind that you will hamper yourself. Second realize the one big area we are truly short on isn't the technology but the people who can service it. From electricians, hydraulic engineers, and mechanical. Get people interested in those careers too. For many who might not have the technical chops to create such systems many more are far more capable of maintaining them
• Pxtl 11y ago
  I'm disappointed that the one item most accessible to the software/consumer-electronics world: telecommuting, doesn't appear much in the article. Giving people the tools to properly manage a remote team (including non-experts that are unaccustomed to remoting) is something we can do and that will take commuters off the roads.
  • api 11y ago
    Telepresence and telecommuting is a big one. The energy savings that could be realized are staggering, and it's so far probably one of the Internet's greatest failed promises. The Internet was supposed to break the tyranny of place, reducing not only the need for constant energy-guzzling commutes but also reducing the need to cluster in overpriced 'centers' like... well... Silicon Valley and San Francisco for example. The reality almost seems opposite. The Internet seems to have intensified geo-centralization of industries, with the Internet itself being chief among these. The fact that the whole tech industry must huddle in the Bay Area is a clear demonstration of this failure-- these are the people who are best at using the net, and they can't use it this way. So yeah, this is a big one and is a very worthy target.
    • cableshaft 11y ago
      Doesn't help when many of the big tech companies -- that other companies are influenced by and model their cultural and corporate infrastructure on -- have decided they absolutely HAVE to have in person spontaneous communication because it might result in some random problem being solved or new idea that saves them millions of dollars, so no one can work remotely and they have to relocate to Silicon Valley or be fired. Yahoo and Facebook and Reddit are a few companies I've seen announcements of new policies that have shunned remote work in the past few years.
  • jlebrech 11y ago
    virtual reality and telepresence, and large virtual shared monitor could help with productivity as a stepping stone till full vr is here.
  • pacifist 11y ago
• protomyth 11y ago
  The simple answer to the question is to create source of power and distribution that are cheaper, easier, and as reliable as gas, oil, and coal. Add to that a cheap solution to remove carbon from the air and oceans and you solve the problem. Anything that requires sacrifice of the first world or impedes the third world's progress is not going to be adopted. Swing for the fences since we need the homerun.
  • rwallace 11y ago
    We already have energy sources that are much cheaper than coal when you take all the costs into account. If you start demanding that renewable energy must be cheaper than coal when coal gets huge effective subsidies and renewable energy gets none, that's an artificial constraint that makes the problem unsolvable.
    • protomyth 11y ago
      Why does China use coal? If you truly want India and China to switch sources then you need to check all the boxes. No one is going to sacrifice when they are bootstrapping.
      • rwallace 11y ago
        Why has China started investing heavily in renewable energy? For one, they want the status of a modern country that's leading the world in important matters; they don't want to be a shitty third world country stuck in the nineteenth century. For another, they're tired of constantly choking on coal smoke.
        • protomyth 11y ago
          > they want the status of a modern country that's leading the world in important matters Yes, their military spending and quest for a blue water navy is number one on that list. They continue to use coal as the main source of energy because it is what the west did and its a know quantity, reliable, and cheap. They are increasing their attempts at other energy but a lot of that comes from their desire to stay dominant in all forms of manufacturing. If they can subsidize and crush the manufacturing in other countries (such as the US), they will do it.
• oberstein 11y ago
  Buy iron, dump in ocean. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_fertilization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_fertilization) Donate to geoengineering efforts and lobbying against insane moratoriums against geoengineering efforts.
  • jbrande 11y ago
    Environmental 'solutions' have the unfortunate habit of being severely under researched and causing further, if not greater, damage. Besides, that is a solution for the symptom, not the disease.
    • oberstein 11y ago
      When you have treated all symptoms and stopped them from arising again, the disease is effectively cured even if you still carry it. The final solution will be complete mastery over our planetary weather, it's better we do that sooner than later. Tsunami and earthquake deaths total far above terrorism deaths, we only need funding to fight terrorism to the extent that they get in the way of building to that final solution. Even if we "fix" the climate change disease (say perhaps by wiping out industrial-era and beyond humanity, the disease?) those other natural phenomena will still be killing many.
      • jbrande 11y ago
        You are vastly, VASTLY, overestimating our understanding of the biology, chemistry, geology, & incredibly complex web of interdependencies and relationships that make up the environment we live in. Much simpler to solve at the source (whatever actions are directly causing the damage) than the falacy of thinking we understand and have accounted for every possible permutation of events that will cascade after dumping material A into resource B. We don't even know what we don't know but this is the end game and mistakes here don't get do overs. The next step in your logic is our 'traditional' response at this point: drop in another chemical/process that is supposed to 'fix' whatever mess up we did before. Haven't we learned from that yet, Deepwater Horizon was just the most recent example.
• bborud 11y ago
  Develop products and technologies that are better for the environment while at the same time more attractive than what it replaces. People don't want to sacrifice: they want better. So real change is about better alternatives. You need a long planning horizon. Be prepared to spend decades for the problems that matter.
• mildweed 11y ago
  re: "Coordination (consuming when?)" Z-Wave already has ADR (Automated Demand Response) capabilities. http://z-wavealliance.org/energy-management/ http://z-wavealliance.org/energy-management/ So the protocol (OpenADR2.0a) is defined, the messaging is available (from a DRAS), and the consumer client is listening (Z-Wave). We just need more appliances to build ADR integrations to Z-Wave.
• cies 11y ago
  Great piece. I was thinking: "what programmers can do?" And came up with the "use compiled languages" answer. I compare Ruby and Haskell, as that's what I have experience with; but I expect it to hold true for any Ruby/Python/Java/etc vs C/C++/Haskell/Go/Rust/etc shootout. Just some typical numbers: Disk space to house one app deployment: 800MB Ruby/Rails vs 80MB Haskell/Yesod. Memory consumption of one instance: 350MB Ruby/Rails vs <1MB Haskell/Yesod. Time (CPU bound) needed for a request: 80ms Ruby/Rails vs 8ms Haskell/Yesod. Startup time of app: 30sec Ruby/Rails vs <1sec Haskell/Yesod. Especially for large scale apps this makes a difference. Just through metal at it, is not a sustainable answer. The Googles and FBs know this; and they compile a lot. I think going compiled is going green with your software in many cases; especially on scale.
  • pjc50 11y ago
    800MB Ruby/Rails What, really? How much of that is the app source? As a byte-shaving embedded developer I have zero experience with Rails. On the other hand, unless you're scaling really big, the CO2 cost of the computers is probably dwarfed by the cost of the developers commuting to work.
    • cies 11y ago
      > How much of that is the app source? Little. Most is libs. > [...] unless you're scaling really big, the CO2 cost of the computers is probably dwarfed by the cost of the developers commuting to work. Yups. That's why I mentioned "scale". Personally I cycle 7 mins to work :)
• jbrande 11y ago
  I like the increasing focus on climate change but what about any one of of the other really damaging things we are doing? Acid Mine drainage, for one, is heavily related to the tech world with the ever growing demand for more materials to build our hardware. Let's figure out how to build electronics & devices in a manner that enables systemic recycling and has more reasonable power costs. As it is, we just bury our old tech under a pile of trash and go mine some more. That is not a sustainable or in my opinion, sane, practice.
• deleted 11y ago
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• chaosphere2112 11y ago
  I work on climate software at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory[1]. My team works with big data and visualization. We support ACME[2] (the Department of Energy's climate modeling program), PCMDI[3] (a team that's been evaluating climate models since 1989), and a number of other projects and groups. If you are interested in what you can do for the climate, we need all the help we can get. Our code may not be the epitome of hygiene (think decades-old python with docstrings that haven't been touched in that long), but in the time I've been here we've gotten loads better. All of our code lives on github ([4] and [5]), we have way more funding than we know what to do with, and we have more work to do than people to do it. If you're interested, shoot me an email (in my profile). I'm still hunting for the job application link. EDIT: Job link found! http://careers-ext.llnl.gov/jobs/4494026-software-developers--2 http://careers-ext.llnl.gov/jobs/4494026-software-developers... Don't worry about all of the skills listed, it's a generic one. Feel free to shoot me an email if you have any questions. [1]: https://www.llnl.gov https://www.llnl.gov [2]: http://climatemodeling.science.energy.gov/projects/accelerated-climate-modeling-energy http://climatemodeling.science.energy.gov/projects/accelerat... [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Program_for_Climate_Model_Diagnosis_and_Intercomparison https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Program_for_Climate_Model_Diag... [4]: https://github.com/ESGF https://github.com/ESGF [5]: https://github.com/UV-CDAT https://github.com/UV-CDAT
  • uberdog 11y ago
    "NOTE: This is a Career Indefinite position." Sold!
    • chaosphere2112 11y ago
      Career Indefinite means that if the project you're on ends, the lab will keep you floating for a (short) period of time till you find another source of funding.
  • LukeShu 11y ago
    1. Your email is not in your profile. 2. The job link throws a certificate error, and then 404s if I ignore it.
• jonesb6 11y ago
  Writing more efficient software?
• spot 11y ago
  The model-driven section (ability to write models, publish models, and for them to become the standard for public decision making) is important to me and I am working on solving it through the Beaker Notebook, an environment for data modeling, visualization, communication, and publication. Check out http://BeakerNotebook.com http://BeakerNotebook.com and especially https://pub.beakernotebook.com/#/publications https://pub.beakernotebook.com/#/publications The final step of making authoring and execution work in the cloud is still under development...
• codeshaman 11y ago
  Fantastic article with so much information.. I feel humbled when I see how much work people put into these things and how great the result looks like ! Haven't read it all yet and forgive me if I'm repeating what's already mentioned there, but I would also add the following.. I think that climate change is the consequence of people doing too much X. One way to curb it would be for people to do less X or do (more) Y instead. No governments, no grants, you and me - the people, aka users. But that involves changing the people's behaviour, which is very hard. Or is it ? Well, advertising works quite well and we've become very good at manipulating and determining people to do (buy) all kinds of things. What if we used all that ad tech and all that exposure that tech corporations have and implement a global 'climate change' propaganda ? This can be done starting tomorrow. Microsoft Windows popping up an alert "Do you really need all your lights on in your house ?" Facebook wall containing ads encouraging people to be less wasteful, respect nature and think about the future (we can do incredibly cool ads nowadays!). iPhones displaying "plant a tree !" on the home screen with the button to actually schedule it in the calendar. Google search returning a 'sponsored' link to climate-healing projects ... There's so much, we, the tech people working at the big corps can do today .. We don't need startups for that, we already have most of the eyeballs of the planet in our operating systems, social networks or search engines. It's a matter of delivering the right information and people will follow. We all want to do this, regardless of country or race or religion. So, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple , etc - why not allocate 1% of your UIs to fixing the climate ? You can reach everyone on the planet and we are ready to do it, just give us some pointers, remind us to do the good stuff and we will, because that's how advertising works ! I'd happily discuss this more, so let me know if anyone's interested ;).
• davidw 11y ago
  Ride your bike to work and encourage others to do likewise. Might be a small gesture, but it's something you can do tomorrow.
  • musesum 11y ago
    Yep, in the 1973 Scientific American, they compared Kcal/Kg/Km of different modes of transport. Bike vs 40x over a Car.
• jrcii 11y ago
  The whole climate thing has become so politicized I'm suspicious of anyone who's passionate about it either way
• mouly 11y ago
  Bret Victor has provided a first principles approach to solving climate change. I work at SolarCity we take a similar systems thinking approach and tackle the problems at their fundamental level. We have been vertically integrating the business from manufacturing highest efficiency solar panels, mounting systems that enable fast installation, electrical systems that can work with the grid, financing for homeowners that don't require any downpayment. Our Software engineering team specifically works on improving efficiency of our sales workflow, geo spatial systems that support our installation crew, grid systems that monitor and work with the grid, and providing the best experience for our customers. I'm happy to talk to anyone who is interested in joining us. Shoot me an email at mkumaraswamy@solarcity.com Our career's page: http://solar.solarcity.com/careers/software-engineering/ http://solar.solarcity.com/careers/software-engineering/
  • hobolord 11y ago
    I applied to SolarCity for similar reasons, because I'd like to hopefully do something about climate change. Hope I hear back soon
• suyash 11y ago
  Do you find that navigation in the middle annoying, specially since user has to scroll to find it again. Content is great but design didn't quite do justice to the research.
• cozzyd 11y ago
  Many workplaces are built in suburban wastelands. Perhaps if enough people refused to work in such a hostile-to-any-mode-other-than-car environment, that might help.
• super-serial 11y ago
  Build mining robots. Those robots can mine olivine, crush the rocks, and spread it all over the oceans. We can offset all human CO2 emissions with this method.
• greggman 11y ago
  I'll probably get downvoted but I'm honestly interested in some thoughts on my dumb thinking. This is an amazing presentation and I've loved Bret Victor's other presentations but, and I'm making an assumption here, I kind of assume he's rich or at least financially independent given where he's worked and when he worked there. Assuming I'm right I find it a little hard to listen to the advice which sometimes sounds like "Consider saving the planet but with a high possibility of a financially challenged life. I've already made my money so I'm free to give you this advice in comfort and security". Of course that doesn't mean you can't get rich following one of these solutions. It also doesn't mean that money = happiness or anything like that. It's only this nagging feeling that the reader is being asked to sacrifice something the author themselves has not and that the author has forgotten where they are in their lives relative to most of the people they are asking. If I knew all my financial needs (health care, retirement, family) were already well met I'd have less trouble dedicating my time to worthy causes like say Bill Gates apparently is. But, I'm not there yet. I do have to worry how I will retire, how much I'll need to spent on healthcare as I age, etc... Sure I can still make the decision to chase financial independence or chase worthy causes but it's just, I guess maybe the word is frustrating, to be asked to make that choice but someone who I assume doesn't need to choose. They've already achieved financial Independence and therefore the choice is far easier. (maybe one more reason for basic income). I'm also aware it sounds stupid to even bring this topic up. There's all kinds of ways to frame this and ignore the part of it I just mentioned. But, for whatever reason I can't ignore it. I guess because I've seen my father too old to get an engineering job he's qualified for and too poor to retire.
  • trop 11y ago
    At last report Bret Victor's research is supported by these folks: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-01-29/sap-looks-to-xerox-for-r-d-inspiration-builds-idea-lab http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-01-29/sap-looks-... It's a hard question, what you ask -- should the techno-aristocracy pursue worthy causes, while the rest of us toil to enrich them? Is the world so fundamentally unfair that we're stuck without autonomy, doing tiresome tasks for corporations which don't even offer us basic economic security in return? Much less the opportunity to improve that world? There does seem to be an option, at least early on: Labor for those who respect neither their employees nor customers. Or find/create energetic work which can make us and our surroundings better. Either decision feeds on itself. The first path limits options, the second gives some chance for things being better. But I don't want this to be a blame-the-victim argument: that your father made a poor early career choice, and that Bret Victor chose wisely. But one element of Victor's argument is that our career choices (if we have them) have consequences for the world as well as ourselves. If we can find work which is not cynical and destructive, it may make the world better, and even set a good example. If we struggle for work which is emotionally, financially, and creatively unrewarding, then we're suggesting to others that that is the world, and they may find it easy to make similar choices. The recent essay (by a presumably enfranchised techno-aristocrat) https://medium.com/@ystrickler/resist-and-thrive-1d36819853ca https://medium.com/@ystrickler/resist-and-thrive-1d36819853c... covers a similar territory regarding career choices, also pre-supposing that we have some autonomy. An argument there is that the initial choice is harder, but the consequences are easier.
• frankiechh 11y ago
  Seriously? Technologists have a hard time being employed past a certain expiration date.