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You could have made a similar poll in New York in 1900, only with regards to how many pounds of horseshit you created. Ok, you'd need a team of ledger operator

by brc 17y ago

You could have made a similar poll in New York in 1900, only with regards to how many pounds of horseshit you created. Ok, you'd need a team of ledger operators with slide rules to work it out, but you'd get frightening figures projected forwards over 50 years. One would start to get terribly frightened about where all that horseshit would go. Politicians would come up with ridiculous schemes to put an artificial price on horseshit to reduce the production of it (which had a marketable value, but supply overwhelmed demand) The thing is though, within 50 years you could fit all the horseshit in New York city into one dumptruck. All because of a game-changing technological introduction - the motor car. That's the problem I have with this type of thought experiment. It assumes constant growth of everything else but technological breakthroughs. 50 years ago you couldn't easily speak to someone on the other side of the world. Sending international messages was so expensive you paid per letter. Now I can speak to multiple people in multiple countries in full video conference, and all for basically free. I think it's either naive or arrogant to think the problems of 50-100 years time are constrained by the technologies we have today, and I think it's the wrong response to try and dial back peoples lives to achieve it.

jblochjohnson 17y ago
I'm optimistic about our ability to develop technology that addresses climate change, and perhaps some sort of function based on increased efficiency (or the development of new technologies altogether) should be introduced – some sort of constant growth of technological breakthroughs. That's a legitimate criticism. However, I take issue with the idea that people shouldn't try to dial back (or change) their consumption now to deal with the issue. Until someone invents that car (very low emissions energy, for instance), we still have the horseshit piling up, and there's no guarantee the car will be invented any time soon. I don't want to simply sit around watching it accumulate until someone invents a car, especially when its accumulation could potentially have large negative effects that would be hard to undo (a whole other technological problem). We do want to help introduce people to these technologies as they emerge (reduce your load of horsecrap, drive a car!) – we just also want to allow people to try to deal with the problem with the tools at their disposal. PS: Our site is written mostly in slide rule.

by brc 17y ago

jblochjohnson 17y ago

I'm optimistic about our ability to develop technology that addresses climate change, and perhaps some sort of function based on increased efficiency (or the development of new technologies altogether) should be introduced – some sort of constant growth of technological breakthroughs. That's a legitimate criticism. However, I take issue with the idea that people shouldn't try to dial back (or change) their consumption now to deal with the issue. Until someone invents that car (very low emissions energy, for instance), we still have the horseshit piling up, and there's no guarantee the car will be invented any time soon. I don't want to simply sit around watching it accumulate until someone invents a car, especially when its accumulation could potentially have large negative effects that would be hard to undo (a whole other technological problem). We do want to help introduce people to these technologies as they emerge (reduce your load of horsecrap, drive a car!) – we just also want to allow people to try to deal with the problem with the tools at their disposal. PS: Our site is written mostly in slide rule.