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What's with this obsession to 'get back to where we were before'? Where we were before was broken, and the pandemic helped reveal that. Poor work/life balance,

What's with this obsession to 'get back to where we were before'? Where we were before was broken, and the pandemic helped reveal that. Poor work/life balance, income inequality, industries built on JIT processes which fail spectacularly when the unexpected happens (see lumber, shipping containers, semiconductors, etc), an unfortunate wake-up call that even with entire industries shut down and almost no flights and cars on the road we only reduced emissions by 13% so we're going to need to make incredible sacrifices and green-tech investments if we even want to hope at our promised 50% reduction by 2030. We shouldn't hope to get to where we were before. We should try to be better, and perhaps learn to live with less, because on a global scale we're not going to have a choice before too long whether we do it consciously or have it forced on us.

dragonwriter 5y ago
> What's with this obsession to 'get back to where we were before'? > Where we were before was broken, Not for the people with dominant power over society, including over the media organizations that write the narratives fed to the masses. And that's the answer to your question.
- cableshaft 5y ago
  Good point, fair enough. We should push back against that narrative, then, I guess is my point.
PraetorianGourd 5y ago
Honestly, I can only imagine this is informed by a relatively privileged place in society. First of all, your focus on this boogeyman of work/life balance assumes that all but a small percent of the global population even has enough autonomy in their employment to enjoy any balance whatsoever. Most everyone in the world is at sustenance levels of labor, "work/life balance" is the work of being alive. Secondly, JIT everything worked for the past 100 years, failed during an unprecedented in history event (we've had pandemics, but we've never "shut down" society) and will probably recover to do well until the next once-in-a-century event. Solving the global emissions crises isn't going to occur via the wealthiest working remotely or "learning to live with less". Population growth is far and away the biggest contributor to global climate change. Not your commute to the office, but growing enough food, building enough homes and providing for nearly 10 billion people and counting. Again, most of these people don't have anywhere near the luxury of bemoaning a poor work/life balance. It is so telling that the answer you see to solve the woes of modern society -- which as you are commenting on HN, you and me and the rest of us are beneficiaries of -- is to work less and remotely. What sacrifice you make for the good of the world! I am sorry I just am beyond over the sanctimony and self-importance of everyone. Now that _you_ have _yours_ and can relax in relative comfort, lets call it a day and cut off the engine that rose you and yours out of poverty for those poor schmucks still dreaming of the comfort of a 40-hour work week.
- cableshaft 5y ago
  I mean, this is Hacker News, most people here are in a privileged place compared to the rest of the world. That's kind of the audience. I'm fully aware not everyone is in this position to request or push for work/life balance. I've worked a decent amount of shitty jobs in my day, in fast food, retail, shipping/receiving, warehouse work. I've gone through periods where I was so physically exhausted after work I didn't do much more than go home and pass out and wake up and go back to work again. It sucks. And I don't know what they can do exactly, I'm too far removed from that now. I believe I did say that shutting down and working remotely brought our emissions down only 13%, not "solving the global emissions crisis". I said it was a painful wake-up call that even with all that happened last year, it wasn't anywhere near enough. So we need to try to do as much of that as possible and a lot, lot more if we are to get anywhere close. I don't know what that might be. I was listening to Bill Gates' 'How to Avoid a Climate Catastrophe' and he thinks there's several technologies that can possibly get our emissions to zero in the next decade or two. But after listening to that book I'm more dubious than he is. It sounded like even with his optimism he just inadvertently kept making a case for how fucking hard it is, how every piece of the solution has downsides and problems to overcome to work at scale, and how there's no way we're going to change enough hearts and minds or provide enough incentives to do enough to get us to 50% reduction in the next decade, or all the way down to zero by 2050. I don't think just staying home means we solved it, not by a long shot. We (and I mean corporations in this too, they're the bigger culprits than individuals) need to be doing all the things and a whole lot more, if possible, and even then I don't see it being enough totally avert catastrophe. I'm just hoping instead of like, 4-8 degrees warming (and likely human extinction or near extinction), maybe we'll somehow bring it down to only 2-3 degrees of warming. And that will still lead to terrible things. And it'll be hard to give up creature comforts. I'm failing pretty hard at this more than I'd like to myself right now. I'm trying to get better, though, but even if I do, it's going to make such a tiny, unnoticeable difference by itself. We can expect things to get fucking bad regardless, I think, I'm just hoping we can make things slightly less bad instead of everyone just shrugging our shoulders and accelerating and steering directly into the iceberg.
  - PraetorianGourd 5y ago
MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
Green Tech isn't the savior we need. Flat out there needs to be a consumption revolution worldwide. Even if say we were all driving electric cars, on top of the energy required for normal everyday life now, you're also adding powering those cars. The necessary "reliable" green energy generation for that to happen is nothing short of trillions of dollars (when I say reliable, I mean exactly as you use it today). Yes I'm pulling that number out of my butt, although I'm in major power company in the country. Over 85% of our power generation is from non-renewables like natural gas and coal. Why? Well for one thing Natural resource departments don't like us damming up rivers as well as Joe "Second Home" Schmoe. On top of that, wind is unreliable or if it's too windy we can't use them so the turbine doesn't obliterate from too much torque. Sun? Where is the sun in winter? I get so upset about people who think green energy is the answer when they don't realize it's not feasible if you want your current lifestyle. People altogether need to stop driving so much, spending so much, and living more modestly. I guarantee you without even switching to green energy we'd see a higher drop in non-renewable usage.
- cableshaft 5y ago
  > People altogether need to stop driving so much, spending so much, and living more modestly. Yeah I believe I said that when I said we need to make large sacrifices, I just didn't specify what those sacrifices were exactly. I don't think green tech is the end-all be-all. I honestly think we're kind of fucked either way (if anything I was holding back, I've been reading some pretty bleak shit about how impossible this task will be and how bad things can get, but this is Hacker News and most people here don't seem to be receptive to that). Clean tech is just part of reducing the degree of how fucked we are, at least slightly. And I also think nuclear energy needs to be part of that solution to bring down emissions as well, at least for now. I haven't been against nuclear power for a long time, and was disappointed how people shunned it again after Fukushima.
  - MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
    One reason we don't do nuclear is not enough people are skilled in it, we don't want to invest in building them after just having decommissioned two, and they are the ultimate NIMBY powerplant. Tell people there's a coal plant and they may get upset. Tell them there's a nuclear power plant after just having seen the HBO series Chernobyl and guess how fast they'll be knocking down the city governments door to not allow it. You're spot on really. People just don't trust it and there's nothing we can do about it.

dragonwriter 5y ago

> What's with this obsession to 'get back to where we were before'? > Where we were before was broken, Not for the people with dominant power over society, including over the media organizations that write the narratives fed to the masses. And that's the answer to your question.

cableshaft 5y ago
Good point, fair enough. We should push back against that narrative, then, I guess is my point.

PraetorianGourd 5y ago

Honestly, I can only imagine this is informed by a relatively privileged place in society. First of all, your focus on this boogeyman of work/life balance assumes that all but a small percent of the global population even has enough autonomy in their employment to enjoy any balance whatsoever. Most everyone in the world is at sustenance levels of labor, "work/life balance" is the work of being alive. Secondly, JIT everything worked for the past 100 years, failed during an unprecedented in history event (we've had pandemics, but we've never "shut down" society) and will probably recover to do well until the next once-in-a-century event. Solving the global emissions crises isn't going to occur via the wealthiest working remotely or "learning to live with less". Population growth is far and away the biggest contributor to global climate change. Not your commute to the office, but growing enough food, building enough homes and providing for nearly 10 billion people and counting. Again, most of these people don't have anywhere near the luxury of bemoaning a poor work/life balance. It is so telling that the answer you see to solve the woes of modern society -- which as you are commenting on HN, you and me and the rest of us are beneficiaries of -- is to work less and remotely. What sacrifice you make for the good of the world! I am sorry I just am beyond over the sanctimony and self-importance of everyone. Now that _you_ have _yours_ and can relax in relative comfort, lets call it a day and cut off the engine that rose you and yours out of poverty for those poor schmucks still dreaming of the comfort of a 40-hour work week.

cableshaft 5y ago
I mean, this is Hacker News, most people here are in a privileged place compared to the rest of the world. That's kind of the audience. I'm fully aware not everyone is in this position to request or push for work/life balance. I've worked a decent amount of shitty jobs in my day, in fast food, retail, shipping/receiving, warehouse work. I've gone through periods where I was so physically exhausted after work I didn't do much more than go home and pass out and wake up and go back to work again. It sucks. And I don't know what they can do exactly, I'm too far removed from that now. I believe I did say that shutting down and working remotely brought our emissions down only 13%, not "solving the global emissions crisis". I said it was a painful wake-up call that even with all that happened last year, it wasn't anywhere near enough. So we need to try to do as much of that as possible and a lot, lot more if we are to get anywhere close. I don't know what that might be. I was listening to Bill Gates' 'How to Avoid a Climate Catastrophe' and he thinks there's several technologies that can possibly get our emissions to zero in the next decade or two. But after listening to that book I'm more dubious than he is. It sounded like even with his optimism he just inadvertently kept making a case for how fucking hard it is, how every piece of the solution has downsides and problems to overcome to work at scale, and how there's no way we're going to change enough hearts and minds or provide enough incentives to do enough to get us to 50% reduction in the next decade, or all the way down to zero by 2050. I don't think just staying home means we solved it, not by a long shot. We (and I mean corporations in this too, they're the bigger culprits than individuals) need to be doing all the things and a whole lot more, if possible, and even then I don't see it being enough totally avert catastrophe. I'm just hoping instead of like, 4-8 degrees warming (and likely human extinction or near extinction), maybe we'll somehow bring it down to only 2-3 degrees of warming. And that will still lead to terrible things. And it'll be hard to give up creature comforts. I'm failing pretty hard at this more than I'd like to myself right now. I'm trying to get better, though, but even if I do, it's going to make such a tiny, unnoticeable difference by itself. We can expect things to get fucking bad regardless, I think, I'm just hoping we can make things slightly less bad instead of everyone just shrugging our shoulders and accelerating and steering directly into the iceberg.
- PraetorianGourd 5y ago

MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago

Green Tech isn't the savior we need. Flat out there needs to be a consumption revolution worldwide. Even if say we were all driving electric cars, on top of the energy required for normal everyday life now, you're also adding powering those cars. The necessary "reliable" green energy generation for that to happen is nothing short of trillions of dollars (when I say reliable, I mean exactly as you use it today). Yes I'm pulling that number out of my butt, although I'm in major power company in the country. Over 85% of our power generation is from non-renewables like natural gas and coal. Why? Well for one thing Natural resource departments don't like us damming up rivers as well as Joe "Second Home" Schmoe. On top of that, wind is unreliable or if it's too windy we can't use them so the turbine doesn't obliterate from too much torque. Sun? Where is the sun in winter? I get so upset about people who think green energy is the answer when they don't realize it's not feasible if you want your current lifestyle. People altogether need to stop driving so much, spending so much, and living more modestly. I guarantee you without even switching to green energy we'd see a higher drop in non-renewable usage.

cableshaft 5y ago
> People altogether need to stop driving so much, spending so much, and living more modestly. Yeah I believe I said that when I said we need to make large sacrifices, I just didn't specify what those sacrifices were exactly. I don't think green tech is the end-all be-all. I honestly think we're kind of fucked either way (if anything I was holding back, I've been reading some pretty bleak shit about how impossible this task will be and how bad things can get, but this is Hacker News and most people here don't seem to be receptive to that). Clean tech is just part of reducing the degree of how fucked we are, at least slightly. And I also think nuclear energy needs to be part of that solution to bring down emissions as well, at least for now. I haven't been against nuclear power for a long time, and was disappointed how people shunned it again after Fukushima.
- MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
  One reason we don't do nuclear is not enough people are skilled in it, we don't want to invest in building them after just having decommissioned two, and they are the ultimate NIMBY powerplant. Tell people there's a coal plant and they may get upset. Tell them there's a nuclear power plant after just having seen the HBO series Chernobyl and guess how fast they'll be knocking down the city governments door to not allow it. You're spot on really. People just don't trust it and there's nothing we can do about it.