A lot of older paperbacks seemed to use a lower grade of woodchip fibre and truly awful glue. Admittedly I live in the subtropics which is very unkind to books but it's my airport thrillers, cheap scifi and old penguin and pelican books.
Assuming we consume ~20 TW on average, a metre-squared panel kicks out ~40 W on average, and we halve that to account for batteries and other infra... I reckon we're talking about 1 million square kilometres (people will be along in a sec to check my working, but it's just a Fermi estimate).
Call it 10% of the Sahara.
Bear in mind that if we go all-electric, raw energy consumption falls significantly, many panels will be sited on buildings, solar isn't the only renewable, and solar farms aren't ecological deserts - you can graze animals below them.
I'm not saying that that magnitude of solar generation isn't a good thing. I'm saying that the solar farms of 2050 don't necessarily need to be arrays of panels on top of clear-cut land.
Grazing land is often essentially an ecological desert when compared to previous uses. Farms in general, honestly. Actually, this is a good forward example as agricultural expansion goes hand-in-hand with the Anthropocene die-off, but late advances in land use efficiency via fertilizer and other technologies means that even though these lands are super dead we also require less of them per person. What I'm proposing is analogous to even further development, where you're still somehow able to produce the same volume of food while reintroducing ecological diversity to the same land; moving away from traditional monoculture farms to ultra-efficient food forests. I don't know how you'd do it in farming, but it energy generation, it would probably involve engineering equipment to some level of symbiosis with the preexisting environment. Could we someday build literal forests of photovoltaics that support energy generation as well as a diverse natural ecosystem? Maybe. I'm sure we'll try. And that's why, ultimately, my point is that the idea that solar is an economic dead end is incorrect. This is just one potential branch on a tech tree (heh) that isn't anywhere near done growing.
My wife was complaining about far right knuckle draggers turning up in her feed. I assume the algorithm was shovelling more of them at her because she was rubbernecking. I told her to try a "block every time" approach. It took about two weeks until her feed was (mostly) free of them but it still throws one at her now and again.
I offer this as a data point about how hard it is to turn a polluted feed around. But I'm now wondering if "feed cleaning" is a service that could be automated, via LLM.
What next? The intellectual dark web?
I think we can have a free market of ideas or whatever you’re fetishising without it meaning that I can’t sit on the couch and open an app to see some family photos without it being intermingled with some loser saying that trans people should be hanged on the street.
And you know for a fact that I am not exaggerating. This is where the current political discourse is at.
Can I please have the freedom to do that without the lecture?
That sort of rage bait is literally targeted to rile up people sitting on the opposite side of the kind of people watching that other media site that rhymes with socks. It’s all fake bullshit algorithmically optimized to divide.
Everybody thinks their tribe is immune to this sort of stuff but it isn’t. It’s all the same nonsense packaged for different echo chambers.
At the end of the day, everybody is human. It isn’t us vs them, it’s just us.
The worst to me is the way people dehumanize other people who don't agree with them.
The other side politically doesn't just have different views, they are barely human knuckle draggers. Basically neanderthals, so who cares if they go extinct.
Trolls do as well. Very often if a comment is "bad", it comes from a relatively new account. Then it gets banned and a new account is created. Technically it's ban evasion, but dang doesn't really want to change anything at this point.
My wife uses the app, hence the "consistently block the assholes" approach. But if you're willing to stick to the website I can actually offer you this. Write a browser plugin that redirects you to "/?filter=all&sk=h_chr" every time you land on "/". That's what I use for myself.
I did this on reddit to try and get a useful /r/all and it ended up being mostly cats. I never look or vote on cat pictures but by just removing political serial posters, thats what I got.
Yeah, there's always someone saying "Just delete your Facebook account" as if that solves the underlying "Facebook is actively encouraging divisiveness" problem.
My mother-in-laws Facebook feed is full of fake news - from the left, politically. My own mom doesn’t have a Facebook, but she still manages to balance out the universe with fake news from the right on her YouTube feed.
The internet is a mistake for a lot of people and I don’t think we can fix that.
I think the feeds depends on the posts you read, even accidentally.
My feed is free from extreme left content but I didn't have to block anything. Simply by not reading that kind of content, the algorithm knows I am not interested.
Yes, hence my comment about "rubbernecking". If you tend to slow down for car crashes, the algorithm shows you more car crashes. It amplifies our worst instincts.
That effect also applies when you try to block car crashes. That happened to me years ago with the same genre of videos. Like car crashes and people falling and hurting themself a little bit.
> My wife was complaining about far right knuckle draggers turning up in her feed.
This is what is so difficult in facebook vs. HN. Here if people post angry insulting rants, it gets collectively downvoted to oblivion. That is effective.
On facebook there is no equivalent. All I can do is block an individual, but I personally have to do it for every offensive person, which is for practical purposes impossible. Facebooks needs a downvote button and an option to hide any comments which have N downvotes.
"I'm not interested" and "Don't show posts from this person" is the dowvote button for the algorithm. If you use those functions liberally your feed gets pretty clean and aligned.
I used to belong to a FB nostalgia group that was being relentlessly farmed by Indonesian accounts. The group members (and even the admins) weren't sophisticated enough to spot what was happening. They were absolutely engaging with the spam. They love AI colorizations too.
I don't trust "facebook users" as a group to provide a signal I consider useful.
HN model works, people do downvote for you, if you are just like everybody else here. You indicate that by visiting HN.
In more universal platform such as Facebook you need to indicate who you are by subscribing to specific groups or downvoting some of the content yourself. Just visiting. Facebook is not enoug. Once you signal who you are you also benefit from other people just like you downvoting content you wouldn't like, for you.
Very similar pattern here (UK): circa 1900, ice skating on the local pond every winter. The ice was thick enough to walk on the pond twice in the 1980s. For the last decade, the pond hasn't completely frozen over once. We got about two days of 30% coverage this Jan.
I haven't looked at a cost analysis recently, but it's possible that we basically already have $2k/month models, if they were priced to be even slightly profitable.
I think OP is talking about decoupling tax and government spending, Modern Monetary Theory-style.
In this model government just prints all the money it needs in order to function. Taxation isn't used to fund government, it's used to give your currency value, and to stop inflation running out of control. Metaphorically, you might as well pile all that tax take up and burn it, because once you've collected it it's performed its function.
This is a very simplistic take on MMR, and I don't think it would work in the real world, but spending does precede taxation.
(When I was a kid, Dennis Wheatley paperbacks were everywhere. Now I never see them. They were pretty cheap paper, maybe they literally fell apart).
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