For those who are able (physically and/or mentally able) to go by some proportion of human power, I highly recommend significantly reducing reliance on automobiles. Walk and bicycle instead; less need to make time for exercise, plus a sense of self-efficacy, and, if it sounds distasteful now, it might be enjoyable later as the body adapts to the moderate demands. Start slow and often.
Easy for me to say, as bicycling has been my primary "fast-travel" mode since my teens, but at scale, automobiles have significant negative ecological impact, from exhaust (ozone, soot, CO2, etc), to tire particles in the waterways, to mining the lithium and other minerals (and all the attendant impacts there), to however the electricity is converted (including electric cars in my criticism here, though from a harm-reduction standpoint, by all means switch from petrol-powered to e-), to the risks to pedestrians and cyclists from these multi-ton monstrosities taking up so much space on roads and in neighborhoods.
Again, harm reduction, not abolition, is what I'm harping on; for those who really need it (medical reasons, mainly; which could happen to any of us, on any frequency), expensive fast travel is key. Ditching convenience for self-efficacy can be difficult.
Imagine paying $15 in electricity for ~3,000 miles of cycling with a cargo bike, and the holistic tiredness at the end of the day! That's my life, years ago having given up plane, train, and automobile travel except in the case of medical need and an annual family trip within a few hours' drive of home, and I'm richer for it in so many ways.
That said, I'm aware of my privilege here (with a spouse who commutes to work and whose income largely supports us, while I do childcare and caregiving as my main, unpaid-but-compensated work), and how difficult "just switch to bike!" would be without systemic shifts. It's prohibitively expensive to live in some cities now, pushing people further out, and who is going to make the time to bike 5+ miles into town without some significant, tangible incentives? What might help shift culture towards meeting a greater proportion of our basic needs using our own chemical-to-mechanical energy?
What are the environmental costs? Given that we exist in an ecosystem, and rely on myriad other life for our own healthy-enough existence, focusing on jerbs and the cost to build the data centers, and ignoring all the other costs (to name a few: water, solar absorption potential of plants, rainwater absorption potential of the land, pollution (air, land, water) from all the related energy conversion (and commuting, unless all the employees are walking or cycling to work?), and psychological impacts of robots).
I would argue that the county (an arbitrary demarcation in the first place; I prefer watersheds) would see a measurable lift over the next several hundred years if instead of data centers we tended the land in a way that increased species diversity and also food available from that land. I can't eat data center, though I suppose its existence could help optimize exploitation of land, farm workers, and the transportation of crops, while the rest of us indulge in all sorts of diversions?
I would be more inclined to give to people via Patreon if there was a way to set a desired income amount and a transparent "overflow pipeline" for what happens with any extra money.
No, but I don't use LLM stuff; I value effortful practice towards improving how I do things, without converting too much external energy in the process, and while I still use and benefit from computers, I prefer a low-tech approach to life.
solar.lowtechmagazine.com is wonderful (I learned about it from HN! I'm grateful for the person who made that post, and the many others who share other human-made blogs)
I enjoyed learning to type on a typewriter as a kid, and then on computers in middle school, and I still push myself to improve my typing skills (just a little push, like I do with walking and cycling; I'm good at those things, pushing too hard has diminishing returns, and a little attention to improvement feels good).
Just like we all survive because some number of other lifeforms die, we all benefit from some amount of technology, but to consume too much is to take from future generations, and I don't like that story. Mad Max: Fury Road is an entertaining movie, but can we not rush headlong into making it our reality?
Do you understand the unbridled desire to consume a massive amount of resources to move a human body in a multi-ton knobby-tyred truck from home to school to work to grocery store and back, and to play the flashiest games, to wear shorts inside during the winter, and to talk to robots as if they are friends? I understand that desire, and how, with billions of people having access to such power over enough time, we are now "enjoying" extreme weather more frequently, killing so much other life with our pollution, and harming ourselves in the process? And, because that is stressful to face, many of us are inclined to dive back into the consumption cycle for distraction and diversion?
I'd argue my quality of life is higher for using only hand-me-down phones (current one is ~8yo, thanks to LineageOS) because when I'm feeling dysregulated I run out of phone-based distractions really quickly (I don't allow JavaScript, and I don't install any games). I'm healthier for walking and cycling everywhere within ~16km of home (privileged to live in the city, as expensive as it has become, but I'd still do it if I lived further out), and for using heating & cooling only to take the edge off the outside temperature (16C in the winter, 26C in the summer), mindful of where all this energy comes from, what the effects are at scale, and the quality of life of future generations long after I'm dead.
I don't do all this for efficiency, but for effectiveness (that of my body, my default mobility and data-processing machine) and consuming a reasonable amount of energy rather than one that, at scale, will burn my house down.
Regarding not-yet e-waste, some people just like tinkering, and the challenge of getting old hardware to still function as a useful tool.
I also understand the reaction to other people's "nonsense"; I sometimes go there, too, and it's an ongoing effort to reel it back to what I can reasonably control.
Is it helpful to have all this spelled out for you?
Yes, I understand. I wrote it in a too polemic and dismissive way but what I wanted to say is:
- there's a type of "puritan" people that is outright against enjoyment (if not "deserved") (I think you understand what I mean even if I don't go in detail) (and this type of people can often be extremely effective engineers and also managers)
- and that there's a type of engineering that makes disproportionately bad outcomes like a price point that is let's say 15% cheaper but a performance that is 80% lower, and that that shouldn't be lauded
...and it's fine to not use the loud, vibrating power saw and instead take some extra time to use a handsaw, and thus get more practiced at it.
It's fine to hire movers, but sometimes they end up damaging stuff. My solution is have a lot less stuff, and move it myself.
I increasingly have more respect for the Amish community one of my relatives lives near, at least in terms of their considered, intentional limits set on resource use. I don't agree with all their choices, and some seem arbitrary, but I respect their autonomy to choose.
I choose to move around the world primarily under my own power or augmented by a battery (supplies 2/3 of the Wattage I need to make my cargo bicycle move); harm reduction in the face of fossil-fuel addiction. I choose not to use generative AI because I'd rather human do more work for themselves instead of selling short future humans with profligate resource consumption.
It's fine to strive for things, but the most important thing in my life is my relationships with other humans. If I'm a person who can't walk, and am in physical therapy towards being able to walk, it's fine to keep working at it, and it's fine to never be able to walk; what matters is how I get on with my mates, and spending massive amounts of electricity on data centers is arguably harmful to the health of interpersonal relationships.
This is a great frame. Can I ask (and I mean this with good faith, because I've had this problem for the longest time now) how do you deal with employers or corporations who demand the absolute maximum output every second of every day, forcing you to use the proverbial loud, vibrating power saw to the point that you feel terrified to even look at the handsaw?
The question is what your tolerance to this kind of thing is. If the job is fundamentally changing underneath you, then you need to ask yourself if this is still a job you want to keep. If the answer is no, then you find another one. If you think you can still do it the way your employer is demanding, then stick around.
The sad truth is that the job is changing, and that means we need to change, too. That _doesn't_ mean we need the power saw 100% of the time, but it does mean we need to be very very proficient at it or we'll be left behind.
I reckon a lot of people on this forum have poorer health thanks to man-made pollution.
The more money a person has, the greater the chance they spend it in ways that increase environmental harm. (Travel is a big one, and buying large homes, remodeling homes, heating and cooling those homes, well beyond the private sufficiency that would be enough for us if we also supported public luxuries instead of playing Smaug)
Rather than corporate health I'm more concerned with ecosystem health (actual eco-system, as in interconnected living beings, not the word applied to software...), and care much more about investing in the performance of the ecosystems (based on land, water, and air) that sustain life in the region I have this tiny bit of influence on.
Corporations are fictions, a game we're playing. After they go up in smoke, the land will still be here.
Would there be so many billions if we didn't figure out how to convert petroleum into fertilizer and so many other useful things?
My point is that, just because we now have billions, it feels wrong to justify maintaining those billions of people at the luxury levels so many of us enjoy. We differ from other animals only by degrees, not by kind. From watching so many nature documentaries over the years, and reading nonfiction books about animals, I understand many mammal newborns don't make it into childhood. I'm not convinced that a high human infant-mortality rate is bad. It just feels bad, and with our pathological focus on feeling happy and suppressing sadness, a consequence seems to be we make decisions out of momentary selfishness rather than care for future generations long after we individuals are dead.
Why? We basically broke evolution and purposefully make the specie more dysgenic. At that point we need life long drug treatments to keep people from overeating because they have less self control than pigs and literal cattle. Surely there is a middle ground
I learned about snail teeth in The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, by Elisabeth Tova Bailey! It's a lovely, shortish nonfiction book about a woman with a rare infection that affects her nervous system and has her mostly in bed for years, during which time she observes a snail on her nightstand (that a well-meaning friend brought in from the woods) and then does a deep-dive into mollusks thanks to public-library books. I read this to my child and was inspired to lie down in a field and listen to a slug chewing on plants, tchk-tchk-tchk.
Easy for me to say, as bicycling has been my primary "fast-travel" mode since my teens, but at scale, automobiles have significant negative ecological impact, from exhaust (ozone, soot, CO2, etc), to tire particles in the waterways, to mining the lithium and other minerals (and all the attendant impacts there), to however the electricity is converted (including electric cars in my criticism here, though from a harm-reduction standpoint, by all means switch from petrol-powered to e-), to the risks to pedestrians and cyclists from these multi-ton monstrosities taking up so much space on roads and in neighborhoods. Again, harm reduction, not abolition, is what I'm harping on; for those who really need it (medical reasons, mainly; which could happen to any of us, on any frequency), expensive fast travel is key. Ditching convenience for self-efficacy can be difficult.
Imagine paying $15 in electricity for ~3,000 miles of cycling with a cargo bike, and the holistic tiredness at the end of the day! That's my life, years ago having given up plane, train, and automobile travel except in the case of medical need and an annual family trip within a few hours' drive of home, and I'm richer for it in so many ways.
That said, I'm aware of my privilege here (with a spouse who commutes to work and whose income largely supports us, while I do childcare and caregiving as my main, unpaid-but-compensated work), and how difficult "just switch to bike!" would be without systemic shifts. It's prohibitively expensive to live in some cities now, pushing people further out, and who is going to make the time to bike 5+ miles into town without some significant, tangible incentives? What might help shift culture towards meeting a greater proportion of our basic needs using our own chemical-to-mechanical energy?