Word says hello

A general feeling of futility is useful for autocrats.

Some people will look at a world in chaos and wonder what's wrong with themselves.

I fear this is the reason why intellectual discourse seems to have stagnated. We no longer pursue the spirit of important ideas but try to endlessly put them in uninteresting boxes.

There's a general phenomenon where terms get annexed, not by meaning that makes most sense, but by meaning that is most salient, most eye catching or emotionally riveting. This leads to Flanderization of many many important cultural concepts.

Looking for something to barely raise eyebrows more like. It's like everyone is addicted to anger and anxiety inducing content. But also everyone has been and is being fed it so much it barely registers anymore.

Like a billion people interpreting things and posting about it seem to create very weird noise and artifacts.

I'm not even sure this craziness can be attributed to some group. I think it might be the meme machines fault.

Yeah activists are likely hardly to blame here. Activists that try to point out the real problem will likely be ignored.

We need better ways to communicate as a civilization than clickbait and doomscroll engines.

Tropical deforestation surely happens in vastly spread out areas while private jets are relatively very few?

How many actors that need to be convinced/forced per emission percentage point sounds like a useful metric here?

My quick browsing shows you're probably quite right in that metric though.

Sounds like they're both right.

I remember depressed-crazy laughing about the feeling that the world had turned into an absolute nut house, and I'm not even American.

Now the world is an absolute nut house cubed. And it can still get much worse.

At any point in time the trend could switch course if people acted right though.

If you are content with nothing, everything will be a bonus.

Tens of thousands of #Ukrainian civilians are being illegally held by Russia in modern-day gulags – prisons and special camps.

As early as 2022, Russia had already set up filtration camps and compiled lists of Ukrainians it planned to imprison, torture, and kill.

Theil is an excellent Bioshock villain.

Which means that we need to comprehensively solve the tragedy of the commons by some not yet found political innovation.

Either that or make sure that batteries and solar panels are so much cheaper that you rather pay up for new installations than continue buying coal to your existing plant.

"People just don't care about this very important thing"

Or maybe they are just too busy with life like everyone else?

Cheers to the comment section. I made a thingy for you using your replies.

(Yeah I should probably read it. And I don't at all say AI is without risk. Def high risk high reward situation. And we shouldn't sleep on either of them.

Also, OpenAi is far from holding all the cards at this point. So many competitors are close or partially past them.)

This hits a note. It makes sense that democracy is getting derailed if our social media platforms feel unhinged.

Social media could be the means of political coordination for the people. They should be given the tools for seizing it.

What's the carbon footprint of using ChatGPT? Very small compared to most of the other stuff you do.

We shouldn't fall for the idea that all progress is bad.

www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/carbon-foo...

Yeah, indubitably. But they are too scared to act.

The Russians supporting Putin like diabolical and they want him to do more of it. They want him to be a brutal warlord.

Yap yap yap

Russians probably store their missiles in a barn somewhere so they might want to slap some concrete on that.

How do you step away from all the stupid?

Regular people

The problem was never what we can do but what we encourage us to do.

Han Gamgee

The cost of living crisis has other root causes than climate change that needs to be addressed separately.

The prices in the grocery store is still way way lower than food prices for previous generations.

I'm not saying climate change isn't an existential threat. I'm just saying that one of the reasons that we're so bad at addressing it is because it isn't an *immediate* existential threat.