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Re:Why modern software is slow by kragen on Friday September 30, 2022 @12:19AM (#33030883)
Those are worthwhile problems to solve, but they seem well on their way to getting solved, though it's not guaranteed. Your civilization is collapsing because you're fighting each other, not because of climate change. Fighting each other is also why it's not guaranteed.

Other problems are also worthwhile to solve. I agree that zero-sum HFT and negative-sum adtech and arms races are not the most prominent ones.

Re:Why modern software is slow by culi on Friday September 30, 2022 @03:48PM (#33039851)
> Your civilization is collapsing because you're fighting each other, not because of climate change

10% of all deaths each year are due to air pollution. There's pretty much no place on earth where unfiltered rainwater is still safe to drink. Ocean acidification is accelerating and killing off the organisms that are both the biggest producers of oxygen and the biggest sequesterers of carbon.

Re:Why modern software is slow by kragen on Friday September 30, 2022 @04:28PM (#33040350)
Air pollution is not due to climate change, unless you count CO₂ as air pollution, but that's eargrayish misreasoning — that's not the kind of air pollution that causes 10% of all deaths. The sort of local air pollution we're talking about amounts to factories strip-mining local children's lungs for profit; it's a form of fighting each other.

Rainwater harvesting risks seem to be primarily due to birds pooping on your roof and other fecal contamination, and they can be adequately mitigated by boiling or chemical sterilization: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41545-019-0030-5.

Climate change very likely would collapse your civilization, given enough time, but that isn't what is happening now.

Re:Why modern software is slow by ncmncm on Friday September 30, 2022 @12:35AM (#33030994)
If we spent on those what we spend instead on adtech etc., it really would be guaranteed. Even with fighting invaders. Albeit probably not invaders using nukes.
Re:Why modern software is slow by kragen on Friday September 30, 2022 @12:57AM (#33031159)
I think 228 GWp of solar power generation capacity is being installed in 02022, which is about US$50 billion for the solar modules and another US$50 billion for balance of plant, not counting things like battery storage, pumped storage, transmission, and Fischer-Tropsch. Wind energy generation capacity is getting installed at a similar pace, in terms of peak gigawatts per year, but I have the impression that it is significantly cheaper. Tesla's revenues are US$53.8 billion per year, of which about US$0.07 billion is solar panels and therefore getting double counted. I don't know how to measure other automakers' EV production, housing switching to heat pumps, housing adding insulation, and R&D, so I'm just not counting them.

Alphabet's yearly revenue is US$258 billion, some of which is earned from things like Google Play, Google Cloud, and Google Workspace, and some of which has been spent on things like Makani, Verily Life Sciences, DeepMind, and Google Fiber. Meta's revenue is US$118 billion.

https://www.globaldata.com/data-insights/internet-services-t... says, "Google earned nearly 81% of its total revenues in 2021 from advertisements," and it's talking about that US$258B number, not some smaller number that excludes other Alphabet companies.

We can maybe estimate the whole adtech spend, generously, at US$400 billion per year [edited: was US$300 billion]: most of Alphabet, all of Meta, plus a handful of smaller fish. (I say this is "generous" because it's counting all the effort that goes into running Google Search, YouTube, Instagram, and Android development as "adtech", because it's monetized through ads, even though most of the people working on those projects are not directly concerned with ads; if you omit that, you might size adtech at only US$50 billion.) And maybe US$200 billion per year goes into the renewables transition. I'm not convinced that doubling that to US$400 billion per year would guarantee a win, particularly when the humans are going around bombing each other's power plants, snarling up power plant construction and energy-efficient housing in red tape, and publishing disinformation that "debunks" global warming.

These are of course very rough estimates, but how would you estimate these numbers?

As far as I know, there aren't any invaders the humans are fighting; they're only fighting other humans, plus the occasional rogue elephant.

Re:Why modern software is slow by ncmncm on Friday September 30, 2022 @01:32AM (#33031353)
Maybe boosting $200B to $500B would provide a win, but ok, maybe not.

Invasion is an activity, not an identity. Those so engaged could stop anytime. Many will.

Re:Why modern software is slow by kragen on Friday September 30, 2022 @01:34AM (#33031361)
Nobody is, as far as I know, invading the humans' territory from someplace else, such as Delta Centauri. Humans invading other humans' territory is just a sort of humans fighting among themselves, but not, currently, the sort that is the biggest obstacle to the renewable transition.
Re:Why modern software is slow by ncmncm on Friday September 30, 2022 @05:04AM (#33032634)
Agree. And maybe it will encourage Europe to build out renewables and heat pumps faster.

Apparently it has not had that effect in Romania, yet. But they are by report still happy with their Canadian CANDU reactors.

Re:Why modern software is slow by LtdJorge on Saturday October 01, 2022 @01:17AM (#33044102)
And fission