What is the point of this convenience when it really seems to just be making people miserable and isolated?

We're driving off a cliff, and our elected government has a death drive.

There's lots of rotting low hanging fruits ignored for decades because politicians are paid by the ladder-sellers.

Public transit is rarely a time saver for people who give up their cars in favor of public transit.

> reduce crime

In what way? Car break-ins presumably go down when there when fewer cars, but does overall crime drop? Doubtful.

It saves time when you don't put 10-lane motorways and in your cities nor turn them into parking lot wasteland.

> In what way? Car break-ins presumably go down when there when fewer cars, but does overall crime drop?

Public transport reduces inequality, which is the main cause of crime. If you have whole groups in society that cannot get what they need working within the system - some of them will work outside the system. Public transport makes working within the system easier (barrier to entry to work/study in the good places gets lower). It also smooths around the strict urban class divisions (it makes sense for rich people to live in the city, which makes the elites more likely to invest in the city, which makes it more likely for non-elites to be able to work with the system).

The opposite is car-dependand suburbs + crime-ridden inner cities with no way out other than crime.

I missed the part where this has anything to do with saving time.

I’m not saying that public transit doesn’t have major benefits. I’m totally in favor of strong public transit, but saving time is generally not one of those benefits.

> Public transport reduces inequality, which is the main cause of crime.

If feels like a big stretch to say public transit reduces crime. I wonder if there’s actual data to support this notion.

If you make cities more concentrated without balooning them with parking lots - everything's closer. If you restrict cars - there's less traffic jams, which makes commute faster.

> If feels like a big stretch to say public transit reduces crime. I wonder if there’s actual data to support this notion.

US has much higher crime levels than other developed nations. It's also the most car-dependant of them.

People often think public transport creates crime, because criminals use it to move (like everybody else). But public transport mainly lets non-criminal people to move, which reduces the number of criminals overall.

It lets you put the non-car stuff closer together, so you're traveling less distance to get to the same place. It requires urban design, not just a single person switching between modes of transit.

(Although switching to cycling can often make transit both faster for you and the people around you in a city because you aren't as affected by traffic and don't create as much traffic)

EDIT: I'm not a renewable skeptic, answers bellow

This government meta study of 3,000 such studies puts PV solar at roughly 20x less emissions than coal.

https://docs.nrel.gov/docs/fy21osti/80580.pdf

Any kind of fossil fuel generation means constantly going out and digging up new oil sources, shipping them around the world, and then burning them. So you invest a lot of time & money into something that disappears immediately and also heats up the environment.

Meanwhile, a solar panel just sits there for decades passively making energy with very few externalities.

Not to mention, recycling solar panels & batteries is getting cheaper & more effective by the day. The metal (and even oil!) you dug out of the ground to build them didn’t get burned up; a lot of it is still usable.

How long before the regulation (often times toothless) kicks in to handle these things?

I am all for getting rid of pollution, but there should be some caution in rushing onto new things, which is exactly what got us into this mess in the first place.

Suburbia is much younger than a 100 years btw: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=y_SXXTBypIg&list=PLJp5q-R0lZ0_...

Nothing for now tells us we can power our current needs with renewables only, however we know we can drive around in much lighter vehicles, fly much less, eat more local, buy less clothes, use compute for less stupid things in data centers.

https://powerlinkenergy.com/news/expected-lifespan-of-batter...

Solar panels last for decades, solar inverter shorter.

"Generally, the average solar inverter lifespan is 10 to 15 years for standard string inverters, and 20 to 25 years for microinverters"

https://www.solaxpower.com/blogs/how-long-do-solar-inverters...

https://electrek.co/2025/10/28/forget-the-myths-ev-batteries...

The information from scientific literature is much more realistic.

"All the current recycling methods of lithium-ion batteries have advantages and disadvantages concerning environmental impact, efficiency, and economic viability. However, a significant gap exists between academic research and industrial application. Researchers, policymakers, manufacturers, and recyclers should focus on greener methods with high recovery rates, low emissions, and minimal waste towards zero emissions. "

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S037877532...

The CO2, by contrast, is the gift that keeps on giving. It absorbs extra heat every day and hangs onto it. It doesn't condense or break down.

If that PV went to displacing sources of greenhouse gas, it would be a benefit. If all it's doing is running the plagiarism machine while we burn more and more "clean" coal, then we are in deep, deep trouble.

Harnessing it and piping it through extra steps only to end up as heat does nothing to the planet’s heat balance. All human energy use is tiny compared to total global solar flux. Like not even 1%.

The data center water issue is a municipal management problem. The problem is that evaporative cooling is cheaper. If data centers are using too much water to the point that it’s causing problems for homes or agriculture, it means they are not being charged enough for that water. Charge them more and they will suddenly shift toward more closed loop cooling.

Waste heat from human energy use is a real problem, it does influence Earth's temperature, minimally for now, but it will only grow. And it will be MUCH harder to solve than global warming.

Hopefully if we get really good at fusion we will go LARP The Expanse with it instead of boiling the ocean.

If population stabilizes or contracts, then the only way this could happen is if per capita energy use continued to increase exponentially to the point that we were radiating enough heat to do this. That seems unlikely.

The only scenario I can imagine where per capita energy use goes that high is the "The Expanse LARP" scenario where people are rocketing around on fusion rockets, and that's not on Earth anymore so it doesn't matter.

What terrestrial products or services would demand power use per capita across the whole population that high?

GPUs are actually bad for AI. TPUs too. They’re available and general purpose but what you really want is something like a specialized tensor FPGA that can be loaded with the model. Memory and compute colocated.

There is research on this and a huge market but it takes a long time to go from design to prototype to production for something really novel. It’s also very expensive.

A lot of people are afraid AI is a big bubble. The more it becomes apparent that financial bubbles or not the tech is here to stay the more people will be comfortable making long term investments in building chips that are really optimal for it.

Even general chips get more efficient. Ten years ago my laptop was a lap roaster when I ran a big build on it. Now it’s barely warm and it’s twice as fast with four times the RAM.

Of course if there’s infinite demand for AI that won’t matter, but there isn’t infinite demand for anything.

It should be the other way around: consumers and public interest things like hospitals should get preference and low prices for water, corporations should pay more and invest in their own water systems, like collecting rainwater, cleaning surface water (thinking of NL here), or desalinating seawater (and handling the waste responsibly instead of putting it back in the sea).

So, now I'm focused. I'm very focused.

Maybe America, not many countries on earth, especially in Asia which are full steam ahead on renewables, pun intended.

What we are doing is attempting to hold back progress on generation while subsidizing demand, which is literally the absolute dumbest possible thing.

Unless you are the fossil fuel industry. Then it’s great.

I wouldn't have thought that it would be so popular, but apparently it is, and people can't get t done fast enough.

I'm kind of a misanthrope so philosophically I'm good with working on wiping ourselves out. The fact that we're doing it in the dumbest possible way should feel poetic. Instead it's just kind of embarrassing.

It's a conspiracy theory, but the best ones are always rooted in some morsel of truth (Elon/Bezos wanting more investment in their space firms).

Indonesian Energy Minister: "I decided, let coal continue for now. This is about survival mode and efficiency. We must not sacrifice our people with high electricity prices.”. Fair to say that, given some of the highest electricity prices in the world, a popular wish in the UK is for Miliband to do likewise.

Show a route to renewables plus survival and there will be progress.

https://climatecosmos.com/blog/10-countries-dropping-their-n...

There is something tragic about the human potential being wasted in the most retarded of endeavors, but I wouldn't be able to imagine of a more apt way for the horde of morons that inhabit this planet to go extinct.

My point is that if demand only increases, then they won't be able to shut down carbon-emitting power plants. The first objective should be to replace non-renewables with renewables, and only then scale production up.

Granted, there will likely always be non-renewable power generators running to maintain a baseline / frequency / etc, at least until very-large-scale power storage is a thing.

- People in automobiles.

I'm not saying billionaires are victims, but everybody wants it to be someone else's fault and none of their own fault. It's exhausting.

Like, Canada once tried to implement carbon tax, which was even revenue-neutral. If you're a Canadian and you emitted less CO2 than others the government will literally give you money.

It was widely unpopular and the plan was scrapped in 2025.

A lot of people think "billionaires are at fault" means "we just get rid of the billionaires and everything will become better, if it doesn't then the billionaires are still at fault." They don't want progress, they want someone to blame.

The billionaires are just the line cooks handing out what comes in from the market- and the market aka a globe eaten by people is slim pickings.

Is there a chance that something similar happened in Canada?

Which you are financing through a BNPL platform.

their product wouldnt run if they had 0 users

The elected government is cashing in through corruption and insider trading at a pace never seen or even imagined before.

Everyone else, is in for a very bad time.

Which makes using it as a metaphor for the climate change and humanity either entirely wrong or much more fitting, depending on where you stand.

I wonder if we are already there :( I remember a year or 2 ago we breached 1.5C for a short period of time.

Crypto mining was bad enough, now with AI and Trump, I expect it will happen sooner then later.

We did this to ourselves. We had ~40 years of warnings but politicians we elected did not want to do any real work for fear of loosing their cushy job were lobbyists do all the work for them.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co-emissions-by-re...

Region X was first and reduced their emissions 10-20% so it's fine and it's region Y that's the problem, or

Region X is fine because they have less people, region Y should reduce even though they already have a fraction of per-capita emissions

Both seem like pretty shitty arguments

Wonderful, the United States uses more per capita than anyone else. That doesn’t mean anything in terms of total warming. Even if we cut to zero we still continue.

With twice as many people (acting similarly) you have twice the emissions, it's as simple as that.

To reduce emissions, you need everyone doing their part. And it is also obviously easier and more effective to tackle high-emitters first (because incentivizing a single US family to have their second car be a bit smaller and electric is obviously less burdensome than banning 3 Indian families from heating their homes in winter...)

Also, a bit portion of China's excessive growth in emissions is a byproduct of manufacturing shit for US consumers.

Why should the US be entitled to pollute the world while everyone else has to live without any confort?

Per capita, china murders 0.15 persons per 10k people, ~1.4billion people.

Who murders more people?

Things are manufactured because there are people buying.

I vote it's the manufacturing. What you just said was "China et. al. are not culpable for horrible environmental practices, the people on the other side of the world are because they buy dogshit products"

I can say with 100% certainty that china can manufacture dogshit products in an environmentally friendly way... which would drive the cost up and people would in fact not buy them.

You're blaming the wrong entity here.

What's your problem with the "we" word, again?

https://bookshop.org/p/books/children-of-time-adrian-tchaiko...

Do you understand the word "unmeasurable"?

It means that whatever value you assign to that particular trump variable is so below the noise that it does not matter, can not matter, and anyone pretending it does is a manipulator; a crook.

https://berkeleyearth.org/global-temperature-report-for-2023...

https://berkeleyearth.org/global-temperature-report-for-2024...

https://berkeleyearth.org/global-temperature-report-for-2025...

And over that, there are jumps to new higher baselines like with happened in the previous El Niño, and will happen in the incoming monster one.

- model and build temperature resistant crops.

- harvest energy from the heat

- create resilience in social governance to enable safer movement of people with education to enable quick adaptation.

- build energy resilience everywhere - including in and especially in desert areas.

- more constructive ideas.

Don’t:

- guilt your children into not having children to “protect the planet” from themselves.

- use your megaphones to racketeer the people making your food into paying you “indulgences” for producing useful stuff for you and other humans (thus making stuff needed by humans more expensive)

- use the problem to gather around with rich friends on fuel-hogging private jets while making others eat less to reduce emissions.

This is not a thing. This is just entropy.

we have this interesting thing called a thermoelectric generator,that converts thermal gradient to electromotive force.

https://scienceimproved.com/how-to-generate-electricity-ther...

so yes harvesting energy from "the heat" is a thing, if you gate the dissipation of heat from the source to a sink.

these are already used to scavenge heat to drive fans, lights, phone chargers, and pumps.

People don't want to use them: they're ugly, imperfect, foreign feeling.

We're at the point where we should only be worried about international plane travel, concrete, and shipping. Yet, we still act like the problem is technology... and we can't even build a train in CA because of politics.

Discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47275088

https://realclimatescience.com/2019/12/warming-twice-as-fast

https://science.nasa.gov/earth/explore/earth-indicators/glob...

This is one of the stupidest websites I've ever seen.

We must and we will adapt, if that means renewables, migration or partial extinction. There is no other choice because this is the law of evolution.