I would rather see more investment on better renewable tech then relaying on biohazard.
You would be surprised to know the amount of scientific research with actual solutions that aren’t applied cause goes against the fossil fuel companies and whatnot. Due to the fact that they have market monopoly.
Nuclear is the best and most sustainable energy production long term. You get left with nuclear waste which we are still figuring out how to deal with, but contemporary reactors are getting safer and more efficient. Not to mention breeder reactors can use the byproducts of their energy production to further produce energy.
What are you talking about? In 2023, solar power alone generated 1.63 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity. Twice as much as was generated by coal, and more than half as much as was generated by nuclear. Solar plus wind out performed nuclear by hundreds of gigawatts.
The only thing holding back renewable power is grid level energy storage, and that’s evolving rapidly.
The problem with renewables is the fluctuation. So you need something you can quickly spin up or down to compensate. Now you can do that with nuclear reactors to some extent - but they barely break even at current energy prices, and they keep having the same high cost while idle.
So a combination of grid storage and power plants with low cost when idle (like water) is the way to go now.
I would rather see more investment on better renewable tech then relaying on biohazard.
Modern nuclear energy produces significantly less waste and involves more fuel recycling than the historical predecessors. But these reactors are more expensive to build and run, which means smaller profit margins and longer profit tails.
Solar and Wind are popular in large part because you can build them up and profit off them quickly in a high-priced electricity market (making Texas’s insanely expensive ERCOT system a popular location for new green development, paradoxically). But nuclear power provides a cheap and clean base load that we’re only able to get from coal and natural gas, atm. If you really want to get off fossil fuels entirely, nuclear is the next logical step.
Every commercial fuel recycling plant in existence releases large amounts of radioactivity into the air and water, so I dont really see them as a good alternative.
Considering how long it would take to build safe reactors, how expensive it would be and how much radioactive contamination would be created both at the production of fuel and later when the storage ever goes wrong after thousands of years, I just dont see any reason to ever invest into it nowadays, when renewables and batteries have gotten so good.
I just dont see any reason to ever invest into it nowadays, when renewables and batteries have gotten so good.
Renewables and batteries have their own problems.
Producing and processing cobalt and lithium under current conditions will mean engaging in large-scale deforestation in some of the last unmolested corners of the planet, producing enormous amounts of toxic waste as part of the refinement process, and then getting these big bricks of lithium (not to mention cadmium, mercury, and lead) that we need to dispose of at the battery’s end of lifecycle.
Renewables - particularly hydropower, one of the most dense and efficient forms of renewable energy - can deform natural waterways and collapse local ecologies. Solar plants have an enormous geographic footprint. These big wind turbines still need to be produced, maintained, and disposed of with different kinds of plastics, alloys, and battery components.
Which isn’t even to say these are bad ideas. But everything we do requires an eye towards the long-term lifecycle of the generators and efficient recycling/disposal at their end.
Nuclear power isn’t any different. If we don’t operate plants with the intention of producing fissile materials, they run a lot cleaner. We can even power grids off of thorium. Molten salt reactors do an excellent job of maximizing the return on release of energy, while minimizing the risk of a meltdown. Our fifth generation nuclear engines can use this technology and the only thing holding us back is ramping it up.
Unlike modern batteries, nuclear power doesn’t require anywhere near the same amount of cobalt, lithium, nickel and manganese. Uranium is surprisingly cheap and abundant, with seawater yielding a pound of enrichable uranium at the cost of $100-$200 (which then yields electricity under $.10/kwh).
We can definitely do renewables in a destructive and unsustainable way, recklessly mining and deforesting the plant to churn out single-use batteries. And we can do nuclear power in a responsible and efficient way, recycling fuel and containing the relatively low volume of highly toxic waste.
But all of that is a consequence of economic policy. Its much less a consequence of choosing which fuel source to use.
Economicaly might be viable, but there is so much unused experimental tech that has higher potential and scales better (higher scientific development as well).
I love how in every topic about WFH there’s some dudebro going on about the economy suffering due to supposed lessened productivity and I’m like… Why should I care?
That’s not how productivity works. It’s basically looking at how much a person can produce with a given amount of labor.
Take that small scale subsistence farmer. Individually, they will live a precarious life. Their country will not have the surplus food needed for other pursuits like building cities, engaging in R&D, developing science, and so on. A smaller and smaller number of people need to be able to feed more and more using less land per person.
Manually copied manuscripts are another example. They were painstakingly copied over by hand in an incredibly low productivity manner. The introduction of the printing press essentially eliminated an art form, but gave rise to practical mass media.
In the present day, computers have been the main form of productivity booster. While arguably social media is a drag on productivity, overall computers open up a broad range of possibilities.
Like yo, cancer is incredibly productive.
Cancer is incredibly costly to society. Think about it, a single person getting cancer could mean many hours of them being in the hospital. Net zero on productivity
Demolishing subsistence farms and replacing them with cash crop slave plantations is mad profitable.
As I detailed above, transitioning from unproductive farms to highly productive farms is necessary. Don’t believe me, ask Mao.
I could make thousands of dollars in a day if I just sold everything I own.
That would not be a productive activity since there would be no value added. Arguably there would be less value, since that stuff is likely worth more to you than it is to another person.
Two economists are walking down the street with their friend when they come across a fresh, streaming pile of dog shit. The first economist jokingly tells the other “I’ll give you a million dollars if you eat that pile of dog shit”. To his surprise, the second economist grabs it off the ground and eats it without hesitation. A deal is a deal so the first economist hands over a million dollars.
A few minutes later they come across a second pile of shit. The second economist, wanting to give his peer a taste of his own medicine, says he’ll give the first economist a million dollars if he eats it. The first economist agrees and does so, winning him a million dollars.
Their friend, rather confused, asks what the point of all this was, the first economist gave the second economist a million dollars, and then the second economist gave it right back. All they’ve accomplished is to eat two piles of shit.
The two economists look rather taken aback. “Well sure,” they say, “but we’ve grown the economy by two million dollars!”
The story is interesting but not very lifelike. The first economist would be much richer than the first, if they were OK with spending that much money on humiliating someone else. The likelihood that the second economist would accept the same deal is impossible in my mind. That amount of money is just humiliation money to them, not really worth it.
People have been told their entire lives that the GDP of their nation matters without ever considering what it actually represents, or how it actually went up.
Great, number go up, but why and who actually benefitted.
According to that article, COVID may have resulted in a million deaths in China above the long-term trend line in the last 3 years. This is known as the excess mortality rate, which we can directly compare to other countries even if China lied about COVID mortality (and hey, maybe they did - it would be in their own interests so it’s plausible)
According to this article, since the pandemic began the US’s excess deaths have also sparked sharply even as the COVID mortality rate falls in official government data (sound familiar?) FTA: Since the pandemic began, excess deaths are up by more than 1.25 million in the U.S., about 15% higher than in the pre-pandemic years. That’s worse even when you don’t take populations into account!
Now we can do excess deaths per capita to compare these two policies:
China’s population is notoriously huge, with currently 1.412 billion people living in China. 1 million excess deaths among 1.412 billion people gives us an excess death rate of ~0.07%
America is a much smaller country, with 331.9 million people. 1.25 million excess deaths among 331.9 million gives us an excess death rate of ~0.38%
That means America’s policies were 5x worse on a per capita basis. The zero COVID policy wasn’t perfect, but it was a hell of a lot better than the Let 'er Rip! policy of the rest of the West.
America is the worst of its cohorts, but the rest of the West failed too!
France had 151,000 excess deaths. At that rate China would have lost over 3 million
Germany had 254,000 excess deaths . At that rate China would have lost over 4 million
Britain had 237,000 excess deaths. At that rate China would have lost just under 5 million.
In fairness, China only barely outcompeted South Korea at 42,000 excess deaths - at that rate China would have lost 1.14 million instead of a measly 1 million. That’s still 140,000 lives that were saved because of zero COVID that would have died with the extremely effective South Korean policies.
In conclusion, China is a positive force in the world and I know which side I’m on in the next Cold War.
Is this a joke??? You are aware that the death toll in China vs other states is not the sole or even biggest reason their government is criticized right? And that for the first, most critical year of the pandemic, America had a president that liberals hated and was HEAVILY criticized. Especially how he handled COVID at literally every step of the way and anyone else who agreed with it. Because you know, it lead to so many deaths.
Ugh can’t we go back to the old school edgelords who think they are vampires and wanna drink blood instead of making excuses for fascist governments and movements?
What policies specifically did biden implement that caused public health saftey? And keep in mind ALL of 2019 trump spent it downplaying the virus in every way conceivable and that other republican lead states and citizens listened to and adopted this. If the start runner does a terrible job it really doesn’t matter how well the next person does, they have hurdles no one else has to jump over. Including people believing that the virus is a hoax, masks don’t work, vaccines are dangerous, and even more. That’s an uphill battle. Context matters. And like China literally boarded up or even welding peoples homes shut without consent to keep them from breaking quarantine.
So yeah I get a little fucking pissed off when some comfortable westerner tries to play devils advocate that an authoritarian state that impacts people I love is some sort of intellectual thought experiment of how could it be better than the very bad USA (which also sucks but for completely different reasons!!!) I noticed you completely skipped over someone else’s point that we are free to speak out in America and not really face any consequences but nitpicking some other quotes.
Fuck this shit. I’m seeing so much more pro CCP shit on Lemmy and it is squicking me out. I’m not making this comment to convince you because you have made up your mind and have your own motives for sharing. Here is my movitve for repsoding… anyone reading this don’t believe what this person is saying without some critical thought. All the major governments suck right now to some degree. Be wary of anyone telling you that a government that has historically been horrible TO ITS OWN PEOPLE is for some arbitrary reason better than the west (and oh my gosh did everyone collectively forget HK protests and the human rights violations that happend there ?!!)
It has triggered an economic race to the bottom for any industry that can incorporate it. Employers will be forced to replace more workers with AI to keep prices competitive. And that is a lot of industries, especially if AI continues its growth.
The result is a lot of unemployment, which means an economic slowdown due to a lack of discretionary spending, which is a feedback loop.
There are only 3 outcomes I can imagine:
AI fizzles out. It can’t maintain its advancement enough to impress execs.
An unimaginable wealth disparity and probably a return to something like feudalism.
social revolution where AI is taken out of the hands of owners and placed into the hands of workers. Would require changes that we’d consider radically socialist now, like UBI and strong af social safety nets.
The second seems more likely than the third, and I consider that more or less a destruction of humanity
Someone needs to tell google that AI powered search is not working right now, and that they better wait a few years to try massively implementing that in a successful way.
Other AI fields are working really good. But search engine “instant AI answers” for general use are not in a phase when they should be as widely used as google (or microsoft) is trying to use them right now.
In what sense does a small community working with open weight (note: rarely if ever open source) llm have any mitigating impact on the rampant carbon emissions for the sake of bullshit generators?
Not a small community by any means. It inherently is opposed to the unnecessarily large and wasteful models of corporations. But when people just lump i al l under “AI”, the actually useful local models are the ones most likely to get harmed while Google, meta, and the other megacorps will be able to operate with impunity.
Those people doing the majority of the lumping, and it’s not even close, are the corporations themselves. The short hand exists. Machine learning is doing fine. Intentionally misinterpreting a message to incidentally defend the actions of the corporations doing the damage you are opposed to ain’t it.
The big companies are racing to get the best model, and they’re using highly inefficient GPUs to get there. Not just Google, Meta is doing it as well. They’re also completely missing their “climate target” goals because of it
The problem is the concentration of power, Sam “regulate me daddy” Altman’s plan is to get the government to create a web of regulation that makes it so only the big tech giants have access to the uncensored models.
Of course, as usual with capitalism and basically everything, we had hope to recieve a tool making expressing themselves easy for workers lacking time and training to do art, and we will superexpensive proprietary software and monopolies quite possibly gatekeep by law. Again just as in software some hope is in open source.
I’m one of the dozen people that bought premium to not have to deal with it. I’m just patiently waiting for alternatives to become more viable so I can jump ship entirely. YouTube is the last remaining Google service I still use.
From what I’ve read, YouTubers don’t get paid from views that use an ad-blocker, but they still do from views that have premium, so my justification is that I’m helping support the creators I like. I’m also paying for Nebula, which some of the documentary-style creators upload to as well now.
The way it’s done at this current moment is in no way sustainable. Once we start seeing better dedicated hardware for doing ai on client side hardware and remove the need to use massive GPU farms. AI is cool but it’s like driving a tank to the grocery store. We need the Prius of ai.
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