I kind of understand this argument, but I kind of don't. Does this argument prefer that there is less food production in California?
> It supplies one-third of U.S. vegetables and three-quarters of its fruit and nuts. California is the country’s biggest milk producer, producing nearly 20 percent of the nation’s milk. And of all crops grown in the U.S., 19 of them – including almonds, pistachios, walnuts, raisins, olives, plums and table grapes – are grown only in California.
There's a lot of crops that are grown in CA that are not native to the area, and require a lot of water to be viable in that area. Trying to grow a crop native to monsoon areas in a dry area is just unsane.
And growing a human in that area? Would it not also be a drag on the area? At what point does blame the plants become blame all alien life including human?
(Not referring to your comment, I feel often people tend to handwave themselves out the equation).
> At what point does blame the plants become blame all alien life including human?
I don't think that's what people are saying. The question is why is the cost of growing such water intensive crops in such an arid land cheap enough to make financial sense.
The answer, I expect, is essentially that the costs involved in said water are subsidised in such a way as to socialise them? Would be interesting to understand.
There is a reason 80%(?) of the world almond crop is grown in California. It has a great climate for almonds, a lot of land, and water to support the trees. We need to trade something for our IPhones besides the promise of future dollars (debt).
> Does this argument prefer that there is less food production in California?
Yes. This scale of agriculture in CA is not historical, and is driven by hydro-engineering projects of huge scale throughout the American west that began in the 1940s. The Bureau of Reclamation's fever dreams were fueled by two decades near the turn of the 20th century that were some of the wettest in a thousand years, and this has led to a crazy situation that is not sustainable in the long term (perhaps not even in the medium term).
Tax water for agricultural usage enough to fund desalination plants for their water use. The market participants should then adapt by switching to less water-intensive crops, or paying the tax and getting the desalination plants.
From the survival of civilization scale, most of "almonds, pistachios, walnuts, raisins, olives, plums and table grapes" are probably luxury items that we can ill afford.
Sure it's a balancing act between "save the planet!" and "save the economy!". Guess who's winning so far?
Strange because you are naming staples that are concentrated sources of nutrition and energy that can indeed ensure survival, and components of “trail mix” for this very reason.
Certainly if you wanna supplant them with other crops that support something other than European style cuisine, go for it, but if you propose to take away nuts, olives, and grapes then you may be a racist or bigot, and we’d sooner die than change in that regard.
Fact: a major component of the Ukrainian conflict is that nation's ability to supply wheat products to the rest of Europe.
I believe that a certain philosophical viewpoint was raised by some sci-fi authors, to the effect that wheat and other staple crops are the most intelligent sentience on Earth, because they successfully domesticated human beings, who give them all the best land, water, and doting TLC to become fruitful and multiply.
We can afford them, it costs maybe 5% more to grow them other places. We just don't anymore because that is 5% someone can skim off the top because they don't have to pay for environmental destruction and other downstream effects.
This was recently an episode topic on the podcast 99% Invisible. It brought up a lot of interesting questions for me mostly about the systemic differences between public and private operations and pros&cons on both. Plainly shown TVA has been abysmal after it was forced to operate as a profit motivated institution. Though it was still federally owned it received nearly total immunity from the mishaps it caused through sovereign immunity laws. What is the check on disasters like this happening again? Will more regulation prevent it? The EPA's regulations incentivized it to further endanger workers during the cleanup. It needs to either be fully privately owned (still regulated) or fully federally owned and funded.
Coal plants being dirty, toxic, and generally not good for the health of nearby populations isn't exactly new information of course. But they were important for energy generation for a long time.
That's the reason the resulting pollution and toxic waste is tolerated. Coal contains all sorts of stuff besides organic matter. When you burn it, the non organic stuff remains. It will typically contain metals, heavy metals, and other stuff that isn't good for you. That's also the reason coal smog isn't good for people. You don't want that stuff in your lungs. It's similarly bad as smoking is.
The ash needs to go somewhere and the standard practice with a lot of coal plants has been to just dump it outside, try to contain it with some infrastructure, and not worry too much about it. Nobody really cared. Except now a lot of these plants are going out of business and the the toxic waste remains. And most of these plants needed cooling water so they tend to be close to water ways. So, there's that.
> The ash needs to go somewhere and the standard practice with a lot of coal plants has been to just dump it outside, try to contain it with some infrastructure, and not worry too much about it.
More precisely: The standard EPA recommended practice would have been to dump the dried fly ash in a lined landfill (to prevent poisoning groundwater). This is also what whas done in the cleanup.
Allowing the disaster to occur was a clear case of insufficient regulations combined with the sort of cost-saving sloppiness that is to be expected from private companies.
Those regulations were amended and risks at other potential disaster sites were mitigated (which cost billions), finishing in 2022.
I'd like to note here that muntzing government regulations in a style that Musk advocates for ("you can always reinstate some regulations later if you run into problems") is not only irresponsible, but also impractical; it takes decades to implement regulatory changes and switching is very expensive.
> is not only irresponsible, but also impractical; it takes decades to implement regulatory changes and switching is very expensive.
But perhaps this latency is itself a problem that should be solved? I understand that there are good reasons for regulation to be a slow process, but it doesn't have to (and probably shouldn't!) take decades to iterate on.
And if regulation could iterate faster, some of your objections to the approach go away, do they not? This would also come with the added benefit of reducing the efficacy of regulatory capture.
That's one reason the resulting pollution and waste is tolerated. Another big reason is that the harms are diffuse and often hard to see. If coal power plant operators had to actually pay for the harms they produce, coal would have started phasing out much earlier and faster.
Because people have a completely wrong impression of the scale of nuclear waste. In the Netherlands there is a museum inside their nuclear waste repository - you can literally walk right up to the barrels containing nuclear waste, it's open to the members of the public.
And I don't remember the exact number, but I'm sure I read somewhere that all of world's highly radioactive nuclear waste(spent fuel) could fit in several olympic swimming pools - while this coal power plant produced 1000 tonnes(!!!!) a day(!!!) of coal soot. The scale is just completely incomparable. But people look at Chernobyl or Fukishima and think that the exclusion zones created by those events are inherently a feature of nuclear power - when they are not.
Radioactive clouds and exclusion zones are inherent features of nuclear power the way that buffer overflows and remote code execution are inherent features of C.
True, but if you add up Chernobyl, Fukushima and all other nuclear disasters per MHw generated coal is still many times more harmful and killed way more people.
And of course Chernobyl couldn’t have happened in the US, France, Britain or any other country run by extremely incompetent halfwits.
Those arguments are misguided or even deliberately misleading.
People don't die from flooding because of dams, people die from flooding despite dams. Deaths from flooding would not vanish (or even decrease) if we stopped using hydroelectricity/building dams.
Hiroshima was not significantly contaminated by radioactive material because the bomb dropped on it was not designed to do so (compare later speculative Cobalt-60 based designs), and the low amount of fissile material made incidental contamination a non-issue.
> People don't die from flooding because of dams, people die from flooding despite dams. Deaths from flooding would not vanish (or even decrease) if we stopped using hydroelectricity/building dams.
The floods are significantly worse because of the dams.
Water may naturally pool in areas but it doesn't pool to the degree necessary for hydropower which is why the dam is built. This causes 2 problems.
1) The construction of the dam will flood a ton of land upstream of the dam. If you've been to the beach you'll notice that the water doesn't need to go up or down very much for a ton of area to be flooded so in order to get that extra space.
2) You've now stored a ton of water upstream that will make any dam failure worse than a natural flood because you have all the rain from the rainstorm and the water stored before the rainstorm that's in the flood.
---
However, I'm still pro-hydro because uh, electricity is nice and you can mitigate flood issues better than cancer.
> The floods are significantly worse because of the dams.
No they are not.
Dams mitigate damage during floods because you have buffer capacity and control over outflow. Without dams, you get uncontrolled flooding every single time that there is a lot of rain. With dams, you only get uncontrolled flooding on dam failure, which tends to happen less often than... heavy rain.
> The construction of the dam will flood a ton of land upstream of the dam. If you've been to the beach you'll notice that the water doesn't need to go up or down very much for a ton of area to be flooded so in order to get that extra space.
Yes, large water reservoirs need large amounts of space. That is a completely different argument from flood risk, though, and those costs are negotiated on before the dam is even built.
> People don't die from flooding because of dams, people die from flooding despite dams. Deaths from flooding would not vanish (or even decrease) if we stopped using hydroelectricity/building dams.
wat
--- start quote ---
In August 1975, the Banqiao Dam and 61 others throughout Henan, China, collapsed following the landfall of Typhoon Nina.
The dam collapse created the third-deadliest flood in history which affected 12,000 km2 (3 million acres) with a total population of 10.15 million, including around 30 cities and counties, with estimates of the death toll ranging from 26,000 to 240,000.
The flood also caused the collapse of 5 million to 6.8 million houses
--- end quote ---
This was literally caused by dam failures. And yet somehow we still build hydroelectric plants.
By your flawed logic we should've stopped building them years ago. Because multiple human deaths, destruction and ecological disaster are literally built into every single dam.
Just in 2018 the Oroville Dam failure caused the evacuation of 180 000 people. That's more people than were evacuated due to Fukushima.
That dam was built to prevent and mitigate damage during floods (besides producing electricity).
Was it built to insufficient specifications? Absolutely! But building less dams does NOT lead to less victims during flooding, because the flooding then just happens completely uncontrolled. Spoiler alert: "Just not build any dams" doesn't do shit against flooding if you get 1m of rainfall within a day, and the people just die from starvation/infectious diseases instead (which is the source of >50% of the victims in the Banqiao incident, too), possibly in even greater numbers, because you have flooding everywhere.
> Just in 2018 the Oroville Dam failure caused the evacuation of 180 000 people. That's more people than were evacuated due to Fukushima.
Are you suggesting that we would have to evacute less people during rain if we did not build dams? Because that is the critical flaw in your argument that I'm pointing out.
> Are you suggesting that we would have to evacute less people during rain if we did not build dams
Are you suggesting that more people would have died had we replaced all coals plants with nuclear decades ago?
Because obviously the opposite is true.
Damns reduce the amount of people who drown during natural floods. Nuclear power reduces the amount of pollution and CO2 emissions (since people are just as likely to stop living in flood plains as accepting not having access to electricity)
> Are you suggesting that more people would have died had we replaced all coals plants with nuclear decades ago?
Absolutely not, and I'm not sure what I said that made you assume that.
On that topic: I do believe that the economics for nuclear power are bad, will get worse comparatively and were never really good in the first place.
I think there is a good reason that basically only a single nation on the planet went "full nuclear" for electric power (France), which they achieved basically thanks to ignoring the cost and pushing it as strategical measure instead (=> energy indepencence, specifically from oil).
If everyone around them had went full nuclear the (economical) situation would be even worse (because everyone would compete for hydro/peak power and/or forced into operating plants in load-following mode).
In conclusion: I think massive nuclear buildout would have made a lot of sense to mitigate climate change 30 years ago (but that was not really a realistic option then), and jumping on that bandwagon is no longer worth it. Just going for wind, solar, batteries and improved grid connectivity simply makes more sense now almost everywhere in my view.
This misses the point. Hydroelectric dams have a big negative cost component in human lives, because they protect a significant amount of them every single time there are flooding conditions (e.g. heavy rain) and the dam doesn't fail (which is obviously the huge majority of cases).
Nuclear plants, on the other hand, protect a negligible amount of lives during floods, because they make for impractical shelters :P
In my expeience, comparison in "lethality" between hydroelectricity and nuclear power are only ever made by people that are uninformed on flood management and/or want to push an agenda, and I wanted to provide a counterpoint to that.
IIRC, and I forget where I know this from so it might be bullshit, but the energy required to live a lifetime at a western lifestyle creates a grapefruit sized volume of the "highly dangerous don't go near this" type waste.
Fun fact: in the UK low risk nuclear plant waste (for example workers' overalls) is bundled up and buried with... coal plant ash. Which is, of course, far more radioactive than the waste it is supposed to be protecting against. This was the case 15 years ago, may have changed since the UK has removed coal from its generation mix.
Why do you claim the coal ash is intended to be "protecting against" the nuclear plant waste and not just different types of radioactive waste being buried together?
Coal ash is not classed as radioactive and it was abundant and cheap as a useless by-product of burning coal. The point is more that things classed as "low level" waste from nuclear are most often completely harmless, just regulated differently due to public understanding of the word "nuclear". As such, its disposal is heavily regulated.
Coal ash is commonly used in cement [1]. I would suspect the nuclear waste is being encased with cement to prevent its leakage with of course the punchline being that the encasement is more radioactive than its contents.
Nuclear energy seems less harmful because its damage is often invisible or long-term. However, uranium mining leaves behind 99.99% of the extracted material as radioactive waste, contaminating land and water for centuries. The mining sites are primarily in Indigenous territories—such as those of the Navajo in the U.S., First Nations in Canada, Aboriginal Australians, and communities in Niger and Kazakhstan—where local populations suffer from radiation exposure, heavy metal poisoning, and increased cancer rates. While nuclear disasters receive global attention, the ongoing destruction from uranium mining remains largely ignored—out of sight, out of mind.
99.99% of the extracted material that was already there? Conservation of matter suggests the area was already rich in uranium ores. And uranium operations are pretty small on the scale of mine operations. It also is common enough in modern mining practice to put the nasty stuff at the bottom of the waste dump, as close as possible to the conditions where it came from.
That seems unlikely to be causing any problems, especially without a source to gauge how political the studies are. We're talking populations that live close to the middle of nowhere, limited education, limited employment opportunities and questionable infrastructure. They're not going to get health and wellness outcomes as good as more urban populations.
> 99.99% of the extracted material that was already there? Conservation of matter suggests the area was already rich in uranium ores.
This is a misleading take on heavy metal mining in general.
Mining is not primarily harmful to local environments because it leads to more of the harmful extracted material; it is harmful because ore concentration is often rather low, and the extraction process produces millions of tons of toxic mineral slurry (=> more harmful than the ore), which has to be disposed somewhere (and preferably not in groundwater, which is the cheapest place to get rid of it).
Don't get me wrong, I don't think that mining hazards are the showstopper for nuclear energy, but this ("harmful ore was already there before it is mined") is the wrong dismissal for that argument.
Saying that a mine leaves behind 99.99% of the material is a misleading take. Material that has been there since before the dawn of recorded history remains there. It is a non-statement chosen for emotional effect. I might as well say that the overall concentration of uranium in the area is dropping because they just dug it up and sold a bunch off.
He didn't articulate what his problem with the situation was; it is a remarkably vague comment for an area that is extremely well understood. What exactly are these harms? Especially when considering that living remotely from a city is harmful to health outcomes they probably aren't particularly interesting.
Gathering the materials for solar panels is harmful and you don't see anyone seriously sitting down to have a whinge about it. Industrial society has costs. News at 11.
> Saying that a mine leaves behind 99.99% of the material is a misleading take.
This might be slightly overstated, but uranium at ore concentrations of 0.1% and under is mined commercially right now. Safely disposing of toxic byproducts of Uranium ore extraction and -concentration is already non-trivial in sufficiently regulated industrialized nations, situation in Kazakhstan or Africa is very obviously worse (or are you actually arguing that the operators there are gonna restore groundwater quality, and dispose of toxic byproducts in a permanently safe way at their own cost?)
> What exactly are these harms?
Again. The harm comes primarily from groundwater contamination, which is very hard to prevent because you are basically pumping some leaching agent into the ground, which is alreay invariably gonna affect groundwater quality. Even if that did not, you then need to dump slurry/brine byproducts from extraction somewhere (and the next river is gonna be the cheapest place).
> Gathering the materials for solar panels is harmful and you don't see anyone seriously sitting down to have a whinge about it. Industrial society has costs. News at 11.
People whine about environmental impact of lithium/rare earth mining bascially every single time that electrification of vehicles comes up (or wind turbines), primarily to then make bad arguments in favor of fossil fuels...
> Again. The harm comes primarily from groundwater contamination, which is very hard to prevent because you are basically pumping some leaching agent into the ground, which is alreay invariably gonna affect groundwater quality. Even if that did not, you then need to dump slurry/brine byproducts from extraction somewhere (and the next river is gonna be the cheapest place).
I could say that humans breath out CO2 and therefore are significant contributors to global pollution. It is not a real answer unless an order of magnitude estimate is attached. You're just noting that generic heavy metals mining pollutes; which is true but with Uranium mining it turns out pretty quickly that the harms are the most minor of any energy production method because the volumes of material are so small.
I don't think the anti-nuclear crowd wants to do that because as soon as they do they're probably going to end up looking foolish. There are situations like our Kazakhstani friend in this thread bought up where the uranium production turns out to be a relatively small component of a much more significant industrial pollution picture. They don't paint a compelling picture for avoiding nuclear power though, and misleading statements like pointing out that mines leave most local material behind are what they have to fall back on.
What materials cause less damage than uranium in the extraction process? IN absolute terms there aren't many. Most materials we require orders of magnitude more of the stuff than we need tonnes of uranium.
What's the uranium concentration of the waste though? If it's higher than the .1% natural concentration they're mining wouldn't they mine their waste piles? I'm failing to see how the waste has more uranium in it than the land did to begin with unless it was a case of the surface land people deal with being free of it.
> If it's higher than the .1% natural concentration they're mining wouldn't they mine their waste piles?
Your mental picture of the process is a bit off: Uranium mining happens mostly by pumping a leaching agent (typically some acid) into the ground, and extracting it elsewhere via wells. This is very obviously not helpful for groundwater quality.
And you are not extracting just Uranium (or even other "desirable" heavy metals)-- most of the radioactivity (>80%) is in economically uninteresting decay products, and you just want/need to get rid of those.
I live in one of the mentioned countries (Kazakhstan) very close to one the major (unenriched) uranium processing plants. It's in the very east of the country close to the border with China, you'll easily find information about it if you're interested.
It most definitely is causing problems, but you will not hear about it because: a) nobody gives a flying fuck about us, especially our own government, and b) very little research is being done because nobody important is interested in doing it.
Most of the money made by destroying our health and environment goes to Switzerland (i.e. Glencore), and they have no incentive to care about us.
I read one study by a grad student who managed to escape from here to a French university, and she used a scanning electron microscope to find very high levels of heavy metal pollution -- including uranium -- in tree leaves all around the plant. That's about it.
And here's a personal anecdote of what the reality is here: when I was in college, I was working for a few months with a group of researchers that were testing novel techniques of reducing particulate pollution from a local coal power plant. While we did see some positive results, the emission values (both before and after) were significantly higher than what is permitted by government emission standards, about 8-10 times as much. So we were "asked" (and complied -- you don't really say no to these things) to reduce numbers to acceptable levels and publish that. This makes for a pretty piss-poor study if you ask me, it's not really science.
I worry this is going to come off as overly combative; but you haven't gotten to the meat of my complaint here. What is the harm you are objecting to vis a vis the uranium?
The only actual evidence you're proffering is that there is heavy metals pollution "all around" the processing plant. That isn't much to go on. What sort of distances are we talking about? What does "very high" mean?
Sure, I was too impulsive myself, but it's really difficult to read dismissive comments when people all around you lose 10+ years of life expectancy to this "non-problem" just so that some guy in France can have his nuclear energy for cheap.
I think this is the study; I read it as a proper full-length thesis, but it also seems to have been condensed into a short paper:
Are there any mines involved in this study? There don't seem to be any mines involved here. I'm not even sure that most of the damage is being done by the Uranium processing, we seem to be looking at a heavy industrial district. I can't figure out where their colour scale comes from but it seems the high Uranium concentrations are quite localised to near the Uranium processing plant and the area is a witches brew of pollutants from all sorts of horrible industrial activities.
I wouldn't choose to live there, I give you that. Not convinced it is relevant to nuclear power debate though. The studiers seem to be drawing attention to the toxicity of the lead-zinc plant.
This goes to the core of my complaint against the anti-nuclear people. I think ignoring the Ag, As, Ba. Be, Co, Cr, Sb & Zn - and all the other elements in the study - and myopically focusing on the U is really misunderstanding what an industrial district does. They are unhealthy places.
You seem to misunderstand how mining pollution actually works.
When things like uranium are trapped in rocks they are typically immobile and not bioavailable. In most ground strata things things can be stabally held for millions of years. When humans mine the area we can cause what would take erosion millions of years in hours. For example blasting and mechanical splitting of rocks then loading them with equipment causes huge amounts of dust. Also in the process of exposing 'fresh' rock we cause sulfate materials to be exposed to water creating acids that mobilize metals.
Do the higher temperatures and pressures in power station liberate more of the harmful stuff, or is it basically as bad?
UK homes were commonly coal heated as late as the 1980s, a few still are. Its contribution to air pollution was well-understood, but this has got me wondering about ash exposure, as people would routinely handle the stuff with basically nothing in terms of protective gear.
The brain can mimic the _feeling_ of having had an incredible idea when in reality nothing actually incredible or mind opening has been understood. But some people do indeed have deep realizations, while others just deeply feel the feeling of having had a deep realizations, if that makes sense.
the visceral realization that something feeling incredibly deep and meaningful doesn't necessarily mean it's actually incredibly deep and meaningful, can, itself, be incredibly deep and meaningful. an opportunity to reset and recalibrate what you feel you want out of life.
Thats why this stuff works the best of very deeply depressed people or people struggling with trauma because it shows them their brain can be happy / not in a bad state again in a demonstrable way.
It's also why many bros are super confident in whatever crap they believe though, because they thought about it while high and even though they can't explain it, they feel very strongly it has to be true because of the strong feelings felt during.
> because it shows them their brain can be happy / not in a bad state again in a demonstrable way.
I took my first (RC) benzo when I was 30 (to stop long acting stimulants/panic attacks) and it was a profound experience precisely for this reason.
Just carrying a pill in my wallet ended a half-year streak of panic attacks and just knowing you're not at the complete mercy of anxiety eased the anxiety greatly and also pushed me to actively want to change the way I feel by other non-chemical means.
There are also other problems: while on acid once I came to a realisation that really changed how I experienced things later on. My realisation was that most of my perceptions of things were really "coloured" by a layer of society. For example, during that trip I found some husks of dead lobsters, that were sundried and quite rotten and gory. But during the trip they were this amazing structure of iridescent craziness on a dimpled hard and shiny shell, combined with dried out half rotted soft meat on the inside. I knew that I should keep the germs away from my mouth or cuts/wounds and I think I played and analysed it for a bit, being amazed by its structure, textures and colours. After that the trip got a bit stronger and the focus was on other things, however. Some hours after the trip I came by the same place that I had happenstanced the lobster husk. The same lobster was lying there. It was ugly and disgusting. I had washed my hands thoroughly after playing with it but really had an urge to wash my hands again.
I laughed at how my amazement of the dead lobster had felt so profound just hours earlier.
But. The next day after a nice rest I actually started to see that many things are actually very special and beautiful but our upbringing has destroyed the ability to experience this beauty. Society has teached us that rotten things are ugly. But that is just a layer on your perception. The materiality of things has their intention embedded in them and if their intention is of great beauty, then the materiality tends to be beautiful as well.
What I am trying to say is that first order dismissal of "deep insights" might not be warranted. You might have really had a deep insight, but you cannot correctly assess it because the setting has changed.
I did know a guy who claimed to have lived years of family life with a wife and kids once on DMT. I doubt it was actually years but it probably felt like it and it did fuck him up a bit. He had to mourn the loss of the perfect family life he'd gotten used to. He knew all of their names and favorite foods and sports and colors and what happened at school and first kiss and pregnancy announcement and wedding and stuff. Honestly kinda scared me. He just started reciting a whole life, and then he refused to talk about it again
The biggest thing that DMT taught me is that time is an illusion, created by our minds as part of the construct that allows us to exist and focus on survival. This is true for all life that experiences an internal chronology, but as humans we can only know how this applies to humans. Sorry, time travel hopefuls :)
DMT also taught me that our perception is our reality, and that we cannot actually perceive "objective" reality in any form. It helped me understand my mother, who we believe was suffering from Alzheimer's or dementia (she was never able to be diagnosed before physical health issues became the primary concern). She would tell me about these stories of traveling to write movies or novels. Prior to my DMT experience, I would respond like many would, "oh but you never left the bed! you've been here the whole time!" in the gentlest way possible. After my DMT experience, I would sit with her and ask her about them. She was never able to go into quite as deep detail as the person you are talking about, but from that point, I truly believed that, in her perception, in her reality, she did very much indeed travel to write movies and novels. Or at the very least, I believe that is how her brain interpreted what the DMT was presenting her.
I believe DMT is ultimately the "guide" for death. It doesn't cause or induce death, but our brains release it in response to death. And sometimes, like all biological machines, it happens at the wrong time. Sometimes before, and sometimes maybe the brain misses the signals and is unable to secrete DMT at the appropriate time, for whatever reason. I believe dementia is merely the early natural introduction of DMT into the brain. I guess I'll find out when I feel what it feels like if I end up suffering dementia.
There's a lot of "belief" here, sure. Some may even go so far as to call it "woo". But DMT gave me this profound understanding at a deeply visceral level. This even took some time to realize upon lengthy reflection on the experience and what it took me through, with surprisingly strong remnant memories of the visuals of being forced through a "time loop" where my eyes were sort of "dragged" along the very path I'd looked around the room in the early part of the trip. We do scientifically know our brain will sometimes "rewind" to fill in gaps in our vision (think of the classic example of looking at a clock with a second hand and the first second kind of seems to linger, that's our brain rewinding and lying to us about what we were seeing in that moment, using all available information once our eyes stabilize).
What you remember (that wasn't mind-blowing) was what you thought, would be a reminder to the first sign post along a trail of thoughts that led to the much bigger idea, which was the thing that was mind-blowing. But of course, it's too big of a thought to communicate via words, so all you're left with is a feeling of reminiscent awe and a trudge of disappointment.
Yeah, that's common. Only slightly more common than having actual mind blowing realizations that help people see how others see them, give them empathy they never knew, and give the motivation to fix their lives before they die unhappy.
The big problem is that there's only so many actual realizations you can have, but it feels big every time you take it. So the people that take acid every month inevitably end up with a mind full of so much "incredible importance" that it turns into mysticism and the realizations are at best buried, at worst completely lost. If you take shrooms one every 3 years i bet your gonna have actual realizations every single time, and they're gonna help you reevaluate and plan your future. If you take it every week you're gonna go insane.
> Only slightly more common than having actual mind blowing realizations that help people see how others see them, give them empathy they never knew, and give the motivation to fix their lives before they die unhappy.
I don't think that's true? I know that's what Tim Leary was hoping would happen, but it never panned out.
I know plenty of people who have experience with hallucinogens, and none of them really had those kind of life changing revelations. Most found it fun, a few appreciated the new perspectives it offered, but none of them came away with a new path in life. I know I certainly didn't.
I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but I think it takes a certain type of person, in a certain state of mind or view on life, that has those sort of life changing experiences.
And that would make sense? If hallucinogens give you a glimpse of a world view that everyone is human, everyone has struggles, life is short and human connections are what matters - if you already have that world view (or something close to it), then those perspectives wouldn't be revelations, but rather reminders of what you always knew.
If that's the case, what does this metal plate do that my phone can't? It is just a knob that sends a number to my phone? Why can't I just use my phone? This feels like the humane pin again.
Well, it's a bookmark ...I guess. One that can be used to select a book from a list and set a page number. But, yeah. I just don't see the need for it.
It's "research" that's highly politicised and much of it is junk (see the "black plastic" scare not long ago).
Synthetic fibers are around a century old by now, other plastics applications more than that, and everyone has already been exposed to microplastics. If they were as harmful as the scaremongers want us to believe, we would've noticed long ago.
Just like non-ionising radiation from radio, this whole plastics scare is another nothingburger.
I think one problem is that most people confuse private ownership with "the market". Just because a utility company is owned and operated by a private entity does not mean it is influenced by market forces. Utilities fall under a natural or technological monopoly. Due to space constraints it is not desirable or efficient to have multiple companies run pipes, cables, or other infrastructure alongside each other to compete. There are no competitive forces; there is no market. Publicly run institutions or privately run+ publicly regulated institutions better serve the needs of the people in these conditions.
I think a related thing that many people get confused by is the idea that market forces even exist. It's very rare these days to find industry segments where participants actively compete on quality or price. The whole idea is a holdover from how business was done 40 years ago.
And with today's investors just buying funds/picking some 'group' on the 401k website, they aren't investing in a company, counting on receiving dividends from the company for the rest of their lives, and therefore forcing the company to be healthy. Instead they are counting on the stock going up short term, something totally different than buying and holding for dividends. And they just keep putting money into the generic pools of XYZ stock fund, again not a specific stock that they then hold accountable for anything. In fact they can't even punish a specific company by selling it's stock, only an entire ETF or 401 fund that the company is buried in.
And then there's dark pools. Trading isn't even done on the market anymore.
market forces do exist. But it varies highly from industry to industry and product category to category.
Food:
- restaurants definitely compete with each other, mostly in each local area
- and within that, different slices of the restaurant business more directly compete, e.g. fast food is more competing with each other than fine dining.
- BUT: we have a huge problem with a lack of competition in the supply chain driving prices up for everyone, at least in the US.
- Groceries are similarly impacted by supply chain monopolies
Smartphones: high end smartphones are a oligopoly: - Apple vs Samsung vs HTC and several other tech companies producing phones; Apple definitely commands quite a bit of a premium, as do some of the nicer Android phones. But on the whole, the companies really are fighting to one-up each other with better features, battery life, etc. - quality is improving, even if the price is over-charging vs the ideal competitive market. Low end phones are even more fiercely competitive
Other electronic categories seem to show decent market dynamics; headphones, earbuds, usb peripherals, keyboards, etc. all seem very commoditized; there certainly are brands that try to command a bit of a premium based on reputation / marketing, but the cheap options are often good enough and definitely have a very competitive market. Big electronics like GPUs and gaming consoles though I think it's easier to start considering market distortions due to more monopoly power.
Of course there are no shortage of monopolistic practices out there, e.g. for utilities, collusion on rent, online retail (Amazon), textbook prices, medical care & pharmaceuticals, and even more mundane things like frozen potatoes and chicken.
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The thing that bothers me most with the simplistic view that "the market will do it better" is that the whole premise of market forces giving the most efficient price assumes that (a) a commodity is being traded by (b) a large number of buyers and sellers, none of whom have any significant share of the market. Many markets either (a) aren't trading a commodity (e.g. iPhones and Android phones aren't interchangeable so Apple can command a premium price) or (b) have consolidated buying or selling to the point that they don't have the large number of independent buyers or sellers necessary to have the price be set by market dynamics rather than the monopolist or monopsonist. And the people promoting "let the market fix it" either are too dumb to realize that, or more likely are letting their rich friends make a quick buck or want to score political points by promoting smaller government.
Market forces do exist. I'm not sure why you think they do not. You are plain incorrect to claim that it is the exception for industries to compete on quality and price, at least in the U.S.
How certain are you of your position? There are 3 major mobile telecoms in the country. Their service plans and coverage are roughly comparable. There are a handful of parent corporations that own fast food franchises in the country. Their product offerings and price points are roughly the same and all opportunistically raised prices after supply side disruptions from the pandemic were largely resolved. Most consumer appliances (regardless of brand) are assembled from parts made in the same factory. Similar features, similar life expectancy, similar price. Same with packaged food brands, clothing, furniture, building materials, this list is basically endless, and a product of a few decades of unchecked corporate mergers and acquisitions and the steady march of private equity into just about every market niche in existence.
Services subject to natural monopolies are good candidates for being run cooperatively, by / on behalf of the market participants, so that there is not the incentive to extract rents via market power. Government-run may be practical from e.g. a fundraising perspective, but these services could be run wholly privately as co-ops.
In theory having the government run it should have the same effect. In practice what happens is that voters don't separately elect the utility's board and then the mayor gets elected on the basis of some school or tax issues and allows the government-run utility to become wasteful or corrupt.
What could be interesting is to have the local government found a co-op, i.e. they issue a bond to do the build-out and then hand the network to a co-op in exchange for a contract to pay the debt, essentially giving the co-op the backing of the government's credit rating for the initial build-out. Then the co-op board gets separately elected by its customers so they're directly accountable to the customers for any shenanigans.
Easier said than done these days. We had a coop managing out drinking water with local government support. Being a coop excluded them from grants and eventually the board burnt out and gave up. Local government now operates the thing - you'd think they'd be accountable to voters but they can only get grant money with strings attached. They can repair a few pipes only if they install chlorination that no one wants and will add more maintenance costs because of pressure from health and safety - the provider must guarantee water is safe at the end point so boiling water, which everyone does here, is no longer acceptable apparently. There isn't a big enough population that increasing the cost of water would make a difference.
All that to say, voters here do care about utilities, and the coop solution worked for about 25 years iirc but it can't work in today's "one solution fits all" regulatory context anymore, at least where i live. Things are far from that simple in practice.
For electric and gas that works as it's all just accounting. Energy company A buys futures for has and electricity and it all gets provided via the grid.
For trains it's much harder - yes, there are two providers on the WCML, but they're not equal (one runs faster trains) and as such there's zero real competition.
These things are a choice though. The natural monopoly isn't the trains, it's the tracks. And it's not maintenance of the tracks, it's ownership of them.
So you have the government own the tracks, contract with a private company to maintain them. Then anyone can use the tracks, like anyone can use the roads. Private companies offer train service to the public. All they need is rolling stock and they can start selling tickets. You then get a market that looks like airlines, i.e. entering the market is a moderate investment (millions; buy rolling stock/planes) rather than needing billions to build the network itself. More popular routes get more suppliers, which turns into more frequent service. There is plenty of competition because rolling stock is mobile and can easily be reassigned according to customer demand.
Open access rail operators are not permitted to compete with franchisees (on the same routes/proposition) - there's a test that is applied before granting a license to ensure that the services will be "not primarily abstractive" - that is, that the operator will generate new revenue rather than simply taking away from the franchisee.
