I think that we should encourage elections to _not_ be standardized. The problems among various polities in the USA have many different issues and should not be forced to conform to a specific way that elections should be done. This is a social problem and we should not cram it into a technical solution. Legibility of elections should be maintained at the local level, trying to make things legible at a national level is in my opinion unwanted. As much as I would like the data to be clean, people are not so clean. Even if they used slightly more structured formats than PDFs, the differences between polities must be maintained as long as they are different polities.
The way that OpenElections handles this, with 'sources' and 'data' directories I think is a good way to bridge the gap.
Not being standardized is fine and even a positive (diversity of technology vendors is a security feature and increases confidence in elections). But producing machine readable outputs of some sort, instead of physical paper and PDFs, is clearly a positive as well.
How is it unwanted to have a standardized database of _results_? They're partly going to be used in a federal context, right?
We do this pretty decently in India - the results of pretty much every election run by the Election commission is updated on https://results.eci.gov.in/# and it's the same for the whole country.
Elections at the local level should be governed by the locality. I do not see the need for standards at a higher level, other than for democracy to be maintained in some fashion. External data reporting certainly need not be standardized at t̶h̶e̶ ̶l̶o̶c̶a̶l̶ [sic] a higher level.
I met some of the Feldera team last year at a conference and their knowledge of incremental computation engines is top-tier. Good luck to you all!
As discussed at the end, the storage costs for such a system may be exorbitant. How much space did the example than ran at 115k updates per second take?
both this and land acknowledgements are making sure people are keeping those people in mind. that makes it harder to keep justifying screwing over those people.
This is certainly a reaction to economic strangulation of a huge percentage of people in the economy. Of course, if people want to be near each other they should, but this phenomenon is a direct result of the crumbling conditions for the working class. The resurrection of third-spaces is a much better alternative than the erosion of first-spaces.
Our civil society organizations have eroded to the point that the private market has completely ended the concept of the third space. Places where community can be formed are gone; commoditized and politicized and so are not places where community can develop. Instead of the use of third-spaces we are forced to depend on our friends economically like this.
This seems like a good thing, "people are coming together, yay!" but being forced to live like this is not going to have good outcomes. These people have real issues described in the article, they need better child-care, they need closer personal roots, they need economic security. But we forcing people to make these contracts of great economic dependency, we should be more prepared to allow people to live more independently. I see this move as kin to the economic migration from the Global South today to countries like Sweden, Germany, etc. which has been causing great strife internally to those countries.
I don't think it's part of the terminal emulator (e.g. xterm, gnome-terminal) but the shell (bash, zsh, etc.). You're correct that it's not something that's implemented as an external program though; the "current directory" is state for a currently running terminal session, so changing that state is done via the shell interface (either directly by built-in commands like cd or indirectly via external commands that use those transitively).
Note: Child processes can't change the working directory of the parent. An external command (that is, not a shell builtin, shell function, or externally loaded module) cannot change the working directory, because they're launched as child processes.
Good point. I'm not sure why I was thinking that it was possible to do via some other command invoking `cd` or something, but you're right that the only examples I can think of are all using other builtins (e.g. invoking `source` to have a script change the current state).
There is a workaround I saw used by wcd, a tool for changing directories. To install it you have to add a wrapper function in your shell that executes the actual wcd binary, and after possibly interacting with the user to figure out what directory to change to the executable will print out the destination, and then the wrapper function will make the call to cd, affecting the shell it runs in.
True, I meant the shell, as `cd` is a shell builtin. However, `git-checkout` does implement this behavior. `git checkout -` will checkout the previously checked out branch.
But they're not two different formats—they're two different jobs being done by the same format.
JSON as currently spec'd is honestly quite bad at both jobs, but the most rational defense of its use as a data format is that it's (mostly) human readable. Given that that's its main value proposition, what exactly is the reason for saying that JSON-as-data-format should not have comments? What do we lose if we allow them?
> Given that that's its main value proposition, what exactly is the reason for saying that JSON-as-data-format should not have comments? What do we lose if we allow them?
Because JSON originally did have comments, and people were putting pragmas into them, and so different parsers would act different depending on whether they understood them or not. Comments ended up being an anti-feature in JSON because people were abusing them.
Source:
> I removed comments from JSON because I saw people were using them to hold parsing directives, a practice which would have destroyed interoperability. I know that the lack of comments makes some people sad, but it shouldn't. […]
I don't buy it, what's stopping people from putting pragmas in key:value pairs? There's a chance of collision, but you're already deciding to sacrifice interoperability, so just accept that the myJson spec says '___declare___' is a reserved key.
If I parse json, I dont want to lose data. Having the parser read the comments (however they are, as long as they are in spec and therefore read by the parser) is a good thing. Having to parse the file again, with a fuzzy out-of-spec system (looking for comments) is clearly worse. The whole point of json is to serialize stuff, breaking that to insert non-machine readable comments makes the spec less reliable.
> Suppose you are using JSON to keep configuration files, which you would like to annotate. Go ahead and insert all the comments you like. Then pipe it through JSMin before handing it to your JSON parser.
But there are dangers there - look at how horribly comments get abused in code:
* doctests are nonsense, just write tests. (doctests like rusts that just validate example snippets are the closest thing to good I've seen so far, but still make me nervous).
* load bearing comments that code mangling/generation tools rely on (see a whole bunch of generated scripts in your linux systen - DO NOT EDIT BELOW THIS LINE)
* things like modelines in editors that affect how programs interact with the code
* things like html or xml comments that on parsing affect end user program logic.
Comments can be abused, and in something like JSON on the wire I can see systems which take additional info from the comments as part of the primary data input. Often a completely different format... and you end up with something like the front-matter on your markdown files as found in static site generators.
Point being, comments are not a purely benign addition.
> see a whole bunch of generated scripts in your linux systen - DO NOT EDIT BELOW THIS LINE
these are mostly a warning sign for humans, to be read as "if you need to modify the script below this line, a) you gotta be knowing what you're doing, we are not held liable for support if you change stuff around there b) please contact us to make sure we didn't miss a legitimate need or c) you're trying to do something in a bad way and there's better ways to do so".
I feel like most of your examples of "abuse" are just getting things done.
I don't see anything intrinsically wrong with doctests. I also can't see a better way to do "load bearing comments," and I'm not eager to go back to "Step 2: Edit your .bashrc to include foo."
at least a top-level metadata property can be explicitly defined in a .json.schema[0] and formalized, rather than being some kind of ad-hoc pre-processor step you have to evaluate before actually using the JSON data. I didn't even know about that approach before I read your comment but it instantly makes more sense to me in terms of maintainability and interoperability.
The problem is using JSON as a file format in the first place. It’s not designed for humans to edit. (Then again, it’s better than the Norway-sceptic YAML.)
I disagree. At least in an ought vs is sense: it's entirely the kind of format that I would create as an editable format. As witnessed by the fact that my workmates and I did create very nearly JSON previously as a file format in the 90s (but for C code programs)
TOML, extensions of json like json5 and hjson, a bunch of lesser known formats for nested structures like NestedText, UCL, kdl, Eno,sdlang, eldf, etc.
Also languages with some progrommatic capabilities like cue, dhall, jsonnet, nickel etc.
Non of them are perfect, and some are less suitable for certain use cases than others. But IMO pretty much all of them are better for human editing than json, and in many cases yaml.
JSON has a very minimal set of types and I regularly use all of them. I guess you could argue that integers and numbers could be combined, but I think that's it.
Can I confirm that the reason it's not preferred to have comments in data-formats is because it's to be machine read only and as such should be as efficient as possible and not contain information that wont be used?
Seeing as I can only see the use case as a file format to be read/written by humans in the loop, then maybe the conversation should be about compiling the file format to a data format for compatibility outside of the user tooling.
The argument is that comments are often used as an escape hatch from specified formats to carry further instructions. So you got a properly specified format and then want to do vendor&extensions but not break other implementations ... just make your extensions a comment. Then other parsers ignore it and you can do your thing.
The idea is that this forces better formats.
How well this works? Well, then I got an "x-comment" property or non-standard comments. Nonetheless. If people see the need to hack some extension in, they'll find a way.
JSON wins because it can be casually inspected by people testing bizarre theories. The importance of this is lost on people who don’t treat triage as a skill that can be honed.
I like to solve problems - or at least bringing them to me doesn’t result in a loss of status for either party. People notice this about me and bring me problems. Someone recently described to people what is essentially my process: the likelihood of the cause divided by the difficulty of verification. Partially sort and just start checking off assumptions.
A lot of cheap but low probability options get shuffled higher, and just sending the wrong data is a common enough problem, especially with caching. And if it’s nearly free to look at the payload, it’ll get checked. If it isn’t people will try everything else to avoid it.
JSON is notable for making UTF-8 encoding a hard requirement.
…which was pretty ballsy back in the mid-2000s. We were still fighting with Shift-JIS and Windows-1252. Excel didn’t add proper support for UTF-8 until depressingly recently.
Late 90’s I had to fix bugs in a shiftJIS implementation. And I couldn’t read a lick of Japanese. Still can’t.
I don’t remember when I started pushing for utf-8 everywhere but it was “early” by most people’s standards, so I know what you mean.
And one of the things that makes me dislike MySQL is that they have a field type called utf-8 that isn’t. And they didn’t fix it, they introduced a new type instead. So that footgun was still there for all to trigger. So mad.
Ah ok, fair enough. This is a more recent (2017) clarification of the standard which I hadn't seen. The original mid 2000s specification did not require UTF-8.
> Previous specifications of JSON have not required the use of UTF-8 when transmitting JSON text. However, the vast majority of JSON-based software implementations have chosen to use the UTF-8 encoding, to the extent that it is the only encoding that achieves interoperability.
Hmm, not as I read it. It says that UTF-8 is the 'default' encoding. In context that just means that it's the encoding you assume if the first four octets don't match a pattern characteristic of one of the other encodings (when restricted to ASCII characters). See section 3 of https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc4627. The original RFC is vague, but I think the idea is that a fully conformant implementation would support all the encodings mentioned.
I think in the JSON case its because you can't have true comments, any comments are intrinsically part of the data structure, and you invite problems by including irrelevant information
And who knows what deeper layers of hell we avoided.
Frankly, VSCode shows that all this time people were complaining about no comments in JSON config and how hard it was to write config in JSON, they could have just written their apps to strip comments at read time.
JSON is awful for writing manually because it requires typing too many quotes, commas etc. I think JSON is meant to be machine-generated and machine-read and therefore doesn't need any comments.
Out computer infrastructure today is anti-human, you see it in the examples given here in this blog post. Instead, we must start using computers and software in particular to create environmental computing infrastructure. Environmental computing infrastructure is not one of representation, not containing an interface, but a digital twin that handles the complex bureaucratic parts of our lives for us. It should not supplant us in meatspace, it should not exist in meatspace. This is what I want computers to do.
Much as the article describes, we are using contemporary computing technology to create infrastructure that allows us to live in the illusion of creating. The infrastructure is inherently cynical and consumption oriented, so it produces cynical consumers. A proper computing infrastructure, namely an environmental computing infrastructure, should produce producers.
This is a reductive interpretation. If I create a modify a photo using Photoshop I'm creating. If I use ChatGPT to help write some code for a hobby project, I'm creating. These are just tools for creating like all other tools that came before. I'm not quite sure what the moral panic is about.
Yeah, I am not against using tools of production. My problem is with ownership. You do not own the product you create with Photoshop[1], and you do not even own Photoshop anymore! It's all leases and terms of 'service' and no ownership of software.
Users of ChatGPT are serfs not owners. Their use of ChatGPT provides value to ChatGPT the corporation. Today we live in techno-feudalism[2], and not a time of tech ownership. So the serf gets wheat and cattle, the king stays in his castle.
I am against that these tools are actually tools of consumption. I am for software production ownership.
Anti-human is software not in control of it's human user. So an "environmental computing infrastructure" is anti-human.
A classic desktop model, where the OS is a single application, user-programmable with ease like modern Emacs or classic Smalltalk workstations, of course networked with other systems offering the same kind of interaction, so a kind of "environmental computing" but personal that's pro-human. Because you are not slave of someone else created automation with more or less limited personalization, you are the owner, the commander of anything belonging to you.
Yes I agree. I think that my main issue is that with today's software, we are assuming the identity of our 'digital twin', instead of having it firmly separated from us. This is my main problem with representational aspect of our current software infrastructure. It actually removes ownership and control over the software.
How has private equity become such a strong force today? They are eating the world it seems. Blamed for strangling stable chain-restaurants[1], shuttering toy stores[2], and now ruining bowling!
Of course, these were not the best performing stores, and perhaps large chains are out of fashion in the contemporary era. Is private equity simply the scavenger, feeding off the walking-corpses of these businesses, encouraging new growth? I would be more OK with that if it didn't end with shadowy rich finance bros owning everything. The kind of disruption that these PE firms accomplish feels a lot more like corruption to me.
VCs all read Peter Thiel's book 'Zero to One' and embraced the idea of owning a monopoly. Rather than starting a business that grows and outperforms all the competitors, they're just leveraging massive sums of money to buy all the competitors to create one instead.
That’s a pretty uncharitable interpretation of the book’s main idea, which is better stated that you should seek to invent something entirely new that is a defacto monopoly, rather than engage in competition with others doing the same (old) thing. His background in the hyper competitive world of law was the key connection point toward that realization. Basically, he says that ambitious people often end up competing against each other in law/consulting/finance etc. but they should invent something new instead.
US politicians stopped valuing actual capitalism and stopped supporting anti-trust actions, accelerated by the SCOTUS Citizens United decision essentially equating money to free speech and allowing effectively unlimited corporate political donations.
Since then, there has been no downside to becoming an effective monopoly, so why make a better product?
Theil and his followers are exploiting a weakness in the system. If they can take all the money, why should they give a flip about anyone else in the system that supports their lifestyle? After all, it may take until they are dead for it to collapse.
Because antitrust laws are no longer enforced, so you’re allowed to create monopolies and jack up prices/cut service, and the government will no longer stop you.
Actually it's because antitrust laws are stretched to the point that big acquisitions are no longer likely to win approval, so "alternative" exits are the only option.
Not to mention that until interest rates rose a few years ago, these PE acquisitions could be funded with cheap borrowed money.
Shouldn't you focus on the firms selling to PE's instead?
The PE's can only hostile take over public companies, the rest have to sell themselves.
I think the growth of PE's is due to the firms' owners realizing they don't want to be in business anymore, having the goal of eventually selling to someone (ala selling to FAANG in the DOT COM space), or the owners can't scale their businesses beyond what they are now.
>Shouldn't you focus on the firms selling to PE's instead?
Kind of but I also don't blame someone when PE firm shows up with briefcase full of life changing money and asks to buy. Few people can resist that temptation, especially as they get older.
And for small businesses, there is a massive wave of boomers retiring. Either they sell or go out of business. For the better ones, PE is buying and rolling them up.
It is illegal, as a fiduciary (owner or director of a business), to not take a financially expedient deal (of course someone would need standing, ie as an investor, to sue). It is often seen as immoral to refuse one which would benefit, eg, friends or family who have invested.
> While it is certainly true that a central objective of for-profit corporations is to make money, modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not do so. For-profit corporations, with ownership approval, support a wide variety of charitable causes, and it is not at all uncommon for such corporations to further humanitarian and other altruistic objectives. Many examples come readily to mind. So long as its owners agree, a for-profit corporation may take costly pollution-control and energy-conservation measures that go beyond what the law requires. A for-profit corporation that operates facilities in other countries may exceed the requirements of local law regarding working conditions and benefits. If for-profit corporations may pursue such worthy objectives, there is no apparent reason why they may not further religious objectives as well.
Thank you for the info. I am curious: is there a corollary, by which minority owners could sue majority ones, for lost profit? I suppose the key caveat to my argument earlier is that one must have standing to sue: if owners disagree (board decisions need not be unanimous), is there valid standing to sue.
That’s a pretty big over dramatization. You are assuming the company would not be able to operate and provide value to its investors without said deal.
There is a discussion happening below regarding actual law. I would guess in a court, the argument could be reversed: one cannot assume there would be more profit without the deal, absent evidence.
This only applies to public companies. Private enterprises can do whatever they want (within the law of course, and assuming they have majority interest)
And it may not compel a specific action. The law is there mainly to prevent situations whereby corporate officers tank a company on purpose say, for the benefit of another company for which they are the shareholders or receive other benefits. Say, pass on a deal from company X which has more favorable terms vs. company Y for which the CEO sits on the board. In this case the CEO could be held fiscally and potentially criminally liable for acting against the best interests of the company.
Short of a bankruptcy, I'm not sure there is any legal compulsion to sell off any part of a company.
Or alternatively is PE identifying and enshittifying businesses that have (1) lots of dedicated customers who are path-dependent and unlikely to switch (e.g., older folks), and (2) perform essential services that have low (short term) elasticity, like emergency veterinarians. This seems like the smart move if you want to extract profit from society without providing much value in return.
There was an opinion piece posted here by Matt Stoller about "economic termites" and this is the pattern I recognize: where corporate involvement makes everything more expensive, while workers' salaries go sideways. https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/economic-termites-are-eve...
That kind of value extraction can be very good for investors, so they give PE firms lots of money to deploy, and the PE firms then throw that money at the business owners who find it hard to resist. I suspect that's how.
However:
> Is private equity simply the scavenger, feeding off the walking-corpses of these businesses, encouraging new growth?
I think there is a lot of truth to this. The kind of business that is susceptible to this kind of pillaging tends not to be one with a promising future. A healthy company tends to trade at a healthy premium to its net asset value (reflecting expected future growth) so it makes less sense for someone to buy up the company just to extract the assets. I suspect in many cases the alternative to a PE takeover would be consolidation or just plain old bankruptcy.
There is a separate, but arguably related, problem of PE extracting consumer surplus, ie, buying a company and putting the squeeze on customers (charging more for shittier products) in order to increase profits. But that is far from a PE-specific problem, as can be seen from the many cases of enshittification in public companies.
The other point is that we only hear about PE deals that "go bad" (either for the investors or the company) because that's the juicier story. PE firms are buying up lots of companies all the time, but "PE deal goes okay" is not a good headline. There are probably a lot of brands out there that you don't even know are owned by PE. Contrary to popular believe PE isn't just about stripping the meat from dead or dying companies, though it is a common strategy (and one that is arguably more prevalent in certain parts of the economic cycle).
It's another example of enshittification.
1. Find something that makes money and has "inefficiencies"
2. Buy a controlling share
3. Make it more "efficient"*
*Here efficient means: remove everything that makes it fun and unique and replace with the least expensive, low quality alternative. Add invasive advertisements. Charge extra for anything that can be carved off the original service or product.
Seems like the inevitable outcome of late stage capitalism with a lot of capital concentration and diminishing places to deploy it.
Ultimately they’ll probably just end up with all the land while burning what’s currently on it, as that allows them to put the squeeze on the entire physical economy, and then we’re back to feudalism all over again.
I have some hope for a technological solution to the climate change problem. However, I constantly struggle with the question, what if we are wrong? What if we will not be able to fix it fast enough? We are sitting on our hands and praying for a deus ex machina to save us from ecological collapse, when we should be actively striving for a sustainable society.
So, in addition to being hopeful for technological innovation, we must advocate for widespread systemic change, so that we would not even need technology to fix the problem for us. This includes destroying the inherently unsustainable supply chain and in its place constructing a supply cycle. We need to abolish landfills, and require all (at least industrially) produced goods to have a clear recycling strategy. Sustainability is a problem that needs to be solved socially as well as technologically.
> when we should be actively striving for a sustainable society
Sorry to sound frustrated, but this is an argument for 60 years ago. It's irrelevant today. The die is cast. There is no situation when we will not even need technology to fix the problem for us, except the one where we just give up and say "fuck it". No models show an insignificant rise in global temperature, even if all emissions stopped today, and there is no foreseeable scenario in which all emissions stop even in the next 50 years. We need to get with the program. It sucks, we don't want it to be this way, but we are basically down to science and engineering solutions rather than regulatory or ground-level change.
Not saying we don't also need systemic change, just that is is not sufficient at this point.
I certainly do not want to go back in time to a pre-industrial society. I do want to go _forward_ into a truly post industrial society though, and not simply hide the dirty industries into the poorer parts of the world.
But, the technology must be met with an ideological shift away from technological dependence. We need to create more environmental technology, and less representational technology - interfaces and screens.
The software revolution is yet to happen, that is what I aim for.
What was magical about COVID was the ability to see a blue sky in China and India, people still had food, shelter and fornicated. COVID showed you that we could have a cleaner environment and have the basics provided.
COVID also gave us clear knowledge that it is easy to define socially necessary labor. Most jobs out here in the USA are downright bullshit jobs, and our 'labor' only contributes further to the current ecocide.
Today, our industries abuse our planet's resources for the short term benefit of all of us. Abolishing landfills is a confirmation that we are past such a myopic technological level. We no longer need them.
> Drive outside a major city sometime.
Growing up in the suburbs, I understand this quite well. But this land is not ours just because it is there and unused. We need to return a majority of the earth back to the ecology. Monkeys are falling out of trees in Mexico, 50% of bugs and birds are dead due to the ecocide, I could go on.
Just referencing 'unused land' as if it is ours to use by default is a gross misunderstanding and human-centric approach to ecology. There is more than us here.
The things you are describing are not going to make a material difference. Ground all plane travel, permanently. Ground all car and truck transportation that is not electric, permanently. No electricity generation except by solar, wind, wave, nuclear, etc., permanently. Kill all cows and have a giant BBQ and then no more methane producing livestock are allowed, permanently.
Solutions that are not "acceptable enough" are not solutions, they are notions.
We can still "have it all" -- flight, meat, etc., if the right incentives exist; this too is more notion than solution but is the only possible path.
We can make "sustainable" fuel, and cattle can be fed seaweed and restricted to existing range lands (i.e., don't destroy more forests).
A key problem is that this issue and associated solutions have been artfully politicized by their incumbent stakeholders so a significant portion of the population will resist these efforts purely out of spite.
It seems like that to me too. I keep hoping that it's just some cognition defect, that they're trying to be reasonable, that there's this one little piece of logic they stumble over... but the more I listen to them, the more convinced I become that they really do just want all of us to be extinct.
Yeah the environmental movement from the 70s has evolved into something like a death cult in its modern equivalent. Technology can no longer save us, but is in and of itself the problem along with industrialized civilization. Doubly ironic given how that movement killed nuclear power, and if we had actually built as many reactors as Nixon wanted we would've actually accomplished some of these now-arguably unachievable goals on climate metrics.
I'm being a little glib in that comment, but the sentiment is I think true and I wish they'd be honest about it. If they stated plainly that "we think in order to achieve what we believe are the required reductions in xyz, we have to decrease the human population by X% so less is consumed" I would actually respect them more. Instead the de-growth mentality is rhetorized up to look nice, but again it's just window dressing.
> It's expensive but we could absolutely produce green methane with renewable energy.
You don't even understand. The methane's mostly for the hydrogen, used to make ammonia or some other nitrogen compound. There are other ways of making this, Birkeland Eyde, for instance, but there like one third as efficient, at best. This means people starve. You might make the case that we could efficiently use livestock manure as a substitute (it's the green solution), but not if you're going to turn this into Planet Vegan. Given the necessity of animal manure, it's difficult to think that "get rid of all the livestock" stems from anything other than bizarre vegan tendencies.
If you absolutely have to get rid of the livestock, so be it, but then you really do need the fossil fuels. Pick, it's one or the other as far as I can tell.
> And there are natural fertilizer paths that aren't cattle.
Nope. You've got livestock (hogs, poultry, etc), or you've got fossil-fuel-based Haber-Bosch. I'm not even really aware of any science fiction concepts "other paths".
Green ammonia is already being commercially deployed by folks like Talus. Yes, we'd have to invest hard in renewables and nuclear, but it's absolutely achievable. Ammonia production is whole integer percent of global energy use, that's not an impossible number to supply with hydrogen.
Additionally, pulse crop rotation is increasingly being used to provide some free nitrogen to the soil.
Bioreactors with Azotobacter vinelandii are showing promise in providing nitrogen fixing in a reactor.
And like, industrial composting produces fertilizers with plenty of nitrogen. Soybeans, in particular, need no nitrogen inputs and produce plenty of both useful food and nitrogen containing plant matter.
Our wastewater also contains tons of nitrogen, both from biosolids and from agricultural runoff. These are difficult to get at safely, admittedly, but not impossible.
If you pause to think about it, all that manure needs to come from feedstock plus other inputs (water, etc). If you diverted that same feedstock into producing fertilizer (in the case of soybeans) or not producing at all (in the case of dent corn) you'd have plenty of material and a reduced demand. Manure doesn't just magically come from no inputs.
Nope. You've got livestock (hogs, poultry, etc), or you've got fossil-fuel-based Haber-Bosch. I'm not even really aware of any science fiction concepts "other paths".
The Haber-Bosch process needs hydrogen, as you said in your first paragraph. Hydrogen can be made directly from water by electrolysis with renewable or nuclear electricity. This was already done on an industrial scale in the 20th century, with hydroelectric power used to produce hydrogen for ammonia:
"1921–2021: A Century of Renewable Ammonia Synthesis"
> The Haber-Bosch process needs hydrogen, as you said in your first paragraph. Hydrogen can be made directly from water by electrolysis
Nice. You've just made one of the most energy-intensive necessary industrial processes even more energy intensive. Even while you're doing your best to demolish whatever baseload power we might still have.
> This was already done on an industrial scale in the 20th century, with hydroelectric power used to produce hydrogen for ammonia:
Got any spare hydroelectric? Any more rivers you want to dam up? Maybe you can decommission a few more nuke plants and replace them with brown coal.
I have a head sci-fi story of us creating a super powerful AI that solves almost all of humanity's and the Earths problems by curating a selection of 250,000 ideal humans, and then killing everyone else. A quarter million good people living in a near perfect world propped up by AI robots with essentially infinite resources.
I'm almost positive I wouldn't make the cut, the top .003% has gotta be a higher bar than me to clear, hah. But still fun to think about.
In the early 20th century, arguments against eugenics included pointing out that natural selection works through environmental pressures. Selecting for traits we value currently may well paint us in a corner should the environmental pressures change in some way.
I guess that might hint at a fly in the ointment to drive the plot...
Then we're wrong, and it doesn't matter. If we're wrong, what's the point in questioning it?
> We are sitting on our hands and praying for a deus ex machina to save us from ecological collapse
Well... no, we're not. Millions of people are working every day on the technology needed to solve these issues either directly (i.e., better pollution control on factories) or indirectly (i.e,. developing cleaner energy)
This isn't to say we all should just sit back and wait for the scientists to come up with an answer - we do very much need to fix many other issues as well, as you point out - but please let's not pretend that a) WE'RE DOOMED! or b) that we're just waiting for a "miracle" or some kind of "breakthrough" to save us
We definitely won't be able to fix it fast enough. And the answer to "what happens?" is simply: Darwin.
There is already historical precedent for what happens when a species makes the planet uninhabitable for nearly everything: after the evolution of photosynthesis, the atmosphere filled up with extremely toxic waste product known as oxygen gas, driving most species to extinction. The ecology recovered, with new species, millions of years later.
Rich people won't survive in their bunkers, either.
I reject your argument entirely. Your nihilistic thinking is what continues the crisis. Reject the void, choose productivity, and work to make the world better.
You can if you want, but the rest of the world is still going to continue trying to drive you extinct anyway, so you'd rather have a plan for that, than not.
Other major cities must start making significant headway in this direction. As a New Yorker, I am very interested in getting rid of all cars in NYC.
NYC (Specifically, Governor Hochul) has "indefinitely paused" the rollout of a new congestion pricing system for cars in Manhattan, which was a step in the right direction perhaps, but certainly not a solution by any means.
Following Paris' lead and removing parking spaces, streets, and improving more sustainable transit is the only way forward if we want to start mitigating climate instability.
NYC I feel is one of the few (if only!) cities in America that has the ability to get rid of all private cars within 10 years. We could also become a cyclists' paradise! We need to give the politicians a mandate to accomplish this or they will flail about as always until we all get swallowed up by a tsunami or something.
I'd love to see more sidewalk and less road here. The pandemic-induced trend of sidewalk/street seating at cafes and restaurants and closed streets (like St. Marks in manhattan and Vanderbilt in Brooklyn) really make the spring/summer/fall here a joy, but it's silly that we have to sit in little huts in former parking spaces. Make it official and permanent. NYC sidewalks are wide as for America, but pretty narrow compared to the rest of the world.
I was in Berlin recently, and some of the more posh neighborhoods have enormous sidewalks, full of people walking, or sipping espresso and chatting. I'm jealous!
I'm really bummed that they canceled congestion pricing. We almost did the right thing for the city and the planet, and of course at the last minute some politicians have to go and fuck it up. They're really the worst.
I also am against policies that only allow rich to do stuff, annoyed by this idea that rich can always buy their way out of things, if there’s a problem with cars then just ban it for all
I wouldn’t be opposed to making tolls and fines income based, like some Nordic countries.
I once was finishing up eating at Astro diner (iirc) on 55th and 6th and some guy in a lambo double parked across the street on 6th, blocking traffic, and just left it there. Cops came pretty quickly and were ticketing it, but there’s no way the person driving a $400k car cares about a $100 ticket. When we walked out they were still trying to figure out what to do, as they weren’t even sure a tow company would come to take it.
I don't think NYC is capable of getting rid of all cars. Maybe Manhattan. But there are five boroughs. Queens, most of Brookyln, and Staten Island aren't quite as easy to live in without a car. If you live in Bayridge and work in Bayonne as a carpenter, its sure a hell of a lot easier with a car.
1. Ban all non-electric vehicles (because noise and pollution)
2. Allow electric taxis/ride share vehicles
3. Convert all reasonable roads to one-way, half for vehicles half for bicycles and other small transportation options (I’m thinking scooters, Segways, and such)
4. Remaining roads for bicycles and other small vehicles
What do y’all thinking of bringing back horse drawn carriages?
I think large trucks and SUVs should not be legal to drive through the city without a valid business permit. Special temporary permits can he granted to newly purchased vehicles.
Large vehicles are a safety hazard to pedestrians, cyclists, and other motorists in smaller cars. They take more parking space, and consume more gas/electricity.
Asia is full of trucks and vans that are smaller than most four door cars in NA... There's really no reasonable reason for someone to be driving a vehicle the size of an F-150 in the city unless it's being used for construction IMHO.
In Montreal, areas with permitted parking charge by e.g. the weight of the vehicle, the size of a vehicles engine, or the length of the vehicle (it changes by borough/year). It's an OK proxy for big cars, but people still are willing to pay it.
We got rid of horse drawn carriages in Montreal relatively recently for animal cruelty reasons.
The way that OpenElections handles this, with 'sources' and 'data' directories I think is a good way to bridge the gap.