zerakith

I haven't seen any work estimating this. I have as part of my work spent some time trying to estimate the upstream effects of private cars (and other forms of transport) and it quite quickly gets very hard to find very much data. Even something quite basic like road maintainance gets quite difficult to unpick. So we know broad generalisations like heavier vehicles cause more damage but its quite hard to isolate this connection with individual traffic make ups (e.g. how much change in costs does a 10% change in average vehicle weight cause)

Sadly, we don't have a culture that particularly wants to know or track the costs. I'm not sure I'd be so confident though that the administration costs would be completely neglible. Some of the costs are quite high level: highway engineering, infrastructure and enforcement which can have high labour and materials costs. Probably what you need is a "natural experiment". Find a town or city that already happens to have a strange policy (I vagually recall somewhere that has a network of golf cart usage?) and try and ask the relevant authority whether they can provide the back history of spending and compare it to a similar size "normal" road network.

Related bugbare of my mine is the term cycling or walking infrastructure when in reality most if it is actually only necessary because of cars so its really car infrastructure (i.e. to facilitate cars going non human speeds without killing people or damaging buildings).

I do understand the sentiment but I would urge that we need all the voices of discontent towards the current system to be united if we even stand a chance at the change we need on the timelines necessary.

I agree that solidarity and good faith dialogue needs to be two way and it can be difficult at times but we must keep striving to find a way of working with those voices.

Also, should go without saying but you shouldn't judge a person by their fans (or really a subset of them). Lots in Marx has relevance and resonance to the problems we face. Solarpunk without class analysis will be subverted into techno-captialists vision for the future.

Worth mentioning that we need to be aware the degrowth in a degrowth scenario is a global average. Working classes could see growth (in living standards) whilst the whole economy shrunk.

On a lot issues people consistently say the they want the sort of changes (energy) degrowth would provide. We shouldn't get lost in the current systems deliberate blurring of economic value and living standards.

See for example this work here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-018-0021-4

This is frustrating because its a strawman. A degrowth scenario could still have growth in some areas (and I would expect it to if it was part of a realignment on more equitable and sustainable principles) and the whole global experience degrowth.

At the core of this is the physical limits of energy sources (and therefore economic activity which is highly coupled and is likely to remain so). There is room for disagreement here but its down to whether or not one believes that tech will save us by providing a different high energy source in time (or a sufficient combination of energy sources and efficiency and decoupling options). On the timescales of Climate Change I'd say that's highly unlikely and a period of degrowth will be necessary and the precautionary principle suggest we should work to this in case the tech options don't work.

Very interesting, thank you. I guess then the centralised server must have some sort of economy of scale.

In my head, I'm comparing the network to the electricity grid with certain shapes of network making different technologies more or less feasible. I would guess the internet network is probably similar to the electricity grid in most places having fewer hubs and lines of high bandwidth rather than a more evenly distributed network. Maybe the analogy is bad though.

Wait have pandemic done a McCarthy board game suggesting that socialism is a disease to be eradicated?

I suspect this will generate a lot of discussion and opinions on both sides but what I think we lack is a culture of longitudinal data and study. Maybe you are right or maybe dropping new users in the deep end puts them off forever. It would be nice to see some quantative study on the Linux user experience. Does it shift wider tech beliefs or political beleifs?

Agree, a headline of "Humans aren't dominating the climate" does the damage of subtly suggesting climate change/human impacts on environment isn't a big deal or is overblown. Even if there is legitimate disagreement about whether we can say it has definitely technically begun or not.

If that were the case it could have been communicated as "Human Interference in the biome is at an unprecedented scale but scientists aren't clear if it dominates natural systems... Yet"

Its a really interesting question. I wonder what the underlying economics and ideologies are at play with its decline. Economies of scale for large server farms? Desire for control of the content/copyright? Structure and shape of the network?

I guess it has some implications for stream versus download approaches to content?

My understanding is the internal calculation is that they know the time is up and eventually the money train of fossil fuels will come to an end the only question for them is how much more money they extract before they cut their losses, hide the wealth and move on.

The calculation is that, because of the sheer scale of profits from FF any amount of delay in the transition away from them (even say six months) is worth to them billions of dollars which massively outweighs the size of any fines.

Basically they are banking on there being no real consequences or accountability and to the extent they think about the climatic consequences at all they think they'll just be able to buy their way out of them.

Can we not use austistic as a pejorative. Thanks

My understanding is this was still a bit of a grey area: particularly with non-text media?

I thought that the training would not be covered but that there is the possibility of LLMs regurgitating the training materials under certain circumstances which would be covered as a potential breach?

Even without consideration of AI though I still think its an important question. Do users retain the copyright of thier work? I don't want to see another repeat of other platforms where users contribute and build communities with a collective mindset giving the platform it's value only to be enshittified.