• 4 Posts
  • 124 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: February 25th, 2024

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  • throwing away your old ICE car

    But most people wouldn’t send their old car to the scrap heap, they would sell it on the secondary market to someone else (or a dealer, who would auction it into the secondary market). The old car would then continue to burn gas for likely many more years, until it “falls apart” anyway.

    Stepping back, your old car may be the first in a chain of older (or more falling-apart) vehicles getting traded out, all the way down to one that really does get fully retired, or replacing one that was totaled in a collision. So choosing to keep it deprives someone else of its availability and thereby drives up used prices slightly.

    For any study of this type of net effect, the authors need to pick a boundary for what gets considered. How many secondary market transactions do you study in that replacement chain, and what do those buyers substitute when the original ICE vehicle is not replaced with an EV? How far do you go in the pollution and other supply chain effects of manufacturing a new vehicle? I didn’t read a machine translation of your Swiss link, so I don’t know where the study authors drew the bounds, but I suspect it’s easy to choose and defend framing that supports either conclusion.

    In my personal calculation, I can only see one step down the used chain, wherein my old vehicle would continue to be driven by someone else, so replacing it with an EV wouldn’t make a substantial difference. I love my old car with no surveillance, so I’m in no hurry to switch even though I’ll presumably buy an EV eventually.

    Ultimately this is just one more example that that’s no ethical consumption within capitalism.



  • If LLMs don’t turn into AGI and instead the AI bubble pops, maybe some of the data centers don’t get finished. Even so, many of the rest will likely continue to operate and consume water.

    The US federal government will soon start decreeing how the overdrawn Colorado River will be resolved and things will get very ugly. Western water rights law is an unsustainable construct and all real solutions hurt rich people (even as they also hurt everyone else). Maybe the current administration is waiting until enough of the data centers are built before “solving” the water crisis by prioritizing AI over crops and humans in the name of national security.

    But we’re still living in a bad B movie. If AGI actually works and we get SkyNet in the end, then the water infrastructure in most of those regions is probably plenty for the machines once all of the humans are gone.










  • Actually I think the problem is that he cares way too much. He has written himself too many sprawling storylines that all need to come back together in a satisfying convergence, which is very difficult. The further he gets in the story, the harder it becomes to continue. He’s also a perfectionist.

    He’s a bit of a jerk for chronic underestimation of what it will take him to finish anything, and possibly for taking on other projects that further delay work on his magnum opus. But I understand procrastinating one important task by throwing yourself into work on different tasks.



  • It depends somewhat on how you’re planning to watch it all. If you’re sailing the high seas or watching blurays you already bought years ago, just go until it starts to feel dumb again. But if you are going to pay real money or spend streaming subscription time, don’t watch any of it. Weiss and Benioff did such a bad job in handling the end that the entire series should be considered financially toxic. Not a penny, not a groat.

    A better plan would be to listen to the audiobooks and hope that some residuals will help GRRM focus his ADHD long enough to finish another book while he’s still alive.