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Cake day: March 1st, 2024

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  • They’re just looking at death rates, not the reduced economic activity due to restrictions in usable land, and the transition costs for moving. They also looked at, say, the mortality rate for the thyroid cancer and count the 2-8% death rate only The other 92% suffered nothing I guess. . . /s

    But i’ll grant them that coal seems way way worse. Though basing on 2007 study is a time before the IED kicked in and a lot of LCPD plants were running limited hours instead of scrubbers - modern coal has to be cleaner by the directive - unfortunately the article is paywalled so hard to tell what their sample was based on time-wise and tech-wise.

    Hydro estimate is interesting because it shows the impact of the one off major catastrophic event.







  • oo1@lemmings.worldtoCommunism@lemmy.mlProtestation
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    5 days ago

    I think that’s partly to show the point, median is a lower than something equivalent to mean, indicating the high skewess of the distribution.

    The gdp vs wage angle is adding another point about about unearned income, rent and interest. I’d be slightly worried at not provisioning for fixed capital stock formation out of GDP - you do want to produce some of that stuff was well as consumption.

    Of course you can argue about who is best placed to own the capital too - as well as how the fk it can be measured in a market price system. (I already see a LTOV comment further down).


  • Perpetual motion machines are one of the mothers of all snake oil. Maybe AI can turn base metals into gold too. Do these AIs even really have a demonstrable understanding of thermodynamics yet? It needs to prove itself with a usable output for a clear observabe application on a small scale scale before anyone should start chucking vast amounts of energy at it in hope of what it can “maybe” do. I’d much rather chuck all that energy into trials of tokamaks or something like that.


  • Ah yeah, just choose a different energy souce. Simples.

    Have you seen the growth in % of renewable (incl, nuc biofuel and waste) electricity generation over the past 30 years. (36% i in 1990 , dropped to about 33% in late 2000s up to 38% recently) this is global, IEA figures.

    There have been two years since 1990 when renewable electricity output has grown faster than total electricity demand. 2008/9 recession and 2020 covid. The only way renewables will come close to meeting current electricity consumption is actually to start reducing those demands.

    If we start transerffing gas( domestic heating), and petrol( low-capacity road transportation) onto the electricitry grid then the scale and speed of renewables needs to ramp up inconcievably quickly - it has grown fast over the past decade, but it hasn’t been cheap nor has it been fast enough to keep up with current demands.

    TBH I don’t know where AI lines up next to EVs in scale of potential extra demand, probably lower but still an added demand (unless it can substitute for other stuff and improve efficiency somehow).

    Electricity source is not really a choice, it is resource and tech constrained many sources are needed; the cheapest fuels will continue to be in the mix used so long as demand keeps increasing so fast.

    Maybe, If you ran all AI in peooles houses in cold countries in winter, it’d substitute for heating - that’d be one way it could reduce its impact. Or maybe it can get its act together and spark widespread, frequent, deep, long lasting recessions in economic activity.


  • Yeah, i think it is more like thousands of years. wiki origin of species (Darwin)

    “. . … plant breeding, going back to ancient egypt”

    But breeding and GMO are different tech entirely, even if they might have similar results.

    Breeding plants probably started before egypt (they just the earliest with decipherable writing ) even just as an unintended biproduct of agriculture, just planting stuff together then weeding out the plants with less desirable yield, or selecting seed from the most productive plants for next year would do it. t may not hve been conscious or scientific, but it would have been effective over the generations.