• NaibofTabr ( NaibofTabr@infosec.pub ) English
      2·
      3 months ago

      OK.

      What happens when particular resources become necessary for public good?

      That is, does the world in general have the right to extract the resources necessary to manufacture solar panels and grid-scale batteries &etc even if the local people object, because replacing fossil fuel power is a necessity for the survival of the human race entire?

      What happens when acquiring and using a resource becomes a requirement for treating human life with value?

      • The D Quuuuuill ( Quill7513@slrpnk.net ) English
        5·
        3 months ago

        the mining of these resources must be done with respect and in cooperation with the people who would be harmed by doing so without respect and care. we must also take an approach of being considerate in our consumption habits, otherwise we’re just participating in eco-colonialism

        • NaibofTabr ( NaibofTabr@infosec.pub ) English
          2·
          3 months ago

          That sounds great… on paper. A very Disney ending to the long story of international resource conflict.

          It also doesn’t really address my question, which is:

          What happens when the extraction of a resource is necessary, but the local people object? What if they refuse to cooperate?

            • NaibofTabr ( NaibofTabr@infosec.pub ) English
              2·
              3 months ago

              OK.

              Copper. The answers to necessary and to whom should be self-evident.

              Other examples would be the rare earths which China has done so much work to acquire control over, and also sand for concrete which is such a high-value commodity that it has developed a global black market worth hundreds of billions of dollars, complete with international organized crime groups, and has caused a lot of environmental damage.

              • Leon ( Dojan@pawb.social ) English
                2·
                3 months ago

                Ah, well that makes it easy then. You leave the people the fuck alone, and let them go on with their lives.

                Why? Because the necessity is to some rich cunt who needs to exploit the natural resources of an area they have no larger claim to than anyone else, as well as the labour of whoever they can coerce into working there, to extract further riches for themselves. It is not about life or death. t is not about the betterment of a particular community, or society at large. It’s about profit.

                This is only a necessity from a capitalistic lens. We have already extracted these materials, and they are out there ready to be reclaimed and reused. It just so happens that it’s more profitable to trample communities and destroy the earth to get more of it, rather than use what we already have.

                That is the problem with capitalism. It is inimical to life and humanity, and cares only for profit. Capitalism is the paperclip maximiser.

                • NaibofTabr ( NaibofTabr@infosec.pub ) English
                  1·
                  3 months ago

                  It is not about life or death. t is not about the betterment of a particular community, or society at large. It’s about profit.

                  This is a nonsensical point of view. If we’re going to get out of our current climate problems we need to replace fossil fuel infrastructure with renewable energy sources as much and as quickly as possible. That’s going to mean more electrical infrastructure, more solar panels, more grid-scale battery systems, more wind turbines, more hydroelectric stations, etc., which in turn means more copper, steel, aluminum, silicon, and concrete.

                  Sure there’s profit motivation involved. It’s going to be a lot of fucking hard work and people gotta eat. But framing resource extraction for industrial use as only motivated by profit is so narrow-minded that this conversation can’t really continue until you take a few steps down from your high horse and adjust your extreme point of view to something more rational.

                  We have already extracted these materials, and they are out there ready to be reclaimed and reused. It just so happens that it’s more profitable to trample communities and destroy the earth to get more of it, rather than use what we already have.

                  There are already massive recycling industries in place for aluminum, steel, copper, and even lithium recovery from old batteries. Aluminum in particular is cheaper (more cost effective in terms of time and labor) to recycle than to mine and refine new ore. That’s great, but it still doesn’t produce enough volume of material, we still need more new material also.

                  There are also quarries that grind rock and old concrete down to make fine particles, but… it’s not the same as sand, it can’t be used in all of the same production processes. The result is more like very fine gravel than it is sand. There’s also an issue with a lot of concrete being reinforced with steel cables or rebar, which you can’t just throw into a rock grinder.

                  I don’t know why you’re talking about this as if it were all-or-nothing, that’s not a practical approach in the real world. It seems like you’re more interested in scoring holier-than-thou points than discussing actual solutions.

                • WarmApplePieShrek ( WarmApplePieShrek@lemmy.dbzer0.com ) English
                  1·
                  3 months ago

                  Refusing to manufacture solar panels because the people living over the whatever refuse to let us mine the whatever would lead to us burning more fossil fuels and killing the planet sooner, and it would even be worse for the people living above the whatever.

      • t3rmit3 ( t3rmit3@beehaw.org ) English
        2·
        3 months ago

        Sorry, what biological change in humans made it such that humans as a species require electricity to survive? Or that made it a prerequisite to “treating human life with value”?

        Methinks you are conflating maintenance of the human species and maintenance of your desired quality of life.

  • wyldrstallyns ( wyldrstallyns@lemmy.dbzer0.com ) English
    5·
    3 months ago

    Could we at least “fix” a few of those responsible, though? A little side quest, ya know, for The People. ✊🏼 I’ve got just the vet, and they’re very affordable —might even probono it as a civic duty. 🫡

  • nanometer1625 ( nanometer1625@thelemmy.club ) English
    4·
    3 months ago

    IMO the most pressing problem in the USA is that we have “consensus protocols” that can fail to achieve consensus. If the USA government was a software product, these would be considered massive bugs:

    • The presence of both a House of Representatives and a Senate, and both bodies need to approve legislation with a majority in order for the legislation to become law. This is fundamentally broken, because there’s no guarantee that both houses will be controlled by the same party. Imagine if a database locked up because it had only 2 replicas, and if they ever became out of sync, all writes would stop, with no way to achieve a majority.
    • The fact that the president can veto legislation. As above, this can result in a complete lockup of the government’s basic functionality, since there is no guarantee that Congress and the president are controlled by the same party.
    • The electoral college. The fact that it is capable of installing as president the loser of the election is an obvious and massive flaw.

    If we eliminated these bugs, then we would be able to achieve party-wise accountability; At the moment, when the House, Senate, and/or presidency are controlled by different parties, both parties can blame the other for inaction. In reality, the true problem is the fact that the Senate exists and that the President has veto power. If we had 1 democratic body (the House) and no Senate, then the party that controls the House would be directly accountable for its successes and failures, and I would expect American cynicism and apathy about “government not working” to decrease as a result.

  • HrabiaVulpes ( HrabiaVulpes@europe.pub ) English
    2·
    3 months ago

    AI failed because humans doing the same (bad) work were cheaper when AI stopped being heavily subsidized.

    Just think about it, a technology that automates work fails because humans are cheaper. System was not designed around the idea of humans being the cheapest part of the whole and it shows heavily. Humans were supposed to be this endlessly growing consumer base that works expensive jobs and can afford goods cheaply produced by automation. This did not happen. Population growth stagnated and reversed in many countries, humans became the cheapest part of economy while their purchasing power dwindled.

    No system in history ever was built on such assumptions. Hell, even democracy assumed that average person works only so many hours, and spends considerable time a week on getting informed about political issues. Currently democracy is just herding overworked tired people into the voting booth and asks them to vote on something they had neither time nor energy to get informed on.

  • Phantaloons ( Phantaloons@piefed.zip ) English
    2·
    3 months ago

    Anarchy isn’t a government, it’s the empty space between the last one and the next. It’s a power vaccum. The inability to act together means we’d all be at the mercy of the next neighbor with an organized military, or stoke a Civil War.

    I want to be wrong. Anarchism would be my first choice – if and only if, it’s viable.

      • Phantaloons ( Phantaloons@piefed.zip ) English
        2·
        3 months ago

        I have no idea how or why that could possibly make me change my mind, refutes or is even in contrast to anything I said. I know how it works, we’re onto if it could.

        In my opinion, there is no scenario where all of humanity mutually agrees… period, much-less – to abandon their governments in every single country.

        Anarchism wouldn’t work otherwise, everyone would be at the mercy of the last military on earth.

        • sobchak ( sobchak@programming.dev ) English
          3·
          3 months ago

          People in an anarchist society can agree to join a resisting force. When I think of anarchism in practice, I think more along the lines of the Zapitista territories (maybe I’m incorrect in that), which does indeed have an army.

      • sudoer777 ( sudoer777@lemmy.ml ) English
        2·
        3 months ago

        My roommates and I couldn’t even agree on how to load a fucking dishwasher, so good luck getting billions of people to agree on issues with much higher stakes