This, my friend, is an overly cynical take. You can apply it to your life in any way that serves you. You can imagine it as a good reminder to live life to the fullest, to not let your ego run away from reality, or to give perspective on all the little things we worry about when we consider how many weeks we have left on this planet.

Memento mori.

I haven’t read the author’s book, but I think her position in the article still misses the mark and is naively dangerous, having us all just look at the flowers and embrace market solutions while we collapse the biosphere at stunning pace.

Honestly I’m not seeing any ‘solutions’ that are on a timeline relevant to the crisis. But I think any first step will have us coming to terms with climate change not being the problem, but a symptom of our economic system and our relationship to the environment. We’re going to have to reorient away from growth, because that growth is literally consuming the biophysical basis of our own existence.

Large-scale solutions aside, I think we’re going to start seeing a growing desire in people to somehow ‘exit’ this system. I know I feel it in myself, deep in my bones, and it pisses me off to no end that I’m forced into destructive behavior because of the system I’m trapped in. All this waste, plastic and destruction just to exist each day, and I’m not even having a good time! If anyone has made some progress in this area I would love to hear about it. I imagine it must start with some rejection of what the market ‘values’, choosing not to participate in this whole game that is making us miserable, and somehow trade material wealth for greater awareness and connection to our humanity. If Elon and Jeff want it all, they can fucking have it, I just want out of this nightmare and to find peace with nature somehow.

Just curious, which pen are you planning to get?

It will also have a very low attention span and not know anything of substance.

I’m trying to wrap my head around this - I’ve been stuck in the mickey mouse line of business world where a company may have like a few TB of transactional data in a decade - and I kind of want out into the real world. A few questions if you don’t mind, what kind of customer needs this amount of storage, what kind of data is it, and are you mostly building on top of S3?

This sounds interesting. I’m wondering if you could go into any more detail about what you were trying to do with your opening, and what needs you are seeing out there around storage specifically. I have a small software company and I’ve been under the impression that storage is pretty much taken care of at all levels by the existing commodity services, but maybe I’m just talking to the wrong people or missing something important. Thanks.

Okay, but this money basically IS going to people that need it, by way of affordable fuel prices. Ever wonder why fuel is so cheap in places like Egypt? It’s because the government is subsidizing the cost and picking up a lot of the tab. What happens when people can no longer afford to get around, and food prices skyrocket because transportation is so expensive? Leaders are mostly concerned with keeping their heads attached to their bodies and they’ll do anything to keep the economy growing, even if it destroys the environment and explodes the public debt. It’s why climate change is such a gnarly problem, it’s not just that there’s a bunch of corrupt evil people preventing progress, our whole economic system needs to be overturned.

For a livable future, we’re going to have to massively reduce our energy usage (like, yesterday) and figure out how to survive in a degrowth scenario, while we try to replace the entirety of our infrastructure and build out resilient systems, all without access to credit. Fun times ahead.

The number is kind of misleading. There’s about $1-2T of direct subsidies, with the remainder being uncharged externalities (remediating environmental damage, etc) that’s paid for later with public funds. I’m not sure how they come up with those numbers, but if they really wanted to count externalities, the number should be orders of magnitude higher, like what’s the cost of actually removing that fucking carbon from the atmosphere, how do you price the inevitable mass starvation and collapse of industrial civilization, etc.

In my experience it’s okay, but not amazing and slowly getting worse year after year for various reasons. Generally speaking if you have a life-threatening issue (heart failure, cancer, etc), you are taken care of as well as anyone could reasonably expect. But for anything else it can take forever to see a specialist and it’s easy to get lost in the system that always seems to be running in capacity crisis mode. There are other countries that do a better job with the single-payer model, mostly those without provincial fiefdoms that insist on doing everything themselves and reinventing all the wheels for political reasons.

Looks like we’ll still be doing TPS reports, right up until the very end of industrial civilization.

Very detailed and helpful, thanks.

Fall of Civilizations

I haven’t seen this mentioned yet, but it’s incomparably good (if stories about past civilizations is your thing).

Their greenwashed climate change videos really exposed them as a corporate propaganda outlet. I can’t watch them anymore.