On top of all the extremely valid points about the ad-driven cognitive friction inherent to modern device usage: print books can’t get yoinked off my shelf because a rich person with political connections wants that.
With respect, this is just propaganda. That is not about banning books, that is about keep certain kinds of books out of school libraries. School libraries already kept other classes of books. This reminds of when Gavin Newsome or Pink tried to claim conservatives states banned "To Kill a Mocking Bird," which was not only untrue but it was the case that in their foolishness, they did not realize California banned the book, if anything.
It hasn't been "manually delisted" - it has been rightfully flagged by users, plus set off the flamewar detector, plus downweighted by moderators, the same way we would downweight any other thread that violates the values of this site so shamefully. Hacker News is not a site for mobs.
You believe in something which has never existed and will never exist. In international relations, there has never been anything besides "might is right". Anything else is an illusion. At most something that leaders pay lip service to, when it aligns with their own goals.
The law of the jungle is reality. World War II was won by terror bombing civilians. It is lamentable, but reality is reality. So to say "that's not how it works" is denying reality.
“Never”? Not once in the Story of Us has any dispute between large groups of humans been resolved by anything other than a superior application of brute force? Strong claim, but I’ll run with it.
And you appear to believe this is a pretext for humans to ignore their own laws and commit atrocities, when they could choose otherwise.
It may be reality that jungle law is currently how humans almost always handle conflict at nation-state scale. Non sequitur that it should remain so.
My understanding is that deep-sea nodules produce oxygen by a process similar to electrolysis, where they generate currents that split seawater into hydrogen and oxygen.
The proportion of global abiotic and global total oxygen production this represents is not known, but may be significant.
Leaving aside the certainty of yet more cascading collapses of marine life in waters de-oxygenated by deep sea mining: do we want to risk finding out the hard way how significant?
Apparent consensus is we do, but I don’t have to like it, or think these are the plans of sane people who see the big picture.
It's still quite controversial whether or not they produce oxygen that way. It's been hypothesized, but I wouldn't consider it a consensus or settled. There are also microbes that can produce oxygen without light, so there are other mechanisms to explain "dark oxygen" in deep sea ecosystems.
With that said, the simple truth of it is that we know next to nothing about these ecosystems and really can't accurately estimate impacts. They're quite possibly significant, but we just don't have much info to go off of and studies like this are sorely needed.
These are not the plans of sane people. They are the plans of capital / technology, which if you’re familiar with Nick Land’s work, operates as an independent entity with its own goals in mind. It does not value the planet in any capacity.
Profits must be pursued & we can always just regrow marine life after AGI gives us infinite knowledge of everything (which is going to happen any day now).
ML and physics share a belief in the power of their universal abstractions - all is dynamics in spaces at scales, all is models and data.
The belief is justified because the abstractions work for a big array of problems, to a number of decimal places. Get good enough at solving problems with those universal abstractions, everything starts to look like a solvable problem and it gets easy to lose epistemic humility.
You can combine physics and ML to make large reusable orbital rockets that land themselves. Why shouldn’t be able to solve any of the sometimes much tamer-looking problems they fail to? Even today there was an IEEE article about high failure rates in IT projects…
Expectations do not spring sui generis into hearts and minds. I don’t know about you, but AFAICT approximately sane and rational folks (ha! Ha!) at least try to derive their expectations from reality.
When most people’s reality is substantially human-defined and abstracted from nature - including a global advertising industry exists to create mass expectations, of economic significance for its clients, often enough to the detriment of their target markets - you can absolutely point the finger at “reality” for pissing on your leg while varieties of Stoic, Buddhist, and HN poster tell you it’s raining.
It’s good to start with ourselves when trying to create change, as that is where the locus of control should lie… but sometimes “reality” is absolutely the reasonable and proximate cause of negative emotion. Saying otherwise feels like anticipatory victim-blaming.
While there is certainly an argument to be made that many contemporary “Western” Pseudo-Christian Superempire nations face a crisis of short-termism, there are also ancient bits of “Western” infrastructure like the Roman aqueducts still in use today - off the top of my head, the Aqua Virgo which supplies Rome’s Trevi Fountain, dated either 19BC or 19AD, I forget; Spain’s Segovia Aqueduct from the first century AD; and the Pont du Gard in Nîmes, from the same period.
Not quite as old, or at the scale of the Dujiangyan system, but still evidence that the “Western” culture did once build for long term. Less ancient, but more indicative, are the European cathedrals built by multiple generations over a century.
As overt corporatism goes, you can do a lot worse than simultaneously embed tech execs in the military command chain, and military commanders in the tech industry.
Yeah, there’s a good quote about how they don’t trust people to “eat the rich”, because what they’ll actually do is come at a bunch of doctors and lawyers while the real rich gets away relatively unscathed.
In the French revolution, mobs would smash textile shops to the dismay of the workers, string up the middle class owners, then drink the reagents and die.
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