That’s what always gets me. You can’t spend a billion dollars on yourself - you could live in the highest possible luxury, waited on hand and foot by the best, and you’re barely going to eat up half of it in a lifetime - even if your money earned no interest

They’re not even happy. They’re hated by many, idolized by others, and the rest want to leech off them. They don’t even have good relationships among their peers, it’s like a never ending dick measuring contest

You can buy the cells, but you have to wire them into batteries yourself

They are good for just that though - some people on YouTube have find it and break down the process

More like “carbon capture you say? That sounds like a great reason to stop caring about emissions”

Here’s a neat detail about burning hydrocarbons - the oxygen burns carbon and releases CO2, but also H2O (and other things that don’t seem great)

There is a real difference for things like baking - I’m not saying it’s impossible to compensate with electric, but you’d have to adjust your process to get the same result

Sure you can, outside of a few specific carve outs it’s a civil matter… Meaning it takes money to fight money behind it

I worry more that it will become like recycling, and they’ll pretend it works or that it’s being done at scale so the majority stops worrying about it

Because the freaking UAE was able to pull some strings so they could hold the climate summit

We keep asking the wolves how to avoid wolf attacks

Glad to help.

It’s a weird concept outside of inheritance - for example, a royal bloodline could end because the regent dies without children. Because the upstream follows the ruler, you might have to backtrack up the bloodline to find the next heritor, which you’d call a branch bloodline

But in modern life? It’s kinda pointless as a concept. We care about heredity and family, not bloodlines

Imagine a line running only down the tree connecting two individuals - that’s a bloodline

If you can draw a bloodline from one person to the other, they are of the first’s bloodline. Your full blood siblings are not in your bloodline, though you share all of each other’s bloodlines

I love seeing someone else get this.

Money at this scale is just points in a game. It is entirely divorced from value to them, it’s just social status

The worst part is, they’re not even happy either. Some people do enjoy playing capitalism… But the mental gymnastics you have to do to enjoy min-maxing your labor pool leaves you hollow as a person.

Everyone you meet is hoping to leech off you, a peer you are competing against in the stupidest game, or someone who doesn’t care about money (and probably looks at you with disgust because your financial existence is literally destroying our species)

The only happy billionaires are the ones no one hears about - the people who are generationally free of the game and have accepted their ticket out from the start

Of course it’s different, and economies of scale are generally more efficient. 50 Independent Burger joints would likely be healthier and higher quality, they would do more to keep money flowing around the community rather than funneled away to corporate, and their ice cream machines wouldn’t break

But you wouldn’t have 50 - you’d have more like a dozen. Most local restaurants find the best place they can, because they want the store to succeed

Franchises want coverage - they want as many locations as possible. They want a new McDonalds next to the Wendy’s, even if there’s three other fast food restaurants all within sight already. They’ll dictate every detail of it, because they win even if the store barely breaks even

Such as the famous McDonald’s always broken ice cream machines. Billionaire shareholders in both companies mandate these machines, which must be repaired frequently by licensed technicians. They even shut down a couple that built a $40 device that was able to fix the glitch that causes the problem

And that’s how it works from top to bottom. At every stage, the billionaires must get their hidden taxes. Like the ice cream machines, it generally costs more in every way to society - we would not be using decades old ice cream machines known for breaking down all the time, we wouldn’t oversaturate towns with competing fast food franchises, we probably wouldn’t be subsiding the food itself

I keep joining discord rooms because I just want to search for something specific real quick… I don’t want to dig up my real account or join, I just want to take a peek inside and dig up the answer to my question

Almost every time I sign up with a username and get just enough time to start looking for what I need before it decides to kick me out for “suspicious activity”

At this point I just search the project name when it happens… I’m usually there to evaluate a project, and if that’s not enough I just drop it

But again, it’s all for their personal benefit. A human Their money is managed to grow by any means, and that has a lot of knock on effects

They generally either put their money in funds with the highest returns (which often use unethical and illegal but accepted practices, and the best ones require large minimum deposits), or they directly own large percentages of a company and use that influence when it suits them

I see where you’re coming from, but I think the line is blurry. Their direct personal actions don’t capture the full extent of their actions, but this also assumes full responsibility for their ownership, where honestly it’s impossible to know what level of emissions the companies would have if the billionaire’s wealth machine wasn’t involved

I wouldn’t say this is totally unfair to say though - at the end of the day they own what they own, and letting others do your dirty work doesn’t absolve you of responsibility

The fact that their life would barely be affected if they added emissions to their criteria for investment makes this worse - these are the figures the billionaires should be looking at to make decisions

A billionaire is a business themselves. One person can’t even passively possess a billion dollars without tons of support staff

If you separate the direct actions of the person from the actions of the staff required to maintain and grow their wealth, you’re missing most of the reason why billionaires are so harmful to society

I started by adjusting my expectations for myself

It’s impossible for me to become carbon neutral at this point in time - I might be able to survive in the woods, but without buying the land I’d eventually get arrested, and my homestead torn down.

So it’s a matter of harm reduction, or balancing the scales in the right direction. So I made a goal - I want to build a solarpunk community out in the mountains somewhere. I also want to spread good ideas, while reducing bad ones

I will never achieve either if I’m not in a good physical and mental state. So I forgive myself for indulging when I need to

Do what you can when you can. If you die and cut your footprint to zero, you won’t save the world… So at least attempt something that could help

But most of all, my guiding mantra is “if everyone in the world was like me, it would be a utopia”. Be the kind of person who could be part of the world you dream of

That would be pretty badass, ngl

This smells like bullshit

I mean, it would be great if you could write a comprehensive view of a topic and have people read it. Unfortunately, both sides of that are nearly unachievable in this day and age

Science communication is hard. You can’t put understanding into words - you have to dance around understanding, over and over from many angles, before you can capture even the most basic understanding of a complex or complicated system

I’m a software dev. My brother started teaching me concepts when I was 14 and he started learning it, I was 22 before he stopped being my mentor and we truly became peers. My friend, who I’ve been mentoring for the last 3 years, calls me to share achievements and to do after action discussions on his decisions - more and more I have nothing but validation to give him

Everything has endless depth - but understanding can only be learned, not taught. You gain understanding one fragment at a time through thousands of interactions or experiences, not a manifesto

Those two ideas don’t clash

Energy use is outpacing renewables so we’re still emitting more carbon than ever. When we manage to transition away from fossil fuels, the prices will drop and make that harder

The coherent message is: we can’t save ourselves by letting the economics slowly play out

I’d argue it’s the opposite. NFT’s are an actually useful technology - it nicely creates a distributed open leger to track digital ownership. But the technology was basically used to run a scam before anything else - now every use of it has to convince people it’s not a scam before you can get to the idea itself

These people are literally just taking money to release pollution and telling customers that it’s fighting X units of global warming.

They’re not testing the technology - there will be no measurable results at this kind of scale. They’re not perfecting the technology - they’re literally just releasing it out in the desert

This is just a scam - I don’t think it’s a particularly good concept to start with. But even assuming this is a good approach, they’re not boosting the technology, they’re using it illegally and irresponsibly