Personal responsibility is important. But at the same time, we don't let people open up a heroin shop and then claim it's your personal responsibility to not buy it and use it. We don't put slot machines in schools but tell kids that they need self-control to not get addicted to gambling.
I don't know what the answer is, but it feels wrong to lean _entirely_ on personal responsibility. We live in a world in which we were simply not evolved to live in. People literally make a good living by engineering and exploiting our weaknesses for profit.
> raise everyone with the forethought to know what might be addictive, the self-awareness to realize when you are addicted to something, and the self-control (and support systems if and when necessary) to stop
If only it were that easy. If you've ever known somebody who struggles with a serious addiction you'll know that even when they know it's destroying their life they still can't stop.
but then again, vehicle miles travelled per-capita has been mostly increasing in the US since as far back as 1975. There could be a lot of confounding factors. Like astronomical housing prices in urban areas forcing people live very far away and incur more VMT at a faster rate than WFH decreases VMT. I'm no expert here, I'm just spitballing.
Absolutely not. There are tens of millions of Americans who have jumped full speed onto the "It's not even happening" train, let alone the "It's actually a good thing because plants" or "It's not our fault" or "We can't fix it so we shouldn't try" or "It's too expensive to fix and I can't do long term math" trains.
And this is a massive reversion too. In the mid 2000s republicans were openly advocating that we needed to do something about climate change and that it was a serious problem and then we opened the cash floodgates to American federal politics and would you look at that, oil companies have a lot of cash.
Keep in mind that the real cost of transitioning is very likely to be less than what we spent on the stupid oil wars of the 2000s. We can literally afford it now, let alone if we hadn't burned all that cash bombing the desert because of oil politics.
Oil companies themselves are fine to be "Energy" companies and invest in Solar and other renewables. They will be profitable just fine. Our country is tearing itself apart over a lie to ensure they remain more profitable.
In 2008 McCain openly talked about greenhouse gas cap and trade. I think the driving force behind it was fear of peak oil. Secure your energy supply. With fracking supply concerns went away.
In the mid-2000s there might've been individual Republicans concerned about climate change, but it was the Bush administration who opposed the Kyoto Protocol and pushed for adaptation to climate change on the basis of protecting the economy.
Yeah, I've always seen it as a hot potato issue. I think a lot of people who don't play ball on dealing with climate change aren't deniers, they just want the next guy to have to do the work. It's very, very hard to sell to anyone, "this is going to be incredibly costly and painful for you and you won't enjoy any of the benefits. Your grandkids might."
Agreed. I care enough about it to sell my car, stop buying stuff I don't need, give up most meat, and live in a small energy efficient house.
However I do know people who really do not care. They may say they care but their actions and voting record show that in fact they don't care (or don't want to make it a real priority). But those same people get very upset when they're stuck in traffic
It's too bad that countries only consider things like this to address a crisis in fuel costs. Why not enact measures like this to curb the pollution and CO2? I guess it says a lot about what humanity truly values.
I worked from home but a few times I needed to go to my parents house during what used to be rush hour. Less than 5% of normal traffic and fuel demand dropped so much that prices were lower.
My job went hybrid in 2022 and then return to office full time last year. Everyone hates it. It's a waste of time and resources.
Less pollution, less traffic means we don't need to use tax revenue to expand roads and less wear and tear means less repairs.
Take it one step further and give tax breaks to businesses that let employees work from home and close physical offices. Then this means less new office construction which can be used for housing to help the housing crisis. It's a win win for everyone except control freak managers.
Optimizing performance management and labor cost controls is more important to those making these decisions than climate change. Misaligned incentives.
Cheap and efficient solar power didn't seem to require any actual breakthroughs or real investment. Maybe better power electronics for inverters and things? Batteries are a real issue but storage could have been totally ignored for a while.
So, maybe when Carter put those (thermal) solar collectors on the White House we should have thrown a hundred billion dollars at solar panel work and had abundant solar power decades ago.
But no, Carter was "weak" so we had to instead elect the guy who ignored AIDS because he hated gay people, pushed absurd drug policy, put us in bed with the middle east, and started the process of removing taxes from any rich person and racking up national debt for stupid reasons.
Why was Carter "weak"? Well you see, Iran was a huge Bad Guy that we needed to stop!
Global climate change will make much of the world barely habitable, and devastate crop yields. Those living outside "the West" will far and away be the most adversely affected. Reducing CO2 emissions is an urgent global priority.
>Global climate change will make much of the world barely habitable, and devastate crop yields
There's no empirical basis for that statement, the people behind it have been making similar apocalyptic predictions for decades that never materialized, their models have no predictive power.
Most high-quality climate models have been if anything overly conservative in their predictions and things have been going at a much accelerated rate. So which doomsday models can you point to that have not materialized?
Mollusks in the ocean are producing shells slower because of the increase in carbonic acid. Nighttime temperatures are observably higher in the tropics.
You're say things that even climate denialists aren't claiming are true.
No it doesn't. That economoic activity when done from home, raises their local neighborhoods now where mom and pop businesses can thrive instead of competing in a costly rental market based on scarcity.
Ah yes, because economics and resource allocation are already perfectly optimal and balanced, and it is against the physical laws of the universe to raise quality of life via any other methodology
You can’t collapse countries and humans down to four sentences and conclude that’s what they value. Do you want to analyze the problem or throw quips at the wall?
Once you get over the hump and develop a certain amount of cardiovascular fitness, it stops being unpleasant and stressful.
The real problem is that most people don't feel like this is true. It really takes a solid 6ish months of earnest effort (AT LEAST 3x per week, probably more) to develop cardiovascular fitness. For some people, it'll take even longer.
I run an average of 6 days per week for the past 10+ years. At this point running is just about the easiest thing I do, it doesn't take any mental fortitude at all to do it. It wasn't always that way though, I used to dread it.
> It really takes a solid 6ish months of earnest effort (AT LEAST 3x per week, probably more) to develop cardiovascular fitness. For some people, it'll take even longer
I don't think people need to suffer through 6 months just to start enjoy running.
Yes when beginning running you suck (and also prone to injury); you basically have no zone 1-2 since your'e so out of shape, your zone 2 is basically a fast walk. So for newbies who train like that all runs become a zone 3 or even 4 - when you're totally new to running. No surprise they many time
a) hate it
b) get injured
I advise newbies to walk and run and try to keep HR very very controllable until you build up fitness. That should be both more fun and also more sustainable injury wise.
this feels like a false equivalence and slippery slope fallacy.
Clearly things like cigarettes and hard drugs are bad and need very heavy regulations if not outright banned. There are lots of gray areas, for sure, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't take things on a case-by-case basis and impose reasonable restrictions on things that produce measurable harm.
Whether or not social media does produce that measurable harm is not my area of expertise, but that doesn't mean we can't study it and figure it out.
Oddly the countries that don’t do this have far better outcomes.
Imagine being allowed to have a beer outside, or after 2 am, oh the humanity. Surely such a society would devolve immediately into chaos.
What if the government wasn’t meant to be a strange parent that let you kill your kids but felt having a beer outside was too much freedom. It might just lead to being the happiest country on earth.
> Imagine being allowed to have a beer outside, or after 2 am, oh the humanity.
Where do you live that this is not possible?
(I know you’re speaking loosely, I.e. you mean “where I live bars have to stop serving alcohol at 2
Am” but it’s so loose that there’s 0 argument made here, figured I’d touch on another aspect leading to that, other replies cover the others. Ex. The 2 AM law isn’t about you it’s about neighborhoods with bars)
It’s illegal to drink in public in Washington state [1]. I believe this is the case in most places in the United States. Las Vegas is a notable exception.
Can't tell if you're being earnest or pedantic (if earnest, I grew up in a poorer neighborhood than HN so maybe I'm just more familiar with the solution. The Wire has a scene that'll explain it better than I: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GV9MamysCfQ)
I don’t see how either of those are relevant. The question is where you can legally drink in public. The answer is very few places in the United States. People break laws all the time.
Illinois sells liquor in grocery stores but not after 2am. Or maybe it was a local ordinance. The town next to me was 1am then you couldn’t buy liquor at the 24 hour grocer. So not just bars.
> this feels like a false equivalence and slippery slope fallacy.
The slippery slope fallacy is purely a logical fallacy, meaning that it's fallacious to argue that any movement in one direction logically entails further movements in the same direction. Arguing that a slippery slope empirically exists -- i.e. that observable forces in the world are affecting things such that movement in one direction does manifestly make further movement in that direction more likely -- is absolutely not an instance of the slippery slope fallacy.
A concrete instance of the metaphor itself makes this clear: if you grease up an inclined plane, then an object dropped at the top of it will slide to the bottom. Similarly, if you put in place legal precedents and establish the enforcement apparatus for a novel state intervention then you are making further interventions in that direction more likely. This is especially true in a political climate where factional interest that actually are pushing for more extreme forms of intervention manifestly are operating. Political slippery slopes are a very observable phenomenon, and it is not a fallacy to point them out.
> Whether or not social media does produce that measurable harm is not my area of expertise, but that doesn't mean we can't study it and figure it out.
It's true that the fact that it isn't your area of expertise doesn't mean we can't study it and figure it out.
Rather the thing that does mean that we can't study it and figure it out is that what constitute "harm" is a normative question, not an empirical one, and the extent to which there is widespread consensus on that question is a bounded one -- the more distant we get from evaluating physical, quantifiable impacts, and the more we progress into the intangible and subjective, the less agreement there is.
And where there is agreement in modern American society, it tends in the opposite direction of what you're implying here: apart from very narrow categories, most people would not consider mere exposure to information or non-physical social interactions to be things that can inflict harm, at least not to a level sufficient to justify preemptive intervention.
okay it's not a slippery slope, but it's something similar (that's why I said "feels like"). He's trying to establish a continuum of things that have a variety of addictive properties in an attempt to discredit the whole idea of addiction ("Don't try to make your video game fun, or some people may become addicted")..
> apart from very narrow categories, most people would not consider mere exposure to information or non-physical social interactions to be things that can inflict harm
That's an extremely disingenuous interpretation of social media. Huge straw man. We're talking about infinite-scrolling A/B tested apps that are engineered to keep eyeballs on the screen at the first and foremost priority for the primary benefit of the company, not the user.
As far as I can tell, even in US, the most litigious nation in the world, you can't SUCCESSFULLY sue e.g. a cigarette maker or alcohol maker for making you addicted.
(I emphasize successfully because of course you can sue anyone for anything. The question is what lawsuits are winnable based on empirical data of what lawsuits were won).
If you could, that would be the end of those businesses. The addiction is beyond dispute and if every alcoholic could win a lawsuits against a winemaker, there would be no winemakers left.
In that context it seems patently absurd that you could sue Facebook for making you addicted.
It would be absurd to create a law that makes it possible without first making such laws for alcohol and cigarettes.
It's also patently absurd that we (where "we" here is leftist politicians) are allowing open drug dealing in populated areas of San Francisco and yet this is what we discuss today and not politician's systemic failure to fix easily fixable problems for which we already have laws making them illegal.
> okay it's not a slippery slope, but it's something similar (that's why I said "feels like"). He's trying to establish a continuum of things that have a variety of addictive properties in an attempt to discredit the whole idea of addiction ("Don't try to make your video game fun, or some people may become addicted")..
But he actually is correct. Use the same term to describe the effects of ingesting biologically active chemicals and the effects of emotionally engaging activity -- which in this case mostly consists of exposure to information -- absolutely is disingenuous equivocation. People in this very thread are comparing Instagram with ingestion of alcohol or tobacco products, and that absolutely is a prevarication.
It's not unreasonable to observe the course of these debates, and suspect that the people invoking the language of addiction are doing so as a pretext for treating what is actually a cultural issue instead as a medical one, so as to falsely appeal to empirical certainty to answer questions that actually demand normative debate.
This feels like such a weird non-sequiter argument, but I can't exactly put my finger on it. This comment seems to be asserting (1) government jobs don't produce value and (2) GDP is the only thing that matters.
I'm ignoring the fact that I don't actually know how government sector jobs contribute to or affect GDP.
Seems like by this logic, why not just cut ALL government jobs? Obviously that's a terrible idea...
However, he specifically said "will want to have children and feel/know that their children's lives will be good ones."
But this doesn't necessarily mean being richer. For example, many people are afraid of what unchecked climate change is going to mean for kids born today. No amount of individual or country wealth is going to fix that issue.
I have kids myself, but man... I really really worry about this. I do personally know people cite climate change as one factor in having no kids (or fewer kids). Some people even think that having kids will make it worse. They're not wrong...
I think this is exactly right. It's not just environmental disasters either. There are more existential risks looming than ever before. The relative peace of the post-WW2 order kept things relatively calm and quite prosperous for decades, but everyone can see that coming to an end right now.
Maybe things will work out fine or even great in the medium term, but I think a lot of childbearing age people are looking around and thinking the next 30 years might be a lot worse than the previous 30.
Housing for the boomers used to cost 3x the median salary. Now it's more like 6x the median salary. These are nationwide numbers. Wage growth isn't keeping up to pace with housing prices
Sure people can just move to a remote dying town and get a house for super cheap, but turns out people want to live within a reasonable distance to jobs.
I don't know what the answer is, but it feels wrong to lean _entirely_ on personal responsibility. We live in a world in which we were simply not evolved to live in. People literally make a good living by engineering and exploiting our weaknesses for profit.
> raise everyone with the forethought to know what might be addictive, the self-awareness to realize when you are addicted to something, and the self-control (and support systems if and when necessary) to stop
If only it were that easy. If you've ever known somebody who struggles with a serious addiction you'll know that even when they know it's destroying their life they still can't stop.
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