I see my old self in what you’re saying. I used to be extremely extroverted, spending nearly all my free time socializing, but now I find much more life satisfaction as an introvert. I derive a lasting sense of pleasure and peace from the things I build, especially physical things, while social interactions only created at best a fleeting sense of satisfaction. I also have much more time for reading, contemplation, and enjoying nature.
I get more than enough social time from my partner and a small handful of friends that I see on occasion. I lived quite a full social life, with a huge variety of people and activities, yet surprisingly I don’t find it all that memorable or important in retrospect. It’s a similar feeling to looking back on one of my former careers.
It may be that the people most likely to blindly follow astroturfed suggestions don’t pay attention to these indicators. In which case volume is more important than camouflage.
Fossil EROI is steadily declining and renewable EROI isn’t as high, in fact it’s much lower when you include battery storage. It’s going to get more expensive.
Good point, it looks like battery-backed PV is comparable when you factor that in. Non battery is definitely cheaper. I was not aware of that.
I guess it all depends on if EROI estimates hold up over time, how quickly we can scale up on renewables, and how much data centers and reshoring cut into available energy. There will still likely be a crunch going into next year, though.
Yes, it’s not whataboutism if it’s part of a discussion about bipartisan corruption, for instance. Or when discussing the causes of conflict between two countries. It’s a problem when it is used without context to deflect from the bad actions of one actor or one “side”.
Find a way to test informally, like taking metrics on the number of times that someone misunderstood written questions, instructions, or requirements at work. If it was possible to measure that cleanly, I bet you’d find a similar trend.
I often find that people simply don’t read anymore beyond a sentence or two, which makes it impossible to communicate complex ideas. If it can’t be expressed as a bullet point, it may as well not exist.
Ironically this may finally force the fulfillment of the Web 2.0 paid API service dream. Remember when people were pushing companies that just provided a paid API?
There might very well be more of that. In a world where everyone has agents filtering data on their behalf, it seems more complicated to figure out a way to force a user to view certain content along with their desired data than to simply refuse to supply data until a small transaction completes.
On the other hand, that’s just traditional banner/video style advertising where the goal is to force specific content on the user. If someone wants to spread the word about their product or service, I’m sure they’ll pay money to advertising services that use agents to inject their message into the global context. This is happening already, we just talk about it in the frame of “dead internet theory” and AI influencers, etc. Anywhere that content is being produced and consumed is an opportunity for the message to be nudged in favor of the person paying money.
So we go from the days when we have to pay our ISP so that we could go to weather.com to see it if it's raining outside, to a future where we have to pay for our ISP, so that we can connect to the AI company who we also have to pay, so that we can have their AI connect to the API at weather.com which we also have to pay for, so that we can see if it's raining outside? I'm not convinced that'd be making our lives better through technological progress.
Despite what the media leads you to think, there are still jobs that provide a living without contributing much to current social problems. You can do ok in medium tier cities with an average job, and still live in a safe neighborhood. If you pick a state with a good university system, the kids can get a good education without any debt. They won’t automatically get the connections of a top-tier school, but if you teach them the importance of connections early then they will do well (these schools often have strong alumni networks).
Continuing to work for evil people is a choice. Don’t brush it off.
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