BeautifulMind ♾️

It’s pretty okay. Lots of engagement, also there’s something of a ‘block early and often’ culture that seems to have a way of really reducing the drama and nonsense

While on the one hand I can agree there’s a place and time to be present and participate appropriately, on the other hand it’s so goddamned tiring to see politics that in situations of nuance zoom in on ‘control them’ as a thing everyone can rally to as if the solution of phone control was really going to be simple and accomplish its objectives.

I mean, criminalizing drugs seemed on its face to be a simple-enough thing to do, and a good idea- who could object to that, right? Who favors addiction, right? What could go wrong? Fundamentally, the ask for enough power to ban anything isn’t a trivial ask, and it shouldn’t be undertaken lightly.

When you have financial engineers overriding the decisions of mechanical engineers, you get crashy airplanes and eventually, caught up murdering people that might talk to investigators in order to defend those juicy profits

…sort of like how when administrators and insurance folk and lawyers and judges override the decisions of doctors and nurses, you end up with highly profitable hospitals and people dying for it

…all a bit like when the bean counters run your software company, layoffs designed to boost stock price by showing investors ‘fiscal discipline’ leaves your engineering teams shorthanded and forces them to de-prioritize bug fixes and dealing with technical debt and rigorous testing and you end up shipping lots of bugs when you release your product

…you really do need to be specific. Otherwise, it sounds like you’re claiming that “the production processes” (of what, everything? all products in the entire economy?) require PFOAs- and that’s plain bullshit.

Yes, there are some products for which there aren’t equivalent inputs, and you don’t need to be vague and generalize over all of productive everything in the economy in order to make that point- but given the opportunity to be specific, you specified “production of base chemicals that are used in various other follow-up products” and that’s not a straight or specific answer to a direct question.

there is no other material known to withstand the temperatures and pressures needed in the production processes?

Production of what, exactly?

Welp. It’s time for Tesla workers to unionize, and hard

But do we really need AI to generate art?

Why can’t AI be used to automate useful work nobody wants to do, instead of being a way for capital to automate skilled labor out of high-paying jobs?

will raise the salinity of the ocean

If care isn’t taken to avoid concentrating brine going back in just one spot, sure that could create localized problems. Buuut, you realize that the oceans constantly lose water to evaporation and their salinity is more or less stable, right? Every bit of rain or snow that falls on land (most of which returns to the ocean eventually) is water the ocean can be without and still not too salty for life.

Speaking of salinity, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current (which in normal conditions, is the deep/cold return current from the gulf stream -> North Atlantic) is running into a big damned problem because Greenland is melting and all that fresh water pouring off of it is disrupting the return flow of cold water to the tropics. That’s why the Gulf Stream has been so hot- it’s not getting return feed from its radiator in the North Atlantic, and meanwhile the North Atlantic is getting colder because it’s not cycling water back south, and that prevents hot Gulf Stream water from getting there.

Edit: I recently learned that concentrated brine regions in the oceans (called brine pools) are a thing. There are massive salt deposits (as much as 8km thick) under the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico today, the legacy of a time when the gulf was closed off from the oceans- when it refilled, the salt layer was covered over. Today, the deposition on top of it is heavy enough that subsidence within it squeezes the softer salt around, occasionally exposing that salt to the ocean water.

This sounds fantastic on its face, but I seem to keep on hearing about how desalination will solve all kinds of problems and we still have this particular problem.

The missing piece, it seems, is the will for it to be used as infra at scale. Meanwhile selling bottled water taken for free from public lands for several dollars a liter in single-use bottles remains a multi-billion dollar industry. (an industry, I might add, that is aggressive about lobbying to protect its interests)