This, my friend, is an overly cynical take. You can apply it to your life in any way that serves you. You can imagine it as a good reminder to live life to the fullest, to not let your ego run away from reality, or to give perspective on all the little things we worry about when we consider how many weeks we have left on this planet.

Memento mori.

I haven't read the author's book, but I think her position in the article still misses the mark and is naively dangerous, having us all just look at the flowers and embrace market solutions while we collapse the biosphere at stunning pace.

Honestly I'm not seeing any 'solutions' that are on a timeline relevant to the crisis. But I think any first step will have us coming to terms with climate change not being the problem, but a symptom of our economic system and our relationship to the environment. We're going to have to reorient away from growth, because that growth is literally consuming the biophysical basis of our own existence.

Large-scale solutions aside, I think we're going to start seeing a growing desire in people to somehow 'exit' this system. I know I feel it in myself, deep in my bones, and it pisses me off to no end that I'm forced into destructive behavior because of the system I'm trapped in. All this waste, plastic and destruction just to exist each day, and I'm not even having a good time! If anyone has made some progress in this area I would love to hear about it. I imagine it must start with some rejection of what the market 'values', choosing not to participate in this whole game that is making us miserable, and somehow trade material wealth for greater awareness and connection to our humanity. If Elon and Jeff want it all, they can fucking have it, I just want out of this nightmare and to find peace with nature somehow.

It will also have a very low attention span and not know anything of substance.

Just an aside, but has anyone had the misfortune to have a quick look at the comments over on r/canada or cbc.ca around these articles? The amount of dumb (i.e. simplistic, low information), seething hatred for basically everything, is overwhelming. I can't tell if this is all bots, or if something weird is coming out of the woodwork, but it seems like we've passed some tipping point and I'm starting to feel alarmed at where we are headed. I get this is super embarrassing, but no serious person could think there was malicious intent in this Parliament incident. Fuck-ups and carelessness happen, the guy resigned, time to move on and focus on real issues.

The number is kind of misleading. There's about $1-2T of direct subsidies, with the remainder being uncharged externalities (remediating environmental damage, etc) that's paid for later with public funds. I'm not sure how they come up with those numbers, but if they really wanted to count externalities, the number should be orders of magnitude higher, like what's the cost of actually removing that fucking carbon from the atmosphere, how do you price the inevitable mass starvation and collapse of industrial civilization, etc.

In my experience it's okay, but not amazing and slowly getting worse year after year for various reasons. Generally speaking if you have a life-threatening issue (heart failure, cancer, etc), you are taken care of as well as anyone could reasonably expect. But for anything else it can take forever to see a specialist and it's easy to get lost in the system that always seems to be running in capacity crisis mode. There are other countries that do a better job with the single-payer model, mostly those without provincial fiefdoms that insist on doing everything themselves and reinventing all the wheels for political reasons.

Looks like we'll still be doing TPS reports, right up until the very end of industrial civilization.

We will all need to come to terms with the scope and scale of our predicament - climate change is not 'the' problem, it is one facet of the overall collapse of the biosphere that we are causing (see: planetary boundaries). Guaranteeing some livable future for our children will require revolutionary change in our economic systems and our relationship with the environment. Real mitigation will involve: reserving our remaining carbon budget for critical activities (heating our houses, food transport, etc), significant build-out of resilient systems (local sustainable/regenerative agriculture), and preparing for a less complex economy with much lower energy use. We can do this in a controlled way over the next few decades, or in a chaotic way when we are left with no other options. It doesn't seem like the public is ready or willing to have these conversations yet.

Ah, I posted above before I read your reply which basically said the same thing. I think this is a really cool idea (but probably doesn't need blockchain to work).

There may be an opportunity here for Lemmy to help solve part of the distributed blob problem, that is, what are the incentives for people to contribute bandwidth/storage? Instead of the dodgy crypto-reward schemes we see come up, it could just be an extension to the motivations already driving why people set up Lemmy instances or contribute hours to moderate communities.

Some brain-droppings:

• I have a few TB that I would be willing to contribute if I knew how, if it wasn't very time consuming, and if I was comfortable with what I was supporting.
• I don't really want to serve videos unrelated to my personal interests or that I feel are low value, but I would be happy to serve content that is important to the communities that I am part of.
• Lemmy can be a proxy for automatically deciding what content is worth storing/serving for people contributing resources. Blob is posted to this community I'm supporting -> I'll seed that. The post it belongs to has low interest or gets downvoted -> maybe that blob doesn't need to stay around for that long.
• All the complexity of the blob swarm underlying a community really should be hidden from the clients. If it's any more difficult than integrating an imgur-like service it'll never be implemented.
• This could (should?) be implemented outside of Lemmy core.

This is interesting, I've never considered torrents for this exact case before. Has anyone done any groundwork to figure out what this would look like from a systems level? I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around the big picture - where the seeders come from, what are the incentives to keep certain kinds of data resilient, how to keep complexity away from the clients, etc.