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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • my point is to draw sources from subjugated knowledge

    Really not sure what “subjugated knowledge” is supposed to mean.

    In any case this is mostly irrelevant. It’s been hundreds or thousands of years, depending on which culture you’re talking about. The environmental conditions have changed, the land has changed, and the cultures are long gone. We have newer methods and better options for land and resource management, and for studying the current actual conditions, and for understanding local environments in the context of the global whole.

    the people of the Americas had INCREDIBLE land management strategies that were interwoven with their cultural heritages

    They also had a life expectancy of about 50 years and no methods for treating anything like cancer or sepsis or long-term debilitating conditions. My sister is Type 1 diabetic, she’d probably just be dead by 40.

    I agree that we should have more respect for those that came before and the work they did that we are still benefitting from today (such as the selective breeding for crops you mentioned), but we can’t move forward by looking backward. The survival strategies of those past cultures don’t scale up to sustain 8 billion people, we need new methods supported by new technologies, better information and system-wide analysis.


  • This sounds a communication problem, not a system problem.

    Huh? Communication is a system problem? Why would they be separate issues?

    Decentralized systems are good at adapting to changing environments and are typically harder to destroy.

    But slower and prone to error, because the same information has to be conveyed to all members of the system, and if the individual members are not coordinated they take individual action leading to duplication of effort and waste of resources, or worse take the wrong action because they only got part of the information or because they are not restricted to follow orders from other members of the system because no one has any authority over anyone else.

    This decentralized system requires that every member is acting in good faith for the benefit of other members with no self-interest. That is not practical, it will never happen.


  • It is not about life or death. t is not about the betterment of a particular community, or society at large. It’s about profit.

    This is a nonsensical point of view. If we’re going to get out of our current climate problems we need to replace fossil fuel infrastructure with renewable energy sources as much and as quickly as possible. That’s going to mean more electrical infrastructure, more solar panels, more grid-scale battery systems, more wind turbines, more hydroelectric stations, etc., which in turn means more copper, steel, aluminum, silicon, and concrete.

    Sure there’s profit motivation involved. It’s going to be a lot of fucking hard work and people gotta eat. But framing resource extraction for industrial use as only motivated by profit is so narrow-minded that this conversation can’t really continue until you take a few steps down from your high horse and adjust your extreme point of view to something more rational.

    We have already extracted these materials, and they are out there ready to be reclaimed and reused. It just so happens that it’s more profitable to trample communities and destroy the earth to get more of it, rather than use what we already have.

    There are already massive recycling industries in place for aluminum, steel, copper, and even lithium recovery from old batteries. Aluminum in particular is cheaper (more cost effective in terms of time and labor) to recycle than to mine and refine new ore. That’s great, but it still doesn’t produce enough volume of material, we still need more new material also.

    There are also quarries that grind rock and old concrete down to make fine particles, but… it’s not the same as sand, it can’t be used in all of the same production processes. The result is more like very fine gravel than it is sand. There’s also an issue with a lot of concrete being reinforced with steel cables or rebar, which you can’t just throw into a rock grinder.

    I don’t know why you’re talking about this as if it were all-or-nothing, that’s not a practical approach in the real world. It seems like you’re more interested in scoring holier-than-thou points than discussing actual solutions.