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We need to take Climate Change seriously


Dibya

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2 minutes ago, cc333 said:

I'm tired and depressed after yet another day of observing humanity's ineptitude and people's utter lack of concern for each other, so I won't go on much....

Re: EV vs. ICE:  I don't know.  I think maybe EVs ultimately aren't a terrible idea,

Don't be fooled, even for an instance. They are a terrible idea. Environmentalists should not settle for the "lesser" (if it is that) of two huge evils. There is a third, better way.

2 minutes ago, cc333 said:

but I agree wholeheartedly with many comments here that the available options leave much to be desired, create needless complications, and simply manufacturing them and their components (the plastics, the metals, and, most notably, the batteries) actually creates almost as much damage to the environment than driving around a 20+ year old gas/petrol powered car.

I'm a little bit more positive about it, in that I don't think it's 100% about milking more money out of people, but I do believe that the current push, at least over here in California, USA, is severely misguided at best, because we have an old, outdated electric grid that isn't equipped to supply the kind of power output that several tens of millions of EVs would need, except perhaps in the major cities.  What about all the people living in rural areas, though? 

Yup, exactly. And consider how toxic most urban areas are these days, most environmentalists live in or are relocating to rural areas.

2 minutes ago, cc333 said:

Where I am now, every third car is an EV of some type, and those who own them have the money to not only buy the car, but to also upgrade their homes with a proper charging solution.  Attempting to drive an EV in a mountainous rural area, while doable, isn't practical or financially sustainable by most;  therefore, I don't think it's wise to force everyone to adopt them right now.

In time, my hope is that the technology will improve, new methods of manufacturing will be invented that reduce the environmental impact, and the electric grid will be upgraded and rebuilt, but with all the political inertia and red tape, it's gonna take decades at best for all of these things to happen, and nobody seems to care.  Hopefully when nuclear fusion power gets invented, things will improve.

These are the bright green lies society is banking on: that in the future, we'll have better technologies that will make the problem disappear. The problem is *that's not going to happen*, it's not physically feasible, and all of this is destroying the planet *right now*.

2 minutes ago, cc333 said:

And now for electronics.

Take cellular/mobile phones, for example.

I like my iPhones, but it's gotten to a point now where every phone on the market is some kind of Apple (iOS) or Google (Android) based flat slab of glass or plastic with cameras galore.  For years, I haven't really cared about the latest and greatest, preferring instead to use older phones, and to keep using them for longer than the average person might (we used TracFone (a US prepaid service) with a 2G phone until late 2013 or so, LONG after most everyone else I knew switched to an iPhone), because why upgrade if it still works?  I mean, the main purpose is to

I'd keep using my old Nokia 5190 or Motorola StarTAC indefinitely if I could, but as the 2G and 3G signals get shut down over here in the US, the situation is becoming increasingly bleak and depressing, because pretty soon, only brand new smartphones will work.

Ditch your "smart" or "dumb" phone altogether, and get a real phone. My 1957 Western Electric 500 blows your phone out of the water any day. Or any other phone manufactured by Western Electric before Divestiture.

 

2 minutes ago, cc333 said:

The carriers all say they need to maximize capacity for the new hotness they call 5G, but I just don't buy it. 

5G is an environmental disaster. It's going to significantly increase carbon emissions and compromise any current targets for carbon neutrality. It's yet another we don't need that is bad for the environment on multiple fronts.

2 minutes ago, cc333 said:

4G was plenty fast for my needs (I mean, even 3G is good enough for what I want to do;  2G is pushing it, but even that's still OK for the occasional email or something), so why do we need to keep making things faster?  Did anybody actually ask for it?  I didn't.

And don't get me started on all this SaaS rentware garbage.  And cryptographically locking down all aspects of the hardware architecture that rentware runs on is just wrong.  I don't want to pay $1000 or more for a computer, only to be locked out by the manufacturer a year later when they decide to stop supplying OS updates because it's "too old".  And when they inevitably say that the newer OS is safer, I cringe, because while there can be some genuine risks in high security settings, I feel that the average user need not care too much, as long as they practice good browsing habits and the software in question is updated enough to work with modern standards (I consider Windows XP to be the practical minimum here, with 7 being my preferred recommendation for those who aren't quite as technically minded, because XP requires a lot of hoop-jumping nowadays, whereas Windows 7, provided the hardware is compatible, still more or less works out of the box once updated a bit (and Spectre/Meltdown mitigations are disabled, because I think the danger of exploitation is mostly theoretical (and requires direct access to the hardware, if I'm remembering correctly), and thus in practice poses relatively little risk to the average home user).  I developed a soft spot for Windows 8.1, because I could make it work and look mostly like 7 with some minor tweaks, but I avoid 10 like the plague because I don't like it.  11 is worse in this regard, and has rendered 100% of my hardware (some of which I've paid thousands of dollars for over the years) obsolete.

I'm with you there. Windows 7 is my main OS, and I'll continue running it on hardware from around 2010 for a very long time. (Lots of it being recycled so I have ready access to it)

2 minutes ago, cc333 said:

Anyway, I guess I went on longer than I thought.  Oh, well.

Maybe someone, somewhere, sometime will invent a time machine that we can all use to go back in time to a point when the world as we know it seemed like a better place (for all its turmoil, I find that the bulk of the 20th century seems like a happier time than the 21st century has so far turned out to be (of course, looking back through modern history, few periods have been quite as thoroughly miserable as the past ten to twenty years have been).

You can do this if you don't want.

I don't have a cell phone or any other low-quality, high environmental impact consumerist crap technologies. I only use landline phones (mostly Western Electric, which is the gold standard as far as phones go). I've got an early 2000s Canon point and shoot camera that works great. I've got everything I want and need, and it works better than all the crap that everyone else is taking on debt to buy.

My PC and monitors are all 12 years old.

I don't have a car yet, but when I get one, you can bet it won't be newer than 40 years old.

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4 hours ago, cc333 said:

I'm tired and depressed after yet another day of observing humanity's ineptitude and people's utter lack of concern for each other, so I won't go on much....

Re: EV vs. ICE:  I don't know.  I think maybe EVs ultimately aren't a terrible idea, but I agree wholeheartedly with many comments here that the available options leave much to be desired, create needless complications, and simply manufacturing them and their components (the plastics, the metals, and, most notably, the batteries) actually creates almost as much damage to the environment than driving around a 20+ year old gas/petrol powered car.

I'm a little bit more positive about it, in that I don't think it's 100% about milking more money out of people, but I do believe that the current push, at least over here in California, USA, is severely misguided at best, because we have an old, outdated electric grid that isn't equipped to supply the kind of power output that several tens of millions of EVs would need, except perhaps in the major cities.  What about all the people living in rural areas, though?  Where I am now, every third car is an EV of some type, and those who own them have the money to not only buy the car, but to also upgrade their homes with a proper charging solution.  Attempting to drive an EV in a mountainous rural area, while doable, isn't practical or financially sustainable by most;  therefore, I don't think it's wise to force everyone to adopt them right now.

In time, my hope is that the technology will improve, new methods of manufacturing will be invented that reduce the environmental impact, and the electric grid will be upgraded and rebuilt, but with all the political inertia and red tape, it's gonna take decades at best for all of these things to happen, and nobody seems to care.  Hopefully when nuclear fusion power gets invented, things will improve.

And now for electronics.

Take cellular/mobile phones, for example.

I like my iPhones, but it's gotten to a point now where every phone on the market is some kind of Apple (iOS) or Google (Android) based flat slab of glass or plastic with cameras galore.  For years, I haven't really cared about the latest and greatest, preferring instead to use older phones, and to keep using them for longer than the average person might (we used TracFone (a US prepaid service) with a 2G phone until late 2013 or so, LONG after most everyone else I knew switched to an iPhone), because why upgrade if it still works?  I mean, the main purpose is to

I'd keep using my old Nokia 5190 or Motorola StarTAC indefinitely if I could, but as the 2G and 3G signals get shut down over here in the US, the situation is becoming increasingly bleak and depressing, because pretty soon, only brand new smartphones will work.

The carriers all say they need to maximize capacity for the new hotness they call 5G, but I just don't buy it.  4G was plenty fast for my needs (I mean, even 3G is good enough for what I want to do;  2G is pushing it, but even that's still OK for the occasional email or something), so why do we need to keep making things faster?  Did anybody actually ask for it?  I didn't.

And don't get me started on all this SaaS rentware garbage.  And cryptographically locking down all aspects of the hardware architecture that rentware runs on is just wrong.  I don't want to pay $1000 or more for a computer, only to be locked out by the manufacturer a year later when they decide to stop supplying OS updates because it's "too old".  And when they inevitably say that the newer OS is safer, I cringe, because while there can be some genuine risks in high security settings, I feel that the average user need not care too much, as long as they practice good browsing habits and the software in question is updated enough to work with modern standards (I consider Windows XP to be the practical minimum here, with 7 being my preferred recommendation for those who aren't quite as technically minded, because XP requires a lot of hoop-jumping nowadays, whereas Windows 7, provided the hardware is compatible, still more or less works out of the box once updated a bit (and Spectre/Meltdown mitigations are disabled, because I think the danger of exploitation is mostly theoretical (and requires direct access to the hardware, if I'm remembering correctly), and thus in practice poses relatively little risk to the average home user).  I developed a soft spot for Windows 8.1, because I could make it work and look mostly like 7 with some minor tweaks, but I avoid 10 like the plague because I don't like it.  11 is worse in this regard, and has rendered 100% of my hardware (some of which I've paid thousands of dollars for over the years) obsolete.

Anyway, I guess I went on longer than I thought.  Oh, well.

Maybe someone, somewhere, sometime will invent a time machine that we can all use to go back in time to a point when the world as we know it seemed like a better place (for all its turmoil, I find that the bulk of the 20th century seems like a happier time than the 21st century has so far turned out to be (of course, looking back through modern history, few periods have been quite as thoroughly miserable as the past ten to twenty years have been).

Sorry for rambling....

c

Oh , that was a fine read ... but geez ... you could defeat thy enemy with texting.

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4 hours ago, InterLinked said:

Ditch your "smart" or "dumb" phone altogether, and get a real phone. My 1957 Western Electric 500 blows your phone out of the water any day. Or any other phone manufactured by Western Electric before Divestiture.

Never owned a smart phone and don't want one, but I do have a dumb phone because it was too costly to justify them getting me a land line phone.

4 hours ago, InterLinked said:

My PC and monitors are all 12 years old.

I don't have a car yet, but when I get one, you can bet it won't be newer than 40 years old.

Have you beat - both my PCs are going on 18 years old but my main monitor is only 10 years old. My Old Dell that came with my old Dell Dimension 3000 still works but causes massive headaches.

I've never owned a car and I can't imagine how people afford to drive, one of the guys that pick me up says a full tank lasts for only 1 week, but he drives all over. I walk, but not as much as I should be. Hard to explain, phobia(s).

I guess its just sad that this is not the country my dearly departed father hoped it would be. I'm glad I don't have spawn (hehe) as I worry about the state the world will be in when I'm cremated. I (personally) find the whole funeral thing and religious crap extremely offensive - people are there at the end crying over the coffin when where the heck were they throughout their life when that person really needed them.

I"ll haunt anybody that does that =P. Actually, I'm so isolated that nobody would even know if I dropped off the face of the planet tomorrow, and I prefer it that way. Wouldn't even be in the paper ... "poor troubled soul was he" .... hurl. 

 

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11 minutes ago, XPerceniol said:

Never owned a smart phone and don't want one, but I do have a dumb phone because it was too costly to justify them getting me a land line phone.

Then go VoIP. It's cheaper than both.

Point is to use a landline PHONE and the actual service can be VoIP or true POTS, etc.

Then again, I'm a VoIP/telephone engineer in my spare time so I have to remember it's not as simple for everyone ;)

11 minutes ago, XPerceniol said:

Have you beat - both my PCs are going on 18 years old but my main monitor is only 10 years old. My Old Dell that came with my old Dell Dimension 3000 still works but causes massive headaches.

In my case, all the equipment was free anyways, so it was either use such a PC or watch it be recycled...

11 minutes ago, XPerceniol said:

I've never owned a car and I can't imagine how people afford to drive, one of the guys that pick me up says a full tank lasts for only 1 week, but he drives all over. I walk, but not as much as I should be. Hard to explain, phobia(s).

Right now I live in the city, so yeah, no car. In a few years I'll probably move somewhere more rural and then I'll "need" a car, but for now I don't so no point in having one.

11 minutes ago, XPerceniol said:

I guess its just sad that this is not the country my dearly departed father hoped it would be. I'm glad I don't have spawn (hehe) as I worry about the state the world will be in when I'm cremated.

Yeah, kind of the same myself...

11 minutes ago, XPerceniol said:

I (personally) find the whole funeral thing and religious crap extremely offensive - people are there at the end crying over the coffin when where the heck were they throughout their life when that person really needed them.

I"ll haunt anybody that does that =P. Actually, I'm so isolated that nobody would even know if I dropped off the face of the planet tomorrow, and I prefer it that way. Wouldn't even be in the paper ... "poor troubled soul was he" .... hurl. 

 

 

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17 hours ago, InterLinked said:

Yup, exactly. And consider how toxic most urban areas are these days, most environmentalists live in or are relocating to rural areas

It was a few years ago that the county executive had decided to back some plan to ban plastic bags because one time he was driving in the city, he saw plastic bags stuck to trees. And he then decided that banning the use of plastic bags was the solution and not say... organising some groups to clean up the garbage. And everyone also conveniently forgot the last time we banned plastic bags in the 90s that didn't end up lasting. For one it was the 90s and the alternative was some sort of composite bag made from corn or something that would fall apart or biodegrade way too soon... like still at the store. So they made everyone use paper bags. Then the environmentalists made a big fuss about all of the trees that were being cut for the bags and they went back to plastic. So now that we are back to paper (although many places are still using plastic despite the ban) I am counting the days until the crying over cut trees is heard again.

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Most of the paper bags I'm seeing have obvious fairly high recycled content (little splotches of white/other colors, etc). YMMV. But sustainable forestry is definitely possible in any case.

But the idea is to get people to use reusable bags. I don't know how successful that is generally but my family has switched to that, and in fact my mom and grandmother have been using reusable bags almost exclusively for ages before the ban. As for litter, I would say a lot of it I saw was in fact plastic shopping bags. There's still plenty of other litter, but its nice that one big chunk is gone, and paper bags not only don't seem to get littered as much but also they quickly and unquestionably degrade. As someone who as been one of those people "cleaning up all the garbage" on a number of occasions, it's a losing battle. Even in some less popular areas you can clean it up one day and its almost back to how it was the next. The only real solution is to cut it off at the head... ideally both de-plasticizing waste AND reducing how much people litter/let stuff blow away.

I haven't missed single use plastic bags one bit. The couple of things that my family really needs them for (kitchen scraps, etc) has just shifted to other sorts of bags that we've always had that are probably not going away (cereal bags, produce bags).

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19 hours ago, cc333 said:

I'm a little bit more positive about it, in that I don't think it's 100% about milking more money out of people, but I do believe that the current push, at least over here in California, USA, is severely misguided at best, because we have an old, outdated electric grid that isn't equipped to supply the kind of power output that several tens of millions of EVs would need, except perhaps in the major cities.

I've read of similar concerns over here...and that it'll probably just increase import of older, stinkier vehicles from other countries unless ICE cars were banned.

19 hours ago, cc333 said:

I like my iPhones, but it's gotten to a point now where every phone on the market is some kind of Apple (iOS) or Google (Android) based flat slab of glass or plastic with cameras galore.  For years, I haven't really cared about the latest and greatest, preferring instead to use older phones, and to keep using them for longer than the average person might (we used TracFone (a US prepaid service) with a 2G phone until late 2013 or so, LONG after most everyone else I knew switched to an iPhone), because why upgrade if it still works?  I mean, the main purpose is to

I'd keep using my old Nokia 5190 or Motorola StarTAC indefinitely if I could, but as the 2G and 3G signals get shut down over here in the US, the situation is becoming increasingly bleak and depressing, because pretty soon, only brand new smartphones will work.

I occasionally need the phone for phone function, it's mostly for if there's something important to communicate to another family member when away from home.

Other than that, it's mostly for accessing the internet so I'm not glued to the computer for everything. Regarding mobile data plan from the cellular provider, I only use few MB per month, usually less than 10 MB, and that's mostly for gas payment transactions, so have no need for fast transfer speeds. Don't need multiple cameras either, even the one is rarely used.

Everything from 2G to 5G is fine and dandy here though, maybe 5G coverage isn't as good as older ones yet.

16 hours ago, XPerceniol said:

I guess its just sad that this is not the country my dearly departed father hoped it would be.

US is the 3rd world craphole in my book.

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8 hours ago, Tripredacus said:

the county executive had decided to back some plan to ban plastic bags

Yet again proves my point about this whole ecological agenda being 100% politics. 

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6 hours ago, UCyborg said:

US is the 3rd world craphole in my book.

UK [GB] , US , Holland , France , Canada , Dutch part of Belgium and the whole Benelux , Ireland , Denmark, Sweden , Norway , Finland , Italy and

West Germany are the best countries in the world in my book.

But you're very welcome not to visit . Less people , more oxygen , you know ))))))) We'll survive.

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1 hour ago, D.Draker said:

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Oh, I just really liked the quote from George and up-voted it. I know, under some Communist regimes the mentally ill were killed off, as well as other things they deemed to be defective or harmful to their "cause". Yeah, at least, here, I"m able to live on my own and sustain a (somewhat) independent existence , but, sadly (and I hate to say it), some of those programs we have could go away if the pendulum swings too far to the right. Please don't assume I'm far left, I'm not, just trying to survive and need assistance (some social programs) and I don't think the govt taking care of the ill is socialism. Sorry ;(

So, yes, better here than other horrible place and I'm just barely getting by and live a VERY humble lifestyle if I can even call this "living". Day-by-day and moment-by-moment is it.  

EDIT: Sorry, had to correct all my typos.

Edited by XPerceniol
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Besides, I guess it doesn't matter because I'm going nowhere. Stuck regardless of what is happening. I just try to accept what is happening and what is in my control and that my little bubble, just me and my plants. I don't talk to people all that much and sometimes I don't even use the phone or make or receive call in weeks anyway. Gonna be 50 soon and looking back, I worry the better days are behind me and I hope I don't become bitter old grouch filled with regret(s). *Would've ... Should've ... Could've* will eat away at your spirit if we don't catch it. Today (after being inside for almost 2 weeks) somebody is going to take a few of us to the beach and I'm scared to death and in anxiety city. Yeah, not good at all. Working on it still as its a long process.

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