And it is!

Insufficiently.

Like here in Europe.

It must be a very different kind of Europe than the one I live in.
I live in Germany and regularly encounter such troubles to find ecologically optimal products. Most of the time because there aren’t any available for me. Then there is a huge lack of transparency and sometimes of course the price. Although the latter is not really problematic for me, it is for a lot of other people. Those products, which are environmentally detrimental, are usually much cheaper than the ecologically better ones. You are being financially punished for choosing the better alternatives.

“free range” eggs

Despite the fact that a non-plant based diet is worse than a plant-based one in terms of ecological impact, the industry has been subject to a lot of critique due to insufficient regulations towards the treatment of egg-laying hens. Not only that, but also controls are often not conducted, even though it says so on paper.

The problem here is not Bezos, it’s YOU

Even if we neglect the ecological irresponsible business practises conducted by Bezos & friends, when it comes to individual ecological impact, wealthy people are usually causing a multitude of the damage which is caused by not-that-wealthy individuals. It seems to be a problem inherent to the lifesytle.

Most smaller delivery vehicles here in the UK are fully electric.

That’s cool. However, there is more to electric vehicles which must be considered when we think about ecological impact. (Lifetime, resources, production, etc…) Even if that’s given, this alone doesn’t solve the climate crisis. Although it certainly seems to be a nice step in the right direction.

Regarding the remaining list: that’s surely nice to hear. Still, there are still a plethora of unsolved problems. Even in your country.

And you don’t.

How about you don’t generalise a whole population?

Instead you ban contraception and abortions.

You must have mistaken me with someone from another country. It might help to be less prejudiced.

And it is!

Insufficiently.

Like here in Europe.

It must be a very different kind of Europe than the one I live in.
I live in Germany and regularly encounter such troubles to find ecologically optimal products. Most of the time because there aren’t any available for me. Then there is a huge lack of transparency and sometimes of course the price. Although the latter is not really problematic for me, it is for a lot of other people. Those products, which are environmentally detrimental, are usually much cheaper than the ecologically better ones. You are being financially punished for choosing the better alternatives.

“free range” eggs

Despite the fact that a non-plant based diet is worse than a plant-based one in terms of ecological impact, the industry has been subject to a lot of critique due to insufficient regulations towards the treatment of egg-laying hens. Not only that, but also controls are often not conducted, even though it says so on paper.

The problem here is not Bezos, it’s YOU

Even if we neglect the ecological irresponsible business practises conducted by Bezos & friends, when it comes to individual ecological impact, wealthy people are usually causing a multitude of the damage which is caused by not-that-wealthy individuals. It seems to be a problem inherent to the lifesytle.

Most smaller delivery vehicles here in the UK are fully electric.

That’s cool. However, there is more to electric vehicles which must be considered when we think about ecological impact. (Lifetime, resources, production, etc…) Even if that’s given, this alone doesn’t solve the climate crisis. Although it certainly seems to be a nice step in the right direction.

Regarding the remaining list: that’s surely nice to hear. Still, there are still a plethora of unsolved problems. Even in your country.

And you don’t.

How about you don’t generalise a whole population?

Instead you ban contraception and abortions.

You must have mistaken me with someone from another country. It might help to be less prejudiced.

How does that even go together? Being anti-vax and at the same time condemning people for not being vaccinated?

Get your facts straight next time.

This is also covered in others, more recent findings. Want me to dig them out for you?

If you wouldn’t buy that shit, Bezos won’t be selling that shit and there would be no pollution

Which is part of what I meant by:

“it is mainly due to our modern way of life and production”

But not in such a condemning way as you.
The fact, that you were able to write your comment, shows, that even you felt the necessity to buy stuff. And I am 100 % sure that the device, you used for that, was not produced free of GHG emissions or under ecologically (or even socially) perfect conditions. As bad as this is, this is the case for most people. But did you have a choice? Can you live an average life in our current society without stuff like that? Do you even have the option to choose alternatives?

That’s my point. This kind of “you buy, you choose” attribution of causal chains, is surely true to some degree. But imo it’s an oversimplification to label it completely like that. I can’t even buy fucking organically grown tomatoes in my closest supermarket. So I don’t even have the option to choose the better alternative. This also applies to several other basic foods. Yet, I also need them. Most of the times such items are more expensive than the worse ones. The latter is a huge deal for people who really don’t have that much money. So they literally can’t buy the better options.

The market self-regulates that kind of stuff by itself to some degree. But not completely. And policies worldwide, especially in industry nations, fail to address these issues, thereby fueling the problem. Then of course there are further problems, like a lack of education and awareness about it and so on.

Another thing: how easy do you find it to see which product is the better one from an ecological perspective? How do you know it’s not just greenwashing? Do you feel like it’s an easy choice?
If so, congratz, you are a lucky one. But for most of the rest of us, that’s really not made sufficiently transparent.

Again, something which needs to be regulated.

And then, Bezos and co. could make their whole business conpletely green. Do they want to? Nope. Bezos and co. also could decide not to take their private jets, or live in a private mansion, live lifestyles which cause so incredibly more emissions than the one of average Joes and Janes. And again, they decide against it. But yeah sure, go on making each customer and the whole of humanity responsible.

Not the amount of people are the problem, but their disregard for eco-systems, especially the failings of policies. Humanity managed to survive for thousands of years without fucking up the whole planet. Shit really started to spiral downwards since the industrial revolution.

I bet this is also somehow the immigrants’ fault. /s

(Looking at you, right-wing voters in EU. ò.ó )

Although I also think there is a correlatin between number of people and detrimental climate effects, it’s wrong to reduce the causes to that. Despite the fact that “the richest 10 percent of people produce half of the planet’s individual-consumption-based fossil fuel emissions, while the poorest 50 percent — about 3.5 billion people — contribute only 10 percent”, it is mainly due to our modern way of life and production. As you probably know, the climate started the downwards spiral since the industrialisation. If we werent producing so insanely much GHG-emitting stuff, it wouldn’t be such a problem. (Regarding temperature alone. There are of course also other detrimental effects on our eco-systems due to things like overuse of fertilisers for example.)

I bet, a lot of people felt that way throughout history.

However, given we have the internet, the best access for information we ever had, it’s really ridiculous how little people seem to care about spending some time to critically think about their election choice.

Thanks for sharing!

As far as I know, there is no such list (yet).

What should be done:
Escalate it to the people responsible for IT administration & security in your company or institution. They’ll deal with it.

But the default step if you suspect of being infected is not to use the device at all until you got a green light for it from the security/admin folks. Power down, disconnect from any networks, either via physical cables or wireless, unplug external storage devices and wait for further info.

Oh ja, richtig. Ich bitte um Entschuldigung!

Ja, sogar auf mehreren Instanzen. Das ist aber auch das Problem. Zersplitterung, statt ein einzelnes Zuhause dafür zu haben. :'(

*gemacht mit Mematik Maimatik

TL;DR:
The misuse of technology in capitalism threatens jobs and financial stability. Affordable robots and AI could either enhance our lives or lead to unemployment and misery. Proposals like an automation tax could fund education or basic income. We need good legislation to ensure technology benefits everyone, not just profits. Recent steps like Europe’s AI act offer a little hope, but a lot more political action is urgently needed.

Long Version:
From my perspective, the core of the problem is not the technology, but the reckless way we use it in our capitalistic system. Or let’s say, let it be used.

For example, a light load robotic industrial arm costs merely 1k to 5k € nowadays. The software for it is cheap as well.
What the business owners and managers see, is not an awesome new invention which could help to propel humanity into the future of a robotic utopia, but cheap labour force, aiding them to cut jobs in order to maximize their profit margin as human labour is expensive.

I am sure AI and robots are our future, one way or another, whether we want it or not.
But I would like to see a future where AI and robots help us to increase our quality of life, instead of making us unemployed and endagering our financial survival.

There are various ideas how this could be achieved. I don’t intend to go way too in-depth here, so just as an example:
an automation tax: estimate to which amount a business can be automated and then demand a tax proportional to how much the business was automated. Such a tax could then be used to finance higher education for people or a universal basic income. Maybe at first just an income for those who can’t get a decent job due to automation.

We had similar developments as those we see now with virtually all technological advances, where human labour was replaced by more and more clever machines. Jobs where lost due to that but it could still be seen as a good thing in general.

An important difference is the level of required skills though. Someone who’s job it was to go around a street and light gas lanterns every day, extinguishing them some time afterwards, was replaced by electric light grids. A switchboard operator at a telephone company, who connected people manually, got replaced by clever hardware. And so on. Those people didn’t require high skills for their job though. They had it a bit easier to find another one.

This becomes increasingly difficult as AI and technology in general advances. Recently we see how robots and AI are capabable of tasks where higher skills are necessary. And it’s probable that this trend will incresingly continue. At some point, we will have AI developing new and better AI. An explosion of artificial intelligence can then be expected.

It’s less a problem as long as people have job prospects in higher skilled work levels. But that will, for a while at least, not be the case. This has different reasons:

As I see it, we have a “work pyramid”, where the levels of the pyramid represent the required skills and the width of the pyramid levels represent the amount of available jobs. In other words, there is a way higher demand for low skilled work than for high skilled work. (BTW, what I mean by work skill is the level of specialisation and proficiency, often connected to more intense and long training and education.)

As recent developments in AI now slowly creep into higher and higher levels, people may start investing in their own education in order to even get a job. But higher skilled work is less available making it increasingly tight and problematic to get one.

There may of course also be an effect observable where new jobs are created by enabling more even higher skilled jobs due to the aid of AI, but I think this has limitations. On the one hand, the amount of jobs created that way might be insufficient. On the other hand, people might not want to or can’t get an education for that.

The latter needs to be emphasized from my perspective. There are a lot of people who simply don’t want to study for a decade in order to get a PhD in something so that they can get some highly specialised job. Some people like the more simple jobs, those requiring more manual than cognitive labour. And that’s totally fine. People should be happy and like the work they do.

Currently, not all people even have access to that kind of education. Be it due to limitations in available places at universities / colleges, or due to financial reasons or even due to physical or mental health reasons.

You may now understand, why I see that we are going to create more misery if we don’t change the way we handle such things.

I would like to see humanity in that robotic utopia. No one needs to work, as most work is done by AI and robots. But everyone can get a fair share and live a happy life however they would like to live it. They can work, take up some interest and pursue it, but no one needs to.

But currently, this is probably not going to happen. We need good legislation, need to create a system where advancements in AI and robotics can be made without driving people into financial ruin. We need to set those guarding rails which help to guide us towards such a robotic utopia.

That’s why I am advocating for putting this topic higher on political priority lists. Politics worldwide don’t have it even set on their agenda. They are missing crucial time frames. And I really hope they’ll wake up from that slumber and start working on it. I’ve got some hope. Europe recently passed their first AI act.
It’s a start.

Sincerely,

A roboticist working in AI and robot research.

I love this.
Also hilariously illustrates the obsession of so many people over genitals instead of seeing the person having them.

I’d say give it a try and see for yourself.

I can just recommend using Firefox for a multitude of reasons. However, I am biased as I have been using firefox for almost two decades and did not have many reasons to complain.

I understand that you made such an experience, but I can’t share it though. I’ve been a Firefox user for almost as long as Firefox exists, which is almost two decades. (I think I joined somewhere between 2005-2007). I’ve tried other browsers, sometimes I had to. However, I didn’t notice any benefits compared to Firefox. Especially not in performance. Even though benchmarks have always shown clear differences, they weren’t significant enough for me to consider switching, as the difference really didn’t impact my browsing experience.

Regarding the memes: That was just a random annectode which I found suitable here. I don’t claim it has been that way since the beginning. (Can’t relate to that anyway.) But given that it has been around for a while, I don’t see how performance can be an argument in favour of Chrome in this.

I’ve been a loyal Firefox user for almost as long as Firefox has existed. So I’m probably a bit biased. However, when I used other browsers, and if it wes just to try them out, I didn’t notice any benefits in terms of loading websites and executing their scripts. This includes Chrome. In benchmarks there are obviously differences visible, but to me as a user they didn’t matter. I wasn’t so short on time that I needed those microseconds. So I really don’t get how performance could be an argument in this.

Restore Privacy – Alternatives to Google Products – The Big List (2024)

How was it more performant? As I remember it, Chrome was loading websites not noticeably faster than Firefox, as website loading speed depended and still depends mainly on your internet connection and hardware anyway.

As I remember it, Chrome exploded because it was pushed onto users at every possible opportunity while Firefox depended (and still depends) on users actively looking for it.

Used Google or Google products? Get ads for Chrome. Wanted to download Google Earth? You had to activly uncheck a box such that Chrome wasn’t going to be installed as well. Meanwhile no ads and not the same amount of exposure for Firefox.

That way they achieved a critical mass and snowballing did the rest. There were so many users using it that it was considered a good choice just because it was used by many people.

Regarding the performance aspect, if there even was a noticeable difference, it was worse than Firefox. Where else did the “Chrome eating RAM” memes come from?

Sadly not just the USA.