The most weirdly disconcerting part of the heatwave is how objects that your hindbrain insists should be cool are, in fact, quite warm. Brick walls. Metal pots. Ceramic sinks. All of them body temperature. #Heatwave
This is the coldest summer of the rest of your life.
To even try to fix this we’ll have to crash halt the entire capitalist system. Wonderful, no?
Except that it wont mean joyously confiscating billionaire private jets. Nope. It’ll mean dismantling most of our current industrial and agricultural infrastructure.
Optimistically, it’ll be like returning to the 1950s.
Pessimistically, it’ll be like returning to the 1950s. Just with 6 billion more mouths to feed than 75 years ago.
@awfulwoman@ljrk I completely agree with the notion of "this is the coldest summer of the rest of our lives" and also very much with "capitalism must die". Though I am very curious about this post in particular, and what makes you say "optimistically it'll be like returning to the 1950s" etc. /gen
@star@ljrk because everything in modern life we use and own contributes to emissions. Flying, and driving cars (emits CO2 directly, as does all the infra to support it). Buying things (everything is made thousands of kilometres away, burning fuel to bring it here). Eating (40% of all habitable land is devoted to feeding humans, and we transport it all vast distances).
We need to get these to zero just to stop the acceleration. To go in reverse means somehow going massively carbon negative.
@star@ljrk so when I mention the 1950s, I mean that EXTREMELY optimistically. As it essentially means halting all manufacturing, travel, luxury goods (i.e everything not connected with direct survival), and eating at a subsistence level it’ll be more like the late 19th century.
@star@ljrk we’ll never achieve that at a global scale as we’ll starve to death. Therefore we have to cope with the results of no action. Which is pretty much the same bum note as taking action, but much, much hotter, with desperate waves of refugee migrating from rapidly uninhabitable parts of the world, and a few massive wars thrown in.
@star@ljrk oh and that’s all without wildcards like AMOC collapse, the West Antarctic ice sheet melting due to volcanic activity, a new global human-infectious pandemic, a food chain collapsing due to pesticides killing off insects, a staple crop going extinct due to some fungus, or indeed the ongoing Holocene Mass Extinction event.
@awfulwoman@star I'm kind of "happy" that I know there are people who have more bleak view of the future (with reason) than me. I always feel like I'm the one dragging people down with my assumptions of the trajectory where we're headed.
Yeah, I recently had a call with investors [yeah, sometimes I do feel shame...], advising them on whether is able to replace $x and how. And my basic stance that it is not /able/ to adequately replace $x but it will regardless, just like fast fashion, left a certain impression lol.
I went on a long ramble on how we've historically accepted that websites suddenly take seconds to load, computers are "magic" and the only fix is to "try reboot" etc. and that we, as a society, have accepted this reality. And that we will also accept that LLMs replacing $x will reduce quality (the way we use LLMs at least), increase security vulnerabilities, and that data leaks of highly sensitive personal data will just be a common occurance.
The investor looked rather devastated, she almost looked liked she wanted to crawl into bed after that call. She also sounded a bit concerned about my mental health, when asked something along the lines whether this was my honest opinion in where we're headed. But yeah, it's also what I consider realistic, and there's little denying that this is roughly the future we're gonna expect. Your image is much more macro-scale of course, but I relate a lot.
flori_ava_star:~
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