I commonly switch between chatgpt, perplexity, and copilot. Whatever is closest to my mouse or shortcut. Copilot is clearly the worst of the three but I have not true loyalty or most of the time, care. I suspect I am getting weak model responses from perplexity at times but it’s good enough to keep moving fast. Sam mentioned brining memory to people, not just because it’s what ppl want but I suspect my it will help to lock ppl into one platform of snowballing context.
I’ve worked for two refining companies. They aren’t about to rebuild their global infrastructure to make this happen…it doesn’t matter what possible, it’s what corporations can buy out politicians and the rich building a society that benefits them.
When you start to look at a lot of technological solutions to problems like environmental pollution, climate change, low-cost energy, healthy food production and distribution, you realize that most of the challenges are not technological in nature, but social and political -- basically human nature (fear and greed).
(This is another reason why the idea that's been floated that "AI" or the near-mythical "AGI" will "solve the world's problems" is fallacy -- unless of course by "solve" it means "make a few companies extremely wealthy at the expense of everyone else".)
You could have said that about motor cars. That the horse industry wasnt going to give up that easy. Its all about incentives
Having said that, deep sustainability initiatives like this require some forward thinking, and i dont see the public buying into preserving their own future when the reaction to climate protesters is eye rolling and the west and east keep throwing the hot potato of blame to each other rather than trying ti solve the problem.
Ideally, the government would introduce regulations to incentivize this for entities for whome the value proposition would, in the short term, be negative. But i dont know if they'll get their act together to do that. So you might be right
There never existed a "refinery" that produced whatever the equivalent of "50 million barrels of crude oil a day" in horses is. "Big Horse" never existed; it was massively decentralized, even when sold at large annual livestock events.
It’s not a radical thought to hold corporations accountable after they have limited our choices and controlled markets. So many things most Americans buy are manufactured needs so built into the culture that we think we need it. Proctor and gamble have written books about strategy that synthesize a market.
I work for a O&G super major. You’d think that one of these groups would be more interested right? It’s all about money, if one can’t make huge profits (especially with huge gov subsidies) then they will continue to ignore the prospect.
Megacorps aren’t trying to save the world they are trying to get mega rich.
Clean air is default. You can’t make ‘more clean’ air to offset dirty air. You can just hide real and compound health impacts with the fact that someone else exercises more in clean air and lives better.
No, air isn't clean by default. All air has particulates in it at various levels. There are natural particulates like forest fire smoke, blowing dust, and volcano emissions. And there are man-made particulates, dating back to the invention of fire but getting much worse with coal. All are harmful to some extent.
If you do something that causes air in one place to get 1 ppm dirtier and air in another place to get 1 ppm cleaner, and the populations are the same, the net impact on health cancels out.
> If you do something that causes air in one place to get 1 ppm dirtier and air in another place to get 1 ppm cleaner, and the populations are the same, the net impact on health cancels out.
The average ppm cancel out but the outcomes don't, because you have more sick people: Let's say 12 ppm is the maximum safe ratio for some pollution [edit: assuming it is a pollutant that has local impact, not like CO2 which has global impact]:
1) If place A has 10 ppm and place B has 10 ppm, then nobody is sick
2) If place A has 15 ppm and place B has 5 ppm, then people in place A are sick
Public policy generally doesn't work well with averages and similar analyses, because outcomes are usually discrete for each individual; it's not a stew where you can mix outcomes together and get something good.
As another example, if the economy results in one person making $1 billion and 999,999 making nothing, the average is $1 million per person - but what does that mean? 999,999 people are still in dire poverty. (It does have some significance, for things society does collectively - fund police and fire, and even help for poor people.)
Health effects of particulates are approximately linear. So the more particulates the more mortality. There's no threshold below which people are healthy and above which they're sick.
It's actually slightly sub-linear, meaning that an increase for one group and an equal decrease for another group produces slightly less total mortality. See https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9109601/#gh2329-bib... for some numerically fitted curves (search for GEMM).
> If you do something that causes air in one place to get 1 ppm dirtier and air in another place to get 1 ppm cleaner, and the populations are the same, the net impact on health cancels out.
Not exactly. The other place might have people die from poverty, illnesses and godknowswhat much earlier so the effect of pollution shifting doesn't manifest itself or even gets masked off by rising life expectancies in general - that's the dirty secret behind the move of dirty and toxic productions to Asia.
The marginal health impact of 1 ppm (of what?) may not be the same across all concentrations, not least because of adaptive behaviors: avoiding outside exercise, using air filters.
But in general I agree that you should be able to look at tradeoffs of a set of actions and allow of the possibility that some negatives are offset by positives.
