Wasted Effort
It’s very frustrating to be a logical, rational thinker and to have to wait for years, even decades for bad ideas to finally work themselves out of the societal enthusiasm that surrounds them. Recycling is one. It doesn’t work, except for iron, as far as I know. Plastic is the easiest to recycle, but it isn’t happening, no matter how much one takes it upon themselves to sort their own trash at the behest of some city government. Only about 10% of plastics gathered for recycling actually gets recycled. What happens to the rest? It gets dumped, just as if one did not go through all of the motions of recycling. The amount of time and machinery developed to do this one very possible thing, is wasted, because there’s no financial benefit.
The communist answer to that is to make using recycled plastic mandatory, or increasing, through taxes, the cost of generating new plastic. That doesn’t get us any closer to efficiency like letting the truth of the matter reveal itself and stop all of the excessive activities to make it look like it’s working.
Everything in today’s world is marketed as a solution to some overall human harm, either to us or because of us, whether it works or not, or has any effect or not. I’m all for the environment, but it’s a bit of hubris that makes us think we can have an effect on it. The earth itself creates more CO2 than the entire history of human beings by a large margin. One volcano can replace all of the CO2 that we remove through all of the efforts of humanity, all of the trillions of dollars spent and that’s assuming that CO2 is bad, which I absolutely refuse to believe. I’ve asked trees and they agree with me.
The end of the world for the environmentalists was in the removal of CO2 as a dangerous ingredient to the atmosphere. It never should have been classified as such. There is no correlation between CO2 and theoretical warming of the planet. None of the horrific stories of a devastated planet have come true since they started hawking this irrational fear of CO2.
When people talk of humanity and start dividing people up between those who want to save the planet (the humane) and those who want to live their life as always before (the inhumane), what is never talked about is the lost trillions and man hours spent chasing a ghost instead of actually working on systems that might benefit humanity.
One of those things is the idea of container-sized nuclear reactors that can power whole communities. Imagine something like this that every community could own, the amount of self-sustaining power it would unleash. One wouldn’t have to build huge powerplants that lose half (or more) of their product through transmission; wouldn’t need the huge swaths of land that it takes to carry electric current across thousands of miles. The grid would no longer be a concern, because one wouldn’t need a national power grid.
I can’t drive past a swath of wind generators without thinking of this. The amount of time and energy put into developing wind energy, building all of those turbines, shipping them across the country to be erected, wear out, replaced all to accommodate the profits of power companies who don’t use the power anyway, but get the incentives for building such things to offset some obscure idea of a carbon credit and provide return on investments that after ten years pay for the wind turbines. Where do those incentives come from? Taxpayers. We fund this insanity with no input from those who have to pay for it.
At home, I believe in electric self-sufficiency against the time when these data centers, that are the new wind turbines, in effect, demanding much more power than they will ever be able to deliver in the promise of AI, but I can’t stop government officials from jumping onboard this new insanity. Politicians are like children at a circus, falling for every huckster’s pitch when jobs or money are involved. It doesn’t matter that they’ve wandered into the house of mirrors, they’ll buy it.
How many decades of failure will it take before they realize it was all a scam? How many trillions will be spent in the search for an electronic friend and why do we have to pay for it in excessive power bills?
AI won’t work, not as it’s currently being promoted, and even if it did, what would it cost, not only in dollars, but in humanity? The newest rage in convenience stores is teaching us to be our own attendant against a time when there won’t be any need of a human to make a transaction, no cash either. I like that at the gas pump, I’m not so sure I like it when I go to purchase something else. I don’t like the idea of big corporations forcing me into labor to make them profits and if something goes wrong, like the scanner recording one purchase as two, where do I go to rectify it? Already that happens when talking to some AI customer service voice that just doesn’t understand the incredibly technical issues I’m having with their product.
The concept of AI’s revolutionizing our world hinges on some very illogical assumptions, like AI can build on itself, write its own code, process generations of knowledge in nanoseconds. It can’t. It extrapolates from what is already known, proven in the fields of science, takes all of that and streamlines it, categorizes it and makes assumptions for the future that may or may not be true. It doesn’t matter, it will assume that its own assumptions are true and build on that. If you can’t see the crash of logic coming, you’ll witness it in less than a decade.
The whole goal is to distance humans from other humans. Actually, to distance government from human input. AI will make government arguments much harder, maybe impossible, to refute. Where will we go for the truth when everything will be filtered through artificial intelligence?