Technology

Thousands of tons on a single vessel.

Which I responded to. Copying and pasting:

Probably not one boat at a time, but I’d rate the importance of reducing the required number of boats as “less than low, a simple zero” and the importance of a breathable atmosphere as “extremely high.”

The reason we have such huge container ships is that while the surface area and subsequent water resistance gets squared, the volume growth is cubic.

This means the larger the vessel, the more energy efficient it is at delivering anything from point A to point B.

Nope. It gets harder to build ships beyond a certain size, so our ships actually aren't infinitely large, they're at a size limited by construction difficulty.

Also, our biggest ships use crude oil, and I hear we've never really found a way to make sails work for ships that size, so it seems like our ships have actually gone bigger than the most efficient size.

This is exactly how shipping has become the most efficient way to deliver goods.

I don't get what you mean. Most efficient in what list? What are the other ways? I guess you could define "shipping" in a way that excludes couriers carrying single items at a time, but what does that have to do with cargo ship size?

Were you trying to say crude-oil-based cargo ships are an efficient way to deliver goods? They're not, unless anti-natalism is objectively correct, which I don't think it is.

If you want to deliver the same amount of cargo by many smaller ships, you’ll need way, waaaaaay more energy to do so.

And?

This is incredibly inefficient,

If that's "incredibly inefficient," what adjective do you use for the inefficiency of misusing crude oil?

and ships of the past were of that scale exclusively due to structural limitations.

Again, ships today are still not infinitely large, they are limited in scale by "structural limitations" (more like construction method limitations but whatever)

And there was a time in the past when the biggest ships were the size the biggest ships should be today, instead of bigger

Now, rowboats cannot technically be wide, because otherwise you won’t be able to seat enough rowers to drive the ship.

No idea what you're trying to say with this part

I answered you right there - you can use electricity generated through renewables instead of heavy human labor.

If you had a secret method to make that happen overnight, I think you'd have lead with that isntead of making me ask how. I see 0% chance your next reply is gonna have instructions for what I should do to make it so all ships are electrified with pure renewables within 24 hours.

But OK, I'll bite. How?

Sodium ion batteries for smaller missions (like, ports in Asia), green hydrogen for longer hauls,

But how? What is the method you secretly have involving these? Just saying their names doesn't give me any idea how to make all this happen so fast.

and nuclear for particularly long hauls through complicated areas (like the Northern Sea Route).

I'm glad you have no explanation for how to make this one happen, since what I want is a path away from extinction, instead of merely a different path towards it.

I re-read you comment again. You claim we’re all wage slaves anyway and it’s better to row a cargo ship until people in power decide to rather throw us into war. You also mentioned that it’s either rowboats or ecological collapse.

Terrible reading comprehension, but that's to be expected from such a dishonest person.

Maybe you should try reading again and again until you can handle telling the truth.

Did I get it right, or did you mean something else entirely?

False dichotomy. I've meant what I said, and there's no reasoning for the idea that I meant what you made up, instead of what I've said.

Studies on the issues of modern agriculture and recent developments in renewable energy tech. We do have safe ways to grow food, indeed, but they require much higher level of investment and do not pay off very well, while renewables are already cheaper than their traditional counterparts, naturally leading to massive rollout. We just need to keep going with this.

Again, how?

0% chance you're secretly holding onto an answer until my next reply, and not just blindly saying false shit, but how do these "studies" show evidence your secret technique to electrify all cargo ships with renewables instantly is a better strategy than doing the best we can with publicly known stuff?

Obviously not as in “9 hours a day, 5 day a week job”. It’s more of a cultural reference to the current work time conditions.

The reference makes no sense. It's as ridiculous at the metaphorical level as the literal level, and it seems like you're just adding the dumbest shit you can think of to waste my time and energy in a gish gallop at this point.

If there are too many workers and too little job, maybe the best course of action is reducing work time and redistributing gains made through automation?

Are we suddenly randomly discussing a hypothetical where that's the only problem? And you're upholding you wrote this in good faith? Kinda funny, but moreso scary.

This way people won’t need to do useless jobs like rowing a boat in the era of electric propulsion, and will have more time for themselves.

Sure, in a hypothetical where we had no other problems, but it's delusional and sick how you seem to be pretending this applies in the real world.

Bad faith

By no means.

Yep, there's the part where you pretend this is you attempting good-faith discussion.

Why even lie at this point?

I was genuinely engaged with the conversation,

Nope.

but it just so happens that the point of your argument completely misses me

That's why bad faith discussion is bad. You should try to understand things, instead of just lashing out when you don't understand something. You'd understand more that way.

There are obviously better ways to do what you propose,

What proposal, and what ways?

and I fail to see the merits of going back to rowing as means of ship propulsion.

Again, not an excuse for bad faith. More of an example of why it's bad.

Rowboats cannot be big

What the fuck is with this part? Scraping the bottom of the stupidity barrel for this gish gallop, huh?

I didn't ask if your threshold for "big" is bigger than you think a rowboat could ever be. I can use a dictionary and pick my own threshold for "big."

Are you trying to tell me there's something wrong with me for thinking "big" is a fair enough word for the biggest rowboats, or is there something I'm missing about why I should give a fuck how you use the word?

hence they fail to reap physical benefits that come with larger ship sizes, which alone makes them so incredibly efficient; they require intense manual labor and overblown crew, raising costs and reducing useful load, and they offer a very grim picture of the future full of pointless jobs instead of worker liberation.

What?

So…why rowing, of all things?

Because we have arms. What the fuck kind of question is that?

I had to retype this entire reply because I accidentally clicked "reply" while copying that last sentence, and learned PieFed deletes any existing reply when that happens.

That made me very angry at your gish gallop, and yet somehow I'm probably the one at risk of being banned for being rightly angry at you.

If you have any fraction of a spine, either reply on nostr (where I can't be banned), or not at all.