perestroika

I would especially want to comment about:

Norway

A country that swims in oil, and has few other natural resources of comparable value, so indeed nearly all parties support using it.

What example will he bring next, Saudi Arabia?

That aside, Norway has a huge electric vehicle adoption rate. They will sell you oil, but have themselves almost stopped using it.

Chatbots have a built-in tendency for sycophancy - to affirm the user and sound supportive, at the cost of remaining truthful.

ChatGPT went through its sycophancy scandal recently and I would have hoped they'd have added weight to finding credible and factual sources, but apparently they haven't.

To be honest, I'm rather surprised that Meta AI didn't exhibit much sycophancy. Perhaps they're simply somewhat behind the others in their customization curve - an language model can't be sycophant if it can't figure out the biases of its user or remember them until the relevant prompt.

Grok, being a creation of a company owned by Elon Musk, has quite predictably been "softened up" the most - to cater to the remaining user base of Twitter. I would expect the ability of Grok to present an unbiased and factual opinion degrade further in the future.

Overall, my rather limited personal experience with LLMs suggests that most language models will happily lie to you, unless you ask very carefully. They're only language models, not reality models after all.

The article certainly has a point.

However, I feel like the message it tries to convey can be simplified.

• some qualities of a society determine if it can exist without extracting, expanding or fragmenting
• some of these could be equality, freedom, solidarity and sustainability
• if so, we must admit that our societies fall short
• we can observe how certain traits are counterproductive (agression, domination, egoism, greed)
• we can observe our living environments often reward such traits

Now that a problem is visible, it has to be solved.

If the context is narrow and timescale is small, solutions are intuitive: if a person is agressive, egoist, seeks to dominate or behaves greedy, we know how to avoid dealing with them and how to warn others, and how to oppose them in a confrontation (hopefully while limiting the intensity of the confrontation).

If the context is wide and the timescale is long, we need to find solutions. If the offending subsystem is a certain type of business, or business itself, we have to dowregulate that.

If the offending subsystem is a particular type of state, or state itself, we have to downregulate certain types of state, or state itself.

To accomplish such large-scale goals, one has to create formats of action and organization that lack the offending features but can still accomplish the goal. Preferably in sufficient time for individual people to see results and analyze if the action taken went well or needs improvement.

The author seems to imply (and if they do, I would agree) that one can't create a "copy" of a megacorps or state with just the ethics fixed, as it would self-corrupt. The organisational level and building blocks that can form an environment to downregulate these organizations - preferably without coming into direct conflict, at least not conflict on their terms - is still being sought. I wish I could contribute a solution, but I only have half-solutions.

Solvay's factory reported only 56 kilograms of SF₆ emissions for 2023 to Germany's industrial emissions register. The scientist's estimates are 500 times higher: around 30 tons. Its effect on the atmosphere is more than that of 700,000 tons of CO₂ due to the high global warming potential of SF₆, comparable to a coal-fired power plant.

So, in terms of how much they probably lied: really bad.

In terms of whether this one factory could significantly screw up climate: not as bad. Footprint is roughly the size of a large coal-burning plant going at full load.

They obviously have to fix their leaks + pay for their emissions + pay a large fine + show their internal documents to make it clear if this was intended.

Yep, that's how it should be.

In reality, I've been able to engage gear lock at a low speed. Whatever interlock they (Mitsubishi) have built - ain't 100% foolproof.

I drive an ancient (2012) EV.

I'm content with a stick shift, but the functions I want are:

• reverse
• neutral (coast without regen, allow car to be towed, only mechanical brakes)
• regenerative brake level 1
• level 2
• level 3

...and that's all, and I have them. I don't need acceleration performance to change, much safer to have it always consistent. It's the default braking performance I need to alter, because sometimes you go downhill and sometimes it's icy.

They're electronic, no mechanical pushrods needed, but my car's manufacturer, in the dark dawn of electric vehicles, could not understand that and used mechanical pushrods. :D

A function that is mechanical and which I would like to remove from my car's gear stick and place under a separate switch is the "gear lock" function. It's like a parking brake without engaging brake pads. It's useful, but having it under the stick creates a nozero possibility of engaging it in motion - it shouldn't be there, but under a protective cover or protective circuit, elsewhere.

The cause is uncertain for now.

It's known with certainty that polar ice did not exist then - so it was not Antarctic melting giving a feedback bump. Besides the feedback bump caused by Antarctic melting is speculated to be on the order of 2 degrees.

It could have been partly volcanic, but not mainly volcanic. It certainly wasn't tectonic, as the event was a brief spike of "only" ~200 000 years.

The study below, somewhat speculative in nature, proposes that bottom water warming occurred 3000 years before the carbon trip, and decomposition of methane hydrates could have been the amplifier of the process. Which, to me, suggests that maybe the cause was geological.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18097406/

A hypothesis referenced in Wikipedia: a lot of high-carbon rock (kimberlite) experienced a volcanic eruption that released much CO2, and brought oceans above the theshold where methane hydrates decomposed and supplied methane.

Although the cause of the initial warming has been attributed to a massive injection of carbon (CO2 and/or CH4) into the atmosphere, the source of the carbon has yet to be found. The emplacement of a large cluster of kimberlite pipes at ~56 Ma in the Lac de Gras region of northern Canada may have provided the carbon that triggered early warming in the form of exsolved magmatic CO2. Calculations indicate that the estimated 900–1,100 Pg[194] of carbon required for the initial approximately 3 °C of ocean water warming associated with the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum could have been released during the emplacement of a large kimberlite cluster.[195] The transfer of warm surface ocean water to intermediate depths led to thermal dissociation of seafloor methane hydrates, providing the isotopically depleted carbon that produced the carbon isotopic excursion. The coeval ages of two other kimberlite clusters in the Lac de Gras field and two other early Cenozoic hyperthermals indicate that CO2 degassing during kimberlite emplacement is a plausible source of the CO2 responsible for these sudden global warming events.

I haggle. Sadly, it's a form of promising to use your market power (no matter whether tiny or big) in a way favourable to the partner. Markets are irrational things and market power is a real thing - you can make markets work nicer for others, usually requesting something nice for yourself.

E.g. "if you can sell me X for 4 € / km, I promise that I buy 500 km / month, otherwise thank you, but I only need a sample". The buyer makes a conditional promise to favour the seller if the seller can maintain the requested price level.

Another example: "I agree to buy this sofa at once and pay in cash, but please drop the price to 100 €". The buyer offers to not waste the seller's time (time is valuable) and to avoid any contact with tax officials, in return for a more favourable price.

As for whether it's good or bad - I think that over long timescales, it's bad. If there exists a market, one should strive for it to be transparent and equal, free of covert influence. Haggling is a form of applying such influence. So if I would be designing a trading system, I would try to go against what I personally do. I would try to avoid the need for haggling and discourage it.

As long as a car isn't open source, a car maker going out of business is a big problem. It's going to leave customers stranded without spare parts.

That, in my opinion, fully explains the propping up.

And for this reason, I predict that they will be keeping even unprofitable manufacturers on life support despite everything, quite long. The companies will likely get merged and production of spares will hopefully be arranged. If not, lots of people will be angry.

the able bodied revolutionary

This passage suggests an assumption - that anarchist society is reached through a revolution that requires forceful action. Or maybe war. But, I must note - even in disputes that were settled with artillery, not all revolutionaries were able bodied.

However, if the previous assumption is true, the subsequent conclusion is indeed true. In a war, you can't depend on reliable supplies of medicine, fuel, electricity or even food and drinking water. A factory or warehouse may get bombed. A power plant may get bombed. A water treatment plant may get bombed.

Then again, I must remaind: states are quite and very capable of waging war, without any anarchist assistance. Yet people dare to live in states, despite risk that a local state will go crazy and attack others, or the risk that a foreign state will invade.

"We don't exactly have alternatives, Sherlock", one would surely counter. And indeed, most of Earth is owned by some state or another, except Antarctica. Lucky people can pick the flavour and intensity of statism they live under. Less fortunate ones dont' get a meaningful choice.

And indeed, a lot of people on Earth right know... would not have the option of getting insulin - despite living under a full blown hierarchy - not to mention accessing a tailor-made cancer vaccine (most of us on Lemmy don't have that option either).

What would anarchism change?

Well, for a start, it might be permissible to cook it up at home. Speaking as an ex-biologist: you need a bioreactor and purification process or animal organs and a purification process to get insulin. Once you start making it, there's no point making it for one patient only. There's no point in making antibiotics for one patient only. There's no point in making vaccines for one patient only.

So you industrialize and standardize the process. And I don't see anything in anarchist ideology saying "no, you shall not industrialize any process or announce a standard". I see critique of how resources are managed. Anarchism criticizes hierarchies of power (wealth == power). It does not typically critique medical or technical advancement, unless some form of advancement alienates people from their rights or concentrates power. Anarchism does criticize large organizations, but only a few tendencies of anarchism conclude that large organizations may not exist. Sometimes they're needed. Risks that they bring can be grounded in various ways.

...but getting back to the beginning, I think one should try to reach anarchy without war. War very much necessitates acting like a state to maximize chances of victory. It shouldn't be the first option for an anarchist, and might actually be a the last option to try (when a choice has been forced and nothing peaceful has worked).

From a personal perspective...

In that kind of scenario, I just…die.

Emigrating from a place where violent conflict looks to be imminent, would be advisable if once needs advanced medical care.

Makes it quite clear: sea is responding with a delay, but it will respond, and then very likely - for a long while, it won't stop responding even if the driving force is removed.

Despite this, the article suggests that nearly all of the increase in deadly accidents has come from urban roads.

If the roads are just as poorly designed as before, the increase has to originate elsewhere.

Which doesn't mean that road design shouldn't improve. :)