Erik Haugen @ech@qoto.org

@debasisg@mstdn.social @breadandcircuses @ClimateHuman I don't know if there's really any great alternative at this point if we're to maintain the lifestyles to which we've become accustomed. Like, ethanol sounds great – sustainable carbon cycle and all that – but would it even work if we switched to that wholesale? land use, energy required to process, etc? I remember a few years back it looked like the answer was "no" – have things gotten better?

With governments like Germany moving away from nuclear it is starting to feel hopeless.

@freemo @roboneko Yeah I think we do better than dogs in hot weather, dogs only do better in extremely cold weather, horses somewhere in between? I'm sure it depends on a lot of things. Hyenas I think also can run long distances, but most mammals can't.

@freemo "stop discussion" and also "put that on the table for discussion"?

@wiseguyeddie “There’s nothing in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead armadillos.” Yeah it's tough being a centrist, just look at what's happening to Sinema and Manchin. Of course, none of this is a coherent argument that any given person or group is wrong or should change, just an observation about today's US party politics.

@freemo I think the expensive part is getting enough horizontal speed. Taking off at LEO-heights, you avoid air and the need to gain potential energy. This is like a fifth of the fuel or something. But sure: not nothing.

@VoxDei @freemo In a lot of counties – I mean places that this ruling is directed at – this is not remotely an honest description of what was going on. You could be a world-class expert in firearm usage or whatever and not get a CCW in these places. And the problem was not hoops to jump through to prove your expertise: they just didn't issue.

@freemo "130 miles to be at the lower end of LEO and service the ISS." But it's whizzing by at 5 miles/sec; most of the work is just getting up to speed, isn't it?

I guess the higher up you go the better, (less air etc?), but unless your elevator is quite a bit higher than these numbers you don't really get the main savings of a space elevator.

@freemo tl;dr – I don't have anything intelligent to add about maximum heights using rock or other modern material...

How high would it have to be? 100km to "space", but what application does a 100km space elevator have?

I found something saying that 10 miles is the max mountain height, but I think that was taking into account how fast mountain growth processes are vs. erosion, so I don't think it applies to this project: we can probably go quite a bit higher.

I agree it seems like if you go wide enough the rocks can probably support 100km without basically liquefying and squishing outward? I think? But I think the crust will deform a ridiculous amount, so be sure to take that into account. :)

@birwin @JustinMac84 @emma_cogdev @Sheril I hope you aren't driving your car to the nettle patch.

@Robru3142 @emma_cogdev @JustinMac84 @Sheril ah but see tree nuts there on the very bottom. Is that wrong?

@colo_lee @JustinMac84 @emma_cogdev @Sheril Yeah the graph might be more usable if it was in terms of per serving or something. (Also I'd like to see beans or something on there, as an alternative to meats – but soymilk is looking good so I'll go with that.)

One thing gets through accurately: clearly beef and other animal products, as they're typically farmed, are high-impact foods.

@Sheril I appreciate easy-to-consume data like this, because it seems like our assumptions about what choices are better or matter most are often (almost always?) wrong. (paper vs. plastic bags, cloth vs. disposable diapers, for example) So it's great to be able to focus our attention back on things that matter. thanks!

@JustinMac84 @emma_cogdev @Sheril It's fine – it's high up on the list because the impact per kg is high, but you don't consume very many kg of coffee per day. (I'm assuming this is kg of beans.)

I mean, nearly everything we consume has some kind of impact, of course, but I doubt drinking a cup of coffee has more impact than a dinner of prawns (the next lower item on the list).

I think one take-home point of this post is things like this: I would have assumed that buying beans and then brewing coffee myself was wildly less harmful than buying bottles of brewed coffee, just because of the transportation cost of the water in the coffee bottles. But maybe that assumption isn't quite right.

@freemo – "isnt any good way to verify it personally" that's part of it, I think – an unwillingness to believe anything you didn't personally verify. Like, go outside and look at the ground or whatever: it looks flat. So to accept this premise that it is round instead of what it obviously looks like, they'll want to see something *personally*.

At some point, to function at a certain level, so to speak, you need to take some stuff on trust: like things you learned in science class and so on.

Also: I think there's also a personality that wants to find meaning in everything – so like the idea that something happening implies somebody did it by design.

Both of these are maybe related by failure to apply Bayes' theorem. You kind of know this subconsciously: you think something is true with some probability, but then as you see evidence that probability in your mind changes according to the evidence. Basic underpinning of science, right? But you need to have some way of evaluating these probabilities and adjustments. If there's something missing in you that makes it hard for you to do it, then you're going to have the kinds of problems that I'm outlining.

Re. moon landings, you really need to be conspiratorially-minded (or wildly ignorant): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_evidence_for_Apollo_Moon_landings – if this is a conspiracy, then just wow.

@mikejackmin sounds good. It certainly suffers from the problem that a lot of people who care about (lowercase) social justice are very opposed to Critical Social Justice. But yeah you might be right this is a good term.