I watched David Attenborough's recent film 'Ocean' on a big screen. The footage of bottom trawling was really shocking. I don't understand how that has been allowed to continue in UK coastal waters, let alone to be subsidised in marine protected areas. Madness. It's like napalming a forest to get a few deer. Thankfully things may be changing:
Greenpeace used to drop boulders into the ocean to prevent bottom trawling circa 2021-2022. Unsure if they still do. Fairly straightforward to solve for if you’re willing to drop chunks of rock (granite, non reactive) or concrete in the ocean at the right spots.
Bans are nice, destructive force against adversaries works better though. Hard to take the selfish out of the human, so you have to engineer systems accordingly.
I’d assume it’s pretty standard practice already. Your average Florida Man with a boat has a sonar showing the surface before dropping anchor or throwing fishing line… surely industrial fishing groups would know the area before they start exploiting it. But maybe that’s hoping too much!
I think it would be a great PR idea for a billionaire to buy a few old ships and use them to drop rocks over the most popular/vulnerable fishing grounds. What happened to rich people who were all not evil?
In a terminally capitalistic age (or whatever we should call the last 30 years, we are actually "capitalistic" the same way the URSS was "communist" in the '80s) being rich and being ethical are mutually exclusive.
I don't agree. They didn't get rich by creating value. They might have created value, but they got rich by keeping that value to themselves.
I would also argue that they don't create the value themselves, but their workers do.
Just like that joke: a worker is admiring the boss's Ferrari, and the boss tells him "if you continue working hard, next year I'll have 2"
Yes these numbers are peanuts compared to the Rothschilds and Saudis of the world. But the question was about self-made billionaires, which I believe everyone on that list is.
This is a breach of the guidelines (“please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community”), but it is also inaccurate. Most regular participants on HN are employees, not wannabe billionaires.
> Most regular participants on HN are employees, not wannabe billionaires.
You can be both and it would be interesting to see the breakdown of aspirations.
Certainly as the tide of public opinion has turned hard against tech and tech billionaires in the last 5 years, the dominant demographic on HN seems less and less aware of how out-of-touch they are with public opinion at large.
I read the comments here all day and it's pretty clear to me that overall opinion is weighted fairly strongly against tech billionaires and big tech company leaders on HN, as much or even more than it is among the broader population.
If you have a recent discussion thread or subthread that demonstrates that the “dominant demographic on HN seems less and less aware of how out-of-touch they are with public opinion”, I'd be interested to know about it so I can get an understanding of what you mean.
I suspect it's an assumption based on stereotypes about what kind of people would be interested in a Silicon Valley-based tech-focused discussion forum, but if it was ever accurate, and perhaps it was in the early days of YC/HN, it's not that way any more.
> I read the comments here all day and it's pretty clear to me that overall opinion is weighted fairly strongly against tech billionaires and big tech company leaders on HN, as much or even more than it is among the broader population.
I think you're out of touch with public opinion outside of your bubble.
> If you have a recent discussion thread or subthread that demonstrates that the "dominant demographic on HN seems less and less aware of how out-of-touch they are with public opinion", I'd be interested to know about it so I can get an understanding of what you mean.
This thread is a perfect example. While there is debate about the role and morality of billionaires, offline this phase has passed and now people are talking about how to overturn the economic order and the resulting impacts on billionaires, to put it politely.
> I suspect it's an assumption based on stereotypes about what kind of people would be interested in a Silicon Valley-based tech-focused discussion forum, but if it was ever accurate, and perhaps it was in the early days of YC/HN, it's not that way any more.
I suspect you are insulated demographically if you believe that's the case. I think many/most people's opinions of how to solve extreme wealth inequality would be banned here.
Please don't make assumptions like that. I don't live in Silicon Valley or even the USA. Almost none of the people I associate with socially or in my family work in tech. Much of the work I've done in the past decade has been with farmers. Most people I know are concerned about the influence of the big tech companies and emerging technologies on society and about wealth inequality, as am I.
> I think many/most people's opinions of how to solve extreme wealth inequality would be banned here.
Nothing is banned here if it's expressed in a way that is within the guidelines. I gather what you're getting at is that outside the bubbles that you think I (and the stereotypical HN user) inhabit, there's more of a push to, as you put it "overturn the economic order". I see plenty of support for that on HN too, and nobody gets banned for saying it. But perhaps it doesn't get much visibility, because "overturning the economic order" is not really a new idea. The thing we don't see enough of are workable new ideas on how to build an economic system that gets the best outcomes for society and avoids the pitfalls that have befallen all the economic systems that have come before.
Which brings us back to the beginning of this discussion: the reason comments like that get downvoted is not because "everyone spending time here is a one-off genius, superior to others that deserves to be a billionaire", it's because comments like that are repetitive, generic tangents that stir up indignation but don't raise anything interesting or new to discuss.
I would say billionaires create value just like any other entrepreneur, but billionaires take their profitability to the extreme. So in that sense, I agree they start to lean over to exploitation.
It's up to political structures and laws to keep billionaires under control.
Since wealth naturally accumulates to those who already have wealth and power, I would say it's a natural process. Look at history and how many elites had huge power and wealth. Just compare the richest man now, Musk, with Augustus Caesar, Genghis Khan, etc... . Musk is a nobody.
It's not up to the billionaires to keep themselves under control, it's up to us to create political structures to keep it under control. Which we are already doing (some countries better than others), and we could still improve.
It is natural. Unfairness is the basis of civilization.
In order to mobilize a group of humans for the common good they must be artificially incentivized to do it as the tragedy of the commons usually prevents people from doing these things collectively. Look up the tragedy of the commons.
But in order for a group of humans to be incentivized like that there must exist an authority with enough wealth to incentivize humans to work collectively like that. That means one authority needs to get unfairly rich. And additionally there must be incentive itself for such an authority to conduct that action in itself. So basically there must be some unfair distribution of wealth for any of this to happen AND there must exist strategies that can be exploited for someone to gain that wealth.
I’m not making this shit up. Literally in anthropology one of the theories about why certain places developed into advanced civilizations or not literally relied on whether or not the currency of the habitat could be used to accumulate wealth. For example fruits in Hawaii didn’t last long enough for someone to become a billionaire but grain in Europe does.
This is very "theory X" - the theory that people only work or do anything if someone in authority forces them to.
The other theory, "Theory Y" says that people work because that's what people do, and the function of authority is more about guidance and removal of blockages.
I'm a Theory Y believer, and believe that people work together to improve their lives without needing an authority or any compulsion. I believe that the incentive for people to work together for the common good, is the common good. That alone is enough incentive. I believe that authority tends to enrich itself and work against the common good. Less authority is better.
You're saying this because you actually don't understand a huge part of what I'm talking about: The tragedy of the commons. You didn't look it up, so your answer here is completely mistaken. MY entire ARGUMENT is based on that, and that is EXACTLY what theory Y is. It is the negative consequence of theory Y. You need to understand my argument before responding. Perhaps it's my fault for expecting most people to know what the tragedy of the commons is:
The tragedy of the commons is a paradox in which individually rational behavior leads to a collectively irrational and destructive outcome. It is not a story about bad people doing bad things. It is a story about good people doing exactly what makes sense—and still destroying something vital in the process.
Imagine a shared resource: a pasture open to all local herders. Each herder faces a choice:
1. Add another animal and gain the full benefit of that animal’s growth.
2. The cost? Slightly more wear on the pasture, but that cost is shared by everyone.
Rational choice says: add another animal. You gain, others share the cost.
But now every herder thinks this way. They all add more animals.
Soon, the pasture is overgrazed. The grass dies. The system collapses.
Everyone loses—including the ones who were just “doing what made sense.”
Let’s be crystal clear:
1. Individually: Adding another animal is logical. The gain is personal.
2. Collectively: If everyone does it, the shared resource is destroyed.
3. Result: Rational behavior by all leads to a guaranteed catastrophe.
This is not about greed or malice. It’s about structure.
It’s a situation where doing the right thing for yourself creates the wrong outcome for everyone.
The tragedy of the commons is not a flaw in people. It is a flaw in unregulated systems.
It is inescapable unless external mechanisms change the incentives.
And that is what makes it truly tragic: it unfolds from reason itself.
That external MECHANISM is what I mean by AUTHORITY. You need some law to control it. The tragedy of the commons is the reason to almost all the environmental problems we face on earth today. Overfishing, global warming, pollution. Why do you drive a car when you know it harms the earth? What exactly is being DONE to make it so you don't harm the earth. Is it your individual choice, or are people in positions of AUTHORITY pushing for it and trying to save the earth by changing the law and changing the underlying infrastructure. I assure you, if authority wasn't part of the equation there's no hope of stopping global warming.
You and I are exactly talking about theory Y.
Now. That being said. What happens when you let theory Y run rampant? That's pre-civilization anarchy. Hunter-Gatherer groups because of: No authority. Make sense? I mean think about it. What group in all of human civilization has Zero authority? Hunter-Gather groups. Groups that were NEVER part of civilization in the first place.
If you have authority you can start controlling people and making people build things that kick start civilization. Canals, public works, all things that they wouldn't build on their own because of the tragedy of the commons.
This isn't even a personal opinion I'm talking about here. This is academic opinion. People who study these things say what I'm saying and all I'm doing is regurgitating it. But, of course arm chair expert marcus_holmes knows best and can trump all of academia with theory Y.
I wrote out a whole response but decided not to bother replying to this post. I'm not an armchair expert and this kind of ad-hominem bullshit is not worth wasting my time on.
Your previous response and this one was just garbage. Just flippantly dismissed all of what I wrote and came up with a response that showed you wrote it without even understanding half of what I’m talking about. Additionally saying I’m just randomly applying a theory out of some arbitrary choice is just offensive. Did I not say this is academia? This is the study of anthropology? Don’t play this as if you have some moral high ground when your response was rude.
I’m not interested in your reply because I think it’s dishonest. You clearly didn’t know what was going on and now you’re just trying to defend a position. You’re not charitably exploring a concept or idea.
Has it occurred to you that the narrative you're repeating here is awfully convenient for the elite? Don't question their wealth - don't you know civilization itself depends on it!
> I’m not making this shit up. Literally in anthropology one of the theories
It's a theory, yes. And there's another theory which says that's all BS invented by the ruling classes over time - the church and kings back in the day, the billionaires these days - to justify their otherwise quite unjustifiable positions, cloak them in mumbo-jumbo about natural law or what not, with the goal of discouraging questioning of the status quo.
The theory I'm regurgitating is from academia. The opposite of wealth.
I hate billionaires. I think it's unfair. But I'm also scientific. That means if unfair and unequal distribution of wealth is what resulted in civilization we need to admit it.
But that doesn't mean we need to worship billionaires. Civilization is built off of blood and corruption. That doesn't make the blood and corruption justified.
If you want to deal with wealth inequality then why don't we just fight for communism? Communism is the ideal theory for fair wealth distribution. But what happens when we go for the ideal? Reality hits. Communism works in theory BUT not in reality. It's an idealist fantasy concept.
The big question here is that how do we meet our ideals WHILE NOT ignoring REALITY. Like ok, so a billionaire loves what I'm saying. I don't give a shit. To hell with him. We need to attack problems with the truth. Not some fantasy witch hunt bs trying to build a utopia that isn't inline with reality.
So maybe something in between works right? Not communism, you need a bit of inequality. But maybe not too much. What system like that has worked? Do we have examples? I mean Elon is a billionaire ass hole, that much is true, but the allowance of the existence of such billionaire ass holes in the United States has also allowed the existence of rocket catching technology never seen before by the likes of mankind. What's the tradeoff? Do we know? Are we examining the full reality of it? Maybe if we taxed billionaires like crazy and reduced them to millionaires... maybe the rocket catching technology would've still existed... Do we know? No. We don't But let's not blind ourselves to reality before we know.
One thing is for sure: wealth inequality is RESPONSIBLE for civilization. Are you rational enough to be impartial about this or are you so against wealth inequality that you can't even look at the good parts of it.
Billionaires are the definition of unfairness. And therefore they are natural.
Only From the perspective of civilization, of course, which is only a small fraction of human existence.
From the perspective humanity overall, not only are billionaires unnatural, but civilization in itself is unnatural. Hence all the declining birth rates we see today.
You’re sort of confused. The person I’m responding to claimed it wasn’t natural. He came up with the category. So take your illogical argument up with him.
Show me one billionaires in nature beside mankind. Billionaires now and then are artificially created by the systems mankind creates.
They are an anomaly
You came up with the definition part, and dictionaries show definitions.
Billionaires are an extreme example of unfairness not the definition.
Otherwise most unfair things would be unfair at all compared to the unfairness of billionaires.
History is full of people with extreme wealth and power. I would say our current political structures are keeping them somewhat under control.
Edit: So in that sense, I'm also on the side that billionaires are created naturally. When you already have a lot of wealth, the odds are in your favor to create even more wealth. So if you would just keep the system running without much interference, wealth will naturally accumulate to those who already have a lot. Therefore, we need political structures to keep that under control.
"Technically, probably the hardest thing was trying to film bottom trawling because it's never been filmed before and we didn't know if it was possible. You have to film the wonder but you also have to film the destruction. Capturing that was absolutely essential and it took a lot of research to find some scientists planning bottom trawling experiments who decided that adding cameras would help their research and also help to share it with the world."
I watched this film last night, and it was stunning and horrifying all at once. It really brings home the impact of industrial-scale trawling on the marine environment. It's literally like bulldozing a garden to harvest the fruit.
Also taking the action of starting to organise some collective action is a good thing. But don't continue eating fish until everyone else agrees not to, because that becomes self-defeating.
That is a complete paradox because you not only cannot have collective organized action without individual ones but the previous is entirely composed of the latter.
>For rainbow trout, an estimated 10 (1.9–21.7) minutes of moderate to extreme pain (Hurtful, Disabling and Excruciating pain combined) are endured by each trout due to air asphyxia (Fig. 1).
and that's why things like ikejime are needed. It instantly kills the fish and destroys its nervous system in the same way we do for cattle. It's absolutely unbelievable that it is not a common practice. And it also extends the quality of the fish and the duration for conservation.
I am a freshwater fisherman myself, and I do it on any fish I intend to keep, and release them very quickly otherwise.
Be aware of pharma propaganda that for sure support any narrations that would make benefit for them, like making any kind of natural sources good for humans as threat, like sunshine or.. Fishes?
That part of the film is horrifying. Like genuinely, sick-to-the-stomach horrifying. I can't believe that anyone would willingly cause that much destruction.
> I can't believe that anyone would willingly cause that much destruction.
I interact with fishermen as part of a marine SAR role and there's a significant subset who treat the sea with contempt. Not usual to see them dump rubbish overboard in littoral areas, flicking cigarettes butts into the sea, etc.
what, how is it allowed in marine protected areas? I mean, what are they protected from if not BT?
I think the EU planned to ban bottom trawling completely by 2030 and that got nowhere, but it still upholds a ban on bottom trawling in marine protected areas[0][1], in addition to national ruling (e.g. Italy bans it near the coast and in shallow waters).
People did indeed used to set fire to forests to get a few deer - you’d use the flames to drive them to a cliff edge, or to a river, where you would either let gravity do the work, or just pick off the panicked mass with spears or rocks.
"Bottom trawling in seas globally emits as much carbon as aviation, and in Europe costs society up to €11 billion annually while governments subsidize it with €1·3 billion."
> A marine protected area (MPA) is a protected area of the world's seas, oceans, estuaries or in the US, the Great Lakes. These marine areas can come in many forms ranging from wildlife refuges to research facilities. MPAs restrict human activity for a conservation purpose, typically to protect natural or cultural resources. Such marine resources are protected by local, state, territorial, native, regional, national, or international authorities and differ substantially among and between nations. This variation includes different limitations on development, fishing practices, fishing seasons and catch limits, moorings and bans on removing or disrupting marine life. MPAs can provide economic benefits by supporting the fishing industry through the revival of fish stocks, as well as job creation and other market benefits via ecotourism. The value of MPA to mobile species is unknown.
I interpreted his "optimism that we will fix this" as the continuation of his lifelong practice of science communication in service of ecosystem preservation. I believe he grasps that people are far more motivated by having a positive vision to run towards than by a negative one to flee.
In that, I think he's being incredibly strategic with his voice in what he knows are his final years. He could leave us saying "everything is fucked, you absolute idiots", but what is there for us to do then besides lie down in the mud?
Instead he's signing off with "We have come so far, I wish I could witness the spectacular recovery you're all about to usher into being!"
"Besides, there is nothing wrong with the planet, nothing wrong with the planet. The planet is fine; the people are fucked! Difference! The planet is fine! Compared to the people, The planet is doing great: been here four and a half billion years! Do you ever think about the arithmetic? The planet has been here four and a half billion years. We’ve been here what? 100,000? Maybe 200,000? And we’ve only been engaged in heavy industry for a little over 200 years. 200 years versus four and a half billion. And we have the conceit to think that somehow, we’re a threat?"
If we wanted to, we could set back biodiversity 50 million years, in the sense that it would take 50 million years to get back animals as diverse as there are today.
Knowing that earth has 200 million good years left, yes we are pretty damn big threat.
A large enough object coming close enough to our planet could also do that.
Humans have and will continue to destroy lots of living and non-living material. Unless some huge global awareness or higher sentience will reduce that immensly very quickly, humanity as we know it, will end on this planet. With the rising CO2 levels i doubt our intelligence will get any better.
And the planet will quietly do its dance around its star..
My theory: The forces of Line Must Go Up are going to keep winning. Mitigating the impact of climate change will be part of Line Goes Up. Whether it will be cheaper or more expensive than avoiding it in the first place will remain to be seen (but won't really matter in the end), but we will be facing whatever impacts we will be facing, and we will face them, and we will deal with them.
If you have any doubt, look at how the Netherlands dealt with storm surge.
For the Netherlands, the entity that pays the cost is the same that benefits from preparedness. For climate change, the plastic doohickey plant in misc country who would have to pay the cost of losing their asset, is entirely divorced from the entities who will benefit from CO2 reduction: everyone in the world. It's a prisoner's dilemma played at every level from the individual to the corporation to the region, and country. I'm not optimistic about our ability to coordinate the entire species to all suddenly start spending a bunch of money on each other instead of our own groups. Especially when basically every existing business in the world will fight it tooth and nail. We got lucky with solar that its naturally cheaper than coal power, but there's no law that has to be the case with anything else.
Exactly, we cannot expect to bring individual responsibility to a global problem. There will always be individual entities not puling their weight.
The train of climate agreements and collective effort has left the station, the climate accords were aiming for under 1,5C and we are very much into 2,5-3C territory.
I'm not talking about CO2 reduction, I'm talking about living with the result that the emissions have caused. And for that, the entity that pays the cost and benefits will again be the same.
> I'm not optimistic about our ability to coordinate the entire species to all suddenly start spending a bunch of money on each other instead of our own groups
The opposite needs to happen. Less consumption needed, overall. Less spending. It kind of already is, via lower and lower total fertility rates. Might not be declining quickly enough to cause sufficient decline in consumption.
Entire companies have been wrecked by "line must go up" thinking. I see no reason why it should preserve the planet when it can't even preserve its own livelihood.
Never underestimate the complete destructive nihilism some are willing to engage just to earn some status and/or dollars. The feedback mechanism from climate change is far too slow. This kind of "ah it'll be grand like" attitude is completely naïve.
Relying on market forces to mitigate/address the impact of climate change will require us to collectively impose actual market pressure (i.e. regulation, constraints) to do so. Not seeing much sign of that among the major contributors of emissions right at the moment.
That's because very few people are being meaningfully affected right now. For most, climate change exists as an abstract idea and not an immediate, physical problem. It doesn't help that claims like those made by Al Gore about the polar ice caps being gone by 2016 turned out to be untrue.
I wouldn't expect society to transform itself if told that an asteroid may impact Earth in eighty years, for similar reasons.
Heck, faced with a rapidly spreading virus that can kill in 2 weeks (for the general public at a very low percentage, for our elderly neighbors a lot higher), a large majority of humans turned to angry denials and conspiracy theories to justify to themselves that "it's not that dangerous!".
When somebody says something isn't that dangerous it always comes with an unstated post-text of 'for an average person of average health.' Each year the flu kills hundreds of thousands of people. As the population ages, and thus has more individuals in senescence where your body is basically just breaking down, that will increase into the millions. But yet it's still not unreasonable to say that the flu isn't that dangerous.
And you might think I'm being disingenuous with these facts and perhaps e.g. all those deaths from the flu are just in Africa or wherever. Whereas in reality it's the exact opposite! Places like the US have a substantially higher than average mortality rate from the flu. Globally deaths are around 700k and in the US it's around 50k. We have 4% of the world's population, but 7% of the world's flu deaths. The reason is because it's not about healthcare, vaccines, or whatever else. It's about the amount of people in senescence.
At a certain age, and the subsequent state of health it entails, lots of things that indeed 'aren't that dangerous' turn into life-ending threats. For some contrast that most aren't aware of, the average age of mortality of the Spanish Flu was 28 - which made it a completely terrifying freak outlier in terms of viruses, which generally affect the very young and very old most severely. Nobody would be saying that the Spanish Flu is not that dangerous in modern times.
Well, maybe search for the keyword "long COVID" and see how it has caused a lot of suffering even among young and otherwise healthy individuals.
Also, people seem to forget that exponentials go up very fast, so an "average person of average health" would be very selfish to not make the necessary precautions to limit the spread of the virus as much as feasible.
You vaccinate yourself to protect yourself. People who are vaccinated for a disease can and do spread said disease. It's this way for literally everything. The claims that you cannot spread COVID if you're vaccinated were simply false. Vaccination can have a mitigating effect of course, but we were never going to be able to eliminate COVID with something like herd immunity.
The only virus completely eliminated by vaccines is small pox, and that was largely because of a number of ideal factors. The top two are probably that that no animals carried smallpox, only humans. And the second is that infection or vaccination provided lifetime immunity of effectively 100%. This dramatically reduced its potential for mutation and meant that getting rid of it in humans would get rid of it - period.
Coronaviruses, by contrast, are transmissible between humans and animals. This means even if you fully eliminated it in humans, it could, and probably would, come back. This is why flus are basically impossible to get rid of. If you believe CDC numbers then US flu deaths in 2020 were essentially 0, yet now it's back like nothing ever happened. Even the Spanish Flu is still with us as a variant of the common flu. But fortunately most viruses trend towards less lethal mutations over time. Probably natural selection in play - killing your host is not a great path to survival and reproduction.
As for long COVID. I'd rather defer that conversation for a few years. Research on exactly what it is and exactly what causes it is ongoing, and so debating it at this point is just going to be speculation.
The reality is that COVID caused lockdowns never had anything to do with the lethality rate. It had everything to do with hospital pressure - there's a limited number of ICU beds and COVID was the annoying combination of spreading easiliy and if it went bad, you'd occupy a bed in the ICU since you needed very active monitoring. If ICU capacity is exceeded, you get into the really ugly business of having to triage who can get necessary first aid. Governments and hospitals both would really do anything else than have to decide whether or not you leave the weak and elderly to die of diseases because you lack the space to handle them. (Not to mention the personnel shortage; a lot of other medical procedures got delayed because of ICU pressure. Even if they did have enough beds, that wouldn't necessarily translate to enough people to care for patients, and you'd end up having to triage non-COVID procedures too.)
That is what caused the lockdowns. It's also why after the first two vaccine waves, the pressure on hospitals was heavily relieved, leading to most countries lifting their lockdowns. Even just being vaccinated once gives you enough immunity against COVID to usually not need a hospital visit. The disadvantages of a lockdown even on just a healthcare level outweigh the benefits when you don't have a dangerous superspreader on your hands.
Mental problems were up massively during the lockdown period since humans are social creatures; physically there also were major spikes in seasonal diseases for the next year since they never stopped evolving, while we stopped getting them, meaning our bodies didn't have the time to adapt to them... So we got all the seasonal diseases thrown at us at once.
Market pressure is required to avoid climate change by keeping companies from externalizing climate impacts.
Market pressure is not required for a city to decide that having the city flooded is bad, and start a tender for building a sea wall. This makes the line go up for the sea wall companies.
- “Yes, the patient might die, but we’re confident that given enough resources, we’ll bring him back to life.”
Well, to be fair, it’s basically what’s happening with LLMs atm. So, maybe feathering up Mammon and aiming for the sun will be the tech industry’s most lasting legacy.
I agree. I reflect on this from time to time when I consider that my mom, having died a few years back, would not be enjoying much of anything going on in the world right now. (Further, that she was born at the close of WWII in the U.S., she may have been lucky enough to have lived in the best part of recent history here.)
“No one cares about the bomb that didn’t go off.” - Tenet
Preventing “bombs” from going off is not rewarded. And indeed the Line Must Go Up Crowd is reliant upon someone else fixing the problem while they get theirs. But when the majority think that way we’re f**ed.
It’s a good comparison especially in the context of mutually assured destruction, whether administered directly or indirectly, the same grim pragmatic political truth of wedge issues remains:
If we keep at it like we have been maybe there's light at the end of the tunnel for Earth, ecologically. In say 100k or 1M years, after we're long gone and things have started to repair themselves.
As I am 48, I can't help but feel "old", especially given the spaces I find myself (ie, a continually changing industry, with the most active feeling like they're much younger). I really appreciate the perspective of someone who is still "active" and who spent more time living before I was born than I have since.
The sad part of our human existence is that none of us ever live to see how our story ends. We "spawn" at a random point in time and "vanish" at another. Ageing is being worked on vigorously and while we did change our lifespan from 40 years to 80 years of existence thanks to modern science, in order for us to truly comprehend changes on a universal scale, average human lifespan would need to be 50000 years long. That way you'll see species evolve, continents move, quasars explode, maybe even Betelguese explode?
Yes we die, the body goes. But if there is a further element to the experience - and near death experiences, out of body experience suggest there is - we perhaps do see how the story ends. In fact, this experience might not be the real 'story', just an opportunity of some sort to learn, grow. The point is that although many assume material reality to be all there is, it might not actually be the case.
I can understand there is an inherit sadness in not knowing the outcome of one's life's work, but as you say none of use ever see how it ends. In terms of our natural environment humankind has only ever observed in person, let alone recorded, what amounts to the blink of an eye.
Someone might. I think we stand a reasonable chance of self-selecting for extinction in the next few centuries. It's not the end of the story, but it's the end of our story. Someone will be the one who shuts off the lights on the way out.
Our generations of the last 10,000 years are seeing how the story decays.
When the food supply was abundant, families would jog every day doing BBQ every night hunting down mammoths
We have become red in tooth and claw. At the summit of civilisation, we are alienated with our screens, licking frozen TV dinners in our shared flat while we work hard to support our landlords
As long as we have surviving records people have been saying the past was golden and the present is decay with a long list of the present ills which are the downfall of the glorious past. It's a boring take and has been incorrect for thousands of years and will continue to be. Arguments about how some list of things haven't been on a monotonic increase during the last generation do not refute this.
One of the things I like most about David Attenborough is it never seems like he's reading a script. It feels like he's talking about something he knows about (which he does).
When it comes to the acting or performing worlds, is there a phrase describing this?
None of us see the end of the story but I do fear that the story could change when we inevitably lose a passionate advocate in Sir David whose credibility on this issue has been unchallengeable.
I take some comfort from the younger generations who are now growing up with a much greater awareness of the natural environment and the damage we humans can do to it and a much lower tolerance for political sophistry and capitalist all-about-the-money "ethics". With the selfishness of politics in much of the world today I think things will probably get worse before they get better. I still hope that we won't cross any points of no return as those younger people gain influence and those of older generations who are not always as enlightened and concerned as Sir David also leave us.
I think those younger generations will have better chances if there is a highly visible advocate for protecting the natural world for ordinary people to coalesce around. I don't know who the next David Attenborough could be. Perhaps one of his final gifts to humanity can be helping to find and establish the profile(s) of natural successor(s) who can carry on his work.
Here's the good news: we've done basically nothing about climate change even with him, so losing such an esteemed spokesman won't actually make it worse.
Admittedly that's only "good" in the sense that things are maximally bad and cannot get worse. But we might as well fake a smile because that's all we're going to get. I'd say we won't act until it's too late, but it is already too late.
There is no single "point of no return". We have obviously passed the point where bad consequences can be avoided, but every extra ton of CO2 and methane makes things a bit worse.
I worry that the sentiment of "we have passed the point of no return" induces an impotent apathy in people, when the truth is that every step in the right direction makes our future a little bit less dire.
Folks are worried about phase change, the flip from one set of patterns to a different set of patters. That is much different than a linear "every ton makes things a bit worse".
There is going to be big fundamental change, but people need to stop thinking about it like "the sky is falling" and instead ask "how are we going to adapt?"
People are going to have to move to where water is available, to where heat is less of a problem, and large scale infrastructure is going to change. A lot of struggle is going to go along with that change but starting to plan now and predict where is going to be habitable and how to prepare for that is what people should be doing instead of the shame and doom.
The narrative climax to the human story around climate change has yet to happen. Assuming we continue on the current trajectory, expect riots and wars over food and clean water, possibly more.
https://archive.md/CFCFn
I watched David Attenborough's recent film 'Ocean' on a big screen. The footage of bottom trawling was really shocking. I don't understand how that has been allowed to continue in UK coastal waters, let alone to be subsidised in marine protected areas. Madness. It's like napalming a forest to get a few deer. Thankfully things may be changing:
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/government-proposes-to-ex...
Don't know how much of that was due to the film.
Greenpeace used to drop boulders into the ocean to prevent bottom trawling circa 2021-2022. Unsure if they still do. Fairly straightforward to solve for if you’re willing to drop chunks of rock (granite, non reactive) or concrete in the ocean at the right spots.
Bans are nice, destructive force against adversaries works better though. Hard to take the selfish out of the human, so you have to engineer systems accordingly.
https://www.greenpeace.org.uk/news/live-greenpeace-boulders-...
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-the-marin...
You had this nice story about unusual "boulders" to prevent trawling.
https://www.wired.com/story/underwater-sculptures-stopping-t...
The guy behind this (Paolo Fanciulli) is a hero.
> Bans are nice, destructive force against adversaries works better though.
The ocean is large, and the effort required to cover significant areas in boulders is ridiculously high.
Just the possibility of boulders that might destroy your very expensive dredge might be enough.
Won’t they be visible on sonar?
Not sure. But even if they were, do you want to have to survey the path of your dredge before every trawl?
I’d assume it’s pretty standard practice already. Your average Florida Man with a boat has a sonar showing the surface before dropping anchor or throwing fishing line… surely industrial fishing groups would know the area before they start exploiting it. But maybe that’s hoping too much!
I think it would be a great PR idea for a billionaire to buy a few old ships and use them to drop rocks over the most popular/vulnerable fishing grounds. What happened to rich people who were all not evil?
New money outcompeted old money in the economic ecosystem and new money doesn't have the same historical fear of the proletarian guillotine.
Also:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Brian_Thompson
...yet.
Ray Dalio is involved with Ocean research and education: https://www.daliophilanthropies.org/ocean/
The truth is that only the evil remain ultra-rich as the rest use their money in ways that depletes there fortunes.
> What happened to rich people who were all not evil?
Public opinion drove them crazy and turned them evil anyways.
In a terminally capitalistic age (or whatever we should call the last 30 years, we are actually "capitalistic" the same way the URSS was "communist" in the '80s) being rich and being ethical are mutually exclusive.
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Not sure why you're being downvoted, because you're absolutely right.
The current top-10 billionaires on Forbes' list all got rich by creating value, though some like Larry Ellison certainly did both.
I don't agree. They didn't get rich by creating value. They might have created value, but they got rich by keeping that value to themselves.
I would also argue that they don't create the value themselves, but their workers do. Just like that joke: a worker is admiring the boss's Ferrari, and the boss tells him "if you continue working hard, next year I'll have 2"
I also create value but am not as rich. Maybe they extracted value from society by unethical means to acquire that much of it?
Remember Forbes list is a marketing device
Do not treat it like the real list of world's richest people
Yes these numbers are peanuts compared to the Rothschilds and Saudis of the world. But the question was about self-made billionaires, which I believe everyone on that list is.
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This is a breach of the guidelines (“please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community”), but it is also inaccurate. Most regular participants on HN are employees, not wannabe billionaires.
> Most regular participants on HN are employees, not wannabe billionaires.
You can be both and it would be interesting to see the breakdown of aspirations.
Certainly as the tide of public opinion has turned hard against tech and tech billionaires in the last 5 years, the dominant demographic on HN seems less and less aware of how out-of-touch they are with public opinion at large.
I read the comments here all day and it's pretty clear to me that overall opinion is weighted fairly strongly against tech billionaires and big tech company leaders on HN, as much or even more than it is among the broader population.
If you have a recent discussion thread or subthread that demonstrates that the “dominant demographic on HN seems less and less aware of how out-of-touch they are with public opinion”, I'd be interested to know about it so I can get an understanding of what you mean.
I suspect it's an assumption based on stereotypes about what kind of people would be interested in a Silicon Valley-based tech-focused discussion forum, but if it was ever accurate, and perhaps it was in the early days of YC/HN, it's not that way any more.
> I read the comments here all day and it's pretty clear to me that overall opinion is weighted fairly strongly against tech billionaires and big tech company leaders on HN, as much or even more than it is among the broader population.
I think you're out of touch with public opinion outside of your bubble.
> If you have a recent discussion thread or subthread that demonstrates that the "dominant demographic on HN seems less and less aware of how out-of-touch they are with public opinion", I'd be interested to know about it so I can get an understanding of what you mean.
This thread is a perfect example. While there is debate about the role and morality of billionaires, offline this phase has passed and now people are talking about how to overturn the economic order and the resulting impacts on billionaires, to put it politely.
> I suspect it's an assumption based on stereotypes about what kind of people would be interested in a Silicon Valley-based tech-focused discussion forum, but if it was ever accurate, and perhaps it was in the early days of YC/HN, it's not that way any more.
I suspect you are insulated demographically if you believe that's the case. I think many/most people's opinions of how to solve extreme wealth inequality would be banned here.
Please don't make assumptions like that. I don't live in Silicon Valley or even the USA. Almost none of the people I associate with socially or in my family work in tech. Much of the work I've done in the past decade has been with farmers. Most people I know are concerned about the influence of the big tech companies and emerging technologies on society and about wealth inequality, as am I.
> I think many/most people's opinions of how to solve extreme wealth inequality would be banned here.
Nothing is banned here if it's expressed in a way that is within the guidelines. I gather what you're getting at is that outside the bubbles that you think I (and the stereotypical HN user) inhabit, there's more of a push to, as you put it "overturn the economic order". I see plenty of support for that on HN too, and nobody gets banned for saying it. But perhaps it doesn't get much visibility, because "overturning the economic order" is not really a new idea. The thing we don't see enough of are workable new ideas on how to build an economic system that gets the best outcomes for society and avoids the pitfalls that have befallen all the economic systems that have come before.
Which brings us back to the beginning of this discussion: the reason comments like that get downvoted is not because "everyone spending time here is a one-off genius, superior to others that deserves to be a billionaire", it's because comments like that are repetitive, generic tangents that stir up indignation but don't raise anything interesting or new to discuss.
I would say billionaires create value just like any other entrepreneur, but billionaires take their profitability to the extreme. So in that sense, I agree they start to lean over to exploitation.
It's up to political structures and laws to keep billionaires under control.
Since wealth naturally accumulates to those who already have wealth and power, I would say it's a natural process. Look at history and how many elites had huge power and wealth. Just compare the richest man now, Musk, with Augustus Caesar, Genghis Khan, etc... . Musk is a nobody.
It's not up to the billionaires to keep themselves under control, it's up to us to create political structures to keep it under control. Which we are already doing (some countries better than others), and we could still improve.
It is natural. Unfairness is the basis of civilization.
In order to mobilize a group of humans for the common good they must be artificially incentivized to do it as the tragedy of the commons usually prevents people from doing these things collectively. Look up the tragedy of the commons.
But in order for a group of humans to be incentivized like that there must exist an authority with enough wealth to incentivize humans to work collectively like that. That means one authority needs to get unfairly rich. And additionally there must be incentive itself for such an authority to conduct that action in itself. So basically there must be some unfair distribution of wealth for any of this to happen AND there must exist strategies that can be exploited for someone to gain that wealth.
I’m not making this shit up. Literally in anthropology one of the theories about why certain places developed into advanced civilizations or not literally relied on whether or not the currency of the habitat could be used to accumulate wealth. For example fruits in Hawaii didn’t last long enough for someone to become a billionaire but grain in Europe does.
This is very "theory X" - the theory that people only work or do anything if someone in authority forces them to.
The other theory, "Theory Y" says that people work because that's what people do, and the function of authority is more about guidance and removal of blockages.
I'm a Theory Y believer, and believe that people work together to improve their lives without needing an authority or any compulsion. I believe that the incentive for people to work together for the common good, is the common good. That alone is enough incentive. I believe that authority tends to enrich itself and work against the common good. Less authority is better.
You're saying this because you actually don't understand a huge part of what I'm talking about: The tragedy of the commons. You didn't look it up, so your answer here is completely mistaken. MY entire ARGUMENT is based on that, and that is EXACTLY what theory Y is. It is the negative consequence of theory Y. You need to understand my argument before responding. Perhaps it's my fault for expecting most people to know what the tragedy of the commons is:
The tragedy of the commons is a paradox in which individually rational behavior leads to a collectively irrational and destructive outcome. It is not a story about bad people doing bad things. It is a story about good people doing exactly what makes sense—and still destroying something vital in the process.
Imagine a shared resource: a pasture open to all local herders. Each herder faces a choice:
Rational choice says: add another animal. You gain, others share the cost.But now every herder thinks this way. They all add more animals. Soon, the pasture is overgrazed. The grass dies. The system collapses. Everyone loses—including the ones who were just “doing what made sense.”
Let’s be crystal clear:
This is not about greed or malice. It’s about structure. It’s a situation where doing the right thing for yourself creates the wrong outcome for everyone.The tragedy of the commons is not a flaw in people. It is a flaw in unregulated systems.
It is inescapable unless external mechanisms change the incentives. And that is what makes it truly tragic: it unfolds from reason itself.
That external MECHANISM is what I mean by AUTHORITY. You need some law to control it. The tragedy of the commons is the reason to almost all the environmental problems we face on earth today. Overfishing, global warming, pollution. Why do you drive a car when you know it harms the earth? What exactly is being DONE to make it so you don't harm the earth. Is it your individual choice, or are people in positions of AUTHORITY pushing for it and trying to save the earth by changing the law and changing the underlying infrastructure. I assure you, if authority wasn't part of the equation there's no hope of stopping global warming.
You and I are exactly talking about theory Y.
Now. That being said. What happens when you let theory Y run rampant? That's pre-civilization anarchy. Hunter-Gatherer groups because of: No authority. Make sense? I mean think about it. What group in all of human civilization has Zero authority? Hunter-Gather groups. Groups that were NEVER part of civilization in the first place.
If you have authority you can start controlling people and making people build things that kick start civilization. Canals, public works, all things that they wouldn't build on their own because of the tragedy of the commons.
This isn't even a personal opinion I'm talking about here. This is academic opinion. People who study these things say what I'm saying and all I'm doing is regurgitating it. But, of course arm chair expert marcus_holmes knows best and can trump all of academia with theory Y.
I wrote out a whole response but decided not to bother replying to this post. I'm not an armchair expert and this kind of ad-hominem bullshit is not worth wasting my time on.
Your previous response and this one was just garbage. Just flippantly dismissed all of what I wrote and came up with a response that showed you wrote it without even understanding half of what I’m talking about. Additionally saying I’m just randomly applying a theory out of some arbitrary choice is just offensive. Did I not say this is academia? This is the study of anthropology? Don’t play this as if you have some moral high ground when your response was rude.
I’m not interested in your reply because I think it’s dishonest. You clearly didn’t know what was going on and now you’re just trying to defend a position. You’re not charitably exploring a concept or idea.
some of us understand that tragedy of the commons situations are almost exclusively caused by governments themselves.
more authority doesn't help in those situations, it is the root of the problem.
Governments cause it? Why don’t you read the paper and the actual theory before making up shit.
Has it occurred to you that the narrative you're repeating here is awfully convenient for the elite? Don't question their wealth - don't you know civilization itself depends on it!
> I’m not making this shit up. Literally in anthropology one of the theories
It's a theory, yes. And there's another theory which says that's all BS invented by the ruling classes over time - the church and kings back in the day, the billionaires these days - to justify their otherwise quite unjustifiable positions, cloak them in mumbo-jumbo about natural law or what not, with the goal of discouraging questioning of the status quo.
The theory I'm regurgitating is from academia. The opposite of wealth.
I hate billionaires. I think it's unfair. But I'm also scientific. That means if unfair and unequal distribution of wealth is what resulted in civilization we need to admit it.
But that doesn't mean we need to worship billionaires. Civilization is built off of blood and corruption. That doesn't make the blood and corruption justified.
If you want to deal with wealth inequality then why don't we just fight for communism? Communism is the ideal theory for fair wealth distribution. But what happens when we go for the ideal? Reality hits. Communism works in theory BUT not in reality. It's an idealist fantasy concept.
The big question here is that how do we meet our ideals WHILE NOT ignoring REALITY. Like ok, so a billionaire loves what I'm saying. I don't give a shit. To hell with him. We need to attack problems with the truth. Not some fantasy witch hunt bs trying to build a utopia that isn't inline with reality.
So maybe something in between works right? Not communism, you need a bit of inequality. But maybe not too much. What system like that has worked? Do we have examples? I mean Elon is a billionaire ass hole, that much is true, but the allowance of the existence of such billionaire ass holes in the United States has also allowed the existence of rocket catching technology never seen before by the likes of mankind. What's the tradeoff? Do we know? Are we examining the full reality of it? Maybe if we taxed billionaires like crazy and reduced them to millionaires... maybe the rocket catching technology would've still existed... Do we know? No. We don't But let's not blind ourselves to reality before we know.
One thing is for sure: wealth inequality is RESPONSIBLE for civilization. Are you rational enough to be impartial about this or are you so against wealth inequality that you can't even look at the good parts of it.
Unfairness maybe be natural but billionaires are artificial.
Billionaires are the definition of unfairness. And therefore they are natural.
Only From the perspective of civilization, of course, which is only a small fraction of human existence.
From the perspective humanity overall, not only are billionaires unnatural, but civilization in itself is unnatural. Hence all the declining birth rates we see today.
Sounds like something you just made up. Kind of moot to argue what is natural and what isn’t.
Unfairness or billionaires might be natural or not - that doesn’t mean we have to accept their existence.
You know what else is natural? To die at 30 from dysentery or a broken leg.
Natural is a nonsense category
You’re sort of confused. The person I’m responding to claimed it wasn’t natural. He came up with the category. So take your illogical argument up with him.
https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/unfairness
No mention of billionaires.
Show me one billionaires in nature beside mankind. Billionaires now and then are artificially created by the systems mankind creates. They are an anomaly
This is just garbage. Not going to respond further to this.
You could just say you have no arguments
I do but your citation of the dictionary is fucking obviously not a legit argument so I won’t bother with you.
You came up with the definition part, and dictionaries show definitions.
Billionaires are an extreme example of unfairness not the definition. Otherwise most unfair things would be unfair at all compared to the unfairness of billionaires.
History is full of people with extreme wealth and power. I would say our current political structures are keeping them somewhat under control.
Edit: So in that sense, I'm also on the side that billionaires are created naturally. When you already have a lot of wealth, the odds are in your favor to create even more wealth. So if you would just keep the system running without much interference, wealth will naturally accumulate to those who already have a lot. Therefore, we need political structures to keep that under control.
The relevant excerpt. [0]
[0] https://youtu.be/IzG9AwlypaY?feature=shared
Watch it in a cinema, to get the full effect.
There are some before and after scenes of the sea bed, which are pretty shocking as well.
I'm not sure how that got that footage. Surely fisherman would not want that to be seen?
Found this:
"Technically, probably the hardest thing was trying to film bottom trawling because it's never been filmed before and we didn't know if it was possible. You have to film the wonder but you also have to film the destruction. Capturing that was absolutely essential and it took a lot of research to find some scientists planning bottom trawling experiments who decided that adding cameras would help their research and also help to share it with the world."
At:
https://www.arksen.com/blogs/news/ocean-with-david-attenboro...
But watch it anyway. Trawling should be banned.
I watched this film last night, and it was stunning and horrifying all at once. It really brings home the impact of industrial-scale trawling on the marine environment. It's literally like bulldozing a garden to harvest the fruit.
It is like bulldozing a garden full of lots of different fruits and then only taking the apples above a certain size.
Stop eating fish. The fishing industry is destroying the oceans.
Individual actions won’t change the system, you need collective organised action
Be the change you want to see in the world.
You can only control your actions.
Also taking the action of starting to organise some collective action is a good thing. But don't continue eating fish until everyone else agrees not to, because that becomes self-defeating.
why not both, if the point for both is to reach the same goal?
That is a complete paradox because you not only cannot have collective organized action without individual ones but the previous is entirely composed of the latter.
Exactly. The tragedy of the commons makes it so that individual action of eating the fish is the most rational move.
Mobilizing people to act irrationally is challenging unless they are forced to do it by law.
Besides, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-04272-1#Sec3
>For rainbow trout, an estimated 10 (1.9–21.7) minutes of moderate to extreme pain (Hurtful, Disabling and Excruciating pain combined) are endured by each trout due to air asphyxia (Fig. 1).
and that's why things like ikejime are needed. It instantly kills the fish and destroys its nervous system in the same way we do for cattle. It's absolutely unbelievable that it is not a common practice. And it also extends the quality of the fish and the duration for conservation.
I am a freshwater fisherman myself, and I do it on any fish I intend to keep, and release them very quickly otherwise.
I like fishes. Fishes are healthy and main source of Omega-3 fatty acid for many.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega-3_fatty_acid
Be aware of pharma propaganda that for sure support any narrations that would make benefit for them, like making any kind of natural sources good for humans as threat, like sunshine or.. Fishes?
That part of the film is horrifying. Like genuinely, sick-to-the-stomach horrifying. I can't believe that anyone would willingly cause that much destruction.
> I can't believe that anyone would willingly cause that much destruction.
I interact with fishermen as part of a marine SAR role and there's a significant subset who treat the sea with contempt. Not usual to see them dump rubbish overboard in littoral areas, flicking cigarettes butts into the sea, etc.
what, how is it allowed in marine protected areas? I mean, what are they protected from if not BT?
I think the EU planned to ban bottom trawling completely by 2030 and that got nowhere, but it still upholds a ban on bottom trawling in marine protected areas[0][1], in addition to national ruling (e.g. Italy bans it near the coast and in shallow waters).
[0] https://www.bluemarinefoundation.com/2025/05/22/eu-court-uph...
[1] https://www.bairdmaritime.com/fishing/regulation-enforcement...
TIL: trolling != thrawling
People did indeed used to set fire to forests to get a few deer - you’d use the flames to drive them to a cliff edge, or to a river, where you would either let gravity do the work, or just pick off the panicked mass with spears or rocks.
Le plus ca change…
I guess you could get away with it when humans were nomadic and population density was low.
Seaspiracy is another eye opening documentary.
Seaspiracy (like Cowspiracy by the same author) is pretty full of factual errors on misrepresentations.
While the core ideas may be right, it's basically a propaganda piece.
'Seaspiracy' is a polemic with little attempt at balance or objectivity IMO. But I think it is still worth watching.
> subsidised in marine protected areas
What do you mean?
"Bottom trawling in seas globally emits as much carbon as aviation, and in Europe costs society up to €11 billion annually while governments subsidize it with €1·3 billion."
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5...
"A wealth of studies also show that bottom trawling generates significant amounts of CO2 emissions and is fuelled by government subsidies."
https://www.bluemarinefoundation.com/2025/05/07/thebottomlin...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_protected_area
> A marine protected area (MPA) is a protected area of the world's seas, oceans, estuaries or in the US, the Great Lakes. These marine areas can come in many forms ranging from wildlife refuges to research facilities. MPAs restrict human activity for a conservation purpose, typically to protect natural or cultural resources. Such marine resources are protected by local, state, territorial, native, regional, national, or international authorities and differ substantially among and between nations. This variation includes different limitations on development, fishing practices, fishing seasons and catch limits, moorings and bans on removing or disrupting marine life. MPAs can provide economic benefits by supporting the fishing industry through the revival of fish stocks, as well as job creation and other market benefits via ecotourism. The value of MPA to mobile species is unknown.
I think that not seeing how the story ends will be a blessing in disguise.
(I do not share his optimism that we fix this, the forces of Line Must Go Up are going to win... at least until we all rapidly lose)
I interpreted his "optimism that we will fix this" as the continuation of his lifelong practice of science communication in service of ecosystem preservation. I believe he grasps that people are far more motivated by having a positive vision to run towards than by a negative one to flee.
In that, I think he's being incredibly strategic with his voice in what he knows are his final years. He could leave us saying "everything is fucked, you absolute idiots", but what is there for us to do then besides lie down in the mud?
Instead he's signing off with "We have come so far, I wish I could witness the spectacular recovery you're all about to usher into being!"
Gentle parenting the apocalypse. What a legend.
"Besides, there is nothing wrong with the planet, nothing wrong with the planet. The planet is fine; the people are fucked! Difference! The planet is fine! Compared to the people, The planet is doing great: been here four and a half billion years! Do you ever think about the arithmetic? The planet has been here four and a half billion years. We’ve been here what? 100,000? Maybe 200,000? And we’ve only been engaged in heavy industry for a little over 200 years. 200 years versus four and a half billion. And we have the conceit to think that somehow, we’re a threat?"
-George Carlin
If we wanted to, we could set back biodiversity 50 million years, in the sense that it would take 50 million years to get back animals as diverse as there are today. Knowing that earth has 200 million good years left, yes we are pretty damn big threat.
A large enough object coming close enough to our planet could also do that.
Humans have and will continue to destroy lots of living and non-living material. Unless some huge global awareness or higher sentience will reduce that immensly very quickly, humanity as we know it, will end on this planet. With the rising CO2 levels i doubt our intelligence will get any better.
And the planet will quietly do its dance around its star..
My theory: The forces of Line Must Go Up are going to keep winning. Mitigating the impact of climate change will be part of Line Goes Up. Whether it will be cheaper or more expensive than avoiding it in the first place will remain to be seen (but won't really matter in the end), but we will be facing whatever impacts we will be facing, and we will face them, and we will deal with them.
If you have any doubt, look at how the Netherlands dealt with storm surge.
For the Netherlands, the entity that pays the cost is the same that benefits from preparedness. For climate change, the plastic doohickey plant in misc country who would have to pay the cost of losing their asset, is entirely divorced from the entities who will benefit from CO2 reduction: everyone in the world. It's a prisoner's dilemma played at every level from the individual to the corporation to the region, and country. I'm not optimistic about our ability to coordinate the entire species to all suddenly start spending a bunch of money on each other instead of our own groups. Especially when basically every existing business in the world will fight it tooth and nail. We got lucky with solar that its naturally cheaper than coal power, but there's no law that has to be the case with anything else.
Exactly, we cannot expect to bring individual responsibility to a global problem. There will always be individual entities not puling their weight. The train of climate agreements and collective effort has left the station, the climate accords were aiming for under 1,5C and we are very much into 2,5-3C territory.
I'm not talking about CO2 reduction, I'm talking about living with the result that the emissions have caused. And for that, the entity that pays the cost and benefits will again be the same.
> I'm not optimistic about our ability to coordinate the entire species to all suddenly start spending a bunch of money on each other instead of our own groups
The opposite needs to happen. Less consumption needed, overall. Less spending. It kind of already is, via lower and lower total fertility rates. Might not be declining quickly enough to cause sufficient decline in consumption.
Entire companies have been wrecked by "line must go up" thinking. I see no reason why it should preserve the planet when it can't even preserve its own livelihood. Never underestimate the complete destructive nihilism some are willing to engage just to earn some status and/or dollars. The feedback mechanism from climate change is far too slow. This kind of "ah it'll be grand like" attitude is completely naïve.
Relying on market forces to mitigate/address the impact of climate change will require us to collectively impose actual market pressure (i.e. regulation, constraints) to do so. Not seeing much sign of that among the major contributors of emissions right at the moment.
That's because very few people are being meaningfully affected right now. For most, climate change exists as an abstract idea and not an immediate, physical problem. It doesn't help that claims like those made by Al Gore about the polar ice caps being gone by 2016 turned out to be untrue.
I wouldn't expect society to transform itself if told that an asteroid may impact Earth in eighty years, for similar reasons.
Heck, faced with a rapidly spreading virus that can kill in 2 weeks (for the general public at a very low percentage, for our elderly neighbors a lot higher), a large majority of humans turned to angry denials and conspiracy theories to justify to themselves that "it's not that dangerous!".
We are so fucking dead.
Which virus turned "a large majority of humans to angry denials"?
COVID
When somebody says something isn't that dangerous it always comes with an unstated post-text of 'for an average person of average health.' Each year the flu kills hundreds of thousands of people. As the population ages, and thus has more individuals in senescence where your body is basically just breaking down, that will increase into the millions. But yet it's still not unreasonable to say that the flu isn't that dangerous.
And you might think I'm being disingenuous with these facts and perhaps e.g. all those deaths from the flu are just in Africa or wherever. Whereas in reality it's the exact opposite! Places like the US have a substantially higher than average mortality rate from the flu. Globally deaths are around 700k and in the US it's around 50k. We have 4% of the world's population, but 7% of the world's flu deaths. The reason is because it's not about healthcare, vaccines, or whatever else. It's about the amount of people in senescence.
At a certain age, and the subsequent state of health it entails, lots of things that indeed 'aren't that dangerous' turn into life-ending threats. For some contrast that most aren't aware of, the average age of mortality of the Spanish Flu was 28 - which made it a completely terrifying freak outlier in terms of viruses, which generally affect the very young and very old most severely. Nobody would be saying that the Spanish Flu is not that dangerous in modern times.
Well, maybe search for the keyword "long COVID" and see how it has caused a lot of suffering even among young and otherwise healthy individuals.
Also, people seem to forget that exponentials go up very fast, so an "average person of average health" would be very selfish to not make the necessary precautions to limit the spread of the virus as much as feasible.
You vaccinate yourself to protect yourself. People who are vaccinated for a disease can and do spread said disease. It's this way for literally everything. The claims that you cannot spread COVID if you're vaccinated were simply false. Vaccination can have a mitigating effect of course, but we were never going to be able to eliminate COVID with something like herd immunity.
The only virus completely eliminated by vaccines is small pox, and that was largely because of a number of ideal factors. The top two are probably that that no animals carried smallpox, only humans. And the second is that infection or vaccination provided lifetime immunity of effectively 100%. This dramatically reduced its potential for mutation and meant that getting rid of it in humans would get rid of it - period.
Coronaviruses, by contrast, are transmissible between humans and animals. This means even if you fully eliminated it in humans, it could, and probably would, come back. This is why flus are basically impossible to get rid of. If you believe CDC numbers then US flu deaths in 2020 were essentially 0, yet now it's back like nothing ever happened. Even the Spanish Flu is still with us as a variant of the common flu. But fortunately most viruses trend towards less lethal mutations over time. Probably natural selection in play - killing your host is not a great path to survival and reproduction.
As for long COVID. I'd rather defer that conversation for a few years. Research on exactly what it is and exactly what causes it is ongoing, and so debating it at this point is just going to be speculation.
The reality is that COVID caused lockdowns never had anything to do with the lethality rate. It had everything to do with hospital pressure - there's a limited number of ICU beds and COVID was the annoying combination of spreading easiliy and if it went bad, you'd occupy a bed in the ICU since you needed very active monitoring. If ICU capacity is exceeded, you get into the really ugly business of having to triage who can get necessary first aid. Governments and hospitals both would really do anything else than have to decide whether or not you leave the weak and elderly to die of diseases because you lack the space to handle them. (Not to mention the personnel shortage; a lot of other medical procedures got delayed because of ICU pressure. Even if they did have enough beds, that wouldn't necessarily translate to enough people to care for patients, and you'd end up having to triage non-COVID procedures too.)
That is what caused the lockdowns. It's also why after the first two vaccine waves, the pressure on hospitals was heavily relieved, leading to most countries lifting their lockdowns. Even just being vaccinated once gives you enough immunity against COVID to usually not need a hospital visit. The disadvantages of a lockdown even on just a healthcare level outweigh the benefits when you don't have a dangerous superspreader on your hands.
Mental problems were up massively during the lockdown period since humans are social creatures; physically there also were major spikes in seasonal diseases for the next year since they never stopped evolving, while we stopped getting them, meaning our bodies didn't have the time to adapt to them... So we got all the seasonal diseases thrown at us at once.
> That's because very few people are being meaningfully affected right now.
Once we're all at the edge of extinction, the markets will provide?
If that's your point, your idea of capitalism is a cargo cult.
Market pressure is required to avoid climate change by keeping companies from externalizing climate impacts.
Market pressure is not required for a city to decide that having the city flooded is bad, and start a tender for building a sea wall. This makes the line go up for the sea wall companies.
This is not what's going to happen planetwide.
What's going to happen instead is that the rich will mitigate the effects only for themselves.
They will spend a small percentage of their wealth to protect themselves and their property from all the ill effects of climate change.
- “Yes, the patient might die, but we’re confident that given enough resources, we’ll bring him back to life.”
Well, to be fair, it’s basically what’s happening with LLMs atm. So, maybe feathering up Mammon and aiming for the sun will be the tech industry’s most lasting legacy.
I agree. I reflect on this from time to time when I consider that my mom, having died a few years back, would not be enjoying much of anything going on in the world right now. (Further, that she was born at the close of WWII in the U.S., she may have been lucky enough to have lived in the best part of recent history here.)
“No one cares about the bomb that didn’t go off.” - Tenet
Preventing “bombs” from going off is not rewarded. And indeed the Line Must Go Up Crowd is reliant upon someone else fixing the problem while they get theirs. But when the majority think that way we’re f**ed.
The bombs not dropped here today remain available to be dropped elsewhere tomorrow, so perhaps we shouldn't pat ourselves on the back just yet.
It’s a good comparison especially in the context of mutually assured destruction, whether administered directly or indirectly, the same grim pragmatic political truth of wedge issues remains:
why solve today what can be put off til tomorrow?
The human population is set to crash quite hard in the next 100 years. It's backed into the cake.
Not all human population is going to crash. Africa population in 1950 was 228.7 million, in 2025 is 1549 million. Fertility rate in 2025 is 4.05.
https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/afr/afr...
Africa's fertility rate is dropping fast: 40 years it was above 6, 20 years ago it was above 5, and it dropped by 0.6 in the last ten years.
https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/afr/afr...
most projections expect Africa's population to peak around 2070, which is less than the timeframe GP considered.
Could you share these projections that say Africa's population is going to peak around 2070. I cannot find any.
If we keep at it like we have been maybe there's light at the end of the tunnel for Earth, ecologically. In say 100k or 1M years, after we're long gone and things have started to repair themselves.
This is where I find hope: ten million years from now we'll all be gone, and the earth will be a beautiful, thriving place once again.
The short term doesn't look so good, but at least I will only have to watch a few more decades of it.
This is a very macabre position! Your life and other people's lives are a joyous blessing.
As I am 48, I can't help but feel "old", especially given the spaces I find myself (ie, a continually changing industry, with the most active feeling like they're much younger). I really appreciate the perspective of someone who is still "active" and who spent more time living before I was born than I have since.
Amazing how many pop-ups I have to click away. It's almost like being back in the 90s.
Firefox with Blocking turned on and I see no ads..
On mobile Firefox with blocking I still see - cookie consent - some self add for subscription - an altert that I have to login
Can't read it
That's exactly what I meant.
Also chrome with ublock origin still hanging in there
It’s inspiring to see someone at 99 still speak with so much passion about the ocean. Hearing him say he won’t see how it ends feels heavy.
The part comparing bottom trawling to bulldozing underwater forests was powerful. But the recovery of sea otters and whales gives some hope.
Started reading and immediately hearing it narrated in his voice.
The sad part of our human existence is that none of us ever live to see how our story ends. We "spawn" at a random point in time and "vanish" at another. Ageing is being worked on vigorously and while we did change our lifespan from 40 years to 80 years of existence thanks to modern science, in order for us to truly comprehend changes on a universal scale, average human lifespan would need to be 50000 years long. That way you'll see species evolve, continents move, quasars explode, maybe even Betelguese explode?
Yes we die, the body goes. But if there is a further element to the experience - and near death experiences, out of body experience suggest there is - we perhaps do see how the story ends. In fact, this experience might not be the real 'story', just an opportunity of some sort to learn, grow. The point is that although many assume material reality to be all there is, it might not actually be the case.
Nobody sees how the story ends
I can understand there is an inherit sadness in not knowing the outcome of one's life's work, but as you say none of use ever see how it ends. In terms of our natural environment humankind has only ever observed in person, let alone recorded, what amounts to the blink of an eye.
The Sundays beg to differ.
Are you alluding to some religious thing?
Fear of oblivion and/or the unknown is fucking scary.
Certainly this: https://youtu.be/FHsip5xOenQ
Phoebe Bridgers also. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJ9-xN6dCW4
Wow was not expecting to see a Sundays reference in this thread, let alone HN. One of my all-time favorite bands!
So is the Fridays ;)
Avril Lavigne as well.
Depends which story. Every death is the end of somebody's world.
Someone might. I think we stand a reasonable chance of self-selecting for extinction in the next few centuries. It's not the end of the story, but it's the end of our story. Someone will be the one who shuts off the lights on the way out.
Our generations of the last 10,000 years are seeing how the story decays.
When the food supply was abundant, families would jog every day doing BBQ every night hunting down mammoths
We have become red in tooth and claw. At the summit of civilisation, we are alienated with our screens, licking frozen TV dinners in our shared flat while we work hard to support our landlords
As long as we have surviving records people have been saying the past was golden and the present is decay with a long list of the present ills which are the downfall of the glorious past. It's a boring take and has been incorrect for thousands of years and will continue to be. Arguments about how some list of things haven't been on a monotonic increase during the last generation do not refute this.
It’s not boring, it explains the demise of the human experience, no matter how bigoted you pretend you are
David Attenborough narrated some of my favorite paleontology documentaries.
You seen Prehistoric Planet[0]?
The CGI is so good, you can practically smell the beasties.
[0] https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistoric_Planet
One of the things I like most about David Attenborough is it never seems like he's reading a script. It feels like he's talking about something he knows about (which he does).
When it comes to the acting or performing worlds, is there a phrase describing this?
“Conversational delivery”
We’re not here to see how our story ends, we’re here to experience and live in the world that was someone else’s ending, that they never got to see.
that's...actually really beautiful
thank you
None of us see the end of the story but I do fear that the story could change when we inevitably lose a passionate advocate in Sir David whose credibility on this issue has been unchallengeable.
I take some comfort from the younger generations who are now growing up with a much greater awareness of the natural environment and the damage we humans can do to it and a much lower tolerance for political sophistry and capitalist all-about-the-money "ethics". With the selfishness of politics in much of the world today I think things will probably get worse before they get better. I still hope that we won't cross any points of no return as those younger people gain influence and those of older generations who are not always as enlightened and concerned as Sir David also leave us.
I think those younger generations will have better chances if there is a highly visible advocate for protecting the natural world for ordinary people to coalesce around. I don't know who the next David Attenborough could be. Perhaps one of his final gifts to humanity can be helping to find and establish the profile(s) of natural successor(s) who can carry on his work.
Someone like Bertie Gregory could be next? https://www.bertiegregory.com/
Attenborough will be incredibly difficult to follow though. The depth of his career has made him such an iconic and reassuring force for so many.
Here's the good news: we've done basically nothing about climate change even with him, so losing such an esteemed spokesman won't actually make it worse.
Admittedly that's only "good" in the sense that things are maximally bad and cannot get worse. But we might as well fake a smile because that's all we're going to get. I'd say we won't act until it's too late, but it is already too late.
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I’m confused. We are beyond the point of no return when it comes to global warming. Hasnt he already seen how the story ends?
There is no single "point of no return". We have obviously passed the point where bad consequences can be avoided, but every extra ton of CO2 and methane makes things a bit worse.
I worry that the sentiment of "we have passed the point of no return" induces an impotent apathy in people, when the truth is that every step in the right direction makes our future a little bit less dire.
Folks are worried about phase change, the flip from one set of patterns to a different set of patters. That is much different than a linear "every ton makes things a bit worse".
There is going to be big fundamental change, but people need to stop thinking about it like "the sky is falling" and instead ask "how are we going to adapt?"
People are going to have to move to where water is available, to where heat is less of a problem, and large scale infrastructure is going to change. A lot of struggle is going to go along with that change but starting to plan now and predict where is going to be habitable and how to prepare for that is what people should be doing instead of the shame and doom.
The narrative climax to the human story around climate change has yet to happen. Assuming we continue on the current trajectory, expect riots and wars over food and clean water, possibly more.
What do you think he means when he says “how the story ends”?