Mastodawn

lynn / clarissa

I saw a post recently that was arguing that you should stop using alcohol wipes when giving yourself hrt injections because it's too wasteful, literally saying that the possibility of sepsis is worth not using a square inch of cotton per week.

They weren't arguing for more efficient solutions, ways of recycling the material, or anything like that. It was just "you should facetank risk of infection in order to not create waste"

And goddamn isn't that everything I've been noticing lately about how people talk about technology and progress and waste these days; a kind of reactionary tech-pessimism.

I recently had a student argue that we should never have invested in NASA or the space program because rocketry can also be used for weapons, damn all the other things that came out of it like weather satellites.

Westerners literally make up stories about the Fukushima Daiichi plant, talking about people who are walking-dead cleaning up the site since they'd already had a lethal level of radiation exposure. Sorry, what's that? No one died from radiation exposure when Fukushima Daiichi failed? That doesn't feel right.

The power grid! My god, the power grid. Everyone is so hung up on "what if we ban datacenters" but, guys, the US power grid has been decaying from austerity and intentional conservative sabotage for decades. Remember when rotted infrastructure caused wildfires a few years ago in California? The primer driver of your power bills is that, not facilities still under construction. We have to fight and build solar and improve transmission between states so we can actually send that electricity places!

Like we can't embrace our own "reject modernity". We just can't. The answer can't be "stop using air conditioning", "stop using electricity", "stop using satellites", "stop using alcohol wipes".

@left_adjoint this is darkly funny to me because medical supplies have been my go-to example of where disposable products are fully justified. (even if would be great if they could be made safe to reuse.)

EinsPossum, Hass-Ära 2.0 Mar 9

@left_adjoint I agree with everything except the Fokushima thing. Sure the story you repeat is ridiculous and sounds also pretty racist, playing into the "asians dont value the individual" racism.

But there is a big problem with leftists recently trying to aggrandise nuclear power.

I really agree with you disagreeing with people putting ridiculous demands of individual abdication in favour of irrelevant waste-prevention, and that embracing any kind of "reject modernity" is very bad.

@EinsPossum @left_adjoint I don't think nuclear power is the way to go, but spreading falsehoods isn't the way to go about preventing its growth. Solar and wind are much cheaper and don't produce waste disposal problems.

EinsPossum, Hass-Ära 2.0 Mar 10

@not2b @left_adjoint Yeah i agree, i dont think you should spread falsehoods like in the example lynn / clarissa gave, but there is a lot of false "alternate future with nuclear power" nostalgia from people at the moment who do it out of contrarianism. The waste disposal and the security risks are big issues. Thats why i generally dislike people putting nuclear power in line with aspirational stuff like space stuff or medical stuff as in this example.

TheMagicalC Mar 10

@EinsPossum @not2b @left_adjoint hey quick question, are you American? I see a lot more Americans disparage nuclear than I do people from other countries, because for some reason our country has willfully ignored the entire idea of nuclear waste reprocessing. 80% of spent fuel is still usable uranium, just with neutron poisons contaminating it. With reprocessing, the waste goes down to one marble per capita per year, which is extremely manageable.

EinsPossum, Hass-Ära 2.0 Mar 10

@cwg1231 @not2b @left_adjoint im German.

EinsPossum, Hass-Ära 2.0 Mar 10

@cwg1231 @not2b @left_adjoint A lot of Germanys budget is spend on atomic waste processing, it sucks.

EinsPossum, Hass-Ära 2.0 Mar 10

@cwg1231 @not2b @left_adjoint https://taz.de/Budget-des-Umweltministeriums/!6102402/

TL;DR dealing with our old atomic waste eats up most of the budget of our environmental ministry.

Budget des Umweltministeriums: Atommüll bleibt finanziell eine Ewigkeitslast

Ein Großteil des Haushalts des Umweltministeriums geht für Atom-Altlasten drauf. Damit bleibt weniger Geld für den Umweltschutz.

TAZ Verlags- und Vertriebs GmbH

TheMagicalC Mar 10

@EinsPossum @not2b @left_adjoint thanks for the link. Nuclear waste is indeed an eternal problem, but in my opinion global warming is too large of an issue to wholly discount nuclear power.

Sebastian Grill Mar 10

@not2b @EinsPossum @left_adjoint i do agree that solar and wind are better options, but they too cause waste disposal/recycling problems.

0x4d6165 (Julie)Mar 10

@left_adjoint @EinsPossum yeah nuclear is still bad. and still relies on mining on stolen land

EinsPossum, Hass-Ära 2.0 Mar 10

@0x4d6165 @left_adjoint To be honest, thats also a problem with solar and wind and a lot of other energy sources.

Has to be mitigated with fair deals or getting the materials from places that nobody lives.

0x4d6165 (Julie)Mar 10

@left_adjoint @EinsPossum oh def but I'm just guessing here but I feel like nuclear requires more mining? a solar plant doesn't need constant fuel it just needs to replace broken panels every so often

EinsPossum, Hass-Ära 2.0 Mar 10

@0x4d6165 @left_adjoint I think we would need to look that up.

@left_adjoint medicine is the one field where you have to just bite the bullet and yeah, plastic is easier to clean than something that's biodegradable. There's an insane amount of waste involved in medicine. Just more of it's visible when you self-inject. We're turning a giant dial that says "waste" on it, datacenters can reduce waste too if they're not used at a 100 to 1 ratio of bad to good ideas.

That’s a moray Mar 9

@thomasjwebb @left_adjoint There are not insignificant numbers of construction/architecture/civil engineering firms hiring graduates eho have specialized in making industrial infra like data centers more sustainable.

Tekniquelly correct Mar 9

@left_adjoint Furthermore, my desire to clean my ear with a q-tip is a rounding error compared to, say, strip mining for coal. You cannot make me feel bad about tiny things I do to make my life more tolerable and pleasant when freighter ships burn bunker fuel because it's cheaper.

Similarly, I don't take wildly long showers, but I'm not going to race to hop in and out of one while the golf course across the city is watering their tropical plants and square miles of lawn.

Trixter of the Moon Council Mar 9

@left_adjoint I made a conversational poll about cleaning lint out of the lint trap of your dryer a few weeks ago and the number of random people coming out of the woodwork to say "You actually use an electric dryer? smh" was wild.

Like good for you having the place and time and energy to hang all your stuff but *the problems are systemic*.

Philippa Cowderoy Mar 10

@trixter @left_adjoint dehumidifiers use electricity too, and if you live somewhere small then hanging laundry can easily be a mould problem

@trixter @left_adjoint Besides, good luck air-drying things outside in -20℃ weather (or ~20℃ >80% humidity as some places have it instead), lol

Heat-pump ones are perfectly reasonable power-wise (yeah, turns out improving technology actually works for a number of things, much like solar & electricity) and yet for sanitation reasons they also include a "sanitation" mode that can be used (for dry heat sterilization, funny how that works). Pretty relevant when say... you live in an era with unending pandemics.

@left_adjoint
This.
You don't have to go full ecomodern to reject the accelerationist doomer narrative, which is mostly spread by Russian bots to spread despair & confusion.

is a Green Mar 10

I agree fully with your main points.

Current NHS guidance on HRT injections is not to use antiseptic wipes in most settings. Not due to waste but because getting alcohol into the injection site is worse than not cleaning it. So the rationale given in your first example is problematic, but they've hit on good advice by accident.

(I know USians are sceptical, but I haven't used a wipe since the guidance changed like a decade ago and its been fine.)

0x4d6165 (Julie)Mar 10

@left_adjoint you're right about most of these but we do way too much mining tho. like not only are the working conditions awful which could be changed, it's incredibly ecologically destructive and that can only be mitigated not eliminated. also, most of the mines are on stolen indigenous land.

I'm not saying we shouldn't mine but we should scale waaaay back and try to find alternatives and ways of stretching what we do have

@left_adjoint can we stop using ai?

@left_adjoint I think the sentiment "this isn't worth the problems it brings" has been around since... maybe at least the industrial revolution?

And i'm not sure if being scared of alcohol wipes really fits this "techno pessimism" narrative :D. It's just... There has been so many changes recently and so many of them bad, it's difficult to be techno-optimistic.

Carmen-Lisandrette Mar 10

@left_adjoint Yes! I mostly agree.

Technophobia isn't progressive. Technology might be the only way to improve some of the world's problems. It's disappointing to see people who should know better have go all in on it.

grrl_aex Mar 10

"stop using alcohol wipes when giving yourself hrt injections because it's too wasteful, literally saying that the possibility of sepsis is worth not using a square inch of cotton per week."

The CADTH study cast doubt on the need for alch wipes pre-injection on otherwise clean skin. IOW the need for alch wipes pre-injection is not nearly as dire as you assume.

Ref: https://hospitalnews.com/the-alcohol-swab-before-the-needle-a-point-of-debate/

@left_adjoint > a kind of reactionary tech-pessimism.

A lot of it is certain parties purposely pushing ecofascism. It's not a coincidence.