lynn / clarissaMar 9

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".

Show threadEinsPossum, Hass-Ära 2.0Mar 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.

Show threadJoeMar 10
@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.
Show threadEinsPossum, Hass-Ära 2.0Mar 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.
Show threadTheMagicalCMar 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.
Show threadEinsPossum, Hass-Ära 2.0Mar 10
@cwg1231 @not2b @left_adjoint im German.
Show threadEinsPossum, Hass-Ära 2.0Mar 10
@cwg1231 @not2b @left_adjoint A lot of Germanys budget is spend on atomic waste processing, it sucks.
Show threadEinsPossum, Hass-Ära 2.0Mar 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
Show threadTheMagicalC
@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.
Mar 10 at 4:34pmWeb