I don't know why someone going on a vacation would have moral high ground over someone that HAS TO travel for his work. If you are scientist you absolutely have to fly a lot to visit lots of conferences, disseminate your work, provide lectures etc.
Understand this is both an individual and systemic critique. We have the internet. Much of the travel you describe can and should be done remotely. The top 1% of flyers account for 50% of emissions. I would argue most of that probably is unnecessary technically, but there is both a push and pull factor from people expecting some things to take place face to face.
We're adults, we can keep many things in our minds at one time: We should all reduce flying. Regular working people should not be shamed for taking a holiday and flying there. The most frequent fliers for work should make a personal effort to reduce their flying. And companies, conferences, etc. should work much harder to facilitate remote participation and reduce stigma around it, as well as encouraging other modes of travel. Governments should improve alternative solutions such as rail and high-speed rail.
> I think a broad tax would just make it more difficult for middle and lower class to fly. Tax the business/first class and frequent flier, but don't push people who can already barely afford to fly out.
No, it's the other way around. If flying is bad then poor people absolutely have to be priced out of it. I know that it sounds absolutely awful, but unfortunately taxing just business and first class won't do much for reducing emissions if flying will be affordable for and used by billions of people.
> Suggesting that we should leave such things to the sole discretion of the economy and taxes describes a strange unhuman-like society that we don't live in.
Well, the choice is: either we leave it to economy and taxes which work, or we'll rely on shaming which doesn't work. To put it another way - it depends if you want to actually fix the problem or just want to have a moral high ground and don't really care about solving the problem.
I've found one very interesting thing from these trackers - namely how even small amount of alcohol destroy sleep quality metrics. One beer is enough for my sleep scores to drop by like 20-30% and it's consistent and reproducible for me every time. Whether it actually matters - I don't know, but it made me drink much less (from maybe once a week to maybe once every two months) which is good outcome I guess.
> It's sexism in action; the woman gets punished while "boys will be boys." Prove me wrong.
Epstein died in his cell. If Maxwell preferred death to punishment she could've also killed herself. Also it's well documented that women receive less harsh punishment in court vs men for the same crimes, so yeah, it's sexism but not in the way you insinuate.
> Epstein himself is probably still alive in Tel Aviv anyway.
Yes, and it's Maxwell's lookalike that's serving the sentence, while she's enjoying herself in Argentina. See how quickly you can derails discussion with such absurd claims without any substance?
It's not a great idea to blame AI, which is small addition to the global emissions. I suggest focusing on what's really important, not what's currently trendy.
It's already using on the order of 1% of global energy, and there are active plans to expand that by a factor of 5 or more in the near future. That's as a percentage of current energy use, which is already way higher than it should be, so if all other sectors reduced theirs to sustainable levels it would be like 5% now and 25% planned. It's a bit more complicated when you account for renewable energy, but certainly adding consumption is not helping there. Now that buildout may not happen as planned/advertised, but I think it's very reasonable to worry about new things that make the situation worse even by a few percentage points when you need to make things better overall by much more than that to make progress. Of course this is not to say that we shouldn't be worried about/working on other sources of consumption that are currently a larger fraction -- we need to keep doing that too. But giving a pass to hundreds of TWh from AI junk in favor of trying to reduce the thousands of TWh from some other source by a couple hundred is a good way to erase the gains that you make over there.
Come on, if the first thing that comes to your mind is something responsible for 1% with projection of 5% emissions then it’s clear that you don’t really care about actual solutions but prefer to parrot current rhetoric from social media. Why not focus on the biggest contributors?
I tend to agree, but keep in mind that most likely you just don't even bother reading the shittiest of the shittiest papers just based on title and abstract. And for every good article there are like 10 unindexed shitty ones.
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