whoever loves Digit

Yeah. I will say, after looking at the data more, the youngest demographic does make it look like smartphones could be a bigger part than I realized. That’s very counterintuitive to me, since smartphones are interactive and great at accessing information, while we had TVs forever before that

Doesn’t look like it to me. Almost all the charts have 2015/16 close to prior years, but in a severe upswing. After 2020 we’re far out of the previous range, with still no downswing. But the article did say 2016 too, so it’s not you being dumb or anything

If you’re too fearful to think straight, sure. But I suggest honesty instead of denialism. This seems like mostly a result of the ongoing COVID pandemic

Not seeing a link here. Again, this platform has bans, making it an inappropriate place for you to rage bait me, and not a great place for me to read your replies after you’ve demonstrated your penchant for rage baiting.

I already called you out for rage baiting me on a platform with bans.

Do you have a link to the nostr copy of this reply, or did you expect me to read all that here?

No. I’ll need engines because I have too many enemies, and not enough supporters.

Rowing (or even getting out to swim and pull) is safer if you have enough people, because we can’t safely make and power engines.

I want a boat bigger than I can row on my own, so I want a motor. But I wouldn’t want much if I wasn’t up against people that seem to use motorized stuff to derive an advantage while starting gunfights over food that isn’t rightly theirs.

I think youre reading way too much into having sails or not lol

I’m not. My point is you don’t realize how many areas you should be applying this kind of thinking in.

I would not want to go back to that era of illiteracy, poverty and disease.

But you’d want to stay in this one? Or what’s your point supposed to be?

Adapting old ideas into the modern world where it makes sense is good though

I’m saying, when you think about how fucked up it is that we went so far with removing sails from cargo ships, you can see more of how deep we are in misuse of technology. It’s a microcosm of a big picture.

Thousands of tons on a single vessel.

Which I responded to. Copying and pasting:

Probably not one boat at a time, but I’d rate the importance of reducing the required number of boats as “less than low, a simple zero” and the importance of a breathable atmosphere as “extremely high.”

The reason we have such huge container ships is that while the surface area and subsequent water resistance gets squared, the volume growth is cubic.

This means the larger the vessel, the more energy efficient it is at delivering anything from point A to point B.

Nope. It gets harder to build ships beyond a certain size, so our ships actually aren’t infinitely large, they’re at a size limited by construction difficulty.

Also, our biggest ships use crude oil, and I hear we’ve never really found a way to make sails work for ships that size, so it seems like our ships have actually gone bigger than the most efficient size.

This is exactly how shipping has become the most efficient way to deliver goods.

I don’t get what you mean. Most efficient in what list? What are the other ways? I guess you could define “shipping” in a way that excludes couriers carrying single items at a time, but what does that have to do with cargo ship size?

Were you trying to say crude-oil-based cargo ships are an efficient way to deliver goods? They’re not, unless anti-natalism is objectively correct, which I don’t think it is.

If you want to deliver the same amount of cargo by many smaller ships, you’ll need way, waaaaaay more energy to do so.

And?

This is incredibly inefficient,

If that’s “incredibly inefficient,” what adjective do you use for the inefficiency of misusing crude oil?

and ships of the past were of that scale exclusively due to structural limitations.

Again, ships today are still not infinitely large, they are limited in scale by “structural limitations” (more like construction method limitations but whatever)

And there was a time in the past when the biggest ships were the size the biggest ships should be today, instead of bigger

Now, rowboats cannot technically be wide, because otherwise you won’t be able to seat enough rowers to drive the ship.

No idea what you’re trying to say with this part

I answered you right there - you can use electricity generated through renewables instead of heavy human labor.

If you had a secret method to make that happen overnight, I think you’d have lead with that isntead of making me ask how. I see 0% chance your next reply is gonna have instructions for what I should do to make it so all ships are electrified with pure renewables within 24 hours.

But OK, I’ll bite. How?

Sodium ion batteries for smaller missions (like, ports in Asia), green hydrogen for longer hauls,

But how? What is the method you secretly have involving these? Just saying their names doesn’t give me any idea how to make all this happen so fast.

and nuclear for particularly long hauls through complicated areas (like the Northern Sea Route).

I’m glad you have no explanation for how to make this one happen, since what I want is a path away from extinction, instead of merely a different path towards it.

I re-read you comment again. You claim we’re all wage slaves anyway and it’s better to row a cargo ship until people in power decide to rather throw us into war. You also mentioned that it’s either rowboats or ecological collapse.

Terrible reading comprehension, but that’s to be expected from such a dishonest person.

Maybe you should try reading again and again until you can handle telling the truth.

Did I get it right, or did you mean something else entirely?

False dichotomy. I’ve meant what I said, and there’s no reasoning for the idea that I meant what you made up, instead of what I’ve said.

Studies on the issues of modern agriculture and recent developments in renewable energy tech. We do have safe ways to grow food, indeed, but they require much higher level of investment and do not pay off very well, while renewables are already cheaper than their traditional counterparts, naturally leading to massive rollout. We just need to keep going with this.

Again, how?

0% chance you’re secretly holding onto an answer until my next reply, and not just blindly saying false shit, but how do these “studies” show evidence your secret technique to electrify all cargo ships with renewables instantly is a better strategy than doing the best we can with publicly known stuff?

Obviously not as in “9 hours a day, 5 day a week job”. It’s more of a cultural reference to the current work time conditions.

The reference makes no sense. It’s as ridiculous at the metaphorical level as the literal level, and it seems like you’re just adding the dumbest shit you can think of to waste my time and energy in a gish gallop at this point.

If there are too many workers and too little job, maybe the best course of action is reducing work time and redistributing gains made through automation?

Are we suddenly randomly discussing a hypothetical where that’s the only problem? And you’re upholding you wrote this in good faith? Kinda funny, but moreso scary.

This way people won’t need to do useless jobs like rowing a boat in the era of electric propulsion, and will have more time for themselves.

Sure, in a hypothetical where we had no other problems, but it’s delusional and sick how you seem to be pretending this applies in the real world.

Bad faith

By no means.

Yep, there’s the part where you pretend this is you attempting good-faith discussion.

Why even lie at this point?

I was genuinely engaged with the conversation,

Nope.

but it just so happens that the point of your argument completely misses me

That’s why bad faith discussion is bad. You should try to understand things, instead of just lashing out when you don’t understand something. You’d understand more that way.

There are obviously better ways to do what you propose,

What proposal, and what ways?

and I fail to see the merits of going back to rowing as means of ship propulsion.

Again, not an excuse for bad faith. More of an example of why it’s bad.

Rowboats cannot be big

What the fuck is with this part? Scraping the bottom of the stupidity barrel for this gish gallop, huh?

I didn’t ask if your threshold for “big” is bigger than you think a rowboat could ever be. I can use a dictionary and pick my own threshold for “big.”

Are you trying to tell me there’s something wrong with me for thinking “big” is a fair enough word for the biggest rowboats, or is there something I’m missing about why I should give a fuck how you use the word?

hence they fail to reap physical benefits that come with larger ship sizes, which alone makes them so incredibly efficient; they require intense manual labor and overblown crew, raising costs and reducing useful load, and they offer a very grim picture of the future full of pointless jobs instead of worker liberation.

What?

So…why rowing, of all things?

Because we have arms. What the fuck kind of question is that?

I had to retype this entire reply because I accidentally clicked “reply” while copying that last sentence, and learned PieFed deletes any existing reply when that happens.

That made me very angry at your gish gallop, and yet somehow I’m probably the one at risk of being banned for being rightly angry at you.

If you have any fraction of a spine, either reply on nostr (where I can’t be banned), or not at all.

Never on a historical scale we moved so much cargo.

You said “thousands of tons.” I guarantee sails and rowboats have moved thousands of tons over the years. I’d even bet sails and rowboats move thousands of tons every year.

Long-range ships were primarily used to move something extremely valuable, such as spices and gold - and now we have ships hauling everything because it’s so much more efficient than anything else.

No, we have ships hauling everything because the gene pool has been taken over by lazy idiots.

If you think some number of your life-years would be a smaller price to pay for a shipment than some number of your dollars, it’s not that you’re an economic genius or a master of efficiency.

If you’re just using oil because it’s a convenient way to “save dollars,” without even realizing pollution impacts survival, that is again not a mastery of efficiency.

And so the solution is, instead of reducing work week and expanding social programs, to crank people up in dangerous conditions and make them do one of the hardest and most avoidable jobs known to humanity?

Why are you using a strawman argument in a place where I could get banned for an angry reply?

Rhetorical question, obviously.

Also, why is your strawman argument so ridiculous instead of trying to sound more like what I said?

Maybe you should read before replying.

Nowadays, in the age of cheap solar and new, eco-friendly power storage options, it is much, much easier and cheaper to add an electric engine than to maintain a fleet of wage-slaves fed by agricultural surplus.

I see no evidence of that at all. It seems like we have found a lot of safe ways to grow food and not really any safe ways to mass-produce solar panels or motors. What’s your basis for what you’re saying?

Your kind of “solution” is both economically inefficient and inhumane

Neither, actually

and doesn’t seem to get out of the box of “9-to-5 to everyone by all means”.

Incorrect again, and how? You think sailing is a 9-to-5? There are so many layers of you being obviously wrong, I don’t get how you typed this and didn’t notice

So, don’t rush to accuse me of shortsightedness.

There’s no rush, but you are obviously shortsighted, and you strayed pretty deep into bad-faith discussion with this reply.

I’m pretty sure rowboats are absolutely not viable for moving thousands of tons of cargo.

I’m absolutely positive they’ve done exactly that.

Probably not one boat at a time, but I’d rate the importance of reducing the required number of boats as “less than low, a simple zero” and the importance of a breathable atmosphere as “extremely high.”

Also, they existed because there was a huge supply of slave labor.

And now there’s a bigger supply of slave labor than ever. Our owners have never been so far from needing more of us; so focused on killing us off and finding ways to do things without us, for such a long time. It’s nothing new to see a war engineered to kill off a few million slaves when there’s overstock, but it’s unprecedented to see stuff like chat bots deployed to drastically reduce the number needed worldwide.

That’s not to mention the larger crew doing hard manual labor would require much more food, which is a sort of fuel in itself, one that is not commonly produced in an environmentally sustainable way.

Irrelevant. I didn’t say “use bad methods to grow food and fuel the crew with that.” Why would that be my point? If I suggest avoiding the use of motors because they’re deadly and stupid, isn’t it obvious I’d also suggest avoiding agriculture methods that are deadly and stupid?

Or are you saying one good choice is the maximum suggestion you’ll entertain, and if I can’t suggest one good choice that ensures survival on its own, you’d rather just die than move on to second or third or more considerations of what mentally healthy humans would do?

We did without auxiliary motors for a long time. The only reason a motor would be needed is if everyone is too greedy to pay for the work to be done right (having a big enough crew for rowing).

But the crew can’t stop the world from being greedy, so it makes sense that they’re using sails and a motor to improve on what they can.

Sell them to me for a dollar each. I will rent them out for free in exchange for someone putting sails on them.

This era honestly sucks so much, the only way the next era can show a lot of progress is if it shows a lot of reversion.

“What if we took the sails off every fucking cargo ship?” is a sick question, and when society has answered that with “yeah let’s do it,” the sickness runs a lot deeper than that. We’ve just been taking insane/stupid ideas and running with them for a long time.

Idk what’s up with your apparent obsession with being banned, but if that’s a problem for you - maybe you should reconsider the way you interact with people on the internet.

No, you. If you’re using most online platforms without getting banned, you’re not trying hard enough to make the right choices. Or you’re very young or something.

It’s really not hard to avoid bans in most spaces.

Sure, a lot of people find it more convenient to go along with the crowd than to do the right thing. Ad populum fallacy is very popular. It seems like you’re trying to allude to some other bullshit though.

Just follow the rules.

No thanks. Have reasonable rules, or embarrass yourselves / possibly doom your planet by silencing everyone that stands up to abusive authority figures. You’ll actually pick one of the suggestions in my previous sentence, whereas your suggestions for me are based on an unrealistic view of me as someone spineless, or an unrealistic view of authority as something so inherently reasonable that anyone who makes a rule must deserve to have their rules followed.

My whole point is that removing abusive and hateful content isnt censorship, its responsible moderation.

Then your point is incorrect because this is a political discussion space. Open a dictionary and check what “censorship” is. It’s irresponsible moderation.

Any online community that allows hate speech is not a community I want anything to do with.

And if we’re lucky, your kind won’t make the planet extinct before being left behind by a more reasonable future majority of humans.

If you let Nazis in your bar, you have a Nazi bar.

I don’t have a bar or go to bars. I live in the US where it seems impossible to have a non-Nazi bar by my standards, and your standard here is even tighter, to where I don’t see how any bar anywhere on earth could avoid being Nazi by your standards. So a bar seems like a weird comparison for internet discussion, where the Nazi places are more like the ones that promote echo chambering to help Nazism rise up (which includes banning Nazi ideas from many political spaces)

I’m not going to report them, I’m just trying not to let them bait me into getting myself banned.

The problem is if I did give them the reply they deserved, I might be banned when I’m the one treating them fairly, and I doubt they’d face a longer ban for baiting me or anything.

Two wrongs don’t make a right, me trying to get them banned doesn’t help with the fact that online spaces form bullying cults that ban victims. Either neither of us should be banned, or the instigator should be banned without punishing the victim. If you really feel like punishing victims, it would at least look less culty and psychopathic if instigators were treated more harshly. But I’m not the one removing the option to just let everyone talk freely with no bans for non-spammers.

Obviously a fake rule, since I don’t see any risk of the person I was replying to being banned.

Like most online discussion spaces these days, the “moderation” isn’t spam filtering, it’s censorship by bullies who conveniently pretend they’re only censoring bullies. At least that’s my guess based on vote scores on certain content

Seems like you’re trying to bait me into a response that could be used as an excuse to ban me. Try this bullshit on nostr if you can handle talking somewhere you can’t just ban people who stand up to your bullying.

If you copy and paste your reply to me on nostr, I’ll be happy to explain the basic English definitions you’re asking me for (instead of a dictionary) while insulting my intelligence, but I’ll also insult yours back in a more appropriate way.

Edit - you obviously won’t actually reply on nostr, because you’re an authoritarian bully, but if you did, I’d feel a bit proven wrong about you and not immediately say anything I’d get banned for. It’s only here, that I want to say anything I’d get banned here for. Kind of a catch 22 type thing

What does that have to do with the context where you’re replying? I was talking about censorship, not community building / spam filtering

If humans can avoid extinction and keep the internet online for a long enough time, it shouldn’t be too hard for them to eventually figure out censorship is bad

Then you’re really saying the internet is dying faster than it can develop. I think that’s just psychologically defensive defeatism, tied to stuff like saying humans can’t survive climate change