haweemwho

Modern crisis research [1] shows that a sudden loss of just 10% of a population (that is, essentially over night) would have devastating consequences. Basically, breakdown of society as we know it.

Now combine that with nuclear winter and resulting consequences for crops and lifestock. We don't all need to die directly from bombs. Just a minor disruption in stability and hunger and civil unrest do the rest.

[1] It's pretty fascinating how vulnerable our societies are. Other results are things like .. 3 days power outage and you'd also be on the verge of civil war if government doesn't immediately pour in enormous resources in crisis management.

I appreciate that you elaborated your thoughts. That makes for a much nicer discussion!

I'd turn your argument around. We seem to not care about any of the N-1 species. Why treat the remaining one specially? Because we belong to it? I don't find that convincing. Maybe we're focusing too much on individual freedom that suddenly caring about the species as a whole seems is odd. The population around me, as a whole, is giving pretty few f*ks about me. I basically just return that attitude.

Or, to formulate it differently, I'd get on board caring about not just the survival but flourishing of our species, if we'd extend that courtesy to all the other species around us.

That academia job is less stable. Bring in grants or go home. Compete with others to climb a pyramid that gets more and more narrow at the top.

Even if you are laid off at Google or Facebook, with those on your resume, anybody will take you, unless you are some weird incompetent fluke. If you didn't get a new grant, you'll have a hard time in academia. Good luck switching institutions once you are unsuccessful in the grant game.

> IMHO, right now, tenure is the only edge Academia has in many areas of STEM compared to industrial labs.

This.

Even with tenure in place, I'd never go to academia. So much politics, worry about grants, immobility in what to do research in, low compensation compared to industry jobs, so much frustration, frustrated and bitter colleagues... It's terrible. I love working with colleagues that all have the best interest of the workplace in mind. I find that in industry a lot. In academia it's really rare.

> but it is one of the fields that was necessary and instrumental in the development of the of the universal Turing machine.

You'd be shocked how many people in the software industry regard Turing machines as some esoteric construct that is of no value and wasn't necessary for the invention of the iPhone or Javascript.

> I honestly believe that most of the carbon calculations come from the pro-renewable folks to promote whatever pet project they’re on about.

Sounds like reflection to me, if anything.

Again measuring with different standards. Depending on the design of a typical wind turbine, you can recycle 90-95% of those as well. And that's without a prime design criterion of maximizing recyclability, which could be mandated by law and then you'd achieve close to 100%.

The sentence is just as disingenuous as the initial sentence that I criticized.

Isn't Siemens in the wind power business as well?

> At peak, we had about 80k nukes (way less now). That’s nowhere near enough to kill all 8bn people (as spread out as we are).

Directly? Probably not. But the contamination from fallout is more than sufficient to poison a significant fraction of humans over a not-too-long time horizon and provide everybody else with a significant cancer risk. The ensuing chaos and resulting breakdown of civilization will do the rest. Don't believe it? Ever seen the panic when toilet paper is at risk to run out at Walmart?

Those who still remember the Chernobyl disaster are aware what that meant for Europe. A single plant, and everybody got warned and could take precautions.

> a FUD spreader like you

Eh, what? That's not a very nice thing to say.

> So tell me

No, I don't need to. I refuted a claim. You can move the goal posts, but I won't participate in that game.

Obviously a coal plant emits more CO2 than a nuclear fission plant. But the criticized sentence contained the words "carbon free". Which is just not true. I don't see how pointing that out is FUD.

Geez, I'm really worried about discussion styles here.

Nobody claimed that other species do. That has little to do with the question of why I should care about our's surviving.

> The truth is that the once the power plant is built it generates clean power for decades.

That is not the truth. The typical fuel cycle in fission plants is 3-6 years.

"X is the only foo that doesn't suffer from Y!"

"But it does!"

"Well so does every other foo!"

You see that this is not a good argument, don't you?

So, AI prompt is the new language/stack/API that you refuse to learn?