This is both accurate and understating the issue. People can't be downright hostile to new ideas even if it makes their life easier.
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Meshtastic is worth taking a peek and a play at. HAM radio-esque text messages, but without the license requirements.
We can't put that on companies though. We live in a democracy, if people choose not to vote for politicians that pass laws to restrict companies, that's their choice.
It will drive up prices though, so people could already be making those choices with their purchasing and they're not.
People being stupid is not an excuse for not being able to do the right thing.
To be clear, A staple food is something that provides a significant portion of the calories (or other nutrients) in an overall diet.
A single slice of bread for breakfast, which while popular as you point out, simply doesn't come up to that level. From your own link only 60% of respondents even eat breakfast every day, and 20% don't eat it at all.
The whole statement I made was that bread just isn't consumed in the quantities or for the purposes that we have it for in North America, so that's why trying to find things like Whole Wheat bread is so difficult.
Americans eat on average 37 to 53 pounds of bread per year, or around 50-80 loaves. Around two slices of bread per person per day. Extrapolating from the Japanese situation, their average is probably closer to 1/3rd of that value.
Bread isn't really a staple in Japan, even in it's white form. It's not something that you just have in the house all the time. They won't make a sandwich at home, they may purchase and use it for toast but I don't think I've ever seen a Japanese person eat more than one slice at breakfast before. Even the bread at most stores is sold as 4-6 slices only rather than a full loaf. https://mel.jfconline.com.au/cdn/shop/files/37170.png?v=1748918723&width=900
You are not mistaken.
I don't think you understand the level of difference in pollution associated with eating meat compared to being a vegetarian. It's not like it only saves 10% or 20%, even accounting for transportation and the like it's closer to a 50% reduction.
Most customers don’t understand, don’t care, or cannot afford your more expensive products, especially in this economy.
This is why it's the fault of the customers and not the fault of the companies. That's my entire argument. The companies didn't make the alternative more expensive, reality makes the alternative more expensive. The fact that people choose to continue to shop on price is literally the core issue.
It's total global energy usage. Water consumption is a different factor, and most of the datacenters now being built don't even use any. The hardware constructions is a trivial component of the overall picture.
I'm not getting it backward.
While you're right that my example is simplified, it's not wrong. Shoes are actually like that in real life. A good pair of shoes can last many times as long as the cheap shoes, and pollute the same or even less than cheap ones. There is significant market competition from different companies including small start up brands and long term high quality brands that keep the entire industry quite well balanced.
If two companies produce high quality expensive shoes, that a customer likes equally, the only thing driving the consumer choice is going to be price. So one company cuts their costs a little bit to compete by dropping the quality ever so slightly. Consumers buy that, and then the other company says "I can do that too" cuts it a little bit more to undercut and it goes back and forth. The expensive shoes didn't stop existing, customers can still choose them, but they aren't choosing them. The back and forth only stops when the consumers refuse to buy it any cheaper because the quality is no longer even acceptable to them.
That is ENTIRELY customer driven. The moment a company releases a product that isn't sufficient, consumers stop buying it, and the company goes back to the product that does sell and generate profit for them.
Car companies lobbied to kill emissions standards not because they didn't want to produce EVs, but because it would cost them profit as fewer people bought cars that were more expensive to meet the standards. Oil companies may have tried to kill EV programs, but that's not the car companies.
Upfront price isn't real, people who are broke finance cars. An non-luxury EV is effectively the same price per month as a gas vehicle unless you don't drive very much (no commute or very short commute) or happen to live somewhere where electricity rates are extremely high and gas costs are extremely low.
Your lack of education cannot be blamed on companies. That is YOUR responsibility, not theirs. The information is available for free to everyone at this point, even homeless people have access to the internet at this point. The fact that people choose not to be informed can only be blamed on them.
You may want to pretend that you're not responsible because it lets you pick the easier option and not feel like you're bad, but it's no more real than crashing into a parked car and getting mad at them for being in your way.
You have this backwards. The current is being manufactured by demand, not manufacturing the demand. People WANT cheaper and easier.
You walk into a shoe store, you want some new everyday shoes, there are cheap and expensive versions. The pricier set has better materials for durability and comfort, and took more R&D to develop. The expensive shoes will last twice as long and be more comfortable, but are twice as expensive as the cheaper option. The pollution from each of the shoes is pretty similar. The company makes a profit of $5 from the cheap shoes, and $10 from the expensive shoe.
The shoe companies don't care which one they sell you, they want to make the most profit and both types make them the same amount of profit (you need two pairs of the cheap shoes over the life of an expensive pair)
The majority of people will buy the cheaper pair.
Did the company engineer it so that you would buy the cheaper pair and pollute more? Or is the company just forced to produce them because that's what people are choosing to buy?
There are situations and products where buying the expensive version is actually significantly CHEAPER long term, and people still choose the worst long-term option. Electric cars for example have had lower TCO (Total cost of ownership) in many areas (not all) and usage cases for a while now, and you still see people buying brand new gas vehicles. They also have a much lower lifetime environmental impact.
Again, the car company doesn't give a crap. They get their profit on every unit sold regardless. They just make what people want to buy.
You are giving companies far too much credit for how much power they have. There are exceptions of course (Cough Cigarettes Cough) where companies are being blatantly evil by doing things like manufacturing demand through addiction, but the vast majority of companies have no such capability and the most "engineering" you're going to get from them is an advertising campaign.
Forcing companies to not use plastic packaging will not somehow make the same product available at the same price. They will raise prices because the alternative is going to cost them more or again.. they would already be doing it. Those people would then "die" anyways as the prices rise.
Your logic is shit.
People can definitely continue to stay alive with less polluting personal choices, but choose not to every single day., I rarely see broke vegetarians for example, despite a true vegetarian diet (meat replacement products are expensive and do not count) being significantly cheaper than a meat based one and MASSIVELY more environmentally friendly.
Nah, the blame primarily lies solely with the complacency of the population. They want cheap and easy, they get cheap and easy.
Yes it is. If people didn't buy things that are packaged in plastic, the companies won't sell things packaged in plastic.
Alternatives are available right now, they just either a) cost more or b) take more time, or c) you would have to do without
By making the choice to go with the cheaper/easier option, and by doing so are giving them permission to keep doing it.
"BUT MAH COST OF LIVING" this isn't a valid excuse for doing something you know is bad.
If the more environmentally friendly option was the cheapest, it would already be the default. You have to choose cheap or environmentally friendly, and accept the consequences of your choices.
Corporations are not the cause of Climate change, purchasers of the products from corporations are.
I did the math (go look at my comment history) and AI total global energy use is projected to be around 0.4% of the total global energy use by 2030.
There is no way that shutting down AI is even part of the solution to climate change.
Edit: Why are people so resistant to Facts about AI? Nobody is saying I'm wrong, nobody is sharing an article with different calculations that show it's worse than that. The sheer emotion of Anti-AI sentiment has completely broken the ability for people to think critically or even allow other people to provide evidence at this point. It's not AI that's going to doom us, it's people refusing to even acknowledge reality that will be our downfall.
Nah, it's cyclical. Kings, Lords and Peasants were capitalist too, and clearly far worse than even what we have today.
People argue that Feudalism is separate, but really those differences were political, not economic. A small number of people owned almost everything, and forced the labour of the rest of the population to survive because of that.
Labour isn't voluntary under capitalism either, it's required to survive. Modern capitalism just gives us the illusion that it's our choice.
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Again, that's not how productivity works. Productivity is the ratio of input to output.
If I have to produce 40 widgets, and it takes me 40 hours. I have a productivity of 1 widget per hour.
If I reduce my workload, and only need to produce 20 widgets, and it takes me 20 hours, I still have a productivity of 1 widget per hour. There has been no increase in my productivity.
The only way to improve the productivity is to do something more efficiently, I could get better at a task, I could use a tool that helps, etc.
There is likely a non-zero adjustment in dropping your workload, but only if you're already massively overburdened and just from reducing the stress associated or perhaps getting some extra sleep. There's not going to be any significant difference in the number of burgers a McDonalds worker can produce in an hour between a 30 hour work week and a 20 hour work week.
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that's not really how productivity works...
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The simple answer is fear.
They're worried about many of the facets that relate to this, primarily how it will affect them personally via things like job losses or increased personal costs (electricity rates are a big one right now).
It's amusing because the "It's bad for the environment" crowd is either a) really stupid or b) using it as an excuse because they don't want to say they're worried about their jobs.
These people care very little about their environmental impact via other aspects of their life that are FAR more significant than AI will ever be. Meat production alone consumes like 20-25% of global energy usage, and AI is at around 0.3-0.4% of global total energy use. People eating meat one day less per week would save more energy than AI is even predicted to use in a worse case scenario in the next 20 years.
Now clearly there are some vegetarians around these days, but even most of those are doing it for ethical animal reasons rather than because of energy use issues. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10100114/
However, while I continue to see these people drive their SUV home from the AI protest, stop at the grocery store to pick up a steak for dinner, and then cook it in their 2500 square foot house that only holds 3 people I'm going to ignore their whining about energy and the environment. They're nothing but scared hypocrites.
There is no way to reliably identify bot posts if they are not revealing that information intentionally.
Should it be banned? Sure
Can it be banned? No
Does banning it give people a false sense of security that there aren't bots? Yes