If human society collapses, our cities and landfills will become ores. Strange ores filled with unnatural mixtures of metals, but ores nonetheless.
The sources you've linked discuss mostly the recovery of additional metals on top of what we have already recovered. That's a different and much harder problem. It's worth remembering that historically, the amount of metal obtained was much smaller — the vast majority of the copper that has ever been mined was mined in the last century, even though humans have been using copper for thousands of years. But historically, that copper was mostly used for consumer products, while today it becomes electrical cables, so it's less obvious how much copper we all use. There's surely enough copper in the walls of my apartment for everyone living here to cook in a copper pan, even though we think of copper pans as being too expensive nowadays.
This is a defense of glass, specifically, and not a class of architecture in general. And "traditional" architecture is not a properly descriptive term; it tells us where the architecture came from, not what it is. Architecture is basically a creative process, and we can't handwave away the complexity by using temporal language like "traditional" and "modern".
The problem with modern architecture, in my opinion, is its preference for "dramatic effect": long contours, flat surfaces, high contrast. This is visually exhausting. It looks nice in a catalog and from a large distance, but it's uncomfortable to be close to. This doesn't follow from the use of more glass. It's a historical coincidence that the float glass process made windows cheaper around the same time that architects started experimenting with smoothness.
>Have you been schooled in farming? Raising livestock? Milking cattle?
You're equating life skills to professional skills. I was not taught to milk a cow, but my milk comes from someone who was. The topic is whether software engineers in a professional context learned certain things about software.
The Pinkerton incident involved WotC protecting a trade secret, generally the least controversial part of IP law. This was not a case of a mobbed up card vendor roughing up a competitor. People can reasonably object to the tactics used, but the distribution of materials that were never approved for release is a small fraction of piracy and one where the grey hats start to get a little darker.
The efficiency of most existing heat-driven refrigerator and heat-pump designs is kind of disappointing. This isn't a fundamental thermodynamic issue; the Carnot efficiency for a gas burner at 2000 C running a refrigerator offering a 40 C temperature drop is close to the electric efficiency. In principle, it could be a more efficient way to use stored hydrogen than a fuel cell. In practice, it isn't. Maybe actually taking advantage of such high temperature differences requires very good refractory alloys. I would be curious to know the absolute efficiency proposed here rather than just a rough estimate of relative efficiency.
Renewable energy is expanding faster than ever. And it's hard for people to look at that and think we're moving too slowly. But we still are. That's the basic cultural disconnect.
When nuclear power became a thing in the seventies, there was massive planning around a presumed nuclear-powered future. The largest energy storage facilities in the US were all built around that time. This turned out to be a mirage as the cost of nuclear went up with the safety expectations of the electorate, while petrochemical prices dropped. But this time it's not prices we're predicting, it's temperature, which is much more reliable.
Nuclear has a lot of environmental impact too. You need to mine a lot of earth to get a little uranium, and a lot of that activity is very polluting and a lot of that activity is not climate neutral. Then you have the waste problem that's not figured out, proliferation etc.
We can't go cherrypicking environmental problems. That way we roll from one crisis into the next. There's so many issues we're causing, like entire ecosystems going extinct. Sooner or later that will lead to crises too. We have to stop externalising.
And yes the electorate wants to be safe and for good reason. Even Fukushima polluted a lot. It's not just about death tolls.
Uranium mining is a dirty business and if we're going to be needing a lot more of it due to expansion of nuclear and leaving the mining to the lowest bidder it will be very polluting.
I think it’s pretty questionable to suggest it’s easy to recycle, hence the mining of the material isn’t of consequence.
And if we’re just being offhanded then apparently thorium is a replacement for uranium, or there’s the ability to reprocess used fuel again for nuclear power.
I think you missed the point of the nuclear tangent. The point was that people might be reluctant to build out energy storage capacity before demand appears because of what happened last time. The difference is that climate change is more predictable than the economy.
If you're just gonna be replacing entire orders of magnitudes of difference with the word "too", then everything "has a lot of environmental impact too".
> We can't go cherrypicking environmental problems.
Huh? Local pollution with solid waste vs dispersing that waste into the global atmosphere is the same to you?
> Even Fukushima polluted a lot. It's not just about death tolls.
Right, 20_000 deaths from the tsunami is no big deal, the pollution is!
Since you're ignoring any and all statistics wholesale, I hope you never fly — 9/11 was terrible after all, so aviation is clearly unsafe.
You responded to an abbreviation of the original argument. The original was "people had one year to prepare for or protest this". And the impact of a required equipment replacement is dependent on the expected lifetime of the equipment. Practically all equipment lasts more than a year. Disposable items bought in bulk are basically a form of equipment that lasts until you run out. Five years will see about a third of stuff get turned over. I have seen some fluoroscopy equipment still running since the late 90s.
Ultimately "make better rules" is only half the battle. You still need a process for implementation.
The sources you've linked discuss mostly the recovery of additional metals on top of what we have already recovered. That's a different and much harder problem. It's worth remembering that historically, the amount of metal obtained was much smaller — the vast majority of the copper that has ever been mined was mined in the last century, even though humans have been using copper for thousands of years. But historically, that copper was mostly used for consumer products, while today it becomes electrical cables, so it's less obvious how much copper we all use. There's surely enough copper in the walls of my apartment for everyone living here to cook in a copper pan, even though we think of copper pans as being too expensive nowadays.
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