Which is ironic as the vast majority of the human population, including the very same people with such views, are only alive because of substantial amounts of machinery. Such as those used in the Haber-Bosch process.
You could read this as "you can't say anything bad about the industrial complex because you participate in it", though I think that is pretty obviously bad faith.
A more charitable interpretation I would take is "whatever misgivings you have about large scale industrial practices, it's important to remember that they also massively benefit society and are in some cases necessary." Pointing out the flaws is great, villanizing is counterproductive.
I think at this stage large scale for profit petroleum extraction is literally villainous, so I'm ok villainizing. Whether it's productive to is a question of tactics that I wouldn't expect to find consensus on even among like-minded people.
There's potentially a nuanced and worthwhile conversation about what carefully ramping down fossil fuel use looks like, what responsibility we have to the people who haven't been able to take advantage of extraction yet, etc. But it's not like I'm interrupting that conversation to point this out here.
This is straightforwardly admiring the artifacts of a destructive practice and preemptively shaming & dismissing people who would find that distasteful.
A lathe can turn precise bores. Those can be used to make guns, which can be used to kill people. From my perspective, the analogy is you're anti-gun violence, but going after the people who admire the precision of the metalworking tools.
If you want to move away from fossil fuels, yes that's great. I'm with you. You're going to want the people with an appreciation for this kind of engineering on your side, as it will be necessary for transitioning any advanced economy.
If the problem is as bad as we all seem to agree it is, maybe we should cooperate to solve it instead of playing king of the hill for the moral high ground.
It's very presumptuous for you to be telling me what _I_ admire. I get to make that choice.
I admire feats of engineering. I've toured facilities that pump carbon out of the ground, I've toured facilities that capture carbon and pump it into the ground. They're both impressive in their own right, and it's the same skillsets and technologies required to build both.
The machinery looks the same regardless of the economic system. (I suppose a Soviet oil rig might have looked a little different, but basically the same thing)
It really is not. There’s a difference in seeking improvement in a system in which you participate and the current mainstream nihilism that demonizes our past achievements and seeks its destruction.
This puts it in a way I was struggling to do so. The "we are just saying we should improve society somewhat" counterclaim is disingenuous because the "we should improve society somewhat" is usually expressed in criticism and not solutions, and when solutions are suggested they are pretty vapid and full of wishful thinking.
On an even more fundamentally ridiculous level too. The people being (Alanis Morissette) "ironic" here have absolutely no choice in the matter of literally being born.
For those unfamiliar it's this comic that was simplified to the final panel [0]. It's a great send up of a whole arm of bad faith debate tactics that tries to invalidate any criticism of topic X because the person benefits from it.
Water isn't oil though, the former is biologically necessary and the latter is socially necessary. It also wasn't really what I'm talking about but I'll bite none the less.
I'm not really saying we get rid of it fully but we don't need anywhere near the oil and gas industry we have. About 67% [0] of extracted oil used in the US goes into the transportation sector in one form or another and an additional 6% goes into power generation.
We could eliminate a lot of that consumption through building things like nuclear plants and various green energy sources and by reducing the reliance on cars in the US. Unfortunately that latter option is going to be fighting against decades of culture and choices built into our cities, but we could also shift away from gas cars as well and it fortunately seems like we are at least headed that way though I'm betting we'll encounter a plateau in electric car adoption well before they outnumber gas vehicles.
Even if we only shifted most consumer vehicles over to some gas alternative we could probably eliminate at least a third of all oil products consumed in the US. More if electric trucks pan out though that's a trickier proposition just due to how they're used. Those two changes don't even really require large changes to how we operate our world today just shifting the energy demand away from fossil fuel onto electric.
You skipped the whole bit of my comment where I talked about the percentages that go into industrial uses vs transportation I guess? Only 27% of the oil extracted goes into the entire industrial use of oil.
No, I don't think you quite understand the implication. Something like 60% of the bioavailable nitrogen in the biosphere, including that in your human body, is created industrially via the haber-bosch process. Over half of all human beings and land biomass would be dead without it. Human beings and this industrial process produce more bioavailable nitrogen than all the nitrogen fixing microbes in the world combined. This process is a very important part of the earth's biosphere now with human presence taken into account, bioavailable nitrogen production is the bottleneck to biomass production. It is probably our only viable tool to actually reduce carbon dioxide present in the atmosphere.
I don’t think you understand the comic or you overlooked the thread above. It’s ironic because calling something as basic as “machinery” inherently evil has an inherently evil implication, which is that 95% of the population would need to die.
This is nothing like “you participate, how curious”. This is “I’m against literally every piece of technology required to feed any non-negligible portion of the humans on earth”.
Especially given the context of the thread, where your reply barely makes sense. There is a difference between criticizing extreme industrialism and rabid growth and villifying the very thing we all depend on. Which is totally different from just wanting to improve society somewhat ;)
But westerners are so detached from everything that goes into sustaining their lives so there is oddly little awareness of the massive industry needed since it is all outsource over seas. Makes it very easy to dislike it from far away, especially when memes can be used to rationalize away the hypocrisy and pretend the privilege they enjoy doesn't exist
(the meme basically amounts to "yes I'm privileged, but stop pointing it out! There's nothing I can do about my own privilege, I HAVE to own that iPhone too bad for the workers lol" and is the ultimate witty retort from privileged, usually white liberal people. Which is funny since those are the people who usually like to speak about privilege, but obviously not when they are called out on it themselves.)
Huh according to popularity metrics that site doesn't even rank in the top 200000 globally, and only in the 70000s for just the U.S.
If this was a top 1000 site I might get why there's an expectation to know about their 'joke comics', but when it's so obscure, I doubt even 1% of HN readers would know anything about this site.
It seems odd giraffe_lady would phrase it in that way.
Like many pieces of modern internet culture, this image has been detached from its real source and context, and propagated memetically through the various social media platforms.
It doesn't seem like the large majority of the HN audience would participate in this, so it's still a bit weird to assume other readers would know the reference.
I think it would be far more engaging and interesting to respond to the point being made rather than the noteworthyness of the source? I think we can maintain a critical distance to the force that allow us to live the way we do, and i do not believe this reduces us to mere hypocrites. The ability to admire and admonish these practices is deeply human!
That’s not a really good analogies. The real question is: are the people complaining about all industry ready to live in a world without industry? To which the answer is obviously no for most of them. It’s akin to asking: do you want 90% of the global population to die of starvation?
I don't think that's a good analogy either. It's not like a wish will be granted and we'll all still be here but suddenly without tractors. The alternative to consider is being born into a world where industrialization took off slower and culture had more time to understand the consequences before they got really severe.
Well, perhaps the problem isn't where you think it lies.
They may be willing to acknowledge your question and answer it with a whispered "yes", if you at least ask it in a way that cause them no excessive shame. Your denialism that the answer could be yes isn't quite the same thing as it being an "obvious no".
We all wander through a landscape of horrific truths that we blind ourselves to just to remain sane.
I wouldn't mind to have been born a giant, but here we are.
I get that some folks feel bad about human's impact on the earth, but you're going down a very concerning road here. I'm glad I was born, and I'm glad my child was born. I would love for us to move quicker towards a world that isn't trashing the earth like we are now.
I do however get a little concerned about the opinions of those who wished humans existed in far fewer numbers, especially when that involves a wish for a mass die-off (or cull!). You (or whomever) are free to hold whatever opinions you like, but when people start talking about advocating for allowing or promoting the death of large numbers of people, that's when I ask you to politely fuck off.
I never said anything about a mass die off, nobody is harmed by not having been born in the first place. We don't even need a mass die-off anyhow, we just need population control. Without population control we're going to have a mass die-off though, it's unavoidable due to the inherent unsustainability of our resource use.
I didn't say you were asking for that, but that line of reasoning often trends in that direction, and my opinions were directed those who hold those stronger views.
Do we need population control? For the vast majority of industrialized countries their birth rate is and has been well below replacement levels for decades. We're going to have a much smaller population pretty soon, and there's nothing anyone can do to change that now.
We'll see what plays out in the next few decades, but you've effectively already going to have what you're calling for. I don't think it's going to be a fun situation though - demographic collapse is no joke. Cutting down the replacement population numbers from there just seems like you'd be making a bad situation worse.
