You don't have to do anything - if it's more important to you to bring your authentic beliefs and opinions in front of others - you're free to do so. But if your number one priority is getting ahead at work - or simply aiming to develop social cohesion with a group around you, conforming to that group's beliefs and culture are helpful. This applies not just to the 40 hours you work, but to any group you want to be welcome in, whether it's your school, country, church or sports team. And after a little while, it's not really pretending anymore.
> Maybe we should tell kids that in school
Half of the reason we have school is to socialize kids to these very concepts. We obviously lecture about peer pressure, but most of this is learned innately. Society couldn't exist without these social pressures, even though they're not always beneficial.
> Half of the reason we have school is to socialize kids to these very concepts.
School is a brainwashing machine that limits the range of acceptable dialog and therefore leads to a culture of mediocrity.
Don't get me wrong, you should always be polite and empathetic towards others. But the most world-changing ideas don't come to you when you're dedicating huge amounts of your processing power to self-censoring or arbitrarily creating constraints because you're worried that the group will cancel you over them.
There is an actual range of acceptable dialog though. The workplace is not the right forum for discussing politics and religion, or your sex life. Not discussing that stuff is necessary not only for politeness but good rapport and productivity.
>But the most world-changing ideas don't come to you when you're dedicating huge amounts of your processing power to self-censoring or arbitrarily creating constraints because you're worried that the group will cancel you over them.
The most world-changing ideas are not hot button ragebait talking points or political soapboxing. Furthermore, it should not require a lot of processing power for you to stay on task at work and not inject controversial narratives into everything. You might be lucky enough to have some friends at work who enjoy talking to you about that stuff but have a little respect for everyone else who isn't in the mood for your shit.
I concur - the cost of this conformity is that creative outliers can be crushed, and their ideas (maybe important ideas that could save the organization from some dire outcome) can be lost.
If 100% of the fuel we use comes from this technique - where it is imbued with carbon that was atmosphere-bound (flue gas) then we have decreased emissions significantly, since the alternative was that we release the flue gas CO2 AND the burning fuel CO2.
Electrolysis is one of the most promising paths to CO2 utilization - not just collecting and burying CO2, but using it.
With a feed of CO2 plus electricity, you can make a number of chemicals. Some companies look to make fuels - but there's plenty of other chemicals that can be made this way. Fuels are attractive, but also borderline thermodynamically impossible to make profitable vs petrochemical fuels, unless energy is free. Even still, SAFs (sustainable aviation fuels) and other green-washed products can be profitable here. There's also a few use cases for being able to generate fuel in remote places (space, at sea, military applications, national security in case of pipeline blockade)
China is pushing so much power production via renewables that the idea of 'free' power is becoming more and more of a reality. I don't think using this for fuel makes a lot of sense but we use oil for a lot of things other than fuels. With enough investment in renewables to create huge amounts of excess power we can potentially use this to replace a lot of the non fuel uses of oil. Factories in the desert that produce their own raw materials from the air using the solar and wind right next to them is the dream here.
We could choose to redefine profitable -- taxing authority exists in much of the world. Make synthetic fuels that demonstrably generate themselves via solar or wind tax free. Impose taxes on fuels that come from the ground.
We're producing an unbelievable amount of solar energy right now, and that amount is skyrocketing. Especially in China, who seems at the front of a shift toward renewables.
Since everyone is pitching their HN alternative frontends, I'll throw mine in the ring - https://hn.zip - which precaches all the frontpage posts on load, so you can continue to browse comments in flaky network conditions. I use it every day to browse on the subway. It's not perfect, but it does the job it needs to.
Still supporting https://monkeys.zip - my pet art project where users simulate thousands of monkeys on typewriters for silly rewards. After which, moving on to a music creation app.
I never even strictly enabled it, but I'm a big fan. My pixel 5 from 2020 still easily gets a full day of battery life, and without direct evidence, I suspect always slow-charging has helped with that.
I've spent the last few weeks working on the backend, I completely forgot how much work I put into making it able to render enough unique monkeys. Mostly a custom implementation built around THREE.js InstancedMesh to add animations, and support egonomically instancing lots of small types of objects
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