Around the year 1000, it's a reasonable guess to assume that emergence of new species and species extinction were roughly in balance, so net extinction rate was indeed around 0.
Today, it's well-established that this net extinction rate is as horrible as is described. A few new species emerging here and there are not enough to compensate for the mess that we are causing on the extinction front, by orders of magnitude.
And then pay somebody to guard it. Aka the "pay someone else to do it" option that your sibling comment talks about (and of which there are many different flavors, S3 being another one).
> And it's overwhelmingly likely S3 will still exist in an easily readable form in 30 years time.
There is no indication that this statement holds true. Not even remotely.
Businesses fold all the time. How many services still exist today that existed 30 years ago? Not in some archive, but still operational?
In addition to that problem, tech half-life continues to decrease. 30 years in the future is likely more comparable to 60 years in the past. Hello punch-cards.
Why not just mix human rights in China also into the discussion? Make everybody into vegans cause animal cruelty? Police brutality? School crisis?
Obviously different problems are always best tackled in combination! Practically guarantees success. /s
And obviously geopolitical bullies should just not be talked to. Hm so let's see who is left to talk to then. Russia, China, U.S., NATO, none of those won't an option anymore. Good to keep your principles. And good luck doing anything good to the climate with the strategy of only talking to yourself (assuming your country isn't a geopolitical bully itself, which is likely quite a stretch, given the odds.)
Funny, I had this exact discussion with a colleague at work the other day. She claimed this is nonsense and won't change anybody's mind.
Then she mentioned that she just had bought a new car. I asked what kind, it's a hybrid. I asked why? Well, because her old car was using so much fuel, and with recent price hikes, that became too expensive, so she just bought one that was significantly more fuel efficient.
The _exact_ same person! Just 2 minutes after claiming monetary incentives don't work demonstrated that it actually worked for her!
I have high hopes that price hikes are what convinces people to change their behavior. Not ads, not appealing to ethics or conciousness or "the future of your kids" or pictures of dying polar bears. You need to feel it in your wallet, then you act, plain and simple.
Maybe convince somebody then to have final storage for nuclear waste anywhere close to where they live. Once this crap is in your backyard, the armchair philosophers find excuses really fast.
Similar with wind turbines, but at least those are so small scale that you can convince closeby towns fast by just letting them participate in the profits. Different story for leaking barrels stored underground.
(And yes, that's how this crap ends up. Just google Asse II and then let's discuss German cleanliness again.)
Sad that this is downvoted. The hidden cost of nuclear is one of the biggest issue the tech-affine crowds tend to ignore and not want to hear about. You may not pay it on your utility bill, but society and later generations will pay it.
Which is a good thing. Just converting energy sources is not going to save us. We need to tackle the energy sinks too, i.e., getting smarter about how we use the available energy, i.e., mostly being more energy efficient. ("We" as in "humankind".) Raising prices is the right incentive here. In the long run, +50% is not actually that bad. There is room for a lot more.
Arts and U.S. Ivy are missing key words in the title.
If you lift your eyes beyond the U.S., there are countries where the student does not pay tuition and the offered degree program actually contains really useful material with a high quality teaching experience.
But sure, let's just all watch 10min youtube clips and claim it's at least as good.
The ability to do some changes like that is not the same as doing it always. Most commits are quite localized, and those should not be penalized by the ability to have a few cross-cutting ones.
This article is surprisingly and disappointingly simple-minded to appear on a place called Hacker News. It's a list of things aimed at my mom, not at a "hacker", whatever meaning you assign to this term.
The most telling may well be section "5. Be wary of unknown sources" which recommends "You should never trust software from these sources". One of the key ways of making Android privacy focused is to install F-Droid and use the non-cloud alternatives it offers to all the standard Play Store crap.
Sorry, I would have expected more from something posted on Hacker News. I expect everybody here to roll their eyes when reading a heading such as "Use a PIN".
My advice to anybody in general would be: Do it. I did a Ph.D. and I had a blast. You need to be in an area of your field that you really like, and over the Ph.D. candidate years you will meet essentially everybody on the planet working on the same stuff, geek out with similarly-minded people in your lab or at conferences around the globe. A Ph.D. widens your view on our field substantially and you feel less like your role in the world is that of a code monkey. Don't do it in the U.S. though, where your position in society is to be a (financially) poor student and often times just being used by your advisor as cheap labor. Do it in a country that has better conditions, like you find all over the place in Europe for example. If you first go to industry, you'll never come back.
My advice to you specifically would be: Don't do it. You seem to dislike academia and your area in particular. A Ph.D. is not an instrument to get better opportunities in industry, except for a very few research-oriented positions. I'm now working in industry as a software engineer, and I'm also having a blast, but the position I have did not require a Ph.D. (I feel like I have a broader understanding of CS than my colleagues do though.)
Around the year 1000, it's a reasonable guess to assume that emergence of new species and species extinction were roughly in balance, so net extinction rate was indeed around 0.
Today, it's well-established that this net extinction rate is as horrible as is described. A few new species emerging here and there are not enough to compensate for the mess that we are causing on the extinction front, by orders of magnitude.