this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2024
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So then you didn't "solve" the impossible problems.
I hope you and your colleagues have a good laugh about how the work you do is contributing to the march towards the end of human civilization as we know it.
I did. Let me know which part was confusing to you. Unless of course you want to choose to, yet again, latch on to one sentence as a gotcha.
Is that what we are doing? I thought I built recycling systems, sanitation systems, and pumping systems. I wasn't aware that helping make sure we don't die in our own feces+garbage and providing fresh water was going to be the downfall of civilization. Damn here I am thinking that this is one of the most important parts of civilization. Well I don't want to cause civilization to end. Tell you what, why not be the change you want to see in the world and stop flushing your toilet, stop using tap water, stop recycling anything, and don't set your garbage out.
The part where you left out any viable path for any of the hypothetical solutions to be realized 🤷♂️ You of all people should know that a blueprint is worthless if there's no process available to build what it describes.
I mean yeah, I do agree that sanitation and water works are the crowning achievement of human civilization to this very day. But I've gotta say it doesn't inspire confidence if the people running those systems think that concerns about sustainability are something to have a group chuckle about.
Just because the work you do is important doesn't mean it's beyond the scrutiny of ecological sustainability. All your good work won't amount to much in the long run if we can't find a path to reducing consumption and prolonging the viability of these systems. We don't have infinite resources, and our ability to recycle is nowhere near what it needs to be to keep up with economic demand.
My partner and I are unironically taking the time to research subsistence farming and how to maintain very basic personal water collection and waste removal/reuse systems. We're also learning about perma-computing so that hopefully we can preserve some of the knowledge that humans have accumulated into the future.
We see it as a foregone conclusion that human civilization as we know it will entirely collapse, probably sooner than anyone cares to admit, so we're making contingency plans. People with your dismissive attitude are a big part of why we see it as a forgone conclusion. Because as far as we can tell you're in the 95%+ majority of people on this planet, which means hardly anyone is putting effort into solving these existential problems that we're facing. Problems which you have offered no viable solution to, despite your insistence otherwise.
Again. Not my job to handhold you. I build projects other people have the job of convincing the general public. Marketing is not engineering.
You are the one who thought 6 decades was a reasonable number for moving fluid systems. Yes it is ridiculous. You can't get parts that work that way no matter how much money you have. These aren't items you can buy. I don't even know how it would even work. How many bushings and filters and gaskets that need to have the exact dimensions they have and you expect them to last six decades. Tell me how to do that. How do you make something of millimeter thickness that is also rugged enough? Fuck even like paint, you can't expect a paint job to last anywhere near that.
And even if you could build something like that I wouldn't want to go anywhere near it. I hate dealing with the electrical systems from the 80s let alone from the 60s. That would be a nightmare. No way I am sticking my face inside a panel that predates SCCR.
Alright have fun with that. It won't be as inefficient or as safe but you are welcome to try.
Literally this weekend answered an email about a battery recycling facility I am helping to design. But yeah your compost pile is so impressive to me.
I made a decision 8 years ago to go into waste and pollution reduction. I choose to be the change I wanted to see in the world. You grew an heirloom turnip, I wrote the code running on +100 scrubbers. As an environmental expert I am sure you know what a scrubber is and totally don't have to look at Wikipedia to know the difference between a hybrid/wet/dry types. As well as what blowoff, recirculation lines, mist eliminators, and reaction chambers are.
Umm actually I did. Repeatedly. You just waved your hands around, pointed at the one sentence you thought you could attack, declared victory, then bragged about your little garden.
I really admire that you're committed to recycling and waste reduction. Do you have any resources you'd recommend for me to learn more about what's going on in that space and what's being done to combat the acceleration of plastic and electronics waste?
I know it's "not your job" to educate me, but everything I can find on the topic suggests that we don't have a viable path to manage the accelerating growth of waste, and we don't have very effective systems for recycling, so even recyclable waste is mostly just being dumped in landfills because it's more "economical" to just keep churning out products from new materials. I'd be very happy for all of that to be wrong, so any credible source you can point me at to debunk that narrative would be very much appreciated.
Thanks. Challenging question. Department of energy map might be a good place to start to learn about battery recycling. As for e-waste in general there just isn't a lot of movement in this sector that I am seeing. The process is labor intensive. So you don't exactly need an automation guy if you plan to hire a thousand children. Very very generally if energy costs could be brought down by about half automatied processes would make more sense.
Material reduction, material conveying, bath it in the solvent that can strip the meat from your bones, run solvent through solvent recovery, what remains is the stuff worth recycling. It's the same basic process that has been around since before my grandparents were born. We just keep making it safer, bigger, and more efficient.
I really can't speak about plastic sorry. The last plastic recycling project I was on not only failed it failed back in 2019. I am sure there must be good resources out there to learn more. I did work on a scrubber that processed a bit of melted plastic but the amounts were so small a pure water based one could handle it, so not that interesting. If you want to know about that I can go into detail.
It's not wrong. I don't know what to tell you. I feel like I am a doctor with a fat smoker deskjob having meth using patient. We have all the tools we need to solve the problem the issue is that we are prevented from solving problems.
I can easily go on a ten page rant of all the crap I see local governments, PEs, and sales people do to make sure that they don't have to use their brains for even a second.
No one demands accountability from these projects, no one stops the river of dirty money, no one starts looking brutally at how the contracts are rewarded and the designs being used. Routinely, maybe even once a week, I see concrete guys trying to design electrical systems, I see sales guys make civil engineering decisions, I see used piece of crap parts off eBay being put in new systems because some shithead PE didn't want to re-stamp.
The tech is there, the resources are there, the knowhow is there, the will is there. But if everything just works a lot of people would be upset.
Meanwhile despite none of what I am saying being new or novel or surprising the solutions to these second order problems are always bad. I am mocking you for your herb garden for a reason. It means so little compared to actually solving the issues, it is less than a drop in the bucket.
The single best thing you can do is apply for a job in my sector, the second best thing to do is start showing up to your local government meetings, the second to worse thing you can do is try to hunker down. Because guess what, that asshole rolling coal in his F250 is only mildly making the problem worse compared to what you are doing.
We solve society level problems on the society level. I can build machines that process more waste in a day than you will generate in your life.
Thanks for your candid views on this.
To be clear, our interest in subsistence farming is not intended to do anything to solve the problems we're facing as a society. It's an attempt to figure out how we might try to survive locally after the global supply chains collapse. We're particularly researching what crops might be viable in a landscape that has been reshaped by the changing climate. Additionally we're studying everything we can about community organizing and systems of self-governance that promote collaboration over individual greed.
This might all sound defeatist to someone like yourself who is still committed to fighting the good fight, but we see it as a contingency plan that our community's ability to survive may depend on in the future.