Removed by mod
The discovery of making and using fire.
Why
It’s the very beginning of the energy crisis. If we had never started fucking with fire, we wouldn’t have 90% or more of the world’s manmade problems.
Yeah we could argue about having mankind at all …
Pesky humans, we are our own worst enemy… ☹️
Having the intelligence to create technology but not enough intelligence to understand the implications.
The thing is technology is neutral. How we use it isnt.
we understand the implications, we just assume that the negatives will happen to others and that the positives will grant us a temporary reprieve in which to plug existing holes
Leaving the tide pools. Possibly even forming proteins to begin with. I much more enjoyed being stardust.
Fostering societal systems of greed and competition rather than of cooperation and compassion.
This, we moved from Tribes to towns to cities to be more efficient but lost the cooperative aspect of the tribe which made it more efficient in the first place. Now corporations do market research until they figure out exactly what we can afford to get our needs met and then charge that price instead of anything related to their actual costs. It’s resulted in a situation to where most people live month to month and can’t afford vacation or even an unexpected car repair.
Thats me. My car, teeth, hair, and some parts of my rental house (thanks landlord) are falling apart and I can’t afford to fix any of it cause rent and bills are due each month and they keep going up. Its fucken madness, its making me insane.
Cheers from across the hellscape, friend.
The problem with cooperation and compassion is that it literally takes one dick to ruin it. If we could incentivize the psychopaths in society to collaborate for their own good, then at least we’d strike a nice balance, but our economies aren’t structured that way.
A system that can be so easily destabilized is not a system that has planned for the long term. I think we’re slowly getting there, as even the dicks in society are beginning to realise that they can be shunned for their public actions, and that shunning does come with real financial consequences.
I just can’t subscribe to that idea. If it took 1 dick to ruin everything society would never have gotten off the ground in the first place. Hell, even today, our power grid pretty much operates off the principle of 'don’t be a dick and shoot this with the guns we all have" and it took MAGA craziness for people to attack them. I’d say compassion operates within any given system in spite of people being dicks and thats why we have prevailed the way we have.
You make a good point
ITT people trying to be edgy but I’m going to say invading Russia in the winter.
Also, while we’re on the invasion topic: invading Ukraine.
Our collective response to climate change
That’s right. We theorized the effects shortly after the first coal power plant, and we have observed the effects for a century now. Yet the response has been minimal, to say the least
large efforts are being made, its just not up to par with what people are expecting from their governments
I’m sure we’ve seen nothing yet
As far as effort? You’re right
And damage!
“Let’s just divide up Poland and keep the peace. We can focus our whole energy on the western front, you can save yourselves bloodshed by the tanker load, and in a few short years we can share dominion over a subjugated world.”
“You so right, that sounds like a great plan”
“Hey guess what I just decided”
The whole world would have been different. It was still a pretty close thing with help from the Soviets and with Germany fighting a ludicrous two-front war for literally no military or geopolitical reason at all.
How do I politely suggest that learning history through HOI4 or WWII subreddits might not be the best idea?
What about that didn’t happen? Enlighten me.
Every time someone tried to make “a weapon so powerful it would make people not want to wage war”.
Several weapons are on this list, from the cannon to the machine gun to, most famously, the atomic bomb.
The fact that this happened once would’ve been understandable. The fact this escalated to nuclear weapons because people just tried pushing this idea is nuts though.
This is not toward so much the technology, with all tech being no less inevitable, but more to do with the intentions/hindsight/foresight of the people making something that can only be produced by an assembly in a seemingly dire setting, as opposed to something like AI, which does not stem from that and which would’ve come around at some time.
By extension, this extends to populism in general, a mindset that from experience I refuse to compliment. I’m surrounded by people every day who come off as thinking with their feet and not with the methodological part of them, and my experiences with this have never allowed me to be fully at peace.
Surprised the chat isn’t calling me out.
I say we fucked up the moment we existed.
Communism
deleted by creator
Leaded fuel
At least it was (mostly) dealt with. Cars generally don’t need it anymore, and the few that do can reduce engine knock through additives. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a pump offering leaded fuel.
One big exception to all of this is small general aviation aircraft. They mostly run on AVGAS100LL, but it’s not because of the planes anymore. Just like cars, the few planes that need it can use additives. But regulation for fuel standards change slowly, and ICAO moves at the pace of glacial drift.
They were probably also alluding to the long term effects it had on likely the people who are still the most influential age group still running the world.
I remember one of my engineering profs describing Midgley as the most environmentally destructive organism ever, Dude also was involved in the creation of freon.
But he also killed the biggest environmentally destructive person on the planet.
Ur mom giving birth to you
spoiler
Kidding, of course. I felt like someone had to make the dumb low-hanging fruit joke.
Ego.
