I get being critical of mindless consumerism, but degrowth doesn't seem to be about "order less junk on amazon/temu", but fundamentally reducing economic activity and energy consumption, which is civilisational suicide.

Can you name specific issues caused directly by energy consumption as opposed to specific energy sources or downstream effects like pollution, which is avoidable?

Why would an ecologist have to be against more energy consumption? For climate change, what matters is energy from the sun hitting the earth vs. energy being radiated back into space. More energy consumption also doesn't necessarily cause more pollution of any kind.

I responded to a comment implying that if there is a philantropist like Bill Gates camping out in the desert sucking CO2 out of the air, we won’t need a massive collective effort.

Maybe this will be a somewhat effective solution one day for areas where fuel energy density is important (e.g. flight), but that’s about it. Carbon neutrality will still need a distributed effort as point source capture is massively more economical where feasible.

Did you get 750-800 out of the box with a Pi4 and USB ethernet? Asking because mine was around 300 and needed some manual tweaking (see also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27231705)

I had 300-400Mbit/s out of the box and got it up to ~900 with the right set up.

Than energy wasting cash computed by chinese miners and (in the early days) a select group of early adopters? Yes, it makes more sense.

Would you mind linking the specific law(s) you talk about here?

You are not rewarded for "solving tough problems" or anything else related to creating actual value. It's FOMO driven gambling, scams and enabling organized crime that gets money into the crypto ecosystem.

My home country (Switzerland) has a conscription army. ~160k people, each with either a pistol or an assault rifle at home, receiving regular training for a few weeks a year while the government compensates their employer for the loss in productivity. There are tanks, fighter jets and massive alpine fortifications. It's expensive. Most countries have an army and they are usually sized for an unlikely worst case scenario.

One would think maintaining a stockpile of PPE that would allow the authorities to recommend (and even provide) masks for the general population without risking a shortage in health care would be a relatively minor expense compared to that. And yet, all over the western world, PPE is in short supply, and that is without the general public wearing masks like they do in many asian countries.

Roughly 1% of people born in the 17th century were not born in the 1600's.

Interestingly, Wikipedia contradicts itself here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1600s

> The period from 1600 to 1699, synonymous with the 17th century

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/17th_century

> The 17th century was the century that lasted from January 1, 1601, to December 31, 1700.

I think this is going to annoy me until I forget about it.

Can you explain why it appeals to you? Do the low taxes make up for the limitations on personal liberty?