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americanbrightside:

shieldfoss:

serinemolecule:

postnuclearwar:

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srysnoopdoggbutilovethesehoes:

serinemolecule:

serinemolecule:

Most discourse about self-driving cars and nuclear power:

“We need to be more careful about saving millions of lives! A few dozen people might die in the process!”

Honestly, I’m nonzero sympathetic to the viewpoint that technology can make things worse, and we should be cautious about it. You want to argue that social media and clickbait have made our lives worse? That’s a defensible position.

But that caution seems incredibly misplaced when the technology is specifically designed to fix one of the major causes of death in the status quo.

I feel like the main problem here is that people just entirely forget that, like, new tech should be compared to the status quo, not to perfection.

Imagine Toyota came out with a new car, which was half the price of existing cars, and also was twice as safe, and put out half as much pollution. It would be amazing!

Now imagine they didn’t call it a car, they called it a kuruma or something. Everyone would hate it! “Dozens of people are dying in kurumas!” “Kurumas are taking up lanes that could have been used by cars!” The media would report on “The Kuruma Menace”. Some poor people who couldn’t afford cars would buy kurumas, and everyone would complain about the increased traffic/pollution caused by them.

This is how I feel about people’s reactions to basically every transit innovation ever. Scooters, Uber, self-driving cars, Lime, etc. People always hate them even if they’re a strict improvement over cars. Because instead of comparing them to cars, they compare them to what if people stayed home and did nothing.

And, like, maybe that holds water if you’re the kind of person who think everyone should stay home and do nothing. But most of the critics are people who drive cars! I could talk about how not being stuck at home is a human need, that people are willing to pollute and risk their lives for, but I don’t need to, because these people already know that, that’s why they have cars!

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Drilling down into specifics: A lot of the criticism of Uber comes because it’s taking people away from public transit as well as from cars. And yes, cars are in fact less safe, more polluting, cause worse traffic, etc, compared to public transit.

But, like, notice basically everyone I know who complains about Uber owns a car.

People who don’t own cars tend to like Uber. It gets them home when buses aren’t running; when they’re in a rush, it gets them in town in half an hour rather than three hours by bus; it lets them go places while being blind; or while in suburbs underserved by transit. It gets them to hospitals when they’re too sick to bike, for 1/50th of the cost of an ambulance. It lets children go places when their parents don’t feel like driving.

But the car owners? They’ll tell you all about how Uber is ruining their city, because it allows poor people and disabled people the convenience of a car every once in a while, and the convenience of a car just happens to come with tradeoffs.

i’d love to hear how your logic ties into nuclear energy

#im with you all the way on the other stuff even though id add in some points #but with nuclear energy im just not so sure #if the tech is as i recall – and this may not be so – the by products of that stuff are extremely deleterious to our environment #in which case perfection should be aimed for

Like the others, nuclear energy is one of those things where it always gets compared to “not using energy”, rather than to coal.

And as long as a single coal plant exists, the question isn’t “is nuclear power better than nothing?” but “is nuclear power better than coal?” – i.e. “should we replace this coal plant with a nuclear plant?”

Because you don’t need to get bogged down in the tradeoffs of “are deaths and environmental effects worth having electric power?” when we as a society have already said ‘yes’ to the same question regarding coal. If you disagree with those tradeoffs, you should be lobbying for dismantling coal, or at least for replacing it with nuclear as we move towards

Estimates for coal deaths range in the millions of deaths per year. Nuclear is responsible for, like, on average, one death per year? Most meltdowns result in zero deaths. Literal meltdowns!

(Nuclear is even safer than solar and wind – if you’re wondering how, people sometimes die falling off roofs while installing solar panels. Nuclear power hysteria kills more people than nuclear power itself does – more people died in the Fukushima evacuation than would have died if they just ignored it!)

Sure, nuclear energy has byproducts which are not great. But the question isn’t “are the byproducts better than nothing” but “are the byproducts as bad as millions of deaths every year?”

Which, even if you didn’t know anything about them, it’s probably less bad than millions of deaths per year, considering there are relatively few things in the world quite that bad, and we’d probably hear about them if they were. ^[1]

Casual research (skimming the Wikipedia article) confirms this: nuclear waste is being dealt with. There’s room for improvement, but considering there hasn’t been a single death involved, it’s clearly significantly less bad as millions of deaths per year.

It’s not like nuclear waste is magic. We have a pretty good understanding of it: It emits radiation which lessens over long periods of time, and we know how to block radiation, how far away from it is safe, etc etc.

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^[1] Fun fact: gasoline is one of the few worse things; electric cars are less bad per-mile than gas cars even if the electricity is generated from coal.

I know this has some good points, but please for the love of god do not try and convince people that nuclear energy is good. Nuclear waste is a huge issue actually and the u.s. technically still has no plan in place for it. Also meltdowns can have serious, long ranging and long term effects on people’s health.

Deaths caused from solar or wind are due to improper implementation, not something that the energy in of itself causes. Interactions with coal and muclear energy in of themself cause damage to the environment and to living things.

Do you notice that this is the exact thing I was talking about, though? I could talk about how you’re wrong about how big of a problem nuclear waste and meltdowns are, but I shouldn’t even need to, because they’re nothing compared to the widespread environmental destruction and death caused by coal power.

Deaths caused from solar or wind are due to improper implementation, not something that the energy in of itself causes.

Deaths aren’t less bad when they’re accidental… The deceased’s family isn’t going to feel any better if you tell them it was preventable.

The only way this matters if we’re talking about what we should do in the future, when these deaths can be entirely prevented. At that point, yeah, I agree, we should stop using nuclear power, and switch to, like, Dyson spheres or something. But that’s not relevant to what we should be doing now.

Also, if accidental deaths don’t count, Nuclear has zero deaths.

Not to mention that the half-life for fossil fuels’ impact on the carbon cycle is infinite. It’s just easier to ignore when you can dump your toxic waste into the atmosphere

Also coal power stations still release more radioactive waste than nuclear plants do, just because they burn through so much coal that the trace amounts of radioactive elements adds up. And with nuclear power plants you actually bother with trying to contain it.