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sustainable-development.md

Sustainable Development

This gist https://gist.github.com/sleepyfox/61d4375aa1fcfad8cb0338edb4151546 URL shortened to https://tinyurl.com/fox-sustainable-development

About me

  • Hello, I'm SleepyFox, Fox to my friends
  • Mastodon: @[email protected]
  • You don't care who I am, you care about the content, so let's get straight to it
  • All the content is online, and will be linked on every slide, so there's no need to take notes or screenshots, you can just relax and pay attention to the material.

Definitions

Sustainable

  • Definition of Sustainable (Oxford English Dictionary)
    • 'Stocks or reserves of money, materials, people, or some other asset, which can be drawn on when necessary'
    • 'Capable of being maintained or continued at a certain rate or level.'
    • 'Designating forms of human activity (esp. of an economic nature) in which environmental degradation is minimised, esp. by avoiding the long-term depletion of natural resources; of or relating to activity of this type. Also: designating a natural resource which is exploited in such a way as to avoid its long-term depletion.'

Resource

  • Definition of Resource (Oxford English Dictionary)
    • 'A means of supplying a deficiency or need; something that is a source of help, information, strength, etc.'
    • 'Stocks or reserves of money, materials, people, or some other asset, which can be drawn on when necessary.'

Carbon emissions

https://www.carbonchain.com/carbon-accounting/scope-1-2-3-emissions

  • Scope 1 - Scope 1 emissions are direct emissions from operations that are owned or controlled by the company, at source.
  • Scope 2 - Scope 2 emissions are emissions from the generation of purchased or acquired electricity, steam, heating or cooling consumed by the company. Scope 2 emissions are Scope 1 emissions of another company.
  • Scope 3 - Scope 3 emissions are all other indirect emissions (not included in Scope 2) that occur in the value chain of the company.
    • Upstream emissions → indirect emissions related to purchased or acquired goods and services
    • Downstream emissions → indirect emissions related to sold goods and services

Problem statement

How broken is the world right now? three examples

Sustainability

  • Zero-sum game - humans are wired for scarcity - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-sum_game
    • One person's gain must be another's loss
    • Zero-sum bias may be both an adaptation of evolutionary psychology to mankind's early resource-constrained environment, and also a proximate cause related to the individual's developmental experience. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-sum_thinking
    • Loss aversion - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_aversion
      • "The response to losses is stronger than the response to corresponding gains" -- Daniel Kahneman, 1979
  • Abundancy vs. scarcity mindset
  • 'Too cheap to meter' -- Lewis Strauss, US Atomic Energy Commission, 1954
    • When the reporters asked him about the quotation and the viability of "commercial power from atomic piles," Strauss replied that he expected his children and grandchildren would have power "too cheap to be metered, just as we have water today that's too cheap to be metered." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Too_cheap_to_meter
    • Later used for Fibre-optic Internet provision, then 5G.
    • Edholm's law predicts that the bandwidth and data rates double every 18 months, which has proven to be true since the 1970s - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edholm%27s_law
    • Post-Scarcity - 'Star Trek Economics'
  • SLOW movement (later)

Physical Resources

  • Computers

  • Data Centres

    • "But last year, Microsoft took a massive step backwards in that regard by increasing its greenhouse gas emissions by 30%, mostly due to its ambitious AI pursuits." -- ibid
    • "Data centers are now the “number one issue we hear about from our constituents,” says Ian Lovejoy, a Republican state delegate in Virginia. Aside from quality of life concerns, he says that local politicians and residents are worried about data centers threatening electricity and water access, as well as the idea that taxpayers may have to foot the bill for future power lines." -- ibid
    • "Between 2024 and 2030, electricity demand for data centers in the United States is expected to increase by about 400 terawatt-hours at a CAGR of about 23 percent" -- https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/private-capital/our-insights/how-data-centers-and-the-energy-sector-can-sate-ais-hunger-for-power
    • "additional data center capacity needed in the United States by the end of the decade would require an investment of more than $500 billion in data center infrastructure alone" -- ibid
    • "At the moment, around 15% of the world’s data centers are located in Europe. By 2030, the power needs of these data centers will match the current total consumption of Portugal, Greece, and the Netherlands combined." -- ibid

  • Office Space - Remote Working

  • Memory - VMs mean RAM is the new Oil

  • Disk - 'Disk is cheap!' except when it isn't, because we store more and more things about more and more people, so logs, particularly PII, grows exponentially.

Electricity

Water

Virtual resources

  • Time/money
    • Time - Lifespan!
    • Dev budgets
    • Project failure?
  • Attention/Cognitive function
    • Small brain size (A bear of very little brain)
    • Accidental complexity
  • Feature bloat

Failure modes

  • AI: HAL 2001
  • Cognitive: Burnout
  • Money: Innovation starvation
  • All: #Enshittification

Climate catastrophe

  • 'Until you're the one taking the video' meme
  • Freshwater droughts
  • Death of all life on Earth

Sustainable development strategies

Dependencies

Featuritis

Minimalism

OS Minimalism

SLOW

  • SLOW movement - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_movement_(culture)
    • Slow Food Movement, Carlo Petrini, Italy 1986 - reaction to McDonalds on Spanish Steps in Rome
      • Supports local and small farmers and producers
      • Traditional, regional cuisine
      • Encourages farming of plants and animals that are part of the local ecosystem
      • Promotes Sustainable agriculture
      • Quality over quantity
      • Against overproduction
  • Slow movements Art, Ageing, Cinema, Cities, Consumption, Counselling, Conversation, Democracy, Education, Fashion, Food, Gaming, Gardening, Goods, Living, Marketing, Media, Medicine, Money, Parenting, Photography, Religion, Scholarship, Science, Technology, Thought, Travel
  • 'In praise of Slow, Challenging the Cult of Speed' -- Carl Honore, 2004 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Praise_of_Slow
  • 'Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout', Cal Newport, 2024
    • Do fewer things
    • Work at a natural pace
    • Obsess over quality

#NoAI

  • No 'killing people as a service' - #slaughterbots
  • No Oil/Tobacco/Gambling
  • No Crypto
  • No AI
    • "Just Say No"
    • 'The underlying purpose of AI is to allow wealth to access skill while removing from the skilled the ability to access wealth.' -- @jeffowski

Funding models

  • No VC
  • Cooperatives - Mondragon, Semco, John Lewis, MorningStar
  • Bootstrapping - Getting Real, Jason Fried - also Rework - you don't need to be big, it's okay being the right size.

Political approaches

  • Anti-capitalism

    • Anarchism
      • 'Steal this book', Abbie Hoffman, 1971 - counterculture of the 60's and Vietnam war protest
        • "It's embarrassing when you try to overthrow the government and you wind up on the Best Seller's List."
        • also https://stealthiswiki.com
    • Marxism
    • Communism
    • Libertarianism
    • Socialism
    • Cooperativism
    • Labour Movements https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labour_movement
      • Britain has a long and deep history of labour movements, Jacobins, Chartists, Luddites starting with the Weavers Act of 1756 in which the British Government first committed itself to the principles of laissez-faire economics. The rest, as they say, is history, and one that is well worth reading.
    • Unions that support tech workers
      • Prospect
      • Unite
      • CWU Communication Workers' Union
        • UTAW United Tech and Allied Workers

  • Local-first computing

About me - SleepyFox

  • Mastodon: @[email protected]
  • 35yr IT Industry veteran
  • Scientist by training (B.Sc. Astrophysics)
  • Generalist/Systems Thinker
  • Technical Coach/Principal Engineer
  • Aikido and TaijiQuan teacher
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