I live in Australia, like America, it's a really big place that doesn't have the European benefit of having the roman empire putting down footpaths everywhere for a thousand years.
Cars are required. But I do agree, I think the trend should be towards smaller cars. And I try and live my values, I share 1 hatchback with my wife.
I also live in Australia, I'm one of the minority that doesn't live in an urban sprawl ala Brisbane | Sydney | Melbourne | Adelaide | Perth like the overwhelming majority of the Australian population.
"It's a really big place" isn't the reason for many having cars in Australia, it's largely due to cities that sprawl beyond the reach and capacity of public transport, it's due to a love of long weekend trips outside cities, etc.
Smaller cars and better use of suburban space would go a long way to reducing Australian personal use of fossil fuels .. which is a relativel small part of the larger use of fossil fuels here.
That's a more understandable way of living: not requiring a car for most of the time, share one if needed, demand better public transit infrastructure to not depend on a car for most of your day-to-day trips.
As much as Australia and the USA are big, most of the trips are very much under 30-50 km of distance, those are easily covered by intercity trains, and in cities mass transit is a much more efficient way to transport people inside of their borders. If there's need to go somewhere unpopulated in a large landmass where this system doesn't cover, I'm totally ok with cars, the issue comes from not having other options that reduce the car dependency.
Comparatively to the total population, in the USA, Canada or Australia very few people are using a car most of their time to cover large distances in swaths of undeveloped land, being a big place correlates to almost never going to the very far off unconnected places exactly because it's so far away and inconvenient.
Cars are required due to urban development policies and lack of passenger rail connecting cities, not because the place is big, in Australia most of the population live relatively close by [0].
It's not so easy to go out in nature and breath when every piece of land is changed to a gigantic concrete and steel wasteland just so people can use 2-3 ton 2x5 metres boxes to get somewhere while somewhere worth getting to gets farer and farer away from where they live.
The best place, to me, was the largest remnant of this plateau that dates from the Tertiary age. It’s kind of rolling country, not flat, and when you get to the edge of it you find these ravines that cut very steeply in to cliff-like drop-offs and there was even a waterfall there... That summer there were too many people around my cabin so I decided I needed some peace. I went back to the plateau and when I got there I found they had put a road right through the middle of it... You just can’t imagine how upset I was.
I agree with the author. I've also quit my job as a software dev. early this year, after about 10 years in the industry in various companies (so I can say it's not just a local issue) Having some savings, I'm looking to reorient into something else, also technical, but more hands on - literally. Also, as an added note I think that a large part of software written today makes the world a worse place to live in (I'm thinking social platforms and cloud computing - one taking away the realness and empathy in interacting with each others and the other taking away the ownership of anything). Also, don't get me started on ads system and the crap list of apps/games/software in general that gets pushed down people's throats due to big advetising budgets. If the people working in the industry as software devs doing the above would instead use their creativity and skills in other fields of work (ie. actual science and engineering) we would have a better world. I truly loathe the software development industry in all aspects, as it unfolds today. Not the software dev. activity itself, mind you. But the current goals, players (corporations) , environments, values and trends of the industry as a whole!
I initially considered this as well (still considering), but I am a bit reluctant - a decent mining rig can be quite expensive - and I keep hearing or stumbling myself upon both pros and cons.
Some of the cons:
- Bitcoin mining is now feasible only? using ASIC miners. They cost a lost and I can't find a reliable source to buy them (i.e warranty for hardware breaking down, etc.).
- Bitcoin prices are very volatile, so if they go down (even for a limited period - e.g. up to a few years) I would be stuck with (temporarily) unprofitable equipment.
- Ethereum (for example) is minable using GPU-s (less risky investment from my point of view) but I hear in the near future it will transition to proof of stake and not be minable anymore (correct me if i'm wrong)
(OP) I woke up this morning and I was pleasantly surprised at the large number of answers to my question. I saw some pretty insightful ideas. Thank you!
Also, it would be nice to hear about hurdles that non-software devs are facing.
It may be a skewed opinion of mine, but I think that more value can be added, more easily, by software into other domains, than what can be added by software in software development itself.
Software "divorced from reality" is pretty useless. It becomes useful when: it helps drive a real process (e.g. factories, cars), it helps better understand a phenomenon (e.g. data analysis), provides entertainment or education (e.g. games, animations), gives answers or predictions (AI, machine learning), facilitates communication (messaging, video calls), etc.. A god-like software running in a box (e.g. general purpose artificial intelligence), but not plugged into anything (e.g. at least a monitor, speaker, etc.) will literally offer nothing (even if it could, should it be connected)
Say you make an application to facilitate selling of tickets to a business. Then you may go optimizing the database/website to handle more users, etc. Then you may go optimizing the build-tools, the programming language, etc. The more you continue down this chain (which goes more abstract) the less you directly and meaningfully impact the initial requirement. I'm not saying it's a bad thing! I'm saying:
-> The more "meta" you go, the more broader impact you have on a whole area, rather then just the initial requirement. This is the good part! But also the harder and more complex it gets! Exponentially! This is the "bad" part.
I guess the ultimate point would be to reach general purpose AI. When we get there, the whole purpose of this discussion thread is useless anyway.
But until we get there, I personally think we should focus more (or at least just as much) on fixing the actual problems (in a clean way, with few dependencies), rather then going to deep on that "meta" chain I mentioned. There are good outcomes of course, but one bad outcome of going too "meta" is the increasing bloat and complexity we seem to be experiencing in all modern software.
