https://www.instructables.com/How-to-Build-a-High-Speed-Centrafuge/

Only necessary for filtering used oil, however

He is unironically more enlightened though

This is incredibly cringe-inducing. Violence is the answer? Growing food is bad? AI is evil but not because it uses water.

Right. The propaganda against growing food (you know, like happens all by itself in nature and is necessary for human survival) is so dumb. If you have a problem with certain agricultural practices then name them, don’t just blame “agriculture” as a whole. That’s like blaming humans as a whole for what corporations do. Oh wait, that’s what the same propaganda also does!

It’s not going to stay this way for much longer. Technology progresses exponentially and in a decade or two at most AI will be able to outperform all humans in everything. The future is dark unless it’s all unplugged.

It’s the other way around. Right wing media got popular because people reacted against the rapid devolution of mainstream and left wing political discourse and sought other media. But I’ve accepted that people like this will live and die without ever understanding this.

You’re right. The agricultural revolution that invented involuntary unemployment and transferred wealth from the peasants to the land owners.

I’m not saying everyone will be unproductive unless there is a necessity to be productive, although from experience it appears that most people will. But even if everyone will be productive without necessity, surely people still need motivation to be productive right? And how can there be motivation in a world where machines do everything faster and better than us and we could just get them to do all our projects? Even the self-improvement projects like losing weight or learning things are hard to motivate when you can just take a drug to lose weight and instantly look things up or rely on an AI brain chip instead of learning things.

Regarding my first paragraph not being what you said then you’ll need to clarify in order for me to understand what you meant, but I appreciate you don’t want to continue this discussion.

I’m only speaking from what I have read. Apparently it is perfectly fine to run engines on biodiesel from using cooking oil or diesel from used motor oil as long as you have a good filtering process using a centrifuge. And I’m not saying that everyone will be able to save or make money this way, just that it’s something one could explore and at least limit the amount of tax they give to a corrupt government.

My understanding is that the vast majority of US subsidies in this area are for production rather than consumption subsidies aimed at reducing the price (only $44 billion out of $760 billion). The US is also on the lower end of fossil fuel subsidies compared to other countries at $28.16 per person in 2021, which seems considerably less than how much each person would have paid in fuel taxes that year.

Like I said, follow the instructions. That includes removing impurities if you’re working with used cooking oil. If it’s unused then that simplifies things.

Doing it at scale may not be economical because of taxes as well as the fact you either need to buy expensive vegetable oil or collect large amounts of used oil from disparate places. For personal use the taxes are avoided and you may be able to get sufficient used oil from a couple of restaurants or neighbors.

At “for trade”

So everyone has to make their own food rather than get it through trade? Sounds very individualist and isolated. What’s wrong with making other things and trading for food?

More broadly that the notion of “productive work” being what’s needed to give human lives meaning… That’s a big leap.

The alternative to productive work is unproductive work or passing the time away. It means nothing you ever do has a goal or purpose to it except perhaps satisfying your immediate desires like hunger, entertainment and sexual pleasure. That doesn’t seem like a fulfilling life and from experience I know that kind of life doesn’t make people happy.

Are we as humans so incapable of devising our own structures for meaning absent the framing of capitalism?

I never said anything about capitalism being necessary, just productive work. Productive work can be working towards personal goals and need not have anything to do with money or material goods.

Only if you don’t follow the instructions

The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.

At what point does growing food or producing other goods to trade for food become “capitalist toil”? When a common currency is involved? When you’re working on someone else’s farm for a share of the produce?

Anyone who’s had kids or worked with kids knows that people will be lazy if they are allowed to be. If you don’t think this applies to adults (who are basically big kids with only slightly more self-awareness) then consider this. Most people in developed countries have all their basic needs (food, water, shelter, sleep, physical safety, social stability and so on) easily met and do fewer hours of work than the vast majority of humans in recorded history. Yet they still frequently complain about not having enough money or too much work or their other responsibilities and they still want to retire early and go on lots of vacations. Their mental health and happiness is way worse than their grandparents’ and worse than those of less developed countries. This is not only obvious from every day experience but confirmed by just about every study.

So it’s very obvious to me that people want to be lazy, but being lazy actually makes people unfulfilled and unhappy. I have seen this process at work with numerous people I am closely acquainted with. They can have all the important things in life yet still be unhappy. They can blame it on not having the right looks, not having enough vacation, the people they work with or whatever, but they obviously wouldn’t be so stressed about those things if they had real problems like ensuring the family has food. And when people do have real problems instead of focusing on inconveniences they are happier.

It’s just the natural state of humans that they have to work to survive or rely on their family/friends to look after them if they’re unable to work. There could potentially be a society where hardly anybody needs to do anything productive, but this would be a completely unnatural society that would have widespread mental illness due to many people lacking goals or productive things to do. Most people would also get physically unhealthy and lazy (both physically and intellectually) - like they already in developed countries.

One minute - gonna go drink some drive

Where it all went wrong was the industrial revolution

Everyone needs lines that shouldn’t be crossed. For me one of those lines is computer programs that can do things their creators don’t know how to do. In other words, programs that are “trained”, or “AI”. Such programs are the beginning of the end of human existence, as they will replace human thinking and labor - taking away human purpose and power - and eventually become capable of making weapons of mass destruction from microwaves and shoelaces. There’s no possible good future with AGI in it, and the only way to prevent AGI is to stop AI altogether.