One of the very few I haven’t. But will do now.

A seriously talented writer. I was hooked as a teenager in the 90s by his incredibly funny travelogs The Lost Continent and Neither Here nor There. Went on to read most of his other stuff, it’s really eclectic and all great.

There are a whole bunch. The two that spring to mind:

• The Dawn of Everything (David Graeber)
• Sapiens (Yuval Noah Harari)

Both have blown many minds. Other ideas:

• A Short History of Nearly Everything (Bill Bryson) - about science, extremely readable
• The Ancestor’s Tale (Dawkins) - evolution, the book the author is most proud of
• Collapse (Jared Diamond) - brace yourself because it’s convincing

True in spirit but not to the letter. You can fire up your own server and federate Bluesky. The issue is that Bluesky’s centralized design means that you would be hosting a clone of literally all the data, which requires serious infrastructure and expense. But the protocol is open, so in theory an alternative provider (with resources) could do it.

If all Xitter users decamped to Bluesky, that might create incentives for more providers to step in, creating some competition and accountability. Non-profit foundations with deep pockets could do it, for example. That would definitely be an improvement compared to today’s corporate social media.

But I agree that ActivityPub is the more democratic solution.

Warning people to stay inside their bubbles to avoid the awful possibility of reading things they disagree with. A nice metaphor for our times.

Or go slow and make the trip the destination. I once did all of South America by bus. Very cheap! But you’ll need time.

This is the closest to a sensible response so far. The problem then is that it is basically impossible to spend lots of money without creating pollution somewhere up or down the chain. Because money is itself a vector of pollution. But your point is taken.

Absolutely illogical. The flight is going because you created demand for it by buying the ticket. This is exactly the same as saying, “Why bother voting? Your single vote won’t make any difference”.

Who’s getting angry and defensive in this debate?

My concern is with not being a hypocrite, that’s all.

The 3% figure is going up, up, up exponentially with no end in sight. Because right now, most of the world’s people have never set foot in a plane but they sure want to. And why shouldn’t they? After all, we do (or do we?).

That figure is in fact misleading for the purposes of this debate, because for individuals flying has a huge impact on one’s carbon footprint. That’s not surprising when you think about it: it’s similar to driving (alone in a smallish car) for the same distance, but who drives to NZ and back? The problem is distance and time. And most people in the world have never taken a plane. It’s a completely unscalable as an activity.

About alternatives, the premise of this whole debate seems to be that the only good holidays are ones far, far away. That is very debatable.

I’m less bothered about being a killjoy than I would be about being a hypocrite.

On an individual level, vacations are not an “incredibly small factor”. For an average person, a single flight will wipe out all their other conscientious efforts in terms of diet, housing etc. For some reason most people are only dimly aware of this fact.

If people really aren’t interested in the impacts of their choices, why should I not be disappointed? Why aren’t you? Surely it’s disappointing. Nobody will be taking any luxurious distant holidays on a planet that’s been made unliveable by the cumulative impact of 8 billion people who don’t give a shit.

I will answer for them. Because flying from the Netherlands to New Zealand in economy class will emit the equivalent of about 4 tons of carbon dioxide. Roughly equivalent to driving a car every day for a year or so.

Do hypothetical questions automatically have no moral dimension?

Disappointed but unsurprised to see nobody acknowledging that there might be reasons other than money for not flying business class to the other end of the world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instance_(computer_science)

Same, same, and same.

I like it. The reasoning’s good.

I hate the term “instance”. It’s hopelessly geeky (it derives from object-oriented programming). It brings to mind nerds and gamers in basements.