There appear to be two interrelated issues with your sources. (Although thank you for giving sources, which was much more than the person you were replying to did.) First, there's a substantial issue with how representative these environmentalists are from the general movement. The ability to point to specific people doesn't really say much about the movement as a whole (although I will grant there's a decent fraction of the environmental movement which really does seem stuck in a 1970s sort of "degrowth" or "antigrowth" attitude). But you seem to also confuse sources saying "Hey, this is creating a serious problem" and not wanting to have that thing at all. The Science.org article for example is about the actual fact that steel production really does contribute seriously to climate change, but then much of the article is about the effort to make steel manufacturing more environmentally friendly. So the article is not about getting rid of steel manufacturing but about making it work better. Others in your list are not about getting rid of things, but moderation. To use the very last example, large scale car use really is creating a lot of problems. But one can recognize that and favor more moderation in terms of car use without getting rid of cars as a whole.

Narcc, why are you incapable of polite discussion with people you disagree with? Would it hurt you so much to some day, maybe try to do people the courtesy of responding to what they have with some detailed arguments or reasoning rather than insults?

The environmental issues are exaggerated. It is true that electricity prices are going up, https://www.solarreviews.com/blog/average-electricity-cost-increase-per-year but this is barely a blip above the current (very high) inflation rates https://www.minneapolisfed.org/about-us/monetary-policy/inflation-calculator/consumer-price-index-1913-. The complaints about water usage are also not highly reasonable. The vast majority of water used for data centers get reused. Current data center water usage is about a 10th of the water usage for golf courses by the most extreme plausible estimates, and US golf courses account for a bit over 1% of all water usage, so being concerned about data centers here when a more useful thing would be to not have golf courses in the middle of Arizona would be a far more reasonable concern. https://www.usga.org/content/usga/home-page/articles/2025/03/water-conservation-playbook-released-golf-industry.html. There are legitimate grid concerns; AI data centers don't just use a lot of power, but they use it in hard to predict ways, which makes load balancing the grid very difficult. So there are legitimate concerns.

But it seems like much of the left has adopted an anything involving LLM AIs is bad attitude in the US. This seems connected to the fact that the US attitude towards LLM AIs is more negative than pretty much almost every other country https://today.yougov.com/international/articles/53654-english-speaking-western-countries-more-negative-about-ai-than-western-europeans. But rather than having a serious discussion about the positives and negatives of this technology (and there are a lot in both columns), there's this tendency to just pick any possible negative and throw it on the wall. This is also particularly unfortunate right now in the US because there's major problems with the Trump administration rolling back all sorts of environmental regulations, including not just those for CO2 but for many other pollutants, and the administration is now actively stopping almost any new US wind and solar on a large scale. While there's been some legal pushback against some of that (see for example, this victory just today https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/08/climate/trump-offshore-wind-federal-judge.html ) this would be a far better use of these groups time and resources than going after a specific industry.

I'd say keep letter delivery, but cut it to once a week. Have a smaller workforce cycle through the routes. Do bulk mail once a month.

The Kroger by us, in a fairly densely populated suburb, has over 25 positions open. The nearby Wal-Mart can't stay open 24-hours because they can't get enough people to work the night shift. Two nearby restaurants closed because they couldn't keep enough staff to stay open during lunch and dinner rushes.

It would be hard to keep the dashboard top clean enough to prevent reflections in the windshield even if the dashboard top were very black. There is nothing to stop you from using flat black spray paint on your dash.

The Materials Today article seems to indicate that all the tests were performed at either 6K or 270 mK. It's a long article and I don't know why they didn't mention any room temperature measurements. It's going to be a long time, if ever, that this tech is usable in a home computer.

The alleged purpose of antitrust laws was to prevent domination of an industry no matter how it was achieved. In practice, antitrust laws have been used to intimidate or destroy political enemies.

My son works for his high school newspaper. He brought in a battery powered Panasonic cassette recorder to do interviews, complete with the cheesy chrome microphone it came with. It got people more interested in the interviews and he got some good copy out of them. He also brought in a portable typewriter we found on the side of the road being thrown away. He fixed it up and uses it to type notes in newspaper class. Everyone in that class loves it.