If we actually taxed fossil fuel producers what it took to offset the negative externalities offloaded to the public, we'd be 100% on renewables long ago.
Most of the externalities are created when you burn the fossil fuels, or someone does so on your behalf, not when Exxon obtains and sells it to you. Why shouldn’t you be the one to pay the tax?
And perhaps with an economic collapse to rival the climate outcomes we're afraid of nevermind noncompliance by economies that couldn't begin to survive with such an expensive early switch followed by... what recourse? War?
Wouldn't everything be great if everyone did the super hard thing in the past so all of our problems would be solved and we'd live in peace and perfect harmony! /s
> if everyone did the super hard thing in the past
I'd settle for the present - or the near future - or at all, ever, really, in place of the "let's just drive this bus off the cliff at full speed and hope our children learn to fly in midair" policy we've been implicitly choosing.
Solar is the cheapest source of electricity now and we've got grid scale batteries that are economical. The solution is here.
Climate change is too. It's time to stop worrying and hoping drastic prevention plans are going to work because it's already happened. The world is going to change and people are going to have to change with it (and move, mostly).
Therefore we should do nothing! Why should I do anything if the folks before and around me didn't already do everything? Moreover, why work on a climate catastrophe for everyone if there's even a chance of negative economic impact for the investor class?
You don't have to do anything. You're losing money if you don't move to solar. You don't have to do anything out of any kind of altruistic future world saving hopes and dreams.
You can just do it because you're cheap and greedy.
If you want to stand by and pollute the world with fossil carbon emissions... well you're paying extra for the privilege, and why?
Sad to see we're going with a "child by default" internet. It'd be so easy for device and OS makers to align on an API that could tell the browser/app whether the user is under 18 or not.
You can also buy the hardware and hire an IT vendor to rack and help manage it as smart hands so you never need to visit the datacenter. With modern beefy hardware, even large web services only need a few racks so most orgs don't even to manage a large footprint.
Sure you have to schedule your own hardware repairs or updates but it also means you don't need to wrangle with the ridiculous cost-engineering, reserved instances, cloud product support issues or API deprecations, proprietary configuration languages, etc.
Bare metal is better for a lot of non-cost reasons too, as the article notes it's just easier/better to reason about the lower level primitives and you get more reliable and repeatable performance.
That’s called managed servers or managed services.
I have run bare metal and manage services you just have to be clear on what you have coverage for when disaster strikes or be willing to proactively replace hard drives before they die.
That’s why they traditionally want to get rid of older people. More likely to talk back. You hire a fresh batch of 20 year olds and their shut up and do what you tell them.
Yes, that's great. Push back, tell me why I'm wrong or why we should do it differently (with reasons and data, of course). Those are the best team members.
I currently manage an engineering team and all my team members are awesome, but the older ones are better at being informedly opinionated, which is very important.
I don't know how rare they are overall, but you can make them rare for yourself by quitting such places.
In over 30 years of career, I'd say I've spent a total of about 2.25 years (between 3 companies) in roles where I wasn't allowed to do my job and was, instead, expected to just listen. In each case, I left pretty quickly.
I'm an expert, if you hire me it is so you will delegate the decision making of my areas of ownership to me. Otherwise why am I here? If there is no good answer to that, then I won't be there long.
I don't recommend staying in any job where you don't own any decision making.
When I was in my 20s I was an insufferable know-it-all who found fault with everything.
I still spot problems and “push back”, but I have the experience now to know how to get people to listen and not just write me off as an annoying prima donna.
I think opensource is a good analogue here. For many SaaS products, you don't even need to vibecode anything - there is already a reasonable OSS alternative. Yet people still pay for the SaaS. They want support, maintainability, security, edemifcation, a throat to choke, regulation and domain expertise, etc.
I do think like this HN post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46847690) is a good example of where a custom more domain specific solution makes a lot more sense that dropping in an off-the-shelf ERP. Still though, I think the bakery would prefer to buy the bakery-ERP than build it but vibecoding does reduce the barrier to entry so we might see more competition and share taking from incumbents by domain-specialized new entrants.
It doesn't make sense to 'build trust' with a bot. Today it works but tomorrow someone may push a malicious 'skill', a dependency may be compromised, or someone eventually figures out the right prompt injection incantation to remotely drain your accounts.
I don't see the demand for space being there, OSS is driving costs down and there are still plenty of hardware and algorithmic optimizations we haven't deployed yet.
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