self-control aristocracy, decarbonising cement & mediators
CC#83 - Beating Poverty through Growth (?), No Effect from Income on Health (?) & No Russian Benefits Cohesion (?)
Hey there and welcome to ✨ CuratedCuriosity - a bi-weekly newsletter delivering inspiration from all over the internet to the notoriously curious.
Things I Enjoyed Reading.
💭 What do libertarians and pedophiles have in common?
Interesting viewpoint: Essentially libertarianism benefits those with the highest amount of self-control and does not necessarily create ‘equal benefit for all’. I found this article through another great article on the topic: People Unlike Me
What does this have to do with libertarianism? It is important because every academic proponent of libertarianism – understood loosely, as any doctrine that assigns individual liberty priority over other political values – is a member of the self-control aristocracy. As a result, they are advancing a political ideal that benefits themselves to a much greater extent than it benefits other people. In most cases, however, they do so naively, because they do not recognize themselves as members of an elite, socially-dominant group, that stands to benefit disproportionately. They think of liberty as something that creates an equal benefit for all. (Or, to the extent that it fails to benefit some people, it is entirely the fault of those people, for failing to exercise sufficient self-control.)
🏘️ How to decarbonise the world’s cement
Considering that the cement industry is responsible for ~7% of global greenhouse gases and CO2 is naturally created during the chemical process of cement production, it will be important to figure out a way to erase or at least substantially reduce the emissions coming from cement production. This is a very accessible and interesting write up of how this might be possible.
40% of emissions come from the demand for heat. Cement is produced from limestone at very high temperatures. Currently, fossil fuels are used to generate those high temperatures. That is a problem of decarbonising industrial energy. The other 60% comes directly from the process itself. (…)
Knowing this, there are three main buckets of solutions to reduce emissions from cement. We either:
Use less cement
Keep the current process, but handle the CO2 at the end of the chain
Find a new process for making cement.
🏛️ The elemental foe
While I am not 100% sold on the idea that we need GDP growth for progress to happen, I think this article reminds one of a couple of valid points about how economic progress happened in the past and that not everything about the current workings of our economy is bad.
To ask why some societies in the world are still poor is the wrong question. Poverty is the default condition, not just of humanity but of the entire Universe. If humanity simply doesn’t build anything — farms, granaries, houses, water treatment systems, electric power stations — we will exist at the level of wild animals. This is simply physics.
When we spin fantasies of our collective past, we write about kings and princesses, because they’re the only ones who lived lives we could even remotely relate to today. Even then, the comparison is only approximate — the mightiest emperor of yesteryear had plenty to eat, but lacked antibiotics, vaccines, flush toilets, or air conditioning. (…)If you want to understand the principles that underlie my political leanings, this is the key. Humanity is at war — a war so old, so terrible, and so all-consuming that even World War 3 would be a minor skirmish in comparison. Whether or not we remember it, we are always on death ground. But our intelligence has given us an opportunity not afforded to other animals — the chance to conceive of our species as a single team, fighting not individually but as an army united against the implacable, elemental foe of poverty and desolation.
Food for Thought.
🇱🇻 The Latvian government made a law that disallowed Russian as a second language in schools - this is a huge move considering that ~30% of Latvia’s population speak Russian as their first language. What does this mean for the country’s cultural cohesion?
🩺 During an RCT low-income earners received a monthly cash transfer of $1,000 for 3 years → interestingly no effect on physical health and no lasting effect on mental health…
🔮 Agree. What should we do about this?
Random Stuff.
🏀 Interesting statistic that speaks for the role of intuition in sports
🤗 Some live advice / self-care reminder for your week
💸 Considering how successful/popular Uber is, its kinda insane how long it took them to become profitable…
Personal Update.
I am currently in Estonia to attend a summer school on interactive design for wearables - the last week was mainly about user centric design. Much looking forward to the next week where we will actually do hands on prototyping and start building actual wearables.
Also, here is a sneak peak of the tech / art project I am currently working on with Amanda - we made quite some progress this week and I had lots of fun diving into data art. Can you guess what all of this is about? (more coming soon)
Also got to explore Estonia a bit - visited a former Soviet prison turned commercial waterpark (how ironic) as well as Tallinn’s nowadays abandoned, gigantic (>8,000 seats), brutalist looking event center.
(1) Sundowner in Tallinn, (2) Outside of the Tallinn Linnahall and (3) Rummu Quarry Swimming Area
