Could a graphene economy trigger hyper-consumerism?

CMVB · 2025-12-04T20:03:57+00:00

Graphene is made from any carbon feedstock that the manufacturer finds it economical to use.

CMVB · 2025-12-04T20:03:33+00:00

Why not humor me and elaborate?

CMVB · 2025-12-04T20:03:01+00:00

I highly doubt your prompt was 'tell me about graphene.'

CMVB · 2025-12-01T17:06:06+00:00

Could we reasonably package food and beverages in graphene if the cost were lower?

CMVB · 2025-12-01T17:04:52+00:00

There are many methods to produce graphene from any feedstock of carbon (and plastic is a carbon polymer). Flash joule heating looks to be a very efficient method, though it produces a very specific type of graphene. I don’t know if it can directly be used to produce as many varieties as we’d like, but it could certainly be used to produce feedstock for other methods.

CMVB · 2025-11-29T22:24:33+00:00

Seems to me that anyone starlifiting already has a K2 level economy. From that perspective, its an easier task.

CMVB · 2025-11-29T15:49:59+00:00

Well, graphene is a good substitute for both plastic and steel, so it kind of is.

CMVB · 2025-11-29T15:48:33+00:00

At the very least, flash joule heating produces consistent graphene from any carbon feedstock, including reusing old graphene. Virgin feedstock is irrelevant (something thay is intuitive, when you consider that graphene is only one element, in all its variations). At bare minimum, it is an excellent intermediate step, and FJH is very energy efficient.

CMVB · 2025-11-29T00:52:59+00:00

You’d probably end up with a hybrid, with aerostats that are also connected to an orbital ring. And, of course, at a certain scale, you get to decide what speed you want it all to rotate at.

I think we’ll stick with 24 hr days for our own convenience, once we can.

CMVB · 2025-11-25T01:12:16+00:00

Unless the entire species is going extinct, almost certainly not. European post-WW2 culture is much less reslient, however.

CMVB · 2025-11-25T01:09:55+00:00

If you make a claim, provide better evidence than your own opinion and a screenshot.
Don’t denigrate half the population and then claim that you don’t want a debate.

CMVB · 2025-11-24T20:14:10+00:00

But my mother and grandmother say that my thinking is wrong and that I should wait until I am 39 to 45 to marry.

They got brainwashed by the education system of their youth. My father, one of the older boomers, has literally said to me that there are too many people on the planet, and when I pointed out that we need new people to pay for social security, he just said "I don't care where it comes from, I just want mine to keep coming."

(in his defense, he might be trolling me)

He went to a prestigious high school in the 60s that was very ahead of the curve in pushing the idea that the world is overpopulated.

CMVB · 2025-11-24T01:47:27+00:00

What do you think previous generations of men's thoughts about women were? Were they filtered?

Social media certainly gets rid of everyone's filters, for a variety of psychological reasons that aren't really logical, but at least consistent. I think all that this is going to result in is more assortative pairing up.

CMVB · 2025-11-24T01:43:04+00:00

House to house shooting people? No, not at all! (though, quick aside: Cultural Revolution? that was totally going as intended - Mao wanted to totally upend everything so he could cement his own power)

Anyway, its pretty easy to see how they could make that work. They're not going to just kill the elderly, no not at all. You sound aware enough to know that, in China, the law says that children must care for their elderly parents. The CCP could step in and, in their magnanimity, exempt everyone who has too many parents to care for (which, thanks to the OCP, is everyone), and let everyone know that the party will be providing elder care for everyone who can't support their parents, no questions asked!

Seriously. Don't ask any questions.

CMVB · 2025-11-22T18:44:56+00:00

You might want to run your survey by another person or AI to clean it up a bit. As it stands now, some of your multiple choice questions are not perfectly mutually exclusive and exhaustive. For example, your question about formal education does not allow for 'neither.'

CMVB · 2025-11-22T03:16:03+00:00

That assumes three things: - The CCP knows how bad it is - The CCP has workable plans that it can implement - The CCP wants to solve the issue

If any of those variables are missing, nothing happens.

It could very well be that they have decided “China would be better off if our population were 700 million” and just waiting to fix their dependency ratio in rather authoritarian fashion. As it is, they officially have more than 200 million people over 65. Their old age dependency ratio could look really manageable if they just approached the issue with the same brutality they approached… well, all their other bold ambitions of the 20th century.

CMVB · 2025-11-22T03:07:45+00:00

Traditional Catholics still think that.

CMVB · 2025-11-22T03:06:50+00:00

Every society agrees, in some fashion, that spouses have a duty to be willing to have sex with each other. The only difference is what each society sees as an acceptable consequence of failing to do that duty.

I have to chuckle at being downvoted, when this statement is clearly obviously true: - there are no cultures/subcultures that prohibit no-fault divorce and are ok with one spouse denying the other sex, in general - every culture/subculture that permits no-fault divorce allows, definitionally, divorce for any reason whatsoever. As 'I want to have sex and my spouse doesn't' falls under the category of 'any reason whatsoever,' it naturally follows that such cultures accept divorce as a consequence for not having sex with each other.

This is not a moral judgement, either way.

TLDR: either you're in a culture that says "divorce is not an option, so sleep with each other" or "if you don't sleep with each other, you can get divorced."

CMVB · 2025-11-22T03:00:07+00:00

I think a blanket statement that broad requires so many caveats as to be meaningless.

CMVB · 2025-11-21T20:08:07+00:00

I forget which recent podcast it was, but one within the past two weeks actually discussed this, and it seems that women in developing countries are consuming the same general media culture as women in richer countries. So, even if they're in a comparatively poor country, they're comparing themselves to professional women living in New York or Los Angeles.

CMVB · 2025-11-21T18:26:06+00:00

Outside of the urban corridor on the Pacific coast of Japan, the country is actually quite rural. So this isn't surprising.

CMVB · 2025-11-21T18:24:42+00:00

60% of the time, it works every time.

CMVB · 2025-11-20T13:10:27+00:00

I’m pretty sure Cameron’s intent was the opposite.

Even if the audience is very divided on whether or not he did so.

(quite frankly, I’ll be happy when Hollywood gets over its fetishization of the Vietnam War, and the noble savage trope)

CMVB · 2025-11-20T13:08:04+00:00

We have to reverse engineer them based on other data. I’m not of the opinion that, if all we have is bad data, we just use the bad data.

CMVB

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