Huge areas of Canada are at high latitudes and very dark, cold, and inhospitable in the winter. Something like 50% of Canada’s population lives south of the northern extent of the US (i.e. south of Seattle, the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, half of MN, and almost all of MT/ND.
Huge areas of Australia are desert.
The population distribution of Canada and Australia is not an accident. The coasts and more temperate climates are much more hospitable.
It sounds like we generally agree that there are structural reasons quite aside from population growth, and agree that they desperately need to be addressed (i.e. regulatory). I’m arguing from the perspective that we should absolutely attempt to address these reasons, but that ANY population growth from any source is essentially adding fuel to the fire.
I think a lot of emphasis gets put on “supply-side” solutions that sound a lot like “just build more houses, NBD!”. From what I’ve observed we can’t get there with the existing land without (IMO) excessive densification and/or sprawl which has an easily-felt deleterious effect on livability. I’ve spent the last couple of decades living in very different places, and watched them change due to growth. In all cases growth has caused traffic that never existed before, MASSIVE crowding of local attractions that can’t be mitigated without restrictive permitting, and astronomical increases in the price of real estate. Without being hyperbolic at all, more population has quite literally been felt as less freedom. Some of this is due to the rise of the global middle class, but they have their hands in my home places at the expense of locals, and it’s gone from great to hellish in about 20-30 years.
The problems with new housing seem to be:
Like if you think you can find 10 million people to give up LA/Seattle/NY/etc and move to central Kansas, where there’s no ocean, no mountains, no lakes, no jobs, and nothing to do, more power to you. People live in interesting places for good reasons, and other places are cheap for good reasons.
An adjacent point: nature abhors a vacuum. If the QOL is better in the US and there are ~8 billion possible candidates for immigration, our population could easily double in a month. The demand is there. We could adopt a policy of open borders until QOL reaches equilibrium at some much lower level and immigration stops - we could also make immigration virtually impossible - or anything in-between. I’m of the opinion that lower influx means > QOL pretty close to 100% of the time.
EDIT: tl;dr - more individuals translates to reduced individual freedom. I’m not going to get weird and libertarian about it, but that’s the relationship I observe.
I appreciate the data-supported arguments but the comment on doubling was a stated goal of the Canadian national government. The Canadian population is presently projected to double in 26 years. Geographically constrained places with high immigration like Australia and Canada are shockingly unaffordable right now. These places are the canary in the coal mine for the US, which may have plenty of usable land on paper, but has the same issues with a self perpetuating cycle of the major metro areas having all the jobs and limited room to grow. The population is up 50% in my lifetime and I think that accurately reflects real estate becoming increasingly unattainable.
Edit: I guess what I’m saying is that housing-as-investment is wrong, but the basis for housing-as-investment (and indeed all investment) is the projection of increased future demand. In developed nations, this comes from immigration. If the population were shrinking indefinitely, housing certainly wouldn’t be increasing in value
That was a different time before a reasonable house in a major metro area cost $500k-$1m. Capitalists want endless population growth forever to make their investments go up, and the only way they can get it in educated nations with low birth rate is immigration. Canada explicitly targets it. The population is doubling at the expense of affordability. I’ll never be able to afford a house because everyone wants to live here, and immigration policy is set by those who favor endless growth.
I suppose it could be opt in for the end users - say they host the communities they participate in only (i.e somebody likes 3D Printing and coffee, but maybe not porn or politics).
I’ve been arguing that Lemmy needs to become distributed a la BitTorrent to be sustainable. If regular users are participating in small pieces of hosting so that it’s completely decentralized and load is taken off the instance servers, it would be sustainable.
To be honest I don’t have a clue but my lay understanding is that it’s a tool for establishing trust or authenticity in a distributed system. It was a half-serious suggestion because I’ve always heard those who are much more knowledgeable than me say that it has essentially no worthwhile applications.
I just typed out a whole reply and it got eaten after I clicked reply - no surprise there are still going to be bugs in this implementation, nevermind getting more complex with it.
I’m not technical enough to make anything happen if it involves code, but I’m way psyched you’re working on something along these lines. The way I see the problem there are some distinct issues
Yeah, trust and federation is a concept that would have to be worked out in this model. I think it would require some critical-mass of federation amongst instances to establish trust. I wonder if this is an actual application for [dodges beer can] blockchain technology…
This is a flashforge creator pro 2 (in original comment). I’m not sure how to characterize the distortion, but the standard leveling routine puts the extruder in 3 locations near the screw adjustment. After adjusting spacing with a sheet of paper (included, calibrated thickness), it puts the extruder down on the center. The center is always higher than the 3 calibration points, often significantly.
I have both problems in different locations in the same test print first layer (see the second photo I posted).
What I’m concluding is that when the calibration locations (front center, left/right rear) are level at the ideal height, the center of the build plate is too high. This is either due to convexity of the build plate OR droop of the extruder due to very slight bending of the beam it travels on. I don’t know how to fix either of these problems.
Result of lowering the bed - perfectly deposited at the middle, underextruded at the edges
This is my attempt at calibrating the first layer. I don’t know if there’s some other process I should be using (while I’m fairly technical, I’m new to 3D printing)
In the case that is an uneven bed, where the middle is slightly high/convex, how do people fix that? I’ve calibrated it twice, but I think it’s still too close in the middle while the standard calibration locations (front center, back left, back right) are perfect
I think this could be the case but I just calibrated it twice and it still does it.
In the case that is an uneven bed, where the middle is slightly high/convex, how do people fix that?
There’s a lot of land in North Dakota as well. It’s super flat, boring, and winters are ultra cold and windy as hell. There are very good reasons it has a low population. It’s further south than most of the places in Canada you’re talking about.
EDIT: I’d like to add that “we’re not overpopulated, there’s plenty of land!” isn’t really the whole story, either. Occupying every square mile that can be occupied should not be a goal. Leaving more places in a natural state without human impact is highly desirable, IMO.