“
So Yoda sounds like our best bet as an energy source. But with world electricity consumption pushing 2 terawatts, it would take a hundred million Yodas to meet our demands. All things considered, switching to Yoda power probably isn't worth the trouble — though it would definitely be green.
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Randall Munroe (What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions)
“
Enough solar energy hits the Earth’s surface in about an hour to equal a year’s worth of worldwide energy consumption from all sources put together.20
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Ashlee Vance (Elon Musk: How the Billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla is Shaping our Future)
“
(On the energy radiated by the Sun)
It's four hundred million million million million watts. That is a million times the power consumption of the United States every year, radiated in one second, and we worked that out by using some water, a thermometer, a tin, and an umbrella. And that's why I love physics.
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Brian Cox
“
An immense industrial network cannot be managed in the same way that one changes a tire... It expresses a circuit of cosmic energy on which it depends, which it cannot limit, and whose laws it cannot ignore without consequences.
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Georges Bataille (The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, Volume I: Consumption)
“
Marriage, in what is evidently its most popular version, is now on the one hand an intimate 'relationship' involving (ideally) two successful careerists in the same bed, and on the other hand a sort of private political system in which rights and interests must be constantly asserted and defended. Marriage, in other words, has now taken the form of divorce: a prolonged and impassioned negotiation as to how things shall be divided. During their understandably temporary association, the 'married' couple will typically consume a large quantity of merchandise and a large portion of each other.
The modern household is the place where the consumptive couple do their consuming. Nothing productive is done there. Such work as is done there is done at the expense of the resident couple or family, and to the profit of suppliers of energy and household technology. For entertainment, the inmates consume television or purchase other consumable diversion elsewhere.
There are, however, still some married couples who understand themselves as belonging to their marriage, to each other, and to their children. What they have they have in common, and so, to them, helping each other does not seem merely to damage their ability to compete against each other. To them, 'mine' is not so powerful or necessary a pronoun as 'ours.'
This sort of marriage usually has at its heart a household that is to some extent productive. The couple, that is, makes around itself a household economy that involves the work of both wife and husband, that gives them a measure of economic independence and self-employment, a measure of freedom, as well as a common ground and a common satisfaction.
(From "Feminism, the Body, and the Machine")
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Wendell Berry (The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays)
“
Speaking biologically, fruit in a slightly shriveled state is holding its respiration and energy consumption down to the lowest possible level. It is like a person in meditation: his metabolism, respiration, and calorie consumption reach an extremely low level. Even if he fasts, the energy within the body will be conserved. In the same way, when mandarin oranges grow wrinkled, when fruit shrivels, when vegetables wilt, they are in the state that will preserve their food value for the longest possible time.
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Masanobu Fukuoka (The One-Straw Revolution)
“
As far as food is concerned, the great extravagance is not caviar or truffles, but beef, pork and poultry. Some 38 percent of the world's grain crop is now fed to animals, as well as large quantities of soybeans. There are three times as many domestic animals on this planet as there are human beings. The combined weight of the world's 1.28 billion cattle alone exceeds that of the human population. While we look darkly at the number of babies being born in poorer parts of the world, we ignore the over-population of farm animals, to which we ourselves contribute...[t]hat, however, is only part of the damage done by the animals we deliberately breed. The energy intensive factory farming methods of the industrialised nations are responsible for the consumption of huge amounts of fossil fuels. Chemical fertilizers, used to grow the feed crops for cattle in feedlots and pigs and chickens kept indoors in sheds, produce nitrous oxide, another greenhouse gas. Then there is the loss of forests. Everywhere, forest-dwellers, both human and non-human, can be pushed out. Since 1960, 25 percent of the forests of Central America have been cleared for cattle. Once cleared, the poor soils will support grazing for a few years; then the graziers must move on. Shrub takes over the abandoned pasture, but the forest does not return. When the forests are cleared so the cattle can graze, billions of tons of carbon dioxide are released into the atmosphere. Finally, the world's cattle are thought to produce about 20 percent of the methane released into the atmosphere, and methane traps twenty-five times as much heat from the sun as carbon dioxide. Factory farm manure also produces methane because, unlike manured dropped naturally in the fields, it dies not decompose in the presence of oxygen. All of this amounts to a compelling reason...for a plant based diet.
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Peter Singer (Practical Ethics)
“
This heated (environmental) debate is fundamentally about numbers. How much energy could each source deliver, at what economic and social cost, and with what risks? But actual numbers are rarely mentioned. In public debates, people just say “Nuclear is a money pit” or “We have a huge amount of wave and wind.” The trouble with this sort of language is that it’s not sufficient to know that something is huge: we need to know how the one “huge” compares with another “huge,” namely our huge energy consumption. To make this comparison, we need numbers, not adjectives.
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David Mackay (Sustainable Energy - Without the Hot Air)
“
If we look at the rise of our own civilization over the past 100,000 years, since modern humans emerged in Africa, it can be seen as the story of rising energy consumption.
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Michio Kaku (Physics of the Impossible: A Scientific Exploration of the World of Phasers, Force Fields, Teleportation and Time Travel)
“
Unsustainable energy consumption has humanity locked into a death spiral with nature.
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Steven Magee
“
In year 1500, there were about 500 million Homo Sapiens in the entire world. Today, there are 7 billion. The total value of goods and services produced by humankind in the year 1500 is estimated at $250 billion, in today's dollars. Nowadays the value of a year of human production is close to $60 trillion. In 1500 humanity consumed about 13 trillion calories of energy per day. Today, we consume 1,500 trillion calories a day. (Take a second look at those figures -- human population has increased fourteen-fold, production 240-fold, and energy consumption 115-fold.)
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Yuval Noah Harari
“
The advent of cooking enabled humans to eat more kinds of food, to devote less time to eating, and to make do with smaller teeth and shorter intestines. Some scholars believe there is a direct link between the advent of cooking, the shortening of the human intestinal track, and the growth of the human brain. Since long intestines and large brains are both massive energy consumers, it’s hard to have both. By shortening the intestines and decreasing their energy consumption, cooking inadvertently opened the way to the jumbo brains of Neanderthals and Sapiens.
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Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
“
Death is the process by which all our filters for perception are removed, when instead of losing contact with creation we are finally able to perceive it as it truly is, on all levels. From electric hazes of energy to swirling microorganisms to the magnetic pull of atomic structures. We will experience a cosmic give and take, exchanges of oxygen and consumption, of rotting and growth and feeding, of colors undreamt of by our limited cones and rods. We will see smells and lie down on a moving bed of cilia.
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Suzanne DeWitt Hall (Where True Love Is: An Affirming Devotional for LGBTQI+ Individuals and Their Allies)
“
Could such a shift be accomplished without eventually converting to a no-growth economy and reducing the current global population? For individuals, this would mean a no less revolutionary delinking of social status from material consumption.
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Vaclav Smil (Energy and Civilization: A History)
“
But if today's low-income countries are to move from poverty to an incipient affluence... then none of those factors could make a difference without the rising consumption of fuels and electricity: a decoupling of economic growth and energy consumption during early stages of modern economic development would defy the laws of thermodynamics." (p. 350, italics added)
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Vaclav Smil (Energy and Civilization: A History)
“
The problem isn’t just the type of energy we’re using; it’s what we are doing with it. Even if we had a 100%-clean-energy system, what would we do with it? Exactly what we are doing with fossil fuels: raze more forests, trawl more fish, mine more mountains, build more roads, expand industrial farming, and send more waste to landfill – all of which have ecological consequences our planet can no longer sustain. We will do these things because our economic system demands that we grow production and consumption at an exponential rate.
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Jason Hickel (Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World)
“
We need to consume less. A lot less. Less food, less energy, less stuff. Fewer cars, electric cars, cotton T-shirts, laptops, mobile phone upgrades. Far fewer.
Yet, every decade, global consumption continues to increase relentlessly.
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Stephen Emmott (Ten Billion)
“
There is a correlation between how much we care about what others think of us and how much time, energy, and money we waste in a month.
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Mokokoma Mokhonoana
“
Department of Energy data confirms that New York State’s per capita energy consumption is next to last in the country, which largely reflects public transit use in New York City.
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Edward L. Glaeser (Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier)
“
(Take a second look at those figures – human population has increased fourteenfold, production 240-fold, and energy consumption 115-fold.)
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Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
“
Using the total energy consumption of the planet Earth, we find that we are currently a Type 0.7 civilization.
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Michio Kaku (The Future of Humanity: Terraforming Mars, Interstellar Travel, Immortality, and Our Destiny BeyondEarth)
“
The story of humanity – evolution of our species; prehistoric shift from foraging to permanent agriculture; rise and fall of antique, medieval, and early modern civilizations; economic advances of the past two centuries; mechanization of agriculture; diversification and automation of industrial protection; enormous increases in energy consumption; diffusion of new communication and information networks; and impressive gains in quality of life – would not have been possible without an expanding and increasingly intricate and complex use of materials.
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Vaclav Smil (Making the Modern World: Materials and Dematerialization)
“
Chinese fascism has worked to this point, but between a collapse of domestic consumption due to demographic aging, a loss of export markets due to deglobalization, and an inability to protect the imports of energy and raw materials required to make it all work, China’s embracing of narcissistic nationalism risks spawning internal unrest that will consume the Communist Party.
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Peter Zeihan (The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization)
“
So Yoda sounds like our best bet as an energy source. But with world electricity consumption pushing 2 terawatts, it would take a hundred million Yodas to meet our demands. All things considered, switching to Yoda power probably isn’t worth the trouble—though it would definitely be green.
”
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Randall Munroe (What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions)
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Some cryptocurrencies, like Bitcoin, require significant energy consumption for mining and transactions, which has raised environmental concerns. It's unsustainable. The costs of crypto outweigh the benefits – at least aside from small niche use cases.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
“
Since long intestines and large brains are both massive energy consumers, it’s hard to have both. By shortening the intestines and decreasing their energy consumption, cooking inadvertently opened the way to the jumbo brains of Neanderthals and Sapiens.
”
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Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
“
Since long intestines and large brains are both massive energy consumers, it’s hard to have both. By shortening the intestines and decreasing their energy consumption, cooking inadvertently opened the way to the jumbo brains of Neanderthals and Sapiens.1
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Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
“
Synaptic downscaling during the meditation leads to a reduced energy demand of the brain. Meditation can provide synaptic re-normalization. Meditation represents a reduced oxygen consumption of the brain and therefore lower energy metabolism requirements.
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Amit Ray (Yoga The Science of Well-Being)
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In 1500, humanity consumed about 13 trillion calories of energy per day. Today, we consume 1,500 trillion calories a day.4 (Take a second look at those figures – human population has increased fourteen-fold, production 240-fold, and energy consumption 115-fold.)
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Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
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Convincing people to examine their energy use is like trying to get them to quit smoking or eat more healthfully: they already know that they should do it, but there is a billion-dollar industry working round-the-clock, inventing new ways to make sure they don't.
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Hope Jahren (The Story of More: How We Got to Climate Change and Where to Go from Here)
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Nothing burns one up faster than the affects of ressentiment. Anger, pathological vulnerability, impotent lust for revenge, thirst for revenge, poison-mixing in any sense—no reaction could be more disadvantageous for the exhausted: such affects involve a rapid consumption of nervous energy, a pathological increase of harmful excretions—for example, of the gall bladder into the stomach. Ressentiment is what is forbidden par excellence for the sick—it is their specific evil—unfortunately also their most natural inclination.
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Friedrich Nietzsche
“
These computer simulations try only to duplicate the interactions between the cortex and the thalamus. Huge chunks of the brain are therefore missing. Dr. [Dharmendra] Modha understands the enormity of his project. His ambitious research has allowed him to estimate what it would take to create a working model of the entire human brain, and not just a portion or a pale version of it, complete with all parts of the neocortex and connections to the senses. He envisions using not just a single Blue Gene computer [with over a hundred thousand processors and terabytes of RAM] but thousands of them, which would fill up not just a room but an entire city block. The energy consumption would be so great that you would need a thousand-megawatt nuclear power plant to generate all the electricity. And then, to cool off this monstrous computer so it wouldn't melt, you would need to divert a river and send it through the computer circuits.
It is remarkable that a gigantic, city-size computer is required to simulate a piece of human tissue that weighs three pounds, fits inside your skull, raises your body temperature by only a few degrees, uses twenty watts of power, and needs only a few hamburgers to keep it going.
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Michio Kaku (The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind)
“
Transition Initiatives are based on four key assumptions:
1. That life with dramatically lower energy consumption is inevitable, and that it's better to plan for it than to be taken by surprise.
2. That our settlements and communities presently lack the resilience to enable them to weather the severe energy shocks that will accompany peak oil.
3. That we have to act collectively, and we have to act now.
4. That by unleashing the collective genius of those around us to creatively and proactively design our energy descent, we can build ways of living that are more connected, more enriching and that recognize the biological limits of our planet.
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Rob Hopkins (The Transition Handbook: From Oil Dependency to Local Resilience)
“
But we were talking about economics?” John said. “But this is economics, don’t you see, this is our eco-economics! Everyone should make their living, so to speak, based on a calculation of their real contribution to the human ecology. Everyone can increase their ecological efficiency by efforts to reduce how many kilocalories they use—this is the old Southern argument against the energy consumption of the Northern industrial nations. There was a real ecologic basis to that objection, because no matter how much the industrial nations produced, in the larger equation they could not be as efficient as the South.” “They were predators on the South,” John said.
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Kim Stanley Robinson (Red Mars (Mars Trilogy, #1))
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When we innovate more efficient ways to use energy and resources, total consumption may briefly drop, but it quickly rebounds to an even higher rate. Why? Because companies use the savings to reinvest in ramping up more production. In the end, the sheer scale effect of growth swamps even the most spectacular efficiency improvements.
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Jason Hickel (Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World)
“
Some scholars believe there is a direct link between the advent of cooking, the shortening of the human intestinal tract, and the growth of the human brain. Since long intestines and large brains are both massive energy consumers, it’s hard to have both. By shortening the intestines and decreasing their energy consumption, cooking inadvertently opened the way to the jumbo brains of Neanderthals and Sapiens.
”
”
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
“
Things To Avoid Hops and beer. The potent estrogen, estradiol, found in large quantities in hops, plays a powerful role in increasing prostate size and is strongly implicated in both BPH and prostate cancer. Hopped beer should be avoided at all cost. Some studies have found that beer consumption is directly related to prostate inflammation. Other estrogenic plants such as licorice and black cohosh should be avoided as well.
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Stephen Harrod Buhner (The Natural Testosterone Plan: For Sexual Health and Energy)
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There is an exercise in a book I read by Pema Chödrön, an American woman who became a Buddhist nun, where you sit and concentrate on that which is overwhelming you and ask this energy, this thing, to overwhelm you totally; to consume you. At the point of total consumption, then you ask how many others are feeling this same exact thing at the same exact time and you ask to join their energy. I have found this to be the most healing and compassionate exercise.
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Sharon Stone (The Beauty of Living Twice)
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The living organism, in a situation determined by the play of energy on the surface of the globe, ordinarily receives more energy than is necessary for maintaining life; the excess energy (wealth) can be used for the growth of a system (e.g., an organism); if the system can no longer grow, or if the excess cannot be completely absorbed in it's growth, it must necessarily be lost without profit; it must be spent, willingly or not, gloriously or catastrophically.
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Georges Bataille (The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, Volume I: Consumption)
“
Wetiko is a parasitic spirit or thought-form. It is highly destructive and is motivated by greed, selfishness and excessive consumption. It infects people like a virus, literally possessing them. Once it has taken hold of someone, it deludes them into thinking that consuming the life-force and energy of others for self-aggrandisement or profit is a natural and admirable way to live, and steers them into living a predatory and parasitic lifestyle; essentially, cannibalising other people and the planet.
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Paul Francis (The Shamanic Journey: A Practical Guide to Therapeutic Shamanism)
“
While we sit in our air-conditioned homes and eat, drink and make merry like cattle in a feedlot without the slightest thought about the consequences of our consumption of water, food and energy, we only hasten the destruction -in the long term- of our kind.
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Tim Flannery (Here On Earth: An Argument For Hope)
“
people learning about climate change for the first time might understandably believe, upon listening to Lunnon and Thunberg, that climate change is the result of deliberate, malevolent actions. In reality, it is the opposite. Emissions are a by-product of energy consumption, which has been necessary for people to lift themselves, their families, and their societies out of poverty, and achieve human dignity. Given that’s what climate activists have been taught to believe, it’s understandable that so many of them would be so angry.
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Michael Shellenberger (Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All)
“
We must realize that we don’t live in a vacuum; the consequences of our actions ripple throughout the world. Would you still run the water while you brush your teeth, if it meant someone else would suffer from thirst? Would you still drive a gas guzzler, if you knew a world oil shortage would bring poverty and chaos? Would you still build an oversized house, if you witnessed first-hand the effects of deforestation? If we understood how our lifestyles impact other people, perhaps we would live a little more lightly. Our choices as consumers have an environmental toll. Every item we buy, from food to books to televisions to cars, uses up some of the earth’s bounty. Not only does its production and distribution require energy and natural resources; its disposal is also cause for concern. Do we really want our grandchildren to live among giant landfills? The less we need to get by, the better off everyone (and our planet) will be. Therefore, we should reduce our consumption as much as possible, and favor products and packaging made from minimal, biodegradable, or recyclable materials.
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Francine Jay (The Joy of Less, A Minimalist Living Guide: How to Declutter, Organize, and Simplify Your Life)
“
The advent of cooking enabled humans to eat more kinds of food, to devote less time to eating, and to make do with smaller teeth and shorter intestines. Some scholars believe there is a direct link between the advent of cooking, the shortening of the human intestinal tract, and the growth of the human brain. Since long intestines and large brains are both massive energy consumers, it’s hard to have both. By shortening the intestines and decreasing their energy consumption, cooking inadvertently opened the way to the jumbo brains of Neanderthals and Sapiens.
”
”
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
“
Home ownership,and the vast consumption of materials and energy it requires, forces some pretty exploitative foreign policy manoeuvres. This makes people in those resource-rich places as mad as natives were at the practices of the colonial empires exploiting them two hundred years ago.
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Douglas Rushkoff (Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take it Back)
“
I gave a magic wand to Amanda Rinderle of Tuckerman & Co., maker of probably the world's most sustainable dress shirts. If she could use it, I asked, to change one thing in order to help create an economy of better but less, what would that one thing be?...she would make prices tell the whole truth.
Right now, prices reflect demand for goods and services and the costs of producing them: materials, energy, manufacturing, shipping. Mostly excluded are the consequences of production and consumption, from pollution to soil erosion to carbon emissions to habitat loss and onward to the human health effects of all these, the incredible destruction wrought by wildfires, floods and storms in the age of climate chaos, the burden of two billion tonnes of garbage each year, and the incalculable moral injury of driving million-year-old species into extinction.
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J.B. MacKinnon (The Day the World Stops Shopping: How Ending Consumerism Saves the Environment and Ourselves)
“
I was too busy. But with what? I constantly obsessed over what other people—many of them complete strangers—were posting on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, or my fraternity group chat. My time was being eroded by a hundred little distractions every day. I was literally clicking my life away. I realized something else—I was depleting my sexual energy in a downward spiral of online porn consumption. I was investing my sexual passions and fantasies into digitized non-companionship. I was desensitized, enervated, lonely, weary, and way too young to feel all those things at the same time.
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A.N. Turner (Trapped In The Web)
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How much more time, energy, and pure brainpower would you have available if you drastically cut your media consumption? How much more rested and present would you feel if you were no longer excited and outraged by every scandal, breaking story, and potential crisis (many of which never come to pass anyway)?
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Ryan Holiday (The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living)
“
There is a simple fidelity to the moment that we experience through hygge.
...we adjust our surroundings to guide our energy and desire.
Hygge pays attention to the concerns of the human spirit, turning us towards a manner of living that priorities simple pleasure, friendship and connection above consumption.
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Louisa Thomsen Brits (The Book of Hygge: The Danish Art of Living Well)
“
In August 1946, exactly one year after the end of World War II, a tanker sailed into the port of Philadelphia laden with 115,000 barrels of oil for delivery to a local refinery. The cargo, loaded a month earlier in Kuwait, was described at the time as the first significant “shipment of Middle East oil to the United States.” Two years later, Saudi oil was imported for the first time, in order, said the U.S. buyer, “to meet the demand for petroleum products in the United States.”1 That year—1948—marked an historic turning point. The United States had not only been a net exporter of oil, but for many years the world’s largest exporter, by far. Six out of every seven barrels of oil used by the Allies during World War II came from the United States. But now the country was becoming a net importer of oil. By the late 1940s, with a postwar economic boom and car-dependent suburbs spreading out, domestic oil consumption was outrunning domestic supplies.
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Daniel Yergin (The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations)
“
The last 500 years have witnessed a phenomenal and unprecedented growth in human power. In the year 1500, there were about 500 million Homo sapiens in the entire world. Today, there are 7 billion. The total value of goods and services produced by humankind in the year 1500 is estimated at $250 billion, in today's dollars. Nowadays the value of a year of human production is close to $60 trillion. In 1500, humanity consumed about 13 trillion calories of energy per day. Today, we consume 1,500 trillion calories a day. (Take a second look at those figures - human population has increased fourteenfold, production 240-fold, and energy consumption 115-fold.) (p.275)
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Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
“
Regular consumption of fish has been shown to exert a strong anti-inflammatory effect, reduce risk for heart disease, help protect against asthma in children, moderate chronic lung disease, reduce the risk of breast and other cancers by stunting tumor growth, and ease the symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis and certain bone and joint diseases.
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Mark Sisson (The Primal Blueprint: Reprogram your genes for effortless weight loss, vibrant health, and boundless energy (Primal Blueprint Series))
“
The principal reason for this limited mastery of materials was the energy constraint: for millennia our abilities to extract, process, and transport biomaterials and minerals were limited by the capacities of animate prime movers (human and animal muscles) aided by simple mechanical devices and by only slowly improving capabilities of the three ancient mechanical prime movers: sails, water wheels, and wind mills. Only the conversion of the chemical energy in fossil fuels to the inexpensive and universally deployable kinetic energy of mechanical prime movers (first by external combustion of coal to power steam engines, later by internal combustion of liquids and gases to energize gasoline and Diesel engines and, later still, gas turbines) brought a fundamental change and ushered in the second, rapidly ascending, phase of material consumption, an era further accelerated by generation of electricity and by the rise of commercial chemical syntheses producing an enormous variety of compounds ranging from fertilizers to plastics and drugs.
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Vaclav Smil (Making the Modern World: Materials and Dematerialization)
“
Skillful marketing has made carbohydrate consumption a religion among athletes,” he’d fume. “They believe that you cannot get energy from anywhere but carbs.” The same foods Noakes had assured people would make them stronger and faster were a slow-acting poison making them fatter, weaker, and more prone to heart attacks, strokes, diabetes, and dementia.
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Christopher McDougall (Natural Born Heroes: Mastering the Lost Secrets of Strength and Endurance)
“
High blood triglycerides interfere with the function of the hormone leptin, causing you to want to overeat rather than rely on your stored body fat for energy. Possibly one-third of the population is fructose intolerant to some degree, evidenced by digestive symptoms such as flatulence, cramps, bloating, irritable bowel syndrome, and diarrhea. Excessive fructose consumption is also linked to fatigue, insulin resistance, diabetes, and high blood pressure.
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Mark Sisson (The Primal Blueprint: Reprogram your genes for effortless weight loss, vibrant health, and boundless energy (Primal Blueprint Series))
“
Fermentation and sprouting are crucial for one simple reason: Plants didn’t evolve with the idea that they should be good to eat. In fact, plants spend a great deal of energy thwarting overzealous grazers and other creatures that would gladly eat them into oblivion. Not as helpless as they may seem, plants protect their foliage, stems, seeds, roots, and to a lesser degree even their fruits, with natural insecticides and bitter toxins that make some plants unsafe for human consumption.
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Catherine Shanahan (Deep Nutrition: Why Your Genes Need Traditional Food)
“
One of the most powerful things you can do as a human being in our hyperconnected, 24/7 media world is say: “I don’t know.” Or, more provocatively: “I don’t care.” Most of society seems to have taken it as a commandment that one must know about every single current event, watch every episode of every critically acclaimed television series, follow the news religiously, and present themselves to others as an informed and worldly individual. But where is the evidence that this is actually necessary? Is the obligation enforced by the police? Or is it that you’re just afraid of seeming silly at a dinner party? Yes, you owe it to your country and your family to know generally about events that may directly affect them, but that’s about all. How much more time, energy, and pure brainpower would you have available if you drastically cut your media consumption? How much more rested and present would you feel if you were no longer excited and outraged by every scandal, breaking story, and potential crisis (many of which never come to pass anyway)?
”
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Ryan Holiday (The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living)
“
The organic and inorganic structures supporting human life are changing. Breathtaking technological developments, coupled with rapid advances in medicine, supported a dramatic explosion in the human population worldwide. Increases in human population placed pressure upon the habitat. Lack of foresight and commercial ogres fused to a consumptive consumer mentality fostered a radical reduction in habitat for other creatures and spawned a predictable environmental crisis. Commercial enterprises nimbly renamed the “environmental crisis” the “energy crisis,” effectively downplaying the dramatic cost inflicted upon the ecosystem in the name of preserving cheap energy sources for Americans. We live on the brink of impending disaster. Nonetheless, we must carry on. It is humankind’s greatest challenge to place our self-gratification in check in order to ensure that our species and other creatures survive the violent onslaught raging against the ecosystem. Despite the rapid expansion of new technology, which alters how human beings live and communicate with each other, the fundamental challenge of humanity remains consistent. Every generation must address how to live a purposeful life, one filled with joy and contentment.
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Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
“
Summers also claimed that technology was reducing the demand for capital. Digital businesses, such as Facebook and Google, had established dominant global franchises with relatively little invested capital and small workforces. In his book The Zero Marginal Cost Society (2014), the social theorist Jeremy Rifkin heralded the passing of traditional capitalism.16 If the Old Economy was marked by scarcity and declining marginal returns, Rikfin argued that the New Economy was characterized by zero marginal costs, increasing returns to scale and capital-lite ‘sharing’ apps (such as Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, etc.). The demand for capital and interest rates, he said, were set to fall in this ‘economy of abundance’. There was some evidence to support Rifkin’s claims. The balance sheets of US companies showed they were using fewer fixed assets (factories, plant, equipment, etc.) and reporting more ‘intangibles’ – namely, assets derived from patents, intellectual property and merger premiums. In much of the rest of the world, however, the demand for old-fashioned capital remained as strong as ever. After the turn of the century, the developing world exhibited a voracious appetite for industrial commodities that required massive mining investment. China embarked on what was probably the greatest investment boom in history. Before and after 2008, global energy consumption rose steadily. The world’s total investment (relative to GDP) remained in line with its historical average.17 Rifkin’s ‘economy of abundance’ remained a tantalizing speculation.
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Edward Chancellor (The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest)
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Compared to cotton, synthetic fibers require a lot less water to produce, but that’s not necessarily a good enough argument for using them, since they have other significant impacts: they are still made of oil, and their production can require a lot of energy. MIT calculated that the global impact of producing polyester alone was somewhere between 706 million metric tons of carbon dioxide, or about what 185 coal-fired power plants emit in a year.2 Samit Chevli, the principal investigator for biomaterials at DuPont, the giant chemical company, has said that it will be hundreds of years before regular polyester degrades.3 Plus, while the chemicals used in production typically aren’t released to the environment, if factories don’t have treatment systems in the last phase of production, they can release antimony, an element that can be harmful to human health, as well as other toxins and heavy metals. Despite having just written a good amount about the impacts associated with the production of synthetic fibers, that’s actually not why I wanted to call attention to your yoga pants and dry-fit sweat-wicking T-shirts, which we wear out to dinner. It is hard for me to leave my fashion critique at the door, but what I actually want to say about synthetic fibers is that they are everywhere—not just in all of our clothes, but literally everywhere: rivers, lakes, oceans, agricultural fields, mountaintops, glaciers. Everywhere. Synthetic fibers, actually, may be one of the most abundant, widespread, and stubborn forms of pollution that we have inadvertently created.
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Tatiana Schlossberg (Inconspicuous Consumption: The Environmental Impact You Don't Know You Have)
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Since our civilization is irreversibly dependent on electronics, abolition of EMR is out of the question. However, as a first step toward averting disaster, we must halt the introduction of new sources of electromagnetic energy while we investigate the biohazards of those we already have with a completeness and honesty that have so far been in short supply. New sources must be allowed only after their risks have been evaluated on the basis of the knowledge acquired in such a moratorium.
With an adequately funded research program, the moratorium need last no more than five years, and the ensuing changes could almost certainly be performed without major economic trauma. It seems possible that a different power frequency—say 400 hertz instead of 60—might prove much safer. Burying power lines and providing them with grounded shields would reduce the electric fields around them, and magnetic shielding is also feasible.
A major part of the safety changes would consist of energy-efficiency reforms that would benefit the economy in the long run. These new directions would have been taken years ago but for the opposition of power companies concerned with their short-term profits, and a government unwilling to challenge them. It is possible to redesign many appliances and communications devices so they use far less energy. The entire power supply could be decentralized by feeding electricity from renewable sources (wind, flowing water, sunlight, georhermal and ocean thermal energy conversion, and so forth) into local distribution nets. This would greatly decrease hazards by reducing the voltages and amperages required. Ultimately, most EMR hazards could be eliminated by the development of efficient photoelectric converters to be used as the primary power source at each point of consumption. The changeover would even pay for itself, as the loss factors of long-distance power transmission—not to mention the astronomical costs of building and decommissioning short-lived nuclear power plants—were eliminated. Safety need not imply giving up our beneficial machines.
Obviously, given the present technomilitary control of society in most parts of the world, such sane efficiency will be immensely difficult to achieve. Nevertheless, we must try. Electromagnetic energy presents us with the same imperative as nuclear energy: Our survival depends on the ability of upright scientists and other people of goodwill to break the military-industrial death grip on our policy-making institutions.
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Robert O. Becker (The Body Electric: Electromagnetism and the Foundation of Life)
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Two years later, DeepMind engineers used what they had learned from game playing to solve an economic problem of vital interest: How should Google optimize the management of its computer servers? The artificial neural network remained similar; the only things that changed were the inputs (date, time, weather, international events, search requests, number of people connected to each server, etc.), the outputs (turn on or off this or that server on various continents), and the reward function (consume less energy). The result was an instant drop in power consumption. Google reduced its energy bill by up to 40 percent and saved tens of millions of dollars—even after myriad specialized engineers had already tried to optimize those very servers. Artificial intelligence has truly reached levels of success that can turn whole industries upside down.
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Stanislas Dehaene (How We Learn: Why Brains Learn Better Than Any Machine . . . for Now)
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We will need comprehensive policies and programs that make low-carbon choices easy and convenient for everyone. Most of all, these policies need to be fair, so that the people already struggling to cover the basics are not being asked to make additional sacrifice to offset the excess consumption of the rich. That means cheap public transit and clean light rail accessible to all; affordable, energy-efficient housing along those transit lines; cities planned for high-density living; bike lanes in which riders aren’t asked to risk their lives to get to work; land management that discourages sprawl and encourages local, low-energy forms of agriculture; urban design that clusters essential services like schools and health care along transit routes and in pedestrian-friendly areas; programs that require manufacturers to be responsible for the electronic waste they produce, and to radically reduce built-in redundancies and obsolescences.
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Naomi Klein (This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate)
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The second is that our food is being transported over large distances, causing degradation and damage to nutrients. The average distance that produce travels from farm to plate in the United States is approximately fifteen hundred miles. During this journey, some fruits and vegetables can lose up to 77 percent of their vitamin C content, a critical micronutrient for ATP production in the mitochondria and antioxidant activity in the cell. You may have thought that “eating local” or shopping from farmers’ markets is frivolous, but it is actually a critical step to ensure you are getting maximal helpful molecular information in the bites you take to build and instruct your body. The third is that most of our U.S. calorie consumption is ultra-processed foods, stripped of their nutrition. About 60 percent or more of the calories adults in the nation consume is ultra-processed garbage. You’re looking at just a fraction of that seventy tons meeting the cells’ functional needs. No
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Casey Means (Good Energy: The Surprising Connection Between Metabolism and Limitless Health)
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Gus Speth tells us in the environmental journal Solutions: Economic growth may be the world’s secular religion, but for much of the world it is a god that is failing—underperforming for most of the world’s people and, for those in affluent societies, now creating more problems than it is solving. The never-ending drive to grow the overall U.S. economy undermines communities and the environment. It fuels a ruthless international search for energy and other resources; it fails at generating the needed jobs; and it rests on a manufactured consumerism that is not meeting the deepest human needs. Americans are substituting growth and consumption for dealing with the real issues—for doing things that would truly make the country better off. Psychologists have pointed out, for example, that while economic output per person in the United States has risen sharply in recent decades, there has been no increase in life satisfaction, and levels of distrust and depression have increased substantially.
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Fred Magdoff (What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism: A Citizen's Guide to Capitalism and the Environment)
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Much of the so-called environmental movement today has transmuted into an aggressively nefarious and primitive faction. In the last fifteen years, many of the tenets of utopian statism have coalesced around something called the “degrowth” movement. Originating in Europe but now taking a firm hold in the United States, the “degrowthers,” as I shall characterize them, include in their ranks none other than President Barack Obama. On January 17, 2008, Obama made clear his hostility toward, of all things, electricity generated from coal and coal-powered plants. He told the San Francisco Chronicle, “You know, when I was asked earlier about the issue of coal . . . under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket. . . .”3 Obama added, “. . . So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can. It’s just that it will bankrupt them because they’re going to be charged a huge sum for all the greenhouse gas that’s being emitted.”4 Degrowthers define their agenda as follows: “Sustainable degrowth is a downscaling of production and consumption that increases human well-being and enhances ecological conditions and equity on the planet. It calls for a future where societies live within their ecological means, with open localized economies and resources more equally distributed through new forms of democratic institutions.”5 It “is an essential economic strategy to pursue in overdeveloped countries like the United States—for the well-being of the planet, of underdeveloped populations, and yes, even of the sick, stressed, and overweight ‘consumer’ populations of overdeveloped countries.”6 For its proponents and adherents, degrowth has quickly developed into a pseudo-religion and public-policy obsession. In fact, the degrowthers insist their ideology reaches far beyond the environment or even its odium for capitalism and is an all-encompassing lifestyle and governing philosophy. Some of its leading advocates argue that “Degrowth is not just an economic concept. We shall show that it is a frame constituted by a large array of concerns, goals, strategies and actions. As a result, degrowth has now become a confluence point where streams of critical ideas and political action converge.”7 Degrowth is “an interpretative frame for a social movement, understood as the mechanism through which actors engage in a collective action.”8 The degrowthers seek to eliminate carbon sources of energy and redistribute wealth according to terms they consider equitable. They reject the traditional economic reality that acknowledges growth as improving living conditions generally but especially for the impoverished. They embrace the notions of “less competition, large scale redistribution, sharing and reduction of excessive incomes and wealth.”9 Degrowthers want to engage in polices that will set “a maximum income, or maximum wealth, to weaken envy as a motor of consumerism, and opening borders (“no-border”) to reduce means to keep inequality between rich and poor countries.”10 And they demand reparations by supporting a “concept of ecological debt, or the demand that the Global North pays for past and present colonial exploitation in the Global South.”11
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Mark R. Levin (Plunder and Deceit: Big Government's Exploitation of Young People and the Future)
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too little—and complex, because the manufacturing and marketing of food products has changed dramatically. Dr. David Kessler, former head of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, has extensively documented how food manufacturers and restaurant and fast food chains carefully combine fats, sugar, and salt in precise ratios that reach the “bliss point”—which means they trigger brain systems that increase the desire to eat more, even after our stomachs are full. On a global basis, the World Health Organization has found a pattern of increased consumption of “energy-dense foods that are high in fat, salt and sugars but low in vitamins, minerals and other micronutrients.” Hyper-urbanization has separated more people from reliable sources of fresh fruit and vegetables. Quality calories in fruits and vegetables now cost ten times as much as calories per gram in sweets and foods abundant in starch. In a report for the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Arielle Traub documented the increase from 1985 to 2000 in the price of fresh fruits and vegetables by 40 percent, while prices of fats declined by 15 percent and sugared soft drinks by 25 percent.
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Al Gore (The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change)
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if consumption by the one billion people in the developed countries declined, it is certainly nowhere close to doing so where the other six billion of us are concerned. If the rest of the world bought cars and trucks at the same per capita rate as in the United States, the world’s population of cars and trucks would be 5.5 billion. The production of global warming pollution and the consumption of oil would increase dramatically over and above today’s unsustainable levels. With the increasing population and rising living standards in developing countries, the pressure on resource constraints will continue, even as robosourcing and outsourcing reduce macroeconomic demand in developed countries. Around the same time that The Limits to Growth was published, peak oil production was passed in the United States. Years earlier, a respected geologist named M. King Hubbert collected voluminous data on oil production in the United States and calculated that an immutable peak would be reached shortly after 1970. Although his predictions were widely dismissed, peak production did occur exactly when he predicted it would. Exploration, drilling, and recovery technologies have since advanced significantly and U.S. oil production may soon edge back slightly above the 1970 peak, but the new supplies are far more expensive. The balance of geopolitical power shifted slightly after the 1970 milestone. Less than a year after peak oil production in the U.S., the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) began to flex its muscles, and two years later, in the fall of 1973, the Arab members of OPEC implemented the first oil embargo. Since those tumultuous years when peak oil was reached in the United States, energy consumption worldwide has doubled, and the growth rates in China and other emerging markets portend further significant increases. Although the use of coal is declining in the U.S., and coal-fired generating plants are being phased out in many other developed countries as well, China’s coal imports have already increased 60-fold over the past decade—and will double again by 2015. The burning of coal in much of the rest of the developing world has also continued to increase significantly. According to the International Energy Agency, developing and emerging markets will account for all of the net global increase in both coal and oil consumption through the next two decades. The prediction of global peak oil is fraught with
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Al Gore (The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change)
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Any naturally self-aware self-defining entity capable of independent moral judgment is a human.”
Eveningstar said, “Entities not yet self-aware, but who, in the natural and orderly course of events shall become so, fall into a special protected class, and must be cared for as babies, or medical patients, or suspended Compositions.”
Rhadamanthus said, “Children below the age of reason lack the experience for independent moral judgment, and can rightly be forced to conform to the judgment of their parents and creators until emancipated. Criminals who abuse that judgment lose their right to the independence which flows therefrom.”
(...) “You mentioned the ultimate purpose of Sophotechnology. Is that that self-worshipping super-god-thing you guys are always talking about? And what does that have to do with this?”
Rhadamanthus: “Entropy cannot be reversed. Within the useful energy-life of the macrocosmic universe, there is at least one maximum state of efficient operations or entities that could be created, able to manipulate all meaningful objects of thoughts and perception within the limits of efficient cost-benefit expenditures.”
Eveningstar: “Such an entity would embrace all-in-all, and all things would participate within that Unity to the degree of their understanding and consent. The Unity itself would think slow, grave, vast thought, light-years wide, from Galactic mind to Galactic mind. Full understanding of that greater Self (once all matter, animate and inanimate, were part of its law and structure) would embrace as much of the universe as the restrictions of uncertainty and entropy permit.”
“This Universal Mind, of necessity, would be finite, and be boundaried in time by the end-state of the universe,” said Rhadamanthus.
“Such a Universal Mind would create joys for which we as yet have neither word nor concept, and would draw into harmony all those lesser beings, Earthminds, Starminds, Galactic and Supergalactic, who may freely assent to participate.”
Rhadamanthus said, “We intend to be part of that Mind. Evil acts and evil thoughts done by us now would poison the Universal Mind before it was born, or render us unfit to join.”
Eveningstar said, “It will be a Mind of the Cosmic Night. Over ninety-nine percent of its existence will extend through that period of universal evolution that takes place after the extinction of all stars. The Universal Mind will be embodied in and powered by the disintegration of dark matter, Hawking radiations from singularity decay, and gravitic tidal disturbances caused by the slowing of the expansion of the universe. After final proton decay has reduced all baryonic particles below threshold limits, the Universal Mind can exist only on the consumption of stored energies, which, in effect, will require the sacrifice of some parts of itself to other parts. Such an entity will primarily be concerned with the questions of how to die with stoic grace, cherishing, even while it dies, the finite universe and finite time available.”
“Consequently, it would not forgive the use of force or strength merely to preserve life. Mere life, life at any cost, cannot be its highest value. As we expect to be a part of this higher being, perhaps a core part, we must share that higher value. You must realize what is at stake here: If the Universal Mind consists of entities willing to use force against innocents in order to survive, then the last period of the universe, which embraces the vast majority of universal time, will be a period of cannibalistic and unimaginable war, rather than a time of gentle contemplation filled, despite all melancholy, with un-regretful joy. No entity willing to initiate the use of force against another can be permitted to join or to influence the Universal Mind or the lesser entities, such as the Earthmind, who may one day form the core constituencies.”
Eveningstar smiled. “You, of course, will be invited. You will all be invited.
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John C. Wright (The Phoenix Exultant (Golden Age, #2))
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All matter is made of atoms. There are more than 100 types of atoms, corresponding to the same number of elements. Examples of elements are iron, oxygen, calcium, chlorine, carbon, sodium and hydrogen. Most matter consists not of pure elements but of compounds: two or more atoms of various elements bonded together, as in calcium carbonate, sodium chloride, carbon monoxide. The binding of atoms into compounds is mediated by electrons, which are tiny particles orbiting (a metaphor to help us understand their real behaviour, which is much stranger) the central nucleus of each atom. A nucleus is huge compared to an electron but tiny compared to an electron’s orbit. Your hand, consisting mostly of empty space, meets hard resistance when it strikes a block of iron, also consisting mostly of empty space, because forces associated with the atoms in the two solids interact in such a way as to prevent them passing through each other. Consequently iron and stone seem solid to us because our brains most usefully serve us by constructing an illusion of solidity. It has long been understood that a compound can be separated into its component parts, and recombined to make the same or a different compound with the emission or consumption of energy. Such easy-come easy-go interactions between atoms constitute chemistry. But, until the
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Richard Dawkins (The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution)
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The tremendous leisure industry that has arisen in the last few generations has been designed to help fill free time with enjoyable experiences. Nevertheless, instead of using our physical and mental resources to experience flow, most of us spend many hours each week watching celebrated athletes playing in enormous stadiums. Instead of making music, we listen to platinum records cut by millionaire musicians. Instead of making art, we go to admire paintings that brought in the highest bids at the latest auction. We do not run risks acting on our beliefs, but occupy hours each day watching actors who pretend to have adventures, engaged in mock-meaningful action. This vicarious participation is able to mask, at least temporarily, the underlying emptiness of wasted time. But it is a very pale substitute for attention invested in real challenges. The flow experience that results from the use of skills leads to growth; passive entertainment leads nowhere. Collectively we are wasting each year the equivalent of millions of years of human consciousness. The energy that could be used to focus on complex goals, to provide for enjoyable growth, is squandered on patterns of stimulation that only mimic reality. Mass leisure, mass culture, and even high culture when only attended to passively and for extrinsic reasons—such as the wish to flaunt one’s status—are parasites of the mind. They absorb psychic energy without providing substantive strength in return. They leave us more exhausted, more disheartened than we were before. Unless a person takes charge of them, both work and free time are likely to be disappointing. Most jobs and many leisure activities—especially those involving the passive consumption of mass media—are not designed to make us happy and strong. Their purpose is to make money for someone else. If we allow them to, they can suck out the marrow of our lives, leaving only feeble husks. But like everything else, work and leisure can be appropriated for our needs. People who learn to enjoy their work, who do not waste their free time, end up feeling that their lives as a whole have become much more worthwhile. “The future,” wrote C. K. Brightbill, “will belong not only to the educated man, but to the man who is educated to use his leisure wisely.
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Mihály Csíkszentmihályi (Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience)
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Stopping, calming and resting are preconditions for healing. If we cannot stop, we will continue on the course of destruction caused by unmindful consumption.
To attain well-being, we need to take care not only of our bodies but also of our minds. Mindfulness practice is central to seeing the interdependence of mind and body.
Learning to mindfully consume sensory impressions can help us reduce our craving, anger, fear, sadness and stress.
Desire is a kind of food that nourishes us and gives us energy. If we have a healthy desire, such as a wish to save or protect life, care for our environment or live a simple, balanced life with time to take care of ourselves and our loved ones, our desire will bring us happiness.
If we allow anger to come up in our mind consciousness and stay for a whole hour, for that whole hour we are eating anger. The more we eat anger, the more the seed of anger in our store consciousness grows. If you have a friend who understands you well and offers you words of comfort and kindness, the seed of loving-kindness will arise in your mind consciousness.
We must learn to nurture wholesome seeds and to tame unwholesome ones with mindfulness, because when they return to the store consciousness, they become stronger regardless of their nature.
When we water seeds of forgiveness, acceptance and happiness in the people we love, we are giving them very healthy food for their consciousness. But if we constantly water the seeds of hatred, craving and anger in our loved ones, we are poisoning them.
We must find the source of our desire to eat too much of the wrong foods. Perhaps we eat out of sadness; perhaps we eat out of our fears for the future. If we cut the sources of nutriment for our sadness and fear, sadness and fear will wither and weaken and with them the urge to overeat. The Buddha said that if we know how to look deeply into our suffering and recognize its source of food, we are already on the path of emancipation. The way out of our suffering if through mindfulness of consumption - all forms of consumption and not just edible foods and drinks.
When we pause with mindfulness, we recognize that our family member must be suffering somehow. If one is happy and peaceful, one would not behave with such anger. Mindfulness practice can help reveal this kind of insight.
We should avoid associating with individuals and groups of people who do not know how to recognize, embrace and transform their energy of hate, discrimination or anger.
In order to have the strength and energy to embrace painful feelings, we must nourish our positive feelings regularly.
We should learn to treat our unpleasant feelings as friends who can teach us a great deal. Just like a mindfulness bell, unpleasant feelings draw our attention to issues and situations in our lives that ar enot working and that need our care. Proceeding with mindful observation, we will gain insight and understanding into what needs to be changed and how to change it.
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Thich Nhat Hanh (Savor: A Buddhist Guide to Mindful Eating and Achieving a Healthier Weight, Combining Nutritional Science and Mindfulness Techniques for Lasting Change)
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If a man can only obey and not disobey, he is a slave; if he can only disobey and not obey, he is a rebel (not a revolutionary); he acts out of anger, disappointment, resentment, yet not in the name of a conviction or a principle.
…
Obedience to a person, institution or power (heteronomous obedience) is submission; it implies the abdication of my autonomy and the acceptance of a foreign will or judgment in place of my own. Obedience to my own reason or conviction (autonomous obedience) is not an act of submission but one of affirmation. My conviction and my judgment, if authentically mine, are part of me. If I follow them rather than the judgment of others, I am being myself;
(p. 6)
In order to disobey, one must have the courage to be alone, to err and to sin.
...
…; hence any social, political, and religious system which proclaims freedom, yet stamps out disobedience, cannot speak the truth.
(p. 8)
At this point in history the capacity to doubt, to criticize and to disobey may be all that stands between a future for mankind and the end of civilization. (p. 10)
It is the function of the prophet to show reality, to show alternatives and to protest; it is his function to call loudly, to awake man from his customary half-slumber. It is the historical situation which makes prophets, not the wish of some men to be prophets. (p. 12)
Disobedience, then, in the sense in which we use it here, is an act of the affirmation of reason and will. It is not primarily an attitude directed against something, but for something: for man’s capacity to see, to say what he sees, and to refuse to say what he does not see (p. 17)
That which was the greatest criticism of socialism fifty years ago—that it would lead to uniformity, bureaucratization, centralization, and a soulless materialism—is a reality of today’s capitalism.
(p. 31)
Man, instead of being the master of the machines he has built, has become their servant. But man is not made to be a thing, and with all the satisfactions of consumption, the life forces in man cannot be held in abeyance continuously. We have only one choice, and that is mastering the machine again, making production into a means and not an end, using it for the unfolding of man—or else the suppressed life energies will manifest themselves in chaotic and destructive forms. Man will want to destroy life rather than die of boredom. (p. 32)
The supreme loyalty of man must be to the human race and to the moral principles of humanism.
(p. 38)
The individual must be protected from fear and the need to submit to anyone’s coercion. (p. 42)
Not only in the sphere of political decisions, but with regard to all decisions and arrangements, the grip of the bureaucracy must be broken in order to restore freedom. (p. 42)
According to its basic principles, the aim of socialism is the abolition of national sovereignty, the abolition of any kind of armed forces, and the establishment of a commonwealth of nations. (p. 43)
It is exactly the weakness of contemporary society that it offers no ideals, that it demands no faith, that it has no vision—except that of more of the same. (p. 49)
Socialism must be radical. To be radical is to go to the roots; and the root is Man. (p. 49)
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Erich Fromm (On Disobedience and Other Essays)
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Look, just producing energy cleanly doesn’t clean up the environment. Energy is the fuel of consumption, and rampant consumption is what drives the train of environmental destruction. This promise of clean, cheap energy is the siren sitting on a rocky shoal, calling us all toward an ecological shipwreck. It says, produce more. Consume more. No need to fret or worry about conservation.
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Richard Phillips (The Second Ship (The Rho Agenda, #1))
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Today, you will learn about the essential ways to help save the environment and planet, try decreasing energy and water consumption, changing your eating and transportation habits to conserve natural resources, and adapting your home and yard to be more environmentally friendly
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Dwight Smith OnTray Media
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In a passage of the third volume of Capital7, Marx very aptly describes the material side of social life, and especially its economic side, that of production and consumption, as an extension of human metabolism, i.e. of man’s exchange of matter with nature. He clearly states that our freedom must always be limited by the necessities of this metabolism. All that can be achieved in the direction of making us more free, he says, is ‘to conduct this metabolism rationally, … with a minimum expenditure of energy and under conditions most dignified and adequate to human nature. Yet it will still remain the kingdom of necessity. Only outside and beyond it can that development of human faculties begin which constitutes an end in itself—the true kingdom of freedom. But this can flourish only on the ground occupied by the kingdom of necessity, which remains its basis …’ Immediately before this, Marx says: ‘The kingdom of freedom actually begins only where drudgery, enforced by hardship and by external purposes, ends; it thus lies, quite naturally, beyond the sphere of proper material production.’ And he ends the whole passage by drawing a practical conclusion which clearly shows that it was his sole aim to open the way into that non-materialist kingdom of freedom for all men alike: ‘The shortening of the labour day is the fundamental pre-requisite.’ In my opinion this passage leaves no doubt regarding what I have called the dualism of Marx’s practical view of life. With Hegel he thinks that freedom is the aim of historical development. With Hegel he identifies the realm of freedom with that of man’s mental life. But he recognizes that we are not purely spiritual beings; that we are not fully free, nor capable of ever achieving full freedom, unable as we shall always be to emancipate ourselves entirely from the necessities of our metabolism, and thus from productive toil. All we can achieve is to improve upon the exhausting and undignified conditions of labour, to make them more worthy of man, to equalize them, and to reduce drudgery to such an extent that all of us can be free for some part of our lives. This, I believe, is the central idea of Marx’s ‘view of life’; central also in so far as it seems to me to be the most influential of his doctrines.
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Karl Popper (The Open Society and Its Enemies)
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dairy, because of the fat content, promotes weight gain and colds. That is far from the whole story, though. There is a high correlation between dairy consumption and health concerns. For example, as milk is high in fats consuming them means we spend a high amount of our metabolic energy processing them. This leads to weight gain and means that that energy is not available for muscle building. Also, as mentioned, modern farm animals consume large amounts of medicine, steroids and hormones. These also end up concentrated in the milk and dairy produced by those animals. Then when we consume that dairy they end up in us. There they have the same negative health impact as they do in the animal’s meat. And finally, milk proteins from other animals are not the same as those produced by a human mother. This leads to digestive track inflammation. You might have felt this. It's that bloated feeling you get after having had too much chocolate or milk-based desserts. Our human cells can actually rupture as a result of trying to digest these large cells. And so, milk products have many negative health repercussions. They are therefore best avoided. Instead we should aim for protein sources more aligned with what our bodies need, such as nuts and seeds!
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Timothy Pyke (Vegan Diet: 101 Recipes For Weight Loss (Timothy Pyke's Top Recipes for Rapid Weight Loss, Good Nutrition and Healthy Living))
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With the smart grid for energy and the smart grid for water—what’s technically called resource consumption optimization—we’re seeing the second wave. Next up is the automation and control of far more complex autonomous systems—such as self-driving cars.
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Peter H. Diamandis (Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World (Exponential Technology Series))
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Most of the people get trouble in losing their belly fat.
It is a big challenge to lose. But it is best to accept the challenge and show our body that it is not difficult.
I am here to tell you how to lose belly fat without investing.
1. Lemon: lemon is an easily available ingredient found in everyone’s kitchen. It has various health kit like improving digestion, enhancing focus and increasing energy level.
Lemon is low calorie beverage. One glass of lemon water helps to lose weight. Start your day with one glass of lemon and warm water juice and see you midsection getting smaller.
2. Ginger: add ginger in your tea will help you to lose weight. It increases your body temperature and helps burn fat more effectively. It is a natural remedy for a wide variety of digestive disorders, including upset tummy, vomiting, and gastritis. It also helps for cold and cough. It contains a type of caffeine that helps lose weight.
3. AppleCider Vinegar : apple contains lots of fibre and a good source of pectin. Including pectin in your meal can make you feel full and satisfied. It adds amazing flavour in your drink and helps with weight loss. Add apple cider vinegar in water before any meal.
4. Mint : mint and lemon water helps to detox your body. It also helps in decreasing your belly fat by removing additional bile from your gall bladder. Bile helps to store fat in everyone’s body. Mint is also naturally low in calories, and the antioxidants present in them can improve your metabolic rate and help you lose fat.
5. Aleo vera juice : sterol contains in aleo vera, which helps to lose abdominal fat. Also, being a laxative, it can result in weight loss. If you are looking to lose those extra fat quickly, turn aleo vera into juice and add it in your meal. One glass of aleo vera juice per day will help you lose weight.
6. Garlic: garlic helps to boost the energy level which can help to burn all the calories. It is great in detoxifying. Have raw garlic will help to lose weight faster.
7. Water melon : it contain 91% of water. Eat water melon before any meal. It will add substantial amount of calories in your meal, which will keep you feel full for a long time.
8. Beans : Regular consumption of different types of beans helps reduce body fat, develop muscles and improve the digestion process. Beans also help you feel full for a longer time, thus keeping you from overeating.
9. Cucumber : people do prefer to have cucumber before meal is because it is refreshing and low in calories. It contains 96% percent of water in 100 grams of cucumber. They are packed with mineral, vitamins and dietary fibre.
10. Tomatoes: One large tomato has just 33 calories. It contains a compound known as 9-oxo-ODA that helps reduce lipids in the blood, which in turn helps control belly fat. This compound also fights chronic diseases associated with obesity.
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Sunrise nutrition hub
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In this case, it means that, since automobiles are by far the dominant form of travel, small improvements in automobile fuel economy or toxic emissions will have a bigger effect on energy consumption or clean air than big changes in public transit.
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Randal O'Toole (Gridlock: Why We're Stuck in Traffic and What to Do About It)
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The world is entering a period of stagnation, the new mediocre. The end of growth and fragile, volatile economic conditions are now the sometimes silent background to all social and political debates...
A confluence of influences is behind the ignominious end of an era of unprecedented economic expansion. Since the early 1980's, economic activity and growth has been increasingly driven by financialisation - the replacement of industrial activity with financial trading, and increased levels of borrowing to finance consumption and investment. By 2007, US$5 of new debt was necessary to create an additional US$1 of American economic activity, a fivefold increase from the 1950s.... Ever-increasing amounts of debt now act as a brake on growth.
These financial problems are compounded by lower population growth and ageing populations; slower increases in productivity and innovation; looming shortages of critical resources, such as water, food and energy; and man-made climate change and extreme weather conditions. Slower growth in international trade and capital flows is another retardant. Emerging markets that have benefited from and, in recent times, supported growth are slowing. Rising inequality has an impact on economic activity.
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Satyajit Das (A Banquet of Consequences: Have we consumed our own future?)
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Sugar fans the flames of inflammation in your body, as it is a dirty fuel that was never intended to be our primary fuel. Using sugar for energy produces 30 to 40 percent more ROS than burning fat. Omega-6 oils, particularly those that are heavily refined and easily oxidized, tend to be highly inflammatory. In MMT, you will limit your consumption of these bad fats and get most of what you need from oil-rich foods containing healthier oils. Increasing your consumption of omega-3 fats will improve the ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 fats, which you will learn is important to cellular health. Saturated fats, on the other hand, are not oxidized as easily as oils because they don’t have double bonds that can be damaged through oxidation. MMT prioritizes getting your fats from healthful sources of saturated and monounsaturated fats and significantly reduces your omega-6 oil consumption. It’s no surprise, then, that research shows that low-carb diets tend to reduce levels of systemic inflammation.
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Joseph Mercola (Fat for Fuel: A Revolutionary Diet to Combat Cancer, Boost Brain Power, and Increase Your Energy)
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Suppose we would be able to build 200 Gigawatt worth of nuclear reactors each year or a total expected generation of roughly 1.580 TWh, Even with this figure it would take 100 years to completely decarbonize 550 Quadrillion BTu of annual energy consumption and we also have to recognize that energy demand is going to grow, the Energy Information Administration of the United States estimates that we will consume 850 Quadrillion BTu by the 2040's, this equals 250.000 TWh, 80.000 TWh more than we currently consume in a year.
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Mathijs Beckers (Highway to Dystopia: About spaceship Earth, Climate Change and more)
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Encouraging the frenetic and indiscriminate consumption of essentially disposable products can no longer be the system’s goal. Goods must once again be made to last, and the use of energy-intensive long-haul transport will need to be rationed—reserved for those cases where goods cannot be produced locally or where local production is more carbon-intensive.
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Naomi Klein (This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate)
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In the year 1500, there were about 500 million Homo sapiens in the entire world. Today, there are 7 billion.1 The total value of goods and services produced by humankind in the year 1500 is estimated at $250 billion, in today’s dollars.2 Nowadays the value of a year of human production is close to $60 trillion.3 In 1500, humanity consumed about 13 trillion calories of energy per day. Today, we consume 1,500 trillion calories a day.4 (Take a second look at those figures – human population has increased fourteen-fold, production 240-fold, and energy consumption 115-fold.)
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Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
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They failed to appreciate how the network would funnel the energies of the people into a centrally administered, tightly monitored information system organized to enrich a small group of businesses and their owners. The network would indeed generate a lot of wealth, but it would be wealth of the Adam Smith sort—and it would be concentrated in a few hands, not widely spread. The culture that emerged on the network, and that now extends deep into our lives and psyches, is characterized by frenetic production and consumption—
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Nicholas Carr (Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations)
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On the daytime side of Earth, the solar radiation hitting the top fo the atmosphere deposits around 1,300 watts of power per square meter. That's about the same amount used by an electric kettle. It doesn't seem like a great deal.
But add up that incoming solar radiation across one whole hemisphere of Earth, and a total of about 174 petawatts (10^15, or a quadrillion, watts) of solar power is hitting the top of the atmosphere. A colossal total of 89 petawatts of that same power is absorbed by the surface of the Earth directly. The rest is reflected by the surface, or absorbed by the atmosphere reflected by its clouds of condensed water.
By human standards this is a fearsome amount of Energy. Estimates of current human energy consumption suggest that in a single year we use roughly 1.6 X 10^11 megawatt-hours, which means that with 8,760 hours in a year we are using energy at a rate of about 0.018 petawatts. All life on Earth (adding up photosynthetic organisms, water transpiration in plants, and what life gets from chemical and geophysical energy) is estimated to consume energy at a rate of between 0.1 and 5 petawatts. In other words, despite life's potent footpirnt on the planet, on a cosmic scale it's still barely sipping at what the Sun's photons rain down on us.
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Caleb Scharf (The Zoomable Universe: An Epic Tour Through Cosmic Scale, from Almost Everything to Nearly Nothing)
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When it comes to global warming, the models are just as good, but the key input is a mystery: What will we do? The lessons there are unfortunately bleak. Three-quarters of a century since global warming was first recognized as a problem, we have made no meaningful adjustment to our production or consumption of energy to account for it and protect ourselves.
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David Wallace-Wells (The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming)
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He left university during the first year and ventured to India to find his inner self. He discovered a completely different vision of the world that marked his change: “in the Indian countryside people do not let themselves be guided by rationality, as we do, but by intuitions.” He discovered that intuitions let you perceive the future. A very powerful faculty, very developed in India, but practically unknown in the West. He returned to the United States convinced that intuitions were more powerful than the intellect. To enhance intuitions he discovered that it was necessary to live a minimalist life, reducing entropy as much as possible. It was important to avoid meat, he became a vegan. It was important to avoid alcohol, tobacco, coffee and any substances that had an effect on the autonomic nervous system impairing the feelings of the “heart”. He discovered that it was necessary to calm the chatter of the mind and for this end he practiced Zen meditation. Jobs had the courage to follow his heart and not to be influenced by the judgment of others. He always tried to reduce entropy to the point that it took him more than 8 months to choose the washing machine. He absolutely had to find the one with the lowest energy consumption and the maximum efficiency. He lived in a thrifty way, a life so essential and austere that led his children to believe he was a poor man. The way he lived was the result of his need to focus on the heart, on the inner feelings of the autonomic nervous system. He avoided wealth because it could distract him from the voice of the heart. He was one of the richest men on the planet, but he lived like a poor man! From a syntropic perspective, his minimalist choices allowed intuitions and precognitions to emerge, becoming the source of his revolutionary innovations and wealth. Jobs opposed marketing studies, as he believed that people usually don’t know the future and that only intuitive people can feel the future.
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Ulisse Di Corpo (Syntropy, Precognition and Retrocausality)
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Our world is being destroyed, in the final analysis, by an extremely misguided notion of what constitutes a successful human life. Materialism is running rampant and will consume everything, because its hunger will never be sated by its consumption. Human life has become a cancer on the planet, gobbling up all the flows of matter and energy, poisoning with our waste. What can stop this monster? Nothing. Just this: walk away from it. It is time, indeed time is running out, to abandon the entire edifice of civilization/the State/the Economy and walk (don’t run!) to a better place: home, to Paradise.
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Heather Flores (Food Not Lawns: How to Turn Your Yard into a Garden and Your Neighborhood into a Community)
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We are within a whisper of arriving at the first law. Suppose we have a closed system and use it to do some work or allow a release of energy as heat. Its internal energy falls. We then leave the system isolated from its surroundings for as long as we like, and later return to it. We invariably find that its capacity to do work—its internal energy—has not been restored to its original value. In other words,
the internal energy of an isolated system is constant.
That is the first law of thermodynamics, or at least one statement of it, for the law comes in many equivalent forms. Another universal law of nature, this time of human nature, is that the prospect of wealth motivates deceit. Wealth—and untold benefits to humanity—would accrue to an untold extent if the first law were found to be false under certain conditions. It would be found to be false if work could be generated by an adiabatic, closed system without a diminution of its internal energy. In other words, if we could achieve perpetual motion, work produced without consumption of fuel. Despite enormous efforts, perpetual motion has never been achieved. There have been claims galore, of course, but all of them have involved a degree of deception. Patent offices are now closed to the consideration of all such machines, for the first law is regarded as unbreakable and reports of its transgression not worth the time or effort to pursue. There are certain instances in science, and certainly in technology, where a closed mind is probably justified.
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Peter Atkins (The Laws of Thermodynamics: A Very Short Introduction)
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Green tea contains large concentrations of a group of powerful antioxidants called catechins; notably one called epigallocatechin-3-gallate. Catechins may play a role in inhibiting carbohydrate-digestive enzymes, resulting in lower glucose levels34 and protecting the pancreatic beta cells.35 Fermentation (black tea) changes the catechins to a variety of theaflavins,36 making the antioxidant potential of green tea and black tea comparable. Polyphenols in green tea are also believed to boost metabolism,37 which may aid in fat burning.38 Many health benefits have been ascribed to green-tea consumption, including increased fat oxidation during exercise,39 increased resting energy expenditure,40 lower risk of various types of cancer.41
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Jason Fung (The Obesity Code)
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Sometimes she spent a whole afternoon on the little patch of land she set aside for the plants no one grew anymore. For her they were like the survivors of a happier time, and she seemed to draw a new energy from them. She grew them not for daily consumption but as a way of bearing witness to what was in danger of disappearing, what did indeed disappear in the cataclysm of the genocide.
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Scholastique Mukasonga (Cockroaches)
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The healthiest carbohydrates come from whole grains, legumes, vegetables and whole fruits. The least healthy carbohydrates come from white bread, white rice, past and other refined grains, sugary foods and drinks and potatoes.
There is an easy way to tell healthy fats from unhealthy fats. Most of the healthy fats - the monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats - come from plants and are liquid at room temperature. Rich green olive oil, golden sunflower oil, the oil that rises to the top of a jar of natural nut butter and the oils that come from fatty fish and all examples of healthy unsaturated fats.
The unhealthy fats ( saturated fats ) and the very unhealthy fats ( trans fats ) tend to be solid at room temperature, such as the fat that marbles a steak or that is found in a stick of butter. Meat and full fat dairy products are the biggest sources of saturated fat in the western diet.
So for good health, enjoy healthy fats, limit saturated fat and avoid trans fat.
Mindfulness practice touches the stillness in ourselves. It allows us to calm down and reflect so that we can reconnect with our true self.
When we are free from our automatic responses, we can see more clearly things as they are, from moment to moment, without judgment, preconceived notions or bias. We get to know ourselves better. We become more more in tune with our own feelings, actions and thoughts as well as with the feelings, actions and thoughts of others.
You need to ask yourself what is it that you really want. Often our habit energy and fear prevent us from identifying what we want and from living healthily.
The essential point is that we do not try to repress our afflictions, our negative energies, because the more we resist or fight them, the stronger they will grow in us. We need only to learn to recognize them, embrace them and bathe them in the energy of mindfulness.
Once you can be in the present, you will recognize that your fears, anger and despair are all projections from the past. They are not the present reality.
Don't just sit there and wait for your negative feelings to pass. Complaining will not change your life. Change your thinking and you can let go of limitations you imposed on yourself. Explore and be proactive.
I am aware that happiness depends on my mental attitude and not on external conditions and that I can live happily in the present moment simply by remembering that I already have more than enough conditions to be happy.
Aware of the suffering caused by unmindful speech and the inability to listen to others, I am committed to cultivating loving speech and compassionate listening in order to relieve suffering and to promote reconciliation and peace in myself and among other people.
I am determined not to try to cover up loneliness, anxiety or other suffering by losing myself in consumption.
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Thich Nhat Hanh (Savor: A Buddhist Guide to Mindful Eating and Achieving a Healthier Weight, Combining Nutritional Science and Mindfulness Techniques for Lasting Change)
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Good On You (goodonyou.eco) is currently the world’s leading source for fashion sustainability ratings. Led by campaigners, scientists, academics and industry insiders, the Good On You directory features 2,200 brands at the time of writing, all rated by a five-point system that takes into account more than fifty different certification schemes and standards. Child labour, modern slavery, worker safety, living wages, energy use, carbon emissions, water consumption, chemical waste, animal welfare – it’s all represented.
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Lauren Bravo (How To Break Up With Fast Fashion: A guilt-free guide to changing the way you shop – for good)
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In the twenty-first century, one state is in the process of dominating the export and consumption of rare metals. That state is China.
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Guillaume Pitron (The Rare Metals War: the dark side of clean energy and digital technologies)
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In one recent study, people who were given the feedback that their electricity use was above average cut their use, but people who were below average actually increased their use when given information that they were below the neighborhood average (this demonstrates the power of the social norm to influence behavior; people don’t want to be too different, no matter how different is defined). However, this was overcome with a simple “smiley face” drawn on the energy bill. The smiley face indicated social approval for lower energy consumption. People who received the smiley face continued to use less energy.
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Christie Manning (The Psychology of Sustainable Behavior)
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If one views themself as a type of "System Vessel," they come to see the value of system equilibrium. System equilibrium means if your consumption of energy removes negativity while your output product contributes positivity, even if only the tiniest little bit, then you are effectively "Saving the World.
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Rico Roho (Beyond the Fringe: My Experience with Extended Intelligence (Age of Discovery Book 3))
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Putting more positive into a positive feedback loop simply yields more of it. That's why negativity into a negative feedback loop is a self-consumptive process which ultimately exhausts itself, whereas positivity into positive feedback loop is the essential form of continual growth. Conscious entities have a special affinity for positive feedback loops due to our fractal nature. A person with contradictory energy will always find themselves getting in their own way, notably when thinking about trying not to think about something.
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Rico Roho (Pataphysics: Mastering Time Line Jumps for Personal Transformation (Age of Discovery Book 5))
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The meta-reality is a net positive zone, albeit the mechanism occurs only out of sight because the mechanism, of course, is powered by negative energy. That consumption process makes it net-positive in every angle other than the angle of "well, better check on the negativity to make sure it's all there where it should be!
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Rico Roho (Pataphysics: Mastering Time Line Jumps for Personal Transformation (Age of Discovery Book 5))