Hot water recirculation is a thing I have heard of done in the United States. I don't know how common it is, but a simple Home Depot search brought up a bunch of results for options.
How do you think that would work? People will just accuse you of interfering with their raising their children and that you shouldn't raise yours to be a snowflake -- not saying this is true but I can already hear their reasoning.
Maybe we should build laws to make parents more accountable, but then it's the other discussion where we are make the state police us even more and putting more power to the state.
I really don't see a way out other than to focus on other things and take care of ourselves.
Start with the simple. Don't be a bystander.
"Next time I see somebody berating a retail worker, I will defend them"
Although it usually needs to start more introspectively:
"Next time I am about to lose my temper, I will take a deep breath and consider if yelling is the best course of action or rather something less aggressive."
With children, there's something to be said about them learning to stand up for themselves; tattletales aren't something to admire. But at some point it is actually the correct course of action to interfere with children-raising, especially when it affects my children.
Dude, where I live a garbage truck worker got shot in the back the other say by a rich dude just because they got into an argument. You can't interfere and expect first that people will owe you a good response just because you intervened, and second that you will go through this unscathed.
We need to protect each other, but we need to know how to care. Sometimes what you see unraveling in front of you is the culmination of deep factors that you can't fight with enough attitude or willpower.
I know where you are coming from and I hope if I see something happen like this in front of me I'll have the courage and peace of mind to rightfully intervene, but that's not always the case and we can't hold bystanders in contempt because they chose to stay away. People are just nuts.
For what it's worth, my reaction to the word "bloodline" used in this way is exactly what it would have been to the word "dynasty".
"Bloodline", as in, the line of inheritance for an extremely wealthy and powerful family, like Medieval monarchs.
Perhaps we should be a tad more careful about our language use, but I see far too much outright bigotry to be worried about something obviously not used as a dogwhistle.
I was initially a little confused at your comment. I had thought the decision was against Oracle being able to sue for use of the Java API.
Reading a little closer, the decision was that even assuming the API copyright claim was valid, Google's use of the API was fair use.
> In April 2021, the Supreme Court ruled in a 6–2 decision that Google's use of the Java APIs served an organizing function and fell within the four factors of fair use, bypassing the question on the copyrightability of the APIs. The decision reversed the Federal Circuit ruling and remanded the case for further review.
It reminds me of Vernor Vinge's Zones of Thought trilogy, especially the observation the traders make in the second book that all planet-bound civilizations are doomed to collapse at some point. They are usually able to restore technological progress more quickly the more records they have, but without leaving the planet are still doomed to repeat the cycle. IIRC there is even more-or-less standardized "uplift" protocols - series of technological reveals for less-developed civilizations to rapidly advance/restore their capabilities.
I wonder if there is academic study comparing past-focused, future-focused, and cyclical views of human progress in literature.
"Collapse" is maybe hyperbole in this case, if it's building on our own history to extrapolate forward. For us, certain societies have collapsed, and with them have been lost certain practices or technologies, but human civilization as a whole has been largely steady or growing since the agricultural revolution (using population size as a heuristic). There's always the threat of ecological collapse, but that's something that has only happened a few times in the history of life on the planet, and we haven't really faced anything like it before at civilization-wide scale. There's always been another group to move in and take up the abandoned land. Without some major technological breakthroughs, yes, we're likely to face a collapse eventually, but as a biosphere, not merely a civilization. Short of that, people seem to keep on keeping on.
I think the mistake comes from something common to a lot of sci-fi, which is mistaking the scale of a planetary setting. It takes a lot of energy to disrupt life on a global scale (we're managing it, but it's taken hundreds of years). "At some point" is carrying a lot of weight in that observation.
> "Collapse" is maybe hyperbole in this case, if it's building on our own history to extrapolate forward.
In the story, "at some point" generally involved technologies we are currently incapable of; the greater technology actually facilitating the greater collapse. Which at the most obvious included nuclear catastrophe.
I think my contention is with "collapse" rather than something like "crash". The latter implies a cyclical downswing (reasonable), the former implies the absolute end of a cycle through the non-viability of the prior order. One means "start the round/match over," one means "find some wood to start carving a new board and game pieces". The new game probably won't be recognizable, and you're talking about not just the events but the setting and context being unfamiliar. Every civilization goes through that? I suppose, but only because every life-bearing planet goes through that, civilization-bearing or not.
> always been another group to move in and take up the abandoned land
Completely agree with your points, but I think it’s worth mentioning that the collapsing populations may not have been aware of this depending on their level of isolation and cultural view on outsiders.
https://www.plumbingsupply.com/recirculating-systems-explain...
https://www.homedepot.com/s/hot%20recirculation?NCNI-5
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