a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment by am_Unition
am_Unition  ·  587 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Californians asked to cut power use as extreme heat approaches

Today was much more typical:

10,000 MW variance in demand between a Wednesday and a Thursday? I guess it could be as simple as "It rained quite a bit in Houston on Thursday afternoon".

Expanding current battery tech production? We gotta think about that (source, REE = rare earth elements):

Whatever company or government manages to mine or capture (orbitally) a sizeable rare Earth metals asteroid could generate several trillions of dollars. Ideally, we could do it in tandem with having it serve as a space elevator anchor, but I digress.

I haven't looked into graphene/graphite capacitor-battery tech lately, but I guess it's still not economical enough for scalable production compared to lithium/REE stuff.

Call me a Texan, but I'm still uncomfortable with overly-capitalistic solutions to EV or wide-scale battery production. We've traded minor improvements in affordability for an almost incalculable amount of risk.

How 'bout this? Fuck car ownership altogether. We need to hasten a future of self-driving, Uber-like, and possibly partitioned cars (for carpooling) designed to meet capacity at rush hour, while expanding public transport, and restructuring cities to be denser. Even a feasibility study on implementing some of that would be great. Imagine if Andrew Yang's "Forward Party" (or anyone, for that matter) could come up with just a rough proposal to implement something concrete related to that instead of useless platitudes like "risk the imagination of a new possibility" and "common sense consensus". But nope, everything's a fucking cash grab.

I also don't think we'll get self-driving cars without linking either a small handful of companies or the government to both infrastructure and automobile construction. Maybe they all work together, ideally.

These are hard problems.





wasoxygen  ·  587 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    A typical lithium car battery weighing about 450 kilograms contains about 11 kilograms of lithium, nearly 14 kilograms of cobalt, 27 kilograms of nickel, more than 40 kilograms of copper, and 50 kilograms of graphite—as well as about 181 kilograms of steel, aluminum, and plastics. Supplying these materials for a single vehicle requires processing about 40 tons of ores, and given the low concentration of many elements in their ores it necessitates extracting and processing about 225 tons of raw materials.[108] Again, we would have to multiply this by close to 100 million units, which is the annual worldwide production of internal-combustion vehicles that would have to be replaced by electric drive.

Vaclav Smil, How the World Really Works

[108] H. Berg and M. Zackrisson, “Perspectives on environmental and cost assessment of lithium metal negative electrodes in electric vehicle traction batteries,” Journal of Power Sources 415 (2019), pp. 83–90; M. Azevedo et al., Lithium and Cobalt: A Tale of Two Commodities (New York: McKinsey & Company, 2018).

am_Unition  ·  587 days ago  ·  link  ·  

First of all, OK, but instead of designing a plan to reduce consumption (maybe I'll tag you in my dumb, naive little plan I'll post later today or tomorrow?), because of climate change, you believe climate change is good, thus oil and gas are fine. Corrections welcome.

40,000 tones of ores x 100 million units annually = 4E12 kg ore annually. Earth mass = 5.972E24 kg, so there are mos def some viable years ahead, even if crustal veins of lithium are pretty damn rare. Make it to the mantle and it's EZ-PZ (see below link). It's an industry.

Do you know how the battery industry(ies) breaks down as subsidized vs. profit? I don't. It seems complex, quickly changing, and perhaps even a bit intentionally obfuscated. Majority from profit? almost sorry for source.

So yeah, also focus on reducing emissions and pollution from REE mining. We need more honest case studies in what carbon emissions vs. battery production looks like right now, but doing so probably conflicts with the interests of both sides of the argument, no? Know any good studies?

At least there's tech like regenerative braking that is objectively cool.

b_b  ·  587 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Time out. I think the wasoxygen is only saying that there are tradeoffs. And the mining of ridiculous amounts of ore (not to mention the current impossibility of mass battery recycling) is a tradeoff that the EV boosters just handwave over almost 100% of the time. ICE engines have beaucoup problems, but they're still the devil you know for the time being.

am_Unition  ·  587 days ago  ·  link  ·  

That's the intended gist of my second-to-last paragraph.

b_b  ·  587 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Lol. Guess I only got as far as "you like global warming"

am_Unition  ·  587 days ago  ·  link  ·  

wasO has previously asserted just that, almost verbatim, but I've recently taken Donald Trump at his word, so it could take me several years to rebuild your trust.

I understand.

wasoxygen  ·  587 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Can we get a quote?

am_Unition  ·  587 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Yes:

    I think it’s worth doing a cost-benefit analysis, as we should do for any big decision. As long as we are not allowed to count benefits of climate change, it won’t be an accurate accounting.

Uh-oh. OK, OK, I have extrapolated from your uncertainty, and put some words in your mouth. And now, b_b will never love me. At least you were already never going to love me, no loss there.

My obvious bias results from a belief that it is strange to ponder if there are significant economic benefits from climate change when compared to the costs. It boils down to sheer disruption. Disruption is costly. If the optimal latitude to grow crops of a certain type shifts by several degrees, one way or the other, that is disruptive. Shifting hundreds of millions to billions of people poleward within a generation or three is also quite disruptive. Wet bulb concerns, for starters.

On top of the steady warming trend is the increased occurrence of climate change-related natural disasters stemming from increasingly wild atmospheric oscillations, producing increasingly ahistoric local weather events; in pressure, temperature, large-scale polar vortices fluctuations, El Niño, La Niña, precipitation, etc.

Insurance companies have market-driven forces driving up insurance rates almost everywhere due to... liberal climate scaremongering?

You have a hard case to make for climate change benefits.

Not including more than one hyperlink; I think you'd dispute most sources.

I also love how Ben Shapiro's like "sea level rise? just sell your house, dumbass!". So many hilarious fallacies in that take.

wasoxygen  ·  585 days ago  ·  link  ·  

First I "don't believe in global warming," now I "like global warming," what could be next?

Are you sure we actually disagree, given this degree of difficulty in communicating my position?

For the record, I think we should avoid binary good/bad judgments and use cost-benefit analysis to consider better or worse alternatives.

    it is strange to ponder if there are significant economic benefits from climate change when compared to the costs

Why strange? Aren't you curious to see reality as it is? How can you correct for bias if you dismiss evidence that challenges your beliefs, concluding in advance that it will be too small to matter?

Deaths are a relevant consequence of climate change. Every year people are killed by high temperatures. And every year people are killed by low temperatures. Which number is higher? It's not obvious. If fewer people die in the winter, shouldn't that mitigate some additional heat-related deaths in the summer? Or perhaps climate change will cause more deaths in both winter and summer, but we won't know if we don't look.

Note: Source cites the Fourth National Climate Assessment which claims that "With continued warming, increases in heat-related deaths are projected to outweigh reductions in cold-related deaths in most regions" citing The Impacts of Climate Change on Human Health in the United States which expresses the same claim, "The reduction in cold-related deaths is projected to be smaller than the increase in heat-related deaths in most regions" ("medium confidence") while recognizing that "Future adaptation will very likely reduce these impacts" i.e. people will install air-conditioning ["Very High Confidence"].

    Disruption is costly.

Switching from animal power to motorized power was costly. Automating manufacture was costly. Eradicating polio was costly. Installing air conditioning is costly. If you do cost analysis instead of cost-benefit analysis you won't get the whole story.

    the optimal latitude to grow crops of a certain type

Relocating a farm doesn't sound easy, but agriculture is constantly changing, with higher yields reducing the amount of land needed. Smil points out that in a satellite image of Spain you can see a large white region at the southern tip. Almería is covered in greenhouses and produces vegetables which are shipped all over Europe, as far as Stockholm. To extend the growing season, some of the greenhouses are heated. (Greenhouses are also enriched with CO₂ to improve yields.)

    Shifting hundreds of millions to billions of people poleward

Why shift? People live with temperature changes of a few degrees every year, indeed every day. People retiring from New York to Florida will endure more climate change than New York will get in a century. Outside of deserts, the hottest regions of the world are populated, and the largest uninhabited regions are cold. We have East African genes.

    Insurance companies have market-driven forces driving up insurance rates almost everywhere

No link so I won't dispute your claim. Climate change could certainly drive up rates, if real rates are in fact rising, but so could rising affluence (we have more valuable things to insure) or cost disease. Swiss Re says "By mid-century, the world stands to lose around 10% of total economic value from climate change." That is a lot of value in absolute terms, but average annual growth of 3% would more than double total economic value in that time, so people will still be better off (1.03^29 × 0.9 = 2.12). The real comparison is to how much climate change mitigation would cost in total economic value.

These numbers are all fairly speculative, but Smil makes a (rueful) case that mitigation is all but hopeless anyway.

    The UN’s first climate conference took place in 1992 in Rio de Janeiro, and in the intervening decades we have had a series of global meetings and countless assessments and studies. Annual climate change conferences began in 1995 (in Berlin) and included much publicized gatherings in Kyoto (1997, with its completely ineffective agreement), Marrakech (2001), Bali (2007), Cancun (2010), Lima (2014), and Paris (2015).

    In Paris, about 50,000 people flew to the French capital to attend yet another conference at which they were to strike, we were assured, a “landmark” — and also “ambitious” and “unprecedented” — agreement. Yet the Paris Agreement did not codify any specific reduction targets by the world’s largest emitters. And even if all voluntary non-binding pledges were honored (something utterly improbable), the Paris accord would still result in a 50 percent increase of emissions by 2030.

    Some landmark.

Like Jamie Dimon, he recommends natural gas over coal as a realistic practical measure.

"We can proceed fairly quickly with the displacement of coal- fired electricity by natural gas (when produced and transported without significant methane leakage, it has a substantially lower carbon intensity than coal) and by expanding solar and wind electricity generation."

am_Unition  ·  584 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I assert a consensus-aligned view: The eventual economic costs of climate change for anyone currently 10, 20, 30, maybe even 40 years old or younger could be debilitating if we don't respond more drastically ASAP. Reducing the nuance afforded by a cost-benefit analysis, which, yes, can e.g. inform a course of action over some span of time, to a binary judgement is useful in my rhetoric here because it reflects my perceived magnitude of your misjudgements.

Since you have expressed an inclination to do almost nothing, coded as "let The Market sort it out", your position is indistinguishable from a climate change denialist or someone who thinks that climate change is generally good. Hopefully that will help you understand some of my confusions regarding my perception of your position. Action-wise, they are all currently the same position.

The idea that the market will naturally provide appropriate economic incentives when the most significant costs are incurred only far in the future flies in the face of the way economics is now conducted. Amazon et al. have come to define the most long-term-est business model, at least in America, which says that a project has about 10 years to corner an entire emerging market sector and become profitable via monopoly. Almost every large-scale and established corporation, which are admittedly driving most of the economic landscape, demands a much more immediate 10% annual or equivalent quarterly growth. Because they seem to routinely disregard expert and consensus opinion when convenient, the financial-class folks don't always offer a maximally-informed funding landscape. And VC is still the most long-term-minded funding model in the extra-governmental economic landscape? Troubling.

    Switching from animal power to motorized power was costly. Automating manufacture was costly. Eradicating polio was costly. Installing air conditioning is costly. If you do cost analysis instead of cost-benefit analysis you won't get the whole story.

Missing: A list of climate change benefits that don't pale in comparison to the costs.

    If fewer people die in the winter, shouldn't that mitigate some additional heat-related deaths in the summer?

Oddly reminiscent of your "since covid just spiked up the death rate, less people should die later" argument from two years ago-ish. As of March 2022, nope. joke about wasO's popularity in nursing homes

The distribution of people vs. latitude is difficult to summarize in sweeping statements, except that "white" and wealthy countries skew very much towards the mid-latitudes already (and Northern hemisphere, but that's a landmass and history thing, largely). At least in the short term, the average human's latitude set to move further close to the equator, because that's where the population growth is, specifically in central Africa. Lo and behold. Another reason to consider whether lingering Western dismissiveness regarding the seriousness of climate change is related to systemic racism. Your favorite two words.

    Why shift? People live with temperature changes of a few degrees every year, indeed every day. People retiring from New York to Florida will endure more climate change than New York will get in a century.

The distinction between voluntary choices and involuntary impacts renders the point null. But on top of globally heating up overall and localized anomalous heat events (and drought, and flood) of increasing frequency, weather patterns unfamiliar to the people native to any particular location are disruptive if the people don't have the know-how and infrastructure capable of handling new types of "natural" disasters. Not just heat deaths. Unpredictability in weather is also costly for the energy sector, and as we have seen, can jeopardize the integrity of an electricity grid. Eventually, incorrect predictions of increasing frequency from atmospheric neural network models trained on historic data will help further reveal the destablizing and inherently unpredictable nature of climate change. If it hasn't measurably happened already. And if the fine folks in Manhattan suddenly take a strong hurricane to the nose for the first time ever, but Florida's underwater? Everybody loses.

    "By mid-century, the world stands to lose around 10% of total economic value from climate change." That is a lot of value in absolute terms, but average annual growth of 3% would more than double total economic value in that time, so people will still be better off (1.03^29 × 0.9 = 2.12).

All 10% of the economic contraction occurs IN ONE YEAR, after 29 years of unhindered economic growth?? No: It shaves the compounding 1.03 down a bit. It's also fantastic news to hear that there are no overall economic contractions in the future and climate change ends in 2050, instead of continuing to worsen like the climatologists are warning, even if we achieved a carbon neutral US and Europe by then. The effects will get worse after 2050, either way.

My biggest fear is that climate feedback loops push us towards system collapse. Coal to gas is a relatively minor concession almost certainly intentionally designed to fend off meaningful progress. Should we still do it? Sure, in addition to many, many other steps.

And previously, you wanted proof of overpopulation, right? Global warming is it. I would say "Maybe you have a point, and we wouldn't have to consider the Earth overpopulated if we can make significant cultural changes", and then you're like "We should definitely not change our lifestyles very much at all, it would have immediate costs that I and the billionaire class have decided are too expensive for us, personally". Unless you're secretly a billionaire, that argument makes way more sense for you than them (they have a few spare dollars), but they're funding the brand of information you prefer to consume. Do you acknowledge that?

If you decide that climate change only will only cost the world one or two trillion dollars between now and 2050? And there's a very good chance that if you threw significantly less than a trillion dollars (this fucking graph AGAIN!?) at fusion you'd get a technology that has one of the best chances at saving our skins instead of basically mothballing it 50 years ago? "Economic incentives" have failed us already, and were assuredly responsible for lobbying government to de-fund fusion and maintain the status quo. Again, the inability of economics to address long-term problems rears its ugly head.

As you can see elsewhere in these comments, I think the case could be made that switching to increasingly battery-centric energy solutions will likely lead to an unsustainable ravaging of the planet. On top of curbing energy demands, we must de-carbonize if the planet is to remain habitable. The response of Earth to such a high CO2 concentration will continue until the CO2 is decreased. Fusion is the best path to do it. Throwing up our hands Jamie Dimon-style is not an option. It's not what a majority of us want, either.

The inability to appropriately respond to climate change is an indictment of economic fetishism and the economic incentives that got us this far into the hole in the first place. Btw, this is also related to your strange conviction that profitability automatically confers net benefit or value, in an economic environment where e.g. Andrew Tate can make a shitton of money championing domestic violence and Jordan Peterson rakes in the dough from worrying about all of the transsexual genitals he'll never see. Many more caveats abound, but I digress.

Meta: What does it say if you prefer a cost-benefit framing through the lens of a perspective overly hostile to expertise and institutional trust, and then decide that properly addressing climate change ultimately costs you too much money, in this moment? It says we can't abolish tax law, because you can't be trusted to properly vote with your money, which undermines your entire vision for society.

am_Unition  ·  583 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Hey, I almost forgot, remember when we let economists play epidemiologist?

The most likely interpretation is that expert economist Kevin Hassert didn't actually believe his own bullshit, and instead sold his repute to the White House to help Trump minimize what we were facing with covid-19. Surely, this time, with the even more complicated system of the Earth's climate, the economists aren't minimizing the scale of what we're up against to protect the ruling business class that employs them, right?

The idea of Jamie Dimon receiving accolades from attendees on his conference call after he graciously announces his support for switching the types of fossil fuels we're burning is fucking hilarious. Also Dimon:

    "Why can‘t we get it through our thick skulls, that if you want to solve climate [change], it is not against climate [change] for America to boost more oil and gas?" Dimon reportedly said.

Our thick skulls: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExxonMobil_climate_change_controversy

But this time? This time, surely, big business and the economists to whom they pay exorbitant amounts of money have prescribed the correct plan of action, and are deserving of our trust.

Yes, natural gas produces ~50% less CO2 than coal. Smil, at least, is a vocal advocate of reducing overall energy demand. Dimon's position is basically "And that solves it!". Smil is right that de-carbonization is a huge problem. Maybe we should actually get started in on it instead of (once again) pretending bullshit like "carbon offsets actually work". De-carbonization is inherently not profitable, so I will assume you're against it, no? Smil also thinks our current requirement of economic growth must end. I agree. So much for 1.03^29.

    Why shift? People live with temperature changes of a few degrees every year, indeed every day.

Revisiting this; I don't think you're actually arguing in good faith. What a waste of my time. Later.

b_b  ·  587 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    I also love how Ben Shapiro's like "sea level rise? just sell your house, dumbass!".

It's actually a better take than many conservative voices. Arguing this is a problem with a solution (no matter how facile) is better than arguing it's not a problem. And also, yeah, stop moving to Florida, so he's right on that point. I live in Global Warming Paradise (no natural disasters, more abundant fresh water than anywhere on Earth, save for maybe Lake Baikal, mild temperatures, ~600-800 ft above sea level), so I'm expecting a rebound of the Great Lakes region after decades of decline as one small regional benefit. One could argue that my property value nominally rising isn't that great of a benefit to humanity relative to 100,000,000 people dying of thirst, but I'm a glass half-full sort of dude.

am_Unition  ·  587 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Fair 'nough, on your end. Self-interested, market-guiding Keynesian handjob.

Shapiro's take still ignores the fact that the cycle-of-poverty contingent are almost 100% renters, and can't simply flip a property they don't own to offset thousands of dollars in costs to move their family of 5 or 6 or 7 at will. Or that nobody wants to buy an underwater property. And the problem skews heavily non-white, because wealth skews white, because the U.S. more or less bailed on reconstruction and reparations. Not sure how this idea is still controversial for a huge subset of the U.S., apart from intentional propaganda to the contrary. (oH iT's SiMpLy CuLtuRaL bAnKruPTcy uNrElAtEd tO the EChoEs of SlAvErY)

Thanks, Ben Shapiro!

kleinbl00  ·  587 days ago  ·  link  ·  

JP Morgan Chase Research, in their preface to their study on the economic effects of Hurricane Harvey on Texas in 2017, said words to the effect of "natural disasters are terrible for the economy but great for GDP." Their argument - and the fact that they have to make this argument says a lot about capitalism as practiced currently - was that the wholesale destruction of existing goods is obviously terrible for the human beings within capitalism but that the need to replace everything that had been destroyed was great for sales.

I am really coming around to the idea that the externalization of "human beings within capitalism" is the original sin of modern American capitalism and that it is not a Democratic viewpoint, not a Republican viewpoint but a human viewpoint that the economic system should work for the bulk of the people subject to it. The Republican argument for renewables is "energy independence" "jobs for the heartland" and "exportable technology." The Republican argument for environmental protectionism is "keeps farming jobs from moving to Canada." The Republican argument for immigration is "weakens our adversaries by siphoning off their best, brightest and most motivated."

I think the core issue of the American Right is they're entirely beholden to a populist ideology (white christian males over all in all things) in order to get the votes to support an oligarchic business strategy (all proceeds to the 1%). It was never going to work forever, it was always going to end in a messy messy way, everyone just kicked the can down the road in hopes they'd be out of office before it exploded.

It exploded Jan 6 2021, and now we get to see what the cleanup looks like.

am_Unition  ·  587 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Absolutely (alt. title: One of the richest fuckers on Earth realizes climate change disproportionately impacts the poors negatively, which is fine, as is continuing to bolster petrolstates).

Both the Harvey-specific and generalized climate calculus contain a disregard for a dynamic that enables further wealth disparities. Weird, coming from a wealthy guy!

Pedantic squabblings, for posterity (as always, there's just so many goddamn lurkers here): "white christian males over all in all things" is much more of a racist than true-blue populist ideology. "all proceeds to the 1%" makes it even more transparent.

Agree with your interpretations here almost completely.

uhsguy  ·  587 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Nobody truly owns electric cars. For 50-70k you get a License to access their ecosystem complete with garbage software and lots of bugs. The manufacturers can ota upgrade your car to be a brick at any time they feel like you should upgrade. It’s truly the worst of both worlds, ownership costs without ownership rights.

am_Unition  ·  587 days ago  ·  link  ·  

wasoxygen

That's not just an electric cars problem though. BMW subscription model seat warmers, John Deere's proprietary electrical subsystems, and right to repair and software issues with smartphones come to mind.

I'm talking about something way more radical. We can install 20 gazillion solar panels and batteries, get an asteroid, whatever, sure, but focusing solely on improving efficiency in the renewables sector avoids a yuge slice of the problem.

Ultimately, I think we need to curb energy consumption, and I'll make the case that it can be baked in to generally positive lifestyle improvements. We should have a different model that we can apply to city-specific and country-specific conditions, but what follows is for U.S. cities. I've no idea about Africa, South America, or the Middle East, for starters.

If we were capable of collective action, whether through the free market or otherwise, we'd realize that if less than 50% of all cars are in use even during peak demand, we could all "buy" about half as many cars, and spend the money we saved on other things. "Buy" in quotes b/c it'd then be a (private non-monopolistic) service(s) that'd cost ~50% (probably ~60%, more realistically) as much as monthly car payments, on average. There could be subscription tiers, but on average, it'd be maybe a little less or equal to the cost people typically spend on maintenance of their paid-off cars, but for a better car, and no maintenance inconveniences.

The cars could be stored and recharged in centralized and/or smaller, quasi-centralized garages with more efficiency, and people could convert their house garages to another room. Home value goes up. It would also radically diminish the amount of area devoted to parking lots adjacent to businesses and apartments. A way to increase population density.

Population density goes up, including business density, along with restructuring, specifically targeting green space, all creating less demand for automobiles. Downtown and University of Bern are five minutes' walk from the station of a one-hour 160mph bullet train to inside of the Zurich airport terminal, halfway across the country (OK, it's a small country). European cities were built before automobile demands existed. They are superior places to live for it.

To be fair, implementing and optimizing a self-driving carpool system algorithmically, especially if you're trying to incorporate public transportation and carpooling, sounds like the most NP problem I've ever heard of, and it could lead to e.g. you getting screwed on a random Tuesday morning commute that's three times as long as the usual when you have an important AM meeting that day.

It does kinda hinge on self-driving tech being fleshed out, obviously. Humans are expensive, but should be. And if EV batteries aren't at houses, you'd need to have another battery module built. Sounds bad, but there are some benefits to not needing to design a battery to travel 80+ mph on the underside of a car. You're still not too much higher than the same number of batteries anyway, because there exist only half as many cars. Apartments have bigger and probably more efficient batteries.

Even besides somehow wrestling policy-making away from the oil & gas companies, there's a LOT of other problems with this idea, honestly, but it's fun to try to think what's possible thirty or forty years from now. Like: you're putting anyone who drives anything out of a job, :(, and almost assuredly nowhere near enough battery/solar maintenance tech jobs to make up for it.

Simply switching oil combustion schemes to electric, and only using a battery/solar scheme will probably eventually run into some kind of diminishing returns. Curb demand regardless, and enrich our lives in the process. ASAP.

inb4 the idea that using a government in tandem with private industry to this specific end is somehow insultingly socialist (code for: "cost the always-sacrificing, always-suffering, increasingly-wealthy class too much money, and btw get the fuck back to work").

Tear my arguments apart, any and everyone. Have fun.

dublinben  ·  586 days ago  ·  link  ·  

This is an interesting 'solution' to the problem of fuel-burning, car-based transportation. Unfortunately it relies on a lot of technology that doesn't exist yet.

There's another solution which reduces driving, using just technology that we already have. Building walkable cities again. If we allow more people to live in local communities where they can accomplish their life necessities with just walking, biking, and transit, then we can drastically cut transportation emissions without strip-mining the whole earth for minerals.

kleinbl00  ·  587 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Pretty sure veen does this for a living

am_Unition  ·  587 days ago  ·  link  ·  

You're lucky you shared this, I was just about to suggest killing gen-X'ers to hasten progress for us millenials