Seriously though why the fuck does it seem like they get to just appeal shit forever no matter how many times their position is shown to have zero merit, legal standing, or even basic logic?

You may not know this but oil comes from cyanobacteria or algae blooming, dieing, and falling to the bottom of ancient lakes. We can farm them better than they could ever grow on their own in nature, just like we do with corn, rice, wheat, and a hundred other crops. The only complex part would be the scale required. We have the technology to industrialize hydrocarbon production that way today. Life isn’t magic, so there’s no reason we couldn’t do direct synthesis with more controlled processes. And yeah it’s going to require resources. Everything does. It’s just pretty fatalistic to think we won’t be able to bootstrap ourselves up to current technologies without oil when we’ve already done it once before. Oil just makes scale possible, not the technology itself.

The large scale replacement for oil is the original source of that energy, the sun. Sure it will take a while, but high technology (read small computers) doesn’t actually require hydrocarbons, it just requires knowledge of physics. Modern society is based on hydrocarbon fuels because they’re so convenient, but that doesn’t mean it’s required for any of our technology to function. We will likely be combusting hydrocarbons for the rest of our existence, they’re just too convenient for energy storage, but the source of those hydrocarbons could easily be specialized cyanobacteria farms or direct chemical synthesis. Both of those technologies already exist, but we have never done any significant investment in them because they would have to compete with basically picking up what’s already lying around. In the absence of significant oil deposits we will be forced to make those technologies work.

Hey you leave gooners alone. They aren’t hurting anyone. They’re just jerking off.

The direct answer to your question is that it’s a deep rooted cultural problem that has been with us since the beginning. The problem is the culture of extreme individualism and anti-intellectualism. People want to be completely free and unrestricted in their behavior, whether that harms others or not. Ultimately the desire for the freedom to harm others with impunity is what leads to where we are now. The rich want to be able to exploit their workers harder, men want to be able to beat and rape their wives and control their entire life, pedophiles (see endless stream of republican pedophilia controversies) want everyone to make more babies for them to rape, landlords want to take all your money for the privilege of having a place to sleep, every company that sells goods or services wants to fleece you, and all of these assholes want to have zero consequences for their actions. They gaslight the normies into distrusting the scientists, the educated, the compassionate, because they would actually help people. It’s not even about greed really, it’s about the ultimate extreme of personal freedom. Money just makes you more free.

So why haven’t we done anything? People have, there’s just a lot of people who want this to happen. A lot of people would cheer as they send me to the gas chamber. The majority of my extended family probably would.

I hate this place

There are no ethical billionaires. All of them got their wealth by exploiting people. The ones that seem like nice people still got there by causing untold harm to thousands or millions of people, and they continue to exploit people and personally benefit no matter what ideals they pay lipservice to.

This article is… difficult to critique. There’s too many things to refute so I’ll just undermine the title. We’ve known about an operation that can undo any rotation for a lot (hundreds?) of years. 3D rotations represented as quaternions or rotation matrices are trivially invertible, and their inverse literally undoes the rotation. For a rotation matrix the inverse is simply the transpose of the matrix, and for a quaternion it’s the complex conjugate (3 of the 4 numbers have their sign flipped). These operations have been used in computer algorithms likely for as long as we have had computers. Honestly this whole thing feels like a big fat nothing so I’m gonna stop letting it steal my time.