- Legislation would certainly require political will, which we don't have now for tackling anything on such a time scale. To tackle the problem through laws and government enforcement, it would have to become politically tenable at some point, but how would we go from where we are now to something that is closer to this? It's difficult to say with any confidence. But I do know politicians are still human, influenced by their biases and beliefs inherited through biology and life experiences. If our future politicians are to grow up in an environment in which a larger (than today) proportion of people care about problems on a longer time scale, they are more likely to care as well. Consequently, a larger proportion of individuals getting into politics will care about these types of problems, increasing the likelihood of them being addressed.
In parallel but as a separate point, fewer people will be willing to use products or services provided by organizations that they believe are doing wrong or harm by contributing to such problems, thus making it less profitable within capitalism. We already see this to some degree today (Harry Potter comes to mind). Even if the reduction in customers and profit is small, it would decrease compounding and ever so slightly disincentivize the company from making such a pursuit.
It's impressive how adaptive humans are, I must admit. We are quite good at tackling problems we see right in front of us if we set our minds to it. But that doesn't mean we should dismiss problems that are not causing an issue right here and now. We shouldn't wait until it becomes an actual problem because there could be irreversible consequences (or rather, we cannot reverse on reasonable timescale).
- It's comments like these that sadden me. It's this mindset that make me pessimistic about the long-term viability of humanity as I think it is shared among many people. When we (individuals/groups/society) don't plan far ahead (even for the loosest sense/meaning of the word "plan"), that will tend to lead to short-term benefits with long-term detriments. That even applies even for things that can occur past our lifespan. In my opinion, we should strive to benefit/help our decedents. Climate change is the most obvious case of this, but it applies to other cases like solar flares on the scale of the Carrington event or greater or like Kessler syndrome here (both perhaps on the order of hundreds of years). If Kessler syndrome is a legitimate concern to be a problem in the not crazy distant future, we shouldn't dismiss it outright just because the issue is unlikely to be a problem within our lifetime.
> This might seem strange if you haven’t worked with markup before, but it comes with a few advantages:
> 1. You can handle your writing’s content and its presentation separately. At the start of each document, you describe the design you want. LATEX takes it from there, consistently formatting your whole text just the way you asked. Compare this to a wysiwyg system, where you constantly deal with appearances as you write. If you changed the look of a caption, were you sure to find all the other captions and do the same? If the program arranges something in a way you don’t like, is it hard to fix?
> 2. You can define your own commands, then tweak them to instantly adjust every place they’re used. For example, the \introduce and \acronym commands in the example above are my own creations. One italicizes text, and the other sets words in small caps with a bit of extra l e t t e r s p a c i n g so the characters don’t look too crowded. If I decide that I’d prefer new terms to have this look, or that acronyms should be formatted LIKE THIS, I just change the two lines that define those commands, and every instance in this book immediately takes on the new look.
> 3. Being able to save the document as plain text has its own benefits:
> • You can edit it with any basic text editor.
> • Structure is immediately visible and simple to replicate.
> • You can automate content creation using scripts and programs.
> • You can track your changes with version control software, like Git or Mercurial.
I find the author's criticisms not convincing, particularly points 1 and 2 but some aspects of point 3 as well.
"If you changed the look of a caption, were you sure to find all the other captions and do the same?" That applies equally to LaTeX as it does to Word or Writer. In Word/Writer, you can use manual bold formatting and italics formatting for emphasis in two or so places. You can also find yourself in this situation using LaTeX by using \textbf or \textit for emphasis in different places. You can avoid this by following a convention like by defining and using something like \emphasis in LaTeX and using a character style in Word.
"If the program arranges something in a way you don’t like, is it hard to fix?" From my experience, text wrap style in Word or anchors in Writer behave roughly similar to float specifiers in LaTeX (unsure if that is the correct term).
"You can define your own commands, then tweak them to instantly adjust very place they’re used." This is the essence of using styles in Word or Writer.
"You can edit it with any basic text editor." Word can be opened/extracted like a zip, and you can access the XML if you really want to mess with the markup language under the hood, though I've never seen anybody actually do this. "You can automate content creation using scripts and programs." If you feel so motivated, I don't see how this cannot apply to Word or Writer documents alike.
"You can track your changes with version control software, like Git or Mercurial." I consider how Git or Mercurial can't handle container formats as a limitation of those software more so than a limitation of the document itself.