"Expedient" is a common (or at least not rare) English word that means something like "practical and effective even if not directly attending to higher or deeper considerations."

For example, if two students in a class are having frequent confrontations that bring learning in the class to a halt, and attempts by teachers and counselors to address their conflict directly haven't been effective, the expedient solution might be to place them in separate classes. The "right thing" would be to address the problem on the social and emotional level, but if continued efforts to do so is likely to result in continued disruption to the students' education, it might be better to separate them. "Expedient" acknowledges the trade-off, while emphasizing the positive outcome.

Often a course of action is described as "expedient" when it seems to dodge an issue of morality or virtue. For example, if we solve climate change with geoengineering instead of by addressing thoughtless consumerism, corporate impunity, and lack of international accountability, many people would feel frustrated or let down by the solution because it would solve the problem without addressing the moral shortcomings that led to the problem. The word expedient stresses the positive side of this, the effectiveness and practicality of the solution, while acknowledging that it leaves other, perhaps deeper issues unaddressed.

> For example, if we solve climate change with geoengineering instead of by addressing thoughtless consumerism, corporate impunity, and lack of international accountability, many people would feel frustrated or let down by the solution because it would solve the problem without addressing the moral shortcomings that led to the problem.

Oof. Now I understand something I didn't before

Are you sure? No offence, but I don't think there's anything to understand here.

If we could solve climate change without "addressing thoughtless consumerism, corporate impunity, and lack of international accountability" we would all be f'ing _thrilled_.

As I type this Hurricane Helene just destroyed a good chunk of inland North Carolina (!!!) and Hurricane Wilton was just upgraded to a "category 5" storm.

If we could solve climate change the easy way we'd all be _thrilled_, because then we'd actually solve climate change.

"we would all be f'ing _thrilled_."

I think the argument is pretty much the opposite: not everyone would be thrilled. The wannabe priest class (think of Greta and her How dare you!), which is always with us, would be frustrated from the lack of something to preach about.

Of course there is always Israel vs. Palestine.

I myself am convinced that man-made global warming can't be stopped without changing the way our political economies work, and I happen to believe that Palestinians are people and therefore deserve basic human rights (which they do not currently have). I'm also a researcher.

I _would_ be thrilled if there was an expedient way to solve climate change. But the best systems models for the earth all tell us that there's one way to solve the issue: just leave the carbon in the ground. That's it. Stop extracting it. Nothing else will solve the problem, it's a really simple, really bad, feedback loop.

This characterization of environmental or Palestinian activists as wanting to have the moral high ground is, imo, a knee jerk reaction. The people on the street aren't in it for clout, they're doing it because it is the right thing and they feel compelled to act. What gets me moving is not wanting to feel morally superior (a religious aspect, more at home in right wing politics), but an anxiety for the future, which is projected to include horrible death and suffering due to obvious problems that we could all fix if we just decided to recognize them.

The motivations of regular participants vs. leaders may be rather different. Only a specific type of person is attracted to leading crowds.

You can apply the same cynicism to any political or protest movement. Not sure that it tells us very much.

I agree with your first sentence, only I would replace the word "cynicism" with "skepticism".

And I think it is actually useful. People will try to manipulate other people through emotions, and mobs are easy to manipulate. One should have fairly high barriers before joining a street mob, because its potential destructive power is enormous, and it also tends to elevate unsavory characters to positions of power.

I am not saying that those barriers should be infinitely high, but fairly high.

For us humans, it is easy to succumb to "righteousness in numbers".

If innocent people being murdered or the threat of an imminent environmental catastrophe don't meet your 'high barriers', then nothing will. So though you claim in principle to approve of some protests, what you're saying in practice is that no-one should protest against anything because they'll probably just make things worse – because people in general are fairly awful and people who take charge of things are even worse. It's impossible to argue against this kind of cynicism as it's self-reinforcing, but it doesn't strike me as an interesting or insightful position to take. Especially when painting in broad brushstrokes rather than addressing issues with particular political or protest movements (which no doubt are not beyond criticism).

It's also important to weigh the harmful effects of apathy in the balance. These are easily forgotten but almost inestimably enormous. Just think of all the damage done in the decades (centuries) where hardly anyone could be bothered to protest against slavery, women's oppression, racial segregation, pollution, etc. etc.

War is often more complicated than "innocent people being murdered" and we both know it. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict isn't morally black and white, and the current Israeli-Hezbollah conflict is something else entirely.

I think you may be proving my point. Taking one side of a complicated situation because of a black-and-white moralistic thinking is potentially destructive, and organizations like Hamas benefit from that.

As for your slavery example, did slavery disappear because humanity awakened morally and started demonstrating in the streets, or because we gained a new non-human resource of raw power? Previous civilizations didn't engage in slavery because they were profoundly immoral, but because human and animal muscle was the only practical source of power. The specifics varied across the globe, but unfree labor was ubiquitous in pre-modern societies.

For a contemporary situation, imagine a 22nd century activist judging people of 2024 for eating meat from dead animals, when he can get a good steak by pressing a button on a steak-making machine. It wouldn't be demonstrations which made the difference between 2024 and 2124.

Protestors are protesting against things that they think are seriously wrong. What you think about the Israel-Palestine conflict or the history of the abolition of slavery is completely irrelevant to their decision whether or not to protest about something. (But err, yes, popular anti-slavery movements played an important role in the abolition of slavery. The Haitian revolution didn't happen because we 'gained a new non-human resource of raw power'.)

"Protestors are protesting against things that they think are seriously wrong."

OK, but that was sort-of my point. The more outrage, the less you need to really think about things.

"err, yes, popular anti-slavery movements played an important role in the abolition of slavery"

That is a chicken-and-egg question. Why did those mass movements only emerge at the time of the Industrial Revolution, and why did they emerge first in places that were influenced by the Industrial Revolution the earliest, while other places (Russia, the Ottoman Empire, the Qing Empire) only followed suit after their own industrialization began?

I don't think the arrow of causality is so simple here. A hypothetical society that abolished slavery, serfdom etc. in the 15th century could easily prove non-viable against its slavery-powered foes, which had more brute force at their disposal. By 1820, the situation was very much turning around and it was the modern, personally freer societies that were more effective in commerce and at war.

Notably, even though Victorian Britain was very anti-slavery, starting with the monarch herself, it had no moral qualms against subjugating a quarter of humanity in another form of submission. Which tells me that it was less about morality (equality) and more about practicality of the situation.

Everyone agrees that innocent people are being killed in the Israel-Palestine conflict and that this is an outrage. The disagreement is over exactly which people fall into this category and who is to blame. Acknowledging the horror and being outraged by it does not preclude thought, and it is ungenerous and inaccurate (and, indeed, cynical!) to characterize all protests about the conflict as thoughtless.

Your take on slavery is pretty wild. The Industrial Revolution did not replace Haitian slaves with machines for harvesting sugar cane. Nor did Spartacus invent the steam engine.

Wars are brutal. No doubt about that. Nevertheless the disagreement that you mention ("which people fall into this category and who is to blame") seems to run so deep even here in the West, that I wonder if some of those protests wouldn't end up in an old-fashioned pogrom, if they weren't thoroughly policed from the outside.

Existence of more-or-less successful slave revolts across history doesn't really say much about viability of slavery as an economic institution. I don't think my take is pretty wild. The historic correlation between industrialization and abolition of slavery is rather strong, and while we can argue about whether it was causative, the hypothesis is at least plausible.

"Wild" would be if I attributed abolition of slavery to something that is clearly uncorrelated with it, so, say, the Milankovic cycle.

>Existence of more-or-less successful slave revolts across history doesn't really say much about viability of slavery as an economic institution

That's the point. The Haitian revolution didn't have anything much to do with the economic viability of slavery, but it still happened, and was a major and very definitely causative event in the broader history of the abolition of slavery.

If you think that slavery ended for purely economic reasons, then perhaps you can point to a mainstream historian who advocates this theory. I don't think you are doing your overall argument any favors by tying it to wild revisionist lost causes.

So free association is less than ideal is what you're getting at?

If you abstract away enough, you will always get to "X is less than ideal".

Food is less than ideal, war is less than ideal, death is less than ideal, HN is less than ideal.

Are you satisfied with this sort of Twitter-like posting and thinking? I am not.

Pixels are basically free and we should strive to post more than one-sentence snarks. For one-sentence snarks and drive-by dismissals, Reddit is the ideal territory.

And I'm of the opinion that we'll not change our political economies without a material society adjustment, a threshold recognition between an emotional reasoning and a more controlled rational level of reasoning. Basically maturity; we've got a material volume of immature adults that derail any and all public and many private conversations with immature observations, short sighted reasoning, and the belief that their unprofessional opinion carries weight with those whose careers are the issue at hand. Until we do something about these, frankly, idiots, we're left adrift in a culture of unintended chaos.

I highly recommend the feeling of living grass on the palm of your hand my friend. Or the kiss of the suns rays.

I don't see why climate change needs "solving" per se, or how it can be "solved." To take your example, there have always been hurricanes. It's not correct to infer there's a human-induced tendency toward destruction that can be reversed by humans, or that yet another hurricane is actually a change to the climate in the first place.

It isn’t correct to infer that from the fact that hurricanes exist, no.

Nor is it correct to ignore the decades of peer-reviewed research that concludes that we really are causing more hurricanes on the basis that hurricanes have always existed.

It's the meme:

A:"Only Global Communism can solve Climate Change."

B:"Nuclear power also solves climate change."

A:"I don't want to solve Climate Change, I want Global Communism."

No you don't because there is no expedient solution.

> if we solve climate change with geoengineering instead of by addressing thoughtless consumerism, corporate impunity, and lack of international accountability, many people would feel frustrated or let down

If some people feel frustrated or let down because we achieve a literal miracle (by today's technology standards) that saves millions of lives I'm willing to call them mentally unhinged.

Presuming said miracle is possible, geoengineering at a scale capable of "solving" climate change would be a massive gamble. Humanity's ability to model the climate simply isn't at a point where we could say with any confidence what the long-term effects of any particular geoengineering "solution" would be, and short of an abrupt technological singularity, won't be for centuries. Without any appeal to moral judgments whatsoever, it's safe to say geoengineering would only be seriously attempted out of total desperation and signal persistent unresolved issues.

If we could solve climate change purely technologically, I wouldn’t feel let down by the fact that we solved climate change. I would absolutely support solving it in that way.

I would also feel frustrated by the knowledge that there were many people who were willing to sacrifice unimaginable numbers of humans and animals for the sake of making more profit for themselves, who were not held to account for their actions. If a person acts in a way that they should know will lead to future suffering, the development of an unforeseen technological solution to that suffering should not wipe their moral slate clean.

Trying to kill someone using a non-functional weapon, that you believe is functional, is not morally equivalent to taking no action just because it didn’t have an effect.

Not unhinged, just human. There's even a logic to their views: when different approaches to a problem are on different sides of a line of political polarization, people see them as competing, and see the success of one as tending to invalidate the other. I've heard/read politically minded people on either end of the spectrum talk about global warming as a challenge that is going to discredit the other side, by which they mean that the success of their preferred approach will discredit other approaches. And I think there's a lot of truth to that, because of how most human beings see things. Thinking from an engineering mindset, we see different ways of solving a problem as complementary rather than mutually exclusive, and to us it's common sense to 1) pursue both of them simultaneously given the high stakes and uncertainty of success, and 2) continue to improve our understanding of different approaches so we can apply them all effectively in the future in situations that call for them. But thinking from an engineering mindset is not normal. That's not how most people see things. I think the way most people see things could be described as a zero-sum competition for mindshare.

You can even see the tendency to see complementary approaches as competing at work in smaller divisions between people who are mostly politically aligned. For example, when one group wants to take immediate direct action to ameliorate a problem and another group wants to focus on longer-term fundamental solutions, they might fight bitterly and badmouth each other's approaches if they feel they are competing for a finite pool of resources such as funding, political backing, or public attention.

For a more concrete example, think of how the issues facing Black Americans recently came to the forefront of public consciousness, books like Between the World and Me and Stamped from the Beginning were shaping the public conversation, and in this context, some people tried to harness that energy to get the public interested in social class as well. When they tried to inject class into the conversation, they often encountered pushback from people who were like, "Hey, the way the public is paying attention to the Black American experience is really special and amazing right now. Let's focus on maintaining this momentum. Save class consciousness for another day." It's not that the majority of people on the left disagreed about class being an important perspective for gaining insight. They simply believed that the public's appetite to learn about a topic like racism was limited and fragile, and it would collapse faster if they tried to add another topic on top.

For a small minority of deeply ideological people, the feeling of competition was stark and intense. Some claimed that talk about class was an attempt to change the topic away from racism and put white people back in charge, and others claimed that identity politics was a class warfare weapon of distraction. But even people who valued both race and class as ways of understanding society perceived a competition for public attention.

non-native speaker here

> "Expedient" is a common (or at least not rare) English word that means something like "practical and effective even if not directly attending to higher or deeper considerations."

I was not aware of the word "Expedient" before. From your example I conclude, that it has the same meaning as "pragmatic", i.e. if I sed i/expedient/pragmatic/g then your comment still makes perfect sense to me. A quick google search also seems to support this conclusion.

--> is there a nuance of the word "expedient", that I am missing here?

There's a lot of overlap, and you could certainly use "pragmatic" in the two example contexts I gave. The differences as best as I can sum them up are:

- "Pragmatic" can also be used to describe a person (a pragmatic person) or a mindset (a pragmatic approach to a problem.) "Expedient" isn't used to describe people.

- "Expedient" usually acknowledges the existence of a higher or more demanding standard that the solution does not meet, admitting that the solution is not perfect. You might choose a word like "pragmatic" to praise a solution with known shortcomings, but it doesn't imply known shortcomings as strongly as "expedient" does.

- "Expedient" can be used euphemistically. ("Pragmatic" can, too, but not nearly as often, and not as harshly.) "They took the expedient route" might, depending on the context, mean that they did something lazy or unethical because it was easier. The euphemistic usage is common enough that for some people it has an overall unsavory flavor, but I don't think it's tipped over into the euphemistic usage being the assumed one.

"Pragmatic" connotes a choice that achieves a goal by practical means, possibly sacrificing some desirable features that are challenging to achieve.

"Expedient" connotes a choice that achieves a goal quickly and conveniently, possibly by sacrificing some important but difficult features, and incurring some undesirable costs or consequences.

So they're similar, but not identical. A pragmatic choice might be improved when you can afford it. An expedient choice will probably require some cleanup afterward.

What's misleading here? He was using that as an example of usage of the word 'expedient', not actually suggesting climate change solutions.

A lot of people in this thread seem to think OP was suggesting that geoengineering is a possible way forward right now, when they were just positing it as an example.

Since OP provided a different example, an expedient solution would be to edit OPs post and remove that paragraph about geoengineering, and delete all comments referring to it.

The technical solution is the only practical solution. People aren't gonna give up a large percentage of their lifestyle for the sake of some greater 'good', especially not if their leaders and influencers seem to have zero interest in doing the same.

And anyone trying otherwise will struggle significantly at the polls. Mass carbon removal, renewable energy, recycling and maybe some technological solutions to limit the effects of atmospheric carbon seem like the more practical way to go.

Why not? Really, why not? If we had a profitable way to extract CO2 from the atmosphere at scale, to deacidify the oceans, clean up toxic waste, etc., what would be left? How would that not solve the problem?

No technology has been invented that doesn't have costs and tradeoffs. Technology that deacidifies the oceans will have other costs, other externalities that we cannot predict now. Determining how we want to deal with those costs/tradeoffs is a social problem, not a technical problem. Technical know-how can only inform us about the what tradeoffs are available, it can't tell us what we prefer.

The ion pumps enabled by the technology we are working on won’t have external effects. They basically just filter out certain small molecules from the ocean into crystal storage.

What kind of flow rate would be necessary to pull CO2 out of the ocean faster than it dissolves from the air, and is that achievable without affecting the surroundings?

CO2 wouldn’t be pulled out of the ocean. You’d have to liquify it from air in a different process. The molecular pumps are used to extract dissolved ions or solutes from sea water and only act as fast as diffusion.

So this is desalination? That seems unrelated.

I listed cleaning up toxic waste and co2 sequestration as separate things, yes.

Because it's a distraction.

Global warming and other environmental crises are unfolding right now. While exploring possible future technological advances which would make coping with it easier is certainly a positive and useful pursuit - it cannot be the _main_ pursuit when facing those crises and challenges. That is:

1. We should not divert the discussion from present to possible fortuitous futures.

2. We must not confuse action with prospects.

3. We must not think of the two as "either-or". We can reduce emissions _and_ do R&D for new tech possibilities.

There are plenty of examples of technological advances that in one fell swoop entirely eliminate a class of societal problems. Haber-Bosch, for example, completely eliminated famine as a barrier to world populations growth. Penicillin and vaccines eliminated entire categories of terminal disease.

We don’t NEED to reduce emissions. So long as we clean up as much or more than we pollute, what’s the problem?

Those are poor, poor examples; but before examining them - I can simply refer you to my previous comment. You are doing exactly the three things I caution against: Attempting to divert the discussion, confusing prospective futures with reality, and reinforcing a supposed dichotomy.

As for the examples:

* For every example of a technological advance that eliminated a class of societal problems, there are five examples of advances which didn't, and untold examples of advances which just never happened (or never happened the way they were expected to). Where is our transmutation of led to gold? Airships? Or Dennard scaling for that matter? No use writing efficient software, our computers will just get faster and it'll be fine.

> Haber-Bosch, for example, completely eliminated famine as a barrier to world populations growth.

And we (= humans) now have to work hard, and suffer through all sorts of problems, to establish barriers to population growth, and to cope with the resource use pressure of the huge population on the Earth.

Not to mention -

* Famines are alive as well.

* Massive energy requirement; and once the population is up - you can't just give this agriculture-industrial choice and let people starve.

* More industrialized economies able to produce a lot more than less-industrialized/poorer economies and areas, exacerbating all sorts of power dynamics, e.g. agricultural "dumping" and mass destitution of peasants who become unable to compete, without a transition having been planned.

* Some detrimental environmental effects.

That's not to say this process shouldn't be used - it's just that it's not a panacea.

> Penicillin and vaccines eliminated entire categories of terminal disease.

They did not. They reduced the fatality rates significantly, for a long period of time - which, apparently, may be drawing to an end over the next few decades:

https://www.wired.com/story/antibiotics-resistance-useless-p...

but even if that doesn't quite happen - antibiotics have absolutely _not_ :

* Reduced the need to Keep medical environments clean, carefully sterilize tools, wear gloves and "scrubs" etc. when treating patients.

* Made it uninteresting or unimportant to avoid mass infections - even those amenable to treatment with Penicillin or vaccines

* Reduce interest or prevalence of other forms of treatment of germs and viruses which are amenable to Penicillin or vaccines.

You want there to be fewer people? Why?

I don’t think I can continue this conversation in good faith. I hope someday you can see the intrinsic evil of the world view in which more people = bad.

why are you fantasizing? none of that is going exist (caveat: unless we figure out infinite clean energy).

It’s not fantasy. I’m working on a startup to enable this technology. It’s a hard problem, but not impossible. And the energy needs are not as great as you think. A relatively small patch of the Sahara or Gobi desert or open ocean would be sufficient.

its indistinguishable from fantasy extrapolating from the given track record . Previous fantasy technology break through like harbor bosch were viable only "after" major diaasters and worldwars and brought with them ever more destructive hidden costs.

Haber-Bosch predates the world wars.

But was only usefull with free trade guarantees by a sea empire. In colonial empire times it might aswell have been alchemy to make free cheese on the moon.

I am confused. Haber-Bosch was developed to work around the need for free trade guarantees. There was enough nitrates in Chile for the foreseeable future in 1911, but Germany wanted a local source of fertilizer to remove their foreign dependency.

You might need to panel over the whole Sahara: https://www.wired.com/story/the-stupendous-energy-cost-of-di...

Much less than the whole Sahara.

I see this got downvoted. Maybe a citation would have helped. https://www.space.com/sunshade-earth-orbit-climate-change

See also: war crimes

> Is Amazon "the best" place to go shopping? No, you might find better prices on individual items if you put a little more work into it, but it's the most expedient.

It's not just that. Every time you do business with a new web site you assume additional risk. Amazon is a known quantity. You can be pretty sure that they are not going to outright scam you, and they aren't going to be hacked by script kiddies. There is a significant risk of getting a counterfeit item, but they have a very liberal return policy, so the real cost to you in this case is a minute or two to get a return code and possibly a trip to the nearest Whole Foods to drop it off.

Amazon sucks in many ways, but at least their suckage is a known quantity. Predictability has significant value.

Yep it’s the return policy that allowed me to gamble on items that may or may not be real/functional vs spending a ton of time to find one elsewhere that maybe is, but if it’s not it’ll be hard to return

There is also "satisficing" (vs. maximizing).

Your model of the world is not perfect so instead of trying to find a globally optimal solution, you are satisfied with a local optimum that exceeds some threshold that has to suffices. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satisficing

Love that. Well-done marketing* can orient a consumer into a preferred "local optimum territory" , leading to satisfiction(?) and sales

* For example, the limited selection of candy at the checkout aisle. All you have to do is get your brand in there. (Placement on the 4P's)

* Or, "best credit card for travelers." By offering travel rewards, you can acquire a group of cardmembers even if, e.g. a more valuable cashback card could have gotten them even greater benefits (Promotion on the 4P's)

>Is Amazon "the best" place to go shopping?

The number one reason I use Amazon, is not for the best prices, but because of their return policy. Amazon returns are actually often more painless than physical store returns.

Being able to return something predictably and easily outweighs a small difference in price.

> you might find better prices on individual items if you put a little more work into it

That extra work costs you money, too. Calculate how much your job pays you per hour, then you can deduce the $cost of spending more time to get a better deal.

This is a fairly crappy methodology though because the vast majority of people are not substituting paid working time with researching buying things online. So it hasn't "cost" them anything other than their free time which is far more complex than an hourly rate. Maybe they enjoy researching products and in that situation, it wasn't a waste of time at all.

Exactly. I always hate these "your time is worth your hourly wage" arguments. They're often used to argue against things like changing the oil in your car, fixing a clogged drain, or DIYing anything.

Your time is only worth money if you'd otherwise be working at that rate, which is not the case for the vast majority of humans.

Are you removing paid working time in doing the extra work? If not it is just an opportunity cost

In my line of work, yes.

If you include the cost of gathering information, the expedient solution may in fact be the best.

> Is a Tesla (perhaps outdated example since X) "the best" car - no, but it is the most expedient.

The most expedient car? Or BEV in the US?

Fair point... it was a coastal California-centric point but there is plenty of nuance or adjustment to be made. At some point in the 90's we'd probably have said "Silver E class Mercedes" is the most expedient luxury sedan, if you wanted a different example.

The early to mid 90s E class aka W124 definitely went down in history as one of the best quality and best designed cars ever made. Other luxury cars may be faster, more fun, or have more features… but the W124 probably is “the best” if you’re looking just at build quality and well thought out design details.

As a car nerd though, I never felt the need to buy one because they just seem fairly boring- other than a few rare models most were 4 door sedans with automatics, fairly small engines, and soft non sporty suspension.

I think Toyota would have gotten your point across better. Tesla is most certainly not expedient. It is a luxury purchase.

It's definitely in a class above Toyota, but once you account for gas savings, the LR RWD costs about as much as the cheapest Corolla you can buy. People bagged on Tesla being too expensive when their $35K car was only available over the phone. Now, adjusted for inflation, the LR RWD is $28K and comes with 100mi additional range to boot. On top of that, it's $13K below the average car purchase price.

IMO, it destroys its competitors in the value market, and the media is being awfully silent about it. I guess it's far too easy to focus on Elon instead.

Really depends on where you live and what your electric rates are. These is my breakdown (Corolla comes out ahead as cheaper to operate): https://www.reddit.com/r/TeslaModel3/comments/14rj3fp/tesla_...

“In a class above Toyota” in what sense? Certainly not in reliability or interior quality or CarPlay compatibility…

Neither. Going by the parent poster's gauge, the most "expedient" is probably Lucid; better engineering, better range, and better service.

but it's really not what "expedient" means

I might argue it’s the one most known by the most people, the “best” takes time to get there, Google was better than yahoo but it took years to become #1 in terms of hits

Related - thinking takes a lot of energy, so people prefer options that are cheap to evaluate. This definitely contributes to the preference for expedient options.

Reminds me of this quote by Bauman: https://untested.sonnet.io/notes/proteus-uncertainty-is-the-...

> inoculated of buyer's remorse

Non native here. What's the meaning of inoculated here?

It's not the first time that I struggle to parse this word. In italian it keeps the original latin meaning and can be translated with "injected with". You could inoculate a vaccine but you could also inoculate a poison, so it does not carry the immunity meaning by default. English (US?) as far as I can tell use it as a synonym of "immune", is that so?

It should be "inoculated against" but the meaning is clear.

A vaccine inoculates you against a disease by a physical mechanism: that is, it prevents you from getting that disease (to a greater or lesser degree).

Metaphorically being inoculated against something means it can no longer hurt you. For instance, maybe by not owning a car you're inoculated against vehicle depreciation. Or by wearing the same simple but quality outfit every day you're inoculated against the vagaries of fashion.

I think the author means "vaccinated". They mean that they've been made resistant to buyer's remorse.