141–150 of 214 posts
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Actually.. Original money was just a highly marketable commodity. Salt, spices, gold, cigarettes in prison. I highly suggest a better biography of currency. Maybe something authored by one of those pesky Austrians.
The author addresses this. I suggest you read the book before making assumptions.
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Actually.. Original money was just a highly marketable commodity. Salt, spices, gold, cigarettes in prison. I highly suggest a better biography of currency. Maybe something authored by one of those pesky Austrians.
The book you want is David Graeber's, but it will not confirm austrian leanings, nor the history of money you present above.
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correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you've been misunderstood. Are you saying: 1. Most CO2 release is natural 2. We increased CO2 through our own efforts as well 3. [implied statement you may agree with: this led to a feedback loop] 4. We now may be too late to stop it merely by reducing emissions, if planetary emissions of stored carbon take over and become the main source of CO2 emissions I think's actually fairly…
Most CO2 is indeed natural. We did increase the circulating amount by a very small margin. Large enough so that it accumulated over the years. This of course led to a feedback loop. Arctic ice has 1400Gt of carbon locked up as methane. [1] This is equivalent to 1400/10 = 140 years of human 2016 activity. [2] If ice starts to melt, we are doomed. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_methane_emissions [2]: https:/…
But since we pushed the system to a new state, its net emissions may dwarf our own emissions. Then things get even harder.
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Couldn't agree more. Here in the UK we have a lower percentage of forested land than many other European countries and I much prefer forest to the barren green fields which we have in many places. Sadly I think lots of my countrymen think of green fields being the default state of rural UK and don't realise it's the legacy of deforestation by stone age man.. I can only imagine what the UK must have been like prior to…
> Sadly I think lots of my countrymen think of green fields being the default state of rural UK and don't realise it's the legacy of deforestation by stone age man.. Much if not most of the deforestation in the United Kingdom took place in the Middle Ages and later, to extract resources during the Industrial Revolution. For example the Caledonian Forest in Scotland experienced massive destruction following the Highla…
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One of the major flaws of this species is that we don't do anything inconvenient, that requires global agreement, until it becomes literally an existential threat. And even then we may dither, and there will be special interests that will keep spreading out misinformation about it, etc. Seriously, the "sapiens" part in the name of our species is a bit of an exaggeration.
It's a prisoner's dilemma type problem. Unless you can get everybody to agree then the rational thing to do is to use as much carbon as you can to stay ahead of the other guys.
Perhaps that indicates that reason itself has some hardcoded fundamental limits.
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This isn't a flaw in the species. It's a consequence of game theory and evolution and would likely be found in any species that was a product of evolution.
Yes, this is one of the explanations of the Fermi paradox.
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Nobody believes that global warming will cause the literal extinction of the human race. The scientific consensus is that sea levels will rise by a couple feet over the next 2 hundred years. That's the science. Doesn't sound like doomsday to me.
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-...
> It is, I promise, worse than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible, even within the lifetime of a teenager today. And yet the swelling seas — and the cities they will drown — have so dominated the picture of global warming, and so overwhelmed our capacity for climate panic, that they have occluded our perception of other threats, many much closer at hand. Rising oceans are bad, in fact very bad; but fleeing the coastline will not be enough.
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One of the major flaws of this species is that we don't do anything inconvenient, that requires global agreement, until it becomes literally an existential threat. And even then we may dither, and there will be special interests that will keep spreading out misinformation about it, etc. Seriously, the "sapiens" part in the name of our species is a bit of an exaggeration.
To be fair to us we are only just barely sentient. In evolutionary terms we have literally only just managed to build a technological society. Therefore it stands to reason we only recently evolved sufficient intelligence to do so. Otherwise we'd have done it sooner. In the grand scheme of things we're on the very lowest bottom level of the sentience hierarchy.
I don't have proof of this, but I think most creatures have some amount of awareness, progressively decreasing as you descend the great chain of central nervous system complexity. Probably decreasing quickly at first, from humans to primates to regular mammals, and more slowly afterwards, until asymptotically vanishing into virtual nothingness as there's no complex nervous system to speak of anymore.
Perhaps we're at the bottom of the interval of what could be called truly self-aware consciousness, as opposed to, I don't know, maybe somnolent or lethargic or dimly awake consciousness. With that I would agree.
Which of course automatically raises the question: why should the ascending arc stop here? And what do the next levels look like? Probably impossible for us to imagine even in principle, but still.
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I would have never imagined that a book about the utter obliteration of the world could be so hopeful .
Indeed. I'd say more, but spoilers.
I mean, you never know when you might need it, right? :)
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Then trillions of dollars were extremely inefficiently allocated to the task of creating better worlds and a much better world could have been created with that money instead, costing lives in the process. Having noble goals doesn't immunize you from accounting.
And none of it means anything if we all die because the planet cant sustain us any longer.