161–170 of 279 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Trillions used for the GND is debt but trillions sunk into tax cuts for the top 1% is just good economics.
Unironically, yes. Remember tax cuts isn't money just given away, the 1% didn't cause the spending part of the equation. You just think 1% should pay that tab.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Trillions used for the GND is debt but trillions sunk into tax cuts for the top 1% is just good economics.
Incurring debt != Foregoing revenue via income tax
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Trillions used for the GND is debt but trillions sunk into tax cuts for the top 1% is just good economics.
Incurring debt != Foregoing revenue via income tax
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What if we didn't crowd ourselves into cesspools of humanity ie cities? I'm being a bit facetious, but ultimately, this lack of privacy is all self-inflicted.
Then we'd probably destroy our ecosystem more quickly. People in cities much more efficiently than rural or suburban people.
Someday we'll be saying that travel is only for the rich - everyone else will be forced to use VR, and they will be brainwashed to like it. As they say, American lifestyles are only sustainable for the 1%. The rest of us should eat bugs and live in pods.
As we move into cities, production becomes cheaper - which means we produce more, which means we can support more people, which means we need to increase efficiency even more.
I'm not sure that this is preferable to life without technology. Aren't family and small moments the things that make life worth living? Squeezing out a few more years of expected lifespan hardly seems worth the tradeoff to me.
Personally, I don't think this is sustainable.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We did not simply make "behavioral choices". Whole swathes of humanity were ordered indoors! It was achieved at untold cost (actually, much greater than the trillions of dollars that have been given away already by governments) that will be paid by generations to come. Only people who were lucky to hold a job that wasn't affected made a conscious decision to cut down. I am willing to bet that come 2022 or so, emissio…
> Whole swathes of humanity were ordered indoors! It was achieved at untold cost Climate change has untold cost too, so what you’re saying doesn’t have much weight.
The foregone economic activity in just one year of lockdowns in the US is a significant fraction of cumulative worldwide damages anticipated from climate change through 2050.
Yeah but people already miss being stuck in traffic and their daily commute so it's not going to last
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unpopular prediction: we're going to solve global warming by the 22nd century, but we're going to "solve" it with nuclear winter and the destruction of 80-90% of humanity. Once we're down to a billion people or so and most of what passes for advanced civilization has been destroyed, carbon emissions and warming won't be a problem.
Do you realize how cheap sea walls are? The Dutch were building them 800 years ago with medieval technology and resources.
Changing weather and vegetation patterns is going to be a big event. We're going to see some previously fertile areas (Mesopotamia, Northern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa) suffer from decade-long droughts, while other previously uninhabitable areas (Canadian & Russian taiga and the Sahara, for example) become fertile grasslands. This will drive widespread migration, which has a tendency to destroy political stability and lead to mass wars. Nature isn't going to kill us; we're going to kill each other because some of us are going to starve and others are going to get fabulously wealthy.
Don't forget about the cows eating seaweed development, that will be huge for the climate too
Beef is only 3% of US emissions, meat has very little to do with the US's climate woes. The big problem is transportation. Ideally we'd have lots more muxed-use walkable neighborhoods than we have. Roughly 50% of people want to live in walkable neighborhoods, but centralized planning has virtually banned this type of low-carbon living over the past 75 years.
Second, beef is proportionally MUCH worse than all other foods: we can't afford to leave a full 1/25th of our emissions on the table.
Third, you're ignoring land use, land degradation, water use, and negative health effects of beef production and consumption. To look solely at "US emissions" in a narrowly defined way misses many of the harms of beef.
Fourth, cows are mammalian species who endure great suffering and misery so that your mere 3% of emissions can lead to a relatively smaller number of calories consumed. Is it worth it to cause suffering on a mass scale for the least healthy, most emitting food source?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Incurring debt != Foregoing revenue via income tax
They have the same outcome, though, relative to future debts. Isn't this a distinction without a difference?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A very large amount of cases are simply false positives. We have no idea how widespread the disease is, but it’s certainly less spread and deadly than feared. This has been talked about in non-mainstream news for a while, but is only recently recognised in the state and big media organisations around the western world. Like terrorism was in the 00’s, this is proving very useful for those who want to expand their powe…
> We have no idea how widespread the disease is, but it’s certainly less spread and deadly than feared. These 2 statements seem to contradict each other. If it's less spread than feared / reported, that would mean it's more deadly than reported.
When talking about case numbers, it’s (very) inflated by the large number of false positives in PCR tests.
When speaking of deaths, at least where I’m around (Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and Germany) the reported numbers are people dead who also tested positive for covid-19. I suppose reported deaths work similarity elsewhere.
The claim about 2020 being the best year in decades for those who want to concentrate statist power I guess we can agree to be objectively true.