Earlier quoted context omitted.
Global Warming is absolutely a slow motion comet strike. We don't believe the science, because we don't WANT to believe it. Those of us that DO believe it feel like robots, speaking to the rest of mankind in ones and zeros. And it's still 10-20 years away, we all think. We will just move north (or south). We will just move inland or uphill. We can science our way out of this shit. Not true. None of that is true. When…
First time I read a comment on the Internet about so well how bad things are, how even worse they are going to be and how nothing is actually done to avoid it. Thank you. And if I may add, before COVID I was also concerned about antibiotic resistance, mainly because of how we produce a big part of our food (meat). But after two years of COVID, and given how we dealt with it so far, I think it's an even more worrying…
Oh, 2022
541–550 of 557 posts
Re: Oh, 2022
#542Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think your perception of the ease of/effort required for atmospheric carbon capture is off by a few orders of magnitude.
I don't get what you want to say. Decarbonizing is happening, at least to electricity generation and transportation. There is a group insisting on denying this, but it's just your usual form of denialism. There is reasonable freedom to debate the last 10% of emissions. Those are not being replaced right in front of our eyes. There is also room to claim that decarbonization is not enough. But then you'll have to claim…
I responded to a comment implying that if there is a philantropist like Bill Gates camping out in the desert sucking CO2 out of the air, we won’t need a massive collective effort.
Maybe this will be a somewhat effective solution one day for areas where fuel energy density is important (e.g. flight), but that’s about it. Carbon neutrality will still need a distributed effort as point source capture is massively more economical where feasible.
Re: Oh, 2022
#543Earlier quoted context omitted.
Buddy, you're missing the forest for the trees. This is not technology thoughtlessly trampling over human dignity; this is human nature expressing itself within a certain environment. This is me realizing I cannot suckle off the financial teet of my parents and the state; and I actually must go out, make money, and keep my "work life" balance in-check -- because I'm a bag of meat with a reward-behavior system that ne…
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I am a disintegrated man -- lacking any boundary or inkling of personality. I do not have any sense of ego, or self. I do not feel anything. I am an animal; a beast that cares for nothing more than primal urges.
My caricature of "the way things are" is only bleak, fatalistic, and sad if you allow it to be. I don't consider it to be any of those things. I've watched people of all sorts go about life. I've seen the decisions they make, the things they've said, and the consequences of all their actions. My base inclinations were towards optimistic naivete.
After watching humanity, I believe it's foolish to go down that line of being. People are self-interested, and their self-interests do not stray further than "feel good, don't feel bad." Any higher cause, nobility, or substance within people is a mirage: a collection of ideas that only exist in your head, and are forced into "shape" by your mind looking for patterns.
If you strip away the doe-eyed idealism, the youthful fervor that preaches life, and all the human emotion from your words: there is nothing there. You have strung along a very pleasing-to-the-eye harangue (I do like your style. I could read it for days); but it's carried only by your emotion, and not by innate observations or intuitions that stand up on their own two feet.
I do not disagree with anything you've written. I agree with all of it -- except your sense of possibility and your still clinging to emotion.
You are someone whose temperament is full of emotion. It drives you, colors your world, and dictates how you act. It also means you're more likely to gravitate towards the things and thoughts that make you feel good (humanistic, life-affirming, etc.) and away from the the things and thoughts that make you feel bad (pathetic, unimaginative, all that is shit). This gives you much greater power for feats of will and sustained stamina. But this leaves you towards and action bias, and the world becomes painted with your emotions.
My temperament is naturally cool. I'm not driven by much, but rational understanding of the things I must do to keep my homeostasis -- my health, my soundness of mind, and so on. I do not gravitate to things, nor am I repelled from things. Things don't make me feel much, and I do not color them. They appear to me as they are: without assigned incorporeal qualities, and simply as they exist.
Knowing this, I do not suffer from cognitive dissonance, emotional disturbances, or other blockages and ailments of the mind. If something is truly fait-accompli, then I tacitly accept it.
People are driven by self-interest. They are driven by their emotions, those little daemons that have them fritter about, trying to make sense of everything. Your thoughts and feelings are no different. You are a critter, chittering on and on, trying to make sense of the world, and orient yourself. Why? Because you feel like you must -- that is your temperament; you're "holding on" to your emotions, still seeing them as some source of truth -- that they must be satisfied, else (it feels) something terrible will happen.
I have experienced different. I have found a tranquility of soul and mind, by letting go. My emotions are simply biological products of my nervous system -- nothing more. If I don't humor them, they will go away. If I humor them, I most likely drift into the realm of "spiritual violence" against others, trying to influence and touch their souls (as you have here).
The way I view the world does not make me feel anything. I accept the world as it is. I also accept that any "action" I try and take will simply be for the benefit of my emotional state (and not actually result in anything but a temporary shifting of the pressure from one area of society to another -- which will inevitably rebound).
Yet, I am at peace. Can you say the same?
Re: Oh, 2022
#544So wrong. “If” sars1/2 had gone pandemic. The reason they didn’t is because they don’t make you infectious in an asymptomatic way like cov19. It wasn’t an “if.” They never will. And also, covid 19 is not 1 to 4 percent lethal. It’s more like 0.02 percent lethal. A Stanford professor said so. But he could have said we were lucky to not have gotten hit by a different virus that kills 80% and travels asymptomatically. T…
> 0.02 percent lethal. A Stanford professor said so. Sometimes you have to stop listening to what people say and get out your own tape measure/calculator. If not for yourself, so other people can take you seriously. We have .25% of Americans officially dead from COVID so far . Not of infected Americans, of the general population. If not more person dies, "A Standford Professor" is already off by a factor of 12. Offic…
Re: Oh, 2022
#545Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 0.02 percent lethal. A Stanford professor said so. Sometimes you have to stop listening to what people say and get out your own tape measure/calculator. If not for yourself, so other people can take you seriously. We have .25% of Americans officially dead from COVID so far . Not of infected Americans, of the general population. If not more person dies, "A Standford Professor" is already off by a factor of 12. Offic…
*with COVID average number of co-morbidities: 4.5 what really killed them?
Most people who die of a gun shot wound don't die instantly, they die from blood loss or organ failure. We write GSW on the certificate because the Rule of Law treats violent assault very differently from self-inflicted injuries. But if you're thinking like a longevity expert, it's bodily instability that is far more likely to kill you.
Covid has a lot of complications. But as an infectious disease, we can argue that we should treat it a bit more like an assault instead of an accident. Perhaps part of the disconnect in thinking between people is that not everyone agrees with that notion, and think of getting Covid like falling in the shower. It's my shower, and my body, if I'd rather die than install bars or get one of those stools then that's my perogative. Of course, your children probably disagree with this and tell you at least once per visit. In an overpopulated world maybe we let people go out their own way.
But you can't make someone else fall in that shower. You can make lots of other people die of Covid by being stupid.
Re: Oh, 2022
#546Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 0.02 percent lethal. A Stanford professor said so. Sometimes you have to stop listening to what people say and get out your own tape measure/calculator. If not for yourself, so other people can take you seriously. We have .25% of Americans officially dead from COVID so far . Not of infected Americans, of the general population. If not more person dies, "A Standford Professor" is already off by a factor of 12. Offic…
I went back and checked. 0.2 overall 0.05 for most people under 70 or 60. Based on pre-vaccine serology test with a follow up on death. False positive rate of 0.05% percent. So not 1% and definitely not 4%. Can you blame me for being mad when I see guys saying 4%? It’s misinformation according to science and Stanford professors of medicine.
When people don't want to agree with you, you have to be very very careful what statements and measures you use in your arguments. Because if you're off by a factor of X, then they will take what you say as hyperbole or outright lies. I'm not sure what X is, but it seems to be somewhere between 8 and 20.
If you say that I'm lying or stupid because the numbers I'm using are off by a factor of 3, then you look like a wackadoo if you substitute numbers that are off by a factor of 20 in the other direction.
Its why I keep comparing registered dead to the US population. That number is way below the actual rate, but until we learn that people are getting COVID three times and dying the second or third time, we can't have more than 331m people who have been exposed, so actual dead divided by population is a very, very pessimistic lower bar on the ratio. If my argument holds, or is even plausible, with the worst case version of my numbers, then the argument holds, even if that means I'm lowballing the priority of any actions I propose we take.
The latter can get us into plenty of trouble, and often does. But first you have to admit there's a problem before you can get any help (I solo a lot of things that I 'know' are a problem but can't sell anyone else on, and I deal with the consequences of that, but death is hardly ever on the line.)
Re: Oh, 2022
#547Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you saying that Catholics can’t be pro-life fundamentalists? That’s definitely false.
Christian fundamentalism comes from the protestant tradition. Pro-life isn't limited to christian fundemantalism.
https://religionnews.com/2019/11/19/the-rise-of-fundamentali...
Re: Oh, 2022
#548Earlier quoted context omitted.
Vaccinating everyone is a near impossible task but as with most things, you can get almost all the benefits by getting an 80-90% vaccination rate and letting herd immunity take care of the rest.
That might work if you could get all the animals vaccinated, too. But they are not being vaccinated at all, and won't be. They will continue innovating new strains on their own initiative. Herd immunity works only for microbes that have species preference. So, herd immunity turns out to be a fond delusion. We can only hope that the mice don't innovate a 40% fatal (in humans) strain as contagious as omicron. We certai…
Re: Oh, 2022
#549> (Apologies for slow load time: this blog runs on an ancient, slow Athlon box and this entry is currently being hammered by Hacker News readers.) Lol, and yet it still loads lickety split compared to something like cnn.com for instance.
Took over 30 seconds here. I wish all blog engines came with a decent caching system though…
Re: Oh, 2022
#550Earlier quoted context omitted.
> lots of people were predicting a pandemic yes — even William Gibson, in a book Stross references in this blog post by using its term “the klept.” for that matter, Obama predicted it too, setting up a pandemics office, and he did that because as (again) Stross himself says in this blog post, this pandemic came along after two prior coronavirus pandemics. (I’m a fan, but I don’t think he did a ton of proofreading on…
Would anyone have predicted that a sizeable minority of people would simply deny the existence of the pandemic and/or refuse to do the most basic precautions to protect society? Not ten years ago.