81–90 of 159 posts
And now after the Covid clickbait non-sense people are actually discussing it.
Meta-discussion, but I think "statistical deaths" - deaths where the causation has to be inferred, rather than being completely obviously monocausal - have been a big feature of quality of life improvement in the 19th and 20th century, but are now running into an informational problem. Namely that you have to believe the statistics in order for the process to work, but it's increasingly common to lie with statistics.…
Wow 9 million a year die prematurely. The environmental crisis is manifold: we have the destruction of species and habitats, the global warming problem, and now also just trash - overuse of plastics is a huge problem, air pollution is pretty terrible.
I really don't think we should call the "environmental crisis" a "crisis". For example, smoking probably causes more deaths than Covid. So, while it may be perfectly true that things like smoking and pollution are bigger public health issues than Covid, we never spoke of a "smoking crisis", and justifiably so. The thing that makes a crisis into a crisis is that it's highly discrete in time and there is a temporally v…
That is your definition, but not necessarily the one meant by others. From Merriam-Webster (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/crisis):
"Essential Meaning of crisis : a difficult or dangerous situation that needs serious attention"
[...] Definition 3b: "a situation that has reached a critical phase // the environmental crisis"
Wow 9 million a year die prematurely. The environmental crisis is manifold: we have the destruction of species and habitats, the global warming problem, and now also just trash - overuse of plastics is a huge problem, air pollution is pretty terrible.
I really don't think we should call the "environmental crisis" a "crisis". For example, smoking probably causes more deaths than Covid. So, while it may be perfectly true that things like smoking and pollution are bigger public health issues than Covid, we never spoke of a "smoking crisis", and justifiably so. The thing that makes a crisis into a crisis is that it's highly discrete in time and there is a temporally v…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If we know that a candle factory is causing 1/36 deaths to lung cancer, we don't need such a mechanism (or the involvement of an arbitrary family) to take the operator to court. At least not in the UK.
My backyard bonfire in the UK produces so much smoke I'm sure someone somewhere will be given lung cancer from it. Yet, it's perfectly legal and there is no carrot or stick to encourage me to buy an incinerator or start composting. Having a small chance of a knock on my door and someone saying "Excuse me, but you killed grandpa, plz pay for his funeral" probably would make me change.
https://www.thedrive.com/news/42218/if-leaded-fuel-is-so-bad...
Then move onto Texas. Where there are knowingly, purposely, toxic pollution zones right in the population because "reasons".
Maybe we can keep using masks? Now that we already got used to them, we may reduce the effects of pollution with good filtering masks. Of course this doesn't mean we shouldn't address what's causing the pollution in the first place.
our brains are wired to read faces because weve been doing that since we were apes, theres no way masks dont have a negative psychological and social impact on our lives when used longterm
Given the virality and case fatality rate we knew at the time, we were on track to lose hundreds of millions of lives from covid back then (assuming no vaccines and hospital infrastructure collapse). Even with those worst case scenarios, there was still significant pushback to taking immediate global actions. And this is no where near the same scale of a threat.
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Then, the candle production was moved to China. The end.
Not quite the end... since a lot of shareholder value was created due to the move, others followed their lead (even without the threat of lawsuits). Now we argue about capitalism, globalization, human rights, etc. but can't seem to reconcile the fact that our world simply _cannot_ be perfect and we should focus on compromises and balances instead; this is exceptionally difficult in such a polarized environment. It wi…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
'Climate lockdowns' are already an established conspiracy theory among the nuttier end of society, I really think the news industry has a moral responsibility to avoid alarmism because of its inherently destabilising effect on society. Of course, alarmism is excellent at driving engagement and ad revenue so I might as well have asked for someone to write a program that solves the halting problem. I don't know how inv…
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remember that people called the great reset a conspiracy theory, this is literally stated on WEF page, on Klaus books, and on his talks. And this is a key factor for a cleaner economy, since economical control at the individual level is required to create a more strict compliance mechanism.