Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Swerve

locusmag.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 207 posts

Re: The Swerve

#41

Post by jacquesm »

majormajor wrote: post #34
danhak wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't seem to be engaging with the main point here: there were places that DID take COVID seriously--that shut down overnight, paid the price of mass unemployment, homelessness and growing tent cities, increasing substance abuse / overdose, loss of education that will never be recovered and countless other second-order effects. And those places did not emerge with a significantly better COVID outcome. Without an…

This is massively revisionist. "Shutting down overnight" was pretty much the response across the nation in March 2020. This was based on the information available at the time, and as things evolved, things changed. Everything after was basically differences in how quickly things opened back up (and what things, in what order, with what restrictions). And mass support for reopening rapidly with no restrictions wasn't…

There are only a few countries that really shut down (some only regional): New Zealand, Japan, Australia and China (others?). This one graph shows how effective it was and if we'd all done that the difference would be enormous, even for the countries that did shut down.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_by_country_a...

Re: The Swerve

#42

Post by odessacubbage »

voakbasda wrote: post #4

It is just me, or is this an open call for a proletariat revolution against the bourgeois? Any successful "plunge past the first-class passengers" will not be a peaceful event.

in essence, any proposed swerve will do far less to hurt the first class passengers than it will to hurt those in coach and it will outright kill those who are hanging onto the bumper. whether those harms are moral, unavoidable or 'necessary' is largely open to interpretation.

Re: The Swerve

#43

Post by prometheus76 »

knodi123 wrote: post #10
voakbasda wrote: post #4

It is just me, or is this an open call for a proletariat revolution against the bourgeois? Any successful "plunge past the first-class passengers" will not be a peaceful event.

damn, if we only had a functional democracy.

I'm sure that tyranny of the majority will lead us to enlightened places...

Re: The Swerve

#44

Post by troupe »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #25
karaterobot wrote: post #20

I guess I'm in the camp that says that unless there are a bunch of people in the back row trying to sew a bus-sized parachute together out of old clothes, we're screwed. In other words, the only hope I have left is that somebody invents a climate-fixing machine. Or a bunch of different climate-fixing machines, I don't care. But, I don't see a lot of other appropriately-scaled options at this point.

Agreed. We're past the point where culture can shift in time to turn the wheel. Only technology shifts quickly enough to do so. EVs and wind/solar energies are examples of technologies which are so much better than the alternatives that they're succeeding at reducing emissions faster than consumption can grow to catch up. We don't have the time to get enough people together to mandate that the front row drives a Tesl…

Unfortunately some of those technologies haven't been around long enough to fully understand the full lifecycle cost. We are burying wind turbine blades in some places and the total emissions of an EV are sometimes more than a small efficient gas automobile when total lifetime emissions are considered.

Still these technologies are succeeding in the marketplace and if they can continue to improve we may solve many of those problems as we go.

Re: The Swerve

#45

Post by jacquesm »

GolfPopper wrote: post #37
jacquesm wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those places would have come out better if we all did this. And that's the whole problem: if you don't tackle problems of this magnitude globally then you might as well not bother because a couple of dissidents on a large enough scale will ruin it for everybody else. In this case the dissidents even use this argument to show that the better choices didn't work... which when you think about it is really despicable.

Not to mention, the US by and large collectively avoided worst case outcomes (hospital system too overloaded to provide treatment to majority of cases) because enough people did take COVID seriously. And that's before getting into how hindsight is 20/20 (in addition to being rosy). the neo-Black Death will be really happy, if, a month into the next pandemic the going line is, "well, the last one probably wasn't as ba…

Yes, that is a risk. In a way we already had that because of how SARS-1 ended up being not nearly as bad as was predicted initially thanks to some absolutely amazing international coordination. Unfortunately COVID was a lot nastier.

Re: The Swerve

#46

Post by colechristensen »

thanatos519 wrote: post #2

It's like a cross between 'The Big Bus'(1976) and 'Snowpiercer'(2013). Grab your pitchforks and torches and let's get to the front of the bus! Seriously, I agree that this is the only choice, but what is the actual plan?

The actual plan is “nothing”.

There’s going to be an S curve where a large portion of fossil fuel energy is replaced with solar and a large portion of internal combustion motors are going electric. Both of those because they are cheaper more than any other reason.

The climate is going to warm, the habitable zones of earth are going to move north, some equatorial regions are going to be uninhabitable, lots of people are going to have to move, lots of agriculture is going to have to move.

How bad it is just depends on how well we prepare for and adapt to change.

The people who just predict doom over and over and try to use that to promote some impossible change to “stop” climate change aren’t helpful.

Re: The Swerve

#47

Post by jacquesm »

prometheus76 wrote: post #38
jacquesm wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those places would have come out better if we all did this. And that's the whole problem: if you don't tackle problems of this magnitude globally then you might as well not bother because a couple of dissidents on a large enough scale will ruin it for everybody else. In this case the dissidents even use this argument to show that the better choices didn't work... which when you think about it is really despicable.

What is the evidence for the claim in your first sentence? And what does "come out better" mean? Less covid, but more unemployment, more drug addiction, more suicides than the ones that happened? With climate change, what exactly are we optimizing for? That's never been clear to me. We want to destroy the world's economy to keep the climate from changing? How long will the climate "not change"? In other words, the go…

See map linked in other comment.

With climate change we are optimizing for survival of the species and some form of civilization as we know it. If that's all we manage to do then I would consider that a huge win.

Re: The Swerve

#49

Post by jacquesm »

aidenn0 wrote: post #32
danhak wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here in the U.S., at least, what has widely been maligned as "COVID denialism" was actually a deeper and more nuanced conversation about whether sudden, sweeping changes to society would prevent more harm than they cause. And now looking at outcomes across different states (e.g. Florida vs. California)--and considering ALL outcomes (public health, homelessness, unemployment, substance abuse, mental health, truancy, g…

Two examples of what I (in the US) decry as "COVID denialism" both are people known personally to me (extended family actually). These are from mid 2020. Both people eventually pivoted to "being opposed to draconian policies" 1: The numbers coming out of NYC are grossly exaggerated; probably only about 1/10th of those reported as "dying of COVID" actually died of COVID. Other people died from different causes but jus…

The mistake in your reasoning is to believe that the fatality rate is the only thing that matters.

But fortunately with climate change it is that easy: you or your descendants will either die or you won't, and hopefully there will be a recognizable society left for the survivors. Enjoy the ride and make sure to snap pictures.

Re: The Swerve

#50

Post by wrnr »

hgomersall wrote: post #22
wrnr wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The is wrong on so many levels, in most places be it country or company the bus is being steered towards what is thought to result in global carbon reduction. This is a classic example of a moth and bailey argument, if only we had the same confidence about what to do about climate change as the fact of climate change. According to this article it is as if we only need to elect the right people and then those shall do…

We know what to do about climate change - stop emitting greenhouse gases, most notably carbon dioxide and methane. Any strategy that doesn't address that on the scale that is required can be immediately dismissed as noise. That leaves relatively few options, and those are well enumerated. Probably we need to do all of them.

Yea but HOW? Do you think there is some cheap pareto improvement to be had here. For god sake, the article is advocating for hurting and killing people and then complaining about a lack of political consensus.
Post reply on HN