411–420 of 429 posts
If the evidence on worrying climatic events does not exist, we don't have to ignore and discredit it.
https://oceanographicmagazine.com/news/trump-administration-...
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> Are you serious? That is pretty naive! Strange. I only see working class people building roads here. Show me a picture of a billionaire building a road.
Show me a picture of working class people building roads on their own initiative without a billionaire paying them.
When roads are built for the common good, it’s only when government acts on behalf of the working class to compel taxpayers to fund it; it must coerce the billionaires to contribute under the implicit threat of force.
I’d love to believe that humans become generally more collectivist when they amass great wealth - and much credit to those who do - but they are much too few and far between for us to rely this as a society
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Show me a picture of working class people building roads on their own initiative without a billionaire paying them.
When billionaires make the decisions about what roads get built, they build roads that help them more efficiently exploit the world around them. This has been observed in many developing countries when their industrialization is driven by private capitalist interests: roads emerge from the plantations to the refineries, to the factories and distribution centers. Roads for the local populations are built to get them t…
The point is that the rich has become rich by serving the society enormously (It does not matter if someone become rich by serving ad, and thus not serving in the ideal sense, yet some member of the society paid them to do it). If every service needed (real or made up, does not matter) by common men were provided by government, then these billionaires would not have existed.
No one has the right to deny the rich, if they want to use what society owes them, to save themselves from catastrophe!
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When billionaires make the decisions about what roads get built, they build roads that help them more efficiently exploit the world around them. This has been observed in many developing countries when their industrialization is driven by private capitalist interests: roads emerge from the plantations to the refineries, to the factories and distribution centers. Roads for the local populations are built to get them t…
Sure, but that is missing the bigger point. The point is that the rich has become rich by serving the society enormously (It does not matter if someone become rich by serving ad, and thus not serving in the ideal sense, yet some member of the society paid them to do it). If every service needed (real or made up, does not matter) by common men were provided by government, then these billionaires would not have existed…
Your statement, as written, ignores that much wealth, power, privilege is inherited from ill-gotten gains like savage conquest, slavery, oppression, corruption, etc. and most great wealth is held by people who had extreme advantages from those endowments being born into those circumstances.
In most cases, it’s very hard to argue that society “owes them” anything.
I would say that debt would be much more appropriate for people like Nikola Tesla who wanted his inventions shared with the world at no cost, or the inventors of insulin who sold the patent for $1 to benefit the common good. Not for the telecom and pharma CEOs who become billionaires by extracting the maximum value from exploiting others’ ingenuity!
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Wealth distribution is an issue, but lots of "wealth" is due to stuff that is owned by some and used by many. Take a landlord as an example: he might have 100 houses and own 99% of the wealth in a village, but if the houses are inhabited, people still use them. If those people want to use a 300 sq meter houses rather than 50 sq meter studios, they do contribute as well to the climate issue. This holds for other field…
Your simplistic take is fundamentally wrong. It would take someone in the bottom 99% of the world's population more than 1,500 years to match the personal lifetime carbon footprint of a billionaire. People in the top 1% can be attributed with 25% of emissions when you take their investments into account also. But most importantly, they are the ones who actually "steer the boat". They are responsible for the utter lac…
I notice the absurdity of you suggesting you have no responsibility.
It is a matter of how you choose the percentage. You choose 99%. If you would have said 50%, than whoops, suddenly you would include yourself in the responsible part. I claim that most rich people (western countries) are in the responsible part and maybe they should start reason like that.
You claim that rich people shouldn't fly. I would be fine with nobody flying. Or, even, with only rich people flying but not more than today (that would be still a 10x reduction in CO2!).
In my opinion too many people think in the terms of "what should the others do" rather in terms of "what should we all do", so that they have an excuse to do nothing.
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Sure, but that is missing the bigger point. The point is that the rich has become rich by serving the society enormously (It does not matter if someone become rich by serving ad, and thus not serving in the ideal sense, yet some member of the society paid them to do it). If every service needed (real or made up, does not matter) by common men were provided by government, then these billionaires would not have existed…
Perhaps you’re considering a very select subset of the rich for whom you can argue their wealth was entirely earned through value they delivered to society. Your statement, as written, ignores that much wealth, power, privilege is inherited from ill-gotten gains like savage conquest, slavery, oppression, corruption, etc. and most great wealth is held by people who had extreme advantages from those endowments being bo…
I am not sure you are getting it. If you have 100$ and I steal it from you, you can argue that I don't deserve the 100$ worth of work that I can buy from the society using it (you deserve it). But that is not the contract. The contract is anyone who has the 100$ is entitled for services that is 100$ worth from the society.
And society should not really concerned with who the actual owner is. Its end of the bargain is completed as soon as it does 100$ worth of work and accept the 100$ as payment.
So the billion $ a billionaire have means that society is indebted for that much amount to someone. And the burden to fulfill that commitment is on the society until that billion $ is exhausted from payment.
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Yes, pretty much, except getting to working fusion is not guaranteed - but the climate disaster is, so we have to make a bet. Solar and batteries are the obvious fallback plan. Nuclear should also be, but it’s a hard sell.
We seem to agree that there is a major resource allocation problem here (" shortening ... the Iran war by a couple of days "), but you still haven't explained how oil becoming scarce will cause breakthroughs in nuclear fusion to occur. I might accept the argument if it were just about solar (which mostly needs straightforward deployment). But nuclear fusion research requires spending large amounts of resources withou…
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> It's literally "you should die out and become extinct". That's what you're telling them. This is both dumb and dishonest. It's dumb because you're not making an actual argument, just pointing at a potential long-term outcome, which isn't even an obviously bad outcome; if there are no more humans, there are also no humans to fret about their own lack of existence, so who exactly is being harmed here? It's dishonest…
>which isn't even an obviously bad outcome; Ok. I suppose that I can play along and pretend (literal) human extinction isn't a "bad outcome". Is that the point of contention? You think it's ok or even preferable, while I dislike that outcome? Is that the source of our conflict? If so, this is the closest to honesty I've ever heard from someone like yourself. But for me, this makes you my enemy. People who truly belie…
Explain to me how you are harmed by the eventual extinction of humanity (which will come at some point in the future, as all things end).
> It's never temporary.
Everything is temporary.
> But for me, this makes you my enemy. People who truly believe as you do are beyond redemption. No courtesy, kindness, or obligation is owed to you. You can be allowed no influence, no one should hear your voice. It's actually pretty deserving that the people like yourself should be wiped out.
If you read what you just wrote, then read what I said to you that caused this outburst, and think about how warranted your reaction was, I'm sure you can reach an objective conclusion about which of us is genuinely more likely to be beyond redemption. I've used HN for as long as it's existed, and this is the first time I've wished I could block someone, because your behavior is not acceptable.
From one human to another, I hope you are okay.
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Perhaps you’re considering a very select subset of the rich for whom you can argue their wealth was entirely earned through value they delivered to society. Your statement, as written, ignores that much wealth, power, privilege is inherited from ill-gotten gains like savage conquest, slavery, oppression, corruption, etc. and most great wealth is held by people who had extreme advantages from those endowments being bo…
>Your statement, as written, ignores that much wealth, power, privilege is inherited from ill-gotten gains like savage conquest, slavery, oppression, corruption, etc. and most great wealth is held by people who had extreme advantages from those endowments being born into those circumstances. I am not sure you are getting it. If you have 100$ and I steal it from you, you can argue that I don't deserve the 100$ worth o…
It’s not a particularly helpful paradigm for solving predicaments without excess violence and suffering, but the model makes sense insofar as it’s consistent
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>Your statement, as written, ignores that much wealth, power, privilege is inherited from ill-gotten gains like savage conquest, slavery, oppression, corruption, etc. and most great wealth is held by people who had extreme advantages from those endowments being born into those circumstances. I am not sure you are getting it. If you have 100$ and I steal it from you, you can argue that I don't deserve the 100$ worth o…
I understand what you’re saying now, basically boils down to “might is right”. It’s not a particularly helpful paradigm for solving predicaments without excess violence and suffering, but the model makes sense insofar as it’s consistent
Money gives you purchasing power. Is that surprising?