What I am conveying to you is that your misunderstandings of evolution are causing you to say things that are illogical pretzels.
Evolution is such a beautiful, elegant discovery. It underlies so much behaviour in the universe, from biology to politics to economics to culture.
If you insist on calling it an analogy--even though it is in fact the reality of the situation, which is just one more example of you misunderstanding it--your use of it is faulty, and so your "analogy" is failing.
And towards the overall point, there are plenty of competing ideas and executions to the market economy. While I sustain none are succeeding, many adventurers in this field would disagree.
While you just don't seem to know about them, perhaps you could take this conversation as a call to action to go search for the many groups working on testing different economical models and go join them. It could be fun!
This is your second reply to where I explain what I meant with regards to evolution without you enlightening me about what's wrong but instead go on about evolution in some sort of spiritual awe.
But you're not done there. After you've decided to overrule that the author of the analogy used it as an analogy you extrapolate that since I'm not following your evolutionary wanderings I'm clearly ignorant of politics and economics altogether. What the hell?
How would you propose testing or verifying a non-falsifiable model? Each sample of future data we have tends to show our models to be simply broken except in the most broad sense of a longterm gradual increase in temperatures. For instance from 2001 and 2010 the warming slowed to 0.11C per decade. [1] For the 17 years before then was 0.17C. There was not a single model that predicted this and, in spite of a number of after the fact hypotheses for that apparent decline, there is still no decisive answer. Does this not kind of bother you?
We might argue that well since they're getting the overall picture right, that they must be fundamentally correct, even if they don't perform so well on the micro scale. But I'm not sure this is a reasonable argument. In particular, the past 400k years of Earth [2] show a very regular waxing and waning of temperatures, with the scale increasing upwards of 10C from the frequently extremely rapid transition from the mins to the maxes. Not only is about now when you would expect to be entering a warming era, but we've yet to even hit the highs of temperatures the planet reached in relatively recent geologic history, though before humans even existed. This is no way suggesting that humans are not contributing to the current phase of climate change, yet at the same time is it really particularly insightful to propose that temperatures will continue to do as they've done for hundreds of thousands of years?
As usual I'm sure people will just downvote this, but I genuinely have no clue why. It's as if its taboo to ask, what I think, are completely reasonable questions. At the same time it's completely kosher to freak out and suggest climate change could imminently end the very species of humankind, which is not a remotely realistic outcome even in the most catastrophic and near 0 probability level outcomes.
Whether or not the world has been warmer in the past is entirely and completely irrelevant. The only thing that matters is that we are provably massively accelerating the current warming, causing changes to weather, water and food systems we rely on for our survival. If we don't make equally massive sacrifices to fix this, we will lose our food, water, and land. This isn't the time for middlebrow devils-advocate games, it is the time for action.
Why do you think we'll lose our food, water, and land? Let's start with a couple of important maps. This [1] is a map of where US farmland is. This [2] is where US water resources are. So of course we need to consider these things in terms of climate change. I quite like the simulator the NOAA has set up here [3]. It lets you increase or decrease water levels and dynamically see the effect. Perhaps the most surprising thing though is this [4]. That's an article that illustrates what the world would look like if somehow literally all ice in the world melted, some 216 feet of sea level rise. And indeed the world would be quite reshaped, but the surprising thing is by how little. Suffice to say you wouldn't need to start building an ark. And as an relevant aside, sea levels have already risen more than 400 feet since the the most recent interglacial warming period started some ~20,000 years ago. [5] Somehow, life went on.
To be clear I 100% agree with you on changes, but not losses. And I am in no way playing devil's advocate. I think the things I've asked, and said, are reasonable. They're completely authentic in any case, and I am 100% open to changing my view. If anything I've said is inaccurate in any way, or any question technically unreasonable - please do share. Apologies on the excessive amounts of links here, but I find this is a topic where disinformation is excessive and so I think it's important to cite most facts.
Wow! Thanks for the heads up. I'll be sure to cycle them off the split peas. I wonder if sweet potatoes could be a problem too. Will look in to supplementing their diets.
I often click on the user's comment history if a comment stands out positively or negatively, and I realized that I'd done so more than once with yours. I don't think that counts as weird.
That said, I did write a bunch of code that actually allows me to track a user's comments. But I wrote that mostly so I can get updates if infrequent but great commenters post something. Perhaps that is a bit weird.
I found your comment by clicking on another comment of his, in another thread. He is absolutely "live blogging". He seems to have little to no actual real world experience, conflates technological notions easily, and often comments without any understanding of the underlying subject matter. Paulie, I think we would all prefer if you returned to reddit.
Thinking that subscribing to a user's new and public comments (the equivalent of adding a blog to your feed reader) is creepy and stalking would further confirm that. Nice to hear I'm not just being crazy about this though :).
> Why should I trust them if that data is subject to wild swings as measurements get refined?
You are begging the question here.
Simply put, "that data is subject to wild swings as measurements get refined", isn't reflected in the article. It's something you are making up. Again, the data was within the estimation previously made. They've refined that data.
A wild swing would in fact go from showing one thing to showing another thing entirely. That's how a swing works. What really happened is the predication was correct. We are now getting to see more precisely how correct.
Regardless, I honestly don't believe you are being honest here, since you are asking the same question and not putting any effort into this. You are trolling. If you aren't, put forth some effort. You think you are being "smart," but the truth is, you aren't.
This right here sums up about 97% of the entire issue. People look at the scale of problem, figure they can't make "a real difference" and use that as justification for continuing on with business as usual. It boils down to "The pain and nuisance of me personally taking fewer airplane trips, walking more or eating less meat (or whatever) far outweighs in my mind the benefit to The World of me inconveniencing myself. So Why Bother?"
And, conveniently, it's an argument that frames itself in a way that is nigh impossible to argue with.
That doesn't seem like a realistic answer. It requires a lot more knowledge on the part of consumers than consumers have or can readily obtain, and puts the onus on those least able to affect the behavior of those companies and puts the cost of making the change on those who have little responsibility for the choices that led us here.
We have environmental regulations, they just aren't strong enough and they often have loopholes specifically for the worst offenders (e.g. animal agriculture and shipping both externalize tremendous environmental costs on everyone). There's also differences between nations that make it possible to outsource environmental impact, which needs to be balanced.
It's not realistic to tell consumers, "Don't buy products made overseas", because for most people in most parts of the world, most of the products they need are made overseas. I don't think it's a bad thing for manufacture to flow to where it is most efficient, but it is a bad thing when environmental impact explodes because of it. There needs to be pressure on the companies hauling those goods, from every nation they ship to, to reduce emissions dramatically.
And, while I've been vegetarian or vegan for 24 years, and I encourage everyone to do so, both to reduce suffering and to reduce environmental impact, it turns out asking people to become vegetarian or vegan doesn't actually work. There have been organizations encouraging plant-based diets for decades, and yet only a small percentage of people eat a plant-based diet. The industry has to be made to internalize those costs, so they change their practices. It'll also raise prices to more realistic levels, which would shift consumption to plant-based alternatives which have orders of magnitude lower environmental impact (though still high, when talking about feeding a few billion people, but certainly more sustainable than feeding a few billion people beef).
I person stopped caring and I think many people are starting to feel the same. While the issues are the most important to our lives and future generations, I feel totally hopeless in humanity. We simply cannot and will not organize on a broad enough level to do anything about it. It will probably take a series of miracles to make any serious impact on improving our situation even though solutions are dead simple. One google search will turn up many viable solutions to global warming but since we are dealing with deeply flawed creatures called humans, we are screwed.
At this point, I don’t know that I care at all. I will die. My offspring will die. Perhaps human extinction is the ultimate cleansing that needs to happen. But then again, who cares if Earth remains habitable. Who cares if by some odd chance the only planet in the universe to support complex life (highly unlikely) loses that life? What are we on universal scale if NOTHING. perhaps a being that cannot stop a stoppable and foreseeable suffering should seize to exist. Isn’t this what evolution is all about? The fit survive the unfit parish.
Don’t get me wrong, I love my fellow human beings. We have overcome some amazing challenges on personal and societal scales but perhaps we have met one we are not capable of overcoming? 1 or 0, we struck out.
If you consider the world a classroom and the problem homework then none of the 30 students are aware they have homework. The cockroach in the corner of the room knows but everyone else didn’t get the memo. My point being - I will argue that majority of the world is unaware of impending doom - either for reasons of lack of education and awareness or out of pure ignorance. People forget that modern life as you and I know it does not apply to a large population of this planet who are blissfully unaware or don’t have the resources and capacity to do anything about it if they were.
It certainly doesn’t help that our political and value systems have been set up to promote greed and corruption. Look at Trump, he has to be reasonably educated right? But does he give a damn? And if not, why not? The same goes for all the senators.
When I was 18, microcomputer advocates were predicting 3-day working weeks because of all the hum-drum work computers would do for us.
I'd like to believe in your dream and I'm not saying it won't come to pass, but we'll have to redesign our culture to stop fetishising hard work first.
Read Hans Rosling’s ”Factfullness.” It’s the antidote to that crushing feeling of hopelessness. Though admittedly, it feels like I need to constantly reread it to stay hopeful.
Unfortunately, Hans Rosling's research has dealt with the last few decades, which saw massive socioeconomic improvements that humanity bought on environmental credit. The next few decades are going to be about whether or not we will be able to pay back that debt.
It's more complex than that. To heat up by those 2C, water takes over 4 times as much energy as air does. On the other hand, most of the warming happens in the upper layer of the ocean, which is a big issue because it messes with the ocean's circulation.
So when I said that the ocean has 1000x the mass of the atmosphere, I did the math earlier to get the total mass of both. That is a different calculation than the below per unit of volume measurement.
Sea water has a mass of ~1000kg/m^3. Sea level air has a mass of 1.2kg/m^3. How does it only take 4 times as much energy to heat up a cubic meter of seawater than a cubic meter of air? Wouldn't it be ~820 times as much?
That's just it. It used to, but it doesn't. At this point global warming is self-reinforcing. So while it's correct what you say, the implied corollary is not true.
The implied corollary is of course that if we slow down emissions global warming will stop. And it won't. It will slow down, but not stop. Not even if we get net emissions to zero.
Ah so more for personal reasons fair enough. Digital efforts could scale in a nonlocal way with teaching theoretically but people would need to take interest although it could help if they say see an easy to make hummus as a healthy and delicious dinner to get them to natrually start eating less meat not as an end goal but because of legitimate preference.
Oh the digital part is mostly a few bits of calling and logging, I don't want any sophisticated tooling, the goal is gathering and enjoying learning/doing together. I don't know what to cook off humus, but surely by having great new dinners, hobbies that are fun, eco friendly is the goal. Basically low on resources, high on pleasantness.
The monetary system itself is a big contributor or climate change. Kings used to require empires in order to protect their gold stores. I think securing the longest PoW (or PoS) chain is a very good use of resources, as it's tantamount to a king protecting his gold.
It can handle economic decisions within an organization using democracy, or multi-sigs to a few trusted individuals. It's also connected to Web 3.0, so you have all of the benefits of being within the ethereum ecosystem.
39 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 83.7 ms ] threadEvolution is such a beautiful, elegant discovery. It underlies so much behaviour in the universe, from biology to politics to economics to culture.
If you insist on calling it an analogy--even though it is in fact the reality of the situation, which is just one more example of you misunderstanding it--your use of it is faulty, and so your "analogy" is failing.
And towards the overall point, there are plenty of competing ideas and executions to the market economy. While I sustain none are succeeding, many adventurers in this field would disagree.
While you just don't seem to know about them, perhaps you could take this conversation as a call to action to go search for the many groups working on testing different economical models and go join them. It could be fun!
But you're not done there. After you've decided to overrule that the author of the analogy used it as an analogy you extrapolate that since I'm not following your evolutionary wanderings I'm clearly ignorant of politics and economics altogether. What the hell?
We might argue that well since they're getting the overall picture right, that they must be fundamentally correct, even if they don't perform so well on the micro scale. But I'm not sure this is a reasonable argument. In particular, the past 400k years of Earth [2] show a very regular waxing and waning of temperatures, with the scale increasing upwards of 10C from the frequently extremely rapid transition from the mins to the maxes. Not only is about now when you would expect to be entering a warming era, but we've yet to even hit the highs of temperatures the planet reached in relatively recent geologic history, though before humans even existed. This is no way suggesting that humans are not contributing to the current phase of climate change, yet at the same time is it really particularly insightful to propose that temperatures will continue to do as they've done for hundreds of thousands of years?
As usual I'm sure people will just downvote this, but I genuinely have no clue why. It's as if its taboo to ask, what I think, are completely reasonable questions. At the same time it's completely kosher to freak out and suggest climate change could imminently end the very species of humankind, which is not a remotely realistic outcome even in the most catastrophic and near 0 probability level outcomes.
[1] - https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/did-global-warmin...
[2] - https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f8/Ice_Age_...
To be clear I 100% agree with you on changes, but not losses. And I am in no way playing devil's advocate. I think the things I've asked, and said, are reasonable. They're completely authentic in any case, and I am 100% open to changing my view. If anything I've said is inaccurate in any way, or any question technically unreasonable - please do share. Apologies on the excessive amounts of links here, but I find this is a topic where disinformation is excessive and so I think it's important to cite most facts.
---
[1] - https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/Internet/FSE_MEDIA/nrcs143_010966....
[2] - https://water.usgs.gov/ogw/gwrp/activities/images/StudyLocat...
[3] - https://coast.noaa.gov/slr/
[4] - https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2013/09/rising-s...
[5] - https://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/gornitz_09/
Thanks :)
But it's honestly fucking weird that you are tracking my comments.
That said, I did write a bunch of code that actually allows me to track a user's comments. But I wrote that mostly so I can get updates if infrequent but great commenters post something. Perhaps that is a bit weird.
You are begging the question here.
Simply put, "that data is subject to wild swings as measurements get refined", isn't reflected in the article. It's something you are making up. Again, the data was within the estimation previously made. They've refined that data.
A wild swing would in fact go from showing one thing to showing another thing entirely. That's how a swing works. What really happened is the predication was correct. We are now getting to see more precisely how correct.
Regardless, I honestly don't believe you are being honest here, since you are asking the same question and not putting any effort into this. You are trolling. If you aren't, put forth some effort. You think you are being "smart," but the truth is, you aren't.
This right here sums up about 97% of the entire issue. People look at the scale of problem, figure they can't make "a real difference" and use that as justification for continuing on with business as usual. It boils down to "The pain and nuisance of me personally taking fewer airplane trips, walking more or eating less meat (or whatever) far outweighs in my mind the benefit to The World of me inconveniencing myself. So Why Bother?"
And, conveniently, it's an argument that frames itself in a way that is nigh impossible to argue with.
We have environmental regulations, they just aren't strong enough and they often have loopholes specifically for the worst offenders (e.g. animal agriculture and shipping both externalize tremendous environmental costs on everyone). There's also differences between nations that make it possible to outsource environmental impact, which needs to be balanced.
It's not realistic to tell consumers, "Don't buy products made overseas", because for most people in most parts of the world, most of the products they need are made overseas. I don't think it's a bad thing for manufacture to flow to where it is most efficient, but it is a bad thing when environmental impact explodes because of it. There needs to be pressure on the companies hauling those goods, from every nation they ship to, to reduce emissions dramatically.
And, while I've been vegetarian or vegan for 24 years, and I encourage everyone to do so, both to reduce suffering and to reduce environmental impact, it turns out asking people to become vegetarian or vegan doesn't actually work. There have been organizations encouraging plant-based diets for decades, and yet only a small percentage of people eat a plant-based diet. The industry has to be made to internalize those costs, so they change their practices. It'll also raise prices to more realistic levels, which would shift consumption to plant-based alternatives which have orders of magnitude lower environmental impact (though still high, when talking about feeding a few billion people, but certainly more sustainable than feeding a few billion people beef).
At this point, I don’t know that I care at all. I will die. My offspring will die. Perhaps human extinction is the ultimate cleansing that needs to happen. But then again, who cares if Earth remains habitable. Who cares if by some odd chance the only planet in the universe to support complex life (highly unlikely) loses that life? What are we on universal scale if NOTHING. perhaps a being that cannot stop a stoppable and foreseeable suffering should seize to exist. Isn’t this what evolution is all about? The fit survive the unfit parish.
Don’t get me wrong, I love my fellow human beings. We have overcome some amazing challenges on personal and societal scales but perhaps we have met one we are not capable of overcoming? 1 or 0, we struck out.
It certainly doesn’t help that our political and value systems have been set up to promote greed and corruption. Look at Trump, he has to be reasonably educated right? But does he give a damn? And if not, why not? The same goes for all the senators.
I'd like to believe in your dream and I'm not saying it won't come to pass, but we'll have to redesign our culture to stop fetishising hard work first.
Carbon pricing is what really is going to set things in motion on a large scale.
So when I said that the ocean has 1000x the mass of the atmosphere, I did the math earlier to get the total mass of both. That is a different calculation than the below per unit of volume measurement.
Sea water has a mass of ~1000kg/m^3. Sea level air has a mass of 1.2kg/m^3. How does it only take 4 times as much energy to heat up a cubic meter of seawater than a cubic meter of air? Wouldn't it be ~820 times as much?
The implied corollary is of course that if we slow down emissions global warming will stop. And it won't. It will slow down, but not stop. Not even if we get net emissions to zero.