It's over for the US they will never wake up no matter how bad things get. It's so comically bad you'd imagine the so called well-regulated militia would have intervened by now
That was Trump's 'magic', somehow appearing that he related with those types. Probably mostly accidentally because of his limited vocabulary, resulting in a very basic style of communication, in combination with only seeing the way the world works at a first-order effects level.
Scott Adams (crazy I know) had a good point about calling Trump a mass hypnotist. He seems to have a way of speaking that lets people hear whatever they want to, it's mystifying.
I wonder if the militia types like Trump because people like you, talk about them, like you do. Regardless how much Trump is on their side, he is your enemy, they are obviously your enemy with the disdain you feel for them, so its at worst an alliance of convenience.
The "so called well-regulated militia" hasn't been a real thing in the USA since shortly after the "founding" of the nation (if it even existed then). The closest thing (maybe) might be the National Guard, but these day they're clearly mostly just puppets for the rich and powerful.
Well-regulated militia is the National Guard. Note the term well-regulated. They’re military personnel that belong to the states, but still operate alongside the regular force. What do you mean by puppets?
Eh, there are a lot of anti-Trump and "liberal" gun owners, but I think nearly all of them know that if they go all violent and rogue against this admin it's only going to be used to justify much worse.
I'm kind of curious if New Yorkers will try and do a tea party impression with the Russian diesel ship though.
As far as I can tell, that's what "militia" means in modern parlance? If you're not an organ of the state - military or police - and you're an armed organized group, that's paramilitaries.
I'm interested in seeing the chaos of a republican party with all the ideas of power that Trump has given them, but without any of them having the godhead position that Trump has in order to keep the rest of them in line. There will be a bunch of wannabe Trump's, and all the puffery that goes with it, but without the large supportive entourage. It will be infighting like never before seen.
And if the Democrats don't do an absolutely stellar job of trying to fix things, and making life at least seem better for most of the US voting public, then an entirely chaotic Republican party could still get back in.
... and that's saying nothing of the possibilities for repeats of Jan 6th come midterm results or the 2028 election.
> And if the Democrats don't do an absolutely stellar job of trying to fix things, and making life at least seem better for most of the US voting public, then an entirely chaotic Republican party could still get back in.
Pessimistically, this is my expectation. The Oligarchy has become so out of hand, i.e. corporate-government-media collusion. The Dems are doing the same "Win at all Costs" so we can "Dominate those who think differently" thing. We The People have to take the reins back.
That's my reading too. If they don't sew it up this time around they're going to be in jail for life, the lot of them. So they must be getting a bit desperate to cling to what they've made because any step back is going to embody the risk of losing it all.
I don't think anybody has ever been able to corral the Democrats the way Trump has the Republicans. If they were that controlled, you wouldn't have The Squad and Fetterman in the party.
The problem with your reasoning is that nothing ever matters, because you can always divide things in smaller and smaller chunks and in the end "it's really not that bad it's only 0.x percent of emissions/pollution/etc"
I agree; but that's also not a very useful observation. Modern society depends on industry of all types, and national independence depends on at least some of it being local. We can try to make it cleaner, and to some degree we can choose which types to implement. But we do not have the option to just wish it all away.
It would be very nice if we could have our cake and eat it too.
That seems like a bit of a false equivalency this was not some precious old growth forest, it was basically a managed logging area so more comparable to some farm land in the US, and this is me speaking as a certified tree hugger here.
I rarely see people complaining about the insane amount of water that is used in meat production (trillions of liters worldwide) but almost constant discussions about water consumption of datacenters (millions of litres worldwide).
It’s complaining about the splinter in your eye but being oblivious to the giant wooden beam lodged in your brain.
It’s of course that people like meat on their plates but dislike AI for ideological reasons
idk where you live but vegetarianism is a hot topic in europe and in ecological circles, the problem is that you get borderline aggressed by meat eaters when you open your mouth about the topic.
Most people are too brainwashed to even start self reflecting about their meat consumption, everybody talk about data centers because we're spending 5x more on them since LLMs became the new messiah: https://ourworldindata.org/cdn-cgi/imagedelivery/qLq-8BTgXU8...
Hilarious compared to what exactly lmao? The US? China? Russia? TYhE GlObAl SoUtH? OPEC?
The world is a giant school playground where the bullies in charge are competing for #1 position on the goober eating contest while the school is burning
I both agree and disagree. The EU isn't worse than others. For example, it's basically the only place that's willing to replace coal with imported gas, which is a major economical sacrifice.
On the other hand, with the money the EU spends on climate measures, the results leave a lot to be desired. The EU has prioritized things like hydrogen, biofuels and carbon capture, which all have very little to show for.
If Europe had spent all that money on EVs and heat pumps, emissions would have decreased drastically while prices woundn't even go up. But that's not possible if you want to preserve old jobs. Then you have to do those stupid things that aren't viable, like e-fuels for cars.
I'm also not sure if replacing coal with gas did actually decrease emissions on the whole. The gas lobby is a large reason why electrification has stalled in Europe, while China's coal lobby helped electric trucks to reach 50% share last month.
Climate catastrophe will be the reason there's no food on the table.
This is already happening to crops like cocoa and coffee, and crops like maize and wheat are next.
If we're too stupid as a species to understand this, we can just let Darwin clean this up and give the planet another chance with different species in a few million years or so.
My point is that people want their short term economic needs met (food, shelter, quality of life).
You wont find broad support for policies that save an abstract future 40y away if you cause huge economic hardship on current people.
You can see how quickly support for addressing climate change erroded in the last few once more pressing short term needs of people were not met anymore. Academics and the upper middle class can keep theorizing about how to save the future because they can afford it while the less fortunate will turn to policies that dont hurt their short term prospects.
Bottom line is that ignoring the economic impact is foolish. No lasting political support
Humans are probably the only Earthlings that have any chance of achieving interplanetary civilization and persisting long term. If this civilization collapses and our energy technologies are lost then any future attempts at civilization will be facing a steeper slope to get those technologies back without the cheap and abundant fossil fuels we burned up. Many of those fuels may never return to this planet because life has evolved considerably so things like the Carboniferous may not happen again.
> Humans are probably the only Earthlings that have any chance of achieving interplanetary civilization and persisting long term.
Stop watching sci fi my dude, there is 0% chance we leave the solar system and probably even earth.
It's not a video game, there is no speed run, there is nothing out there for us, what's the hurry with burning and destroying our home planet ? Do you think we'll have it better on Mars lmao?
I'm not sure why you're responding as if my comment is some sort of hopium. I'm saying that if we don't stop ourselves from making Earth uninhabitable to us in the very near future, that this is the peak of technological civilization on Earth for all time. Whether human descendants or another sapient species comes out of the climate turmoil and tries to advance again, they're gonna hit a wall.
All our ambitions and dreams for the future hinge on reversing the damage we've done.
> Climate is going to be least important of your problems if you cant put food on the table.
??? We're already having record low crop yields CAUSED by climate change right now my dude. You won't have food on your plate BECAUSE of climate change
Its the only corner where one can try to talk some sense into some of the people directly involved in this process.
The self-professed unideological technical minds that pride themselves on first-principle thinking.
The walking contradictions that fail to recognize that it is in fact their ideology that is pushing us to this outcome, based on said first principles (thermodynamics ffs!) they do not actually take into account.
CO2 capture is obvious greenwashing, just like electric personal cars. They're here to save industries, not the planet, I don't think anyone half serious believes anything other than that
Yes on CO2 capture, but electric personal cars are substantially lower emissions than internal combustion cars. Anyone saying something different is pushing fossil propaganda - that is just not a fact-based argument.
Yes, getting everyone onto electrified public transport + scooters is better - but EVs do provide meaningful emissions reduction.
Maybe, but cement manufacturing by itself is responsible for a staggering 8% of global co2 emissions. And we really don't have a viable option for replacing cement, and probably won't for a long time. Capturing and removing that co2 has a meaningful impact. Even if CCS were limited to just that one industry.
There are absolutely viable ways to reduce concrete emissions by about 30% - but it is staggeringly difficult to get the construction industry (including architects, structural engineers, standards bodies etc.) to change practices.
It’s pretty easy to see how electric personal cars make a difference even if the initial vehicle manufacturing process is indeed dirtier, and plenty of serious people consider them a part of the solution. CO2 capture also isn’t greenwashing, it’s just handwaving away problems with the idea that tech will somehow save us, which is also true for like… every single solution to this problem we’ve considered.
Both perpetuate the idea that we can just continue business as usual and that we'll find a magic solution later.
2 to 3 tonnes of metal and batteries to transport 75kg of meat and sit uselessly 98% of the time is not the optimal way to transport people, no matter how you look at it
Nobody has ever, at any point been talking about “optimal”, so that’s irrelevant. Optimal is completely abandoning science and returning to nature. There is no better outcome for nature. That’s the optimal outcome.
Putting a bunch of meat in tubes is not optimal. Putting a bunch of meat on very large, multi-passenger vehicles is not optimal. Putting 9 billion bike and walking pathways for meat is not optimal. Cities made of concrete are not optimal.
Who cares about optimal? Actually serious people are discussing living in harmony.
If nobody is allowed to own a car, then nobody is happy. If the only way to own a car is to own an electric one, then many people are happy. This is not optimal. Nothing we’re doing or aiming for is, in any sense of the word.
It always puzzles me when people think fusion is just infinite free energy. You're not just gonna have one fusion plant producing a billion zetawatts of electricity. Each fusion plant will likely produce roughly the same as a large nuclear plant. So we would need to build hundreds/thousands of them, it would take many decades to build them. Fusion reactors are extremely complicated machines.
And even if we did this, we would also need tens of thousands of carbon capture facilities, and the infrastructure to actually store the CO2 somewhere.
Carbon capture (from air) is just completely infeasible. It's not even remotely realistic. There is absolutely no way it will ever make a significant difference.
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