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False Progress (old site) 
People got to make a livin you effin tree hugger. I bet I saved more trees that you ever planted.
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D.B. Is that real or a parody of an illiterate wingnut? Check that grammar. You address nothing about the details of this topic, but of course that’s normal for the low-information crowd. If this whole post offended stupid people, that was the point.
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It’s not just so-called “right” wingers. The Obama administration also granted permits for both hydrofracking and mountaintop removal and continued supporting the oil industry through tax breaks, all in spite of Obama’s “environmental legacy.”
Consider also Mexico’s president-elect, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, whose energy strategy could have been taken straight from the playbook of any American conservative: generate more electricity, expand refinery capacity, and iexpand oil and gas drilling.
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Right-wingers are much more vocal in their disdain for nature, but you have a point. Nature wasn’t helped by Obama’s subsidies for industrial wind turbines; the most environmentally-invasive “clean” energy technology ever invented (see other posts here). It’s all part of the same mindset that tries to build our way out of various messes while creating new ones.
“100% renewable energy” is an utter lie based on carbon credits. Those who think we can simply vilify fossil fuels and fix energy problems are deluded because they don’t grasp scale. Major infrastructure will depend on dense carbon-based energy for an indefinite time to come. It’s impossible to build just a single wind turbine blade or gearbox without fossil fuels in the chain.
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I think that the chances that humans do not emerge from the 21st century are 99.5%. But if we do emgerge it will only be if we can generate nuclear fusion power, AND figure out what actions to take to counter act the consequences of global warming that are already set in motion. AND adopt a world wide maximum 2 child per family policy which hopefully with the intent of of achieving less than 2 children per family as some women would no doubt chose to have only one or no children at all. AND that humanity figures out how to go in to a type of economic hibernation while still managing to feed everyone with out making some people feel like they are slaves to those doing little work. Developing benevolent AI would help to figure out how to solve some of the problems that I listed above. But attempts to create a benevolent AI could backfire and lead to the creation of a hostile AI.
Ok so in summary the key that unlocks the door that might save us is,
Nuclear Fusion
Economic Hybirnation
A Demographic Shift
Climate Triage
(Possibly aided by aritificial intellegence)
We are not dead yet. We now should be talking about
A.) giving up and carrying on as we have been until we can not carry on any more. At which point the militaries of the world will supply the populations of their countries with cyanid capusles so people do not have to starve to death if they do not want to. After all failure is going to be really really gruesome. Suicide on an industrial scale will be very humain by compairison. Everyone has to die though. I do not like one bit the idea one bit that huge numbers of people from the third world, who did not create these problems, should die and then millions of rich north Americans and Europeans manage to pull through because of some kind of technological miracle.
B.) carrying out an overthrow of the world wide capitalist system and replacing it with a socialist system which would be the only way that the world’s economy could be power downed with out creating social chaos by living billions of people to starve to death. The conditions of economic hybernation would hopefully buy enough time for nuclear fusion to be developed and climate triage policies to get some results.
The thing is you the reader of this comment have no role to play, except to carry on doing what ever it is that you have been doing, until choice B is made. If it is ever made. At this point in history there is only one group of people who could in theory chose option B for the world. That is the field grade officers of the American, Chinese, and Russian militaries operating in complete harmony with one another.
Now a natural human reaction would be to say that it is insane to even suggest such a thing could happen. But to believe that such a thing could not happen you would have to believe that all the field grade officers of these three nations, despite being highly educated, are complete idiots. Or that OK maybe there are one or two from each country who are not complete idiots but they no doubt do not have any children of their own and are not concerned about the future fate of other peoples children.
Well if there are any people in those militaries who can see beyond their nose how is it that we have gotten to this point that we are now in? That is a good question. Could it be because the general officers of one of these militaries, was exceptionally corrupt beyond even the level of your garden variety nazi, and that this group of general officers had a huge head start in organization over those who finally woke up to the fact that those generals are the people that they should have been protecting their population from rather than cooperating with those generals plans for the world’s future. Sadly if there were people who reached such a conclusion, until they step out from the shadows for the world to see, they exist only in my imagination.
Because even though I do not think that all field grade officers are idiots I do not know how many think that the world’s tipping point was 350 ppm CO2 and so the point in which the world could be saved is long past and the only thing to do now is to play a starring role in a real life war movie until production of the real life zombie movie starts. That means that a few good men may never emerge from the shadows.
A final thought about AI. Even a benevolent AI could be a disaster for humanity if it causes people to be even lazier intellectually than they are now.
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Well put, and between the lines it looks like you aren’t buying the hype about so-called renewables. Nuclear fusion is of course very elusive. This is the boldest claim I’ve seen: https://www.google.com/search?q=Commonwealth+Fusion+Systems
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Well what I will say is that if things were done differently after the second world war in terms of economic development we could have been in a much better position today to handle our problems, Under different circumstances than we have now wind and or solar power could have been desicive in creating a comfortable sustainable society. First of all it would have been important NOT to have built the interstate highway system which allowed urban sprawl. Second an electrified railroad network needed to be built to move food and other goods long distances. In addition the US needed to renounce the idea of maintaining a world wide empire. That would have allowed the defence policy of the United States needed to take advantage of its position that is unique in the universe. The United States could have realied on a very inexpensive and energy efficent policy of maintaining a nuclear trip wire. Because of that any nation or group of nations would have had to even prepare for an invasion of the USA this is no chance that this nuclear tripwire would have ever been challenged. The hydrocarbons that the USA burned would have been used primarily for farm tractors and heavy equipment. That is if the solar power and wind could have powered the railroad network. Any additional power could have then been used to provide for our TVs, radios, washers, and possibly dryers, and refregorators. But the last 3 would not have been absolutely neccessary. Although a washing machine is really a time saver for the spouse who does the family laundry. I remember a time when my grandmother had to do all of the laundry by hand. And she dried it on the line. She used to really get pissed when a bird would shit on the bed sheets before they were dry.
So if the benifits of technology would have been shared reasonably people in the 1970 up until now could have live a life of perhaps 24 hours of work per week with the rest of the time playing baseball, basketball and soccer, playing chess, go, backgammon, dominoes, and card games, painting, playing music, reading books for pleasure, riding bicylcle, and going to the theater. Time could have also been spent watching TV and listening to the radio.
Things could have been much different. But our future was hijacked by child molesters masqurading as leaders. Many of these so called leaders were confederare officers dressed in union army uniforms. But the soldiers could not see these military leaders for who they really were. Or they were proud to serve with them knowing full well that they were serving in the confederate army.
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“Under different circumstances than we have now wind and or solar power could have been desicive in creating a comfortable sustainable society. ”
Sorry, wind turbines are bleak as hell when you really see what’s going on (see other posts here) but I’m for rooftop solar with emphasis on a small footprint, as all “green” technologies should. Wind power fails that test out of the gate. Solar’s at least mountable on existing structures but all of it’s built with fossil fuels and becomes a net energy farce when you run the math, e.g. Mark Jacobson’s popularized scheme.
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I am mere sociologist not a mathamatician or a physicist But, Manuel Garcia Jr, is a physicist. He seems to think that solar had (has) potential.
https://manuelgarciajr.com/2018/11/19/climate-change-action-would-kill-imperialism/
One other thing that I forgot to bring up as at least a stop gap measure. That is that nuclear fission power be reconsidered. There have been quite a number of engineering proposals made since the 1980s that claim that the redesign of nuclear fission power plants can make nuclear fission power much safer and also deal with the radioactive material produced in the process.
Reguardless of what should, but is unlikely, to happen, we have to ask ourselves what do we do now. I live for revenge myself. I think that things could have been done differently and much better in the past. More importantly I do not think that it was an accident or through stupidity that bad decisions were made. I think that that bad decisions of the past were done with cold blooded intent. For that people have to pay. Such a horrible crime deserves a really horrible punishment.
Ok yes dreams of revenge are no doubt a type of fantasy. But in these troubling times millions turn to the fantasies of religion, millions more to drugs, millions more to video games, millions more are so busy working two jobs that they do not have time to think. It takes dreams of revenge to get me through the day.
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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has proposed a 70% tax rate on incomes over 10 million. That is so generous to the rich that it is completely criminal.
I once created a tax table. It had a 100% top tax bracket. I do not remember anymore at what level it was reached. But I do remember the gist of my tax table was that it was impossible for a family to earn more than 330,000 US dollars per year, in earned income. My tax rates for unearned income was also progressive, starting at 1% at 12,000 US dollars and reaching 100% at 65,000 dollars for those under 65 years of age. For those over 65 it started at 1% over 24,000 and reaching 100% at 78,000 US Dollars. Social Security income would be untaxed. Is it a good idea not to tax social security income if someone makes say 60,000 in Social Security and has other unearned income?
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Back around 1990 I realized that American (US) society was insane and that i had to leave before the society that I was living in drove me insane.
It took a few years but eventually I left. Now I have reached the point that I think that even though American society is the most insane, the entire planet is insane. I want to disassociate myself from humanity. Yet me my family ties prevent me from committing suicide. There are of course individual exceptions to the general insanity. But collectively speaking those of one this planet that are sitll sane failed at curing the masses of their delusions.
That does not mean that we were stupid. It means that we had a really really hard job ot start with. We were heavily outnumbered. The lunatics had a big head start. We did not have all the time in the universe.
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Yes, it’s beyond insane. But any talk of offing one’s self should be redirected into stopping damage somewhere, even if only temporarily. It’s a better legacy than nothingness.
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That is exactly what I would have told Colonel Theodore Westhuising if I had had the opportunity. A field grade officer has a large capative audiance. Sure he could get in to really big trouble if s/he gets reported for sedition. But the military would be in a loose loose situation. It would be as embarrasing as hell for the military to have to admit that there was a field grade officer in its ranks committing sedition. Or it could ignore the sedition and hope to reel in the officer by other means. Those other means would be unorthodox which would also have negative side effects.
Sadly I guess once someone gets corrupted they are hesitant to remake themselves in to who they need to be rather than who they have been.
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I found my proposed tax table which I created around 2010. I had it in mind for those who are married filing jointly. It was quite simple. It had a 50,000 dollar family deduction. Then a starting tax rate of 15%. Then the tax rates went up with each 50, 000 dollars until the reached 100% at 350,000 dollars. It would have been illegal for anyone to earn a take home pay of more than 155,000 dollars per year.
But even this tax table has been over taken by facts on the ground. At this point the only thing to be done is to say all economic activity is illegal except for the production and distribution of food and terrafarming to try to capture CO2 in the atmosphere, until further notice.
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Another thing that really pisses me off is that governments could have enacted policies that would have led to a rapid reduction in the consumption of beef and pork with an increase in the consumption of rabbit and poultry. Not only that humanity could have made much greater use of Bamboo, not only to replace wood but even to replace steel in some cases. It only took a leadership with the intellegence of Wilma Flintstone and Betty Ruble.
If Cynthia McKinney and Ilhan Omar had been in charge we would probably be living like the people in the Jetsons by now.
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