FirmWeird
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User ID: 757
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
5mo ago
But seriously is anyone really complaining about food waste? I personally haven’t really heard that.
People complain about it all the time where I live, and it is actually a real environmental issue. I know that I feel bad whenever I waste food, for one. That said it isn't like there are many people championing food waste, so there's not much of a debate.
Modern industrial and petroleum-based agriculture is absurdly wasteful. For every calorie of energy the modern agricultural system produces, 13 calories were spent growing it and distributing it ( https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/food/us-food-system-factsheet - this data is somewhat old but if you have better I'd love to see it ). Historical farming methods tended to have ratios like 1:5-10 as opposed to 13:1, but nobody really notices that we're technically massively less efficient at turning energy into food due to the abundance of energy provided by fossil fuels. We're currently expending those fossil fuels at breakneck speeds, and in many cases using farming methods that contribute to environmental degradation and loss of soil quality as well. It'd be dishonest to just shove those costs into the energy equation, but I think there's a real and serious issue there that a lot of people have spent a lot of time talking about.
Industrial agriculture is actually a tremendously bad deal when you look at the level of raw energy we put into the system and what we get out of it when compared to other options, and food wastage is made worse because the costs of that waste are magnified by the sheer inefficiency of the system that produced it. Sure, an apple you throw away because it had a worm in it or went off isn't that big of a deal, but when that apple was produced by the modern day industrial system of agriculture you're wasting a lot more energy than you were in the past.
Finally, a lot of food is wasted for reasons that a lot of people don't like (corporate profitability, aesthetics, etc). I believe you live in Australia - if you're interested in learning more on that particular aspect, I recommend checking out The War on Waste https://iview.abc.net.au/video/DO1624H001S00
(edited solely for spacing/readability)
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
5mo ago
I don't really see the problem here. Like, why is the energy input/output ratio the relevant metric?
Sustainability is the biggest one. Energy is one of the most fundamental building blocks of human society and existence, and the way we spend and manage it is extremely important. To use a financial metaphor, spending more than you earn is not usually considered a solid strategy for improving your financial conditions for the future. Our current farming habits are spending accumulated energy rather than helping to collect it, and this is a deadly serious concern over the long term. Of course, it isn't the only issue - modern industrial farming practices are bad for the soil and planet in a huge number of ways. Some of them are more local, like the decline in soil quality and damage caused by excessive pesticide usage. Some of them are bigger issues which only show up as problems later on - like the excessive usage of antibiotics used to help animals grow, which are currently contributing to the evolution of antibiotic resistant bacteria. These problems are all solvable, yes, but solving problems takes time, energy and attention.
Obviously modern agriculture is going to involve more energy usage since we now have tractors and stuff and we didn't use to.
Yes, and there's nothing wrong with tractors existing. But as has been pointed out, they're not really the biggest contributor to these issues.
But that's also why we are now able to feed 8 billion people.
And this is actually a big fucking problem now that we're spending energy to create food rather than generating it. Currently, we're only able to support that number of people by drawing down on a limited resource which does not renew itself on any timescale relevant to human lives (it takes a long time to make fossil fuels!). On a societal level, the discovery and utilisation of fossil fuels was the equivalent of a massive lottery win - a huge, one-off windfall of useful, usable energy. If you're incredibly rich, you can afford to spend far more than you make - for a while. But when you get a whole bunch of dependents reliant upon those resources, what happens when you run out?
There's a very glib saying associated with sustainability practices - "What cannot be sustained, won't be." Right now, the population we have is unsustainable, only made possible because we are drawing down on the fossil-fuels that were formed over millions of years. Those fossil fuels won't last forever, and we currently have no adequate replacement for them when they become uneconomical to extract (people tend to get the easiest-to-extract resources first, leaving the harder-to-utilise ones for later). We haven't just got an unsustainable system of food production, our system of food production produces negative externalities and degrades the environment in ways that will make future agriculture more difficult.
Energy is there to be used - and what's a better use for it than feeding the world?
Building AGI(unless you're Big Yud). Setting up sustainable and renewable power sources. Leaving a useful inheritance for those who come after us. Space exploration. Scientific research. Sustaining industrial civilisation over a longer timescale, giving us more potential opportunities to find useful things and giving us more time for technological (and cultural) development. Just to be clear, I'm not arguing that we need to keep human numbers down in total, but that our current population bump should have been stretched out through time so that the growth could happen in a more sustainable and enduring way.
I don't believe there is another viable option to "industrial agriculture" when it comes to producing the amount of food we need.
You're correct! There isn't another viable alternative to industrial agriculture, and there isn't a way to produce the amount of food we need. This doesn't mean that Demeter is going to descend from the sky in a cloud of smoke and give us a sustainable, energy-positive farming method that doesn't require fossil fuels. It means that people are going to needlessly, pointlessly starve to death when more prudent management of our natural resources could have let them live longer and more satisfying lives. You don't need a crystal ball to predict what happens when a population outgrows the carrying capacity of their environment - you can see it happen all the time in nature, and it isn't particularly pleasant to go through.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
4mo ago
He has seen these institutions treat mild to moderate social aggression as a threat to the existence of various minority groups. And here he is, hearing loud and clear that words aren't violence when directed at his ethnic group. None of it counts when you do it to Jews.
How is any of this surprising at all? He has been cataloguing the exact same system of social aggression that is being turned not on Jews qua Jews, but on White Nationalist jews. Antizionist jews aren't just applauded, they're celebrated by the left for entirely consistent reasons. If you advocate for an ethnostate for white people the fact that some of those white people wear funny hats and don't like Santa Claus doesn't change the fact that you're a white nationalist in the eyes of the left, especially when there's a daily feed of photos of brown people getting blown up and killed. It isn't like the left has been hiding their views on this situation, and while I don't pay for his content I have a sneaking suspicion that Singal has actually got a bit of first-hand experience with the modern left (and may in fact make a living talking about it).
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
6mo ago
That would indeed hamper Trump's efforts to campaign, but I honestly think they would prefer it if he was ostensibly free yet unable to actually talk or campaign. I think putting him in prison and actually sending him to gaol would be too big of a boost to his campaign - a lot of swing voters find things like putting the opposition candidate in prison for spurious process crimes while ignoring serious corruption and malfeasance committed by your son to be somewhat offputting.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
6mo ago
It’s definitely not almost zero chance. There is a ton of antisemitism going around. You can’t just forgive everyone for being a dumb kid who did antisemitism by accident. Someone is pulling the strings.
There's zero chance that this was an antisemitic dogwhistle. Greta is an individual whose political inclinations and beliefs have been broadcast all over the world and none of them line up with antisemitism. I don't think you understand politics well at all if you think that left-wing opposition to Israel is motivated by antisemitism. The limit of her antisemitism is owning an innocuous plush octopus toy. Nobody is "pulling the strings" to make a slightly autistic (not an insult, she has claimed this about herself) young girl buy a small plush toy. Children routinely purchase stuffed toys all over the world.
And Greta is fairly high up decision maker in this food chain.
Greta has no decision-making authority beyond her own personal statements. She is not some big leader - she was a symbol because she expressed political motivations at an extremely young age. She isn't some well respected guru or thought leader, she's simply a prominent activist. Do you really, seriously think that she'd have any influence at all if she decided to come out publicly and say "Hey everyone, I just saw a really well made /pol/ infographic, turns out I was wrong and the nazis were right - gas the jews now!"?
I fail to understand how you just accidentally use a Jewish dog whistle
The plush toy of an octopus is not an antisemitic dogwhistle, it is a small toy purchased by a child. 4chan has been breaking new ground in discovering and developing new antisemitic dogwhistles (like the OK hand sign and drinking milk) but not even they have managed to get to the point of calling CHILDREN BUYING SMALL PLUSH TOYS the new sign that they're antisemites who are already goose-stepping and heiling Hitler in their heart of hearts. This is utterly paranoid conspiracy-theory thinking that sees vast amounts of meaning in incredibly inconsequential acts.
directly calling for Jewish genocide.
Huh? Where did Greta do that? Can you show me the example of her talking about how Hitler was right and the jews need to be gassed? The sign she was actually holding in reality said "STAND WITH GAZA" - and there's actually a big difference between saying "I stand with Gaza" as opposed to "All the filthy juden need to be exterminated". Remember, people on the left think that it is actually possible for different ethnicities to co-exist, so saying that she stands with Gaza doesn't actually mean that she wants every single jew killed first. Indeed, the girl next to her in that picture has a sign saying THIS JEW STANDS WITH PALESTINE - if she's actually an antisemite who is directly calling for a final solution to the jewish problem, why isn't she trying to murder the girl next to her?
She’s almost 21 now. At some point your not dumb kid and you just don’t accidentally do genocide promotion.
She did not accidentally promote genocide. A small plush toy was inflated into a fictional dogwhistle in order to discredit Greta after she supported the other side of an incredibly fierce argument in the public space. There isn't a single serious thinker in the world who thinks that Greta Thunberg is a secret nazi.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
6mo ago
Then Greta shows support for them along with many others.
Greta showed support for Gaza. This doesn't mean she supports murdering civilians, anymore than an American talking about how they support the troops means they endorsed Abu Graib or the dropping of agent orange on Vietnam. People can support causes even if they disagree with the actions taken by other supporters of that cause.
Maybe a fairer representation would be she isn’t an anti-Semite directly she’s just fine with genociding high IQ successful people which a lot of Jews fall under.
I don't think you're taking this remotely seriously if you believe that she actually supports genociding smart and successful people. This is a comical lack of charity and seems like a wilful attempt to misunderstand her and what she stands for. It isn't particularly hard to work out why left-wingers don't like Israel and support the Palestinian cause, though I suppose it is even easier to simply imagine extremely unflattering caricatures of those you disagree with. What do you actually think is more likely - that an internationally famous and notable left-wing activist is actually a secret nazi who hates smart people and is ok with jews being genocided because they're intelligent (presumably she isn't murdering her jewish friend because said friend is stupid), or that she's actually a left-wing political figure who believes in left wing political ideas?
But to return to the original point, we're talking about whether or not the octopus plush toy she had was an antisemitic dogwhistle. To be perfectly blunt, I don't think you've proven your claim that it is a signifier of hidden antisemitism in the slightest. I pay enough attention to internet culture that I'd probably know if a new antisemitic dogwhistle showed up, and I can honestly state that a generic plush toy of an octopus isn't one them.
As someone who considers themselves a green activist, de-electrification isn't really the goal per se.
The problem is that the cut-off date for a smooth, clean and orderly transition away from using fossil fuels is the far-off future of...1974. De-electrification isn't a goal anymore than having a car stop when it runs out of gas is a goal. There's no energy source that can take the place of petroleum and fossil fuels - nothing has the massive amounts of existing infrastructure, body of knowledge, energy density and EROEI to take their place, and the costs of retrofitting our society with the technology required to maintain current living standards with the far lower energy budget that renewables provide are so massive that it would not be possible from within the constraints of the current society.
Shale in particular is a really bad idea, because it has incredibly high depletion rates, lower EROEI than regular crude and causes substantial environmental damage. Those costs might not show up on a fracking company's balance sheet, but those consequences will show up elsewhere in society, in the form of less usable farmland, medical issues, water-pollution, etc. The main reason that shale looks good at the moment is the combination of unaccounted externalities, incredibly low interest rates/money-printing and a paucity of conventional light, sweet crude. This isn't a case of the environmentalists just wanting less electricity usage because civilisation is bad, but more along the lines of pointing out that eating the seed corn is actually a bad idea rather than a brand new strategy that older people were too dumb to see the benefits of, even if you have a new accounting system which claims that there's nothing wrong with eating said seed corn.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
4mo ago
I haven't been accurate for the entire duration (the start of the war was indeed surprising) and I don't think picking a specific date is terribly important either, but I've actually been fairly consistent in my beliefs on the Ukraine conflict since before we got kicked off reddit and if anyone actually took the bets I was offering I'd have a 100 percent success rate so far. I think that you're right when you say that predicting the individual events that happen is insanely difficult, the general trend of the war is very easy to work out and extrapolate (the massive nuclear power is going to defeat the small economic backwater immediately adjacent to and financially dependent upon it). People just don't do that because the conclusions you come up with when you take a dispassionate look at the situation aren't very popular on twitter or facebook.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
1yr ago
My take: while Fox is certainly useful for presenting facts that other sources don't, it's made factually incorrect claims that remain uncorrected. Those would make it difficult to use as the only source for a claim, and if you can't do that, what's the point.
Wikipedia is a nakedly political organisation and has been for some time. "Made factually incorrect claims that remain uncorrected" is not the criteria being used by Wikipedia - if it was, then you'd be unable to rely on any mainstream/"reliable" source of information. I have a long enough memory that I can recall discussions during the gamergate period where wikipedia editors made it clear that even if there was direct proof that a reliable source was lying, the reliable source was to be the viewpoint presented in the article no matter how much evidence there was to the contrary. Wikipedia has already been politicised, and has been for a long time - I would prefer it if they were just honest and flat out said that Fox was being banned for political reasons.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
4mo ago
Why doesn't the US or some other nuclear power Simply (tm) operate nuclear power plants at a profit on foreign soil on behalf of the local government?
Because it is impossible to operate a nuclear power plant at a profit anywhere. I can't find a single example of a nuclear power plant that's run at a profit without a galaxy of government subsidies - the EROEI is not high enough to do so (and no, France doesn't count). You'd have to clear that particular hurdle first, and so far nobody has managed it.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
7mo ago
That statement is totally true, but it isn't just "reading fiction about it being done to other people". Is it absurd to infer that men want to have sex because they frequently masturbate to videos of other men having sex? Women don't just read fiction about this, they actively enjoy it, create it and seek it out. Hell, they frequently talk about how much they enjoy it in public! The inference gets a lot less absurd when you look at the real world context here, and you can even use this knowledge to make accurate predictions about women's preferences (i.e. they prefer it when men do not ask them for explicit consent for every single physical escalation).
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
3mo ago
He didn't build the wall the first time, why would he do it now?
Trump's first presidency was hamstrung by multiple factors, some of them explicit (Crossfire Hurricane and the Mueller investigation it turned into) and others less visible (entrenched resistance from the deep state and republican party). The last eight years have seen substantial shifts in the GOP, with many more pro-Trump individuals getting involved in the actual political machinery of the republican party, and he's going to have a lot more leverage in a second term.
- Personal Loyalty: This is close to the Richard Hanania theory. Personal loyalty would make sense if Trump was loyal in turn to his supporters, but he isn't. How many of his lawyers have gone to jail? How many orange-blooded Trump fans lost their jobs or got arrested for believing in him too hard on January 6? He could have pardoned these people, but he didn't. Orange Man good because Orange Man good.
The moment Trump pardoned the J6 protestors he would have been impeached by the Republican party - the threat was even made explicitly in the media IIRC.
- Perceived Injustice: Yes, Trump has been treated unfairly by the media and the Washington establishment. Lots of people have been. I can understand why this would be seen as a necessary condition (e.g. "nobody liked by the 'elites' could ever be a good president"), but why would this be a sufficient condition? Surely electability and general competence matter more than an extra standard-deviation worth of grievances against the media.
Every single person who has been trusted and liked by the media/Washington establishment has immediately abandoned the particular policies that Trump-voters want and support once they get into office, and it isn't like this is an accident - the only way to be liked by the media/Washington establishment is to preserve and extend the same policies which they like and the Trump base hates. This is also why Desantis and Nikki Haley were immediately rejected by the base - they're just more representatives of Conservative Inc who want to return things to business as usual, and business as usual has gotten utterly intolerable for a lot of the people supporting Trump.
- Hatred: I'm not talking about "Hate™". I'm talking about a genuine desire to see one's political enemies suffer. It's not even clear to me that Trump would be better at this than other Republican candidates, but I feel I would be missing something if I didn't put it on the list.
Have you been paying attention to how much weeping, moaning and gnashing of teeth even the prospect of Trump getting back into power has caused? Nobody's writing lengthy thinkpieces about how the election of Nikki Haley would mean the end of democracy/sunlight/good things in the world.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
8mo ago
My understanding of this was that some of it was just "this shit happens in war" (just go look at Fallujah), and some of it was due to a Ukrainian habit of using schools and hospitals etc as military bases. I've seen photos of Ukrainian troops in school gyms and the like, and I find it perfectly believable that Russian commanders would say "fuck them kids, fire the missile" when they notice a school being used to host troops.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
7mo ago
You might want to add an additional edit reflecting that Huadpe's point got so demolished that he deleted his entire account and vanished from the site. Leaving up just your prior edit might give a misleading impression.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
3mo ago
DeSantis attacked Trump from the right, Trump attacked DeSantis from the left.
I don't believe this is meaningful at all when looking at Trump and what he represents. The policies that got him elected and which he tried to implement, are in direct opposition to the bipartisan consensus of more forever wars, more outsourcing, more illegal immigration and more corruption. I don't think that the Left/Right divide is really that useful when you look at Trump's politics and his base. Opposition to or support of the existing elite and their chosen policies is the far more meaningful divide. Desantis and Haley have donors which the Trump base find intolerable, and the Trump base is a big enough constituency in the GOP base to give them effective veto power over future candidates.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
3mo ago
In terms of how judges have treated other defendants, what other defendants have been the target of conspiracy theories like Eps?
Is there any legal basis for this at all? Would I be able to escape a criminal conviction by having a bunch of people on twitter talk about how I was a federal agent? If this is actually a criteria that's being used to adjust sentencing and shift legal outcomes, I've just come up with an incredibly profitable new business idea that will help get people out of sticky prosecutions even when there's direct video evidence of them committing the crime! Of course I don't actually believe that's the case - he's not being let off due to an actual legal principle. There are hundreds of conspiracy theories circulating about Donald Trump, and I highly doubt that he's going to be able to dodge the charges by using a similar precedent.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
10mo ago
Without having to put their own forces on the line, and at the cost of a fairly moderate chunk of the US military budget, the US is getting to incapacitate one of their major geopolitical threats.
I keep seeing this take in a lot of social media and I really don't think that it has any relation to reality. It isn't a "fairly moderate chunk of the US military budget" but a massive economic imposition and cost upon the rest of the west. Aside from the direct costs of sending money and arms to one of the most corrupt countries in Europe, the indirect costs from rising energy prices, economic disruption, inflation, sanctions, refugees and the like have made this entire affair incredibly expensive. If the de-dollarisation that the sanctions regime has spurred continues it could ultimately prove to be one of the most expensive mistakes in US history.
Even then, the cost in materiel matters as well. Western supply chains and reserves have been tapped out to funnel that equipment to Ukraine, and those stocks have been considerably depleted (at least among EU member state militaries). While that's bad by itself, it becomes even worse when you remember who Russia's biggest ally is - China. The Chinese government is, presumably, sitting back and rubbing their hands together with glee as they watch the west burn vast amounts of military equipment on a pyre. Every bit of kit that gets blown up in the Ukraine or sold onto the black market by some unscrupulous oligarch is a piece of kit that is not going to be used in any prospective defence of Taiwan - if the US is getting a pretty great deal, you're gonna run out of superlatives when you try to describe the one China is getting.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
5mo ago
My reply to concerns like this has been consistent over time - where's the energy source that powers modern industrial civilisation once we run out of fossil fuels? Renewables and environmentally friendly forms of energy generation, as nice as they are, can't do it. Nuclear fusion has been 20 years away from being economical for the past 60 years, and there isn't a single nuclear power plant generating power at a profit without substantial government assistance anywhere in the world. You're right that the EROEI of the past isn't really relevant here, but the reason why it is brought up is in contrast to the negative EROEI of the present. Previously, making food meant that there was more net energy available to humans - now it means that there is less. We're eating the civilizational seed corn already. When the fundamental basis of your society is energy positive, your society is substantially more sustainable. We're currently consuming our savings faster than we can earn, and just hoping that we find a payday that can prop us up longer. There's no guarantee that that payday will ever arrive.
All those problems were supposed to be insurmountable centuries ago, but the carrying capacity of the earth has only grown exponentially.
If you actually go and look at history, you are not going to see a slow but exponential ramp up towards progress and complexity. You'll see a series of rises followed by falls - the progress of science did actually go into reverse at multiple points in history, and we're looking at the sort of trends and conditions that very reliably precede moments like that. Earth's true carrying capacity is unknowable and constant, but if you're judging based on what humans can do, we have actually gone backwards several times (Bronze-age collapse, collapse of Rome, etc).
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
6mo ago
It's to lock him up for the rest of his life.
See, the problem is that doing this will actually make Trump's cause stronger, and while they would like it if he was locked up for the rest of his life... that's not something they're going to be able to do before the election without severe and serious consequences. I agree that they aren't doing this to discredit him and make him unpopular, but I never actually made that claim. The claim that I made was that the goal is to hamper his ability to campaign - and that's actually a very reasonable assumption, especially when you know the broader history of the efforts from within the government to defeat him.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
8mo ago
While the current counteroffensive is certainly very lackluster, it's silly to just extrapolate a straight line on the rate of progress and thereafter assume nothing will change.
You're right that it would be silly to just find the angle of the line on the chart and zoom off into infinity - but luckily we don't actually have to do that. Serious people who are interested in these kinds of conflicts can actually take the historical context and modern situation into account when doing their extrapolations... it's just that when you do that you tend to arrive at conclusions unpopular with the PMC. Conclusions like "Ukraine has zero chance of winning this war", "The counteroffensive was a massive failure that wasted lots of Ukrainian lives" and "Putin's propaganda is substantially less effective at influencing popular opinion in the west than western propaganda". People have been advocating for peace and negotiation rather than continued conflict because they (correctly) view the continuing bloodshed as futile, and throwing more Ukrainian lives into the blender is just going to make things worse when the fighting comes to an end. If I actually hated Ukrainians, I'd encourage the US military to send them more fancy toys to encourage them to fight to the death in a suicidally quixotic quest to maximise shareholder returns in the US military industrial complex and degrade Russian military capability.
And just to show that I'm serious about these claims, I'll throw 200 USD in monero into escrow with the bet that Ukraine does not regain Crimea and the breakaway republics by the end of hostilities. If I'm just swallowing Putin's propaganda then this is free money sitting on the table, just waiting for you to pick it up and take it. But I will note that I haven't encountered a single person who believes the western propaganda enough to actually put any money on the line - to me it feels remarkably similar to people talking about how awful racism is then moving their children into 90% white suburbs.
You mean like how the USSR and the US won against Afghanistan?
There are multiple differences that make that comparison useless even in the incredibly glib phrasing I used - financially dependent specifically. But if you want to get into all of the reasons why the course of this war was largely predictable we'd be here for a while.
It's easy to flip this too and say the combined economic output of NATO vs Russia means Russia is destined to lose.
If you look at the ability to produce arms and materiel, NATO is actually the loser when compared to Russia and Russia's allies (China, Iran, North Korea etc). Comparing NATO to Russia alone isn't really that useful anyway, given that this is a conflict between a NATO proxy and Russia, as opposed to all out war between all of NATO and Russia alone.
it became an almost certainty that the war would be determined by how much military support the West was willing to give to Ukraine.
I disagree - the west isn't actually able to give Ukraine enough military support to change the ultimate outcome of the conflict. They're currently running out of Ukrainians (you don't start conscripting women and 17 year olds if you have a choice) and they're continuing to run out of territory too. If you're interested in an article that gets my perspective on the conflict across fairly accurately, I recommend https://www.ecosophia.net/notes-on-stormtrooper-syndrome/
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
5mo ago
I don't think time is a good way of measuring resources like this, because there's so much variability in future patterns of consumption. How much of that stored coal is uneconomical to extract, and how much more of it will be burned to make up for shortfalls elsewhere? Fossil fuel usage also contributes to pollution and environmental damage, and while you can ignore those costs on a corporate balance sheet (or at a country level, for a while) they eventually come home to roost and show up elsewhere. Rising sea levels are going to require an awful lot of energy expenditure to deal with, for example, and they're already starting to show up. The problems and costs associated with fossil fuels aren't far off in the future - they're already here, and they show no sign of going into reverse.
I also wasn't talking about biofuels at all, assuming you're using the term technically as distinct from fossil fuels. Nobody cares about biofuels because they're largely wastes of energy - why burn 13 calories of energy to make 1 calorie of food which then gets converted into fuel and hits efficiency again? You can get a bit of return from working with used cooking oil, but that's not exactly the sort of energy base you can power an industrial civilisation with.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
6mo ago
Concerning but I still tend to think they will try and fit in the system.
Why?
What possible motivation could the Chinese have to support the Pax Americana? They have been talking loudly for decades about the need to shift to a multipolar world and the replacement of the current system. They are explicitly allied with Russia in order to destroy the current system, and they have been working on projects to take the place of the current system for decades.
This is actually even worse than it seems. "Reasonably foreseeable witnesses or the substance of their testimony" could include a vast number of people - what's to say Chutkan can't come down on him for even the mildest political attack ad by saying that Biden is a potential witness for the prosecution? The entire point of this prosecution is to hamper Trump's efforts to campaign, and this is just one of the tools they're using to achieve that goal. The legal theory doesn't actually matter at all, because the point is to hurt Trump's campaign and it doesn't matter if their every decision is immediately revoked upon appeal because they will have hurt Trump in some way. It's not like there could be any reasonable restitution Trump could receive afterwards either.
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