Tintin
3d ago
You said building a fleet is proof of intention to use it. That's like saying anyone carrying a gun is premeditating murder. You interpret everything china does as aggressive against you, when it's far easier to see it as defensive in nature. The US is scary.
Tintin
3d ago
It's also not a coincidence that China has fleets of ships around South America, ostensibly to deplete the fish around the coast (which is bad enough.) But consider how many drones can fit in a shipping container.
They're fishing boats off the coast of Peru. Ukraine's drone containers were smuggled onto russian territory, a few hundred meters from the planes.
And no country goes through the enormous expense of building up a fleet without intending to use it.
Except the US, who, I assume, does it out of benevolence?
Tintin
7d ago
A woman who sleeps with Churchill for a million pounds is not a whore in any real sense. Just a rational being responding to incentives. She'd be mentally ill not to. Churchill's just using too-simple a definition for his little PUA trick.
Tintin
7d ago
I would call for restraint then - in fact, I would simply maintain my 'don't nuke' policy. You have a 'don't do anything that might provoke Russia to nuke' which is completely different. I urge the same restraint in similar circumstances for both - you want more restraint from the weaker, less dangerous, defensive party.
Tintin
7d ago
They also destroyed poor old innocent nuclear-capable bombers with the drone-truck attack.
Why would they not hit anything of value to russia they can? Do you think they need a suicidal reason(let's bait them to nuke us!) to not respect russian property? Why is all the onus of restraint on them, and never on the giant aggressor with nukes?
Tintin
7d ago
I believe the 'Ukraine trying to bait Russia into a nuclear strike' is well-worn Russian disinfo, whose main trick the whole war has been nuclear threats. If russians are that weak, and so desperate to nuke Ukraine, let's just go; I'll blame them, obviously, and not the victims of the nuclear strike, for 'baiting' the psychos.
I think it would be anger and a need to set an example so that kind of thing doesn’t happen again.
What are they going to do? Continue the war, but angrier? Nuke ukraine? Really? I'm trying to understand a moral framework where killing one murderous dictator is 'irresponsible' but nuclear strikes & risking nuclear annihilation, are justified by the various 'baits' of ukrainians.
Tintin
7d ago
What exactly is the history and legal and moral etiquette on assassinating heads of states you're at war with? Surely if Ivan can be killed in a trench, Vlad ought to be killed in a mansion?
The allies famously nixed a hitler assassination plan because they feared he might be replaced by a more competent leader. The americans tried killing Castro, Stalin Tito; recently, and pertaining to this current issue, russians poisoned Yushchenko, allegedly.
I think from the Ukrainian POV putin is very much worse than his replacement. It's his war, his costs are sunk, he has no interest in fessing up to what a giant waste of life, treasure and power his 'special military operation' has been. Can't really think of a reason to spare him. He just needs to die, it's a win-win situation for all.
Tintin
8d ago
"There's no real academic debate about what might happen hundreds of years in the future" - Okay .
I know some academics are prone to dramatic predictions of doom, but you know you don't have to take everything they say at face value, right? It honestly reads like you never double-check anything, do the barest of common-sense questioning.
Questions such as:
-
How can you reconcile 'all ports being underwater soon' with 'actual sea level rise for a century and a half being 0.2 m'. 'all ports Underwater' to me means 'dozens of meters', at least. How do you get from one to the other, when the straight extrapolation falls far short?
-
Why, if we are on a 'nasty transitory period' is, as always, the productivity of farmland increasing?
-
Why, if nuclear energy is 'uneconomical', does France have such cheap electricity compared to 'nuclear-exiting' Germany, and why does it export so much of it?
-
Why, if EROEI is determinant, were past societies with better EROEI so much poorer than we are?
Tintin
9d ago
Life is messy, no big deal. Kids aren't that fragile, they'd just go with the flow. I know just as many adults who blame their failures on their still-married parents than on their parents' divorce, and they're all full of shit. If we all wait until the perfect circumstances with the perfect partner and so on, to have kids, we simply won‘t be having enough. And that‘s too bad.
Tintin
9d ago
The world must be peopled. Just go forth and multiply, man.
I do agree with the stick in the muds commenters that you won‘t be legally in the clear . But really, the ‚best interest of the child‘ here is to be born, messiness of the world and circumstances notwithstanding.
You want it, the hot bisexual and her wife want it, the kid can be presumed to want it, the rest of the global present and future human population wants it, slam dunk really. Leaves only the minor matter of your wife‘s reluctance. Don‘t have all the details on that, an offering of flowers perhaps?
I do believe she‘s being a tad selfish, but don‘t tell her that in those words. She‘s got her fill of your seed, now she wants to deny it the whole world? And the priests as always are backing up the worst impulses of womanhood.
Tintin
11d ago
Does it even matter who wins this industrial competition? It might as well be a football game between foreign nations to me, and you. I just want to be, a swiss. To live comfortably without an overlord. If pikes no longer suffice, nukes.
When the japanese and south koreans copied and then bested american cars and german optics and swiss watches, did the americans and germans and swiss subsequently sink into poverty? No, they just got richer. It has never been a zero-sum game. Believers in zero-sum games end up playing negative-sum games.
Tintin
11d ago
do you have numbers for it?
Since the industrial revolution we went from 290 ppm CO2 to 424 ppm.
From 2002 to 2014, plants appear to have gone into overdrive, starting to pull more CO2 out of the air than they have done before.[33] The result was that the rate at which CO2 accumulates in the atmosphere did not increase during this time period, although previously, it had grown considerably in concert with growing greenhouse gas emissions.[33]
A 1993 review of scientific greenhouse studies found that a doubling of CO2 concentration would stimulate the growth of 156 different plant species by an average of 37%.
A 2005 review of 12 experiments at 475–600 ppm showed an average gain of 17% in crop yield, with legumes typically showing a greater response than other species and C4 plants generally showing less.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CO2_fertilization_effect#Observations_and_trends
We report a strong enhancement of photosynthesis across the observational network (9.1 gC m−2 year−2) and show that the CFE (CO2 Fertilization Effect) is responsible for 44% of the gross primary production (GPP) enhancement since the 2000s, with additional contributions primarily from warming (28%) .
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8915860/
Here we use three long-term satellite leaf area index (LAI) records and ten global ecosystem models to investigate four key drivers of LAI trends during 1982–2009. We show a persistent and widespread increase of growing season integrated LAI (greening) over 25% to 50% of the global vegetated area, whereas less than 4% of the globe shows decreasing LAI (browning). Factorial simulations with multiple global ecosystem models suggest that CO2 fertilization effects explain 70% of the observed greening trend, followed by nitrogen deposition (9%), climate change (8%) and land cover change (LCC) (4%). CO2 fertilization effects explain most of the greening trends in the tropics, whereas climate change resulted in greening of the high latitudes and the Tibetan Plateau.
https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate3004
Is it greater at high altitudes where one could expect CO2 increase produce larger impact in %?
I don‘t think so. According to this map, the CO2 fertilization effect is stronger at the equator, where there are more plants, more primary production already (rainforest) . Then less as you get further away from the equator. The quote above suggests plants at high latitudes need warmth more than CO2.
Tintin
14d ago
I do believe you‘re a religious ascetic-mystic of some sort.
- you starve your body of real food
- you deny yourself common comforts like cars
- you punish your body by extensive running
- you limit your mating prospects with exorbitant restrictions like your dietary and mobility vows
Tintin
14d ago
How do you figure every port city will be underwater? Total sea level rise since the 19th century is estimated at 15-25 cm. It's a joke.
Heat and CO2 have resulted in greater agricultural productivity for our plants already,and it's only going to get better from here. Gigantic areas of canadian and russian tundra are going to slowly become available for crops and human habitation.
France has had cheap electricity thanks to its nuclear power plants for decades now.
The 19th century english and americans had access to cheap, high quality fossil fuels - why weren't they richer than us?
Tintin
14d ago
I’m thinking about how to continue to live my life without buying a car so I don’t have to worry rising fuel and associated costs.
Enjoy your pilgrimage, sinner. Your conception of happiness is being eaten by wolves, because then at least you‘ll never have to experience being eaten by a bear. Sure, we can discuss it another time.
Tintin
14d ago
I don‘t think I was snarky, but in any case I don‘t mean to be. In fact, I have a dear friend who believes similar things to you, and it makes him miserable, and I really want to convince him. I‘m trying to do the right thing here. Aside from spreading cheer to my friends and fellow mottizens, I‘m interested in the psychology of this particular discussion: they say it‘s hard to get a man to change his opinion when his self-interest depends on not changing it. But for the green/degrowth people (and also communists , feminists, various doomers and conspirationists etc) , it would be far more advantageous for them to adopt a more optimistic, practical ideology!
Yet they don't. Which to me indicates that those cynical explanations are weak; people generally really believe what they say they believe because they think it's true, without ulterior motives.
Anyway, your argument is very theoretical , syllogism-like (1. resources are finite. 2.etc) , so I had to respond in kind – we‘re not disagreeing on actual figures of copper production.
I will go to bat for a higher standard of living between ~1950-1970 in America than now in America.
Okay, this is a concrete claim I disagree with. As evidence, I have (per capita) :
- inflation-adjusted salary
- number of household appliances and various luxuries
- number of cars
- square footage of dwelling
- life expectancy
- years of education
Tintin
14d ago
one sometimes guffaws at the preposterousness of the trusting behavior shown by e.g. victims
Another thing to remember is that those people were very very stupid. They believed straightforward ads. They were shorter than we are. Didn‘t get enough to eat, especially with the great depression. Flynn effect. Some vietnam/korea conscripts had three meals a day for the first time in their lives.
Tintin
14d ago
This is just throwing shit at the wall and see what sticks. The (also false) ecological destruction argument is entirely separate. If we run out of energy and resources, the ‚destruction‘ will cease.
Fusion? What about fission? We already have hundreds of years of proven uranium reserves, and it‘s a small part of nuclear energy generation cost.
According to your EROEI math, the romans, and then the 19th century english, were richer than we are, since they had access to high-grade resources they could mine for less energy.
Tintin
14d ago
A line-go-roughly-up price graph, a list of things copper is useful for, and price forecasts by banks and mining companies, that‘s your evidence? Not worth the paper they‘re - not -printed on.
Of course the grades have been getting worse. The grades of everything (coal (less anthracite more brown) , oil (less sweet more sour) , copper, uranium etc) have been getting worse since humans thought of something to do with them. The total amount of copper on Earth is around 1014 tons in the top kilometer of Earth's crust, which is about 5 million years' worth at the current rate of extraction. The only reason they don‘t find more deposits is because they aren‘t motivated at current prices.
Every time I have to ask the same question: What makes this moment special? People could have, and HAVE made, the exact same argument for the last 200 years at least. They were all wrong. You have your theory/intimate conviction that says ‚at some point we‘ll run out‘ on one side, and on the other you have empiric proof of your ideological forefathers being wrong every single time. We're observing a physical phenomenon, and you have a theory that sounds convincing but always fails , while I can predict exactly what happens - shouldn't you give up at some point?
Tintin
14d ago
We are basically already at peak oil and we hit peak copper this year.
Claims of being ‚at peak X right now‘ decompose into two elements, one is a completely unsupported and constantly falsified prediction of decline, the other the correct statement ‚we now produce more X than ever‘, which is hardly supportive to the doomer‘s central thesis. Despite the abundance of resources (as in, there are many types of useful resources), you never see these global peaks in hindsight, they‘re always hiding right around the corner.
Tintin
14d ago
„If I can save their marriage, I can save their mortgage“, thought Dick Fuld. It had been another long day. A lawyer had called, and a cop. The clock on the wall counted down the hours until another tranche defaulted. He lit another cigarette.
Tintin
15d ago
The thing with Cis-by-default is that the whole point of a default is that you don‘t need to describe it. You can save those bits of information. If you refer to someone as a man, all the default qualities are implied – het, ‚cis‘, normal in every way - unless otherwise specified. Queer theory and the trans movement produce verbal pollution, forcing people to specify useless information we leave out/imply („my pronouns are he/him“). Because they‘re autists who have a hard time with implicit clues. Instead of brave rebels asking questions no one dared to, they force people to repeat answers everyone already knew.
Tintin
15d ago
We have machines for that. Breeding ourselves into a giant troll that can beat up a gorilla is not an efficient use of our resources. We need to get to the stars. Carrying around all that muscle consumes far too many precious calories here on earth, so imagine trying to lift that deadweight out of earth's gravity. Plus it's unhealthy, mass causes cancer.
No, I don't think they use it all the time. The size of the US fleet is massive overkill for what it's used for. It's like Britain's old policy of having a bigger fleet than the next two powers combined. It wasn't because they needed the ships for some coups in zanzibar or wherever.
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