You have a raging hateboner for a wide swath of your country that you've painted with a broad brush dipped in a ridiculous stereotype. There are real people that match this stereotype, but they're far from common and certainly not representative of "intellectuals" in general. But you love the idea of this hatred they supposedly carry for the common folk, you feed off of the way it villainizes those damn smartass college kid lib'ruls, because without it they'd just be people who want equality based on immutable traits and pro-labor policies that would help those rural Americans far more than themselves, and then who would be your bogeyman? Not so easy to hate those people.
You might also find that nobody on the left dislikes people who live in rural locations, people who are poor or poorly educated, or people who are straight or white or Christian, specifically. They dislike people who support prejudicial policies and social norms (especially if done willingly), corporatocratic policies, and anti-scientific disinformation campaigns, for example. The fact that is a correlation between those sets of criteria is largely a coincidence. Leftists don't hate rural farmer-folk. Leftists hate prejudice, exploitation and lies. Leftists don't want them to turn gay and forge their country records into unicycles. They want them to at least give strangers the equality and decency any human deserves, and ditch their economic policies which are all tarted-up versions of "EVERY MAN FOR HIMSELF!" with the goal of fortifying white privilege at the cost of the absolute wealth of the 99%, especially their own.
Think about what it took to get you called a Nazi 20 years ago vs. today. Then: Shaved head, swastika tattoo, white supremacist. Now: supports Freedom of Speech, supports strong borders, thinks we have a problem with Islamic extremists, and hates Sharia Law.
They're both nazis, just the former you described are more overt and the latter you described (with euphemisms) know when to hide. They don't shave their heads and get swastika tattoos, but they're still white nationalists who want to establish an ethnostate, that's why they want "strong borders" (insane immigration restrictions) and "freedom of speech" (very specific dislike of private censorship against hate speech).
An American should not think there is meaningfully more of a problem with Islamic extremists than there is with homegrown right-wing terrorism, and if they dislike Sharia law (a very rational dislike), has no more reason to make it known than a Siberian has to state a dislike of heat waves.
The difference is that the nazis without shaved heads and swastika tats kept it on the down-low 20 years ago. They could make racist jokes with their buddies and not stand out so much from an Average Joe. Now that people are more sensitive to racism, these plainclothes nazis are having a hard time blending in with the rest of society, and at the same time have been emboldened by a nazi-sympathizing president, so they stand out more, and we can more easily recognize and call out the nazis in khakis who were previously hidden.
They do not want competition. They do not want capitalism. They want a pampered and feted lifestyle without worry.
And nobody should have that except the 0.1% ownership class?
If you look at history, unionization is basically the core engine of human progress. It's the only way that improved pay and reduced working hours have ever been gained, and that's the stuff that actually improves the economy, by putting money into the hands of people who will spend it soon, and giving them the time to spend on new and less essential things produced by technological advancement.
Without it, money concentrates in the hands of the ownership class, who seek to maximize inequality since it will make them feel more aristocratic. They're as least as happy to do that by impoverishing the masses as by enriching themselves, both of which are bad for the economy and humanity in general. People have less free time which decreases the number of non-essential services they can consume. All to feed the egos of a selfish few.
First, you need to learn the difference between median and mean. I didn't even ambiguously say "average," I said "median." So Bill Gates and the Obamas are not a factor here. Next, if you think a bit of college admission preference etc. is actually giving black people an overall advantage, you're kidding yourself and the numbers confirm it.
I agree it's more beneficial to seek justice for the 99% than the 11%, but not if it comes at the cost of massively deferring or abandoning the 11% getting justice. If the alt-right is pursuing this tactic it could possibly even make sense to join forces with them on this goal and go back to fighting them tooth and nail after it's achieved. But you have to be very careful about joining forces with the worst people operating with the worst intentions.
Your incentive should be some sense of fairness or moral obligation to do good - admittedly a rare trait, especially among any privileged class.
In the US, the median white family has nearly 10x the wealth of the median black family, and this gap has not been steadily decreasing. Broadly speaking there are only two possible explanations, one acknowledges racism (that slavery's legacy is still hurting people today and minorities are still discriminated against - IOW, white privilege is real) and the other is racist (that there is some inherent difference between races that produces this huge inequality independently of any possible societal biases). Choose one.
HINT: Racist beliefs are ethically and scientifically wrong bullshit for dimwits.
If you believe wealth privilege isn't real, then you're a useful idiot for the 1%. If you believe white privilege isn't real, then you're a useful idiot for white supremacists.
Solve all the problems, don't be a useful idiot for anyone.
You either have to accept that the skinheads are going to get their chance to speak, or accept that you'll never be able to speak freely on any subject ever again.
Indeed, down the path of hate speech laws lies the dystopian hell of...Germany? Canada? England?
So in other words, these various electric technologies we're discussing are the worst at what they do except for all those other technologies that have been tried from time to time? I could agree with that.
As for not moving energy long distances, that sounds like either an argument for urbanization or for local power generation. I'm all for local power generation if it means renewable power, but it's better to inefficiently pipe in clean or at least futureproof power from elsewhere than to produce power locally from fossil energy.
This conspiratorial, counterfactual nonsense should be looked down upon at least as harshly as holocaust denial. It's just as clearly counterfactual and almost as clearly denying past deaths, and is more immediately and effectively paving the way for future ones. It isn't merely anti-semitic but anti-human (the latter being a superset of the former), and the scale and immediacy of the harm it threatens and has successfully brought about is far greater.
Holocaust denial aims to bring genocide against Jews, but climate conspiracism/denial aims to bring ruin to all of human civilization, causing far more death and suffering, stunting humanity's future permanently. So why does society treat climate denial with kid gloves compared to holocaust denial? My guess is that it comes down to emotional reasons. It doesn't feel as personally cruel to target all of humanity as it does to target a minority.
There's nothing inherently inefficient about electricity and it's used in our most efficient methods of converting potential energy to kinetic energy (electric motors), moving energy long distances (high-voltage lines including superconducting lines), and heating and cooling (electric heat pumps).
The reason "the hip thing to do is to electrify everything" is because it's generally more efficient, and even when it isn't (in which case it usually just about matches other methods), it gives greater flexibility in energy sources.
Around 0.5% of the US population are transgender. What are they not doing to accommodate you that you'd like them to do? You already have full legal recognition of your gender so unfortunately they can't offer you that in return.
And just how much effort would it take for you to not prevent these legal classifications from being put into place? Since it's so difficult for you that you expect some kind of compensation...
If you define conservatism by its means rather than its ends, then it would make sense to call Stalin a conservative. The typical means has been small government/personal responsibility/loose regulation etc. to preserve old moneyed interests (the aristocracy) in a capitalist economy. Under Soviet communism, the aristocracy was slaughtered and the politburo soon became the new aristocracy, and the method of preserving and elevating that aristocracy was now to perpetuate their (very unequal) communist system.
It's worth considering that it didn't distribute resources anywhere near as unequally as Western capitalism now does. The politburo had what we would consider upper-middle class lifestyles while most people were dirt poor. In contemporary Western capitalism, most people aren't doing so well but our aristocracy is hyper-wealthy space royalty, rich far beyond what the politburo ever could've dreamed (or had nightmares) of. I'm sure just the golden parachutes of Andy Rubin or Megyn Kelly alone could've kept the whole politburo in their dachas for a good few years.
There are absolutely legitimate and very important reasons for total anonymity. Not everyone breaking the law is working against the best interests of humanity.
True, you have a good point here. There are technologies that empower criminals but also help people who are breaking the law in the interests of humanity. In these cases I think it's important to weigh how these technologies are used for good and bad in the real world in order to assess their benevolence or malevolence.
Darknets, for example. I have weighed the positives and negatives here and come out in support of darknets. They're used by all kinds of criminals including pedophiles and terrorists to evade law enforcement surveillance and carry out terrible crimes in a slightly more secure manner, but they're also used by journalists and dissidents around the world to evade surveillance by people who would persecute or prosecute them for thought crimes and gain access to information censored by authoritarian governments. There aren't any similarly good alternatives for replicating these positive uses by other means without including the negatives. I think the good outweighs the bad there by a small margin, so I support darknets.
Now onto cryptocurrencies. The most common uses of cryptocurrencies are cybercrime finance including ransomware payments, purchasing things that are illegal mostly for good reasons, as an instrument for gambling disguised as investment, and committing white-collar crimes like routing around foreign exchange controls, running fraud investments, and evading taxes. Another big downside is its incredible inefficiency leading to ludicrous energy consumption when the planet can least afford it.
On the positive side, you could use it to enhance privacy in some harmless purchases that you'd rather not share with your credit card processor and their marketing affiliates (although gift cards can be used to achieve much the same thing in many cases), and I suppose you could use it to get money to benevolent institutions inside authoritarian regimes although I've never heard of it being used this way - most authoritarian regimes have outlawed cryptocurrencies. These are things you couldn't do with an alternative, the libertarians getting their jollies by buying fidget spinners from Overstock with Bitcoin don't count because that could be done just as well with a credit card. These positive uses also seem to be vanishingly rare. So to me the negatives appear to greatly outweigh the positives with cryptocurrencies, which is why I think they're a bad idea.
Most financial crises have nothing to do with a currency's central control entity, and as should be obvious the power of banks is a completely unrelated problem. The solution that cryptocurrency could offer is looking for a problem to solve, while bringing along many new problems of its own.
No, that statement is true, I said cryptocurrencies, not blockchain technology in general. There are a few positive niche uses for a blockchain in notary services and computer security.
Your hypothetical scenario makes no sense when applied to currency or payment in a sane world. There is no practical reason not to have a central control entity. Central control entities have been handling our currency and payments pretty decently overall for centuries. They have screwed up a few times, but it's a small price to pay compared to the environmental and criminal costs and risks of cryptocurrencies, to say nothing of its slowness and general inefficiency.
When your credit card number gets stolen, it's the payment provider's responsibility to restore the money you lost. Stolen wallet files or payments made to addresses with typos in them are gone forever.
The existence of wealthy democratic politicians does not conflict with the historical goals of conservatism. The Clintons are barely democratic centrist politicians anyway. But if Prince Harry were to go into politics on a far-left platform, that would not conflict with conservatism's goals any more than if broke-ass Jed from the trailer park got elected as a conservative President and put set of regressive tax brackets in place.
No, Paypal's high fees are not an argument for cryptocurrency. Remember that the hard resource/administrative costs of operating or working with a cryptocurrency are not in any way cheaper than operating any traditional electronic currency. If a cryptocurrency is cheaper, that can only be due to three factors:
1. Regulatory circumvention 2. Externalized costs 3. Price gouging by traditional payment providers
If it's 1 and/or 2 you're only saving money by shifting the costs elsewhere (onto crime victims or other miners and/or simply onto the environment), and for 3 it's just a matter of shifting to a different provider if regulatory capture isn't preventing one from arising (this is where most of the higher costs of Paypal are vs. cryptocurrency). There are other traditional payment providers out there with 2~4% fees, which is also the ballpark for cryptocurrency exchanges.
It's a lie or at least bad math to say that accumulated cyclone energy has been trending downward for 30 years. It's rather flat overall for the last 30 years, and has decreased over the last 10 years due to natural variation:
I know the deniosphere loves to try to fit declining curves against this short-term spiky but long-term flat graph, but this technical number is not that important and the only one that doesn't show a clear upward trend. Hurricane frequency is steadily increasing:
These numbers are more practically relevant than accumulated cyclone energy, and you can see it where the rubber hits the road: in the clear upward trend in storm & flood damage costs, even against our improving preparedness:
And let's not forget that there is zero, zilch, no advantage to using cryptocurrencies for anything but crimes. Non-blockchain payment services are at least as good, sometimes much better for anything where you're OK with your payments being traceable and visible to law enforcement and financial regulators. Sometimes you can even enhance privacy with traditional payment systems using gift cards.
Cryptocurrencies could enhance privacy in a few legal purchases, but it's certainly not worth the environmental cost alone, to say nothing of how it empowers criminals. This is a technology that should and must be left to die.
Slashdot Mirror
You have a raging hateboner for a wide swath of your country that you've painted with a broad brush dipped in a ridiculous stereotype. There are real people that match this stereotype, but they're far from common and certainly not representative of "intellectuals" in general. But you love the idea of this hatred they supposedly carry for the common folk, you feed off of the way it villainizes those damn smartass college kid lib'ruls, because without it they'd just be people who want equality based on immutable traits and pro-labor policies that would help those rural Americans far more than themselves, and then who would be your bogeyman? Not so easy to hate those people.
You might also find that nobody on the left dislikes people who live in rural locations, people who are poor or poorly educated, or people who are straight or white or Christian, specifically. They dislike people who support prejudicial policies and social norms (especially if done willingly), corporatocratic policies, and anti-scientific disinformation campaigns, for example. The fact that is a correlation between those sets of criteria is largely a coincidence. Leftists don't hate rural farmer-folk. Leftists hate prejudice, exploitation and lies. Leftists don't want them to turn gay and forge their country records into unicycles. They want them to at least give strangers the equality and decency any human deserves, and ditch their economic policies which are all tarted-up versions of "EVERY MAN FOR HIMSELF!" with the goal of fortifying white privilege at the cost of the absolute wealth of the 99%, especially their own.
Think about what it took to get you called a Nazi 20 years ago vs. today. Then: Shaved head, swastika tattoo, white supremacist. Now: supports Freedom of Speech, supports strong borders, thinks we have a problem with Islamic extremists, and hates Sharia Law.
They're both nazis, just the former you described are more overt and the latter you described (with euphemisms) know when to hide. They don't shave their heads and get swastika tattoos, but they're still white nationalists who want to establish an ethnostate, that's why they want "strong borders" (insane immigration restrictions) and "freedom of speech" (very specific dislike of private censorship against hate speech).
An American should not think there is meaningfully more of a problem with Islamic extremists than there is with homegrown right-wing terrorism, and if they dislike Sharia law (a very rational dislike), has no more reason to make it known than a Siberian has to state a dislike of heat waves.
The difference is that the nazis without shaved heads and swastika tats kept it on the down-low 20 years ago. They could make racist jokes with their buddies and not stand out so much from an Average Joe. Now that people are more sensitive to racism, these plainclothes nazis are having a hard time blending in with the rest of society, and at the same time have been emboldened by a nazi-sympathizing president, so they stand out more, and we can more easily recognize and call out the nazis in khakis who were previously hidden.
They do not want competition. They do not want capitalism. They want a pampered and feted lifestyle without worry.
And nobody should have that except the 0.1% ownership class?
If you look at history, unionization is basically the core engine of human progress. It's the only way that improved pay and reduced working hours have ever been gained, and that's the stuff that actually improves the economy, by putting money into the hands of people who will spend it soon, and giving them the time to spend on new and less essential things produced by technological advancement.
Without it, money concentrates in the hands of the ownership class, who seek to maximize inequality since it will make them feel more aristocratic. They're as least as happy to do that by impoverishing the masses as by enriching themselves, both of which are bad for the economy and humanity in general. People have less free time which decreases the number of non-essential services they can consume. All to feed the egos of a selfish few.
The PiratePirateBay?
First, you need to learn the difference between median and mean. I didn't even ambiguously say "average," I said "median." So Bill Gates and the Obamas are not a factor here. Next, if you think a bit of college admission preference etc. is actually giving black people an overall advantage, you're kidding yourself and the numbers confirm it.
I agree it's more beneficial to seek justice for the 99% than the 11%, but not if it comes at the cost of massively deferring or abandoning the 11% getting justice. If the alt-right is pursuing this tactic it could possibly even make sense to join forces with them on this goal and go back to fighting them tooth and nail after it's achieved. But you have to be very careful about joining forces with the worst people operating with the worst intentions.
Your incentive should be some sense of fairness or moral obligation to do good - admittedly a rare trait, especially among any privileged class.
In the US, the median white family has nearly 10x the wealth of the median black family, and this gap has not been steadily decreasing. Broadly speaking there are only two possible explanations, one acknowledges racism (that slavery's legacy is still hurting people today and minorities are still discriminated against - IOW, white privilege is real) and the other is racist (that there is some inherent difference between races that produces this huge inequality independently of any possible societal biases). Choose one.
HINT: Racist beliefs are ethically and scientifically wrong bullshit for dimwits.
If you believe wealth privilege isn't real, then you're a useful idiot for the 1%. If you believe white privilege isn't real, then you're a useful idiot for white supremacists.
Solve all the problems, don't be a useful idiot for anyone.
You either have to accept that the skinheads are going to get their chance to speak, or accept that you'll never be able to speak freely on any subject ever again.
Indeed, down the path of hate speech laws lies the dystopian hell of...Germany? Canada? England?
So in other words, these various electric technologies we're discussing are the worst at what they do except for all those other technologies that have been tried from time to time? I could agree with that.
As for not moving energy long distances, that sounds like either an argument for urbanization or for local power generation. I'm all for local power generation if it means renewable power, but it's better to inefficiently pipe in clean or at least futureproof power from elsewhere than to produce power locally from fossil energy.
Exactly, if everyone keeps quiet and allows runaway inequality to continue to worsen unimpeded, everything will be fine forever!
What methods of moving energy long distances and heating/cooling are more efficient?
This conspiratorial, counterfactual nonsense should be looked down upon at least as harshly as holocaust denial. It's just as clearly counterfactual and almost as clearly denying past deaths, and is more immediately and effectively paving the way for future ones. It isn't merely anti-semitic but anti-human (the latter being a superset of the former), and the scale and immediacy of the harm it threatens and has successfully brought about is far greater.
Holocaust denial aims to bring genocide against Jews, but climate conspiracism/denial aims to bring ruin to all of human civilization, causing far more death and suffering, stunting humanity's future permanently. So why does society treat climate denial with kid gloves compared to holocaust denial? My guess is that it comes down to emotional reasons. It doesn't feel as personally cruel to target all of humanity as it does to target a minority.
Indeed the correct number is about 4%, which is still huge but is less than half of 10%.
https://www.earth-syst-sci-dat...
Electricity is inefficient.
LOLWUT?
There's nothing inherently inefficient about electricity and it's used in our most efficient methods of converting potential energy to kinetic energy (electric motors), moving energy long distances (high-voltage lines including superconducting lines), and heating and cooling (electric heat pumps).
The reason "the hip thing to do is to electrify everything" is because it's generally more efficient, and even when it isn't (in which case it usually just about matches other methods), it gives greater flexibility in energy sources.
Around 0.5% of the US population are transgender. What are they not doing to accommodate you that you'd like them to do? You already have full legal recognition of your gender so unfortunately they can't offer you that in return.
And just how much effort would it take for you to not prevent these legal classifications from being put into place? Since it's so difficult for you that you expect some kind of compensation...
I switched around means and ends in the opening sentence obviously...
If you define conservatism by its means rather than its ends, then it would make sense to call Stalin a conservative. The typical means has been small government/personal responsibility/loose regulation etc. to preserve old moneyed interests (the aristocracy) in a capitalist economy. Under Soviet communism, the aristocracy was slaughtered and the politburo soon became the new aristocracy, and the method of preserving and elevating that aristocracy was now to perpetuate their (very unequal) communist system.
It's worth considering that it didn't distribute resources anywhere near as unequally as Western capitalism now does. The politburo had what we would consider upper-middle class lifestyles while most people were dirt poor. In contemporary Western capitalism, most people aren't doing so well but our aristocracy is hyper-wealthy space royalty, rich far beyond what the politburo ever could've dreamed (or had nightmares) of. I'm sure just the golden parachutes of Andy Rubin or Megyn Kelly alone could've kept the whole politburo in their dachas for a good few years.
Forget the mail bombers and the wannabe apartment shooters and the vehicle attackers, those women in pussyhats are the real threat.
There are absolutely legitimate and very important reasons for total anonymity. Not everyone breaking the law is working against the best interests of humanity.
True, you have a good point here. There are technologies that empower criminals but also help people who are breaking the law in the interests of humanity. In these cases I think it's important to weigh how these technologies are used for good and bad in the real world in order to assess their benevolence or malevolence.
Darknets, for example. I have weighed the positives and negatives here and come out in support of darknets. They're used by all kinds of criminals including pedophiles and terrorists to evade law enforcement surveillance and carry out terrible crimes in a slightly more secure manner, but they're also used by journalists and dissidents around the world to evade surveillance by people who would persecute or prosecute them for thought crimes and gain access to information censored by authoritarian governments. There aren't any similarly good alternatives for replicating these positive uses by other means without including the negatives. I think the good outweighs the bad there by a small margin, so I support darknets.
Now onto cryptocurrencies. The most common uses of cryptocurrencies are cybercrime finance including ransomware payments, purchasing things that are illegal mostly for good reasons, as an instrument for gambling disguised as investment, and committing white-collar crimes like routing around foreign exchange controls, running fraud investments, and evading taxes. Another big downside is its incredible inefficiency leading to ludicrous energy consumption when the planet can least afford it.
On the positive side, you could use it to enhance privacy in some harmless purchases that you'd rather not share with your credit card processor and their marketing affiliates (although gift cards can be used to achieve much the same thing in many cases), and I suppose you could use it to get money to benevolent institutions inside authoritarian regimes although I've never heard of it being used this way - most authoritarian regimes have outlawed cryptocurrencies. These are things you couldn't do with an alternative, the libertarians getting their jollies by buying fidget spinners from Overstock with Bitcoin don't count because that could be done just as well with a credit card. These positive uses also seem to be vanishingly rare. So to me the negatives appear to greatly outweigh the positives with cryptocurrencies, which is why I think they're a bad idea.
Most financial crises have nothing to do with a currency's central control entity, and as should be obvious the power of banks is a completely unrelated problem. The solution that cryptocurrency could offer is looking for a problem to solve, while bringing along many new problems of its own.
No, that statement is true, I said cryptocurrencies, not blockchain technology in general. There are a few positive niche uses for a blockchain in notary services and computer security.
Your hypothetical scenario makes no sense when applied to currency or payment in a sane world. There is no practical reason not to have a central control entity. Central control entities have been handling our currency and payments pretty decently overall for centuries. They have screwed up a few times, but it's a small price to pay compared to the environmental and criminal costs and risks of cryptocurrencies, to say nothing of its slowness and general inefficiency.
When your credit card number gets stolen, it's the payment provider's responsibility to restore the money you lost. Stolen wallet files or payments made to addresses with typos in them are gone forever.
The existence of wealthy democratic politicians does not conflict with the historical goals of conservatism. The Clintons are barely democratic centrist politicians anyway. But if Prince Harry were to go into politics on a far-left platform, that would not conflict with conservatism's goals any more than if broke-ass Jed from the trailer park got elected as a conservative President and put set of regressive tax brackets in place.
No, Paypal's high fees are not an argument for cryptocurrency. Remember that the hard resource/administrative costs of operating or working with a cryptocurrency are not in any way cheaper than operating any traditional electronic currency. If a cryptocurrency is cheaper, that can only be due to three factors:
1. Regulatory circumvention
2. Externalized costs
3. Price gouging by traditional payment providers
If it's 1 and/or 2 you're only saving money by shifting the costs elsewhere (onto crime victims or other miners and/or simply onto the environment), and for 3 it's just a matter of shifting to a different provider if regulatory capture isn't preventing one from arising (this is where most of the higher costs of Paypal are vs. cryptocurrency). There are other traditional payment providers out there with 2~4% fees, which is also the ballpark for cryptocurrency exchanges.
It's a lie or at least bad math to say that accumulated cyclone energy has been trending downward for 30 years. It's rather flat overall for the last 30 years, and has decreased over the last 10 years due to natural variation:
https://www.skepticalscience.c...
I know the deniosphere loves to try to fit declining curves against this short-term spiky but long-term flat graph, but this technical number is not that important and the only one that doesn't show a clear upward trend. Hurricane frequency is steadily increasing:
https://phys.org/news/2013-03-...
Also hurricane intensity and power dissipation are sharply increasing:
https://www.skepticalscience.c...
These numbers are more practically relevant than accumulated cyclone energy, and you can see it where the rubber hits the road: in the clear upward trend in storm & flood damage costs, even against our improving preparedness:
https://phys.org/news/2017-11-...
Also while strong tornadoes are decreasing and tornado energy is flat, tornado count is steadily increasing:
https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc...
And let's not forget that there is zero, zilch, no advantage to using cryptocurrencies for anything but crimes. Non-blockchain payment services are at least as good, sometimes much better for anything where you're OK with your payments being traceable and visible to law enforcement and financial regulators. Sometimes you can even enhance privacy with traditional payment systems using gift cards.
Cryptocurrencies could enhance privacy in a few legal purchases, but it's certainly not worth the environmental cost alone, to say nothing of how it empowers criminals. This is a technology that should and must be left to die.