Be it as it may that nobody who isn't a mainstream climate scientist is allowed to hold any opinion on the subject, and that climate science trumps all other related fields like statistics or geology, it is still reasonable to question the proposed remedies and actions, perhaps more so when those remedies appear to be promoted by idiots. Technology and social values progress anyway, but the idiots seem to think this can be made to happen to a schedule, and if it can't then they want to reincarnate as a virus to smite the selfish human race. Meanwhile people all over the world continue to make little improvements in technology and society and well, patience is a virtue. There is what's commonly known as the "third" world and the "second" world which are working gradually to improve and educate their girls, and get basic treatable diseases handled, so child mortality can come down, people can return to having two kids per family, and afford a bicycle to get to market, and so on. Doomsday didn't happen, they shifted the date into the future. Well nobody knows the future. Let's all just do our best to make the incremental improvements we can, and test and assess each innovation to see what value, if any, it really offers.
When new evidence contradicts a theory, it doesn't mean the theory is wrong, as there could be something wrong with the new evidence. But it could also mean the theory is wrong. So we make progress with trial and error.
What made me a concerned sceptic on AGW was the claim that the evidence was incontriverible and that to question, to ask if it might be wrong, is morally akin to denying the holocaust, that to question it is to doubt whether the sun would rise in the morning, and to doubt the whole edifice of science.
I would point out that the reason we trust science is that it is self-correcting, with the caveat that the processs of self-correction, over a group of thousands of professionals, that self correction takes decades. Sometimes even 50 years.
When even the head of the IPCC is on video, telling a bunch of young people that, the denialists are like the people who still believe the earth is flat, and the same head of IPCC calls some indian scientists who checked a claim about a mountain range's ice melting by 2035 and found it mistaken, and the IPCC guy then responds and calls then "vodoo scientists", only for it to come to light later that the 2035 number was a simple mistranscription of 2350, you really start to wonder about the culture.
The theory may be right, but if you go round attacking anyone who disagrees, the self correction process becomes a very slow event. Instead of self correcting in 10 years, you are now having to wait until everyone who supports it professionally has retired.
In a climate where people are branded denialists, the self correction goes out the window. We can no longer KNOW if the theory is indeed right, largely right, needs some adjusting, or is just based on mistaken understanding.
If I don't have kids, does the world owe me a million dollars, for all the "externalises" I have saved? I am sure it is more than that, actually.
I am fond of the notion that real wealth is people inventing new clever stuff that saves us all having to own slaves or be slaves. Everything else seems to be made up money, printing money, carbon credits, etc. If someone invented a cheap way to cure cancer, that would take a massive burden off the health system. If politicians are just arguing over which of their lobbyists should gain more influence for the sake of things being more privately financed or more publicly financed, that's not a whole lot of difference, on average, apart from arguments over inequalities, compared to a nation which has high child mortality rates.
If wind power was so good, I think we'd recognise its life enhancing effect. Chop chop, chop chop.
I mean that a huge problem in talking about science and religion, is that to many people, they appear to be two completely separate categories, wheras it is more like what you say (and i tried to say in my post) that we all have things we value, but which we would be very hard to objectively prove are actually of more value.
But there is still to bear in mind that there are levels of reasonableness, so there is a big difference between believing in love because you rationally know that all humans are valuable, and believing in love because of a purely mythic belief system forced you to believe it, the book says it, the book is truth, i must not question it, because questioning (thinking for myself) is herecy.
Huge problem mixing "science" and "religion" is that for many, religion is about "faith" and science is about reason. So it invokes the pre-modern versus the modern. Another problem is not just faith but the content of that faith. The Protestant Work Ethic is credited by some as a key ingredient why the West developed so fast, as the faith was, work for the sake of work, develop for the sake of development. That is a huge contrast to mere warlord hedonism, or a monk sitting recluse and fasting. Arguably, faith in modern progress is a thing people value and value for its own sake. So one can say that science has this aspect of faith in self determined progress and ability to lift ourselves out of material mysery. However, we are now talking a very reasonable humanistic value, in contrast to "kill the hethens" and "burn the witches who float like ducks" faiths which are just ignorance, along with "world created in 6 days". Now any atheist may say they have zero beliefs, but ask them what they want, and it is stuff like, to love my family, to see my children happy, to make a positive impact on the world. Now as it happens, none of those answers can survive a thorough postmodern deconstruction, they are all groundless, or "empty" as some Buddhists might say. So where are the atheists who say, "Darling, of course I don't love you, we all know I merely have a flow of hormones and other mood altering chemicals flowing around my brain, for survival reasons, selected by the environment from random mutations" No of course not, there are things which we still value as intrinsic to human life, not life as a collection of 40 trillion cells, but sentient experienced life with compassion and love. There is no reason why as biological machines, we need to be sentient, my brain can respond to the environment without there needing to be "anybody here" to experience the show. Anyway, this is where you can get into a scientific humanistic rational ethical purposeful arena, where as we understand more about the brain, and psychology, we can maybe understand more what makes people happy, what makes for better education, what makes for a better and healthier life. Here some rational "atheists" would be happy to include anything we might already have some ideas about, such as Buddhist self-questioning, who are you? and certain meditation, etc. as a small part of an overall scientific understanding of love, insofar as these things can be rationally tested, not merely believed. And if that means that most of traditional religious teaching is shown up to be the head fuck that it really is, well so be it.
I don't disagree but I'm reading someone's code at the moment, some routines in R, and the word "training" is in the name of a routine, but it doesn't explain in which sense of the word "training". So now I have to try to figure out the meaning of the result. I'm sure it was obvious to the author. Maybe fine grained comments are bad, but an overall story explaining in ordinary words the overall intent and picture would be nice. Anyway, IANAP.
"Having a conversation with the sketchbook" is a notion in visual design like architecture or construction. For little scripting tasks, I find talking to the comments an exercise in clarifying what I am trying to do and why. The intention, the way it fits the bigger picture. The code is the reality, the comments are the mental intention. Unless it is a very well understood area where to be a programmer you really have to know the domain and the problems very well, so the code is immediately obvious to the trained eye. But for run of the mill make stuff up as we go along problems, the intention needs to be talked about, methinks.
I gather the real basis for "diversity" is the cognitive skill of finding fault with one's own thinking, beliefs, attitudes, etc. But too often it is merely used as a narrative to find fault with the opponent. Basically, honest diversity is about being able to deconstruct one's own view, "maybe we are treating gays unfairly". So it is an actual skill HOWEVER, unless one has that "bending over backwards to prove one's self wrong" skill, the teaching of diversity can merely encourage tribalism. Basically, you get good at deconstructing the other's views, "gee you must have some hidden neocolonialist power drive", but don't get round to deconstructing your OWN views, "gee I wonder if I am using the neocolonialist phallocentric racist narrative to bypass any need to look at whether my own views might also contain some errors which need examining." Which is where perhaps the "left" then fails to deliver, because in trying to promote diversity, it doesn't examine the key ingredients which are necessary for true diversity, namely developing the cognitive skills. So the kids who are already smart enough to get diversity, because they criticise their own views just as honestly as they criticise other's views, can thrive in these exercises. But the kids who don't already have the skill, will find it a bridge too bar, the curriculum is literally over their heads, and instead tend to interpret the lesson as a free pass to encourage tribalism. Of course, a left narrative is that everyone is equally smart, it is just life or society that is unfair, so the notion of a teaching about diversity being "over their heads" sounds nasty, but the consequence, if true, is that the left ends up ignoring the needs of those people whom it most desires to help. It is just a matter of adding some intermediary steps toward diversity. One book on cognitive development describes engaging kids in a boat building project, where they get to build their own boat, so that's the "selfish" motivation, but the work is arranged so that for some tasks, they need to help each other in a cooperative way, so it gradually introduces social bonding and social cooperative skills. But it doesn't make those the obvious goal. Anyway, IANA... etc.
There's actually a pretty long history in the monotheistic faiths that, the way to make a good world is to ban all the bad stuff. Some traditions, however, eventually twigged that this doesn't in the end, actually work quite how they intended, and so the "tantra" paths were created, basically, you can't eradicate aggression, but you can transform it into something more productive. I'm told there is a huge amount of repression of sex in the Middle Eastern cultures, and this is all driving people a little nuts. Anyway, now they have the internet. Anyway, going back to paleo man, wasn't there another story that beer drinking allowed them to relax the tribal social rules, which in turn made possible some creative thinking? Inspector Morse may have been the erudite educated type, but he shared that basic human practice with his pale ancestors. Drink, and think. Gee, maybe the crazy woman who fancies me did it...
Some say there's a cold war between Saudi Arabia and Iran. After the victory of the 1979 revolution, Iran really thought the rest of the Middle East would fall in their direction. But then they lost the Iran-Iraq war, so it was to their advantage for USA go in and remove Saddam, leaving room for the Iranian proxy armies to take over after the Americans left. But Saudi Arabia does not want an Iranian crescent of states encircling it, so Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, etc. are all war zones between the Iranian proxy armies and the Saudi proxy armies. And the rumour now with regard to USA restricting Iran's nuclear development, is that if the restrictions don't go far enough, and Iran gets the bomb and missiles, well Saudis have let slip a rumour that they helped fund the Pakistan nuclear programme on the proviso they could have delivery of nukes anytime they wanted. Of course, which is truth and which is lies, well, interesting times. Why was USA on Saddam's side, until it all changed?
I am not going to prove to anyone on Slashdot in three paragraphs. I'm talking a dozen books, 4 year personal experiment with my wife and I, and the stuff that some doctors are now starting to speak out about. It is actually how my own body seems to react that is most tentatively convincing to me. I do not believe I am right. I can only go with what I can see so far. Many people have no interest in changing their food lifestyle anyhow, I had motivation from health issues. So I'm now into Paleo, LCHF, Primal, etc. So far so good. So I mention it in case anyone else just hasn't heard of it. As an earlier poster said, it boils down to us not being cows, or apes with large bellies which can digest that much vegetable and fruit matter. Paleo is simply, eat what we were eating 500,000 years ago. That might not be the real answer. But it has some logic to it. I say to explain, not to convince. At the end of the day, your own body is the only judge. Your body doesn't care what your or my opinion is. We're just the clueless humans trying to understand what our biology requires. Legumes etc. in Paleo are anti-nutrients. If you know anyone with digestive problems, see if they can cope with those. I've seen people basically have to give up soya products 100% (no milk, no anything) in order to see improvement in their digestive problems. But everyone is different. The trouble is, it is very hard to scientifically study nutrition, because you can't force a diet on people for 50 years, you can't find out what eating fruit "healthy 5 a day" does to you 50 years down the line. That's why there is so much disagreement on food.
Also, the sort of grand experiment with our food chain is something I'm not a fan of. Original Nations who ate meat and fat (all grass fed), and were to some accounts quite healthy, good teeth, good bones, compared to the high carb, high sugar, highly processed foods, high soy, low fat yoghurts packed with hidden sugar, etc. etc. substitutes which, according to some reports, we're starting to see the outcome in how even children now get diabetes, whilst still in the womb. It takes a few generations to see the results.
I would much rather save energy on other stuff than on foods, which leads to massive health costs. I would rather continue to get the bus to work, never own a car (have never owned a car), not have too many kids (actually have no kids), and to appease the CO2 people, never fly (I fly once in 10 years), and keep the heating low and wear furry fleeces around the house. I'd insulate but the house is way too old for that, so I settle for better glazing. But food? Mess with that and may as well not be living in a first world country.
Well her point in her book is that you'd be better just letting cows eat their natural diet, grass. Then we eat the cows. Like the food chain was originally.
It has become a "moral" issue, numbers don't matter. Unless you're talking carbon trading, in which case made up numbers and made up money matter a lot. Or would if they could. Who cares if Africa can't turn the lights on? I hope China continues to build infrastructure in Africa, because the West isn't going to help them. Not far from where I used to live in Africa, in a small town, there is now a football stadium, built by the Chinese. I saw it on Google Earth and was like, what the heck is that?
Food can be controversial, but I'll just chip in that all those fields of wheat and soya rely on intensive agriculture, stripping the diversity, excluding many species, and is heavily reliant on oil.
There is just a meme that veganism is good, CO2 is bad, therefore veganism is an answer to global warming.
Anyone interested in questioning this can read The Vegetarian Myth by a ex-long term vegan lady, as she explored whether veganism actually means less killing in practice, and whether it actually means better health in practice. Also, in Sweden you have the LCHF movement. So I wonder if the army is just trying to save money.
Yes I don't think much of it either on the whole, which is why I tried to quote exactly what they did and what result they claim they got. From there, infer what you will.
In Pinker's Better Angels of Our Nature, he describes a study done on attitudes throughout USA. The study was in the form of a letter, written as if from a guy looking for a job, and the letter was sent to employers round the country. The letter made an admission, "I think you should know, I was involved in a murder, I was confronted by a guy in a bar and we had to take it outside, and he suddenly had a knife and I had to defend myself, and he died." Employers in the Northern states were not sympathetic to him. Employers in Southern states were sympathetic, and admitted that he was forced into it and had to defend his honour and even offered him friendly support would he ever be in town. Meanwhile a similar letter was used with a different admission, that the guy had been poor and so stole a car. Similar difference but in reverse. This time the Northern states were sympathetic to his situation, but Southern states thought it was no excuse. As it happens, separate stats show that the incidence of gun related murders is lowest in Northern states, and highest in Southern states. The inference? Gun crime is largely about cultural values to do with honour. You must guard yourself, your honour is to protect your relatives, your property, etc. Why? Well this is the interesting thing. If you don't trust the government to protect you, because say, you are herding goats in a desert area far from authorities, then the code of honour dominates. So perhaps, USA has higher gun crime because it is enshrined in the constitution that you shouldn't trust the government anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Be it as it may that nobody who isn't a mainstream climate scientist is allowed to hold any opinion on the subject, and that climate science trumps all other related fields like statistics or geology, it is still reasonable to question the proposed remedies and actions, perhaps more so when those remedies appear to be promoted by idiots.
Technology and social values progress anyway, but the idiots seem to think this can be made to happen to a schedule, and if it can't then they want to reincarnate as a virus to smite the selfish human race. Meanwhile people all over the world continue to make little improvements in technology and society and well, patience is a virtue. There is what's commonly known as the "third" world and the "second" world which are working gradually to improve and educate their girls, and get basic treatable diseases handled, so child mortality can come down, people can return to having two kids per family, and afford a bicycle to get to market, and so on. Doomsday didn't happen, they shifted the date into the future. Well nobody knows the future. Let's all just do our best to make the incremental improvements we can, and test and assess each innovation to see what value, if any, it really offers.
When new evidence contradicts a theory, it doesn't mean the theory is wrong, as there could be something wrong with the new evidence. But it could also mean the theory is wrong. So we make progress with trial and error.
What made me a concerned sceptic on AGW was the claim that the evidence was incontriverible and that to question, to ask if it might be wrong, is morally akin to denying the holocaust, that to question it is to doubt whether the sun would rise in the morning, and to doubt the whole edifice of science.
I would point out that the reason we trust science is that it is self-correcting, with the caveat that the processs of self-correction, over a group of thousands of professionals, that self correction takes decades. Sometimes even 50 years.
When even the head of the IPCC is on video, telling a bunch of young people that, the denialists are like the people who still believe the earth is flat, and the same head of IPCC calls some indian scientists who checked a claim about a mountain range's ice melting by 2035 and found it mistaken, and the IPCC guy then responds and calls then "vodoo scientists", only for it to come to light later that the 2035 number was a simple mistranscription of 2350, you really start to wonder about the culture.
The theory may be right, but if you go round attacking anyone who disagrees, the self correction process becomes a very slow event. Instead of self correcting in 10 years, you are now having to wait until everyone who supports it professionally has retired.
In a climate where people are branded denialists, the self correction goes out the window. We can no longer KNOW if the theory is indeed right, largely right, needs some adjusting, or is just based on mistaken understanding.
If I don't have kids, does the world owe me a million dollars, for all the "externalises" I have saved? I am sure it is more than that, actually.
I am fond of the notion that real wealth is people inventing new clever stuff that saves us all having to own slaves or be slaves. Everything else seems to be made up money, printing money, carbon credits, etc. If someone invented a cheap way to cure cancer, that would take a massive burden off the health system. If politicians are just arguing over which of their lobbyists should gain more influence for the sake of things being more privately financed or more publicly financed, that's not a whole lot of difference, on average, apart from arguments over inequalities, compared to a nation which has high child mortality rates.
If wind power was so good, I think we'd recognise its life enhancing effect. Chop chop, chop chop.
In Soviet Russia, missing ice find you!
I mean that a huge problem in talking about science and religion, is that to many people, they appear to be two completely separate categories, wheras it is more like what you say (and i tried to say in my post) that we all have things we value, but which we would be very hard to objectively prove are actually of more value.
But there is still to bear in mind that there are levels of reasonableness, so there is a big difference between believing in love because you rationally know that all humans are valuable, and believing in love because of a purely mythic belief system forced you to believe it, the book says it, the book is truth, i must not question it, because questioning (thinking for myself) is herecy.
UID zero divided by zero
Huge problem mixing "science" and "religion" is that for many, religion is about "faith" and science is about reason. So it invokes the pre-modern versus the modern. Another problem is not just faith but the content of that faith. The Protestant Work Ethic is credited by some as a key ingredient why the West developed so fast, as the faith was, work for the sake of work, develop for the sake of development. That is a huge contrast to mere warlord hedonism, or a monk sitting recluse and fasting. Arguably, faith in modern progress is a thing people value and value for its own sake. So one can say that science has this aspect of faith in self determined progress and ability to lift ourselves out of material mysery. However, we are now talking a very reasonable humanistic value, in contrast to "kill the hethens" and "burn the witches who float like ducks" faiths which are just ignorance, along with "world created in 6 days". Now any atheist may say they have zero beliefs, but ask them what they want, and it is stuff like, to love my family, to see my children happy, to make a positive impact on the world. Now as it happens, none of those answers can survive a thorough postmodern deconstruction, they are all groundless, or "empty" as some Buddhists might say. So where are the atheists who say, "Darling, of course I don't love you, we all know I merely have a flow of hormones and other mood altering chemicals flowing around my brain, for survival reasons, selected by the environment from random mutations" No of course not, there are things which we still value as intrinsic to human life, not life as a collection of 40 trillion cells, but sentient experienced life with compassion and love. There is no reason why as biological machines, we need to be sentient, my brain can respond to the environment without there needing to be "anybody here" to experience the show. Anyway, this is where you can get into a scientific humanistic rational ethical purposeful arena, where as we understand more about the brain, and psychology, we can maybe understand more what makes people happy, what makes for better education, what makes for a better and healthier life. Here some rational "atheists" would be happy to include anything we might already have some ideas about, such as Buddhist self-questioning, who are you? and certain meditation, etc. as a small part of an overall scientific understanding of love, insofar as these things can be rationally tested, not merely believed. And if that means that most of traditional religious teaching is shown up to be the head fuck that it really is, well so be it.
I want to know which OS would be considered to be buddhism?
Who is root?
Imagine the damage when they realise your monitor is displaying over 2 million single pixel movies!!!
No phone calls?
I don't disagree but I'm reading someone's code at the moment, some routines in R, and the word "training" is in the name of a routine, but it doesn't explain in which sense of the word "training". So now I have to try to figure out the meaning of the result. I'm sure it was obvious to the author. Maybe fine grained comments are bad, but an overall story explaining in ordinary words the overall intent and picture would be nice. Anyway, IANAP.
"Having a conversation with the sketchbook" is a notion in visual design like architecture or construction. For little scripting tasks, I find talking to the comments an exercise in clarifying what I am trying to do and why. The intention, the way it fits the bigger picture. The code is the reality, the comments are the mental intention. Unless it is a very well understood area where to be a programmer you really have to know the domain and the problems very well, so the code is immediately obvious to the trained eye. But for run of the mill make stuff up as we go along problems, the intention needs to be talked about, methinks.
I gather the real basis for "diversity" is the cognitive skill of finding fault with one's own thinking, beliefs, attitudes, etc. But too often it is merely used as a narrative to find fault with the opponent. Basically, honest diversity is about being able to deconstruct one's own view, "maybe we are treating gays unfairly". So it is an actual skill HOWEVER, unless one has that "bending over backwards to prove one's self wrong" skill, the teaching of diversity can merely encourage tribalism. Basically, you get good at deconstructing the other's views, "gee you must have some hidden neocolonialist power drive", but don't get round to deconstructing your OWN views, "gee I wonder if I am using the neocolonialist phallocentric racist narrative to bypass any need to look at whether my own views might also contain some errors which need examining." Which is where perhaps the "left" then fails to deliver, because in trying to promote diversity, it doesn't examine the key ingredients which are necessary for true diversity, namely developing the cognitive skills. So the kids who are already smart enough to get diversity, because they criticise their own views just as honestly as they criticise other's views, can thrive in these exercises. But the kids who don't already have the skill, will find it a bridge too bar, the curriculum is literally over their heads, and instead tend to interpret the lesson as a free pass to encourage tribalism. Of course, a left narrative is that everyone is equally smart, it is just life or society that is unfair, so the notion of a teaching about diversity being "over their heads" sounds nasty, but the consequence, if true, is that the left ends up ignoring the needs of those people whom it most desires to help. It is just a matter of adding some intermediary steps toward diversity. One book on cognitive development describes engaging kids in a boat building project, where they get to build their own boat, so that's the "selfish" motivation, but the work is arranged so that for some tasks, they need to help each other in a cooperative way, so it gradually introduces social bonding and social cooperative skills. But it doesn't make those the obvious goal. Anyway, IANA... etc.
And that's a place where religions differ somewhat: do they advocate converting others?
There's actually a pretty long history in the monotheistic faiths that, the way to make a good world is to ban all the bad stuff. Some traditions, however, eventually twigged that this doesn't in the end, actually work quite how they intended, and so the "tantra" paths were created, basically, you can't eradicate aggression, but you can transform it into something more productive. I'm told there is a huge amount of repression of sex in the Middle Eastern cultures, and this is all driving people a little nuts. Anyway, now they have the internet. Anyway, going back to paleo man, wasn't there another story that beer drinking allowed them to relax the tribal social rules, which in turn made possible some creative thinking? Inspector Morse may have been the erudite educated type, but he shared that basic human practice with his pale ancestors. Drink, and think. Gee, maybe the crazy woman who fancies me did it...
Some say there's a cold war between Saudi Arabia and Iran. After the victory of the 1979 revolution, Iran really thought the rest of the Middle East would fall in their direction. But then they lost the Iran-Iraq war, so it was to their advantage for USA go in and remove Saddam, leaving room for the Iranian proxy armies to take over after the Americans left. But Saudi Arabia does not want an Iranian crescent of states encircling it, so Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, etc. are all war zones between the Iranian proxy armies and the Saudi proxy armies. And the rumour now with regard to USA restricting Iran's nuclear development, is that if the restrictions don't go far enough, and Iran gets the bomb and missiles, well Saudis have let slip a rumour that they helped fund the Pakistan nuclear programme on the proviso they could have delivery of nukes anytime they wanted. Of course, which is truth and which is lies, well, interesting times. Why was USA on Saddam's side, until it all changed?
I am not going to prove to anyone on Slashdot in three paragraphs. I'm talking a dozen books, 4 year personal experiment with my wife and I, and the stuff that some doctors are now starting to speak out about. It is actually how my own body seems to react that is most tentatively convincing to me. I do not believe I am right. I can only go with what I can see so far. Many people have no interest in changing their food lifestyle anyhow, I had motivation from health issues. So I'm now into Paleo, LCHF, Primal, etc. So far so good. So I mention it in case anyone else just hasn't heard of it. As an earlier poster said, it boils down to us not being cows, or apes with large bellies which can digest that much vegetable and fruit matter. Paleo is simply, eat what we were eating 500,000 years ago. That might not be the real answer. But it has some logic to it. I say to explain, not to convince. At the end of the day, your own body is the only judge. Your body doesn't care what your or my opinion is. We're just the clueless humans trying to understand what our biology requires. Legumes etc. in Paleo are anti-nutrients. If you know anyone with digestive problems, see if they can cope with those. I've seen people basically have to give up soya products 100% (no milk, no anything) in order to see improvement in their digestive problems. But everyone is different. The trouble is, it is very hard to scientifically study nutrition, because you can't force a diet on people for 50 years, you can't find out what eating fruit "healthy 5 a day" does to you 50 years down the line. That's why there is so much disagreement on food.
Also, the sort of grand experiment with our food chain is something I'm not a fan of. Original Nations who ate meat and fat (all grass fed), and were to some accounts quite healthy, good teeth, good bones, compared to the high carb, high sugar, highly processed foods, high soy, low fat yoghurts packed with hidden sugar, etc. etc. substitutes which, according to some reports, we're starting to see the outcome in how even children now get diabetes, whilst still in the womb. It takes a few generations to see the results.
I would much rather save energy on other stuff than on foods, which leads to massive health costs. I would rather continue to get the bus to work, never own a car (have never owned a car), not have too many kids (actually have no kids), and to appease the CO2 people, never fly (I fly once in 10 years), and keep the heating low and wear furry fleeces around the house. I'd insulate but the house is way too old for that, so I settle for better glazing. But food? Mess with that and may as well not be living in a first world country.
Well her point in her book is that you'd be better just letting cows eat their natural diet, grass. Then we eat the cows. Like the food chain was originally.
It has become a "moral" issue, numbers don't matter. Unless you're talking carbon trading, in which case made up numbers and made up money matter a lot. Or would if they could. Who cares if Africa can't turn the lights on? I hope China continues to build infrastructure in Africa, because the West isn't going to help them. Not far from where I used to live in Africa, in a small town, there is now a football stadium, built by the Chinese. I saw it on Google Earth and was like, what the heck is that?
Just use the radiation equivalent of the Drake equation, fill it full of made up numbers, and calculate how many are going to die.
Food can be controversial, but I'll just chip in that all those fields of wheat and soya rely on intensive agriculture, stripping the diversity, excluding many species, and is heavily reliant on oil.
There is just a meme that veganism is good, CO2 is bad, therefore veganism is an answer to global warming.
Anyone interested in questioning this can read The Vegetarian Myth by a ex-long term vegan lady, as she explored whether veganism actually means less killing in practice, and whether it actually means better health in practice. Also, in Sweden you have the LCHF movement. So I wonder if the army is just trying to save money.
Yes I don't think much of it either on the whole, which is why I tried to quote exactly what they did and what result they claim they got. From there, infer what you will.
In Pinker's Better Angels of Our Nature, he describes a study done on attitudes throughout USA. The study was in the form of a letter, written as if from a guy looking for a job, and the letter was sent to employers round the country. The letter made an admission, "I think you should know, I was involved in a murder, I was confronted by a guy in a bar and we had to take it outside, and he suddenly had a knife and I had to defend myself, and he died." Employers in the Northern states were not sympathetic to him. Employers in Southern states were sympathetic, and admitted that he was forced into it and had to defend his honour and even offered him friendly support would he ever be in town. Meanwhile a similar letter was used with a different admission, that the guy had been poor and so stole a car. Similar difference but in reverse. This time the Northern states were sympathetic to his situation, but Southern states thought it was no excuse. As it happens, separate stats show that the incidence of gun related murders is lowest in Northern states, and highest in Southern states. The inference? Gun crime is largely about cultural values to do with honour. You must guard yourself, your honour is to protect your relatives, your property, etc. Why? Well this is the interesting thing. If you don't trust the government to protect you, because say, you are herding goats in a desert area far from authorities, then the code of honour dominates. So perhaps, USA has higher gun crime because it is enshrined in the constitution that you shouldn't trust the government anyway.
The devil is in the numbers. By how much would we have to scale down?