There is a much bigger problem the earth is facing right now and it is being pretty much ignored by the powers that be and the mainstream media - Fukushima radiation is poisoning the worlds oceans. 300-450 tonnes a DAY is still pouring into the Pacific from the nuclear facility.
Which is quite impressive given that there was only 4300 tons there in the first place. Let's exploit the hell out of this!
Or are you deceptively ignoring the actual radioactivity of the mass in question and counting water as radioactive material?
and it took a schoolgirl from Alberta Canada to point it out to the world
Quite the argument from authority there. If a schoolgirl from Alberta says it's true - it must be!
This is a known major threat to every person on the planet that gets no airtime, the facts are clear and anyone with a Geiger counter can prove it.
Do so. And then STFU when you realize what an idiot you are.
When your opposition is lavishly funded by billionaires and directly controls an attorney general's mouth, using it to launch multiple fishing expeditions about you, hires private detectives to find your dirty laundry and brings your work to a standstill by tons of frivolous FOIA requests - you might start thinking differently.
No, I wouldn't. Are these people really your moral compass? And using this reasoning, what becomes fair game for me should I end up on the wrong side of a RICO lawsuit?
And yes, that's all happened to Mann. RICO is completely appropriate here.
Just because some of what has happened to Mann is undeserved, doesn't justify abuse of the law. As others have noted in this thread, once you abuse the law just because some other side is doing it, then that opens the door to many future abuses.
The real solution here is to note that all these ridiculous interventions in the science and policy decision making are wholly inappropriate, whether they come from 20 clueless scientists, you, or an attorney general from Virginia.
Does it strike anyone else that this research should only have been undertaken after a great deal of public discourse?
Add myself to the list of people who answer "no". What would be the point of this public discourse? Who would care enough to have a relevant opinion? What happens when someone decides to do it anyway because they don't accept that something shouldn't be done just because it is icky to the general public?
If there was big money behind nuclear power they could afford to build new stuff instead of getting governments to put up the money.
They could, but I highlighted the part of your post that explains why they frequently don't. And these plants require billions of dollars in capital investments. If that's not big money, then what is?
Further, what's the cost of funding some environmental astroturf to permanently protest a refinery? I bet it's on the order of a few hundred thousand a year including the lawsuits obstructing every capital improvement or other major change the refinery tries to make. And permanently hiring a PI to sniff out expensive, time consuming safety and environmental violations? A factor of ten less a year.
The sort of stuff that "Big Oil" is being accused of in this thread would generate a considerable amount of blowback. It's one thing to pick on small fry, it's another to pick on fellow bullies with international reach (like General Electric). The MAD principle is at work here.
The point is that back when nuclear was still 'new', there was a lot of talk about all kinds of uses that could displace oil. There certainly was a reason for big oil to attack nuclear. It matters not how well founded their fears were. I didn't get any sense from your post that you understood that.
Big Oil is not the only special interest out there. There is a really obvious reason to fund environmental groups - protection both for regulation and public opinion. And there's a really obvious reason not to fund an assault on nuclear power - retribution from the big money behind nuclear power.
You are not viewing through the lens of yesteryear, and are minimizing just how big the market overlap was. I was never even remotely hinting oil would be completely displaced, or even mostly.
What is the point of making such an assertion? Find some evidence first.
The combined energy market was and is still huge. The energy market for oil power plants isn't and never was. It's a fallacy to attach a small market to a large one and then claim the former is large as well.
Further, the places that tend to use oil-generated power because oil is plentiful, also tend to have a notable lack of competition. A Middle East country like Saudi Arabia or Iran would usually have the same parties in control of all their power generation.
Personally, I think the article you originally cited makes the common error of assuming that oil is energy. It's not. Certain oil products, like gasoline and diesel drive the oil market, but they have the additional feature of being very energy dense, cheap, and convenient fuels, which batteries still aren't. Nuclear power never will replace those features.
Most people aren't doing that and are burning oil products instead. I'd look at the propaganda around electric cars instead. That's the actual crucial segment for Big Oil to attack. And there just isn't a lot of propaganda out there (say the occasional story about the pollution from the battery packs or how the vehicle does in an accident, maybe).
I think a much better explanation for Big Oil funding of environmental organizations is protection money.
"Big oil" also pumps out gas, which IS often used for electricity, much like oil. Nuclear energy is quite literally the only credible threat to the bottom line of oil companies. Even if they went nuke, their profits would dry up very very quickly as reactors tend to need far less fuel than their fossil fuel equivalents.
Two things to note. First, natural gas has been for decades used as peaking load. That means it is complementary to nuclear power to the degree that a higher use of nuclear power, which is a very inflexible power source, results in higher demand for natural gas to cover the variability that nuclear power can't cover.
Second, it doesn't even make sense to compare nuclear to fossil fuel by amount of fuel. Nuclear fuel rods are considerably more expensive, and upkeep and liability for nuclear plants is considerable.
Again, it COULD happen that a hobby device brings down an aircraft, as improbable as it may be.
The degree of improbability is quite relevant. When you stop caring about the size of a risk, then you no longer do sensible risk management.
but we simply cannot allow a *hobby* to endanger existing aviation activates
Today's hobby is tomorrow's vital technology.
Which justifies nothing. Just like you cannot run a GPS jammer because of the danger to others, you cannot justify the idiots who endanger others with their hobby activities. Or perhaps you'd like to argue that YOUR desires for having fun outweighs the health and safety of those around you?
Sure, it does. There are plenty of examples where someone's fun-seeking behavior causes a small increase in the risk to others. Driving for fun is a good example.
And at one time, airplanes were a very risky hobby. Imagine how much better off we would be, if we had banned that (because it's just a *hobby*) and never developed flight at all.
Nuclear powerâ(TM)s main energy competitor is of course Big Oil
It's not. Almost no one burns oil for electricity. Similarly, no one has a fission engine on their car. Similarly, there is no overlap in the other uses of oil such as chemical feedstock or asphalt road systems.
Coal is the fossil fuel competing head to head with nuclear.
but we simply cannot allow a *hobby* to endanger existing aviation activates
Today's hobby is tomorrow's vital technology.
So if the FAA wants to put limits on the operation of paper airplanes you fly in the front yard, they can do it, as stupid and ill-advised as it seems to you.
And it should seem not only stupid to you, but a solid indication in that situation that we should curb the power and mandate of the FAA. Why am I called stupid, when you advocate this sort of silliness?
If you take the regulatory authority away from the FAA, then you will be compromising their ability to keep air travel in this country safe, which is a stupid thing to do in the long run.
Unless, of course, that doesn't actually happen as you claim.
Please understand.... The FAA does what it does for a good reason in most cases. Elimination of risk in aviation is their mandate and they literally have absolute authority over anything that flies or could affect something that flies starting at the ground and up from there.
Please understand, I already knew that (though their authority does stop at space).
The FAA won't hesitate to remove a risk factor like this.
Which is why we have to curb their authority here.
IF the FAA finds that letting the hobbyist have and operate these small aircraft constitutes a risk to their main mandate (aircraft safety) you can be sure as the sun rises in the east they will put regulations in place to limit that risk.
They already have such regulation in place. We're not operating in a regulatory vacuum here.
A drone carries nothing that the FAA traditionally cares about, they are not airplanes carrying people and there are no companies that have any financial interest in things that have traditionally driven the FAA's decisions.
Actually, that's probably already false with the presence of military and police drones out there.
The FAA looks at any avoidable risk, especially one that has zero impact to the cost and efficiency of aviation operations, as a risk that should be avoided. This is how it should be. The FAA's work is about saving lives and if flying your drone endangers the lives of those flying around in some aircraft, they rightfully conclude that your drone needs to go away.
It isn't the job of society or even drone operators to enforce the viewpoint of the FAA. They are one of many viewpoints and they should still need to justify any claims or actions they made. And someone needs to show that huge "if" in your above assumptions.
The story in particular is about a rather generous exaggeration of the risk of drones. You should think about why the FAA would want to do that. I doubt it's because they want to protect society from all that death that drones are creating right now.
Idiots are why we cannot have nice things without oppressive regulations...
How much funding and power are you giving me to fix all the idiots of the world? Remember when you hear or write sentiments like the above, that it is the oppressive system creating those oppressive regulations which needs to be fixed not the idiots who we really can't do much about.
But you're assuming the AI driving the car wouldn't also be able to notice an approaching object and be prepared to take preventative action.
The incremental approach criticized here would be letting the human take over when that happens. If the car is taking preventative action, then it's going beyond that.
Still, you are cherry picking when choosing only mercury, a single pollutant out of many.
As you are, when you pick CO2. The difference is my cherry pick has known significant damage to the environment and humanity while yours is mostly speculation at the current concentrations.
Why not, that is the design philosophy for airliners made in the past 30 years and their pilots who operate them. Sit and babysit the machine for 99.99% of the time; then jump in ready to go for the 0.01% of the time the situation is beyond the programming of the software. (In which case the software 1) does wrong thing. 2) just shuts-down while displaying a message to the pilots to let them know that, suddenly, THEY are flying the plane.)
Because that approach has killed people in the past. vakuona mentioned a key example, flight AF447 whose autopilot, as I understand it, bailed out on its pilots once it had dumped them in a cluster of thunderstorms at high altitude, blind to everything including airspeed, and ready to stall at even the slightest deviation in pitch outside a narrow range.
There is much more to greenhouse gases than mercury. Accounting just for mercury is misleading. Overall, the US procduces much more greehouse gases per capita than China.
Mercury is not a greenhouse gas. There's not enough mercury in the atmosphere to have a measurable effect one way or other for global warming. I mentioned it because it is a poisonous substance that accumulates in living tissues, especially organisms, like humans, at the top of food chains. IMHO treating greenhouse gases like pollutions with significant toxicity (which I think China almost uniformly is a higher polluter per capita than the US at due to a combination of weaker regulations and weaker enforcement of those regulations) is dishonest. A ton of CO2 doesn't, except in local concentrations at least an order of magnitude greater than present in the atmosphere have any sort of measurable toxicity. But a ton of mercury released into the biosphere is exceptionally dangerous. So we have to have hundreds of millions to billions of tons of CO2 to have measurable effect on humans while as I understand it, a few tens of thousands of tons of mercury creates a global problem in the oceans.
You are just measuring mercury. Therefore it's irrelevant.
That's quite the dishonest reply since the research was measuring atmospheric mercury pollution, not just "mercury". And unlike CO2, mercury is a serious pollutant with serious health consequences. Given your sudden disinterest, I think I made my point.
As it happens, the Dune society would collapse without it.
Hence, why I used the saying.
Imagine less and think more. Once things descend into violence it doesn't really matter what sparked it.
Then I'd rather have a society where I keep more of my own. Because I'll need that when the society collapses to improve my chances of survival.
People get resentful when they get less than they think they deserve. If enough people get resentful you get trouble. So it's not what you or I imagine, it's what Joe Average imagines. And Joe has grown up in a consumer society where his desires are constantly stroked by every company competing for his waning purchasing power.
Sounds like another good reason to cut back on the overpromised goodies. Lowers those unreasonable expectations.
They can't grow their own food, since they have no land to do so, nor the skills or physical conditioning to farm it without tools they can't afford. They can't simply go West and start their own homestead since there's no place left to do so. They can't employ themselves because they don't have the capital to mass-produce stuff and cottage industry is not competitive expect in extremely specialized niche areas which require skills Joe Average doesn't have and has no capacity to acquire - because valuable skills are valuable precisely because the supply is limited.
So no, most people can't carry their own straw. They need to be integrated to the economic system to survive, and that means they need income. This is the world capitalism built, and this is the world it will also have to deal with.
I'm not retarded here. Trade still happens. It doesn't take a ridiculous complex of government spending to keep that going.
And as I've noted before, since income is so important, you'd think modern, developed world societies would want to encourage it rather than throw so many obstacles in the path. But I guess that employment isn't considered any more important than a functioning society.
The thing is, the developing world doesn't have these problems.
Of course it's your problem if society collapses around you. You're simply letting your own quirky sense of fairness tell you it shouldn't be your problem, and confusing that with reality.
The thing is, you imply it's going to fail anyway. Same outcome except as I noted above, I have more in my scenario.
I think your argument is really bizarre. You admit it won't work yet you push it anyway. People are helpless; people have ridiculous expectations; people are going to get violent when those ridiculous expectations aren't met; capitalism is doomed to fail; etc. That sounds to me like maybe we shouldn't do your thing then and avoid all that.
It is always funny to see how identical the responses of the apes... sorry believers... are when one points to their barbarity.
Facts don't change from person to person.
Communism: There never was communism. Stalin was no communist. Pretended to be communist for his political agenda. Yadda, yadda.
You'd have to show first that Stalin didn't buy into Communism in order for this situation to be analogous. As far as we can tell, he was a true believer.
And nobody here is claiming there never was Christianity.
"Chrisianism": No, no, not those where not Christians. Those were Atheists. Pretending to be Christians for their political agenda. Yadda, yadda.
In their own words.
Btw... it does not matter about what Hitlers spoke in this video. It matters that the claims the a Christian. And he was. A very good one.
That's not an option. Every society has a certain minimum quality of life and perceived fairness it can get away with before it goes down in flames. Both Europe and US are exhibiting signs of a gathering storm, for example in the form of increasing hostility towards immigrants.
The spice must flow, eh? I imagine those flames will burn at least as fiercely, if your society promises something and fails to deliver rather than just doesn't deliver. Also, I imagine the actual minimum quality of life is way below what you think it should be.
The problem is, that straw must be carried by some camel. Currently the choices are either employees, employers or public sector. Employees are hopelessly in debt, as is the society, so that leaves employers. If they can't or won't carry it either, then we're headed for another age of revolutions.
One thing we've discovered in democratic societies is that most people can carry their own straw most of the time.
Any attempt to do anything that might get in the way of corporate profits gets shot down as communism. Any attempt to do anything through public sector gets shot down as socialism. Any attempt to do anything with your personal resources is too little to have any effect unless other people join in, which they won't because tragedy of the commons. So pragmatically speaking, there's not much point worrying about the future of our societies since them going over the edge is pretty much a done deal due to having no functional steering mechanisms left because the anti-government "Invisible Hand takes care of it!" types purposefully broke them all, as dictated by their pseudo-religion.
Not my problem that you can't overcome the failure of communism. People have this quirky sense of fairness. The idea that need should determine what you deserve has been epicly parodied long ago and a lot of people agree with that. Of course, most of them also agree with the premise of Medicare or many public pensions - put money in and get inordinately more out even after a reasonable rate of return on the initial money, typical pyramid schemes.
So pragmatically speaking, there's not much point worrying about the future of our societies since them going over the edge is pretty much a done deal due to having no functional steering mechanisms left because the anti-government "Invisible Hand takes care of it!" types purposefully broke them all, as dictated by their pseudo-religion.
If only that were true. But even the US, the supposed bastion of this sort of thing doesn't do that. Instead, it's thoroughly incompetent and/or self-serving steering so bad that I'm not surprised you don't actually recognize it as steering. Really, what are they doing now that wouldn't be more successfully done by merely removing the steering wheel altogether?
You are a liar. Mussolini and the Catholic church were best buddies.
So? He had to get their support early on in his reign.
His both children were baptized, Catholicism was the state religion and marriage was controlled by the church.
Fascists and Nazis had a lighter touch when it came to religion than the Communists did. They often went through the motions of public religious observance. None of that stuff indicates a belief in Christianity.
For example, Mussolini supposedly advised some visiting Nazi leaders (in early 1937):
"The Catholic Church is like a rubber ball, if you don't keep up the pressure, it will return to its original shape."
Both Mussolini and Hitler repeated discoursed on the absolute nature of their ideologies. For example, this quote by Mussolini in the aftermath of the Italian retreat from North Africa.
We become strong, I feel, when we have no friends upon whom to lean, or to look to for moral guidance.
Notice the Christian-like appeal to God? I don't either.
Hitler played that game even more. There are plenty of quotes where Hitler played lip service to religion. In private, he had different things to say.
Night of 11th-12th July, 1941:
National Socialism and religion cannot exist together.... The heaviest blow that ever struck humanity was the coming of Christianity. Bolshevism is Christianity's illegitimate child. Both are inventions of the Jew. The deliberate lie in the matter of religion was introduced into the world by Christianity.... Let it not be said that Christianity brought man the life of the soul, for that evolution was in the natural order of things. (p 6 & 7)
To put that into context, being a Jew or a Bolshevik was a thing that could get you killed in Nazi Germany. So what fate would fall on those who clung to Christianity over the coming decades?
My take is that the various Fascist leaders planned on getting rid of religion at a later date when it was more politically convenient because just like the Communists, they saw religion as a rival power for the minds and hearts of their subjects. But it was a power that they wanted to get to acquiesce to their rule. Hence, the superficial displays of religious favoritism.
Slashdot Mirror
There is a much bigger problem the earth is facing right now and it is being pretty much ignored by the powers that be and the mainstream media - Fukushima radiation is poisoning the worlds oceans. 300-450 tonnes a DAY is still pouring into the Pacific from the nuclear facility.
Which is quite impressive given that there was only 4300 tons there in the first place. Let's exploit the hell out of this!
Or are you deceptively ignoring the actual radioactivity of the mass in question and counting water as radioactive material?
and it took a schoolgirl from Alberta Canada to point it out to the world
Quite the argument from authority there. If a schoolgirl from Alberta says it's true - it must be!
This is a known major threat to every person on the planet that gets no airtime, the facts are clear and anyone with a Geiger counter can prove it.
Do so. And then STFU when you realize what an idiot you are.
So you're saying that we should just "note" it, shrug and move on?
Yes. For example, that attorney general wouldn't have bullied Mann, if there wasn't political support for it.
When your opposition is lavishly funded by billionaires and directly controls an attorney general's mouth, using it to launch multiple fishing expeditions about you, hires private detectives to find your dirty laundry and brings your work to a standstill by tons of frivolous FOIA requests - you might start thinking differently.
No, I wouldn't. Are these people really your moral compass? And using this reasoning, what becomes fair game for me should I end up on the wrong side of a RICO lawsuit?
And yes, that's all happened to Mann. RICO is completely appropriate here.
Just because some of what has happened to Mann is undeserved, doesn't justify abuse of the law. As others have noted in this thread, once you abuse the law just because some other side is doing it, then that opens the door to many future abuses.
The real solution here is to note that all these ridiculous interventions in the science and policy decision making are wholly inappropriate, whether they come from 20 clueless scientists, you, or an attorney general from Virginia.
Does it strike anyone else that this research should only have been undertaken after a great deal of public discourse?
Add myself to the list of people who answer "no". What would be the point of this public discourse? Who would care enough to have a relevant opinion? What happens when someone decides to do it anyway because they don't accept that something shouldn't be done just because it is icky to the general public?
If there was big money behind nuclear power they could afford to build new stuff instead of getting governments to put up the money.
They could, but I highlighted the part of your post that explains why they frequently don't. And these plants require billions of dollars in capital investments. If that's not big money, then what is?
Further, what's the cost of funding some environmental astroturf to permanently protest a refinery? I bet it's on the order of a few hundred thousand a year including the lawsuits obstructing every capital improvement or other major change the refinery tries to make. And permanently hiring a PI to sniff out expensive, time consuming safety and environmental violations? A factor of ten less a year.
The sort of stuff that "Big Oil" is being accused of in this thread would generate a considerable amount of blowback. It's one thing to pick on small fry, it's another to pick on fellow bullies with international reach (like General Electric). The MAD principle is at work here.
The point is that back when nuclear was still 'new', there was a lot of talk about all kinds of uses that could displace oil. There certainly was a reason for big oil to attack nuclear. It matters not how well founded their fears were. I didn't get any sense from your post that you understood that.
Big Oil is not the only special interest out there. There is a really obvious reason to fund environmental groups - protection both for regulation and public opinion. And there's a really obvious reason not to fund an assault on nuclear power - retribution from the big money behind nuclear power.
You are not viewing through the lens of yesteryear, and are minimizing just how big the market overlap was. I was never even remotely hinting oil would be completely displaced, or even mostly.
What is the point of making such an assertion? Find some evidence first.
The combined energy market was and is still huge. The energy market for oil power plants isn't and never was. It's a fallacy to attach a small market to a large one and then claim the former is large as well.
Further, the places that tend to use oil-generated power because oil is plentiful, also tend to have a notable lack of competition. A Middle East country like Saudi Arabia or Iran would usually have the same parties in control of all their power generation.
Personally, I think the article you originally cited makes the common error of assuming that oil is energy. It's not. Certain oil products, like gasoline and diesel drive the oil market, but they have the additional feature of being very energy dense, cheap, and convenient fuels, which batteries still aren't. Nuclear power never will replace those features.
Well, things have changed. My point is that it didn't used to be that way.
Most people aren't doing that and are burning oil products instead. I'd look at the propaganda around electric cars instead. That's the actual crucial segment for Big Oil to attack. And there just isn't a lot of propaganda out there (say the occasional story about the pollution from the battery packs or how the vehicle does in an accident, maybe).
I think a much better explanation for Big Oil funding of environmental organizations is protection money.
"Big oil" also pumps out gas, which IS often used for electricity, much like oil. Nuclear energy is quite literally the only credible threat to the bottom line of oil companies. Even if they went nuke, their profits would dry up very very quickly as reactors tend to need far less fuel than their fossil fuel equivalents.
Two things to note. First, natural gas has been for decades used as peaking load. That means it is complementary to nuclear power to the degree that a higher use of nuclear power, which is a very inflexible power source, results in higher demand for natural gas to cover the variability that nuclear power can't cover.
Second, it doesn't even make sense to compare nuclear to fossil fuel by amount of fuel. Nuclear fuel rods are considerably more expensive, and upkeep and liability for nuclear plants is considerable.
Again, it COULD happen that a hobby device brings down an aircraft, as improbable as it may be.
The degree of improbability is quite relevant. When you stop caring about the size of a risk, then you no longer do sensible risk management.
but we simply cannot allow a *hobby* to endanger existing aviation activates
Today's hobby is tomorrow's vital technology.
Which justifies nothing. Just like you cannot run a GPS jammer because of the danger to others, you cannot justify the idiots who endanger others with their hobby activities. Or perhaps you'd like to argue that YOUR desires for having fun outweighs the health and safety of those around you?
Sure, it does. There are plenty of examples where someone's fun-seeking behavior causes a small increase in the risk to others. Driving for fun is a good example.
And at one time, airplanes were a very risky hobby. Imagine how much better off we would be, if we had banned that (because it's just a *hobby*) and never developed flight at all.
Nuclear powerâ(TM)s main energy competitor is of course Big Oil
It's not. Almost no one burns oil for electricity. Similarly, no one has a fission engine on their car. Similarly, there is no overlap in the other uses of oil such as chemical feedstock or asphalt road systems.
Coal is the fossil fuel competing head to head with nuclear.
but we simply cannot allow a *hobby* to endanger existing aviation activates
Today's hobby is tomorrow's vital technology.
So if the FAA wants to put limits on the operation of paper airplanes you fly in the front yard, they can do it, as stupid and ill-advised as it seems to you.
And it should seem not only stupid to you, but a solid indication in that situation that we should curb the power and mandate of the FAA. Why am I called stupid, when you advocate this sort of silliness?
If you take the regulatory authority away from the FAA, then you will be compromising their ability to keep air travel in this country safe, which is a stupid thing to do in the long run.
Unless, of course, that doesn't actually happen as you claim.
Please understand.... The FAA does what it does for a good reason in most cases. Elimination of risk in aviation is their mandate and they literally have absolute authority over anything that flies or could affect something that flies starting at the ground and up from there.
Please understand, I already knew that (though their authority does stop at space).
The FAA won't hesitate to remove a risk factor like this.
Which is why we have to curb their authority here.
IF the FAA finds that letting the hobbyist have and operate these small aircraft constitutes a risk to their main mandate (aircraft safety) you can be sure as the sun rises in the east they will put regulations in place to limit that risk.
They already have such regulation in place. We're not operating in a regulatory vacuum here.
A drone carries nothing that the FAA traditionally cares about, they are not airplanes carrying people and there are no companies that have any financial interest in things that have traditionally driven the FAA's decisions.
Actually, that's probably already false with the presence of military and police drones out there.
The FAA looks at any avoidable risk, especially one that has zero impact to the cost and efficiency of aviation operations, as a risk that should be avoided. This is how it should be. The FAA's work is about saving lives and if flying your drone endangers the lives of those flying around in some aircraft, they rightfully conclude that your drone needs to go away.
It isn't the job of society or even drone operators to enforce the viewpoint of the FAA. They are one of many viewpoints and they should still need to justify any claims or actions they made. And someone needs to show that huge "if" in your above assumptions.
The story in particular is about a rather generous exaggeration of the risk of drones. You should think about why the FAA would want to do that. I doubt it's because they want to protect society from all that death that drones are creating right now.
Idiots are why we cannot have nice things without oppressive regulations...
How much funding and power are you giving me to fix all the idiots of the world? Remember when you hear or write sentiments like the above, that it is the oppressive system creating those oppressive regulations which needs to be fixed not the idiots who we really can't do much about.
But you're assuming the AI driving the car wouldn't also be able to notice an approaching object and be prepared to take preventative action.
The incremental approach criticized here would be letting the human take over when that happens. If the car is taking preventative action, then it's going beyond that.
Still, you are cherry picking when choosing only mercury, a single pollutant out of many.
As you are, when you pick CO2. The difference is my cherry pick has known significant damage to the environment and humanity while yours is mostly speculation at the current concentrations.
Why not, that is the design philosophy for airliners made in the past 30 years and their pilots who operate them. Sit and babysit the machine for 99.99% of the time; then jump in ready to go for the 0.01% of the time the situation is beyond the programming of the software. (In which case the software 1) does wrong thing. 2) just shuts-down while displaying a message to the pilots to let them know that, suddenly, THEY are flying the plane.)
Because that approach has killed people in the past. vakuona mentioned a key example, flight AF447 whose autopilot, as I understand it, bailed out on its pilots once it had dumped them in a cluster of thunderstorms at high altitude, blind to everything including airspeed, and ready to stall at even the slightest deviation in pitch outside a narrow range.
There is much more to greenhouse gases than mercury. Accounting just for mercury is misleading. Overall, the US procduces much more greehouse gases per capita than China.
Mercury is not a greenhouse gas. There's not enough mercury in the atmosphere to have a measurable effect one way or other for global warming. I mentioned it because it is a poisonous substance that accumulates in living tissues, especially organisms, like humans, at the top of food chains. IMHO treating greenhouse gases like pollutions with significant toxicity (which I think China almost uniformly is a higher polluter per capita than the US at due to a combination of weaker regulations and weaker enforcement of those regulations) is dishonest. A ton of CO2 doesn't, except in local concentrations at least an order of magnitude greater than present in the atmosphere have any sort of measurable toxicity. But a ton of mercury released into the biosphere is exceptionally dangerous. So we have to have hundreds of millions to billions of tons of CO2 to have measurable effect on humans while as I understand it, a few tens of thousands of tons of mercury creates a global problem in the oceans.
You are just measuring mercury. Therefore it's irrelevant.
That's quite the dishonest reply since the research was measuring atmospheric mercury pollution, not just "mercury". And unlike CO2, mercury is a serious pollutant with serious health consequences. Given your sudden disinterest, I think I made my point.
The spice must flow, eh?
As it happens, the Dune society would collapse without it.
Hence, why I used the saying.
Imagine less and think more. Once things descend into violence it doesn't really matter what sparked it.
Then I'd rather have a society where I keep more of my own. Because I'll need that when the society collapses to improve my chances of survival.
People get resentful when they get less than they think they deserve. If enough people get resentful you get trouble. So it's not what you or I imagine, it's what Joe Average imagines. And Joe has grown up in a consumer society where his desires are constantly stroked by every company competing for his waning purchasing power.
Sounds like another good reason to cut back on the overpromised goodies. Lowers those unreasonable expectations.
They can't grow their own food, since they have no land to do so, nor the skills or physical conditioning to farm it without tools they can't afford. They can't simply go West and start their own homestead since there's no place left to do so. They can't employ themselves because they don't have the capital to mass-produce stuff and cottage industry is not competitive expect in extremely specialized niche areas which require skills Joe Average doesn't have and has no capacity to acquire - because valuable skills are valuable precisely because the supply is limited.
So no, most people can't carry their own straw. They need to be integrated to the economic system to survive, and that means they need income. This is the world capitalism built, and this is the world it will also have to deal with.
I'm not retarded here. Trade still happens. It doesn't take a ridiculous complex of government spending to keep that going.
And as I've noted before, since income is so important, you'd think modern, developed world societies would want to encourage it rather than throw so many obstacles in the path. But I guess that employment isn't considered any more important than a functioning society.
The thing is, the developing world doesn't have these problems.
Of course it's your problem if society collapses around you. You're simply letting your own quirky sense of fairness tell you it shouldn't be your problem, and confusing that with reality.
The thing is, you imply it's going to fail anyway. Same outcome except as I noted above, I have more in my scenario.
I think your argument is really bizarre. You admit it won't work yet you push it anyway. People are helpless; people have ridiculous expectations; people are going to get violent when those ridiculous expectations aren't met; capitalism is doomed to fail; etc. That sounds to me like maybe we shouldn't do your thing then and avoid all that.
It is always funny to see how identical the responses of the apes... sorry believers... are when one points to their barbarity.
Facts don't change from person to person.
Communism: There never was communism. Stalin was no communist. Pretended to be communist for his political agenda. Yadda, yadda.
You'd have to show first that Stalin didn't buy into Communism in order for this situation to be analogous. As far as we can tell, he was a true believer.
And nobody here is claiming there never was Christianity.
"Chrisianism": No, no, not those where not Christians. Those were Atheists. Pretending to be Christians for their political agenda. Yadda, yadda.
In their own words.
Btw... it does not matter about what Hitlers spoke in this video. It matters that the claims the a Christian. And he was. A very good one.
Wait wait wait... thats' SARCASM isn't it?
That's not an option. Every society has a certain minimum quality of life and perceived fairness it can get away with before it goes down in flames. Both Europe and US are exhibiting signs of a gathering storm, for example in the form of increasing hostility towards immigrants.
The spice must flow, eh? I imagine those flames will burn at least as fiercely, if your society promises something and fails to deliver rather than just doesn't deliver. Also, I imagine the actual minimum quality of life is way below what you think it should be.
The problem is, that straw must be carried by some camel. Currently the choices are either employees, employers or public sector. Employees are hopelessly in debt, as is the society, so that leaves employers. If they can't or won't carry it either, then we're headed for another age of revolutions.
One thing we've discovered in democratic societies is that most people can carry their own straw most of the time.
Any attempt to do anything that might get in the way of corporate profits gets shot down as communism. Any attempt to do anything through public sector gets shot down as socialism. Any attempt to do anything with your personal resources is too little to have any effect unless other people join in, which they won't because tragedy of the commons. So pragmatically speaking, there's not much point worrying about the future of our societies since them going over the edge is pretty much a done deal due to having no functional steering mechanisms left because the anti-government "Invisible Hand takes care of it!" types purposefully broke them all, as dictated by their pseudo-religion.
Not my problem that you can't overcome the failure of communism. People have this quirky sense of fairness. The idea that need should determine what you deserve has been epicly parodied long ago and a lot of people agree with that. Of course, most of them also agree with the premise of Medicare or many public pensions - put money in and get inordinately more out even after a reasonable rate of return on the initial money, typical pyramid schemes.
So pragmatically speaking, there's not much point worrying about the future of our societies since them going over the edge is pretty much a done deal due to having no functional steering mechanisms left because the anti-government "Invisible Hand takes care of it!" types purposefully broke them all, as dictated by their pseudo-religion.
If only that were true. But even the US, the supposed bastion of this sort of thing doesn't do that. Instead, it's thoroughly incompetent and/or self-serving steering so bad that I'm not surprised you don't actually recognize it as steering. Really, what are they doing now that wouldn't be more successfully done by merely removing the steering wheel altogether?
You are a liar. Mussolini and the Catholic church were best buddies.
So? He had to get their support early on in his reign.
His both children were baptized, Catholicism was the state religion and marriage was controlled by the church.
Fascists and Nazis had a lighter touch when it came to religion than the Communists did. They often went through the motions of public religious observance. None of that stuff indicates a belief in Christianity.
For example, Mussolini supposedly advised some visiting Nazi leaders (in early 1937):
"The Catholic Church is like a rubber ball, if you don't keep up the pressure, it will return to its original shape."
Both Mussolini and Hitler repeated discoursed on the absolute nature of their ideologies. For example, this quote by Mussolini in the aftermath of the Italian retreat from North Africa.
We become strong, I feel, when we have no friends upon whom to lean, or to look to for moral guidance.
Notice the Christian-like appeal to God? I don't either.
Hitler played that game even more. There are plenty of quotes where Hitler played lip service to religion. In private, he had different things to say.
Night of 11th-12th July, 1941:
National Socialism and religion cannot exist together.... The heaviest blow that ever struck humanity was the coming of Christianity. Bolshevism is Christianity's illegitimate child. Both are inventions of the Jew. The deliberate lie in the matter of religion was introduced into the world by Christianity.... Let it not be said that Christianity brought man the life of the soul, for that evolution was in the natural order of things. (p 6 & 7)
To put that into context, being a Jew or a Bolshevik was a thing that could get you killed in Nazi Germany. So what fate would fall on those who clung to Christianity over the coming decades?
My take is that the various Fascist leaders planned on getting rid of religion at a later date when it was more politically convenient because just like the Communists, they saw religion as a rival power for the minds and hearts of their subjects. But it was a power that they wanted to get to acquiesce to their rule. Hence, the superficial displays of religious favoritism.