And how does your model play out if "now" is today, and "then" is tomorrow? I've got to feel it doesn't do a great job as a template for applying ethical considerations.
No, I'm saying that pretending the future is some non-thing to us current humans is frankly stupid. We can and should be concerned with the consequences of our actions.
...that it's still cheaper to fly jets like buses for the same kinds of routes a bullet train would cover.
No way. You can buy a 90 day pass on Tkaid Shinkansen(run by a private for-profit company), for the price of a single round-trip airfare in the US of similar distance. I mean, it's a nice argument, but it isn't true. There were huge infrastructure costs in setting up the lines in the first place, but this "it's not cheaper than airfare" thing is completely made up.
That we put multiple robots driving around on other planets since then? That our scientific knowledge of space has expanded dramatically? That we've put satellites in space that help all of humanity navigate, communicate, and understand our world?
Great firewall, etc. It's almost certainly the case that Apple operating in China is contingent on their software distrobution channels going through some layer of official interference.
I don't know the details because A. I'm not Chinese B. The Chinese government isn't big on letting the technical details of their great firewall go public
You know I get one of these "Hey! You're acting sane for once." posts almost every day, right? You can see why that might not help shape the impression you're so clearly striving for(i.e. getting me to ask myself why I don't always act sane), I hope.
1. You grab your protestor-beating-nightstick. 2. You walk down to the phone distributor's HQ 3. You say: "You know that software update system you built for your phones? Let us borrow it for a while" 4. If you run into any problems, gesture vaguely at the nightstick from step 1.
We're talking about the very divided urban/rural China here, not the US where we have widespread suburban recreational agriculture like you're describing. Urban Sprawl is a monstrosity caused by all sorts of poorly reasoned policies, and in the US it's probably the single biggest source of unnecessary environmental harm.
As for a general scientific citation about the costs of microfarming versus organized industrial scale farming I'm going to have to say I don't have one. For multiple reasons, the first people that "environmental harm" is a subjective measure that only appears in aggregate for an entire eco system, and also because I'm not aware of anyone trying to study any of the more objective measures specifically with respect to it.
As an argument by example, however, I'd point at the economic and environmental differences between Haiti and the Dominican republic as an example. Just look at the border on google maps
As an environmentalist, that's so incredibly simplistic, I'd almost call this post an attempt at parodying environmentalist positions. Luckily I'm aware that people who sometimes agree with me do so for simplistic reasons.
Organized, structured, large scale farming does less ecological and environmental harm than the people those farms would feed instead scrounging for food or running ad-hoc microfarms. Not to mention the human costs to those changes, like malnutrition and economic loss.
Now, if we pave every forest, turn every grassland into grazeland for cattle, and net every fish in the ocean, we've fucked up. We've fucked up badly. Good environmentalism is about being stewards who recognize our planetary ecosystems are irreplaceable and providing incredible value to us as a species, as well as the unique and unmeasurable quality that each species and ecosystem represents that can never be replaced once gone.
No one is saying you can't worship nature as some manifestation of perfection, just that we'll take it as seriously as we take any other religion.
Turns out huge amounts of farming doesn't do much good if there's not a large population to feed. Humanity has had plenty of water wars in the past, and it's quite reasonable to say they will in the future.
But on the technological horizon, there's altered graphene based desalinization. It may be possible to efficiently generate drinking/farming water from the oceans, which will end this problem.
For now this is an artifact of the whole "China is growing unsustainably" phenomenon, and not some huge trend about the world.
You misread sarcasm. I was absolutely arguing that point sarcastically.
The serious point is that we can and do measure temperature increases, and while they aren't evenly distributed, there's only a tiny spot where it's not getting warmer.
It might just be that they have a lower top speed, but all the vehicles on the bottom of the list are physically quite large. I'd conjecture that they seem proportionately slower to the eyes of enforcement, since their size messes with your sense of scale.
So we have to prove we're not "chicken littles" or whatever these guys call us by pointing out the fairly obvious fact that sea ice melting doesn't mean the end of gravity as we know it. I mean, it's hard enough that we have to deal with those couple of non-scientists who are actually making unreasonable dire predictions(unlike the reasonable very very very concerning ones based on objective assessment), but we also have to deal with this completely imagined alarmism.
It's not that they cherry picked(in this particular case). For once I'm willing to give the deniers some credit. Extent was the only meaningful objective metric we had about Antarctic ice until climate change research raised the question of thickness, and some very smart people went looking for ways to tell.
Extent's easy, you just take satellite images(okay, without space tech this would be impossible), apply some transforms to make them properly proportional, run a quick area approximation, and poof, you've got your number.
We've had that for decades. And we had no way to tell how thick it was until experiments like this one. So rather than cherrypicking, they were looking at the only numbers we had available, which is actually moderately reasonable.
No, see, that tiny patch of the globe representing southern canada and northeastern US where the temperature trendline is actually slightly negative is storing so much hidden cold it completely contradicts any observations that the average temperature of the rest of the planet.
This is a notion that makes sense and isn't crazy at all.
But seriously, the easiest answer is that we can measure the heat changes over time themselves. We know the earth is warmer because we've been watching, and you have to go into serious levels of denialism about the validity of very reliable scientific tools like thermometers and IR cameras to twist yourself into a different conclusion about the state of the temperatures compared to 30 or 60 or 90 years ago.
I see. Which has what bearing on an order signed in 1981 by Reagan? If you invent imaginary reasons to pretend Obama's presidency didn't happen, which is pretty crazy on the face of it, it doesn't actually eliminate this in any way shape or form.
Slashdot Mirror
And here I learn that laws can only be enforced when all more severe crimes have been fully handled.
"Sorry, we can't pursue this murder of your child, Mr. Smith, the genocide in Darfur isn't resolved yet."
Oh, well, I do get those messages about once every other day. So you'll forgive me seeing you as Yet Another Person Doing It, right?
And how does your model play out if "now" is today, and "then" is tomorrow? I've got to feel it doesn't do a great job as a template for applying ethical considerations.
No, I'm saying that pretending the future is some non-thing to us current humans is frankly stupid. We can and should be concerned with the consequences of our actions.
Luckily I'm aware that people who sometimes agree with me do so for simplistic reasons.
I think I already addressed concerns like yours in my post.
No one doesn't call BS on this one.
...that it's still cheaper to fly jets like buses for the same kinds of routes a bullet train would cover.
No way. You can buy a 90 day pass on Tkaid Shinkansen(run by a private for-profit company), for the price of a single round-trip airfare in the US of similar distance. I mean, it's a nice argument, but it isn't true. There were huge infrastructure costs in setting up the lines in the first place, but this "it's not cheaper than airfare" thing is completely made up.
That we put multiple robots driving around on other planets since then?
That our scientific knowledge of space has expanded dramatically?
That we've put satellites in space that help all of humanity navigate, communicate, and understand our world?
Great firewall, etc. It's almost certainly the case that Apple operating in China is contingent on their software distrobution channels going through some layer of official interference.
I don't know the details because
A. I'm not Chinese
B. The Chinese government isn't big on letting the technical details of their great firewall go public
Absolutely true. Evolutionarily, we're only a millionish right now. Not actually sure what that has to do with anything.
You know I get one of these "Hey! You're acting sane for once." posts almost every day, right? You can see why that might not help shape the impression you're so clearly striving for(i.e. getting me to ask myself why I don't always act sane), I hope.
1. You grab your protestor-beating-nightstick.
2. You walk down to the phone distributor's HQ
3. You say: "You know that software update system you built for your phones? Let us borrow it for a while"
4. If you run into any problems, gesture vaguely at the nightstick from step 1.
Problem solved.
Abstract and potentially meaningful depending on their ethical system.
Oh wait, were you asking a rhetorical question? Sorry, because of fucking course the future matters.
We're talking about the very divided urban/rural China here, not the US where we have widespread suburban recreational agriculture like you're describing. Urban Sprawl is a monstrosity caused by all sorts of poorly reasoned policies, and in the US it's probably the single biggest source of unnecessary environmental harm.
As for a general scientific citation about the costs of microfarming versus organized industrial scale farming I'm going to have to say I don't have one. For multiple reasons, the first people that "environmental harm" is a subjective measure that only appears in aggregate for an entire eco system, and also because I'm not aware of anyone trying to study any of the more objective measures specifically with respect to it.
As an argument by example, however, I'd point at the economic and environmental differences between Haiti and the Dominican republic as an example. Just look at the border on google maps
Not in volumes necessary to both do agriculture and keep the area sea basin wet.
As an environmentalist, that's so incredibly simplistic, I'd almost call this post an attempt at parodying environmentalist positions. Luckily I'm aware that people who sometimes agree with me do so for simplistic reasons.
Organized, structured, large scale farming does less ecological and environmental harm than the people those farms would feed instead scrounging for food or running ad-hoc microfarms. Not to mention the human costs to those changes, like malnutrition and economic loss.
Now, if we pave every forest, turn every grassland into grazeland for cattle, and net every fish in the ocean, we've fucked up. We've fucked up badly. Good environmentalism is about being stewards who recognize our planetary ecosystems are irreplaceable and providing incredible value to us as a species, as well as the unique and unmeasurable quality that each species and ecosystem represents that can never be replaced once gone.
No one is saying you can't worship nature as some manifestation of perfection, just that we'll take it as seriously as we take any other religion.
No, that's only the nearly statewide class 4 drought that has hit California.
You know, the one that made it illegal to wait for you water to heat up.
Oh, yeah, they're absolutely shit about intellectual honesty in the general course of events. I was just trying to helpfully clarify.
Turns out huge amounts of farming doesn't do much good if there's not a large population to feed. Humanity has had plenty of water wars in the past, and it's quite reasonable to say they will in the future.
But on the technological horizon, there's altered graphene based desalinization. It may be possible to efficiently generate drinking/farming water from the oceans, which will end this problem.
For now this is an artifact of the whole "China is growing unsustainably" phenomenon, and not some huge trend about the world.
You misread sarcasm. I was absolutely arguing that point sarcastically.
The serious point is that we can and do measure temperature increases, and while they aren't evenly distributed, there's only a tiny spot where it's not getting warmer.
It might just be that they have a lower top speed, but all the vehicles on the bottom of the list are physically quite large. I'd conjecture that they seem proportionately slower to the eyes of enforcement, since their size messes with your sense of scale.
So we have to prove we're not "chicken littles" or whatever these guys call us by pointing out the fairly obvious fact that sea ice melting doesn't mean the end of gravity as we know it. I mean, it's hard enough that we have to deal with those couple of non-scientists who are actually making unreasonable dire predictions(unlike the reasonable very very very concerning ones based on objective assessment), but we also have to deal with this completely imagined alarmism.
It's not that they cherry picked(in this particular case). For once I'm willing to give the deniers some credit. Extent was the only meaningful objective metric we had about Antarctic ice until climate change research raised the question of thickness, and some very smart people went looking for ways to tell.
Extent's easy, you just take satellite images(okay, without space tech this would be impossible), apply some transforms to make them properly proportional, run a quick area approximation, and poof, you've got your number.
We've had that for decades. And we had no way to tell how thick it was until experiments like this one. So rather than cherrypicking, they were looking at the only numbers we had available, which is actually moderately reasonable.
No, see, that tiny patch of the globe representing southern canada and northeastern US where the temperature trendline is actually slightly negative is storing so much hidden cold it completely contradicts any observations that the average temperature of the rest of the planet.
This is a notion that makes sense and isn't crazy at all.
But seriously, the easiest answer is that we can measure the heat changes over time themselves. We know the earth is warmer because we've been watching, and you have to go into serious levels of denialism about the validity of very reliable scientific tools like thermometers and IR cameras to twist yourself into a different conclusion about the state of the temperatures compared to 30 or 60 or 90 years ago.
I see. Which has what bearing on an order signed in 1981 by Reagan? If you invent imaginary reasons to pretend Obama's presidency didn't happen, which is pretty crazy on the face of it, it doesn't actually eliminate this in any way shape or form.