[Biosphere Collapse] 420 days of blazin' it

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > C-SPAM > [Biosphere Collapse] 420 days of blazin' it

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(Thread IKs: Stereotype)

Raine: Apr 30, 2013; ACCELERATIONIST SUPERDOOMER

Comatoast posted:

No, its because it doesn't affect the vast majority of people. And we're overpopulated besides.

i love how you edited your garbage take to somehow be worse

go gently caress yourself

# ? Feb 15, 2022 03:32

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# ? May 20, 2024 17:08

The Oldest Man: Jul 28, 2003

Wait that can't be right, that sounds like what climate change is going to do

# ? Feb 15, 2022 03:33

Paradoxish: Dec 19, 2003; Will you stop going crazy in there?

Just love to utterly prostrate myself before capital's argument that you shouldn't worry about anything that doesn't directly affect you right this instant. Keep consuming, because surely these problems will never come to your doorstep.

# ? Feb 15, 2022 03:34

The Oldest Man: Jul 28, 2003

Paradoxish posted:

Just love to utterly prostrate myself before capital's argument that you shouldn't worry about anything that doesn't directly affect you right this instant. Keep consuming, because surely these problems will never come to your doorstep.

Well of course not, I have Doorstep Protection Plus Platinum

# ? Feb 15, 2022 03:44

Complications: Jun 19, 2014

tiberion02 posted:

lol

the goon is correct

most individuals in industrialized nations could almost certainly mitigate an entire ton of carbon emissions every year solely through individual action

and then we would only have 33+ gigatons of emissions per year left to mitigate not counting growth

# ? Feb 15, 2022 03:51

Second Hand Meat Mouth: Sep 12, 2001

https://twitter.com/laughingcat2016/status/1493298027460763649

# ? Feb 15, 2022 03:52

Comatoast: Aug 1, 2003; by Fluffdaddy

Raine posted:

i love how you edited your garbage take to somehow be worse

go gently caress yourself

Who do you suppose killed more, covid or genghis khan?

# ? Feb 15, 2022 03:53

skooma512: Feb 8, 2012; You couldn't grok my race car, but you dug the roadside blur.

Paradoxish posted:

Just love to utterly prostrate myself before capital's argument that you shouldn't worry about anything that doesn't directly affect you right this instant. Keep consuming, because surely these problems will never come to your doorstep.

But also we're totally just going to stop and do the right thing at the 11th hour. Until then stop bothering me, I need my treats!

# ? Feb 15, 2022 03:53

Koirhor: Jan 14, 2008; by Fluffdaddy

collapse as a service

# ? Feb 15, 2022 03:59

munce: Oct 23, 2010

Trabisnikof posted:

And Covid won�t even be the last new epidemic we get lol. Covid is the tutorial level.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2016/08/01/melting-permafrost-releases-deadly-long-dormant-anthrax-siberia

The permafrost already gave us anthrax in 2015. It's going to be a different world when smallpox and friends thaw out.

# ? Feb 15, 2022 04:00

SKULL.GIF: Jan 20, 2017

Koirhor posted:

collapse as a service

that's just cspam

# ? Feb 15, 2022 04:04

FUCK COREY PERRY: Apr 19, 2008

Mayor Dave posted:

lmao our banner bandit is back

https://massextinction.events/

hadn't clicked through and read yet and drat this owns

# ? Feb 15, 2022 04:09

FUCK COREY PERRY: Apr 19, 2008

The Oldest Man posted:

I re-watched The Big Short the other day and had something of an epiphany about this and maybe why our society is so catastrophically bad at undervaluing risk and overvaluing optimism.

When you 'go long' on a stock (or buy into/espouse/act in accordance with) the notion that something will be better in the future you are effectively making yourself a prophet of good news. This thing is good, and specifically, I (and you!) can benefit from my foresight on this subject. There are many ways that prophetic foresight manifests social value, like "buy these stocks and you'll make money" or "buy a house, you'll have a secure future" etc. but the basic premise remains the same: I know something is going to be good, and I can use that foreknowledge to profit myself by joining that venture and by sharing my insight so that others join as well. The social utility of people who display this behavior is obvious; you don't have much of a community or society without people banding together for common benefit.

When you 'go short,' the premise is inverted: you are making yourself a prophet of bad news. This thing is bad, you shouldn't participate in it, you should bet against it, you should avoid it. The thing is, this isn't symmetrically valuable to being the bringer of good news. There's no immediately obvious way that others can profit from a forecast of a bad outcome the way that they can from a forecast of a good outcome. So what's the value of the bad news bringer to the community? If everyone listens to them, and the thing they are warning about doesn't happen/bad outcome avoided, the obvious value is zero. Even if they were clearly, obviously correct (and that often isn't the case), you don't profit by listening to the guy who says the '08 housing bond market is hosed or who says the barn being raised is going to collapse (I'll get to short-selling in a sec) and staying out of it, you simply avoided some potential hypothetical losses - but the people tied to those endeavors are pissed because you kept others from supporting you. If no one listens and the event happens, everyone is pissed at you anyway because you knew and didn't stop them.

In the financial markets they had to specifically legalize short selling equities in the 30s because there was no incentive to step up and publicize even a very accurate forecast of bad news. Sure, you could avoid losses and maybe help others avoid losses, but avoiding losses is not a symmetrical incentive to gaining profits. Legalizing shorts helped balance that out by creating a financial vehicle for people to make huge piles of money if they were right (according to the market, in the future) that something was not going to work out. But there's something interesting about the way short sales are structured (partially fixed by options trading) that I think speaks to the asymmetry of optimism and pessimism in our society: if you go long, your gains are potentially unlimited but your losses are capped. If you go short, your gains are capped, but your losses are potentially unlimited. Betting a good outcome will occur is structurally less risky than betting a bad outcome will occur.

Now apply the same exact lens to poo poo like COVID or climate change. Where is the social or economic penalty for being wrong over and over and over on the side of optimism? It's extremely limited. Now look at the other side: you err on the side of caution (or hell, don't even make any errors but just talk about it a little too much) and you're a doomer, a chicken little, etc. Bottom line is, you can prognosticate incorrectly many many more times on the side of optimism and get away with it because we are socially conditioned to treat 'going long' and being optimistic as both more inherently valuable and less risky than 'going short' and being pessimistic. And when you can consistently profit from pathological optimism without suffering the consequences of your rosy view of the world, regardless of the actual outcomes, you can leverage that profit into greater and greater influence on the rules of the game - you can protect your bets by making it harder to bet against you. The status quo of our economic system is pathological optimists making pathologically optimistic bets and hiring other pathological optimists to run the optimist betting machinery, do PR for the bets being made, and write that no one could have predicted a bad outcome in the charred aftermath when those bets fail.
Pathological optimism at some point stops being the most profitable strategy and becomes the only acceptable strategy.

So what's the value of any of this navel-gazing?

In the 08 market collapse, the big optimistic betters almost all got cover from the government first to unwind their bets and then to sell off the crap they couldn't unwind when they turned out to be catastrophically wrong because our entire social and economic order is based on optimism being the default correct stance. Think about this for a second: we have baked in the correctness of pathological optimism into our culture to such a radical extent that even when we knew it was wrong to a degree that put the entire country's financial system in jeopardy of total collapse, the response was to pause the whole machine, change the rules, and make sure we protected the pathological (even fraudulently pathological) optimists from the consequences of their own terrible wagers before we started the machine up again.

That was in a system where the outcomes could be rigged to protect the gamblers when they were on the 'right' side. So what the gently caress happens when the system is the global climate or a pandemic and you can't bully it or cheat it or rig it so that the pathological optimist bet always pays out the way our society needs it to? In this society, anyone who says "things are going to get worse" becomes the equivalent of a crazed doom-saying prophet on the street corner because our society is no longer equipped to deal with the possibility of optimism being wrong. The prediction of the possibility (or likelihood) of a bad outcome is automatically apocalyptic because we can no longer prepare for or fix bad outcomes.

So don't be a doomer, you're really harshing everyone's vibe.

yeah poo poo's hosed

# ? Feb 15, 2022 04:15

Basic Poster: May 11, 2015; Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

On Facebook

Is this DnD brigading today? Maybe we should embrace the goon other, regardless of their detestable nature.

Perhaps they are going through the stage of anger, writhing and fidgeting under the weight of their neolib contradictions, prostrate before the undeniable evidence and constant stream of annecdotes that lay waste to their hope.

Perhaps now is the time to embrace them, put them into sexy fox dog and cat costumes, and jettison them into the void?

# ? Feb 15, 2022 04:23

lobotomy molo: May 7, 2007; by Jeffrey of YOSPOS

Comatoast posted:

No, its because it doesn't affect the vast majority of people. And we're overpopulated besides.

�this specific category 6 hurricane only killed 2% of the population and scattered another 20%, it didn�t affect the vast majority of people.�
which is dumb as gently caress when another one�s coming, and another, and

also look at the effects of covid: it fucks with peoples brains, or gives them crippling side effects like diabetes or needing oxygen to live, but you�re right, it usually doesn�t kill a given person. when it affects people�s brains, it makes them more aggressive, more risk-taking, less memory, and less capable of critical thinking. we have no idea if these effects are permanent.

what do you thinks gonna happen when the majority of america is brain damaged, always angry, and has a crippling need for resources? well, more so than usual? lol the same thing that�s always resulted from that: exploitation and horror. only this time we�ll be dumber, angrier, desperate, and armed with thousands of nukes

# ? Feb 15, 2022 04:29

lobotomy molo: May 7, 2007; by Jeffrey of YOSPOS

Basic Poster posted:

Is this DnD brigading today? Maybe we should embrace the goon other, regardless of their detestable nature.

Perhaps they are going through the stage of anger, writhing and fidgeting under the weight of their neolib contradictions, prostrate before the undeniable evidence and constant stream of annecdotes that lay waste to their hope.

Perhaps now is the time to embrace them, put them into sexy fox dog and cat costumes, and jettison them into the void?

the weather�s getting more and more obviously hosed by the day and they�re still in the denial/bargaining phases

# ? Feb 15, 2022 04:31

Just a Moron: Nov 11, 2021

Fly Molo posted:

^^lol yeah, maybe some people weren�t hit so hard, but it definitely wrecked plans for people to build local resiliency with their communities. plus covid takes millions of workers away from any climate projects and fucks up any public transportation plans. gotta love it when our unprecedented disasters synergize in perfect harmony

sorry I don�t, just traumatized nurses venting about the horror of it in the covid thread

don�t worry though, it�s mild

Terrible. I probably shouldn't have made ligbt of it.

# ? Feb 15, 2022 04:42

lobotomy molo: May 7, 2007; by Jeffrey of YOSPOS

The Wisest Moron posted:

Terrible. I probably shouldn't have made ligbt of it.

nah you�re fine. making extremely dark jokes about hosed up subject matter is why cspam exists. sometimes you�ve gotta crack a joke at the insanity and suffering or it�ll break you

look at the epstein thread, it�s funny as hell :v:

# ? Feb 15, 2022 05:28

Venomous: Nov 7, 2011

Comatoast posted:

No, its because it doesn't affect the vast majority of people. And we're overpopulated besides.

ok ecofascist

# ? Feb 15, 2022 06:16

Flunky: Jan 2, 2014

Comatoast posted:

No, its because it doesn't affect the vast majority of people. And we're overpopulated besides.

oh word, which groups of people do u think should die

# ? Feb 15, 2022 06:18

silicone thrills: Jan 9, 2008; I paint things

lol keep looking at that worst drought in over 1200 years and thinking about all those civilizations that just disappeared abruptly from the archeological record in the southwest >.>

# ? Feb 15, 2022 06:25

ELTON JOHN: Feb 17, 2014

climat chage

# ? Feb 15, 2022 06:50

rabble rabble: Mar 24, 2015; Nap Ghost

silicone thrills posted:

lol keep looking at that worst drought in over 1200 years and thinking about all those civilizations that just disappeared abruptly from the archeological record in the southwest >.>

no.

# ? Feb 15, 2022 06:57

rabble rabble: Mar 24, 2015; Nap Ghost

you will see i have now solved the problem, you are very welcome

# ? Feb 15, 2022 06:58

Ornery and Hornery: Oct 22, 2020

my approach to negative externalities is to ignore the externalities

in my mind they do not exist

# ? Feb 15, 2022 07:36

kyojin: Jun 15, 2005; I MASHED THE KEYS AND LOOK WHAT I MADE

It's actually very coherent:

-Covid doesn't affect me because I'm young
-Climate change means I won't get old

# ? Feb 15, 2022 07:51

Microplastics: Jul 6, 2007; It's what's for dinner.

silicone thrills posted:

lol keep looking at that worst drought in over 1200 years and thinking about all those civilizations that just disappeared abruptly from the archeological record in the southwest >.>

Well of course those uneducated uncivilised savages died out, they weren't smart and white enough

We, on the other hand, will simply solve the problems and carry on.

# ? Feb 15, 2022 08:41

Microplastics: Jul 6, 2007; It's what's for dinner.

Pollution of the world's rivers from medicines and pharmaceutical products poses a "threat to environmental and global health", a report says.

quote:

Paracetamol, nicotine, caffeine and epilepsy and diabetes drugs were widely detected in a University of York study.

The research is among the most extensive undertaken on a global scale.

Rivers in Pakistan, Bolivia and Ethiopia were among the most polluted. Rivers in Iceland, Norway and the Amazon rainforest fared the best.

The impact of many of the most common pharmaceutical compounds in rivers is still largely unknown.

But it is already well established that dissolved human contraceptives can impact the development and reproduction of fish, and scientists fear the increased presence of antibiotics in rivers could limit their effectiveness as medicines.

...

"Typically, what happens is, we take these chemicals, they have some desired effects on us and then they leave our bodies," Dr John Wilkinson, who led the research, told BBC News.

"What we know now is that even the most modern efficient wastewater treatment plants aren't completely capable of degrading these compounds before they end up in rivers or lakes."

Take a chill pill i say, while pinching a loaf off directly into the sea

# ? Feb 15, 2022 08:48

crepeface: Nov 5, 2004; r*p*f*c*

didn't realize this year's olympics were carbon neutral

https://twitter.com/ErikSolheim/status/1493103730648129540?s=20&t=qsjaYkEU-igbIZWZLj6wdg

# ? Feb 15, 2022 11:50

Enfys: Feb 17, 2013; The ocean is calling and I must go

Covid isn't just about a mortality figure, or even the poorer health outcomes of people who survive infection but have long covid or lasting damage to their bodies.

Covid has led to a transfer of vast amounts of money into the hands of the ultra-wealthy minority while further impoverishing the majority of people and public systems; it spurred a rapid increase of far-right radicalisation and spread conspiracy theories to a wider population; it strained global logistics and shipping in ways that haven't recovered; it swamped healthcare in ways that will have knock on effects for decades to come (assuming there is a meaningful form of healthcare for decades to come) due to a variety of things like healthcare worker burnout/death/disability and people not getting appropriate treatment or diagnosis for other illnesses (and that's not even getting into things like long covid and covid damage that non-obese 80 year olds still have to live with). It's driving an increase in evictions, housing insecurity, food insecurity and homelessness as more and more people have fewer resources and less support they can fall back on while facing increasing costs of living.

In general, completely outside of all the people killed, covid has left the global population poorer, less healthy mentally and physically, stretched thinner and overall just less resilient and more vulnerable to further disasters.

Those disasters are already happening to some and will increasingly happen to more and more of us until everyone and everything on the planet is affected in ways that dwarf the pandemic, yes. And yes, climate collapse would happen with or without covid and we're all going to die someday etc. However, the pandemic has increased how much people are suffering and will continue to suffer in a significant way beyond tallying the mortality rate.

The pandemic response is particularly similar to climate change in that people who are invested in denying how bad it is like to focus on a specific number soundbite to say actually everything is fine while ignoring all the interconnected systems fracturing and collapsing all around us.

# ? Feb 15, 2022 12:34

Rectal Death Adept: Jun 20, 2018; by Fluffdaddy

Could it be that our response to the Coronavirus disaster is related to how we handle other disasters like climate change?

No, the Y Axis labeled "Population" isn't the same

# ? Feb 15, 2022 14:08

T-Paine: Dec 12, 2007; Sitting in the Costco food court unmasked, Bible in hand, reading my favorite Psalms to my five children: Abel, Bethany, Carlos, Carlos, and Carlos.

Enfys posted:

In general, completely outside of all the people killed, covid has left the global population poorer, less healthy mentally and physically, stretched thinner and overall just less resilient and more vulnerable to further disasters.

Yep https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2020/3/31/21199917/coronavirus-covid-19-animals-pandemic-environment-climate-biodiversity

quote:

It�s because we are building roads between wild animals and human bodies. We�re using up a lot of land � for our cities, our mines, our farms � and while doing that, we�re destroying wildlife habitat. That�s why 150 species are going extinct every day. And the species that are remaining have to squeeze into these tiny fragments of wildlife habitat that we leave for them.

When you cut down the forest where bats live, they don�t just go away; they come roost in the trees in your backyard or farm. That means it�s easier to have casual contact with their excretions.

If a little kid goes outside and plays near a tree where bats roost, they might pick up a piece of fruit that has some bat poop or bat saliva on it and put that in their mouth, and then you�ve created an opportunity for the microbes that live in the bat�s body to enter into a human body. We know that with Ebola, there was a single spillover event � the first case was a 2-year-old child in West Africa who was playing near a tree where bats live.

These are accidents waiting to happen. Now we have this amazing flight network, so even if pathogens emerge in a place where there aren�t a lot of transmission opportunities, they can easily get to somewhere where there are. We�re also urbanizing in an ad hoc fashion, so we have a lot of places where people are being exposed to each other�s waste. There�s not a lot of infrastructure in many of the places that are rapidly urbanizing. All these factors combine to increase the risk that a microbe will spill over into human bodies and then start to spread.

...

We often look at an outbreak as a foreign problem � like Ebola and SARS and Zika are coming from outside and encroaching upon us. That�s the traditional narrative: the germ invading from outside. I call it microbial xenophobia.

But these are things that are happening right here in the United States. So for example, West Nile virus is a virus of migratory birds from Africa. They�ve been landing in North America for hundreds of years, but we never had West Nile virus here until 1999. Well, why is that?

It turns out that when you have a diversity of bird species in your domestic flock, you don�t get a lot of West Nile virus because birds like woodpeckers and rails are really bad carriers. So as long as you have a lot of those diverse bird species around, even if you have an introduction of West Nile virus from a migratory bird, you�re not going to get a lot of virus overall.

But what happened over the last 20 years or so is that we lost a lot of that avian biodiversity. Woodpeckers and rails became rare in a lot of environments. Instead, we have a lot of birds like crows and robins, which are generalist species that can live in any kind of degraded environment, and they�re really good carriers of West Nile virus.

So the fewer woodpeckers and rails you have around, and the more robins and crows you have around, the more West Nile virus you have around. And the more likely it becomes that a mosquito is going to bite an infected bird and then bite a human.

# ? Feb 15, 2022 14:21

blatman: May 10, 2009; 14 inc dont mez

every time someone comes in here and starts bitching that nobody is taking personal action about climate change I just assume they're trying to see how many goons they can get arrested

# ? Feb 15, 2022 14:28

Comatoast: Aug 1, 2003; by Fluffdaddy

Venomous posted:

ok ecofascist

If I could Thanos Snap half of the population away, then I�d give it at least three or four snaps. I never would have suspected Im one of the few actual doomers in the thread.

You can talk poo poo, praising Genghis Khan for bringing some forests back for a short time. Meanwhile, I�m aware of my mortality and prepared for the oncoming doom. There was never any point in being afraid of covid. There are more covid-like events to come.

I'll go back to lurking for links, so y'all can go back to your circlejerk.

(USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)

(USER WAS BANNED FOR THIS POST)

Comatoast has issued a correction as of 16:03 on Feb 15, 2022

# ? Feb 15, 2022 15:18

T-Paine: Dec 12, 2007; Sitting in the Costco food court unmasked, Bible in hand, reading my favorite Psalms to my five children: Abel, Bethany, Carlos, Carlos, and Carlos.

https://twitter.com/MGSchmelzer/status/1493592759432847363

# ? Feb 15, 2022 15:37

Cromulent_Chill: Apr 6, 2009

Comatoast posted:

I have no problem being a dissenting opinion when y'all are just repeating memes straight from the liberals over at r/collapse.

The human response to covid and the human response to climate change are not comparable. One is a virus with a less than 2% mortality rate disproportionately affecting the sick, elderly and obese. The other is the doom of multicellular life in the biosphere. There will come a time when climate change is undeniable and humans will respond. It's been suggested that at some point we will attempt to nuke the problem away. I wouldn't doubt it. Covid on the other hand could have always been disregarded if you checked the right set of boxes: fairly young, healthy, and isolated from those who are at risk.

The wealthy will profit from climate change, there will be no attempt to stop it. Why would they when people are already trained not to care about mass death. Your understanding of the world is that of a child.

# ? Feb 15, 2022 16:36

Cold on a Cob: Feb 6, 2006; i've seen so much, i'm going blind
and i'm brain dead virtually; College Slice

maybe i'm just emotionally keyed up but the poo poo currently going down in my country has taught me that we are absolutely not going to be anywhere near ready for the collapse of our biosphere or our governments

# ? Feb 15, 2022 16:43

Comatoast: Aug 1, 2003; by Fluffdaddy

Killin_Like_Bronson posted:

The wealthy will profit from climate change, there will be no attempt to stop it.

There was never going to be any other way. It's just sped up. Sounds a lot like the 'sooner than expected' trope.

# ? Feb 15, 2022 16:49

Cabbages and VHS: Aug 25, 2004; Listen, I've been around a bit, you know, and I thought I'd seen some creepy things go on in the movie business, but I really have to say this is the most disgusting thing that's ever happened to me.

hot take: COVID is ultimately being driven by the same incessant capitalist forces driving petro burning. If we didn't have globally lovely and unclean practices around agriculture and getting meat in people's mouths, we'd have a lot less vectors.

We've already seen many cases of animal-to-human transmission of abx resistant infections on US pig farms. If that happens enough times something real lovely will happen eventually.

blatman posted:

every time someone comes in here and starts bitching that nobody is taking personal action about climate change I just assume they're trying to see how many goons they can get arrested

we're building rad suits and burying fifty year food supplies in underground bunkers with geothermal cooling, but I don't see how that will get me arrested, or be very useful in the long term.

Killin_Like_Bronson posted:

The wealthy will profit from climate change, there will be no attempt to stop it. Why would they when people are already trained not to care about mass death. Your understanding of the world is that of a child.

you are engging with a "just the flu, bro" poster. Why?

Cabbages and VHS has issued a correction as of 16:53 on Feb 15, 2022

# ? Feb 15, 2022 16:50

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# ? May 20, 2024 17:08

Cloks: Feb 1, 2013; by Azathoth

Killin_Like_Bronson posted:

The wealthy will profit from climate change, there will be no attempt to stop it. Why would they when people are already trained not to care about mass death. Your understanding of the world is that of a child.

children are smarter than this

# ? Feb 15, 2022 16:51

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > C-SPAM > [Biosphere Collapse] 420 days of blazin' it

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