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I know that mask says 'Wee skitter' i.e brat, but I can't help but see it as Wee Skunner. Also laughing at Ketamine Keith but that's nothing new.
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Oct 9, 2021 03:07
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Regarde Aduck posted:i suggest you leave the climatology to the climatologists. You do know what the current discourse is with a significant number of climatologists, right? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDWhjSUu8UY   https://www.livescience.com/ghastly-future-global-crises.html The view displayed in the media is a lot more happy clappy 'something can be done' than the actual academics, who in many cases now see societal collapse due to overshoot as a historical inevitability. Especially marine biologists, they're depressed as hell. Anyway, any word from Gibbo yet?
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Oct 22, 2021 14:12
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big scary monsters posted:They are changing the way they run things, though. Slowly, and of course with the aim of preserving the systems that give them their power as much as possible. But climate change and its mitigation are accepted, conventional and mainstream concerns in a way they certainly were not ten or twenty years ago. Even the oil companies pay lip service to going green these days. A lot of the actual action is still greenwashing, corruption, and useless gesturing, but not all of it. That change in consensus is down to decades of pressure from groups of ordinary people. Now, when the effects of climate change are becoming undeniably obvious, is hardly the time to give up. Yes, people have noticed that this rollercoaster is getting rather high now and are paying lip service to 'maybe we should mitigate this by going net zero by 2050'. The point is that we're already high in the air and we've got to come down somehow. Given human nature and *waves generally at all of history* I don't see that being a nice gentle descent.  It just irritates me when people write off an acknowledgement of the actual material conditions as 'doomerism' or fatalism. When we say it's too late, we mean that for a comfortable resolution mitigation strategies needed to be put in place back in 1991, if not the 1970s. It's not like this is unprecedented, we see exactly the same boom and bust cycle in every aspect of nature. See: St. Matthew's Island reindeer population. We as humans just have the unmitigated gall to think we're unique and clever enough as a species to avoid it late in the day. I'm going to post this again because it's by far the best sociological analysis of the overshoot I've come across: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDWhjSUu8UY Barry, as unhelpful as it's going to be to say this the solution is truly to let the knowledge wash over you and enjoy life in an existentialist way. I know that's not possible for a lot of people, and as such I apologise for bringing this into the thread. I normally try not to.
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Oct 22, 2021 15:47
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Yes, that one of my three examples of current academic thought is a bit woo woo gaia. The first is a from an ecological economist who explains the whole conceptual lens problem quite succinctly, and the third is a more standard 'things keep getting worse but if people start paying attention and listening something can still be done!' article. In all three the point remains the same though. We have fundamentally taken advantage of an energy source that has taken millions of years to accumulate, and burnt through half of it in the last 30 years. There is no replacement. A much more detailed examination of why, in my opinion at least, 'redirecting the world economy' at this stage is far too little and too late can be had from the Geological Survey of Finland: https://tupa.gtk.fi/raportti/arkisto/42_2021.pdf quote:Current expectations are that global industrial businesses will replace a complex industrial energy ecosystem that took more than a century to build. The current system was built with the support of the highest calorifically dense source of energy the world has ever known (oil), in cheap abundant quantities, with easily available credit, and seemingly unlimited mineral resources. The replacement needs to be done at a time when there is comparatively very expensive energy, a fragile finance system saturated in debt, not enough minerals, and an unprecedented world population, embedded in a deteriorating natural environment. Most challenging of all, this has to be done within a few decades. It is the author’s opinion, based on the new calculations presented here, that this will likely not go fully to as planned. Back to what I was originally responding to, which is the idea that market forces and the current political structure can limit us to 1.5 degrees warming and people should 'leave the climatology to the climatologists'. A lot of those climatologists are far more fatalistic than might be acknowledged in polite society. In the UK marxism thread I think we can make the argument that the fundamental problem isn't *really* climate change, it's a political ideology of Don't Rock the Boat backed up by neoliberal capitalism that prevents us from improving things somewhat. Thus far, nobody has come up with a solution for that - can't make a man understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it etc. Ten years ago I wouldn't have thought about this stuff at all and blithely carried on with an I'm alright jack life. After becoming far more involved in left wing thought and having experienced the last few years, I now have trouble seeing it from any other viewpoint. RockyB fucked around with this message at 23:29 on Oct 22, 2021 |
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Oct 22, 2021 23:26
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Jaeluni Asjil posted:One of my friend's father is a retired fireman. He said the person you didn't want to be out with fighting a fire was an optimist. You want pessimists who can imagine everything that might go wrong so you can mentally prepare yourself to deal with the unexpected. This is the crux of it honestly. I've always approached life in a slightly pessimistic way because, as they say, a pessimist is rarely disappointed and often pleasantly surprised. As such I've run into no end of people of the 'cheer up it may never happen' bent that would rather blithely ignore a potential problem than do a modicum of planning for it. People like radmonger who can look at the Finland report and come to the conclusion that it's optimistic, when the understated sarcastic bottom line is actually: quote:The mass of lithium ion batteries required to power the 1.39 billion EV’s proposed in Scenario F would be 282.6 million tonnes. Preliminary calculations show that global reserves, let alone global production, may not be enough to resource the quantity of batteries required. In theory, there are enough global reserves of nickel and lithium if they were exclusively used just to produce li-Ion batteries for vehicles. To make just one battery for each vehicle in the global transport fleet (excluding Class 8 HCV trucks), it would require 48.2% of 2018 global nickel reserves, and 43.8% of global lithium reserves. There is also not enough cobalt in current reserves to meet this demand and more will need to be discovered. Each of the 1.39 billion lithium ion batteries could only have a useful working life of 8 to 10 years. So, 8-10 years after manufacture, new replacement batteries will be required, from either a mined mineral source, or a recycled metal source. This is unlikely to be practical, which suggests the whole EV battery solution may need to be re-thought and a new solution is developed that is not so mineral intensive. We just need a magical new battery tech that's just around the corner and it'll all be fine! There's a reason that hope was in the same jar that Pandora released all the other evils of mankind from. I acknowledge that for a lot of people it's a valid coping mechanism, but it sure gums up the works with wishful thinking sometimes. It also irritates me how often people characterise an acknowledgement of the situation as 'sitting impotent and miserable' when it's quite possibly to fling your entire effort into a cause you feel is lost simply because it's the right thing to do. To bring it back vaguely on topic, it's like acknowledging that labour is hosed as a productive force for good and that we need other solutions. I'd like to think that over the past year the thread perspective has shifted from 'stay in and maybe we can make things better' to 'we need to build something else'.
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Oct 23, 2021 22:36
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zhar posted:That’s fair. Still think a person motivated to work on something they think can be pulled off will be a lot happier than someone with the same work thinking it’s sure to fail but it’s the right thing to do. More likely to find solutions too I would imagine. But this could well be me projecting myself onto those roles and people are different, I guess as long as you do your best either way you can be satisfied however it goes! I'm not trying to be an arsehole here, just genuine curiosity. Have you worked on large scale projects or at the management level of infrastructure migrations in the past? My experience is that the people who tend to drive them in a productive manner are those who can acknowledge the madness of bureaucracy and systemic failures. That group of civil servants who are exasperated by attempting to herd cats and the failures they can't control, or the backend developers who are down the pub bitching constantly but put in the best work they can because of professionalism. There's often a thin line to ride to prevent burnout, but that's why it's important to be able to dissociate and switch off. Again, not everyone is built for that. People may or may not even be able to get into that mindset at different points in their life. However someone doing a dismissive drive-by of 'have you considered that you are depressed' isn't helpful. For reference, I get a surprising amount of validation from doing strong man type weightlifting. Nothing quite like having a dozen people cheer you on for a simple feat of strength rather than dealing with a complex, multifaceted problem. Or the old existentialist standard of walking through the woods looking at pretty flowers. (Fair notice, I started this post 4 hours ago then got distracted) Uhh, Demelza it depends exactly what you want to prepare for. Can you get a multi thousand pound LiPo battery and solar array setup? Sure. If you want something a little more lightweight but still expensive, you can get a 500W portable power station and solar panel for about £700 (see: Jackery https://www.hampshiregenerators.co....2xoCqnwQAvD_BwE). Even cheaper, a £40 chinese solar power bank jobby.
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Oct 24, 2021 02:09
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Answers Me posted:Anyone got any recommended reads/listens for a decent left critique of the looming supply chain/food shortage, infrastructure collapse etc crisis? Obviously it’s getting referenced a lot, but I haven’t really seen something that gets deep into the hows and whys. tia This is going to be a bit scattershot, not necessarily lefty and probably not answer your questions. But here's some interesting reads I've run across in the past couple of months.
Not related to the above question, but as a more general source of actual leftist thought I'd recommend Red Pepper. It's one of the few left-wing British publications https://www.redpepper.org.uk/ Seeing as we're discussing working from home in the thread, it's also well worth revisiting Bullshit Jobs and considering just how much of the modern economy is just box ticking and makework. Graeber in general was an excellent author, taken from us too soon. Oh, and apropos of nothing the reason I'm highly sceptical whenever someone brings up the concept of new technology saving us all.  E: What the hell have this too https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSZgoFyuHC8 RockyB fucked around with this message at 20:14 on Oct 25, 2021 |
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Oct 25, 2021 19:36
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ThomasPaine posted:Worth pointing out here that yes, this: There's still something like 200,000 people a year getting prosecuted for not paying. Be careful with this advice if you're not legitimately BBC free (which you should be tbh, it's utter trash).  Turns out outsourcing to Capgemini 'works' when they target women and the vulnerable, who knew. https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CBP-8101/CBP-8101.pdf https://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/sep/24/in-court-non-payment-tv-licence-television-desperate-cases https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/tv-licence-fee-women-convictions-b1763192.html E: 108 degrees Fahrenheit is the internal temperature at which the human body's vital organs begin to fail from overheating. It's also the emergency phone number in India. RockyB fucked around with this message at 13:53 on Oct 26, 2021 |
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Oct 26, 2021 13:48
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 13:43 |
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Cefte posted:Clearly a second-rate amateur historian - he could have gone for the Bronze Age Collapse, with added headlines about SEA PEOPLES. JeremoudCorbynejad posted:I guess this is as good a time as any to highlight the absolutely excellent Fall of Civilizations podcast, especially the episode on Roman Britain: Finally started listening to this the other day. Came across the whole 'Sea peoples were actually climate refugees' theory and drat that hit me surprisingly hard. https://journals.indexcopernicus.com/api/file/viewByFileId/906340.pdf E: As we're talking about this again, here's the 50 year update on Limits to Growth from KPMG saying 'Yeah that was pretty accurate': https://advisory.kpmg.us/articles/2021/limits-to-growth.html RockyB fucked around with this message at 02:33 on Nov 1, 2021 |
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Nov 1, 2021 02:27
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