(https://storage.buzzsprout.com/variants/uhqlaihuamqfzs01bzrg8loa4uzc/60854458c4d1acdf4e1c2f79c4137142d85d78e379bdafbd69bd34c85f5819ad.jpg) Tech won't save us. With Paris Marx (https://www.buzzsprout.com/1004689/10602309-the-argument-for-half-earth-socialism-w-drew-pendergrass-troy-vettese.mp3)
Drew Pendergrass is a PhD candidate in environmental engineering at Harvard University and Troy Vettese is an environmental historian and a Max Weber fellow at the European University Institute. They are the co-authors of Half-Earth Socialism: A Plan to Save the Future from Extinction, Climate Change and Pandemics. Follow them on Twitter at @pendergrassdrew and @TroyVettese.
The Argument for Half-Earth Socialism (https://techwontsave.us/episode/114_the_argument_for_half_earth_socialism_w_drew_pendergrass__troy_vettese)
Paris Marx is joined by Drew Pendergrass and Troy Vettese to discuss the environmental crises of climate change and mass extinction we face, and why taking them seriously while providing for everyone requires a radical change to how we structure society.
I think most of us here are agreed we need to restructure society in order to have any chance of at least bringing the non stop degradation of the environment under control, even if we can't reverse what has already been done. This brings with it a new set of questions.
1- What are the changes that need to be made, and in what order?
2- How do you go about implementing these changes?
3- What means would be most effective for getting the changes made?
4- What are the negative consequences of making the changes?
5- How do you get people to accept these consequences?
6- Who are the people/groups with the best chance of getting the process started, and how do you enlist them in the effort?
7- How do you make this a global effort with cooperation from all countries?
Pretty tough questions.
RE
Quote from: K-Dog on Jul 03, 2023, 12:17 PMThere is not enough copper and lithium to do it. More than the imaginary money you correctly predict is needed. Imaginary metals anyone?
Indeed. Also hard to figure where they are going to find, train and pay all the additional linemen, tower builders and technicians given the already critical labor shortage throughout the economy. Recruit retired Boomers and add training programs in high school along with the CDL classes? Retrain the laid off geeks from Silicon Valley? Will K-Dog leave the Warehouse and exchange his steel toed boots for pole climbing spikes?
Where are they going to find the still solvent banks to finance the construction loans and EV loans and credit worthy customers to hand these loans out to? I do not think the regulatory delays are the real problem here, but politicians will use that as the spanking monkey in the blame game.
Given the lofty goals for a carbon free transportation system about a decade away in 2035, my WAG would be about 5 years until the mismatch between electric supply and further expansion of EV transport becomes impossible. A reality check will ensue and the false promise of a techno solution will be apparent even to brain dead J6P.
Of course, we have quite a ffew other problems to negotiate before we hit the 5 year mark, so we may already be swimming in shit anyhow.
RE
QuoteWill K-Dog leave the Warehouse and exchange his steel toed boots for pole climbing spikes?
Retired Boomers? Most boomers can't do what I do. I am fortunate to have my health. How many men of boomer age can throw 70 lbs onto a 7 foot high shelf. I do.
I am sure there are plenty of hard working people in European and Asian shitholes who keep their kids up late burning midnight oil to learn physics, math and engineering. Something our binge watching make your own reality woke generation of fourth turning working age Americans won't do. If metals and money were there, workers would be found. America would just have more people. Same as it ever was, but with less stuff for everybody overall. Less food and none of it cheap.
Bizzness likes foreign workers who work for no benefits. They work and go home. Sometimes they stay and bring family. If they stay we get new restaurants so it is all not so bad. It would be hard to find an Indian restaurant in my area if we had no Microsoft. As things are we have grocery stores that are Indian themed up our ass. I like curry so I have options. Nice! Same thing with Asian restaurants.
New Immigrants would shoulder the debt. Immigrants would be Americas future if there was a future to be had. Native born Americans would continue to do drugs, continue to insult immigrants. Binge watch walking dead type zombie movies and collect mailbox money. But it would work out.
If things could work out they would. As things are they won't.
Quote from: K-Dog on Jul 04, 2023, 12:27 AMI am sure there are plenty of hard working people in European and Asian shitholes who keep their kids up late burning midnight oil to learn physics, math and engineering. Something our binge watching make your own reality woke generation of fourth turning working age Americans won't do. If metals and money were there, workers would be found. America would just have more people. Same as it ever was, but with less stuff for everybody overall. Less food and none of it cheap.
Bizzness likes foreign workers who work for no benefits. They work and go home. Sometimes they stay and bring family. If they stay we get new restaurants so it is all not so bad. It would be hard to find an Indian restaurant in my area if we had no Microsoft. As things are we have grocery stores that are Indian themed up our ass. I like curry so I have options. Nice! Same thing with Asian restaurants.
If immigration was the solution to the worker shortage problem, how come they haven't solved the Nursing shortage by importing more nurses? How come the Driver shortage isn't being solved by importing more truckers?
Where are you going to find the affordable housing for this new population of immigrants? There is already a shortage of affordable housing for the people currently living here.
Are new immigrants credit worthy enough to buy all the new Teslas rolling off Elon's production line? Are the power utility companies credit worthy to float more debt to finance the build out? They already can't service the debt they have.
Immigration is no longer the Magic Bullet for Amerikan Bizness it was when the French gave us the Statue of Liberty to encourage all the poor Frogs to leave Paris for the streets paved with gold in Amerika, and poor people worldwide have come to grasp that life here for poor people isn't a whole lot better than where they are, unless it's some war torn country that has already achieved failed state status. While Libyans and Somalians still jump at the chance to come to Amerika, it's not so true of Germans and Chinese.
Solving the labor shortage is not as simple as increasing immigration anymore. The situation has become much more complex as collapse has progressed and Amerika is no longer a growing economy.
RE
You make good points but both your examples are bad. Nurses and truck drivers are an expense. Is there a real shortage or is this a manufactured shortage claimed by business. Owners of rehab places want their mailbox money. They don't want it going to pay nurses. If owners of trucking companies want more drivers they can get them if they pay more.
The owning class says people don't want to work. The truth is they don't want to pay. Licenses are required to be a nurse or to drive a truck. That shrinks the labor pool. Business wants a larger labor pool so they can hire cheap workers.
For the highly skilled, those with skills you can't pick up on You Tube, immigration will fill a shortage be it real or imagined. Wages will be kept low. The H1-B program of sanitized immigration has been around for years.
It comes back to the money. Who finances the green revolution?
Nurses mostly came from the Philippines ten years ago. What changed?
* Living facilities for guest workers build themselves. Workers get paid enough to pay rent. The amount of money Microsoft millionaires (people paid in stock years ago) have invested in new apartment buildings in Bellevue and Redmond, WA must be in the hundreds of millions. The workers have to live somewhere and it is not hard to figure out what will be profitable with a little inside info.
The superorganism grows. Money is its blood.
They still do import Filipina Nuses, but it's a numbers problem. They only graduate so many each year, and the number they produce doesn't keep up with increases needed here due tothe aging population, and of course COVID which required such a rapid increase it left a hole of trainees behind it. Accelerated training programs and early graduation drained them dry.
The second problem is the same demographic problems are true in all the developed countries, so we're not the only country competing for immigrants to fill these jobs which require a decent amount of training like Nursing and Trucking. The Euros need the immigrants, so do the Japanese and even the Indians. Places which used to be net exporters of immigrants are now net importers. Particularly in skilled professions, this is a global problem.
RE
If fascism whips up enough there won't be any immigration at all. Not with legions of climate refugees on the seas. Intensifying the global problem.
Quote from: K-Dog on Jul 04, 2023, 09:33 PMIf fascism whips up enough there won't be any immigration at all. Not with legions of climate refugees on the seas. Intensifying the global problem.
Also very true. There is the old issue where people who are already here don't want to share what's left of their shrinking pie with newbies. Never mind that basically everyone who lives here is a descendant of immigrants, with the exception of a vanishingly small percentage of 100% native aboriginals who mostly live in poverty on a few reservations.
New immigrants compete for housing with the locals, driving up the prices and making it still MOAR unaffordable. Up here, Wasilla took in something like 2000 Ukrainian refugees, and there are like ZERO open apartments up there now for low income people. Here in Anchorage I am on a Waiting List for Cook Inlet Housing, with a current estimate of a 6-18 month wait list. They can't boot me out of my SNF which charges $16K/mo currently being paid almost in full for me by Medicare and Medicaid, but at the end of August my case gets reviewed and my bennies might get reduced, in which case they take all my retirement money and leave me a big $200/mo pocket money.
New immigrants also compete for shrinking Social Services, medical care, education for their kids etc. Needless to say, none of these agencies are getting more money to provide their services, most of them are getting budget cuts as tax revenues dwindle in the latest economic slowdown, which is already in recession just not admitted to by the stats people officially.
Also presenting obstacles to expanding immigration is the endless War on Terror which labels just about everyone from a Muslim Country as a Terrorist and everyone from South and Central America a Drug Dealer. About the only thing which might be a little better is racism, since so many Brown and Asians have added to the Black immigrant population already here that all together it's probably close to even with the White population. Of course, we still do have the local Neo-Nazis protesting further immigration by any non-white populations, aka everybody except Eurotrash.
So to return to the Grid buildout problem, it doesn't seem likely that they will be able to expand the workforce rapidly enough to do the extensive kind of construction necessary inside a 12 year window, even IF the money and the metals were magically available, which they are not.
Despite the fact this should be clear to anyone with half a brain, you still have talking heads from Think Tanks and Political Policy groups hanging the blame here on Regulatory complexity, which is a problem but by no means theworst or biggest problem. Nobody will admit the problem either, right up to the day EV owners plug in at the local charging station and they hang out the "Out of Juice" sign.
RE
Quote from: RE on Jun 30, 2023, 06:34 PMI think most of us here are agreed we need to restructure society in order to have any chance of at least bringing the non stop degradation of the environment under control, even if we can't reverse what has already been done. This brings with it a new set of questions.
1- What are the changes that need to be made, and in what order?
2- How do you go about implementing these changes?
3- What means would be most effective for getting the changes made?
4- What are the negative consequences of making the changes?
5- How do you get people to accept these consequences?
6- Who are the people/groups with the best chance of getting the process started, and how do you enlist them in the effort?
7- How do you make this a global effort with cooperation from all countries?
Pretty tough questions.
RE
Yes, very hard questions and we will get back to this. (without getting arrested) I'm convinced a strong labor movement is essential to developing a new community centered focus. Community focus and proletariat control must be a cornerstone of any movement away from elite narrow minded self-centered rule.
Listening to Richard Wolf is like breathing fresh air.
France:
QuoteDemonstrations strikes all kinds a range of activities showing that the majority of the people are saying something very profound namely this and this is not properly reported in the American Press the French government the ruling class of the French businesses has made a mess of the French economy and once one dimension of that mess is the broken budget. They spend more money than they tax it's a little bit like the United States in that regard okay and they've been borrowing a lot of money building up the country's debt kind of like the United States and they don't want to keep doing that because that's costly that if you keep raising the debt then you have to tax your people more and more to pay off the interest on that debt to whoever you borrowed the money from to simple rule of the capitalist economic system so they wanted to stop borrowing money and they had to come up there for with another way to manage their budget and they came up with one they're gonna deprive elderly workers who normally under French law for decades have the right to retire at age 62 say to them you cannot retire even if you have paid into your pension in their equivalent of the social security system for your entire working life you've made all your plans you've arranged where you live or your relationship to your children all the rest to retire at 62 no President macron says you won't be able to we're going to keep you working another two years until you're 64. During those years you will be putting money in to the pension program like all workers do instead of pulling money out in simple English solve the problem that the ruling class messed up its Budget on the backs of the working class and everyone in France knows it it can't hide you know why because all the language of the big fancy press making it look like in the words of President Michael we are reforming the pension system no you're not you're ripping it off because they have socialist and Communists and anti-capitalist newspapers and schools they can give a different interpretation and so the people of France get oh yeah they're taking away my pension
On our side of the pond we don't get the 'different interpretation'.
The unrest was most severe on the evenings of Thursday, Friday and Saturday. In this time span, there have been approximately 2,186 arrests, 3,500 burned vehicles, and 168 attacks on police premises.
(https://img-s-msn-com.akamaized.net/tenant/amp/entityid/AA1dhW4l.img?w=768&h=432&m=6)
That last blurb was from POX news who portray the riots as the result of the killing of a teen of North African heritage.
No, POX news, this is not a George Floyd sort of thing though such a thing might have been the trigger. Chris Hedges explains it well. I recall him saying that when things get tense any sort of spark can start a rebellion.
POX news is in the sheep management business. They prefer not using the word 'labor' in a sentence.
* shooting from the hip I'd say 3,500 burned vehicles lined up bumper to bumper would make a line over 10 miles long.
Thats the standard Merican interpretation. France is being ripped apart because one teen died.
Yeah,
(https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=http%3A%2F%2Ftravelinnate.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2014%2F05%2FBrooklyn-Bridge-2.jpg&f=1&nofb=1&ipt=10dd076186583decef365cfaf743b2a7528ad5ea87ffe8ed4c117315faa7d625&ipo=images)
I've got this for sale. Any takers?
Quote from: K-Dog on Jul 06, 2023, 02:47 PMThats the standard Merican interpretation. France is being ripped apart because one teen died.
Right, just like the whole Arab Spring was caused by one Tunisian Fruit Vendor self immolating. ::)
France has been a Tinderbox since the Gilete Jaunes protests, all it needed was a new trigger to restart. The question is, how far along will it go this time? Will it spark enough anarchy to bring down the State? The French have a very strong Police State apparatus, and you can be pretty sure they'll pull out all the stops to quell the rebellion. Curfew, detention without trial, live bullets are all on the table.
Here we go again.
RE
Quote from: RE on Jul 06, 2023, 03:10 PMQuote from: K-Dog on Jul 06, 2023, 02:47 PMThats the standard Merican interpretation. France is being ripped apart because one teen died.
Right, just like the whole Arab Spring was caused by one Tunisian Fruit Vendor self immolating. ::)
France has been a Tinderbox since the Gilete Jaunes protests, all it needed was a new trigger to restart. The question is, how far along will it go this time? Will it spark enough anarchy to bring down the State? The French have a very strong Police State apparatus, and you can be pretty sure they'll pull out all the stops to quell the rebellion. Curfew, detention without trial, live bullets are all on the table.
Here we go again.
RE
I don't think it's fair equating it to the gillete jaune. I believe the demographic is different. The pension reforms are going to affect the young generation starting work not older workers. So you see young people on the street protesting this one. The gilletes jaune protest was mostly older workers frustrated about gas taxes, electrification and cost of living issues. Or so it seemed to me. Plus it's summer in paris which is protest season.
(https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fmedia.istockphoto.com%2Fvectors%2Fgrand-canyon-with-road-on-bottom-park-of-arizona-vector-id1256429496%3Fk%3D6%26m%3D1256429496%26s%3D170667a%26w%3D0%26h%3Drb9Nym9EbRkFViEc-4lJFpA0WLuRvhGzqx0CbPKRMWQ%3D&f=1&nofb=1&ipt=df6c1c68813dc6fa41b1d8d78a02e60359aa38c9ecb3313ccc67a9e57834b701&ipo=images)
Income inequality, the divide.
Professor Reich at UC Berkeley
* Robert is an endangered species.
Fossil Kapitalism - Ever onward to maximum profits and minimum happiness. Increase the misery.
I add the K but it is a C in the title. K is the answer to the problems C causes.
Father Karl looked at the relationship of
labor and capital to produce the 'commodity'. As Diners know a barrel of oil is worth 20,000 energy slaves. A comparison I have not been fond of. It is confusing, but the fact is. Oil MULTIPLIES
labor and can't be neglected from a
proper analysis of economic conditions, Father Karl style.
As I have been saying like a broken record going round and round and round so much I am dizzy. We let the money do our thinking and it is KILLING US.
FOSSIL CAPITAL is self expanding value (profit) generated by the metamorhphosis of fossil fuels into CO2 gas. Profit generated through the service of fossil fuels.
Climate change human extinction and capitalism are joined at the hip.The video mentions the book 'Losing Earth' by Nathaniel Rich. Here is what Nathaniel says :
(https://s3.amazonaws.com/mcdbookimages/authors/images/000/000/008/reg/NatRich_PableauxJohnson2.jpg?1510605465)
The world has warmed more than one degree Celsius since the Industrial Revolution. The Paris climate agreement — the nonbinding, unenforceable and already unheeded treaty signed on Earth Day in 2016 — hoped to restrict warming to two degrees. The odds of succeeding, according to a recent study based on current emissions trends, are one in 20. If by some miracle we are able to limit warming to two degrees, we will only have to negotiate the extinction of the world's tropical reefs, sea-level rise of several meters and the abandonment of the Persian Gulf. The climate scientist James Hansen has called two-degree warming "a prescription for long-term disaster." Long-term disaster is now the best-case scenario. Three-degree warming is a prescription for short-term disaster: forests in the Arctic and the loss of most coastal cities. Robert Watson, a former director of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has argued that
three-degree warming is the realistic minimum. Four degrees: Europe in permanent drought; vast areas of China, India and Bangladesh claimed by desert; Polynesia swallowed by the sea; the Colorado River thinned to a trickle; the American Southwest largely uninhabitable. The prospect of a five-degree warming has prompted some of the world's leading climate scientists to warn of the end of human civilization.
Is it a comfort or a curse, the knowledge that we could have avoided all this? <-- Capitalism has veto power on that decision (KD)
Because in the decade that ran from 1979 to 1989, we had an excellent opportunity to solve the climate crisis. The world's major powers came within several signatures of endorsing a binding, global framework to reduce carbon emissions — far closer than we've come since. During those years, the conditions for success could not have been more favorable. The obstacles we blame for our current inaction had yet to emerge. Almost nothing stood in our way — nothing except ourselves.
And Capitalism! All hail the Musk (https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fupload.wikimedia.org%2Fwikipedia%2Fcommons%2F4%2F49%2FElon_Musk_2015.jpg&f=1&nofb=1&ipt=bde9d21422a8cad9326e2f0dc651919335811517e1d564b5dd2e564a2440634f&ipo=images) .
Nearly everything we understand about global warming was understood in 1979. By that year, data collected since 1957 confirmed what had been known since before the turn of the 20th century: Human beings have altered Earth's atmosphere through the indiscriminate burning of fossil fuels. The main scientific questions were settled beyond debate, and as the 1980s began, attention turned from diagnosis of the problem to refinement of the predicted consequences. Compared with string theory and genetic engineering, the "greenhouse effect" — a metaphor dating to the early 1900s — was ancient history, described in any Introduction to Biology textbook. Nor was the basic science especially complicated. It could be reduced to a simple axiom:
The more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the warmer the planet. And every year, by burning coal, oil and gas, humankind belched increasingly obscene quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.Why didn't we act? A common boogeyman today is the fossil-fuel industry, which in recent decades has committed to playing the role of villain with comic-book bravado. An entire subfield of climate literature has chronicled the machinations of industry lobbyists, the corruption of scientists and the propaganda campaigns that even now continue to debase the political debate, long after the largest oil-and-gas companies have abandoned the dumb show of denialism. But the coordinated efforts to bewilder the public did not begin in earnest until the end of 1989. During the preceding decade, some of the largest oil companies, including Exxon and Shell, made good-faith efforts to understand the scope of the crisis and grapple with possible solutions.
Nor can the Republican Party be blamed. Today, only 42 percent of Republicans know that "most scientists believe global warming is occurring," and that percentage is falling. But during the 1980s, many prominent Republicans joined Democrats in judging the climate problem to be a rare political winner: nonpartisan and of the highest possible stakes. Among those who called for urgent, immediate and far-reaching climate policy were Senators John Chafee, Robert Stafford and David Durenberger; the E.P.A. administrator, William K. Reilly; and, during his campaign for president, George H.W. Bush. As Malcolm Forbes Baldwin, the acting chairman of the president's Council for Environmental Quality, told industry executives in 1981, "There can be no more important or conservative concern than the protection of the globe itself." The issue was unimpeachable, like support for veterans or small business. Except the climate had an even broader constituency, composed of every human being on Earth.
It was understood that action would have to come immediately. At the start of the 1980s, scientists within the federal government predicted that conclusive evidence of warming would appear on the global temperature record by the end of the decade, at which point it would be too late to avoid disaster. More than 30 percent of the human population lacked access to electricity. Billions of people would not need to attain the "American way of life" in order to drastically increase global carbon emissions; a light bulb in every village would do it. A report prepared at the request of the White House by the National Academy of Sciences advised that "the carbon-dioxide issue should appear on the international agenda in a context that will maximize cooperation and consensus-building and minimize political manipulation, controversy and division." If the world had adopted the proposal widely endorsed at the end of the '80s — a freezing of carbon emissions, with a reduction of 20 percent by 2005 — warming could have been held to less than 1.5 degrees.
A broad international consensus had settled on a solution: a global treaty to curb carbon emissions. The idea began to coalesce as early as February 1979, at the first World Climate Conference in Geneva, when scientists from 50 nations agreed unanimously that it was "urgently necessary" to act. Four months later, at the Group of 7 meeting in Tokyo, the leaders of the world's seven wealthiest nations signed a statement resolving to reduce carbon emissions. Ten years later, the first major diplomatic meeting to approve the framework for a binding treaty was called in the Netherlands. Delegates from more than 60 nations attended, with the goal of establishing a global summit meeting to be held about a year later. Among scientists and world leaders, the sentiment was unanimous: Action had to be taken, and the United States would need to lead. It didn't.
The inaugural chapter of the climate-change saga is over. In that chapter — call it Apprehension — we identified the threat and its consequences. We spoke, with increasing urgency and self-delusion, of the prospect of triumphing against long odds. But we did not seriously consider the prospect of failure. We understood what failure would mean for global temperatures, coastlines, agricultural yield, immigration patterns, the world economy. But we have not allowed ourselves to comprehend what failure might mean for us. How will it change the way we see ourselves, how we remember the past, how we imagine the future? Why did we do this to ourselves? These questions will be the subject of climate change's second chapter — call it
The Reckoning. There can be no understanding of our current and future predicament without understanding why we failed to solve this problem when we had the chance.
That we came so close, as a civilization, to breaking our suicide pact with fossil fuels can be credited to the efforts of a handful of people, among them a hyperkinetic lobbyist and a
guileless atmospheric physicist (https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Falchetron.com%2Fcdn%2Fjames-hansen-9d90b9bb-3c76-4b5d-9b5c-ed60cc078c3-resize-750.jpeg&f=1&nofb=1&ipt=f98a303901d21acbcf1163c79bdf9c44fde50e8852aec5b02c3777e60596ad81&ipo=images) who, at great personal cost, tried to warn humanity of what was coming. They risked their careers in a painful, escalating campaign to solve the problem, first in scientific reports, later through conventional avenues of political persuasion and finally with a strategy of public shaming. Their efforts were shrewd, passionate, robust. And they failed. What follows is their story, and ours.
100 Hansens would have changed the world. We only had one.
Humanity is not smart enough to figure out that if money got us into this mess, perhaps money could get us out. Let the obstacle become the way.
Carbon Fee and Dividend puts a tax on carbon AND DISTRIBUTES THE PROCEEDS TO THE PEOPLE.
Gas becomes expensive as FUCK but since YOU GET THE TAX you can still drive if you want to.
BUT YOU COULD CHOOSE TO DRIVE LESS AND GET RICH.
The dumfucks of the world can't understand this. Too busy dreaming of being the Musk or Bezos to actually care about making their own life better.
I made the last video a couple of years ago. I found it at the Museum Website.
James Explains How Fee and Dividend is different in the video about halfway through. This link has more info. (https://citizensclimatelobby.org/basics-carbon-fee-dividend/)
What could have been.
Quote from: K-Dog on Nov 22, 2023, 11:04 AMAs Diners know a barrel of oil is worth 20,000 energy slaves.
I didn't know the math that way. According to Jason Heppenstall, Homo Saps on the planet are the equivalent of
22 Billion Energy Slaves (http://22billionenergyslaves.blogspot.com/). Divide by 8 Billion people, 1 person= ~3 Energy Slaves. How much is an energy slave worth? 1 gallon of gas? 1 Kw of electricity? 1 Joule? 1 BTU? Dunno.
The point of this number of course is to demonstrate how much Work a Homo Sap can do versus how much Work a Barrel of Oil can do, but that number varies on the type of machine the oil is used to run and its efficiency at converting Heat to Work. Muscles are actually very efficient converters of chemical energy to work without burning the same way you burn oil to get work done, which usually involves pistons or turbines. Muscles take ATP and the energy released by breaking a phosphate bond to make the muscle contract, and the ATP is formed by running glucose through an electron transport chain that adds enough energy to ADP to allow it to hook on an extra phosphate group. Basic biochemistry here. The glucose is the energy fuel homo saps use, along with fat (oil) which we use to store energy on our bodies. That tire around your waistline is actually your personal gas tank of stored energy.
FAT on your body is actually close to equal in energy to a similar quantity of oil, but you would have to be darn fat to carry around 55 gallons of body fat. Say the typical person carries 10 gal of fat? So you have to render down 5 people to fill one 55 gallon drum of oil! ;D
RE
Quote from: RE on Nov 22, 2023, 01:11 PMQuote from: K-Dog on Nov 22, 2023, 11:04 AMAs Diners know a barrel of oil is worth 20,000 energy slaves.
I didn't know the math that way. According to Jason Heppenstall, Homo Saps on the planet are the equivalent of 22 Billion Energy Slaves (http://22billionenergyslaves.blogspot.com/). Divide by 8 Billion people, 1 person= ~3 Energy Slaves. How much is an energy slave worth? 1 gallon of gas? 1 Kw of electricity? 1 Joule? 1 BTU? Dunno.
It is a hard number to quantify, some assumptions need to be made but roughly if a young fit slave you should net 1kwh of work from him, less as they age.
Quote from: 18hammers on Nov 22, 2023, 02:24 PMQuote from: RE on Nov 22, 2023, 01:11 PMQuote from: K-Dog on Nov 22, 2023, 11:04 AMAs Diners know a barrel of oil is worth 20,000 energy slaves.
I didn't know the math that way. According to Jason Heppenstall, Homo Saps on the planet are the equivalent of 22 Billion Energy Slaves (http://22billionenergyslaves.blogspot.com/). Divide by 8 Billion people, 1 person= ~3 Energy Slaves. How much is an energy slave worth? 1 gallon of gas? 1 Kw of electricity? 1 Joule? 1 BTU? Dunno.
It is a hard number to quantify, some assumptions need to be made but roughly if a young fit slave you should net 1kwh of work from him, less as they age.
How many kwh in a 55 gal drum of crude? How much after it is refined down to gas? Down to Diesel? Down to jet fuel?
RE
(https://btstech.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/M492_M452B-A.png)
I have an answer.
One approximation suggests that a barrel of oil contains roughly
4.5 to 6 years of human labor,
That tells us nothing. I have to chew on this.
One gallon of diesel can take a fully loaded semi up a 10% grade over a mountain pass and the engine will cut out just as the truck reaches the summit.
(https://s3.amazonaws.com/welcomia-s3-public/assets/photo/medium/red_semi_truck_isolated_11954.png)
Now using a series of posts sunk into the road on which hand winches can attach we find out how long it takes One Joe Six Pack to winch the truck up the same path.
Several weeks of cranking to produce the same result for sure. The time to move between hitching posts does not count. Diesel is obtained from a barrel of crude at an efficiency of slightly less than half. So twenty gallons (a barrel is 42) times several weeks.
Is in the ball park of 4.5 to 6 years considering a barrel gives more than diesel when it is refined.
* If the earth is 4.5 billion years old and Sisyphus had been rolling stone all that time he would have rolled up the equivalent of a third of Alaska's total oil endowment (as of 2021) in terms of energy used. But Sisyphus is a good stone roller. He would have put out the equivalent of all of Alaska's oil by now.
(https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1600/1*9JoOfMcpLY1M6TpfbUauug.gif)
Twenty thousand slaves harnessed in front of a semi truck like the twenty mule teams of the old west could haul the semi no problem. Only a few hundred would be needed.
A human being can sustainable produce 50-150 watts of mechanical energy. That number seems pretty consistent across most sources I've found researching various energy topics. A gallon of gasoline has roughly 34 kWhrs of energy in it. So at the high end assuming a 30 percent efficiency in a gas engine, and a fit human say 34 x 0.3 /0.15 or 68 hours of labour for the labour of 1 gallon of gasoline. I don't like when they use the full energy content of gas and substitute it for labour as it does not take into account the efficiency of use. I did just amend my original numbers as I was using numbers for younger more athletic types. I was fascinated with human powered machines for a while. There was even a thread I used to follow where a recombinant bicycle was hooked up to a hydraulic pump to run tractor accessories. There are efficiencies to be gained though to cut that number down. Take an excavator for example. Having hand dug many 4 ft deep 25 in wide footing holes I can tell you they are awesome. They can easily replace my 24 hours of digging with 1 hour of work. Then it gets messy though. They get freighted in by truck, must use roads that are built with fuel, often coated in asphalt, and have a staggering embedded energy number. So all those numbers should count against their efficiency but I never see that part written down.
Quote from: 18hammers on Nov 22, 2023, 02:24 PMQuote from: RE on Nov 22, 2023, 01:11 PMQuote from: K-Dog on Nov 22, 2023, 11:04 AMAs Diners know a barrel of oil is worth 20,000 energy slaves.
I didn't know the math that way. According to Jason Heppenstall, Homo Saps on the planet are the equivalent of 22 Billion Energy Slaves (http://22billionenergyslaves.blogspot.com/). Divide by 8 Billion people, 1 person= ~3 Energy Slaves. How much is an energy slave worth? 1 gallon of gas? 1 Kw of electricity? 1 Joule? 1 BTU? Dunno.
It is a hard number to quantify, some assumptions need to be made but roughly if a young fit slave you should net 1kwh of work from him, less as they age.
A have to flesh that number out more, I ment 1 kwh a day net. I am going by working him 12 hrs a day, every day (he is a slave after all) assuming 100 watts output an hour, the extra 200whrday are energy requirements needed for his own food production, medical care clothing and such. I base the power produced by my own estimates and experience in cycling. Though I would make a poor slave at my age as I can only sustain 50 to 75 watt output on my bike. I do have power meters on ( Volts, amps, and watts) my electric bikes so I can measure my own contribution. I believe 1kwh a day to be a reasonable estimate.
Eco-socialism? Has the DD turned into a WEF outpost? You guys get that the eco-socialists are already in control of our institutions and pandemics are just one of the means of their depopulation plans?
Quote from: whd on Nov 23, 2023, 05:12 PMEco-socialism? Has the DD turned into a WEF outpost? You guys get that the eco-socialists are already in control of our institutions and pandemics are just one of the means of their depopulation plans?
Considering the WEF is 100% capitalist which has nothing to do with socialism I have to ask you to clarify what you mean.
Regarding socialism and this website much of it has to do with me.
In line with '
Save as many as you can.' as RE says, my position is that you can't expect people to comply with doing the right thing (
whatever that is) unless there is a PAYBACK for them.
Guaranteed work and Universal Heath care are PAYBACKS which the upper class has convinced every right-wing nutter between the east and west coasts to think of as bad. Are you one of them? You put eco-socialism and the WEF in the same sentence so I am thinking you may be.
The best thing we could do is implement Carbon Dividends (https://citizensclimatelobby.org/basics-carbon-fee-dividend/) but that would mean 'they' the imaginary left wing hordes of SOCIALISTS would be taking over.
You can't say the eco-socialists are in control when you can't even name one. I am calling you out on that. Name an eco-socialist, or if you cannot name one, tell me what one is and I will let you know if you are right or not.
And the prevailing winds of Doom indicate NOBODY is in control.
The WEF is stakeholder fascist, making common cause with the eco-socialists undermining all our institutions. Basically, anyone who thinks climate justice is race and gender justice, aka woke. That is the basic message of the WEF, which is Capitalist like the CCP is capitalist. Green is the new red brigade. CBDC will be the key, all those woke/trans ideologues admining cancellation of anyone questioning the Narrative, like that boy toy leading Canada during Covid. Which means everybody here, likely. .
Quote from: whd on Nov 23, 2023, 07:39 PMBy everybody here I mean, CBDC will get everybody here cancelled.
What is the CBDC?
If you mean -- Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) do tell how changing how rich people define and keep money changes the plight of the poor?
There are many ways to be cancelled, worrying about digital currency being a primary cause is not one of them. But you are free to disagree and explain why and how.
When I meet people who worry about digital currency the thought always goes through my mind to ask : "You do realize there are three letter government agencies that can already cancel your credit cards any time they want. Don't you?", but the desire to ask is not strong. Such people for the most part are talking to themselves and would not listen. They do not know they already wear chains.
A primary point of a CBDC is to prevent the unwashed masses from buying gas, guns or meat. It will also be tied to AI: "At 3:07pm you stated on ----- website that ------ official is a 'kidfucker'; 150 Fedbits have been deleted from your account"..."Your Fedbit account has been cancelled because you have said three times in the the past thirty days that Fedbits are a conspiracy to cancel dissidents."
Of course Intelligence can cancel your accounts, but that is so 20th century. Once it is all digital and AI, they can all claim it isn't happening.
Yeah, and, line up for your monthly mRNA boosters or lose your Fedbit account....
WHD returns to the Diner packing WMDs for the WEF , mRNA & CBDCs. WTF I am LMAO. ;D AFAIK I will BBL.
RE
I wonder why
Quote"You do realize there are three letter government agencies that can already cancel your credit cards any time they want. Don't you?"
always gets ignored. It mystifies me that the truly paranoid never consider that shit already happens. It always is in a future and never right now to them.
Quote from: RE on Nov 23, 2023, 08:33 PMWHD returns to the Diner packing WMDs for the WEF , mRNA & CBDCs. WTF I am LMAO. ;D AFAIK I will BBL.
RE
This one is Canadian, I am sure, we got them less than two fingers of forehead folks aplenty hear. I blame the fox news blasted up here, All you can do is smile and wave at them.
Quote from: K-Dog on Nov 23, 2023, 09:12 PMI wonder why Quote"You do realize there are three letter government agencies that can already cancel your credit cards any time they want. Don't you?"
always gets ignored. It mystifies me that the truly paranoid never consider that shit already happens. It always is in a future and never right now to them.
Which is why many people who are at-risk of being targeted for investigation by the FBI, DEA, ATF, IRS, NSA, CIA, INS, TSA or BHS keep a substantial amount of money in CASH in Safe Deposit Boxes or buried in one of the National Parks off the main trails and keep the lat/lon of the location in a file encrypted with GPG4USB on a MicroSD card in a waterproof capsule they store in their Prison Wallet. Not only your Credit Cards can be stopped, but you bank accouunts and stock trading accounts all can be frozen in a matter of seconds leaving you only with the money you have on you if you need to skip town.
This of course is the reason for numbered Swiss Bank Accts, Cayman Islands Accts and why many held very high hopes for Crypto as a means for having stored money Da Goobermint can't touch if you run afoul of their approval of your activities. Of course, folks whose activities include things like Drug Smuggling and Weapons Trafficking have a lot to worry about in this regard, so most people tend to believe if you are just a nice law abiding citizen you have nothing to worry about, but sadlly that is not necessarily true. Mistaken Identity and Identity Theft can be a problem, and targeting for political purposes is most certainly possible also. J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI was well known for making miserable the lives of anyone he disagreed with politically who had even limited notoriety.
Crypto has turned out to be not so great and Gold can be problematic due to the fact any transactions over I think $600 have to be reported to the IRS. Offshore bank accounts can be hard to get the money from if you don't have a functioning bank acct here to transfer money to. So, CASH remains King as the money safety valve in the world of plastic and digital currency that has evolved.
Cash itself can be a problem to work with except in small transactions of say <$10K, but once you wanna buy something bigger than that it can be difficult to pay cash. If you walk into a Porsche dealership and wish to pay Cash for a 2023 Porsche 911 which retails around $300K, I'm pretty sure a call will be made to the local cops on the high probability you are a drug dealer. lol. Same thing buying a house, I'm not sure walking into a closing with a briefcase with $500K in it to buy a McMansion if it is that easy to just hand over the briefcase and get the Title signed over by the seller without having bankers and lawyers all hovering around.
In any event, I have never had that much surplus money around to need to bury it or use a safe deposit box, but I have always recommended all Doomers keep a few grand in cash around for emergencies. On occassions all the cash machines and store POS registers all suffer an outtage, having cash to buy your smokes is essential.
RE
I asked WHD to name an eco-socialist and he never did so I will.
In the video JBF makes an excellent point that one reason ecology is always a back-page item, is because socialists invented the concept.
JBF gets no argument from me on that.
"I asked WHD to name an eco-socialist and he never did so I will."
I did in fact - every moron who utters the words "climate crisis" when what they really mean is, I want control over your life and to depopulate the planet.
The only thing worse than capitalists devouring the biosphere is socialists who talk about saving the planet when what they really are advocating for is genocide.
Quote from: whd on Nov 28, 2023, 06:42 AM"I asked WHD to name an eco-socialist and he never did so I will."
I did in fact - every moron who utters the words "climate crisis" when what they really mean is, I want control over your life and to depopulate the planet.
The only thing worse than capitalists devouring the biosphere is socialists who talk about saving the planet when what they really are advocating for is genocide.
I am for a good depopulation, where is that button to press! Far to many stupid meat sack's around.
Quote from: whd on Nov 28, 2023, 06:42 AMThe only thing worse than capitalists devouring the biosphere is socialists who talk about saving the planet when what they really are advocating for is genocide.
No, genocide has the-ide suffix, like fratricide, suicide and homicide. It requires killing people.
Depopulation as it is currently operating is lowering the birth rate below replacement level. No killing required.
This is neither a capitalist or socialist phenomenon, it's a biological one and no goobermint of any flavor has found a means to stop it.
Everybody has their own pet theory on why this is happening across so many different countries all at the same time. Personally, I think it's basically economics, kids just cost more than most people can afford to pay, or want to pay. There really isn't much reward for it anymore either. Used to be kids were parents insurance policy for when they got old. Now, kids either disappear and move away, or they are a continuing drain well into their 20s and 30s. So why go through all that sacrifice when you can live better without them?
https://www.vox.com/23971366/declining-birth-rate-fertility-babies-children
You can't even pay people to have more kids RE
Quote from: whd on Nov 28, 2023, 06:42 AM"I asked WHD to name an eco-socialist and he never did so I will."
I did in fact - every moron who utters the words "climate crisis" when what they really mean is, I want control over your life and to depopulate the planet.
The only thing worse than capitalists devouring the biosphere is socialists who talk about saving the planet when what they really are advocating for is genocide.
Socialists of that ilk are not found here. Our motto is save as many as you can. No unnecessary ass-kicking.
Quote from: 18hammers on Nov 28, 2023, 09:28 AMI am for a good depopulation, where is that button to press! Far to many stupid meat sack's around.
Well, 50% of the Meatsacks populating the planet are always below average intelligence, by definition. That never changes no matter how many stupid people you kill off. lol.
Now, just for argument sake, say we pulled Thanos out of the MCU to snap his fingers while wearing the glove with all 6 Infinity Stones and instantly vaporize everybody with an IQ below 100. With Earth's new population of 4B people, the median score is again 100, by definition. Just it is a smarter 100 than the prior test done with 8B people. It is not clear however if either 100 score is smart enough to eliminate stupidity.
From my own admittedly skewed perspective, I have found just about everyone I ever met with an IQ of 100 to be pretty stupid. Starting around 110, I find some people who are not stupid, they just don't test well. At 120, about half of them are smart, then about half are stupid but test well. Starting around 130, you rarely find a stupid person who can generate a score that high. At 140, everybody is smart, unequivocally. You just can't generate a score that high without being very smart. So, if I was doing eugenics based depopulation selecting for smart people and making absolutely sure no stupid people sneak in and stay alive, I would probably put the cutoff score at 135. That is exactly the 99th percentile score, coincidentally. 1% of the population makes the cut for eliminating human stupidity. Fortunately for me, I make the cut with plenty of room to spare. ;D That would cut the population from 8B to 80M, and would be a really roomy earth where everybody could have a nice big chunk of land to live H-G, Permaculture, or techno Aquaponics powered by all renewable energy, your choice of Xanadu.
All that being said, stupidity isn't the proximal problem with the population of Homo Saps right now, it's demographics. Way too many old folks, too few children and too few homo saps of breeding age. So, if you were to bring in Thanos for a genocide based solely on age distribution, he should snap his fingers and vaporize everyone above the age of 40. That knocks off 3B people and allows you to reset social security and medicare liabilities to 0.
Ideally for me, all men with an IQ below 135 and all women above age 40 should be vaporized by Thanos. 8)
RE
"So, if I was doing eugenics based depopulation selecting for smart people and making absolutely sure no stupid people sneak in and stay alive, I would probably put the cutoff score at 135. That is exactly the 99th percentile score, coincidentally. 1% of the population makes the cut for eliminating human stupidity."
To add, "smart" people were more likely to take the covid jabs than "stupid" people, so smart can also be quite stupid, and stupid can be smart, depending on how you measure it.
"I am for a good depopulation, where is that button to press! Far to many stupid meat sack's around."
Let the socialists do it and they tend to focus on killing all the smart people who don't need control freaks.
Quote from: whd on Nov 29, 2023, 07:23 PMTo add, "smart" people were more likely to take the covid jabs than "stupid" people, so smart can also be quite stupid, and stupid can be smart, depending on how you measure it.
I don't think smart people were any more likely to get vaxxed than stupid people. Plenty of idiots got vaxxed. I got it, but only because it was mandatory in the Gulag I was incarcerated at during the 1st wave when it was a panic response. Actually my facility had a 50% mortality rate right before I got imprisoned there. That's how a bed opened up. The guy who was in my closet before me died of covid. I doubt I would have contracted it with or without the vaxx. I just don't get viral diseases.
In any event, covid was a tiny blip on the radar of death. 3 million people, maybe. A nothingburger.
RE
Quote from: whd on Nov 29, 2023, 07:26 PM"I am for a good depopulation, where is that button to press! Far to many stupid meat sack's around."
Let the socialists do it and they tend to focus on killing all the smart people who don't need control freaks.
That's why we need to let Thanos do it. Elon Musk just wants the poor people to die and Billionaires to impregnate as many A list vaginas as they can with the aid of fertility drugs.
RE
Quote from: whd on Nov 30, 2023, 08:28 AMExcess mortality continues to exceed baseline in every vaxxed country.
Yes it does, but as I have explained in excruciatingly long and politically incorrect fashion, it's the BIRTH RATE, not the death rate that is causing the population drop rate of change. People aren't dying all that much faster (yet), they aren't being BORN! .84 births/woman in Korea, 1.34 bpw in Japan, 1.28 bpw China, 1.64 FSoA. You gotta go to India which is mostly agrarian and the women are barefoot and pregnant to get just over the 2 needed for replacement at 2.02.
Your obsession with vaxx is blinding you to the real problem. Relatively speaking, more people dying from whatever cause, war, famine, vaxx, fast food etc is a tiny problem numerically. A birth rate like S, Korea at .84 could cut their population in half in a generation.
RE
Quote from: RE on Dec 01, 2023, 12:04 PMQuote from: whd on Nov 30, 2023, 08:28 AMExcess mortality continues to exceed baseline in every vaxxed country.
Yes it does, but as I have explained in excruciatingly long and politically incorrect fashion, it's the BIRTH RATE, not the death rate that is causing the population drop rate of change. People aren't dying all that much faster (yet), they aren't being BORN! .84 births/woman in Korea, 1.34 bpw in Japan, 1.28 bpw China, 1.64 FSoA. You gotta go to India which is mostly agrarian and the women are barefoot and pregnant to get just over the 2 needed for replacement at 2.02.
Your obsession with vaxx is blinding you to the real problem. Relatively speaking, more people dying from whatever cause, war, famine, vaxx, fast food etc is a tiny problem numerically. A birth rate like S, Korea at .84 could cut their population in half in a generation.
RE
Korea could cut their population quickly but Korean top dogs who don't care about population will soon be concerned with the number of men in their standing army. They will propagandize to have the rate back up.
To increase the German population, the Nazis encouraged their teenagers to have lots of sex. (
which they did when the Russians got there)
(https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1400/format:webp/1*WZeoqR8kEQ3MJrxI92aiNg.jpeg)
The Nazis established two organizations to control and manipulate German teenagers. For boys, they had the Hitler Youth and for girls, they created the League of German Girls. They established both organizations in 1936.
The League of German Girls was the girl's wing of the Hitler Youth. Because of sexual promiscuity, the organization got the nickname "The League of German Mattresses."
From a Medium article, which I no longer have a subscription to. I can't see the rest.
Quote from: K-Dog on Dec 01, 2023, 01:27 PMThe League of German Girls was the girl's wing of the Hitler Youth. Because of sexual promiscuity, the organization got the nickname "The League of German Mattresses."
I think "League of German Sluts" has a better ring to it.
Supposedly this technique has been tried by the Japanese but the teens are not interested in having sex, except with their smartphones.
RE
I wrote this on the 6th extinction forum. Since the discussion is happening here, I'll copy it into this thread to chew on.
Quote from: RE on Nov 29, 2023, 06:23 PMFrom the Capitalism thread:
Quote from: RE on Nov 28, 2023, 11:52 AMQuote from: whd on Nov 28, 2023, 06:42 AMThe only thing worse than capitalists devouring the biosphere is socialists who talk about saving the planet when what they really are advocating for is genocide.
No, genocide has the-ide suffix, like fratricide, suicide and homicide. It requires killing people.
Depopulation as it is currently operating is lowering the birth rate below replacement level. No killing required.
This is neither a capitalist or socialist phenomenon, it's a biological one and no goobermint of any flavor has found a means to stop it.
Everybody has their own pet theory on why this is happening across so many different countries all at the same time. Personally, I think it's basically economics, kids just cost more than most people can afford to pay, or want to pay. There really isn't much reward for it anymore either. Used to be kids were parents insurance policy for when they got old. Now, kids either disappear and move away, or they are a continuing drain well into their 20s and 30s. So why go through all that sacrifice when you can live better without them?
https://www.vox.com/23971366/declining-birth-rate-fertility-babies-children
You can't even pay people to have more kids
RE
I want to add a related economic reason why we have the lowered birthrate and population decline: Women's Liberation.
In the 1970s, women began to move into the work force in droves. This was explained by sociologists as a Liberation of women from the droll role of being a mother and homemaker to having equal opportunity with men to be Doctors, Lawyers, Politicians, Astronauts...whatever a little girl could dream of for her future could come true. No longer did she have to restrict her dreams to the fabulous Wedding she would have and glamorous Wedding Dress.
In reality, Women's Liberation was really Women's Enslavement into the Drone Workforce of Capitalism. Most women did not become Astronauts, they became Bus Drivers, Real Estate sales women and Travel Agents. They didn't go to work because they wanted to be liberated from being barefooy and pregnant, they went because in the growing Capitalist society it was the only way a couple could afford to buy a house. You had to have 2 incomes, in most cases. Unless one person had an Elite level, high paying job like Doctor, to have enough money for a downpayment, the wife had to go to work. Once they went out, they didn't want to go back.
Although a zillion movies were made depicting the Super Moms who had it all, kids and a fabulous career, the reality was and is if a woman works, if she has time and money enough to pop one new meat package out of her vagina she is doing good. 1 kid instantly wipes out all the economic advantage the couple had by both working, since most of the 2nd income goes to Day Care, Braces, Clothes, Gymnastics or Hockey and saving for the kid's future college tuition.
Women going to work didn't happen just in the FSoA, it happened all over the world, particularly places like China, Japan and Korea, which became the main electronics Factory countries of Capitalism. For that type of drone production line work, a females finer, smaller fingers were better for assembling transistor radios and cassette tape recorders. Ever see the inside of an old transistor radio from the days before printed circuits and silicon chips? All the little resistors and capacitors squeezed together on a bakelite circuit board and wired together with little needlenose pliers. I made a few Radio Shack project kits for Science Fairs in elementary school. It is tedious work, and to do this day in and day out 12 hours a day to make radios had to be mind numbing. Those women were not in the mood for baby making after getting home from work. Thus, it is the Asian countries that have the absolute lowest birth rates in the world.
Where do they still make enough babies to replace their parents plus additional ones to emmigrate toward the rich low birth rate countries? You guessed it; countries which still have a primarily agrarian population where Capitalists did not build factories, and where the women are still barefoot and pregnant, and often wearing a hajib. Muslim countries in the Middle East and Africa, in other words.
Why didn't capitalists put their factories there? Partially due to political instability and geography, but also because having both the Means of Production AND the Natural resources in the same place would have made those places independent of the trade network and bankers control. Raping their natural resources and keeping them in perpetual Debt Slavery kept the Capitalist Illuminati rich and powerful, but doing that doomed the Homo Sapiens to perpetual enslavement until all the resources and energy are consumed.
At that point, the current slow depopulation via birthrate decline and gradual shrinkage will turn into a torrent of death and destruction, as Famine, Plague, war & Death consume the planet.
Cometh the 4 Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the inevitable result of the Global Conquest of Capitalism, who rode in upon the White Horse, ending with Death upon the Pale Horse, and Hell followed with him.
6 And I saw when the Lamb opened one of the seals, and I heard, as it were the noise of thunder, one of the four beasts saying, Come and see.
2 And I saw, and behold a white horse: and he that sat on him had a bow; and a crown was given unto him: and he went forth conquering, and to conquer.
3 And when he had opened the second seal, I heard the second beast say, Come and see.
4 And there went out another horse that was red: and power was given to him that sat thereon to take peace from the earth, and that they should kill one another: and there was given unto him a great sword.
5 And when he had opened the third seal, I heard the third beast say, Come and see. And I beheld, and lo a black horse; and he that sat on him had a pair of balances in his hand.
6 And I heard a voice in the midst of the four beasts say, A measure of wheat for a penny, and three measures of barley for a penny; and see thou hurt not the oil and the wine.
7 And when he had opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth beast say, Come and see.
8 And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.
(https://i.pinimg.com/originals/6e/72/d7/6e72d76dd7d2c369e096fae0a41c617d.jpg)
RE
RE
Right on cue
https://www.newsweek.com/south-korea-youth-birth-rate-falling-1848201
South Korea's Population Collapse Is Set To Deepen
RE
If anybody watches this and wants to comment I will respond. I had it playing while I made my last two posts.
The privileged class of the pissed met in the small English town of Glastonbury where (sometimes controversial) discussions about the environment and society. One conference explored how we might become more 'collapse ready' in emotional, practical, and political ways. This 'deep adaptation' event was organised by local residents and included an afternoon panel with the Green Party Mayor of Glastonbury, Indra Donfrancesco, the co-founder of Extinction Rebellion, Gail Bradbrook, the host of Planet Critical, Rachel Donald, the host of All That We Are, Amisha Ghadiali, and author of 'Breaking Together', Professor Jem Bendell.
(https://chasingthesquirrel.com/public/pics/cheworking.jpg)
My feeling is that an important ingredient is missing.
QuoteHow can we make it real for them, real enough to feel fear, real enough to fear for themselves and their children, real enough to change themselves and to demand change from everyone else?
Quote from: K-Dog on Jan 05, 2024, 05:54 PMQuoteHow can we make it real for them, real enough to feel fear, real enough to fear for themselves and their children, real enough to change themselves and to demand change from everyone else?
Make what they believe crucial to their well being, and that of their children....scarce. That is why resource scarcity has always been such a go-to scenario for those looking for scary scenarios. Diseases have been popular, super-volcanoes are great for effect, hard for predictability , we all know how peak oil went 5 years ago now, climate change doesn't work as well, no pizzaz.
I'm betting that when one thing or another finally gets going, it'll be reflected more in social unrest than anything else. Not the penny ante stuff that folks are always trying to claim is the beginning of the end, but the real deal. We won't be sitting around in a comfortable abode lounging with clean water in a glass that came out of the faucet as we go hyperbolic on the internet over the equivalent of a pimple, we will be too busy trying to stay alive. When we have electricity we won't be using it for complain we can't go our favorite website, as opposed to looking for where authorities are attempting to distribute food or fuel supplies.
Right now I think the thing that bugs the "haves" is the future of their money/security/home/ food ...etc. That scarcity is palatable in our societies. My hope and work is to emphasize the futility of hopium for a standard of living that is "advertised" to us all. That is the trick. Now, with AI we can create narratives of what the stupidity of chasing after the "American dream", actually gets you. Now where. The values in life have to change from the materialist/capital driven meme, to a cooperative winning meme.
Changes will be coming.
Roger makes it clear state control of the economy WILL HAPPEN.
So, what kind would you like to have?
Quote from: K-Dog on Jan 30, 2024, 04:25 PMChanges will be coming.
Roger makes it clear state control of the economy WILL HAPPEN.
So, what kind would you like to have?
Not one controlled by democrats or republicans.
Not one controlled by Billionaires.
Not one controlled by politicians elected by a population that has shit for brains.
RE
Climate change and resource depletion cannot be directly blamed on capitalism, but capitalism creates an environment where exploitation is the norm. An environment where collective concerns are ignored.
It is a fatal flaw. Capitalism enabled the century of the self. The century which may have set up conditions that result in human.
Jason W Moore sees unfavorable shifts in the climate as bad for ruling classes. Their grip on the existing order is exaggerated and when unfavorable climatic conditions happen the ruling class can't adapt and provide what average people need.
QuoteThis should give us pause to reject both the climate doomism and, I think the climate resignation, this sense of powerlessness in the present conjuncture.
But Diner readers know resource depletion means doomism can't be rejected as cavalierly as Jason would like to.
I had a sense of where the argument might go and I guessed correctly. Critics will say the arguments Jason presents are circular. I am not a critic. I agree with Jason says mostly. Capitalism puts money in charge and profit exploits.
The exploitation of labor power is the cash machine that destroys the environment. Cheap labor is the resource that capitalism cannot live without. Cheap labor is used to cheapen everything else. As environmental conditions become unfavorable getting things done becomes harder and profit suffers. Capitalism fails.
Without a new frontier to exploit capitalism fails. Profit must extract from a surplus. The cancer will die, but it likely takes us with it.
Quote from: K-Dog on Apr 06, 2024, 11:59 AMThe exploitation of labor power is the cash machine that destroys the environment. Cheap labor is the resource that capitalism cannot live without. Cheap labor is used to cheapen everything else. As environmental conditions become unfavorable getting things done becomes harder and profit suffers. Capitalism fails.
Without a new frontier to exploit capitalism fails. Profit must extract from a surplus. The cancer will die, but it likely takes us with it.
I'd say, 'dead labor' qua Marx i.e labor embedded in goods over which the laborer has no control, or literally dead laborers sacrificed in the process of producing goods. The cheapness of a specific group of laborers can always be partially mediated to keep the system stable/functional, hence why not all labor has the same value. But the
net value of all labor is always already cheaper than the
net value of all goods under any capital system, i.e any economic system based on hierarchical command over the labor process.
Getting rid of 'capitalism' alone won't change this beyond the aforementioned partial and temporary mediations. We (or rather the parasitic classes) may well decommodify labor and goods when capitalist waste risks the stability of the capital system. But without universal democratic control over what gets produced how why, you still have 'dead labor'. An undemocratic structure can allow for guaranteed work and min wage, vital resources being centrally managed etc, but none of those things can be universal or irreversible. The metabolic order of inequality will always seek wasteful expansion, will always be threatened by some combination of social antagonism and resource limits, and always adapt thereto by reversing its concessions until the crisis subsides.
A lot of the eco-socialist discourse is around trying to 'balance' ecology and socialism which assumes those things can ever be at odds to begin. If people genuinely control the labor (and life) processes they will actively want to do everything in their power to ensure they continue far beyond their lifetimes.
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A quote from the video.
QuoteYou'll notice that congresspeople, they're not millionaires when they go in, but they're millionaires when they come out.
Money makes mo'money, with slaves to money stuffed at a bean feed while everyone else goes hungry. Everyone brainwashed into thinking that this is the way it is, and this is the way it must stay. The more pathetic philanthropists of the useless eater are bribed by a bag of groceries.
Everything literally crumbles back at the ranch, while billions of American tax dollars are spent supporting a genocidal war and an apartheid state. Our country is run by criminals who slaughters people for profit. Follow the money. See who our politicians serve. It's not you.
Hundreds of millions have seen our politicians serve their money since the Gaza crisis began. All of them. The truth can't be ignored. It is as clear as the difference between night and day.
Carlos is a very smart guy.
Might capitalism be the problem?
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We be saving the planet if it is profitable, and fuck humanity if it is not.
Do you think so?
Capitalism puts the burden of remaining within our planetary boundaries on the most exploited people in the world, and will not come soon enough to save us all. Only the most fortunate. That is unacceptable. There is no capitalist path to climate justice.
Call the bullshit and save as many as you can.
Similar to the affordable housing problem. It's not as profitable as luxury housing for rich people. So all the investment capital goes toward building 5000 sq ft McMansions and $1M Condos.
RE