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What shouldn't be done...about climate change


Kalbear

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3 minutes ago, Triskele said:

Didn't it leak that Trump had actually proposed something not too dissimilar to this?  Or at least asked why he couldn't just do that?

...it wouldn't surprise me. And the fact that it seems plausible not only that Trump proposed it but that it's been forgotten amongst all the other scandal is really quite horrifying. :(

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41 minutes ago, Triskele said:

Didn't it leak that Trump had actually proposed something not too dissimilar to this?  Or at least asked why he couldn't just do that?

I suspect you're referring to this:

Quote

Frustrated with a record number of people seeking asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border this spring, President Donald Trump at one point asked in a private meeting with close aides whether the U.S. could shoot migrants below the waist to slow them down. [...]

According to two sources familiar with the matter, Trump in private meetings raised the prospect of shooting migrant families seeking asylum at the border as early as November 2018. He also floated a similar idea publicly at one point, suggesting that rocks thrown by migrants will be considered a firearm and potentially warrant lethal force.

Sources interviewed by ABC News say Trump’s aides discouraged the idea of shooting unarmed migrants and it was never acted upon. But Trump remained focused on the idea, bringing it up again in the private Oval Office meeting in March 2019, when the number of undocumented migrants arriving at the border topped 100,000 for that month alone.

 

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Interesting that Trump seems to have had no approval bump from the Baghdadi killing at all (yet).

Google tells me Obama got a 5 point+ bump right after Osama was announced. But even Rasmussen has Trump down by 9 (45 / 54) in a poll conducted entirely after the announcement. Am I missing something? Or is this just another case of Trumps approval numbers being so entrenched that they're basically impossible to move.

 

 

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6 minutes ago, Impmk2 said:

Or is this just another case of Trumps approval numbers being so entrenched that they're basically impossible to move.

Yes.  Also bin Laden was a considerably higher profile killing than al-Baghdadi.  I'd like to see a comparison of how many voters could accurately identify Baghdadi compared to bin Laden before they were killed.

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This idea has potential, though there are also significant issues. (assembling trains in freight yards for one)  Be interesting if the kid gets a job offer from Musk.  A new kind of railway system....

 

https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/hyperloop-design-teenager/index.html

 

(CNN) — Several rival companies may be hard at work trying to get Elon Musk's Hyperloop concept off the ground, but hurtling across country -- maybe even across continents -- at 600 miles per hour in a low-pressure steel tube still feels far from reality.
But 13-year-old New York student Caroline Crouchley may have invented a more economically viable and eco-friendly Hyperloop solution.
Crouchley's idea, which just won second place in the annual 3M Young Scientist Challenge, is to build pneumatic tubes next to existing train tracks.
Magnetic shuttles would travel through these vacuum tubes, connected via magnetic arm to trains traveling on the existing tracks.
This system would utilize current train tracks, thereby cutting infrastructure costs and, Crouchley says, eradicating the potential safety risk posed by propelling passengers in a vacuum.
There'd be no need for trains to use diesel or electric motors, making the trains lighter and more fuel-efficient.
This is important to Crouchley, who aims to devise active solutions to the climate crisis.

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On 10/30/2019 at 1:55 PM, felice said:

What about refugees from within the US? A lot of citizens are going to lose their homes in places like Florida; should there be a wall at the top of the panhandle to stop the riffraff escaping? In the longer term, how about a wall along Canada's southern border to keep the Americans out?

Well Ben Shapiro says they can just sell their houses and move somewhere else. So there problem solved. Who's going to buy a house that's on ground that's literally going under water? Who knows. Who cares.

Seriously, though millions will literally become homeless and I figure would have to try migrate to somewhere safer It'd be interesting to the extremity of localism will be. 

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On 10/24/2019 at 6:12 PM, The Anti-Targ said:

Except the only thing it will get govt to act on is arresting them. If you lose a lot of average Joe public support then the govt is ONLY motivated to get average Joe on their side so they can win the next election.

trying to brow beat people into action simply doesn't work, and it's more likely to be counter-productive.

The way to get govts to act is to get masses of people on your side so that govts actually realise there are votes to be lost (or won) by doing the right thing.

XR is doing the wrong thing for the right reasons, and IMO that means they are more likely to slow down the pace of change rather than speed it up.

And it seems XR has realised this, at least with the tube protest.

 

 I’m not saying there should be absolutely no care on how society sees you. But, not every action should be halted if it might upset the majority. 

And, I’m sorry but I think you’re putting too much stock in the average joe’s ability to effect really policy change using the electoral process. Often times it isn’t. 

Cesare Chavez thought the way to get real improvements was to go after a company’s purse. Boycotts, not votes.

I don’t take such a extreme position. Elections do matter. Clinton despite her flaws-and their were many even on this particular issue-would have far better on it than Trump who literally preached it’s a Chinese hoax. But I do think Chavez right that people take too much stock in the idea of democracy being the thing that will usher in change automatically. I do not begrudge XR deciding to be more PR minded. 

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22 minutes ago, Varysblackfyre321 said:

 I’m not saying there should be absolutely no care on how society sees you. But, not every action should be halted if it might upset the majority. 

And, I’m sorry but I think you’re putting too much stock in the average joe’s ability to effect really policy change using the electoral process. Often times it isn’t. 

Cesare Chavez thought the way to get real improvements was to go after a company’s purse. Boycotts, not votes.

I don’t take such a extreme position. Elections do matter. Clinton despite her flaws-and their were many even on this particular issue-would have far better on it than Trump who literally preached it’s a Chinese hoax. But I do think Chavez right that people take too much stock in the idea of democracy being the thing that will usher in change automatically. I do not begrudge XR deciding to be more PR minded. 

I'm not sure you are getting my point. Democracy (as in the virtues of voting and stuff) isn't what I'm driving at. It's every (almost) politician's sense of self preservation and them reading the tea leaves trying to figure out which way to jump on an issue. There are two drivers: what's going to win/lose votes, what's going to win/lose donors.

If politicians can safely dismiss a protest group as merely representative of a negligible fringe of society then they are going to try to whip the generality of society into a frenzy of hatred for that group. And if the protest group does stuff to piss off the generality of society then the politician's job is made easier. And even if the protest group is totally right about how they want society to change the effect of their actions will be to make that change less likely in the immediate term.

Groups trying to effect social change really need to think about productive action vs counter-productive action. A lot of the time being all angry and in the face of the average Joe / Jane is going to be counter-productive. 

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 11/2/2019 at 5:17 PM, ThinkerX said:

This idea has potential, though there are also significant issues. (assembling trains in freight yards for one)  Be interesting if the kid gets a job offer from Musk.  A new kind of railway system....

 

https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/hyperloop-design-teenager/index.html

 

 

 

Can someone break down this one a bit more for me?  It sounds like some kid decided that if we put vacuum tubes next to regular style train tracks and then generated a magnetic link between the cargo inside the tubes and the regular train we would somehow get CO2 free transit.  Got to generate the energy for the maglev field somehow.  And getting rid of wind resistance in the vacuum tube doesnt eliminate the energy needed to accelerate the mass within.  Sounds akin to perpetual motion machine.  Why not put the whole train in a vacuum tube?  Which is back to hyperloop 1.0 idea but at least that idea considered thermodynamics.

2 hours ago, Triskele said:

Someone is studying the "global systems death-spiral."

Lolz.  I m sure its good for his research budget.  The earth had much higher CO2 concentrations in the past and didn't turn into a venusian he ll hole.  I rather doubt plastic straws and gas range tops will kill each and every one of 7 billion+ people.

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3 minutes ago, mcbigski said:

Can someone break down this one a bit more for me?  It sounds like some kid decided that if we put vacuum tubes next to regular style train tracks and then generated a magnetic link between the cargo inside the tubes and the regular train we would somehow get CO2 free transit.  Got to generate the energy for the maglev field somehow.  And getting rid of wind resistance in the vacuum tube doesnt eliminate the energy needed to accelerate the mass within.  Sounds akin to perpetual motion machine.  Why not put the whole train in a vacuum tube?  Which is back to hyperloop 1.0 idea but at least that idea considered thermodynamics.

your summary is fairly accurate.  the idea, best i can tell, doesn't violate thermodynamics, but does have multiple issues.

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8 minutes ago, mcbigski said:

Lolz.  I m sure its good for his research budget.  The earth had much higher CO2 concentrations in the past and didn't turn into a venusian he ll hole.  I rather doubt plastic straws and gas range tops will kill each and every one of 7 billion+ people.

One small difference: the world rarely has had incredibly rapid increases in CO2 like this. While CO2 has been higher at times, those happened over millions of years. Rapid changes have only occurred from extinction-level events which wiped out most of the life on earth. 

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On 11/2/2019 at 10:17 PM, ThinkerX said:

This idea has potential, though there are also significant issues. (assembling trains in freight yards for one)  Be interesting if the kid gets a job offer from Musk.  A new kind of railway system....

 

https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/hyperloop-design-teenager/index.html

 

 

 

What have the people who awarded this with a prize been smoking? That girl obviously knows zero physics. First, I'd really like to know how that "magnetic arm" is supposed to work. Then the thing that makes fast trains (and maglevs) expensive to run is aerodynamic drag. That's why Musk came up with the Hyperloop to begin with. You put the train in vacuum to get rid of the drag. Having a locomotive in vacuum (linked to the train my magic) accomplishes nothing. But hey, she used Autodesk Inventor to make some pretty pictures.

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5 hours ago, mcbigski said:

  The earth had much higher CO2 concentrations in the past and didn't turn into a venusian he ll hole.  I rather doubt plastic straws and gas range tops will kill each and every one of 7 billion+ people.

True.  But a relatively small increase in CO2 (compared with prehistoric levels when everything was different) will result in changes to weather patterns and rising sea levels.   They won't cause the end of the world.  But they will prove rather awkward (already are!) for them pesky little humans - affecting food production and flooding their homes, for example.    That's why we don't want to make things any worse than they already are.

Meanwhile, the plastic straws will eventually be our legacy - tiny traces found in rock strata all over the world by octopoid geologists 20 million years from now.

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  • 2 months later...

(Sad) News of the day...

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/01/21/donald-trump-davos-climate-change-101327

Quote

 

President Donald Trump on Tuesday warned the international community against heeding the advice of environmental activists — dismissing them as fearmongering “prophets of doom” who will cripple global economies and strip away individual liberties in what he described as a misguided mission to save the planet.

“This is not a time for pessimism. This is a time for optimism. Fear and doubt is not a good thought process because this is a time for tremendous hope and joy and optimism and action,” Trump said in his opening address at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland.

“But to embrace the possibilities of tomorrow, we must reject the perennial prophets of doom and their predictions of the apocalypse,” he continued. “They are the heirs of yesterday’s foolish fortune tellers. And I have them, and you have them, and we all have them. And they want to see us do badly, but we don’t let that happen.”

 

All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds, nothing to see here.

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58 minutes ago, Rippounet said:

(Sad) News of the day...

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/01/21/donald-trump-davos-climate-change-101327

All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds, nothing to see here.

Just to be clear that this speech was spouted by Trump but given that he probably doesn't understand the meaning of half the words in it, let us say it was written for Trump to say, much like a trained seal. 

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6 hours ago, maarsen said:

Just to be clear that this speech was spouted by Trump but given that he probably doesn't understand the meaning of half the words in it, let us say it was written for Trump to say, much like a trained seal. 

What did trained seals do to you?

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On 11/14/2019 at 6:28 AM, Essan said:

True.  But a relatively small increase in CO2 (compared with prehistoric levels when everything was different) will result in changes to weather patterns and rising sea levels.   They won't cause the end of the world.  But they will prove rather awkward (already are!) for them pesky little humans - affecting food production and flooding their homes, for example.    That's why we don't want to make things any worse than they already are.

Meanwhile, the plastic straws will eventually be our legacy - tiny traces found in rock strata all over the world by octopoid geologists 20 million years from now.

Should be noted that the sun was much weaker at those points where CO2 levels were much higher. Were CO2 level to get to that point now with the Sun as it is, I don't know about "venusian" But it would make those "damn near tropical rain forest at the poles" days look absolutely frosty by comparison.

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