At least it's more civilised than a Trump debate. After all, they both get to make their point.

Once again, for a supposedly "civilised" country, many aspects of the US health system feel utterly barbaric.

Well milk is bovine

Large populations of our species just has got it's milks mixed up.

Certainly the thought of pig milk, or dog milk would make any person retch, but we've been conditioned to think that for some reason cows milk is also for us. So much so that we'll kill this little fellow just get his mother's milk. Of course we'll kill her too once her milk no longer flows economically enough. We'll hide it and call it humane to make ourselves feel like good civilised people, even perhaps decide that we need milk, even though most of the world doesn't and is healthier for it.

@bcglorf Here's a tome for you....


It's certainly not (the only way). Converting to green energy sources stimulates the economy, it doesn't bankrupt it, and it makes it more efficient in the future thanks to lower energy costs. My solar system paid for itself in 8 years, giving me an expected 12 years of free electricity and hot water. Right wingers would tell you it will never pay for itself....utter bullshit.

Every gap in our knowledge I've ever seen that we have filled with data has made the estimates worse. Every one. Every IPCC report has raised the severity and shrunk the timeframe from the last report....but you stand on the last one that they admit was optimistic and incomplete by miles as if it's the final word and a gold standard. It just isn't. They themselves admit this.

The odds of catastrophic climate change is 100% in the next 0 years for many who have already died or been displaced by rising seas or famine or disease or lack of water or...... and that goes for all humanity in the next 50 because those who survive displacement will be refugees on the rest's doorsteps. Don't be ridiculous. If we found an asteroid guaranteed to hit in the next 50-100 years, and any possible solutions take a minimum of 50 years to implement with no surprises, and only then assuming we solve the myriad of technical issues we haven't solved in the last 100 years of trying and only if we can put the resources needed into a solution, not considering the constantly worsening barrage of smaller asteroids and the effects on resources and civilisation, we would put all our resources into solutions. That's where I think we are, except we still have many claiming there's no asteroid coming and those that already hit are fake news....including those in the highest offices making the decisions.

Every IPCC report has vastly underestimated their projections, they tell you they are doing it, only including data they are certain of, not new measurements or functions. They do not fill in the gaps, they leave them empty. Gaps like methane melt that could soon be more of a factor than human CO2, and 100% out of our control.

The AR5 report is so terrible, it was lambasted from day one as being incredibly naive and optimistic, and for not including what was then new data. Since its release, those complaints have been proven to be correct, in 5 years since its release ice melt rates have accelerated 60 years by their model. I wouldn't put a whit of confidence in it, it was terrible then, near criminally bad today. I'll take NOAA's estimates based on much newer science and guess that they, like nearly all others in the past, also don't know everything and are also likely underestimating wildly. Even the IPCC AR5 report includes the possibility of 3 ft rise by 2100 under their worst case (raised another 10% in this 2019 report, and expected to rise again by 2021, their next report), and their worst case models show less heat and melting than we are measuring already and doesn't include natural feedbacks because they can't model them accurately yet so just left them out (but noted they will have a large effect, but it's not quantitative yet so not included). Long and short, their worst case scenario is likely optimistic as reality already outpaces their worst case models.

Again, the economy benefits from new energy production in multiple ways. Exxon is not the global economy.

It took 100 years for the impact of our pollution to be felt by most (some still ignore it today). Even the short term features like methane take 25+ years to run their cycles, so what we do today takes that long to start working.

If people continue to drag their feet and challenge the science with supposition, insisting the best case scenario of optimistic studies are the worst we should plan for, we're doomed....and what they're doing is actually worse than that. The power plants built or under construction today put us much higher than 1.5 degree rise by 2100 with their expected emissions without ever building 1 more, and we're building more. Without fantastic scientific breakthroughs that may never come, breakthroughs your plan relies on for our survival, what we've already built puts us beyond the IPCC worst case in their operational lifetimes.

There's a problem with that...I'm good with using real science to identify them without political obstruction and confusion, the difference being we need to be prepared for decisive action once they're identified. So far, we have plans to develop those actions, but that's it. In the event of a "surprise" asteroid, we're done. We just hope they're rare.
This one, however, is an asteroid that is guaranteed to hit if we do nothing, some say hit in 30 years, some say 80. Only morons say it won't hit at all, do nothing.
Climate change is an asteroid/comet in our orbit that WILL hit earth. We are already being hit by ejecta from it's coma causing disasters for millions. You suggest we don't start building a defense until we are certain of it's exact tonnage and the date it will crash to earth because it's expensive and our data incomplete. That plan leaves us too late to change the trajectory. The IPCC said we need to deploy our system in 8-10 years to have a 30-60% chance of changing the trajectory under perfect conditions....you seem to say "wait, that's expensive, let's give it some time and ignore that deadline". I say even just a continent killer is bad enough to do whatever it takes to stop, because it's cheaper with less loss of life and infinitely less suffering than a 'wait and see exactly when it will kill us, we might have space elevators in 10 years so it might only kill 1/2 of us and the rest might survive that cometary winter in space (yes at exponentially higher cost and loss of life and ecology than developing the system today, but that won't be on my dime so Fuck it).' attitude.

Meanwhile, in the civilised world, we’re ALL “democratic socialists” by US standards.

and it’s awful. All these fucking people walking around not going broke just because they get sick. It’s disgusting.

Dont blame "capitalism", blame humans, civilisation. Some countries, communities, families are able to create institutions and rules that span generations and centuries without destroying their livelihoods. Call it capitalism if you must, but the only way for humans to survive it is if they are allowed to make meaningful decisions and shoulder the responsibility for those decisions.

I lived in a "communist" country and I can inform you that shit was removed from rivers, sulfur from power station smoke and lead from car exhaust gasses only after it reverted to a form of constitutional democratic individualistic "capitalism".

All it takes is some basic rules about shit and rivers and a will either free, or imposed by institutions, to abide.

Some big rich countries have good rules and institutions, some dont. Most poor countries dont and that is a real problem. If you cant afford to put shit anywhere else it has to go in the river.

Fair points, but this is obviously a prototype.

Ultimately, the price of these will come down and even if you need to swap out the batteries, there's no reason that can't be automated too. Hell, a roomba basically does that now. The point is it doesn't need sleep or meal breaks and it doesn't care about working hours. Or you just leave it connected to a permanent power source (if you can teach it to drywall, you can teach it to avoid the cable).

And yeah, my numbers are obviously estimates, since this isn't commercially available yet, and you'd need to factor in capital investment, maintenance, etc. But you don't have to pay it a salary, it doesn't need medical and it doesn't have to comply with health and safety regs (at least, not for the robots H&S).

I find it difficult to believe that something like this could ever be less cost-effective than a human.

Of course, that's assuming a steady rate of improvement. Bipedal robots (like self-driving cars) have been "90% there" for many years now. It might be that the last 10% is REALLY, REALLY difficult.

My gut feeling is that we will see a tipping point. There will be some really challenging engineering/programming obstacle that stops these going mainstream, but eventually, someone will solve it and then the rate of progress will be exponential.

But you're right in that, that's certainly a few years away yet. I'm fascinated as to how we as a society/civilisation deal with mass automation.

To do this on anything like the scale we'd need would be a monumental task and you'd have to replace all of it every 10 years. Next generation nuclear is the only way we can produce enough clean and reliable power to run civilised society.

That is some serious conflation there. Because Americans can relate better to similar civilisations, which many have direct or nearby ancestry from, doesn't mean that wars are somehow racist, which he seems to be implying.

And no, not all lives have equal value (Einstein and Manson do not have equal value). But they do deserve the same basic rights. These are two different concepts, perhaps he was oversimplifying, but that is a problem in itself, and too much of that is what makes people dye their hair blue or green and tear up universities.

Absolutely agree with you, but if I can't convince someone intelligent like you to eat a plant-based diet, I don't like my chances att convincing Sharleen and Damien from having 5 kids :-)

The other thing is if you look at the consumption in Western civilisation, we use somethng like 80% of the resources, even though our populations are the smallest. Which would suggest it's mostly lifestyle related.

Like any extremist philosophy Rand's writings contain elements of truth. The problem is that they offer a philosophical fig leaf for the rich and powerful to fully exploit their situation in business and politics without regard to the negative effects they may have on the rest of society.

A successful civilisation needs to understand the limitations of both sides of the argument and take the best of both worlds.

I don't really have a problem with owning guns and it's certainly not "all or nothing".

My issue with the gun arguments in the states is that they're asking the wrong questions. The problem isn't the guns, it's why you seem to think you need them.

No other developed nation has this issue. The rest of the world all have guns, we're just responsible with them. We're ok with reasonable legislation and we don't have a lunatic fringe screaming about tyranny if we can't own assault rifles.

Most importantly, no civilised country thinks you need a gun for self-defence. A) we have police for that and b) most of us just aren't afraid that someone is coming to kill us... because they aren't.

I don't think there's an easy fix to America's gun problems. Fundamentally I think the issue is cultural rather than regulatory, but honestly, at this stage, you're like a bunch of kids, who need their toys taken off them until they can prove they're mature enough to use them properly.

If someone is an alcoholic, the most important thing isn't taking the booze away, it's getting them to admit there's a problem. But sometimes, you need to take the booze away long enough for them to sober up and admit there's a problem.

In the civilised world, "doing taxes" is one of those weird things you are aware of because of American TV.

In my entire working life, my interaction with tax amounts to looking at my payslip whenever my salary changes and ... that's it.

My tax comes off my pay automatically, I pay a flat Goods and Services Tax of 15% on everything I buy, and there are various other duties, levies, etc., all of which are pre-calculated and included in the listed price.

There are a few "tax refund" companies around that will try and recoup a tax gain, but most of the time it amounts to so little money it's not worth it.

On one hand it does perhaps lack imagination, but on the other it makes perfect sense that aliens we first find would be much like us since they'd be attracted by our radio waves, and to become a space traveling civilisation they'd likely have similar motivations and their brains/reasoning capabilities would have evolved in a similar way. Afterall the human brain seems to be hardwired to find other humans - we see faces in the clouds and random floor patterns etc.

That new movie Arrival (2016) (not the Charlie Sheen 90s one) did a great job of unique aliens.

I guess another reason why fiction makes aliens like us is so that it allows a story to be told without the story getting bogged down on the details (unless that is the focus of the story).

I don't know where you live, but you can hire or steal a truck pretty easily here in Australia (one of the most heavily regulated countries in the world). And our regulations haven't stopped recent idiots mowing down people with cars on purpose (Melbourne!!!). They're thinking of putting bollards in place in strategic locations - because you can't regulate away what we don't want happening.

Yes, some things kill at lower rates than the examples but I had to end somewhere.

Vehicle ownership is not essential. You can have public transport service everyone just fine (e.g. Singapore). Of course, some people argue that what is good for Singapore may not be suitable for themselves (i.e. it is essential in my scenario because I say it is). And you can extend that same argument to firearms (that they are essential in someone else's scenario). Firearms have a measured economic benefit, protection benefit, health benefit (active outdoor sports), military benefit, etc.

Modern civilisation works fine (I'd argue it works better) without private vehicles. Try having a civilisation without firearms - you'll have to have awfully large mobs of bobbies armed with nothing but sticks. Good luck with that