Just a anecdotal based response: Left my 3 year old, who was asleep buckled in his seat (which he cannot undo), in the car on an overcast day, 68 degrees out, doors locked. I left a second cell phone on monitor, so I could hear him if he woke up. Went in to a strip mall store 50 yards away from the car.
I hear him wake up, so I come out to check on him, and there's some man, apparently having banged on the window to wake him up, looking at me like I was trying to kill him. Apparently took my license plat and called child services, who eventually called me, my wife, my parents, and did a full investigation. I had almost the same experience, but I'm white and privileged so did not get arrested or have my children removed. I'm confident it could have been a lot worse if I was near the poverty line. I also received a similar lecture:
"We recognize that temperature and weather were ok, but do you recognize how unsafe it was to leave him unsupervised?"
"No, I don't. What could have happened? He was secure and unable to come out of the chair, the doors were locked, and he was monitored"
"Well some one could have smashed the window and taken him"
"Really? A stranger abduction, from a locked car, in broad daylight?"
"Well, what about if the police were called, and you were arrested in front of him. Wouldn't that be traumatic?"

And there they are right. And there you have it - the real danger is not any ACTUAL danger, it's our own fear. FDR had it right.

Dishonest morons go to Cuba looking for problems and find some. Duh.


Every shortage problem they decry is caused by America's embargo. Gas shortages....because America won't let them import it. Old cars....because America won't allow them to import any new ones. Medicine shortages, no fresh food out of season in cities...
because America won't let them to export anything to be able to afford it, or use credit. No international investments...because America won't allow it. No American tourism (meaning by any American company or subsidiaries, or travel that includes America like cruise ships or international air travel), because America won't allow it. No money, because America won't let them export anything or exploit tourism.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_embargo_against_Cuba

Cuba was doing just fine before we embargoed them into abject poverty for 60+ years. Cuba is doing far better today than they represent.

These are slums and abandoned buildings. Go to Detroit slums, you morons. It's worse, and not because it's communist. Try 5th ward Houston, same thing. Try Florida, plenty of hurricane ravaged ruins there too. American slums don't have communism to dishonestly blame.

Try flying your drone where it's not allowed in America, the cops will be at your door again, and this time you're going to prison, not the embassy, idiots.

And who do they claim is suggesting we convert to communism in America? Probably these morons don't know the difference between communism and socialism and assume their audience doesn't either, or the difference between pure communist socialism and democratic socialism, and don't know America already is a democratic socialist country. Such utter bullshit...it is from turningpoint USA after all.

So sad this is what the right calls informative.

Edit: don't take the above as an endorsement of communism, it's not one. It's a lambasting of dishonest propagandists twisting reality to suit their political narrative.

Really? Can you offer a comparative American/Russian timeline of computer telecommunication innovations, or are you just assuming? Be sure to focus on pre '68 era, before American socialism was applied in large part (public funding/monopoly busting).

And for some unknown to you reason China is beating the ever loving pants off America lately....so what's your point? Certainly not that Capitalism always beats socialism, I hope you aren't that deluded. Both have strengths and weaknesses, both ebb and flow. Neither are the sole determining factor for inventiveness, neither has a monopoly on invention.

Russia beat America into space even with their near poverty level economy at the time, and despite the fact that their scientists definitely didn't personally profit from their myriad of inventions required to make it happen.
I'm not arguing which is better, that's like arguing over which color is better....better in what way? I'm arguing against your contention that ONLY personal profit drives invention or innovation. That's clearly a mistaken assumption imo.

THNX

I do believe it is.

If my world is not very habitable in the first place and I have the option of setting fire to some rainforest to build a farm, sell me some clean air and Orangutang habitat in exchange for good karma and poverty, please.

On the other hand if I make decisions that impact hundreds of millions of people on a daily basis without much recourse to anything in particular (party line? military commanders? local clans? religious leaders?) what does a teenagers speech on the opposite side of the planet change for me? Its just completely off the playing field of making important decisions.

I hear her cry, now calm down and look for ways to actually improve the situation, please.

Suing Argentina for breaking childrens rights? Not bad, human rights cases were actually a good method to fight communist regimes in the 70s and 80s. Just a very slow grinding method.

Machine guns are firearms. You can buy pre 1986 machine guns in the USA (I'm not sure what form you have to fill out). The 1986 cutoff is fairly pointless.

I don't consider bazookas, grenades, mortars, etc. firearms. To me a firearm is essentially a rifle that fires cartridges. But if the US government considers them as firearms then that is what they are for legislative purposes.

I believe there is case law regarding what scope of arms they were referring to in the 2A and the result was any common firearm. This currently includes almost all pistols and rifles, both automatic and semi-automatic (with the exception being automatic guns must have been made before 1986 - I believe this limit should be removed).

I'm very much against restricting semi-automatic rifles. There are no good reasons for restricting them. It is unconstitutional. They are not the "weapon of choice" for mass shootings, pistols are. The lethality of them in mass shootings is the same as that of pistols (someone ran an analysis just recently). This last point surprised me a little.

https://www.reddit.com/r/gunpolitics/comments/d7ypcv/no_mass_shootings_carried_out_with_semiautomatic/

I'm for background checks (i.e. for second hand sales which are the only sales left without a background check) as long as the service is cheap and no records are kept (i.e. it isn't used to create a de-facto registration database).

Public health wise, talking about firearms is a red herring. If I were to drop a bucket load of money into stuff in the USA it would be into making health care and mental health care cheap and available and reducing poverty. This would have more affect on mortality and morbidity rates then any gun legislation will. And yes, I would give fully subsidized health care to the poor.

By now you should be asking yourself what planet someone comes from where they support the 2A and free health care at the same time.

Almost as stupid as holding the producers of the toxic product AND the misleading or outright false information about it's hazards blameless. Because they actively misled their customers, I give them the vast lions share of blame, but maybe not 100%. There's plenty to go around.

You don't have to live in poverty to abandon fossil fuels.
Not.
Even.
Close.
I bought solar 10+- years back...it paid for itself in 8. It's lifespan is 20+-. I get 12 years of free electricity for abandoning that portion, with no blackouts, no brownouts, and no rate increases.

True, the video could be better at sharing the blame, but it stayed on topic instead, that topic being major polluters greenwashing their mage. I didn't take it as assigning ALL blame to one source, just not allowing the worst offenders to shirk all responsibility for their products.


Every one of these is the likely outcome of any anthropogenic rise over 2-3C because of feedback loops that drive us to 6-12C rise. Only the wars are likely this century, but I didn't put a timeframe on those outcomes. 140 million + will be displaced by just a 3' rise, which is all but guaranteed by 2100 under the most optimistic current projections.
That wipes out mangroves and other fish nurseries, further impacting the struggling ocean food webs. All the while it accelerates as our ability to cope erodes like the shorelines....it doesn't just halt at 3' rise.
The natural food webs on land are also struggling, and are unlikely to survive ocean collapse.

Not just from deforestation, but diatoms are near a point of collapse from ocean acidification. https://diatoms.org/what-are-diatoms. That's over 1/2....and the base of the ocean food web.


Since the IPCC (again, known for overly conservative estimates) now says at current rates we could hit as much as a 6C rise by 2100, and rates of emissions are rising as fast as carbon sinks are shrinking, they're not just a possibility, they a likelihood in the near future....but granted the hydrogen sulfide clouds are far in a worst case scenario future, far from guaranteed.

@newtboy,

Walking backwards to simplify, my main point is that simply blaming ALL fossil fuel usage on the company providing the fossil fuel is stupid and misleading in the extreme. We don't see millions of people willingly abandoning fossil fuels and living in abject poverty to save the world, instead they are all very willing and eagerly buying them and this video lets all those people off the hook. This video lets everybody keep using fossil fuels, and at the same time pointing the finger at Shell and saying it's all their fault. It's an extremely detrimental piece of disinformation.

"explain what, specifically, I claimed that's not supported by the science."
-Complete collapse of the food web
-Wars over hundreds of millions or billions of refugees
-Loss of most farm land and hundreds of major cities to the sea
-Loss of well over 1/2 the producers of O2
-Eventual clouds of hydrogen sulfide from the ocean covering the land
-Runaway greenhouse cycles making the planet uninhabitable for thousands if not hundreds of thousands or even millions of years

@newtboy,

If North America is to adopt the Amish lifestyle, how many acres of land can the entire continent support? The typical Amish family farm is something like 80 acres is it not? I believe adopting this nationwide as a 'solution' requires massive population downsizing...

If you want to look at the poorest conditions of people in the world and advocate that the poverty stricken regions with no access to fossil fuel industry are the path forward, I would ask how you anticipate selling that to the people of California as being in their best interests to adopt as their new standard of living...

You mention overpopulation as a problem, then invent the argument that I think we should just ignore that and make it worse. Instead I only pointed out that immediately abandoning fossil fuels overnight would impact that overpopulation problem as well. It's like you do agree on one level, then don't like the implications or something?

The massive productivity of modern agriculture is dependent on fossil fuel usage. Similarly, our global population is also dependent upon that agricultural output. I find it hard to believe those are not clearly both fact. Please do tell me if you disagree. One inescapable conclusion to those facts is that reducing fossil fuel usage needs to at least be done with sufficient caution that we don't break the global food supply chain, because hungry people do very, very bad things.

Then you least catastrophic events that ARE NOT supported by the science and un-ironically claim that it's me who is ignoring the science.

You even have the audacity to ask if I appreciate the impacts of massive global food shortages, after having earlier belittled my concern about exactly that!

The IPCC shows that even in an absolute worst case scenario of accelerating emissions for the next century an estimated maximum sea level rise of 3ft, yet you talk about loss of 'most' farmland to the oceans...

Here's where I stand. If we can move off gas powered cars to electric, and onto a power grid that is either nuclear, hydro or renewable based in the next 50 years, our emissions before 2100 will drop significantly from today's levels. I firmly believe we are already on a very good course to expect that to occur very organically, with superior electric cars, and cheaper nuclear power and battery storage enabling renewables as economical alternatives to fossil fuels.

That future places us onto the IPCC's better scenarios where emissions peak and then actually decrease steadily through the rest of the century.

I'm hardly advocating lets sit back and do nothing, I'm advocating let's build the technology to make the population we have move into a reduced emissions future. We are getting close on major points for it and think that's great.

What I think is very damaging to that idea, is panicky advice demanding that we must all make massive economic sacrifices as fast as possible, because I firmly believe trying to enact reductions that way, fast enough to make a difference over natural progress, guarantees catastrophic wars now. Thankfully, that is also why nobody in sane leadership will give an ounce of consideration to such stupidity either. You need a Stalin or Mao type in charge to drive that kind change.

No one comes here to find capitalism, they come from capitalist countries (except those few fleeing Cuba and Venezuela).

The masses come fleeing danger, poverty, and oppression...from capitalist countries....often caused by capitalist drug cartels. Even those fleeing socialist countries aren't fleeing socialism, they're fleeing poverty caused largely by our sanctions and embargoes of their nations.

Venezuela is poor today largely because of sanctions/embargoes (not being allowed to sell their main resource and export, oil), poor planning (basing the entire economy on one resource, oil), and corruption.... in that order.

Atrocities?! We don't have time to list the atrocities caused by capitalism. They are greater in number and detriment.

Public schools, public police, roads, medicine, food subsidies, public housing, a state (not private) military, ecological regulations, etc. These are all socialist, and are the exact reasons these same people claim the immigrants are coming.

Once again Bob misuses the channels, this is absolutely not history, not educational, not a debunking, and no one was destroyed. Just more right wing nonsense *political propaganda that ignores the salient points to make baseless claims.

Injenueity?! They're coming for our unsophisticated young women?! Now I get why the right is terrified.

@newtboy
@BSR

Think of it a bit like this (quote from Wilde)

"...surrounded by hideous poverty, by hideous ugliness, by hideous starvation. It is inevitable that they should be strongly moved by all this. The emotions of man are stirred more quickly than man’s intelligence; and, as I pointed out some time ago in an article on the function of criticism, it is much more easy to have sympathy with suffering than it is to have sympathy with thought. Accordingly, with admirable, though misdirected intentions, they very seriously and very sentimentally set themselves to the task of remedying the evils that they see. But their remedies do not p. 3cure the disease: they merely prolong it. Indeed, their remedies are part of the disease.

They try to solve the problem of poverty, for instance, by keeping the poor alive; or, in the case of a very advanced school, by amusing the poor.

But this is not a solution: it is an aggravation of the difficulty. The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible. And the altruistic virtues have really prevented the carrying out of this aim. Just as the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realized by those who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated it"
--------------
And allow me to pop this out:
"the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves"
--------------


This is a stark/bleak example. I don't personally agree with it entirely. As I said, I bring cereal for my students and it's there and free and available unless I don't have time to get to the store or unless I myself am out of pocket change to buy extra food.


I don't ENTIRELY disagree though ----> Which is not to say that I agree.

I would say, YES there are structural changes that need to take place, but I also believe that assistance needs to be there to handle some kind of transition period while a problem is realized.

ALL of that being said

Here is a perfect example of a societal ill in our current system that needs to be addressed. It's a disgusting by-product of a structurally unsound student loan system.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Db9NaPDtAmU


Source: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1017/1017-h/1017-h.htm

Image two feels like the odd one out here. While the rest of the images have a definite negative connotation (war, poverty, hunger, etc)... that image looks pretty normal?

Am I missing something?

Yes agreed, extreme poverty is equally damaging when combined with industry, but bear in mind its been the giant corporations dropping poison on poor villages not the villagers themselves.. and the basic rules for much of the world are decided ultimately by US senators who are for sale to business for embarassingly low cost.

There are problems in the US that may eventually make the US more likely to fall into a revolution, but I doubt that the type of wealth inequality we have today is high on the list.

We have had a few riots in some of the larger cities. Poverty and lack of opportunity are definite contributors to these riots. However, these localized riots never seem to spread, even though we have the income disparities you mentioned. At least for now, I don't think we can expect a "French Revolution" type event to occur, even though there are quite a few millionaires and billionaires living within a few dozen miles of the poorest people.

Yes, widespread poverty, largely because of insane wealth inequality. (I'll elaborate if you wish) The rich had plenty to eat, and as the dismissive "let them eat cake" implied, had no concern for those who didn't. It was that disparity paired with the dismissal of the peasants plight by the ruling class that tipped a bad situation into civil war/revolt, imo.

Yes, poor are going hungry in the United States, maybe not starving to death often, but suffering to death from ailments caused by the only diets they can afford, which barely qualify as food. No, it's not to the extent of 1700 France, but we wouldn't tolerate anywhere near those conditions today, so that argument is ludicrous.

The real poor in America don't have roofs or electricity, where are these TV'S they're parked in front of exactly? The homeless problem is growing exponentially...those are the real poor surfs in this analogy, not just people like me who can live fine on $15k a year.

Nope. I am implying that in the late 1700's, the wealth inequality in France was combined with widespread poverty and starvation, and such conditions do not exist today in the US. The suggestion (Newtboy's) that we should fear a revolution today is unsupported. Back then, half of all children then died before the age of 10, many due to the famine they were experiencing. We just don't have the kind of poverty today in the US that the French peasants endured in 1780.