If those people could sign waivers refusing any medical care they don’t pre pay for, waiving any physical damages if they aren’t at fault (I shouldn’t have to pay for your preventable injuries just because we crashed) and hospitals honor those waivers…just a dot on your license that says if your wallet is empty you agree to be a live organ donor…I’d agree.
Since that’s not the case and as often as not the paying public ends up footing the bill in one way or another for the irresponsible behavior like not wearing a seat belt, mandating seat belt usage seems 100% reasonable.
Also, since most learning/teaching is by example, it’s near child abuse to not wear it with kids in the car. Akin to shooting drugs or playing Russian roulette in front of them….taking a deadly risk for no purpose.

@newtboy
"I meant in a practical and ethical sense it would have made more sense for them to take part of Germany as actual reparations."
Isn't this a red herring, irrelevant point though unless they were given part of Palestine as 'reparations'? If we're gonna fix history with wishes lets go further and erase WW2.

"When they, as a people, invade a recently sovereign land and take it by force..."
It's your characterization here that you seem to just be asserting as true, but it's the heart of where we see it differently.

Are you objecting to the Jewish refugees illegally taking refuge alongside Jewish people already in Palestine in the 30s and early 40s? Your usage of the word 'invade' seems to suggest that.

Do you think I'm misrepresenting things as well when I pointed out it was the Arab states that declared war, immediately upon Israel embracing a two state solution? And let's be clear, it was a two state solution with borders essentially mirroring the existing land occupied by both Jewish and Arab peoples currently in Palestine at the time.

You declare it was taken by force, but the history as I know it has by far the largest use of force was 100% defensive after the declaration of war by all neighboring Arab states.

What are you seeing so differently at that point of history?

@newtboy,

1. Given how few people are affected, I'd love to see way less coverage of trans-sports as a wedge issue to rally political bases

2. Failing that, isn't it clearly 100% common sense that the Men's and Women's sports divisions are NOT divisions applied based upon gender but instead upon biological sex, and as such should always have been a non-issue.

3. I really can't see the issue, if it must be raised, as anything other than a request for special exemptions to be made. Existing competitive sports are divided based on biological sex and most have requirements around usage of drugs, hormones and other performance enhancing substances. We have existing and established testing for both the biological sex and PED requirements. Applying those equally to everyone IS equality.

/s There, now the debates all settled /s

Duh....install as many high power using carbon sequestering designs as there's room for. Use that surplus clean power to offset some of the enormous dirty power emissions...suddenly there won't be enough wind and water power again.
Too much clean power is only a problem for the completely unimaginative.

He touched on why I've said for 20+ years that it's already too late to stop out of control climate change or save civilization as we know it. Even if we managed to produce more clean energy than we can distribute, switching older polluting technology over to clean energy is a bigger problem than clean generation. Assume we had the ability to power every form of transportation using clean and cheap energy....it would still take decades and tens if not hundreds of trillions to replace the combustion engines alone, with the corresponding new ecological issues of creating, building, and implementing a new power usage method across the board. In order to reverse the carbon trend, we needed an excess of clean energy and the desire to use it exclusively decades ago, because the change over will take decades after the clean power generation ability exists.... decades we no longer have.


Side note, aren't they worried all those wind turbines are going to give them all cancer?

I don't believe "political correctness" is really a thing. Just a 90s buzzword made up by people who couldn't handle being called out as some form of bigot and/or asshole. It means the same damn thing as "cancel culture" for most of the usage either term sees these days, and generally just amounts to "I don't like consequences for my actions."

Jokes can still be dirty and offensive as hell, no problem. Just don't punch down / belittle people for no good reason, that shit's just mean-spirited.

I was talking about the Republicans that supported him and his insane cult and their baseless fraud claims for personal political gains and helped create the seething thicket of violent misguided idiots hunting and threatening liberal traitors now finding that they are considering them the traitors.

Crows coming home to roost in my usage means the beast you created came back to terrorise you instead of your enemies.

The video is one of them being attacked by Trumpsters because he voted to certify the election instead of fighting to audit the vote again. This means his support for Trump's inflammatory claims and rhetoric, implying the election could be reversed (largely because they were making money off the lie hand over fist, not because they believed it) came back to bite them in the ass when reality crashed down and all they could do was delay certification a few hours and the rabid mob blamed them for the theft that never happened.

[author flagged as a spammer - redacted]

What a disgusting piece of shit and outright liar.
Her achievements already outweigh his by miles...he's only managed to get himself kicked off Fox, impressively hard to do if you're right wing. Fox has apologized for his disgraceful ad hominem attacks against a child who he couldn't factually contradict....but Laura Ingram has also personally attacked her on her show, as has Trump on Twitter.

Being on the autism spectrum, she says she has aspergers, is a developmental disorder NOT a mental illness.
Being a pathological liar, that's a mental illness apparently now shared by an entire political party.
Being a fecal golem is a personality disorder he clearly has in spades.

The Carnegie Mellon study he sites said no such thing, and it's authors have stated that it's a total misrepresentation of their findings....repeatedly.
The study actually said certain produce at it's worst might be more ecologically harmful per calorie than some kinds of white meat eating by comparing things like bacon vs lettuce on a calorie to calorie instead of serving to serving rate, so 4 strips of bacon were compared to > 40 cups of lettuce. Get real.
To compound the confusion they chose a calorie poor produce like lettuce with high greenhouse gas emissions instead of kale, broccoli, rice, potatoes, spinach and wheat (just to name a few) which all rank lower than pork in terms of greenhouse gases.
The same argument holds for water usage...they chose lettuce, with high water requirements, instead of things like corn, peanuts, carrots and wheat which all use less water than all non-seafood meat.
It's also assumed the produce will be wasted at exponentially higher rates than meat, which can be preserved more easily. That may be true, but they don't include the preservatives or energy to refrigerate and/or freeze meat on the bacon side of the equation.

Of course the lettuce takes more resources if you eat 40+ cups instead of 4 thin bacon strips, just like when you compare a single fish stick to several giant pumpkins.

*rant over*

@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.

You asked at least 3 questions and all fo them very much leading questions.

To the first 2, my response is that it's only the extremely fortunate few that have the kind of financial security and freedom to make those adjustments, so lucky for them.

Your last question is:
do those companies get to continue to abdicate their responsibility, pawning it off on their customers?

Your question demands as part of it's base assumption that fossil fuels are inherently immoral or something and customers are clearly the victims. I reject that.

The entirety of the modern western world stands atop the usage of fossil fuels. If we cut ALL fossil fuel usage out tomorrow, mass global starvation would follow within a year, very nasty wars would rapidly follow that.

The massive gains in agricultural production we've seen over the last 100 years is extremely dependent on fossil fuels. Most importantly for efficiency in equipment run on fossil fuels, but also importantly on fertilizers produced by fossil fuels. Alternatives to that over the last 100 years did not exist. If you think Stalin and Mao's mass starvations were ugly, just know that the disruptions they made to agriculture were less severe than the gain/loss represented by fossil fuels.

All that is to state that simply saying don't use them because the future consequences are bad is extremely naive. The amount of future harm you must prove is coming is enormous, and the scientific community as represented by the IPCC hasn't even painted a worst case scenario so catastrophic.

What say you to those who grow their own food, produce their own power with microhydro, solar, and or wind, (or only buy renewable energy, possible in California) and drive electric vehicles or bicycles when they drive?

What about those who still pollute, but offset their carbon usage by buying credits/planting trees?

Can they blame the problem on the companies who supply destructive products and the junk science that tricks gullible ignoramuses into believing they aren't destructive...or do those companies get to continue to abdicate their responsibility, pawning it off on their customers?

I mean, your position seems to be if you assholes wouldn't buy the lead painted products, we wouldn't be selling it to toy companies and producing studies claiming it's safe....so it's your fault your child is brain damaged....or the same argument over opioids, your fault you listened to your doctor and got addicted, then turned to heroin, not your doctor who told you the pills weren't addictive, certainly not the drug company who told your doctor they were safe, right?
Fortunately, courts don't think that way, just ask Johnson and Johnson.

Yes, customers bear some responsibility for what they buy, but not nearly as much as the sellers, especially true when the sellers advertise by lying about the dangers. When companies lie about their products dangers, they make themselves 100% responsible for their damages.

Interesting suggestion.

I believe that with 1/10 the population, near today's per capita resource usage would be sustainable....although there would be a necessary time period with net zero or better emissions required to return the atmosphere to "normal" before runaway greenhouse effects and feedbacks turn earth into Venus 2.0. After that, there is an amount of emission the planet can absorb, so resource usage need not be curtailed excessively, but it wouldn't hurt.

I'm all for the lottery system if everyone draws straws, no exceptions except those willing to just move to the reservation voluntarily.
Even a lottery system simply for procreation would do wonders, but remembering the outrage at China for just allowing one child per couple, I doubt that would fly either. Also, it does leave the possibility that the lucky procreators might all be imbecilic morons incapable of following/continuing the plan...we don't want to become a species that is dumber than our pets....or do we?

I think the priorities should be reversed too, what's best for life on earth first, humanity second.

It's an extreme solution certainly, but not without merit. I doubt there'd ever be a willing acceptance of such a plan though, so a slightly more realistic solution would need to be moderated some. How's this for dystopian-but-not-quite-genocidal:
Worldwide lottery, a small percentage (total of 500M - 1B maybe) wins the right to live in what will be the new model of the world: something like what we have now, but with drastically reduced usage of non-renewable resources (until they can be replaced completely) and a target of zero negative impact on the environment as a whole. Still some version of democratic (generally at least), freedom of whatnot and such, open travel to the degree that sustainable transportation options allow, all the (again, sustainable) mod cons. I suppose different countries / regions could still run things according to their preferences, as long as the net-zero goal remains.
The other lottery entrants, the non-winners, don't need to die, hooray! They will however live on something akin to reservations, as serfs, without the right to further reproduce. These poor bastards, in exchange for not being outright murdered to save civilization, are to be consolidated into agricultural communes to do whatever they can to regrow the world's flora and fauna until they all eventually die. Their goal is not net-zero, but as far into the positive as possible. It would all be overseen according to some grand scheme(s) to be as beneficial for the overall future of humanity and life on Earth in general as possible.

Probably also unworkable, but preferable to megamurder?