Tiresia

If you let a sabretooth tiger loose into a playground full of unsuspecting children in order to catch the rats that are eating all the shrubs, does it fail catastrophically? Or was it just catastrophic to begin with?

In the struggle against human-caused climate change, this is a completely new avenue for humans to change the climate.

Yes.

Technically that's not a public health issue. And you can reliably store hydrogen for a day or two without too much leaking out, which does make it economical and reliable in rocketry and maybe aviation.

Maybe they're going for something similar to RDJ's Sherlock Holmes. A veneer of propriety over a ruthless and savage intelligence.

it becomes the first nation on earth to avoid civil war by allowing its military to rape prisoners

If this is true, it is only because usually the rapists got their way before enough people heard about it for it to become a civil war. Soldiers threatening mutiny unless they were allowed to rape people is a pretty common phenomenon in war.

Incidents like this almost certainly took place during the US American occupation of Okinawa, there just weren't smartphones to relay the information to the general public, other soldiers, and the government so they could take positions. Maybe the prisoners will be tried at a later date, like the US did with some rapists in the US armed forces.

It's an interesting open question what we would want to replace intellectual property with.

My brain is so used to capitalism that I would be inclined to preserve things like artists having a contractual obligation to turn their work into a finished product if they got paid for it by someone that wanted a finished product. But if you look at some of the great renaissance artists, many of them were infamous for just skipping town and leaving unfinished works left and right when they got bored of making them. So maybe it's better to just accept that many great works are never finished so that other, greater works can get made instead.

One thing that does seem very important is crediting the actual artists and people that made it possible. Not to deny the right to copy or distribute, but to make it so people just know who is responsible and who they want to support or praise or communicate with. You would need infrastructure for that to make it easy to check, to remove duplicates, and to make sure entries give credit correctly.

Another important thing is the location, maintenance, and integrity of physical pieces. Hoarding seems bad, especially behind closed doors and especially without the permission of the creator or their (cultural) descendants. Letting artpieces decay seems bad, especially if others would pay to maintain them. Defiling artpieces seems bad, perhaps even with the creator's consent. But how do we decide which measures, if any, are okay to address these issues? I honestly don't know.

I don't know if it's necessary to do anything beyond these two that is specific to art. As long as there is a digital currency and wealth is already fairly distributed, voluntary patronage and donations (using the crediting infrastructure to make sure it ends up at the right places) may just be the best system for deciding which artists get what budget and how much of the world's resources and labor go to art. If wealth weren't fairly distributed, poor people would have less say in what gets made than everyone else, but the solution to that is to redistribute the wealth, not to patch that up with special rules for art. If there is no digital currency, then it's inconvenient to pay artists remotely.

A good reason would be to get ahead of the bad press and control the narrative. Even something as minor as a bad turn of phrase in an internal e-mail could force them to make a press release early, in that case becaues of the risk of it being stripped of context and leaked to the press by corporate spies or well-meaning whistleblowers in a way that looks way worse than a promise to get around to it later.

Not sure how likely this is compared to it being a fig leaf over cancelling the target altogether.

Whether or not we strive to go back to climate not seen for the past 50 million or even 500 million years, we might end up getting there regardless. Even if we decided today to put all our industry together, we'll still hit double the amount of warming we're experiencing today. If that is extreme enough for a catastrophic feedback loop like the collapse of the Greenland ice sheet, permafrost outgassing, catastrophic ecosystems collapse in a subcontinent, or all the plankton dying at once because the oceans got too acidic, then even our best efforts can not save us from that reality.

And once we are in that reality, those of us that survive deserve a chance. Even if Antarctica melts and 90% of all human structures ever built are flooded, even if the forests die and global dust swarms blanket the planet until even the tropics are buried in snow, even if no living thing can exist outside a purified climate-controlled space. We, here and now, owe the people living through that our best effort. And that means looking at those futures unflinchingly, determining which are more or less likely and trying to prepare for all those eventualities as best we can.

The time to throw up our hands and say "all of these options are terrible, we should just stop climate change as hard as we can" was twenty years ago. Barring a technological miracle like the Silicon Valley AI God actually saving us from perdition, a billion human deaths would be us getting off easy. We need to prepare for the inevitable catastrophe, because even if a billion humans die, the next billion matter just as much, and the billion after that, and after that, and after that and after that and after that, and after that.

(That said, obviously research shouldn't be used as a smokescreen for delaying carbon emission reduction. It's crystal clear what our politics and our economy need to do if we want to raise the average life expectancy of children born today above 50).

Why do you think it doesn't scale well? The ocean isn't going to run out of water, and Texas being huge only means it's easier to find space for all the solar power you would need.

I'm also curious about what you think the alternative is.

You want to have your cake and eat it too. You pay those corporations to pollute in the process of getting you the things you refuse to live without. You vote for those politicians to enable your consumerism and then blame corruption for the policies they pass to give you what you want. You claim that regular people can't afford the needed changes, yet you insist on eating meat and using cars to get around as if those are free. You claim to want corporations to increase their operating costs to be more sustainable, but you complain about your purchasing power decreasing. You blame corporations for greed, but you insist on a personal electric car because you would rather spend >$50k than learn the difference between walkability and only being traversible on foot.

Not all corporate emissions are for private consumption, but most of them are. Not the whole decrease in personal purchasing power is from decolonization and switching to more sustainable production processes, but a decent chunk of it is. You will have to sacrifice products if you want any hope of a better world.

If there is one ray of hope I can offer you, it is that you seem to have too little faith in the quality of life in a degrowth economy. Modern walkable cities are more pleasant to traverse for more disabled people than car-centric ones, with mobility scooters and public transit chauffeurs. Alternatives to meat are delicious if prepared by a competent cook, and it's easier to get a competent cook to make a fancier meal for you if you share meals with flatmates. Without SpaceX-raised satellites your internet and television connection might be worse, but as you share a meal your human connections can be stronger.

Corporations have spent the past 150+ years permeating every form of media about how necessary it is for you to consume and consume and consume. You don't need their products nearly as much as you think you do, at least in the long term if we work together.

You like forest fires? You monster.

There is political pragmatism and there is political naiveté.

Did you notice what happened when Biden's performance dropped the Democrats' chance of victory below 40%? Donors, private media, and politicians all started piling on the pressure for the Democrats to pick a more appealing candidate, and now Harris has already managed to pull the needle back to 45% with the help of a rush of donations and private media support. If losing to fascism is so bad, why don't major players get that upset at 50%? Why don't they push for 60% chance of winning, or 80%? Could they if they actually tried? How many big donors donate to both the Republicans and the Democrats?

When you do phonebanking, you're not fighting against fascism, you're fighting so that a company like Coinbase donates $100k less to the Democratic campaign and $100k more to the Republican one, presumably meaning the Democrats owe them one less favor and the Republicans owe them one more. You're not fighting against fascism, you're fighting to make the Democrats a bit more likely to crack down on crypto if they win, and Republicans a lit less likely.

The fascists have 50% of winning, and you can do less to change that as an individudal than you can change the stock price for Apple on NASDAQ. You can either spend all your time phonebanking and be utterly unprepared if we lose the coin flip, or you can do non-electoral things like help set up an underground railroad to Canada. (Or neither). Whether or not Natalie Wynn dies does not depend on whether you phone bank, it depends on whether she can get out in time as a political refugee if we lose the coin flip. And there we can improve her odds through preparation. Natalie is right that a lot of online anti-electoralism is roleplay (not even LARP, because that involves props), but to be fair so is a lot of (online) electoralism. Most people in the US neither phonebank nor prepare for fascist takeover, but if you're going to do one, the latter is more meaningful.

This isn't a fully general argument against elections. If the opponents weren't fascists, making the Democrats less dependent on crypto donors and more dependent on people being willing to support them would be a meaningful improvement. If private advertisement or donations for political campaigns or other forms of corruption were illegal (and enforced), there wouldn't be a force to counterbalance your shift of voting numbers. If there were three or more viable alternatives, there wouldn't be an optimal point for donors to keep the parties' sizes at. If polling was unreliable or illegal, donors wouldn't have feedback on which party to donate to, so phonebanking in an untraceable way would help. If you're in a local election with few enough donors you can overwhelm those donors with labor. And in the end, votes do count: Republican donors can't retroactively increase or decrease their contribution depending on what you fill in, so there in the booth with nobody looking over your shoulder, you do actually decrease the chance of fascism by voting D.

As for it being funny that these discussions pop up around peak campaign times, how strange that people are inclined to talk about a phenomenon that is flooding every corner of social media.