Jack @ Jack @lemmy.ca

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2 yr. ago

I highly recommend watching Larry Lessig's "Our democracy no longer represents the people. Here's how we fix it" speech from 2015.

He compares democracy in Hong Kong and the USA by looking at who nominates who eventually rules.

The people in China are terrible, and the people in USA are terrible. The vast majority of them are greedy, omnicidal, mass-extinction causing monsters. One is worse than the other, but both are so amazingly terrible that we should be boycotting both, and all the other dictatorships and oligarchies.

Is this not the only tipping point that can actually reduce energy held by the biosphere due to increased ice in the northern hemisphere, and therefor increasing Earth's albedo?

In the microwave, I always use the lid of a bigger glass bowl on top of my large, wide, glass, measuring-pitcher. It doesn't fit perfectly, but I turn the lid upside down so it doesn't slide when I carry it.

Wait, so the people who are willing to consume a product which is almost entirely imported from far away, and is therefor culpable in making the world unlivable because of green house gas emissions; are going to start boycotting it to help a few workers? Because causing a mass extinction is okay, but union-busting is not?

117.7 tonnes of Co2e per kid per parent per year in the USA (58.6 tonnes average when including all the poorer countries).Wynes et al. 2017

A conservative estimate is that we need to emit less than 2.1 tonnes in total per person per year to try to prevent catastrophic Anthropogenic climate change. Girod et al. 2013 (life expectancy/2050).

117.7 > 2.1

We need a fertility rate of about 0.01 for several decades.

Human overpopulation is not only the biggest contributor to push us into a climate-change tipping-points cascade, it's also the root cause of almost all its other causes. It's also the root cause of unsustainable habitat loss and pollution. It's also the root cause of factory farming and industrial fishing, which causes more pain and suffering every year than all other atrocities ever committed combined.

As for corporations, they're not burning the planet for shits and giggles - they're psychopaths doing it because billions of people are choosing to buy their goods and services, which they want but don't actually need.

Are the voters not the root cause?

"On oil and gas companies who have spent decades burning fossil fuels - ramping up the world’s carbon emissions - Mehta said the law couldn’t go back in time and punish past activities."

Since we gave people the death penalty at the Nuremberg trials ex post facto, we can do the same with anthropogenic climate change. I would support such death penalties now already, tho I suspect more than a hundred million people would have to die directly from unambiguous climate change events within a short period like a week, before more people would agree. The problem is that the climate-change tipping-points will cascade, which means that the 1st one may cause other tipping points to be triggered, at which point billions of people will die unnecessarily in a Mad Max world.

This whataboutism may not be saying that what the Saudis are doing is excusable, but instead pointing out the hypocrisy and saying that if you're going to complain about the psychotic Saudi regime, you have to admit that the voters who elected Bush and then re-elected him after his invasion of Iraq, are vastly worse than the Saudis. It's important to know if we are the baddies, especially if we are vastly worse and propping up the Saudis.

I think it's important to criticize and boycott the psychotic Saudi regime, but also to keep in perspective that there are worse people out there: people who are orders-of-magnitude worse.

Iraqi deaths in the Iraq war in the 8 years from 2003 to 2011 = approximately 461 000 (PLOS Medicine 2013) to 655 000 (Lancet 2006 (PDF)).

That's currently even worse than the psychotic Russian invasion of Ukraine:

• Ukrainians killed by Russia in the 7 years from 2014 to 2021: approximately 7 800 (OHCHR 2022 p. 3 (PDF)).
• Ukrainians killed by Russia in the 2.5 years 2022 to 2023 = upper estimates of approximately 59 500 (Reuters 2023-04-12+Fox 2023-05-21).

I'm not sure about the Saudi/Kuwait/UAE/Egypt/Morocco/Jordan/Sudan/Senegal/Bahrain/Blackwater (supported by US/UK/France) coalition's actions in the war in Yemen since 2015.

Edit: I'm also not sure how many the Saudis have killed in the Iran-Saudi proxy wars, so maybe the Saudis do actually have more direct blood on their hands than the western powers in the last 50 years or so.

Editors in Vice’s news division actively welcomed the piece, Lubbock said, as it fitted with the outlet’s track record of reporting on LGBTQ+ rights, autocratic regimes and the Middle East.

Bad bot. The sentences before and after this are needed to understand the quoted sentence:

"Their reporting claimed the Saudi state is helping families to harass and threaten transgender Saudis based overseas."

[...]

"However, publication of the article was repeatedly postponed and then cancelled at the last minute. Multiple sources at Vice said it was pulled after a high-level intervention by senior Vice managers, who said its publication could pose a threat to the safety of the company’s staff working in Saudi Arabia."

No they're not - having a kid in an overpopulated world is 2 orders of magnitude worse in the USA.

• 2.4 tonnes of CO2e released per driver per year with the average fossil-fuel powered car.
• 1.2 tonnes of CO2e released for electric car users in most countries.
• 117.7 tonnes per kid per parent per year. Wynes et al. 2017

Human overpopulation is not only the biggest contributor to push us over climate-change tipping-points, it's also the root cause of almost all other causes. It's also the root cause of unsustainable habitat loss and pollution. It's also the root cause of factory farming and industrial fishing, which causes more pain and suffering every year than all other atrocities ever committed in all of history combined.

"Enslave" is a bit harsh, considering there are about 38-50 million people who are currently slaves https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_21st_century

We're choosing to allow a lot of the things these companies are doing to us; but we could choose to walk away at the cost of some shiny things.

The 1st study https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1002605 mentions that "Students chose their summer housing preferences on a first-come, first-serve basis in a manner that was not expected to be associated with exposure or outcome.", but couldn't this be effected by wealth, and effect the results?

NPR has a text version of their site, see article at https://text.npr.org/1190627995

To view a text only version of CNN pages, replace "www" with "lite". https://lite.cnn.com/2023/07/26/economy/china-youth-unemployment-intl-hnk/index.html is about 50 kB, whereas the original is about 2.7 MB.

BBC article.

operating heavy machinery with the potential to kill people really shouldn’t be done by 16-year-olds.

14 year olds can get drivers licenses in South Dakota (source, which of course requires either scripting to view the text or opening the page source).

which lists religious belief as a group covered by the law

If followers of a denomination of the Invisible pink unicorn (bbHhh) are provoked by people wearing pink clothes because one of their holy books says such people should receive the death penalty, does that therefor make wearing pink clothes illegal in Sweden?