So the impact of Chinese climate policy is also vastly overestimated because the Chinese are a small minority of earths people?

Except NATO already has had nukes stationed closer to Moscow the any point in Ukraine for decades?

Tax breaks for the farmers working the fields, or tax breaks for the international corporations and land speculators that own nearly all the fields?

Do Japan and Italy just not count as part of the world? I mean Japan took over half of Asia and the Pasific while Italy took the Mediterranean countries. Germany took over part of northern Europe and helped a bit of North Africa.

Given the sudden change in course after being instructed to cross behind the CRJ, the pilot likely misidentified the plane before the CRJ in the line that was just landing as one they were being instructed to watch out for, and because they were focused on the wrong plane didn’t pick out the right one directly in front of them against the city lights. Between the limited FOV of night vision goggles and the light they needed to see not moving at all from their perspective this seems more like a demonstration of the limits of see and avoid at night than gross negligence on the part of the pilot.

All that being said, the helicopter appears to have been a hundred and fifty feet above the upper bond for that route, but when the routes only two hundred feet high to begin with you don’t exactly have very much in the way of a margin for error either way.

Counterpoint, I grew up in a smallish town in Idaho and was still absolutely surrounded by Democrats. State wide, only sixty percent of the voting age population actually turned out, and of those one out of every three people voted against Trump.

Hell, Democrats outnumbered Republicans in some countries and again, this is fucking Idaho.

This means that if you talk to an a Idahoan at random, there is a more than fifty percent chance they either largely already agree with you, or they are largely insulated from and not paying attention to politics and thusly susceptible to being swayed with the right approach and concrete examples of what Trumps doing to fuck them and their friends over specifically.

Left wing ideas and policy are still far more popular among the general public, which is why Republicans have to lie about them constantly.

Look for your local anarchist bookstore, look at what your counties Democrats actually organized, especially things like local pride events, show up, and network/make friends.

As is fun to note, there are more Democrats living in Texas than New York state, so the idea you should just give up on finding any around you because you live in a red state instead of one where the numbers are reversed is honestly rather absurd.

Honestly, the climate crisis seems to be a subtle or explicit theme of a lot of what Hollywood makes, staring in everything from Waterworld and Mad Max to Pacific Rim and Don’t look up, and if anything might be overrepresented in speculative and science fiction.

I don’t think that’s a bad thing now, but to say that Hollywood doesn’t have anything that talks about the climate crisis seems to say a lot more about the author’s either media literacy or taste in movies than it does about Hollywood itself.

Some people still go through life without posting or taking much on the public internet at all, instead socializing at work or bars. Incomprehensible, I know.

Well you were just suddenly teleported into the world, so I guess the question is, do you want to find out?

Not 3d printing the final components makes it even more strange to be farming out final assembly, as the expensive part is the tooling and molds for making components in the first place, but said tooling can make a functionally unlimited number of parts once set up, so it really doesn’t make sense to try and sell it out when you could just fulfill all the orders with one set of molds at a central location, but at that point what are they left with? A kit car built by small shops with a subscription model and a hope that the small shops fall into the sunk cost fallacy instead of realizing their at best nowhere close to earning minimum wage and more likely losing money on net?

It’s extremely predatory, but I’m not really convinced it’s set up like an MLM though, since I can’t really see much incentive for the assemblers/middlemen to set up a proper downline. Feels more like an attempt at an Uber but for car manufacturering? or at least to make money off of would be entrepreneurs trying to set up a car assembly company.

Honestly though, mostly it feels like an attempt to grift investors in the standard silicon valley startup way, where you promise the moon to try and get established companies and venture capital to give you free money just in case you make it big, maybe IPO or get bought out completely, and worse case you just get to keep the extravagant salary you pay yourself and your friends for as long as you can keep the grift going.

There’s a lot of red flags to be skeptical about here, but the first one that stood out to me wasn’t any of the organizational shanagans or attempts to undermine labor, but the emphasis on 3d printing. 3d printing is great for one offs or incredibly complex internal geometry, but is effectively the polar opposite of mass manufacturing and economies of scale, taking hours to produce what can be done with injection molding in seconds at a small fraction of the cost, and it is telling that they are bragging about combining a more expensive and less reliable technology with a less efficient, more carbon intensive, and vastly more complex supply and transport chain as a way bring costs down.

I get that the whole point is to drum up investment hype using vaguely futuristic technologies while building a company that takes the majority of the profits while farming the risk and costs out onto the franchisee, but surely any serious investor can see through this sort of bullshit worse solutions to non existent problems, right?

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1809311013839466846.html

I think this article sums it up well. In short, when the primary actual problem most left wing voters have with him is the issue the media largely ignores in favor of manufactured controversies like his age or his son missing a checkbox in n a government form, it is absurd to think that any other candidate would not quickly have similar controversies made up.

To expand on this, we also have mapped it out and know that the amount of dark matter varies wildly between galaxies, with some having basically none while others have far more dark matter than observable matter in them. There’s also a lot of stuff with the early universe that only works if you have something with gravity that doesn’t otherwise interact significantly with matter.

As Angela Collier puts it, dark matter is not a theory, it is a set of observations.

Mass Transit and walkable cities are a lot of things and has a lot of benefits that makes it worth expanding, but they are not an full climate solution or anything like a replacement for electric cars.

Neglecting that even in small very dense countries with cities built wholly around high quality mass transit still have freeways and millions of cars, the facts that it almost always takes over a decade of construction to establish a new light rail or metro line in north america, that it takes many such cycles to fully build out a network, and that it can take years to even establish a simple bus line, mean that it cannot be built fast enough to be relevant to anything under a 2.5 to 3 degrees warming senecio at best.

We quite similarly don’t have the carbon budget to keep emiting two tons of carbon dioxide per year per vehicle for another half century while we wait for the best case where effective 24/7 transit with fifteen minute headways is extended to even the most conservative small town with politicians elected on culture war issues like eliminating public transit. Not when we have a nearly drop in solution that can be scaled up to the point where it can have eliminated nearly all personal transit related carbon emissions in the time it takes to build two stages of a single metro line.

And I haven’t even touched on the infatuation north america has with diesel, battery electric, and even hydrogen buses over seeing trollybus or tram wires, or the sudden pushback and NIMBYism you see in even very blue cities in blue states like Los Angeles the second you start talking about connecting the rich white neighborhoods to the poor block ones, or that time the Koch brothers quashed a new light rail line a small North Carolina city had spent hundreds of millions working on to provent woke walkable cities, or the third of north amarica that doesn’t live in or near a city, or the infatuation that both the liberals and conservatives who control north america have with running public transport at a profit.

Again, this isn’t to say that mass transit isn’t worth it or that we shouldn’t be building a whole lot more of it than we currently are here in north america, just that it is not something we should be expecting in time to reach net zero.

Work from home is great and something that should be encouraged for a whole host of reasons, but it isn’t something that most jobs with an actual physical output or effect on the world can do.

My mind went to otter or beaver so it’s definitely not that easy even for us organics.

I mean, regulating air pollution and managing air quality in cities was literally the reason Republican president Richard Nixon created the environmental protection agency in the first place, and it has managed vehicle emissions standards for decades, so this very much feels like the agency doing exactly what it was created to do and has long done.

If it makes you feel any better, modern climate and economic studies have shown that even a full scale nuclear war involving every nuclear power at the height of the Cold War and when nuclear stockpiles were far larger than today we still wouldn’t have come very close to actually killing off all the humans on earth, with the vast majority of the casualties being owed to famine in regions that were/are heavily dependent on western fertilizer. Indeed entire nations in the southern hemisphere tend to get through such senecios without much of an direct effect from world war three.

Mostly this change from earlier predictions came from being able rule out the theory of a nuclear winter as climate modeling became more accurate and we could be sure that the secondary fires from such a war could not carry ash into the upper atmosphere in significant quantities, which was practically shown when a climate change fueled wildfire in Australia got so large that it should have been able to carry the ash into the upper atmosphere under nuclear winter theory but none was observed, validating modern climate models.

Also, dispite what some less scrupulous journalists trying to drum up clicks have posted on the Ukraine War, the Russian government itself hasn’t really made any major signaling moves with regards to bringing nukes into the conflict, and indeed has maintained and repeatedly reiterated Putin’s 2010s no first use policy when asked.

Don’t get me wrong, this is not the result of some greater Russian morals or whatever, but just a consequence of the inherent risk that such posturing could lead to nuclear escalation and breaking the nuclear taboo or even just other nations actually believing they plan to, and such scenarios end very badly for Russia in general and Putin in particular.

Don’t forget Putin bravely defending himself against western imperialism by invading neighboring nations, and how he must secretly be a communist no matter how much of the country he has privatized and sold off to his cronies.

Opinion pieces on the Internet and political saber rattling by low level politicians does not a nuclear policy make.

States actually have quite a few different ways of signaling they are serious about potentially ending the world as we know it, and Russia is currently using none of them.

As an example, the Russian state’s own published nuclear policy has remained unchanged for over a decade and still explicitly prohibits nuclear first use in cases like this. Currently high level Russian politicians including Putin continue to reference said defense policy in response to questions about the use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine. If they were seriously considering using said nuclear weapons in Ukraine, they would be unambiguously signaling through changing these documents and other such methods that other governments actually take seriously.

More to the point, breaking the nuclear taboo would be massively harmful to both Russia and Putins own interests. It would at best result in a NATO backed no fly zone over Ukraine while China and Iran completely abandon them, and quite possibly result in a direct conventional or nuclear war with Nato. I simply don’t buy that they would do that with no warning or previous signaling simply because an artillery rocket was manufactured in a different country.

I mean, the government has mandated that all cars built since the 90s have to have a lot of computers and sensors for engine monitoring and emissions logging so that ship has long since sailed. Automatic braking is also credited with eliminating something like 1 in 5 fatalities in car accidents, so as long as we have any motorized vehicles around at all I don’t really have a problem with the government requiring manufacturers to spend the extra 20 dollars or so per vehicle it costs them to add a few ultrasonic sensors and a microcontroller it takes to slow the vehicle to the point where a driving into a pedestrian might just be survivable.