2020 US Election

Regarding education, maybe the answer is in valorising non-academic jobs. I don't think that our economies necessarily need an army of mediocre academics. Instead we need a few very good academics and a lot of - also very highly trained - blue collar workers and social/empathic workers. These jobs deserve to be paid better and be more validated. Digitalisation might on the long term make a lot of mid-range academic professions obsolete anyway. What's left will probably be social jobs, some handcraft jobs that require human dexterity (something machines can't quite achieve) and a few extremely highly qualified academic jobs. So maybe the narrative that you only can make something out of yourself if you have an academic qualification and the notion that handcraft is something for not that bright people is obsolete (and that "women's"/social jobs don't need to be paid a lot, too, notice the gender discrimination aspect here). Maybe a universal basic income can help reducing the inequality between academic and non-academic professions, too.

  On 7/29/2020 at 8:05 PM, dingformung said:

...but it's the access to higher education that's flawed and the student loan crisis that's a problem.

access to higher education is the least important part though, vital for certain things sure, but most people don't really require a 3rd level education. solid primary education is vital, once you've got that you leave people in a state where they can progress pretty well in life on their own. removing the notion that everyone needs a 3/4 year degree for a decent job is a far better idea that attempting to subsidise everyone to get one. put that investment into alternative forms of training and education instead, cheaper and more effective forms. this would also have the benefit of reducing the ridiculously expensive cost of running US universities (get them back focused on educating a reduced number of students in serious subjects and not on babysitting a bunch of kids wasting their time on nonsense). I don't think Biden does enough to fix these things though, and neither did anyone else's plans (aside from Yang a bit), at least he's not trying to make the problem worse like Bernie was though.

  On 7/29/2020 at 8:05 PM, dingformung said:

It's much more dangerous than Covid-19 but happens over a longer period of time so - psychologically - it always seems as if there is still plenty of time left while it isn't. Chomsky is right when he says that climate change could in the worst case scenario mean the end of organised humanity. I hope caze is right in that Biden can save the planet with his environmental plans, which I seriously doubt, to be honest. The US American political establishment never in its history has done any decision that's against the agenda of the military-industrial complex. Another aspect is that national governments have only limited possibilities to regulate what international corporations do on the larger scale. It's why multilateralism is so important. As it looks Biden isn't opposed to multilateralism unlike Trump, so there is a shimmer of hope.

 

There is still a lot of time left really, climate alarmists like extinction rebellion and their fellow travellers are not accurately representing the science, even the plausible worst-case scenarios would not in any way threaten human civilisation in any meaningful way, Chomsky, as usual, should stick to linguistics. Likely we have 80 years before the serious shit starts hitting the fan, though we should apply the precautionary principle here and aim to have things fixed well before then. The behaviour of international corporations is completely irrelevant when it comes to climate change, the solutions are entirely within the abilities of national governments to fix - sort out clean electricity generation and transportation and you've broken the back of the problem, this is eminently fixable with our current technology and with the time available to us, it just takes political will. 

  On 7/29/2020 at 6:02 PM, bendish said:

Obviously against medicare for all

Moving in the right direction at least: https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/payer/biden-sanders-task-force-health-platform-pushes-for-public-option-a-free-covid-19-vaccine

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/07/28/biden-democrats-medicare-for-all-385607

  On 7/29/2020 at 8:05 PM, dingformung said:

From what I know the education itself -  at least on average (the dispersion might be large) - is at a fairly high standard in global comparison (even ranks above Canada in the Education Index

Since I feel compelled to answer - I'm not sure how the UN compiled their data (and it really only talks about quantity of education, not quality), but OECD shows Canada far outstripping the US in numbers of adults who go on to get either a vocational certificate (they call it short-cycle tertiary) after secondary school or a bachelor/master's degree. The full study can be found here https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/6b8d261f-en/index.html?itemId=/content/component/6b8d261f-en

This think-tank in the US has Canada in its list of top performing countries based on PISA scores (PISA is an OECD developed assessment of education systems that tests 15 year olds in key subjects), but not the US: https://ncee.org/what-we-do/center-on-international-education-benchmarking/top-performing-countries/

  On 7/29/2020 at 8:51 PM, caze said:

80 years before the serious shit starts hitting the fan, though we should apply the precautionary principle here and aim to have things fixed well before then. The behaviour of international corporations is completely irrelevant when it comes to climate change, the solutions are entirely within the abilities of national governments to fix - sort out clean electricity generation and transportation and you've broken the back of the problem, this is eminently fixable with our current technology and with the time available to us, it just takes political will.

80 years is when shit will start hitting the fan in your opinion. The IPCC predicts with high confidence that global warming is likely to reach 1.5°C between 2030 and 2052 if it continues to increase at the current rate. This has all the implications of global warming that you would expect - change in agriculture, sea levels, land use, extreme temperatures etc. (to varying degrees of confidence, but mostly high or medium confidence). The behaviour of multi-national corporations is entirely relevant. Any natural resource extraction industry needs to be much more strictly regulated. Factories that produce consumer goods need to be made cleaner in terms of emission output. Regulation of these types of corporations takes years: look how long the tobacco lawsuits dragged on (48 years between the link to cancer being discovered and a settlement from the tobacco companies). Sorting out clean energy generation and improving transportation will also take years. National governments are slow-moving beasts - corporations can move much more quickly in response to regulation. Regulation and action on this issue needs to have started 20 years ago, but now is the second-best time. If we want to have a hope in hell of reducing global warming to even 1°C by 2030, we need massive action right now.

  On 7/29/2020 at 8:43 PM, dingformung said:

Regarding education, maybe the answer is in valorising non-academic jobs. I don't think that our economies necessarily need an army of mediocre academics. Instead we need a few very good academics and a lot of - also very highly trained - blue collar workers and social/empathic workers. These jobs deserve to be paid better and be more validated. Digitalisation might on the long term make a lot of mid-range academic professions obsolete anyway. What's left will probably be social jobs, some handcraft jobs that require human dexterity (something machines can't quite achieve) and a few extremely highly qualified academic jobs. So maybe the narrative that you only can make something out of yourself if you have an academic qualification and the notion that handcraft is something for not that bright people is obsolete (and that "women's"/social jobs don't need to be paid a lot, too, notice the gender discrimination aspect here). Maybe a universal basic income can help reducing the inequality between academic and non-academic professions, too.

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We should all stop working so much.

  On 7/29/2020 at 8:43 PM, dingformung said:

Regarding education, maybe the answer is in valorising non-academic jobs. I don't think that our economies necessarily need an army of mediocre academics. Instead we need a few very good academics and a lot of - also very highly trained - blue collar workers and social/empathic workers. These jobs deserve to be paid better and be more validated. Digitalisation might on the long term make a lot of mid-range academic professions obsolete anyway. What's left will probably be social jobs, some handcraft jobs that require human dexterity (something machines can't quite achieve) and a few extremely highly qualified academic jobs. So maybe the narrative that you only can make something out of yourself if you have an academic qualification and the notion that handcraft is something for not that bright people is obsolete (and that "women's"/social jobs don't need to be paid a lot, too, notice the gender discrimination aspect here). Maybe a universal basic income can help reducing the inequality between academic and non-academic professions, too.

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this is a very work-centric view of education whose implementation would result in the centralization of knowledge in the hands of the few deemed worthy to be one of these elite academics.  what are the elite academics for if not education of people other than themselves (or else their knowledge will die with them), and what is the place for education if not educational institutions?

education isn't for jobs and has nothing to do with jobs or work

a job which doesn't require education is merely a job which has succumbed to deep division of labor, or the exploitation of a type of worker through thrusting dull manual labor upon them

the goal is to abolish work as work and implement work as life, which requires absolute educational access and for education to be de-coupled from work

Whos gonna get vpd?

I'll put my money on Abrams 

warren

  On 7/30/2020 at 1:16 PM, very honest said:

warren

gotta be black not Cherokee

  On 7/30/2020 at 10:03 AM, cyanobacteria said:

  On 7/29/2020 at 8:43 PM, dingformung said:

Regarding education, maybe the answer is in valorising non-academic jobs. I don't think that our economies necessarily need an army of mediocre academics. Instead we need a few very good academics and a lot of - also very highly trained - blue collar workers and social/empathic workers. These jobs deserve to be paid better and be more validated. Digitalisation might on the long term make a lot of mid-range academic professions obsolete anyway. What's left will probably be social jobs, some handcraft jobs that require human dexterity (something machines can't quite achieve) and a few extremely highly qualified academic jobs. So maybe the narrative that you only can make something out of yourself if you have an academic qualification and the notion that handcraft is something for not that bright people is obsolete (and that "women's"/social jobs don't need to be paid a lot, too, notice the gender discrimination aspect here). Maybe a universal basic income can help reducing the inequality between academic and non-academic professions, too.

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this is a very work-centric view of education whose implementation would result in the centralization of knowledge in the hands of the few deemed worthy to be one of these elite academics.  what are the elite academics for if not education of people other than themselves (or else their knowledge will die with them), and what is the place for education if not educational institutions?

education isn't for jobs and has nothing to do with jobs or work

a job which doesn't require education is merely a job which has succumbed to deep division of labor, or the exploitation of a type of worker through thrusting dull manual labor upon them

the goal is to abolish work as work and implement work as life, which requires absolute educational access and for education to be de-coupled from work

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I hear what you mean but non-academic knowledge is also knowledge/education. I don't want an academic elite that's above all other people, I want to de-elitarise academic professions so that people don't pursue them only because of work. It would make it less "work-centric", not more work-centric. At the same time I want that other jobs get the validation they deserve. Why are social workers underpaid? Kindergartners? Nurses? They do an incredibly important job that requires high empathic skills and knowledge, too. Maybe some people want to pursue these professions but end up going to university to study business because they are told that it gets them further in life and the payment is better. I don't want that. Also, the notion that handcraft is dull is simply wrong. In a way it's our dexterity that makes us human more than our ability to do accounting work or calculate formulas. The latter of which can digitalised (which requires extremely highly skilled people in that field, but not many of them), while no robot can achieve the coordination and dexterity of humans and won't be in midterm future. These jobs need to be validated more as well, and especially paid for more. And a basic income puts people into a much better position to pursue what they really like and are good at.

  On 7/30/2020 at 7:13 AM, chenGOD said:

80 years is when shit will start hitting the fan in your opinion. The IPCC predicts with high confidence that global warming is likely to reach 1.5°C between 2030 and 2052 if it continues to increase at the current rate. This has all the implications of global warming that you would expect - change in agriculture, sea levels, land use, extreme temperatures etc. (to varying degrees of confidence, but mostly high or medium confidence).

80 years is little more than an educated guess, which is why I mentioned the precautionary principle. But there is little evidence that it's likely there will be big negative changes occurring 10-20 years from now.

The IPCC doesn't make predictions. They use various models to provide a range of possible outcomes (which they refer to as projections), one of these models may be a good fit to reality, or maybe not, maybe we need a totally different model, maybe they just need tweaking. We can't really pick between the different models with any great degree of confidence, only time will tell if any were correct or not (or maybe not, because our actions will change how things progress as well). Individual scientists will no doubt have their own opinions on their own pet models, but there is no consensus as to which model is the more likely, if anything the more we learn the less sure we are about which model is likely to be correct. Many important variables are completely immune from prediction, like volcanic activity (which causes net cooling, rather than warming). The models you're talking about also don't factor in possible non-clean-energy mitigation strategies, and often don't even include natural mitigation processes, like increased forestation.

There are certain fundamentals we can be pretty confident about (temps will increase, ice will melt, sea level will rise), but when it comes to making specific predictions about exact temperatures and sea-levels and so forth at a given date, we're out of luck unfortunately.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-truth-about-scientific-models/# 

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The behaviour of multi-national corporations is entirely relevant. Any natural resource extraction industry needs to be much more strictly regulated. Factories that produce consumer goods need to be made cleaner in terms of emission output. Regulation of these types of corporations takes years: look how long the tobacco lawsuits dragged on (48 years between the link to cancer being discovered and a settlement from the tobacco companies). Sorting out clean energy generation and improving transportation will also take years. National governments are slow-moving beasts - corporations can move much more quickly in response to regulation.

 

 

 

The behaviour of most multinational corporations has little to do with the energy sector (they don't care where they get their energy), aside from fossil fuel lobbying (which includes lobbying for environmental and other anti-nuclear groups) and it's the energy sector (including heavy industry which relies on a large % of this energy) which is the main problem when it comes to climate change, after that it's transportation and agriculture, the rest is small change compared to all of that. I'm not arguing against carbon pricing, or increased regulation regarding environmental standards in general, they're all good things, but they won't fix the main problem and are useless by themselves, the single most important thing is stopping burning coal and oil, and then soon after that gas too (though it's fine as a transition), then sorting out transportation and agriculture. The primary solutions require that governments fund technological research and either directly build or otherwise fund/incentivize the production the fruits of that research (much of which we already have, and a lot of it simply requires governments to not make stupid decisions like closing nuclear power plants earlier than necessary), these are all decisions governments can make that have little bearing on how multinational corporations behave. It took France 10 years to almost completely decarbonise its energy sector, it's not as difficult as you think it is.

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Regulation and action on this issue needs to have started 20 years ago, but now is the second-best time. If we want to have a hope in hell of reducing global warming to even 1°C by 2030, we need massive action right now.

I don't disagree with we should have, and could have, acted 20 years ago. The 2nd part is pure speculation on your part though.

Doesn't Covid show that global action can be mobilized if there is enough of an immediate / felt threat? i.e. climate change impacts could be addressed overnight if there was the elusive political will? Whether models ultimately work or not - chances are that shit is going to get ugly and so we should prepare asap. Shouldn't we follow the worst case models as a better safe than sorry policy even if it's speculation? I think when people refer to MNCs and climate change they are generally referring to energy / fossil fuel companies. I really can't see the market fixing this issue - got to be government and global org effort. Just doesn't sit right listening to hair brained schemes of burying carbon, solar shades etc.

  On 7/31/2020 at 4:54 PM, bendish said:

Shouldn't we follow the worst case models as a better safe than sorry policy even if it's speculation?

 

It depends what you mean by worst case models though, if you're just referring to the kind of thing the IPCC talks about, then yes, better safe than sorry. If you mean the kind of thing that predicts that human civilization will be gone if we don't do anything in 20 years, then no.

  On 7/31/2020 at 5:01 PM, caze said:

It depends what you mean by worst case models though, if you're just referring to the kind of thing the IPCC talks about, then yes, better safe than sorry. If you mean the kind of thing that predicts that human civilization will be gone if we don't do anything in 20 years, then no.

 

 

Exactly. Who is saying that though? Tech to remove C02 doesn't exist so it has to be govts - energy companies. Perhaps more devastating drops in gdp as we have seen in the u.s will have a silver lining despite inflicting other devastating harm. 

  On 7/31/2020 at 4:54 PM, bendish said:

Doesn't Covid show that global action can be mobilized if there is enough of an immediate / felt threat? i.e. climate change impacts could be addressed overnight if there was the elusive political will? Whether models ultimately work or not - chances are that shit is going to get ugly and so we should prepare asap. Shouldn't we follow the worst case models as a better safe than sorry policy even if it's speculation? I think when people refer to MNCs and climate change they are generally referring to energy / fossil fuel companies. I really can't see the market fixing this issue - got to be government and global org effort. Just doesn't sit right listening to hair brained schemes of burying carbon, solar shades etc.

If you take the covid-event as an example, I think you see a couple of things. Yes, priority (similar to political will) is important. But you also see the same urgency in non-governmental institutes. And basically the general public. Including the market. (yes, there are some counterexamples, but the general picture is that the markets tend to be even more strict than some governments)

And no, this global action is actually pretty disorganised. Take the attitude of various countries, for example. Most countries are fighting for themselves, instead of working together. Take the scarcity wrt facemasks early on, for example. Or a certain country buying the first X months of stock of new therapies/vaccines for themselves.

Wrt climate change, there are a number of differences which are relevant. The obvious is the immediate urgency. And then there's also way more uncertainty involved. Without improved climate policies, you *may* end up with a worse situation in a decade or so. With improved policies, you might still end up with a worse situation in a decade. The question about what good and effective policies would be, is more difficult and complex to answer, than compared to covid. And the potential results are decades into the future. If you could measure the effect.

The other factor is that global politics is just part of the puzzle. It's everyone involved. Corporations too. There is no single bullet fixing this issue. Neither governments nor the market alone can *fix* this. It's not an either/or thing. It's an all of the above thing.

IF it can be fixed, that is. I'm personally very sceptical of the notion that we can engineer the climate effectively. I mean, we need to improve our behaviour and all that. No argument there. But the outcome of that...well.. we might be fucked anyways. At least, I assume that to be the case.

  On 7/31/2020 at 4:33 PM, caze said:

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Regulation and action on this issue needs to have started 20 years ago, but now is the second-best time. If we want to have a hope in hell of reducing global warming to even 1°C by 2030, we need massive action right now.

I don't disagree with we should have, and could have, acted 20 years ago. The 2nd part is pure speculation on your part though.

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You guys mean 40 years ago. This stuff has been known since the 80s. I have little hope that too much will change. Most that's done now is cosmetics to comfort the public that has become increasingly aware of the ecological problems, to win elections. Industrialised Western and Asian countries won't be hit as hard by the ecological catastrophes that global warming will cause as the whole south, especially Africa. They just need to close their borders and let the southerners suffer. They hadn't have a problem with that during the previous centuries so why now?

  On 7/31/2020 at 4:33 PM, caze said:

The IPCC doesn't make predictions

Mate, I linked you to a document with a chapter titled projected outcomes. The rest of what you wrote about MNCs begins with a factually inaccurate statement (they obviously care where they get their energy from, pricing impacts their bottom line) and some methods of production are cleaner than other. 
 

France took almost 20 years after the oil crisis to decarbonise, and they had done substantial work on nuclear energy before then. I know what it takes to make changes in governmental policy in Canada because I work in government. For Canada to move to clean energy production will take way more than 10 years. 
 

@bendish sadly, the difference between implementing action on a global scale for a pandemic and action involving massive changes to the way global markets operate is quite huge. 

  On 7/31/2020 at 10:17 PM, chenGOD said:

Mate, I linked you to a document with a chapter titled projected outcomes. The rest of what you wrote about MNCs begins with a factually inaccurate statement (they obviously care where they get their energy from, pricing impacts their bottom line) and some methods of production are cleaner than other. 

Multiple projections are different than a single prediction, you seem to have ignored everything I've written there where I explained why this is. The headline figure given by the IPC is simply an average of the projections of the different models, the individual models don't even have a built-in margin of error, and none of them accurately (to withing several degrees in some cases) track with historical data (other than matching a rough trend upwards). 

Here's a good interview with an Oxford climate scientist which highlights the role uncertainty plays in their models. This guy thinks the average of models is a good predictor, but the fact that the past average of models doesn't match up with past data very accurately is a good reason to believe he's wrong on that point, and many would disagree with him. Having said all that, I do believe the headline figure is a good enough number to base policy decisions on, just don't get carried away thinking we've discovered a way to accurately predict global mean temperature down to a fraction of a degree, because we haven't. Also remember that global mean temperature isn't a good indicator of what the effects of climate change are going to be on a limited time scale of years and decades, which is also something the models are no good at creating accurate projections for.

Of course pricing affects their bottom line, but governments can help make that less of a problem via various means, not the main requirement from them, but it can help. Like I've said, carbon pricing is important, just not sufficient. Also, yes, some methods are cleaner than others, with Nuclear being the cleanest, sadly that isn't reflected in government priorities at present.

France built the bulk of their nuclear fleet in 10 years, they were effectively decarbonised by then. It took another 5 years to finish off a handful of their 56 reactors. It did not take them 20 years. If every country in Europe had done the same thing at the same time there would be no problem with emissions in Europe now. Obviously we don't live in a perfect world where governments always make the correct decisions like France did after the oil crisis, my point is simply that it's a matter of political will and human decision making, it's not a practical road block.

  On 7/31/2020 at 10:17 PM, chenGOD said:

 

@bendish sadly, the difference between implementing action on a global scale for a pandemic and action involving massive changes to the way global markets operate is quite huge. 

we'd need at least 10 more greta thundbergs.. maybe 11. 

  On 7/31/2020 at 11:44 PM, ignatius said:

we'd need at least 10 more greta thundbergs.. maybe 11. 

Apparently not. 

Above article references this dude: 

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/new-york-times-stunningly-false-deceptive-hit-piece-preserve-lomborg 

@caze you know France is not even 100% decarbonised right now? It’s also not a guarantee that their decision was the correct one. They still have issues with storage of nuclear waste, spent fuel etc.  Fukushima was a real wake up call, and even the French are looking to roll back the amount of electricity generated through nuclear. 

The IPCC projections come with qualifiers on their level of certainty. They are 100% predictions. 

 

@bendish @ignatius I’m always torn with Greta. It’s very obvious she’s a figure that’s being used to tell a story. But the story is an important one, and her point about “16 year olds shouldn’t have to be taking this kind of stance, it should be the adults in the room” is pretty on the money. 

  On 8/1/2020 at 5:53 AM, chenGOD said:

@caze you know France is not even 100% decarbonised right now? It’s also not a guarantee that their decision was the correct one. They still have issues with storage of nuclear waste, spent fuel etc.  Fukushima was a real wake up call, and even the French are looking to roll back the amount of electricity generated through nuclear. 

The IPCC projections come with qualifiers on their level of certainty. They are 100% predictions. 

 

@bendish @ignatius I’m always torn with Greta. It’s very obvious she’s a figure that’s being used to tell a story. But the story is an important one, and her point about “16 year olds shouldn’t have to be taking this kind of stance, it should be the adults in the room” is pretty on the money. 

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i think Greta is great. I was doing a gloomy satire. i was not in any way politically active when i was 16. there was no cause that propelled me other than typical 16 yr old shit. 

fukushima was a wake up for some. it seemed inevitable though.. the location, insufficient contingency plan (thank fuck for those smart ass engineers on site who managed the crisis with macguiver-like solutions at the cost of their lives), and low sea wall and arguably some bad decisions about where to put the back up generators. i'm no engineer and hindsight is 2020 but damn it seems obvious after watching a few documentaries that it was only a matter of time. 

there are other countries w/issues w/storing spent fuel. a shame that we can't get some modern nuclear going becuase hte designs are far superior in every way. some use spent fuel from other reactors for fuel. other use thorium molten salt. Bill Gates was working hard w/a group on building the first modern reactor in china when trump became president and some of the trade war bullshit poopoo'd that. 

there's a good doc on the technology and how the pentagon fucked it up so many years ago because they wanted things a certain way for powering ships and submarines. 

this is gates' company

https://www.terrapower.com

the story about the construction stopping in china

https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a25728221/terrapower-china-bill-gates-trump/

obviously it's not solved.. nuclear might make an important bridge to whatever comes as we hopefully transition to renewables and off fossil fuels entirely but there's still plenty to be done there obviously. 

here's the preview PBS doc The Nuclear Option from the Nova science show. I found it fascinating. couldn't find it on youtube other than a bunch of spoofs where people put the title of the doc over anti-nuke stuff. it's probably on the torrents though. 

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/the-nuclear-option/

  On 8/1/2020 at 6:46 AM, ignatius said:

fukushima was a wake up for some. it seemed inevitable though.. the location, insufficient contingency plan (thank fuck for those smart ass engineers on site who managed the crisis with macguiver-like solutions at the cost of their lives), and low sea wall and arguably some bad decisions about where to put the back up generators.

It was all about cost. I did a case study on it. Seems corporate behaviour does matter. 
Modern designs may be far safer, but the risk is still there. Would prefer more research into increasing efficiencies in renewable, but in the mean time, looks like Biden will support construction of modern nuclear (it’s in his climate plan somewhere). Much better than Trumps idiotic plan of supporting coal. 

  On 8/7/2020 at 7:47 PM, ignatius said:

 

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When it was pointed out that he actually can’t win in 2020—that he won’t be on enough ballots to yield 270 electoral votes, and that a write-in campaign isn’t feasible—and thus was serving as a spoiler, West replied: “I’m not going to argue with you. Jesus is King.”