per Ozric request I'll drop the topic, but thanks for the reasonable response.
General / Off-Topic Is man made climate change real or not? Prove your belief here.
- Thread starter Zak Gordon
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I was looking for that 'fact' earlier, to offer J.B. But, hay it is Sunday and I have 10 better things to do.Lol, we're really down to "I bet if Obama did it you would be cool with it!"?The thing is that the previous administration had a tendency to inform its allies, whereas the current one failed to even inform its own military in advance. It was an atrocious decision performed hopelessly poorly.
Oh, the troops were moved to Iraq, btw, instead of withdrawn. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-50117765 Same number of US troops in the area, just one ally less and a resurgence of IS.
Lord Chump, sold it, 'as if the troops, were coming home'?
The Russians, took over, a good share of it.
Mkay... So you seem to think you have the answer. What is value then?Lets find out!
Yes.
Yeah, that is not how value works.
What century do you live in?
No, it is about what people want, not can, pay.
Lol, no. See above.
Wut? Consider that I have, for example, not $2 but $20000. Are you going to put the price at $20000? Do you think I will pay that price? Do you really think 'setting the price at whatever sum of money someone has' is anything other than insane?
Not really? Well, I am excited to discover the truth!
"They say money is a storage for value, but when they print money they don't create apples!"
Honestly mate, and without exaggerating, I've heard 8-year olds with a better understanding of how money works.
Let's modify the thought experiment with the apples somewhat. Instead we put 10 people in a room, without telling them when they will get out. In the room there are two buttons that says "bucket of water" and "bucket of diamonds". Each person can only press one button per day and each bucket is a small bucket holding two liters of either water or diamonds. See where I'm going?
The first day, some of the more opportunistic people will probably take their chances and go for the diamonds, but after a couple of days they will be dangerously dehydrated. Do you still think they will push the button giving them diamonds? That was a rhetorical question.
Now let's make the experiment even more "fun": The second day each button can only be pushed nine times, the third day eight times and so forth. What do you think will happen with ten people in the room over time?
The thought experiment isn't as far fetched as it might seem. The room is similar to living on Earth, with no realistic way of getting away from the planet. Water, like food, is vital to anyone's survival. Finally turning down the number of times the buttons can be pressed equals food per capita getting lower, something happening IRL right this minute.
How many people in the room do you think gives a flying duck about diamonds after a week?
It might be so obvious that an 8-year old can understand it, so what happened to you and many others while growing up?
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With the the difference that everyone who is short on water in real life has zero access to diamonds, and those with diamonds can get as much water as they could ever want. Sure, if you're dying from dehydration water can be more valuable to you than something else. Building a giant economic theory and worldview around a choice that does not exist in real life is silly, though.
Considering that you claim to hold a PhD, I thought you knew about thought experiments.The World is not a closed room with ten people, but it works equally "well" with 7.8 billion humans. You need a bigger room, like a planet, but the result will be the same. Since neither you nor the economists knows the answer to "What is value?", and considering that "money makes the World go around", I believe that it's a pretty decent and relevant question, and since Nixon dropped the gold reserve, money has had no relation to value.
My claim is that true "basic value" is elements (atoms) and exergy. You cannot do anything without those two. You can add utility by using exergy to rearrange the configuration of the atoms, but the amount of those is constant, and exergy is dropping. The thing that changes over time is entropy. When you dig relatively concentrated (low entropy) phosphate rock out of a mine you use exergy. Next you use exergy to refine the ore, and more exergy to make fertilizer. Finally you use exergy to transport the fertilizer from the fertilizer production to the soil. That's a lot of exergy used to lower entropy, and exergy (useable energy) is currently a limited resource. So is phosphate rock.
The phosphorus enters a plant, that we either use as food or feed (spending exergy), and the end result is that it goes through a human mouth, out the other end, and via the sewer ends up in the oceans, where it is spread, leading to a high increase in entropy. You can lower entropy locally, by using exergy. That's what you do when you clean up your home. Likewise the phosphorus isn't "lost", but the next time you want to use it, since you have increased it's entropy, you need more exergy to gather and concentrate it.
I know that I use examples that sounds like some an 8-year old would use, but first of all, I'm trying to explain some pretty complicated system dynamics, and secondly, if I turn up the nomenclature to 11 no one will understand. Even a simple fact like "Growth cannot continue forever in a finite system" seems beyond reach for most of the global population.
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Except it doesn't. In your example people either chose water or die. In the real-world I can pick diamonds and let other people die. In your example the negative consequences are not just suffered by me personally (which is false) but also in the very near future (which is also not true). Those are not just details, they are the heart and center of your 'thought experiment', and they are the exact opposite of reality. Now you may argue other people should care about the consequences of their actions on complete stranger in the distant future, but thats just your opinion. Your thought experiments are quite poor and fail at the very first glance. I also never said 'money makes the world goes around', which is just a weak strawman, and I didn't 'claim' to hold a PhD but actually showed you.
You come up with feeble thought experiments, I explain why they are wrong. If your only response to that is strawmen and personal attacks I suggest you stop, because that wont convince anyone.
As long as it’s not something the government can or will use to collect more taxes.
We do not disagree on equality. Equality is primarily a social construct, and even speaking strictly biology and evolution, social animals are all over, and plentiful, so something seems to indicate that social skills like empathy are important for better chances of survival and reproduction. Some have better emphatic skills than other. Like with autism, we are all different without being sick or necessarily wrong. Also, strictly speaking, philosophy still haven't coughed up a proper definition of right and wrong that they could all agree upon. When it comes to that, it seems the agreement stopped around the time Kant wrote his Imperative, which basically, like much else from Kant (eg. the true value of aesthetics), was "Trust your gut feeling".
That ends up in politics and that's a no go here, and honestly it's still so early in it's theories, that even though I loved watching "Justice" from Harvard professor Michael Sandel, I disagree with him on some very subjective points. More importantly, in his introduction he says something like: "Howdy to this semester about Political Philosophy at Harvard. You're all bright kids from very wealthy and influential families, so you're likely to go rule the other humans. Therefore you think that you'll leave this semester having learned right from wrong. Let me warn you, that you won't, but I can promise you that your current doubts will will become better defined along the way". Then he moves straight to ethical dilemmas using thought experiments. Rather entertaining dude that Michael Sandel.
That is not about the planet or the climate though. Bertolt Brecht once in German wrote what translates to "First we eat, then we can concentrate on morale". I agree. Therefore the general state of the planet, and the ability to feed the future population is more important than ethics or politics. It's simply something that has to be fixed, if miraculously possible. Using relatively simple physics like the basic laws of thermodynamics, Carnot, energy balances etc. and relatively simple math, it's possible to show that we currently do not live sustainable, and as I use to notice here, sustainable life is life that continues and doesn't die. In general people are starting to understand that something is "not good", but very few seem to have comprehended the time horizon.
Still we concentrate on economics thinking it's about money, forgetting that we do not know what value is, and from a strictly system theoretical perspective, it even seems that economy is built into the system. It wasn't invented, more discovered by people like Adam Smith, but it was found in nature long before humans. Economy is basically trade of resources, these days often via money considered a stock of value. Even physical money hold no value in themselves apart from a few joules if you burn them. Way before humans, and to this very day, plants exchange glucose to the microorganisms living in the soil. In return the microorganisms gather phosphorus from the soil and pass it on to the roots of the plant. Among chimpanses prostitution has been observed, paid in, I kid you not, bananas.
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If this is a metaphor for the global economy, I'm getting eight liters of diamonds and two liters of water a day. Everyone else is getting a half-ration of water and a boot to the head to keep them in line.
Decoupling the Dollar from gold didn't change it's relation to value, just it's relation to gold. Gold is not value. Value is simply the utility something holds, which is entirely subjective to the situation. Money has a value because it can buy stuff...until it doesn't, because it can't.
What you've said sounds basically like a rambling paraphrasing of the labor theory of value.
No such thing.
Morbad: "No such thing."
Agreed, there's a local "rain tax" here in my locality, I jest not. Some rot about roof surface area and runoff erosion.
Marx, when speaking as an economist, was talking about labor as being value. I'm not a marxist in any way. Honestly, I don't have time for politics, and it seems there are plenty of people that have. What I'm talking about is work as in work in physics. You need to convert energy to do that, and converting energy causes the amount of exergy to drop.
When I give some simple thought experiments, you cannot answer that you get eight liters of diamonds a day. Any global model is not about you alone, no matter what political philosophy you admire. Many people earn a lot, and much more people starve. Personally I think that's wrong, but I have no illusion about that going to change due to politics, philosophy or whatever.
Even in a highly probable "post apocalyptic" future, you won't find equality like you won't find money. You will probably find gold though, the main difference between money and gold being that the amount of gold atoms in the system is constant, and that the element is very non reactive. That is what gives it it's value, and it has always been that way. Gold in itself has relatively low utility.
When I look around, I normally see humans and friends, but when I take a few steps back, I've been taught to look at the whole planet as a biophysical system. That is a very complex system that nobody understands completely, but all it's alarms are blinking red. If the economy can survive that long, from system models it seems that we will reach a peak in 20-30 years, after which, climate, running out of vital resources including exergy, and a lot more mixing up in a "perfect storm", will lead us to go towards a planet like before the industrial revolution in the following decades. Before the green revolution, the carrying capacity, due to simple agriculture, was roughly one billion, though global starvation was much higher than today. In that case, the population curve will drop as quickly as it's currently climbing, and we will lose, at least, more than a billion per decade, depending on how well we behave towards one another. Considering that much more people will be starving, I don't believe we will behave well.
That is not a completely certain scenario. Many renowned economists look in their crystal balls and say that we are due for a "crisis" worse than 2008, that will last longer. That in itself might somewhat change the population size and the growth rate on resource spending, but the current market is not something we've experienced before. It might very well, considering the subzero interest rate and QE being "the only option", that the crisis will be a total collapse of the global financial system, something we we're frighteningly close to in 2008. We've seen something like collapses nationally, but even though 29 was a crash it wasn't a collapse, likely leading to money loosing their value. Some of the economists that "mysteriously" predicted 2008 say that they expect something very bad to happen in 2020. If that is a collapse, then much will change with the business as usual models, but it won't be pretty.
The solution is to realize that without exergy the system does not work. Currently we use roughly 20% of the energy flowing through the biosphere, and we have more than doubled that number in ~100 years. On top of that we use roughly the equivalent of that by mainly burning fossil fuels. We need to replace that exergy supply quickly, meaning that we build some sort of replacement, but we need to use exergy for that as well, and currently the available exergy is mainly fossil fuels, so even just the task of building the alternative will cause climate change. If we use the remaining exergy on funny stuff, then we have to build it by hand.
A part of the solution is also to realize that growth economy can't continue, and I suggest we start considering what we consider value. Honestly I don't think we will wake up, but I've been told to "think positive", be constructive, and try and describe solutions.
In a post apocalyptic world the system of exchange, beyond mere barter, will be whatever humans prize most. Maybe a chunk of gold, maybe a plastic five gallon jug of water, maybe a pound of rice.Marx, when speaking as an economist, was talking about labor as being value. I'm not a marxist in any way. Honestly, I don't have time for politics, and it seems there are plenty of people that have. What I'm talking about is work as in work in physics. You need to convert energy to do that, and converting energy causes the amount of exergy to drop.
When I give some simple thought experiments, you cannot answer that you get eight liters of diamonds a day. Any global model is not about you alone, no matter what political philosophy you admire. Many people earn a lot, and much more people starve. Personally I think that's wrong, but I have no illusion about that going to change due to politics, philosophy or whatever.
Even in a highly probable "post apocalyptic" future, you won't find equality like you won't find money. You will probably find gold though, the main difference between money and gold being that the amount of gold atoms in the system is constant, and that the element is very non reactive. That is what gives it it's value, and it has always been that way. Gold in itself has relatively low utility.
When I look around, I normally see humans and friends, but when I take a few steps back, I've been taught to look at the whole planet as a biophysical system. That is a very complex system that nobody understands completely, but all it's alarms are blinking red. If the economy can survive that long, from system models it seems that we will reach a peak in 20-30 years, after which, climate, running out of vital resources including exergy, and a lot more mixing up in a "perfect storm", will lead us to go towards a planet like before the industrial revolution in the following decades. Before the green revolution, the carrying capacity, due to simple agriculture, was roughly one billion, though global starvation was much higher than today. In that case, the population curve will drop as quickly as it's currently climbing, and we will lose, at least, more than a billion per decade, depending on how well we behave towards one another. Considering that much more people will be starving, I don't believe we will behave well.
That is not a completely certain scenario. Many renowned economists look in their crystal balls and say that we are due for a "crisis" worse than 2008, that will last longer. That in itself might somewhat change the population size and the growth rate on resource spending, but the current market is not something we've experienced before. It might very well, considering the subzero interest rate and QE being "the only option", that the crisis will be a total collapse of the global financial system, something we we're frighteningly close to in 2008. We've seen something like collapses nationally, but even though 29 was a crash it wasn't a collapse, likely leading to money loosing their value. Some of the economists that "mysteriously" predicted 2008 say that they expect something very bad to happen in 2020. If that is a collapse, then much will change with the business as usual models, but it won't be pretty.
The solution is to realize that without exergy the system does not work. Currently we use roughly 20% of the energy flowing through the biosphere, and we have more than doubled that number in ~100 years. On top of that we use roughly the equivalent of that by mainly burning fossil fuels. We need to replace that exergy supply quickly, meaning that we build some sort of replacement, but we need to use exergy for that as well, and currently the available exergy is mainly fossil fuels, so even just the task of building the alternative will cause climate change. If we use the remaining exergy on funny stuff, then we have to build it by hand.
A part of the solution is also to realize that growth economy can't continue, and I suggest we start considering what we consider value. Honestly I don't think we will wake up, but I've been told to "think positive", be constructive, and try and describe solutions.
![[VR] Merkir](https://d2aefvhu2f0gi9.cloudfront.net/data/avatars/m/141/141091.jpg?1553527154){kind=avatar}
Still awaiting the link you promised re your statement that the proposal would involve "tearing down every existing house and building in America to bring them all up to the green code."
Reminder:
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threa...-your-belief-here.527481/page-86#post-8171206
Yep, I figured you were. Tell you what: you answer my question and I'll supply that link for you.
Nope, it doesn't work like that.
The proposal summary stated, "upgrading every building in the country to be more energy-efficient."
You stated that it involved, "tearing down every existing house and building in America to bring them all up to the green code."
You need to either justify your statement to show that the summary was wrong, citing those parts of the proposal that involved tearing down every existing house and building, or admit that it was exaggeration and/or fear mongering. Hint: Your self proclaimed rhetorical skills can only go so far. At some point facts will catch up with you.
There are some authorities that disagree with this premise. Being unqualified, I'm agnostic on the issue, and think you might be right.
By "authorities" I don't mean Economists, but guys like Kurzweil, who have a strong track record for accurate predictions.
He thinks that continued growth is feasible because of the logarithmic deflation of computing costs, coupled to efficiencies driven by AI.
I suspect that raw materials shortages and ecosystem collapse will break Kurzweil's optimistic projection. But we have to factor in genomic computation and biological intervention on an unprecedented scale - unpredictable for me.
Without going into the political side of things, all efforts to counter and cut emissions of reflective particles like CO2, Methane and, most importantly,
laws to regulate and scrutinize the use of SF6 (Sulfur Hexafluorides) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulfur_hexafluoride will be rendered useless by
current geopolitical developments. It's gonna be less than 2 years until the world is drowned in a global war once again.
The other reason why we will never be able to counter environmental changes is that humans are hype-sheep. No one seems to use their own common sense or restraint.
It's all populistic movements that will make everyone feel better but do nothing in effect.
Innovation and a strong push towards better education (the most valuable human assets) are the only ways to slowly change behavioral and structural changes that
would have any effects. Below i posted a video showing what happens to plastics when mauled by sand particles. And there are two sides to blame, the packaging industry
faces too little scrutiny over failing to find ways to return and reuse plastics properly, and most of us, to put it bluntly, act like pigs. It is easier to just throw garbage out into
the world with an apparent mindset of "oh it's gone noow, not my problem any more".
Today's society doesn't care about the worth or the cost of human life no more.
If you go through a rough time, you will be punished further for not playing the happy game.
(trust me, i can write a book about this)
Humans, society, our whole civilisation needs to dramatically change their lifestyle to counter a dramatic ever-increasing effect we have on
marine life and every species that roams and grows on this planet. If you look at how easy it is to scam a whole nation into thinking how facts are now fiction,
with the use of deliberate attempts by "media" outlets like Breitbart, Fox "News", the Telegraph and many others to not inform the masses, but influence their opinion
to fit their financers' agendas, i see no hope left and the only solution left is to brace for impact and live with the dire consequences of our all inability to see through
the web of lies, and our inactivity towards picking up the fight.
Every day i hope something happens to me, so i won't have to see what will come next. This planet is doomed with the Homo Sapiens.
BTW, the fact this video so far had only 22 views shows how this world is not about looking at reality, but that we are only led on the leash of advertisement,
we have become blunt to self-restraint. Self determination has become a ressource rarer than Antimony.
laws to regulate and scrutinize the use of SF6 (Sulfur Hexafluorides) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulfur_hexafluoride will be rendered useless by
current geopolitical developments. It's gonna be less than 2 years until the world is drowned in a global war once again.
The other reason why we will never be able to counter environmental changes is that humans are hype-sheep. No one seems to use their own common sense or restraint.
It's all populistic movements that will make everyone feel better but do nothing in effect.
Innovation and a strong push towards better education (the most valuable human assets) are the only ways to slowly change behavioral and structural changes that
would have any effects. Below i posted a video showing what happens to plastics when mauled by sand particles. And there are two sides to blame, the packaging industry
faces too little scrutiny over failing to find ways to return and reuse plastics properly, and most of us, to put it bluntly, act like pigs. It is easier to just throw garbage out into
the world with an apparent mindset of "oh it's gone noow, not my problem any more".
Today's society doesn't care about the worth or the cost of human life no more.
If you go through a rough time, you will be punished further for not playing the happy game.
(trust me, i can write a book about this)
Humans, society, our whole civilisation needs to dramatically change their lifestyle to counter a dramatic ever-increasing effect we have on
marine life and every species that roams and grows on this planet. If you look at how easy it is to scam a whole nation into thinking how facts are now fiction,
with the use of deliberate attempts by "media" outlets like Breitbart, Fox "News", the Telegraph and many others to not inform the masses, but influence their opinion
to fit their financers' agendas, i see no hope left and the only solution left is to brace for impact and live with the dire consequences of our all inability to see through
the web of lies, and our inactivity towards picking up the fight.
Every day i hope something happens to me, so i won't have to see what will come next. This planet is doomed with the Homo Sapiens.
BTW, the fact this video so far had only 22 views shows how this world is not about looking at reality, but that we are only led on the leash of advertisement,
we have become blunt to self-restraint. Self determination has become a ressource rarer than Antimony.
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