Update from the Archdruid Greer
Moderator: Peak Moderation
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Little John
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Lord Beria3
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Same here.Little John wrote:Yes indeed it is. I sometimes find myself inexplicably emotionally overwhelmed by his writing.
Greer is the only writer who has that impact on me.
Peace always has been and always will be an intermittent flash of light in a dark history of warfare, violence, and destruction
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Lord Beria3
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UndercoverElephant
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emordnilap
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Well, yes, it is a dumb idea but if you've got a spare £1m these people are taking orders now.Consider, as an example, the plight of a team of engineers tasked with designing a flying car. People have been trying to do this for more than a century now, and the results are in: it’s a really dumb idea.
But this:
I totally agree with. I know of several people who think intergalactic space travel is not only possible but desirable.No question, a fantastic amount of scientific, technological, and engineering brilliance went into the quest to insert a handful of human beings for a little while into the lethal environment of deep space and bring them back alive. Visit one of the handful of places on the planet where you can get a sense of the sheer scale of a Saturn V rocket, and the raw immensity of the effort that put a small number of human bootprints on the Moon is hard to miss. What’s much easier to miss is the whopping irrationality of the project itself.
I experience pleasure and pains, and pursue goals in service of them, so I cannot reasonably deny the right of other sentient agents to do the same - Steven Pinker
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Potemkin Villager
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"...... I want to raise here is that Stirling’s sole reaction to Aurora, Kim Stanley Robinson’s brilliant fictional critique of the interstellar-travel mythos, was to claim dismissively that Robinson must have suffered an attack of misanthropy."
I have just started reading Aurora.
Robinson does a subtle critique of a multi generation star ship trip by considering practical issues of what could be called sustainability but so far has begged the question as to why they set off in the first place. In a way the starship partly serves as an allegory for planet earth which it tries to imitate at a very small scale in design terms.
My favourite takeaway so far is "Test to destruction: engineers like to do that. Only with a test to destruction can you find the outer limits of a system's strength".
Overconfidence, not just expert overconfidence but general overconfidence,
is one of the most common illusions we experience. Stan Robinson
is one of the most common illusions we experience. Stan Robinson
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emordnilap
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On the list.Potemkin Villager wrote:"...... I want to raise here is that Stirling’s sole reaction to Aurora, Kim Stanley Robinson’s brilliant fictional critique of the interstellar-travel mythos, was to claim dismissively that Robinson must have suffered an attack of misanthropy."
I have just started reading Aurora.
It's up to about a thousand films and even more books. For every film I see or book I read, I seem to add two (or more) more. 
I experience pleasure and pains, and pursue goals in service of them, so I cannot reasonably deny the right of other sentient agents to do the same - Steven Pinker
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Lord Beria3
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Greer's latest...
On immigration and border controls in America;
On immigration and border controls in America;
On Corbyn...David, at this point the United States has long since passed into damned-if-you-do territory. If it throws open its borders it will be swamped by more immigrants than it can support, and go through various forms of political and economic collapse. If it closes its borders, it will breed warbands outside them, with the same result. It might be possible to find a middle ground — decrease illegal immigration by imposing draconian penalties on employers (the only way to actually have an effect on it) while allowing moderate amounts of legal immigration — but even that’s a crapshoot. Once the roller coaster has crested that first long rise and begins to head down the other side, there’s not much you can do but hang on…
On US healthcare...Mog, I tend to think that Corbyn could accomplish a fair amount, for the simple reason that Britain’s current austerity policies exist solely to funnel as much as possible of the national wealth toward a kleptocratic corporate elite, and if that elite were to have to put up with a less preposterous share, a lot of Britons could have much better lives. On the other hand, of course, social reforms do not suspend the laws of thermodynamics or the brutal mathematics of energy depletion, so those benefits would be at most a way to cushion the rigors of the Long Descent for a while.
Steve, ding! We have a winner. Yes, emphatically — the US “health� care industry is a grand example of bubble logic at work; there is no way that health care can continue to take a bigger and bigger cut of the national wealth every single year, and as that reality sinks in, a vast amount of the current medical, pharmaceutical, and insurance industry is going to revert to a net value of zero or less. I see Obamacare as a desperate last-ditch attempt to keep the bubble inflating by forcing people to pay for health insurance they can’t afford under penalty of law, and it’s going down as more and more people are finding out that they can file Form 8965 and claim exemption from the law if the premiums are more than 8.15% of their household income — which, these days, it usually is. (You can get all the juicy details from the IRS here.) As for alternative health care, find out what’s legal in the state where you live, and keep that very well in mind — the medical industry defends its monopoly savagely. There are plenty of schools where you can learn alternative health care modalities, and I’d encourage you to explore your options and go for it.
On Trump...Scotlyn, mainstream medicine these days is trapped in a fantasy of omnipotence, and believers in it are clinging all the more frantically to that fantasy as the basis for it — the relative success of mainstream medicine at treating many human ailments — goes away. The end of antibiotics due to the catastrophic spread of resistance among microbes, the collapse of the economic arrangements that make high-tech medicine possible, and the stunning corruption of a medical industry that always puts making money ahead of all other concerns, especially human lives, are among the factors at work. A hundred years from now the backlash, which is now building, will have swept it all away — which is a pity, because a great many valuable treatments will be lost, at least for a time.
Future wealth...Lydia, I expected Trump’s election to upend the political applecart in this country, and it has. Right now Americans are so busy screaming at each other that the decline of our empire and our nation is proceeding with impressive rapidity, without anybody seeming to notice. By the time he finishes his second term — and unless the Democrats notice that perpetual preaching to a very narrow choir is what put Trump into the White House, he’s going to get a second term — I suspect we’ll all blink and discover that we’re in a different country…or possibly more than one different country…
On the future...Mike, in all probability you will not be able to preserve your wealth that way, or at all. I could be wrong, but I expect a very serious reset in the decades immediately ahead, in which a lot of fictive wealth is going to turn back into twinkle dust in a hurry…
Anchyo, what that means is that at some point between now and 2030 or so we can expect another round of serious crisis, comparable to the mess that overwhelmed Europe and its empires between 1914 and 1954 — you know, two world wars, the Great Depression, the end of European global domination, little things like that. Peak oil is simply one part of that much broader picture. On the far side of that, yes, we’ll be using a lot less oil, and there may well be a good many fewer human beings as well. Then we’ll get another fifty or sixty years of relative stability before the next, and probably terminal, crisis hits industrial civilization. Welcome to the Long Descent!
Peace always has been and always will be an intermittent flash of light in a dark history of warfare, violence, and destruction
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emordnilap
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Another crock of shıt from one of goldLurkalot wrote:Titan's methane lakes won't exploit themselves you knowemordnilap wrote: I know of several people who think intergalactic space travel is not only possible but desirable.
Musk also shared concept images of the spacecraft landed on Mars, next to a human settlement, telling people in Adelaide he wanted to make the Red Planet “a nice place to be� with a sustainable human population of around one million.
I experience pleasure and pains, and pursue goals in service of them, so I cannot reasonably deny the right of other sentient agents to do the same - Steven Pinker
I think Elon Musk needs to employ a few people who have the courage to tell him when he's being a dick. Won't happen though.emordnilap wrote:Another crock of shıt from one of goldLurkalot wrote:Titan's methane lakes won't exploit themselves you knowemordnilap wrote: I know of several people who think intergalactic space travel is not only possible but desirable.
Musk also shared concept images of the spacecraft landed on Mars, next to a human settlement, telling people in Adelaide he wanted to make the Red Planet “a nice place to be� with a sustainable human population of around one million.
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kenneal - lagger
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Regarding the space travel, I think that we should encourage it. After all the people who would go off searching for a better world would be the rich kleptocrats who have ruined this one with their greed. The sooner we get rid of them the better so that we can start looking for a way forward unencumbered by the greedy, psychopathic kleptocracy we now suffer from.
Action is the antidote to despair - Joan Baez
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woodburner
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I agree.kenneal - lagger wrote:Regarding the space travel, I think that we should encourage it. After all the people who would go off searching for a better world would be the rich kleptocrats who have ruined this one with their greed. The sooner we get rid of them the better so that we can start looking for a way forward unencumbered by the greedy, psychopathic kleptocracy we now suffer from.
To become an extremist, hang around with people you agree with. Cass Sunstein