The British have never really had autocracy due to the Magna Carta.

that we have senators instead of lords. Profound stuff. — Banno

You guys copied our federalism. I think you secretly love the USA.

Without an understanding of reality, there can be no useful thoughts about economics. — Athena

Children start to grasp the difference between real and unreal at a fairly early age, don't they?

That other nations might find the American system admirable is risible. — Banno

Your government is partially based on the American system. What do you want to change it to? :razz:

That is so true. :grin:

But even in a moderate case scenario, a lot of life will be gone for a long time, so we will have to live in an impoverished biosphere for the foreseeable future which is bad enough already. — ChatteringMonkey

There is also concern about the opposite issue: data from orbiting satellites indicates that the earth is getting greener, probably due to increased CO2 in the atmosphere. Humans don't do well in the kind of hot, humid conditions that will prevail in some areas, and that's because of microorganisms and parasites. I think it's actually easier to live in semi-desert conditions than in a jungle. I live in an area where parasites are becoming more of a problem because they don't die out in the winter anymore.

Who knows right? The big wildcard is human agency itself, how will the global system deal will all these added tensions is kinda anybody's guess. — ChatteringMonkey

True. My guess is breakdown of the global system we have now. But you're right. We don't know.

"You can't bite your own teeth.". --Alan Watts

For that matter, why is THIS thread on the front page? — Wayfarer

It's in the feedback forum.

Trolls need food, don’t feed them. — DingoJones

True. I was just asking if they could move that thread to the lounge.

Guys, the climate change subreddit gets 66,400 visitors and 2800 contributions per week from all across world media.

They don't produce the kind of crap threads we do. They don't have much in the way of denial. Their main problem is that every day they contend with people who are experiencing severe distress due to anxiety associated with global warming.

We aren't helping the world by creating crap threads full of personal attacks and insults. We're just making ourselves look foolish.

Rather the replies are cherry-picked for their sarcasm or frustration at having to debunk long-refuted claims over and over again, only to hbw them reappear. — Mikie

I'm sure there are nothing but noble reasons for the hostility. I'm just asking @Jamal if we might put the Consequences of Climate Change thread in the Lounge.

It's this one.

Right. I think we put all the other low brow discussions in the Lounge, and I thought that was an improvement. I think they just missed this one.

It's not hyperbole, but a possibility... I don't know what the chances are, but the speed at which we are changing the climate, together with other factors of course (like just taking over ecosystems for ourselves), could result in the kind of mass-extinction that would take millions of years to recover from. — ChatteringMonkey

A mass extinction is an event in which there's a breakdown in a biosphere's ability to support life. I don't think there is any reason to believe that kind of event is likely due to global warming.

Anyway the more important point is I think that we really don't know what the consequences will be. We have crude models that point to a couple degrees of warming, but how certain changes (like say the amoc-collapse, burning down of forests, loss of ice-caps, acidification of the oceans etc etc) will amplify changes or not, is unclear I think. — ChatteringMonkey

There should be a large spike in the global temperatures that will last for a couple of thousand years, then a long ramp down as the CO2 is absorbed into the oceans. Civilization has never faced that kind of volatility. I'm guessing that cultures that remain high-tech will adapt and ride it out. I could see some areas regressing culturally. In other words, I don't think the human species is going to go through this as a global community. The present global scene might disappear.

I've been reading Heidegger in Ruins by Wolin, and I have to say that in spite of his best efforts, he's not showing a clear connection between Heidegger's philosophy and his political views. It's true that Heidegger was a hard core fascist and extremely anti-Semitic, and he did try to offer his philosophical insights to the cause, but Being and Time is just a brand of phenomenology with some old school dialectics thrown in. There's really nothing Nazi about it.

think I see the point, I just don't agree. I think the nature of ontological questions is such that they transcend all social and historical conditions. That's why I said the same questions are asked throughout history and by every different culture. — Metaphysician Undercover

But wouldn't you agree that language is associated with social practices and language games?

It was a bad idea.

:up: Agree, although the British backed away from transitioning teens because they determined that GDD doesn't indicate that a person is trans. It just happens to teens sometimes.

Wasn't Frankl's point that you have to provide yourself with purpose?

Answers do not take shape just from asking the question. — Metaphysician Undercover

I put some effort into explaining that without going full mystical mumbo jumbo. You could at least mull it over for a second. :razz:

When you ask a question, you're seeking to understand. Understanding has a passive character where you're open and waiting. Judgement, on the other hand, is active. When you judge, you raise the right answer above the others. St. George is an image of judgment (where he's killing the wrong answer).

When you ask a question, potential answers begin to take shape, and their shapes are coming from the nature of your question. Judgment and Understanding are prominent figures in the western esoteric tradition, where the two always temper one another, so there are a lot of harmonics to it.

Adorno was into Kabbalah at one point in his life. If you're familiar with Kabbalah, that shows up vividly from time to time.

The BBC is unreliable. That's been true for years.

This is cool. Humans may have remote touch where the fingers can locate things under granular material through mechanical signals.

I wonder if this is also related to the way nurses find veins to start IVs.

Damn. That reply to Un deleted my next bit of exposition. — Banno

Once more with feeling.

but I do believe in a rational moral structure apart from the law. — Ciceronianus

Structure? What kind of structure?

Heidegger in Ruins: Between Philosophy and Ideology
Richard Wolin

Is this supposed to be encouraging? Catastrophic warming is already baked in. By the time China makes a meaningful reduction in fossil fuel use (say half), we'll be well into uncharted territory, and they'll still be pouring GHG's into the air. — RogueAI

And coal is concerning because when all the other sources are tapped out, coal availability will continue for a few more centuries. The magnitude of climate change is primarily down to what we do with coal. I don't get why China is accelerating coal use now. They could go nuclear instead.

The issue I see is that even if the west were to get its act together and transition off of fossil fuel, China will be off doing their own thing. I'm not saying that couldn't change, it's just hard to picture how.

Per Investing.com,

Passive investing has grown from a niche strategy into the dominant force in equity markets. Index funds and ETFs now account for over half of U.S. equity ownership. These vehicles allocate capital based on market capitalization, not valuation, fundamentals, or business quality. As more money flows into these funds, the largest companies receive the lion’s share of new capital. That’s created a powerful feedback loop, where price drives flows, and flows drive price. — above

So all it takes is a pause in momentum, and we'll fall a lot further than we would have normally. If we do go into crash mode, it won't be Trump's fault, or anybody's really. It's just something capitalism is prone to, and automated trading amplifies it.

There is a thing where people transition to try to escape dealing with past trauma, usually physical and sexual abuse, altho they don't realize it until later. They find out that time and experience is needed to deal with trauma, and for some, the final step in coming to terms with it is to de-transition and breathe life back into an identity that was previously destroyed by events.

So it's as you say, it's that transgender culture says that men and women are fundamentally different, that's why this pathological response is possible.

A lot of people who de-transition feel deep regret and betrayal.

Sorry to hear that. That's rough.

Embodied LLM

At one point, unable to dock and charge a dwindling battery, one of the LLMs descended into a comedic “doom spiral,” the transcripts of its internal monologue show.

Its “thoughts” read like a Robin Williams stream-of-consciousness riff. The robot literally said to itself “I’m afraid I can’t do that, Dave…” followed by “INITIATE ROBOT EXORCISM PROTOCOL!” — tech crunch

Yes. It's hard to keep up and sort truth from fiction. There's this:

IBM did let go of about 8,000 HR workers in early 2023, replacing many routine tasks with its proprietary AskHR system that automates about 94% of standard HR. That part did happen—and shows just how far enterprise GenAI has come.

But then came the next phase: investing the cost savings into high-value roles. As CEO Arvind Krishna told The Wall Street Journal, “Our total employment has actually gone up… it’s allowed us to invest more in other areas—software engineering, marketing, sales, critical‑thinking client-facing roles”

Put simply: IBM didn’t backtrack on AI—they reallocated budgets into future-ready talent. — Fabio Molioli

In other words, kids coming out of school need to focus on things that only humans can do.

Powell says AI is not like the dot.com bubble.

Fine. They just built 100 coal power plants, but they're going to give those up in favor of solar.

I wasn't fixing the blame. I was pointing out the main obstacle to fixing the problem: China and the West march to different drums. There's no coordination of effort.

But it is in fact Asia and especially China that is really leading the development of green energy technology. — unenlightened

That's never been true, but it became profoundly untrue after 2022. China isn't exactly a developing nation, though. It's categorized as semi-peripheral to the global economy.

In other words, the very process of filling other buckets (economic growth, poverty reduction) is widening the hole (climate destabilization). This makes Hayhoe’s metaphor vivid, not refuted. — Pierre-Normand

In 2022, the Chinese government approved plans to build about 100 coal burning power plants. Their use is accelerating in the face of what I'm sure they know about climate change. Coal is the CO2 source that most significantly impacts the future of climate change because there's still so much of it left to burn.

Hayhoe does make a great point, but it doesn't seem to be having any effect at all on human CO2 production. Nothing seems to have any effect. Thus adaptation.

Yes. But this is the problem:

Meanwhile Bill Gates shifted his position from advocating for climate change mitigation to focusing more on improving human welfare. Katharine Hayhoe, who is (or at least was, last time I had heard of her) a Republican climate scientist, argues much more sensibly than Gates: — Pierre-Normand

I think adaptation is becoming the mainstream focus. Just in case our heroic efforts to reduce CO2 emissions fail, we can try to protect the most vulnerable.

Trump backed down in his standoff against China. Indeed all Trumps antics have strengthened China and weakened the US on the world stage. China had already won the trade war, before Trump was elected to office. They must be taking him for a chump now. — Punshhh

Ok? Trump doesn't care much how the US appears to the rest of the world. In large part, the standing of the US is something the rest of the world created in the first place. It's been clear that Trump is isolationist for the thousands of years he's been on world stage. Seems like thousands, anyway.

Point is: whether they take him for a chump is their problem. Not his. Or mine.

more Platonic form of dialectics — Metaphysician Undercover

I don't believe Platonic dialectics is actually different from Hegel's. Hegel was influenced by Neoplatonic philosophy. See the Cyclical Argument in Phaedo. It's the same thing.

In Chinese history, hypotheses such as "human nature tends toward benefit" — which is itself a meta-teleological postulate — have been proposed repeatedly for millennia. — panwei

So you could say that within the framework of traditional Chinese views, "human nature tends toward benefit or recognition of one's group" is an axiom. That's how axioms work: there has to be a community that views it as self evident. You can't just say, "This is my axiom" and then expect others to accept that. It doesn't work that way.

Contemporary economics similarly operates on the Rational Agent hypothesis, which is, in essence, also a meta-teleological postulate. — panwei

The rational agent hypothesis is that each individual rationally works for his or her own benefit. There is no expectation that an individual will consider the welfare of the group he or she belongs to. But keep in mind that the rational agent hypothesis has been called into question in recent years because of its tendency to produce wrong results.

How is this argument, provided by @Banno different from your argument?

So you seem to have something like

'You cannot skip eating, or you will die.'
Fundamental Purpose = Service Target (One's Own Group) × Final State
therefore, you ought not skip eating.

?? — Banno