Once an identity forms, it becomes passed down generationally and elaborated upon. A fresh dose of contest may be required to dust it off and rejuvenate it. Verbal contests might just be the cheapest form of energy injection.

Can you see any of that in the verbal contests you enter into? Or not? — frank

Absolutely.

Larger identities (like, "Scandinavian", "Anglican", "French" (especially French), are inherited. Some identities like "millennial" or "hippy" are rather foamy identities without too much substance. And identities benefit from the refreshment of conflict, and again I am not speaking of combat. Someone who really identifies as an anarchist or a socialist or a syndicalist in 2018 is going to need to reargue his case periodically, because there is so little in current society that would positively reinforce such an identity. Gay men, on the other hand, don't need to argue their case, because we can live the identity.

Actual combat experiences forge new identities among the combatants. Strenuous political campaigns can do the same thing. But these kind of experiences can't be arranged. One signs up or is drafted, and somebody else is in charge of the war or the campaign.

We'd be spoiling your thread to continue a discussion of socialism here; there's Tinman's thread on socialism and Fdrake's thread on Marx's value theory if we want to pursue the topic.

By the way, it was Salvador Allende who was the democratic socialist in Chile; General Pinochet was a run of the mill South American dictator after Allende. The US helped kill Allende in 1973.

The vigor with which you seek interpersonal conflict — frank

People do seek interpersonal conflict. I think it is a critical piece of individuation. However, by 'conflict' I mean verbal contest. Debating, arguing, strongly disagreeing. It might be the case that in arguing you convince someone of your point of view, but at least for young people the principle benefit is convincing one's self of what one believes, holds dear, thinks is right, or wrong, and so forth.

a command economy must necessarily prohibit. In order to design production, a command economy must tell people what to do, when to do it, and cannot stand dissent of any kind - because the State manages production. — karl stone

The USSR was a command economy sometimes described as "state capitalism". What the hell does that mean, you ask?

In state capitalism there is one corporation: the state. The state corporation runs industry, commerce, politics, religion, whatever there is to run. That is not "socialism" or "communism" as Marx defined it. It's just a totalitarian society. Marx described a system where all the institutions of capitalism (including the state) were replaced by a bottom-up system of social management.

The American socialist Daniel DeLeon felt that in democratic countries violent revolution was unnecessary and counterproductive, Rather, use the machinery of democracy (unionized work force, the ballot, political organization, education, etc.) to prepare the citizens to assume political and economic control of society.

Marx expected the bourgeoisie (the owning class) to inadvertently prepare the working class to take over the management and operation of production. How would this happen? By workers doing more and more skilled management type work. Employees perform most of the work involved in both managing and running British companies. Per Marx.

Of course, the owners don't expect the employees to take the company away from them. (That happens when the socialists are in power; the ownership of industries, capital property (like office buildings, warehouses, etc.) and so on are transferred to the employees of the companies. The primary task of governing a non-capitalist, socialist society is deciding economic matters: what to produce, how much, where to get the raw materials, and so forth, under the guidance of "production for need".

So and and so forth. I don't expect to convince you that this is what should or will happen. Now, the UK is not the US. Our political and class systems and history are quite different. Workers in the US have tended to have harsher experiences than workers in the UK have had, at least under the post-war labor governments. The same goes for much of Europe, which has had a longer history of social welfare programs than the US.

The US has done a much better job than you Brits of camouflaging the fault lines of class differences. Both the UK and the US have a ruling class, and an overlapping very wealthy class. Most American workers have been taught to not see class. That 5% of the population owns more wealth than the rest of the population is unbelievable to many Americans. Credit that to pervasive miseducation. Americans have drunk the kool aid that "Anyone can get rich in America." Your are poor because you just didn't try hard enough. ETC.

It is always important to keep things in perspective. Bad things have been happening in the United States for a long time. Fifteen presidents or former presidents have been shot; 4 didn't survive. We had a vicious civil war. We've had all sorts of violent vigilante groups like the KKK come and go. We've had lynchings. We've had mass murders. We've had several morally compromised presidents. We've had disgraceful business affairs. The list goes on and on. None of these came close to sinking the ship of state (save the Civil War).

Trump is very bad, and bad things are certainly happening in America. There is a long list of things going on that I don't like. You seem to feel this way too. What to do?

Engage in politics: send money; vote; support groups that are doing good things; do what you can on a local level (because that's where you are, and that's where you can do something). Be vocal about criticizing Trump, and the swine that are running along side him.

Pray for Mitch McConnell's brain aneurysm to burst (he doesn't have to die, just become severely aphasic -- no language capacity at all). He's as big a threat to the country as Trump. While you're at it, there's several hundred people in Washington who could benefit the country by losing their capacity to use language. Add the Koch Brothers to your prayer list. (God is busy, so... keep the list reasonably short -- less than 500.)

Well, Schop, I've said several times in several places in the Forum that I believe the universe has no inherent meaning. It expands in all directions and will, as far as we can tell, continue to do that forever. Whether our species suffers excessively, should suffer more, should suffer less, or even whether our suffering is significant is a matter of supreme indifference in an indifferent universe.

Quite singularly on this planet, we are able to give things meaning -- rocks, shoes, trees, stars, flowers, fish, etc. -- including ourselves. We can also deny that things have meaning. You find the quite real suffering we experience meaningless. Meaningless suffering has no purpose. The species that suffers meaninglessly has only one out: extinction. Therefore antinatalism.

I do not view suffering as a good, but I also do not consider suffering to be inherently meaningless. It can be granted meaning. Meaningful suffering is no reason to give up on the species or the universe. Quite the reverse: Our suffering is a very small part of the unfolding life of this planet in the universe. Our lives, our suffering, our world has meaning because we can, we have bestowed meaning on them.

I can not ask you to change: You didn't choose to feel suffering as meaningless, to feel life as meaningless, and to see extinction as a desirable end. I didn't choose my position either, (Didn't Schpenhauer say that we can not choose what we want?) I can't choose your position; you can't choose mine. I may be able to understand your position, but I don't agree with it.

I'm not avoiding the question: I'm rejecting the answer you are looking for.

In the fullness of time, our species will most likely be extinguished. We will be extinguished because we were no longer capable of adapting to new existing conditions and as a species we "failed to thrive". "Fail to thrive" is med-speak for dying. We will die out. Our meaning and our suffering, our pleasures and our joys, will be over and done with. Whether our departure from existence comes in a couple of centuries, a millennia, several millennia, or in another age... we don't/won't know until the end is quite close.

I actually try to avoid anthropomorphizing; animals have their own raisons d'être; they don't need ours, and we quite often infantilize animals as well as anthropomorphize them. So we really ought, and we really can, make connections with other creatures as other, and not an extension of our beings.

As a socialist, it's not my job to defend capitalism. "We have not come to praise Capital; we have come to bury it." I do not believe that capitalism is compatible with continued human existence into the next century. Despotic dictatorships are also not compatible with human life, whether they pay heed to Karl Marx or Adam Smith.

Scrooge McDuck vs. exquisite epistemic theory... Indeed capitalism could do more; much more. People like the Koch Brothers and the whole oil/coal industry are doing their capitalistic damnedest to do much much more.

Don't get all fragile and guilt ridden at this stage of the game. Enjoy your upper hand while you still have it. The brown hordes are on the move.

As a rich gay WASP I bask in the knowledge that my exalted position in society rests securely on the overburdened backs of oppressed peasants. (As well it should!) I really wouldn't have it any other way. [aside... "Hey, you fucking peasants, stand still!] And of course neither would the peasants of color and especially the peasant women. They rejoice in their wretched state of servitude, believing that the last shall be first, and that imperialist sexist fascist gay WASPS are over due for their comeuppance. Well, rah rah cis boom bah!

We have heard rumors that the oppressed riff raff at the bottom of the heap (where they belong) are becoming bitter and resentful about we benevolent overlords sitting up here having peak experiences at their expense. Does it matter? We have been good to them. They are not starving, actually. Many of them are from the fried fish belt and desperately need a raw oat and water body cleanse to get rid of all that lard they have been sucking up with their PCB-flavored catfish. Plus they smoke inferior substances and it stinks! Quite disgusting. At least we aren't required to endure seeing all the way down to the bottom; that would be just totally disgusting. Keep them in the dark, please.

Satire alert.

My master premise is that people are not walking around thinking that life is suffering. If they do recognize that there is suffering in life (there surely is), they do not believe their suffering is so great that they should have no more children.

A derivative premise is that people like being alive pretty well.

But the 10,000 foot view question is... — schopenhauer1

"At what altitude does hypoxia and antinatalism set in?"

"The envelope please..." rip... "and the answer is, '9500 feet'".

Come down, come down.

There is no reason that I know of to suppose that socialism can, will, or should result in some sort of rigidly defined "equality". What? Should everybody have exactly the same kind of underwear? How does that make sense? Everyone should get exactly 32 ounces of extra sharp aged cheddar cheese per year? Everyone gets exactly 175 square feet of indoor space? That kind of equality isn't worth the argument, let alone not being worth a revolution.

People should be equally entitled to what they need and equally entitled to utilize their talents. Under this formula there will not be equality of production and consumption. Talents, abilities, physical energy, and environment varies too much to require equality of production. Needs vary too: A ditch digging man needs more calories every day than a bus driving woman. A scientist needs different infrastructure than a musician. Etc. Etc.

The only perfect equality that exists on earth is in the grave.

If we eschew brute force methods, (there are plenty of historical examples) and instead use a bottom-up approach to building the infrastructure of socialism (starting with militant unionism) and ending with a peaceful transition to a worker owned society (probably over a period of decades) we will have defined what "socialist equality" means by the time we achieve it.

Why should people living under advanced capitalism decide for some future socialist society what "equality" should mean?

We will get the kind of socialist society that we work for. If we use organization, education, democratic political tools, and continual worker engagement in the process, we will get something better than if we use either brute force methods or the top-down dictatorship approach.

Ursala LeGuin, a popular sci-fi writer, developed the idea of a rigidly egalitarian society in The Dispossessed. It's a very good novel. She imagined an extreme form of egalitarian anarchism, a project that I would consider more difficult to achieve than socialism.

There is such a thing as human nature, and any political system that intends to succeed by dismissing the inherent characteristics of human beings is doomed to failure. We are somewhat plastic, somewhat malleable, somewhat educable, and so on. But we also have characteristic needs, without which we fail to flourish.

In face of the existential threat climate change poses - I find it very difficult to understand why a comprehensive renewable energy infrastructure isn't government funded. — karl stone

For the reason you cite in your paragraph:

Instead, they want me to stop eating meat, cycle to work and wear my overcoat indoors - just so they can keep pumping the black gold!

Capital finance (embodied in a few hundred people who make major investment decisions) and fossil fuel owners don't care (can't care) about the environment, the various species, and whether you and I freeze or not. They pretty much MUST focus on perpetuating the life of the gold-egg laying goose and generating a steady stream of profits for hundreds of thousands stock holders.

You and I would experience too much cognitive dissonance to be worrying about the future of the species and at the same time doing business as usual.

The situation is reflected in the statements of some business leaders traveling to Saudi Arabia who were asked about their presence, considering the Saudi crowned thug's recent chopping up a journalist in their Turkish embassy. "I'm here to make deals; I'm not concerned about anything else."

I quite readily anthropomorphize dogs. I am quite aware that even a very bright dog has limits which prevent them from having the sort of complex, abstract ideas that humans have. On the other hand, most dogs seem abundantly capable of having wants, fears, preferences, learned behaviors, memories of good and bad, and various instinctive drives that add up to fairly complicated behavior.

A man and a dog connect at various levels, mutually, which is a pleasurable experience (usually -- unless the dog is trying to get you to play by shoving its slimy tennis ball into your mouth). Were I to treat the dog as a warm, wetware mechanism, there would be very little pleasure in interacting. Indeed, it might even be desirable from an ecological point of view to embrace our connection with all living creatures. Better that than treating ones cow like a machine, the forest like a warehouse, the birds like ornaments.

Anthropomorphizing one's car, one's computer, or one's force of robots is common, but mistaken. A geranium has more personality than a robotic vacuum. My computer knows nothing, feels nothing, and most of the time, does nothing.

That was the book of which Truman Capote said 'that's not writing, that's typing'. — Wayfarer

Truman Capote was a much better writer, certainly. I read Kerouac's book as part of a short course in beat literature I was offering myself. I found it interesting, useful for getting the feel of the beat period, and was glad to cross it off my list of books I should have read by now. It was OK. I've tried reading a number of Burroughs's books, with mixed results. The first one I read was The Ticket that Exploded, which was back in about 1967. I didn't get it in '67. Don't know that I got it in 2017, either.

I've come to like Allen Ginsberg's beat period better.

...who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked
and trembling before the machinery of other
skeletons,
who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight
in policecars for committing no crime but their
own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication,
who howled on their knees in the subway and were
dragged off the roof waving genitals and manu-
scripts,
who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly
motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,
who blew and were blown by those human seraphim,
the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean
love... — Allen Ginsberg

and so on. Howl. Had I read this poem in 1964, when some sections of English lit 110 were focussing on the beats, I would have been shocked, appalled, and totally fascinated. Much better that I read it later when I could appreciate it, when I had had enough sex & life experiences to know what he was talking about, when I had finally aged past those sorts of joyful activities...

There is a lot to be said for NOT reading some books too soon.

I'd use mirrors to heat sea water, to produce clean water and steam to drive a turbine to produce electricity, and irrigate wasteland for agriculture. — karl stone

Indeed one could do that. But solar-thermal power hasn't taken off. Mirrors can focus a lot of heat, but not on cloudy days, and not at night.

Your solar to H plan is better.

I think we're getting hung up on the word mortgage. — karl stone

Right; I would just drop "mortgage" from your description. It has too many specific connotations connected to purchasing property or getting consumer loans.

There is no political will — karl stone

Where there is no political will, nothing happens. Period. Your plan is going to require plenty of political will too. I don't know exactly when political will is scheduled to arrive. It had better be pretty damn quick or we are totally screwed.

What's the obstacle there? — Jake

No new technology springs out of the box and takes over the market. It tends to take around 50 years (rough figure) for a new technology to fulfill its market potential. Take automobiles: The first autos had few roads designed for autos. There were few service facilities. The machines were not terribly reliable, and in crashes they just shattered (talk about unsafe at any speed). They were not terribly easy to use. One had to turn a crank to get them started. It took more than 30 years for everything to fall 1/2 way into place. A really good auto-friendly highway system wasn't built in this country until starting in the 1950s.

Passenger trains followed a slower course: The good old days of passenger travel were terrible. The railroads didn't make passenger travel comfortable or convenient. Where transfers were necessary one often had to walk quite a ways from one station to another. One might have to stay overnight to catch the next train. Dining cars didn't exist until late in the game. Ditto for comfortable Pullmans. We're talking... roughly 50 years between the first trains and comfortable trains (at least for the hoi polloi.)

The really luxurious trains waited until after WWII. It was a short-lived paradise. Roomettes rather than bunk beds; splendid dining cars; cocktail lounges; sightseeing domes (west of Chicago) and air conditioning were the new standard. this regime starting running down almost as soon as it began. The railroads never made a lot of money hauling passengers, and by the 1960s a lot of the roads were going broke hauling anything. (A long history of bad management finally killed a lot of railroad companies off.)

By 1970? Amtrak was created to take over a ghost of passenger travel. The promise of railroad travel began around 1840. It took about a century to finally become really nice, and then it died (all this only applies to the US.)

Soooo many books, soooo little time. Be aware that you can read a lot and still be stupid, and read sparingly and be quite wise.

Start and stick with the classics. should you read Shakespeare? Don't know. There are other writers contemporary with Shakespeare who wrote some awfully good stuff. Like Love III by George Herbert b. 1593) Just three stanzas. Read often.

James Boswell b. 1740 (dictionary compiler Samuel Johnson's biographer) wrote great prose. In one case (from his Journals) he tried to save a fellow condemned to hanging for theft (this was the 18th century) by attempting to revive the unfortunate fellow after the hanging. Didn't work.

Don't miss Samuel Pepys' diary (b. 1633) for a candid report on the daily affairs of a man on the make.

Tolkien. LeGuin. Many works of science fiction. The short stories of Flannery O'Connor. Emily Dickinson. Henry James. Kurt Vonnegut.

Mary Anne Evans, aka George Eliot is one of the best Victorian novelists, imho. Dickens, of course.

Hawthorne, Poe, Steinbeck, Philip Roth, Thoreau, some of Walt Whitman (his long poems are a bit much today). Sample stuff from the beats: Some of Alan Ginsberg's poetry is magnificent.

I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber,
poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery
boys.
I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the
pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?
I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans
following you, and followed in my imagination by the store
detective.
We strode down the open corridors together in our
solitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen
delicacy, and never passing the cashier.
... — Allen Ginsberg

Is Cormac McCarthy a great writer? Don't know, but his The Road was one of the most unforgettable apocalypse stories I have read.

How about On the Road by Jack Kerouac? Moderately interesting.

Margaret Atwood's Madd Addam trilogy; the Handmaid's Tale.

on and on.

So you didn't get it right on the first try. So what? — Jake

Visionaries very often work alone. When they start working with other people, they start receiving annoying (but very useful) new information, and their vision or invention improves. I suspect Karl has spent a lot of time working on this alone. It seemed like a compete and perfect idea. The trouble with sharing one's bright ideas is that they aren't always immediately recognized as brilliant. Quite annoying, really.

Crank, your financing plan is built upon an asset with market value, solar generated hydrogen. Karl's financing plan is built upon an asset that can't be used, and thus has no market value. — Jake

I'm hoping that Karl will see there is a real alternative to mortgaging oil in the ground.

I blame primates. Had they opted to stay in the trees and not evolve, we wouldn't have all these problems. Alas, they did. And alas, they didn't evolve far enough fast enough. While we are able to split the atom, spot planets around distant stars, and create many things of beauty and utility, we retain a good deal of our primate nature. (Remember, chimp DNA is almost the same as ours.)

When Lise Meitner was walking through the winter park thinking about whether the atom could be fissioned, it did occur to her that a great deal of power would be released. She, being a very smart primate, was pleased to see that the equations she had sketched out worked. It didn't occur to her to burn her notes and say nothing about it. She reasoned her way to identifying fission as a possibility; others could and would do the same thing, sooner or later. People like Meitner or Rutherford, who discovered the proton earlier in the 20th Century, weren't thinking about bombs. They were just doing their physicist thing. Which is of course what your are pointing out: smart people just doing their thing risks our undoing. That, and completely ill-willed assholes doing their thing...

We primates are capable of worrying about our present situation, and maybe the immediate future of our children -- but we are not capable of practically thinking 100 years or a thousand years into the future. Most of us are "detail" people. Even people who see the Big Picture fail to see a big enough view of what's happening.

Our deficiencies are not personal: they are a feature of the species. If we had 20/20 vision into the future, we'd be paralyzed with fear. We wouldn't be able to do anything. We know that we are primates, but being primates prevents us from fully utilizing that knowledge. Just because we know we belong to the primate family, doesn't mean that we can do anything much about ourselves.

Assets can be mortgaged - and in this way, fossil fuels can be monetized without being extracted. The money raised by mortgaging fossil fuels would first go to applying sustainable energy technology. — karl stone

If solar generated hydrogen is a practical energy source (and let's say it is) then the logical place from which to obtain capital finance is the market. Since the technology is scalable, you don't have to finance the final stage before the first stage is built. IF you built the final stage of the project today, had 300 square miles of solar panels and a plant cranking out hydrogen, and freighters lined up to take it away you wouldn't be able to sell much of it because the industrial base isn't ready to receive and use H. What you would do is finance a 10 square mile solar panel set up, located near the right shore, and start producing electricity, drinking water, and some H. The electricity and water could be sold to the nearby shore (i.e., India). The H would have to find its market. The profit could be plowed back into the operation, or used to pay dividends. When you were ready to expand, additional shares could be sold to finance enlarging the plant. And so on down the line.

The usual way to pay for capital projects is either a national subsidy or the capital market.

Assets can be mortgaged - and in this way, fossil fuels can be monetized without being extracted — karl stone

The oil mortgage plank in your platform needs clarification.

A mortgage is given by a bank because the value of the property can be cashed out if the loan is not paid. Oil in the ground can indeed be mortgaged as long as there is no barrier to its extraction and sale. IF society decides to leave the rest of the oil in the ground, then it ceases to be a mortgageable property.

Once we pump up the last barrel of obtainable oil, there will still be lots of oil in the ground. It just won't be practically obtainable by fracking or any other method. The unobtainable oil has no more value than the immense and lovely diamonds produced on a planet orbiting a distant star.

Your utopian dream is dead. — Jake

We're done. I will not speak to you again. — karl stone

Philosophers, mind your manners! Gentlemen never walk off in a huff.

You both recognize that we face grave problems. You disagree about methods of avoiding catastrophe. Situation: Normal.

If the way forward were so obvious, and were we so dispassionate as to see with perfect clarity, we would have avoided all our problems. As it happens the way forward has usually not been at all obvious at the moment. That's why we spend so much time hacking our way through dense thorns and nettles, not knowing if we are even hacking in the right direction.

A part of our primate heritage has endured through the stone age of hunting and gathering, through the first grain harvest, through the age of bronze and iron, through the dawn of civilization, on into the present moment: the ape's inability to think about long term consequences. Only with great difficulty can we plan 25 or 30 years into the future. 50 years seems to be about the limit. Hundreds of years is out of the question. And 50 years planning assumes that we even see the necessity to plan that far in advance. Usually we don't.

the problem of equality among workers in a socialist state will not be solved by magic. We are not "equal" in physical and mental attributes, needs, personal liabilities and strengths, talents, and experience. We can, however, feel equal as citizens of a community. We all have an "equal share" of citizenship.

Of course, socialism isn't going to come about by magic, either. The struggle to establish egalitarian, fraternal equality is the revolution. Disposing the reign of the extremely privileged-by-wealth is but a necessary step.

An ethos of equality will have to be developed over time; not a long time, certainly. Equality is an urgent goal.

"From each, according to the abilities; to each, according to their needs" is a recognition that personal assets and needs vary. Equality doesn't mean that everybody gets the same sized peanut butter sandwich.

Brothers and sisters: After the Revolution there will be strawberries for everyone!"
A hand goes up.
"Yes, Comrade?"
"I don't like strawberries."
"Comrade", the commissar says menacingly, "After the Revolution you will like strawberries."

It means there is an equality in finding that their needs are met, and their capabilities are utilized, in as much as they can be. The paraplegic has different needs than the athlete. The parents of 3 young children have different needs than a single man. The scholar can not offer the same thing that a dairy farmer can, and visa versa. There is work enough for everyone, and not the same work. There is no point in the scholar sweeping the streets, or the extremely limited intelligence studying.

There must also be an equality of power: Every worker must participate in the exercise of power which is running the society. That doesn't mean everyone becomes a member of the politburo, or something. It means that everyone participates in a central task of socialism, deciding how to meet the needs of the people. Participation on a given day may mean nothing more difficult than responding to a survey about what kind of public transit the individual prefers.

Most of the managing activity in a socialist society should be about substantive material issues. What kind of food can we grow, what kind of breads should be made, how much cotton do we need, are the trains running on time, etc. If the youth decide that mohawk haircuts are just the thing, the people's congress doesn't need to discuss it. Similarly, if learning Esperanto becomes the national craze, so be it. Big C Culture is worth some time. Little c culture should be left to the people to play with.

Could we say that the pure science was hijacked by ideological interests? — Jake

You probably know this story already:

We could say that the pure science took place in a setting that was inherently ideological: Academic physicists Lise Meitner and Otto Hahn discovered the principle of fission in 1939. Meitner fled Germany in 1938 to escape the murderous anti-Jewish Nazi regime. Meitner and Hahn met secretly once after she fled Germany to plan the experiments that Hahn carried out in Berlin proving the theory. It was Meitner who identified and named the process 'nuclear fission'.

Once the results of Meitner and Hahn's experiments were published, a committee of physicists alerted Roosevelt to the discovery.

Who would make the bomb that Germany, Britain, USA, and USSR now knew was possible?

Some research was conducted beginning in 1939 on nuclear fission. But the US was not at war with the Axis powers, and the mood in the country was still isolationist. After Pearl Harbor, the situation changed, of course. There was some evidence (the business with heavy water from Norsk Hydro, for instance) that Germany was seriously pursuing a bomb. In 1942, when the Manhattan Project was conceived, it was not clear that the Allies would be victorious.

Further, not all of the scientists that were asked were willing to work on the project (several guessed what it was probably about), and quite a few of the scientists who did work on it were quite unhappy about it by the end of the war.

General Groves, the superintendent of the project, insisted on very tight partitions of information about the project. Each participant -- top scientist or lowly lab tech -- was only told as much as they needed to know to perform their job. (This was an anti espionage strategy). Quite a few of the scientists did not know exactly what they were working on till late in the game. For instance, the polonium team in Ohio who were working on making the "trigger" for the bomb, a ping pong sized ball of purified polonium, did not know what the little ball was for. A very few of the managing scientists at Los Alamos knew about the ball, and what it was for. Most of the scientists didn't know until the winter of 1945, when they were closing in on the construction of the two bombs.

Well before the first two bombs were ready, it became apparent that Japan would be the target for the nuclear bombs. This was entirely ideological. Initially, a German atomic weapon was an existential threat. By 1945, neither Japan nor Germany posed existential threats to the Allies.

Nuclear power doesn't produce carbon emissions, but it takes half the energy a nuclear power station will ever produce - to build a nuclear power station. All that concrete and steel is incredibly energy intensive to produce, and that's almost certainly going to be fossil fuel energy. — karl stone

This is part of the problem that James Howard Kunstler points out: a lot of chemicals go into making solar and wind power and all the associated equipment--chemicals derived from petroleum. Once petroleum becomes too scarce and expensive to obtain, it will be very difficult to replace all the infrastructure that was made from and with petroleum: plastics, lubricants, solvents, raw chemicals, finishes, and so on. Things wear out, break, burn up, are smashed, and so forth.

It isn't that nothing will or can be done in the future; it's just that manufacturing will have to re-invented for many products (if it can be).

Making the essential ingredients of concrete, like calcium obtained by heating limestone to a high temperature -- are very energy intensive and extensive. I don't see making the large amounts of portland cement with solar or wind.

There is a reason why we used so much coal and oil: It takes a hell of a lot of energy to build all the infrastructure you see around you. We can not rebuild all of it, or even half of it, on a meagre energy budget. We'll get along, but it will be on much different terms than we operate with now.

See from UN homepages, CHERNOBYL: THE TRUE SCALE OF THE ACCIDENT — ssu

I grew up in the upper midwestern part of the US during the entire period of atmospheric nuclear bomb testing Of course fall out from the tests drifted across the continent given prevailing westerly winds. The Soviets were also doing atmospheric nuclear bomb testing during the same period.

As I recollect, people worried about radiation, but we didn't think we were doomed, and no one was getting sick from radiation. We didn't drink less milk (strontium-90 or not). Minnesota has the best overall health outcomes of all the other states, except Hawaii and Massachusetts, with whom we trade off first place position. Good health outcomes are not owing to more radiation, of course, but to social policies and community norms which have brought about less smoking, less drinking, less fried food, better dentistry and better health care.

As annoying as the facts are, animals do seem to be able to tolerate more radiation than I thought. There are some adverse effects on animals living in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, but nothing approaching catastrophic consequences. Wolves--the top predator--seem to be doing well there, despite feeding at the top of the food chain. Some birds have, if I remember correctly, developed a mal-aligned beak, not a beneficial mutation. The wolves may not be attaining the same upper age as they would elsewhere.

I wouldn't for a minute suggest that we should be blasé about radiation. Most mass radiation exposure results from sloppy, incompetent, or "public be damned" behavior in the nuclear plants. A good example is a fire at the Rocky Flats plutonium plant near Denver (maybe 30 years ago). The fire spread to the roof and burnt up a number of big filters which were supposed to capture plutonium dust. The fire resulted in quite a bit of plutonium being scattered over much of the Denver area.

Thus, the Manhattan Project is not a truly scientific endeavor. The motives are purely ideological. The scientists were employees of ideological interests. — karl stone

Right. The Manhattan Project was very "scientish" but was essentially a tremendous technological nuts and bolts project. There was, of course, an ideological goal. The Manhattan Project was intended to build an atomic weapon before Germany did. Germany could have, maybe, built an atomic weapon, but they decided they couldn't produce conventional weapons and atomic weapons at the same time. We didn't know that in 1942 (when the project was conceived). By the time the Manhattan Project was finished, Germany was no longer a threat.

"Saving lives by not invading the home islands of Japan" is a claim undermined by the fact that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were spared heavy bombing--something most Japanese cities were not spared. The were left in a "pristine" state so they could better serve as a test site to measure the destructiveness of the new weapon.

Having achieved the initial goal, it was decided that we needed to go forward with plutonium/U235 bombs and to build a hydrogen bomb (Edward Teller's favorite project) and achieve world dominance in nuclear weapons. So we did. Our monopoly on nukes was very short. Tens of thousands of bombs later...

It is the difference between science as a tool box, and science as an instruction manual. We've used the tools, but failed to read the instructions. That's what's wrong - with everything! It's why we're burning rain-forests to clear land for palm oil production, and cattle ranching. It makes sense ideologically - but in terms of a scientific conception of reality, it's insane, unnecessary, and ultimately fatal behavior. — karl stone

Exactly.

"Read the instructions as a last resort". Now that we have made a colossal mess of things, we've opened the manual and discovered the really bad news.

I'm arguing that our philosophy needs to be updated to match the technological environment, that we need to adapt philosophically to the new reality. — Jake

Say more about that, would you, please.

every non-white/non-male person suffers from racism, sexism, and other forms of bigotry and oppression — VagabondSpectre

Somebody on one of the late night talk shows called these sorts of glittering generalities "deepities". They sound a lot profounder than they are. Another example of a deepity is "There is no such thing as an illegal human." Sounds good -- and is even true, but nobody has called "humans" illegal. Illegal aliens, illegal immigrants, illegal this, that, and the other thing, but no "illegal humans".

Given how perverse the incentive structure seems to have become, can we ever grow out of our newfound/newly imposed obsession with outrage? — VagabondSpectre

I think a lot of the outrage, sturm and drang, incessant meme'ery, and so on are a result of the media. It isn't a plot; it's McLuhan's principle that the medium is the message. The high traffic social media are really narcissistic MEdia--emphasis on ME--and not so much social.

Facebook, twitter, and the like are designed to amplify the personal, so that's what people do with it. Recorded sound, film, radio, and television have various effects on the way we experience life. Those media are mostly 1 way: we receive; we do not send.

The Internet/WWW/browsers/email changed that. Now we could receive and send. This forum is a receive and send site. Philosophy Talk (on the radio) is 99.999% receive and about .001% send (the one or two calls and two or three e-mail questions they feature on the show). Send and receive is much more interesting, generally.

So, until such time as social media stops being MEdia. stops doing what the Internet is good at promoting (connecting), or until we run out of electricity, it will probably continue to generate waves of bullshit outrage.

Thanks for opening this thread.

Compare the treatment John F. Kennedy's, Bill Clinton's, and Donald Trump's sex lives received: Kennedy's promiscuous sex life was considered off limits by the 1960s press establishment. Bill Clinton's affairs received extensive, but reasonably restrained mainline media coverage. Trump's sex life news and views is a three-ring circus. Much of the change is owing to the Internet and the large social media corporations which, unlike the old mass media, are focused on the traffic volume on its sites. The old media like the Chicago Tribune and New York Times had a clear and definite stake in what they printed. (They still do, but it matters less.) Outrage, sturm and drang, and high velocity bullshit make for big social media traffic.

What happens now is rapid amplification of resonant outrages. (Resonant doesn't equal reasonable, of course.) And it isn't only the left that is outraged; the right too is outraged. Everybody is outraged because we too are interested in traffic volume, and mere irritation doesn't garner attention.

So I am saying that media is shaping the message. Outrage and non-negotiable demands fly, where modest proposals land with a thud.

I'm not an anti-natalist because I don't accept the central plank in their platform that "having children under any and all circumstances guarantees continued suffering". I have no desire to see our species vanish.

By "resting place" I merely meant that you have gone as far as you can in the logic of promoting H production at sea by solar power. Once you've proved that 2+2=4, people have to either accept the fact or ignore it. There are quite a few examples of 2+2=4 that people seem quite capable of ignoring. Just a simple example here:

The city of Minneapolis, where I live, collects trash, recyclable material (single stream) and compostable material. All that is a plus. We have found that it is very difficult, apparently, for many people to figure out what the difference is between trash, recyclable, and compostable. Signs with words, signs with pictures, signs with actual examples, someone standing behind the bins telling people where the stuff goes -- none of this seems to work with a certain percentage of the population. I think it should be obvious even to morons that a bin with potato peelings, left-over food from plates, moldy bread, carrot tops, spoiled oranges, etc. IS NOT the right bin for plastic cups and aluminum cans. None the less, some otherwise not apparently too-stupid-to-breathe people still don't get it.

If we can't get people to figure out the difference between rotten oranges and aluminum cans...

Seven tenths of the earth's surface is still as rich in metals as when the earth was new. — karl stone

I would imagine that better than 99.9% of the metals that were ever in the earth are still on earth--somewhere. That doesn't mean that it is even remotely possible (in the imaginable future) to get at these metals for a bearable cost.

How will we overcome the problem of metals becoming harder to find in large, accessible quantities?

Take iron, for example. Iron wasn't extruded by magma or volcanoes. 2 billion years ago iron was mostly suspended in water. As cyanobacteria produced oxygen, the O combined with Fe producing an oxide which settled on the sea floors and, in certain places, was concentrated. Other metal deposits were formed by other geological processes. Other metal deposits are formed more directly by geologic activity, plus precipitation and concentration processes. Large deposits just don't occur everywhere.

True, there may be tiny bits of gold, tin, zinc, silver, rare earths, aluminum, nickel, and so on scattered around the globe, but if they were not concentrated a billion years or two ago (or more) then the chances of us getting our hot little hands on lots of it are exceeding small. We aren't going to run out of iron or aluminum tomorrow, but the reachable supply is by no stretch of the imagination inexhaustible.

Take Uranium as an example of a metal with a limited supply: the available unmined reserves of uranium are reported in "millions of pounds" not millions of tons. Were the world to use nuclear fuel heavily, we would find the supply far short of needs.

Ah, I get it now, you’re anti-progress because you can’t keep pace with it and lost your livelihood. — praxis

That's not at all the impression I obtained from Jake.

We currently have the industrial capacity, the intelligence, the skills, and the capitalist economic scaffolding in place to implement the technology, something we cannot trust will be within reach subsequent to any conceivable 'catastrophe first' strategy. — karl stone

Your point above is a resting place. Society has to decide whether to commit, and to which technology. (Society as a whole isn't going to decide -- it's international finance that will decide.) "They" haven't decided to do much of anything, yet, so... we will all have to stay tuned.

We must act proactively, and decisively now - while the capacity exists - or lose the opportunity that exists in sustainable markets of 10-12 billion consumers by 2100. — karl stone

I can hardly wait for a world with 12 billion people.

No, I don't think it will happen but you are 100% right that we have to act proactively. We should be proactive immediately, like 30 years ago. I do not believe that technology and other human institutions can solve the food/water/energy problem by 2100 for 12 billion people. I find the idea rather like the plot of a science faction novel where human kind somehow manages to establish a footing elsewhere in the solar system or galaxy by 2200. At least in science fiction, one knows one is entering a 'created universe' which one either finds believable or not. If it isn't believable, the book will be tossed into the recycling bin.

I can reject abundance for 12 billion people without rejecting your solar hydrogen plant idea. They are not mutually dependent on each other.

You are as doggéd in your defense of the solar powered hydrogen plant as Schopenhauer1 is of anti-natalism. Doggéd persistence is much more of a virtue than it is a vice, but your abiding interest is likely to outrun other people's enthusiasm. At which point one should move on to another topic.

Actually, we don't need to worry about dark-minded terrorists working in gloomy basement labs to cook up something really really bad. It's as likely that bright, sunny laboratories in various countries -- Russia, China, NK, USA, etc. are already working on it, or already have cooked up the witch's brew.

And so has nature. Not to give anyone any ideas, but ebola would work just fine as a bio-terrorism agent. It's ready to go. There are various bird viruses (e.g. influenza) that can be capable killers. For that matter, just starting forest fires would be very harmful. Or importing novel plant diseases that our monocultures of corn are not resistant to. Or selling heroin and meth. So many ways...

I write about it here, on the foremost philosophy forum listed by google - and yet only get replies from wankers. — karl stone

Come now! You haven't gotten responses from wankers; you have gotten responses from reasonable thoughtful people who disagree with you. That doesn't make this discussion a circle jerk.

There is nothing "wrong" with your hydrogen plan, in itself. It's novel, sophisticated, probably do-able. The downside of the Stone Hydrogen Plan is this: we don't have the lead time to achieve this kind of solution before things get much worse.

The FIRST thing we have to do is sharply reduce CO2 production, and that means reducing consumption. We don't have something like 1 or 2 hundred years to do this; we have to start doing this immediately, and we must succeed at it or we're screwed.

While we reduce CO2 production and reduce consumption (all kinds) we need to immediately increase generation of electricity by solar, wind, and hydro. Even nuclear power takes too long to get up and running to be an immediate solution.

IF we make it, IF we reduce CO2 production and consumption sufficiently within 50 years, we will then have the opportunity to investigate long-term alternatives, like generating hydrogen at sea through solar power.

As a fuel, hydrogen is workable, but all new technologies require a substantial lead time. A rule of thumb is that it takes 50 years to invent, improve, and install major new technological systems. (Not 50 years to start, 50 years start to finish.) Industries can start preparing for hydrogen economy now, should that be a choice we want to make. The decision won't be made here, in any case. But thanks to our pig-headed short-sightedness, the planetary environment is in a crisis and the IMMEDIATE task is CO2 reduction, and that as much and as fast as is humanly possible.

I don't know who deals with issues like this in the UK, but in the US it would be the Department of Energy and industrial engineers who have the wherewithal to think about major technological implementation.

If you want to hang the theologians along with the preachers, OK. You'll just need a bigger gallows.

One almost inevitably generates inconsistencies when talking about religion. If one dismisses the whole thing out of hand, announce that it is all hogwash, then one can avoid inconsistency. When one tries to make sense of the whole thing, one is bound to fall down the rabbit hole, at least for a while.

I have a feeling that some theologians actually don't believe much of what is in the Bible.

citizens feel threatened by mass migration — Maw

One of the unfortunate outcomes of a mass migration threat could be defensive war involving population annihilation. It might be nice if all the destination countries joined in welcoming all comers in a "we're all in the same boat" spirit of camaraderie and compassion. That might happen for a while, as long as the numbers are not too high in the beginning. But it probably wouldn't last long.

I don't think there is any group more or less likely to be infinitely kind (or harsh) in response to really high population movements in their direction. It will depend how the destination population views their own situation. If they feel insecure without high population movements, then they may support an aggressive operation to repel the unfortunate people who must move or die where they are.

Is it possible to repel hundred of thousands of people on the move? It is possible, of course. It would just be extraordinarily savage. But humans are capable of savagery, regardless of how they behave when all is calm, all is right.

So, again: the critical effort to control CO2, methane, and other green house gases. (I don't have much confidence the world can get its collective act together soon enough.)

Trump is reptilian, in any case.

There is no mind-body problem. The body (including the CNS) produces "the mind". "The mind" is the noise the brain makes. No brain: silence.

I haven't met that many theologians running around busily deceiving little children. The work of theologians is to train preachers, evangelists, religious education specialist, and the like in the fine points of the divine plot. The preachers, et al then turn around and deceive the innocent. And the world around, in all sorts of religions, they do a pretty good job. Most people end up believing in the gods that everybody else believes in.

Children are dead wringers for deception and all sorts of deceptions are foisted upon them--various big lies and smaller ones. It's a Miracle that anybody escapes total entrapment in the snares and deceits of religion, but remarkably, some do.