I have come across some of this information elsewhere, but it's a nice video presentation.

The thing that I dislike about name-change campaigns is that they are

a) campaigns conducted for some ulterior motive
b) usually in the interest of a small but strongly motivated group
c) often leveraged with shame and guilt whether deserved or not

Minneapolis has many lakes; one of the most popular is the 400 acre Lake Calhoun. 5 or 6 years ago, a group of social justice warriors decided that this name was no longer tolerable, and petitioned it to be labeled with its actual or alleged Dakota Indian (there's that "India" problem again) name -- Bde Maka Ska.

John C. Calhoun played an early role in establishing Fort Snelling in the early 1800s. Fort Snelling was intended to dissuade the British from any further incursions into the Northwest and to stamp out British influence in the booming fur trade. A map maker assigned the name, "Lake Calhoun" around 1839. Later in his career, Calhoun served on the side of the confederacy and owned slaves.

The name change was supposed to reduce the affront to black people of having a slave holder attached to a popular lake. Question: How many people, white or black, connected "Lake Calhoun" with the confederacy and slavery? One would have to be historically well informed to know that, so probably not very many,

The name change was supposed to honor the Dakota people -- thus the new name is the old Dakota name for the lake, Nothing wrong with the Dakota name. Everything here had a Dakota name before Europeans arrived and gave places new names. It's a nice enough gesture, but it's a damned slight comfort for a people who barely survive (because of numerous economic policies over the years).

"We" were to feel guilt about the name, Calhoun. Similarly, they say we ought to feel some guilt if our house had a racial covenant in the deed, despite those covenants having been made illegal and unenforceable in 1948. There were moves to change the names of streets in order to erase the memory of real estate agencies who developed the street and gave it their name along with racial covenants.

One can have the defunct covenant expunged if one wishes -- another very flimsy sop to people who have been screwed over rather thoroughly.

All of these moves are ways for some activists to perform political theater which, in the end, will have no effect.

Some people in the Pacific coast state of Oregon want to break off the eastern 2/3 of the state and join it to neighboring Idaho. This is just one more example of how a highly vocal minority can generate a big issue out of narrow personal interests.

Since "Great" Britain and the "United Kingdom" mean nothing to you, then we should obviously strike those two words from the map. It's like the linguistic mob that wants to edit out references to a male God, Lord, King, He, His, and so on.

So, I don't have a stake -- zero investment -- in what India or Bharat calls itself. But we will all have difficulty finding names for ourselves that are entirely founded on whichever native land we are from. "America" derives from the name of an Italian explorer, Amerigo Vespucci, who otherwise had very little to do with the matter.

"Asia" is a name derived from Greek, or maybe Assyrian, meaning "east of".

My point is that language and maps and usage are this huge accumulation of past events and persons that were mostly not rationally organized. They just happened.

Yes, we could spend the rest of our civilization's life straightening all this out. If we do, our civilization's life will be shorter because there are all these other -- far more urgent -- things that we should have attended to and didn't.

We haven't heard the late Victorian comic view on duty, so herewith

For duty, duty must be done;
The rule applies to every one,
And painful though that duty be,
To shirk the task were fiddle-de-dee!
To shirk the task were fiddle-de-dee!

Here's the way Gilbert & Sullivan put it to music -- unless you love G & S, after 1:47 or so, it's the usual nonsensical falderal.

blithering imbeciles — Mikie

“Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on, or by imbeciles who really mean it.” --Mark Twain

Nice slice of history. Thanks.

Events like the CNT strike in Spain, the Russian Revolution, and various other events, fueled the 1919-1920 "Red Scare" in the United States--the vicious campaign by conservative companies and organizations as well as government agencies to suppress labor organizing and black civil rights. That wasn't the first anti-labor or anti-black suppression, of course. In the Ludlow Massacre in 1914, Colorado National Guard and anti-labor militia fired on a camp of striking miners, killing 25, including 11 children. (Rockefeller owned the mine.) In 1921 a white mob burned down Tulsa, Oklahoma's black community, killing about 300 of the residents. Tulsa wasn't the only such event.

The forces of repression correctly intuited that letting underlings get too far ahead anywhere leads to more undesirable social agitation and change-- like the advancement of labor, civil rights, progressive movements, and the abomination of higher taxes on the wealthy.

I agree with your view that strong pro-labor and progressive politics requires "a strong relation between unions and a political party". Whatever they may say, the two political parties in the US are pro-capital, and at best lukewarm about labor, unless than can be outright hostile.

The official name of the Democratic Party in my state (Minnesota) is the Democratic Farmer Labor party. The Democrats merged with the larger leftist Farmer Labor party in 1944.

Hubert H. Humphrey was a key player in the fusion. Humphrey was mostly on the solidly liberal side of politics. When he was elected mayor of Minneapolis in '47, he led the attack on entrenched antisemitism in Minneapolis. Unfortunately, the progressivism faded. 40 years later, DFL governor Rudy Perpich sent the national guard into Austin, MN to help break the union strike against Hormel, pork and beef processor and maker of Spam.

In the US, hospitals are required to render care in emergency rooms, regardless of ability to pay. However, if you need hospital care once the emergency treatment is finished, then you are back on your own again. No insurance? Tough luck.

Publicly funded benefits have always been grudgingly provided, against the wishes of the ruling class--even against the wishes of the conservative American Medical Association. Those with money, even those in the professional class who are often not close to being rich, tend to think like self-made Republican bankers. They don't want to see the poor or working class people "getting something for nothing" -- forgetting that many of them got quite a lot of something for nothing during their first 25 years of life. They also don't see "something for nothing" in the many tax breaks the wealthy get.

All that is why the US has dragged behind other industrialized countries in providing public services, health services, and so on. In the three major actions to create Social Security, Unemployment Insurance, Medicare, Medicaid, and the ACA--from the 1930s onward, hard-core conservatives have been willing to contest the legitimacy of the benefits in court.

Back when (say... post WWII boom years) many workers had employment with the same company for a long time, it made more sense than it does now, where many workers change employers maybe every 5 years. Before employers started offering health care coverage (like before WWII) workers had to buy their own coverage, if they could afford it. f

[aside: American religious organizations operated many of the health care institutions 'back then' and were prepared to provide 'charity' care to people in straitened economic circumstances. That helped a lot, and they offered pretty good care, on average. That all began to unravel in in the 1960s into the '70s when religious organizations started losing congregants (and $$$), and Catholic orders shrank drastically. Catholics, Lutherans, Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians... all withdrew from healthcare or their facilities became "non-profit" organizations which turned out to be... quite profitable.]

In the 1960s Medicaid was introduced which was paid for health care for indigent people -- people on welfare, the working poor, etc. A big leap forward. About the same time, Medicare was created to provide health care to the elderly--another big leap forward.

There were no new initiatives that made it into law until Obamacare (the Affordable Care Act - ACA) was passed with Republicans kicking and screaming. The ACA doesn't pay for health care; it established a market for affordable health insurance--a helpful, but not huge, leap forward. It also trimmed the sails of commercial insurance companies abilities to deny coverage for "preexisting conditions", for children who turned 21, and so forth.

Quite a few democrats (from liberal northern states) like the idea of single-payer insurance where the government acts as the single sole health insurer. It gives Americans to the right of Karl Marx cardiac arrest just thinking about "socialized medicine" so it's not likely to happen in the near or medium future. As Keynes said, "in the long run we're all dead."

BTW, it was unions that established the principle of the employer paying for health insurance.

My understanding is that American unions generally pay their members during a strike. The amount paid will likely be considerably less than the wage received, and only the largest unions (like United Auto Workers or Teamsters) will be able to pay strikers throughout a long strike. Individual strikers can not collect unemployment; they can pay the company's health insurance individual premium, if they can afford it, in order to maintain individual health care coverage.

The 'pros' and 'cons' list is not balanced. The 'pro' side is far stronger than the 'con' side.

#1 under 'cons' is that some workers may dislike paying dues, when dues are what makes #1, 2, and 3 in the 'pros' list possible. # 2 under 'cons' is mostly not true. #3 involves the inconvenience to the company of following contractual process, particularly in firing, #4 is true only from a company point of view -- the costs that unions raise are the wages that workers are paid.

Employees in non-union workplaces can approach a manager or business owner directly and negotiate an individual wage increase, benefits package or contract. — Alkis Piskas

True, but the individual worker has little leverage by himself. Unionism is designed to give leverage to all workers (in the union).

Wages and working conditions are better when workers are organized.

Is stealing a loaf of bread to feed your hungry children a good thing or a bad thing? — Agree-to-Disagree

Maybe they should be out stealing birth control pills and condoms so they don't have the problem of not being able to feed their children?

(I give money periodically to help feed the poor's children, but there are times when I look at some people and think "Oh, PLEASE don't reproduce -- you can't take care of yourself, let alone others!")

Both, of course, but that's not saying much.

Nature has been shaping animal behavior for a long time, and all present-day animals, including humans, are the beneficiaries of this long process. We inherited a catalog of potentials--like the ability to fly into a rage or carefully plot revenge--and we also developed this uniquely large brain. We should not crow too much about the size of our brains; they have been a quite mixed blessing.

Emotions were invented long before we came along, but we have this big blob of grey matter than can act in fiendishly clever and unfortunate ways to express our emotions, or punish whoever/whatever set us off. A lion might literally bite your head off if you are too annoying, but then it's over. Humans can bear a grudge for decades, declare war, and wipe out millions, if they feel too irritated.

So, I say a lot of the good and bad stuff is from Nature, who doesn't have a long range plan.

Nurture is necessary because we don't hatch out of the egg ready to become a noble saint or a major crook. We're helpless helpless helpless for years, and if we are not taught well, we really aren't good for much. A lot of our nurture is aimed at controlling our nature -- because if we don't, we're likely to end up dead PDQ.

We spend a lot of time thinking about nurture, because at birth, nature has largely finished blessing us or screwing us over, and there may not be much we can do about it. Then society comes along and either blesses us or screws us over some more.

Life is a bitch and then we die, but many of us have nature and nurture on our side and we'll probably live a long time. Or so some of us think. Whether living a long time is a good thing or not is an open question.

Your thread is a success - lots of interesting ideas and responses. That said...

Two dictionary definitions:

1. a moral or legal obligation; a responsibility.
"it's my duty to uphold the law"

2. a task or action that someone is required to perform.
"the queen's official duties"

3. something that one is expected or required to do by moral or legal obligation. the binding or obligatory force of something that is morally or legally right; moral or legal obligation.

Your definition is " a feeling of obligation brought about by expectation that is irreducible".

There is considerable difference between duty as "legally obligatory" and duty as "a feeling of obligation". Both kinds of duty operate among people, but the former has a much sharper edge than the latter.

Legal and moral obligations are learned, and their strength depends on intrinsic and extrinsic rewards, and other emotional components, like love, fear, loyalty, selfishness, and others. So it's possible that in a given individual or group "duty"may or may not be the single strongest motivator for action.

I say that the right people in the right positions to lead need to stand up and allow us some redemption. — ToothyMaw

On many occasions "the right people in the right positions" have led. The American Revolution and both sides of the Civil War were brought about by the right people in the right positions. Another group of the right people in the right positions brought about the first Gilded Age of excess in the late 19th century and again in the late 20th. We're very much in this period of excess. In reaction, to the Gilded Age excesses, another group of the right people in the right positions brought about a historic, widely beneficial rearrangement of wealth, particularly during the Great Depression, WWII, and the Post-WWII period, running roughly from 1930 to 1975. Around the 1970s, another group of the right people in the right positions undid the labor/capital/government coalition that had resulted in a major redistribution of wealth from the richest people to the working class.

Everyone involved in all this was doing "their duty" to the group to whom they owed the most fealty. So, the duties of the right people in the right positions cut both ways. Unfortunately for us, the oligarchs make up most of the right people in the right positions.

"the right people in the right positions" are generally not the rank and file of the people: they are the elite. The American economy was structured to serve the interests of the elite, as opposed to the rank and file. That's capitalism for you. What "duty" means to a capitalist is not going to be the same thing that it means to a socialist. What "duty" means to a member of the 1% or the top 1/10 of the 1% is going to be considerably different than what it means to a member of the impoverished working class.

Socialists and communists talk about "class consciousness" because what your "duty" can or ought to be depends on how you recognize your real position in society. Except for defined legal duties, there's no such thing as a commonly recognized duty across the different classes of people. People who don't know their class elbow from their ass are liable to accept the altogether inappropriate duty to vote for the leading oligarch candidate.

duty ... exists only as a meta-construction - as recursive and a sum of its parts — ToothyMaw

I'm sorry, but I won't die for a meta-construction, even a recursive one.

I contend that duty is perhaps the single strongest motivator for action I can think of, whether it is duty to the tribe, an ideal, a spouse, etc., and should be nurtured wherever it exists to good ends. — ToothyMaw

I have nothing against duty--I've performed my duties in different contexts many times--but I think there are a number of stronger motivators: fear, anger, hunger lust, greed--your basic 7 deadly sins: pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth--in that order.

All of these are negative (though lust is hard to beat). Love is a powerful motivator too.

We often have conflicting duties. Our employer thinks it our duty to perform faithful service in exchange for paying us a meager share of the wealth we create. Institutions expect loyalty (a duty) from their agents. Whose duty comes first? The duty to render good service in exchange for pay, or the duty to disrupt the business to further the interests of other workers, like one's union comrades?

In retrospect, I sometimes chose the wrong set of duties, in situations where my choice of duty led to inferior results for everyone concerned. At the time it seemed like a good idea. Generally, though, when people start talking about "duty" I detect the acrid odor of social control.

Your OP makes it my duty to quote "James Thurber, an American humorist, cartoonist, author, playwright, and journalist known for his quirky and relatable characters and themes." The. quote comes from his 1940 story about a very dutiful bloodhound. The duty-ridden (or obsessive compulsive) beast wore himself out following an endless trail all over the world.

The paths of glory at least lead to the grave. The paths of duty may not get you anywhere.

Thurber might be referencing a line from Thomas Grey's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard

The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

The United States is not the best example of how unionisation works. — Banno

Which country did you have in mind as a good example?

As somebody put it, "The labor movement in the United States didn't die of neglect -- it was murdered". Murdered by laws which erected barriers to organization; murdered by very aggressive counter-union measures by capital (some of them illegal); murdered by outright state intervention to defeat strikes. Unions themselves were often enough corrupted by organized crime, which diminished their creditability.

However, organizing workers has usually been hard work, with or without an unfriendly state. The peak percentage of organized labor was 35%. Peak union membership was in 1979 at 21 million.

The
nicely constructed dilemma involving real choices which workers face
— BC
is mostly pretence. — Banno

Workers do face difficult decisions in supporting a union drive, becoming active in the union, and in striking, especially when the employer is hostile. The risks are not a pretense. Strikes do not always succeed, and a failed strike can leave the union members broke and out in the cold.

This is a nicely constructed dilemma involving real choices which workers face. The frosting on the cake is the government's appropriate decision to reform the economy to reduce pollution. Will the cost be borne by workers alone or by the society more broadly?

Unions are an essential element in a progressive and democratic society, and they are a vital protection for workers -- provided they are strong. That is why the best medium and long-term option for a worker is to support the union and the strike. Only in the short run does it make sense to go back to work and put up with crappy wages and working conditions.

A competent government could organize the development of industries to replace collieries, petroleum refineries, gas plants with sustainable industries and training programs so that workers in the carbon industries will not end up unemployed / unemployable. A competent government would want to replace tax income from closed fossil fuel industries with taxes on sustainable energy production and use.

Reality may not conform to progressive democratic ideals, of course.

In the United States, the competent government has hobbled unions with laws that make union organizing difficult. Competent governors sometimes intervene in strikes by employing the state militia to protect strike breakers (even in liberal states like Minnesota). Competent propagandists have effectively devalued unionism in the collective mind-set of many Americans. Our competent national governments have opted not to do too much about oil and coal consumption.

In the United States, see, the competent government is pretty much on the side of the capitalists.

amount of fossil fuel deposits (let's say coal) — jorndoe

According to the Energy Information Administration (US gov): as of December 31, 2021, estimates of total world proved recoverable reserves of coal were about about 1.16 trillion short tons, and five countries had about 75% of the world's proved coal reserves.

amount of fossil fuel deposits (let's say oil) — jorndoe

Global consumption of oil is currently estimated at roughly 96.5 million barrels per day. According to OPEC, global demand is expected to reach 109 million barrels per day. Estimations vary slightly, but it is predicted that - if demand forecasts hold - we will run out of oil from known reserves in about 47 years. (2023 estimate)

"Oil reserves" is complicated by the adjective "recoverable". Some oil is buried so deeply that more energy is required to obtain the oil than the oil itself contains. Western Canada's tar sands can be dug out and cleaned up enough to qualify as "crude oil" but the whole process is quite polluting.

Trolls would have us do nothing about it, despite evidence/consensus of anthropogenic climate change, pollution, etc. — jorndoe

Well, count the major energy companies as trolls, because they are not doing anything very significant about it. And they have company. While government at various levels have taken some actions, while various companies have either worked towards a lower carbon output or manufactured equipment to reduce green house gas emissions, the world response to the threat of a global heating catastrophe has been sluggish.

Unfortunately for us all, the world's energy economy was shaped into its present form what... 200 years ago? 150 years ago? 100 years? Changing a 100 - 200 year pattern of voracious resource consumption just can't be done quickly EVEN IF everyone was enthusiastic about it, and lots of people are not even slightly enthusiastic, but are bitterly opposed to the level of change that is required.

What is your purpose in this thread? After one has read the Bible, studied theology and history, and attempted to follow this or that set of teachings (or not), one is left with the option to believe in God, Jesus, and all the rest--OR NOT.

If you opt to not believe, then much of the teaching by Jesus and his Church are likely not going to make a whole lot of sense to you. If you opt to believe, it isn't that everything will fall into place and make perfect sense. If you believe you are saved from hellfire and damnation by God's grace, and you do the best you can to emulate the life of Jesus, then that's the end of it.

Diane Feinstein is another one who should retire forthwith. I don't think Biden is holding up all that well -- he appears to be aging more rapidly lately. It's one thing to be old and doing reasonably well at home, with nothing much on one's schedule, and something else being a senator, representative, president, or Supreme Court judge.

Can we say "transient ischemic attack"? He's on his way to a major stroke.

Even if I touch your hand with my hand, there are still electrons involved -- though it isn't necessary to talk about electrons in animal to animal touch. On a "common sense" level, objects can touch -- we can see it happen everywhere. But still, how much matter interacts with matter in objects that touch, or animals that touch? That's where electrons come into it.

Is touching possible? It depends. Some animate two-legged objects are very fussy about being touched without giving their express permission. Soccer players may objected to their lips being touched by another pair of lips.

I suppose the touch averse do not want the electrons orbiting their nuclei having commerce with the electrons orbiting somebody else's nuclei, especially if an intermingling of electrons wasn't given prior authorization.

Seriously, though... I am sure that surface atoms (electrons) do touch; when a hammer hits a nail the two objects give every indication of having touched and the force moving the hammer having been transmitted to the nail. How many layers of atoms of hammer and nail come into contact, I don't know, And just guessing, but I assume that the nuclei of atoms do not touch under normal circumstances. Do Plutonium nuclei touch one another when a ball of plutonium is compressed by the shaped explosives in a nuclear bomb?

The bonds that hold solid matter molecules together are very, very strong, so touching is possible but not intermingling of solid matter atoms. The hammer molecules don't interact with the nail molecules.

???? Corrections, anyone ????

Thank you for the good critique. I was raised in a Protestant home and believed in God, Jesus, prayer, etc. I didn't choose my family, Christian doctrine--all that, but on numerous occasions I did choose to maintain those beliefs. I did make a definite, deliberate effort to reject religious belief around the age of 40. It proved quite difficult to accomplish and required a lot of mental effort and time--years.

I also chose political beliefs -- though that was a more gradual process. I was raised with quite conventional political beliefs about government, democracy, taxation, congress, the president, etc. It was not particularly difficult to adopt socialist ideas and believe that they were sound, feasible, and beneficial. What was difficult was to find other people who agreed, or to convince other people to adapt similar beliefs.

So, two big areas of chosen belief -- religion and politics.

That I believe my senses, believe the world is an understandable place, believe that people are generally reliable and predictable, and so on are much determined by experience which itself is not chosen. But on numerous occasions I did choose to maintain those beliefs in terms of social activities, reading, conversations, etc.

Conclusion: My earlier off-the-cuff estimate favors determinism too much.

Can we "choose" what to believe? 95%, no; 5%, yes. — BC

@Hailey My new, revised, and improved off-the-cuff estimate is 60%, no; 40%. yes. -- provided one is endowed with the capacity, time, and energy to undertake voluntary belief changes.

We are not all equally able to revise and edit what we think. How much tolerance we have for ambiguity, cognitive dissonance, opinions or positions outside of dominant social norms, etc. varies from person to person -- and those differences are mostly not voluntary.

It's axiomatic, isn't it, that a large scale operation (40K McDonald outlets) is more efficient than scattered small scale operations (40K coffee shops, diners, cafes, etc.). That doesn't make McDonald's good, from several perspectives, or the small scale operations bad.

Operating thousand-cow dairies has downsides for both the cows and the community. 1000 dairy cows are going to spend very little time outdoors grazing and cud-chewing. A small operation (50 cows) can be pastured, and a good share of the cow manure will be deposited on the pasture. Fly larvae will help break it down, as will sun and air. Shifting 50 cows from one grazed pasture to an ungrazed one is doable. Moving 1000+ cows around is a cattle drive,

A thousand cow dairy barn will produce more manure than can practically and usefully be spread on fields -- so it goes into sewage lagoons or tanks where it will produce noxious by-products and likely pollute ground water or streams. 1000 cow dairies are likely to be milking 24 hours a day, each cow being milked 2 or 3 times daily. Maximizing production and profit is the reason for thousand cow dairies, and it's likely the cows will be getting bST (bovine Somatotropin) to increase milk production, which is hard on the cows.

Huge hog operations and massive chicken and egg production facilities are more efficient too -- but at the cost of the animals' quality of life and the quality of the end product. Pigs like to be outside -- they are probably the brightest bulb in the barn yard next to the dog. Chickens are, well, not "smart" but they benefit from movement outside as well -- actually being outside with room to move around and eat whatever is crawling around for an extended period of time.

If you like chocolate, did you CHOOSE to like chocolate? If you hate coffee, did you CHOOSE to hate coffee? If you like raw oysters, did you CHOOSE to like raw oysters? If you consider red headed guys to be the sexiest, did you CHOOSE to prefer red heads>.

It probably isn't possible to easily figure out WHY anybody likes this, dislikes that, or finds something else totally uninteresting.

the ability to practice skepticism may not be possible for some people. — Hailey

That may be true; if it is, they didn't choose to be gullible.

There are countries that raise their people to be dumb and deprieve their ability to be skeptical so that their rule can be secured. — Hailey

IF government requires the consent of the governed, THEN it is the interest of all governments to discourage excessive skepticism about their legitimacy. Besides, gullibility isn't the only handy tool governments have to assure compliance. There's fear, force, secret police, plain-out-in-the-open police, prisons with bad reputations, threats, the convenient airplane crash (recent example), poisoning, smear campaigns, public executions, public relations efforts, charm offensives, bread, circuses, sex, drugs, video games, etc...

A land of stupid people, however, is likely to have a very low GDP.

"How to choose what to believe?"

Can we "choose" what to believe? 95%, no; 5% yes.

"Beliefs" are derived from experience, to start with, "when I was a little bitty baby my mama would rock me in the cradle..." Our first experiences are from adequate and competent nurturing -- or not getting as much good nurturing as we need. We have experiences which confirm or disqualify certain assumptions, some of which might be in-born. For example, a baby presented with a helium balloon that doesn't fall to the floor the way objets are "supposed to" will show surprise. Babies might have an innate grasp of gravity, but not of antigravity.

Babies are immersed in language--good, bad, or indifferent. The more good, positive words they hear from their parents, the better. Hearing too many harsh negative words and commands has a negative effect on the child's developing mind. Interaction with other children and adults shapes personality.

Maybe most children have confidence that the world is a reliable place. Other people are usually friendly. All of the childhood experiences shape the kind of beliefs about the world we are likely to have. As we get older, we start running into contrary experiences, good and bad. We might discover that one could drown in deep water--but didn't.

WHAT WE FIND BELIEVABLE and WHAT WE FIND NOT BELIEVABLE will be largely determined by the multitude of experiences we have had.

Maybe as a mature adult, one will actually decide to reject a previous belief or accept a new belief. An adult raised in a sexually repressive household who discovers he is gay, may have to make an effort as an adult to believe gayness is good and live accordingly. Or a career criminal may decide to go straight.

But mostly we don't decide.

And the government doesn't have that much to do with it.

Fine, but heat is heat and you can't identify which degree of heat is from water vapor, CO2, CH4, N20 (nitrous oxide), Perfluorocarbons, hydroflurocarbons, or sulfur hexafluoride. My point was that it it practically doesn't matter a lot whether the effect of a GH gas kicks in 10 years from today or 200 year from now.

Some people, (not thinking of you) are always looking for an interpretation or 'flaw' or angle that gets us off the hook.

What I want to say to @agree to disagree is that we are on the hook, and we won't be getting off the hook through reinterpretation. Only by altogether stopping greenhouse gas production can we avoid getting cooked.

That's new. They used to say the lag was a century or more. :up: — frank

"Greenhouse gas" isn't a single substance; methane, CO2, CFCs, and other gasses all have varying periods of time before they are broken down. A cubic foot of methane gas lasts about 12 years but absorbs much more heat than the much longer lasting CO2. CFC gas lasts a long time because it is non-reactive. However, it is very good at absorbing heat.

We are not adding a lot of CFCs to the atmosphere, but what we have added lingers a long time.

SO, if we cut methane pollution -- which we can and should do immediately, the benefit would show up relatively quickly -- 10 years. But that would not solve the whole problem.

Masshole — Mikie

Interesting neologism. Question: Did you make it up (kudos if you did) or is it in common usage? I lived in Massachusetts for 2 years -- 68-70 -- and I thought it a pretty decent place. Of course, things change over time -- it's probably still a pretty decent place.

I read in today's NYT that Connecticut is having problems with bears. Bears? There?

@T Clark, have you ever in the past, do you now, and might you in the future think of yourself as a "masshole"?

So, is it worth a shot? — Mikie

The practical problem of sortition at the federal level is that congress is elected "by the people" so to speak for the purpose of protecting wealthy interests groups. In order to randomly select for congress and the presidency we'd have to neuter the wealthy interest groups. Fine by me, but the wealthy would object strenuously.

Jury pools are selected sort of randomly, but then are pruned by the two sides of the case during pretrial procedures.

While the idea of random selection for local civic affairs is attractive from several perspectives, there is the problem of selecting from a pool of citizens, many of whom seem quite ignorant of local, regional or world affairs (or local and world geography), basic science, or are functionally innumerate and illiterate. They may be quite intelligent (giving a generous estimation) but aren't well prepared.

That said, there is a substantial proportion of the population who are intelligent, literate, reasonably well informed, and generally cognizant of what's going on in the world. So, how does one separate the wheat from the chaff before you do a sortition?

An interesting discovery about babies is that seem to be born with a few innate expectations about the physical world. Other animal babies also. Kittens, for instance, won't crawl on a surface printed with th optical illusion of a drop off. Adult cats might not either, at least without cautious investigating.

But back to baby humans. The seem to understand this much about gravity: things fall. All their early experiences indicate that. So, if you show a baby a helium filled ballon (the baby, of course, doesn't know anything about helium) and you let go of it, it rises to the ceiling. This is a shocking revelation to the baby; you can see it on their faces.

Dogs, lacking pretensions to sentience (most of the time) are frank in their expression of surprise. Dogs shown magic tricks are shocked and appalled.

What am I missing? — Benkei

I'm not a hydrogen booster. Namibia is planning a hydrogen production facility driven by wind and solar. If steel and lime can be made with electricity, then use that instead of making a fuel with electricity first. I don't see H being a major form of energy.

I used hydrogen as an example -- if we were going to make a lot of hydrogen for all sorts of purposes, it would probably take 40 years (+/-) to get production, transportation, and consumption facilities built.

40 years of warning about the next 10 years. Right. Too bad we weren't paying attention.

In this world, very little ever happens quickly. Long lead times are needed to effect major changes in production, transportation, construction, energy generation, medicine, and so forth. Rule of thumb: it takes 40 years to introduce and build out new technology. Electric cars are a good example: Tesla made its first car in 2008. 15 years after the first car, Tesla is now building out a nationwide charging system. Various companies and agencies are working on this area. Meanwhile, non-carbon-fueled electricity generation is still far from dominant. It's price competitive, but it still amounts to only about 20% of the total electricity production in the US.

We haven't run into global shortages of lithium and cobalt for batteries yet; the same goes for neodymium, samarium, terbium. dysprosium, lanthanum and cerium which are used in various parts of electric motors -- then there is copper. Lots of copper. The metals are produced by fairly dirty extraction and refining, It's isn't that they are so rare. So, we don't have enough of all this stuff on hand to suddenly field 30 million electric autos, even if that was. good idea. Again, 40 years.

Various technologies (like hydrogen) would be far less polluting than even natural gas, but we are a long ways from having the infrastructure to produce, distribute, and use enough H to make a difference, Again, think 40 years.

Ten years is a good stretch of time to talk about. 100 years is way too long to think about meaningfully, and 1 year is way too short.

I favor a slow move away from fossil fuels. But not so fast that it creates big problems. — Agree to Disagree

You will be happy to discover that is precisely the policy of most countries. However, if the change doesn't happen fast enough then global heating may scuttle all of our plans.

I mean, the very notion that people would sit around arguing about cows seems crazy to me. — frank

Amen, brother. Can we please stop discussing the god damned cows!

I think that there is something that we might be able to do about global warming long-term. — Agree to Disagree

By my definition of long term (a century, say) we don't have a long term. We have a short term which 30 years ago was maybe 40 years into the future. We've pissed away the last 30 years, and now have about 10 years left.

Do we all drop dead in 10 years? No. People are already dropping dead from global heating, In 10 years, we may not have any options left which we can apply to the problem. In other words, the planet will continue to get hotter as we struggle to meet the standards for 1.5ºC of global warming, which goal will have been left in the dust.

How did you start the heater? Did you use lighter fluid? — frank

No, we used a small wood fire to get the coal going. During the winter, the fire was maintained by the regular addition of more coal (done by hand). At night, the coal would burn down and almost nothing left in the morning, so around 6:00 more coal had to be added.

A lot of people heated with coal. Until the late 60s the only alternative in the upper midwest was oil. Unless they were buying gravel coal (ground up to the size of gravel that could be loaded into the furnace by an auger) they had to add the coal with a shovel or a bucket. You opened the stove's door and threw the coal in.

The other source of heat for the house was a large cast iron wood burning cooking stove that had been converted to oil--kerosene. The stove was supplied from a 5 gallon tank that had to be refilled once a day from a bigger tank in the barn. Quite a few times a day, the stove's tank would make a "glug-glug-glug" sound as air filled the emptying space in the tank. It was especially noticeable in the night's quiet. This stove also was on all winter. (Our house was an old, uninsulated leaky frame building).

8 billion+ people, a billion cattle, a billion cars, a petroleum-dependent world economy, cement production (cooking limestone to make lime), metal production, airlines, a mindless garbage problem -- it is ALL the problem.

The "cure" may be as unpalatable as the "disease".

Agree to Disagree is not being substantially more recalcitrant than a billion car owners that do not want to give up their private vehicles, or give up good roads to drive on, or a few billion carnivores who do not want to replace meat with beans and greens.

Our ways of living are unsustainable, and we are in trouble and heading for worse. Sure, some individuals don't see the problem, but entire governments can't seem to actually do very much either--never mind the corporate sector. Either very few or no G20 governments have managed to act effectively on carbon dioxide/methane gas reduction. Sure, spotty progress is being made here and there, but critical decades have passed where nothing got done.

Meat produced through rotating grassland grazing (without a finishing program of grain feed) is quite possibly sustainable. I generally buy grass-fed ground beef. What isn't sustainable and good for the earth are very high levels of beef production.

Most of the beef sold is NOT grass-fed -- it's grass for-a-while then grain-finished. I discussed the increased CO2 load from grain production above.

True enough, methane is much shorter-lived than CO2--12 years, +/- as you said. The problem is that we are loading the atmosphere with more and more methane -- much of it from natural gas and oil production. The increased load of methane is the problem -- not that it takes a long time to break down, like CO2. Belching cattle are one source. There are a lot of cattle on the planet, about a billion.

There are also about a billion automobiles in the world, which produce various noxious chemicals and which we can't eat.

Plants do take up CO2, of course. Unfortunately, we are reducing the planets best carbon sinks -- rain forests. Grass lands can absorb CO2 also, as can crop land. Both grazing and crop production can be managed to maximize CO2 uptake. This requires minimum tillage, and rotating the grazers so that they don't "clear cut" the pasturage. This method of meat production takes more labor and attention than the other method.

We should be planting more trees, and restoring crop and grazing land so that more CO2 could be captured and sequestered in soil.

The information on Good Meats isn't wrong, but quantity matters when it comes to CO2 and methane,