I don't have many lefties following me, but here's a bit of reality check for US lefties who talk about "how you don't need to pay for anything with Canadian Healthcare"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPQ2bhtRVqM
Skullagrim is Canadian, and he's selling his sword collection to pay medical bills.
"That can't be! He's in Canada, and not even a scrub province like Alberta!"
It isn't a magic lamp, of course there's limits -- and he's running up against them. The surgeries take forever to get even if they are free, but ancillary services are still mostly private.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPQ2bhtRVqM
Skullagrim is Canadian, and he's selling his sword collection to pay medical bills.
"That can't be! He's in Canada, and not even a scrub province like Alberta!"
It isn't a magic lamp, of course there's limits -- and he's running up against them. The surgeries take forever to get even if they are free, but ancillary services are still mostly private.
To be fair, both humidex and windchill are common metrics intended to better illustrate the way someone feels heat depending on actual attributes -- either reduced capacity of the human body to cool itself in high humidity or increase heat transfer during high winds.
Something like this is incredibly common in Canada because you end up in those edge cases where it's cold and either windy or not windy, or it's hot and either humid or not humid.
Something like this is incredibly common in Canada because you end up in those edge cases where it's cold and either windy or not windy, or it's hot and either humid or not humid.
There are actually a few examples of small businesses being owned by the super rich. In fact, something that qualifies as a "local small business" can secretly behind the scenes owned by larger aggregated funds that hold ownership in a bunch of small local businesses. The family that owns the mega corporation Uline owns a number of small local businesses within a fund that holds such things.
As for an example of families who own what look like mega corporations, franchise rights are a good example of that. Yes, the sign on the door says super ultra megacorp, but it's actually a small business operated by a local family who ends up kicking back a portion of the proceeds to the franchising company.
Notwithstanding the fact that publicly traded companies can be held by for example pension funds, meaning that no individual rich guy holds that company, instead it's collectively held by a large number of working-class people who want to retire someday.
Regardless, for the sake of my argument I don't need my hypothetical to exist. I simply needed to have the capacity to possibly exist. There's nothing stopping Scrooge McDuck from opening up a lemonade stand, and people who look rich because they own something big and important regularly end up penniless.
As for an example of families who own what look like mega corporations, franchise rights are a good example of that. Yes, the sign on the door says super ultra megacorp, but it's actually a small business operated by a local family who ends up kicking back a portion of the proceeds to the franchising company.
Notwithstanding the fact that publicly traded companies can be held by for example pension funds, meaning that no individual rich guy holds that company, instead it's collectively held by a large number of working-class people who want to retire someday.
Regardless, for the sake of my argument I don't need my hypothetical to exist. I simply needed to have the capacity to possibly exist. There's nothing stopping Scrooge McDuck from opening up a lemonade stand, and people who look rich because they own something big and important regularly end up penniless.
It isn't as straightforward a question as it looks at first for a few reasons.
One of the assumptions built into the question isnt about the companies but about the owners. It's assumed that the small business is owned by a poorer person and the large corporation is owned by a rich person or rich people. What if in one hypothetical situation your small business was owned by Bill Gates and the huge corporation was actually owned by a modest middle class family? In that case it isn't about stealing from a big or small company, it's about the more standard stealing from the rich or the poor.
Another thing is the use of the word "far". Not that it's just more immoral, but far more immoral. Such language suggests that the orders of magnitude are so great that it totally changes the moral calculus of a question.
But what is the telos we are striving towards? Today people might say the telos is sort of utilitarian, so you just want the most people to be the post happy and so stealing from a small organization is going to cause more unhappiness than stealing from a large one (the bike cuck problem). If on the other hand the telos of life is a life well lived, then stealing at all is damage to your honor, your virtue, the amount of sin in your soul, and so the act of missing the mark isn't about who you transgress against, but about the integrity of yourself and both are similar marks against you because the end result is you're living a life less well lived regardless of the direct measurable consequences to the world at hand.
In the end, we can all agree I think that we should steal not from small businesses or large corporations, but from homeless people. They have less debt than any of you and if they're high enough they won't even notice their stuff is missing. As well, they won't harm any customers or supply chains up or down, they don't have an economic multiplier effect, and as one famous fictional character tells us, if you steal enough from them you could even help reduce the surplus population which will have far ranging positive effects!
One of the assumptions built into the question isnt about the companies but about the owners. It's assumed that the small business is owned by a poorer person and the large corporation is owned by a rich person or rich people. What if in one hypothetical situation your small business was owned by Bill Gates and the huge corporation was actually owned by a modest middle class family? In that case it isn't about stealing from a big or small company, it's about the more standard stealing from the rich or the poor.
Another thing is the use of the word "far". Not that it's just more immoral, but far more immoral. Such language suggests that the orders of magnitude are so great that it totally changes the moral calculus of a question.
But what is the telos we are striving towards? Today people might say the telos is sort of utilitarian, so you just want the most people to be the post happy and so stealing from a small organization is going to cause more unhappiness than stealing from a large one (the bike cuck problem). If on the other hand the telos of life is a life well lived, then stealing at all is damage to your honor, your virtue, the amount of sin in your soul, and so the act of missing the mark isn't about who you transgress against, but about the integrity of yourself and both are similar marks against you because the end result is you're living a life less well lived regardless of the direct measurable consequences to the world at hand.
In the end, we can all agree I think that we should steal not from small businesses or large corporations, but from homeless people. They have less debt than any of you and if they're high enough they won't even notice their stuff is missing. As well, they won't harm any customers or supply chains up or down, they don't have an economic multiplier effect, and as one famous fictional character tells us, if you steal enough from them you could even help reduce the surplus population which will have far ranging positive effects!
My original word target for Future Sepsis was 60,000 words, I'm at 65,000 words today. Getting close now!
Much of Canada is in a deep housing recession right now, but all housing markets are local and I guess Winnipeg is in the money?
That's just really weird.
Like, imagine if we picked an interest for everyone who committed a crime. "Star Trek fan arrested for CP" "LA Kings fan arrested for drunk driving" "Funko Pop collector arrested for robbing a Circle K"
Like, imagine if we picked an interest for everyone who committed a crime. "Star Trek fan arrested for CP" "LA Kings fan arrested for drunk driving" "Funko Pop collector arrested for robbing a Circle K"
One of the harms of modernism is we have decided something can only be true if we can measure it, label it, and test it with very limited tests to prove perfectly that it's true and always perfectly true.
It's given us many superpowers as we narrow down the physics of the universe, but we've lost thousands of years of wisdom in the process.
It's given us many superpowers as we narrow down the physics of the universe, but we've lost thousands of years of wisdom in the process.
I am specifically dealing with technology that exists, because anything that we do today must be based on what exists. Since we have never successfully captured energy from space, and since we haven't been able to get a tomokak energy positive yet at scale, whatever we do is going to not be those things. Fission is one thing that can be used, but the big point I'm getting at is that we're going to need a lot more energy production than we think to stop using fossil fuels, because electricity is only a small piece of the puzzle -- you have to take hydrocarbons that were previously "free" energetically speaking, and put them together with energy you got elsewhere.
Since 2009 I've softened on my stance that we require fewer people imminently, but if we are to make decisions today, it needs to based on reality today. A lot of 1970s opposition to growth was proven wrong because we were able to turn energy into opportunities, so it all starts with energy.
One set of decisions is definitely to use fission (as well as hydroelectric and geothermal, two proven long term base load technologies), to pursue fusion and space based energy, but they don't exist until they exist. We were wrong in the 1970s about what technology would look like today, after all.
Since 2009 I've softened on my stance that we require fewer people imminently, but if we are to make decisions today, it needs to based on reality today. A lot of 1970s opposition to growth was proven wrong because we were able to turn energy into opportunities, so it all starts with energy.
One set of decisions is definitely to use fission (as well as hydroelectric and geothermal, two proven long term base load technologies), to pursue fusion and space based energy, but they don't exist until they exist. We were wrong in the 1970s about what technology would look like today, after all.
I referenced my previous work, I've posted it here previously:
https://lotide.fbxl.net/posts/6006
It lays out my hypothetical conversation of 3 key process industries and how they compared to global energy sources that lack a marginal carbon cost.
https://lotide.fbxl.net/posts/6006
It lays out my hypothetical conversation of 3 key process industries and how they compared to global energy sources that lack a marginal carbon cost.
I would be careful not to *exclude* the "the whole way of life on most of the planet would need to fundamentally change." part. Lying to people about what's ahead will cause massive blowback when people realize you were lying.
We are so fundamentally reliant on the fossil fuel subsidy for virtually every single thing in our lives, that most people's view of how to decarbonize is insanely incomplete.
We are facing the famous Carl Sagan line: "to make an apple pie from scratch first you must invent the universe". A lot of people think that they can just drop in one technology and it's going to fix any given thing, the problem is that in our highly industrialized civilization the feedstocks for any given technology rely on fossil fuels. People go "well here's a plant-based substitute" for one thing or another, and they don't realize that farming today requires lots of fossil fuel based chemical feedstocks such as ammonia, and is highly mechanized, which doesn't just require fossil fuels to operate but to manufacture, to refine the materials used in manufacture, to mine the minerals used in manufacture, to transport all the materials used in manufacture, and all of these apply to the machines used to manufacture as well, as well as the machines used to manufacture those machines.
I want to make something perfectly clear: almost none of the decarbonization that we see today is actually removing carbon. The West has simply made a deal with the devil and made Asia the painting of Dorian Gray.
The Asian continent, and particularly India and China, burn a vast majority of all coal burned on earth. What do they burn it doing? Making shit for westerners so our countries can pretend we are "net zero" carbon use.
People hold up the way solar panels are way cheaper than they were 20 years ago. Some of that is legitimate technological progress, but much of it is moving production from jurisdictions with labor and environmental regulations to jurisdictions that don't. It's no accident that the region that produces most of the world's polysilicon is produced in the region of China with the most coal and the most coal fired power plants.
I could go on forever, but the bottom line is that on a fundamental level, without the fossil fuel subsidy, we are past the carrying capacity of the planet in terms of humans. Even in the best view of things we can't feed this many people without that subsidy, and at the worst view of things, we definitely can't support the lifestyles we have today.
What we eat will change. What we wear will change. Where we live will change. What our homes look like will change. Our jobs will change, and they'll likely pay a lot less and require a lot more manual labor. And some of it might be for the better on an individual level, but for the most part lives will get much harder because you don't take away all the energy a civilization uses and make lives easier.
Premodern civilizations before the industrial revolution drove humans to use fossil fuels lived fundamentally differently than we do today. Today, most people live in cities. In the past, most people lived outside of the cities because while the per person resource is lower in the cities, those regions don't produce any primary feedstock and thus rely on rural farmland for renewable resources and rural mining for non-renewable resources such as metals(which can still be extracted without using carbon resources, at much higher cost).
Premodern civilizations also made use of technologies we consider reprehensible today. The Roman and Greek empires relied extensively on slavery. Premodern Europe ceased using slavery, but feudalism was another form of forced labor to make use of human horsepower to keep civilizations running used throughout Asia as well.
Another major problem with decarbonization is that not everyone is going to do it, and that could be a huge problem. If China and Russia keep burning fossil fuels and the rest of the world gives it up, what exactly would stop Russia's invasion in Ukraine if they can produce far more tanks and feed far more people? Disregarding even that, the only reason we have frictionless global trade today allowing for example people in Canada to eat fresh oranges in January is the huge US military keeping the seas relatively safe. Even if we could resolve the problem of how to fuel the huge ships that bring oranges to Canada, we wouldn't be able to resolve the problem of how to keep those treasure troves safe from pirates without an absurdly large navy policing the seas.
Most of the people who talk about decarbonization have never had anything to do with making things industrially, so the scale of lovely sounding sentences like "Just stop using oil" isn't apparent. That sort of disconnect from reality won't be possible without fossil fuels doing our manual labor for us. In Aristophanes play "The councilwomen", there's one powerfully satiricial moment where after laying out a utopia where nobody ever wants for anything, one of the councilwomen ask "But who will do the work?" to which another answered "The slaves". We live in a civilization with a similar issue, but instead of the slaves, it's fossil fuels doing all the work, and people have no idea how much work it's doing because the scale is so massive.
Do we have to move off of fossil fuels? Undoubtedly. No argument there. Even ignoring man-made climate change, the fact is that fossil fuels are limited, and we've already burned through billions of years worth of compressed biomass that in some cases would never return even if we left the earth alone. As well, climate change is going to change our lives, and so is the increasing difficulty of finding fossil fuels to burn. However, multiple things can be true at once, and it's true that staying on our current path is going to mean a big change eventually in terms of our lifestyle, but it's also true that changing the path is going to mean a big change in terms of our lifestyle. That's just cold, hard, reality.
The key here is to nail your feet to the ground and look at and talk about the reality of your options, rather than pretending if only our stupid leaders would listen to us then utopia is around the corner. The reality is that a lot of slow moving things are going to have to happen, and it's going to look different in the future than today. Transition too quickly, then the whole project will collapse and you don't get a choice in the end.
We are so fundamentally reliant on the fossil fuel subsidy for virtually every single thing in our lives, that most people's view of how to decarbonize is insanely incomplete.
We are facing the famous Carl Sagan line: "to make an apple pie from scratch first you must invent the universe". A lot of people think that they can just drop in one technology and it's going to fix any given thing, the problem is that in our highly industrialized civilization the feedstocks for any given technology rely on fossil fuels. People go "well here's a plant-based substitute" for one thing or another, and they don't realize that farming today requires lots of fossil fuel based chemical feedstocks such as ammonia, and is highly mechanized, which doesn't just require fossil fuels to operate but to manufacture, to refine the materials used in manufacture, to mine the minerals used in manufacture, to transport all the materials used in manufacture, and all of these apply to the machines used to manufacture as well, as well as the machines used to manufacture those machines.
I want to make something perfectly clear: almost none of the decarbonization that we see today is actually removing carbon. The West has simply made a deal with the devil and made Asia the painting of Dorian Gray.
The Asian continent, and particularly India and China, burn a vast majority of all coal burned on earth. What do they burn it doing? Making shit for westerners so our countries can pretend we are "net zero" carbon use.
People hold up the way solar panels are way cheaper than they were 20 years ago. Some of that is legitimate technological progress, but much of it is moving production from jurisdictions with labor and environmental regulations to jurisdictions that don't. It's no accident that the region that produces most of the world's polysilicon is produced in the region of China with the most coal and the most coal fired power plants.
I could go on forever, but the bottom line is that on a fundamental level, without the fossil fuel subsidy, we are past the carrying capacity of the planet in terms of humans. Even in the best view of things we can't feed this many people without that subsidy, and at the worst view of things, we definitely can't support the lifestyles we have today.
What we eat will change. What we wear will change. Where we live will change. What our homes look like will change. Our jobs will change, and they'll likely pay a lot less and require a lot more manual labor. And some of it might be for the better on an individual level, but for the most part lives will get much harder because you don't take away all the energy a civilization uses and make lives easier.
Premodern civilizations before the industrial revolution drove humans to use fossil fuels lived fundamentally differently than we do today. Today, most people live in cities. In the past, most people lived outside of the cities because while the per person resource is lower in the cities, those regions don't produce any primary feedstock and thus rely on rural farmland for renewable resources and rural mining for non-renewable resources such as metals(which can still be extracted without using carbon resources, at much higher cost).
Premodern civilizations also made use of technologies we consider reprehensible today. The Roman and Greek empires relied extensively on slavery. Premodern Europe ceased using slavery, but feudalism was another form of forced labor to make use of human horsepower to keep civilizations running used throughout Asia as well.
Another major problem with decarbonization is that not everyone is going to do it, and that could be a huge problem. If China and Russia keep burning fossil fuels and the rest of the world gives it up, what exactly would stop Russia's invasion in Ukraine if they can produce far more tanks and feed far more people? Disregarding even that, the only reason we have frictionless global trade today allowing for example people in Canada to eat fresh oranges in January is the huge US military keeping the seas relatively safe. Even if we could resolve the problem of how to fuel the huge ships that bring oranges to Canada, we wouldn't be able to resolve the problem of how to keep those treasure troves safe from pirates without an absurdly large navy policing the seas.
Most of the people who talk about decarbonization have never had anything to do with making things industrially, so the scale of lovely sounding sentences like "Just stop using oil" isn't apparent. That sort of disconnect from reality won't be possible without fossil fuels doing our manual labor for us. In Aristophanes play "The councilwomen", there's one powerfully satiricial moment where after laying out a utopia where nobody ever wants for anything, one of the councilwomen ask "But who will do the work?" to which another answered "The slaves". We live in a civilization with a similar issue, but instead of the slaves, it's fossil fuels doing all the work, and people have no idea how much work it's doing because the scale is so massive.
Do we have to move off of fossil fuels? Undoubtedly. No argument there. Even ignoring man-made climate change, the fact is that fossil fuels are limited, and we've already burned through billions of years worth of compressed biomass that in some cases would never return even if we left the earth alone. As well, climate change is going to change our lives, and so is the increasing difficulty of finding fossil fuels to burn. However, multiple things can be true at once, and it's true that staying on our current path is going to mean a big change eventually in terms of our lifestyle, but it's also true that changing the path is going to mean a big change in terms of our lifestyle. That's just cold, hard, reality.
The key here is to nail your feet to the ground and look at and talk about the reality of your options, rather than pretending if only our stupid leaders would listen to us then utopia is around the corner. The reality is that a lot of slow moving things are going to have to happen, and it's going to look different in the future than today. Transition too quickly, then the whole project will collapse and you don't get a choice in the end.