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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Well now I shall drink my coffee knowing that I have angered some random person on the Internet. Not because that I have completed my task of finding someone randomly to anger, because I had no such task, but because my coffee is getting cold and it is solely what is keeping me alert enough to work and post things that anger people at the same time.

    In seriousness, LOL. That does seem to be some people’s reaction to people just interjecting randomness into conversations. I think those people just need a good cup of coffee.


  • In France it wasn’t the wealthy who rioted over the gas tax. It was the average person

    Oh absolutely. Changes in society are going to affect the marginal the most. No disagreement there.

    but the guy who is just barely making it now with the supercharged fossil fuel economy?

    But I would indicate that we must look at the core issue on why the guy who is just barely making it now is in such a position. The monetary resources of this planet are finite and there is a group who is holding onto the vast majority of it. If that bulk of wealth was better distributed the guy who is just barely making it would have more at their disposal to absorb the impact of the change. That isn’t to say that the change would not still be felt, but they would be better to navigate such change.

    but that’s going to be a concern even with public companies with no “one percent” making the decisions.

    I would say that this undervalues the amount of consolidation that has happened in most industries. Where many industries are reduced to say a few players who dictate the direction the industry goes into. We need to diversify the mixture of players in many core industries in order to find those who take risks that could benefit solutions to climate change. That or we mitigate the risks at a governmental level in order to foster those changes.

    It’s no one fix and done kind of issue for sure. But the rich do hold an outsize grasp on the levers of change in government policy and industry direction. But I think we cannot just simply dismiss that they have such a position that is adverse to risk that comes with new initiatives that seek to reduce climate changing emissions and that they have incentive to be adverse to those risks. Removing them completely would absolve governments from implementing policies that cost taxpayers to mitigate those risks and free up capital locked into the hands of a few who would be adverse to take those risks.

    There’s also ways we can do all of the above without removing any players from any given industry, but there (at least to me so do understand this is solely my take on the matter) seems to be too many bad faith actors within these various industries that would be so affable to such changes and would seek to shift the winds more in their favor.

    The rich for the most part can afford and handle a transition

    And that, I think, is the point I’m trying to make here. While they would absolutely be the ones better at handling the change, they are also the group that would seek to prevent the change in the first place. Because why have the change and potentially receive less when they can have no change and continue to receive their current amount? The road that they are on is proven to yield a known value and changing that brings about risks that can modify that yield in unknown ways. Why change to something unknown, when what is currently working has known values? It’s a kind of profit inertia that grips a lot of industries.

    The general public is just mostly struggling to get by, that profit inertia is less a factor in their day-to-day life. If there is a change, that via the liquidation of one who held large amounts of locked capital, we can mitigate the impact on those struggling; there is still an impact but by an avenue that does not require taxpayer dollars we can minimize it.

    It’s much like how in third world nations we were resource dumping onto these countries and preventing small players from gaining footholds. And by basically removing the ability for these rich companies to dump resources heavily subsidized onto the people of these nations we allowed smaller players to gain some traction. Yes, the cheap resources are gone and people are struggling, but allowing domestic production of these goods eventually allows for products that can be afforded by all, because the domestic production grants more liquidity to those who work the jobs, increases demand, and in turn requires expansion of those domestic industries to include even more workers. We, rich first world nations with industries that are outsized, just needed to stop dumping onto these countries to allow that to foster. A parallel of that to the rich, I believe can be made and is the point of my argument.

    But that’s not to detract from what you have here as well, in that the solution is much more complex than just a single issue. Eating the rich isn’t the panacea folks believe it to be. Once those rich companies dumping on the poorer nations was gone, there still needed to be development of domestic production, that’s a non-zero cost and risk.


  • way bigger than any stupid obvious fix

    Yes, we have a societal shift that’s required in order to address this issue. It’s going to have to be as massive if not larger in scope than the entire industrial revolution and on a timescale more accelerated than the industrial revolution. I would posit, that the rich have the most incentive to maintain the current societal paradigm and have the most access to institute policy that maintains such. And thus, in general, in order to effect such a social shift that is required to address the issues, the rich must either begin supporting policies that put their vast wealth at risk or that the rich must be eliminated.

    The latter of that I would draw a parallel to a blocked river to farm fields. Removing the blockage doesn’t instantly irrigate the fields. There’s still lots of work to be done once the flow of the river is restored. BUT digging all those irrigation ditches does nothing unless flow is returned to the river. In my parallel, the rich are our blockage to the river and removing them doesn’t technically fix everything, but it’s a step required in order to get flow back.


  • I am just randomly tossing this into y’all’s conversation, use it as you wish. Aviation in general contributes 2.5% of the global emissions, (3.5% if you would like to read the fine print). That is ALL aviation, not just a selection of jets held by a few people. The 25% value is a real thing too but I think @VieuxQueb is misquoting it. A single private jet round trip from coast-to-coast of the United States with a party of four aboard (not counting pilots) is 25% the CO₂ value the average American will emit. There’s actually a quora that talked about this when whatever news agency said this same thing.

    I distinctly remember some news organization saying this, but it was worded so confusingly, I had a feeling someone would put it back together incorrectly. I cannot blame VieuxQueb, some of this stuff that’s talked about is metrics that are hard to digest.

    So. I just wanted to put that out there for you two. Thank you for your time. Hopefully that helps you all out.


  • Nah, much like shit gets tested on mice, tobacco is the goto for testing on plants.

    Yeah, there’s time we need to test on pigs and whatnot. But mice are usually good enough in multiple domains, cheap to get a lot, and are pretty easy to handle in a lab. So that’s the usual selection for testing shit on.

    Pretty much same deal with tobacco, checks enough boxes for interesting things to test against, is super cheap, and pretty straightforward for dealing with in a lab.

    You do initial testing on dummy cheap shit. Once you work out the bugs on the cheap thing, pretty much you do roughly the same thing on the expensive stuff that you’re actually going to sell.

    Tobacco is super cheap and editing the seed gene on it is pretty similar to the seed gene in grapes. So you do most of the work on cheap ass tobacco. When you’ve got tobacco down switching that same process over to grape only requires a few tweaks.



  • WD-40 used to come in big cans before it was an aerosol. And there has been spray bottles of it for some time too.

    From what I remember, WD-40 is just mineral oil plus some hydrocarbons. The aerosol version is just so that tiny target straw works well, but you can literally just spray it on the work area and “rub” it in as it’s a penetrating oil for water displacement. In fact, I’m pretty certain that’s what the WD stands for, water displacement.