Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, meanwhile, called for immediate punishment for the Palestinian Authority and expanded settlement construction in the Occupied West Bank as a response.
This is unhinged, wanting to punish the PA for other countries recognizing Palestine.
Their tax rate isn’t the real issue. The fact that they extract that much wealth out of the labor and production of others is the real problem.
No human being should have a billion dollars. The workers who got you to your level of privilege and status should be paid based on their worth.
A boss that pays fairly would never become a billionaire, and their workers would live good lives being paid the actual value of their labor. Increased demand from increased household discretionary income would create a boom on the supply side.
But it will never happen, because billionaires own everything and will always manufacture consent. Democracy will die to thunderous applause.
Us poors (the dumb ones, because education will be forever castrated) will clap for the billionaires and lay our thrift store hand-me-down jackets over the curb so they can cross a puddle in the street lest they get a drop of water on their 100k elephant skin boots. It’s coming to a head
Germany depends on the votes of Spain and Ireland at the EU for a lot of things that Germany finds important.
If a measure at the EU level has enough consensus and Germany vetoes it, they’ll see other members be a lot more likelly to use veto power on things that mostly matter for Germany.
Since Germany are in the curious position of being the EU member that benefits the most from the Free Market (they’re the biggest exporter and their biggest market by far is the rest of the EU) and the Euro (their currency now is a lot weaker and hence they’re more competitive because it’s a currency union with far weaker countries, than it was back in the deutsche mark times), they can’t even threathen to leave the EU as that would a bit like threatenning almost everybody else with a good time whilst they shot themselves on both feet.
Still, the most likely outcome is going to be nothing at all getting done at EU level, either way, if only because that’s always the most likely outcome.
If only Germany would not be willing to recognice Palestine, then this might happen, but that is not the case. France and Italy the two next most powerfull countries do not recognice Palestine either.
Germany is usually fairly happy with the current state of the EU. The things Germany wants to change are usually also supported by Spain and that means blackmail is harder. The only exaption to that is finance. However Spain is not going to let billions go to waste to have Palestine recogniced. That is just more of a symbol, rather then massivly important.
Also Germany leaving the EU would cause some massive problems in other EU countries as well. They would hardly be cheering for it.
It’s unclear were exactly France is on this, though I agree that Italy under the current far-right government is unlikelly to recognize Palestine.
I’m mostly thinking about the Financial stuff: none of the so called PIIGS forgot how they and their populations were sacrificed to save German banks and a “Let’s fuck Germany” posture wouldn’t at all be a hard sell in those countries plus I very much doubt that generally not doing what’s good for Germany would be bad for those countries since they’re almost opposite to Germany in the forms by which their economies can benefit from the Euro - they would actually grow more in an Euro without Germany.
I’m also not so sure that a German exit would end up being bad for the rest of the EU, especially for the less export oriented and more peripheral countries like Spain - certainly an Euro minus Germany would actually be better for everybody else but Germany (as Germany pushes up the value of the Euro, making other Euro nations less competitive and partly explaining their anemic growth and lack of funds to restructure their Economies, which is the other big reason for their anemic growth) though granted it depends on how important are exports to Germany in each economy, though on non-Euro EU matters you might be right. In summary and as I said before, almost nobody else but Germany benefits from Germany’s Euro membership and the kind of nations that would be least affected by a Deutschexit are the ones who have no borders with Germany, a group that includes Spain, Ireland and Norway (though the latter is not an EU member and hence has no vote or veto so doesn’t really apply for the scenario we are discussing).
Spain has grown faster then Germany for most of the last decade(besides 2020). Out of PIIGS Portugal and Ireland also have done pretty well. Greece got hit hard and Italys economy has problems since the 90s(aka not a EU/Euro problem).
The figure is quite different if you look at the growth in nominal per-capita terms rather than in percentage of initial value as any shitty-shit growth in a poor nation looks a lot more in percentage terms.
Further, I’m living in Portugal and I can tell you that at least in quality of life terms the country has been going backwards for at least a decade, even if mathematically, thanks to a housing bubble and understating housing inflation, the GDP figures produced show “Growth” which is actually just housing inflation that has not been discounted from the Nominal GDP.
The only one of the PIIGS anywhere near catching up to Germany is the Republic Of Ireland and even those have fishy numbers because of how many international companies declare the revenue of their entire EU operations in Ireland because of just how much Ireland facilitates tax evasion - a lot of the money being “made in Ireland” is neither “made in Ireland” nor does it even pass by Ireland and it being counted as Irish GDP is just an accounting artifact.
But yeah, Norway is not an EU member, as I myself pointed out in the very post you replied to.
Portugal is were it is because of a lot more reasons than the housing bubble, though I agree with you that the only element of Germany’s blame for housing bubbles in the Eurozone in general (so, not just in Portugal) was way back in 2009/10 when they pushed ultra-low interest rates as the “solution” for the consequences of the 2008 Crash because it was what was better for the likes of Deutsche Bank and the Landesbanken which were overexposed to subprime and soverign debt.
(I actually have a recent comment were I list the IMHO various reasons for the housing bubbles in Europe one by one and that one is just one of them and most definitelly include in that list local problems like refusal to regulate AirBnBs and even the incentivising of foreign investment in the local realestate market)
Those “temporary” ultra-low interest rates lasted for over a decade and pushed up mortgages, both via the pathway of making the same monthly mortgage payment allow for a much larger mortgage (which together with other problems in the housing market innevitably pushed house prices up to the point were people were paying the same montly payments as before with much larger interest rates) and via the pathway of causing a “race up the yield ladder” which moved a lot of money from things like Treasuries (which even ended up with negative yields) into things like realestate and stocks, increasing Demand in those things and thus pushing prices up.
Further, and again to help the likes of Deutsche Bank, Germany also pushed for continued light-touch-regulation on Financial Institutions and unconditional rescue of affect banks with no requirement for reform (most notably no requirement to divest from and close the investment banking operations of retail banks), which in turn led to the progressive swamping of housed markets in places where most people were owner-occupiers with much more wealthy realestate investors, further pushing up prices.
This is without even going into the stuff which is not housing related and were Germany also put pressure to do all the wrong things for peripheral economies, such as the imposition of Austerity in countries like Greece and Portugal, something which even Christine Lagarde, former head of the IMF and president of the ECB later admitted was the wrong thing to do.
Let’s not excuse the German politicians whose prime priority was the interest of Deutsche Bank, just as we shouldn’t excuse the past and current incompetent moron politicians in places like my homeland.
Correct on a per capita bases Portugal has been growing much much faster then Germany. The simple truth it that Germany is not benefiting from austerity either. What should happen is that the German government massively increases spending. This would turn Germany from a net exporter, to a net importer. That allows the PIIGS to export products to Germany paying down the debt, but it also stimulates the economy. Germany profits from the increased spending as well.
The simple truth is that German life expectancy is declining since a couple of years(being below Spain, Italy and Portugal btw). Median wealth of Italy, Spain and Portugal is higher then that of Germany, which is only slightly higher then that of Greece. Real wages in Germany have gone up by 3.8% over the last decade(not annually but the entire decade).
The only ones who really profit from this austerity are the super rich. Other then that it is as bad a policy for Germany as it is for Italy, Portugal, Spain or Greece.
The life expectancy is falling all over Europe (welcome to Neoliberalism were only the life expectancy of the rich goes up and deregulation cause all sorts of problem for people who can’t afford prime products and living in their own mansion outside of the polution of cities).
As I said, in absolute money terms Portugal isn’t actually growing all that much because it’s coming from a much lower base: 2.3% on a country with an average anual wage of €20k a year even if perfectly distributed (which that growth is definitelly not since Portugal is pretty bad in terms of income inequality) are a great whooping extra €430 a year (notice that I’m mixing nominal salaries with real GDP growth, which is an approximation and why I didn’t mention salary growth losses due to inflation), which would at best see Portugal catch up with the €45k average anual wage in Germany, if the last did not grow at all and in the absence of further economic crashes (I explain this last point further below), by the end of the century.
The only reason why Portuguese growth in money terms still exceeded that of Germany in 2023 is because that year the German economy actually shrank, otherwise a 2% GDP growth in Portugal is in absolute terms the same amount as a less than 1% GDP growth in Germany, because the German GDP per-capita is more than twice that of Portugal, so Portugal wil never catch up to Germany unless it has more than twice the German growth in percentage terms.
Since Portugal’s Economy is heavilly dependent on volatile industries like Tourism and hence prone to deep dives whenever there is a Crash which wipe out a significant proportion of previous growth, it’s highly unlikelly that the country can sustain a growth of more than twice the German on in percentage terms for the next 60 years.
I do agree that Germany itself has to change what it is doing, even just for Germany’s sake.
Personally I think that the choices of Mutti back in the post 2008 Crash were not the ones best for Germany and Germans, but the ones best for a certain section of the German Elites, namelly financeers and large Asset owners (i.e. the very rich). It just so happens that given the influence of Germany (and that Germany wasn’t the only country choosing to save the Asset owners on the backs of the rest) her choices hurt a lot more than just the Germans, with some people - namelly the Greek - being very purposefully sacrificed even more than the common German person all for the good of Deutsche Bank and large german investors.
their currency now is a lot weaker and hence they’re more competitive because it’s a currency union with far weaker countries, than it was back in the deutsche mark times
That myth again. The Euro is a much harder currency than the DM ever was. Most of the trouble states had with the Euro was not due to Germany but them not being accustomed to having a hard currency in the first place, being used to relying on monetary fuckery to steer the economy.
As to recognising Palestine: Not a EU prerogative, simple as that. And I highly doubt states would pressure Germany over this, it’d be a lot of political capital spent on practically zero impact – up to negative impact as Germany has a much better chance convincing Israel to recognise Palestine with its current stance, and there’s simply no country with deeper diplomatic ties to Israel than Germany. If anyone can convince them, it’s Germany.
Obligatory note for all the “Christians should support Israel” crowd. The Israeli minister of Security said, that Christians should be spit on. When Christians want to pray for Easter in the Church of the holy sepulcher, Israeli security forces are also harassing and attacking them. Israel is not only an ethnostate, it is also founded on religious and race supremacy, where white european/american Jews are on the top of the hierarchy and anyone else will face discrimination.
Definitely true, its just the arms companies milking your country dry want more money. So, they’ll convince you all that you’re no longer a super power.
Militarily speaking the US is still a force to be reckoned with, they can bitch-slap any smaller non-nuclear country anywhere in the world on a moment’s notice.
Soft power wise, though, the US is in freefall. And without that soft power the hard power can’t be readily employed because blowback. I’d say in the future the US is going to do a lot more riding on the EU’s soft power than they’re currently comfortable admitting. That is, they’re not going to invade random countries to bolster election results at home, they’re going to knock on Brussel’s door and ask “hey anything need peacekeeping right now that would be popular with the world?”, then portray it as their own initiative.
Militarily speaking the US is still a force to be reckoned with
Sure. But so are France, Russia, India, and Pakistan. A lot of the US influence comes from its extensive base network. And yet… America can’t keep the Suez open in the face of some Yemeni rebels with access to a Radio Shack. They’ve bowed out in Afghanistan and Iraq. They’re roughly holding the line in Ukraine by sheer weight of expenditure. Logistically, all very impressive. But its playing ten different chess games at once. Only impressive if you’re not losing them.
I’d say in the future the US is going to do a lot more riding on the EU’s soft power than they’re currently comfortable admitting.
I’m not even sure what the EU looks like in another thirty years. The UK is in steep decline, France is in full sell-out mode, Germany and Italy are making kissy-faces at their fascist wings. The Eastern European states never recovered from the break up of the USSR. Scandinavia is a gas station.
Europe’s chips seem to be stacking up in the Middle East, under a handful of petty dictatorships and theocracies. But the real future power players are looking more and more like the member states of the South Pacific - India, China, Pakistan, Indonesia. Enormous populations, high tech industries, rapidly expanding navies, some of the last pristine wilderness anywhere on earth… These look like the countries which will be leading the world into back end of the 21st century.
We could stop the Yemenis. But it would take far more manpower and material than anyone in the US is willing to commit right now. We could go to the fortress village concept; and just generally go full scale COIN. It would stop the attacks. It would also cost a trillion dollars over a couple years and probably turn into a transitional government and peacekeeping mission.
Enlistment? Shit at the rate we’re getting into fights we’re going to need conscription anyways. Let’s just get it over with. /s
The only reason we have shortages is because they cannibalized an entire generation. Turns out when you keep fighting you go right through the pool of eligible volunteers.
And hey I didn’t say we’d leave a stable state behind. Just that we’d stop the attacks.
And hey I didn’t say we’d leave a stable state behind. Just that we’d stop the attacks.
I mean, it helps to understand the political situation in Yemen up to this point. Its already functionally been in and out of civil war for the last decade. The Houthis currently lobbing bombs into the Gulf of Adan are the same insurgents that Saudi-backed Yemen officials have been fighting with since the Obama Era.
Then you’ve got the other side of the Gulf, where pirate communities across Somalia were already a perpetual nuisance for major shipping. They’ve been raising the insurance rates on this boats well before the Houthis started playing Battleship with merchant vessels. This isn’t a new problem for the US Navy. Its simply a numbers game. Too many ships to protect and too many potential pirating crews to combat.
The cost-efficient solution appears to be to send everyone around the Horn of Africa again, rather than trying your luck in the Canal.
Much as russia just spent their material legacy capacity in ukraine, the us spent their economic legacy capacity in Iraq/Afghanistan. We are driving around a fancy army we spent too much on, and the payments are hurting.
We still spend too much on it. We’re following Germany’s fallacy from World War 2 of trying to have all of our equipment be the bestest ever instead of good enough. Accounting for inflation last time I looked we’re spending twice what we were when we invaded Iraq.
That’s… That’s my point. We won world war 2 with equipment that was great strategically and logistically, but was merely good enough tactically. We’ve switched positions. We need to realize that a million man military can’t be gold plated.
Israel would "move people out of Rafah, the main humanitarian hub in the enclave, to al-Mawasi
Yeah, that's not their plan. There's 1.42 million people in Rafah right now, which is 25 square miles. That gives it a population density of 56,800 per square mile, making it the 25th most densely populated city in the world - and with intact infrastructure enough for only a tiny fraction of that number.
So, Israel supposedly wants to move all these people to al-Mawasi. Now, al-Mawasi is barren, with; the last official count I could find said there were about 1500 people living there in a small Bedouin town. It's also only about six square miles total.
Let's say that Hamas is 10% of the population - I don't think it is, but let's use that number. That means there's 1,278,000 innocent civilians they want to move to al-Mawasi. That would mean a population density of 213,000 per square mile. That would be twice the population density of Manila. And there is no infrastructure. They're just taking a million people and throwing them into a barren desert next to the sea and saying, "Not our problem." There's no food, no water, no toilets, no shelter, no medical facilities, no electricity, no shelter from the heat - and no way to quickly make any of these things appear in enough quantity to matter.
The Palestinians are already on the verge of famine. This will make things worse, and disease is absolutely going to decimate the population. And then they'll decide that al-Mawasi is hiding Hamas, and they'll go after that as well.
Let’s say that Hamas is 10% of the population - I don’t think it is, but let’s use that number.
The Palestinians are already on the verge of famine. This will make things worse, and disease is absolutely going to decimate the population.
Decimation was the Roman practice of killing 1 out of every 10 mutinous/deserter (i.e., guilty of something) soldiers to punish an entire legion while still keeping it operational as a combat unit. Here we have the opposite. It is killing 9 innocents to get to also kill 1 additional (very hypothetically) guilty person.
This is the saddest “um ackchyually” I have ever written.
More aid enters Gaza every day. The situation has been improving for months and there is zero reason to think it will not continue to improve. Daily death totals have been dropping since what, the second or third week of the war?
Tell Hamas to surrender and come out. Watch the daily deaths drop to zero.
I Just wanted to add that Northern Gaza, where the IDF physically controls all entrances, is officially in famine. Southern Gaza is fed by the entrance in Rafah.
The motive for taking Rafah could not be more clear. They intend to destroy the international aid supply line for southern Gaza. Moving so many people to a purposefully mismanaged IDP camp is just the cherry on top.
He testified to $400M, and he already put up a $100M bond for the other thing. But the whole point of this is that he overvalues things, right? I bet when his people had to get down to the actual state of the accounts and not what DJT feels they are, it was probably only $200M or so that is liquid.
It’s not worth going after him again for overstating that in court. It’s too easy to skirt around. His punishment will come when the DA starts seizing and auctioning stuff to pay the judgement.
That’s not quite how it works. When the bond company writes the bond, they don’t just take the $2m from the client and then the client is off the hook. They ask the client to put up collateral. So in order for Trump to secure this bond, he would have had to set aside the full amount of the bond and say “If the verdict doesn’t get reduced on appeal, I am giving you all this stuff, and not using it for anything else in the meantime”.
All Trump is getting for that fee is not actually having to sell those assets now, and have any overage refunded if the appeal gets the verdict reduced. (Given the interest rates right now, the passive income on that kind of cash is not trivial).
True, but we were talking only about liquid assets here, I thought. Otherwise, what would the $400m you mentioned be referring to? Or - what specifically did you mean and do you have a source by any chance?
I’ve read some different things about what those bond companies will take as collateral. They are not likely to take on real estate as collateral. Not only is it a pain to unload, but the properties also likely have existing liens on them, reducing the value that can be recovered. The bond companies are well within their rights to say that they will only accept cash or marketable securities as collateral.
I suspect that trump life is over if he fails to win in November, he will either take it himself or it will be effectively over bc he will be in jail and penny less. To that end he does not care about consequences of some extra crimes in the near term.
He’s a serial narcissist. Maybe one of the worst in the current world.
No way does he take his own life. That would require having empathy, which he absolutely does not have.
No. trump won’t take his own life. He’s not committed to any cause like someone like Hitler, nor does he feel backed into a corner.
What he’ll do instead is pander/cater to his unhinged base and con them out of what little money they have left.
That’s all after he pillages the coffers of the RNC for what he can use there to pay for his legal fees/woes.
It’s possible, and I don’t want to hope for too much here, but it’s possible, that trump maybe legit takes down most of the RNC/republicans if he fails to win in November.
If he wins though, I think we’re all pretty fucked. He’ll use tax money to pay for that judgement or some shit. He has no morals, ethics, or shame.
He’ll use tax money to pay for that judgement or some shit.
Can’t do that. President doesn’t control the purse, both revenues and budget come from Congress. He’d have to get Congress to include paying his legal fees in the budget and manage to pass that budget. Then he could pay for the judgement with tax money.
You know that whole “fiscal cliff” thing that keeps happening? That’s a consequence of this - Congress assigns a maximum amount of debt that the President can issue bonds until it is reached to pay for things in the budget (issuing bonds is technically a power of Congress, but they delegate it up to a set value via legislation so that they don’t have to bother). Congress also assigns how much money will be spent on each thing (aka the budget). When the President is required to spend more by the budget than there is in tax revenue plus bonds he is allowed to issue, that’s the fiscal cliff. It’s literally a problem that Congress creates (by creating a budget that spends more than is available in taxes and bonds), that only Congress can fix (typically by raising the amount the President can issue in bonds), but that usually gets blamed on the President.
That’s good to know, thank you for the detailed explanation.
I’m still concerned he’ll do it, and his sycophant supporters will enable him and let him do it because they see this as him being politically persecuted. You’re probably right, but if trump wins, nothing is normal, there is no rule of law.
Can’t do that. President doesn’t control the purse
That’s how dictatorships start, they ask for the powers for just a few, just a little bit, and then it never gets returned.
So I have low confidence that anything we consider rule of law today will be in effect if trump should win a second term, with all the insane support he’s got within the GOP right now that currently controls the lower house.
Also giving up ALL your cash is a bad idea, you’d want to do that as a mix of cash and other assets, so he’d still need someone willing to use those as collateral.
We wouldn’t give it up, he woild just use some of it as collateral for his bond. He gives insurance company $40,000,000 and they pay the full amount, or whatever they negotiate.
He doesn’t have enough cash for the down payment for his loan essentially.
If he locks up 400 million (all his cash) he has no cash until this is over with and he gets it back and he can then sell assets if needed to cover it.
That’s not a good financial move for anyone.
No one wants to use any of his asset collateral because he’s lied about its worth so he has to use his cash.
Edit: to clarify, no one wants to risk 500 million if he gives them 50 because they don’t think they can get the 500 back from him if he tries to back out of it.
Again, as mentioned, whether it’s a good financial move or not, doesn’t really matter if he doesn’t have the capital to flex beyond meeting the requirements.
It’s a legal judgement. It might force him to do things that are not good financial moves. That’s tough shit in life for the rest of us too. The thing here is that trump’s never been held accountable, legally, for any of the crimes he’s committed before. This is what happens when one of the oligarchs falls off their throne and gets treated like the rest of us.
Of course, to him, he feels like this is unfair, because he’s never been made accountable. But this is just a fucking Tuesday for the 330+Million rest of us.
Just to be clear - I’m in no way shape or form supporting Trump. I’m just pointing out using all your cash, in any circumstance, is not a good idea. He has to solve his own problem even if it’s a bad situation
This isn’t bail with a small risk of loss paid for by the guaranteed loss of 10% to the bondsman. This is 99% Chance of loss on a settled case with the reasonable expectation that Trump would fight collection tooth and nail, try to pay less than face via bankruptcy etc. It’s a risk of hundreds of millions of dollars that would take YEARS to settle. Years in which lenders could be earning returns if that money was invested elsewhere. 30 institutions said no.
He needs to secure the loan with cash or cash equivalents for the whole shebang. Nobody wants properties which he has already borrowed against even if the net of value and loan are positive to the tune of hundreds of millions its risky and challenging to sell. He should have started mortgaging when the judge told him he’d lost and they were only determining the scope of the loss so he could have obtained favorable terms.
You don’t have the option of looking at a court judgement like an investment opportunity. This is a legal judgement. You don’t get to “hold onto cash” just because not having it would risk exposure or something.
You do this, or they start selling your assets off for an unflattering amount of money, and/or you can go to jail, or have all of the things you owned possessed and auctioned off to pay for the judgement.
This isn’t about him paying his legal bill, it’s about a bond to appeal.
Using all your cash to appeal is a bad idea for ANYONE
if you lose the appeal, you can then decide on your cash and asset mix to pay it off.
Edit: think about it this way. If you can put up asset collateral on a appeal that’ll take a year, that’s a whole year you could be earning interest on the cash and have cash for an emergency. Maybe you go half and half so you don’t risk as much of the other assets. Leaving yourself with no cash is just bad. He’s in a really bad situation so maybe he only has bad options, but that doesn’t mean it’s not bad.
Yeah, everyone’s scared of using the L-word because of the legal liabilities involved. And if I was the editor, I would 100% assume trump would attempt to fucking sue my paper for libel if I say anything that gives him an inch.
So that’s probably why everyone’s scared of saying “Lied”, because trump can, will, and has sued people for things like that.
Scheppele’s assessment echoed that of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, which warned in an analysis published late last year that “the entire project is devoted to aggrandizing executive power by centralizing authority in the presidency, and a key aspect of democratic backsliding is viewing opposition elements as attempting to destroy the ‘real’ community, an essential aspect to quashing dissent.”
“Project 2025 paints progressives and liberals as outside acceptable politics, and not just ideological opponents, but inherently anti-American and ‘replacing American values,’” the analysis said. “Targeting vulnerable communities is a core tenet of Project 2025. Project 2025 is very clearly on a path to Christian nationalism as well as authoritarianism.”
For the love of everything we care for. Please vote this November.
It’s far too late to vote our way out of this, Trump will be president next year because the Democrats would rather lose an election than a fundraising opportunity.
Start preparing for the inevitable. If you and your friend circle aren’t ready to engage in mass civil unrest like the French do whenever their government acts up then it’s time to get that way. Form an affinity group, practice acting in concert while in black bloc, study police tactics, surveil the local fascist agitators, join a worker’s union, identify opportunities to disrupt business-as-usual, and most importantly, do not organize online.
The thing that is upsetting about American fascism is not that it exists.
It’s the fact that everyone is debating it like an argument about what kind of chairs you want at a wedding.
It’s the same scenario that played out in 1930s Germany and the rise of Nazism … everyone kept arguing that it wouldn’t happen, it’s not like that, it isn’t that bad, they have good points, we can control it, we won’t let them go too far, everyone obeys the rule of law, we have morals …
… then we all had to literally break the entire world in order to fix the problem.
I’ve been gently pushing for the same message but at best hear people say “oh it’s just politics, and we have laws against all this so it will be years before anything can truely change”
Hitler’s power was solidified in a matter of months, whereby he threatened and/or had his political opposition killed. Then he came with the excuse “I don’t believe my people did this”
No one dared say any of it was against the laws, he was fully above the law and shielded anyone he felt worthy of the same, ofcourse he would have them dissappear when their use ran out…
It’s seeming like a tide of unthinkability bias is awashing the country. Maybe there’s a better word for the phenomenon where one just can’t contemplate what could be a really bad problem. Or if one can, ‘oh but [the grim outcome] is so far down the road…’
There is no ceiling. It might go up 6 or 7C. The people who have the power to change things do not give a shit if the rest of us die. They don’t care, and they won’t change anything. That’s the world we live in.
They (selfishly) believe that allowing the problem to flourish is what will get us to solve it.
They’re not wrong. There’s just way better, more humane approaches.
So you’re mostly right. Because they know they have the wealth to weather the discomfort in comfort. But it is accurate that humans historically are fucking aces at reacting and kinda piss poor at proacting.
Yes, they are wrong. Because we don’t know if there are positive feedback loops that will take us beyond survivable temperatures once we’ve crossed an invisible line.
Even the ultra-rich won’t survive +5C because the entire concept of “wealth” falls apart when society does.
Finally some good news on the climate. Our ability to fuck the Earth will mostly go away when our civilization collapses. We might even get a second Genghis Khan cooling when everyone dies.
There isn’t one definitive paper I can give. They’re are of course also papers claiming the opposite.
I’ve seen multiple articles about this. Less yield from staple crops, productivity loss with heatwaves, storm damage. There are a bunch of papers too, usually about a specific region. But roughly above 2°C, the hurt really begins with the cost to the economy exceeding almost every country’s growth. Exact numbers differ per article.
Too bad, I’ll have to hunt around myself. Simulation is always a bit vulnerable to assumptions when human behavior is involved, but it’s definitely worth trying to model things.
If that’s true, the political landscape is going to become starkly different. We expect growth right now; it’s used as the yardstick of economic success. Obviously past civilisations didn’t, and we could go back, even peacefully for all I know, but it would be uncharted territory post-industrialisation.
I kind of suspect climate adaptation produces more CO2 than other forms of activity, because it would be construction heavy. I wonder if that’s factored it. Actually, I wonder what the adaptation assumptions are in general.
There is a problem of lag. By the time temperatures are high enough to force the economy to stop, the amount of CO2 will be sufficient to continue pushing the temperature up considerably.
The problem is that feedback loops start to kick in above 2°C so it doesn’t matter if the economy crashes.
In fact, in some cases that makes things even worse. One example is that without smokestacks and ships pumping out sulfur dioxide the albedo of the atmosphere will rapidly drop, which might cause immediate and rapid warming over a period of only a few years.
We could be pushed past 2.5°C or even 3°C without industrial forces contributing at all.
Yes and no. Renewables are now cheaper than other forms of energy but cost isn’t the only issue.
There are practical limits on how many renewables projects we can build and integrate at a time. We’re not even remotely close to building them fast enough to save anything. We can’t even build them fast enough to keep up with the ever increasing demand energy.
Nuclear is expensive as fuck but we need to be building more of it as well as renewables because we can’t build enough renewables fast enough to avert the catastrophe, and that’s about the only other tech we have that can generate energy in the massive quantities needed without significant greenhouse gas emissions.
I don’t think that’s quite true. Where I live it has expanded from nothing to a major power source in just a few years. We’ll need grid storage of some kind to kick fossil fuels completely, but that seems surmountable. Worst case scenario we build pumped air and just eat some round trip losses.
Nuclear plants take many years to get off the ground, so I’m not sure that’s actually an easier solution. Once they’re up and running at scale they’re actually really cheap per unit production, so I would have agreed with you a decade ago, but as it is solar and wind have just pulled ahead.
Don’t take my word for it. Look up the numbers for yourself and do the math.
Search for “National GHG inventory {your country}”.
You find a report listing (among a bunch of other things) the amount of electricity generated each year by each method, and the emissions from each. Look up the total TWh of electricity produced by fossil fuels.
Then look at the total TWh from renewables, and rate it has been growing Y-o-Y and extrapolate until it reaches the number needed to eliminate fossil fuels.
You’ll find it will take decades to build enough renewable capacity to replace fossil fuel based electricity generation.
And that’s before you realize that only about 25% of fossil fuel combustion goes to electricity generation. As we start switching cars, homes, industries to electric we’re going to need 2x-3x more electricity generation.
Yes it takes a long time to bring on a new nuclear plant, roughly 7-9 years. If it was remotely realistic that we could build enough renewable power generation in that time to replace all fossil fuel generation then I’d agree we don’t need nuclear. But we’re not anywhere close to that.
It’s also helpful to note too just how much power a nuclear reactor generates. I live in Canada, our second smallest nuclear power plant in Pickering, generates almost 5 times more electricity annually than all of Canada’s solar farms combined. It will take 1000s or solar and wind farms covering and area larger than all of our major cities combined to replace fossil fuels…
…or about 7 nuclear power stations the same size as Pickering.
Then look at the total TWh from renewables, and rate it has been growing Y-o-Y and extrapolate until it reaches the number needed to eliminate fossil fuels.
You’ll find it will take decades to build enough renewable capacity to replace fossil fuel based electricity generation.
I get ~2 decades when I extrapolate these numbers (from 2010-2023) to get to 2022 total primary energy usage for solar alone.
Energy usage will grow as well, and keeping that growth is ambitious, but it the future doesn’t look that bleak too me if you look at it that way.
Did you use linear extrapolation, or something else? Because it’s an actual paradigm shift happening now, I’d guess some kind of exponential or subexponential curve would be best. That would bring it even faster.
Extrapolation is tricky, and actually kind of weak, although I think it’s appropriate here. This XKCD explains it really well, and I end up linking it all the damn time.
Exponential, it fits the curve very nicely. I can give you the python code if you want to. I got 2 decades for all energy usage, not only electricity, which is only one sixth of that.
I just took the numbers for the whole world, that’s easier to find and in the end the only thing that matters.
The next few years are going to be interesting in my opinion. If we can make efuels cheaper than fossil fuels (look up Prometheus Fuels and Terraform Industries), we’re going to jump even harder on solar and if production can keep up it will even grow faster.
E-fuels are a big deal, particularly for aviation. Non-electricity emissions are also something to watch. Hydrogen as a reducing agent seems like it can work very well as long as we do phase out fossil fuels like promised, so that solves steel production and similar. Calcination CO2 from concrete kilns is a very sticky wicket apparently, since they’re extremely hot, heavy, and also need to rotate, which is challenging to combine with a good seal.
Cheap grid storage is a trillion-dollar question, but I suspect even if new technology doesn’t materialise, pumped air with some losses can do the trick, again subject to proper phase-out of dirty power sources.
So that’s just solar, then? Long term, it does seem like the one that’s the biggest deal, but right now there’s also a lot of wind and hydro in the mix, so that’s another point in favour of the assumptions here being conservative.
Yes, just solar. Hydro is bigger now, but it doesn’t have the growing potential. Wind is currently also growing exponential, but I don’t see it doing that for 20 more years. And even if it does, it doesn’t really make a big difference since exponential + exponential is still exponential. If it grows as fast as solar that would mean we’re just a few years ahead of the curve.
Alright, I can’t seem to find useful numbers anywhere. We went from 50% coal to nil in just a few years, though, so big changes fast are possible. If you’re in Ontario, you also have to consider your local renewables penetration was really high to start with, because of those waterfalls.
And yeah, like I said to the other person, exact growth pattern matters. It’s probably exponential-ish right now, not linear, because it’s just unambiguously cheaper to move to renewables, and so just getting ducks in order to do it is the bottleneck.
I respect you for doing your own research. People need to understand the scope of the problem if there’s going to be meaningful action.
The reason I’m passionate about nuclear in particular is that only about a quarter of all fossil fuel consumption is from electricity generation.
Most of the rest is burned in transportation, buildings, commercial and residential applications. We have the tech already to switch most of these things to electricity, and eliminate their direct emissions, but that’s not much of a win if we’re burning fossil fuels generate that electricity. Which is what happens today when electricity demand is increased, we can’t just turn up the output of a solar/wind farm in periods of high demand, but we can burn more natural gas.
Switching to electric everything (Car, trucks, ships, heat pumps, furnaces, etc) will increase electricity demand by 2-3x.
Even if renewables growth is held to the exponential-ish curve it’s been so far (doubtful) we still need 15+ years just to get to the point of replacing current global fossil fuel electricity production in the most optimistic case, never mind enough to handle 2-3x demand.
Massive quantities of new carbon free electricity generation is needed to “unlock” the electrification technologies we need to deploy if we going to avoid the worst of the disaster. If we wait until renewables alone get us there it’ll be too late.
The more carbon free energy we can build in the next 20-30 years, the more options we have. Even if we can reach a place of excess capacity, there are a lot of things like DAC and CCS, that we could use it for that today result in more emissions from electricity generation than they sequester.
I don’t mean to diminish your point about the utility of nuclear, but (a) it’s subject to the same ramping up/scaling issues as anything else*, and (b) you’d be surprised how quickly we could ramp up manufacturing of renewables if The Powers That Be actually wanted to.
(* Or worse: in particular, the absolute debacle that was Plant Vogtle 3 and 4 – delivered years late and billions overbudget, while bankrupting Westinghouse in the process – shows that we definitely did not maintain our nuclear expertise over the past several decades of building exactly fuck-all new plants.)
Same. England for me, but I think it’ll bother the people in power who abhor people migrating and also deny climate change or at the least taking adequate action to mitigate the effects / affects (which is it).
uh no florida has already made the next play, and it was to repeal all protections for outdoor workers against the elements
in other words the next move is literally “Fuck you, die”, apparently, so, good to know we’re past the bullshit and can get on with actually solving the problem properly.
Not a racial stereotype. If you ever watch her press conferences you’d know that’s the way she is. A smart hard ass prosecutor who has no problem taking on Trump or the NRA. I’d hate to be in her cross hair.
I’m confused? Is there a stereotype that all black women wear pearls and flip their hair when they talk? If you told me that was a stereotype of any race I would actually guess white but I kind of thought that was just something that women with a certain personality did, regardless of race.
It sounds like you read their comment and visualized something racist in your own mind. Maybe the call is coming from inside the house?
I don’t know much about her and I don’t watch her press conferences. I’m not defending anyone, your comment has just genuinely confused me because I’ve never heard of this stereotype in my 33 years on earth, living in a racist state in a racist country.
I’m just asking how a hair flip and pearls is racist? Can you explain that?
(Letitia James, wearing her pearls and flipping her hair) “You best believe it.”
She’s a high level public employee…
No one would imply a white woman in her position acted like that, and despite you and the other account insisting she acts like that so it’s not racist, neither of you show any interest in taking the two seconds to prove it if she always acts like that like the other account said.
Can you please just tell me what the racist part is?? Is it misrepresenting her personality that makes it racist? I’m telling you I genuinely do not understand and I’m trying to learn something from you but you seem hell bent on making people out to be racists instead of actually informing people about the topic.
In that case I think you’re racist because you have misrepresented my personality.
I literally told you that I would assume it’s a white stereotype of any. When someone says wearing pearls and flipping hair, I literally picture a wealthy white socialite in my mind.
She always wears the pearls when she dances on the corpse. She used to hair flip, but i don’t see it here. In any case, when she decided not to run for Governor of NY, the current governor said “that’s really bad news for Trump and the NRA”
Yeah in my head I was thinking a white Karen tbh. Am I racist because I picked white? Or not racist because I didn’t choose black? Maybe it had NOTHING TO DO with skin color, until that dude brought it up. 🙄
Weird how often when I block an account, it usually doesn’t take long for an account with very few comments to come along wanting to continue the arguement…
If you are interested you can go and find one, it’s not going to be difficult. We are not here to bring you stuff. What a level of entitlement, sir (or ma’am).
I hope he’s ready for the fate of kings. Actually, i take that back. I don’t give a shit what that bloated rapist felon demented sociopath is ready for. His 15 minutes were up in the 80s. Obviously no one in an official capacity is able to take care of fucking business.
If he does become a true dictator, I wouldn’t be surprised by him dying of old age. The fascist he hands his power down to however, they might see the fate of kings.
It’s the same projection play that the GOP and Russia use. Antifa are fascists. LGBTQ+ people are oppressing us. Ukrainians are Nazis, let’s abduct all their children.
when i read the title i thought he said something identical or very similar to something Hitler said maybe without knowing… all fascism leads to the same destination after all, you don’t need to be deliberate about it. (remember how people said TFG was quoting hitler and he said, and i paraphrase, “i didn’t know he said it i just came up with the same conclusion on my own” as if that doesn’t make it worse… kinda like that)
but NO! he literally quotes Hitler by attributing the quote to Hitler without a modicum of irony. dude the israeli government has gone do far deep into fascism that they can’t even use the thinnest veils as cover.
He has never been part of Israel’s government.
Like I wrote in another comment, he was 36th on the Likud’s list 10 years ago, and later founded a party that didn’t even get 1 mandate.
i shouldn’t have used the word “government” as what i meant was more along the lines of Israeli politics in general. not that the government itself is much better, they just haven’t name checked Hitler as much yet.
although natenyahu already has engaged in apologia for Hitler himself so it’s not far off anyway.
Coming from a country which had a Fascist dictatorship until the 70s, I’ve started calling Zionism ethno-Facism, because it’s a far more rabidly racist strain than most Fascist dictatorships and unlike almost all of the others which were mainly Nationalist, claims to represent an entire ethnicity and justifies even their used of the most extreme violence as some kind life or death fight for the defense of their ethnicity.
Fascism as seens in places like Spain, Portugal, Greece or even Italy was mainly Nationalist (still authocratic, repressive and violent) and never anywhere as racist or violent as the kind of Fascism that includes claims of racial superiority and representing a whole ethnicity.
Amongst Fascists in Europe it’s only the Nazis that claimed, like the Zionists do, that they represented an entire ethnicity, who similarly committed extreme genocidal violence against specific ethnicities whilst claiming it was all in defense of their own ethnicity and who in the same way claimed than critci sm of their acts was being against that ethnicity.
Any Fascism is bad, but ethno-Fascism adds to it the whole layer of ethnicity and hence is far more cold, calously violent and genocidal when it comes to other ethnicities - think Ku-Klux-Klan crossed with Fascism.
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