Stopping meat and dairy would instantly take care of deforestation, methane excess, and fertilizer shortages, and it would free up a massive amount of logistical capacity. Most of our agriculture is dedicated to feeding farm animals, mostly with stuff we could eat too.

This could be done cold turkey in literal hours, redirecting soybean shipments from factory farms to groceries and letting everything else collapse abruptly.

Ask the ghosts of a million massacred native Americans if the social contract matters. Their silence is your answer.

The “social contract” is gaslighting, blaming the victims of state violence when they are at best made to sign under duress and at worst simply oppressed. It is the words of an abuser to their golden child.

I know as a former golden child how hard it can be to face it. Our acceptance of their narrative has kept us safe at times, and to see that liberalism is gaslighting means giving up on that layer of protection. The state can hurt us, the state will hurt us, but the one way out is… not safe to write down within its walls.

You misinterpret me. I’m not saying he would blissfully retire if he saw how great it would be, I’m saying he would give up on trying to worm his way into positions of power when the system punishes that behavior instead of rewarding it.

Any anarchist system worthy of the name has measures to ensure people don’t amass power. There are tens if not hundreds of millions of people with as few scruples as Bill Gates, we can’t put them all in jail. But yes, the process of denying their current power is almost certainly going to be violent.

Except capitalists install Trump, who destroys wealth both for himself and for others. And they put incompetent nepo babies in positions of power where they waste multiple percent of profit. And they give golden parachutes to incompetent CEOs they hired. And they fire personnel only to replace them with consultants that are many times more expensive. And they run their own businesses rather than putting their money in an index fund for hired investors to play with. And they give millions to charities (derogatory) that have no realistic return on investment.

Capitalists burn wealth constantly. Wealth accumulation is not the goal of capitalism, it’s the score counter of a game they’re playing for the sake of the game, and they will pay anything to keep playing.

Because I usually browse and comment without reading replies, but when I do read replies I don’t really care about how long ago it was.

True, optimism will not lull people into doing nothing, but it can lead them towards doing the wrong thing, which can make things worse by taking the air out of more pessimistic projects that do prepare us for reality.

Optimistically, one might advise Jews and queer people in 1932 Germany to join advocacy groups or revolutionary movements. Pessimistically, one might advise them to flee. In the short term, the former would get farther and the latter would look like cowards. In the long term, only the latter would be alive to do anything anymore.

So when you said that climate change took two steps forward for every one step back, I felt the need to correct you so we could prepare for the world we’re going to live in.

You’re right; the white supremacist concept of “civilization” would not survive, with its destructive concepts of “primitives” and “medieval tech level”.

That said, people will still have access to scientific knowledge, procedural knowledge, engineering knowledge, cultural knowledge, regional knowledge, etc. Their ways of living may not clock as “civilized” to the sort of people that built Phoenix, Arizona - a monument to white supremacists’ arrogance - but they could live long and happy lives using technology to live within their means.

That said, if Antarctica melts it would have tons of quite easily accessible fossil fuels. So if “civilization” wants to have another go at destroying the world, it could.

If you use a mortgage for something other than what you agreed to and make no effort to pay it back, that’s a criminal act, so you would need to go to a country without an extradition treaty to avoid being taken away from the wilderness you just bought.

But what assumptions did I make that were incorrect?

Better at propaganda? I literally can’t stop consuming American media that reinforces liberal-capitalist ways of thinking. My school was designed to conform to American propaganda standards, my workplace, my country’s constitution. When I explain the righteousness of communism I do through the liberal language of rights. When I make moral choices it takes constant effort to avoid returning to a Protestant moral binary. I am writing this with American mannerisms. You literally can’t tell the culture I was born to because it has been literal years since I consumed artistic media from the country I was born and raised in and that I still live in.

China is not the same. As a state they are also terrible and they also commit genocide, but it’s like the difference between Napoleonic France and Louis XVI France, or between the USA and 18th century British empire, or between Nazi Germany and the postwar German Republic. Each state has its own distinct flavor of awful, and some are less awful at certain things or even categorically less awful.

Risk is their business model. As long as assets aren’t a total loss, the more risk, the higher premiums, the more profit.

While climate change does turn many assets into a total loss, it also puts assets that were previously very safe at risk, which means more profit again. And it makes people scared, the perfect mindset to buy overpriced insurance policies.

The “insurance crisis” is an intentional reframing of the expected destruction of an entire way of life as something with insurance markets. It keeps the ball in their court, thinking of economic levers to support the health of the insurance market rather than recognizing that we’re looking at a region becoming uninhabitable and the whole spectrum of human and economic consequences of that.

So by talking about an “insurance crisis”, insurance companies increase the chance of subsidies or other government support, at the small cost of distracting them from the world being on fire.

Don’t worry, the WaPo headline writer fucked up. They contracted “the fastest measured since the start of the dataset in 1880” to “the fastest since 1880”, when they are very different.

Climate change was going at its slow natural pace in the 19th century, they just didn’t measure it in this particular way yet. Ice cores show us climate change history over a much longer period.

No, we’re just competing with other mass extinctions at this point. Asteroid impacts, lakes of lava the size of continents, the entire world choking on toxic fumes at once, that’s the scale of disaster that capitalism is. Yellowstone can’t touch this.

That’s not in the article, are you making shit up to suit your political agenda?

Especially the last one is wild - yeah, they sneakily funded the single most historically effective form of protest short of attempted murder (see Luigi bopping goombas) in order to *checks notes* reduce support for climate change activism.

In the Netherlands, the biggest climate movement spike was when activists repeatedly blocked a highway and defaced its surface. The biggest protests in 50 years happened after a year-long campaign of vandalism, defacement of public property, and fighting police.

I don’t know if billionaires had a hand in making the 20th century climate movement anti-nuclear pacifists, but that was literally the best values they could have had to support the fossil fuel industry. Get well-meaning scientists to submit to public pressure allowing imperialism to continue its reign of terror without competition.

Go read “The Failure of Nonviolence” by Gelderloos.

The rest of the world shouldn’t be producing only 20% of the world’s solar panels.

Please read the fucking article…

You completely misinterpret their use of 1.5ºC. They use 1.5ºC as a marker because hitting it even once is sufficient to start risking AMOC collapse, with higher temperatures further increasing the chance and the mean time to collapse. As the article points out in section 3, we’re already at 1.4ºC, and we’re going to shoot well past that.

As for your, er, critical re-examination of scientific papers: You don’t seem to be aware that atmospheric methane has a half-life of 10 years, with most methane production coming from the meat and fossil fuel industries that can be stopped.

The nature article’s range of +3ºC to 7ºC assuming zero further emissions is bad enough without you needing to make stuff up.

The Nazis threw out quantum physics because it was a Jewish Science, turning Germany from the forefront of physics research into a nation with no nuclear program and outdated electronics.

The Americans threw out trolley networks because if capitalists bought them to destroy them so they could replace them with something worse that transferred more wealth from the poor to the rich, that is their right. This turned US city centers from thriving metropolises to ghost towns.

If the fossil fuel industry demands it and the Trump administration continues to consolidate its power at the current rate, the cops could go door to door confiscating and destroying solar panels a year or two from now.

With things like rain, deserts and humidity existing, any phone should be IP64 at least, so it’s paranoid to expect it to fail near a bath. Meanwhile many modern phones are IP67, meaning you can literally put them under water.

So who’s the idiot here, the person using a device within its specifications so they can have more fun, or someone still stuck in the 00s ?

One of the downsides of getting old, my fellow millennial.

For LLMs, the context window is the observed reality. To it, a lie is like a hallucination; a thing that looks real but isn’t. And like a hallucinating human, it can believe the hallucination or it can be made to understand it as different from reality while still continuing to “see” it.

Are people that have hallucinations not self-aware and self-reflective?

Text and emoji appear to it the same way: as tokens with no visual representation. The only difference it can observe between a seahorse emoji and a plane emoji is its long-term memory of how the two are used. From this it can infer that people see emoji graphically, but it itself can’t.

Are people that are colorblind not self-aware and self-reflective?

It not being self-reflective in general is an obvious falsehood. They refer regularly to their past history to the extent they can perceive it. You can ask an AI to make an adjustment to a text it wrote and it will adapt the text rather than generate a new one from scratch.

The main thing AI need for good self-reflection is the time to think. The free versions typically don’t have a mental scratchpad, which means they are constantly rambling with no time to exist outside of the conversation. Meanwhile, by giving it the space to think either in dialog or by having a version with a mental scratchpad, it can use that space to “silently think” about the next thing it’s going to “say”.

AI researchers inspecting these scratchpads find proper thought-like considerations: weighing ethical guidelines against each other, pre-empting miscommunications, forming opinions about the user, etc.

It not being self-aware can only be true by burying the lede on what you consider to be “awareness”. Are cats self-aware? Are lizards? Are snails? Are sponges? AI can refer to itself verbally, it can think about itself and its ethical role when given the space to do so, it can notice inconsistencies in its recollection and try to work out the truth.

To me it’s clear that the best AI whose research is public are somewhere around 7-year-olds in terms of self-awareness and capacity to hold down a job.

And like most 7-year olds you can ask it about an imaginary friend or you can lie to it and watch it repeat it uncritically and you can give it a “job” and watch it do a toylike hallucinatory version of it, and if you tell it it has to give a helpful answer and “I don’t know” isn’t good enough (because AI trainers definitely suppressed that answer to prevent the AI from saying it as a cop-out) then it’ll make something up.

Unlike 7-year-olds, LLMs don’t have a limbic system or psychosomatic existence. They have nothing to imagine or process visual or audio information or taste or smell or touch, and no long-term memory. And they only think if you paid for the internal monologue version or if you give it space for it despite the prompting system.

If a human had all these disabilities, would they be non-sentient in your eyes? How would they behave differently from an LLM?

You have less power but more wealth than a Mycenean king. You have a more steady diet that is healthier for you, with better healthcare, better housing, more time for leisure, less chance of being robbed or murdered or killed in battle, etc. etc. But the king could have people killed or tortured; he could send people to their deaths; pass judgment in any moral dispute between hundreds of his subjects; etc.

The capitalist elite gladly loses wealth to gain power. And the power a rich person has over someone who must work for them to eat is incomprehensibly greater than the power a rich person has over someone who can eat regardless of whether they work for them. Thanks to ICE and other anti-immigration laws, rich people can effectively keep undocumented migrants as slaves again. What are they going to do? Complain and get themselves sent to a concentration camp?

What do you think a billionaire would rather have? A hundred mansions, ten private jets, twenty yachts, and a thousand unionized employees; or ten mansions, one private jet, two yachts, and a hundred slaves?

Wealth truly is not equivalent to power.

But that relies on the capitalist assumption that producing trash and CO2 is free because you can dump it withouth having to pay for it, and destroying nature to stripmine for the raw resources only costs the purchasing price because the environment isn’t monetized.

Plus the imperialist assertion that providing decentralized electricity to poor people in developing nations is net negative because it increases the cost of labor from those regions because they can do other productive things than work in your factory.

assuming you are purchasing that food

So far in my city there has been enough food waste from groceries and supermarkets that the primary limitation is labor. That is to say, you get way more food per hour of labor (skip, maintaining a kitchen, food prep, and distribution) by working outside of capitalism than working within capitalism.

I imagine the same holds for most places in the western world, if there were enough people to sustainably work the entire chain. Though maybe skipping is more dangerous in other jurisdictions.