Rhaedas

I said wild animal, not cat. Missed the point. Where do you draw the line at animal abuse being okay?

If it was a wild animal would it be okay? They aren’t going to be leashed, so I fail to see how that changes empathy.

I think that’s the best angle to improve things right now, minimizing packaging, use other materials in place of plastic where we can, and what used to be the first R, Reduce consumption. The last one has a lot of parts to it, and attacking planned obsolescence is a big one. Things should work longer and be repairable.

Lastly, I hope there is a Hell and Edward Bernays is in it. Look him up to learn about the father of consumerism and how he changed how people act for the worse.

Robber beats you up, knocks you down, and takes your wallet.

“Hey, that’s my money?”

“Tell you what, I’ll just take 30% and call it peace.”

“Okay…just don’t do it again, right?”

Robber runs away laughing.

The Reagan-Carter election is the first one I vaguely remember as a kid, and to have the news of the freed hostages get announced at the inauguration seemed so convenient even for a politically uninformed kid. Yet I heard so much of “see, he got elected and got them free!” NO, Carter did the work, dumbasses. At the cost of his reelection.

How Reagan of him.

The first publishing of “Limits to Growth” suggested that if immediate actions were done to curtail growth and use of resources, the world could possibly in many decades peak and then come back down to a sustainable flat line. That was in 1970. 54 years ago we may have had a chance - although the research didn’t include many things not known to them, including the impact of climate change that was already underway and just not obvious (the ocean was buffering much of the effects for a long time).

My non-scientific opinion is that crossing the line of hunter-gatherer to agriculture was the real point of no return. We gained a lot from that, but it also sealed our path and fate. Finding the rich energy source of petroleum was the final accelerant.

Wasn’t some of that because no one wanted to be the guy to tell him something’s wrong? Eg. the Downfall scene.

Right, it’s not about learning anything. They know what they’re doing. They’re making money.

It’s much cheaper to tell everyone there’s stealth planes over there…than to send any.

Aka Robin Williams joke - instead of building all these stealth bombers, you put some wreckage in the desert and say one of them crashed.

Wow, an active socialist. Helping people. We can’t have that in Washington. Right, Republicans?

Bringing down a helicopter is just a matter of removing the miracle that keeps it up there. I’ve always been wary of them, but after seeing that one tragic Ring video of the small helicopter that just came apart in midair and a straight plummet down. Never. I mean they are great strategically, but when they fail…it’s pretty complete.

Pilots spend an insane amount of their non-flight time in simulators doing this very thing, to the point where when things do go wrong they subconsciously know the routine to address it. There’s no time to think about a reaction in many cases. And now they want to just have one person be at that alert level all the time.

And I thought that fatigue was an ongoing problem with pilots now, but I’m sure having just one person focused the whole flight won’t hurt.

A compromise - have one pilot, but also require there be at least one passenger who has flown before, or at least messed with Flight Simulator at one time in their life.

They’re looking at money and forgetting why there’s rules.

I’d agree I’m cynical, but it’s just my opinion based on everything I’ve read and seen over decades, not some attempt to brainwash people into inaction. We should absolutely do anything we can to change our ways both individually and overall now that we know the damage we do, but that doesn’t guarantee a fix.

It’s very difficult to discuss the state of things today without being accused of being too negative and now even claimed to be “the problem”. If you want to continue thinking that we could have had a modern society with high living standards and constant growth, then go ahead. It’s simply not realistic to me knowing we have a finite world. The bacteria in the beaker analogy is well known to everyone.

We crossed the line maybe with the industrial revolution, but certainly with learning how to use chemical means to provide far more food than naturally possible (Haber process). I fail to see how we can ever get back to that line now, especially since it and everything else we do is heavily dependent on petroleum that’s also finite. Hence my comment on restructuring society - unlimited growth is not sustainable, yet it’s a cornerstone for us for centuries.

I did think we could fix things long ago, but after a while you begin to see the pattern of hope and promises and realize we’re experts at fooling ourselves.

Small changes never were a viable solution, but for a while they could be sold as one. Especially the ones where the consumer became the problem and one to take action (recycling et al.) Only a complete restructuring of society would do much of anything, and now it’s even too late for that because of both the time and the population. Yeah, it’s pessimistic and doomerism, but it’s also reality.

The objective method is to put one of them in parentheses. But that removed the shock effect that they’re going for with the second sentence. I don’t really use Celsius and have to remind myself what’s what, but I think it’s pretty common to know that 100C is boiling water, and half of that is pretty bad.

Wages not keeping in step with inflation is exactly why everything seems so expensive. $30k of today’s money is the equivalent of less than $10k in the 80’s, and cars were more than $10K then except for a few that ended up being examples of “you get what you pay for”.

I should probably state that as “wage increases being suppressed”.

Or a panicked call from their insurance company. “You have a backup, right???”

“It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it.” - George Carlin