Climate Change and the Environment

Actually you’re wrong about that too.

Go on

Pretty sure there’s a better thread for all this.

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The further you fall the less you have to lose. You can’t have less than nothing. 2$ a day isn’t even possible in the United States lol. I see more money getting given to homeless people every time I stop at a red light near a bridge.

2$ a day is a made up number that is 60 years out of date and totally silly. The federal poverty line itself is MUCH more than 2$ a day and is still ridiculously understated and cynically chosen to produce the number of poor people the statistics creators wanted when they created it.

We are the richest country in the world and if our system can’t provide every citizen with food, shelter, and healthcare reliably whatever system we are currently running is responsible. It’s not that expensive and we produce 10-20x the level of resources where it was even a little justifiable for some to go without on the basics. That’s the big picture truth of the matter. Libertarians promised us in the 60’s-80’s that if we just let the free market handle everything we would all be richer for it. Instead the economy bifurcated into a top 40 and a bottom 60 and actually got worse for the bottom 60.

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I agree with that. I also think that a proposal to achieve these conditions is consistent with, and perhaps even requires, a high level of economic freedom—and reinforces it.

I also think such a system is impossible to maintain in the kind of command economy advocated by ~everyone else itt. Ironic.

Nobody itt is doing anything like that at all. We’re simply trying to explain why your limited understanding is, well, limited. But you can’t understand that either. Too many limitations to overcome, I guess.

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No one is advocating for a Venezuela style command economy. Scandinavian style small f free market economy yes.

The problem with this entire argument is that it’s on settled questions. We (everyone anywhere in the neighborhood of serious business/economics) know that the right way to run a country is neither full blown command economy or full blown laissez faire… it’s somewhere in the middle.

There are certain scenarios that just break government and there are certain scenarios that just break free markets and when either one gets control over one of these scenarios that naturally belongs to the other all hell breaks loose. These are known and specific setups at this point. This isn’t supposed to be a conversation about philosophy it’s supposed to be a conversation about engineering.

We have a problem with climate change and it’s bearing down on us. We have to figure out how to deal with it before it gets significantly worse. Personally I think most of the command economy approaches to climate change are doomed to failure because government projects take too much time to get done. That longer time scale is fine for larger projects, but for things like figuring out how to decarbonize the economy I think what’s needed is to use capitalism to optimize the economy for using less carbon.

So the government needs to buy carbon and tax it to drive up it’s cost to consumers, and the cost of living increase that comes from that is going to need to be born entirely by the very wealthy because no one else has any money because they won the last round of the game and ran up the score.

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If only you know the first thing about Parenti you might actually land one of these punches. Swinging at air, friend.

You blocking Mystery?

Missing all the hearts, too.

No he’s who I got into it with about land reform. Other posters views do not make that terrible article you posted any better lol.

I don’t ascribe to the views of the author, or the sentiment expressed in the article. I simply used it to cite to the facts I posed in response to fawning Parenti love. You keep going back to the source, and the author’s intent. I don’t care about any of that and it doesn’t change the Brookings cite one iota.

I saw 55 new posts in this thread and thought “Whats going on, did something interesting happen?” Now I am disappointed wasting my time.

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A person throwing a libertarian link into UP is like throwing a piece of meat into a pond full of piranhas.

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The Brooking cite is hopefully out of context (I am way too lazy to actually hunt it down to prove this point if you really care about it feel free to go look at the Brooking source material), which is another thing guys like the author of your article just LOVE to do. Like I pointed out the problem with the 2$ a day metric is that it was out of date in the 80’s just because of inflation and didn’t accurately reflect the admittedly very hard lives of subsistence farmers.

So yes the technological boom of the last century transitioned a lot of people from the very hard life of subsistence farming to the also very hard life of working in a developing world factory which are such wonderful working environments that they need suicide nets around the workers dorms where they warehouse their cheap labor in between their 14 hour shifts with one day off a week if they’re lucky. But again subsistence farming sucks a lot which is why subsistence farmers in India (and other places) have a tendency to take the easy way out and drink pesticides straight no chaser.

But yes I hated the person who wrote that article the second there were quotes around income inequality. I knew exactly what the goal of the article was and that’s to make a bunch of specious arguments equating ‘economic freedom’ (that really does deserve quotes) with development when the two are barely related, all in defense of the argument that income inequality is a made up thing that doesn’t matter.

Sorry for the delayed response I kept tell myself I was going to look up the Brookings cite because it’s basically a mortal lock to be horribly out of context, but I finally accepted that I am too lazy.

Really smart piranhas.

Six Extinction Rebellion protesters have been cleared of causing criminal damage, despite a jury being told by the judge there was no defence in law for their actions.

Judge Gregory Perrins said that even if their actions were “morally justified”, that did not provide a lawful excuse.

Before reaching their verdicts, the jurors had asked to see a copy of the oath they took when they were sworn in.

Citizen_smith

Power to the People!

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This is good news. As the struggle for ecological and human survival continues there will be more cases like this. So, it’s a good time for a reminder that people who serve on juries in the USA, and the UK(pretty sure about his based upon a quick google) have the right to practice jury nullification. We as jurors do not have an obligation to render verdicts that are contrary to our morality or ethics. I don’t know of any court in the US that tells jurors they have this option, and in most(maybe all) cases the defense is not allowed to inform the jury that they have this option.

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What happened to this? Did they exclude the area from the “roadless rule”?