Greta Thunberg

But they are routinely used as political tools. It's amazing how much pure shit gets passed as being "for the children" (like state lotteries, a crime against citizens even if they don't gamble). And look how children's tragedies are exploited from Elian Gonzalez to Alan Kurdi. You'd think people would be more suspicious about the crocodile tears, but instead, they eat it up. Amazing.

 

Johnathan Swift famously wrote a letter to the editor suggesting the solution to the "Irish Problem" of the potato famine, was to make it every patriotic British citizen's duty to eat Irish babies. For his efforts, he received several thousand letters asking where they could buy their Irish babies and find recipes. The sad truth is the wealthiest and most powerful country in the world, the most religious in the developed world, has the worst social record imaginable and is now confronting another possible civil war.

When your own children progressively reject everything you stand for over the last century, you'd think people would catch on. Modern technology is about to offer them real alternatives and new ways to elevate themselves and each other. You can run, but you cannot hide from the self-evident truth being revealed by modern science, that metaethics rule the universe, and as yea sow so shall yea get.

 

You really said an important mouthful there. Our social development has become what you'd expect from so many people with so few restrictions on things like wealth and religion as well as the acceptance of hedonism as a norm for most of the country's history. Back then people were more factionalized by limited communities, limited communications and substantial travel times (people wrote books over the course of a trip as a norm).

But people were also closer to living off the land in early America, even into the 20th century. So their reliance on government was far slimmer than what we see now. Back then the church had to keep their congregations mired in a state of constant guilt to cover the overhead of taking care of things the government didn't. In the 19th century a "homeless" person in a city would likely have been told not to let the sun set on them. Rapists were executed more often than murderers. And churches were actively engaged with keeping the disadvantaged far away from the rest of society.

We had alms houses in the US well into the 20th century. Today such a thing is barely heard of. A place where you have to work to earn your keep? Oh the horror!

What's weird to see today though is that people are once again segregating into factions, largely by class, but also by ethnicity and nationality. Sure this happened in the early days of the US, but today we're watching the beginnings of wholly ethnic cities instead of connected enclaves. But what really blows my mind is how the "social contract", Quixotic though it may be, has been abandoned by the wealthy class except where it wins them governmental brownie points.

The rest of humanity to them are just turnips from which to squeeze every last drop of blood. I can't help but wonder why they are so rarely the targets of maniacs.

 

In George Washington's day men commonly shared a bed with someone else when sleeping at an Inn, and spent their money on food and wine. Their entire society was founded by extended families on rural farms and, for many of them, the idea of even sleeping off the floor was exotic, with furniture being a significant expense. Today's family of four in the suburbs can't compete with John Boy Walton, and their numbers are imploding as a result. They desperately need to change their lifestyles, but usually have no clue how to go about it in a society that promotes materialism, however, automation is about to change everything, starting with the economics that power the whole system.

 

We'll all be long dead before automation changes everything. They can't even build a robot that stands upright, much less has to deal with my boss.

I do look forward to the day when bosses are left with machines to try and insult, though, 'cause they won't get the job right, either.

 

I estimate just short of 2 trillion (an average approximately 20 bees per hive x 90.5million hives). How many honey bees are there? A 2019 update. But my point was Onceburned was telling us he didn't see evidence of mass extinctions, so I was just trying to get an idea of how reliable an observer he is.

 

The devils advocate thing is just another round about argumentum ad hominem, as is the troll label

I would take the main definition of devils' advocate as someone arguing a point they dont believe

In this case, yes I do believe you need to have at least a rough idea of how many bees there are in order to be confident to preach to others the amount of that somerhing is declining when you dont know how much of that something exists

There are less bee species, but there are more bees than ever before. If you go around for the next 20 years, and its already been happening for 10 years; telling people because of declining number of total bees, agriculture will suffer and there will be mass food shortages.....and it doesnt happen....


Its another one of those ones where we should have seen an effect already. We wont, because they just farm more bees, import / export them, a whole other industry pops up that didnt exist before

The decline of the number of insect species in the last 10 years cant be explained by climate change alone, it has been too dramatic. Increase in atmospheric radiation due to cell phone networks does make the most sense. Along with household insecticides.

And those two things point to us directly. We cant blame governments for us being on our smartphones all the time. Or even evil greedy capitalist cell phone makers. And thats where the climate change activists get in the same kind of denial as the climate change deniers. If its something they have to take personal responsibilty for, pretend it doesnt exist

 

I always find myself arguing for things I don't believe in. lol. I just don't like seeing people heavily scruitised for their own ideals, so I'll put mine aside and stand by them.

 

You didnt even read that article did you

 

Oh, there was an article! Golly gee, let me read it! Please, please, please! Gotta get my hands on this article!

 

Yes I read it. The article says there has been a significant decline in the honeybee population in the U.S, although not worldwide, since 1961. You didn't even read the 7 articles I cited in my previous post, did you? I don't think farming more bees will solve the problem.

 

You dont think farming more bees is going to solve the problem of needing more bees to polinate crops.

Well, that is how they are managing it now

 

Lands man on the moon.
Dunno how to pollenate plants we've lived on for 50,000 years.

 

The issue is the disappearance of wild bees, not farmed bees
And their decline is likely due to heavy use of pesticides in the US, not cell phone use
(Not that I'm really disagreeing with what you said about cell phones, I think radiation due to cell phones probably does cause harm but we just dont know enough about the long term effects yet)

Beyond honey bees: Wild bees are also key pollinators, and some species are disappearing

Anyways what you said about cell phone radiation....I think there's a tendency to pit climate change against other types of harmful human activity, or focus on one and ignore the other, but humans should really focus on the whole, on everything humans do that is harmful to nature

 

That has little to do with it. I actually want the UK out now as soon as possible as well (albeit for different reasons as the brexit supporters). I don't know if you missed it but he tried some rather uhm.. unorthodox methods to get his way. At least as a leader of a parliamentary democracy.

 

Tell that to the UAW! Automation has wiped out whole floors of office workers and food production workers as well. Sure, androids are a long way off, but automation is shifting into overdrive, even replacing engineers and craftsmen.

 

It really isn't, though. It can replace people stuffing meat into boxes, and that's about it. It has no intelligence. It can't even work out complicated jobs. It can do one thing: put meat into boxes. And that's it. You guys want to pretend there's some robotic revolution, but guess what? Even AI researchers admit that they're nowhere near creating a conscious robot. Most of them say it's impossible, and I would tend to agree. Consciousness plays a big role in being able to do people's jobs, obviously. Yeah, you can get a robot to stuff meat into boxes. You can even get a robot to cut the meat. You can never get a robot who is going to cook and clean for you, though.

And the robots will make mistakes. Whole assembly lines will be shut down, due to simple timing difficulties. A robot will end up throwing meat on the floor, and an actual human will have to come out and fix everything. And the bosses will have to be pissed at a bunch of machines instead of abusing people. Fuck them.

Anything that just involves a direct action, a robot can do. Anything more complicated, and it can't. It can't think. It can't do two things. It can only do one thing, the thing it was designed for. And employment is actually going up, not down. Pretend we're geniuses who have created thinking robots all you want, though. At the end of the day, everybody's still got a job. Get back to me when you've got robots delivering the mail. Oh wait, that requires consciousness. And you don't have the foggiest idea how to create that, do you? Sorry, tough luck.

 

There are obviously different reasons to play devil's advocate. I, just like Driftrue, play devil's advocate too at times. Details like the exact motive matters

Yups, just because 'we' did something amazing in one technological field doesn't mean we can save us from ourselves (well, I think we can but it's gonna be an effort and not solely a technological one)
What if we do find a way to artificially pollinate crops like in indoors intensive farms at the cost of any wild bee and other pollinating insects in nature? I think I rather have some thriving ecosystems.

 

Consider me stupid then : )

Although it's not only because I find him sympathetic...
But you'd find my other reasons stupid too so I will not open myself up to that debate by talking about them. I don't mind if anyone thinks I'm stupid for it.

 

Pretty sure you're jumping to conclusions here, but im ok with not expanding on him in this thread. He has proven to be a danger to your country's parliamentary democracy though. As well as a stone cold liar. I don't see how anyone can be happy with that