Many buildings in Africa have their own fossil fuel electric generators. Reliable electricity removes the need for those, which does reduce emissions immediately.

Furthermore, improving people’s lives empowers them to help reduce emissions (or increase them). Reliable electricity frees up labor for things like washing clothes or cooking, which they can then use to work on, for example, regenerative agriculture like the Great Green Wall, which captures CO2 and further reduces the production of CO2 and chemical pollution from extensive farming practices.

Nukes won’t destroy the planet. All their yields combined don’t measure up to a 1 km asteroid or an average supervolcano, and their radiation and dust is gone in 0.00005% of the remaining time Earth will exist.

The chemical pollution of all our industry washing out to sea will have a bigger impact. All ocean-based animals with shells will die out as oceanic acidity reaches critical levels, though in 0.01% of the remaining time earth will exist shell-based life from freshwater habitats would probablu repopulate them if non-shell-based life doesn’t evolve to fill the same niches first.

There will be trees, flowers, mammals, shellfish, algae, fungi, birds, reptiles, and insects. The Earth from above will look like ocean, forest, desert, and glacier, though the forests may cover less of it for the first 0.01% of the remainder of its existence. We will produce a mass extinction event comparable to the other five, but Earth will still look the same at the scale of a simple drawing.

Ah yes, the C bugs in the kernel libraries. We’ve all seen them.

Nuclear war would actually cool the oceans. All nuclear bombs combined contain about the same energy as Hurricane Katrina or a small supervolcano eruption. There would be a small fraction of a degree of temporary increase in global atmospheric temperatures, quickly overwhelmed by the nuclear winter as ash and dust in the upper atmosphere reduce global temperatures by several degrees for several years.

The only way I see humanity boiling the oceans is by deliberately releasing global-industrial quantities of super-effective greenhouse gases, actively designed to make the Earth as well-insulated as possible.

If the EU won’t consider themselves to be at war when the part of the EU defensive pact zone that is called Greenland is invaded, they’re losing all credibility both internally and externally. Why would the EU defend Finland or the Baltics or Cyprus? Why would the EU organize against foreign powers funding violent rebellions inside EU territory (similar to how Russia funded Transnistria or the US funded the contras in Nicaragua)?

There is no better red line for France to launch their nukes than the invasion of Greenland. As seen with Russia, any grace given to cult of personality dictators only emboldens them and their worshipers. The only fair response to madman theory is to call the ‘insane’ administration’s bluff and let the people who don’t want them and their families to become radioactive piles of ash take the responsibility of defying insane orders.

That still wouldn’t excuse him from accusing others of lying.

Run where? An even less hospitable planet?

Buy up primary resources that are unlikely to devalue from climate change (such as indoor farming, solar panel factories, and housing in walkable areas that are less vulnerable to climate disaster like Dublin).

Buy up the tools by which the powerful will desperately cling to power (such as the military industrial complex, media/propaganda channels, and privatized human rights like health care).

Bribe politicians, fund authoritarian-capitalist propaganda, and organize coups to put fragile dictatorships in charge of valuable strategic/industrial resources (like lithium, rare earths, fossil fuel, uranium, etc.).

edit: Thank you for taking my comment to heart!

Original comment:

With all due respect, I think you’re being racist.

This is an active religious practice described objectively and with voice being given to those observing it. To dismiss it as “eastern mysticism narrative” is to deny Shinto itself a place in media on par with western religions.

A couple years back there was a similar bunch of articles about German Hunger Stones - stones expressing pity for the next people that would see the river level go low enough for them to be visible, because the drought would mean disastrous crop failure.

They’re long-lasting traditional climate disaster markers, expressed through the worldview of the culture that discovered the marker, with a news article focused on the unhinged fact that they are now constantly warning that disaster is incoming.

Anytime a non-profit stops for lack of volunteers, that’s a gift economy that’s failing. Whether it is goods or service that you are giving, that’s part of a gift economy.

Most non-profits aren’t gift economies. They’re places where “volunteers” come together to give to “recipients” not in the non-profit. They have no infrastructure for the volunteers to be gifted things, and usually having such an infrastructure is a violation of the law. In a gift economy, volunteers and recipients are all the same class of people, exchanging gifts between all of them.

When you include this criterion, are there still experiments in the 60s and 70s that qualify?

But I have met enough people to know that there is also a very common profile that considers that if you can get away with free stuff, you are smart. And the people who made these rules are dumb. And it’s totally fine to “win” by taking away what you can.

These people exist. And it’s not a rare profile. They are not going to be stopped by a sign that just says “please”. And I don’t want a system where we have policemen chasing them and beating them up if they don’t obey the rules. It’s unavoidable, we have to play their game of wits to some extent.

You’re making one big leap of logic here. Yes, selfish behavior is unavoidable. But you can’t just assume that that makes fighting selfish behavior worth it. Paranoid schizophenia is unavoidable but that doesn’t make lobotomies worth it. If you’re introducing the neurodiversity lens, then consider that we typically don’t treat people who need accommodations with hostility and threat of violence.

Selfish people will take more stuff than they deserve, but if you post a guard to stop them, you’re losing the guard being able to do something more beautiful with their life, you’re losing the joy and comfort of everyone who gets inspected or questioned, you’re creating a culture of suspicion, you’re creating an opportunity for the guard’s prejudices and biases and possible harmful tendencies to harm innocent people, and you have to take into account that the selfish person will either outwit the guard or find a place that is unguarded. Possibly because it’s more vulnerable.

Before you know it, you have more guards than selfish people, all sitting around doing nothing useful with their lives and forming a toxic culture in their idleness, you have hundreds of normal people per selfish person going through difficult processes to demonstrate that they aren’t selfish, dozens of false positives who get treated as selfish and get pigeonholed into a selfish lifestyle, while a handful of people who can’t manage to attract a guard still get fucked over by the selfish people and those selfish people still end up with a similar amount of stuff.

It’s like anti-homeless infrastructure. It doesn’t seem like a big step to remove the bench next to your shop, but next thing you know nobody can sit anywhere, every street looks hostile and barren, and homeless people still find some underpass to sleep under, except now they’re more likely to get sick and require expensive medical care so they might turn to organized crime to get the money they need for the operation they wouldn’t have needed if there had still been benches.

I would sooner believe that the existence of selfish people means gift economies can’t work (because they lose too much to non-participants) than that their existence means gift economies are viable if and only if there’s a sufficiently oppressive gatekeeping system to prevent selfish people from taking more than their fair share.

The question is whether it is more healthy in the long run to let resellers get away with it or to punish everyone by trying to implement a system that catches resellers.

That’s an empirical question, that we don’t have a lot of data for directly. We do have a lot of indirect data. On the trying to catch people side: that the current democratic-legalistic justice system is extremely counterproductive in how severely it punishes criminals, that attempts to stop fraud with government social programs typically cost more than the fraud they fights, and that fighting digital piracy negatively affects sales because pirates spread popularity through word of mouth. Meanwhile on the free association side, public libraries aren’t robbed empty; community kitchens have plenty of volunteers to get food, pay rent, and clean up; big boxes of Halloween candy can be left on someone’s porch and most of the time it doesn’t get robbed by one person; lots of countries have self-sustaining queueing cultures; etc.

I don’t really know cases of gift economies being tried and failing, but it’s possible that it often isn’t reported if it happens.

In terms of social predictive reasoning, you could make the argument that openly telling resellers “it’s fine if you resell it if you need the money but please donate or contribute if you can, and please tell people about us” is way more effective than turning it into a game of wits where resellers are too busy evading the security system that everyone else suffers under to question whether they’re making a morally just decision. For example, it seems harder for an undocumented person to prove themselves trustworthy without putting themselves in harm’s way than for a veteran reseller-scammer to fool someone.

In terms of moral red lines, AFAIK many people in this Instance are happy to have seen nothing if someone shoplifts or pirates something. Would it be worse if a reseller takes things from someone who has already decided to give it away for free?

So all in all, I would be very curious about the experiment of just letting resellers take stuff if they’re willing to withstand people being sad at them about it.