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This guy's blog is subtitled "Eliot Jacobson's Collapse of Everything Blog". Is this his schtick? Does he just say the world is ending all the time, or is what

This guy's blog is subtitled "Eliot Jacobson's Collapse of Everything Blog". Is this his schtick? Does he just say the world is ending all the time, or is what he's saying true?

p_j_w 3y ago
>Does he just say the world is ending all the time, or is what he's saying true? These two things aren't necessarily mutually exclusive.
giarc 3y ago
Perhaps. I never know what to believe. I've heard smart, knowledgeable people like Bill Gates state that he thinks we won't experience a scorched Earth ending, but that we will solve this crisis. I'd like to believe him, but then I see an article like this and I don't know who to believe, the graphs are pretty damning if only to say "that line is way above the other lines, and that is bad."
- djleni 3y ago
  For what it’s worth, the average interpretation I’ve seen from climate scientists is: - No, we won’t hit scorched earth Venus-like runaway warming. - If we don’t reduce emissions drastically, greenhouse gas warming plus various feedbacks will cause extreme weather, render some parts of the world unlivable due to wet bulb temperature, and overwhelm unprepared infrastructure, costing huge amounts of money and creating millions of migrants. So, not the end times, but definitely dark times. If you sprinkle a bit of pessimism about current politics it’s not a stretch to assume we probably won’t handle those impacts gracefully, or achieve the drastic emissions cuts required to avoid them.
  - iso1631 3y ago
    Millions of migrants seems a massivly optimistic view. I suspect it will be well over a billion in 10 years.
    - pc86 3y ago
      What's your citation for suspecting that more than 1 in 8 living people will be a migrant? That seems pretty alarmist, and well over any number I've seen suggested elsewhere.
      - sofixa 3y ago
        Well if current temperatures and predictions are anything to go by, big chunks of Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Bangladesh will become uninhabitable, wet bulb temperatures wise. Just from that area you can easily get to 1 billion; there's also Africa and the Americas that could experience droughts, destruction of wildlife habitats relied upon for sustenance (mostly fishing), unviable temperatures, floodings, etc.
      - bbor 3y ago
        Definitely don’t think it’s as settled as you’re implying here :) This think tank says 1.2B: https://www.zurich.com/en/media/magazine/2022/there-could-be-1-2-billion-climate-refugees-by-2050-here-s-what-you-need-to-know https://www.zurich.com/en/media/magazine/2022/there-could-be... Reasoning: - 19 countries with the highest number of ecological threats are among the world’s 40 least peaceful countries including Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Chad, India and Pakistan. - Over one billion people live in 31 countries where the country’s resilience is unlikely to sufficiently withstand the impact of ecological events by 2050, contributing to mass population displacement. - Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, the Middle East and North Africa are the regions facing the largest number of ecological threats. - 3.5 billion people could suffer from food insecurity by 2050; which is an increase of 1.5 billion people from today. - The lack of resilience in countries covered in the ETR will lead to worsening food insecurity and competition over resources, increasing civil unrest and mass displacement, exposing developed countries to increased influxes of refugees.
      - forgetfreeman 3y ago
        Just look at the population figures for the areas of the globe that are projected to become uninhabitable. That's your baseline number and it by itself is over a billion people. Any additional extrapolation for political and social upheavals related to resource conflicts (regardless of how conservative your analysis might be) only add to that baseline.
  - saltminer 3y ago
    > greenhouse gas warming plus various feedbacks will cause extreme weather, render some parts of the world unlivable due to wet bulb temperature, and overwhelm unprepared infrastructure, costing huge amounts of money and creating millions of migrants This is what I've been trying to tell people for years. Climate change is everyone's concern, if only because entire nations becoming uninhabitable, wars over natural resources (not just oil - now we'll be seeing fighting over arable land and water sources), etc. will cause massive influxes of refugees. Even if many nations did not have a significant split in opinions on migrants, most are still ill-equipped to handle the many millions of climate refugees that will come. Remember the Syrian migrant crisis? Where people were shouting about "the great replacement" (read: "white genocide") over people fleeing ISIS? That's going to seem like chump change compared to what's coming (and I'd bet good money that new extremist groups will start popping up as conditions deteriorate, governments collapse, etc. - a good chunk of the blame for climate change can be laid at the feet of developed nations, after all, so I would be shocked if no extremist groups decided to take matters into their own hands). I could write at length about this, but I'll leave it at this: the US is not going to come out of this unscathed. Obviously, sea level rise will lead to coastal flooding, yada yada, but unless American agriculture is forced to be more conservative with its water usage, the aquifers we rely so desperately on for our farmlands will run dry due to over-pumping within this century (and with megadroughts getting worse, our aquifers are recharging far slower than before...this will only get worse as climate change worsens).
- tovej 3y ago
  Bill Gates has been buying up water reserves, has investments in polluting industries, and he's got an interest in keeping the public thinking it's "not so bad". It is. Bill Gates is also behind the "our world in data" series on youtube, that consistently misrepresents climate science to make it seem like we can solve it with enough "green industry", when the only real solution is degrowth, we can't afford to keep siphoning the carbon out of the earth. GDP growth is correlated with --- and the main driver of --- the warming. This message doesn't serve the interests of billionaires, and Gates is no exception.
  - mistrial9 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - CyberDildonics 3y ago
      Bill Gates purchased farms clandestinely on a massive scale Clandestine means secrete and illegal. If it was secret, how do you know about it and if it was illegal, what was illegal about it? Bill Gates famously funded a "mini-nukes" company to make smaller footprint nuclear power plants, and portable nuclear generators. So what? Where is the connection to a smaller nuclear reactor coming from?
      - mistrial9 3y ago
        pedantic "secrete" means to emit fluids or odor.. if you say so! ; "clandestine" means secret or secretive "especially if illegal" .. not illegal per se.. "so what" is up to you.. maybe it means nothing to you, "so what"
        CyberDildonics 3y ago
        maybe it means nothing to you It means nothing to me, what was the point you were trying to make?
  - boc 3y ago
    Degrowth is not a solution. Geo-engineering is our only way out of this mess.
- otikik 3y ago
  Oh, I believe him. "We (the ultra-rich) won't experience a scorched Earth ending"
  - bamfly 3y ago
    From what I can tell, they'll all be riding it out in New Zealand, to minimize the climate effects they personally experience and keep themselves nice and far away from any political instability (or consequences...) It's the goldilocks-zone country for avoiding climate chaos, if you also need to minimize chances that the government will seize all your stuff (as less-liberal states might).
- zzzeek 3y ago
  a public figure like Bill Gates who is trying to provide solutions (or whatever he is doing, I see some other posts pointing to other less noble agendas he might have) can't exactly come out and say "well, this will probably all not work, most of the observations point to collapse of most farming and mass die-offs due to heat / starvation within ten years", that would work against his goal of getting people motivated and interested in working / voting towards a solution.
- followthefunny 3y ago
  [flagged]
thedougd 3y ago
"Eliot Jacobson, Ph.D. Retired professor of mathematics and computer science, retired casino consultant, now a full time volunteer, husband and grandfather. Know-it-all doomer. Born in the year 316 ppm CO2."
- avgcorrection 3y ago
  Seems he was born in 1959. Hmph. I want to scoff at how easy he has had it on this subject. And I guess I am.
abeppu 3y ago
Why do you think these things are in tension? If the world has been on a decades-long trajectory careening towards disaster with little indication that we can coordinate to respond appropriately, someone _should_ be saying it all the time _because_ it's true.
Trasmatta 3y ago
Climate change is terrifying, but I also have a hard time taking self titled Doomers totally seriously. It makes sense to consider all of the worst case scenarios for any event, and to prepare for them. But Doomers seem to have an obsession with it, and a need to convince others that the worst will happen. I noticed this a lot in 2020. COVID was (and is) awful, but there was so much shit that Doomers claimed would happen that year that just didn't. They seem to have a bias towards always considering the worst case scenario the most likely.
- jazzyjackson 3y ago
  Apocalyptic Ideation see also: the book of revelations There will always be people fixated on The End, some because they think we all deserve it, others because they can't seperate their own existential crisis from potential global crises
  - PheonixPharts 3y ago
    And still others because they've started looking at the pieces of how our global society functions as a system and realized that it's very possible we have pushed our environment beyond it's ability to support us. Leading ultimately to overshoot which leads to collapse.
    - jjoonathan 3y ago
      Maybe, but they never seem to weigh any of the challenges against humanity's staggering ability to adapt and overcome. Doomerism has planet-sized infomercial hands. There is a long and embarassing trail of false apocalypses predicted from extrapolations + assumptions of helplessness, often made by otherwise intelligent and scientifically inclined people. We were all going to starve, but then Haber figured out how to chemically fix Nitrogen. Nuclear war was going to end the world, but then MAD actually worked. The ozone hole was going to cook the plant life, but then we cleaned up our refrigerants. We were going to run out of oil by 2010, but then we found more. Betting against humanity isn't a historically wise move. You don't have a choice in the matter, and it's easy to fixate on this and imagine yourself trapped, but you are "trapped" with one hell of a fighting chance so the truth is you just don't know.
seydor 3y ago
High priests always invoked the wrath of god to convince people
bjourne 3y ago
As I understand it there is a scientific consensus about both the causes and the potential effects of global climate change. Scientists say that we are headed for 2C degrees of warming in the next years. Scientists say that 2C degrees of warming would be disastrous for millions of people. Any random dude can put two and two together.
pphysch 3y ago
Climate change is many things: - Real. - Influenced by human activity, both positively and negatively. - Difficult to study, because we only have decades of hard data for what is a phenomenon spanning eons. - A narrative pushed by Western economies to discourage economic development of the Global South and maintain hegemony. If the former were actually serious about mitigating it, it would harshly regulate planned obsolescence which causes astronomical amounts of waste and pollution. Instead, they browbeat poor countries for building durable infrastructure. - Classic fear-mongering as a means of maintaining control ("follow me or everyone will die"). - An expression of aging "hippy" eschatology; we have one of the most individualistic generations in human history reaching old age and projecting its death onto the world as a coping mechanism. - A polarizing topic that lures engagement. I think blogs like this are a manifestation of the latter two or three.
- vkou 3y ago
  As opposed to the narrative pushed by Western economies to encourage limited forms of economic development in the Global South, by facilitating the creation of captive markets and dependent client states? You know, the normal day-to-day economic orthodoxy the world's been running under for two hundred years? Which one do you think is winning? (Also, when you say the Global South, do you mean the Global South that tends to be exempt from, or subjected to less stringent carbon limitations than the developed world? Or do you mean the Global South that everyone starts complaining about as soon as I mention that maybe we should reduce our emissions...)
  - pphysch 3y ago
    > You know, the normal day-to-day economic orthodoxy the world's been running under for two hundred years? Exactly, it's modern lipstick for an old pig. > the Global South that everyone starts complaining about as soon as I mention that maybe we should reduce our emissions... Yeah, that one.
rpenm 3y ago
The sea surface temperature data is from NOAA and the sea ice extent data is from JAXA. His claims are not difficult to verify, if you follow the citations.
phkahler 3y ago
>> Is this his schtick? Does he just say the world is ending all the time, or is what he's saying true? I didn't get any "alarmist" signals from this post of his until near the end. If all the data is as it suggests there really does seem to be something going on this year in particular in addition to a trend. But then he said "Infrastructure will break beyond repair." which jumped out as alarmist to me. Like we can't fix or build more infrastructure? I wish people wouldn't do that, as it makes me react with "dude calm down" when they otherwise seem to have a point.
- bbor 3y ago
  I guess it depends on what you mean by “beyond repair”, I.e. how many pieces of a bridge can you replace before you’re replacing the bridge rather than repairing it? I am definitely not an expert on infrastructure or civil engineering in general, but I’ve heard lots of stories about heat being bad for our infra, e.g. warped rail lines in the UK. “Beyond repair” seems within the bound of reason EDIT: also, obligatory dont-look-up-ication: "I didn't sense any 'alarmist' undertones from this post of his until almost the end. If all the data is as it suggests, there genuinely seems to be an extraordinary astronomical event headed our way this year on top of other celestial trends. But then he said, 'Civilization will crumble beyond repair,' which struck me as alarmist. Like we can't rebuild or adapt our society? I wish people wouldn't resort to such extreme statements, as it prompts me to respond with 'dude, calm down,' even when they otherwise seem to have a valid concern."
- data_maan 3y ago
  I think the point here is the metaphore. When you say "infrastructure" you think of bridges, roads etc. And for those you have a notion of possibility and difficulty of repairing them. When he says "infrastructure" he means the nature that we draw on (to build our infrastructure) i.e. the weather, the trophic chains etc. I would doubt that everything from one type of infra can be translated to the other. E.g. when it comes to nature some things are simply almost irreversible, whereas there is no such thing for man-made infra.
wahnfrieden 3y ago
try discussing the ideas and data, not the guy
- anigbrowl 3y ago
  We should do both. Gates has outsized personal influence and resources, he's not some quirky hermit that publishes startling pamphlets but is otherwise separate from the world. It's rational to consider whether and where his personal interests coincide with his policy proposals.
  - wahnfrieden 3y ago
    who
Havoc 3y ago
To be fair it seems to be quite a hot niche right now

This guy's blog is subtitled "Eliot Jacobson's Collapse of Everything Blog". Is this his schtick? Does he just say the world is ending all the time, or is what he's saying true?

p_j_w 3y ago

>Does he just say the world is ending all the time, or is what he's saying true? These two things aren't necessarily mutually exclusive.

giarc 3y ago

Perhaps. I never know what to believe. I've heard smart, knowledgeable people like Bill Gates state that he thinks we won't experience a scorched Earth ending, but that we will solve this crisis. I'd like to believe him, but then I see an article like this and I don't know who to believe, the graphs are pretty damning if only to say "that line is way above the other lines, and that is bad."

djleni 3y ago
For what it’s worth, the average interpretation I’ve seen from climate scientists is: - No, we won’t hit scorched earth Venus-like runaway warming. - If we don’t reduce emissions drastically, greenhouse gas warming plus various feedbacks will cause extreme weather, render some parts of the world unlivable due to wet bulb temperature, and overwhelm unprepared infrastructure, costing huge amounts of money and creating millions of migrants. So, not the end times, but definitely dark times. If you sprinkle a bit of pessimism about current politics it’s not a stretch to assume we probably won’t handle those impacts gracefully, or achieve the drastic emissions cuts required to avoid them.
- iso1631 3y ago
  Millions of migrants seems a massivly optimistic view. I suspect it will be well over a billion in 10 years.
  - pc86 3y ago
    What's your citation for suspecting that more than 1 in 8 living people will be a migrant? That seems pretty alarmist, and well over any number I've seen suggested elsewhere.
    - sofixa 3y ago
      Well if current temperatures and predictions are anything to go by, big chunks of Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Bangladesh will become uninhabitable, wet bulb temperatures wise. Just from that area you can easily get to 1 billion; there's also Africa and the Americas that could experience droughts, destruction of wildlife habitats relied upon for sustenance (mostly fishing), unviable temperatures, floodings, etc.
    - bbor 3y ago
      Definitely don’t think it’s as settled as you’re implying here :) This think tank says 1.2B: https://www.zurich.com/en/media/magazine/2022/there-could-be-1-2-billion-climate-refugees-by-2050-here-s-what-you-need-to-know https://www.zurich.com/en/media/magazine/2022/there-could-be... Reasoning: - 19 countries with the highest number of ecological threats are among the world’s 40 least peaceful countries including Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Chad, India and Pakistan. - Over one billion people live in 31 countries where the country’s resilience is unlikely to sufficiently withstand the impact of ecological events by 2050, contributing to mass population displacement. - Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, the Middle East and North Africa are the regions facing the largest number of ecological threats. - 3.5 billion people could suffer from food insecurity by 2050; which is an increase of 1.5 billion people from today. - The lack of resilience in countries covered in the ETR will lead to worsening food insecurity and competition over resources, increasing civil unrest and mass displacement, exposing developed countries to increased influxes of refugees.
    - forgetfreeman 3y ago
      Just look at the population figures for the areas of the globe that are projected to become uninhabitable. That's your baseline number and it by itself is over a billion people. Any additional extrapolation for political and social upheavals related to resource conflicts (regardless of how conservative your analysis might be) only add to that baseline.
- saltminer 3y ago
  > greenhouse gas warming plus various feedbacks will cause extreme weather, render some parts of the world unlivable due to wet bulb temperature, and overwhelm unprepared infrastructure, costing huge amounts of money and creating millions of migrants This is what I've been trying to tell people for years. Climate change is everyone's concern, if only because entire nations becoming uninhabitable, wars over natural resources (not just oil - now we'll be seeing fighting over arable land and water sources), etc. will cause massive influxes of refugees. Even if many nations did not have a significant split in opinions on migrants, most are still ill-equipped to handle the many millions of climate refugees that will come. Remember the Syrian migrant crisis? Where people were shouting about "the great replacement" (read: "white genocide") over people fleeing ISIS? That's going to seem like chump change compared to what's coming (and I'd bet good money that new extremist groups will start popping up as conditions deteriorate, governments collapse, etc. - a good chunk of the blame for climate change can be laid at the feet of developed nations, after all, so I would be shocked if no extremist groups decided to take matters into their own hands). I could write at length about this, but I'll leave it at this: the US is not going to come out of this unscathed. Obviously, sea level rise will lead to coastal flooding, yada yada, but unless American agriculture is forced to be more conservative with its water usage, the aquifers we rely so desperately on for our farmlands will run dry due to over-pumping within this century (and with megadroughts getting worse, our aquifers are recharging far slower than before...this will only get worse as climate change worsens).
tovej 3y ago
Bill Gates has been buying up water reserves, has investments in polluting industries, and he's got an interest in keeping the public thinking it's "not so bad". It is. Bill Gates is also behind the "our world in data" series on youtube, that consistently misrepresents climate science to make it seem like we can solve it with enough "green industry", when the only real solution is degrowth, we can't afford to keep siphoning the carbon out of the earth. GDP growth is correlated with --- and the main driver of --- the warming. This message doesn't serve the interests of billionaires, and Gates is no exception.
- mistrial9 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - CyberDildonics 3y ago
    Bill Gates purchased farms clandestinely on a massive scale Clandestine means secrete and illegal. If it was secret, how do you know about it and if it was illegal, what was illegal about it? Bill Gates famously funded a "mini-nukes" company to make smaller footprint nuclear power plants, and portable nuclear generators. So what? Where is the connection to a smaller nuclear reactor coming from?
    - mistrial9 3y ago
      pedantic "secrete" means to emit fluids or odor.. if you say so! ; "clandestine" means secret or secretive "especially if illegal" .. not illegal per se.. "so what" is up to you.. maybe it means nothing to you, "so what"
      - CyberDildonics 3y ago
        maybe it means nothing to you It means nothing to me, what was the point you were trying to make?
- boc 3y ago
  Degrowth is not a solution. Geo-engineering is our only way out of this mess.
otikik 3y ago
Oh, I believe him. "We (the ultra-rich) won't experience a scorched Earth ending"
- bamfly 3y ago
  From what I can tell, they'll all be riding it out in New Zealand, to minimize the climate effects they personally experience and keep themselves nice and far away from any political instability (or consequences...) It's the goldilocks-zone country for avoiding climate chaos, if you also need to minimize chances that the government will seize all your stuff (as less-liberal states might).
zzzeek 3y ago
a public figure like Bill Gates who is trying to provide solutions (or whatever he is doing, I see some other posts pointing to other less noble agendas he might have) can't exactly come out and say "well, this will probably all not work, most of the observations point to collapse of most farming and mass die-offs due to heat / starvation within ten years", that would work against his goal of getting people motivated and interested in working / voting towards a solution.
followthefunny 3y ago
[flagged]

thedougd 3y ago

"Eliot Jacobson, Ph.D. Retired professor of mathematics and computer science, retired casino consultant, now a full time volunteer, husband and grandfather. Know-it-all doomer. Born in the year 316 ppm CO2."

avgcorrection 3y ago
Seems he was born in 1959. Hmph. I want to scoff at how easy he has had it on this subject. And I guess I am.

abeppu 3y ago

Why do you think these things are in tension? If the world has been on a decades-long trajectory careening towards disaster with little indication that we can coordinate to respond appropriately, someone _should_ be saying it all the time _because_ it's true.

Trasmatta 3y ago

Climate change is terrifying, but I also have a hard time taking self titled Doomers totally seriously. It makes sense to consider all of the worst case scenarios for any event, and to prepare for them. But Doomers seem to have an obsession with it, and a need to convince others that the worst will happen. I noticed this a lot in 2020. COVID was (and is) awful, but there was so much shit that Doomers claimed would happen that year that just didn't. They seem to have a bias towards always considering the worst case scenario the most likely.

jazzyjackson 3y ago
Apocalyptic Ideation see also: the book of revelations There will always be people fixated on The End, some because they think we all deserve it, others because they can't seperate their own existential crisis from potential global crises
- PheonixPharts 3y ago
  And still others because they've started looking at the pieces of how our global society functions as a system and realized that it's very possible we have pushed our environment beyond it's ability to support us. Leading ultimately to overshoot which leads to collapse.
  - jjoonathan 3y ago
    Maybe, but they never seem to weigh any of the challenges against humanity's staggering ability to adapt and overcome. Doomerism has planet-sized infomercial hands. There is a long and embarassing trail of false apocalypses predicted from extrapolations + assumptions of helplessness, often made by otherwise intelligent and scientifically inclined people. We were all going to starve, but then Haber figured out how to chemically fix Nitrogen. Nuclear war was going to end the world, but then MAD actually worked. The ozone hole was going to cook the plant life, but then we cleaned up our refrigerants. We were going to run out of oil by 2010, but then we found more. Betting against humanity isn't a historically wise move. You don't have a choice in the matter, and it's easy to fixate on this and imagine yourself trapped, but you are "trapped" with one hell of a fighting chance so the truth is you just don't know.

seydor 3y ago

High priests always invoked the wrath of god to convince people

bjourne 3y ago

As I understand it there is a scientific consensus about both the causes and the potential effects of global climate change. Scientists say that we are headed for 2C degrees of warming in the next years. Scientists say that 2C degrees of warming would be disastrous for millions of people. Any random dude can put two and two together.

pphysch 3y ago

Climate change is many things: - Real. - Influenced by human activity, both positively and negatively. - Difficult to study, because we only have decades of hard data for what is a phenomenon spanning eons. - A narrative pushed by Western economies to discourage economic development of the Global South and maintain hegemony. If the former were actually serious about mitigating it, it would harshly regulate planned obsolescence which causes astronomical amounts of waste and pollution. Instead, they browbeat poor countries for building durable infrastructure. - Classic fear-mongering as a means of maintaining control ("follow me or everyone will die"). - An expression of aging "hippy" eschatology; we have one of the most individualistic generations in human history reaching old age and projecting its death onto the world as a coping mechanism. - A polarizing topic that lures engagement. I think blogs like this are a manifestation of the latter two or three.

vkou 3y ago
As opposed to the narrative pushed by Western economies to encourage limited forms of economic development in the Global South, by facilitating the creation of captive markets and dependent client states? You know, the normal day-to-day economic orthodoxy the world's been running under for two hundred years? Which one do you think is winning? (Also, when you say the Global South, do you mean the Global South that tends to be exempt from, or subjected to less stringent carbon limitations than the developed world? Or do you mean the Global South that everyone starts complaining about as soon as I mention that maybe we should reduce our emissions...)
- pphysch 3y ago
  > You know, the normal day-to-day economic orthodoxy the world's been running under for two hundred years? Exactly, it's modern lipstick for an old pig. > the Global South that everyone starts complaining about as soon as I mention that maybe we should reduce our emissions... Yeah, that one.

rpenm 3y ago

The sea surface temperature data is from NOAA and the sea ice extent data is from JAXA. His claims are not difficult to verify, if you follow the citations.

phkahler 3y ago

>> Is this his schtick? Does he just say the world is ending all the time, or is what he's saying true? I didn't get any "alarmist" signals from this post of his until near the end. If all the data is as it suggests there really does seem to be something going on this year in particular in addition to a trend. But then he said "Infrastructure will break beyond repair." which jumped out as alarmist to me. Like we can't fix or build more infrastructure? I wish people wouldn't do that, as it makes me react with "dude calm down" when they otherwise seem to have a point.

bbor 3y ago
I guess it depends on what you mean by “beyond repair”, I.e. how many pieces of a bridge can you replace before you’re replacing the bridge rather than repairing it? I am definitely not an expert on infrastructure or civil engineering in general, but I’ve heard lots of stories about heat being bad for our infra, e.g. warped rail lines in the UK. “Beyond repair” seems within the bound of reason EDIT: also, obligatory dont-look-up-ication: "I didn't sense any 'alarmist' undertones from this post of his until almost the end. If all the data is as it suggests, there genuinely seems to be an extraordinary astronomical event headed our way this year on top of other celestial trends. But then he said, 'Civilization will crumble beyond repair,' which struck me as alarmist. Like we can't rebuild or adapt our society? I wish people wouldn't resort to such extreme statements, as it prompts me to respond with 'dude, calm down,' even when they otherwise seem to have a valid concern."
data_maan 3y ago
I think the point here is the metaphore. When you say "infrastructure" you think of bridges, roads etc. And for those you have a notion of possibility and difficulty of repairing them. When he says "infrastructure" he means the nature that we draw on (to build our infrastructure) i.e. the weather, the trophic chains etc. I would doubt that everything from one type of infra can be translated to the other. E.g. when it comes to nature some things are simply almost irreversible, whereas there is no such thing for man-made infra.

wahnfrieden 3y ago

try discussing the ideas and data, not the guy

anigbrowl 3y ago
We should do both. Gates has outsized personal influence and resources, he's not some quirky hermit that publishes startling pamphlets but is otherwise separate from the world. It's rational to consider whether and where his personal interests coincide with his policy proposals.
- wahnfrieden 3y ago
  who

Havoc 3y ago

To be fair it seems to be quite a hot niche right now