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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • Plus, current climate change has seen a velocity across a mere century that prior events took tens of thousands of years to achieve.

    This imparts an “inertia” to our current climate that - even if we stopped on a dime, right now - will lead to conditions that may have most of the planet outside of the polar regions as being uninhabitable year-round due to chaotic weather and lethally high wet bulb temperatures that AC is simply unable to handle.

    And if we don’t stop; if we continue on our “business as usual” path for another 10 or 20 or 30 years, said inertia could conceivably push the entire planet over into a full-blown Venus Scenario, wiping all life from the face of the planet.

    Warming trails CO2 by 15-20 years. We are now seeing the 1.5℃ of warming of 2003, when Windows XP was released. If we hit CO2 levels that predict 5℃ of warming, humanity has essentially dug its own grave, the planet will (once warming catches up) no longer have any carrying capacity for us to survive in sufficient numbers. If we hit CO2 levels that predict 8-10℃, we run a non-trivial possibility of a tip-over into a Venus Scenario.

    Prior events took many tens to hundreds of thousands of years, allowing entire ecosystems to migrate to and from the poles. This allowed the biosphere to “put the brakes on” warming itself because they never stopped being robust sequesters of CO2.

    We don’t have that in play, here. Entire ecosystems will die in-place because they simply don’t have the time to migrate. We will see extinctions on a scale never before seen in the geological record. And the very robust biosphere that saved the planet in prior warming events will be commensurately weakened in this one, likely to the point where it cannot effectively sequester sufficient CO2 to stop the warming.

    TL;DR: as a species, the likelihood that we are all endlings is uncomfortably high. Humanity may not see the year 2100, and will most likely not see the year 2200.




  • Libertarianism requires its members to engage in due diligence in order to execute their libertarian ideals properly and make the choices that are correct for them.

    This, unfortunately, excludes the lower-60% of all Americans, who are so ground down, economically terrorized, and mentally overwhelmed with their daily struggles to survive that they have little to no opportunity to approach any major choice with anything even vaguely in the realm of due diligence. They just don’t have the headspace to do so, and are forced to spend all their available mental efforts on just putting one financial foot in front of the other.

    This is why having social support frameworks enforced/provided/funded by the government is so important for so many working-class people - it allows them to put those issues on autopilot, significantly reducing their own cognitive load and allowing them to better process the most important issues in their lives.

    Ergo, libertarianism is a wealthy person’s toy. It is something that they can champion, because only they have the economic options and financial freedom to fully and properly engage with it.

    Until everyone has vanishingly few catastrophic-level issues on the horizon (like one missed paycheque leading to homelessness, or a sudden illness leading to medical bankruptcy), any attempt to implement libertarianism will only bring mass amounts of misery and destroyed lives to anyone beneath the Parasite Class.

    And when you have those kinds of widespread government-provided supports that lift all boats - and not just the megayachts - why bother with libertarianism? We should continue to use what got everyone into that safe state in the first place – socialism.

    Remember, the Parasite Class already uses socialism for themselves. It’s called grants and bailouts and subsidies, and allows the Parasite Class to privatize the profits and socialize the losses.

    It’s just at a scale that makes it impossible for working-class people to leverage.