What odds are they giving for “shitty rocket accidentally blows up on launch”?

There is no biological difference between innate and acquired immunity, right? Right?

Slavery was perfectly legal according to the votes at that time.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-05668-6

This paper zooms in on the Amazon forest (used to be the hugest CO2 sequestration area). Every drought year signals the start of a multiple year long stretch where there is a loss of Carbon uptake in the forest. The trees are damaged, weakened and dying from each round of drought.

These droughts are happening on a 5-6 year cycle, and the damage to Carbon absorption lasts from 3-5 years each time.

If I’m doing the math correctly, the annual contribution to global CO2 from the forest was around 1/8 of a year’s human fossil fuel contributions…

They specifically think they ruled out factors like technology, covid and support for the teachers, because different countries isolated for those variables.

It’s clear that US leadership, no matter what it says publicly, is getting ready for a Climate Apocalypse and a “New World Order”. The SPEED at which they are moving indicates they expect things to start getting BAD very soon now.

I think a lot of the narratives that have spun up about what is going on (with the changes in the world order) smack of a kind of “taken-for-granted” reality / logic. There is an overall reaction that the way things were normal in the past is the way they are always supposed to be, and any and all change is now wrong just because it defies to maintain previous expectations.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_constructionism

“The real environment is altogether too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance” between people and their environment. Each person constructs a pseudo-environment that is a subjective, biased, and necessarily abridged mental image of the world, and to a degree, everyone’s pseudo-environment is a fiction.

To me, collapse is THE most cogent explainer for what is going on now. There is an overall pattern of changes where the system seems to be seeking lower complexity and lower costs (money/energy). The facade that we will fix climate change or other global issues in the future…that is going away now.

At the same time, most people seem totally blindsided as they try to grapple with that glimpse into deeper reality…and they are seeing what is going on with a worldview where literal collapse seems to be something they can’t (or won’t) see. Its like a grieving process where people are in stages of denial and bargaining.

So, as an example, instead of being scared about climate, people are fretting about the stock market taking away some of their money. You can see how deeply they are clinging on to this bubble that is popping. That future never was. But what people badly want is to go back to sleep.

This blog post comes at the role of aerosols and raises the issue of whether sulphur ship emissions works out to be a good Faustian bargain.

https://benbyfax.substack.com/p/how-to-boil-the-mediterranean-sea

In hindsight, sulphur ship emissions were running a climate geoengineering program that had a huge effect we didn’t fully realize.

The cooling effect from sulfur is much greater than the warming effect from CO2.

It is good for the climate that we have a emitted a lot of sulfur into the atmosphere, because it is masking a lot of warming. Without sulfur, we’d already be near 2°C.

Even though it’s already accelerating, it’s going to go even faster: The author points out that starting in May, much more emissions will start to be cut over the Mediterranean, which is 1/3 of all ship traffic on the planet.

They don’t have the cards?!?

Interesting quote for our times:

the additional buying power made available by added debt tends to lead to inflation rather than more finished goods and services. This inflationary tendency is the problem the US has been contending with recently.

Seems like you can’t print your way out of resource and energy limits.

…and make Mexico pay for it.

We are subsidizing Canada to the tune of more than 200 Billion Dollars a year.

Translation: Canada buys more stuff from us than we do from them.

Like… why are taxes so hard when the IRS always has all my data?

In some European countries, the government automatically does the taxes and just sends a letter showing the result of the calculation so you have a chance to review the result.

They have all the numbers already…

There is a whole branch of management theory about “narcissistic leadership”.

Narcissistic leaders are not always dysfunctional narcissist personalities…it’s also a style of leadership where the people in charge push their own ideas / agenda and dont really care about other people. Its essentially a leader who is in the job for their own selfish personal gains.

The benefit of narcissistic leaders is that they can be very magnetic people who become very popular. In management schools they basically accept that these people are useful for rallying support.

The danger is that if there is a power vacuum, they often step into top positions where there is no longer oversight / supervision. This is the cardinal rule: you NEVER let these people run anything. NEVER.

Once in a top position, they tend to discard rules, disregard others, do a lot of bad things in secret, sabotage all rivals etc etc, eventually leading to major corruption problems for any organization they head.

You can change the region area view to ‘nino 3.4’, which is a 5-month running trend of the nino area.

Explanation of the nino 3.4 tool is at this page:

https://climatedataguide.ucar.edu/climate-data/nino-sst-indices-nino-12-3-34-4-oni-and-tni

This is one driver of the big disasters like storms, droughts, floods, heat waves and other bad weather that is all being amplified by climate.

The newest month for which there is a full 5-month run would be October/24 which showed a cooling trend, but in the past 60 days it kicked back to a dramatic warming /el nino conditions. Supposedly they forecast a 60% chance of a switch back to neutral conditions in March-April-May.

Under the line graph, there is a small button labelled “show T2 anomaly map”.

If you click that (terrifying) it visualizes how hot the polar regions are getting. Today is about 10-15° above trend.

16" of rain in 8 hours. Wow.

He threw in the towel because the casinos were being investigated for money laundering and the regulations were expected to increase oversight.

They were always a scam just to launder criminal funds.

It is expensive (the most expensive in North America *) because it is low in fossil fuel generation AND uses a lot of renewables with variable production.

The only way to keep the system stable is to rely on fossil fuel generation outside the jurisdiction to offset the peaks and troughs that happen on short time scales.

Ontario actually pays the bordering states to take away excess energy, and they can do it because their gas fired generation can act in seconds to balance supply and demand.

The power EXPORT from the windmills costs the ratepayers in the province over $1B a year…

Similarly, many of the hydro projects rely on seasonal foreign demand. For example BC produces a lot of extra hydro in summer season, and there is air conditioning demand in California during those months. Its not as if the province can hold that water and use it for heating homes during winter.

(* because of unreliable supplies, large consumers like industry can’t actually operate in the province because they cannot get reliable contracts… This is about 1/2 million jobs. This is a big part of how Ontario became a have-not province, actually. I had multiple clients from Ontario’s generating sector who told me that they “did not want” to enter power contracts with penalties around outages, so if a car plant loses power they can lose millions per hour, and the power companies didn’t want to commit to anything. All things equal, big factories can move to Buffalo NY and pay half the price for Ontario energy… )

Basically, it’s expensive because of the costs of remote jurisdiction dependencies and the lack of true self sufficiency.