I would be very against individual investors not being allowed to buy property for investment. I think most people can agree that corporations like blackstone/rock shouldn't be manipulating markets. It would be very bad to force blackrock to liquidate its current holdings of 230k homes. It could crater the entire industry and it runs into ex-post-facto issues. Assets need to maintain value or banks will fail.
Are asylum cases from Venezuela legitimate or not? One cannot support asylum claims while simultaneously believing Maduro didn't deserve to be arrested.
I absolutely believe that asylum claims from Venezuela are completely legitimate and that Maduro completely deserved to be arrested. I am just saying under international law and norms, the United States government did not have the legal or moral right to go in and abduct him to arrest him. And also, I am not necessarily sure if he deserved to be arrested to be charged with the odd charges the United States is saying they'll charge him with (drug-related offenses) as opposed to all the things related to human rights violations and being a despot. And double-also, Trump's motives here are almost entirely ulterior and impure, as opposed to a moral desire to bring a horrible dictator to justice and free a nation from his clutches.
TSMC running stateside != "nevermind Taiwanese independence"/"US withdrawing military protection for Taiwan"
For starters, TSMC has opened facilities in Az, but these are still owned and operated from Taiwan and rely significantly on Taiwanese capability for substantial inputs to the development process in both knowledge and operational capacity.
The new wafer capacity is not a replacement for Taiwan based infrastructure, but rather an extension of those operations.
And to be blunt: If amerika were to immediately about-face on 1975's "back-to-basics" math movement and resume math theory based primary education in order to develop the foundational comprehension necessary for the materials science at|in the design level workforce, it would still be at least one generation before homegrown capacity was 'on-par' with the current Taiwanese (and Dutch) resources.
TLDR; not a concern from a rational leadership condition.
However, pretending that one TSMC plant in Az is sufficient reason to TACO and post on social media in saggy golf pants == very much a potential outcome; regardless of the absolute immediate cost in lives and material capability, and the unavoidable long term consequences both within the US and around the world caused by said capricious behaviour.
I really didn't mean to imply that one TSMC plant in AZ could replace Taiwan, nor that we should only care about semiconductor wafer output or worse to discount the desires of the Taiwanese people. Presumably, at least some large fraction of them wish to remain independent from China.
From a US strategic perspective, there are a lot of other things made in Taiwan other than just semiconductors. They make a lot of machine tools, for example, and tend to have better quality than what we can get imported from China directly. The castings are likely made in China mainland but then finished in Taiwan. You can get nearly identical machines from either source but the Taiwan-made version is generally superior.
Maybe we should let people learn that actions have consequences. The kind and uplifting are seldom shot.
Take Isabelle Robinson from parkland. Paraphrasing: "It's not my responsibility to "befriend" a person who is showing violent red flags; it’s the school’s job to intervene and provide professional help or remove the threat."
So she did notice the red flags, but didn't do anything, she believe the school should do something not her. The failure in this line of reasoning is that every institution is made up of individuals, if they all think the same way nothing will change.
This is literally a school shooting victim saying she doesn't believe that she should personally have to pay... well she didn't have to pay as much as some of her classmates.
The school of will find their own people to blame.
Pretty much every major religion teaches something like: If they slap one cheek show them the other, and that we are all one.
Nevertheless, very few people will take any amount of responsibility for another "individuals" actions. The logical conclusion is that we sit in silod VR pods until the life support systems fail
Billions of people will not die from climate change, if anything they would simply not be born.
That is already happening in almost every western democracy as fertility rates have dropped precipitously. That is not because we have any food shortages: it’s because people are choosing not to have kids because life is so expensive.
Europe now has hundreds of excess deaths from heat and hundreds of excess deaths from flooding due to events exacerbated or caused entirely by climate change most years. Africa likely already experiences tens of thousands of climate change related deaths each year, although attribution is tricky. Assuming that climate change and its effects are an exponentially escalating phenomenon, why would it be unthinkable that over the next 10/20/50/100 years the cumulative death toll of climate change will reach into the billions?
It all depends ob your assumptions, i.e. the actual effects of climate change on extreme weather events, the capacity of various polities to adapt to these effects and how you would define "climate change related deaths" and the timeframe you are looking at.
Direct fatalities from weather related natural disasters (droughts, floods, storms, etc) between 2005 and 2024 worldwide are estimated somewhere around 200.000 people, so about 10.000 deaths per year [0].
If you assume (just for the sake of the argument) that climate change will increase this death toll by 10% every year for 100 years, direct deaths from natural disasters caused by climate change alone will amount to close to 140.000.000 deaths over that time period.
Add to this indirect deaths, i.e. premature deaths due to insufficient nutrition during childhood caused by drought, disease spread by floods, etc. etc.
And because the effects of climate change are mostly political in nature, you'll have to make some assumptions about that, too. Sea level rise will affect (as in inundate their current homes at least once a year) more than 600 million people by the year 2100 [1]. Many of these peoples will be displaced and depending on the political and economic capacity of their societies to cope with this displacement, this alone could result in millions of deaths.
Climate change is also a contributor to general political instability and the risk of both civil and nation state war. How do you account for those deaths?
In summary, the death toll of climate change can inherently not be known. But if you look at the next hundred years, I doubt you can assume a number of less than in the hundreds of millions, if we assume climate change effects based on current estimates of "status quo" emissions. Which makes emission reductions essential, because there is a literal connection between an additional ton of CO2 in the atmosphere and an increase in the number of deaths.
Which is why I wrote "for the sake of the argument". You can of course make your own assumptions, but for my money, 10% is not necessarily unrealistic.
Temperature = energy and more energy will necessarily lead to an increased number of and more severe weather events which in turn will claim more lives.
Natural disasters also have the nasty tendency to have tipping points. If a disaster (or a string of disasters) overwhelms the ability of a society to mitigate its effects, deaths rise exponentially not linearly with the severity of the event. I.e. the U.S. government can likely mitigate the effects of any one hurricane, but a series of catastrophic hurricanes might lead to a total collapse of the disaster response system, leading to potentially tens of thousands of deaths which otherwise could have been avoided.
And again: direct deaths from natural disasters are only one aspect of climate change and likely a minor one. Indirect effects will likely play an even bigger role, i.e. premature deaths due to worsening life conditions for children and elderly people, mass displacement/migration or political crises up to and including war.
We are talking about a status quo scenario, in which CO2 emissions are continuing unabated along current levels or falling only very slowly. This will result in an increase of average global temperatures of +3°C [0]. It will literally make uninhabitable due to flooding or heat a non-insignificant share of currently settled land area around the world.
If you want to really kill your appetite, google "wet bulb temperature" and think about the (very real) possibility, that a mega-city in pakistan or india could experience a wet bulb temperature of >35°C for several hours sometimes this century, which will probably kill most people who don't have access to air conditioning (which is most of them), while the excessive use of air conditioning will further increase the temperature in this city during the event.
If we are talking about +3°C scenarios, it is really for you to argue why excess deaths shouldn't be assumed to show compounding growth.
> Have you considered mitigating factors to prevent deaths?
I've mentioned the possibility of adaption several times in this thread. But I personally severely doubt that a global society that can't get it's act together to limit CO2 emissions will be able to mobilize adequate economic and political resources to make a dent in the excess deaths resulting from a +3°C scenario. It's the same basic problem: we would need to mobilize considerable public resources, financed mostly by rich people and with significant impact on the lifestyle of the middle class to benefit society at large. Either we manage to achieve this for both emission reduction and adaption, or we will loose at both.
Why? Because I used the term "percentage points" incorrectly? Or do you have an issue with the facts?
Those are: In 1976, global average temperature was 0.15 degrees C above the 1861-1890 mean. 50 years later, in 2024 it was 1.54 degrees above. On average, that's a 2.79 percent increase in the temperature anomaly per year over the past 50 years. https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/climate-change?Metric=T...
If you look at the graph and the scientific forecasts, it would be dumb not to assume that the rate of temperature increase will increase if we do not drastically cut down emissions quickly. If such a scenario doesn't scare the pants off you, you either have very little investment in the state of the world past 2050 or you are unreasonably confident that it won't impact you or your loved ones.
Currently (mostly) cities don't see Death Valley or Marble Bar range tempretures or beyond .. this will change.
Government statistics show there were more than 10,000 heat-related deaths in the UK alone between 2020 and 2024. Close to 3,000 people died amidst the record-breaking 2022 heatwaves, when UK temperatures exceeded 40C for the first time. Despite this, the UK remains unprepared for extreme heat.
That's just the UK (high latitude), at tempretures lower than current tempretures in Death Valley / Marble Bar.
Give it time for higher tempretures to reach dense urban centres, look to India and equatorial countries that'll experience both high temp and high humidity and you'll see heat exhaustion deaths rise to well past those anglocentric numbers.
The more serious numbers will come from climate related conflict and migration in any case (assuming no change in increasing emmissions, even assuming a flattening to a steady human annual addition).
Cold deaths will decrease in high-latitude countries (which tend to be sparsely inhabited) but heat deaths will increase in low latitude countries (i.e. places like India). The exact effects of this will depend on political factors (adaption), but it is unlikely that the decrease in cold deaths will compensate the increase in heat deaths. Also, the people dying from heat will still be dead.
Having children is subsidized where I come from. To a point where getting pregnant is a strategy to secure a form of UBI for certain low-income people. I think the reasons for lowered birth rates are much more hedonistic and less related to costs.
Not wanting to bring children into an overpopulated polluted overheating stormy flooding jobless fascist warring world of burning bombed out cities and ICE concentration camps run by heath care and science denying oligarchs and religious zealots is hardly hedonism.
Culture meaning women having economic freedom, physical security, and access to birth control?
Women don't have "tens" of children due to culture, they have them due to not having an option. The data says they (as a global group) barely want 2 or 3 (which makes sense to those that have seen the risks and tribulations).
ICE must cast a wide net in blue cities because they are not sharing data on the criminal undocumented residents. They are shielding the illegal migrants who are already in jail or released on bond. Red areas are not shielding their criminal element and there is less need for such a wide net. Sanctuary cities ignoring the constitution and delegation of powers to do whatever they want is causing much of the escalation.
You will love this amendment (14th) from the US Constitution then, it’s a banger with it’s opening text that describes how states are responsible for protecting the people in their borders and giving them due process, citizen or not:
> All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
You know because it’s hard to make a case about being a country of rights, due process, law and order if you don’t extend that to the people within it’s borders.
The blue cities are enforcing the Constitution as sanctuary cities are legal laws of those states. The red states and federal government are violating it.
>” The blue cities are enforcing the Constitution as sanctuary cities are legal laws of those states. The red states and federal government are violating it.”
The 14th Amendment is federal law that the States must protect the people within their borders through rights, due process, etc. by their own state laws. The Supremacy Clause is irrelevant.
On iPhone check out Orion browser. Blocks ads, even on YouTube. Though sometimes video quality goes low (manually set it higher to fix). Firefox focus also works, but only one tab
If on Android, check out revanced. You can remove ads from lots of apps. Highly recommend Firefox as well.
Brave is also extremely effective at removing ads while keeping websites functional (including YouTube). It even has some fingerprinting protection. (and before someone complains, you can disable all the crypto stuff)
Sure but personally I'm against recommending different flavors of chrome. Brave is a nice idea but it still gives undue power to Google because at the be of the day, they control chromium. It also makes a hard problem for chromium reskins as they keep finding things chromium can use to track their users...
I would hope so. The temptation to strap unknown sensors to map and analyze the customers they fly over will be impossible for them to ignore. Let the drone hunting season commence.
Retailers will absolutely budge on this technicality, this is to disarm those that aren’t aggressive. Everyone’s retail margins are wayyyyyy higher than they want the consumer to believe and their holding costs are non-negligible.
I thought the purpose of that was to let them avoid price matching on certain items despite having price matching policies. I have never heard of one budging on this. Have any?
It is so the manager has a policy to fall back on to say no. It is just the second round of negotiation.
I am not saying everyone will play ball, but managers whose pay is a function of sales likely will. Have you ever negotiated buying a car before? Indicating you will let corporate know they lost a sale by not budging on price will almost always win the negotiation with managers who think they can just be lazy without consequence.
In the standard retail environment, I have definitely had businesses price match products with the same specs but very slight SKU differences, you just have to be open about a willingness to forego the instant gratification because that is the only service in person retail provides today. That might mean actually completing the sale online and then asking again. They know when there is actually a material difference to the products.
Businesses that are legit monopolies will not budge.
