by liberal japonicus
The New Thermodynamic Understanding of Clocks
Don’t let the title chase you off, really interesting article.
403 thoughts on “Time for a Friday open thread”
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Money quote:
That’s some heavy sh*t.
Even the simplest clock will, occasionally, miss a beat. That’s what makes it imperfect. But there is some consistency to the average frequency with which missed beats occur. Thus, if the time to be measured is long enough, compared to the average time between missed beats, it should be possible to increase the accuracy of the overall measurement of time applying the statistical correction.
No doubt there are technical details which I, as neither a professional in the workings of the basic clock nor in statistics, am ignorant of. But it seems, absent those, like the limits on precision are a bit better than they appear from first glance at the article.
Good very interesting article. Thanks.
But it seems, absent those, like the limits on precision are a bit better than they appear from first glance at the article.
Not really. We have very accurate clocks, so I don’t think there’s much of anything approaching an immediate, practical concern. It’s theoretical physics, not clock manufacture.
“Oh noes, we can’t make clocks!” doesn’t seem to be point.
the point
JILA is a pretty cool place. Used to have to run in there every once in a while to collect a signature for a grant when I was working as a courier for the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics.
The idea that the accuracy of clocks is limited and related to energy use of the clock is very easy to accept intuitively for anyone who is familiar with Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. However, formalising this understanding with this kind of analysis of an elegant Gedankenexperiment is truly nice, especially when you can tie in the statistical thermodynamics. I am quite sure that this opens interesting avenues of research.
Even though it is 30+ year old news, I find it simply amazing that the accuracy of clocks is good enough to measure the difference between the passage of time for a clock sitting on the floor, and one on top of a table. From the general-relativistic effect of the Earth’s gravity over meter-scale differences in altitude.
It’s probably at centimeter scale, now. Haven’t checked recently.
And, as a general rule “the more accurately you can measure something, the more weird shit you find”. Some mundane, some …not.
Regarding limits, this was interesting from the Oxford experiment referred to in the article:
https://journals.aps.org/prx/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevX.11.021029
…Once nonthermal noise is accounted for, we find that there is a linear relation between accuracy and entropy and that the clock operates within an order of magnitude of the theoretical bound…
The idea that the accuracy of clocks is limited and related to energy use of the clock is very easy to accept intuitively for anyone who is familiar with Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle.
That’s what I was thinking yesterday. Then I did some meth.
Driving by for a nano-second to post 2 things which might be of interest, the first link I think a good description of US “freedoms” versus other first world, social democratic countries, the second I will copy and paste, on abortion, because it is behind the Times paywall, and is by Caitlyn Moran, a popular feminist columnist, and this piece (which has been getting a lot of positive coverage here) might possibly interest USians who could otherwise miss a view from this side of the pond.
https://twitter.com/thefarmerjones/status/1232413802349637632/photo/1
In the same month the state of Texas has passed its punitive new anti-abortion laws, my youngest daughter reached 18. We had a cake, and gifts; we celebrated her life. Both my children are, now, adults. Every day, I thrill to their existence.
However, it would be a discredit to their existence to pretend they haven’t been… costly. Parents do everyone a disservice if they pretend children are a free gift to the world. We are not salmon, who spawn and then depart back downstream. We are mammals. Our baby mammals very quickly die without care, tools, and infrastructure. Our baby mammals dwindle unless they have someone in their corner, every step of the way, loving them.
And this is why love is a verb – love is a doing word. Love is feeding and clothing; love is toys and books; love is housing and electricity; love is buying the things they need to nurture talent and interest.
Love is finding a way to earn the money to provide the things that love requires – so love involves conjuring up childcare too. Every business in the world should have a modern reboot of that old poster you used to see on walls. In a world where 79 per cent of families have two working parents, it would read, “You don’t need to have a full-time childminder or nanny to work here – but it helps!”
Parenting means earning money to earn money. It’s a tax you pay tax on. It is… costly.
Love also requires time and pain. Love might require you being utterly broken after birth – incontinent, psychotic, depressed or disabled. No one is guaranteed a healthy, happy child who leaves home when they reach adulthood – so love might require midnight trips to A&E; love might require years in the mental health service. Love will require putting your life on hold while you sit with sadness, fear and heartbreak – along with homework and shoe-tying and bath times – week after week, year after year. Loving a child is the big, immovable fact of your life – everything else comes after, including yourself. In labour, you will talk to your existing children on the phone. In fever, you will read stories or change dressings. You are never anywhere but “available”. You are a practical God. Your omnipotence changes the sheets; cooks the soup; drives to Liverpool at 2am to save the sad, abandoned, drunk or lost.
The best kind of love – the love we humans love the most – is the idea of a love that lasts for ever. The person who always loves you and never leaves. As we can see from the divorce statistics, the gender split in single parenting and the caseload of absent fathers pursued for child maintenance, love without end is most likely found not in a rom-com, but between a mother and a child. There are exceptions, of course, but mothers just tend… never to leave. They’re there, through it all, to the bitter end. It’s reflected in our language. “Fathering” a child tends to refer to the moment of conception. “Mothering”, on the other hand, lasts a lifetime. We all know 56-year-olds who are still being mothered. Mothering is for ever.
Maybe it seems counterintuitive to talk about my daughter’s joyful 18th birthday and mothering in the same breath as the new anti-abortion laws in Texas. Most abortion rights campaigners, understandably, tend to shy away from talking about solid, living things like babies and children and birthdays; they talk of the right to abortion being primarily a thing that concerns women’s bodies: “My body, my choice.” They talk, correctly and truthfully, about unviable collections of seven-week-old cells.
But this new law now prevents women getting abortions after six weeks – it allows private prosecutions of not only the women seeking abortions, but anyone who helps them. So, theoretically, not only are doctors and abortion clinics prosecutable, but even the Uber driver who takes a woman for a procedure. An aunt lending the fare. A husband holding her hand on the way there. And all with the promise of a $10,000 (£7,200) bounty if you’re the one making the decision to shop a desperate pregnant woman to the state. If you would play God with the rest of a woman’s life, and that of the child you’ve just coerced into being, for the price of a shitty second-hand car.
Because what we’re talking about isn’t a right to abortion, but the now legal ability for Texas to enforce motherhood. Texan women are now compelled to become mothers. From this week on, and for as long as this execrable legislation exists, Texas is about to see a new, faltering generation of children start to be born and raised by mothers whom the state has insisted must reproduce. Texas is now in the business of conscripting mothers. It is creating an army of unwilling women to breed.
If Texas thinks that women seek abortions for nugatory reasons – they’re just being “a bit shy” about being mothers and can be persuaded if the state insists! – then the most common reasons for seeking abortion show otherwise: 40 per cent state lack of financial resources; 31 per cent abusive or non-supportive partner; 29 per cent already have children; 20 per cent feel it would interfere with educational/vocational plans; 19 per cent have emotional or mental health reasons; 12 per cent cite physical health reasons; and 12 per cent simply “want a better life for the baby than she could provide”.
These are all simple, practical reasons that would be respected were they given by, say, a company CEO for not expanding their business. But they are not accepted as reasons not to become a mother. Women are simply not believed when they say, “I cannot do this.” I’m not exaggerating when I say this legislation is, in its lifelong impact, a piece of non-choice as barbaric as child marriage or sex-trafficking. It is seeking to utterly control women’s futures, bodies, minds and lives.
As the average abortion rate in Texas has been around 55,000 per year, this means perhaps 1,000 children a week could start being born to women for whom those babies are an enforced fact, rather than a joyous choice. What a cruel thing to do – to both unwilling mother and eventual child.
And, also, to the society they live in. Talk to anyone who works in social services, mental health or the emergency services and they say the greatest burden of cases they see relate to people born in chaotic, unprepared households. The cost to the taxpayer of dealing with the children of unhappy, unwilling, abused, raped, pressured or desperate mothers is enormous.
Both my children – 18 and 20 now – are, touch wood, happy, stable, working young adults; and I was only able to put the resources into helping them achieve this because I ended my fourth pregnancy with an abortion. I’m with the 40 per cent who sought a procedure for financial reasons, the 29 per cent who already have children and the 12 per cent who knew they couldn’t give a third baby the life it deserved. Having had two children already, I knew how much time and love it took to meet their needs. And whenever abortion rights, anywhere in the world, are under threat, I think often of the alternate timeline of my life, if I’d lived somewhere where that abortion wasn’t an option.
In the summer of 2006, because of our circumstances, I would have had to give up writing to become a full-time mother. I would have become financially reliant on my husband, who earns less than me. I would almost certainly have suffered a recurrence of the postnatal depression I’d suffered previously – but this time, without the release of writing or the financial resources to help me out of it. I would never have written any of my books, films, TV shows or subsequent columns.
Putting aside other considerations, the loss to HMRC alone would have been sizeable. It is a profound privilege, honour and joy for a woman to be able to contribute to their country in whatever way, big or small. I shudder to think of how many businesses, careers, inventions and ideas are lost when women’s physical ability to reproduce DNA is insisted on over, say, their potential to research it or write about it.
And then, during the five years of my youngest’s illness, I would have had to choose between children – one small and needy; one older but broken and in A&E. However heroic a mother’s love is, it nonetheless exists in the brutal, real world. Much parenting is simply triaging a series of emergencies. Texas has just made women incapable of dealing with emergencies. Texas has just made women’s future lives – with all their existing commitments and delicate calculations – vulnerable to whomever wants to a) impregnate them, and/or b) sell them out for $10,000. I’d like to think no one would sell out a woman like that. In a world of poverty, misogyny, addiction and abuse, I suspect the reality is that many, many will.
Let’s be honest about the ultimate morality of all this: it isn’t a legislation that really cares about the lives of babies. If you wanted more Texan babies, you’d provide better maternal care for women who’ve chosen to be mothers and/or desperately want a child: the American maternal mortality rate is the worst in the industrialised world, and has roughly doubled since 1990. Anti-abortionists don’t rush to fund nurseries, childcare centres or IVF; they’re not known activists for drop-in youth centres or after-school clubs.
But, of course, nowhere is this about helping women or babies. This isn’t about making a better, happier or more moral and stable society. It’s a craven, vicious law that punishes women simply for being fertile and impregnable. It imposes the cost of motherhood on those who already know they can least afford it. It is the start of a new, bad-star generation of children who, statistics tell us, are already unfortunate before they are even born. And it turns love from a verb, and a doing word, into a legal requirement. A punishment. A threat. It is a cost that will, simply, break women. It would break me. It would break you too. No one chooses not to choose. How utterly contemptible that, in Texas, others – greedy, real-life, 21st-century Handmaid’s Tale extras – can now choose for you.
Thank you, GftNC. Reading that gave me the terrible thought that some women in Texas will choose suicide over pregnancy because of this law. There’s nothing “pro-life” about that. It’s tragic and barbaric.
I just read my comment, and I could see how you might think the “thank you” was sarcasm, given what followed. It wasn’t. It’s a terrible thing to contemplate, but it’s important, so I thank you sincerely for sharing.
President Biden has apparently run out of patience and is mandating vaccinations. (And not before time.) Predictably, a bunch of Republican governors (not all of the, but the usual suspects) are having a hissy fit and saing they will sue to stop it.
Here https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/09/10/republican-governors-challenges-vaccine-mandates/ is an overview of over a century of Supreme Court rulings which all say that the government can require vaccinations.
Of course, the new Court majority may decide to ignore precedent on this, too. But even they may find this a stretch.
the GOP is a petulant death cult.
that’s Curtis Yarvin, a recent Tucker Carlson guest.
thus confirming that i no longer need to qualify statements about the GOP being a thoroughly racist garbage death cult party of petulant morons.
i no longer need to qualify statements about the GOP being a thoroughly racist garbage death cult party of petulant morons.
“thoroughly”? No, at least not yet. “Overwhelmingly”, sadly, I will grant you. But “thoroughly” still seems to be an overstatement.
Yarvin, Carlson and the entire conservative movement embodied in the vermin racist subhuman republican party, here and abroad and throughout the universe, are products of their time and place and therefore should be extended our deepest but negligible empathy for their victimhood.
We should stand by as they close the polling stations to us, as they rape women and forcibly them to bear their children, as they arm themselves to the teeth to kill us, as they commit pandemic genocide against the infirm, students, and teachers in the name of their murderous death-cult Christian diety, and as they murder the rest of we politically correct chumps for not understanding the burdens they carry living and flourishing amongst us, while insisting on not paying taxes.
As long as they don’t dress like Audrey Hepburn and sit down to pee in a public ladies’ room, I see no reason to butcher and slaughter every fascist last one of them with savage violence and leave their carcasses hung up to bleed out in public squares across the country.
As it happens, Tucker Carlson does NOT have a mother I’d like to fuck. That his subhuman conservative father rutted his toxic spunk into Tucker’s eager beaver mother is occasion enough for America’s everlasting regret and the end of IQ rankings as we know them.
As for Yarvin, his sow of a mother would have benefited from the hog farmer who bought her at market throwing some hay down in the sty in which he was issued.
I’m going to fight both of them.
All conservatives are created to be equally executed.
Not knowing anything about the parents of these pieces of garbage I would rather abstain of such wording, in particular comparisions to breeding stock of the porcine kind.
https://www.mediamatters.org/sebastian-gorka/newsmax-host-calls-vaccine-and-testing-requirement-most-egregious-assault-our
‘”thoroughly”? No, at least not yet. “Overwhelmingly”, sadly, I will grant you. But “thoroughly” still seems to be an overstatement.’
Give it a week.
I’m more than willing to add an asterisked addendum to the word “thoroughly” which qualifies the statement to read, “except for that one guy, the reasonable conservative wj at Obsidian Wings, for whom hope is sprained eternal. %-}
Substitute “Impossible Meatheads” for all pork references.
Given the lying, cheating, thieving species of conservative jurisprudence these days, ignore this precedent too:
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/09/08/vaccine-mandate-strong-supreme-court-precedent-510280
That ruling was made by reasonable thinking individuals in 1905 and of that superior and more intelligent time and place, and therefore will be ignored by the murderous conservative judicial imposter monsters of this time and place.
Nothing will do but Civil War now to get back to the real.
I view bullets as a mandated viable vaccine to be used against the conservative plague killing America in 2021.
That ruling was made by reasonable thinking individuals in 1905 and of that superior and more intelligent time and place, and therefore will be ignored by the murderous conservative judicial imposter monsters of this time and place.
But Jacobson, while reaffirmed numerous times, is not the only precedent. The Court has consistently ruled that the public good, not just in cases of vaccinations, trumps personal preferences.
Here https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/09/10/republican-governors-challenges-vaccine-mandates/ is an overview of over a century of Supreme Court rulings which all say that the government can require vaccinations.
Of course, the new Court majority may decide to ignore precedent on this, too. But even they may find this a stretch.
Well, maybe and maybe not. Local jurisdictions can and do pass local laws mandating vaccinations. Operative words: *jurisdictions*, *pass* *laws*. OSHA is a regulatory agency, not a jurisdiction. It does not pass laws. The President is the executive and not the legislative.
Short-sighted, heavy-handed jamming shit down peoples’ throats only looks good when you agree with the end result. No one here–including me–wants the next president to order *whatever* as a matter of work place safety because that’s what that president wants to do. This is mega-shitty precedent. I recall all the stuff about norms and processes and whatnot when DT was president. Executive fiat, regardless of the rightness of it, is illegal.
Unless the Martys and McKinneys of the world decide that even oh-noes-soshulism is preferable to MAGAtry, there’s not much chance of avoiding Civil War 2 in the US.
The MAGAts seem pretty confident they’d win that war, don’t they?
–TP
Short-sighted, heavy-handed jamming shit down peoples’ throats only looks good when you agree with the end result.
since when is OSHA is not empowered to set minimum workplace safety standards?
OSHA is a regulatory agency, not a jurisdiction. It does not pass laws. The President is the executive and not the legislative.
You may have noticed that OSHA is an agency empowered to issue regulations as was duly authorized in LAW.
Short-sighted, heavy-handed jamming shit down peoples’ throats only looks good when you agree with the end result.
No shit, Sherlock. You mean like anti-abortion regulations? Like forcing me to live in a gun crazed society? Like making it for all intents and purposes impossible to form a union? Like forcing me to watch the destruction of the human race due to global climate change? Those kinds of heavy handed regulations?
The “real” GOP is found here.
Operative words: *jurisdictions*, *pass* *laws*. OSHA is a regulatory agency, not a jurisdiction.
As I’m sure you are well aware, there’s a great deal of case law to the effect that regulatory agencies can, in fact, make rules (“regulations”) which are legally enforceable. No reason why vaccinations for covid should be an exception.
since when is OSHA is not empowered to set minimum workplace safety standards?
OSHA can control the work site, up to a point. It cannot require employees to take medicine, stay home if they don’t feel well, lose weight, eat less meat, eat more vegetables, get marriage counseling, take long walks or any number of other things that might produce better health outcomes physical or mental health outcomes, even if it could be shown that improving one employee’s health also improves other employees’ health. OSHA could mandate masks and social distancing, probably, because that is *activity on the worksite*.
And, there is a recognized rule-making process that has to be followed. Declaring an 18 month old phenomena to be a sudden emergency with harm so imminent as to justify bypassing that process (also knows as “due process”) is patently gross over-reach.
You mean like anti-abortion regulations? Like forcing me to live in a gun crazed society? Like making it for all intents and purposes impossible to form a union? Like forcing me to watch the destruction of the human race due to global climate change? Those kinds of heavy handed regulations?
There are no anti-abortion regulations that I know of–legislative acts a/k/a democratically passed laws are different. Emphasis: democratically passed.
Forced to live in a gun crazy society? Interesting way of putting it. You could move, I suppose or society could reconfigure itself to your satisfaction, but it would have to do so legally, i.e. by passing laws that are allowable under the constitution.
Making it impossible to form a union? Again, that is a function of the legislature, i.e. democracy, the rule of law, etc. You are not guaranteed your personal optimal outcome anymore than I or anyone else is.
Forcing you to watch the destruction of the human race through climate change? Sorry, that’s not US laws, that’s the PRC, India, Russia and others.
As I’m sure you are well aware, there’s a great deal of case law to the effect that regulatory agencies can, in fact, make rules (“regulations”) which are legally enforceable. No reason why vaccinations for covid should be an exception.
Actually, regulatory agencies can, following a legislatively crafted rule making process, make regulations to carry out laws if authorized by congress to do so. This has never meant that any agency can *effectively* pass any rule it wants. Otherwise, we’d be at risk of a federally-mandated diet, among a host of other things that would be good for us if only someone would make us do them.
The president is proposing to use a federal agency to tell citizens they must get a shot in order to go to work. If that over-reach isn’t patent on its face, I got nothing. We just go along with what we are told to do if it’s in our best interests.
I wanted to make vaccines mandatory at my firm, which I am confident, as an owner, I can do. The president is not the *owner*. He can’t just order people around because he thinks it’s a great idea. Hell, even if it’s a great idea, he just doesn’t have that power.
Bit of a philosophical question for McKinney: In Texas, the state requires that any student attending any public, or private, school must show evidence of having received at least seven vaccines covering diseases such as polio, hepatitis, measles, mumps and rubella. Those seven vaccination requirements — which have helped banish once prevalent diseases such as polio — cause little controversy. So why is pushing for adults to get vaccinated for covid-19 such a flash point?
Even if you want to get into arguments over laws vs regulations, etc., why is the whole topic even an issue?
let’s take a look at what Biden actually did:
And, there is a recognized rule-making process that has to be followed.
and since it’s being followed, what’s your actual complaint?
https://www.whitehouse.gov/covidplan/
also:
can the President set standards for federal employees?
strings. don’t like the attachment, don’t take the money.
oh dear. he called on them!
are we ok with that?
So why is pushing for adults to get vaccinated for covid-19 such a flash point?
Even if you want to get into arguments over laws vs regulations, etc., why is the whole topic even an issue?
Because it is one man–the president–making a pronunimiento as if he were an autocrat. We live in a democracy. The vaccine requirements in TX were passed by the legislature and signed into law by the governor, not pronounced by the Governor and thus made mandatory.
Here’s another illustration of how a rule-of-law-democracy works: trial, due process *then* punishment.
Here’s another: congress passes a tax increase, the senate agrees and the president signs it. But hey, we need more money than we are getting from the laws passed by congress: why not just have the pres order up higher tax brackets?
Because we live in a democracy not an autocracy and it doesn’t matter whether the autocrat is mandating only the best for his/her subjects, it’s still freaking one person laying down the law. We just don’t do that.
Because it is one man–the president–making a pronunimiento as if he were an autocrat.
he asked the Dept Of Labor to tell OSHA to make rules. he didn’t issue a fucking edict.
let’s take a look at what Biden actually did:
And, there is a recognized rule-making process that has to be followed.
and since it’s being followed, what’s your actual complaint?
He is proposing to bypass the rule making process and simply declare a rule because of an “emergency.” So, no, he is not following procedure.
And, the rule is not directed at employers, it is directed at employees: either get vaccinated or get tested (what is the sanction if the employee says “no”?). So, it is BS to say this is a workplace rule. It is a rule that is required in order to go to work, not passed by the legislature, but ordered by the president, who controls the administrative organ. There is no functional difference between a direct order by the president or an executive agency formulating an order ordered by the president.
he asked the Dept Of Labor to tell OSHA to make rules. he didn’t issue a fucking edict.
This is spin and not very good spin at that: he is the Executive. He tells the executive agencies what to. Jesus. He didn’t “ask” for anything. It’s called a mandate for a reason. Look up the word.
Look, ObWi was apoplectic during the four years of Trump’s autocracy. However, autocracy the majority here agrees with is just fine, particularly if it’s sugarcoated with some nice-sounding words. As is far too often the case: good for me but not for thee.
Seeing the double standard is easy outside the echo chamber. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.
He is proposing to bypass the rule making process and simply declare a rule because of an “emergency.”
a process which itself is perfectly within the OSHA rules. he didn’t make up a new rule about emergencies, it’s already on the fucking books.
every two days, as many people die in the US of COVID as died on 9/11. and we’re still wallowing in that. so if this isn’t an “emergency” (and an absolutely preventable one!), absolutely nothing is.
Because it is one man–the president–making a pronunimiento as if he were an autocrat.
You are totally missing (or evading) the point. Why are politicians in Texas getting worked up over this vaccination, ans not the others? And don’t try to claim it’s because of any concern on their part for process, as we both know that’s complete bullsh*t — process has nothing to do with it.
Seeing the double standard is easy outside the echo chamber. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.
if you could only see yourself.
How is this different from mask mandates? Or, depending on where you live, executive bans on mask mandates?
And I’m just gonna ignore the “you people can’t see outside your bubble” stuff because it’s a pointless rathole.
Just curious if an executive edict on masking (pro or con) is different than one on vaccines, and why.
Why are politicians in Texas getting worked up over this vaccination, ans not the others? And don’t try to claim it’s because of any concern on their part for process, as we both know that’s complete bullsh*t — process has nothing to do with it.
Ok, now you are asking me to read minds. I’ll give it a go: GOP extremists, like Lefty extremists, blow their stacks whenever the other side says or does anything. Do I think that a bunch of Trump fans give any more of a shit about how things are *supposed to work* as opposed to *is this what I want* than Biden fans who endorse whatever BS he happens to come up with? Hell no.
As it happens, the Lefty hypocrites were right under Trump and the rightwing hypocrites are right under Biden.
I assume you can tell the difference between one man issuing an edict and the legislative process where there is debate, a majority vote and an executive signature, all done according to a pre-established constitutional process?
I assume you can tell the difference between one man issuing an edict and the legislative process where there is debate, a majority vote and an executive signature, all done according to a pre-established constitutional process?
OSHA rules allow for emergency rule making. this is an emergency. the rules are being followed. Congress is not required.
your outraged is misinformed at best.
every two days, as many people die in the US of COVID as died on 9/11. and we’re still wallowing in that. so if this isn’t an “emergency” (and an absolutely preventable one!), absolutely nothing is.
Emergency does not mean the same as crisis. “This” has been going on for 18 months. No one has proposed that Congress mandate the vaccine, although Congress has had plenty of time to act. There is no “emergency”, Covid didn’t just happen, and even his rule is stupid: get vaccinated or tested every week–and then what? The proposed sanction, if I understand it, is to fine the company. Because the employee won’t get vaccinated or submit to a test. Does anyone see a problem here? OSHA cannot tell people what do to outside the workplace and only then can it make rules that apply to the workplace and can only sanction the employer.
We are a constitutional republic with democratically elected representatives who operate under a well understood constitutional framework. One person edicts as shortcuts are bad business on every level.
OSHA rules allow for emergency rule making. this is an emergency. the rules are being followed. Congress is not required.
Thank you Big Brother. Have you seen The Death of Stalin? He followed all the rules too.
Just an observation, and not one that I can enforce in any way, but it seems that if you want to discuss vaccination policy, you need to state your vaccination status. This isn’t to claim that you have to have ‘skin in the game’ (which is a pretty ridiculous concept when discussing societal questions), but if one is arguing for a anti-vaxx stance (like, say, Tucker Carlson) but is actually vaccinated, I think you can immediately discount anything they say.
Anyway, I’ll go first, 2 x moderna. Family as well, oldest is in Tokyo, which is having problems with the rollout for younger people, just got her first, and the second is scheduled. Be interested to hear who else and what you got.
There is a legitimate point to be made that this vaccine requirement is new territory for OSHA. They have asked for record keeping on vaccines but they have not issued a mandate like this. OSHA is concerned with workplace safety and not general personal health. If a workplace can be made safe through a combination of masking, remote work and social distancing, I’m not sure that a vaccine is required. This matters to the extent that the mandate could be analyzed under a standard of furthering a compelling governmental interest with the least restrictive means.
I don’t have a problem with a vaccine mandate as a matter of policy and I think there is a compelling government interest, but this particular avenue is a stretch as it appears to be outside the OSHA’s wheelhouse and may not be the least restrictive means of achieving *workplace* safety.
To be clear, I have no problem with a vaccine mandate, but this tact worries me.
Just an observation, and not one that I can enforce in any way, but it seems that if you want to discuss vaccination policy, you need to state your vaccination status.
Pfizer, 3/1/21 and 3/21/21. I will booster at the first opportunity. As I stated, I would have made vaccines mandatory at my office. It didn’t happen because a critical mass just won’t do it. We require them to work inside a closed office and to wear a mask when in a common area.
I’m fine with employer-mandates. I’m fine with a legislatively passed mandate. I’m not fine with any one executive, a president or a governor, handing down edicts. Forex, I think Abbot is way out of line telling local school districts they can’t have mask policies. I knew Abbot back when he was a trial judge in Harris County. He was a reasonable person. He’s on the Trump Team now or at least, he’s going to pander to them until he doesn’t have to, which is worse. We have legislatures for a reason and we limit what executives can do, also for a reason.
To be clear, I have no problem with a vaccine mandate, but this tact worries me.
Yes, outside the wheelhouse, i.e. authority, but it isn’t even OSHA’s idea. It’s Biden’s. As a matter of principle, a president deciding that individual Americans need to do “X” and using his control over the administrative apparatus to enforce *his* wishes is fricking dictatorial.
Pfizer on 3/23 and 4/13 (as soon as my age group was up).
Yes, outside the wheelhouse, i.e. authority, but it isn’t even OSHA’s idea. It’s Biden’s. As a matter of principle, a president deciding that individual Americans need to do “X” and using his control over the administrative apparatus to enforce *his* wishes is fricking dictatorial.
So what *practical* means do we have of overcoming the RW political opportunist and media coalition intent upon monkey wrenching any policy path to public safety? Do we have any non-dictatorial paths available for change?
How would you propose to change the minds (or the votes) of the idiots blocking the COVID fire exit for politics?
Absent any alternatives, it seems to me the two options that remain are either to take a tyrannical approach (the Lincoln path), or to shrug and let the obstructors paint you as weak and ineffective as the try to pin the deaths they are causing on you.
(Already posted about my drive-through vax experience in earlier threads).
this particular avenue is a stretch as it appears to be outside the OSHA’s wheelhouse and may not be the least restrictive means of achieving *workplace* safety.
If people are afraid to go to the *workplace*(?) because they may get sick and die from an entirely preventable disease, then I should think this regulation falls well within what can reasonably be called *workplace* (?) safety.
McTX: As it happens, the Lefty hypocrites were right under Trump and the rightwing hypocrites are right under Biden.
I would appreciate examples of McKinney agreeing with the “Lefty hypocrites” back then as vociferously as he’s agreeing with the “rightwing hypocrites” now.
–TP
We are a constitutional republic with democratically elected representatives who operate under a well understood constitutional framework. One person edicts as shortcuts are bad business on every level.
Our system assumes, and requires, that both (all) sides are operating in good faith. That is, one side may be wrong on a particular issue, but they are at least trying to make the overall system work for the public good. At the moment, we don’t have that.
What you seem to be saying is that, in the current circumstances, our only valud option is to twiddle our thumbs until those who care only for obstruction finally manage to kill off enough of their own supporters that no amount of shenanigans can keep them in office. No matter how long that takes, or how many other people get killed as a result while we wait.
Or do you see some magic alternative path forward that the rest of us have missed?
No one has proposed that Congress mandate the vaccine
No need to. Congress, as in so many things, has already delegated that authority to the Executive. You may find this advantageous for your issues, and not so much for our wild eyed lefty issues.
In many ways, it is a reflection of the increasingly complex world we live in, and increasingly gridlocked political combat.
Pollo de Muerte: … this particular avenue is a stretch as it appears to be outside the OSHA’s wheelhouse and may not be the least restrictive means of achieving *workplace* safety.
“*workplace* safety” is good. National security is also good.
I know that “national security” has come to be a term of art for military and quasi-military action using missiles and drones and all the other toys Congresses of both parties have given Presidents of both parties permission to play with. I know it does not mean things like protecting The Nation (which is a people as well as a territory) from deadly viruses and such. And I consider that a sorry state of affairs.
–TP
The NYT investigated the drone strike that killed the family.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/10/world/asia/us-air-strike-drone-kabul-afghanistan-isis.html
The US government account looks like complete horseshit.
As one would expect.
Sad, but not surprised by Donald’s 8:00.
Again, though, unless the American people change and stop being some sort of psychic Big Hit highlight reel in their foreign policy Id, we will never see a change in this. Not even Obama, who campaigned on a pledge to do better, managed to implement any of that. It’s too ingrained in the American psyche and too consistently and effectively reinforced by both sides of the US media to change.
Biden isn’t going to be any different. It’s not who he is. And if he did change, we’d punish him at the ballot box for it.
Local jurisdictions can and do pass local laws mandating vaccinations.
In Jacobson, the requirement for a smallpox vaccine was a mandate issued by the Cambridge MA Board of Health, a regulatory agency.
They were empowered to issue that mandate by laws, passed by legislators.
Has OSHA been empowered by law to make rules for workplace health and safety? If so, then I think this question has been asked and answered.
I knew Abbot back when he was a trial judge in Harris County. He was a reasonable person. He’s on the Trump Team now
Reasonable people are no longer welcome in the (R) party.
That’s a shame, but as someone who is not a (R) and has no leverage over (R) policy or interest in having any, there is bugger-all I can do about it.
If conservatives don’t want to be represented by a party that kisses DJT’s behind early and often, it’s on them to make changes.
Best of luck.
In the meantime, I’m agin you, politically.
Clean your freaking house, (R)’s.
McTX: Yes, outside the wheelhouse, i.e. authority, but it isn’t even OSHA’s idea. It’s Biden’s. As a matter of principle, a president deciding that individual Americans need to do “X” and using his control over the administrative apparatus to enforce *his* wishes is fricking dictatorial.
*If* a vaccine mandate is within OSHA’s delegated authority, then I’m not going to get worked up over whether it was Biden’s idea. OSHA, as part of the Department of Labor, is considered a sector within the executive branch of the federal government. Biden is the chief executive.
If you want to have a general discussion about whether Congress has ceded too much to federal agencies, then you and I might have some common ground, but a vaccine mandate during a pandemic won’t be my Exhibit A in that debate.
bobbyp: If people are afraid to go to the *workplace*(?) because they may get sick and die from an entirely preventable disease, then I should think this regulation falls well within what can reasonably be called *workplace* (?) safety.
I’m not worried about there being a compelling government interest or making a connection to the workplace. I’m concerned that *if* a least restrictive means test is applied, a court could find that there are less restrictive ways to achieve reasonable workplace safety. Keep in mind that OSHA is not operating on a zero tolerance standard for workplace safety. There are balancing tests for achieving reasonable safety and I don’t think this will be a cake walk for the administration to defend in court.
bobbyp: Congress, as in so many things, has already delegated that authority to the Executive.
To be clear, I’m not an expert on OSHA (far from it), but I’m not sure that the authority to mandate a vaccine has been delegated to OSHA. Without having researched it, my sense is that it is less than a slam-dunk.
The SARS-CoV-2 virus is the freest of all American citizens.
Indeed, it deserves the Medal of Freedom for showing us the way to Constitutional Valhalla.
It ignores all borders, procedural niceties, high principles, established governance, Constitutional bluster, and you’re-not-the-boss-of-me outbursts, indeed, regarding the latter, it hitches its deadly ride on the expectorating droplets exhaled by the most thunderous defenders … the virus’ chosen vectors … of its freedom to kill me and my loved ones and friends.
The virus emigrated from China to America to enjoy our God-given freedoms and escape China’s totalitarian regime.
The idea that preventing Joe Biden, the President, from declaring nationally-imposed vaccine and testing mandates, in favor of allowing smaller principalities ….. Congress, states, counties, cities, school boards, and corporations and smaller employers to engage in the exact same fascist (why not call it what it is .. the fascism closest to the people is the best fascism of all)) measures, as if compliance enforced on some will be in any way better and more effective than forcing every individual in America to be vaccinated, excepting those whose medical conditions might be adversely affected by the vaccines themselves, is deadly procedural parody.
We want Congress to declare mandates?
Does anyone expect the violent, insurrectionist conservative movement in America to celebrate the procedural niceties of THAT decentralization of power.
Local public health officials and school board members are being driven from their jobs and confining themselves to their homes because of death threats by violent conservatives sicced on them and their families by conservative operatives in the media and within the hallowed halls of stinking national, state, and local conservative governance for the formers’ efforts to exert some local authority and procedure over events.
So much for the decentralization of power and authority in America, where a murderous bug has crawled up its collective conservative libertarian Christian asshole and NOTHING is fine by them.
Properly arrived-at measures that are fine to McKinney, let alone whatever is fine or not by me, are NOT fine to the monsters in the conservative movement.
On January 6, 2021, Congressional Democrats and a few remaining sane republicans were forced by marauding, viral, insurrectionist, murderous conservatives breaking down the doors of the US Capitol to “share” confined spaces with murderous, insane Congressional republican radicals who refused to act like human beings and wear masks, and some of the latter “refuse” refuse now to be vaccinated themselves.
The latter’s procedures: Do Nothing.
Indeed, force the viral infection on every American who doesn’t want it.
The Congressional Democrats, attacked from outside and inside the Capitol by the conservative movement death cult, should have been armed then and absolutely must carry arms now, to shoot to kill their attackers, on that day, and every day henceforth as we there will be no election ever again in America that is accepted by conservative murderers.
When murderers engage in procedures that ignore all procedure, then fuck all procedure and do what needs to be done even if it requires one individual to declare it so for all.
I’m not gonna like it when the other side does it? I arrived there 40 years ago.
Texas passed a law, all procedural niceties observed thru the proper gerrymandered channels, except for the fucking Constitution, deputizing and recruiting citizens to spy on, harass, and extort money from pregnant women and their circles of support.
Stalin and his secret police did that too.
At least Stalin’s iron fist applied to all Soviet citizens, like republican attempts to steal the voting franchise from their enemies, so what’s the problem?
Yes, I saw The Death of Stalin.
Shoot Stalin in his head again, because he’s on the prowl in our midst one more time.
but I’m not sure that the authority to mandate a vaccine has been delegated to OSHA.
Under the OSHA Act, employers are responsible to provide a safe and healthy workplace. The Agency, under this statute, may create regulatory requirements to meet this goal.*
Employers who fail to meet a reasonable standard of workplace safety are at risk of fines. It staggers the imagination to argue that failing to take appropriate safety measures in a workplace where people are in close quarters subject to infection by a highly contageous disease is simply not reasonable in the slightest.
(Furthermore, as I understand it, the “mandate” is to give the employee a choice: Vaccination or frequent testing. Something McFog didn’t bother to mention.)
If you somehow think this is beyond their legislatively delegated responsibiltiy, I am really at a loss for words. This is a safe and sane approach, and well within their regulatory perview. That the President “ordered” it is fucking beside the point. Issuing orders is part and partial of what the President is tasked with doing as Chief Executive. Calling it “dictatorial” is simply this: Bullshittery of the highest order.
If you want to find out more about where OSHA is coming from wrt COVID workplace rules, you might start here.
*As a construction professional, I am well aware of OSHA’s role (in actuality, OSHA sets the minimum standard, and state agencies carry the load to insure safe workplaces). The agency’s really quite mind numbing toothlessness is frustrating at times when dealing with an industry that has a high injury rate and far too many players who treat injured or dead workers as just another cost of doing business.
Thanks.
Pfizer 1 & 2 back in March.
I’m concerned that *if* a least restrictive means test is applied, a court could find that there are less restrictive ways to achieve reasonable workplace safety.
OK…I see where you are coming from here. But it would be a rather strained “test” indeed that found “less restrictive ways” (and what, pray tell, would those be?) to achieve the regulatory goal.
There is a lot of regulatory room between doing nothing and simply sending everybody home (100% guarantee of a safe workplace!). To find, in the face of law and precedent, vaccination to be “restrictive” is, in actuality, quite a stretch.
Thanks.
I’m curious what other people think about this or what other people may know. It seems to me that this is an example of a slow racheting up of the steps needed to get the population vaxxed. Obviously, this is a view sympathetic to the current admin, but I get the impression that as previous measures failed to put a dent, going to this was an escalation and I assume that Biden’s advisers have several other further steps. I certainly don’t get the impression that this was a knee jerk response.
I’m trying to go back to see if there were intimations of this earlier. I didn’t find anything, but these two articles may be interesting.
This discusses Biden’s approach to COVID in the run up to the election.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/14/health/covid-biden-pandemic-plan.html
OSHA on the 2009 flu that Biden took a lead role in
https://www.osha.gov/news/testimonies/05072009
OSHA stands prepared to use its existing authority to aggressively enforce safe work practices to ensure employees receive appropriate protection. Although OSHA has no specific standard on influenza exposure, in appropriate circumstances the agency will use the “General Duty Clause” of the Occupational Safety and Health Act, which requires employers to provide employment free from recognized hazards, to ensure that employers follow the practices that public health experts agree are necessary to protect workers’ health. OSHA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have distributed extensive information about how to protect workers from influenza exposure in the workplace.
Am curious what some of you may think.
That last OSHA press release, btw, was written in 2009…
It’s time for 2nd amendment solutions.
Develop a short range gun firing vaxx syringes and freely dispense it to the vaccinated population at large. The unvaxxed are potential attackers with deadly force and every citizen has a right to defend against that. So they should be encouraged to give anyone they suspect of being an unvaxxed aggressor and approaches to a distance of less than 15 feet a shot. Whether they have to issue a warning first is open to debate but since it is about 2nd amendment and effing Murica, we should assume that one can dispense with that as default.
For safety reasons I’d recommend a double-barreled version with the second shot being a tranquillizer.
bobbyp: As a construction professional, I am well aware of OSHA’s role (in actuality, OSHA sets the minimum standard, and state agencies carry the load to insure safe workplaces). The agency’s really quite mind numbing toothlessness is frustrating at times when dealing with an industry that has a high injury rate and far too many players who treat injured or dead workers as just another cost of doing business.
Again, I’m not an OSHA expert, but it does come up in some of my case involving real estate development and contractors. I completely agree as to your assessment of toothlessness which is why my reaction to the this particular agency being the avenue for a nationwide vaccine mandate was surprise and then concern. On a surface level, it kind of makes sense, but this is new territory for the agency to say the least.
bobbyp: OK…I see where you are coming from here. But it would be a rather strained “test” indeed that found “less restrictive ways” (and what, pray tell, would those be?) to achieve the regulatory goal.
If a court finds that the workplace is not *currently* a major vector for COVID spread and that most workplaces can be protected via masks, social distancing and work from home, then I wouldn’t be shocked if a conservative judge or five found that a vaccine mandate is ultra vires.
bobbyp: There is a lot of regulatory room between doing nothing and simply sending everybody home (100% guarantee of a safe workplace!). To find, in the face of law and precedent, vaccination to be “restrictive” is, in actuality, quite a stretch.
We both know that OSHA does not shoot for 100% guaranty of a safe workplace. There are balancing tests between burdens on the employer (that shouldn’t be an issue here) and personal rights of the employee (e.g., OSHA doesn’t explicitly ban workplace smoking).
lj: Am curious what some of you may think.
This press release discusses OSHA’s brave new aggressive approach to dealing with a flu outbreak. Lots of talk about PPE, respirators and guidelines for determining which workplaces present a higher risk of exposure. I did not see the words “vaccine” or “inoculation”. Compare to a nationwide mandate on all large employers (no guidelines targeting higher risk workplaces) requiring vaccination (with some opt outs).
I guess you could characterize this as a “slow ratcheting up”, but as much as I support the policy goal in general, it feels more like a leap.
That press release was from 2009, so one wouldn’t expect discussion of vaccines, but a lot of that language seems like the idea was waiting there.
On the other hand, there is this politico article
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/09/10/biden-pandemic-vaccination-effort-511157
which portrays the Biden admin as suddenly realizing that people weren’t going to get vaccines. While I normally would think that the truth is probably somewhere in the middle, it seems of a piece with politicos Afghanistan, where every thing was rushed, unplanned, haphazard. But the sources they draw on seem to be out of the inner circle and so get some benefit from portraying the admin as rudderless.
A super PAC supporting the president conducted polling in August that tested support for large companies requiring their employees to get vaccinated in five battleground states — Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin — that went for Biden after voting for Donald Trump in 2016. It was favored by a solid majority of voters in all five of the states. A separate AP/NORC poll shared widely by Biden aides and advisers on Twitter Friday found strong support for vaccine mandates across several corporate and government sectors.
Well, it seems to me if a poll went out in August, there must have been some lead time. But that would not be as click-baity, now would it…
There was a vaccine for the 2009 outbreak that also protected against H1N1. Obviously COVID is next level compared to regular or even swine flu, but whatever balancing tests or political factors that were considered in 2009 did not result in OSHA mandating a vaccine.
Again, I realize that no vaccines were mandated back in 2009, but setting aside how well equipped or organized OSHA is for this, this passage
in appropriate circumstances the agency will use the “General Duty Clause” of the Occupational Safety and Health Act, which requires employers to provide employment free from recognized hazards, to ensure that employers follow the practices that public health experts agree are necessary to protect workers’ health.
Seems to speak to what OSHA is now being called on to do.
Not to engage in both-siderism, but Trump relied on similar general language when he redirected funds to the border wall and many of us complained it was an ultra vires act.
I’m just saying that this is a bit of a stretch.
On its face, the Trump border wall was a dumb, cruel, and stupid farce. That he boosted funds lawfully allocated for other uses was just icing on the cake. So not even remotely the same.
I’m just saying that this is a bit of a stretch.
and I am just saying that it is, given the magnitude of the problem, not.
Fellow revolutionaries! Take heart!
Thank you Big Brother. Have you seen The Death of Stalin? He followed all the rules too.
so, you bitch about him not following the rules, except he did, but now he’s Stalin.
you just want to bitch about Biden. how novel for you.
—
There is a legitimate point to be made that this vaccine requirement is new territory for OSHA.
so is a worldwide pandemic.
I’m trying to go back to see if there were intimations of this earlier. I didn’t find anything, but these two articles may be interesting.
this COVID OSHA rulemaking stuff has been in process since spring 2021. https://news.bloomberglaw.com/daily-labor-report/emergency-osha-covid-rule-drawn-out-by-more-white-house-meetings
tyranny! unconscionable dictates! bullshit shoved down throats! ignorant wailing! other ridiculous Republican talking points!
I have to admit, I come from it based on my context, which is that Japan had stockpiles of the vaccine before the Olympics, but chose not to make a big push. And it prioritized elderly (no problem there) but has not seemed to get its act together. Like this
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2021/08/27/national/shibuya-youth-vaccination-site-launch/
A COVID-19 inoculation site for supposedly vaccine-hesitant youth in Tokyo’s Shibuya Ward got off to a rocky start Friday after the capital dramatically underestimated the size of the crowd that would turn up.
Registration was supposed to begin at 11:50 a.m., but a line had amassed by sunrise and every slot was filled by 7:30 a.m. According to officials, around 15 people were already waiting in line by the time staff arrived at the facility at 4 a.m. Some had been waiting overnight.
“I live in Yokohama so there’s no way I can get here that early,” said Arisa, a 23-year-old who works in Tokyo and gave only her first name. Having had no luck reserving a slot at a vaccine site in Kanagawa Prefecture, she thought she would try her luck in Shibuya — but tickets had run out by the time she arrived at around 10:30 a.m. “I don’t know what to do now,” she said.
Dozens began to arrive at around 10 a.m. on Friday thinking they had given themselves ample time to claim a spot in line, only to find that registration had ended hours earlier and that they would have to return another day.
The confusion and disarray meant many left frustrated, empty handed and unvaccinated.
So I’m thinking yeah, about f**king time…
It also seems that several big business lobby organisations have spoken out in fabor of the measures or kept silent, when their usual mode in case of proposed regulations or..get thee behind me, Satan..tax increases is apoplectic and apocalyptic. Some GOPsters have already aired their great disappointment and sense of betrayal about that.
Hartmut: Develop a short range gun firing vaxx syringes and freely dispense it to the vaccinated population at large. The unvaxxed are potential attackers with deadly force and every citizen has a right to defend against that. So they should be encouraged to give anyone they suspect of being an unvaxxed aggressor and approaches to a distance of less than 15 feet a shot.
I realize you aren’t here, and so may be missing the nuances. But a “2nd Amendment solution” would traditionally not rely on merely resolving a possible threat. And besides, the vaccine takes a few days to work. So lethal force, not a mere vaccine, would be the true 2nd Amendment fans’ response.
companies that employ more than 100 people must require them to either be vaccinated or take a COVID test once a week.
the context here being a pandemic that has stretched for almost two years now, and continues to surge as variants emerge.
FWIW, I felt flu-ish last weekend. went to my local CVS, got a COVID do-it-yourself test. the test was:
* put a q-tip up your nose
* swish it around for 15 seconds
* put the q-tip in a little card with a reagent
* wait 15 minutes and see if a little pink line shows up
this is the tyrannical burden that is being placed on the American populace.
there’s an interesting procedural or maybe balance of power question to ask about whether and when it’s appropriate for the executive to step in to stuff like this. the courts will, no doubt, weigh in, and we’ll see where it lands.
comparisons to Stalin are hyperbole to the point of absurdity. the many many millions who died under Stalin might even call it obscene.
and there is no comparison between the administrations of Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Trump rendered the whole “both sides” line of argument moot.
I am, personally, sick and tired of humoring people who fill their heads with noxious lies and paranoid fantasies, and then use that as a basis for endangering the lives and livelihoods of all of the rest of us.
Get with the fncking program, losers.
677K dead, in this country. Isn’t that enough?
supposedly vaccine-hesitant youth
…
Registration was supposed to begin at 11:50 a.m., but a line had amassed by sunrise and every slot was filled by 7:30 a.m. According to officials, around 15 people were already waiting in line by the time staff arrived at the facility at 4 a.m. Some had been waiting overnight.
Sounds like “vaccine hesitancy” is being used as an excuse for a government which is failing to actually make the vaccines available to meet demand.
677K dead, in this country. Isn’t that enough?
Think of it as an index of how many deaths would be acceptable when fighting to overturn the next election. (Not as an absolute number.
More an order of magnitude.)
wj, the term ‘2nd amendment solution’ was chosen deliberately because I am aware of the insane RW rhetoric (like Sarah Palin’s ‘2nd amendment remedies’).
And that I do not seriously propose freelance self-defense vaccination should be obvious.
It would quickly have lethal results even with a tranquilizer shot in reserve.
Btw not my idea. I took inspiration from this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jV2tZd3ubf4
that I do not seriously propose freelance self-defense vaccination should be obvious
Hartmut, I realized that. But couldn’t resist taking the sarcastic suggestion and running with it. No offense intended.
this is what the plague rat party is fighting for: at the current rate, we’ll have another 1M dead in the US this time next year.
at the current rate, we’ll have another 1M dead in the US this time next year.
One cogent question is: What fraction of them will be people who, had they survived, would have been voters for DeSantis, or Abbot, etc. come November 2022?
Some GOP governors may be in sufficiently red states to not have to worry about such things. But others may find they have created a serious problem for themselves. Simply because they have less margin for error — no matter how carefully they gerrymander no how extensively they try to suppress votes against them.
hey, wj. Speaking of voters, that reminds me about our wager on the Newsom recall election. When can I swing by and pick up my winnings? I do not accept Bitcoins. Given my age, I tend to misplace them.
Have a nice day down there.
K-drum on the mandate here and here.
He might be on to something. I guess we shall see.
Give it to them hard, Joe. Really hard.
What fraction of them will be people who, had they survived, would have been voters for DeSantis, or Abbot, etc. come November 2022?
based on the headlines i see in media, my initial thought was “it’ll be 50/50 : Republicans and black people”. because i keep reading stories about how blacks are refusing vaccines at a very high rate.
then i googled.
https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/issue-brief/latest-data-on-covid-19-vaccinations-race-ethnicity/
and while it’s true in some states that minorities account for more COVID deaths than their percentage of the population, in most states, COVID death rates and population share are pretty close to equal.
so, i guess it will just be Republicans. if only there was a free and easy way for them to take responsibility for their own lives and the lives of those around them! alas. they’ll just have to die, smelling of Heartguard and bleach.
When can I swing by and pick up my winnings? I do not accept Bitcoins. Given my age, I tend to misplace them.
Have a nice day down there.
I’m expecting to have a relatively quiet day working the election. Just because I anticipate so many people have voted by mail (or DropBox, which is essentially the same thing). We shall see. Still, I think it is a job worth doing.
There’s no way I would pay with Bitcoin. Not being engaged in any illegal (or quasi-legal, perhaps) activities, I have no need for such.
Remind me of what, exactly, the terms of our wager were. From what I’m seeing currently, I expect Newsom to eke out a win (albeit with a far lower percentage of the vote than he won with in 2018). I hope, but do not expect, that Elder will manage to fall short of a plurality in the irrelevant (because the recall fails) vote for a successor. And, after this current fiasco of Elder’s “success”, I expect the California GOP to continue its stampede into irrelevance.
Donald, this is only going to get worse – hard to imagine, I know – with no intelligence on the ground.
The “war on terror” isn’t over and will probably never be. Here’s an interesting argument regarding Obama and drone war:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/aug/31/how-the-us-created-a-world-of-endless-war
From the GOP POV it was ‘merely’ a miscalculation made at the time when the blue states bore the brunt on COVID and it had not yet gone out of control in the red states.
Leaked documents show that sabotaging the blue efforts was seen as a top priority to make the Dems look bad leading to losses in the elections. When they had to realize that it would hit them too it was too late to go back on the demagoguery and their only option for personal political survival was to double down (or be eaten alive by the zombie hordes they had released).
And making Biden look bad is still a priority. I guess they assume that midterms always will cost the governing party and that their own losses via COVID deaths and anger would still get compensated by Dem losses via voter suppression and blaming for lack of success.
They made a bet and now have to hope that a) they survive their own primaries and b) that their miscalculations are small enough to not be lethal (to them, not their brainless base).
Cynic that I am I would not bet on that cynical plot not working. And all bets are off should it not work and ‘other options’ are considered and the masks come really off (pun intended).
comparisons to Stalin are hyperbole to the point of absurdity.
But they have the same first name!!
Reading that Guardian piece was interesting for me because of the deep ambiguities (and ambivalences) embedded in the analysis. One example: “One of the insidious results of the humanisation of endless war was to prompt activists to demand even more humane war.”
As a scholar who focuses a lot of attention on the rhetoric of conflict and war, I read that sentence and wonder precisely what the writer means here by even more humane war? Is that even more [humane] war, or *even more humane* war?
I also remain troubled by the moral framework overlap between defenses of drone strikes and defenses of police use-of-force. I don’t see any real difference between the two justificatory frameworks.
Which points to the deepest question I have in all of this which is “Humane for who?” Every one of these discussions hinges on the State of Exception (If there is some person or institution, in a given polity, capable of bringing about a total suspension of the law and then to use extra-legal force to normalize the situation, then that person or institution is the sovereign in that polity (PT 5). Any legal order, Schmitt bluntly concludes, is based on a sovereign decision and not on a legal norm (PT 10, 12–3). Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).
It would be really nice to get a liberal framework of law and order back, and not an endless extension of the State of Exception.
The reality of leadership is not amenable to rigid philosophical frameworks.
Purity of thought is a fine academic pursuit. Nobody in charge of anything has the luxury.
That’s an interesting observation regarding State of Exception (And a sidenote that here in Japan, Japanese press is always using the acronym SoE for State of Emergency as related to quasi voluntary corona measures) which provoked some googling and I see it is a concept from Schmitt. Very interesting stuff.
My take is that the difference between drone strikes and police use-of-force is the notion of Other/alterity. Drone strikes are directed at the Other, while police are supposed to be part of the group that is being policed. That had me find this
https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199916931.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199916931-e-002
which I am working thru now. (*cough**Libgen*) I’m not so familiar with Schmitt, anything you recommend as a starter? Thanks.
On the war on terror—
I think the root of the problem, or at least a big part of it, is the complete lack of accountability when one of our policies or actions kills innocent people. I often rant about war crimes and the need to jail high ranking officials, but that is currently a pipe dream.
But we can start small. In this piece you find General Milley, the head of the JSOC, saying the drone strike was righteous and there was a secondary explosion, meaning an ISIS bomb went off and killed the civilians. The evidence for this is apparently nonexistent.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/05/us/politics/military-drone-strike-kabul.html?searchResultPosition=2
He might have believed what he was told, but it is his responsibility to have a culture of honesty ( I will refrain from snickering) in the military. When things go wrong they have to be reported accurately. He should not be going out to the public and telling a comforting story which appears to be false. But that is what he did and he ought to be fired. Everyone up and down the chain of command who passed on this version of events as the truth needs to be investigated.
The government has a long record of putting out civilian casualty estimates that are far below ( factors of ten or more) what human rights investigators find. Gopal did a survey in Iraq ( and maybe Syria) where he found that the number of air strikes that killed civilians in the region he investigated was thirty tines higher than what the military claimed. ( This was in a NYT Sunday magazine piece years ago). This should be unacceptable.
Ultimately the blame for all this falls on Americans in general, or it does to the extent that we have a democracy. Because all of this is acceptable in practice even if it shouldn’t be.
Honesty about the consequences of our actions isn’t enough. But it would be a start.
He might have believed what he was told, but it is his responsibility to have a culture of honesty ( I will refrain from snickering) in the military. When things go wrong they have to be reported accurately.
Allow me to observe that, if the existing culture is otherwise, it is going to take a while, and probably several successive leaders, to turn that around. And, given the culture, it may take a while to manage to find such a series of leaders.
For illustration, consider how long it took from when President Truman ordered the integration of the military to a time when the military culture (more accurately, the views of its members) was generally not racist. (Feel free to argue that they still haven’t got there. It only reinforces the point.)
As for the suggestion to investigate everybody up and down the chain of command, Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? If the problem is pervasive in the military (which it feels like you believe), where do you get the honest officers for an internal investigation? And if you think that having the politicians in Congress (fonts of probity that they all are) do the investigation — well, I do not refrain from snickering.
The reality of leadership is not amenable to rigid philosophical frameworks.
Purity of thought is a fine academic pursuit. Nobody in charge of anything has the luxury.
They have no luxury to do this because they must consider the character and will of the people or else they will not remain the leader.
I wasn’t particularly interested in critiquing leaders with my analysis. I was looking at the other side of that mutually constraining dynamic.
I think that we are happy to say that we wish to be humane in our application of violence against others for the sake of People Like Us. I think that so long as the person empowered with that franchise for violence can make the argument that they intend safety for People Like Us and used that violence with reasonable judgment against People Not Like Us (or People of Questionable Status), then we excuse the deaths of those others so long as we don’t have to look at them and see them as people.
That’s how aid workers and the innocent people around them get blown to hell by drones. That’s how “threatening” people holding cell phones get shot and the people responsible get excused. We decide the person using that violence is the Person Like Us and that the people who were killed don’t count as much as our own security.
As far as an approach to Schmitt goes, I’ve only read The Concept of the Political in full, and excerpts of Political Theology. The heart of modern discussions of Schmitt comes mostly through Agamben (Homo Sacer and The State of Exception) which are specifically looking at Schmitt through the lens of Benjamin’s critique of Schmitt.
Been a decade since I read any Agamben or Benjamin, so I can’t really get much deeper into the weeds without getting in trouble.
(*cough**Libgen*)
There is nothing to apologize about for using Libgen. It is an absolutely appropriate way to protest American academia and publishing for attempting to price out everyone who isn’t part of the in group.
I’ve NEVER apologized for using
#include <libgen.h>
and never considered that it might be at all controversial.
Now, libwnck, that’s a different matter entirely.
It is an absolutely appropriate way to protest American academia and publishing for attempting to price out everyone who isn’t part of the in group.
I’m fortunate enough to have institutional access to most things. Please, however, do not mistake academic publishing with academia. It’s not academics in general that want paywalled publishing because most of the people doing the writing never get any money from it. In fact some actually pay to get published.
(Nota bene, I have had between one and four chapters published in our programs campus level textbook for a decade or so, it was only in the last year that the department saw fit to pay me for any of that, and once I got paid for it, they would no longer count the writing as service. Even now, though, the pay is a pittance compared to how much the department makes off of my work.)
Individual academics and campus librarians mostly want all this information accessible to people. Departments and administrators want to develop revenue streams and are the ones that try to keep the racket going, and the few rock star professors that sell enough textbooks to get academic autonomy float on those results and mouth a few marxist platitudes to ease their bougie guilt.
The tough part of all this is dismantling the racket without in-turn taking away any small benefit or rewward that the producers of that work might get for the work they did (mostly in security of employment through tenure or longer contracts). They are being exploited just as much as the people being charged for access are. Only the gatekeepers profit.
“ And if you think that having the politicians in Congress (fonts of probity that they all are) do the investigation — well, I do not refrain from snickering.”
The Democrats in Congress, or some of them, actually did investigate the CIA torture scandal. And I think there probably are honest officers in the military as well, but people who make it to the top are presumably the game players.
I am going to ask my own congressperson to launch an investigation. One person doing this means nothing, but if enough people got outraged it might have some effect. But yes, it might take years or decades. Right now officials lie because it is the path of least resistance for them and there are no consequences.
On a related note, the NYT had a story last week about an FBI agent who was sickened by the way they went after American Muslims. He leaked info about the policies to the Intercept and went to jail for it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/01/magazine/fbi-terrorism-terry-albury.html
So there’s another governmental institution which badly needs a shakeup.
I don’t think slogans like “ Defund the police” or the FBI or the military are politically effective (ObiWi had that argument) but there is a lack of accountability in these organizations.
I don’t know what slogans would
Didn’t finish my thought— I don’t know what slogans would work, but it ought to be possible to persuade people that we have a problem.
They have no luxury to do this because they must consider the character and will of the people or else they will not remain the leader.
right. plus, there is no really such thing as “the will of the people”. there are 320M opinions and the best a President can possibly do is try to please most of them most of the time. every bill you get is a compromise, your power is constrained for reasons that are sometimes obscured and ridiculous and many of the decisions you have to make are nearly-literally trolley problems.
then we excuse the deaths of those others so long as we don’t have to look at them and see them as people.
because that is how human brains work. it’s easy to criticize people for not caring what happens on the other side of the world. it’s literally impossible that people could actually truly care about people on the other side of the world the way they care about people they know. and, as COVID keeps demonstrating, a lot of people are absolutely OK with putting people they do know in harm’s way.
Americans are OK with blowing people up? yep. and so are all our allies. and so are the Russians. so are the countless local militias roaming Africa trying to stake out a claim.
America’s only distinction here is scale.
I don’t know what slogans would work, but it ought to be possible to persuade people that we have a problem.
Here’s a radical idea: Avoid slogans. Any slogans. Avoid them like the plague. And do everything you can to keep your supporters and allies from committing sloganeering either.
Slogans can be useful in some circumstances, by making the issue easy to understand. But they can also, witness “Defund the Police,” be counterproductive. Because those opposed can twist them into something which seems like what you said (perhaps simply by taking it literally), even though it’s not what you meant.
witness “Defund the Police,”
not sure how you can stop people from dredging Twitter to find things your base will find alarming.
it’s easy to criticize people for not caring what happens on the other side of the world. it’s literally impossible that people could actually truly care about people on the other side of the world the way they care about people they know. and, as COVID keeps demonstrating, a lot of people are absolutely OK with putting people they do know in harm’s way.
All true, but I don’t believe there is nothing to be done about this. A lot of the blame for how shit all of this is lies with editorial cowardice from the media. It’s not just that we have a hard time caring about more distant people, it’s that our media leans into the spectacle and soft-pedals the truth when that spectacle is proven to be an atrocity.
Yes, media can be suppressed, but there is no need to do so when they are complicit in the mythbuilding.
Morning, thanks for the pointers nous. Schimitt is a really interesting case (I don’t want to say person, because he was a rabid anti-semite and a fervent Nazi supporter) cause he identifies a lot of the problems with liberal democracies, but ewwwww, if you hope that insight would be part of a personal history you wouldn’t feel bad about, you would be deeply disappointed.
I’m not going to enter the slogan wars except to point out that 1) you need slogans and 2) they are always subject to deconstruction, so they may always backfire. I just had a person who I assumed was relatively sane post a long screed about how ‘I believe in science’ is a recipe for disaster. While there might be a bit of a problem, honestly, as slogans go, it seems pretty anodyne. Yes, there are times when science gets a head of itself, but that’s the problem of people doing it, not of science.
Anyway, it’s pretty clear to me that the only slogan that works is ‘Purge the right’. I mean, taking aim at an undefined other that changes whenever the discussion point changes has always worked so well… [/sarcasm]
I’m not going to enter the slogan wars except to point out that 1) you need slogans and 2) they are always subject to deconstruction, so they may always backfire.
Yes, any slogan can be deconstructed. Which is one reason to resist using them. Or, if you just cannot resist using one (perhaps you feel one necessary in a specific case), run them outside your personal ideological bubble to see how they will be readily misread by others. You may still get deconstructed, but make ’em work for it. Don’t hand them a gift on a platter.
Case in point
https://www.argusleader.com/story/news/politics/2019/11/18/gov-kristi-noem-launches-anti-meth-campaign-meth-were-it/4227949002/
Though I have a hard time thinking of Noem consulting anyone on anything…
“Though I have a hard time thinking of Noem consulting anyone knowledgeable and/or competent on anything…”
Fixed that for you.
(Which, note, makes her a leading clone of the previous guy.)
But yeah, “Meth, We’re On It” is a classic made-to-be-effortlessly-misinterpreted example.
You have to have a pretty inflated view of human intelligence to suggest that slogans are unnecessary at best and counterproductive at worst.
“Make America Great Again” is a slogan. Whatever the fuck it means, however incoherent it might be and however open to parody, it worked in 2016 and keeps on working now. It’s comforting to imagine that essay-length responses will somehow de-convert MAGAts from their sheep-like devotion to it, but it’s a pipe dream.
America contains enough stoopid people so that faith in reasoned discourse is rapidly becoming Panglossian. If it takes slogans to motivate non-MAGAts to show up at the polls, then bring on the slogans, sez I.
–TP
Not all slogans are created equal. True, “Make America Great Again” is a slogan. But it’s not trivial to make it seem to mean anything other than it obviously does. (America was great . . . when we were young. But “those people” have wrecked it, and we should undo the damage.)
As opposed to, say, “Defund the Police”. It being trivial to misread that as “reduce police funding to zero.”
Like I said, slogans have uses, but can also be counterproductive. At minimum, you need to have someone outside your immediate circle cross check to make sure you aren’t making it easy to misunderstand.
Hmm, interesting. I mean, who came up with ‘Make America Great Again’? Or ‘Defund the Police?’? Or my favorite ‘Cows Kill Salmon’ (a Northwest slogan, if you want to go in the weeds, we can talk about it)
Deconstructing slogans is great fun because it is easy to assign people to it without actually having to prove that they were the ones who started it, without having to question why it arises and what it means that people use it.
I’ve explained why I think ‘Defund the Police’ is not that bad, and I realize that people disagree. But it is not like there was an author of the slogan (wikipedia suggests it was ‘popularized’ by the Black Visions Collective in the aftermath of the George Floyd killing.) Context matters, and given the situation in Minneapolis, ‘Defund the Police’ makes perfect sense, but when you have people who willfully ignore what that context is and it is picked up by people who can’t be bothered to learn about the context, there is not much you can do. Except to wait until something happens that is so general that everyone everywhere feels the same way about it. But in that case, you don’t need any slogans. And if the only response to its perceived badness is ‘get better slogans’, I don’t actually think we will get very far.
“Defund The Police” is a Republican slogan. it wasn’t Republicans who came up with the text, but it was Republicans who popularized and capitalized on it because Republicans think it says something simple and powerful about Democrats. it was never a Democratic slogan – Democrats never used it among themselves.
I’m not sure about that, according to wikipedia (which is never wrong, ya know!), it has this
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defund_the_police
My understanding is that it gained prominence with the George Floyd protests. I mentioned that the context of Minneapolis and the city’s relation to the police was an important factor. I’d also highlight that Philando Castile was shot in Minneapolis in 2016 and immediately after George Floyd’s killing which was followed by this report
https://www.mpd150.com/report/
Lots of stuff in there, but what caught my eye was the employment of the term ‘abolitionist movement’. That plugging into that set of frames was pretty interesting for me.
Another aspect of this is that the city was pushing to ‘increase’ the number of police officers. Analyzed without connection to anything else, it is understandable (attrition and retirement as well as leave because of PTSD in the wake of the Floyd protests), but if you think about the optics, it’s not really optimal. In addition, a lot of this is baked into the city charter, so that’s another level of frustration.
I try to be pragmatic about this, I can see how the slogan didn’t work, but I don’t dumping on the people who resorted to it and telling them to shape up is really helpful.
My understanding is that it gained prominence with the George Floyd protests.
the Black Visions Collective is a small local group that is only tangentially related to electoral politics. the slogan bounced around Twitter for a while, but gained prominence (as in something you can hear in mainstream reporting) because the GOP adopted it as a slur.
another way you can tell it’s not a Democratic slogan is that no Democrats advocate for what the GOP says it means: literal defunding of police departments. “Democrats have concerns about municipal budget allocation priorities!” isn’t what the GOP has taught people to hear.
It’s true that you can’t control what your opponents will claim you said. But you can refrain from handing them something on a platter. Which is why I pushed back originally on what I took (perhaps incorrectly) to be Donald’s meaning when he said “I don’t know what slogan would work…”
I can see that, but, and this observation is not trying to slam you here but can you see how this might sound a little like victim blaming?
Perhaps I’ve got a thicker skin/harder head about this than other folks here, I have to see and sometimes deal with slogans done by Japanese groups, so I try to not to be too judgemental. Even though it kills me, a lot of times, I’d tell them for free what was wrong (though it would be nice to do that as a job in my dotage…)
This poor man didn’t have COVID, but he died of it, anyway.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/alabama-heart-patient-dies-after-hospital-contacts-43-icus-3-n1279025
case in point
https://japantoday.com/category/national/english-mistake-makes-kyoto-the-enemy-of-the-world
but, and this observation is not trying to slam you here but can you see how this might sound a little like victim blaming?
It wasn’t my intention, but I can see that.
My intent was more in the nature of how, when you are planning anything, you give some thought to what might go wrong and how to avoid it. For example, you can get hurt in an auto accident that wasn’t your fault. Deciding to encourage the use of a seat belt isn’t really victim blaming.
This poor man didn’t have COVID, but he died of it, anyway.
that man was from Cullman, AL.. that’s where my MiL lives. wife was down there a few weeks ago to visit and she was appalled at the lack of precautions.
Sorry, kind of participating while doing Japanese stuff, so cleek’s point (or what I think cleek’s point) went right passed me.
If I am interpreting it correctly, it would be
1)A group outside of electoral politics generates the slogan defund the police to address issues in their community (The title of the MD105 pamphlet was ‘Enough is enough’, but if you look at the 8 times they use ‘defund’, it is to provide a nuanced explanation)
2)Other groups protesting in other communities pick it up
3)No elected or running Democratic uses it except and until a Republican challenger/incumbent demands that they locate themselves in relation to a warped idea of what ‘Defund the Police’ means
At this point, you have two options. You could dimiss the slogan, say it’s just not appropriate and hands something to the opponents on a silver platter. Or, you could try to explain why it arose and why something needs to be done. I believe that AOC is someone who has done that, but if you look at the articles about her stance, it often overlooks basically everything before that. Here are a couple
https://nypost.com/2020/11/12/aoc-defends-defund-the-police-mantra-after-dem-losses/
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-aoc-nypd-de-blasio-george-floyd-protest-defund-police-a9553606.html
Now, you could suggest to her that she should have said she doesn’t agree with the slogan, preserving her own position, but leaving a lot of grassroots organizers hanging. Or you could accept that what she did was what was needed. I lean towards the latter.
I’d also argue that her particular stance is shaped by her context, which is cuts to the $6bn NY City police budget
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/nypd-budget-cuts-aoc-defund-protests-black-lives-matter-new-york-city-vote-a9595146.html
since the slogan is a horrible misphrasing of what some Dems actually want, as a Democratic slogan it’s abysmal. which is why it was never an actual Democratic slogan of any kind. but is close enough to the caricature Democrats the GOP runs against, so the GOP was able to popularize it as a demagogic strawman, and then demand all Dems answer for it.
AOC and some other Dems thought they could seriously engage the issue and try to explain that they really meant … zzzz … all that did was make them sound defensive and evasive and provide opportunities to take parts of their explanations out of context to legitimize the GOP’s strawman.
ex. last year, in a neighboring district, an accomplished and well-respected judge ran for a House seat as a Dem. the GOP accused her of wanting to “defund the police”, of course. and one of her responses to that was:
and then the GOP used that second sentence in their attack ads as proof that she did want to “defund the police”. “reallocating!” she’s a radical leftist!
their strawman could not be beat.
Back to the State of Exception for a moment. I started rereading Agamben (last time I read it was during the height of the Iraq War) and there is just so much that is relevant to our discussions here. One representative example:
Because the sovereign power of the president is essentially grounded in the emergency linked to a state of war, over the course of the twentieth century the metaphor of war becomes an integral part of the presidential political vocabulary whenever decisions considered to be of vital importance are being imposed.
Thus, in 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt was able to assume extraordinary powers to cope with the Great Depression by presenting his actions as those of a commander during a military campaign:
“I assume unhesitatingly the leadership of this great army of our people dedicated to a disciplined attack upon our common problems…. I am prepared under my constitutional duty to recommend the measures that a stricken
Nation in the midst of a stricken world may require.. . . But in the event that the Congress shall fail to take [the necessary measures] and in the event that the national emergency is still critical, I shall not evade the clear course of duty that will then confront me. I shall ask the Congress for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis—broad Executive power to wage war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe. (Roosevelt 1938,14-15)”
It is well not to forget that, from the constitutional standpoint, the New Deal was realized by delegating to the president (through a series of statutes culminating in the National Recovery Act of June 16,1933) an unlimited power to regulate and control every aspect of the economic life of the country—a fact that is in perfect conformity with the already mentioned parallelism between military and economic emergencies that characterizes the politics of the twentieth century.
This as part of Agamben’s review of the historical use of the state of exception in France, Germany, Italy, England, and the US.
It’s not the easiest read, but it’s clearly written and only about 88 pages long.
ask any cop you know what they think about being called to deal with mentally ill people in distress.
then let that guide your thinking about “defund the police”.
Meanwhile….
Climate change is a serious problem. One way to address it involves conversion to green energy sources (i.e. ones not involving combustion of carbon). There are a multitude of alternative options, all of which have drawbacks. For example, solar power is only available during daylight hours, wind power is only available when the wind is blowing, hydro power is widely used in the Western US but is increasingly threatened by drought reducing the available water supply.
Then there is nuclear power. It has fallen out of fashion, but still provides something like 20% of electric power generation. And falling — there has been only 1 new plant in the US in the last 20 years, while 9 have ben shut down in just the last decade.
https://news.yahoo.com/illinois-set-rescue-ailing-nuclear-100000733.html
In spite of being available 24/7.
The drawback here is disposal of the waste — nuclear fuel rods which are no longer radioactive enough to drive power generation, but still dangerously radioactive. There are possible ways to address that, from the futuristic (drop the waste in subduction zones in mid-ocean) to those which are merely politically difficult (consolidate waste in some remote, underground location such as the US facility in southern Nevada). The politics may eventually change. But not as long as those most concerned about climate change are generally knee-jerk opponents of all things nuclear.
Then there is nuclear power. It has fallen out of fashion, but still provides something like 20% of electric power generation.
About 10% globally. About 25% of the supply in the US Eastern Interconnect last year, less than 9% in both the Texas and Western Interconnects. Will drop below 6% in the Western within three years or so when Diablo Canyon shuts down. Various renewable sources (including conventional hydro) accounted for a bit over 40% of total production in the Western last year.
hydro power is widely used in the Western US but is increasingly threatened by drought reducing the available water supply.
Also a problem for nuclear energy with its reliance on cooling, no? The plants themselves are vulnerable to the effects of surface water temperatures rising and that is causing more shutdowns with longer restart times.
I just went and did a quick review of the different sides, and while there is a lot of entrenched opposition to nuclear power from the largest of the environmental groups, the factor that most of the environmental scientists point to as being the argument against nuclear power is the cost and time for developing new plants. Nuclear plants take a long time to build and are not suitable for rapid and flexible expansion.
The gist of their current argument is that nuclear power remains an important low-carbon energy source, but that the need of the moment is for a big push in renewables to extend the timeline enough to allow a more measured response in subsequent decades.
Nuclear plants take a long time to build and are not suitable for rapid and flexible expansion.
Certainly not a complete solution. But for providing the baseline supply, still looks like a sensible approach. Compare the time and expense to build either highways or railroads. (Being in California, I’m sure you are aware to the expenses we are looking at for the planned high speed rail line.)
Climate change is a serious problem.
As if. But it is just about always framed in the context of a basic assumption that the way we live now (aka maintain/grow the standard of living), and our demand for an ever growing population and GNP shall remain unchallenged now and well into the future.
To my way of thinking this kind of thinking is simply suicidal.*
*PS: All my solutions are currently politically untenable (i.e., abandon the burbs to take one example)….but eminently DOABLE from a technical standpoint. When things heat up (to borrow an expression) to the existential crisis point, minds will finally get focused….but I fear it will be too late.
Reader alert-I am a fuzzy headed socialist.
I lean towards the latter.
Good on you.
Maybe some of our Dem betters need to learn how to wave the bloody shirt:
“Defund the police, you say?”, said Dem candidate X.
“I am here to tell you that we need more funding! More funding for schools, health care, retirement assistance, community assistance!!!”
“Republicans are AGAINST FUNDING any of those things!”, she went on.
“They want to DEFUND everything except putting money in their own pockets!”, she thundered.
“The GOP needs to be squashed. Mindless greed needs to be defeated, and defeated soundly. I ask for your vote to make that goal a reality.”
“Thank you.”
Also a problem for nuclear energy with its reliance on cooling, no?
In a drying western US, this is an argument against all thermal power plants. Here in Colorado one of the reasons that wind farms produce power more cheaply than new gas-fired power plants is that wind farms don’t have to shop for water rights.
the context of a basic assumption that the way we live now (aka maintain/grow the standard of living), and our demand for an ever growing population and GNP shall remain unchallenged now and well into the future.
To my way of thinking this kind of thinking is simply suicidal.
You may be convinced, even to the point of restricting your personal standard of living. But your chances of convincing any significant portion of the world to buy in are nil. Even after climate change has already happened, it’s simply not going to fly.
i’m not moving to any city.
Great stump speech, bobby! I hope lots of candidates adopt some variation on it.
Even after climate change has already happened, it’s simply not going to fly.
I’m not sure what “has already happened” means exactly, but once it’s happened enough, people’s standards of living will be restricted for them. So it is going to fly, just not voluntarily.
(Not that I think you disagree, wj. Just taking it a bit further down the logical road.)
“Reader alert-I am a fuzzy headed socialist.”
You also think living in a city is acceptable. So its not that your solutions are not politically feasible, they are inhumane and lack any empathy from the perspective of someone like me who feels crushed in a suburb of a city of 250k. I would die if I had to live in an inner suburb, much less the actual city.
So its not that your solutions are not politically feasible, they are inhumane and lack any empathy from the perspective of someone like me who feels crushed in a suburb of a city of 250k.
Not to mention being inhumane and lacking empathy for those who are currently living at bare subsistence level elsewhere in the world. It’s fine to say that you (and those at near your level) need to forego rising standards of consumption. But there are far, far more folks out there who are simply not going to accept that.
You may be convinced, even to the point of restricting your personal standard of living. But your chances of convincing any significant portion of the world to buy in are nil. Even after climate change has already happened, it’s simply not going to fly.
After the worst effects of climate change are unavoidable, not much will fly. Everyone will be dealing with refugee crises and instability.
Spring 2019 was a dress rehearsal.
There is no status quo option.
Not to mention being inhumane and lacking empathy for those who are currently living at bare subsistence level elsewhere in the world.
They’re going to die first because of AGW.
It’s fine to say that you (and those at near your level) need to forego rising standards of consumption. But there are far, far more folks out there who are simply not going to accept that.
The groups driving ecological collapse are not saving the lives of the poor by raising the global standards. The groups driving ecological collapse are not acting in the interests of the poor and at-risk. The values driving their economic and political activity are not altruistic.
The people trying to avert disaster spend a lot of time trying to find ways to mitigate the harms to the at-risk.
Your scolding is misplaced.
(i.e., abandon the burbs to take one example)
Given the political resistance to this, at least in the US, it might be more useful to ask “Can the suburbs become efficient enough?” The answer to that may be different in different places. Bear with me for a minute…
Now that the Census Bureau has made it possible to calculate population density based on built area rather than simple county area, a bunch of conventional wisdom turns out to be wrong. In the CB’s 13-state western region, suburbs average almost double the population density of suburbs in the rest of the country. Many/most of those western suburbs are on the urban side of the most common density value for dividing urban/suburban. A southern exurb at <2,000 people per square mile might never be efficient enough. A western burb at >4,200 people per square mile may do fine.
The national labs have looked at how to do low carbon/no carbon grids in the US for decades now. Their results for the Western Interconnect say that it’s straightforward. That’s not the same as simple, especially since the politics will likely be harder than the technology. The renewable resources are large relative to demand. Those resources are both type-diverse and geographically-diverse, so statistical load balancing is much easier. Because the population is concentrated in a handful of major metro areas, the routes for bulk transport are obvious. The labs have looked at the problem in great detail. They also have looked at the Eastern and Texas Interconnects, and shown those are considerably harder problems.
All our lives are going to be a cakewalk compared to what my students and their children will face if we don’t curtail our current way of life.
Their lives will be a cakewalk compared to the lives of the marginal who suffer now and will suffer worse after the conspicuous consuming sociopaths get their way.
And the conspicuous consuming sociopaths will likely go to their great reward just before the rest of us go over the cliff they have been driving us towards.
We aren’t constraining people to smaller, harder lives. Those are the circumstances we have already built for ourselves through the accumulated momentum of unwise choices.
No one wants or hopes for these changes.
A man said to the universe:
“Sir, I exist!”
“However,” replied the universe,
“The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation.” – Stephen Crane
Please define conspicuous consumption sociopaths. Because it seems that every person living in a city can be defined as that. I live on less than almost every one I know that live any where near a city. The cities have filthy air, constant light, too much noise,limited Greenspan, who would want to live there? Now that I do 99% of my work by zoom I never drive more than 50 miles a week.
But no, we don’t have a local opera house.
It seems unlikely moving me to a city saves the environment much.
Please define conspicuous consumption sociopaths.
“Here we calculate final energy footprints; that is, the energy embodied in goods and services across income classes in 86 countries, both highly industrialized and developing. We analyse the energy intensity of goods and services used by different income groups, as well as their income elasticity of demand. We find that inequality in the distribution of energy footprints varies across different goods and services. Energy-intensive goods tend to be more elastic, leading to higher energy footprints of high-income individuals. Our results consequently expose large inequality in international energy footprints: the consumption share of the bottom half of the population is less than 20% of final energy footprints, which in turn is less than what the top 5% consume.” – https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-020-0579-8
The top 5% of the population measured by wealth consume more energy than does the bottom 20% and they have far more discretion over where they spend their money. They are also the ones profiting off of all that fossil fuel extraction. Everyone else’s growth has been flat.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-51906530
But Professor Kevin Anderson, from the Tyndall Centre in Manchester, who was not involved in the study, told BBC News: “This study tells relatively wealthy people like us what we don’t want to hear.
“The climate issue is framed by us high emitters – the politicians, business people, journalists, academics. When we say there’s no appetite for higher taxes on flying, we mean WE don’t want to fly less
“The same is true about our cars and the size our homes. We have convinced ourselves that our lives are normal, yet the numbers tell a very different story,” he said.
The study says transport energy alone could increase 31% by 2050. “If transport continues to rely on fossil fuels, this increase would be disastrous for the climate,” the report says.
It suggests different remedies for different types of energy use. So, flying and driving big cars could face higher taxes, while energy from homes could be reduced by a housing retrofit.
The groups driving ecological collapse are not saving the lives of the poor by raising the global standards. The groups driving ecological collapse are not acting in the interests of the poor and at-risk. The values driving their economic and political activity are not altruistic.
I’m afraid that you’ve totally missed the point. Which is that those who are currently very poor are going to want to raise their standard of living. And they are not going to accept “global warming” as a reason why that shouldn’t happen.
So either we make power consumption at a far higher level available to them, at a price they can afford, without burning carbon, or they (as China is currently doing) go big on coal burning and other problem technologies.
I’m afraid that you’ve totally missed the point. Which is that those who are currently very poor are going to want to raise their standard of living. And they are not going to accept “global warming” as a reason why that shouldn’t happen.
I don’t remember anyone saying that the poor should not get power or food, so this is a strange argument to make to counter the people wanting more sustainable energy and agriculture.
Now that I do 99% of my work by zoom I never drive more than 50 miles a week.
when I lived in cities, I didn’t have or need a car. when people talk about urbanization as a way of reducing overall carbon footprint, I think that’s the kind of thing they’re talking about.
and FWIW, Zoom is not carbon-neutral. better than driving, but that’s a low bar.
‘move to the city’ is probably not a sufficient answer for global warming, and everyone isn’t gonna want to do it anyway.
I don’t see a solution to global warming that doesn’t require some significant number of people accepting limits of some kind on what they consume and how they consume it. people in the first world aren’t gonna want to give up what they have, people not in the first world aren’t gonna want to be told they can never have what people in the first world have.
So the laws of physics and human nature are just going to play out.
Young people alive today and the next few generations after them are going to have a fncking mess on their hands.
maybe there will be some wonderful technical discovery that will let us replace our use of fossil fuels, plastics, and similar with some other marvelously impact-less alternatives. that would be great, where for ‘great’ please read ‘miraculous’.
absent that, our progeny are gonna be stuck making all the hard decisions we have refused to make.
people seem to be waiting for a solution that doesn’t require them to make any unwelcome adjustments to their way of life. I’m not sure that exists.
Well, someone is getting the message…
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/sep/06/gen-z-climate-change-careers-jobs
My thinking too has changed on this, but not sure when I can point to an a-ha moment. I was more generally a person who thought that if growth could be harnessed and done, a sort of faith in technocracy. I knew there were problems with that, but I thought if minds could be sufficiently concentrated, it could be done.
Now, I don’t think that is the case and I pretty much fully accept the case for degrowth.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/24/economic-crisis-degrowth-green-new-deal
Yet to fixate on the question of growth risks exaggerating the differences between the Green New Dealers and degrowthers – elevating the former as practical-minded technocratic capitalists who want a return to normal economic activity, just motored by a different energy source, and dismissing the latter as abstemious, back-to-the-land utopians who want to deprive us of most of the luxuries of modern capitalist life.
This in turn could lead to our learning only some of the lessons of the current predicament, and taking only some of the opportunities it offers. What both strands of climate thinking ask us to consider – and what the current crisis poses with special, brutal force, as phrases like “key workers” and “essential services” enter common parlance – is the question of what kinds of jobs we need, and what kinds our planet needs of us.
Which goods and services are indispensable, and which would we be better off without? Degrowth and the GND offer different answers to this question – from green infrastructure construction to the care economy – but they both pose it, as well as raising important broader questions about how, how much and why we work. Once it is safe to emerge from economic survival mode, I hope we will have the wisdom to follow the lead of both movements by systematically reflecting on which kinds of productive activity actually enrich our lives – and which among these our planet can sustain.
What makes me feel shittiest is that my kids have to navigate a world where I can’t really give them much advice. I suppose that every generation feels that, and I often think if my mom and dad had known some things rather than been locked into their histories, I would have done different things. But looking at that, it is more doing things that I imagine _might_ have been more exciting, not behaving in a different way because the planet depends on it. If my kids (or descendents, though that implies too much optimism) ever find my writing here, all I can say is sorry, I wish I had figured it out sooner…
One of Colorado’s contributions to the Christian conservative death-loving, death-dealing subhuman bug up America’s ass all these decades:
https://www.reddit.com/r/HermanCainAward/comments/pnhcnb/another_antivaxx_conservative_talk_show_host/
One bullet saved, but one that should have been used years ago.
Genocidal fucking republican party murderers:
https://www.balloon-juice.com/2021/09/13/pandemic-school-in-deflorida/
And yet the fewer of them there are, the minority killers cheat, lie, and steal to become a greater majority:
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/republicans-gerrymander-redistricting-voting-rights
Well, if it’s legal, what’s the problem?
Kill all republican/conservative-made laws and courts.
This suicidal mass psychosis isn’t killing enough of them fast enough to save the country.
They grin like addled suicide bombers when they threaten on the fucking goddamned public airways to murder half the country in their civil war:
https://www.mediamatters.org/one-america-news-network/oan-wayne-allyn-root-warns-civil-war-its-coming-i-promise-you-its-coming
I’m not smiling. I derive no joy whatsoever from the horror I regret is coming.
I have a promise for Root.
Elder, the subhuman conservative vermin, won’t accept the results of the California recall:
https://digbysblog.net/2021/09/13/the-best-republican-california-could-dredge-up/
Free elections in America are now dead fucking dog shit.
America is ungovernable by conservative decree.
Their only recourse is savage violence, as the facile rhetoric of watering the tree of liberty and the rest of the rhetorical horseshit about anti-gummint insurrectional crapola is now exhausted.
The only thing they have left is trying to kill all of us.
Stealing elections can’t satisfy them.
Is there any reason why we cannot both have degrowth and increase the standard of living for the least fortunate?
I don’t remember anyone saying that the poor should not get power or food, so this is a strange argument to make to counter the people wanting more sustainable energy and agriculture.
Well, that’s how I read you saying:
Specifically the part about objecting to “saving the lives of the poor by raising the global standards.” Glad to hear that isn’t what you intended.
Is there any reason why we cannot both have degrowth and increase the standard of living for the least fortunate?
If you just want to limit growth for those in the first world, no problem. But the way you have phrased it, you want to restrict growth everywhere. It is, I suppose, a “defund the police” phenomena — apparently what you said (as I heard it) wasn’t what you were actually trying to communicate.
Specifically the part about objecting to “saving the lives of the poor by raising the global standards.” Glad to hear that isn’t what you intended.
Not at all. I was thinking (in writing that) about the fieldwork interviews that Justin Farrrell did working with the ultra rich in Teton County, WY. The ultra rich he spoke with align their environmental activism with their personal priorities and values, not with the needs of the poor – even the poor that they are personally involved with. I’m just saying that if we want to help the poor, we can’t rely on the people with the most ability to take voluntary action to help the poor in any meaningful way. The policies they favor don’t do that.
And as for restricting growth, yes, degrowth everywhere, but not as a flat policy. Progressive degrowth that allows relief for the economically at-risk, but probably puts a big crimp in the lifestyles of the rich and famous to do so.
Here’s the thing. To someone not familiar with the degrowth movement**, “degrowth” sounds like it’s obviously a synonym for “shrink.” As in, “we want to shrink your personal economic circumstances” — not, note, restrain growth, but shrink. And no hint that relief for the economically at-risk might be included.
If you are going to use the word, outside the small group who are already onboard, you need to make a major effort to spread familiarity with the term. Or you are going to shoot yourself in the foot, over and over.
Communication, not to mention persuasion, requires using vocabulary that your audience understands.
** Which is the vast majority of the population. Including me, until just now when I looked it up.
wj – I didn’t mention the term degrowth until after you and Marty had already started making noise about the less fortunate as if environmentalists were indifferent at best to their plight.
LJ introduced the term, not as a slogan but as something he had come around to after taking the time to educate himself.
I’m still baffled as to why you and Marty think that those who wish to scale back our ecological burden on the environment would think that means ignoring the needs of the worst off. No one who has proposed that has done so with the intention of putting the burden on the less fortunate. We have all, to a person, been advocating for change in order to protect the least well off and those who do not have a say in the future we are building for them.
And all the major environmental groups have, for quite some time now, been aligning their environmental activism with economic justice and improving the lot of the impoverished around the world. Certainly that is a major part of what Patagonia and the Sierra Club are doing as part of their goals of creating a circular economic model.
Check it out.
Communication, not to mention persuasion, requires using vocabulary that your audience understands.
OK…let’s give it a try:
“Folks, we are now experiencing the onset of an ecological and existential catastrophe. Some say it is fake news. That is the voice of clowns, psychopaths, liars and unforgivable greed.
Some say we should just wait for the next technological miracle. Well, how long will that take? That is the voice of the hopefully delusional.
I liken this moment to a lifeboat decision on a sinking ship. Given our current weight, we cannot all get into the lifeboat. It would sink. Some would simply say, throw the weak overboard. I reject that inhumanity unequivocally. Who amongst you would cast the first stone? (heard that somewhere).
So let’s commit to each of us losing weight. Those with the most weight to lose will have to lose the most weight.
This is both fair and reasonable. If we ALL pitch in to help each other, we can do this. Let’s go!”
here is how the ground reality looks to me.
the top 3 selling vehicles in the US right now, in order, are:
* Ford F-150
* Chevy Silverado
* Dodge Ram pickup
all around 20mpg average with regular gas, knock a couple of mpg off of that for E85.
we – the US – can’t even get people to get a freaking vaccination without them throwing a shit-fit about their sacred inalienable rights. imagine trying to persuade people to (a) drive a small hybrid sedan or (b) take the bus.
or, you know, live somewhere that they can walk to work or ride a bike.
we’re the 4th largest consumers of beef per capita. try to persuade people here to eat half the beef per year that they eat now.
a couple of weeks ago I was in northeast OH visiting family. kind of mid-way between Cleveland and Akron. no curbside pickup for recycling on offer. all of it – glass, paper, plastic, metal – goes in a landfill.
there are 10 states in the US that have some level of ban on single-use plastic bags. 2 more have some kind of tax program to discourage their use. 18 states not only have no law against, they have laws banning local municipalities from passing any restriction on the use of single use plastic bags.
We’re dealing with tens or hundreds of millions of people who approach this stuff like Brett with his incandescent chicken coop bulb. Nobody wants to give a freaking inch, and more than that, they believe they are entitled to not give an inch. About anything.
I hate to say this, but I don’t see this country doing one damned thing about global warming or global-scale environmental issues of any kind, any time in my lifetime or likely a generation after that. We are persuaded that we are entitled to do whatever the hell we want, and no small number of us threatens to shoot whoever tries to tell them different.
if somebody somehow discovers an efficient way to turn dirt into a clean fuel with an energy density approaching that of petroleum, maybe there’s a way forward. even dirt wouldn’t work, it’s bulky and awkward to move around. it would have to be something like ocean water. and even that wouldn’t work, because it would be too hard to make it an excludable good, so nobody would be able to get sufficiently filthy stinking rich off of it.
Americans have a deep and abiding sense of entitlement. We consider ourselves exceptional. The idea that we should willingly give up any bit of what we think we are entitled to is, socially and politically, a non-starter. the kiss of death.
even 50 years ago, we were able to agree about stuff like this to a degree sufficient to create the EPA and pass basic environmental legislation.
now we can’t even agree to wear a mask in public during a pandemic. people will literally start fights in public places if they’re challenged on it.
we no longer have the social cohesion or sense of simple, basic responsibility to other people to make anything like concerted action about global warming feasible.
I’m just talking about the US here, but I’m sure there are analogous issues other places. Like, for example, all the places where people are finally able to afford to buy a car or an air conditioner. Who’s gonna tell them no?
I don’t see how we get to where we need to be until some very serious damage starts getting done. Like, much worse than now. At which point, I’m not sure what options are available.
The world is going to change. How much, where, I don’t know. But it’s already happening, and as far as I can tell outside of a handful of places we aren’t even trying to keep up, let alone get ahead of it.
I’m sure it sounds like I’m being all gloom and doom and hating on America, but I’m just looking around and telling you what I see.
Ford F-150, Chevy Silverado, Dodge Ram pickup. #1, #2, and #3. Every year, for years. How many freaking carpenters are there?
And we knew this was coming 40 years ago.
Suburbs are economic and ecological superfund sites. They were built on pipedream lies. They are subsidized by taxes generated in urban areas. They do not have the tax base (this takes density) to maintain their infrastructure, much less the lifestyle. Ecologically? Well, pavement from horizon to horizon is, simply put, extremely stupid.
As for those of you who have decided at long last to take up the cause of Indian peasants, well, when are you going to do something about it? There are public policies that would actually promote that good thing…policies that would have us give up some of our good things so they can also have some good things.
Conceptually, this is not hard. In political practicality, yes, I would agree….well neigh impossible.
But we, as a species, are going to be faced with such tough decisions in short order.
Count on it.
I would die if I had to live in an inner suburb, much less the actual city.
Your disdain for the millions who happily live in New York, Atlanta, Chicago, Miami, St.Louis, and maybe, just maybe, Boston, is duly noted.
But really, it’s not all about you.
I haven’t read the whole thread, but tend to agree with wj on slogans, whether it is degrowth or defund the police. I have sympathy with what I think are the goals of both. I have read some things about degrowth from both adherents and its critics and am not sure where I fall— some of the critics seem to misrepresent what the advocates want. And on substance I am not sure who is right.
But substance aside, leftist sloganeering seems terrible. I think the right is better at this. Pithy slogans by their nature are about emotion, and so you want the emotion that the slogan elicits to support the goal you want to push. Conservatives say things like “ no new taxes” and the emotion stirred up is that people want to keep their money from the greedy hands of the bureaucrats and tax collectors. Liberals who argue against this are like parents trying to tell their young children they have to eat their vegetables before they can have ice cream. Pithy slogans that stir up emotions are more powerful than rational arguments.
But lefties seem to pick out slogans which stir up the emotions that oppose what the left is trying to advocate. Defund the police makes people think we won’t have police protecting us from criminals. Degrowth— well, we are all raised to see growth as good and so you have to make a long argument explaining what one really wants.
I think people like Jason Hickel might be right. I’m not sure. But the slogan just invites misinterpretation.
I’m still baffled as to why you and Marty think that those who wish to scale back our ecological burden on the environment would think that means ignoring the needs of the worst off.
I can’t speak for Marty, obviously. But my personal experience (admittedly not particularly current, hermit that I have become) has been that those arguing for “no growth” do, in fact, mean no growth anywhere. It’s as if they can sort-of grasp what poverty means in the US, but have no clue that the poor here (not homeless, but poor) would be considered quite well of in much of the world.
If the ecological movement has gotten past that, wonderful. But I have to say that they rather understate it in their news releases. Just as you only brought it up when challenged. I’m guessing that’s because you simply assumed that everybody knew. But everybody doesn’t. Including, as you can see, me.
Degrowth means less energy and resources consumed in aggregate. You could make the lives of the worst-off so much better in terms of quality of life (which, for them, translates fairly well to standard of living on a marginal basis) by reallocating resources from the best-off in ways that are virtually meaningless in terms of quality of life (which, for them, translates very poorly to standard of living on a marginal basis). People don’t need most of the kind of high-end sh*t that the most well-off in the world consume.
What the f**k does anyone need with a goddamned fat-ass diamond ring? What’s wrong with you if you think that can make you truly happy?
But lefties seem to pick out slogans which stir up the emotions that oppose what the left is trying to advocate.
“Liberte, equality, fraternity”
“Eat the rich”
“From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs”
“All power to the soviets. Bread. Peace. Land.”
“Whose side are you on?”
“The union makes us strong”
“I like Ike”“Power to the people”
“Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today”
“Let freedom ring”
Find the one that does not fit.
what hsh (that dirty commie) wrote at 11:51 abv.
Fear, anger, and mockery are easy to do. They also all feed tribalism and shut down curiosity. A constant diet of these conditions a mind to find reward in them and reinforces the notions fed by them.
Pretty soon, the people conditioned this way get fixated on the damnedest things. My relatives were afraid of the malicious influence of vegans for a while.
This is the land in which RW slogans live.
Left wing slogans can live in that land too, but that’s the revolutionary left. We’re trying not to feed that beast any more than we have to to keep the 3%ers at bay.
Curiosity and openness are hard. They’re doubly hard during times of great stress.
Guess what we have been living through, and what is in the forecast for the foreseeable future?
It would be grand if people of good faith on the right would maybe try to stop gorging their amygdalae on outrage and start looking for the good in others long enough to find some common cause.
nous, It would be grand if people of good faith on the left
rightwould maybe try to stop gorging their amygdalae on outrage and start looking for the good in others long enough to find some common cause.Just as true.
And, bobbyp, my disdain is for people who insist the way they live is right for everyone. And then use climate change as the excuse to enforce it.
I would die if I had to live in an inner suburb, much less the actual city.
I remember when I went to Japan on a government program, they took special pains to explain how Japanese residences were like ‘rabbit hutches’ which is often how Japanese apologize for their housing. Here’s an interesting discussion of why the rabbit hutch image is correct as an observation, but fails to understand the context of that system
https://www.timeout.com/tokyo/things-to-do/transcreating-tokyo-part-14-in-praise-of-rabbit-hutches
Above all, what I want to get across is that although Edo commoners’ homes may have looked like rabbit hutches, they more than served their purpose as residences within the context of the city’s overall urban system.
Well then, what about contemporary Japan? Ever since the Meiji era, Western lifestyles have slowly permeated Japanese society, resulting in a gradual decline of the technology and equipment required for Edo-style communal living. In my opinion, urban life is becoming increasingly difficult to get a grip on, as the ‘rabbit hutch model’ survives both as a result of complacency and due to the parallel realities of incompletely adapted Western ways of living and the impossibility of returning entirely to an Edo lifestyle.
However, the notion that ‘a small home doesn’t prevent one from living large in the city’ certainly applies to modern-day Tokyoites. That reality is based on the rather amazing achievement of public space utilisation in Edo’s rabbit hutch lifestyle, developed until the mid-19th century. Not touching upon the forms of control that these public spaces were put under would make my argument awfully glorifying of Japan – but developing that point would require another column altogether.
There were people who really chafed at the size of Japanese residences, but I’d been to Europe and it wasn’t that different. I had stayed a week with a Spanish assistant who taught at the same lycée that I did. They had 6 people in an 2 room apartment, the beds folded out of the wall.
So it does come down to what you are used to, and I can see how some people can’t really imagine themselves living in different circumstances. However, only given the changes we’ve seen in weather in the past 5 years, I would assume that people are going to have to make pretty substantial changes to the way they live. ‘insist’ on it? I don’t think it’s me that’s insisting that people might not be able to live in Miami or New Orleans, or various areas of California, Oregon and Washington.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jul/13/us-wildfires-california-oregon-washington
There is a piper to be paid, the only question is who is going to pay them.
What per capita carbon footprint can the world afford? What’s your personal carbon footprint? If your second answer is more than your first, what are you going to do about it?
I don’t want to tell anyone how to live. But I do want a liveable environment for my children and grandchildren.
Bobbyp—
The left used to be good at slogans. Not lately.
I am not big on slogans anyway. The details matter. The Bolshevik “ bread peace land” slogan was a good one, but the delivery left something to be desired.
Even the nazis nicked it for their ‘for work and bread’ campaigns (before they came to power and the first few months after). Of course “THEY take/took your work and bread away” played an equal if not even larger part (and the ‘they’ were of course varied depending on the occasion, it was not just ‘the Jews’).
They are subsidized by taxes generated in urban areas. They do not have the tax base (this takes density) to maintain their infrastructure
the people on my road literally own the road and pay for its upkeep. there are no public utilities whatsoever.
and that’s a pretty common situation, actually.
Ecologically? Well, pavement from horizon to horizon is, simply put, extremely stupid.
what are the streets in your eco-Oz paved with?
Then there are slogans originating on the Left, first taken apart by the Right, and then successfully repurposed by same:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/defunding-the-worlds-policeman/
My favorite repurposing by the malignant racist rightwing in America, besides their recruitment of racist white conservative southern Democrats, is Ronald Reagan’s (“those monkeys”, referring to African UN delegates, and plenty more) and his fake, bullshit embrace in 1987 (like air-kissing Sammy Davis Jr and then throwing up a little into his hankie) of Martin Luther King’s “judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character” ideal.
And then Reagan and his henchmen feeding the Neshoba County candidacy announcement and later Willie Horton and much more directly into the ready and willing woodchipper of the American conservative amygdalae, goosing and oiling it up for inevitable and subsequent feedings of hate against gays, immigrants, Muslims, masks, vaccines, all things gummint, all things Democratic, feminazis, tree-huggers, all taxation, all science, all things not dogshit conservative dogshit republican.
Including every election from now on across the country.
If republican prostates are as soft and supple as their endlessly receptive and voracious amygdalaes, no wonder we have an abortion problem.
But now their testicles are swollen to go with their big swinging dicks:
https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2021/09/now-look-at-what-you-just-saw-this-is-what-you-live-for
what are the streets in your eco-Oz paved with?
Children’s tears.
cleek,
Propane for heat, water from wells, septic tanks not sewers — but how about electricity, telecom, mail?
I know that in one sense, electric and phone/broadband companies are not “public utilities” like the USPS. And I’m not trying to antagonize you, I’m actually curious.
–TP
And, bobbyp, my disdain is for people who insist the way they live is right for everyone. And then use climate change as the excuse to enforce it.
That’s funny. I suppose there are people like that, but I think a lot of us are forced to live in ways that we, ourselves, think are wrong. I don’t know how to arrange my and my family’s affairs in realistic ways to seriously and significantly fight climate change because I live in a system not of my making, one that makes it extremely difficult to use a lot less energy and consume far fewer resources.
I’m not completely helpless as all that goes, but I’m also not all that powerful.
The website of the leading GOPster candidate for the Californian governorship (Larry Elder) seems to have acces to either an oracle or a time machine since it already cries (and seems to have for days now) that statistical analysis of the results clearly show that it was stolen from him. It also makes open threats of violence saying that, the ballot box not having been protected, citizens cannot really wait for the soap box and the jury box to do their work but trust has to be put into the fourth box of American liberty, the ammo box (although he hopes that, if enough citizens join him in his fight, this box ‘closest to the Pandora’s box’ can stay closed).
I assume the latter is pure CYA.
If not and if there are actual riots after him (hopefully) losing, he should be made an example of and put on trial for calls for violent insurrection. I assume California has laws against that sort of thing.
“I don’t know how to arrange my and my family’s affairs in realistic ways to seriously and significantly fight climate change because I live in a system not of my making, one that makes it extremely difficult to use a lot less energy and consume far fewer resources.”
I think all of us feel that way. But I lived on well water and septic tank most of my adult life. The electricity was coal fired, since retired, and I couldn’t do much about that. The only other services were telecom/cable and we heated with oil. I dont know what that carbon footprint is, but I’m not sure where you reduce it except for solar on the roof for heat and electricity, with questionable results in NE.
I mostly had pretty fuel efficient cars, for cost purposes.
The trade off was a long commute, sometimes bus or train, more often car. But I couldn’t afford to live closer in even had I wanted to.
So now, how does that fit a conspicuous consumption model? I know it’s not a 80 Sq ft shared space in downtown Boston but no. I don’t want to live that way. Now I’m looking at downsizing to 1200 Sq ft but on 3 acres. No idea what those carbon tradeoffs will be. Which I think is the biggest challenge of all. Who knows what they individually cost? I did quit using straws and buying bottled water. Did that really help?
Who the fuck knows, lets tax some rich guys, that will fix everything.
Who the fuck knows, lets tax some rich guys, that will fix everything.
Because letting them not pay anything and fly off into space has worked so well.
I know that in one sense, electric and phone/broadband companies are not “public utilities” like the USPS.
it’s a pretty important sense! city dwellers’ precious tax dollars don’t pay for our phone or electricity.
it’s possible tax dollars were used to pay to run the electric/phone lines down the road when the first houses were put up. i don’t know how that works.
on the other hand, a big portion (~25%) of our monthly telco bill is made up of taxes and various fees having to do with different kinds of “cost recovery” (aka. paying to run new lines). so we’re paying for someone’s new lines. i don’t have an electric bill handy.
I don’t know how to arrange my and my family’s affairs in realistic ways to seriously and significantly fight climate change because I live in a system not of my making, one that makes it extremely difficult to use a lot less energy and consume far fewer resources.
I’d like to see a concise, coherent description of how we would rework our current economy to provide food, shelter, clothing, power and a reasonably free and agreeable lifestyle to everyone under whatever Green Regime the climate change consensus calls for. I doubt it actually exists, and if it does, I’m pretty sure the greens are keeping it quiet for fear of terrifying everyone else into completely ignoring what they (the greens) have to say.
Further, when you have the uber greens going maskless at mega-rich galas, the message falls a little flat. For your daily dose of lefty hypocrisy:
https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/celebrities/2021/09/13/aoc-met-gala-tax-the-rich-dress/8327295002/
The larger picture is (a) you’ll never convince Americans to cut their consumption/lifestyle in half (and it isn’t the uber wealthy, it’s the hoi poloi), but even if you did, we’d be singing solo because (b) the PRC and others aren’t having it and (c) if we do cut ourselves in half figuratively speaking, or whatever fraction it takes, no one is going to look to our example and say “yeah, that’s for me too!”. Not happening.
So, we either plan to mitigate the effects or take it on the chin. Trying to tell the world to get by on less is a nonstarter.
nobody is under any illusion that the party of Occupy The ICU To Spite The Libz is going to agree to anything any Democrat wants.
So, we either plan to mitigate the effects or take it on the chin. Trying to tell the world to get by on less is a nonstarter.
I don’t disagree. Humanity is going to take it on the chin, ISTM. The world is going to cut people’s consumption for them in chaotic ways, with attendant political, social, and economic instability.
I’m starting to feel like I don’t want my kids to have kids. It’s bad enough worrying about what the world is going to be like when my kids are somewhere around retirement age.
The difference between how people Marty and my age grew up, and now, is that there are about 3x as many people on the planet now as there were when we were kids. There are a third again as many people on the planet now as there were when I was 40.
33% increase in world population, in 25 years.
I completely identify with hairshirt’s dilemna. The reality on the ground is that most of us reading this live in a physical context based on burning fossil fuel. It took maybe 100 or 200 years to build that out, it’s not something you can walk back in less than a generation or two.
And that is apparently not fast enough.
I don’t see how we address this without concerted public action. And this country is not oriented toward concerted public action at the moment. We aren’t capable of it, as far as I can tell.
I don’t have any answers. What I think is that a lot of choices are going to be made for us.
Some folks – a lot of folks, probably – will be mostly OK. Lots of other folks won’t.
I’d like to see a concise, coherent description of how we would rework our current economy to provide food, shelter, clothing, power and a reasonably free and agreeable lifestyle to everyone under whatever Green Regime the climate change consensus calls for.
We’d all like that. It probably doesn’t exist. The situation is too complex to be addressed by a solution that is both concise and coherent.
We burn too much carbon. Full stop. We live in a society that is based on being able to burn a lot of carbon. If we don’t change voluntarily, changes will be imposed on us.
It’s not politics, it’s physics.
To be honest, IMO the best – maybe the only – way forward is going to be for all of us geezers who can’t imagine making the kinds of changes that are needed to die off. we’re in the freaking way.
Another 10 years and the kids will have the money and social and political juice to tell us all to STFU and let them get on with fixing the mess we’ve left them.
Another 20 and we’ll mostly be gone, and they’ll be able to get stuff done.
Not soon enough but they’ll deal. In spite of us.
The larger picture is (a) you’ll never convince Americans to cut their consumption/lifestyle in half (and it isn’t the uber wealthy, it’s the hoi poloi), but even if you did, we’d be singing solo because (b) the PRC and others aren’t having it and (c) if we do cut ourselves in half figuratively speaking, or whatever fraction it takes, no one is going to look to our example and say “yeah, that’s for me too!”. Not happening.
This sort of statement makes me angry.
The fact is that if the US cut its per capita CO2 emissions in half it would then be at the same level as China. Once you’ve made that cut, you can sit down with the PRC and talk about how you’ll both make reduce further.
And after you’ve both cut another third, you can talk to UK about how we should join in. Except that we already have, because we don’t feel entitled any more to destroy the planet.
80 years ago, our parents and grandparents put up with rationing of all sorts and all kinds of other limitations on what they could do, where and when they could do it. there was a war on.
50 years ago, our parents and (in some cases) we addressed the poisoning of the natural environment by establishing the EPA and passing landmark legislation protecting air, water, and other resources.
We lost the plot somewhere in the intervening years. We aren’t the people we were then.
Maybe someone can explain it to me. I don’t understand it.
This sort of statement makes me angry.
it’s lazy excuse-making.
we should throw everything we can at finding tech that can reduce CO2 emissions (and plastic waste).
but no. it’s more important that we pretend to uphold simplistic notions of “freedom”.
Maybe someone can explain it to me. I don’t understand it.
i bet this graph has something to do with it.
our politics are so broken, we can’t even address a pandemic. and the biggest reason it’s broken is the fact that the Senate kills everything because of its ludicrous super-majority requirement.
nothing will ever improve until the filibuster is dead.
So much for that mythic American can-do attitude.
So many members of Generation Peak American Prosperity grumbling about Kids These Days and their Senses of Entitlement.
The Party Of Personal Responsibility sure has come a long way.
Another 10 years and the kids will have the money and social and political juice to tell us all to STFU and let them get on with fixing the mess we’ve left them.
Another 20 and we’ll mostly be gone, and they’ll be able to get stuff done.
My prediction is that in 10-20 years neither climate change nor the arguments about it will have progressed much from where they are now.
as recently as the mid-80’s we understood that CFCs and similar chemicals were compromising the ozone layer. they were banned by 1989.
it was a much simpler and smaller lift compared to CO2 generation – CFCs were in widespread use, but weren’t as deeply baked into daily life as fossil fuels are, and there were suitable replacements.
but we somehow found a way to turn that around in about 5 years.
I can’t imagine that happening now. somebody would start shooting before they’d let Big Government take those CFCs from their cold dead hands. folks would be deliberately venting their ACs into the atmosphere just to piss off the libs.
maybe it’s just me looking back with rose colored glasses, but it seems to me that we used to be able to do stuff like this. people would bitch and drag their heels, but it would get done.
I can’t imagine that happening now. somebody would start shooting before they’d let Big Government take those CFCs from their cold dead hands. folks would be deliberately venting their ACs into the atmosphere just to piss off the libs.
the internet gives all those yahoos a platform on which to perform their petulance; the GOP amplifies them; the media (which has long mistaken Twitter for reality) accepts that as evidence of widespread opposition; politicians run to their bunkers.
My prediction is that in 10-20 years neither climate change nor the arguments about it will have progressed much from where they are now.
I reluctantly agree with the latter but definitely not with the former.
It will be worse than it is now but it will be painted as just the new normal (with the ‘new’ often left out).
The question will likely be about how much of a run for the Arctic (and it’s resources in fossil fuels) will be undertaken (now that the ice is not in the way anymore).
Can New York go Dutch (again) now with large dykes and giant sluice gates for the Hudson?
Will New Orleans become the New Venice (without the colored riffraff except as a tourist attraction, because their quarters will be too far low below water)?
Such things.
Imagine having to live in a hellhole like Switzerland where they have less than a third of the per capita carbon emissions as the United States. How would we get by?
This sort of statement makes me angry.
The fact is that if the US cut its per capita CO2 emissions in half it would then be at the same level as China. Once you’ve made that cut, you can sit down with the PRC and talk about how you’ll both make reduce further.
Ok, here’s a link: https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/092915/5-countries-produce-most-carbon-dioxide-co2.asp. If this is right, the PRC is almost twice the US in emissions, which shifts the paradigm a bit. I’m pretty sure the PRC has quite few new coal fired power plants under construction–can’t remember where I read that.
The hitch is, who counts each country’s emissions and what is the methodology for doing so? Seems like quite a task to get an accurate handle on what every country that emits 1% or more of the annual total. Or, do countries self-report?
As for the country pulling together, I think the first time we really quit pulling together was the Vietnam War, although the Civil Rights movement had its divisions. I’m not sure that’s a comparison/metaphor the green movement wants to pursue.
Also, while climate change is a thing, the long term details are a bit hazy and the alarmists have proven wrong so many times in their projections, getting people to keep buying in is kind of like AOC demanding masks and social distancing–it’s just not a convincing sales pitch.
Imagine having to live in a hellhole like Switzerland where they have less than a third of the per capita carbon emissions as the United States. How would we get by?
I wonder what the Swiss per capita rate would be if Switzerland’s industrial base scaled up to ours? As one example, if a country does not produce and refine fossil fuels but imports them instead, isn’t that country just subcontracting out its carbon footprint to that extent? Also, do you think population size plays a role? Geographic size?
we should throw everything we can at finding tech that can reduce CO2 emissions (and plastic waste).
but no. it’s more important that we pretend to uphold simplistic notions of “freedom”.
Right and not right. Who objects to a tech solution to CO2 emissions? No measurable constituency of which I am aware. It’s the “you don’t need that” crowd that wants to reorder our lives that is problematic.
Also, do you think population size plays a role?
Yes. That’s why it’s “per capita.”
If this is right, the PRC is almost twice the US in emissions, which shifts the paradigm a bit
Yes, China produces about twice the emissions of the USA, with more than four times the population. What’s your point?
Emissions from power plants are compraratively easy to estimate from space. Diffuse human emissions e.g. from traffic especially outside the big cities or from woodstoves is a different thing. And triggered diffuse ‘natural’ emissions (e.g. from the thawing permafrost in Siberia) are next to impossible to pinpoint. Burning woods on the other hand pose no difficulty (location is obvious and biomass is primarily measured from space anyway).
I doubt that the Chinese will even try to hide their coalfired powerplants underground to avoid detection.
The entire EU’s per capita emissions are less than half that of the US’s. And you burn the fuel in your country whether you import it or refine it domestically.
Who objects to a tech solution to CO2 emissions?
The fossile fuel industry? Not many voters maybe but their voice (consisting of money) has significant weight.
Who objects to a tech solution to CO2 emissions?
you might be familiar with the recent spate of Texas Republicans mocking solar and wind power and inventing myths to blame those techs for failures of gas supplies in cold weather?
that’s the kind of unnecessary, entirely-politically-driven friction nobody needs except the nihilists in charge of GOP messaging.
I think the first time we really quit pulling together was the Vietnam War, although the Civil Rights movement had its divisions. I’m not sure that’s a comparison/metaphor the green movement wants to pursue.
And we (a) got out of Vietnam and (b) passed civil rights legislation.
So I’m not sure your examples are making the point you want them to make.
This is actually not a complicated issue. The solutions are complicated, but the issue itself is not.
If we keep burning fossil fuels at anything like the rate we do now, we’re going to cause large-scale, long-lasting changes to the climate of the planet. Changes unlike any we’ve seen in about 10,000 years, i.e. since the beginning of the Holocene. I.e., in all of recorded human history.
It won’t be the Hollywood version, so if you’re waiting to see the Statue of Liberty’s torch peeking up above the waves that probably isn’t going to happen.
A million other things are going to happen, and are happening now. Expensive, disruptive, in some cases calamitous things.
The issue itself *is not political*. It’s physics. Making it political just gets in the way of doing anything about it.
McKinney and Marty are all about “libz telling them what to do”. Apparently this offends their tender sensibilities, because they seem to believe deep in their hearts that they never “tell somebody what to do”.
This is, of course, absolute bullshit.
Saying we should do nothing or can do nothing and getting your way politically on this issue is…wait for it….TELLING US WHAT TO DO..
This is the best of all possible worlds.
What’s funny is McK complains about China’s emissions on one hand, then about countries importing, effectively offloading their emissions to the exporting country, on the other. Meanwhile, we import crap loads (wonky, technical economist talk) of stuff from China. Hahn???
the long term details are a bit hazy and the alarmists have proven wrong so many times in their projections
NOPE. MORE BULLSHIT.
the wingnut caps and I shall retire for now. catch you all later.
this will help.
you might be familiar with the recent spate of Texas Republicans mocking solar and wind power and inventing myths to blame those techs for failures of gas supplies in cold weather?
Somewhat. Everyone with an ax to grind is grinding it. It wasn’t gas supplies per se, but rather a fairly complicated mix of maintenance, system errors and much worse temperatures for much longer than were expected.
Wind and solar are substitutes, and both have limitations. I thought you were referring to a tech solution to the CO2 itself, something on the order of a conversion, or capture or something that acted directly on CO2. Is that feasible? Isn’t that a path that no one would object to?
And we (a) got out of Vietnam
Not without a lot of national angst and a new normal of widespread civil disobedience.
This is actually not a complicated issue. The solutions are complicated, but the issue itself is not.
The solutions are very complicated. The power grid in LA is down and will remain so for several more weeks. Electric cars, etc, cannot recharge. Only fossil fuel cars and equipment can function when the grid goes down.
What’s funny is McK complains about China’s emissions on one hand, then about countries importing, effectively offloading their emissions to the exporting country, on the other. Meanwhile, we import crap loads (wonky, technical economist talk) of stuff from China. Hahn???
My reference was to importing refined fossil fuel products specifically, which ISTM, is outsourcing the carbon footprint from domestically drilling for and refining one’s own fossil fuels.
“Saying we should do nothing or can do nothing and getting your way politically on this issue is…wait for it….TELLING US WHAT TO DO..”
No it’s not. I haven’t suggested you move, or work differently. I don’t pretend to know how you could best lower your carbon footprint or if that would even matter.
As usual your solutions entail everybody doing things the way that suits your preferred lifestyle and personal preferences. I just want me to decide what I’m going to do and you do what you do. If there is a good idea where we agree, great.
You, the greater you, spend a lot of time on what “everyone” should do. By fiat. By someone deciding and making them.
Isn’t that a path that no one would object to?
we live in a country where one political party can’t quite bring itself to telling its followers to get a free and safe and effective vaccine for a disease that’s killing 1,500 people a day.
i have no doubt the GOP will come out fully against anything to do anything about anything realated to any aspect of GCC – as long as they can find a way to get the idiots frothed-up about it.
Not without a lot of national angst and a new normal of widespread civil disobedience.
I’m hard pressed to think of a single constructive advance this country has made in 250 years that was not accomplished via national angst and new normals of widespread civil disobedience.
It’s how hard things get done, as far as I can tell.
As usual your solutions entail everybody doing things the way that suits your preferred lifestyle and personal preferences.
So far in this thread, I’ve seen exactly one person suggest that hypothetical you – not even actual you, Marty, but hypothetical people – should move to cities.
Beyond that, I’m not seeing anybody here telling you or anyone else what to do or how to live your life.
There is no – absolutely no – public policy, law, or regulation that doesn’t involve somebody somewhere doing something they would rather not do. You have your list, I have mine. You appear to be under the impression that it’s only liberals who want to impose conditions or restrictions on how people live their lives. That is, unfortunately and laughably, untrue.
It’s probably sufficient to stipulate that whatever we do, or don’t do, about global warming is going to have impacts that are going to range from a nothingburger to ruinous – and all points in between – for some set of people.
That’s whether we take extreme actions, or modest actions, or no actions. Or, in fact, take actions that further accelerate the process of warming. None of those options are off the table. “Drill baby drill”, right?
It’s highly unlikely that any of this is going to result in you, personally, having to change your address. So if that is what you’re worried about, you can probably stop worrying about it.
By the time this country gets around to making anything like real changes, you and I will probably both either be dead or in the old folks’ home.
i have no doubt the GOP will come out fully against anything to do anything about anything realated to any aspect of GCC
not specifically a global warming thing, but 18 states have laws pre-empting local municipalities from banning or otherwise limiting the use of single-use plastic bags.
not simply not trying to ban or otherwise manage them, but preventing anyone else within their jurisdiction from doing so.
tell me more about how it’s only liberals who are telling other people how to live.
tell me more about how it’s only liberals who are telling other people how to live.
Like in Texas, where they’ve just empowered the worst sort of vicious misogynist busybodies not only to destroy the lives of women and the people who help them, but to get paid for it by their victims.
not specifically a global warming thing, but 18 states have laws pre-empting local municipalities from banning or otherwise limiting the use of single-use plastic bags.
Decision-making should be as local as possible. And banning plastic bags is largely a wasted effort. And can be counterproductive.
My reference was to importing refined fossil fuel products specifically, which ISTM, is outsourcing the carbon footprint from domestically drilling for and refining one’s own fossil fuels.
How is that different from the carbon footprint of producing anything for export, except for the product being fuel burned in the importing country, which counts towards the importing country’s emissions? You don’t think producing the stuff we buy contributes to China’s emissions?
The extracting and refining isn’t nearly the problem that the subsequent burning is.
McKinney bemoaning the “national angst” about Vietnam is like a man complaining to the fire department that they got his furniture wet.
McKinney condemning China for emitting twice as much CO2 as the US is akin to the old Conservative(TM) mantra (dare I call it a slogan?) that the top X% of Americans pay Y% of all income taxes where Y>>X, while deliberately ignoring the fact that they have Z% of the income where Z>Y.
McKinney declaring that “climate alarmists” have consistently been wrong suggests he gets his information from pundits and not climatologists.
Marty sounds like he’s capable of saying, with a straight face, “It’s your end of the lifeboat that’s sinking, so don’t tell me to bail, you liberal fascist.”
CharlesWT, while riding his “local decisions” hobbyhorse, makes a decent point about plastic grocery bags. I have long used them as waste-basket liners; food comes in, garbage goes out, in the same bags. Not exactly “eco-friendly”, but if everybody did that rather than littering public spaces with them the … ahem … local bans on plastic bags might never have happened.
If I sound on the verge of irritation it’s because Russo’s is closing, and I don’t know where I will be able to buy actual food after this week.
–TP
I’ve actually been to that communist hell-hole, Vietnam (7 times) working with a university and would have done my sabbatical there if the Korea thing weren’t easier to organize. That had me read up about that whole ‘adventure’ and all I can say is, we really fucked that one up, and we are just lucky that Vietnamese don’t hold a grudge like they do in the Middle-East.
Decision-making should be as local as possible.
18 states didn’t get the memo.
And this statement is, exactly, the libertarian corollary of “the feds should always be in charge”. It’s a knee-jerk blanket statement, and like all such statements is as likely to be false in any given case as it is to be true.
It’s an ideology. My blanket statement is that ideologies are a poor substitute for thinking.
And banning plastic bags is largely a wasted effort. And can be counterproductive.
Of course.
Americans use about 100 BILLION single use plastic bags a year. Where do they go?
I don’t think even Tony P can make use of 10 billion of them. 🙂
As usual your solutions entail everybody doing things the way that suits your preferred lifestyle and personal preferences.
So leaving things the way they are is your “preferred lifestyle and personal preferences”?
Good to know. Tell that to your grandchildren.
McKinney laments that my preferred policies would “force” him to do things he does not favor, and goes on and on about how the instances of “force” I cite were put in place by democratic means.
So OK. If we put the war footing type measures on the ballot to advance the struggle against human caused climate change, and we win…will he shut up about “democratic choices”?
We should live so long.
Americans use about 100 BILLION single use plastic bags a year. Where do they go?
Into the ocean and the groundwater, but that’s okay because reusable bags are an inconvenience.
And if we try to ban them then the frackers won’t be able to give struggling people a short term windfall.
Pay no attention to the profits behind the curtain. Or the groundwater contamination. Or the huge amount of formerly-sequestered methane released into the atmosphere.
Dear Charles,
I fixt it for you:
Decision-making should be as local as possible if they are in line with my ideological priors.
nous,
“Externalities are somebody else’s problem.”
an old and time tested right wing proverb.
Gavin Newsom survives his recall vote.
Larry Elder so far gets the plurality of votes (44%) for being Newsom’s replacement had Newsom not survived the recall. Kevin Faulconer has not yet broken 10%.
Which means that the CA GOP is still an epic crapfest despite continuing to lose ground.
The recall didn’t win in either Orange or San Diego counties. It probably would have done better if someone other than Elder had been likely to replace Newsom, but the knuckleheads were too riled up for a good Trumpian lib trolling.
Sorry for the slow response, but I spent the last 16 hours running a recall election polling place.
russell: maybe it’s just me looking back with rose colored glasses, but it seems to me that we used to be able to do stuff like this. people would bitch and drag their heels, but it would get done.
When we were young, and for quite a while thereafter, the use of the filibuster was limited to blocking (or at least delaying and limiting) civil rights legislation. And those using it had to be willing to actually stand up and talk the whole time.
Now, it’s used to block pretty much everything. And all it costs is telling the other side that you object. In other words, nothing. As a result, very little gets done save in dire emergencies (but only some of those).
That had me read up about that whole ‘adventure’ [the Vietnam War] and all I can say is, we really fucked that one up, and we are just lucky that Vietnamese don’t hold a grudge like they do in the Middle-East.
As seems to be something of a theme**, if we had understood the locale better, or at all, we could have done far better. Not to mention far cheaper. We officially opposed North Vietnam because we worried about spreading Chinese influence in Southeast Asia. But the Vietnamese (including Ho Chi Minh personally) had no use for China and the Chinese . . . until China provided their only support against attacks by us. We could have just kept helping him, as we did after WW II. But we went another way, and paid for that stupidity in blood.
** See also our rejection of a possible alliance with Iran in dealing with Afghanistan. Which we also paid for in deaths from Pakistan-supported (and thus US financed) Taliban.
the CA GOP is still an epic crapfest despite continuing to lose ground.
Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory seems to be a specialty. Push the recall on things like lack of wildfire prevention, rather than far right gibberish, and settle on one halfway sane (trying not to expect too much here), and Newsome is gone. But today’s CA GOP is not only incapable, but increasingly incapable, of anything that sensible.
banning plastic bags is largely a wasted effort. And can be counterproductive.
Supermarket supply of single-use plastic bags in the UK is now about 5% of what it was six years ago. That’s seven billion bags a year not messing up the planet.
This has been achieved by a government-imposed 5p levy on the bags. Almost everyone’s got used to bringing their own bags to the shop.
Please explain how this has been a wasted effort.
“tell me more about how it’s only liberals who are telling other people how to live.”
I think it’s interesting that having a law that bans people from telling others what they can and can’t do is used as a counter example. No one is forcing you or your store to use plastic bags. No one is forcing you to use a gun. No one is forcing you to drive a Ford F 150. No one is telling you what you can and can’t do, except you can’t tell other people what to do.
The only valid counter example in this thread is the abortion law in Texas. It is an abomination.
Please explain how this has been a wasted effort.
according to the dozens of articles posted by the plastic bag manufacturing industry, you’re wasting time and energy and convenience!
I hope I’m not playing the sealion here, but if folks could be a bit more precise in defining the law(s) in question. I’ve not been in the US for anything longer than a month for the past 25 years, so I’m at a bit of a loss in tracking what is at issue. I suspect that other folks who don’t live in the states might also be baffled.
Please explain how this has been a wasted effort.
The alternatives people use can require more resources than the plastic bags. What you get is virtue signaling that inconveniences people while providing little or no net benefit.
The alternatives people use can require more resources than the plastic bags.
a calculation which happily assumes nothing after the creation of the bag matters, that the environmental cost of a bag is of no relevance, that only environmental impacts that occur during manufacture exist.
it’s a calculation only a plastic bag manufacturer could love.
FYI, here is a description of the law in Japan
https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20200630/p2a/00m/0na/007000c
At the beginning, I got caught out a couple of times, I hated paying for a bag, but now, I’ve got a couple in my car and a few in my office so it’s not a big problem.
But today’s CA GOP is not only incapable, but increasingly incapable, of anything that sensible.
A trend that I am personally pleased with, since the GOP seems to be following the CA playbook in other western states where the suburbs have swung blue. In AZ, the party leadership is still fighting their extremists: all of the worst bills for making voting more difficult there got bottled up in committees and died. I still think the AZ GOP is in trouble in 2022. The popular governor is term-limited out, the new districts will be drawn by the independent commission, and they seem determined to piss off the Maricopa County suburbs.
No one is telling you what you can and can’t do, except you can’t tell other people what to do.
When you and your political allies prevent the adoption of effective public policies to counter global climate change you are basically forcing us to watch the planet die and the possible extinction of the human race. But I guess nobody is forcing us to live I guess.
The idea that “freedom” is the ability to do “whatever I want” and that “force” is anything that prevents one from doing so is an ethical and social dead end.
No one is telling you what you can and can’t do
say, why can’t i buy beer in the store before noon on Sunday?
except you can’t tell other people what to do.
i can’t tell them to not make other people sick?
WTF is the point of society, then?
No one is forcing you or your store to use plastic bags. No one is forcing you to use a gun. No one is forcing you to drive a Ford F 150. No one is telling you what you can and can’t do, except you can’t tell other people what to do.
And so we are all obliged to live in a world where plastic crap infests every nook and cranny of the planet, any asshole with a grudge can get a firearm, and Greenland is freaking melting.
No-one should be able to place any constraints on anyone else’s actions or choices. We are all required to simply accept the result of those actions and choices. Preferably with a smile, because otherwise it will seem like we’re saying you’re bad.
We’d all love to live in a world where we could all do whatever we like. This isn’t that world. You doing whatever you like impinges on other people. How the hell do they not get a say in what you can and can’t do?
You appear to want a world in which the highest value is your ability to do whatever you want. That world has never existed. The only way for anyone to live that way is if everyone else is willing to live with consequences of you doing whatever you want. They probably aren’t.
virtue signaling
What is the person who carries their stuff home in a plastic bag and then just throws it away signaling?
You may not know this, but you can buy a cloth grocery bag for a couple of bucks. You can probably make one for close to nothing. Or you can re-use a paper grocery bag several times, probably as many times as you can re-use the plastic ones.
A paper bag will decompose in about a month. Cotton cloth, a couple of months. Both will decompose faster than that if put into compost or similar. They leave behind organic material.
A plastic bag takes years – decades – and what it leaves behind is toxic. 100 billion of those per year is a problem. Not for you, apparently, but definitely for everybody and everything else on the planet.
Talking to you guys is like talking to kindergartners. I don’t mean to be rude, but seriously, I don’t understand how anyone gets to adulthood without understanding that you can’t just do anything you want without considering the consequences of it. I mean, we all have our blind spots – I sure as hell do – but it’s like you all want to make a virtue out of it.
Please explain how this has been a wasted effort.
That doesn’t matter. It didn’t happen in ‘Murica, which is the whole of the known universe to ‘Muricans as concerns what might be good ideas. See also guns and health care.
…and they seem determined to piss off the Maricopa County suburbs.
“Maricopa County” and “suburbs” seem to me to be almost redundant, at least in terms of where people actually live rather than square mileage of land.
Talking to you guys is like talking to kindergartners.
This is an insult to sensible 5-year-olds.
Someone (cleek?) said recently that Marty once admitted to coming here to troll us.
This BS about “freedom to” (shoot guns, make the oceans filthy and dead, etc. etc.) is sacred, whereas “freedom from” (random death by gunfire, planet death, poisons in rivers, etc. etc.) is tyranny is so stupid that I’m starting to believe the trolling theory.
Everyone has to get their kicks somehow, I guess.
It’s one big fallacy of composition. If you’re the only one shooting guns and using single-use plastic bags and driving a gas-guzzling truck for no good reason, you’ll be fine. Once enough people are doing that stuff, everyone, including the ones doing those things, suffer the consequences. Only a kindergartner could understand such a thing.
virtue signaling
modern Republicanism is essentially nothing more than signalling one’s “conservative” virtues to other Republicans. it is entirely performative.
Just because all of you want to live in a submarine with a failing battery on half the air supply to save power doesn’t mean that the rest of us have to. [Begins to hyperventilate in protest.]
Only fossil fuel cars and equipment can function when the grid goes down.
if “the grid goes down”, it’s going to take down all of the non-mechanical gas pumps – including those that are used to fill the trucks that deliver the gas itself. along with all of the computers that run consumer credit card processing and all of the B2B billing steps between the refinery and the gas station.
it’ll be a glorious five days before everyone is out of gas and screaming into the void about how windmills wrecked everything.
I don’t understand how anyone gets to adulthood without understanding that you can’t just do anything you want without considering the consequences of it.
I am considering the consequences of it. This British Environment Agency study is a bit dated but its findings would likely not be changed much by a new study. One of its findings is that a cotton shopping bag would have to be used 131 times for its resource and environmental impact to be less than a single-use plastic bag used one time. And that impact only goes up if it is washed.
“8.1.7 Cotton bag
The cotton bag has a greater impact than the conventional HDPE bag in seven of the nine impact categories even when used 173 times (i.e. the number of uses required to reduce the GWP [global warming potential] of the cotton bag to that of the conventional HDPE bag with average secondary reuse). The impact was considerably larger in categories such as acidification and aquatic & terrestrial ecotoxicity due to the energy used to produce cotton yarn and the fertilisers used during the growth of the cotton.”
Life cycle assessment of supermarket carrier bags: a review of the bags available in 2006: Conclusions (pdf, page 59)
There have been a number of other studies that have found that most substitutes have a higher resource and environmental impact than do single-use plastic bags.
As for convenience, has anyone here tried carrying 15 or more pounds of groceries a mile or more in anything other than plastic bags? Depending on your strength and physical condition, it can be difficult to impossible. A lot of people have to do their shopping on foot.
That last analogy of mine reminds me that i’ll be teaching the classic science fiction short story “The Cold Equations” [https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-cold-equations/%5D in the next couple weeks, and that has resonance with both climate change and the pandemic. Spaceship Earth is past its safety margin already.
Mesh cotton grocery bag.
$3.00
and yes, for some people, $3.00 actually is more than they can afford to spend on a stupid bag. that’s a gallon of gas, or two quarts of milk.
my suggestion: give every person or family that receives food assistance one bag per person, for free. they do wear out, so do it a couple of times a year.
raise my taxes to pay for it.
but everybody reading this, I’m pretty sure, could find $3 for a re-usable bag. or just make one. use an old t-shirt.
you’d think people were being required to donate their freaking bodily organs.
the thing about this whole “you can’t tell me what to do” thing is that it makes it abso-freaking-lutely impossible to make progress on anything.
the world can freaking burn, as long as I can bring my groceries home in a disposable plastic bag. what do you think the odds are of walking that point of view back to something sensible?
if I’m mis-stating anybody’s point of view here, please feel free to correct me. I’d welcome it.
As for convenience, has anyone here tried carrying 15 or more pounds of groceries a mile or more in anything other than plastic bags? Depending on your strength and physical condition, it can be difficult to impossible.
I’d bet the vast majority of people in the US haven’t carried any amount of groceries a mile or more in any kind of bag (or box or crate or whatever). But, depending on your strength and physical condition, anything can be difficult to impossible. Regardless, I’m having a hard time understanding what the material of the bag has to do with it. The bag could even be plastic, so long as it’s not used once and thrown away, if we’re still talking about single-use plastics.
I’m having a hard time with what appears to be a discussion about whether single-use plastic bags are the optimal choice for carrying groceries and that there’s just no better alternative. That seems silly.
This British Environment Agency study is a bit dated but its findings would likely not be changed much by a new study.
All good. If cotton is not a good idea, just re-use the paper bags. Go where the information leads.
Anyplace you want to take this has to account for the fact that we create 100 billion of those bags a year, and they mostly get thrown away, and then it takes decades for them to decompose, and they decompose into toxic crap.
If you leave that out of the equation, you haven’t considered the whole picture.
And FWIW, and at the risk of virtue-signaling, we use canvas bags for groceries. We got them as freebies somewhere along the line. We’ve used the same bags, for years. Many years. 10, maybe? Maybe more.
I think we may have washed them two or three times, when something gross spilled or got squashed. In something like 10 or so years.
They’re still going strong.
Just another data point for our study.
As for convenience, has anyone here tried carrying 15 or more pounds of groceries a mile or more in anything other than plastic bags? Depending on your strength and physical condition, it can be difficult to impossible. A lot of people have to do their shopping on foot.
Yes, I have carried a week’s worth of groceries more than a mile. On foot.
If you carry more than a couple of pounds of stuff in a plastic bag, the handle will tear out. If anything at all pointy or with a sharp edge is in the bag, it will puncture the bag and stuff will probably fall out of it.
The best workaround for this is to double up the bags. Which means two bags for every one bag’s worth of stuff you need to carry.
The virtue of single-use plastic bags is that they are extremely cheap to produce. Full stop. That is, precisely, what is good about them. Who benefits from that is an exercise I’ll leave to the reader. In any case, it’s not an inconsequential advantage, but it has to be balanced against every other aspect of creating and using them.
“I don’t mean to be rude, …”
Watch it there, Tonto, your strained virtue slip is showing and signaling that the worn-thin veneer of societal and governmental order separating ourselves and the increasing numbers of assholes among us might not be indefinitely recyclable, as Margaret Thatcher opined … nay … hoped.
%-)
I take my dumps on the sidewalk in front of my building each morning because first, I’m a regular, manly kind of guy, AND I find the entire idea of one’s toilet, sewage treatment, and the recycling my innocent abused water to be rank, forced virtue signaling (cholera is a mark of virtue) on my part and frankly, or is it johnly, a scandalous invasion of my freedoms, although I am aware conservatives and libertarians recycle their urine by refreshing the tree of liberty from time to time, tra-la-la, and what higher form of virtuous micturation (conservatives pee bullets, which must be painful) could there possibly be, I ask yous?
I’m aware that some of my fucking subhuman conservative neighbors … property rights, don’t ya know … however, are threatening to force me to take a bullet if I continue with my freedom-loving ways, though one of them is a dedicated libertarian who is torn between his sensitive ears putting up with the noise of his own gunfire and having to continue wiping my shit off of his one-size-fits-all magazine-approved shoes he thinks no one else can possibly walk in, without, of course, force.
The last week or so here has me thinking Marty, Charles, and McTX, all decent, smart, blinkered to various degrees guys in their own ways, not a hypocrite among them, should (scratch that, do it of your own volition) link comradely arms and take a flying leap up Donald Trump’s golden (cheap leaf, not solid) bunghole, cheap lip service paid to his demise notwithstanding.
That said, this thread has me set on a course of reviewing my own inconsistent and hypocritical recycling habits with the goal of self- and enviro- improvement, undiluted toxic substance that I am around these here parts.
If any of the three freedom lovers (mind you, I’m not forcing you) would like to fly to Denver, knock on my door, and remind me face to masked face that I am a virtue-signaling, tax-loving commie, not that I don’t agree here and there marginally with you once every decade or so, please know that after you wake up in the hospital (if beds are available, since no one is forcing your oxygen-deprived compatriots to get a fucking vaccination), I will supply you with a reusable metal straw you may grip between your wired-shut jaws and through which you may draw a beverage of your choice at my hospitable expense.
That THAT last, except for the drinkey-poo, won’t happen is my grandest effort at achieving dastardly hypocrisy and avoiding capital gains taxes.
one thing about the plastic bags that these studies don’t really account for is that because the bags are so cheap (and flimsy), baggers will only put a couple of items in each of them. so a trip to the store that would have filled half of a single cotton bag results in a dozen plastic bags.
and then you need to account for the three bags that wouldn’t come off the feeder correctly so they got stuffed directly in the trash by the hurried bagger. or the two that were used as padding around wine bottles, and then the one that got doubled-up to carry those wine bottles.
they all (potentially) go into the ocean too.
From the executive summary of Charles’ study, discussing the scope of the study:
So, if you discount the option of people just bringing their own damned bag to the grocery store, and discount the adverse impacts of all of the plastic crap the bags leave behind when they are discarded and degrade, then plastic bags start to look pretty good.
No grocery stores are handing out single-use cotton bags. People who use a cloth bag, virtually without exception, are bringing their own bag to the store. They are, in fact, probably using the bag at least 131 times before they throw it out, so they are probably meeting the requirement the report cites for parity between plastic and cloth as far as cost of manufacture and use.
And the report explicitly ignores the downstream costs of plastics.
This reminds me of the frequently-cited report about how there is no difference between organic and non-organic produce, except for the pesticides and other industrial chemicals used to grow non-organics.
It’s really really easy to marshal an argument in favor of the point you want to make, if you begin by excluding the information you want to ignore.
Raise your hand if you use your reusable bag fewer than 130 times.
Raise your hand if you wash your reusable bags often, and entirely separate from the load of laundry you were going to do anyway.
We still have the cotton bags we used when we lived in Boulder two decades ago.
And when they do finally die, they can be used to patch a newer bag. And even if we threw it away, it would biodegrade, be non-toxic, and not add any microplastics into the water.
That seems silly.
Welcome to America.
“As for convenience, has anyone here tried carrying 15 or more pounds of groceries a mile or more in anything other than plastic bags? Depending on your strength and physical condition, it can be difficult to impossible. A lot of people have to do their shopping on foot.”
You mean those flimsy plastic things with the breakaway handles?
And do you mean groceries weigh less in a plastic bag?
I saw a guy trying to lift a heavy metal safe full of groceries into his car in the Whole Foods parking lot the other day, but I assumed he had just purchased a pound of chanterelle mushrooms while cursing the unionized chanterelle mushroom gatherers who demanded something more than minimum wage.
Or maybe he was suffering from a hernia.
No, I take a page out of the homeless playbook and commandeer a grocery cart to walk the mile to the bridge the rich as well as the rest of us are forced to not live under.
I would use public transportation, but conservatives and libertarians have, in their infinite wisdom, made such conveyance as scarce as possible for both the rich and the poor.
I have tried carrying eggs home in a plastic bag over hill and dale, but halfway home I tripped and fell over one of those corporate scooters littering the sidewalk and broke eight of the eggs, which lightened the load considerably, and then I came across an anti-everything MAGA demonstration, to which I contributed the remaining four eggs, thrown from some distance.
Now, I’ve taken to letting a chicken sit on my head at all times.
I need the eggs.
There have been a number of other studies that have found that most substitutes have a higher resource and environmental impact than do single-use plastic bags.
As for convenience, has anyone here tried carrying 15 or more pounds of groceries a mile or more in anything other than plastic bags? Depending on your strength and physical condition, it can be difficult to impossible. A lot of people have to do their shopping on foot.
These studies look at the environmental impact of producing the bags. They don’t consider the environmental impact of disposal.
It’s true that cotton bags are a poor alternative to single-use plastic bags. But I’m not impressed by the argument “X is bad, Y is worse, let’s do X without considering Z”. (I use jute bags, which seem to last forever).
I’m fairly confident that CharlesWT has never tried carrying 15 or more pounds of groceries a mile or more in single-use plastic bags. Because if he had, he’d know that the handles aren’t strong enough.
Sometimes I think the point gets lost. I don’t object to paper bags, its four trips to the car to bring them in instead of one. In fact, I am an advocate for paper usage in a world that seems to not understand lumber is a renewable resource. I go to some stores that require you bring your own bags. I think that is a good idea. I think plastic water bottles are very convenient, but I don’t use them any more. The only use I have for a plastic bag is cleaning up after my dog, I haven’t found a good replacement yet.
There is a difference between convincing me to be more ecofriendly, or to help in the education and promotion of that because it is a good idea, and passing a law that tells me(and despite my use of the word a lot I don’t really mean me, I mean a generic me) what I can and can’t do.
It really comes down to your view of the role of government. We can have a common cause, which we are building in the case of climate change, to have a more ecofriendly society without taking each step as needing to be codified by the government.
I don’t have enough time to really explain my thoughts on this but “Freedom from” is a broad and easily abused construct. I think you should be free from fear, that is not the world we live in. Anywhere in the world. “Freedom from” is the root of most governmental and societal abuses, Trump being a key user of those tactics.
If friendly persuasion gets it done, all good.
Is friendly persuasion getting it done? If it’s not, what are our options?
I recycle my plastic through sea turtles and such:
https://www.google.com/search?q=picture+of+a+dead+turtle+with+a+plastic+shopping+bag+stranglin+it&oq=picture+of+a+dead+turtle+with+a+plastic+shopping+bag+stranglin+it&aqs=chrome..69i57.40824j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
In fact, my apartment building has now instituted a more direct me-to-sea recycling system, replacing the recycling dumpster in the parking garage with a large tank of sea turtles who are willing (or not) to walk a mile in my discarded plastic.
They plead with me to stop, with a weird gag of strangulated sputtering, but I’m simply not convinced and will take my own good time changing my ways.
Meanwhile, the turtles could run for office and force me to comply with their selfish needs, but I’m confident Larry Elder would make soup of them before that happens.
“There is a difference between convincing me to be more ecofriendly, or to help in the education and promotion of that because it is a good idea, and passing a law that tells me(and despite my use of the word a lot I don’t really mean me, I mean a generic me) what I can and can’t do.”
True. Littering should be left to choice.
And government should stay out of the enforcement of anti-littering.
Vigilante action by private citizens can supply that enforcement.
Once, years ago,in traffic, I noticed the guy stopped in front of me toss an empty cigarette pack out of his driver side window. I put my brake on, got out of my car, and tossed it back through his window into his lap, thinking I was returning his private property he had lost.
He got into a fuck-you contest from a sitting position with the wrong guy, if noise volume counts for anything.
Nowadays, I don’t bother with such situations because I may be forced to look down a barrel of a gun pointed at me by a guy who hasn’t been forced to carry deadly force.
At least the unvaccinated-by-hardheaded-obstinance can litter in the open air while not breathing on me, thereby killing two birds with one piece of plastic.
Adios for the week.
I need to ask the folks who use cloth bags for groceries: what do you put the resulting garbage into?
My town banned plastic bags some time ago, but does still require garbage to be bagged. Now, even if it made sense to bag garbage in anything other than plastic, I can’t quite see why using the same plastic bag for both is anything but a win.
Of course, you can’t mandate my dual-use approach. That would be telling people what to do.
For me, at least, a lifelong habit of hoarding has meant that I still have a small supply of old plastic bags to put my garbage into. When that supply runs out, I will have to contribute to environmental degradation by buying single-use garbage bags. Which will be good for The Economy, I suppose.
BTW, there’s about 6 grams of polyethylene in a plastic grocery bag. By my calculation, 100B of them would cover 1 square mile about 10 feet deep. Don’t know how that compares to the total volume of refuse in the US, but I bet it’s small.
–TP
Just got back from the grocery store, where I packed my groceries into the two heavy cloth bags I’ve been using for thirty years and counting. Went over a bit, so had to pay a nickel for a paper bag. (Should have brought my third bag in from the car.)
Groceries aren’t all put away yet, so I haven’t read all the comments, but at the point where I picked up people were discussing how much cloth bags cost. Does anyone seriously imagine that the price of plastic bags isn’t folded into the cost of our groceries? SERIOUSLY?
As for walking a mile with plastic bags vs cloth, I don’t even get it. Are we supposed to believe that the weight of the bag makes that much difference? Or is it that you can pack so much more into cloth bags that lots of us wouldn’t be able to carry them a mile fully loaded (except with rice cakes)? If the latter, I mean, how much deep thinking does it take to figure out that you don’t actually have to load them so heavily?
I’d bet the vast majority of people in the US haven’t carried any amount of groceries a mile or more in any kind of bag (or box or crate or whatever).
I do it regularly.
I’m having a hard time understanding what the material of the bag has to do with it.
You can split the load between two or more bags and loop the bags over the back of your hands. No grip effort is required. Just about everything else is clumsier and requires more effort.
And FWIW, and at the risk of virtue-signaling, we use canvas bags for groceries.
My reference to virtue-signaling was to governments banning plastic bags, not to what individuals choose to do.
I think we may have washed them two or three times, when something gross spilled or got squashed.
There’s been evidence of increased food poisoning in jurisdictions that banned plastic bags.
If you carry more than a couple of pounds of stuff in a plastic bag, the handle will tear out. If anything at all pointy or with a sharp edge is in the bag, it will puncture the bag and stuff will probably fall out of it.
When plastic bags first appeared they were trash. But now I rarely ever have a problem with torn handles or split bags. Maybe several times a year. Bags from places like Target are very durable. I take a couple with me when I go to stores with flimsy or no bags.
they all (potentially) go into the ocean too.
Maybe 1% of the plastic in the oceans comes from North America and Europe. Most of it comes from castoffs from commercial fishing and rivers in east and south Asia.
I’m fairly confident that CharlesWT has never tried carrying 15 or more pounds of groceries a mile or more in single-use plastic bags.
Not in a single bag but split between two or more bags.
No one is forcing you to use a gun.
Absolutely true. But they are forcing me to live in a situation where guns of all kinds are in the hands, not only of hunters and others who are trained and have legitimate use for them, but of anyone who is conscious.
Nobody really needs an AK-47; it’s sole use is killing lots of people quickly. (And it’s useless against the Army, which has vastly more firepower than any handful of gun nuts can wield.) So why must we live in a situation where any lunatic can, and increasingly does, decide to shoot up a store or a church or a school?
I need to ask the folks who use cloth bags for groceries: what do you put the resulting garbage into?
My town banned plastic bags some time ago, but does still require garbage to be bagged. Now, even if it made sense to bag garbage in anything other than plastic, I can’t quite see why using the same plastic bag for both is anything but a win.
The compostable remains from groceries get put on bio-degradable plastic bags before going into the bin for Organics. (Same bin where yard waste, tree trimmings, etc. go.) The bags aren’t super sturdy. On the other hand, they only have to make it from the kitchen to the bin beside the house.
There’s been evidence of increased food poisoning in jurisdictions that banned plastic bags.
Got a cite/link for that? I’m genuinely interested in seeing what alternatives were being compared.
Thanks
We use plastic garbage bags, sure. That’s required in our area. We’d like to compost, but there isn’t anyplace to do that in the area and we can’t use enough of it in a second floor apartment to make it work for us. Even with the garbage bags, though, we use fewer of them than we used plastic bags from groceries. Those would build up more surplus than we could ever use, especially when also trying to minimize packaging in our buying as well.
It gets us closer to circularity. Pragmatism, not purity.
Other countries manage it without hardship. We can look to them for ideas, rather than to China for excuses.
Most of it comes from castoffs from commercial fishing and rivers in east and south Asia.
about that fishing stuff… that apparently comes from a claim that 40-some percent of the plastic found in the Pacific’s Great Garbage Patch is fishing gear (ropes, nets, etc). but that doesn’t account for plastic that doesn’t float. for example, nylon, acrylics, PET and PVC (and many others) will sink in water.
the plastic used to make shopping bags will float. though given how light they are and how they are almost entirely surface area, they’ll also happily ride currents under water.
what do you put the resulting garbage into?
We put non-recyclable stuff in a paper bag under the sink, then that goes into a plastic bag for the trash pickup. The town requires us to bag trash in the plastic bag. Not my preference, but it is what it is.
We recycle whatever we can, which in my town means glass, plastic, paper, and metal. Compostable stuff gets (mostly) composted in the summer, or down the dispose-all the rest of the year. I’m sure there is an environmental cost to flushing organic material into the waste stream, but I don’t know how bad or not-bad it is.
We re-use aluminum foil and the inevitable plastic bags that stuff comes in a few times before we get rid of them. If the foil is not overly gross, it goes to recycle. When we’re done with the plastic bags, they go to a friend who uses them to pick up after her dogs. And… she throws them out.
So, not perfect, but some approximation of better-than-bad. I hope. I’d like an alternative to the plastic trash bag, but we typically generate one of those a week.
BTW, there’s about 6 grams of polyethylene in a plastic grocery bag. By my calculation, 100B of them would cover 1 square mile about 10 feet deep.
My understanding is that the issue with the single-use plastic bags is not the volume of waste, but its toxicity and persistence in the environment.
In terms of sheer volume, paper bags are probably worse. But they are re-usable, at least a few times, and are non-toxic or at least less toxic when they degrade.
All of the down-in-the-weeds details about the plastic bags is interesting, but the sticking point for me here is how we go about dealing with any of this stuff. With 9 billion people on the planet, the idea that we should all just be let alone to do our thing as we see fit just doesn’t seem workable.
Scale matters. Things that are not a big deal when 1 or 100 or 100,000 people do them, become a big deal with 1,000,000 or 1,000,000,000 people do them.
So it seems to me we’re obliged to be mindful. And if voluntary mindfulness isn’t getting it done, it seems completely legitimate to me for mindfulness to be required. Or, at least the form of mindfulness – i.e., you don’t have to be personally virtuous as long as you act like it where it touches on other people’s lives.
Also, FWIW:
When I lived in Philly and had no money to speak of, I used to walk about a mile and a half to the grocery store. Three paper bags would get me through the week. They fit perfectly in one of those fold-up wire baskets with wheels.
Maybe you want to get one of those, Charles. Or, not. Whatever works for you.
Really, I don’t care where people live, I don’t care how they get their groceries to and fro. Do what you like. But if what you like creates problems for the freaking planet, it’s legitimate for some constraints to be put on what you do and don’t do.
I really do not understand why that is in any way controversial. We all put up with stuff like this, nobody is picking on conservatives.
We’re changing the climate of the planet. We’re cranking out toxic trash by the ton, and it takes decades or more for it to go away, if it ever does.
If that doesn’t deserve a response, I’m not sure what does. If a response based on everyone being a good do-bee will get it done, that’s great. If not, then we need something else.
Most of the things we’ve been discussing that get framed as freedom versus telling people what to do involve things that are very recent in terms of human history. They may not seem new to us given the shortness of our lifetimes, but they are new, much newer even than the concepts of liberty in the US Constitution.
What makes people think owning gas-guzzling vehicles and using throw-away plastic bags are their natural rights? And why not lead paint or any other number of things that have been prohibited by law when they were found to be harmful to human health and the environment?
Why aren’t people allowed to drive 120 mph while smoking crack? That might be really fun! Have you tried it?
Got a cite/link for that?
“A study published by the University of Pennsylvania and George Mason University found that a ban on plastic bags by the city of San Francisco has led to an increase in E. coli infections. In the three months since the ban, deaths from foodborne illness in that city spiked by 46%.
With plastic bags forbidden, consumers are using reusable bags. While that’s great for the environment, most people don’t know that the bags should be washed regularly. When they are not washed, they become contaminated with pathogenic bacteria. The study’s authors said, “using standard estimates of the statistical value of life, we show that the health costs associated with the San Francisco ban swamp any budgetary savings from reduced litter.”
In fact, the study found that relative to other counties, deaths in San Francisco increased by 50 to 100%, and emergency room visits by a comparable amount. The same bans on plastic bags in other California cities showed similar effects.”
E. coli Infections Spike After Plastic Bag Ban in California
Rebuttal:
“In my role as Health Officer of San Francisco I received a flurry of concerned calls about a research study that claimed that the 2007 San Francisco ban on plastic bags resulted in an immediate, very large increase in foodborne illnesses and deaths.”
San Francisco plastic-bag ban associated with 46% increase in foodborne illness deaths — Not!
I’m reading a fascinating book on profiling serial killers upon which the “Mindhunter” TV series is based, and it relates the story of the profilers visiting penitentiaries to interview their subjects and learning that prisons began painting, leaded or not, common areas in what was thought to be soothing, calming colors to sooth the savage breasts, only to find out from the wardens that the contrary prisoners would pick the paint off the walls and eat the paint chips because they were insulted about the intended behavior modification and the colors pissed them off.
As more and more MAGA types head to prison to await their executions, I expect them to make a meal of the paint on the walls and then start in on the varnish on the furniture.
Will this week please end.
Also, everyone knows smoking crack makes a person drive way under the speed limit in the passing lane and get honked off the road or pulled over for holding up traffic.
Other countries manage it without hardship. We can look to them for ideas, rather than to China for excuses.
The points here about plastic bags resonate because (1) it is addressable with minimal intrusion and (2) accumulated plastic waste is right here and right now and cumulatively aggregating. China can fill itself up with plastic bags and the impact on us is minimal. CO2 emissions are different. We *are* addressing that issue, China is not. I am opposed to futile gestures and even more opposed to futile self-denial (while remaining fully open to supporting and accelerating tech advances in managing/eliminating pollution).
I hope you can see the difference.
https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a22646
What makes people think owning gas-guzzling vehicles and using throw-away plastic bags are their natural rights?
There are a lot of “rights” that people assume they have because, in a largely free and reasonably democratic society, we all have a fairly decent sense of what is and is not allowed. We are “allowed” to do a lot of stuff, incredibly stupid and self-destructive stuff, because we are and always have been ‘free’ to do pretty much what we want. We’ve always driven the cars we want and used plastic bags. When someone decides neither is a good idea and need to be restricted or curtailed, that is, for many people, an intrusion on a ‘right’ that gained its legitimacy over time. In your formulation, one could infer that we have no rights free of government limitation or proscription. I don’t buy into that.
If you have an argument, and evidence, to curtail or require modification of an activity that affects others materially, make the argument.
Upthread, BP chastised me by conflating my resistance to gov’t mandated lifestyle limitations to a lack of fidelity to democracy (if everyone voted to limit lifestyles, would that satisfy McKinney?, or words to that effect). My response is that ideologues left and right really don’t worry much about the theory of when gov’t can and cannot intrude into the private sphere. I’m not even sure ideologues recognize much of a private sphere. It’s pretty much a “Here’s a thing we don’t like, here’s the result we want, let’s work backward on how to achieve it and tough shit if someone has a due process or inalienable rights objection.” Likewise, fidelity to democracy is pretty elastic: BP and others are fine with pure democracy when it raises my taxes or tells me I have to live in an 900 sq ft apartment and set my thermostat at 78 in the summer and 65 in the winter and can only buy 1 lb of beef a week. However, if that same democracy limits abortion rights or changes voting laws or approves open carry of firearms, it’s all a huge freaking disaster. Similarly, the SCOTUS finding a right to abortion is all well and good, but SCOTUS unfinding that right is intolerable. IOW, ideologues focus on the end, not the means, and routinely meet themselves coming as they trip over their own self-made and very flexible rules.
So, when behavior that has been perfectly legal for quite a long time is up for significant modification, those proposing the modification have the burden of proof and, living in a democracy (more or less), are stuck with the majority’s vote (or inaction, as the case may be). Put differently, advocates for a particular limitation have no more of a right to impose their views than others have to oppose the same views and when that happens, we put it to a vote subject to the constitution.
And why not lead paint or any other number of things that have been prohibited by law when they were found to be harmful to human health and the environment?
Because the democratic process worked after those advocating for change successfully made their case. This simply makes my point.
Why aren’t people allowed to drive 120 mph while smoking crack? That might be really fun! Have you tried it?
I think this would be a hyperbolic category error. The use of public highways is governed by a license issued by the state which constitutes permission to use the public roads under terms and conditions specified by the various governments having specific jurisdictions (cities, counties, states). Also, there are speed limits in every state and, I’m confident, laws in every state against driving under the influence of crack and many other substances. And, I’m not sure there is a constituency anywhere lobbying for a change in the law that would allow either of these.
On the bigger picture, I’ve seen and inferred enough about the progressive left to be reasonably confident that the battle between principle and desired outcome is a loser going in: desired outcome wins virtually every time. For that reason, I remain skeptical–highly skeptical in most cases–when I am told that it’s the end of the world unless we all fall into line on any given issue the Prog Lefties happen to be pushing at the moment.
In case y’all don’t have time to read the study and rebuttal that CharlesWT linked to, the rebuttal notes in the very first sentence that the study was not peer reviewed.
A careful researcher would also note that the Food Poisoning Bulletin (at which the study was published) is edited by a person with a BS in Food Science (whose main brag is being a top “food safety social media influencer”) and is published by a lawyer who specializes in food poisoning litigation and sponsored by his law firm.
Wonder how many online sources bothered to check any of this before putting it on blast to be picked up and repeated by the rest of their Brave Contrarians Network.
I think this would be a hyperbolic category error.
Or a f**king joke, FFS!
Because the democratic process worked after those advocating for change successfully made their case. This simply makes my point.
I’m not sure what this means. When I advocate for policies, or even just policy goals, on a blog, am I circumventing the democratic process? What power do you think I or anyone else here has? We’re just making our case, unsuccessfully so far given where we are in the democratic process.
Here’s a thing we don’t like, here’s the result we want, let’s work backward on how to achieve it and tough shit if someone has a due process or inalienable rights objection.
For the issues we’ve been discussing for the last bit of this thread – global warming, accumulation of toxic or otherwise nasty plastics all around the world – I’m not sure that “Here’s a thing we don’t like” captures the concern.
We don’t want to cause changes to the climate. Because they will be profoundly disruptive and, in many case, harmful. Not the Hollywood movie “OMG Manhattan is underwater!” version of disruptive and harmful, but the real life version. The “OMG it’s going to cost us tens of billions of dollars to clean up Manhattan after that storm surge!” version, see also Hurricane Sandy. Or the “we have to choose between water for agriculture or water for drinking and bathing” version, see also the Western US right now. Multiplied many times over, for all the places that are going to be hit by conditions they were not designed for.
We don’t want to blanket the world with toxic micro-shards of plastic. Because they’re toxic, and because we have no known way to clean them up, and even if we had a way, it would probably cost more than anyone wants to spend on it.
We’re not talking about small things here, or matters of personal preference or lifestyle. Nobody is trying to turn anyone else into a Prius-driving coastal elitist metrosexual. We’re trying to figure out how to not fnck up the 10,000 years of stable environmental conditions that have made it possible for humans to establish settled lives and move past nomadic hunter-gatherer culture.
Just thought that deserved pointing out.
I just want to stop people from doing stuff they like because I’m mean. The planet is just an excuse.
We *are* addressing that issue, China is not.
you can buy an electric car in China, right now, for less than $5K. if they can export them, they will crush the Japanese and US EV makers.
The use of public highways is governed by a license issued by the state which constitutes permission to use the public roads
STOP TELLING ME WHAT TO DO!
boohoos
you can buy an electric car in China, right now, for less than $5K.
They will likely cost a lot more than that if they have to meet US and European vehicle standards.
point is, many Chinese people are actually trying to reduce their CO2 emissions. according to this, in 2020 41% of all EVs in the world were sold in China.
a 120km range isn’t useful for me, but it probably would be if I lived in a dense city.
yes, they need to get off coal.
As part of that urban/rural dynamic here we should note that cars are only a small segment of China’s EV market. They sell about 15 million e-bikes every year. Those e-bikes make a huge contribution to reducing the need for a car when and where age, population density, and weather permit.
I’m seeing more and more of these on campus here as well, which works if you are within commuting range. E-skateboards and One Wheels are also pretty popular as alternatives for cars.
Our Chinese internationals have been leading that trend on campus, and it’s spreading.
I’d probably have bought a cheater bike myself if I didn’t live within walking distance of where I teach.
And, no, this is not my “preferred way of life.” I’d love to live on some rural acreage someplace cooler and less dense in population and find other ways to moderate my burden on the carrying capacity of the planet we all share. But this is where I live and work, so here I am, doing what I can where I am.
The US sits at one end of the cosmic lifeboat we call “planet Earth”. China sits at the other end. The lifeboat is sinking.
McKinney claims China is not bailing fast enough. So why, asks McKinney, should the US inconvenience its freedom-loving populace by bailing any faster?
–TP
The limit of my rucksack is about 20 pds (or 6 bottles á 1.5 l). For more I use something like this
https://www.easy-trolley.de/i10639/original/0/Royal_Shopper_XXL__3_Speichen__mit_Tasche_Asta_schwarz.jpg
that is certified for 50 kg (but it’s exactly full at 18 bottles á 1.5 l i.e. 60 pounds).
I do most shopping on foot which is about 1 km in one direction. Otherwise I use public transport but given that the next Underground stop is also where the main shopping area is (and most other shopping areas are located close to Underground stations) it makes no significant difference as far as walking is concerned.
If there is no really heavy lifting to do (i.e. no more than 5 kg per hand) cloth bags are the container of choice. Plastic bags are mainly used, if there is a risk of spillage (of staining or sticky stuff) and then it’s mostly the critical items put in a plastic bag that then is put into the cloth bag, the rucksack or the trolley.
Personally I see the main problem less in single-use plastic bags than the plastic most grocery items come in. That stuff adds up very fast.
We are in the lucky situation that trash has not to be bagged but can be put into the bins (communal for two adjacent blocks of flats) directly, so it’s usually carrying the small bins from the flat to the communal bins and emptying them into those. Biodegradable stuff (food waste etc.)has it’s own bin and usuing plastic bags for that is explictly forbidden. There are paper bags for that.
We still produce too much waste for my personal taste but I am too lazy and too stingy to really work on that, which I have to admit.
They will likely cost a lot more than that if they have to meet US and European vehicle standards.
Obviously you’re not talking about vehicle emission standards (which are the most expensive ones). After all, these are electric cars. So where do they fall down? Inability to withstand a low speed crash? Lack of turn indicators? What?
I should add that Germans will fill plastic bags to the brim, if possible, so we use fewer of those than is probably the case elsewhere.
And one thing Germans do not like at all is other people packing your bags for you. If one gets into a grocery shop here where they have baggers (extremly rare), the first reaction of a German is ‘hey, someone is trying to steal my groceries’ not ‘oh, thank you for the service’.
Inability to withstand a low speed crash?
That would be my first assumption.
And, no, this is not my “preferred way of life.” I’d love to live on some rural acreage someplace cooler and less dense in population and find other ways to moderate my burden on the carrying capacity of the planet we all share. But this is where I live and work, so here I am, doing what I can where I am.
I would also love to have a two-way portal from my rental flat in Germany’s capital city to somewhere rural mid-Norway. I am a big city guy but Berlin has the advantage of lots of green spaces including several forests inside the city limits (one of them right behind the house).
After all, these are electric cars. So where do they fall down?
One guy’s experience with importing a Chinese EV.
“Are these mini electric cars street legal in the US?
The last issue is the biggest wrinkle in all of this — street legality.
Many people think that a Low-Speed Vehicle or Neighborhood Electric Vehicle in the US just needs to have a top speed of 25 mph, and then you’re good to go, ready to hit the open (neighborhood) roads. Unfortunately, it isn’t quite that simple (though it’s not terribly complicated, either).
The Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards were updated years ago with a section specifically for Low Speed Vehicles – the all-important Standard 500. It lays out exactly what an LSV needs to be street legal at the federal level and to be able to drive on US roads. Of course, the usual suspects are there: lights, mirrors, turn signals, brakes, 25 mph top speed, seat belts, etc. The tricky part is that many of the components, such as the tires, seat belts, windshield glass, backup camera, and pedestrian warning system (noisemaker), need to come from DOT-certified suppliers. And then, the final vehicle manufacturer needs to be registered with the NHTSA and supply the vehicle with a US-compliant VIN.”
I bought an inexpensive electric pickup truck from China (and you can too)
BP and others are fine with pure democracy when it raises my taxes or tells me I have to live in an 900 sq ft apartment and set my thermostat at 78 in the summer and 65 in the winter and can only buy 1 lb of beef a week. However, if that same democracy limits abortion rights or changes voting laws or approves open carry of firearms, it’s all a huge freaking disaster.
In a nutshell, we are right and you are wrong on the policy merits, and you work very hard to not have that discussion. Therefore this has nothing whatsoever to do with “freedom” or “force”.
Your screeching broadsides about trans folks and bathrooms makes more sense than the bullshit you are trying to peddle here. At least on that issue you trot out (an admittedly terrible) argument. But here, it’s all simply propaganda.
Motes and beams!
Personally I see the main problem less in single-use plastic bags than the plastic most grocery items come in. That stuff adds up very fast.
last week i wanted to buy some fresh spinach. i had a choice of buying a loose bunch of it and putting it in a plastic bag (because it’s always wet from the misters in the supermarket), or buy some prebagged in plastic (or in a hard plastic clamshell).
plastic is inescapable.
it sucks that the stuff is so very very good at what we use it for.
I should add that Germans will fill plastic bags to the brim, if possible, so we use fewer of those than is probably the case elsewhere.
This suggests an important point. If I go to the local Kroger chain, the one-time plastic bags are so flimsy that I would never take a chance on filling them up. Wal-Mart and Target, OTOH, use much sturdier bags and filling them is not a risk.
I seldom use any of them, only if I’ve made an unplanned stop and my large canvas bag is not with me. I’ve used the bag for 30 years now and have excellent packing tactics. On more than one occasion a clerk has stopped me as I was leaving to say something like, “I saw what you brought to the check-out, and saw your bag, and said to myself, ‘No way can he put all that in there.'” This morning’s list was mostly liquids, so something >20 pounds in it.
I read The Cold Equations in a sci-fi anthology over 40 years ago. An early exposure to “no, there is no miracle to a happy ending.” And, “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one.”
I would also love to have a two-way portal from my rental flat in Germany’s capital city to somewhere rural mid-Norway.
We’d go in 50% with you on a time-share. Our rudimentary Svenska skills will get us most of the way to Norsk, though a Nynorsk region would take some work.
it sucks that the stuff is so very very good at what we use it for.
The legacy of plastics is having been a huge benefit to wildlife and the environment.
“Synthetic plastics reduce mankind’s impact on wildlife populations in two main areas: They reduce the need to a) secure resources from animals in the wild, and b) farm renewable resources. The benefits of reducing the need to farm “renewable resources” are rarely considered and usually vastly underestimated. Indeed, as researcher Indur Goklany notes:
In a nutshell, reduced farming means there is more land available for wildlife, while production of synthetic plastics means wildlife populations are far less threatened by demand for natural plastics.”
How Plastics Benefit Wildlife and the Environment
And a huge benefit to ourselves.
“Even the most basic plastic products can yield profound benefits. In Africa, for example, the introduction of a simple plastic bucket relieves substantial hardships for some of the world’s poorest people. Stephen Fenichell in Plastic: The Making of a Synthetic Century, explains:
“The Immeasurable Benefits of Plastics to Humanity
I put the link about Japan’s mandating that plastic bags be charged for. The question of how you deal with all your garbage if you don’t have plastic bags came up.
https://matcha-jp.com/en/10149
Areas outside of Tokyo’s 23 wards, such as Chofu or Machida city, require designated garbage bags (see photo above). They are sold at large retailers and convenience stores. The price differs depending on size but generally ranges from 80 yen to 800 yen for a pack of ten.
Recently, municipalities in the Kansai and Kyushu regions have adopted a policy of using designated garbage bags. Please be aware that your garbage will not be collected unless you use these bags.
https://www.nippon.com/en/features/h10031/
Many municipalities require trash to be placed in specified garbage bags for collection. These can be bought at supermarkets, convenience stores, and many other outlets, and come in different sizes and separate colors indicating the type of trash that goes in each of them.
All this predates the charge for plastic bags law so there are probably changes from the above article.
Talking to you guys is like talking to kindergartners.
In the Japanese equivalent of kindergarten, kids are taught manners and social skills. That means that when you talk to them as adults, they usually have an understanding of social responsibilities so when you speak to them about things that need to be done, they don’t lash out like, well, 5 year olds…
https://japan-forward.com/blog-teaching-english-in-japan-kindergarten/
Kindergarten in Japan is called yochien. It is perhaps one of the most important parts of Japan’s education system as its where children start to learn a structure that they will continue throughout their school life.
If every bit of petroleum pumped out of the Earth were converted to polyethylene and buried again after use, the biosphere would be better off. It’s burning fossil carbon atoms into atmospheric CO2 molecules that endangers Our Way of Life. (Which is made possible by that burning, for now, and advocating any change to that is soshulism.) The key point is the “buried again” clause. To make sure that happens, we have to Tell People What to Do, alas.
I can’t figure out the toxicity of buried polyethylene, BTW. It’s composed of carbon and hydrogen. Other plastics contain more-noxious elements, of course.
–TP
CharlesWT – those studies you keep posting really do have a lot of low quality links and poorly constructed arguments in them. They are almost always lists full of lightly supported “takedowns” (aka strawman arguments) that have some valid criticisms of activist greenwashing, but that bury those criticisms in just plain wrong information.
Footnote 16 in the first one links to an author that mistakenly argues that introducing 20 invasive species onto an island with 10 unique native species that are then driven extinct is an example of *increasing* biodiversity (?). Not the sort of claim that lends confidence to the argument that she is relying on him to make.
The author goes on to argue: The main challenge was that the animals were owned in common—basically by no one, as they lived in the wild—so they had no one to protect them. When left in the wild without owners—or simply owned by the government—few people have a stake in protecting them. To farmers in regions where elephants are wild, the animals can become giant pests as they can quickly devastate farms, leaving communities with little to eat. In that case, the only value people see in the animals is for poachers seeking their tusks or meat.
Which is false. The threat to elephants in the wild came with colonialism and colonial pressures on local farming and land use. A big part of the environmental movement’s learning since the 1990s has come from indigenous activists challenging settler mentality notions of wilderness and of land use patterns. This is a big part of why environmental groups are working so closely with indigenous populations today in the Global South to try to find more sustainable land stewardship plans that benefit the local communities rather than just exploiting their resources.
And it looks like, no surprise, about half of the references in that report are from plastic industry publications and policy-facing marketing.
Do yourself a favor, and whenever you find one of these Contrarian gotcha pieces, go look for the sources and the critical replies to the sources by scientists. Then go and look at what *specifically* they are disagreeing over and start doing your more detailed research in the gap between those views, looking at what is being argued about and why those arguments are happening. You’ll find out a lot about the BS on both sides and about the real areas of disagreement that way.
But these gotcha pieces are research junk food.
“Even the most basic plastic products can yield profound benefits. In Africa, for example, the introduction of a simple plastic bucket relieves substantial hardships for some of the world’s poorest people.”
Part of the problem in this discussion is that “plastic” is such a broad generic term. Some plastics (as in the bucket here) are durable and intended for repeated use across years or decades. Other plastics (like those grocery bags) are flimsy, single use, items. The former don’t make that huge a contribution to plastics pollution. But the latter are an increasing problem.
Even a small child can carry a few liters.
A few litres of water weigh a few kilograms. Plastic buckets are inexpensive and light, but a wooden pail would still weigh much less than the water in it.
The more I think about the “How Plastics Saved the Animals” arguments, the more I realize that it’s all written in the same genre as the spurious arguments about how fossil fuels saved the whales.
Makes me want to watch Thank You For Smoking again.
Clever movie.
With an interesting production history
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thank_You_for_Smoking
Interesting deal.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-58564837
Which, whatever else it does, gives the lie to the claim that Afghanistan marks the start of US strategic withdrawal.
But these gotcha pieces are research junk food.
I’m just happy CharlesWT isn’t posting anti-Semitic Neo Nazi stuff. If only because I always have to check how to spell semitic…
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/sep/15/generational-conflict-over-climate-crisis-is-a-myth-uk-study-finds
Interesting, wonder if it is different for the US
Bags from places like Target are very durable. I take a couple with me when I go to stores with flimsy or no bags.
These are not the lightweight bags used as the basis for comparison in the UK government study you linked to.
In a nutshell, reduced farming means there is more land available for wildlife,
‘available’. that’s cute.
These are not the lightweight bags used as the basis for comparison in the UK government study you linked to.
The study, page 13, gives a weight of 7.5-12 grams. My kitchen scale gives a Target bag a weight of about 8.5 grams.
7.5-12.6 grams – different size bags.
the bags i get at the grocery store are 6.0g, and the produce bags are 2.0g (yet are much stronger).
Perhaps my recollection of UK supermarket bags from fifteen years ago is too hazy, so I withdraw my last remark.
I see in appendix B that the lightweight bags were found by PIRA to be capable of carrying 18kg for 17 minutes. But that’s in a wildly misleading test where the weight was gradually increased. The report should not have accepted this plastics industry assessment at face value.
100 billion bags a year, most of which get tossed out after one or two uses, is a problem.
7.5 grams, 12.6 grams, still a problem.
We started down this rabbit hole from a discussion of climate change. We can’t get past “Gee, maybe we shouldn’t be putting 100 billion plastic bags out there”. The idea that we have the chops to make the kinds of more consequential changes needed to address climate change is a fantasy.
Other places will get with the program. Even China will probably get with the program at some point.
We’re gonna stand around and yell at each other about whether government should be allowed to tell anybody whether they can take their groceries home in a plastic bag or not.
The idea that we have the chops to make the kinds of more consequential changes needed to address climate change is a fantasy.
yes, it is.
The idea that we have the chops to make the kinds of more consequential changes needed to address climate change is a fantasy.
Strictly speaking, this should have said “any more.”
I think we once did have the chops. But we seem to have lost that ability. (Or, arguably, it has been successfully removed.) Attempts to restore it will likely need to start by examining how we came to lose it.
I don’t know what the motivation has been to convince a significant percentage of people that their relatively trivial personal preferences are more important than the common good. I guess some number of people are benefiting in the short term and they don’t really care what happens after they’re dead.
I don’t know what the motivation has been to convince a significant percentage of people that their relatively trivial personal preferences are more important than the common good.
people who make their livings from the culture wars have done a good job of making sure nothing stays neutral.
Wooden buckets tend to leak, and are not so easy to make (you need to have wood of appropriate consistency and porosity).
An example: red oak vs white oak. ONE of them is good for barrels (like for water, but also wine or whiskey). The OTHER has pores aligned in the wrong direction, so the liquid will seep out.
Northern deciduous hardwood forest != African tropical/desert? regions where water is scarce.
So yes, those blue plastic buckets are a net good.
Plus, “I haz a buket” opportunities, that even non-humans can appreciate.
I guess it’s better to walk dozens of kilometers with a light-weight bucket full of water on your head, than with a heavier clay jar full of water on your head. water is about 8 pounds a gallon, no matter what you carry it in, but no doubt every little bit helps.
but maybe a well nearer to home would be best of all.
Water, children, and plastics…
“Water scarcity takes a greater toll on women and children because they are often the ones responsible for collecting it. When water is further away, it requires more time to collect, which often means less time at school. Particularly for girls, a shortage of water in schools impacts student enrolment, attendance, and performance. Carrying water long distances is also an enormous physical burden and can expose children to safety risks and exploitation.”
Water scarcity: Addressing the growing lack of available water to meet children’s needs.
So, to recap:
Climate change is contributing to water scarcity in many places. This places a large burden on families who may have to travel longer distances to get water.
Solution: plastic buckets, so when women and kids still have to walk for hours a day to get water, the load is merely 40 pounds, plus or minus, for five gallons, rather than 45 or 50 pounds.
This IMO raises “missing the point” to new heights.
It’s also worth noting that this is what climate change looks like. The statue of liberty is not underwater, but thousands to millions of people are finding it increasingly difficult to live where they have always lived.
If it continues, they’re gonna go somewhere else.
Historically, these kinds of population migrations are extremely disruptive. See also “The Sea Peoples” from the Bronze Age and the Migration Period of 1st century CE Europe.
Or, you know, the Dust Bowl.
If you can’t live where you currently live, you’re gonna move.
If you can’t live where you currently live, you’re gonna move.
yet another benefit of rising CO2 levels: increased geographic mobility!
“This IMO raises “missing the point” to new heights”
Among a bunch of things that miss the point. But yeah.
walk the walk, clowns.
“I don’t know what the motivation has been to convince a significant percentage of people that their relatively trivial personal preferences are more important than the common good.”
It is usually hard to have a constructive discussion when it starts with telling the other person that what they care about is trivial.
“Look,” said Joe Biden. “All this irrelevant back and forth about ‘preferences’, ‘freedom’, and ‘force’ aside, either we adopt effective policies to address human caused climate change, or we don’t.”
“One side stands ready to do something (but even they argue about a lot amongst themselves-green new deal which see). And one side is just a bunch of lackey lickspittle seeking desperately to preserve their wealth and privilege.”
“Pick one.”
It is usually hard to have a constructive discussion when it starts with telling the other person that what they care about is trivial.
I hear you.
The flip side of this is trying to have a constructive conversation with people who think they have an inalienable right to carry their groceries home in a plastic bag. Not “the plastic bag is a better choice”, for whatever reason, but “you can’t tell me what to do!”.
Nobody is interested in moving an inch, as far as I can tell.
100 billion bags a year is a lot of bags. It’s basically a bag a day for every man, woman, and child in the US. They’re cheap to make and convenient, but they generally get used once or twice before they’re thrown out. 100 billion of them per year creates a problem.
Nobody wants to be told they can’t eat beef anytime they like. But the amount of beef we eat causes a problem.
Nobody wants to be told they can’t drive a big-ass pickup if they feel like it. But the fact that the three top-selling vehicles in this country are all big-ass pickups causes a problem.
And so on and so on.
If everybody just does whatever the hell they want, there are some fairly serious problems that won’t get solved.
I have no idea how to move forward with any of it.
Small interruption of the conversation to say that I looked over the survey that lj linked to and I have observations.
I think it’s entirely understandable that the younger generations are saying that there is little to be done personally for climate change. That’s not a reflection of a lack of will to act, that’s a more widespread understanding (at least amongst the Millenials and under that I talk to) that the lifestyle choices that they are being asked to make are mostly symbolic choices and that the changes we need to make are big, global, economic things. The younger generation are pretty well convinced that they will not come into their power and influence until after the window of opportunity for change will already have closed with nothing to show but these small gestures.
It’s not laziness or apathy driving those answers, it’s deep cynicism and despair.
I teach science fiction because it is the one way I know of to keep the young engaged in looking for answers to their problems after the change we don’t want to make has become an inevitability. I’m trying to teach them how to live in a future we can’t predict, but one for which the old answers no longer hold.
Because that is what we are giving them when we finally hand over the keys.
It is usually hard to have a constructive discussion when it starts with telling the other person that what they care about is trivial.
I have to observe, there is one side that started selling the ‘fuck your feelings’ tee shirts and it wasn’t mine. (some googling suggests that the phrase starts with Ben Shapiro)
It’s funny how these things have a way of backfiring…
It is usually hard to have a constructive discussion when it starts with telling the other person that what they care about is trivial.
The begrudgery, it is strong….
It’s hard to have a constructive discussion when one side of it is looking for excuses to destroy the planet.
There’s only one earth, we’re all sharing it. There’s nothing special about the USA which means it’s ok if everyone there emits three times the carbon dioxide the environment can sustain. Or that it doesn’t matter if the sea is full of discarded plastic bags so long as they’re American plastic bags.
As is now an internet tradition, it’s hard to decide what to have for dinner when one side suggests “how about Italian?” and the other side insists on “tire rims and anthrax”.
Yet here we are.
sometimes people behave in ways that are profoundly foolish or harmful.
I don’t have the skill set to bring it to their attention in a way that will not cause them offense.
It’s a failing or lack on my part, which I recognize. My wife brings it to my attention, not infrequently.
So I’m probably not the guy that is going to turn the tide and change hearts and minds.
If we don’t stop putting crap in the environment, it’s going to make us and lots of other beings sick.
If we don’t stop putting the amount of CO2 and other greenhouse gases in the air, it’s going to change the climate. It will take decades to hundreds to thousands of years for that to balance out, and in the meantime we’re in for widespread disruption, because that’s what happens when you change the basic physical conditions that people have to live under.
We could stop it. It would be expensive and disruptive to stop it. It will probably be even more expensive and disruptive not to.
So I’m just not sure what to say.
“Stop doing stupid shit” appears to be too blunt and offensive. “Please stop doing stupid shit” appears to be too blunt and offensive.
So you tell me what the right thing to say is.
All of this is directed to the rhetorical you. But if any non-rhetorical yous have a good answer, I’m all ears.
Mostly I find myself wanting to walk up to people and say “What the actual fuck?!?”. But that’s probably not productive.
So I’m open to suggestions.
Not all of you subscribe to the NYT, but this is a pretty fair summary of the degrowth debate.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/16/opinion/degrowth-cllimate-change.html
I have been very pleasantly surprised by the NYT lately. They still have the usual idiots on their opinion pages and some articles still make me angry about but now they also have people presenting issues in a genuinely fair manner ( see above) and also a few genuine lefties like Beinart and Ezra Klein. ( I never used to have that impression of Klein, but either I was wrong— I didn’t read him much— or he changed.)
So you tell me what the right thing to say is.
The right thing to say to them is, “Yeah, I guess you are right. Doing little, or better yet-nothing is the right thing to do, because anything more is simply not right.”
This is the only thing you can say to get a positive response, because they simply will not take any other point of view as having any validity.
You do not convince these folks. You beat them.
I’ve always liked Klein and I seem to remember that Hilzoy had mentioned him as a very much not a bomb thrower (I’m struggling to find the right phrase. Mild-mannered? Neutral? Fair and unbiased? Use those and you are asking to be ridiculed)
So you tell me what the right thing to say is.
Sometimes, the right thing to say involves changing the field of play. An example (about which I confess to being a trifle smug):
At the polling place I was working Tuesday, traffic was light. 113 people voting in person over the course of a 13 hour day, and perhaps another 125 dropping off their mail-in ballots. Not exactly a crowd — voting by mail seems to be taking over; maybe we’ll follow Utah, etc. And go to all mail voting.
Out of those 100÷, we had two who pushed back on the requirement that everyone coming into the polling place wear a mask.** I could have insisted that the county elections department required them to do so. (Not to mention the county Board of Supervisors requiring everyone in a public building, including not just government buildings but schools, resyaurants, etc, wear one.) Which would likely have gotten into arguments about the merits of masks, authoritarian governments, etc. So I didn’t.
Instead, I simply pointed out that we were guests of the church whose building we were using. And they expected everyone inside to wear a mask (as, in fact, they do). So it was just good manners on our part to wear one. Somehow, nobody was up for ranting and railing against good manners. So they dutifully put on a mask and came in to vote.
Perhaps the most effective tactic for getting people to support addressing climate change might be something similar. Admit to ourselves that the opponents are not going to be persuaded by reason. Change the subject to something which hasn’t yet locked into the culture wars framework. Not sure what that might be. But it seems like an approach worth exploring.
** If someone just wouldn’t, we had provisions made to check the in outside, bring them their ballot, and let them vote there.
Not exactly a crowd — voting by mail seems to be taking over; maybe we’ll follow Utah, etc. And go to all mail voting.
I’ll be really surprised if CA doesn’t stay with sending a ballot to every registered voter. The bill to make it mandatory for all counties passed both chambers by very large margins and has been on the governor’s desk for a week now. Assuming he signs it, CA will be the 7th western state to adopt the practice, along with OR, WA, CO, NV, HI, and UT. AZ, MT, and NM each sends mail ballots to more than two-thirds of their voters.
With CA included, more than 90% of all ballots cast in the West will be mail ballots. I have a vision of russell shaking his head in sorrow.
With CA included, more than 90% of all ballots cast in the West will be mail ballots. I have a vision of russell shaking his head in sorrow.
Somehow, I see a time (say by 2040) when only the reddest of red states are NOT on board. It’s just too sensible a way to go.
But what will happen when the next GOP president finally kills the postal service?
(OK OK this will be the least of the problems should a GOPster become POTUS in the forseeable future.)
But what will happen when the next GOP president finally kills the postal service?
All those old folks who have been reliably voting Republican by mail (and also Trump**) won’t be voting. Oops.
** Can’t call him “reliable” after all. In this as in anything.
How are you going to fix it the first time 250,000 votes are delivered 6 weeks late? Or not at all?
We regularly have to trace mail, it is not actually reliable. We send contracts but only with a tracing number. No important documents just get stuffed in a first class envelope and mailed.
It’s not that mail in general works poorly, it’s that there isn’t any way to recount missing votes.
It will happen. Then 90% of the voters in the west will not want to trust the mail again.
It’s a very strange level of trust in a demonstrably flawed system.
How are you going to fix it the first time 250,000 votes are delivered 6 weeks late?
I’m not positive, but I don’t think there has ever been a time when the USPS has not been able to deliver 250,000 pieces of mail and didn’t know why they were held up. Even the delays in 2020 were totally explicable
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_Postal_Service_crisis
That number seems strangely similar to this one
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/04/28/fact-check-false-claim-arizona-audit-found-evidence-election-fraud/4860721001/
Ken Bennett, Arizona Senate liaison and former Arizona secretary of state, told USA TODAY claims that the audit found 250,000 fraudulent votes were “absolutely not” true.
I also wonder if Marty has been reading the storied that were debunked here
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/11/05/politics/usps-missing-ballots-fact-check/index.html
I didn’t read any of those stories. I have used the USPS my whole life, they are not that reliable.
“There has never been a case is an assumption and my guess is its a poor one.
Compared to putting your ballot in the machine yourself it is one shitload less reliable.
I have been waiting for online voting to become a thing, of course it has its own problems, but it is beyond me how the USPS is considered a safe alternative. There is simply no check on whether the votes were delivered or not, it’s just an odd level of confidence to me.
So why the number 250,000? It’s just an odd level of coincidence to me.
As I don’t live in the states, I really don’t know if the USPS has problems or not, but in the absence of any kind of link, I really can’t know, can I?
So now that, for once, the Pentagon felt pressured into admitting it killed civilians in a drone strike, maybe they could be pressured into holding people accountable and explaining why they initially reported a “ secondary explosion”? It almost looks like reflexive bureaucratic lying, something that seems bad in a heavily armed organization.
I tried asking this question ( or close to it) at a local appearance of a congressman ( not mine, but next door) but didn’t get the chance. I am going to email it.
Sorry, another thought occurred to me. I have no idea what percentage of total mail the ballots would represent, but if we said that 1 out of 4 pieces of mail of them were mail-in ballots (and I can’t believe that 25% of the mail would be mail-in ballots), that would mean that a million pieces of mail were 6 weeks late. That would also be confined to a single state, so it seems to me that if something happened that was that momentous, we would probably be worried about stockpiling canned goods and signs of a zombie creating virus rather than whether an election came off.
How are you going to fix it the first time 250,000 votes are delivered 6 weeks late?
if this really concerns Republicans, maybe they should try funding the fucking USPS.
173 million pieces of first class mail each day
https://facts.usps.com/one-day/#:~:text=On%20average%2C%20the%20Postal%20Service,First%2DClass%20Mail%20each%20day.
I have a vision of russell shaking his head in sorrow.
?!??!!?
I don’t have a problem with voting by mail…
also:
the USPS delivers 173 million pieces of first class mail per day. About 160 million votes were cast in the 2020 election.
I’m not seeing a problem with scale.
I personally have also never had an issue with the USPS and reliability. If given the choice between USPS, UPS, or FedEx, I generally prefer USPS. Definitely prefer USPS over FedEx for reliability of delivery, and generally prefer USPS for packages, which UPS tends to beat up in transit.
YMMV, naturally.
It makes sense to trace mail that has important legal or financial information attached, not just to prove the USPS didn’t screw up, but to make whoever it was delivered to accountable for the fact that they received it.
And, in fact, as Marty notes, the USPS offers that, so if we need it for votes, it’s available. I voted by mail in 2020 and I was able to trace the status of my ballot through the process of being delivered and counted. So, that appears to be in place, at least in MA.
I live quite near my polling place – I could walk to it in about 5 or 10 minutes. That’s because I live in a densely settled area. Other people live much further from their polling place. Voting by mail makes the voting process accessible to them.
And I’m in favor of as many people voting as is possible. Because that, at least in principle, is the basis of the authority and legitimacy of our government.
The advantage of voting by mail over online – or any other form of voting vs online, for that matter – is that there is a physical artifact associated with the vote. Online is also vulnerable to hacking in ways that other forms – in person or by mail – are not.
Lastly, what cleek said. Conservatives do nothing but b*tch about the USPS, while at the same time advocating policies that freaking cripple it.
actually, Marty, if you don’t trust the USPS, why use them to send contracts? Why not FedEx?
serious question. I’m trying to understand why you would conduct important business using a service that you wouldn’t trust with your vote.
wrs, plus:
(local elections board): “we’re sending you the ballot you requested, look for it”
…
“we got the ballot you returned, stuff on the outer envelope is valid, it’s set to be counted.”
The links in the internet are unreliable*, yet the system is set up with end-to-end protocols to result in reliable transmission (and notification when it fails).
SYN/ACK, it’s not just for blogposts.
(*much more reliable now, go back a decade or three and it’s clear why the protocols were designed to work around link failures)
russell, I mostly use FedEx. Occasionally USPS is more convenient. USPS is ok if you send with a signature required or overnight where it’s trackable.
I do admit I haven’t seen how the return envelopes are setup for votes. But just sticking my vote in a mailbox as standard first class mail won’t happen as long as I can go vote. My home mailbox receives misrouted mail on a regular basis.
The challenge isn’t that the votes are too much for the USPS, it is that they are a small untrackable percent of the total mail. Yet 150 million pieces automatically mailed to last known address invites significant if not widespread error. And “it hasn’t happened yet” doesn’t really mean much.
Except Snarki, the idea in the West is you don’t request it. It randomly gets sent. And unless you remember to check, the lack of an affirmative response from your board is likely to get overlooked.
I don’t have a problem with voting by mail…
Unless I’m misremembering, though, you have always been an advocate for the community benefits of waiting in line at the precinct with your neighbors. Once a state goes to mandatory mail ballot distribution, regular precinct voting disappears soon after. In Hawaii, for example, with its shiny new mail ballot system, there are a total of eight places in the entire state where you can wait in line to get a ballot and vote on election day. Colorado has more, because there’s a requirement that there be at least one in each county. My 2600 square mile Colorado county (population 360,000 and growing furiously) has six. Colorado actively discourages in-person voting unless you’re one of the edge cases the vote centers are intended to serve.
We get sent regular mail about the elections: to verify addresses; to give us sample ballots; notice that ballots are being sent; the ballots themselves (all individually numbered and tracked by the state in their own systems).
We are told when the ballot should arrive and what todo if it does not. We are told how to check if our ballot has been received (online check, not sure if this can be done by phone). We are told how to verify the information on our ballots to make sure they were counted correctly.
I have no worries about mail ballots.
I do admit I haven’t seen how the return envelopes are setup for votes.
I believe our system here in Colorado is representative. Ballot return envelopes are distinctive in size and appearance. A sizeable majority are returned to county-operated drop boxes rather than by USPS. Distribution and return by mail are handled under special contracts negotiated with the USPS — at least for the larger counties, outbound ballots are presorted and delivered directly to the sorting centers, priority handling is paid for, regular sweeps of post office facilities to avoid misplaced ballots are conducted. It’s not just “throw some first-class envelopes in and hope.”
nous, if you were an average voter that would be great. It’s odd to me that people are concerned about the difficulty some people have figuring out how to vote in person, yet are confident they will be able to follow the process you just described.
you have always been an advocate for the community benefits of waiting in line at the precinct with your neighbors.
I don’t actually have much of a preference for how people vote. There is a bit of Norman Rockwell-sequel civic enthusiasm in going to the polling place but it’s more important that people vote at all. And what works in places like where I live, where you can literally walk to the polling place in not much more time than it takes to drive, vs places where folks are more spread out.
Whatever works, wherever that works.
The process for vote by mail here in MA was:
* applications for a mail-in ballot were sent to registered voters at their last known address
* if you want, send in the application and shortly thereafter get a ballot mailed to you
* fill out the ballot, put it in an envelope that you sign on the outside, put that in a big envelope that is clearly marked as a ballot
* either drop it into a ballot box (like a big mailbox, in our case in front of town hall) or send it in the mail
From there, there was an online thing where you could track the progress of your ballot – arrived at town hall (or wherever the vote tabulation is done), outer envelope opened and signature verified, vote counted.
I guess the ballot could just go totally missing, in which case you’d never see it arrive at wherever it was mailed to. Or it could take too long to get there, but in our area there was a ton of publicity around mailing it early enough to account for COVID related delays etc.
It worked out pretty well.
I will say that I’m not in favor of online. I do buy and sell stuff online regularly, but also have to follow up on bogus transactions at least several times a year. IMO there are vulnerabilities in the online context that simply don’t exist for in-person or by-mail.
-sequal should be -esque
I hate auto correct.
More broadly, I hate freaking machines trying to ‘help me’ when I didn’t ask for the help. I know how to spell, and I know what I meant to say, thank you very much.
I will say that I’m not in favor of online.
Neither are the experts. When various states’ systems are evaluated for accuracy and security, one of the very few down-checks for Colorado’s system is that we allow a small number of military personnel on certain kinds of overseas assignments to vote online. We do that because those assignments make it unlikely/impossible that they can receive paper ballots in a timely fashion.
My home mailbox receives misrouted mail on a regular basis.
You definitely have my sympathy. But I don’t see anything like that here. A couple of times things have gotten misrouted, within the same ZIP code, because someone misread “Gwen Ct” as “Glen Ct”. But beyond that? No problems. Certainly nothing that would suggest that the bright purple (postage paid) ballot envelopes would get misrouted.
We get sent regular mail about the elections: to verify addresses; to give us sample ballots; notice that ballots are being sent; the ballots themselves (all individually numbered and tracked by the state in their own systems).
Important note: It’s the return envelopes which are individually numbered and tracked in California. The ballots themselves are properly anonymous. So you can track you ballot being returned and counted. But nobody knows how you voted on anything.
IMO there are vulnerabilities in the online context that simply don’t exist for in-person or by-mail.
In particular, there is no hard copy to check, should an audit be required. That is why voting machines which merely recorded votes, without producing a paper ballot, are getting replaced with ones which do provide a paper trail.
nous, if you were an average voter that would be great. It’s odd to me that people are concerned about the difficulty some people have figuring out how to vote in person, yet are confident they will be able to follow the process you just described.
I am an average voter. I registered when I got my driver’s license. Before the election they mailed me a ballot. I filled it out and dropped it in a ballot drop box. If the drop box were farther away, I would have mailed it in as I have done before. A few days before election day I checked the status.
That’s it.
All my difficulties with voting were earlier in my life when I was in my 20s, working shit jobs with irregular hours, had no car and an out-of-state driver’s license, and did not have a birth certificate on-hand.
It’s not a trivial thing to ask a person to get a copy of their birth certificate from another state and bring it and a narrow list of documents for proof-of-residence to an office miles away that is open for very limited hours during the work week. Doing that required trips to the public library to find out how to get the birth certificate and *having to mail things* to the county where one was born (assuming there was ever a certificate), then waiting for them to *mail it back* so that you could then take another bus on a multi-hour trip (or arrange a ride from a friend, or pay for a ride) to go to an office with your documents and then waiting some more. Time might have to be taken off from work to do that.
Then you have to figure out which voting location is your local polling precinct and maybe take off more time from work and arrange another ride to go and cast your vote, hoping that your documentation will be sufficient. You don’t see the ballot until you get there. If you get any of it incorrect, you have to ask for a provisional ballot and suffer through all of the worries about that ballot being counted.
(I’ve done all of these things. I’ve also been unable to do all these things a couple times and been unable to vote as a result. Having read some analysis of these voting systems, my situation was not unusual.)
Hands down, I’d take my current vote-by-mail over that any day, whatever my employment status, whether urban, suburban, or rural.
It’s more consistent, convenient, and transparent.
All features that make it less-than-ideal for the people who want to make voting more difficult for people without means.
Important note: It’s the return envelopes which are individually numbered and tracked in California. The ballots themselves are properly anonymous.
Thanks for the correction. I had never done more than checking that my ballot was received.
Y’all do a good job with CA voting.
My home mailbox receives misrouted mail on a regular basis.
The house where we lived for 32 years had the street address “6925”. The next stop on the route, around the corner, had “9625”. We got each other’s mail for all 32 years. Same families all of that time, so it was like a tradition.
I was particularly attuned to the tracking issue after last November’s election. We had a guy come in to vote in person, but the system reported that he had already voted. (Yes, we do check that in real time, so nobody gets their vote counted twice.) He insisted he had not.
Eventually he figured out that, when his wife had voted by mail, she had used the envelope that came with his mail-in ballot. Simple solution: he went and got her envelope, put his mail-in ballot in it, and dropped it off at the polling place. Not really a perfect solution, but it made sure they both got to vote, and only voted once.
If you don’t trust the mail or the drop box, dropping your mail-in ballot at the polling place lets you avoid the lines (if any). You can drop it off at any polling place in the county, not just your own, and it gets counted at the same time as in-person ballots. (Actually, you can use any polling place in the state, e.g. one near your work. The ballot then gets forwarded to the right county, and counted with mail-in ballots postmarked by Election Day.)
Hands down, I’d take my current vote-by-mail over that any day, whatever my employment status, whether urban, suburban, or rural.
Opinion polls in western states that have gone full vote by mail for an election cycle or two are overwhelmingly, “You can take my mail ballot system back when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers.” Across all of the political parties.
It is unsurprising that in AZ this year, where >80% of registered voters are on the permanent mail ballot list, the Republican leadership in the legislature bottled up all of the bills their more extreme members introduced to make mail balloting harder in committees and let them die. The AZ Republicans are facing enough problems without campaigning against programs that are popular with their voters.
Eventually he figured out that, when his wife had voted by mail, she had used the envelope that came with his mail-in ballot. Simple solution: he went and got her envelope, put his mail-in ballot in it, and dropped it off at the polling place. Not really a perfect solution, but it made sure they both got to vote, and only voted once.
The Colorado system would have rejected both ballots. Return envelopes here are keyed to a specific voter, and both would have failed because the signatures were wrong.
The Colorado system would have rejected both ballots. Return envelopes here are keyed to a specific voter, and both would have failed because the signatures were wrong.
Signatures are an interesting issue. People’s signatures change over time. And some people (e.g. me) use use varying degrees of precision on the lettering, depending (to some extent) on what we are signing. So, unless there is reason to do a really close check, “similar” is generally acceptable.
Which may not please the paranoid, but has never produced a significant problem. Spouses, assuming the use the same last name, will typically have signatures which are close enough. If we had a situation where the results, at the precinct level, were wildly different from the expected (based either on registrations or poll numbers) then a tighter check might be warranted. But otherwise? And note that percincts are small enough that you’d have to have a problem in a lot of them to impact statewide results. A conspiracy with that many people involved wouldn’t need to cheat.
Spouses, assuming the use the same last name, will typically have signatures which are close enough.
No one would ever mistake my wife’s “Mary L. Cain” for my “Michael E. Cain”. They differ in almost all the ways that are considered when matching signatures.
People’s signatures change over time.
A few years back, the Colorado Secretary of State told a story during some interview. His daughter, recently turned 18, had voted for the first time. Her ballot was rejected because of a signature mismatch. He asked her if she was still fooling around trying different signature styles while she looked for whatever she liked best. “Well, yeah,” she told him. “I probably signed the envelope with the backhand version.”
Last year I had reason to pull my original Social Security card out of the safe deposit box. Signed it the spring I was in sixth grade. They’re not the same, but my current signature is plainly descended from that one. Call it 55 years. I spent too many years in jobs where some aspect of it required a legible, repeatable signature.
Marty, thanks for the reply, but you realize what I’m pointing out? Let’s say that 250,000 votes are the votes on one day. If it were not someone going in to specficially screw up only the mail ballots, it would be a problem that would screw up 179 million pieces of mail. Is that realistic?
In fact, mail ballots offer a certain protection that voting machines do not
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/apr/15/virginia-hacking-voting-machines-security
https://apnews.com/article/elections-colorado-cbef9943d72a6c4015f861237f3029f8
https://www.npr.org/2021/08/12/1027225157/after-data-is-posted-on-conspiracy-website-colo-countys-voting-machines-are-bann
It should be borne in mind here that Marty’s objective is to make it as difficult as possible to vote. Especially for poor people.
In fact, mail ballots offer a certain protection that voting machines do not
Almost every expert evaluation of states’ voting systems for accuracy and security put Oregon, Washington, and Colorado in the top five. Utah’s new vote by mail system has started to appear in that group.
To Marty’s point, it’s not hard to imagine lots of ways in which vote by mail *could* go sideways.
The burden of proof he faces is to explain why the actual vote-by-mail systems that are in place now, today, aren’t prone to those hypothetical failures.
Are there ways in which it *could* go wrong? Yes.
Does it actually go wrong, in real life, using the systems that we currently use in a number of states? The answer appears to be no.
Marty’s argument boils down to this: “If the universe ended tomorrow, then what?”
Do any here take such an argument seriously in any other context?
Marty’s arguments are like the arguments in debates about gay rights and marriage, and trans visibility and rights, that I summarized a few weeks ago. Anything that a particularly imaginative fiction writer could imagine going wrong is brought forward as a barrier to making any kind of change, even if the status quo exhibits all those drawbacks and more.
Transcendent boneheadedness, or trolling. Take your pick.
I don’t participate in these voting discussions because I assume the reason voting isn’t made easy for everyone is because Republicans and probably some “moderate” Democrats don’t want it to be. Election Day should be a paid national holiday for everyone, voting stations should be very common and within easy reach for most ( unless you are in the middle of some very remote area) and for military people or people who have mobility issues or out of the country we have mail in ballots and a bureaucracy set up to make it easy.
People who genuinely want voting to be easy and without fraud could argue about the details, but that’s a technical issue that could be resolved by people arguing in good faith.
Voting has always been really easy for me— the whole process from leaving my home and coming back is less than 45 minutes and I have no job hour conflicts, transportation issues, massive lines, or childcare difficulties. It should be that way for virtually everyone.
And no, I am not picking on Marty or saying he is arguing in bad faith. But the Republican Party and probably some Democrats are.
Ezra Klein is starting to get it here. The problem is not that our politics are so bitterly divisive, it is that they are so cramped.
Unleash the political imagination, OK?
I was going to post that Ezra Klein link. He has become ( for me) one of the best pundits around, which is like saying the tallest skyscraper in Manhattan KS, but Klein really is good. He reads widely and take arguments seriously.
Klein seems to be tippy-toeing out on a slippery slope to a libertarian point of view while holding onto a rope to progressive views and policies.
Klein has always been just a bit outside the mainstream of Democratic viewpoints. he’s kindof like Matt Yglesias (with whom he founded Vox): just a bit contrarian, and just a bit less concerned about orthodoxy than many political columnists.
it’s always weird to see his name at NYT and WaPo; he’ll always be the guy who got promoted up from comments to the front page at Pandagon, to me.
Not seeing that Charles. On foreign policy he is opposed to our military interventions for the most part, which is where the far left and many libertarians see eye to eye.
On domestic issues he wants progressives to find ways to encourage innovation without letting companies make monopoly profits— for instance, he mentions a Sanders proposal to award millions or billions to a company that finds a cure for some disease, but them make the cure immediately available to be manufactured by anyone. This sounds like something liberal economist Dean Baker would say.
For me, the thing that I remember Klein catching my eye on was that when the ACA was being discussed, he said ‘let’s look at other countries and see how their health care works’. That willingness to investigate seems unfortunately rare.
Klein seems to be tippy-toeing out on a slippery slope to a libertarian point of view
Alternatively, he could be approaching that edge, making sure that he is firmly belayed off so he doesn’t get sucked into a black hole of whataboutism and bad faith argumentation. He wouldn’t want to be quoting neo-nazi tracts…
Not seeing that Charles.
Klein makes a number of the same criticisms of government policies that libertarians have been making for years. Then he advocates for the continued involvement of the government to fix problems that the government created. This often just leads to another layer of problems.
So if I make the same observation of a problem as libertarians, like opioids are bad for people, I have to propose the same solution?
The WT: Klein makes a number of the same criticisms of government policies that libertarians have been making for years.
LOL…no, he does not:
Klein: A problem of our era is there’s too little UTOPIAN THINKING (caps by ed.), but one worthy exception is Aaron Bastani’s “Fully Automated Luxury Communism,” a leftist tract….(go read the rest).
Language never used by Robert Nozick or Ayn Rand I should think.
This often just leads to another layer of problems.
and it often doesn’t.