I get that, but I'm not the one using Instagram. It's my older sister.
I myself don't use Instagram, and I'm meaning to talk to her about it.
152 karma · joined November 13, 2020
I myself don't use Instagram, and I'm meaning to talk to her about it.
Same here.
That assumes Meta's plans for the metaverse ever pay off, and in my humble opinion, that's less than certain.
If I'm representative of younger people—and I have no idea if that's the case—Facebook proper is in deep trouble.
I agree with the sarcasm here, but I must elaborate on how terrible a person Mr. Hedges is. There's a whole saga behind how he went from being a noted journalist to whining on Substack, and I've been tracking it for quite some time.
* First came the plagiarism revelations, which are detailed quite nicely here: https://newrepublic.com/article/118114/chris-hedges-pulitzer...
* Then came the self-plagiarism revelations (many of his Truthdig columns are rewarmed passages from his books). He's apparently also been editing his own Wikipedia page to remove critism, and at one point got into an edit war with another longstanding contributor. All the while, he's called Wikipedia a "tool of the elite". https://twitter.com/Mathlover2/status/1499650487481683968?s=...
* Finally, we have his aforementioned show on RT. While it may not be on YouTube, it's still very much available on rt.com, which I can access from the US as of this writing, and which allows people to download individual episodes.
I should have been more clear that this was a general statement rather than a paraphrase of you argument. My apologies.
There is a qualitative difference between ropes and guns with respect to this argument. I agree with that. I would argue that there is less of one between that and the other things I listed.
> Yeah why not? Shouldn't we be trying to manufacture non-toxic chemicals that don't poison people and the planet.
To be clear: I was arguing whether people recreationally huffing paint thinner was a valid argument against working for a paint thinner company. There may very well be other, valid arguments for not working for a paint thinner company, but people huffing paint thinner contrary to all common sense and the instructions on the container isn't one of them. This also applies to the earlier point made in the thread about car companies: there are many potential ethical issues with working for them, some of which you have listed, but I don't think, say, human-stupidity-causer error by distracted drivers is one of them.
Also, while using non-toxic chemicals is desirable, sometimes it's not an option. This is why, in my example, I chose paint thinner (which AFAICT oesn't really have a non-toxic alternative) and not something like freon, which not only does have alternatives but is arguably much, much more environmentally damaging than, say, mineral spirits.
* Ropes can be used for hanging, and even for racially motivated murders as they were in the south. Does that mean it's unethical to work for a rope-making company?
* Paint thinner can be huffed recreationally for a high. Does that mean it's unethical to work for a paint thinner company?
* Computer security course knowledge can be used to hack systems. Does that mean teaching or learning computer security is unethical?
The thing about "externalities" is that, while some of them can be blamed on the producers of the products themselves, the blame for others lies on the people using the products. While in the above three cases I listed, the answer is more obviously that the people using the products in a harmful or irresponsible way are to blame, the assignment isn't always as clear cut in other cases.
That being said:
* Saying that working in the auto industry is unethical in general because of car accidents is silly, especially when we are talking about accidents due to human carelessness. Driver education in the US is atrociously limited as-is. While I would agree that some accidents can be attributed to manufacturers designing cars badly, or some other problem on the end of the company, the fact is that, if you put a sufficiently stupid person behind the wheel of a huge metal apparatus capable of going faster than a cheetah, bad things can and do happen with that person behind the wheel.
* Saying that working with alcoholic beverage production is unethical is in my view rather silly. While one could argue, and I would agree, that marketing specifically to drunks is unethical, there are plenty of people (myself included) who have drunk beer and wine, but never gotten addicted. Comparing heroin (a far more addictive and dangerous drug) to a drug that many people have been able to use without getting addicted is poor argumentation.
* Credit card companies may often have predatory practices, but that does not mean that every person who goes into credit card debt isn't using those cards in an imprudent, irresponsible way. While some of them are victims, most would, in the absence of credit cards, be falling prey to some other vice.
* As for defense: while weapons can and do fall into the wrong hands, nothing would change even if we magically went back to the pre-firearm era: bullies would just use swords, clubs, and trebuchets instead of firearms and missiles.
There are many externalities where the blame lies squarely on the companies (pollution, global warming, overuse of plastic, environmental degradation). But to assume that all societal issues involving industries can be blamed solely on the companies and people working in those industries is naïve.
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Guy_McPherson
Looking at the quoted article, it looks like the tired old "methane bubbles come all at once" argument which is a distortion of the actual science around this.
Climate change is real and a huge problem that we can and need to solve. Stop feeding inaction and disdain for real science by promoting cranks sites like these.
EDIT: Looks like this site has been reviewed along with McPherson before:
https://fractalplanet.wordpress.com/2014/02/17/how-guy-mcphe...
EDIT: Let me elaborate on my reasons for not liking this article, despite mostly agreeing with the author politically.
The first problem is that it's simplistic, bombastic, and lacks nuance. This is great for opinion pieces and political rhetoric, but it's bad for actual discussion, and media --- in particular longform posts --- that trade nuance and reasoned arguments for bombast and emotion are to be treated with extra skepticism.
The second problem is that, while assholes are a huge problem in American society, the author seems to lump every asshole into one rich "asshole class". The same assholes are simultaneously the ones bullying children online, making money while cutting benefits, and influencing young women with impossible beauty standards. In my experience, it's not the same group of assholes doing every asshole thing. It's many different groups of assholes, a lot of them neither wealthy nor successful nor famous.
The third issue is the notion of a "conspiracy of assholes to dominate our culture". In my opinion, it's much more local: assholes help themselves, and when it's in their ulterior interest, others, and influence groups and think tanks and whatnot exist, but from what I can gather, there is no singular grand conspiracy to speak of. There are localized conspiracies, to be sure (look at the MPAA, regional telecom monopolies, and so forth for particularly egregious examples) but these are neither controlling of everything nor organized to the level the author portrays. In any case, the author does not cite a source other than an allusion (without source) to Marx.
The fact that the reference to Marx is impossible to follow up on leads me to my last major issue with the article: writing quality. Occasional malapropisms ("altercations" should be replaced with "alterations"), a lack of references to anything* (there are no hyperlinks besides an image credit), and other issues detract from the article.
And that's a shame. The idea of being more critical of those in power and authority, of reforming the tax system to benefit the many rather than the few, and most of the other ideas she proposes in the last are really quite good, and ones I agree with myself. It's a shame that they are given in a package that is less amazing than the ideas themselves, with arguments that are less sterling than the ideas deserve.
* I know it's an opinion article and it's not supposed to be full of outside references, but if an article is just one person giving an opinion without external justification for factual points, I personally find that a flaw. Admittedly, this is a matter of personal taste on my part.
Second, there is a huge difference between drama and urgency and nihilistic fatalism. Watts indulges in more of the latter than I am comfortable with at times, and when he isn't, his musings about hurting the children of politicians to get his way is not only not productive (such a measure would absolutely backfire) but also frankly disturbing.
Third, the timeline actually does make a difference. Saying society will collapse in, say, twenty years when the scientific evidence points to something longer than that is a recipe for people dismissing scientists in twenty years when nothing happens and being much more likely to not take action needed to avoid later collapse.
Yes, global warming is very, very bad and it will cause death and destruction, and vastly more so if insufficiently much is done about it. But some of the predictions here are out of line with the science, particularly as far as timelines are concerned, and the whole undercurrent of nihilistic fatalism is not helping.
This. This is the biggest issue I have with r/collapse and similar crowds. If collapse isn't inevitable, then they aren't helping, and they sure as all heck aren't able to prove that it is inevitable.
This mindset reminds me of certain videos I've seen on YouTube where some people have been proposing just letting society collapse due to global warming and founding an anarchist society in the ashes. Spoiler alert: If everyone thought like this, society in the first world probably would continue, but you'd kill millions upon millions of people in the third world.
Second, while the post is irksome, Turchin's methodology is extremely shoddy. The fact that climatologic models (modeling an arguably slower-moving and certainly better-understood system than humans alone or in aggregate) require the use of sophisticated mathematics and intensive computer usage, as opposed to Turchin looking at large collections of historical data, determining patterns seemingly by eyeball, and predicting maybe a decade in advance without so much as a mention of a computer program to produce the prediction, is illustrative of the methodological shortfall.
Moreover, Turchin's original prediction was much vaguer than he or current media around him presents it:
"The next decade (i.e, the years around 2020) is likely to be a period of growing instability in the United States and western Europe, which could undermine the sort of scientific progress you describe in the Opinion collection of '2020 visions' " (source: https://www.nature.com/articles/463608a)
To call "growing instability" a vague prediction is an understatement. It could refer to civil war, democratic decline, crime rates, bad days at work, productivity drops, or any number of other things one could imagine. In this case, it refers primarily to protests against racism (the violent parts of which are comparatively rare and perpetrated mostly by a small number of opportunists) and secondarily to a long-running trend of political polarization, neither of which are particularly unheard of in recent memory. In both cases, these movements are overwhelmingly a problem in the US, with Europe looking calm in comparison. It is therefore somewhat likely that Turchin is not as much a Hari Seldman, or even a poor imitation thereof, as much as a John Edward: that is, he is a cold reader.
There is at least one article in The Independent on this: https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/cli...
EDIT: Looking at the citations, this was published in Scientific Reports, a journal with a 48% acceptance rate for papers and from which I have seen some questionable content, including a paper on human extinction and forest destruction written by theoretical physicists who somehow managed to shoehorn Dyson spheres into their work.