nosleeptill

Of course there is the wonderful hygiene of the buffet, the sneezing, the coughing, the tasting off the serving spoon, dropping the serving spoon on the floor and putting it back into the food. Let's not forget all the wasted food, and the encouraged gluttony.

With more sophisticated machines you just need less people. When the machines start building the systems and then monitoring the systems then the rules will change.

This is fucking insane. $300M for a dog walking company, a dog walking company. A dog walking company. A fucking dog walking company.

People don't support the concept of taxes even when they can directly see the positive impact the tax payment has on their own lives and on the community.

Addressing climate change is an abstract concept and for most people, like 80% of the population they can't grasp the abstract, so it all feels like a scam, one big flea circus. "No, no, the fleas are there you just can't see them, just trust me."

Unless someone can invent a way to capture and sequester greenhouse gases from the upper atmosphere to the tune of 50.9 gigatonnes per year I really don't see humanity making any progress, slowing growth isn't helping.

Buy a sleep mask and you can dispense with the garbage bags.

Really that easy huh. Why don't you ask Meng Hongwei if it's that easy, or may Fan Bing Bing if it's that easy.

When your government is willing to torture and kill you in order to get their way, and they are willing to do it on foreign soil, it doesn't seem so easy, or safe.

Back in the late 80's early 90's I remember reading some articles written by climatologists who believed that things were far more dire than the mainstream climate industry accepted.

Quoted from the article " researchers now suspect that for every one degree Celsius rise in Earth’s average temperature, permafrost may release the equivalent of four to six years’ worth of coal, oil, and natural gas emissions—double to triple what scientists thought a few years ago. Within a few decades, if we don’t curb fossil fuel use, permafrost could be as big a source of greenhouse gases as China, the world’s largest emitter, is today."

This article from NatGeo is the first modern writing I've seen that has put forth such dire warnings about the permafrost thawing. The warning is not as dire at the papers I read, but nonetheless it something we haven't seen before. I wish I still had those original papers, but they were in fact paper and not electronic, and I don't remember who wrote them or where they were published and I doubt they are cataloged anywhere. I do remember the people who wrote the papers were all older scientists, so I don't think any of them are still around.

Most of their models were based on the fact that oceans, glaciers and eventually the permafrost would get locked into a positive feedback loop using greenhouse gases as the fuel.

They postulated that humans tipped the balance and we keep skewing the balance until the earth and climate hit a tipping point at which time the earth and climate would get locked into a few positive feedback loops, warming oceans, melting glaciers, and thawing permafrost.

Most of the papers felt the thawing of the permafrost was the point of no return. It was the point where human activity was no longer the driving force in climate change. Even though the thawing of the permafrost would start out small it was the indication that we passed a warming event from which reducing human output would no longer alter the warming trend. The increase in temperature and forces required to start large scale permafrost warming could not be stopped simply by slightly reducing human output.

The authors mostly felt that 20-40 years of future climate change was already locked in, and once we passed the permafrost thawing event, even large scale changes in human output would not alter the next 20-40 years and during that time the permafrost itself would start to rapidly accelerate it's thawing, eventually coming to release yearly, as much greenhouse gases as all of humans emit, in effect accelerating the warming.

The underlying basis for their theories was that the release of greenhouse gases caused the planet to warm, which in turn caused oceans to warm, glaciers to melt, and eventually permafrost to thaw, which caused more greenhouse gas emissions, which caused more warming, etc. They felt that once the permafrost started to thaw that the final piece of the puzzle was in place and that the three systems, all fueled by greenhouse gas emissions would self sustain the feedback loop.

The papers believed that while in the beginning the permafrost greenhouse gas output would be small, but it was enough to sustain the feedback loops without human input, the feedback loops would slow but they would sustain. Since it wasn't possible for humans to cut emission by 10 or 20% overnight the best humanity could hope for would be a 1-2% reduction yearly, and even if humans reduced by 1-2% yearly the permafrost would actually make up the difference, thus not changing the trajectory of the warming trend. In the models they used it took almost 5% year over year reduction so that the permafrost thawing couldn't sustain the positive feedback loops.

Positive feedback loops typically don't stop until they exhaust their resources, which in his case is greenhouse gases. What we've learned recently is that the permafrost is releasing significantly more Co2m, significantly more methane which is now thought to be 76 times more impactful than co2 and significantly more nitrous oxide which is now thought to be 300 times more impactful than co2.

When I read those papers they all made way more sense than than the other more generally accepted models. As a systems guy I could never accept the thinking that if we reduced our output that it would stop the warming, I thought it would slow the warming trend, but never made any sense to think that the warming would stop.

At the time the papers were written most climate scientists believed that the permafrost wouldn't thaw for hundreds of years, which is why people stopped getting funded to study the thawing, it's only been recently that scientists started to monitor the permafrost thawing and discovered the amounts of co2, methane and nitrous oxide are much, much higher than anticipated.

The models put forth in the papers I referenced needed 5% human output reduction starting in the early 90's in order to avoid the permafrost from self sustaining the warming trend. Not only did we not reduce our output, but it's soared since the early 90's. Most of the models had the permafrost starting to thaw on a large scale in the mid to late 20's, with things getting really bad by the mid 50's.

If those rejected models are right, and it's starting to look like they are, then we are actually about 10 years ahead of schedule if we base it on permafrost thawing trends.

Seems like a get rich quick scheme.

It's already too late. It's unfortunate that we didn't understand what was happening 100 years ago, if we did we might have been able to do something about it, but as it stands right now, we can't even slow down what's already been set into motion. The earth is now changing, it's not just the climate, and the earth changes will drive the climate, the feedback loop has started.

Unless someone can invent a technology in the next 5 years to pull the excess greenhouse gases from the upper atmosphere and take us back to pre-1825 levels and keep us there going forward, this is a lost game.

It's like standing on top of the Empire State building and watching a balling ball go over the edge, we are at the point where the majority of the ball's mass has gone past the balancing point. We are close enough to recognize that it's happening but too far away to stop it from falling.

Having done business in China, and having friends still in China, as one of them put it, "China has more problems than you can count."

China is really a complex house of cards, it looks more foreboding than it actually is in reality.

The second the economy slows the consumers hide, and go back to stuffing cash into their mattresses.

I think Trump is a fool, but in the case of China I think we need a fool. Trump believes he's invincible, so he doesn't get caught up with the "apparent facts" about China and it's economy.

Yes, China doesn't need to steal much of anything, because in order to manufacture in China you need to hand over your IP to your Chinese partner company. Your Chinese partner company has another partner, the Chinese Government, so in effect when you manufacture in China you need to share your IP with the Chinese government, and they share the information you gave them with any Chinese company that could benefit.

Passing all the laws won't matter, because western companies are just handing their IP to the Chinese government.

When both the negative and positives are all added up I think legalizing will have a moderate to large positive overall impact.

The biggest reason I use Amazon, and I'm careful to only buy from Amazon is because of their logistic velocity.

I ordered electrical switch plates from a company that specialized in electrical switch plates, it's all they sell. After 5 days the product hadn't shipped, I cancelled the order and place a prime Amazon order and received the wall plates the next day. I paid a slightly higher price from Amazon but I actually got the product.

In some cases about 50 yards west

Largely the "IP theft" is really "IP transfer". In order to conduct business in China, most non-Chinese companies need to partner with a Chinese owned company, that partnership requires that the IP be shared between partner companies. Each Chinese owned company already has another partner, the Chinese Government. IP shared with the Chinese company is then shared with the Chinese Government. The Chinese Government than takes the IP that has been "shared" and they re-distribute that knowledge to other Chinese companies that can benefit. The Chinese government is sitting on massive amounts of IP that was knowingly "shared" That's why it seems the technology sector in China seemed super charged, because it was.

Make no mistake the Chinese government is actively trying to steal IP, but most of the IP it has was knowingly shared by Western companies desperate to lower costs and get access to the Chinese market.