Rand0m her0

And now for something completely different: Take a minute to try and guess what the next words i'm going to type are. ready? Hurdy Gurdy Cover of Gary Moore's Over The Hills and Far Away Yea, not sure what it was you were expecting, but yea.I had something else to share, but I didn't expect this any more than you really. It's uh, actually pretty good. She's got a solid set of pipes on her. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ec729nmajwc

Oh it has nothing to do with disliking him personally, although I certainly don't like him either (although he is at least personable enough). He has however and to my face decried the fact it's taboo to discuss genetic differences in the discussion of racial disparity in the USA, has repeatedly gone into how all muslims are extremists (because the ones who aren't, aren't true muslims!), and for some reason likes fringe possibilities that result in us needing to take extreme violent action in the middle east (I recall at least two "plausible" excuses for why we should seriously consider one day having to nuke the middle east, including, and I shit you not, Al Qaeda developing ICBMs). He's walked the latter of that back over the last few years (including retroactively editing some of his articles from the early and mid oughts to make it seem more reasonable), but his motivations are god damn transparent. He's every bit a much a fundamentalist bigot as the religious fundamentalists . And if he didn't tout himself as a neuroscientist or use that as a crutch to justify his positions, I might not care. But when he's done a minimum of such work, and his phd thesis was something he funed out of his own charity with a specific goal in mind and includes such headdesk worthy things as That's "we chose to exclude data that we figured was not consistent with our thesis" if you didn't catch that. I have zero patience for it. He managed to earn a Phd in neuroscience . This makes him about as qualified as a scientist as Deepak Chopra. Now not only did I not mention krauss, so no need to defend him, you appear to have misread my comment. That is not "anyone to my knowledge", I'm referring to a specific incident involving a fairly prominent member of the "skeptics" community and a good friend of mine and what he did to her as well as the bullshit that was spread publicly afterwards. I've not dealt with Krauss personally, nor to my knowledge anyone i know other than perhaps some passing acquaintances. That said, the allegations about krauss are something I've known about for close onto a decade now. There is a reason why I noped so hard out of this shit in the last decade. I got out of the stupid religious bullshit pseudo cult using religion as a justification for their own bigoted bullshit, found what was at the time a welcoming community, that over time has gotten taken over by a stupid bullshit pseudo cult using "rationalism" as a justification for their own bigoted bullshit. Sam harris was and is a big part of this.

Don't play it like a pokemon game. Play it like an incremental game. with AR elements and a pokemon skin

Raise your hand if you've dealt with sam harris personally. *looks around* Now i could get into the couple of times i've met him, and the times he's said some of that shit to my face, but let's just take a fairly recent public quote "People" (which here, he's defacto defining as anyone in the fields of education or the study of cognition) don't want to hear it because it's absolute and utter bullshit that was discredited before sam harris was even born. he is absolutely full of shit. He's such a joke of a scientist that Dennent has on more than one occasion trashed his work. He's a neuroscientist in that he bought his Phd (and yea he did, writing the thesis and defending it halfway competently is the easy bit. The hard bit is finding a topic worth researching so you can get funding, which isn't a problem when your own charity provides you the grants), and managed to publish two whole papers? Most of which are considered absolutely shit by anyone with a background in either neuroscience or statistics. THere's a couple good bits of writing ripping his thesis to shreds out there, go find them. I mean, at least Sam Harris hasn't molested anyone I know, so I'll take him over some of the other alternatives I could name, but you know, low bar.

The music industry has been a rotting corpse since the 1920s. It's just more obvious now.

Ah yes, becasue the private market has such a good track record of taking care of the environment and other similar public resources. DDT Overuse of pesticides causing colony collapse disorder The antibiotic resistant bacteria issue the use of chlorofluorocarbons the release of sulfur compound causing acid rain Smog in cities The use of tetraethlylead and so on. not issues *at all*. The free market stood up and went "and now we solve this problem" and then they went away. Right? Right!. Oh no wait, in every single one of those cases they went out of their way to lie, deny, actively suppress research, bribe politicians to fight changes to public policy and in general do every single thing they could do other than eat a temporary loss of profit while they pivoted to meeting different demands in order to serve the public good, and continued to do so right up to the point in time the public got sick of it and voted in poltications that made the lot of them sit down, shut up and peanilized the ones that didn't. there is no carbon neutral fuel that will ever be cheaper to produce than simply pulling hydrocarbons out of the ground. Ever. There is no market niche or most most carbon neutral technologies to get off the ground because the existing options will out compete them. Electrified rail? Wont happen. Improved public transit? Can't be run at both an accessible price and a profit. Rebuild the electric grid in order to allow for load balancing over greater regions than we current can, thus helping mitigate the intermitiancy issue with renewables? That'll cost billions if not trillions by time it's done proper. More peaking plants cost a few million to build, so no one will fund it. More greenhouse gas efficient transport ships with carbon capture built in? We can't get those fuckers to stop using *bunker fuel* ffs. hows about you go huff some lead fumes. Because that was cheaper and more effective than current anti knock additives. Or how about we just pipe you some refreshing beijing smog, since improving air quality in general was more expensive and less effective than just letting it be. You know what's gonna be expensive? As ocean temperatures rise, we'll see greater levels of acidification, lower levels of oxygen and lots of general stress put on the fish population. US fisheries, some of the richest in the world, will start to diminish. Even a loss of productivity will cost billions, if any of the fisheries colapse, good fucking luck. You know what's gonna be expensive? Worsening drought conditions on the west coast. That's quite bad enough now without adding the stresses of more common, more severe and longer lasting el nino cycles. How much does the US lose on wildfires every year? YOu know what's gonna be expensive? The body hit the american prairie are and will continue to take. Less stable growing conditions. yea the grasslands will have longer seasons and some good years, but they'll also have bad. remember the dust bowl and how fun that was? yea a couple years of that every so often will be real fun. You know what's gonna be expensive? Dealing with hurricanes along the gulf and east coasts. They need billions of dollars of defensive works now, and it's not sufficient to deal with the bigger storms. You wanna pay for it as stronger storms become the norm? You know what's really really gonna be expensive? All the parts in the world that don't have the money or expertise to handle stuff like that, kicking off a massive humanitarian and security crisis. You think illegal immigration costs the US a lot now.

Sam Harris is a hack and a fraud, an absolute joke of a scientist who bought his Phd. He's a race science promoting, self aggrandizing, triballist prick. When he does say anything interesting, he's almost universally plagiarizing (sorry, popularizing without attribution) from someone more qualified than he is, more often he prefers to wallow in his own ignorance and mouth off about topics he has no grounding or expertise in. He's a shithead who has on more than one occasion proposed preemptively nuking the middle east would be a great idea. He supports fuckwiit anti science wingnuts like Ben Carson, he's the kind of atheist who things that christians should be prefered to muslims and that we should encourage Christians to proselytize in order to erase islam as a religion and that america should institute religious tests for immigration and refugee claims. And of course recently he's devoted a nice chunk of effort towards sucking off Jordan Peterson and oh fuck that. Him and the rest of his little metoos are why I've checked so goddamn hard out of the secularist movement because apparently they can't go 6 months without delving into eugenics nonsense, race science and other such bullshit. Of the rest of the new atheists, Dawkins at least has the decency to be a semi competent scientist, Dennett an actually competent philosopher, and Hitchens, for all his faults was at least intelligent and entertaining. Sam harris shares none of those virtues Basically fuck him.

Because a rich person through literally millions of dollars at it, a person who's shown to be perfectly willing to commit massive fraud on exactly this in the past (Last time he tried this, literally 100 thousand signatures were thrown out for not existing. Not being faked, or fraudulently. Literally not existing). and what qualifies as gathering a signature is pathetically minor. If you give me millions of dollars to conduct a signature gathering campaign, next year I'll give you very good odds of getting a proposal to ban the use of hydric acid on the ballot. California, by a massive margin, does not support this. If it was a good idea for California, California would support it Actually nuts to this, You want to argue this is such a great idea, please do so. And if you make an argument from ideology alone I get to tase you. Specific discrete examples and facts, backed up with statistical data as to why this will improve things for the people of california.

Interesting talk, 1 point christainy, 2 points sam harris. 3 points You have a budget of three points. Spend wisely.

And if there are more solutions, I want to see them. This is the only solution I have seen, so far, that I can support. This is the problem for me... like you said, lots of people talking about the problem, and when I ask what their "solution" is... they haven't got one, or the one they have is completely insane, or they are too embarrassed to say. One thing for certain is we will not implement every crazy plan some Progressive egghead comes up with just because they say we're all gonna die if we don't do it, because guess what? We're not all gonna die if we don't do it. I have no problem with alternative fuels or any form of power as long as it's the most efficient, and cost effective, means available. I'm not gonna buy "Carbon Credits", I'm not gonna send all my money to Jackassistan because I create more carbon dioxide than they do, I'm not letting go of my air conditioner, or rationing between washing clothes or taking a shower... it's all insanity... but this plan up there, actually works. Say it with me: "solar and onshore wind are already cost less per kilowatt hour than either coal or natural gas" and "improvements in energy efficiency mean the average energy consumption per captia in the USA are at a 40 year low." 80% decarbonization is, with no future advancement in technology, an entirely reasonable target. you're either outright misinterpreting a broad engineering problem statement (ie, something to the effect of "current methods of energy production are not a sustainable way to supply current or projected future demands" ) to mean OMG BAN MODERN LIFE, or you are getting your information from someone who is outright lying to you. Outside of some dumbass reactionary Malthusian Luddites, literally no one has ever said that, and every damn Malthusian supporter has been a waste of oxygen since Malthus himself so stuff that lot. See the bold? That's drought management. And that shit isn't new. Your great great great grandparents dealt with that in exactly the same way.

Their long term plan for profitability is something like solar/etc reduces the cost to produce hydrogen via electrolysis of water in high insolation regions, and they can get the cost of captured carbon down however the hell low they can manage, while running their plant off renewables. They then produce (or sell the carbon to people who produce, either way) synthetic fuel, to supply demand to what they think will be an emerging market for carbon neutral fuels. I know the goal is a price somewhere around a dollar a liter for something like diesel. They're at least semi dependant on gov subsidies. iirc right now they're thinking California as a market since A cheap solar there and B the state is willing to throw money at carbon neutral fuels.

Oh the tech doesn't have downsides. I think you just ran afoul of the whole "X CURES/CAUSES CANCER" type of popularizer who takes the clickbait and completely ignores the bit that read "in a petri dish/at 50 times the lethal dose" This does exactly what Carbon Engineering claims it does. But what Carbon Engineering claims and what the popularizers claim are rather different. In practice decarbonization is the only viable method for combating climate change. We could probably manage 80% decarbonization as a reasonable goal. part of that will be changing how we generate power, part by focusing on energy efficiency, and in part by changing social priorities and choice (make of you want of that, holy fuck do we as a society do some really stupid shit just cause it cheaper from a commercial perspective). And there's gonna need to be an unfortunate amount of money spent on updating the powergrid (and jfc does that need to be done anyways). Huge chunks of the intermittency problem is our inability to effectively balance loads across larger regions.

OK home now. And Oh hey, wait, it's *that* david keith. Ok yea awesome. I'm actually familiar with this project. Fun fact, the chemtrail fucknuts *hate* this guy, since he's done a bunch of work on solar geoengineering. Anyways, David Keith is the lead author of the paper you linked, and the executive chairman and founder of Carbon Engineering. And to quote him on the topic: "I don’t think it makes sense to do large-scale carbon removal until emissions are heading down to zero”. So there's your TL;DR if you want it. So, bottom line, the project out in Squamish is...a demonstration in order to encourage investment into further research is probably the best way to phrase it. They've managed to demonstrate direct air capture, using essentially off the shelf parts, and have shown that at the small scale it can actually be confused with something that's economical from a commercial perspective. It's a really expensive way to say "give us more money so we can figure out how to make this cheaper". They also have an eye towards air to fuel tech, which is a bit iffy atm, but if they can nail it down, it makes for an interesting approach to the whole energy storage problem. It'll never be super efficient, thermodynamics is a cold hearted bitch that way, but we can get low carbon fuels out of it which is kinda neat. The project is not scalable. You can build a plant that works and even makes money. You can capture and sequester a few megatons of CO2. If you want to throw massive money at you, you could feasibly manage a few hundred megatons of CO2. We would need to do this for several dozen *gigatons* of CO2, and it is in no way feasible to do that using this. Even if you could somehow capture it, there's no feasible way to sequester that much CO2. Even in Carbon Engineerings best case it would cost something like 5 trillion dollars a year (somewhere north of 5% of the entire global economic output) to make this work. It ain't happening. Of course this project is still pretty remarkable. Even at their worst case estimate, they've managed to fairly convincingly show a cost reduction by damn near a factor of three form previous best cases, and done so with off the shelf parts. If they can push the costs down more, this is going to be phenomenally useful in handling stuff that's hard to decarbonize like air travel. Carbon Engineering endgame is using renewable electricity sources to run their DAC plants, and then using that captured carbon to make what amounts to carbon neutral fuel that can be used in roles that are otherwise hard or impossible to decarbonize. And ideally, make money doing it. iirc they're hoping to hit something like 4 dollars a gallon for a jet fuel replacement (or presumably a diesel replacement, since same shit). Oh and lys? The authors of that paper, and the founders of Carbon Engineering all collectively belong in that group of people you're referring to as "politically motivated climate warriors " Also inefficient, lol. Utility scale solar barely costs more than coal or natural gas per kilowatt hours these days, and actually beats it out in the best case scenarios (ie, sunny places). Wind and solar are both going to be significantly cheaper than fossil fuels by 2030, regardless of how much you stick your fingers in your ears and go "NANANANANANANAN". Bonus points for sheer awesome, we might actually see synthetic hydrocarbon fuels becoming cost efficient in places like California soon. The biggest problem with that at the moment is how expensive hydrogen is to produce. And if you're powering the production with renewables, that makes it carbon neutral. Oh hey did you know, David keith actually wrote a really great article on the cost efficiency of Solar PV a couple years ago? https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/i-was-wrong-about-the-economic-limitations-of-solar-power

Sorry I'm on my phone and can't be certain I'm reading those specs right, but it looks a lot like they're claiming about 400 kWh to capture 1 ton of CO2 and that they can do a mega ton of CO2 a year. And it sounds like they expect to produce about half again as much CO2 as they capture producing they energy need, which will itself be sequester by the same method. So uh, the us produces about 1700 mwgatons of CO2 per year from power plants alone. If I'm reading this right, neutralizing that would reqquire increasing the USA energy production by a factor of about 1.2. and that doesn't touch the other 3 or so gigatons of CO2 from other sources. So what, hitting net neutrality on Us co 2 production with this would require somewhere between half again and doubling the USA energy production? Of course that's only 15 percent of the world's CO2 production, and of course net neutrality with in no way cut it since we need to short circuit the feedback loop . Also kinda curious who's gonna pay for this. You might be able to run a few plants at a profit, but I don't think there's any demand for several gigatons of CO2 a year. I'm thinking there's some feasablity problems here. Gonna need to look more into it, betting that the authors proposal also expects to run concurrently with aggressive decarbonization.

He's an objectvist nitwit, and pretty well divorced from reality. This is at least the second time he's tried it. He attempted a 6 way split in 2016, and spent at least 5 million on it. It failed to make the ballot large part due to rampant fraud when collecting signatures with at least 100 thousand being thorwn out for litteraly not existing

Yea both of these have been know to be extremely questionable for a long time now

Sure but I don't see how breaking up Cali will change any of that. It'll still be doing mostly ok and poorly in other things. At best it'll just change what those things are. "More local government" will do nothing to change that. And in excshgebtherevwill be a pile of political instability and uncertainty, a seperattikn of intra state factors that each region depends on, etc. California, inspite of all the vague asertations made in this thread is phenomenally successful as a state. What on earth would this fix? Seriously a tiny minority of people in California support this. So either you want to claim that the vast majority of the people, who actually live in the state, are to stupid to see what a great idea this is, or it isn't actually a great idea and would provide no benefit to the people living there. This isn't even the first time Draper has done this nonsense. He does it every year. Most years it doesn't even make it near the ballot and the only reason this even exists is because he keeps throwing money at it because he thinks splitting up Cali will reduce his taxes.

Yea but unless you create what amounts to absolutely homogenous political party affiliated states there is *always* someone in that position Darkfox. I'm also not particularly sympathetic to arguments to the effect of "*party* ignores state because they always lose in it". In just about anywhere else in the world, if a political party fails to gain anything close to majority support somewhere, they recognize that their platform fails to represent the interest of the voters there and adjust it. In America however, the parties platform isn't the issue, it's the voters fault. Granted there's a bunch of busted ass bullshit in the American system that incentivises this, but ugh. This is going to fail because California is literally the world's fifth-largest economy, and one of the most prosperous states in the union. Very few people in California are going to want to fuck with that, let alone take the risk of fucking it up.

yea, not glad to see this. That has jack shit to do with any of the mentioned reasons. The ballot initiative is entirely a product of Tim Draper throwing a pile of money around to gather signatures. Unfortunately with the way these ballot initiatives work, many of these signatures are gathered via questionable methods, especially since there's little to no verification. If you're willing to throw enough money at the problem, and use sufficiently bullshit methods you can get just about whatever you want on the ballot, and stuff like this can get fucked. If you want some fun, next time you're getting swarmed by pushy folks with clipboards, listen to their elevator pitch vs what they're actually trying to get on their ballot. Lies, lies everywhere. Also if they have a "mailing list" so you can get more information, see how many of them try to convince you that you need to sign it. And this is without dealing with outright forgeries (there was a case in AZ recently, where someone got in contact with a random pull of people who signed some ballot initiative. every single one was a forgery ) Bascily Tim Draper and everyone else using massive amounts of money to hijack the democratic process can go fuck a cactus.

ya kay there lys. If it helps you sleep at night. Personally I'm not gonna care till someone in the state department can use the worlds "Complete" "Verifiable" and "Irreversible" in a sentence, and NK signs something binding to that same effect. Until then this is nothing but empty theater, something everyone involved has proven themselves quite good at.

Still trying to hold Trump down because of all the failures of past Presidents? Okay... I hear ya, but since you have been wrong about Trump, every time, about everything... what's trying one more time? I guess it's like playing the same number on a Roulette wheel every time thinking "Hey it's gotta hit sometime". Betting against Trump again... well, good luck with that. I don't see how meeting with Trump, signing an agreement with Trump, and then breaking the agreement with Trump, would benefit Little Kimmy in any way whatsoever. It would more than likely get him killed. Does anyone really believe that if this agreement is broken, North Korea will survive the year? No they would not survive... and no one on Earth will do anything about it. Trump demonstrated that the G7 is nothing more than a photo op for current leaders of select countries. They get together, talk about how great they are, drink, take pictures, go back where they came from, get busy doing nothing, and everything gets worse. It's like a miniature United Nations with less third world. Since the only thing Trump has in common with these jerks is talking about how great he is... he didn't hang around long. He had better things to do... but Little Justin is gonna find out real quick that telling Trump one thing to his face, and then after he leaves, says something totally different in a press conference... well Little Justin is gonna get sent to his room without supper. Now for what I think. I believe Trump will be delivering a Treaty to Congress in about 2 months. Mid-Terms are gonna rock! There is no agreement. For all intents and purposes they signed a statement saying that they will to attempt to agree in the future that a statement was signed. Nothing happened, nothing changed. NK made no concessions and agreed to nothing. They didn't even actually agree to aid the return of remains of MIA/KIA soldiers since that was also non binding. It's empty theater.

nah this is just the 12 time in 20 years NK has said they wont do nukes. Not one binding thing has been signed, no goals defined, and nothing of any value has happened. This is still just empty theater and mostly a propaganda win for NK

A weathered copy of Blood Canticle, written in Etocretian. Further investigation would find that it was apparently printed in the mid 12th century on a Gutenberg rotary press. Coin

An Amazon shipping manifest addressed to your parents house, detailing an order containing: Coat hangers Tube yoghurt Coconut oil Garbage bags A furby A back massager Coin

A sealed coke can containing surströmming brine. Coin.