Tiresia

joined 2 months ago
[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago

It's a 1000 times improvement the same way riding a horse is a 1000 times improvement over riding an army of snails. It's possible because nobody was doing the old thing because it was garbage.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

"Strong current flow" is informal language, but both it and photoresponse refer to the electrical power that comes out. In theory you would just divide that by the incoming solar flux and get the efficiency. For now it's only in a lab setting, though, so we'll have to see what the practical efficiency will be if this is actually incorporated into a reasonable solar cell.

So yeah, apparently barium titanate solar panels used to be extremely terrible, and now they might become competitive with further research.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Oh hey, a noble savage. It's been a while since I've seen one this blatant. Historically, the answer to rape for most people between 10,000 years ago and 200 years ago was "It's awesome, as long as you do it to lower class people, spouses, or foreigners", and the answer for murderous tendencies was "Finally a real man. Earn glory in battle, and have fun raping and pillaging out there. Just don't do it to us or we will send more murderous people after you to torture you to death".

Those are a lot of ways of saying "Don't look right now but there's an explanation behind the curtain, please go bother someone else".

  • If I accept your suggestion to argue on the other subreddit, your post and comment here appear like they are uncriticized.
  • Transformative justice requires a mechanism of transformation. How do you change the systems of injustice if their body is their weapon and their mind the system that begets violence?
  • Restorative justice can never fully restore heinous crimes. A murdered person can not be revived, a sexual trauma will not heal. That should not prevent us from making major steps in that direction, but it does not bring the murder victim back to life.
  • If you know historical examples of peoples with low rates of murderous violence and rape, you could name some of them specifically along with their mechanism of justice to see if it's better than imprisonment.
  • If you refer to literature, cite pages and quote passages that are relevant, if you can. At the very least give the names of the literature while explaining what you got from them that is relevant here.
  • If you say people have developed ways to deal with an absence of policing, give examples of those ways and whether they are able to achieve more justice through those means available to them.

Given the sort of language you're using, you seem to be to describing a vague cultural osmosis version of the Iroquois confederacy. So let me be specific: the Iroquois executed people that were considered too dangerous to be left alive. Prisons would be an improvement on that, now that we have more resources to spare and a better understanding of psychiatry.

I wrote my comment in order to learn. You have given me nothing except vague statements about knowledge existing elsewhere that we can learn from. Do you actually know anything yourself?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

No, you disagree with myself and pretty much all historical usage on the definition of "right-wing". Whether it's the original right wing in the parliament of the first French Republic, monarchists in general, 19th century British Tories, imperialists in general, ethno-nationalists, fascists, etc.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago (4 children)

How would you prevent a police class from forming through people's natural or situational preferences?

Even with a whole armed society, is a new mother going to put as much violence-backed pressure towards ensuring her vision of justice gets realized as a rabble-rousing 18-year-old with Ideas? What stops the hottest heads from prevailing and using recklessness to walk over others?

Or in common parlance, what prevents this from devolving into mob justice?

It seems possible that you could prevent it, but it's not a matter of good faith and not even of (post-)proletarian consciousness. You would actually need commonly agreed upon rules or structures that draw power away from those most eager to wield it. You need people willing to defend the rights of those who later turn out to be guilty of heinous crimes, people willing to protect people guilty of some crimes from excessive violence, etc.

USSR justice wasn't just bad because it was classist, there was also a general disregard for due process, with few people willing to stand up for those accused and many eager to treat them with extreme prejudice. It was very easy for people to end up in a self-reinforcing downward spiral of general opinion that lead to extreme punishment even if their guilt was never properly established.


I don't really know the argument for abolishing prisons entirely. Using them for punishment is dumb, but there are people who will actually engage in violence against innocent others. What would you do with a serial killer or a rapist who doesn't yet believe that what they did shouldn't be repeated? How else are you going to handle that 1/10,000th of the population?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago (3 children)

Mussolini was fascist, but held left wing beliefs like welfare and relief for the poor and government intervention and ownership.

Welfare for the in-group is not (exclusively) left-wing. The Nazis had welfare for blonde blue-haired 'aryans' that produced lots of children. Also, neoliberal and conservative western governments love giving welfare to corporations and rich people. Even if your in-group is "all Romans" (in case of the ancient grain dole that Mussolini was inspired by) or "all Italians", if the motivation for welfare is to empower the in-group to exploit the out-group, it's right wing.

Government intervention and ownership are not (exclusively) left-wing. The original right wing - the monarchists in the French parliament - were pro-government intervention and ownership, with the government being embodied by the king. Government spending is consistently higher among Republicans than Democrats. Large ostentatious state projects with kickbacks for the in-group are bread and butter of pretty much every right wing government, from the massive Nazi government-owned holiday park Prora to the Space Launch System. Right-wing governments often forcefully nationalize projects run by the out-group, like Jewish shops in Nazi germany or Black Panther community support networks in the US.

The right wing may cloak themselves in the guise of the free market or of individual liberty or decentralization of power, or in the guise of community and centralization and rights that must be defended at the cost of freedoms. They will present themselves as underdogs and punks and outsiders or as rightful inheritors, powerful leaders, loyalists and patriots. Often they will switch narratives from topic to topic, going from underdogs fighting against the liberal elite who says you can't say slurs anymore to patriots bemoaning the lack of solidarity of people kneeling in protest at a flag.

The one thing that unites them, the one thing that is consistent, is to exploit and oppress the out-group to benefit the in-group.

Contrast communist authoritarianism and mass murder, which were generally justified as being for the good of all mankind.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

Based on my amateur understanding, it actually seems possible if climate change gets bad enough. When the calcium carbonate of plankton, seashells, and limestone reacts with the carbonic acid that defines the acidic zone, you do get an increase of gaseous carbon dioxide in the water.

The main chemical reaction is

CaCO3 + 2 H2CO3 -> Ca(2+) + 2 HCO3(-) + CO2 + H2O

The chemical reaction by which seashells and limestone dissolve, releasing CO2 and increasing the gas pressure. The CO2 can be dissolved back into the water via

CO2 + H2O <-> H2CO3 (<-> H(+) + HCO3(-))

While dissolving limestone and seashells neutralize the acid in the short term, this just means that more CO2 will be pulled in from the atmosphere and from the freshly produced CO2 to increase the acidity again. Luckily this isn't an infinite loop - half the CO2 gets stuck in HCO3- each time - so this would actually be a carbon sink from a purely chemical perspective. Ecologically, the dissolving of plankton would take away a carbon sink and so accelerate climate change.

As for the limnic eruption, while shellfish and plankton live in shallow enough water that them dissolving would probably be able to outgas into the atmosphere quickly enough that there is never a toxic concentration, limestone deposits can be found at great depths and can be over a kilometer thick. Just because the ocean can dissolve a 0.2mm plankton shell quickly enough for it to die doesn't mean it can eat through 2km of limestone at an appreciable rate. It seems possible that ocean acidification would increase fast enough that the limestone isn't yet all gone by the time it erodes fast enough to form a convective plume, sucking in fresh acidic ocean from the surrounding water while carbonated but less acidic water quickly rises to the ocean's surface, outgassing the carbon dioxide like a limnic eruption.

While on average the dissolution of limestone would be a carbon sink, a lot of the ocean floor is not limestone, and so these places would draw in CO2 while places that do have limestone deposits would vent CO2. I don't know if it would be fast enough to produce a toxic concentration of CO2. I also don't know if by the time oceanic limestone gets eaten away at this rate the earth would still be habitable by humans.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

If that is the choice you make, I believe you that you feel like it is the best you can do right now. But if 'we' refers to people in general, then that is simply false. There are many people who gleefully make things worse and there are also many who fight with heart and soul for a better world. It is not a given that those who see clearly are depressed and too overwhelmed to act.

If you have any energy to spare, search out people irl who take climate change as seriously as you do. Communal mass action is both the most effective strategically and the most invigorating emotionally.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

On that we agree.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (2 children)

I’m acting under the assumption that they would have died anyway. As they do. When they decompose naturally, they release their carbon.

Okay, glad to understand that the issue is that you didn't understand my first comment or any comment that came after it.

One last time: what I'm saying is that you bury the wood to prevent it from decomposing and releasing its carbon, as an alternative to burning it. And that as an alternate source of electricity you use something that doesn't produce as much emissions, like solar, wind, or nuclear. And if you think burying wood is bad for any reason, then setting it on fire is bad for the same reason.

view more: ‹ prev next ›