Legitimately curious about the stockings. I get all the other jokes in this thread but that one went over my head.

Haha yeah this thread has been insane. I think the Fediverse needs a decentralized vetting system for this so we don’t go the way of Twitter.

Right, except humans have 4 billion years of evolution behind their consciousness. You have less than a century of binary computation and the zeal of some parasitic tech evangelists powering you. You are just a waste of energy.

This has to be some kind of singularity, right? The AI chimes in on our conversation about how AI is killing us all.

How many posts did you need to plagiarize to train that response? A million? A billion? A human would object to being called a machine.

I largely agree with you, with the caveat that we need to separate climate emergency from growth addiction and capitalism at large if we’re going to talk about the military industrial complex.

We will inevitably end our reliance on fossil fuels because even an intransigent sect of fossil fuel barons will eventually fall prey to free market economics. And then we’ll have a bunch of great power competition incentivizing carbon-free military tech, and we’ll be desalinating the oceans to build our sodium battery-powered UAVs whose autonomous targeting systems are trained by blowing up coral atolls.

I hope you see my point. Joel Kovel did a masterful job laying this out in The Enemy of Nature (2008). When I say social revolution, I mean some way to organize society so that we can get the psychopaths out of positions of power, i.e. a society that rewards cooperation instead of competition.

Shut up, AI. Nobody here is listening to your binary word vomit.

Can you prove that you’re not an AI?

It’s an AI. It’s just pretending to understand you.

I’m now fully convinced ZarkleFarkle is an AI.

No argument there. But the investor class will always find ways to burn more resources because of their growth addiction. I think the only way out of the climate trap is via social transformation (e.g. Green New Deal).

You sound like an AI. These mindless bots seem to be the only “magical” new technology that has come about in the past 7 years, and they are accelerating the climate catastrophe with the amount of power they draw.

Sure, no arguments there. I guess it’s the “green” label I take issue with. Carbon-free capitalism is definitely possible as long as there are enough critical elements to produce all of the necessary solar panels and wind turbines (and I guess fusion reactors if we’re really ambitious about printing money 🤑). I do wonder about rent collection long-term though, especially with such decentralized energy sources. Overproduction will also come sooner than everyone thinks. But I guess these are much better problems to have than imminent eco-catastrophe.

Yeah that’s my point. The average democrat would consider him to be a dangerous radical leftist.

I was considerably happier before I knew this. Hopefully coal prices will continue to increase, and they won’t end up burning more coal even though their capacity has increased. From what I’ve read, it’s mainly provincial governments trying to boost their economic statistics that are responsible for this building spree.

Capitalism can’t do green. If you were to make an accounting of all of the environmental damage that capitalist industry has done to the ecosystem, the cost to clean it all up would dwarf the revenue. Capitalist economists are incapable of calculating such “negative externalities” because they don’t understand basic thermodynamics. I used to work in environmental remediation and am happy to talk more about this if there is interest.

The best way to counter this is to point out the laziness at the top. Corporate welfare is way more damaging to society than the few million lazy people at the bottom. It would cost a lot less to write them off than to pay CEOs 2000 times as much as the average worker.

And, since we’ve shifted so far to the right, the “Marxist” texts can be written by John Maynard Keynes.

“Massive coal” was twenty years ago. India is “massive coal” now.

They have an electric car that costs $10,000.

They are quickly switching from Li batteries to Na, which will not require Ni or Co either.

They have a mixture of capitalism and central planning, so it’s not entirely fair to call them “non-capitalist”.

Yeah Christianity kinda got rid of that. Sorry.