My Semester with the Snowflakes
gen.medium.com
gen.medium.com
It’s the young adults who are a few years into their career being crushed by high prices, low wages, holding useless degrees under piles of debt that I imagine make up the majority of the online outage mobs and who are likely going to be a lost generation.
How are you forecasting that future? Seems strange to read it with what you see now and as you phrase the lost generation that's struggling from inflation & low wages..
I'm skeptical but I think the worst is yet to come for the next generations. Unless all the young adults that are struggling don't just all commit suicide in the years to follow. It's going to be a disaster when time comes and they need to retire but cannot. The burden will go on the young even more so than what we can imagine today.
It feels like we're already seeing it here in Sydney, Australia. We've had dangerously low air quality from bush fires for the last 1.5 months and we now have a serious water shortage.
I've been accepting of climate change up until recently - now I'm genuinely worried about the future here.
I won't spoil it for you, but you could find out that you might want to phrase that question of yours differently..
I don't think there's much understanding to be gained by attaching sliders with vague, underspecified labels to a graph.
https://www.climateinteractive.org/tools/en-roads/the-en-roa...
https://www.climateinteractive.org/tools/climate-action-simu...
And on the breakthrough technology question: of course we could discover a unknown technology that will instantly solve everything without even having to honor the inertia of the slow but hard to steer forces that make up climate change. And while I really hope this would happen, I'd rather have more realistic scenarios in the meantime.
Suppose we invent free energy. How long will it take for that technology to replace everything on the planet? How much emissions will this distribution of technology produce? Even with fairytale-style-technology overcoming the inertia of the ongoing processes will be anything but easy.
Look at the historical data: all red and yellow for Jakarta, almost all green for Sydney, with the last two months an exception.
Climate change is going to have little to no impact on Sydney now or in the next 50-60 years.
Can you expand on that statement a bit? What do you base it on? It seems like we are already seeing adverse effects of global heating (eg https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2912/satellite-data-record-sho...) but maybe I'm missing your point.
It doesn't make any sense, but apparently it is enough to satisfy the unsophisticated blind followers of climate denialism. Anything that sounds contrarian and data-based is deemed a sufficient response to distract attention, which is scarce in most online discussion forums.
It’s unknown problems you should worry about, that are unnamable because they are unpredictable and unknowable until they happen.
I can't call it something other than the flamzboo event, since we don't know what it is. The clearest picture one can have of what this event potentially is is by considering events which would have similar impact but are currently fringe in terms of public consciousness such as:
- Supervolcano eruptions
- Asteroid impacts
- AI takeoff
- Engineered bio weapons
- Autonomous lethal weapons
- Commoditized, small nuclear weapons
These are not the things I'm talking about, since they have some level of consciousness, but are the closest examples since they are not top of mind in the public consciousness but are confer high x-risk. The ones I worry about are the ones that we can't know currently, that may be lurking on the horizon. One doesn't have to look far back in history to recognize these problems are typically the ones we get hurt by: surprises.
I think greed, selfishness and people truly inconsiderate happens on a greater scale than what we imagine with factoring into as an issue with the problem of global warming. I guess my scepticism is from considering the forgoing, before thinking of global warming and then thinking of other problems humanity faced (where people are concerned with their daily lifestyle continuing or improving).
Global warming is somewhat unique in the list of known problems when I think about it. I assume it will be too late, before people start being truly effected and to the point they act on something other than promoting public awareness. I've been living a lifestyle where I always walk to work & back. I don't own a car and I somewhat imagine similar steps need to be taken on a larger scale. I'm doubtful people will go from being knowledgable to acting. I have less faith on corporations and laws changing so they must act if they even care about being fined.
That's all too likely. I've been following this for decades. Back in the 80s, what we're seeing now -- disappearing glaciers, far less ice cover in the Arctic Ocean, thawing permafrost, tropical diseases moving poleward, etc -- would have been perceived as catastrophic. But now it's largely ignored by the majority.
> I've been living a lifestyle where I always walk to work & back. I don't own a car ...
I was like that for decades. Now I don't care so much. Because it has basically accomplished nothing.
> ... and I somewhat imagine similar steps need to be taken on a larger scale.
For sure. And far more. But the US is screwed, after decades of suburbanization.
> I'm doubtful people will go from being knowledgable to acting.
Enough people will act enough only when it's truly too late. It's just human nature. We deal with emergencies well. But for slowly moving threats, not so much.
> I have less faith on corporations and laws changing so they must act if they even care about being fined.
Corporations exist to make money. If the climate goes to hell, they'll just make money dealing with that.
To think that we've somehow reached the peak of our ability to safely consume energy and resources when we haven't even left our home planet is an extremely short sighted perspective. In 1000 years our ancestors will laugh at those who thought that somehow, after thousands of years of advancement, humanity had found its insurmountable wall to more growth and consumption of the universes' infinite resources in the humble year of 2019 due to a mis-calculation regarding the carbon emissions due to the parochial method used at the time for generating power. It's patently absurd if you take a longer perspective. If we don't survive 1000 years, it surely will not be due to our collective failure to solve this problem.
The more people continue to think that if we just convince people to give up their modern lifestyle we'll solve the problem, the longer the problem will persist.
Instead, we should be striving not to solve global warming as a first order concern, but develop technologies that will radically improve the lives of all people, and solve global warming as one of their side effects.
The climate change is like going out to desert. The further you go out the hotter and harsher environment and once its too dangerous for you its not enough to stop going forward, but you need to walk all the way back home before you are safe.
The CO2 and others are in the air already causing all weather changes, its not enough to go carbon neutral to stop it. To survive we need to go significantly negative to cut out greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere.
And that the biggest problem.
Who hasn't shopped around for a new job every couple of years is stuck with lower salaries than new grads entering the workforce right now.
Most companies seem contempt to punish the loyalty of their older employees who decided to stick around and reward those who job hop, which is ironic.
The side effect of the “campus PC” hysteria is it ignores the very real voices of folks that go to commuter schools like I did where the stereotype matches even less than it does in elite circles (where it rings hollow too).
Are we really so polarized? Are hundreds of millions so gung-ho to flock away from the center? Can the whole American situation be approximately summed up, statistically, by these two exaggerated caricatures?
It seems that’s the tone of the article. Maybe it’s right, maybe it’s wrong, but either way I would hope that the real situation is more nuanced than that.
Maybe the situation on the ground really is that bad in some places. I don’t leave my house in the US much other than to fly out of the country, and only know what I read online about it. Can someone with direct experiences in these places shed some more light?
One of my best friends became a neonazi years ago. I don't live in that village anymore, but every 3 years I manage to meet him at some party or so. He has a extremely clear (and sadly utterly fantasized) image of my political goals and ideas. One of my goals is apparently to introduce muslim Sharia law nationwide, although I never ever mentioned anything about Sharia law to him.
It isreally hard to speak with him about anything at all, because he always seems to "know" what my opinion is, to the point of misrepresentation, while I am more or less just curious what he wants. What he says is usally a progression of: "I just want the foreigners to respect the rules!", "Deport the foreigners!" or "Shoot the foreigners!", depending on how many beers we are in. The whole thing is spiked with unsolicited explainations why liberal ideas "like mine" (although I am usually more on the realistic side) will never work and it sometimes feels he is telling this more to himself than to me.
This is rightwing Austria, his grandfather was a Nazi and this is where the discourse in the US is moving as well.
In a way there's an underlying political statement here on how diverse opinions and education changes perspective.
My hunch is that it’s pretty low.
In that sense, the bloke really did get an education. And of course: collegues, professors and the whole environment plays a huge role in education. I'd argue that collegues can be even more important than professors.
> These hardworking kids are very kind and thoughtful. A far cry from the picture that is often painted of them.
I'm... Confused, to say the least. In fact, those two paragraphs encapsulate my confusion at the post in general.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraternities_and_sororities#Ru...
“Tried” implies he failed. I wonder if it was due to his own merits, or due to bias against him due to age.
I believe I was less liberal in my youth, but since when I got my children I can’t bare the thought of not being able to pay their health care if they ever needed it. Even though that’s not a problem for me, I still think of it very often when I see them sick.