I wish we could actually bet on it. It's a funny thing about this alleged "crisis" -- it's a "crisis", but it's also so vague and slow that nobody's willing to place any bets that could actually be resolved in a reasonable amount of time.
Actually, when you see rich people placing what you could consider private bets, they always seem to be betting against climate disaster, e.g., building airports in the Maldives, buying beachfront property on Martha's Vineyard, etc. Even poor people seem to bet against imminent climate disaster when they, e.g., pay back their student loans.
> every family's weird uncle refuses to get a vaccine
Suppose I thought you should get some injections, and you researched it and concluded they almost certainly wouldn't benefit you, and might harm you. Would you be OK with being characterized as a weird uncle who refused to get a treatment?
For the preservation of (inauthentic) harmony, HN has a special rule that says you can't mention the roving mob of the HN equivalent of Twitter blue checkmarks who don't have any substantive rebuttal, but just don't want your comment to be seen, so they downvote or flag it. It's common knowledge, but you can't acknowledge it, or you get the treatment.
I can't say what I'd do if I were a rich misanthrope. But if I were to have a conversation with a rich misanthrope, I might urge them to take up some kind of spiritual cultivation practice like loving-kindness meditation. And I would try to impress upon them the idea that no human or group of humans is smarter than all humans together, i.e., the best ideas seem to come from emergence, the clash of all our activities, rather than some committee of them and their friends. I would try to instill doubt and humility in them about whether the world needs saving and whether they're so sure that their ideas are correct that it's justified to force them onto millions of people by trickery and deceit.
The Club of Rome is some odious stuff. It seems to be a group of academic doomsayers who like to play around with toy models in order to justify quasi-communism and other goals related to neo-Malthusian beliefs. They may be the primary progenitors of using toy models to cast the bones and make scary predictions about the future, especially with regard to climate alarmism. From The Limits to Growth:
"In searching for a common enemy against whom we can unite, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like, would fit the bill. In their totality and their interactions these phenomena do constitute a common threat which must be confronted by everyone together. But in designating these dangers as the enemy, we fall into the trap, which we have already warned readers about, namely mistaking symptoms for causes. All these dangers are caused by human intervention in natural processes, and it is only through changed attitudes and behaviour that they can be overcome. The real enemy then is humanity itself."
If you feel any need to do that, you should probably consider looking for some different job. There's a karmic burden for making a living in an immoral way.
> A pandemic ravaging the globe doesn't seem clear?
A fear campaign ravaged the globe. If there hadn't been a fear campaign, I don't think anybody but doctors and immunologists and such would have been aware anything significant was happening. Similar to previous seasonal illnesses that were technically pandemics, but no normal person recalls doing anything about it. For example, ask people who are old enough what they remember about the HK flu in 1968.
> Herd immunity and personal protection are both parts of every vaccine, they go hand in hand
I'm still waiting for the example from the past where we administered a vaccine to someone, saying to them "this is not to protect you, since you are not at risk from this virus, but it is just to protect someone out there, we don't know whom". Are you able to provide such an example?
It would be great if we knew that, but we don't. We usually have long testing periods, but we didn't this time, for reasons that remain unclear.
> Stop trying to make out like this is some sort of new or extreme position.
Please remind me, when was the last time that we gave people vaccines not to protect that person specifically, but to allegedly protect some unknown other person, somewhere?
> At an individual clinical level they may not be at significant risk, but the justification for vaccinating them is not about individual clinical risks but public health.
This is a very serious mistake. The duty of a doctor is to the patient in front of them and no one else. The question they have to consider is, is this proposed treatment more likely than not to help this particular patient? If so, the doctor advises the patient to undergo the procedure. If not, they advise against it. If a doctor is considering anything other than the health of the person presently before them, they need to make that clear, that they are treating a herd rather than a specific patient.
> As far as I can tell, the potential risks of vaccinating children are overwhelmingly outweighed by the potential public health risks
That's not the calculus. The question is the risk/benefit for them individually. And, I will add, the risk for even just them as individuals is not known. Some people are advising that the vaccines could cause very significant injury, e.g. https://odysee.com/@OracleFilms:1/Dr.-Sucharit-Bhakdi-Oracle...
I have a movie in my head about how and why "progress" happens, and what its true nature might be. I imagine someone maybe a thousand years ago, living in primitive conditions, holding the body of their loved one who has passed away for some reason. The person is hurt, sad, furious, indignant at God/nature for allowing this thing to happen. The person promises that no matter how many lifetimes, or how much effort it takes, they'll fix the world to be the way God/nature should have done but was too evil or incompetent to make it.
Well, it turns out that the person's loved one could have been saved. All that was needed was what we consider to be a modern hospital. But a modern hospital has quite a lot of technological dependencies, and so do those things, and so do those things, and so on. But let's say you do it. You got copper wire and steel and internal combustion engines and concrete and microscopes and global communication networks and microprocessors and on and on and on and on and on. Now people don't die of that same thing, whatever it was. Via technological magic, we just look inside the sick person's body, see the nature of the illness, and put in the right chemicals, or perform an amazing non-invasive operation via a robotic snake or whatever. Problem solved via vision and the sustained application of brain power.
But it wasn't free. The global communications network you needed for all kinds of things, it's being used to deliver pornography. Pornography addiction is a thing now, a problem that wasn't even previously possible. The same tech you use to make the chemicals that can save someone's life, they're used to make painkillers. Back in the day, drug addiction was something like drinking too much, or maybe smoking tobacco. Addiction to these painkillers is common now, and many people are dying and/or ruining their lives. The same technologies you needed to facilitate global collaboration have made it possible for the first time for governmental powers to do effective mass surveillance. And so on, and so on, and so on.
The point of the parable is to suggest that back in the day, when we were indignant about the death of our loved one, we didn't realize it, but we were kind of at a fork in the road. We could choose to fix ourselves, and accept the death, and see it as just the result of circumstances, and therefore blameless and perfect, or we could choose to try to fix the world. This choice has very very deep implications. When we try to fix the world, it seems like the result might be that we sort out the original problem at the cost of creating a bunch of new problems that are equally bad, or possibly even much more complicated and difficult to solve.
It's definitely not everyone in the US. I keep thinking that it's around a third of the population that is extremely susceptible to propaganda. There's huge overlap between wokeness and vaccine eagerness, and there's huge overlap between conservatism and vaccine hesitancy (aka not being persuaded to undergo needless medical procedures)
It seems like people think this is sad or poignant. I don't, not really. Step by step, choice by choice, we came this way from where we were. You want to go back? You're free to do so: just get a place out in the woods, no running water or electricity, no trade, spending all day cultivating crops or animals to try to make sure you get approximately the number of calories you need.
People know they don't want to go back to that. But they don't want the baggage that comes along with the choices we made to have this situation instead of the old situation. Did you think it was going to be free? It's kind of a utopian streak in people. No matter how good they've got it, they always still think there's something wrong.
Or do you want to change something about the way things are today in order to make a better situation? Then you're just making the same "mistake" that you say people of the past did. What do you want? What would ever satisfy you?
The planet is not on the brink of climate catastrophe due to human CO2 emissions. Why? The atmosphere has established a range from about 10C to 25C over the last 2B years or so. It gets warm, it gets cold. Global average temperature has increased and decreased many times, no need for humans to do anything. Recently it's been about as cold as it ever gets, so naturally it's expected that it will do like it has many times in the past, and get warmer. It's not even to its middle temperature; it's still a bit on the cool side.
But what about the especially high CO2 level? It's actually not especially high. It's near the lowest it's ever been. Earth saw stuff like going from 3000 ppm to 4000. No tipping point, no climate catastrophe. We're much closer to a dangerous low point than a dangerous high point, since plant respiration fails around 150 ppm.
The fraction of the population that's prone to closet authoritarianism also seems to suffer from this peculiar, mutant strain of humor. It's essentially cultists trying to intrude into the health decisions of others, but they seem to think it'll be funny if they make it a song? Maybe they know it's inappropriate and that's why they feel they need to sugar-coat it in some way? There's more to humor than rudely telling someone to do something and putting it to a melody. Would you find it funny if I sang "shut the fuck up about the climate" and strummed a few chords?
I don't think innocent repetition does much harm. What I'm saying is harmful is reporting some current event as if it is new and startling and unprecedented, when in fact it's not that unusual, and has even been reported on before in that very newspaper, which would be uncovered by a search. Obviously they're not even doing that.
But why would they? They don't want to report "thing that happens fairly frequently happened again"... the story being scary translates directly into dollars going into their pockets. In other words, they terrify people by lying, for money.