Please, the Ferengi weren’t forced birthers.

Its the rest of us who are Ferengi, on our good days. Those right wingers are even worse.

If only there was some kind of proven road map where countries who has been dominated by their ruling elite using the two party trick went on to form a kind of labour movement that forced a third choice on the ruling class…

I see a fair amount of online adverts that use them. Usually the kind you might get orbiting an article of some kind, just using AI images as their hook.

Honestly, i think the reason is that just the right amount of alcohol dependency is amazing for capitalism. Dont get me wrong, I’m not judging anyone. I understand and I enjoy a drink myself. I just think we need to be honest with ourselves about it.

It keeps you consuming and it makes you forget all the bullshit you had to put up with all day. It dulls your your problem solving, your creativity and (most importantly) your empathy, so supervisors, middle managers, department managers and execs are less disinclined not to beat down on those below them.

I’m not saying its some grand conspiracy. I’m saying, those in power have known exactly the right drugs to administer to the masses in order to placate them. The Romans knew to give wine and not cannabis. The British army knew to give rum & brandy but not weed.

In fact, all of them were legal. Then, capitalism really took off and, totally unrelated in sure, every drug other than alcohol suddenly became illegal.

The irony being that those are their genuine concerns.

Positively famished, myself

I mean, I made a point not to use legality as a moral argument but you went ahead and said that anyway…

Sorry but it wasn’t someone starving or mentally ill. Its anyone who just feels like robbing you because its “whats better for them in the moment” per the below:

Blameing people for doing what’s better for them in the moment, instead of what’s immediately difficult but ultimately better for everyone, is always wrong.

Its not like the people hiring undocumented people are doing so because they’re starving or mentally ill either. So, its a bizzare caveat to throw in, out of no where.

I mean, if you’re going to claim you wouldn’t blame somone for robbing you when they could have just asked you, as you even say yourself, in order to not have to admit that people are actually culpable for their own actions then I don’t know what to say to that.

Personally, I would say its not something that applies to those things in the same way. It isn’t illegal to have a hight carbon footprint or eat junk food but it is illegal to employ undocumented workers. The problem is, they choose to employ non documented workers because they can force them to accept appalling and unlawful work conditions as well as massively underpaying them for the value of their work.

If always then it would apply to someone who found robbing and killing you better for them in the moment. The harder thing would be for them to get a job and earn that money.

Would blaming somone for robbing and killing you be wrong?

I agree that there’s a systemic problem at the root cause of this and, of course, I agree they’re a fraction of a fraction in size.

However, I don’t think we take that attribute with any other crimes, big or small, right or wrong.

I hope we can agree that a lot of theft is a symptom of the problems caused by systemicpoverty. However, it wouldn’t excuse theft, simply because you wanted a bit more, despite already having enough.

Not just you, by any stretch of the imagination, but we’re so quick to minimise the wrong doing of wealthy people doing illegal stuff to make just a little bit more money for themselves, purely out of greed. I feel like we’ve been almost groomed into some kind of “Well that’s just good business” mentality, for this ne specific kind of law breaking.

Even if it was a starving person, we would say “I understand they’re starving. However, we also can’t have them stealing everything they want to eat from one small, family owned mini mart, all the time. Yeah, yeah, no I still think that even though doing something about it might not contribute that much to the wider, systemic issues leading to poverty.”

You think you’re arguing your point but you’re not. You’re arguing mine.

If that was what you were trying to do, you failed. Honestly, I don’t care enough about any subject to have to deal with you or your incessant ranting and poor social skills.

You didn’t like something you read online. Your objection is noted.

Jesus christ, is this the closest thing you’ve had to human interaction today or something?

They say every accusation is a confession, and that’s exactly what this is.

Yeah, I stopped reading at the lazy recycled rhetoric.

As you love sources to much, provide a source showing that our energy consumption can increase perpetually

Or is that not how things work?

I mean, you could Google “uranium shortage” and find what you need very quickly. Again, I’m not spending my evening teaching you and providing you with sources that you’re unable to refute in any way, despite your best efforts. I’m sure you’ve convinced yourself that anyone who doesn’t do that for you must be wrong but thats just not how the world works.

I’ve already told you how there isn’t enough of the materials we need to make sufficient numbers of solar panels or wind turbines, let alone figure out a way to store the energy for when we need it later.

Why is the default position that there has to be enough of what we need to do that, unless proven wrong?

Degrowth doesn’t have to mean smaller.

I used to do research too but then I left for a career that paid more. Not that something like that would make me right or more believable, of course. No, that would be ridiculous.

Im not really sure why you decided to bring up your career in an unrelated field. Honestly, if I was arguing for perpetual growth on a finite planet, I wouldn’t tell anyone I was a scientist, let alone demand someone “take the L” for having to explain to you that our energy consumption can’t grow perpetually.

Sources aren’t necessarily for widely accepted facts. You just don’t like what you’re hearing and want to sealion it away.

Like I said, getting it and refining it is the problem.

Don’t worry, its clear that you’ve been making things up the whole time. I’m happy to provide sources for serious people, having serious conversations. Not you and your jokes.

You provided one source that fast breeder reactors were built in the former soviet union. Had you been refuting me saying “no other fuel can ever be used” it might have been a useful link. However, I didn’t. So, it wasn’t useful.

Reactors don’t produce or create energy. They release it. Are you trying to tell me that you literally can’t understand a scenario where the energy cost of refining and or gathering something could be more than what is eventually released?

If you think I’m going to waste my life researching links to prove, to your personal satisfaction, everything that you just plain don’t like then you really are deluded.

Good job there isn’t a copper shortage coming …

Oh wait

Nickel is used in the alloys needed in wind turbines and solar panels.

Theres no factual basis to what you’re saying. You’re just declaring utter bollocks to be thus and such.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BN-800_reactor

Youre saying they don’t use uranium or are you trying to move the goal posts again?

Oh, I see, mining the moon is a solution for when we’ve already fixed the problem. No wonder it was so confusing.

it seemed to me that blame was implied.

No, you just made that up and its not implied. They can’t exist without vast amounts of excess labour being undertaken. Im saying its two birds with one stone. That doesn’t mean I’m saying that they made all the emissions. If that’s genuinely what you read from those words then you have a problem. Youre just grasping at straws here.

It took a long time to drag out of you.

Well, far be for me to have to explain to you the finite nature of the planet you find yourself on. Who knows, maybe perpetual growth on a finite planet is possible? Maybe all the scientists and the laws on entropy are wrong and youre right? Maybe thats a thing that could happen in the real world?

I am still waiting for a response to that last quote. I think you’ve found something you can’t dispute.

Omg, yeah, you got me. I can’t dispute that there are more “lower” and middle class people in the world. Well done you.

You can declare it to be thus and such all you like. I keel telling you, we will run out of what we know exists now within 80 or 90 years, at current usage.

You just don’t like it and that’s not the same as it not being true.

I keep telling you, the energy cost of doing it makes it non viable, as any kind of meaningful solution but you keep repeating it all the same.

You don’t need any of those things…well other than the nickel in the coils I specificallymention and the other components that I clearly know nothing about…

Pipe dreams are lovely and all that but until we have something more solid, its best to dismiss the use of other isotopes as it’ll take a decade just to build the power station needed to make the energy. Thats before we get to the time it will actually take to fully research it all.

You’re attempting to argue that I don’t know about renewables or the technology necessary to go green and you’re talking about mining THE MOON in order to, wait for it, lower carbon emissions of all things.

The fucking moon

No wonder you found it so funny. I never said “the rich elite are the only people consuming things at an unsustainable rate.” Honestly, you’re hilarious for attempting to twist what was said into that. Have some intellectual integrity please.

You’ve failed so hard at an “akshually” but please do carry on. As I guessed, you’re against degrowth as anything but a temporary measure and rather than having the spine to come out and stand for it, you try waffle instead.

Just want to leave this here, in case you choose to delete it later

If you actually looked into it you would probably find that lost of the consuming of resources is to support the lower and middle classes

But they haven’t phased them out and we have nothing close to the grid storage we would need to switch to renewables. Even then, they will never provide the amount of energy we need to meet current usage.

At our current rate of usage, we will run out of viable uranium sources within 80 years. If we switched the worlds energy to nuclear, it wouldn’t last 5.

The only realistic option is for the world to use less.