> We might lose a few hundred million in the next few decades
> And we'll be fine.
Maybe we should then consider how to prevent hundreds of millions of deaths in the meantime? Like, the holocaust didn't lead to the extinction of humans as a whole, but there's a good amount of literature around what should've been done differently to prevent it in the first place, and that's an order of magnitude fewer deaths than what you're forecasting.
The left has no issue with building more supply. The issue they tend to have is when housing is commodified - the new units being built are for maximizing private profit, not number of people housed. (The former tends to lead to the breakup of established communities as they get priced out of their longtime homes). Lefties I know are incredibly excited about the prospect of massive construction projects to build more public and social housing.
If we think it's really the case that most wild animals will perish in the climate upheaval, then doesn't that change the math a bit on how much risk we should be willing to accept when it comes to climate engineering? If the wealthiest humans could probably adapt to +5c, but a billion poorer ones would die, how much does that change the math?
Personally I'd be willing to accept quite a lot of risk to avoid these awful outcomes.
AFAIK the plans to put sulfur into the stratosphere are modeled on exactly what a volcano does, i.e. a natural process. Of course it could turn out bad, but it doesn't sound to me like a totally out-of-bounds idea.
Maybe someone with a better background could tell me otherwise? I only know about computers.
It depends on what do you mean by climate engineering. If you mean randomly dumping large amounts of sulfur in stratosphere then it is exactly like shooting another bullet, but if it is done by more controlled devices it is like using a scalpel. In any case waiting the for body to heal naturally is not going to work. And i think it is very unfortunate that any mention of using technology to fix the problem gets ridiculed and downvoted out of view by the the people who care about environment.
I imagine any massive geoengineering project of this scale could take as long as 20-50 years to complete.
We really do need to get started before things get so bad we are unable to bring the massive resources to bear that we will need for something like this.
What if we took this idea, applied it to wealth instead of votes, and called it something like "progressive marginal tax rates"? Seems like it would be a more effective way to fight zealotry than to attack the democratic principle of all people getting the same amount of votes.
Every voter has the same number of tokens, so it is fair.
The quadratic progression is per candidate (or issue or whatever object is being voted on).
If you have 91 tokens, you can vote once for each of 91 competing choices. Or you can vote 6 times for one option: 1 + 4 + 9 + 16 + 25 + 36 = 91. Or twice each for 22 options, with three tokens left to vote on three more.
But tokens aren't votes. A person whose ideology aligns with 100 options has 10x the ability to influence the outcome of the election towards their preferred outcomes than someone whose ideology aligns with only one option.
But "votes" with tokens aren't votes either. Claiming that a spread of 100 votes has 10x the effect of 10 votes requires some model of the vote - you don't know that 10 votes on a single issue doesn't have an outsized effect on swinging a decision where 100 single votes just bump a number up across the board.
More than anything, the system just places power in compromise, which is nothing new - in a one-vote system, a person who is willing to vote for a centrist politician has more political power than me, a fringe voter, because their influence on the election result is better-felt.
There is a problem if there are 99 items to vote for, which are all aligned with each other, more or less, ideologically, and 1 item that is diametrically opposed to these. Someone casting 99 votes for those 99 items has political power over someone trying to concentrate on that one, only able to cast 6. This system works best if all the choices are very distinct.
If numerous choices are really just minor variations of the same choice, that tends to undermines the system with a rather gaping hole. The cynical observer might note that in fact that's the idea behind it: entrench the power of the bland, indistinct choice in leadership.
I'm not denying that this is a type of voting system that biases towards certain outcomes. I'm saying that the bias it attempts to accomplish is not desirable as it gives more political power to people with weak opinions than people with strong opinions. I think a good voting system would allow people to express the strength of their feelings on the options, but the system shouldn't reward weak opinions over strong opinions and vice versa. Most traditional cardinal systems accomplish this just fine.
Rather, it entrenches the power to the bland, indistinct body of politics as a whole, which expresses itself through numerous voting choices that are hard to distinguish from one another and are more less the same ideology, which can get large numbers of votes through choices that are only ostensibly distinct. It suppresses votes for choices that stand out from that group.
I don't think that is even necessary because the current voting systems already eliminate the fringes. For instance in many countries there is effectively a persistent two- or three-party system, even though other parties make an appearance.
It would be amazing if the US had an equivalent of the CBO for determining the impact of legislation on the annual total of labor-hours. Are there any estimates how many less labor-hours would be necessary if the US handled tax returns more efficiently (eg. sent out prefilled forms)?
The OP never said that only successful people should be allowed to express themselves. It was the person above him who was making the inverse suggestion that at a certain success level you should be tempering yourself in public discourse.
There's a very big difference between negative positions and positive "why shouldn't they be able to" defences...
That's fair, but still by virtue of being successful (in this particular context of success) you have a lot more money which offers you a lot more freedom to express yourself. Musk is practically free to do most anything he wants to do, but he chooses to stay in a position where he exposes himself to risk by not tempering himself.
The only reason this matters in legal terms is because he's chairman of a public company with legal obligations. Whether that applies in a general cultural sense is a different question.
The risks Musk is willing to take and his private investors and coworkers tolerance for that is their own voluntary choices to make.
I would blame the person, because the best case scenario of shooting an allegedly harmless gun into a crowd is equivalent in effect to the worst case scenario of doing nothing in the first place.
> And we'll be fine.
Maybe we should then consider how to prevent hundreds of millions of deaths in the meantime? Like, the holocaust didn't lead to the extinction of humans as a whole, but there's a good amount of literature around what should've been done differently to prevent it in the first place, and that's an order of magnitude fewer deaths than what you're forecasting.