03-29-2017, 01:04 AM
(03-28-2017, 02:12 AM)Kinser79 Wrote: @PBR and Bob
Have neither of you ever considered that it is my conscience speaking when it says to not waste money on those who aren't part of my tribe? Or is conscience only for those who hypocritically spout off about their love for all of humanity.
Let me lay out what my conscience dictates on several issues brought up:
1. Health care insurance: People should buy their own. It should not be provided by their employer as that makes the older and sicker among us slaves to their employer, or worse makes them unemployable. But it should be noted that insurance and access are two different problems.
"Medicare for all" would solve most problems. The insurance industry did not want the elderly as customers; most elderly were unable to buy private medical insurance. People end up paying all their lives for Medicate in case they get old enough to need it. The alternative might be that the offspring of the elderly would be compelled to buy actuarially-sound medical coverage which would be astronomical in cost. For most people the last years of their lives are the most costly in overall medical costs, often taking more than the rest of one's life. Medical costs (especially nursing home costs that Medicare does not pay for) have made me join the American poor.
Quote:2. Climate Change is real--the climate has been changing for some 4.5 billion years or so. What remains to be determines is if/when said climate change is going to cause real impacts. Quite frankly the science on this is still out. As for the predictions made over the years.
All of those are actual predictions made at the times indicated in the cartoon. Quite frankly I don't take any prediction about the weather seriously that goes more than three days out--there are just too many variables.
I'll raise you. I can go back 540 million years into the past (which is more than eight times as long ago as the extinction of non-avian dinosaurs) forward from such antiquity with allowance for plate tectonics.
[url=https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2015/02/failed-climate-predictions.jpg][/url]
...and it is possible to have a video that reverses the process:
There is a time in which almost all of Africa, South America, Spain, and Arabia are glaciated -- but Greenland and parts of Antarctica are on the equator and tropical.
But more relevant to the issue of global warming... food is the ultimate reality in economics. If you are hungry, then just about every other store of wealth becomes irrelevant. The agricultural productivity of the world is finely tuned to the climatic patterns and topography that we have. A hot-summer Mediterranean climate in California is fine because the US government can build reservoirs top detain mountain rains and snow-melt in deep, narrow canyons for release in hot summers. A hot-summer Mediterranean climate in Michigan would be a disaster because Michigan lacks high mountains and deep, narrow canyons for storing water to be released in hot summers. Of course, inundation due to rising sea levels of some of the world's most densely-populated areas full of peasant farmers, like Bangladesh, would create great dislocations -- and possibly mass death on a scale not known with respect to the human population comparable to the Mongol conquests, the Black Death, the Atlantic slave trade, the Holodomor, and the Holocaust. Man can adjust well enough to slow changes -- but not something so swift as losing so much prime farmland in lower-elevation zones in a few decades.
Quote:Quite frankly I don't take any prediction about the weather seriously that goes more than three days out--there are just too many variables.
In fact, weather forecasting has become much more reliable over the short term. What weather forecasters do not get now is
(1) the speed of the approach of weather fronts which typically separate 'warmer' and 'cooler' weather. They can predict that on the west side of a cold front that temperatures will be around 50F and that on the east side they will be around 75F, but they might not be able to predict when the front passes St. Louis and Indianapolis five days ahead -- 2PM or 6 PM? or
(2) where weather events will be most severe. They can't predict that a tornado will strike exactly where until the tornado is in the final stages of formation.
The National Weather Service gave up on fifteen-day forecasts because their programs tended to go to 'reversion to the mean', which is no better than mere guesswork.
Have fun with the videos; it's remarkable that at one time the land upon which Richmond, Virginia now sits was practically at the South Pole. You will see ice ages and ice-free times.
Quote:3. As for my request for a definition, it was for the sake of clarity--boomers in general love to not use dictionary definitions of words. Myself, I would say that everyone has a conscience, excluding perhaps psychopaths and sociopaths--but I'm no psychologist so I could be completely wrong here.
Just open a dictionary if that is all that you want. Ask a Boomer, and expect a sermon.
Quote:I'd also go far as to say that some view their conscious (sic!) as expanding to all of humanity--those with pathological altruism. For the rest of us our compassion only goes out so far--family, friends/tribe, everyone else. This means that if something stands in the way of family or Friends/tribe by everyone else; well everyone else's prerogatives can get screwed.
Conscience and consciousness are two very different entities. Conscience implies awareness of Right and Wrong and a desire to choose what is Right. I might have a different view on economic propriety from what a brutal slave-master has or what Pol Pot believed in. Some people thought it right to burn witches and heretics at the stake; I would consider such criminal! Consciousness implies knowledge. A rapist may be fully conscious of a victim whom he can get away with raping and of the illegality of rape; his lack of conscience makes the rape possible. We do good or at least try to avoid doing harm lest we be horrible people. Getting away with horrible behavior is no virtue.
Tribalism is for people at a low level of ethical development.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.