10-24-2019, 08:19 AM
(10-23-2019, 09:54 PM)John J. Xenakis Wrote: ** 23-Oct-2019 World View: Another confused person: Bill Gates
I used to think that Bill Gates was smart. Well, he's the second
richest person in the world, so I guess he is pretty smart, a lot
smarter than I am.
But I just saw a half-hour interview with him, and he said some really
dumb things.
-- Climate change: He said that there will be a massive world wide
effort to fix climate change. Is he really so dumb that he thinks
that will actually happen? Oh, and he said that Trump will have to go
first. He kept talking about what will happen in 10, 20, 30, 40
years, and the thought of a war apparently never entered his mind.
Maybe he even believes the fantasy that the world will end if climate
change isn't fixed in 11 years, as AOC says.
Climate change is real enough that animal life is adjusting to it. I live in southern Michigan, and last Sunday while I was out for a walk I saw a snake. Ordinarily, snakes are in hibernation by now where I live, but not yet.
Donald Trump is an extreme ignoramus on science, so he can accept corporate PR as gospel truth (which also indicates his hollowness as a person. Trump has said that he wants people driving more gas-guzzling vehicles because such is good for the fossil-fuel industry that he considers a cornerstone of prosperity. It is possible to see projections of climate change in the movement of climatic boundaries based on the levels of emissions of greenhouse gases. The Cfa/Dfa line between snowy winters and rainy winters (that of the freezing point of water for the coldest month of the year) used to be through Philadelphia and New York City, but it now seems to be going through Indianapolis and Boston about now. By 2100 that line is projected to pass through the Straits of Mackinac and into the Canadian Maritime Provinces.
What is so bad about losing the real winters in southern Michigan? This is a grain-growing area, and the line between the corn belt and the wheat belt goes through about Battle Creek, Michigan -- home of the giant cereal plants of Kellogg's Corporation. It is no coincidence that Kellogg's has a huge cereal plant in a place in which the grain belt meets the corn belt, as do such competitors as Post and Ralston-Purina. The optimal situation for either wheat or corn involves a real winter whose blizzards protect the soil moisture that germinating crops need in the spring and supply melt-water that those crops need. Michigan's spring is basically April, with March as a winter month and May as a summer month, for all practical purposes. Without those real winters the crops would not be as plentiful, as demonstrated in the year (2012) in which Michigan had the mildest winter of all time. By summer, drought-like conditions had turned the grasses yellow as happens in the San Francisco Bay Area which has a severe and predictable summer drought. Crop yields fell that year.
Quote:-- Child mortality: He talked about how deaths from childhood diseases
are being cut in half. Does he really not realize that cutting child
mortality just creates a lot more cannon fodder for the next war?
What really cuts child birth rates is the education of girls so that they do not start having children in their teens. This reality crosses all ethnic, religious, and cultural lines. High rates child mortality contribute to high birth rates. When children are not born in as large numbers they tend to be treated with more lavish care and are less likely to be seen as sources of remittances as soldiers in wartime.
Quote:So I suppose if you're the second richest person in the world, you can
live in whatever fantasy world you want.
Much unlike Donald Trump, Bill Gates seems to have his head on straight. Gates is an innovator and not a gambler and crony capitalist like Trump.
Quote:Hmmmm. I wonder if he takes jet planes? I wonder if his mansion has
a bunker for surviving a war? Enquiring minds want to know.
Uhhh... if you work for a living in Sao Paulo and want to visit relatives in Recife (Brazil is getting into the age of mass travel by air, and it is not a rich country), then you probably take the long trip by jetliner even if you took the bus to Sao Paulo to go from a shantytown in Recife where there are few jobs in a classic world of Third-World poverty to a shantytown near Sao Paulo which seemed like New York City, Paris, or Tokyo by contrast except for not having a language barrier.
Intercity buses are largely for people too poor (unemployment) to have a car or prohibited from driving a car due to DUI convictions.
As for mansions -- I would rather have the super-rich spending money on mansions, art, and horses than on buying the political process.
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.
