One thing on the ontology of capital: once enough capital (billions, trillions) is gathered in one single control point there is a phase transition: from a means towards an end (build X, destroy Y) it becomes a manner of escaping reality: with enough (crony or not) capital you can keep afloat a business no matter how bad it is, how badly run, how useless or how dangerous the products. Not that 'there is no skin in the game', but there is no skin, there is no game anymore.

Whereas with government, you can keep afloat a government no matter how bad it is, how badly run, how useless or how dangerous it is. Except, as opposed to a company, it can’t crash like Enron or be threatened by competition. It doesn’t even need to fight to stay afloat.

By control point you can understand a corporation or a government, no need for false dichotomies: in the age of capital there is no beyond.

Enron was a weak company, nowhere near the escape reality velocity: at peak, in 2000, they had a market capitalization of $60 billion, at the same time Microsoft was at $600 billion [1].

Also, any company worth their capital knows very well that "competition is for losers" [2] and dreams of the ultimate consolidation [3].

[1] The Largest Public Companies by Market Cap (2000–2022), https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/largest-companies-from-2...

[2] Competition Is for Losers, https://www.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-competition-is-for-..., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Fx5Q8xGU8k

[3] The Consolidation Curve, https://hbr.org/2002/12/the-consolidation-curve

You can't. At some point disaster and dumb leadership conspire to push the people and elite to revolution. We're no where near that now, but don't be fooled that governments are untoppable. They aren't. Every ancien régime had its peak.

Climate Change & the war on CO2 has sucked the oxygen out of the room wrt pollution with dangerous chemicals. Many in the environmental community are optimizing a single metric, CO2 emissions, & not focusing on the myriad of chemicals that cause widespread ecological damage. That coupled with the ongoing doomsday hysteria over CO2, it is easy to lose focus on pressing issues & the complexities in dealing with these other environmental issues. The core tension here is should we narrow focus on a single metric or widen focus on the entire system? Also, Que bono for the different approaches?

Instead of focusing so much on CO2, it would benefit humanity to adopt a more well rounded approach that addresses all pollutants, prioritizing the safe handling of extremely toxic chemicals & reducing the amount of toxic waste emitted by industry. Also, it would be helpful to take the approach that novel substances should be proven safe instead of assuming these substances are safe until proven unsafe.

I'd be really interested in why climate change is a hysteria and not well-founded fear. Well founded studies say we are currently on track to reach 4°C higher average temperature by 2100, and a plausible rise in sea levels of that would be around 40 meters. Completely ignoring all other effects, this would be a catastrophe on a level we can hardly achieve otherwise. And 2100 isn't an end date, it would be kind of nice if the planet was usable a fair bit after that as well.

'Climate change' is a hysteria because there is so much money involved in green tech. anyone with an ounce of common sense is an environmentalist, but there have been so many predictions of impending doom (which is your fault, repent and atone for your sins) that the genuinely important issues tend to get buried in the tsunamai of doomy junk science that is drip fed to Guardian readers and anyone else who will listen.

There is a real danger of the $$ cult of climate change $$ undermining important environmental issues.

this is vile bullshit - we need to invest trillions to possibly arrest climate change, so yes there will be a lot of money in it for someone.

Apologies for offending your religious beliefs but there are an awful lot of now very rich snake oil salesmen out there who are doing a lot more for their cronies wallets than for the planet.

Be more mindful of where trillions of tax payer money is 'invested' would be my advice and try to see both sides of the religious divide.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11653723/How-Al-Gor...

To your point, where are the sanctimonious green agenda pushers, like Greta Thunberg & AOC, on this environmental disaster? The crickets are easy to hear. I thought they cared about the environment...

It's a range from 2.7° - 4°C, where four is the high end of where we'll likely end up at end of century, based on current trends.

> I'd be really interested in why climate change is a hysteria and not well-founded fear.

There are different types of criticism re: the claim of Anthropogenic Global Warming (which I'll refer to as APGW) & it's impacts. Mainly b/c APGW is a composition of claims, many of which are criticized to varying degrees.

My perspective is that throughout Earth's history, the climate has always been under a perpetual state of change, sometimes to far more drastic degrees than what we are witnessing today. About 200 years ago, we left a mini ice age (i.e. "the year without a summer"), which means that this point in the natural cycles is one of warming. I'm far more concerned about events coming from outer space or the Sun & pollution than APGW.

I'm not confident that the state of climate science accounts for all inputs into the cycle...looking at the Sun's cycles, our changing position within the cosmos, cycles external to our solar system and the impacts on Earth's climate. Climate models have a terrible track record with predicting future trends. This complex system, where all of the inputs are not yet properly modeled, is not modeled in a way which gives predictive value. The media & politicians tend to sensationalize the most extreme models (i.e. Al Gore stating that snow will be a thing of the past & the glaciers will all melt by 2020).

The natural cycles (there are many factors) are also not properly modeled, as we have only had precise measurements & can only date ice core samples, for a period that does not incorporate a single period for each of the cycles.

The oceans are also a large reservoir of CO2 & CO2 escapes a liquid as the temperature rises. Given we have geologically recently left an ice age, CO2 will naturally escape from the oceans. I wonder if a large portion of the rise of CO2 comes from global warming (with CO2 escaping the oceans) and not the other way around.

There have been experiments that show that CO2 does increase the temperature of a system to some extent, but the warming has upper-bound limits & it is not a runaway phenomenon. I confirmed this by doing a PV=nRT & CO2 delta calculation on Venus & found that if CO2 is a runaway phenomenon, the temperature on Venus would be significantly higher than it is now.

That being said, experiments show that an increase of CO2 does increase the temperature of a system, but not in a runaway hockey stick graph sense, but in a logrithmic upper-bound sense.

My experience with many people is that they want to simplify their understanding of complex systems in a lossy manner. I feel like many of the fears around APGW is a lossy simplification that attracts people to make sense of nature's complexities. It is psychologically difficult to admit & consciously regard there is much that we don't yet know & are not accounting for..even more difficult to admit that Earth has had numerous widespread natural catastrophes that we would not be able to control. We want to be able to predict the future with our models, the simpler the model the better. The problem is sometimes the system being modeled is very complex & we have not yet recorded all of the cycles involved or accounted for all of the inputs.

You really don't see there being a very distinct difference between the beliefs of the left and right wings of American politics on this?

You think "global oligarchy" is "apolitical", at a time when the right wing is pushing harder and harder for the very wealthy to, essentially, be able to do anything they want, while the left wing (such as it is in this country) is pushing to restrict their power and tax their wealthy?

Two wings of the same party. At this point because the DNC are currently so powerful they are parochially dominant (and extremely corrupt), the pendulum will swing soon and the power will shift to the RNC (who will no doubt also be extremely corrupt).

The unelected bureaucrats actually run everything in the US and at a state level. In California where I live we currently have a supermajority Dem state government, but regardless of this a handful of unelected bureaucrats from the Gray Davis era run everything in Sacramento behind the scenes.

The idea the DNC 'left wing' is pushing to restrict the local elite's power and tax them is laughable. They just have a few noisy straw men to placate voters and fill their air waves. (I'm a registered Dem FWIW. I loathe the party these days).

We need a big parochial political shake up!

> Two wings of the same party.

It is so hopelessly obvious that this is not the case at this point that I think it is fair to treat it as malicious.

One party is actively tolerating and promoting neo-Nazis. It has made its explicit goal the defeat of the other party at the expense of governing the country. It supported an armed coup attempt in order to try to overturn the legitimate election results.

The other is still often frustratingly bogged down in process and captured, in some ways by industry, but is clearly at least trying to govern the country and make things better for people.

Nonsense.

While I agree that there are, in general, significant differences in positions on these things, this seems like a bad example to choose: after all, US rail workers went on strike over the safety, long hours, and being expected to work injured or sick, and President Biden signed off on laws making their strikes illegal.

Unfortunately, at least in the English-speaking world, many nominal workers' parties have largely bought into worker-hostile policies under Blair, Starmer, Clinton, Albanese, and so on.

Exactly.

Honestly, I agree with you on this; however, the grandparent didn't say "Democratic or Republican politicians," which is very much the source of the problem you describe. Their wording was "conservatives or the left", which I think it is fair to say includes the people who identify with those political orientations—and I think you'd have a hard time seriously arguing that "the left" in America, to the extent that it even exists, is not strongly in favor of labour unions and worker protections.

I think the grandparent was really referring to extremities at the tips of the two wings - the cargo culting 'democratic socialist' movement the DNC pays lip service to, and the extremes of nationalist'USA first' 'patriots' the RNC pays lip service to and the DNC's coastal media corp friends love to endlessly frightened their viewers about.

By and large the wealthy in this country vote D and donate to left-wing causes and foundations and colleges. The working class (including union members, not necessarily union leaders) vote R.

The middle class and upper middle class vote D.

The wealthy—y'know, people like Elon Musk?—vote R.

The fact of the matter is that we had a rule to prevent this that was rescinded by conservatives. Further implementation of safety rules will always and forever be hamstrung by conservatives due to their ideology concerning deregulation. There is no need to cast blame onto shadowy oligarchs to avoid attributing the disaster to conservative ideology for the past 60 years.