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[Max™]

California and Australia are suffering because we have stopped letting small fires burn regularly so they build up into massive walls of fire. Importing pretty trees from Australia to California was also a mistake, I watched all of this happen as I was growing up. That isn't climate change, that's mismanagement and kneejerk reactionism: fire seems bad, so stopping all fires is good, OH SHIT ALL THE UNDERBRUSH FUELED A NIGHTMARISH INFERNO, HOW COULD THIS HAVE HAPPENED?

I must have a sad chuckle at the idea that you can't solve something predicated on CO2 emissions which the cheapest forms of electricity currently produce by forcing the poorest parts of the world to stop using the cheapest forms of electricity production they have and instead use... something?

[Iduno]

Good lord, apocalyptic mindsets are absurd, how old are you all? How many times have you heard the imminent doom predictions? Anybody remember when we used to have polar bears and summertime ice at the north pole? What a tragic loss that was. How about all the people lost from the barrage of constant category 6 hurricanes and EF6 tornadoes?

You're getting scared over imaginary issues and ignoring why shit is fucked: trickle down nonsense, obstructionist congresses murdering bipartisanship, crumbling infrastructure, open and proud white supremacists walking down the street and winning elections, gerrymandering, people who pronounce that g and the one in gif the same because they're not the same but one is like in giraffe, wealthy cunts throwing money at elections and winning, that hillbilly cunt mcconnell sneaking hordes of hard right judges onto the benches when he isn't outright stealing their seats.

I get that you feel worked up over what sounds like a righteous cause, I mean, without the environment, where will we keep all our stuff? We can't just move it beyond the environment like that boat the front fell off of, right?

It's not going to be a pressing issue in the next 50 years, or 100 years, even assuming the theoretical framework it's built on isn't flawed.

There are bigger more pressing issues right now, fuck your climate crusade, we have little kids in cages, hordes of backward ass cultists assaulting numerous liberties via the courts, and literal nazis roaming around freely.

"We have Nazis now, so it's okay to start a death cult and end the world." My guess from your posting is you're well off enough to live somewhere that the environment isn't currently killing you. Congratulations on not being poor, but kindly fuck off.

Everyone else noticed long ago that environmental concerns (also war, unbalanced judicial system, unfair labor laws, etc. but you mentioned the environment) unequally affect the poor, and also that non-white (or non-straight, or other at-risk) people are unequally affected by poverty. All of these issues are interconnected.

[Max™]

Hah, not poor, how many times you been to a dentist? More than never? Ever earned enough to not get a tax rebate? Yeah, no.

Wait, no, I think I did technically hit ~$52k a year when I spent two weeks helping tear down parts of a coal plant, but it's been nearly 20 years and I still have a slight wheeze and cough, besides that I think the most I earned was the few months I drove a cab. I grew up on food stamps and was so aware of poverty when I got hit by a car I actively fought against the EMT's trying to get me into the ambulance because I was damned if I was gonna incur a hospital bill.

[PTTG??]

California and Australia are suffering because we have stopped letting small fires burn regularly so they build up into massive walls of fire. Importing pretty trees from Australia to California was also a mistake, I watched all of this happen as I was growing up. That isn't climate change, that's mismanagement and kneejerk reactionism: fire seems bad, so stopping all fires is good, OH SHIT ALL THE UNDERBRUSH FUELED A NIGHTMARISH INFERNO, HOW COULD THIS HAVE HAPPENED?

I must have a sad chuckle at the idea that you can't solve something predicated on CO2 emissions which the cheapest forms of electricity currently produce by forcing the poorest parts of the world to stop using the cheapest forms of electricity production they have and instead use... something?

Both climate change and forest management are places where government policy has been misguided away from science. Land use changes are a massive contributor to CO2, and in turn increasing CO2 is leading to weather shifts that are making already mismanaged forests more flammable and extending the fire season. Clearly we agree that we need actual scientific oversight on the matter rather than right-wing knee-jerk policy. It's more complicated still by the fact that you can't have "small fires" in forests that border neighborhoods. You clearly need to have an environmental management plan that doesn't destroy people's houses and way of life, and it needs to account for the way things are instead of the way they used to be.

As for power for the global poor, solar with storage is cheaper when amortized over the lifetime of the system. It doesn't take a technological shift to move away from fossil fuel to solar, it takes a financial one. And it takes an infrastructural shift, too. Any one of these composting-toilet solar-light-bulb or whatever initiatives could make a big difference if you managed to ship a billion units to Sub-Saharan Africa instead of 100 to a test community in Whyoming.

But that's still a false dichotomy; the poorest parts of the world produce a truly tiny amount of CO2 compared to the industrial world. Our concern must be how to make way for a world where nobody has to be poverty-stricken, yet the burden of sustaining human life doesn't destroy the ecology of Earth. A 2000-year-old forest cannot be replaced without leaving it alone for 2000 years, and a 2-million-year-old species that goes extinct will never come back, not even in two million years. These things have value, and the wealthy world's irresponsible use of fossil fuels is destroying that value. And more, it must be done in a way that isn't magical white people showing up from oversees to tell people they're living wrong. It needs to be a movement where the post-industrial world, for once, treats other people like equals and stops funding criminals and warlords to serve their interests.

It seems to me similar to road construction crews in South America demolishing a Mayan site for gravel. It's so short-sighted and irresponsible and irreversible, how can someone argue against preventing it?

EDIT: And none of that is mutually exclusive with making sure the United States has the same basic respect for it citizens as Bahrain, Russia, Qatar, or Kazakhstan. (That is, free healthcare.)

[McTraveller]

a world where nobody has to be poverty-stricken, yet the burden of sustaining human life doesn't destroy the ecology of Earth.

We already live in that world. Nobody has to be poverty stricken today.  People (both collectively and individually) just are not willing to give up enough of their own time, resource, or energy to give it to others.

(That is, free healthcare.)

There's no such thing.  Please stop calling it 'free'.  I'm all for health care reform, but let's be realistic. Health care costs money.  Either health care premiums or taxes, it all comes out of paychecks the same way, and ultimately out of someone's labor.

[Trekkin]

a world where nobody has to be poverty-stricken, yet the burden of sustaining human life doesn't destroy the ecology of Earth.

We already live in that world. Nobody has to be poverty stricken today.  People (both collectively and individually) just are not willing to give up enough of their own time, resource, or energy to give it to others.

(That is, free healthcare.)

There's no such thing.  Please stop calling it 'free'.  I'm all for health care reform, but let's be realistic. Health care costs money.  Either health care premiums or taxes, it all comes out of paychecks the same way, and ultimately out of someone's labor.

Unfortunately, people don't really think that way. Everyone wants what they don't have, and there will always be some kind of inequality somehow. Even if it's a completely pointless difference with no bearing on anything, as long as it's not universal, people will segregate into haves and have nots around it. If you have $2 and I have $1 (and both know no other people, for the sake of this argument), I'll feel poor and you'll feel rich; if you have $2 million and I have $1 million, the same will apply. So there will, in a sense, always be poverty as long as people have different things. Even in some hypothetical regime where everyone recieves exactly the same posessions, they'll still have different traits or capabilities or something, and will assemble into hierarchies on that basis. Absent any other options, we invent scarce resources in order to possess them exclusively.

Now, you could make a case that in some hypothetical best possible society, the worst possible poverty still allows a standard of living and degree of autonomy that allows for a feasible escape from poverty and attempt to create a self-sorting society in which everyone has as much of everything as they're willing to work toward getting, but everyone will think that sucks too.

As for healthcare, it can't cost money if there's no money anymore -- and while that's hyperbole, there is a general trend to fix the problems with state control by demanding more state control.

[Eschar]

a world where nobody has to be poverty-stricken, yet the burden of sustaining human life doesn't destroy the ecology of Earth.

We already live in that world. Nobody has to be poverty stricken today.  People (both collectively and individually) just are not willing to give up enough of their own time, resource, or energy to give it to others.

(That is, free healthcare.)

There's no such thing.  Please stop calling it 'free'.  I'm all for health care reform, but let's be realistic. Health care costs money.  Either health care premiums or taxes, it all comes out of paychecks the same way, and ultimately out of someone's labor.

The free refers to cost to users, just as free samples of a product to customers are uncontroversially referred to as free even though money changed hands to get them made

[PTTG??]

a world where nobody has to be poverty-stricken, yet the burden of sustaining human life doesn't destroy the ecology of Earth.

We already live in that world. Nobody has to be poverty stricken today.  People (both collectively and individually) just are not willing to give up enough of their own time, resource, or energy to give it to others.

(That is, free healthcare.)

There's no such thing.  Please stop calling it 'free'.  I'm all for health care reform, but let's be realistic. Health care costs money.  Either health care premiums or taxes, it all comes out of paychecks the same way, and ultimately out of someone's labor.

Yes, they do have to be impoverished. They have no choice in the matter. If a billionaire decided to give a bunch of money to other people, then sure, they wouldn't be poor. But you might as well argue that the poor might be able to catch a leprechaun.

And "free healthcare" is an accepted term. Don't go around getting all prescriptivist when you and everyone else knew what I was saying. When I start arguing for the abolishment of money in general, I'll say so.

[McTraveller]

I think that's disingenuous - I even stated

People (both collectively and individually) just are not willing to give up enough of their own time, resource, or energy to give it to others.

The "has to" in my sense is that the haves don't have to hoard it all, but they do.  If the haves hoard wealth, then yes people who don't have, probably still won't have.  But there is nothing in our current system that forces the haves to hoard it.  Encourage, yes I'll admit that, but not force.

As for "free healthcare" I know that's the "accepted" term, but I think that's language modification a la 1984.  Giving things misleading names for political purposes clouds issues and makes them polarizing which just gets in the way of actual progress.  When you say healthcare is free or is a right, it is very easy for people to assume this means that someone is obligated to provide those things.  It's not like free speech where this doesn't have to be "provided" - speech is not a scarce resource; health care is.

As for "free samples" that's a bit of a reductionist example, but it inadvertently proves my point: there is no endless supply of "free samples" that other people pay for - if you're out of those samples they are gone.

I want affordable health care as much as the next guy - but I don't want "free" healthcare.  The consequences of that philosophy are dire when taken to their conclusion.

[hector13]

What are the consequences?

[McTraveller]

I guess schools really are failing these days:

If you can't pay for things*, you can only have what someone else is willing to give you.

EDIT: changed don't to can't; if everything is free, you cannot pay for it.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

It should not be surprising that this situation is the same thing as a definition of poverty.

*EDIT 2: there's a detail here - if you can't pay for things and you are not able/allowed to make things for yourself.

[Max™]

How about adding a word?

Profit-free healthcare? I am glad to at least see people discussing the negatives of capitalism and the failure of "market forces" to do anything but select a small group and give them all the moneys so they might not be the best way to run everything.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

I guess schools really are failing these days:

If you can't pay for things*, you can only have what someone else is willing to give you.

EDIT: changed don't to can't; if everything is free, you cannot pay for it.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

It should not be surprising that this situation is the same thing as a definition of poverty.

*EDIT 2: there's a detail here - if you can't pay for things and you are not able/allowed to make things for yourself.

Uh-huh. Sure. That's why governments can't just spend willy-nilly on tanks and missiles, sell off the nation's citizens on their behalf to industrial factions, wage endless global asymmetric war, and sink countless billions in black projects that don't even have their cost disclosed. Because if those damned "diabetic" bloodsuckers get their dime, where will it end!? Will we feed lost children next!? House those locust hoards of young gangster punks!?

I don't fucking think so. The buck stops here, buster! You won't see one red cent, not from this house, no sir! Maybe try serving your country sometime if you want a handout so badly. We need more guys like you, real killer types, you know what I mean? Got to show the bastards their place in our world, if you catch my meaning.

God bless America.

[Egan_BW]

This thread is a good source of absurdist theatre.

[Frumple]

What are the consequences?

Not dying of preventable health issues, I think. Avoiding medical bankruptcy. That sort of thing.

Wait, wait, something here's supposed to be negative, uh. Fucking vulture capitalists and their ilk couldn't make bank viciously exploiting the desperate and immiserating people at their lowest points. Think of the greedy sociopaths and their well-being!

Wait, shit. Uh. Doctors might have to be state employed? I'm running out here.