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[Lord Shonus]

More to the point, almost all of Biden's picks so far are solid, competent people that most people have never heard of. So there's no baggage, nothing to cause panic or pushback. If we'd known who he'd pick at this time last month, the election probably wouldn't have been so close.

[Dunamisdeos]

Yeah honestly if they're qualified, they're good. All I really need to know unless something wacko is going on with them.

[Reelya]

John Kerry got a role, but it's Special Climate Envoy. In other words it's not handing him a chain of command role in a department but making him a "climate czar" type of thing.

Which is smart. You don't need a celebrity head of the EPA or anything like that, the EPA head should be some no-name person who has a handle on the day to day operations of that agency, not a politician. So John Kerry can push the climate issues but without being bogged down with the minutiae of running a department, or inter-departmental "turf wars". Climate crosses too many departmental boundaries so it's smart to split it off in this fashion, but you also don't want to codify a "department of the environment" either, since that crosses too many jurisdictions - USDA, NOAA, FDA, EPA etc etc.

[Max™]

Biden choosing boring, qualified, capable people for his cabinet instead of going down a list of donors and doling out spots to whichever celeb or ceo threw the most money at his campaign is fantastic.

I mean, if people joined the Biden team expecting to be treated like Trumpers were, get promoted well above their competency level, fuck things up until they randomly piss off the boss, then hear about getting fired in a newstory about a tweet... maybe they joined the wrong team?

I imagine if someone is qualified to work a certain position and he needs to staff it and someone from his team would fit then they'll be considered, but like Reelya said, bringing in people who worked in previously destroyed departments and giving them high enough positions to have the power to restore them... is literally one of the biggest reasons to have voted for Biden in the first place.

In the US there were lots of us who were surprised to learn Canada has their own "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness" but mostly we were envious because it's "Peace, Order, and Good Government" as I recall.

Sounds pretty fucking nice right now, breaking up with your psycho abusive ex who constantly mooches off of you and steals your shit so you can settle down with somebody that has a stable career, lifestyle, supportive friends and family, and actually respects you? I mean, what exactly is the downside? The new guy doesn't wanna toss your salad? At least he insists on washing his ass before you go anywhere near it.

[Bumber]

Boring, qualified, capable neoconservatives. There's something to be said for incompetent evil versus the alternative.

Which Middle-Eastern country shall we invade next?

[Dostoevsky]

They're definitely establishment old guard and not peaceniks, though I wouldn't call them neocon.

And the incompetent evil we've had has arguably been very much bad as well, it's just a lot of disintegration and rot that will take time to roost as opposed to a bombastic invasion. (Neither's good, just in different ways.)

Edit: Also, as a reminder, Trump had to be talked down from attacking Iran roughly a week ago.

[Reelya]

I think he just wanted to stick it to Biden by embroiling the US in a costly military crisis before he leaves office.

Which is perfectly understandable. He'll probably do a shit on the desk of the Oval Office on his last day.

(BTW CBS News just released a short doco about QAnon, linked in Podcast and Videos thread).

[delphonso]

I'm disgusted every time I see a news article about some GOP person "admiting Biden won". Eat my ass, every Republican who went along with this from day one is a traitor and every news source who is still giving it the time of day is doing irrepairable damage to the institution of voting.

[Reelya]

Oh man the sweet irony, there was a historic surge on Wall Street when Trump cleared the way for the transition. The Dow broke 30000 points for the first time. When news broke saying that the surge was due to the Biden transition, Trump called a surprised press conference ... which went for 64 seconds ... in which he claimed credit for the surge.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAKUM73tqGE&ab_channel=7NEWSAustralia

[Max™]

Boring, qualified, capable neoconservatives. There's something to be said for incompetent evil versus the alternative.

No, there really isn't, incompetent evil barely lost while tiptoeing right up to the edge of "fuck it let's just call it the 4th reich and dig out some of those snazzy uniforms, rather than letting our supporters have all the fun of being nazis" and the alternative incompetent evil isn't just "boring competency" though that's what we're getting next.

The other alternative is scarier, someone competent enough to USE all the opportunities to fuck shit up which the orange dumbfuck regularly tripped over before cussing out the staff and demanding they clean it up.

Trump almost accidentally the whole fascist takeover simply by being too fucking stupid and up his own ass to care about violating norms, lately he's been panic-scrambling to avoid jail, if the dumbfuck took five seconds to listen to any evil fucker around him he could have guaranteed another 4 years to work on undoing things like term limits, and frankly I'll take boring competency over competent evil any fucking day.

[Reelya]

There's also well meaning fucking shit up by not being swayed by evidence.

for example, the plastic bag thing. Yeah I bought into the paper bags are better thing, however every single other option other than those flimsy plastic bags turns out just way worse for CO2 emissions than just using the plastic bags. The explanation is that cost is pretty well correlated with how wasteful things are. Paper bags cost more, and that's not the "cost of saving the environment" we need to pay, they actually consume much more water and emit far more carbon in their manufacture. That's what "costs more" means in practice - uses more resources. Where do people think the "costs" are going? It's not money just evaporating. It's stuff. Supermarkets had a vested interest in keeping the bags as cheap as possible, which is pretty well correlated with minimizing the amount of resources in the bag, funnily enough.

But ... all this data isn't swaying the politicians putting these laws through. The appearance of "doing the right thing" is actually more important than checking whether what you did actually improved things, and that's a big problem. If you buy 3 cotton tote bags, well you're probably going to be dead before you used them on enough shopping trips to break even with someone who didn't even bother and uses the disposable plastic ones.

We had the plastic bag ban here on the thin ones, and the main upshot of that is that every time I get take-out they give me a thick plastic bag that's about 10 normal plastic bags worth of thickness, because these fit the definition of "re-usable" ones. So I got a cupboard full of those now and use them as garbage bags, but they're literally like 10 times the amount of material of the old bags, which I used for the same purpose. So the well-intended environmental law has brought perverse incentives into the game.

Well-meaning-but-actually-fucks-things-up is a thing.

[martinuzz]

Similarily, electric cars aren't as climate friendly as you might think.

For example, the Polestar 2, an electric car made by Polestar (part of Volvo), has taken about 26 tons of CO2 to produce when it rolls out of the factory, compared to 16 tons of CO2 for a similar combustion engine model like the Volvo XC40.

This means that you'd need to drive in it for about 112 thousand kilometers for it to break even when using 'grey' electrical power, or 50 thousand km using only 'green' electrical power.

[bloop_bleep]

Not to mention the whole “electricity is just moving the carbon emissions elsewhere a lot of the time” side of things.

[Grim Portent]

There's also well meaning fucking shit up by not being swayed by evidence.

for example, the plastic bag thing. Yeah I bought into the paper bags are better thing, however every single other option other than those flimsy plastic bags turns out just way worse for CO2 emissions than just using the plastic bags. The explanation is that cost is pretty well correlated with how wasteful things are. Paper bags cost more, and that's not the "cost of saving the environment" we need to pay, they actually consume much more water and emit far more carbon in their manufacture. That's what "costs more" means in practice - uses more resources. Where do people think the "costs" are going? It's not money just evaporating. It's stuff. Supermarkets had a vested interest in keeping the bags as cheap as possible, which is pretty well correlated with minimizing the amount of resources in the bag, funnily enough.

But ... all this data isn't swaying the politicians putting these laws through. The appearance of "doing the right thing" is actually more important than checking whether what you did actually improved things, and that's a big problem. If you buy 3 cotton tote bags, well you're probably going to be dead before you used them on enough shopping trips to break even with someone who didn't even bother and uses the disposable plastic ones.

We had the plastic bag ban here on the thin ones, and the main upshot of that is that every time I get take-out they give me a thick plastic bag that's about 10 normal plastic bags worth of thickness, because these fit the definition of "re-usable" ones. So I got a cupboard full of those now and use them as garbage bags, but they're literally like 10 times the amount of material of the old bags, which I used for the same purpose. So the well-intended environmental law has brought perverse incentives into the game.

Well-meaning-but-actually-fucks-things-up is a thing.

The plastic bag issue is not anything to do with the ecological cost of creating the bags themselves, it's about minimising or preventing the detrimental effects those bags cause when improperly disposed of, especially to marine life. The idea of shifting to more costly reusable bags is to reduce the amount of bags ending up in the ocean being swallowed by something that eats jellyfish rather than saving on plastic.

CO2 emissions are not the be all and end all of climate and climate-adjacent issues.

[nenjin]

I think the issue with plastic grocery bags is that they're basically not recyclable? Of if they are, it's not worth the time of recyclers to actually deal with them.