Guide on what it means here: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=SSd7KnWN9CM

Note the red pixels are just a representation, doesn’t mean the whole red area is on fire. See 1:08 to 2:10 for explanation.

If anyone wants to see the actual situation here’s NASA’s live map: https://firms.modaps.eosdis.nasa.gov/map/

and a guide on how to use it, what all the symbols mean etc: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=SSd7KnWN9CM

Yes, I see that. It’s an investment blog written by the account manager of a major finance company. I’m sure he has no vested interests whatsoever and is just trying to be as factually accurate as possible.

If you don’t want to read other people’s thoughts on things, don’t post yours on an internet forum lol.

Am happy to end the conversation on a friendly note though. If we were having this chat in person, i’d say ‘fuck it, let’s grab a beer and chill’. See ya.

More on the data: global investment in the energy transition in 2021 = $755 billion total investment in energy in 2021 = $1.9 trillion (source)

Also I’ll just leave this here:

source

Lmaooo “Greenablers”. What a joke. That’s literally a corporate PR puff piece. How is corporate greenwashing PR supposed to convince me that Capitalism drives innovation (or is good for the climate?) when countless studies of data prove it wrong? The only piece of data he cites is about the billions being spent on the ‘energy transition’. I checked out his source. A good chunk of that is just government investment. Another big chunk of that is electric cars - a really stupid thing to invest in as they’ll compete with renewable energy for rare earth minerals etc. Not to mention all the emissions they’ll cause in production, and the fact that they’ll still need half the world to be paved over in asphalt for roads and parking. Better than petrol or diesel sure, but hardly efficient.

Dense cities yes. End single-family zoning yes (doesn’t really exist where I live, the US is an insane place).

Energy deregulation no. I’m sure it will be great for opening new coal plants, not a chance in hell will it lead to more nuclear power or anything useful.

Ah the innovation argument, so original. “Capitalism creates innovation”. Everyone says it all the time so it must be true right? Well it isn’t. Data doesn’t support this argument.

Pretty much every major innovation of the past century has come from publicly funded and/or not-for-profit research and development. Capitalists only step in once the difficult part is done and the ‘innovation’ can be repackaged into something profitable in the short term.

See the following: https://academic.oup.com/ser/article/7/3/459/1693191

https://demos.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/files/Entrepreneurial_State_-_web.pdf

Capitalism definitely creates barriers to certain types of innovation. Mainly innovation that isn’t profitable - see ‘planned obsolesence’. It also creates barriers to profitable innovation sometimes; just look up ‘patent trolls’.

But I was never even talking about innovation. You just jumped to it because that is the classic buzzword talking point that is constantly repeated everywhere. ‘Develop better alternatives’ doesn’t have to be ‘innovation’. We have the technology already, we’ve had it for decades. Trains and cycle lanes = better alternatives to cars. Nuclear energy = better alternative to fossil fuels.

Market capture exists everywhere, in every economic system.

Sure, this might be the case for every existing economic system. I believe we need to develop something new. Just like modern Capitalism was inconceivable to someone living in the Feudal era, a new system might be inconceivable for us right now. But it is imperative we try.

I swear we need to retire the term ‘Capitalism’ entirely because it seems like it’s impossible to discuss its flaws without someone just assuming it’s a statement in favour of resurrecting Stalin. This has nothing to do with communists.

Electricity can be produced in many different ways - it’s just that some are more profitable than others.

Capitalism also creates an entire web of incentive structures that make it hard to develop more sustainable alternatives - e.g car industry creating ‘lock-in’, as described in this paper. I’m sure a similar paper could be written about some Soviet bloc state 60 years ago, but that’s irrelevant. This is a problem of Capitalism and the Soviet bloc doesn’t exist anymore. Just cause ‘Stalin bad’ doesn’t mean ‘Capitalism can do no harm ever’.

I was in the same position until a few weeks ago; mainly used YT for podcasts, downloading videos to watch while travelling etc.

If you have an Android phone, get the NewPipe app from F-Droid. It has pretty much everything that YT Premium offers, but free. It’s been working really well for me.

Sure, real economists don’t explicitly hold those views. But the kinds of metrics and models liberal economists are fond of using basically lead to that flowchart.

I appreciate you trying to answer a question in good faith, but you’re conflating ‘liberal’ with ‘vaguely left-leaning’, and none of what you’ve said makes any sense outside of current US political ‘discourse’ where ‘Liberal’ means ‘slightly left-wing’.

What you describe as liberal economics is closer to Keynsianism or Social Democracy.

In economics, the ‘Liberal’ school of thought is generally against regulation and interference in the market, seeing it as being ‘self-regulating’. In economic terms, Reagan and Thatcher were Liberals - hence them being associated with ‘Neoliberalism’.

The whole thing you said about Capitalism tending towards monopoly is actually a very Marxist/Socialist idea - Liberal economic theory tends to argue that monopolies form because of government and that they wouldn’t occur in a truly free market (although its more nuanced than that, there’s major disagreements over ‘Natural Monopolies’ etc. within the Liberal school). Source: look up any Liberal economist/thinker and their view on monopolies. E.g Friedman, J.S Mill.

Capitalism being an economic system doesn’t make it apolitical. ‘In theory’ Liberalism and Capitalism are very very closely intertwined, it’s not implicit, it’s absolutely explicit if you read any Liberal political or economic theory.

Economics is inherently political.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/neoliberalism/#Libe Sections 3 and 4 of this are a decent starting point.

Also the idea of slightly changing our voting systems as the way to drive change is quite hilarious. Sure, moving away from FPTP would probably help a bit, but it’s not like countries with other systems are doing fine. These issues are more fundamental. And historically, fundamental change has never occured through small technical adjustments to political systems.

Modern billionaires developing that Roman Emperor urge to fight in the Colloseum (as long as they’re never in any actual danger of course). Absolute joke

It’s bean fun

Feel you with being unable to keep up. The thing is, most of the outrage is artificial; have to remember the incentive structures of media etc.

If its any consolation, I reckon the average person being unable to keep up with stuff during periods of rapid change has always been the case historically. Most conversations, discourse, etc that have shaped society have been either among small groups of powerful people motivated by various interests, or stuff like pamphlets, polemics nailed to church doors, talking points, buzz words. This riles people up and is effective at getting stuff done but not effective at all at having an actual conversation. So the average person just gets swept up in the tide.

I am not an expert in political history by any means but I can’t think of a single example in which people just talked to eachother to decide the direction of society. Seems like it has always been ‘waves’ or ‘trends’ or ‘forces’ and then ‘backlashes’ driving things. Historical developments and transformative change seems to just ‘happen’ and suddenly you live in a fundamentally different world.

Like, did we ever have a conversation, as ‘a society’ (if it can even be considered a singular entity) which resulted in the decision to put big tech corps in charge of running the main platforms we use to communicate with eachother?

Of course not; it’s like we woke up one day and suddenly heads of state are issuing diplomatic communications via goddamn Twitter so we all just use that now. Again, not a historian, but I think it was a similar thing with major historical shifts like industrialisation etc.

And then we get hit by the consequences, and are totally unprepared, as if they were unexpected. A small group of random people having a conversation over drinks could have anticipated pretty much every single issue we now have with big tech running our social platforms, and probably could have anticipated many of the pitfalls of industrialisation or globalisation (not saying these don’t have positives; but we’re dealing with the pitfalls now so it is what it is).

I think this kind of approach to discourse and societal decisionmaking is very vulnerable to being overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information in the modern world.

I recently read ‘The Word for World is Forest’ by Ursula Le Guin, and am reminded of this part in the introduction: “They have built a system of inter-personal relations which, in the field of psychology, is perhaps on a level with our attainments in such areas as television and nuclear physics.” (Context: the Senoi people of Malaysia).

We haven’t developed our ‘social technology’; we’re operating on the same kinds of social tech in the past, which is simply not equipped to deal with a connected globalised world. I think this extends to stuff like academia and journalism. We desperately need an approach to making sense of the world in a calm and thoughtful manner; but since our social tech can’t really facilitate that, we’re doing… whatever it is we’re doing rn.

And coming back to capitalist incentive structures: inflammatory stuff generates more engagement, ad revenue etc.

I am holding out hope that smaller, FOSS alternatives which do not have such incentives will lead to better conversations

This is entirely my observation but the conversations I’ve seen on this platform seem more like actual conversations vs the almost-artificial ‘talking past eachother instead of talking to eachother’ I used to see on Reddit and Twitter.

Sorry for the ramble. My first post on any public-facing online thing since I quit posting on random forums like 15 years ago. I always lurked on Twitter and Reddit but feared that actually posting and/or getting into arguments would drive me insane so avoided it. Hello everyone; let’s be humane to eachother and enjoy eachother’s company. There’s enough alienation in the world as it is. Thanks for reading to whoever is still reading.