“Enlightenment Now” seems designed to reassure both Republicans, who worry about increasing drug use and terrorism, and Democrats, who see racism and sexism as the crises of our time. Despite fears of resurgent racism, the number of hate crimes in America has been falling for decades, while analyses of Internet searches, which reveal searchers’ hidden interests, indicate that racist, sexist, and homophobic attitudes are also in retreat. What Pinker calls “emancipative values”—tolerance, feminism, and so on—are becoming more common even in old-fashioned societies. (Young people in the Middle East now hold social views comparable to the ones held by young Western Europeans in the nineteen-sixties.) Although there’s been a recent surge in drug overdoses in the U.S., most of those who die belong to “the druggy Baby Boomer cohort . . . born between 1953 and 1963.” Drug and alcohol use among teen-agers—with the exception of cannabis and vaping—is at its lowest level since 1976.
Pinker’s message is simple: progress is real, meaningful, and widespread. The mystery is why we have so much trouble acknowledging it. Pinker mentions various sources of pessimism—the “progressophobia” of liberal-arts professors, for instance—but directs most of his opprobrium toward the news media, which focus almost entirely on of-the-moment crises and systematically underreport positive, long-term trends. (Citing the German economist Max Roser, Pinker argues that a truly evenhanded newspaper “could have run the headline NUMBER OF PEOPLE IN EXTREME POVERTY FELL BY 137,000 SINCE YESTERDAY every day for the last twenty-five years.”) He consults the work of Kalev Leetaru, a data scientist who uses “sentiment mining,” a word-analysis technique, to track the mood of the news; Leetaru finds that, globally, journalism has grown substantially more negative.
The power of bad news is magnified, Pinker writes, by a mental habit that psychologists call the “availability heuristic”: because people tend to estimate the probability of an event by means of “the ease with which instances come to mind,” they get the impression that mass shootings are more common than medical breakthroughs. We’re also guilty of “the sin of ingratitude.” We like to complain, and we don’t know much about the heroic problem-solvers of the past. “How much thought have you given lately to Karl Landsteiner?” Pinker asks. “Karl who? He only saved a billion lives by his discovery of blood groups.”
Even as “Enlightenment Now” celebrates our ingenuity, it suggests that there’s something bratty about humankind: we just don’t want to admit how good we have it. In “It’s Better Than It Looks: Reasons for Optimism in an Age of Fear,” the journalist Gregg Easterbrook offers a wider-ranging account of our pessimism. In his view, it’s the result of various demographic, cultural, and political trends. The country is aging, and older people tend to be nostalgic and grumpy. Reaganism made “ritualized denunciation” of the government routine, encouraging cynicism among conservatives; among liberals, a focus on marginalized groups has led to the competitive articulation of suffering, creating a culture of “majority victimhood,” in which every group trumpets its grievances. “Claims for liability and compensation have increased,” Easterbrook notes, reflecting the rise of a punitive society obsessed with the assignment of blame; fewer people attend worship services, where they might hear messages of hope or have uplifting interactions with neighbors. Thanks to cable news, talk radio, and social media, “society has opinionized,” and it’s now “expected that all will possess strong views”; this has fed the rise of “catastrophism,” or the continual overstatement of what’s wrong. (“Everything is terrible” is a stronger view than “Things are pretty decent.”) Finally, technology has changed. Easterbrook cites psychological research suggesting that the physical proximity of our smartphones gives them uncanny power to influence our moods. It’s one thing to see an alarming headline on a TV across the room, and another to feel it vibrating in your pocket.
Perhaps we’ve come to see history itself as one bad news cycle after another. The word “history” used to evoke “traditions to be respected, legacies to be transmitted, knowledge to be elaborated, or deaths to be commemorated,” the French historiographer Henry Rousso points out, in “The Latest Catastrophe: History, the Present, the Contemporary.” After the traumas of the twentieth century, however, we began to define our historical era by “the most lethal moments of the near past”—the conflicts, wars, and atrocities that “have had the most difficulty ‘passing away.’ ” We “delimit the contemporary era” by referring to “the ends of wars or sometimes the beginnings of wars: the end of World War I, the end of World War II, the end of the Cold War.” (In America, we talk about the Vietnam era and the generation born after 9/11.) “Since 1945, all contemporary history begins with ‘the latest catastrophe,’ ” Rousso concludes. We see the past in terms of crises, and imagine the future that way, too.
Pessimism may even answer to our spiritual needs. The philosopher Charles Taylor, in his book “A Secular Age,” from 2007, argued that modern life is characterized by a sense of individual spiritual obligation. In pre-Reformation Europe, ordinary people were held to lower spiritual standards than monks, priests, and nuns, and a member of the laity might live an imperfect, worldly life and still be saved, as long as he supported, through prayer or alms, the work of the “virtuosi.” Such a system, Taylor writes, “involved accepting that masses of people were not going to live up to the demands of perfection.” Eventually, Protestantism intervened, making individuals responsible for their own salvation. In the new way of life that emerged, religion was democratized, and each person was charged with spiritual self-stewardship. Part of this shift involved a political credo. In Taylor’s précis: “We are all responsible for each other, and for society as a whole.”
Today, we tend to conceive the credo of social responsibility as an ethical idea, justifiable on secular grounds. Still, it remains tied to an inner, devotional imperative. We know that we accomplish little by reading the news, and sense that our infinite, tragic news feeds distort, rather than enhance, our picture of reality. Still, it feels wrong to outsource the work of salvation to Bill and Melinda Gates, and presumptuous to trust too much in the power of good works. Pessimism can be a form of penance, and of spiritual humility in a humanist age.
Pinker urges us to overcome these cultural, psychological, political, and spiritual biases, and to take a more objective view of the world. But human beings are not objective creatures. When social scientists write about life expectancy, educational attainment, nutrition, crime, and the other issues Pinker addresses, they often use the abbreviation Q.O.L., for “quality of life.” They use S.W.B. to refer to “subjective well-being”—the more elusive phenomenon of happiness, fulfillment, or life satisfaction. In “Citizen Kane,” Orson Welles’s media tycoon enjoys high Q.O.L. and low S.W.B. He is healthy, wealthy, and unhappy. The question is whether what befalls individuals might also befall societies. If so, life could be getting much better objectively, on the social scale, without getting all that much better subjectively, on the individual scale.
The most obvious way to tackle this question is to survey people from different societies. The annual World Happiness Report combines data from Gallup opinion surveys with economic and sociological studies; it finds that, in general, citizens of high-Q.O.L. countries (Finland, Norway, Canada, Germany) report higher levels of S.W.B. than citizens of low-Q.O.L. countries (Venezuela, Chad, Laos, Iraq). Look closely, though, and the story is more nuanced. Although economics shapes S.W.B., so do social and political factors: despite immense economic growth, Chinese citizens are no happier today than they were in 1990 (fraying social ties, created by rural-to-urban migration, may be to blame), while in many Latin-American countries people report higher S.W.B. than their otherwise low Q.O.L. predicts. (Latin-American respondents often cite their strong family bonds as a special source of happiness.)
In the United States, the two measures have diverged. Although per-capita income has more than doubled since 1972, Americans’ S.W.B. has stagnated or even declined. In a contribution to the 2018 World Happiness Report, the economist Jeffrey Sachs attributes this divergence to a public-health crisis centered on obesity, drug abuse, and depression, and to a growing disillusionment with business and government. From all this data, the picture is one of large-scale predictability and small-scale volatility. Thanks to broad improvements in quality of life, today’s children are likelier to be happier than their grandparents were. But within any shorter span of time—a decade, a generation, an electoral cycle—there’s no guarantee that S.W.B. won’t decline even as Q.O.L. continues to rise.
These metrics may reflect something fundamental about how we experience life. Many psychologists now subscribe to the “set point” theory of happiness, according to which mood is, to some extent, homeostatic: at first, our new cars, houses, or jobs make us happy, but eventually we adapt to them, returning to our “set points” and ending up roughly as happy or unhappy as we were before. Researchers say that we run on “hedonic treadmills”—we chase new sources of happiness as the old ones expire—and that our set points are largely immovable and determined by disposition. Some fundamental changes can affect our happiness in a lasting way—getting married, immigrating to a wealthy country, developing a drug addiction—but many life improvements are impermanent in character. Although food quality may have been worse in 1967, the pleasure of today’s better meals is intrinsically fleeting. More people survive heart attacks than in the past, but the relief of surviving wears off as one returns to the daily grind.
The set-point theory is dispiriting, since it implies limits to how happy progress can make us, but it also suggests that progress is more widespread than we feel it to be. This last conclusion, though, makes sense only if we define “progress” in a certain way. “Imagine Seema, an illiterate woman in a poor country who is village-bound, has lost half her children to disease, and will die at fifty, as do most of the people she knows,” Pinker writes:
Now imagine Sally, an educated person in a rich country who has visited several cities and national parks, has seen her children grow up, and will live to eighty, but is stuck in the lower middle class. It’s conceivable that Sally, demoralized by the conspicuous wealth she will never attain, is not particularly happy, and she might even be unhappier than Seema, who is grateful for small mercies. Yet it would be mad to suppose that Sally is not better off.
Pinker is right: Sally is better off. To say so, however, is to acknowledge that we can be better off without feeling that way—working two jobs to pay tuition and save for retirement, Sally still suffers—or worse off without knowing it. Progress is objective and impersonal, at least in part, and can unfold without making us happier. “The goal of progress,” Pinker concludes, “cannot be to increase happiness indefinitely, in the hope that more and more people will become more and more euphoric.” Quality of life is higher today, no matter what you think, and it was lower under Communism, no matter how you feel about those whole-night concerts and epic soccer games. A blissful existence in the Matrix wouldn’t count as progress. There’s more to life than subjective well-being.
In a book titled “The Optimism Gap: The I’m OK–They’re Not Syndrome and the Myth of American Decline,” from 1998, the public-policy reporter David Whitman cited statistics showing that, in nearly every domain of life—crime, pollution, health, income, happiness—Americans were optimistic about themselves but pessimistic about society as a whole. While believing that crime was rising in general, they congratulated themselves for living in neighborhoods that were mostly crime-free; convinced that the economy was getting worse, they remained confident about their own earning potential. Pinker, too, finds that people are afraid for civilization but hopeful about themselves. Certain that those around them are living lives of quiet desperation, they continue to predict increases in their own life satisfaction. But it seems that this optimism gap isn’t just inaccurate; it’s pretty much backward. The world, as an objective whole, has been getting better. It’s our individual experiences of life that are unlikely to improve. We should be optimistic about civilization but neutral about our own future happiness.
A final reason for doubting progress is the future, in all its terrifying potentiality. One of Pinker’s most persistent critics is the statistician and risk analyst Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the author of “The Black Swan,” “Fooled by Randomness,” and other explorations of uncertainty. For the past few years, in a relentless barrage of tweets and Facebook posts, Taleb has responded to Pinker’s optimism by distinguishing between “thin-tailed” historical trends—picture the trailing ends of a bell curve—which are likely to continue indefinitely, and “fat-tailed” ones, which retain their capacity to surprise. Pinker shows that, during the past century, per-capita deaths from fire have declined by ninety per cent in the United States. In Taleb’s view, this is a thin-tailed trend, since it’s the result of innovations, such as better materials and building codes, that are unlikely to reverse themselves. By contrast, the decline in deaths from terrorism—far more people were killed by terrorists in the nineteen-sixties and seventies—is a fat-tailed trend; as Taleb writes on Facebook, “one biological event can decimate the population.” Pessimists of the Taleb school argue that we underestimate the number of fat-tailed trends. In a review of “Enlightenment Now,” the theoretical computer scientist Scott Aaronson imagines a hypothetical book, published in 1923, about “the astonishing improvements in the condition of Europe’s Jews.” The authors of such a book, Aaronson writes, would have reassured themselves that “an insane number of things would need to go wrong simultaneously” for that progress to be reversed—which, needless to say, is what happened.
Maybe our views about progress depend on our time horizons. Charles C. Mann’s “The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow’s World” tells the stories of two researchers, William Vogt and Norman Borlaug, who occupied opposing sides of the twentieth-century debate about the human population. In Mann’s terms, Vogt was a “prophet”: he predicted that, unless global population growth could be slowed, worldwide famine would result. Borlaug was a “wizard,” who argued that innovations in agriculture would make it possible for farmers to feed everyone. In the event, Borlaug was right: the “Green Revolution,” which he spearheaded, dramatically increased crop yields and saved billions of lives. But the deeper debate between the two sides—“Cut back or produce more?”—persists, this time around climate change. Today, pessimistic prophets argue that radical conservation is the only way to avoid a climatic apocalypse, while optimistic wizards propose innovating our way out of the crisis, perhaps through geoengineering or the creation of new energy sources. Our species seems to face a fork in the road: “If a government persuades its citizenry to spend huge sums revamping offices, stores, and homes with the high-tech insulation and low-water-use plumbing urged by Prophets,” Mann writes, “the same citizenry will resist ponying up for Wizards’ new-design nuclear plants and monster desalination facilities.”
Mann thinks the wizard–prophet distinction reflects a fundamental biological reality. If bacteria are left to grow in a petri dish, they’ll multiply quickly, then consume all their resources and die. The same goes for all species adaptive enough to flourish unconstrained. At first, “the world is their petri dish,” Mann writes. “Their populations grow at a terrific rate; they take over large areas, engulfing their environment. . . . Then they hit a barrier. They drown in their own wastes. They starve from lack of food.” A biologist tells Mann that “it is the fate of every successful species to wipe itself out.”
Both wizards and prophets hope that we can break this pattern. Wizards exhort us to “soar beyond natural constraints” using technology. (Think of Elon Musk, with his solar roof tiles and spaceships.) Prophets implore us to reach, through conservation and political reform, a “steady-state accommodation” with nature. (“What the climate needs to avoid collapse is a contraction in humanity’s use of resources,” the activist Naomi Klein writes.) Both sides agree that progress of a general sort isn’t enough: unless we adopt a decisive and coherent survival strategy, we’ll become victims of our own success. “The Wizard and the Prophet” provides an unsettling coda to “Enlightenment Now.” Pinker could be right in the short term but wrong in the long term. Maybe the world is getting better, but not better enough, or in the right ways.
In the Middle Ages, painters used triptychs to sum up the state of the world. On the left, one might see our origins, in the Garden of Eden; in the center, ordinary, terrestrial life; on the right, the torments of Hell. Above it all, Christ floats in Heaven, surrounded by angels: our redemptive future. One longs for a modern equivalent—a data-driven version of Fra Angelico’s “Last Judgment” or Hieronymus Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights” equal to the contradictions of the human situation.
In “Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think,” the Swedish global-health statistician Hans Rosling, who wrote the book with his son and daughter-in-law, tries to find such a picture. Most depictions of the world, Rosling thinks, are either too optimistic or too pessimistic; if they don’t succumb to despair, they seem to look too quickly away from suffering. Rosling adopts a mantra—“Bad and better”—to avoid these extremes. “Think of the world as a premature baby in an incubator,” he suggests:
The baby’s health status is extremely bad, and her breathing, heart rate, and other important signs are tracked constantly so that changes for better or worse can quickly be seen. After a week, she is getting a lot better. On all the main measures, she is improving, but she still has to stay in the incubator because her health is still critical. Does it make sense to say that the infant’s situation is improving? Yes. Absolutely. Does it make sense to say it is bad? Yes, absolutely. Does saying “things are improving” imply that everything is fine, and we should all relax and not worry? No, not at all. Is it helpful to have to choose between bad and improving? Definitely not. It’s both. It’s both bad and better. Better, and bad, at the same time. . . . That is how we must think about the current state of the world.
Rosling’s image captures many of the perplexities of our collective situation. We desperately want the baby to survive. We also know that survival doesn’t guarantee happiness. The baby is struggling, and suffering, and will continue to do so; as a result, we’re more likely to be happy for her than she is to be happy for herself. (Pinker, similarly, is happier for us than we are.) It’s possible, moreover, that she’ll be saved only temporarily. No one is ever truly out of the woods.
In the meantime, the baby’s survival depends on the act of diagnosis. Until her ailments are identified, they can’t be cured. Problems and progress are inextricable, and the history of improvement is also the history of problem-discovery. Diagnosis, of course, is an art in itself; it’s possible to misunderstand problems, or to overstate them, and, in doing so, to make them worse. But a world in which no one complained—in which we only celebrated how good we have it—would be a world that never improved. The spirit of progress is also the spirit of discontent. ♦
Davy on Tue, 17th Jul 2018 1:34 pm
mm, I admire Putin and despise you ugly lying lefties. You have destroyed the integrity of liberalism. I am betting you blind lying lefties are going to be beaten like a drum next election. Russia deserves respect and further I would like to avoid NUK war so let’s get along with the Russians.
Davy on Tue, 17th Jul 2018 1:37 pm
boney juan, face me like a man instead of hiding behind your sock puppet.
MASTERMIND on Tue, 17th Jul 2018 1:46 pm
Davy
Take a beating? Trump lost the popular vote by over 3 million people..The only reason the conservaSHITS control the house and senate is due to cheating and illegal gerrymandering..
You are a Putin puppet Davy..Keep sucking the elites asshole you faggot..
And according to the economist magazine’s election models the dems have a 65% shot of taking control this November..I know you will deny this though because the economist is to sophisticated for your likes..
The blue wave is coming!
MASTERMIND on Tue, 17th Jul 2018 1:50 pm
Davy
You admire an authoritarian leader..
Now be a good sheep and go watch love island..
Davy on Tue, 17th Jul 2018 1:51 pm
mm, you are losing and digging your hole deeper. It is hilarious to watch. It will take a dumb kid like you time to figure it out. Maybe once you do you will grow up a little
MASTERMIND on Tue, 17th Jul 2018 2:11 pm
Davy
If I could I would have you hanged for treason..You low brow unenlightened moron..
JuanP on Tue, 17th Jul 2018 2:11 pm
Delusional Davy “You are showing how arrogant and lifeless your brain is. You are showing your empty life …”
Projecting again, Exceptionalist? You are such a pathetic loser.
JuanP on Tue, 17th Jul 2018 2:16 pm
Delusional Davy “boney juan, face me like a man instead of hiding behind …”
Your obsession with my imaginary sock puppets is one of your funniest projections, Exceptionalist! LOL!
GregT on Tue, 17th Jul 2018 2:20 pm
“boney juan, face me like a man instead of hiding behind your sock puppet.”
Yet another paranoid delusion.
Get professional help Davy.
GregT on Tue, 17th Jul 2018 2:24 pm
“Maybe once you do you will grow up a little”
You’re projecting again Davy.
You would be the only poster on this forum who routinely acts out like a spoiled rotten little child.
MASTERMIND on Tue, 17th Jul 2018 2:25 pm
Davy
We got you fascist on the run..
‘Proud Boys’ run out of LA bar by democratic socialists calling them ‘fascist’
http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/397177-proud-boys-group-run-out-of-la-bar-by-democratic-socialists-calling
Davy on Tue, 17th Jul 2018 2:26 pm
Greggie Juan, you guys are nothing but noise lately. You are afraid of being moderated because you end up looking stupid. This happens to both of you the other day. Stalking and pricking is noise making. Try being intelligent and maybe you can avoid my neutering you.
JuanP on Tue, 17th Jul 2018 2:29 pm
Delusional Davy “Mr. Noise, doing his usual pricking routine with absolutely nothing to say.”
An absolutely fascinating comment by the board’s moderator and most valuable contributor.
Anonymouse1 on Tue, 17th Jul 2018 2:32 pm
Having faux arguments with your own sock puppet for all see, is a deep enough hole, dont you think exceptionlturd?
Besides you (and nonytard of course), no one uses sock puppets, and creates ‘friends’ to help you fling your digital poo around. At least nonytard uses his MANY sock puppets in the convention way, for back slapping and thumbing up his own stupid comments.
You, however, have gone off the rails and now have these ‘fights’, with your own sock. How messed up is that delusionist?
GregT on Tue, 17th Jul 2018 2:37 pm
“Try being intelligent and maybe you can avoid my neutering you.”
Five long years of your imaginary moderating and neutering, that hasn’t accomplished a single thing.
Still not quite registering yet Davy?
As thick as a brick, and dumber than a sack of hammers.
JuanP on Tue, 17th Jul 2018 2:40 pm
Delusional Davy “… you guys are nothing but noise lately. You are afraid of being moderated because you end up looking stupid.”
Please moderate and neuter me some more, Exceptionalist. I can’t get enough of you, baby! ROFLMFAO! You are the sorriest excuse for a human being I’ve ever met. What a sad fuck you are, Davy!
Cloggie on Tue, 17th Jul 2018 2:49 pm
Clogg
Renewable’s can’t replace oil because oil is used for transportation, and renewable s are used for electricity..
You are energy illiterate..
Now back to reality…
https://cleantechnica.com/2018/07/17/renewables-provided-45-8-of-spains-electricity-needs-for-first-half-of-2018/
Renewables Provided 45.8% Of Spain’s Electricity Needs For First Half Of 2018
(record)
https://cleantechnica.com/2018/07/17/home-energy-storage-system-installations-hit-record-high-in-us/
Home Energy Storage System Installations Hit Record High In US
26% market growth
(“yabut, we are kollapsing!”.lol)
Not sure if this makes Antius happy, but here it is anyway:
https://cleantechnica.com/2018/07/17/new-poll-shows-majority-of-brits-support-onshore-wind-power/
New Poll Shows Majority Of Brits Support Onshore Wind Power
https://cleantechnica.com/2018/07/17/eu-china-sign-joint-statement-increasing-cooperation-on-climate-change-clean-energy/
EU & China Sign Joint Statement Increasing Cooperation On Climate Change & Clean Energy
https://cleantechnica.com/2018/07/17/more-energy-storage-looming-for-wind-power/
More Energy Storage Looming For Wind Power
Cost windpower came down with 32% between 2015-2016. It could fall with another 36% between 2018-2022
lithium-ion batteries could hit the $100 per kilowatt-hour mark in 2018
MASTERMIND on Tue, 17th Jul 2018 2:56 pm
Clogg
You just proved my argument..And your sources are biased and have conflicts of interest with the tech industry..
MASTERMIND on Tue, 17th Jul 2018 3:14 pm
Clog
IEA warns of ‘worrying trend’ as global investment in renewables falls
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/jul/17/iea-warns-of-worrying-trend-as-global-investment-in-renewables-falls
The Jig is up! People are starting to realize renewables are a false hope..
Cloggie on Tue, 17th Jul 2018 3:14 pm
https://voiceofeurope.com/2018/07/italy-warns-eu-we-are-no-longer-the-refugee-camp-of-the-world/
Millimind, our local village idiot, must see his world view collapse:
SOUTHERN EUROPE – Italy warns EU: ‘We are no longer the refugee camp of the world’
Merkel no longer dominates Europe, nobody listens to this witch anymore. Salvini and Orban determine the political show now.
“The next goal of stopping once and for all the mafia of human trafficking, will be to bring the migrants back to their places of origin,” Salvini said.
Soros is mega-out. Trump, Putin, Salvini, Orban, le Pen and others are the future.
The 20th century was the communist century.
The 21st century will be more like the 19th century: conservative, if not reactionary, if not archaic.
Cloggie on Tue, 17th Jul 2018 3:24 pm
Millimind is fascinated by Taylor Swift, which is understandable. But the love isn’t exactly mutual:
http://www.fpp.co.uk/online/images/Taylor-Swift-1.jpg
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/dec/11/taylor-swift-an-obnoxious-nazi-barbie-writes-camille-paglia
MASTERMIND on Tue, 17th Jul 2018 3:51 pm
Clogg
without the rule of law in place..anything will go..
GetAVasectomyAndLetTheHumanSpecieDie on Tue, 17th Jul 2018 4:27 pm
I would agree with Cloggie. It seems that the wind has turned and white people no longer tolerate to be called racist and no longer tolerate to hear other people wishing white extinction. Other skin color better to take note of white people change of behavior.
White man and woman are fed up to be told that we deserve extinction just because we are successful and more intelligent then other skin colors.
World leader should also not that. Ontario new prime minister what to stop illegal immigration to Canada and he wants to take care of Canadians first.
More and more white women seems to be fed up with pathetic beta cuck male like Trudeau. I am expecting a swing back from white women toward more masculine and violent man.
These are my observation and opinions. Take it of leave it
Davy on Tue, 17th Jul 2018 4:37 pm
Asperger, greggie, and Boney Juan, I am still waiting on a demonstration of intelligence. You dumbasses have said absolutely nothing yet today. That is par for the course because most days are the same stalking and pricking noise. Disgusting
JuanP on Tue, 17th Jul 2018 4:42 pm
Delusional Davy “I am still waiting on a demonstration of intelligence. You dumbasses have said absolutely nothing yet today”
Another awesome contribution by the board’s moderator, qualifier, and neutering specialist! LOL! Keep it up, Davey boy! You are doing a great job of balancing things here! ROFLMFAO! You sad, sad insignificant thing!
JuanP on Tue, 17th Jul 2018 4:45 pm
Delusional Davy “Disgusting”
Projecting again, Exceptionalist? What will you call me next? Little dick? You are completely mentally stuck in early childhood. I think your mommy didn’t love you enough to breastfeed you; that would explain a lot.
GregT on Tue, 17th Jul 2018 5:11 pm
“You dumbasses have said absolutely nothing yet today.”
A perfectly normal comment, to be expected from a yappy, spoiled, pre-teenaged brat.
Until you learn to extend to others here Davy boy, including myself, the most basic level of common courtesy and respect, this does not stop, ever.
Your choice.
MASTERMIND on Tue, 17th Jul 2018 5:14 pm
GetAVasectomyAndLetTheHumanSpecieDie
Actually Asians are the most intelligent..
GregT on Tue, 17th Jul 2018 5:30 pm
“More and more white women seems to be fed up with pathetic beta cuck male like Trudeau.”
Actually, it was white women that made up the majority of his voter base. I haven’t spoken with one white male who admitted to voting for him.
MASTERMIND on Tue, 17th Jul 2018 5:40 pm
Clog
There is no future for Europe..The ballot box can’t bring you out of your depression and save you from the upcoming collapse..
MASTERMIND on Tue, 17th Jul 2018 5:46 pm
After Putin summit outrage, Trump says he accepts finding that Russia meddled
https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/congress-rebukes-trump-embrace-of-putin-1.4750125
Welcome aboard Mr Trump! The deep state globalist for the win!
HAHA clogg..I told you that you cant win a battle against the elites!
Anonymouse1 on Tue, 17th Jul 2018 5:47 pm
Well, technically, not one person voted for true-dough, male or otherwise, since you have just have to vote enough neo-liberaltards across the country to get him in. Like, what…35% give or take? Demockracy, Canadian style. Got to love a country where you can be form a ‘majority’ government with ~ 1/3 of the popular vote.
I am sure he got a fair share of the female vote during the leadership convention though.
But I get your meaning. I dont even bother voting in this country anymore, certainly at the federal level. A complete waste of time and energy. Still not sure if it has sunk into certain segments of population heads yet, that ‘we’ just replaced the odious stephen harper, with a younger, slimmer, and more media friendly, stephen harper.
MASTERMIND on Tue, 17th Jul 2018 6:11 pm
Annnoymouse
You got that right winger Rob Ford now? That big lard ass should do well for late stage capitalism..
LMFAO
Antius on Tue, 17th Jul 2018 6:13 pm
Yesterday, I brought up the concept of the ‘Electron Economy’. This is an energy economy, in which the majority of energy consumption is electricity; specifically, grid based electricity, in which electrical generators are directly coupled to consumers through the electric grid, without the need for energy storage.
http://peakoil.com/alternative-energy/retiring-worn-out-wind-turbines-could-cost-billions-that-nobody-has
The overwhelming advantage of this arrangement is excellent energy efficiency and cost effectiveness. We would provide heating using electric heat pumps and heating elements. Motive power will be provided by electric motors, which will be, so far as possible, directly coupled to the grid. For transport this would require overhead wires or electrified rails at ground level. 1 unit of electric power could displace 4 units of petroleum (80-90% efficient, versus 20-25%).
The electron economy would work best with a dependable, baseload power source like nuclear power, but I believe it could be made to work using wind and solar power as well. The key achievement that would make a solar/wind electron economy an affordable prospect, would be to use these sources to power the economy without the need for large scale electricity storage and with only minimal backup plants. This ensures that capital costs are kept to a minimum. I believe that this is achievable.
The final two charts in the link below, shows total renewable electricity generation for the UK for the past 18 months.
http://gridwatch.co.uk/Renewables
Notice that although the output is variable, these sources reliably produced 8% of UK electricity; they produced 16% with some disruptions; and only occasionally exceeded 25%.
I therefore propose that one way of dealing with the intermittency problem, is to divide consumers into priority groups.
Some groups can function as slew loads, which absorb maybe a third of total renewable power – basically the top 50% of the height of the peaks in the gridwatch figures. This might include the use of electric power for heating, given that heat can be stored in large tanks and other thermal masses. It might also include industrial processes such as grinding and maybe thinks like cement and brick manufacture, which are thermal processes that can be configured into batch processes.
The next group would be consumers for which occasional disruptions might be tolerable. This includes most manufacturers, service industries, as well as domestic.
Finally, there will be some processes that require highly reliable power, such as transport and some manufacturing processes where a power disruption could take hours to reverse or even cause physical damage to equipment.
Next step: how do we configure our renewables to minimise power disruptions? From the gridwatch charts it would appear that solar output tends to be greatest when wind is low. A spread of investment across different types of renewables across a wide geographic area further helps to reduce whole-system intermittency. That is why tidal stream, hydro and wave power may be useful, even though they appear to be smaller opportunities.
Next: I reference an article discussing wind capacity factor produced by Euan Mearns.
http://euanmearns.com/uk-offshore-wind-capacity-factors-a-semi-statistical-analysis/
‘The average capacity factor at 28 operating UK offshore wind farms is 33.6% (most recent 12-month average) and 34.5% (lifetime), increasing to 36.1% and 37.5% when four demonstration projects are discarded.’
Mearns uncovers a linear relationship between offshore wind turbine hub height and capacity factor (see Figure 9). Following the curve would indicate that capacity factor reaches 50% at hub height 220m and 60% at 250m. This is extremely important, because it suggests not only that larger offshore turbines generate for more hours closer to their peak output, but also, that lulls in generation are both less common and probably not as deep. This means that it makes a lot of sense building turbines as large as physically possible. This remains the case even if we hit diseconomies of scale, because improved capacity factor allows us to reduce the number of backup plants needed, which is a huge reduction in capital and operating costs. If we can produce 100MW turbines with hub heights of 600m say, then it may make sense if capacity factors keep improving.
Finally, we may build a limited number of backup power plants to reduce the length and frequency of power outages to important customer sets. If wind capacity factors are high enough, then it should be possible to do this using open cycle gas turbines. These are relatively inefficient, but are cheap to build and do not require constant manning. This makes them useful for providing relatively infrequent but high power output. They could use natural gas, liquid fuels or maybe compressed biogas, given that total energy production per year would be modest.
In summary, a renewable electron economy could support a high industrial society. The key is carefully balancing the needs for reliability against cost for each consumers set.
twocats on Tue, 17th Jul 2018 6:59 pm
sounds like a command economy – i love it
MASTERMIND on Tue, 17th Jul 2018 7:07 pm
Trade war danger: IMF warns of global recession
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/07/trade-war-danger-imf-warns-global-recession-180717075410793.html
MASTERMIND on Tue, 17th Jul 2018 7:15 pm
Trump’s trade war is self defeating..
Davy on Tue, 17th Jul 2018 8:11 pm
Great comment Antius and another one I have saved to my notes. The aspects of it I like are the use tiering to better allow intermittency. It seems going forward once renewables break through a point where intermittency is a serious issue then options for addressing intermittency will be needed. The most talked about option is storage strategies but your comment points to tiering use to allow intermittency issues less disruption in the first place thereby lowering the high capital cost of storage and backup systems. You also talk about new systems of heating and transport that can be incorporated.
The biggest issue is behavior. This will need behavioral changes from individuals as well as society as a whole. This means market based capitalism will have to be adapted. It means individuals will have to alter their behavior. It appears the technology is there it is just a matter of behavioral changes. This may be the hardest of the challenges. Our first problem is many do not agree that we even need to change what we are doing. Second issue is the Gini factor. If we have large social inequality it will be difficult to make this kind of adapted system work. Society seems to be increasing social inequality not deceasing it. Education and motivation are required and this is difficult when inequality is high. Poor people do not educate well. Those who are not part of the economy will not have the incentive to cooperate in what is a social demand management effort. If we are going to live with intermittency then we are going to have to practice demand management. This means adapted behavior and alternative living arrangements. I think this is the biggest question for us because it appears the technology is there and the systematic arrangement of that technology is understood. The problem is human behavior.
Cloggie on Tue, 17th Jul 2018 8:23 pm
“In summary, a renewable electron economy could support a high industrial society. The key is carefully balancing the needs for reliability against cost for each consumers set.”
The gems Simon was refering to.
MASTERMIND on Tue, 17th Jul 2018 8:34 pm
Davy
Humans have no control over their behavior..They are influenced by the environment and genetics..there is no free will..see the science of behaviorism ie Skinner, Pavlov, Watson..
MASTERMIND on Tue, 17th Jul 2018 9:10 pm
Bernie Sanders: Trump’s economy is great for billionaires, not for working families
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/07/17/bernie-sanders-donald-trump-economy-jobs-income-employment-column/782404002/
Makati1 on Tue, 17th Jul 2018 9:52 pm
Food for thought: Pun intended…
““The world has enough for every man’s need, but not enough for every man’s greed.” – Gandhi
Cloggie on Wed, 18th Jul 2018 1:24 am
Narrow escape for Theresa May and her soft-Brexit plan:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5961727/May-meets-Cabinet-faces-fresh-Brexit-threat-Remainer-Tories.html
Her plan would be the least destructive.
Britain would be freed from the white world (lol) without martial scenes as a result of a no deal Brexit, like closing of the Tunnel, capturing Gibraltar and holiday makers stuck on their island and British entrepreneurs stuck with 50% of their output and no buyers and facing ruin.
And Europe would not have a precedent for others to follow either. We still get net money from Britain with which we can prop up Eastern Europe, the non-political correct part of Europe, that is getting more important for the survival of European man world-wide with every passing day.
Go for it, Theresa.
Makati1 on Wed, 18th Jul 2018 1:27 am
“Russia Liquidates Its US Treasury Holdings”
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-07-17/russia-liquidates-its-us-treasury-holdings
Smart! You don’t keep your money where it can be used as a hostage. That is why many countries are taking their gold out of the Us. It is too much like the mafia. lol
Cloggie on Wed, 18th Jul 2018 1:37 am
Trump is now facing an “outrage” at home, even in “his own” Republican Party for aiming at getting along with Russia. The establishment media even call him a traitor:
http://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/news-donald-trump-wladimir-putin-russland-nelson-mandela-ard-a-1218759.html
Make no mistake, the US Anglo-Zionist establishment has not given up on the dream of conquering the entire world. Forget about deceptive signals like these:
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-09-27/america-s-new-world-order-is-officially-dead
They are not spending 50% of the global “defense” budget for nothing and they are just waiting for the opportunity to use their arsenal.
The shit will hit the proverbial fan on the very moment that Trump will leave office, for instance when he gets toppled, killed, impeached, whatever.
Every populist European, every Russian, every Chinese and every Muslim should know that WW3 is inevitable and that Trump is a Godsend giving Eurasia time to prepare for the inevitable.
The strategy of Washington is to try to capture Russia first and finally force China on its knees.
The battle will be between the leftist globalists (“communists”), led by the koshers like millimind and his “elders”, who want to abolish borders and races and mix everything, all united under the (((FED-dollar))). And on the other hand the right-wing identitarians, who want to keep a compartmentalized world, including borders and keep different people in different territories.
That is what is at stake. Let’s bring peace to Washington. A Carthaginian Peace.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carthaginian_peace
DerHundistLos on Wed, 18th Jul 2018 4:13 am
The forces of evil, greed, and destruction are no match for the natural world. We know how this ends…. one day we will have broken that last essential link in the chain of life that then causes the entire system to implode on itself. Despite this gift of knowledge nothing changes, instead we see an acceleration of BAU. Perhaps we need to recognize that there’s not a damn thing we can do to change the trajectory of our suicidal civilization so stop posting and worrying.
“In Memoriam
As our wildlife and ecosystems collapse, remembering is a radical act.
It felt as disorientating as forgetting my pin number. I stared at the caterpillar, unable to attach a name to it. I don’t think my mental powers are fading: I still possess an eerie capacity to recall facts and figures and memorise long screeds of text. This is a specific loss. As a child and young adult, I delighted in being able to identify almost any wild plant or animal. And now it has gone. This ability has shrivelled from disuse: I can no longer identify them because I can no longer find them.
Perhaps this forgetfulness is protective. I have been averting my eyes. Because I cannot bear to see what we have done to nature, I no longer see nature itself. Otherwise, the speed of loss would be unendurable. The collapse can be witnessed from one year to the next. The swift decline of the swift (down 25% in five years) is marked by the loss of the wild screams that, until very recently, filled the skies above my house. My ambition to see the seabird colonies of the Shetlands and St Kilda has been replaced by the intention never to visit those islands during the breeding season: I could not bear to see the empty cliffs, whose populations have crashed by some 90% this century.
I have lived long enough to witness the vanishing of wild mammals, butterflies, mayflies, songbirds and fish that I once feared my grandchildren would experience: it has all happened faster than even the pessimists predicted. Walking in the countryside or snorkelling in the sea is now as painful to me as an art lover would find her visits to a gallery, if on every occasion another Old Master had been cut from its frame.
The cause of this acceleration is no mystery. The United Nations reports that our use of natural resources has tripled in 40 years. The great expansion of mining, logging, meat production and industrial fishing is cleansing the planet of its wild places and natural wonders. What economists proclaim as progress, ecologists recognise as ruin.
This is what has driven the quadrupling of oceanic dead zones since 1950; the “biological annihilation” represented by the astonishing collapse of vertebrate populations; the rush to carve up the last intact forests; the vanishing of coral reefs, glaciers and sea ice; the shrinkage of lakes, the drainage of wetlands. The living world is dying of consumption.
We have a fatal weakness: a failure to perceive incremental change. As natural systems shift from one state to another, we almost immediately forget what we have lost. I have to make a determined effort to remember what I saw in my youth. Could it really be true that every patch of nettles, at this time of year, was reamed with caterpillar holes? That flycatchers were so common I scarcely gave them a second glance? That the rivers, around the autumn equinox, were almost black with eels?
Others seem oblivious. When I have criticised current practice, farmers have sent me images of verdant monocultures of perennial rye grass, with the message “look at this and try telling me we don’t look after nature”. It’s green, but it’s about as ecologically rich as an airport runway. One of my readers, Michael Groves, records the shift he has seen in the field beside his house, where the grass, that used to be cut for hay, is now cut for silage. Watching the cutters being driven at great speed across the field, he realised that any remaining wildlife would be shredded. Soon afterwards, he saw a roe deer standing in the mown grass. She stayed throughout the day and the following night. When he went to investigate, he found her fawn, its legs amputated. “I felt sickened, angry and powerless … how long had it taken to die?”. That “grass-fed meat” the magazines and restaurants fetishise? This is the reality.
When our memories are wiped as clean as the land, we fail to demand its restoration. Our forgetting is a gift to industrial lobby groups and the governments that serve them. Over the past few months, I have been told repeatedly that the environment secretary, Michael Gove, gets it. I have said so myself: he genuinely seems to understand what the problems are and what needs to be done. Unfortunately, he doesn’t do it.
He cannot be blamed for all of the fiascos to which he has put his name. The 25-year plan for nature was, it seems, gutted by the Prime Minister’s office. The environmental watchdog he proposed was defanged by the Treasury (it has subsequently been lent some dentures by Parliament). Other failures are all his own work. In response to lobbying from sheep farmers, he has allowed ravens, a highly intelligent and long-lived species just beginning to recover from centuries of persecution, to be killed once more. There are 24 million sheep in this country and 7400 pairs of ravens. Why must all other species give way to the white plague?
Responding to complaints that most of our national parks are wildlife deserts, Gove set up a commission to review them. But governments choose their conclusions in advance, through the appointments they make. A more dismal, backward-looking and uninspiring panel would be hard to find: not one of its members, as far as I can tell, has expressed a desire for significant change in our national parks, and most of them, if their past statements are anything to go by, are determined to keep them in their sheepwrecked and grouse-trashed state.
Now the lobbyists demand a New Zealand settlement for farming after Brexit: deregulated, upscaled, hostile to both wildlife and the human eye. If they get their way, no landscape, however treasured, will be safe from broiler sheds and mega-dairy units, no river protected from run-off and pollution, no songbird saved from local extinction. The merger between Bayer and Monsanto brings together the manufacturer of the world’s most lethal pesticides with the manufacturer of the world’s most lethal herbicides. Already the concentrated power of these behemoths is a hazard to democracy; together they threaten both political and ecological disaster. Labour’s environment team have scarcely a word to say about any of it. Similarly, the big conservation groups, as usual, have gone missing in inaction.
We forget even our own histories. We fail to recall, for example, that the Dower report, published in 1945, envisaged wilder national parks than we now possess, and that the conservation white paper the government issued in 1947 called for the kind of large-scale protection that is considered edgy and innovative today. Remembering is a radical act.
That caterpillar, by the way, was a six spot burnet: the larva of a stunning iridescent black and pink moth that once populated my neighbourhood and my mind. I will not allow myself to forget again: I will work to recover the knowledge I have lost. For I now see that without the power of memory, we cannot hope to defend the world we love.
http://www.monbiot.com“
JuanP on Wed, 18th Jul 2018 5:10 am
It is absolutely ridiculous that Trump is getting hell for talking to Putin. This can’t end well. How can Americans be so self destructive?
Makati1 on Wed, 18th Jul 2018 5:18 am
Juan, many Americans are brainwashed to believe all of the bullshit the government dishes out 24/7/365. Those who get out of the country for a long period of time have a chance to see thru the propaganda. Most Americans never leave the country or even get 500 miles from their home.
Davy on Wed, 18th Jul 2018 5:26 am
3rd world, you are a senior living on a small social security stippen in Intifada, P’s. You don’t go anywhere either and your hand is not on the heart beat of Asia. You are in your little cocoon of an emotional agenda of hate and resentment. Juan and grehggie just enable you and make you feel like you are special.
Makati1 on Wed, 18th Jul 2018 6:01 am
Dream on Davy. You have NO idea of where and how I live here. None. Just your delusional fantasies. You are not even a good stalker. Too obvious. And stupid to boot.
I would not give actual info on the internet of where I live. I’m not stupid. I do live in the Ps. That is as close to giving my location as I will ever get. The IRS and S.S. know my address, but you never will. Oh, and I am about five hours outside of Manila by bus. True or false? LOL
YOU are in a “little cocoon of an emotional agenda of hate and resentment”. YOU are the one with arrogant exceptionalism. You are the one with delusions.
Look in the mirror, hypocrite Davy. You won’t like what you see if you are honest with yourself. A frustrated old man approaching 60 and friendless, with a family that hates you.