Tiresia

Thanks for your perspective, I'm glad there are people like you who feel free to openly articulate in support of it. It's sad people are downvoting as disagreement, because I can't imagine them downvoting out of a good faith belief you're not contributing.

A) When the state owns the company, being "non-profit" is just a matter of accounting. And Uber wasn't a public service back when they were operating at a loss. The power structure is far more important, and when "the benefit of the Chinese people" is decided top-down through nonrepresentative means, that's not socialism even if you trust the dictator/oligarchy/overlord/etc. to play nice.

I am genuinely glad your government has given you ample housing, but that doesn't make your relation less one of being owned and managed. (not to say the west is better, just that China isn't good enough either).

B&D) The USSR is one nation, and a centrally industrialized dictatorship at that. As a point of scientific process, how are they supposed to have definitively proven wasteful capitalism is necessary as you claim? Even if they genuinely attempted degrowth, that's just one data point or approach. Different systems that fall under the same bucket can fail or succeed depending on more fine-grained specifics.

Also, the USSR slaughtered millions of small-scale farmers (so-called Kulaks, who happened to largely be Ukrainian) to make way for their industrial megafarms. They were not an example of trying degrowth, they were an example of an industrial centralized dictatorship being embargoed by most of the world.

Your point of not being crushed by the US is well-taken, and maybe Nixon did make an offer China could not refuse at the time. But I think that time has been over for the past 10-20 years. China can defend itself, and even if the military-industrial complex needs mass production to stay on par with the west that does not need to apply to the rest of the economy.

C) Take it from someone who lives in a mature and "prosperous" nation. The fruits of capitalist-style growth suck balls. You're not giving people a better life by building their industrial/living infastructure wrong initially, you're taking them away from family and craft and friendship. All things that threaten those in power, by the way

If you have time, look up Marx' description of societal alienation. He puts it better than I could. And feel free to ask me to look stuff up to.

China has the opportunity to build an economy that degrows from consumption patterns that assume a far lower level of industrialization.

It's sad that in their state capitalist philosophy of centralizing power over the means of production, they are still building a lot of inefficient consumerist infrastructure. Without that, the target green capacity could be a lot lower and much easier to achieve.

It is very impressive though that they could hit carbon neutrality only 10 years after the nations that outsourced their carbon-spewing industries to them while staying state capitalist. They're definitely doing a better job than the US, though the EU is probably doing better still.

Maybe I'm reading too much into this, but this kind of sounds like a technofascist trial balloon to push for the privatization of the US military. The implication being

Why can't our nation's air industry not simply buy the right to fly through no-fly zones? This is deep state oppression curtailing YOUR freedoms to go where-ever you please. If we just privatize military research and production it will be more productive (SpaceX is better than NASA) and American (a big state is communist; those military officers that don't want to invade Canada are traitors), and people can fly over SpaceX's latest acquisition Area 51X if they buy the rights.

Project 2025 was not written by Trump even if he is the executor/scapegoat. Smart people exist and work for the politicians, shareholders and lobbyists that shape current US policy. And trial balloons don't need to be cleverly worked out, in the era of Trump you can just throw stuff at the wall, see what sticks, and pay private media to not make a story out of the rest. There's a good chance this will come to nothing, but why wouldn't a petty technocrat try to ingratiate himself to the new technofascist regime by offering a win-win.

anywhere

Fun fact: there are places that are not the United States.

Wouldn't that cause it to melt faster?

The better the top layer is insulated, the less heat from sunlight dissipates into the cold glacier and stone beneath. This means that the same amount of absorbed heat brings more of the top layer to the melting point than in a less insulated situation. Once the snow has melted it will go back to the old rate, but 22 days of delay would be optimistic.

Assuming the albedo is the same. If the glaciers are grey from dust and debris, then fresh snow will probably increase the reflectivity, which means less sunlight is absorbed as heat, which would cause the snow to last longer. So maybe 22 days of delay would be pessimistic. Or the effects might cancel out.

I don't know if the infrared and air-to-material heat conduction properties of glacier ice and snow are very different. It's probably less significant than albedo and insulation.

So my guess as an amateur physics grad is that during a heat wave (where air-to-material conduction is the primary driver), snow would melt faster than glacier ice, while during a typical preindustrial arctic early spring (where absorption of sunlight is the primary driver) snow would melt slower than glacier ice.

tl;dr: climate science hard

The important question is what you (yes, you, the person reading this) are going to do.

Climate change has made farming more difficult and expensive, which has lead to more subsidies, which has to be expressed as taxes and government loans, which is distributed over the entirety of right-wingers cutting federal expenses and centrists failing to replace them. The same story holds true for other industries, whether it's the cost to keep sweatshop workers from dying, the cost to grow cotton, the cost to replace services destroyed by forest fires or hurricanes or floods, etc. Capitalism finds alternative routes, but these always cost more. This directly affects your quality of life, but in a distributed stochastic way that you can't directly point to.

So maybe you've suffered from longer waiting periods in the justice system, maybe you're annoyed that inflation has wiped out a considerable portion of your purchasing power (whether capital or income), maybe a lack of infrastructure maintenance has caused potholes or train delays, maybe you could have gotten a well-paying job as a high speed rail engineer or some other forward-looking government project that was never funded, maybe you got food poisoning because FDA checks got cut, maybe the covid restrictions could have stayed in effect longer and someone you know wouldn't have gotten sick or died.

It's like a cruise ship that is taking on water, with all the ship's engineers focused on keeping the ship as stable and upright as possible rather than patching the hole or bailing out the water. They work harder and harder until at some point not even the full might of our regulations and charity and hoarded resources are able to keep it steady. And then everything goes wrong at once.

If your city has N homeless people, the N best places to sleep will be occupied by homeless people. Crazy how most cities will choose to make everyone uncomfortable because they would rather see a homeless person sleep in the gutter than seeing them sleep on a bench or not seeing them because they have the human right of indoor shelter.

Is that advice about how it would be ideal to have a professional eyewash station pumping tens of liters past your eyes? Or is actually specialized for street medicine where you're lucky if you have more than 3 litres available?

It's easy for medical professionals to speak about idealized circumstances that don't actually apply to you or to focus overly much on what little they do know, especially once you leave the narrow range of high-status medical problems.

If you look at the chemical safety data sheet of tear gas and compare it to the components of antacids (one and two), you'll find that it is more dangerous to have tear gas in your eyes than it is to have pure antacid powder in your eyes. Wikipedia lists the safe exposure for tear gas as 100 times lower than the safe exposure for antacid, with tear gas being able to cause scarring in the lungs while antacid merely causes irritation if inhaled.

Note that in those safety data sheets, the answer for eye exposure in all cases is several minutes of rinsing with fresh water. That means tens of liters of water per person, which is simply infeasible in practice. So our goal is not to remove irritants completely, but to reduce the concentration of dangerous chemicals in your eyes as much as you will likely be able to manage in the next hour.

Antacid chemically neutralizes tear gas. If applied in the right dose, that can reduce concentration of chemical irritants to far lower than an amount of water you can reasonably carry with you. If applied in excess, you need to apply a decent amount for it to be more dangerous than tear gas, and as long as the end result isn't as bad you can follow it up with a rinse with water and still end up ahead.

As long as that sophistication is geared towards reaching capitalist targets, all it does is enable them to ruin the land through "tragedies of the commons" faster.

Whether that's desertification because you're pumping up more groundwater than rain can replenish, nitrates continuing to exist after they leave your land, pesticides giving your customers cancer, insecticides causing a collapse of pollinator populations you rely on for crop yields, crop pandemics due to a lack of genetic diversity, or something else, modern capitalist farmers have a lot of fancy tools for destroying the planet and leaving society vulnerable to starvation.

People can adapt, things just aren't bad enough yet to get them to. There's still the illusion many people convince themselves of that everything is fine. When that illusion is incompatible with survival, people will change.

If the weather isn't survivable for long periods, we can build underground shelters. If there are shortages of food and water and home gardens die, we can build storerooms and greenhouses (perhaps underground with artificial lighting) and wastewater recycling. Use wind power (or solar, if the panels can withstand the weather) for electricity to grow the food, recycle as much as you can, and spend any excess labor doing what you can to improve the chances for life on the surface to recover. It sounds terrible compared to our current luxury, but societies have lived (and had kids) through worse.

If you don't want to bring children into a world comparable in quality of life to a 13th century medieval European city, okay. But know that if there is a future, it will be because some people did have children. (Alongside lots of other important reasons).

Economic sustainability has almost nothing to do with population size. The vast amount of unsustainability comes from wasteful consumerism. Furniture that lasts years instead of centuries, clothes that last months instead of decades, holidays 10,000 km away instead of 1 km away, single-use plastics for every single thing, etc.

People that live within an ecosystem have net negative emissions if they care to put in the effort. Every person that exists can live and work to make things better, so how can it be a disadvantage to have more of them?

There is a point when every bit of nature has a steward tending to its development/survival/recovery closely enough that another person won't be a net ecological benefit, but with a global population density of one person per two hectares we're not there yet.