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.
Tiresia
joined 8 months ago
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.
You're right that we need to fight, but we will grow old and die before we've returned the world to a state our children deserve to live in. I don't mean to diminish our duty, but to say that creating the next generation of people to continue that fight is part of that duty. Not for our children's sake, but hopefully for our great grandchildren and every generation afterwards.
Despite what capitalism would have you believe, humans are part of nature. With the same effort that has allowed us to destroy nature faster than any other species, we can maintain or restore balance better than any other species. It makes as much sense to argue against the next generation of humans to "restore the ecosystem" as it makes sense to argue against the next generation of bees.
Let them call us, those born in the 20th century, the worst people to have ever existed. It's not far from the truth. But why let that stop us from doing the right thing: giving birth to them so they can fix this mess for future generations or die trying? Why let our shame deny the ecosystem the best chance at recovery?
A Traditional City Primer (and how modern cities are utterly broken, and even New Urbanism doesn't fix the core issue)
In the medieval city center I grew up in, there are market streets that are 6-10m wide, which are accessible for utility and delivery vehicles in the early morning. All the cars come and go before 9 AM, after which the area is pedestrianized. The market street can then be used for restaurant seating, public gatherings, market stalls, or just a spacious boulevard.
Residential streets are narrower, but still wide enough for one-way car traffic plus pedestrians (cyclists needed to dismount or go around). Utility and delivery vehicles can use these streets, blocking them for other vehicles while they're unloading, but since pedestrians and cyclists can pass it doesn't disrupt people from going about their day.
Ultimately the delivery vehicles do go to dedicated car roads, a two-lane 50 km/h ring roughly 1 kilometer in diameter around the medieval city, but that means you can walk to 3000 people's houses, as well as markets and restaurants and schools for tens of thousands of people, without crossing a car street.
This is unlikely to be sufficient to explain the spike in global sea surface temperature in recent weeks, which is around 0.2C above the prior record for this time of year.
- the article
According to the article, the drop in SO2 emissions may explain 0.02-0.035 degrees of warming in 2023, and even when it has all phased out of the atmosphere it'll be 0.03-0.06 degrees of warming.
As the representative of the ethics committee that gave the advice that was summarised into the headline we're discussing was quoted as saying in the OOP article:
These technologies do show some promise, but they are far from mature. Research must continue, but the opinion of the European Group on Ethics shows research must be rigorous and ethical, and it must take full account of the possible range of direct and indirect effects. It is also important that the scientific evidence on risks and opportunities of solar radiation modification research and deployment is periodically assessed.
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.