European style houses won't save anyone from extreme heat
Europe has had plenty of fatal heatwaves in the past.
Saudi Arabia has 'proven' whatever it has proven through insane levels of draconian state intervention in everything, a lot of oil rents, and using imported slave labour.
https://www.hrw.org/reports/2008/saudiarabia0708/5.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_workers_in_Saudi_Arabia?wprov=sfla1
Hardly a model for anyone to follow.
Also
This kind of futurist accelerationist thinking hasn't turned out well in the past: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurism?wprov=sfla1 It always ends up feeding into Fascism. I wonder why.
The 'future' is not inevitable. There have been countless collapses in history. Our technology doesn't make us immune. The people of the major Bronze Age powers probably thought the same.
Also we do not have the means for weather engineering. If you're talking about SRM, we have no idea what its consequences will be or how to do it effectively. It's all theoretical. No aircraft we currently have can do this stuff. Sure, we could design it and build one, but then you need global governance to actually implement it properly. Not to mention the risk of 'termination shock' and countless others.
Have a look at the scientific literature: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Stratospheric-aerosol-injection-tactics-and-costs-Smith-Wagner/e4e5a78335eda8c16557b32af915798b06091362#cited-papers
Would you seriously risk the future of life on Earth on something this experimental?
I fear this arrogance will kill a lot of people and cause a lot of suffering.
btw they do store a lot of their money in vaults where it doesnt benefit the economy at all.
This is in the form of expensive art that stays in containers in tax-free zones, and offshore accounts in tax havens.
Please educate yourself.
https://archive-yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/how-wealthy-sell-treasures-tax-free
https://www.icij.org/inside-icij/2017/09/7-charts-show-how-rich-hide-their-cash
Have you considered that this too might be an 'experiment'?
Defenders of monarchy and the divine right of kings used to argue the exact same thing - that we tried democracy before and it failed in the Roman Republic and Ancient Greece - so clearly feudal monarchy is the best, right?
Yet here we are, experimenting again.
Why is this joke of a system the ideal? It doesn't produce innovation - most of the stuff that led to the internet and modern computing came out of DARPA and various govt funded universities. All of our space advancements were from state-run NASA and the Soviet space programme. The wealthy CEO types only start 'innovating' after taxpayers fund most of the R&D. Same with medical advancements, material science, physics - almost every single positive innovation has come from state-run, taxpayer-funded, or non-profit institutions.
Maybe try reading a little bit more about all this innovation you seem so fond of:
https://academic.oup.com/ser/article/7/3/459/1693191
https://demos.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/files/Entrepreneurial_State_-_web.pdf
what's your favourite type of bollard and why?
You're welcome!
I'm not an expert by any means, but did Politics and Economics as my undergrad and did decently well in it; am happy to share my knoweldge. Also wanted to apologise if parts of my previous post seemed a bit condescending, wasn't my intention.
Would be happy to debate/discuss more at any point if you're interested.
Figure I might as well drop some more reading recommendations:
Specific to the topics of the discussion:
Chapter 14, from 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism by Ha-Joon Chang This basically expands on the meme, and explains the connection between liberal economics and 'pro-rich' economics, in only 9 pages. Not very in-depth, but quite good and readable - although note that this book is very much a pop-economics polemic, and Chang is an Institutionalist economist and very skeptical of 'free market' economics. He's fairly controversial among economists, but not super radical or anything. Link to pdf of this chapter only. The whole book is free to borrow on Archive.org.
Chapter VIII 'Monopoly and the Social Responsibility of Business and Labor', from Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman. For a free-market take on monopolies, although a bit of an outdated take (the data has changed a lot, but the general arguments are still relevant). Free on Archive.org
Are markets efficient or do they tend towards monopoly? The verdict is in, by Joseph Stiglitz Pretty short article that expands on our discussion about monopolies in the modern world. Link to article
Chapter 2, Section 3 of 'The Poverty of Philosophy' by Karl Marx This is basically Marx arguing against Proudhon, so a lot of it is weird out of context, but does sum up Marx's views on monopolies. As with most Marx, not super easy to read, but very interesting. Link to text from Marxists.org
Chapter 2, 'Liberalism and Liberal Thinkers', from 101 Great Liberal Thinkers by Eamonn Butler A summary of liberal ideas, written by a self-described (neo)Liberal and founder of the Adam Smith Institute. Freely available from the American Economic Association
More Generally Relevant / In-Depth Stuff:
The Wordly Philosophers by Robert Heilbroner Is a nice and readable intro to the history of economic thought, would recommend for an enjoyable read and broad overview. Available to borrow on Archive.org
Economics: The Users Guide by Ha-Joon Chang This is somewhat of a 'pop-economics' text so is quite readable, but also has solid knowlege. Chapter 4 has a nice summary of some of the major schools of thought, and there's a lot of interesting economic history in here as well. Available to borrow on Archive.org
Market Reasoning as Moral Reasoning: Why Economists Should Re-engage with Political Philosophy by Michael Sandel Short article with interesting arguments about the limits of economics as a field, especially in considering the moral implications of allocating resources using markets. Freely available from the American Economic Association
Chapter 3, 'The Nature of Heterodox Economics' from 'Essays on the Nature and State of Modern Economics' by Tony Lawson Although this one is very academic, chapter 3 is only about 20 pages long and has a fairly good summary of some of the assumptions and criticisms of 'modern mainstream economics' vs 'heterodox economics'. The rest of the book is excellent as well, it's focused on a critique of modern economics and its attempts to be a 'hard science' by using lots of maths and models, with questionable results. Link to a pdf here.
Chapter 'The Place of Liberty' from An Introduction to Political Philosophy by Jonathan Wolff Especially recommend the section on problems with liberalism Available to borrow on Archive.org
The Economy by Core Economics This is just a textbook, not exactly light reading but it's free and written by some pretty high-profile (mainstream) economists. It's what I was mainly taught from so if you're interested in what they teach at mainstream econ courses but want to skip the whole 'paying massive tuition fees' part, here it is. Link to the textbook on their website.
Also, Marginal Revolution has good stuff on econ on their YT channel and website; they are very pro-free market.
Hope this is interesting and/or useful, have a nice day!
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.
Sharktopus, bad in a fun kind of way though
I think the difference here is paying for a single newspaper vs having to get recurring subscriptions that are a pain to cancel. With print media, if I want to check multiple sources' take on an issue, I could go out and buy 5 different newspapers, and that's it. But with online news, I'd have to spend like an hour cancelling all the subscriptions after I'm done and if I forget to cancel any i'll realise when I'm down like £50 6 months later.
Also don't like having to enter personal details into so many websites.
Thank god for Archive.org.
I wonder why no news company has tried the 'buy today's digital newspaper for £1 and that's that' approach. I could be wrong and maybe someone has, haven't seen it though.
Spin-offs in other cities would have been cool
Ah this show was wonderful! Ahead of its time with the AI and mass surveillance stuff (IIRC it called it before the Snowden leaks).
Haven't read The Dispossessed yet, but love Le Guin's work ever since I read The Lathe of Heaven and The Word for World is Forest, can't recommend these enough. Am reading through a collection of her short stories now.
Anyone interested in a general Le Guin discussion thread, or a reading group type thing where we discuss a different book each month?
Thanks very much for recommending this! Tried it and am quite happy. Also just tried NewPipe on my phone and it works really well. Bye bye YouTube
We should crowdfund some Lemmy ads
The first one is about how wet bulb temperatures and extreme heat work. The second one is about Europe. Whether or not they are 'more' resilient doesn't matter.
Also I don't think you know what Europe is. Scandinavian, Central European and British houses are mostly made to keep heat in during cold winters. They're not good for heatwaves.
Mediterranean style housing is definitely better for heat. But that doesn't stop Italy, Spain, and France from having deadly heatwaves.