Don’t Mock Greta Thunberg. Listen to Her. She’s right about the science.

Exactly. She’s basically the only one (except perhaps James Hansen) who says what matches the science of global climate change nearly 100%.

Scientists misunderstood how badly the rest of the world misunderstood the problem. A 2008 paper by MIT professors John Sterman and Linda Booth Sweeney showed that even MIT students were, for the most part, unaware of the cumulative nature of greenhouse gases. When the researchers surveyed a mix of graduate students and members of the general public, they found most people wrongly assumed global temperatures would stabilize once we stabilize the rate of emissions, and that the temperature might even fall if this rate were reduced.

That’s she’s correct about the science and its consequences why people don’t want to listen to her and that’s exactly why she’s important. Politically, I think a lot of what she advocates is worthless or would be harmful, to be clear, but she has no political power so that’s irrelevant.

That she’s straightforward and correct about the consequences is why young people do listen to Thunberg — they know and she knows that global climate change is likely to erase them, and perhaps all of civilization.

And they also know that older people — their parents and grandparents — absolutely do not give a shit.

The battery in a Tesla S, which has a range of about 250 miles, weighs 1200 pounds. Eight gallons of gas, which will take you the same distance in a 2019 Honda Accord, weigh about fifty pounds.

— Matt Osterndorf (@MattOsterndorf) December 14, 2019

So fucking what? I am increasingly tired of mal-informed halfwits. The Model S motor weighs about 70 pounds. By contrast, the engine in a car of comparable power weighs about 500 pounds. A transmission 150-200. The cooling apparatuses 100-ish pounds. None of those exist in a Model S, along with quite a lot of other items that just aren’t present.

A comparable car, the BMW 750i weighs 4,500 pounds. A Tesla Model S weighs around 4,800 pounds, depending on configuration. So, yes, it is a little heavier, but the way this wanker discusses it you’d think the car was some huge outlier rather than pretty much in line with similar cars.

It’s worthless to battle against these types of people with evidence, but I still do so, even recognizing that it won’t help.

Why I’m not enthusiastic about Medicare for All.

OK Boomer.

This is why so many people, including me, aren’t enthusiastic about Medicare for All. We expect that it’s going to put us all to work filling out paperwork and making multiple trips to less than congenial and comfortable government offices devoted to keeping the bureaucracy functioning first and helping us a distant second.

What a bunch of crap. Private insurance is far, far worse than that. And he’s dealing with SSI Disability (a totally different thing), not Medicare, as a commenter points out. And he’ll be the first to want to keep Medicare for himself but take it away from everyone else when he’s old enough to be on it. I guarantee that.

I can’t believe I used to like this dipshit years ago. He has the mental capability of a lamprey. Just like Drum, he’s happy if nothing changes and his house price doesn’t decrease an iota — and fuck everyone else.

The world will be better off when people like this die. I mean, I hope they live happy, clueless long lives. But it’s still true what I wrote at the beginning of the paragraph.

Cheapest plan on the marketplace is $500/month with a $16,000 deductable.

I'm likely to slap someone still promoting Obamacare over Medicare for All.

— Benjamin Dixon (@BenjaminPDixon) December 15, 2019

I cannot understand why people want to save this system. Do they really love forking over their life savings to the health care racket that much? And if so, why?

What’s your favorite episode of TV from 2019?

“A God Walks Into Abar” from Watchmen is my pick. Explores the nature and mystery of causality, of memory, of stories and where they come from and why we tell them. By collapsing time it shows that the past is ever-present, and that the future is built from that, inexorably.

With all that, it still somehow manages to explore our fixation on identity over humanity, how we might get past that, and how to begin thinking about the unspeakable racial trauma of our past.

And it manages to be funny, too. Highly recommended.

Bloomberg Just Bought CityLab—and Put Half Its Reporters Out of a Job.

Well that sucks. Billionaires and their proxies are now rich enough to buy up all extant media properties and either bastardize them and bend them to their will or just shutter them altogether.

We’re seeing a media ecosystem that is completely dominated by the thoughts and desires of a few hundred plutocrats. And it’s only going to get worse.

About experiencing fiction, too many people spend too much time worrying about what is possible and not considering how much has already occurred that was “impossible” in actual life.

‘Back up the truck and buy, buy buy,’ because there is no risk, says MUFG economist.

Man they are not even trying to hide the propaganda any longer, are they? Just puttin’ it all out there.

North Florida was a place where two very different worlds met, with terrible results. The people who made a home there dichotomized this way, for historical and financial reasons:

The first type were those whose families were native to the place, going back generations. I am one of those first types though I was a misfit in every other way. My family had dwelled there so long (with detours to the military and such) that no one could recall any history before.

The second type of folks in my part of North Florida were people like Tia’s family — hippies or ex-hippies who moved to the area relatively recently for the extremely low land prices, the decent weather, and the proximity of a large university. Unknowingly, though, these people tossed their kids (many of whom not yet born when they migrated) into a horrific environment that was fully and completely antagonistic to any chance or hope of prospering, especially for those lower on the socioeconomic scale as the children of hippies tend to be. Tia’s family moved from Hawaii, for example.

Cheap land prices are not worth throwing your children into the meat grinder of North Florida. It’s this environment that ground down my friend Tia and so many others. Where I grew up, at that time, it was 90% redneck desolation and 10% people like she was, sensitive souls who were just traumatized and destroyed by that hellscape. That’s what I meant the other day when I said that the best of us did not make it out.

The land in North Florida is cheap, but you pay with dead and destroyed people. Not fucking worth it. Not at all.