Tim Cook Says His Era Has Failed by Over-Debating Climate Change (bloomberg.com) 427
Tim Cook told graduates at Tulane University that his "generation has failed" them by fighting more than making change on issues including immigration, criminal justice and, pointedly, climate change. From a report: "We've been too focused on the fight and not enough on the progress," the Apple chief executive said Saturday at the Mercedes-Benz Superdome in New Orleans. "You don't need to look far to find an example of that failure." He was referring to the Superdome, which sheltered thousands from Hurricane Katrina in 2005. He then criticized, without naming, politicians who raise doubts about climate change or its cause, a group that includes President Donald Trump.
"I don't think we can talk about who we are as a people and what we owe to one another without talking about climate change," he said. Cook, 58, said the solution to climate change won't be found based on whose side wins or loses an election. "It's about who has won life's lottery and has the luxury of ignoring this issue and who stands to lose everything," he said. "I challenge you to look for those who have the most to lose and find the real, true empathy that comes from something shared," Cook said. "When you do that, the political noise dies down."
"I don't think we can talk about who we are as a people and what we owe to one another without talking about climate change," he said. Cook, 58, said the solution to climate change won't be found based on whose side wins or loses an election. "It's about who has won life's lottery and has the luxury of ignoring this issue and who stands to lose everything," he said. "I challenge you to look for those who have the most to lose and find the real, true empathy that comes from something shared," Cook said. "When you do that, the political noise dies down."
Headline vs. quote (Score:3, Insightful)
The headline says "era" and the direct quote is "generation". Why the change?
Slashdot Editors vs. The Dictionary (Score:3)
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TFA uses "era" in the headline too. What is Bloomburg up to? Not offending their Boomer readership perhaps?
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I would bet that the Slashdot editors don't know what "era" means.
An era is just a span of time. The usage is ok.
Re:Headline vs. quote (Score:5, Interesting)
The headline says "era" and the direct quote is "generation". Why the change?
Because the Boomers are running scared, and don't want anymore bad publicity.
They are starting to sense that the "knives are out" because they milked it for all its worth(re-arranging the deck chairs), and are leaving younger generations with the bill.
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Too many characters for a headline. Awful choice though.
Re:Headline vs. quote (Score:4, Interesting)
Probably to avoid those Boomers vs Millennials comparison.
Because humans the ages of 15-30 tend to be rather self centered, as they are biologically wired to find a mate. So they do things, that the middle age adults find like a stupid thing to do. We as middle age adults, may forget a lot of the stupid stuff that we really did.
We failed? India and China grow without bounds.. (Score:5, Insightful)
I see Apple getting benefits from offshore power, labor and lax environmental policies..
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Re: We failed? India and China grow without bounds (Score:4, Insightful)
When their CEOs start sanctimoniously lecturing us about our politics, I sure will!
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When their CEOs start sanctimoniously lecturing us about our politics, I sure will!
CEOs generally do not have the authority to significantly reduce their competitiveness in the marketplace just because they feel it is the right thing to do. That is the kind of thing that gets a CEO removed, arguably rightly. It is the duty of society, and by extension our elected officials, to put policies, regulations and oversight in place to ensure companies are forced to do the "right thing" and to entice / punish foreign entities who don't do the same.
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While I agree with your latter assertion, I do not believe that it is rightly so. Every corporate charter includes the public good as a primary condition (whether explicitly stated or not) as a condition of the grant.>/p>
They have to be held to it by legal force simply because they are amoral at best.
That is one of several reasons Smith said that charters should be granted sparingly and only after significant deliberation on it's service to the public good..
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What precisely does climate change have to do with politics. It's not like molecules of CO2 change their properties based upon the choices of any given electorate.
Responses to climate change certainly seem political, although I'd argue it's more about particularly economic models that get chained to political movements. In the context of AGW, this can range from a peculiar Libertarian response that amounts to "it's probably not happening, but even if it is, the state should be shrunk" (but then again, that'
Re: We failed? India and China grow without bounds (Score:4, Insightful)
Cook's saying the problem is people vote Republican. How is that not politics?
It isn't that "people vote Republican (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem is not that people vote Republican. It is what the Republican party has become.
in the past, the Republican party believed that the country should serve its people and pay its bills. Keep in mind that the core ideas in the much-derided "Obama-Care" came from a program fleshed out by President Nixon (by the way, he gave credit for the idea to Johnson).
The Republican party has changed. It is no longer the party of Theodore Roosevelt and Eisenhower.
The same thing has happened at the Democratic party. The party radicals are no longer just being appeased, they are steering the boat.
What happened to the moderates, who still reflect the will of the country, accept science, feel people should do as they please so long as others aren't asked to pay for it, believe that the country should still serve its people, and pay its bills. In the past, this wasn't too radical. Today sitting in the middle gets cat-calls from both sides.
There needs to be a plan for ringing both parties back to the centre. However, that can not happen as long as the radicals, on both sides, steer the parties. The trouble here is that moderates, by their nature, are not seeking leadership, or even to involve themselves.
Nope, I don't have the answer either, by standing on one side of the fence, or the other, shouting "It's not us, it's those other guys" is not the way forward.
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Nixon wanted to expand medicaid, not provide a gift to the insurance industry and poor people paid for only by the middle class.
General funds is the way welfare should be funded, Nixon understood that. Masquerading a a tax to pay for welfare as insurance and making it deeply regressive was a lie, supposedly for the greater good ... but it's partly what got you Trump, so you should question the wisdom in pushing such huge lies.
Too much disagreement in the moderates. (Score:3)
The problem with the moderates, is to be a moderate you have a point of view often mixed from both sides, or watered down version of such views.
So it is hard to get two moderates to agree with each other, as they have different stances on things.
Are you Pro-Life, Anti-Death Penalty, Wants small governments, Supports Gay Marriages compared to someone who is Pro-Choice, Pro-Death Penalty, Wants Strong government, Doesn't support Gay marriages.
Both of these peoples stances would be considered a moderate group,
Re:Too much disagreement in the moderates. (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem, so far as I can tell, is an utter lack of leadership. Both parties have gained so much data about their demographic that they chart at the paths to electoral success, and instead of leading, they end up just siphoning off messages from those demographics and regurgitating it back to them. Trump is probably the most obvious example, I can't think of a single opinion he's espoused that wasn't fed to him first by Fox News. I wouldn't call him a bad president, I'd call him the inevitable consequence of the partisan echo chambers both parties have now spent decades building. It's become a feedback loop and the only thing either party can do is just keep turning up the volume to keep their bases engaged, because heaven knows sitting down with your base and saying "Look, I know you believe X, Y and Z, and I know some members of our party have vocally supported these positions, but they're wrong." Whether it's the climate change denial so common in the Republican base or the economically-illiterate ideas floating around in the Green New Deal, these aren't really ideas, but just slogans to get mindless crowds of intellectual masturbators chanting.
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You don't need a study to figure a child that got a 5x vaccine against 5 childhood diseases and for some odd reason develop symptoms of one or two of them, got severely, developed into a meningitis and finally an autoimmune disease to be 99.9999% certain that case was caused by the vaccines.
Yes, you do, for the reason I state above. That's just basic science to ward off bad conclusions that you have made. Literally why it exists.
We have plenty of cases like this in Germany, one or two every year. Hence we have a movement to force usage of single vaccines only.
Again, law of large numbers applies. I'm sure there are a few cases like this everywhere. There are 7 billion people on the planet.
Your brain's simple (as are all of ours- no insult intended) pattern matching will send you in the wrong direction. That's why our civilization developed a thousand rituals for gaining various Gods' favor to cause it to rain. Because "a fe
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No, you concluded that it's the Republicans, he never said so.
I'm not blaming you, your conclusion is so obvious that not drawing it would be a matter of willful ignorance, but it is nevertheless your conclusion and not his statement.
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So, you admit you were wrong?
I see a lot of words, an implicit admission, but still denial.
Re: We failed? India and China grow without bounds (Score:4, Insightful)
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The process to prove lead in gasoline is bad is science.
The process to make changes to society so that we no longer sell/use leaded gasoline is politics.
Re: We failed? India and China grow without bounds (Score:5, Interesting)
The process to make changes to society so that we no longer sell/use leaded gasoline is politics.
In retrospect removing lead from gasoline is a no-brainer. It took 20 years since Clair Patterson first raised the alarm about lead poisoning before the EPA even discussed removing it from gasoline. In that time the lobbyists of the lead industry consistently spread FUD and consistently downplayed the harm. If it were up to the science, lead should have been removed long before 1990. What delayed the removal was the politics; the science was always sound.
Apple Assembles in US (Score:2)
Yes because Apple and only Apple manufactures their products in China and India.
Actually, Apple doesn't make all of its stuff there: the laptops are now assembled in the US. Unfortunately, this seems to have made them so insanely expensive compared to competitors that, at least in Canada, it is incredibly rare to see students with mac laptops whereas a few years ago it was quite common. I've stopped buying macs myself because the price differential to PCs has grown so large: it used to be almost $2k (CAD) on a top end laptop.
Re:We failed? India and China grow without bounds. (Score:5, Insightful)
ok, so the solution to this is for the US to institute strong domestic policies aimed at halting climate change, and then use its considerable pressure overseas, with help from its allies (Paris Accord?), to force others (ie China, India) to do the same. these are foreign trade policies that would help EVERYBODY.
not just a handful of iron workers.
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solution to this is for the US to institute strong domestic policies aimed at halting climate change
Why do I get the feeling your preferred solution to every problem is to give central government more power?
to force others (ie China, India) to do the same
"Force"? Really? You want to go to war? I prefer economic deterrence to shipping US manufacturing to places with no worker or environmental protections.
Re: We failed? India and China grow without bounds (Score:2, Offtopic)
> Why do I get the feeling your preferred solution to every problem is to give central government more power?
Because youâ(TM)re a knee-jerk randroid who canâ(TM)t possibly see sensible national policy solutions as an option?
> "Force"? Really? You want to go to war?
I specifically said âtrade policiesâ(TM), can you not read?
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"Force"? Really? You want to go to war?
I specifically said Ãtrade policiesÃ(TM), can you not read?
That's not what "force" means. You can't force China to behave in a way it doesn't agree with without actual force. It will do what it thinks best.
I'm all in favor of the US government preventing US companies from shipping manufacturing to places with no worker or environmental protections, but that doesn't force China to do anything.
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Because youâ(TM)re a knee-jerk randroid who canâ(TM)t possibly see sensible national policy solutions as an option?
Surely that wasn't an attempt at a rebuttal??
Re:We failed? India and China grow without bounds. (Score:5, Insightful)
"Why do I get the feeling your preferred solution to every problem is to give central government more power?" The private sector has failed in curtailing climate change. What do you want to use, the Catholic Church instead?
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Like we already have? Last I checked, we have plenty of environmental controls, regulations and policies in place in America.
We also let a metric shit ton of foreign nationals and immigrants in to work and live.
Try being an american seeking a job in india or buying property in 90% of these other countries. Nope and nope.
China dumps everything they can into their rivers, works people 6+ days per week, and truly subjugates and suppresses religious sects and social classes. Yet Timmy and the boys use those fac
Re:We failed? India and China grow without bounds. (Score:5, Insightful)
Except the Paris Accord you so affectionally refer to gave freedom to India and China to increase their emissions willy nilly until 2030, and forced the US to pay into the Green Fund (ie, move wealth out of the US to "poor" countries).
It was a massive anti-US accord that had for only aim to harm the US position as a global leader.
No, the solution is for the US to institute strong domestic policies and huge tariffs on countries without the same policies so that manufacturers have no choice but to bring back manufacturing into the US. Otherwise, all you're doing is moving pollution to another country, fucking the planet over, and on top of that, fucking every American over.
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It was a massive anti-US accord that had for only aim to harm the US position as a global leader. ... but americans think: the planet should become just like them. Guess what would happen if that had happened? Bye Bye ... Gaia.
In other news: people think we live on the same planet, and should join forces
And in other news: the US are the biggest emitter of CO2 in terms of accumulated CO2 emissions since its industialization. You were wold leading emitter till .... 2012? 2015?
So we simply think: you should st
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... strong domestic policies...
Who do you want the climate police to shoot first?
to force others (ie China, India)
What cities do you want to bomb first?
Re:We failed? India and China grow without bounds. (Score:4, Funny)
Another way of looking at it is that we convinced China and India to avoid reaching Western levels of per capita emissions. It's still not enough but it's a hell of a lot better than it would have been if they had simply aimed to emulate our lifestyles.
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Another way of looking at it is that we convinced China and India to avoid reaching Western levels of per capita emissions. It's still not enough but it's a hell of a lot better than it would have been if they had simply aimed to emulate our lifestyles.
"So what you are saying is that we can burn more coal if we encourage our citizens to reproduce like rabbits..."
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China hit peak coal 5 years ago, it's been in decline ever since.
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Re:We failed? India and China grow without bounds. (Score:5, Informative)
I see Apple getting benefits from offshore power [...]
There are plenty of valid complaints to make against Apple (no lack of them, in fact), but this one is just silly. Apple runs 100% of their operations on renewable energy and have started the process of requiring the same of their entire supply chain. To be clear, I'm not talking energy/carbon credits that allow companies to claim they are carbon neutral by buying credits from others while actually running on coal or whatever else (which is what all of Apple's competitors are doing right now). Apple is actually running on renewable energy, and has been since at least last year.
Suggesting they're benefitting from offshore power policies makes no sense in the face of the fact that they're using locally-generated renewable power and are beginning to require that their offshore suppliers do the same as well.
Re:We failed? India and China grow without bounds. (Score:5, Informative)
100% of their operations run on renewable energy? There is an Apple store in the mall in my town and unless I missed seeing the wind turbines it runs on power from a coal power plant.
You missed the turbines. Straight from the horse's mouth [apple.com] (emphasis mine):
Apple today announced its global facilities are powered with 100 percent clean energy. This achievement includes retail stores, offices, data centers and co-located facilities in 43 countries — including the United States, the United Kingdom, China and India. The company also announced nine additional manufacturing partners have committed to power all of their Apple production with 100 percent clean energy, bringing the total number of supplier commitments to 23.
And then from their Environmental Responsibility Report [apple.com]'s "How we’re staying at 100%" section, they provide some examples of how they do this sort of thing (again, emphasis mine):
We’re investing in large-scale renewable energy projects in the Great Lakes and mid-Atlantic regions totaling 245 megawatts of generation: an Illinois wind farm and a Virginia solar PV array. These projects will cover our electricity use at our retail stores and offices on the East Coast, as well as co-located data facilities in Chicago, Illinois, and Ashburn, Virginia.
More or less, they're building renewable energy facilities if they can't buy renewable energy from a partner utility in the area, then using that energy to power their stores.
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Could you name a company that isn't benefit from offshore products and services?
So basically.... (Score:2, Insightful)
...he is saying "stop arguing with us because we are right. Just do what we want. We are failing as a people because YOU aren't doing what WE want!"
The reason we are arguing is because needless action is wasteful and harmful. The evidence isn't strong enough to warrant some of the sweeping regulations being proposed.
So we have to fight it out.
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The evidence is crystal fucking clear to those who spend their days studying it and the alarm bells have been going off for 30 fucking years. You can listen to an expert who is fallible but better informed than you, or you can go with your gut. Here's a hint: your gut isn't going to know better most of the time. Ask Steve Jobs what happens when you ignore the advise of experts and go with your gut. It's made worse by those who are in power being utterly corrupt by the industries that stand to lose the most
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We are failing as a people because YOU aren't doing what WE want!
If people are damaging a shared living space, when should our individual freedoms to do what we want end - and social responsibility (for those sharing your space) begin?
And yes, Apple is hypocritical for doing business is a dirty, polluting, human rights abusing, authoritarian, "vitrify your political prisoners" country like China. That should change ASAP. But that doesn't invalidate what he is saying as an individual.
The reason we are arg
Re:So basically.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, correlation is not causation, but, when you have no other observable factors at the same time that could cause these kinds of temperature rises you have to at least operate under the premise that "we done f'ed up, and we need to fix it." Even if climate change is somehow not man-made, if the current trends continue and we do nothing about it then we will not have a planet left to call home. So, whether or not we caused it (and the evidence is pretty obvious that we did) we still have to do something about it if we don't want to join the other millions of species that have already gone extinct.
Btw, we already have historic evidence that shows that our emissions do affect the planet on a global scale. From acid rain to the tear in the ozone layer, our pollution caused those problems, and putting an end to that pollution stopped them.
Also, I call bullshit on this statement:
needless action is wasteful and harmful.
Actions properly taken do not have to be wasteful or harmful. What kind of idiotic argument could anyone possibly come up with that putting an end to pollution emissions could be harmful? So we put the fossil fuel workers out of work, well, we give them brand new jobs cleaning up the pollution their former employers caused, or installing and maintaining clean energy installations. How is that harmful?
Even if we put a carbon tax on goods and services that accurately express the amount of pollution inherent in their creation, it will encourage the development and purchase of alternative goods and services that don't have as large of a carbon footprint, or it will at least pay for the cleanup and removal of said pollution. Meanwhile, we make sure we pay people properly so that any said carbon taxes don't become an undo burden on the already downtrodden.
Look, offer to pay off our loan debts or STFU (Score:5, Funny)
"Great, *we* get the billionaire who just wants to lecture us."
Re:Look, offer to pay off our loan debts or STFU (Score:5, Insightful)
Typical Lefty (Score:3, Insightful)
Preaching about climate change, how horrible it is and how we have to protect the most vulnerable in society while at that very moment the factories that made him rich employee child laborers, dump boiling hot toxic sludge into the ocean and create billows of smog that blot out the sun.
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I just wonder what Tim Cook's carbon footprint is, compared to the students he's lecturing? Pretty sure he ain't living in a studio apartment and driving a Corolla.
There's another failing of your generation, Tim: hypocrisy.
Re:Typical Lefty (Score:5, Informative)
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Preaching about climate change, how horrible it is and how we have to protect the most vulnerable in society while at that very moment the factories that made him rich employee child laborers, dump boiling hot toxic sludge into the ocean and create billows of smog that blot out the sun.
I wonder what Tim Cook would say about that? He's making up dramatic stories about some future person. You're making up dramatic stories about some factory.
If we believe stories, why shouldn't we believe dramatic stories where Tim Cook is the villain? Or we could each make up our own stories where we can do what we want and everything works out great for everyone. Why not?
Re:What has Cook given to charity? (Score:4, Interesting)
Cook donated $7 million in 2015, had Apple match employee contributions (so another ~$!50 million got paid in 2015), and promised to give away another $800 million.
We'll likely never have another Carnegie, as he was more than three times as rich as Bezos is, and Carnegie's education fund alone was larger than Bezos's entire (per-divorce) fortune..
Do as I say not as a I do (Score:3)
Cook likely isn’t cutting back on producing devices encased in plastics [fee.org], and powered by electricity, or his private jet [businessinsider.com].
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Katrina wasn't climate change (Score:3, Insightful)
Katrina wasn't climate change. They get hurricanes down there all the time, and have for longer than humans existed there. The disaster of Katrina was the city and state officials who 1. Did nothing to improve aging levees. 2. told people to remain where they were instead of evacuate. 3. Told Federal officials like FEMA to GTFO until things got really bad. Bush got the blame even though it was local democrats who caused the problems at multiple levels.
Now Tim Cook is trying to blame Bush for the hurricane itself.
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climate change, pollution and direct human erosion are all partly responsible for the continued erosion of the Barrier Islands off the coast of Louisiana. Those islands are part of a natural defense that helps prevent storm surges from reaching the coastal areas. Guess who's fighting to enact policies that would help reduce the environmental effects on those islands, who's fighting to reinforce those islands to help prevent future storm surges, and who's actively fighting to deny those efforts?
Bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not over-debating, it's under-acting. People are pretending to debate when what they're doing is actually stalling. Instead of doing the things they know they should do, they're pretending to have doubts and then arguing about those pretend doubts so that they can pretend that the science isn't settled, so that they don't have to act.
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Mod this up to "+6, F-ing Brilliant".
Agree... Nuclear Now! (Score:3)
I completely agree that the problem is lack of action on the one true solution that has been proven. We don't need to sacrifice quality of life and impose higher taxation and more government control of the minutiae of the economy and our every day lives... we need nuclear power now!
Simple problem with a simple solution that we know works.
Fix the damn problem.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm not sure I understand what "settled" means here. Over 100 years later and you still regularly see stories about experiments testing or confirming aspects of Einstein's Relativity. Hardly a bristle about it. And it's still called a theory.
I'm not a political stakeholder here, I'm just curious about all of this, how emotional it has become, and how to make good decisions despite that. I see that the existing science says that it is likely that human activity is causing a change in climate and I have t
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It's not over-debating, it's under-acting. People are pretending to debate when what they're doing is actually stalling. Instead of doing the things they know they should do, they're pretending to have doubts and then arguing about those pretend doubts so that they can pretend that the science isn't settled, so that they don't have to act.
Fucking. Nailed. It.
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Well then, maybe you should do us all a big favor and stop breathing out so much CO2.
How many human-exhaled carbon atoms are carbon that was sequestered underground until we dug them up?
Carbon that was captured from the atmosphere by growing plants, then eaten (perhaps a few times), then re-emitted into the atmosphere by breathing does not increase the greenhouse gas levels.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Put your money where your mouth is (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't be silly. He simply misspoke when he said "Everyone needs to do more." What he meant to say was "Everyone, but not me, needs to do more."
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Future tales (Score:2)
"Look for those" means make up a story in your mind about someone who might or might not exist, who might someday have a hard time with something
What if you don't believe every story someone wants to make up?
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"Look for those" means make up a story in your mind about someone who might or might not exist, who might someday have a hard time with something
What if you don't believe every story someone wants to make up?
Then you might want to start by not watching opinion mongers of Fox News and believing everything they shout at you.
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Then you might want to start by not watching opinion mongers of Fox News and believing everything they shout at you.
Done. And I agree. No one should watch TV news at all. It's a huge waste of time and the news channels are all trying to troll and manipulate viewers most of the time.
Huh? Compassion? What's that got to do with it? (Score:2)
Yes, helping those who are drowning is a good thing, but that's totally beside the point in eco-polotics IMHO.
How about "Stop screwing up the ecosystem you, me and our children are and will be living in, lest I smack you in the Balls with a ball peen hammer."?
Just sayin'.
Then why don't you do something about it (Score:2)
I'm sorry, but so far Tim's been all talk and no walk. In 2020 that doesn't cut it. Take a stand or get in the corner and sit down.
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None of these candidates are actually going to change anything once they get in power, apart from some token gestures.
The Greenhouse Effect (Score:5, Insightful)
When Bush 1 was PotUSA, he was very close to working with other countries to come up with a multilateral approach to capping carbon emissions, similar to what had been done to control the ozone problem.
However that didn't happen, and in the 1990s when the carbon extraction industries discovered that they could confuse the public by spending money on, to use the vernacular, "fake news", they realized how easy it was to keep kicking the can down the road.
Yes, the Boomers and Xers(to a certain extent) have kept kicking the can down the road.
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You can't even define 'Greenhouse effect' correctly, why should we care what follows?
Hint: The number one greenhouse gas is not CO2, it's way down the list.
This guys is a pure Bastard (Score:2)
Apple is a major contributor to trash and environmental waste around the world. Their repair policy is garbage and Cook is playing the same bullshit... "blame everyone else" for problems that we all share.
This generation was not failed by his Generation... BOTH failed period! Sure they helped, but I don't see this generation making any fundamental changes to lifestyle choices or how they vote either. It's always the same... in their ignorance they cause the very thing they want to avoid.
They bitch about
I'll tell you who is standing in the way: (Score:5, Insightful)
Religious types who actually believe that the Earth (which they believe is only 6000 years old) being destroyed is a good thing, will bring about the Apocalypse, which means they'll get to go 'home' to 'heaven' soon.
Greedy companies who only care about next quarters' profits.
Meanwhile: the Average Person? They're just trying to keep their own lives going on a day-to-day basis, a roof over their heads, food in their families' mouths, clothes on their backs, and maybe, just maybe, get ahead a little bit, have some comfort and security in their lives, and see their kids do well.
Furthermore: The Average Person doesn't understand the science behind climate change more often than not, and very often gets misled by Bad Actors who have their own agenda. The Average Person relies on conscientious experts, and their elected leaders, to handle these high-level concerns, and they are being let down by them.
You want something done about climate change, for real, and the myriad other problems in the world? You need to change humans in general. Face it: we are a race of primitives, still. You strip away our so-called 'civilization', our technological toys, and what do you have? Cavemen. Tribalism. One step above hunter-gatherers. You can deny it all you want, you can yell and scream and insult me for saying it because you're so offended by it, but you can't rationally deny it: under the hood, we are still primitives. Put people under pressure and you see it. We, as a species, are faced with the consequences of our cilivization, our technology, and too few of us understand it, too few see where we went wrong and what needs to be done, and the rest, for the most part, can't even grasp it, because it's all too big to seem real to them. So between denial, and greed, and lust for power, and flat-out ignorance (whether it's willful or not), nothing really is getting done. If the U.S. unilaterally changed everything about it's society to stop climate change, the rest of the world almost certainly would not, seeing an opportunity to 'get ahead of the U.S.' power-and-influence-wise. Nothing would change. The chances right now of our species pulling it's collective head out of it's collective ass and turning things around? Vanishingly small. Everyone, everywhere, all at once, would need to change the way they think and feel about many things.
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"Rich and powerful people who believe it's "not their problem" and don't care."
No, it's about how they can gain more wealth from the situation. They care, plenty! Just not in the way you are claiming.
"Religious types who actually believe that the Earth (which they believe is only 6000 years old) being destroyed is a good thing, will bring about the Apocalypse, which means they'll get to go 'home' to 'heaven' soon."
You have two problems with this "kind" of identity politics. #1. If God is all powerful as
Yes Tim... (Score:3)
...democracy is inconvenient as shit, particularly for motivated zealots who have big things they are ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN ABOUT, and who have BIG IDEAS THAT NEED TO HAPPEN NOW!
Dare I say: working as intended?
klimate hoax (Score:2, Insightful)
idiots should stop talking about something they can't change...
and start doing what they can change: cleanup plastic in oceans, ground and drinking water.
plant more trees, don't mass import people from large places to places that are already full of people...
Failed in more than one way (Score:5, Insightful)
The Fight and the Progress (Score:3)
"We've been too focused on the fight and not enough on the progress,"
Truer words were never spoken. If SJWs would put down the fucking sword for just two seconds, they could repackage stuff in a way that both sides could actually get behind. It's like what I said about Tesla [slashdot.org]... it could easily be rebranded as an American pride thing, American-made cars, cars that are sturdier and cheaper and higher performing and better than ICE cars, and the anti-oil narrative could be spun into an anti-fundamentalist Islam narrative (neither Wahabbi Saudi Arabia nor ISIS would be as powerful as they have been without oil being as expensive as it's been) that the right wing would be sure to love. Instead, owning a Tesla is viewed as left wing virtue signaling thing [slashdot.org].
Off the top of my head I could think of plausible bipartisan paths forward on a half dozen other issues, but the fight has become much more important than actual results.
Re:Funny (Score:5, Insightful)
I tell you what Tim, let's compare your electricity and fuel bills to mine and see who *really* cares about the environment.
Re:Funny (Score:4, Funny)
I tell you what Tim, let's compare your electricity and fuel bills to mine and see who *really* cares about the environment.
I'm sure when he travels everywhere by private jet, he uses compostable napkins, and never uses plastic straws.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm sure when he travels everywhere by private jet
Fueled by recycled dinosaurs, though.
Re:Funny (Score:5, Informative)
I tell you what Tim, let's compare your electricity and fuel bills to mine and see who *really* cares about the environment.
Tim lives in a 4 bedroom, 2400 sq ft house in a middle class neighborhood [cultofmac.com].
For someone with a net worth of $625M, he is living modestly.
Re:Funny (Score:4, Insightful)
I feel my generation failed because we couldn't stop people like Mr Cook from taking root away from the average user.
On the contrary. I've seen how the average user uses root.
You know what else we've never had root access to? Our game consoles, our "smart" TVs, our DVD & Bluray players, etc.
I absolutely agree there is a need to have devices that you have root access to, such as general purpose computers.
However, I've fixed far too many problems that had the RCA of "user had root and did something stupid".
Re: (Score:3)
On the contrary. I've seen how the average user uses root.
If the average user is using root as a matter of course, then there are other issues at hand. Yes, needing root is a requirement for low-level tasks (that is, after all, what root is), but it's only necessary as often as it is because of things that don't separate userspace correctly.
You know what else we've never had root access to? Our game consoles, our "smart" TVs, our DVD & Bluray players, etc.
We then start getting philosophical about the nature of computers and operating systems. You're right, most of those things don't include root access (and should), though I'd argue that at least some of them shouldn't include o
Re: (Score:2)
This is how "news" are made. [fixed] (Score:5, Insightful)
[Excuse the duplicate. Slashdot's UI sucks.]
My dad has been an investigative journalist his whole life, and still does it the old way.
But nowadays, most news are made in a very different way, and this is a textbook example.
In these cases, it goes the wrong way around, and some entity approaches a journalist or press agency with the request to "offer them a scoop". Which only works of you have a big name, e.g. are a big corporation. Also because you have contact with them all the time anyway.
Nearly all of the time, those are lobby groups. E.g. with manipulative studies or press releases. But every once in a while, a large ham like Mr. Cook wants to say something and thinks he is special enough.
For big corporations this goes so far, that companies like Associated Press pretty much just forward every press release the corporation makes to the press outlets, with negligible editing.
My dad was approached more times than he can count, and always told them to fuck off.
But if you look at the actual sources, of the content and the money stream, of most "news", you sure feel like a dying breed, as an actual journalist.
Yes, lt's actually truly 90-99% fake news.
Not because of the truth of its content, but because who wrote it and what was omitted. IMHO, the core of spin doctoring, malicious concealment, is not only lying, but the worst kind of lying.
Re:lolz, don't forget the stupid "solutions" (Score:4, Insightful)
The thing you're ignoring in your rush to be clever (at which you failed) is that taxes WORK. Cap and trade doesn't work, that much is true, but Cap and tax does. Taxes make things more expensive, so people seek cheaper solutions, and the market solves the problem.
The only solution is huge push making clean energy power plants with trillions of dollars invested
Right. And that's exactly what will happen if we implement a meaningful carbon tax. NO TRADING, JUST TAXING. Carbon trading is just a way for certain industries to avoid progress.
Re: (Score:2)
bullshit, if that were true my region which has one of the highest gasoline taxes in the nation would have had less driving and less fuel use as percent of tax ramped up over past 20 years.
Nope. And the few electric charging stations are mostly never used.
Just a burden on the common man.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
another taxing story. Here in Cook County they made "soft drink" tax, to push people to healthy drinking. Hilarity ensued. People were pissed, didn't go out to eat when at work, grocery store sales of soft drinks in big containers skyrocketed, and lunchtime restaurant patronage plummeted, the businesses screamed for it to be repealed. So it was repealed. No one drank less soft drinks, they just bypassed the restaurant middle man and so hurt the economy.
another victory for the "tax to change behavior" d
Re:lolz, don't forget the stupid "solutions" (Score:5, Insightful)
Gas taxes just aren't high enough in the US. Gas is cheap pretty much everywhere in the country. If you look across places with more variation, higher prices DO encourage less use. Compare Europe and the US for example.
The real point of a significant carbon tax is that it raises the price of CO2 emission proportional to that emission. That provides a an economic incentive to develop and use technology that emits less. The alternative is for governments to use pick technologies they think are promising and use regular taxes to fund their development. The problem with that is it's hard to pick winners, particularly if you're a politician.
If we *really* wanted to deal with CO2 emission we'd simply impose a carbon tax that was equal to the cost of removing that carbon from the atmosphere. The external cost of CO2 emission would be fully accounted; in applications where it made sense to emit CO2 we'd use the tax money to scrub it right back out, and in all other cases there would be a very strong incentive to develop better alternatives. Suddenly imposing such a massive penalty would be too disruptive, but we could announce a scheduled phase-in to that level, with the amount of time calibrated to how urgent we think the problem is.
Re:lolz, don't forget the stupid "solutions" (Score:4, Informative)
Ever wondered *why* Europe has better public transportation?
The subject of carbon taxes seems to bring out this really weird cognitive dissonance in the right. Conservatives supposedly support minimal government interference in the market, and, if interference is required, favour economic incentives rather than overt regulation.
Carbon taxes are examples of the best kind of economic intervention. They add external costs into prices in an unbiased way and let the market find the optimum strategy.
Sure, if you suddenly imposed very high carbon taxes, there would be problems. The best way to do it would be to clearly specify a period of increasing rates until the desired final rate was reached. That way the market would know what was coming and have time to adapt.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Pick up your sword, fetch your armor, and mount your horse.
And charge at the windmills.
Re:If it's that obvious, convince me (Score:5, Interesting)
I believe humans likely have an impact, but believe that the bulk of warming is more likely a result of milankovich-size cycles where our input is pretty trivial.
I base this on my own evaluation of paleo-climate data, primarily from the vostok ice cores.
And what are your credentials for validating your analysis and reaching that conclusion?
got my degree in international relations and languages.
Well, obviously we should believe you then over the tens of thousands of people with Ph.Ds in things like climate and environmental science, geology, etc.
- you cannot say "well all these experts believe it's true". That's not proof.
Sorry, you don't get to pull that kind of BS. You don't get to wave a magic wand and try to prop up your dissenting opinion by just making some blanket nullification of everyone smarter than you who says otherwise. These experts are indeed just that... trained, qualified scientists, and their findings are infinitely closer to "proof" than any of the armchair-quarterback stuff you're coming up with in your unfounded opinion piece.
Just because there are a few noisy people like you who find the the ramification of human-caused climate change "inconvenient" doesn't mean there's actually any real debate, any more than having the 3000+ people who think the earth is flat means there's any actual debate about that either.
Based upon almost 12,000 reputable, published, peer-reviewed scientific papers, there's a 97% consensus that climate change is real and humans are causing it [iop.org]. You don't get to be all "nah nah nah that doesn't count".
Re:It's the SOLAR CYCLE that changes (Score:4, Insightful)
Global temperatures change, with relation to the sunspot cycle.
Thanks, sub-Genius, but we already received a full dose of Exxon Propaganda back in the 90's.