Same, I didn’t want to go in early on that game but I’m very happy I did.

It just good, clean and terribly unwholesome fun.

Tbf, economics has to presume inequality to be non existent. If they dont, inequality is the overriding factor that makes all the other forces at play pale in comparison. So, they remove inequality.

Again, tbf, in a world with no inequality, where only the very best and brightest rise to the top and not just a endless stream of nepo babies, with whole institutions in place to ensure a lack of social mobility, a national minimum wage would be a bad idea. Just like tax breaks for the rich would fix any problem you had, in that fake - made up world that could never exist.

But, as you allude to, in the real world, things are very different.

Its always been about artificially keeping the price of labour down. I don’t blame people for wanting to move to have a better life but we have to be honest about the real reason it happens.

Theres never a skill shortage. Theres only ever a shortage of companies who are willing to pay people what they’re worth.

Diddy only fits 2/3 of the criteria for that

And it ain’t what it ain’t.

“Well, that’s just how it is”

Person attempting to justify an injustice they also suffer, without even a thought about whether it being “how it is” might actually be connected to all the people saying dumb stuff like “Well, that’s just how it is.”

I mean, I made a point not to use legality as a moral argument but you went ahead and said that anyway…

Sorry but it wasn’t someone starving or mentally ill. Its anyone who just feels like robbing you because its “whats better for them in the moment” per the below:

Blameing people for doing what’s better for them in the moment, instead of what’s immediately difficult but ultimately better for everyone, is always wrong.

Its not like the people hiring undocumented people are doing so because they’re starving or mentally ill either. So, its a bizzare caveat to throw in, out of no where.

I mean, if you’re going to claim you wouldn’t blame somone for robbing you when they could have just asked you, as you even say yourself, in order to not have to admit that people are actually culpable for their own actions then I don’t know what to say to that.

Personally, I would say its not something that applies to those things in the same way. It isn’t illegal to have a hight carbon footprint or eat junk food but it is illegal to employ undocumented workers. The problem is, they choose to employ non documented workers because they can force them to accept appalling and unlawful work conditions as well as massively underpaying them for the value of their work.

If always then it would apply to someone who found robbing and killing you better for them in the moment. The harder thing would be for them to get a job and earn that money.

Would blaming somone for robbing and killing you be wrong?

I agree that there’s a systemic problem at the root cause of this and, of course, I agree they’re a fraction of a fraction in size.

However, I don’t think we take that attribute with any other crimes, big or small, right or wrong.

I hope we can agree that a lot of theft is a symptom of the problems caused by systemicpoverty. However, it wouldn’t excuse theft, simply because you wanted a bit more, despite already having enough.

Not just you, by any stretch of the imagination, but we’re so quick to minimise the wrong doing of wealthy people doing illegal stuff to make just a little bit more money for themselves, purely out of greed. I feel like we’ve been almost groomed into some kind of “Well that’s just good business” mentality, for this ne specific kind of law breaking.

Even if it was a starving person, we would say “I understand they’re starving. However, we also can’t have them stealing everything they want to eat from one small, family owned mini mart, all the time. Yeah, yeah, no I still think that even though doing something about it might not contribute that much to the wider, systemic issues leading to poverty.”

I mean, you could Google “uranium shortage” and find what you need very quickly. Again, I’m not spending my evening teaching you and providing you with sources that you’re unable to refute in any way, despite your best efforts. I’m sure you’ve convinced yourself that anyone who doesn’t do that for you must be wrong but thats just not how the world works.

I’ve already told you how there isn’t enough of the materials we need to make sufficient numbers of solar panels or wind turbines, let alone figure out a way to store the energy for when we need it later.

Why is the default position that there has to be enough of what we need to do that, unless proven wrong?

Degrowth doesn’t have to mean smaller.

I used to do research too but then I left for a career that paid more. Not that something like that would make me right or more believable, of course. No, that would be ridiculous.

Im not really sure why you decided to bring up your career in an unrelated field. Honestly, if I was arguing for perpetual growth on a finite planet, I wouldn’t tell anyone I was a scientist, let alone demand someone “take the L” for having to explain to you that our energy consumption can’t grow perpetually.

Good job there isn’t a copper shortage coming …

Oh wait

Nickel is used in the alloys needed in wind turbines and solar panels.

Theres no factual basis to what you’re saying. You’re just declaring utter bollocks to be thus and such.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BN-800_reactor

Youre saying they don’t use uranium or are you trying to move the goal posts again?

Oh, I see, mining the moon is a solution for when we’ve already fixed the problem. No wonder it was so confusing.

it seemed to me that blame was implied.

No, you just made that up and its not implied. They can’t exist without vast amounts of excess labour being undertaken. Im saying its two birds with one stone. That doesn’t mean I’m saying that they made all the emissions. If that’s genuinely what you read from those words then you have a problem. Youre just grasping at straws here.

It took a long time to drag out of you.

Well, far be for me to have to explain to you the finite nature of the planet you find yourself on. Who knows, maybe perpetual growth on a finite planet is possible? Maybe all the scientists and the laws on entropy are wrong and youre right? Maybe thats a thing that could happen in the real world?

I am still waiting for a response to that last quote. I think you’ve found something you can’t dispute.

Omg, yeah, you got me. I can’t dispute that there are more “lower” and middle class people in the world. Well done you.

You don’t need any of those things…well other than the nickel in the coils I specificallymention and the other components that I clearly know nothing about…

Pipe dreams are lovely and all that but until we have something more solid, its best to dismiss the use of other isotopes as it’ll take a decade just to build the power station needed to make the energy. Thats before we get to the time it will actually take to fully research it all.

You’re attempting to argue that I don’t know about renewables or the technology necessary to go green and you’re talking about mining THE MOON in order to, wait for it, lower carbon emissions of all things.

The fucking moon

No wonder you found it so funny. I never said “the rich elite are the only people consuming things at an unsustainable rate.” Honestly, you’re hilarious for attempting to twist what was said into that. Have some intellectual integrity please.

You’ve failed so hard at an “akshually” but please do carry on. As I guessed, you’re against degrowth as anything but a temporary measure and rather than having the spine to come out and stand for it, you try waffle instead.

Just want to leave this here, in case you choose to delete it later

If you actually looked into it you would probably find that lost of the consuming of resources is to support the lower and middle classes

I’m not saying it can’t be converted or that the amount couldn’t, if refined, potentially fuel America for a number of years. So, I’m not sure what the link was for. I said its not feasible, due to the inefficiency of doing it on mass.

What about the energy transition materials like lithium, nickel and cobalt? We don’t have enough of those. All the windmills in the world won’t help, if you can’t convert motion into electricity.

Even then, copper looks to be facing an impending shortage. More still, refining enough silicone to supply the world with and keep up with increased demand of energy would have a colossal carbon footprint, almost big enough to cancel out the benefit. You’ll have to start refining soil thats 0.000000000001% silicone before you got even halfway through. Yeah, we have loads of these things but getting enough of it, in a pure enough form, to power the whole world simply isn’t realistic.

We can’t keep up with the speed that we increase our energy usage with the resources we have on the planet. Its a circular problem with only one solution. I’m not saying we have to go back to the primitive. We just have the treat the planet as though its resources are finite.

They’ll sell us any flavour of distraction other than “work less, do less, slow down and enjoy life more.” Whatever way you cut it, its the only answer.

The problem is that there a major, major shortage of one of the isotopes needed to re-enrich weapons grade uranium (pu 238). Thats before you get to the vast energy inefficiency of doing it which isn’t a problem, if you’re just decommissioning them anyway and you don’t care about energy consumption. However, in this instance, you would need to worry about energy consumption as well as the isotope there won’t be enough of to convert even a fraction of it.

Again, even if you had 100 years, there aren’t enough of the specialist minerals needed for hydro storage and renewables.

Essentially theres" a hole in our bucket."

The only answer is degrowth.

If I remember correctly, we don’t have enough of it to go fully nuclear with our current energy demands. More so, we’ve mined nearly all of the soil thats anything above 0.02% uranium. As such, not only do we not have enough on the planet, getting it and refining it would almost defeat the whole point of doing so in the first place.

It is a problem in that there might be plenty of it but that doesn’t mean there’s enough.

Just to be clear, I’m not saying we have to go back to the stone ages. Its just that we can’t afford the super rich anymore.

The reason nothing will be done is because the only realistic option we have to save our planets ability to sustain life is economic degrowth.

We don’t have enough of the minerals we need to go fully nuclear or renewable and even getting close would use up vast amounts of the very same energy were looking to save in the first place.

As the record levels of equality directly after ww2 showed, economic degrowth due to nearly all the men being at war, only results in the loss of the super rich which is why they’ll never allow economic degrowth.

We all work too much, produce too much and pollute too much. Worse, we’re all forced to produce the very wealth thats used to force us into wage-slavery and kill our planet.

The answer is and will always be the strategic refusal of labour, above what we need to survive and have a good quality of life. This, by default, will result in economic degrowth.

Want to sit around and do nothing to save the planet? Well, now you can.