patrick.net

richwicks says

I used to be pro Pocahontas - she had some pretty good speeches against the banks, but it was all theater. Now I'm constantly on guard for fakes. DeSantis might be a fake I feel.

Yep warren used to be decent then sold out - DeSantis is real, no indication of fake so far.

Patrick says

These people were always dreamers/idealists and some were always dumb or asshoes, but for the most part they used to fight actual nazis and authoritarian structures in government. They have been successfully brainwashed by the globalist leftoid agtprop so become letftoid brownshirts, the elite are laughing at these useful idiots who actively promote division and destruction of society and authoritarian oppression of speech and freedoms and objective truths. Their lives have been rendered useless except for being tools of the globalist marxist leftoids, this is more than folly of youth. You could not have convinced an antifa of the 1980s to go disrupt an event claiming that men and womyn are biologically different.

What is sobering is that all three of these dissidents -- James Damore, Dr. Heather Heying, and Dr. Peter Boghossian -- lost their jobs over woke nonsense.

Patrick says

Maybe wokeness is just a symptom of being in one's 20's:

Those are the naïve years where you assume "Real Socialism" hasn't been tried yet.
It's also the time you believe that because of rich people, you don't have any marketable skills. Only they don't call it "Marketable Skills" they call it money.
The Chaz zone alone, dispelled every myth I held as a truth, when I was in my 20's.

Elon Musk: 'Wokeness Is Divisive, Exclusionary, and Hateful'
Madeline Leesman
December 22, 2021 11:15 AM

In an interview this week, Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk said that wokeness “wants to make comedy illegal” and gives “cruel” people a reason to be hateful.

Musk made the remarks in a one hour and forty-minute interview with The Babylon Bee, where he discussed wokeness, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D), the Metaverse, taxing the rich, and more with CEO Seth Dillon, Editor-In-Chief Kyle Mann, and Creative Director Ethan Nicolle.

“Generally, I think we should be aiming for, like, a positive society, and it should be okay to be humorous,” Musk said in the interview.

“Wokeness basically wants to make comedy illegal, which is not cool. I mean, [Dave] Chappelle? Like, what the f*? I mean, trying to shut down Chappelle? C’mon man. That’s crazy."

“Do we want a humorless society that is simply rife with condemnation and hate, basically?” Musk asked.

“And no forgiveness,” Dillon added.

“Yeah,” Musk nodded in agreement. “At its heart, wokeness is divisive, exclusionary, and hateful. It basically gives mean people a reason – it gives them a shield to be mean and cruel armoured in false virtue.”

https://notthebee.com/article/cate-blanchett-beautifully-destroys-critical-race-theory-and-gender-identity-politics

But in this role, Blanchett hits close to the Christian teaching of intrinsic worth that has shaped Western civilization – the idea that all people have equal inherent value and should be judged on their character, accomplishments, behavior, and skill rather than external features or deterministic outputs.

It is an important lesson: If you can dismiss Bach, Washington, Shakespeare, or Michelangelo simply because they were "cis white males," then you too can be judged on your sexuality, skin tone, and sex.

The woke might want to pay attention, for the generations after them will eat them alive based on their own standards.

https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/is-go-woke-go-broke-driving-go-woke

their entire ethos and praxis has been arranging the world in such a manner that they are the only ones allowed to speak. they take over media, movies, TV, museums, classrooms, and conversation. the bristle with nasty energy always ready to attack anyone voicing disagreement and they censor, cancel, and shout down anyone who dares diverge.

it’s rule by fear.

these people are impossible to work with, unpleasant to work near, and have been driving away customers and co-workers alike.

their movies bomb. their oppressive performative regimes are exhausting.

they add nothing and demand everything.

and seeing them leave is nature healing.

now it’s only government that is still driving wokeward. ...

i'll bet they are alarmed.

their entire ideology relies upon suppressing dissenting views and being the only one talking in order to make itself seem like a legitimate majority when the fact of the matter is that is it neither.

and that's about to become crystal clear.

this whole movement is predicated on no one being allowed to question it. it simply defines its own core salients as “non-interrogatable” and then demands to deconstruct all else in a game of “punch no punchbacks” that is critical to its survival because if there is one thing that woke cannot do, it’s take a punch.

https://notthebee.com/article/the-world-is-far-less-populated-than-you-think-babies

The "empty" farmland feeds those high-density cities. Yes, we could have a billion people in the USA if we live hand to mouth and clustered into shacks, but no way that billion people could have a 1st world lifestyle.

Patrick says

Maybe wokeness is just a symptom of being in one's 20's:

No. Millies are the first generation not to become substantially more conservative with age, and almost all the Woke Grunts are Millies.

HeadSet says

The "empty" farmland feeds those high-density cities. Yes, we could have a billion people in the USA if we live hand to mouth and clustered into shacks, but no way that billion people could have a 1st world lifestyle.

Takes about 2 hectares of land to feed one person is what I've heard. That's about 325 by 325 feet. My sister and husband raise their own cows for meat, seems about right. They require a pretty serious amount of land to graze.

I always hear that you can pack all the population into this tiny amount of land - you could, if you wanted to starve the entire population of the world to death - well, they would survive by cannibalism for a little while... if they could find enough drinking water. There's a reason there aren't herds of bears and deer. Herds develop for protection, but they can eat the most awful vegetation and must be nomadic to survive on it. We can't.

richwicks says

Takes about 2 hectares of land to feed one person is what I've heard.

And that is just for food. Now considered the resource use that heats the house, fuels the car, and powers the circuits.

https://notthebee.com/article/nikole-hannah-jones-tried-to-argue-with-a-survivor-of-maos-cultural-revolution-about-american-exceptionalism-and-it-does-not-go-well-for-her

Depends on the protein source.

You can get a shitton of protein and fat from chickens (the fat from eggs) or tilapia out of small spaces. Goats need a little more, but not high quality (the back acre you don't mow or plant but leave wild with trees and shrubs, also they eat ANYTHING from table scraps to an old leather shoe they found in the backyard). Cows need a lot more.

But with a single meat 1200lb cow, you're getting about 500 pounds of usuable meat (that's including some wasteage, going for 85/15 ground beef, more bone-in cuts, but not eating the head cheese or organs, and not the scores of pounds from bone having marrow reduced into bone broth, etc.). That's 125lb/person for a family of 4, or 9lb for the family each week. All from a single cow and assuming modern sensibilities don't like to eat cow organs.

But meat cows were/are generally raised in either poor soils badly suited for general agriculture, or in feed lots these days. In Cool Temperate Europe and North America, cows and goats generally roamed the wastes/wetlands/forested areas to graze, with the best land reserved for plants, fruit trees, and horses. In Montana with hard scrabble soils and tough prairie grass, 4 acres/cow. In Emerald Ireland or New England, closer to 2.5 - 3 acres per cow due to the lush grass.

EDIT: Or Florida. Cows also scale up well, apparently. Having two 10 acre paddocks and keeping them in rotation can allow as much as 1.5 acres/cow. But 2.5 would be the floor if you're on a small acerage.

Source for Meat - butcher:
https://www.meatchris.com/blog/2012/6/1/how-much-meat-will-i-take-home.html

Sunflower oil averages about 25 gallons of Diesel for minimal input/acre (no irrigation, no artificial fertilizer dosing)
https://farm-energy.extension.org/sunflowers-for-biofuel-production/

My estimate reduces the given numbers since I'm assuming less input and yield than on a dedicated, chemically-driven farm.

I refuse to call plant-based Diesel "Biodiesel" since Rudolph Diesel invented the Diesel engine to burn seed oil in the first place.

But we're talking food self-sufficiency, not total self-sufficiency.

Came across it so I thought I'd put that up.

AmericanKulak says

I refuse to call plant-based Diesel "Biodiesel" since Rudolph Diesel invented the Diesel engine to burn seed oil in the first place.

Plants creating oil is a very inefficient way to collect solar energy.

You're better off using solar panels and breaking down water into hydrogen and oxygen. There are some algaes that are about 1% efficient in energy conversion, but a crappy solar panel is 10%, and breaking down water to hydrogen and oxygen is 50% efficient, and burning that is 33% efficient. Making it more than 3 times more efficient than the best biological process.

Biofuel is a fine idea, if our population was around, say, 5 million people. In a different time, it was viable, and even then, it would have been limited by access to fertilizer. I don't think it's viable in our time, in fact, I know it's not. If we recycled human waste in efficient way, it would perhaps be doable, but then we'd have to deal with salts in the waste. We'd have to have to consume a LOT LESS salt to do it.

richwicks says

Plants creating oil is a very inefficient way to collect solar energy.

Says the guy typing on a computer connected to a power grid that runs off of fossil fuels.

I’d say plants creating oil, and reproducing themselves to produce offspring that make even more oil is basically the foundation of the ecosystem and by extension the only thing keeping humans upright on this earth. When plants stop making oil and carbohydrates you will see how efficient man made power and nutritional sources are.

PeopleUnited says

richwicks says

Plants creating oil is a very inefficient way to collect solar energy.

Says the guy typing on a computer connected to a power grid that runs off of fossil fuels.

Um, yeah? Of course. We have to run off from fossil fuels, currently. We could (and should) move to thorium. We can improve technology to have supplements in solar, and perhaps we can make better storage, but we're not there yet. It's conceivable that if we change our lifestyles enormously, and we could only make use of energy during the day, and have none (or very little) at night.

PeopleUnited says

I’d say plants creating oil, and reproducing themselves to produce offspring that make even more oil is basically the foundation of the ecosystem and by extension the only thing keeping humans upright on this earth. When plants stop making oil and carbohydrates you will see how efficient man made power and nutritional sources are.

Again, if we radically change our lifestyle. No more foods that are out of season, we need to recycle waste efficiently for fertilizer, eliminate a lot of toxic elements in our society. It would require a radical change.

I really think the way forward is stabilization of the population, structures that are built to be VERY long lasting (like 1000 years), reduced need for transportation, smaller communities but a LOT MORE of them. I don't think most people would want to live like that. I am NOT in favor of people owning nothing and being happy, because only 1/2 of that would be the truth. We're being forced into a new feudalism, which was just an early version of fascism.

If markets are allowed to freely operate, that will solve the problem. Thorium reactors will give us a good 1,000 years and that's a LONG TIME to figure out new solutions.

Thorium reactors are a real thing, they are safe, but we've not had an operating one for like 50 years. They are viable, HOWEVER, they don't produce nuclear weaponry, and the DOE is only interesting in making nuclear weapons.

richwicks says

We could (and should) move to thorium

+1 for MSRs powered by throium.

They do produce a miniscule amount of plutonium, but really, the idea that terrorists are going to somehow gather plutonium from multiple MSRs is silly. Also that plutonium is fantastic energy source for satellites and backup for colonies. There's no reason it can't be periodically collected during maintenance and stored somewhere.

Also, much legacy reactor radioactive waste from traditional reactors can be thrown in an MSR a little at a time and get a second 'burn' out of it, which reduces it's half life, provides power, and generally makes the disposal process much more efficient.

There's no meltdown risk with MSRs since the Flouride Salt core would simply cool and solidify, and if it was too hot it the drop in production would be noticable over a while and no sensors could miss it. You could also put a plug over a concrete-steel reservoir under the reactor, so if it got too hot the plug would melt and the Flouride Salt would simply flow into the reservoir and away from the core, stopping the process. Unlike Traditional Reactors that would crack and emit radiated steam all over the area, failed MSRs would just pool a small amount of radioactive fluid into a chamber beneath it, or worse case in a small area immediately around the facility. The material would then very rapidly solidify after losing contact with the core making cleanup a snap.

If anybody is interested in the back story, Thorium/LSR was developed on behalf of the USAF as an idea to have huge, never landing bombers, and traditional reactors by the USN to power large ships without the need to constantly refuel (ie SSNs and CVNs).

https://euphoricrecall.substack.com/p/how-white-liberals-are-driving-wokeness