Brought to you by CFC

[Gori the Grey]

outside the internet daft idiots are a lot harder to find

 

[Terxpahseyton]

Good post, but it should have mentioned Bismarck. That reactionary classist who introduced pensions, unemployment insurance and a primitive kind of universal helathcare to appease the working class while he banned socialist parties.

While, ironically, you could still vote for the socialists in the national elections. And that the people did in increasing numbers, until it had become a farce that their party was forbidden and the ban was lifted.
Just imagine that. Bismark made the socialists the ultimate and irresistible underdog. Because weirdly in Germany, while the state could crack down hard, it did so within strict boundaries. Well until WWI, that is. After decades of being high the new nation-state got nothing but excrement coming.

 

[Traitorfish]

Good post, but it should have mentioned Bismarck. That reactionary classist who introduced pensions, unemployment insurance and a primitive kind of universal helathcare to appease the working class while he banned socialist parties.

That would undercut his polemic a little, mind, drawing that implicit line between conservative authoritarianism and progressivisim, else you'd end up painting a picture of some bizarre alternate-history in which the greatest progressive president has minorities rounded up and put into aw wait no

 

[Hygro]

That would undercut his polemic a little, mind, drawing that implicit line between conservative authoritarianism and progressivisim, else you'd end up painting a picture of some bizarre alternate-history in which the greatest progressive president has minorities rounded up and put into aw wait no

Brought to you by CFC.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Do social hierarchies in other ape societies actually resemble those found in human societies, or is the simple existence of hierarchy enough for you to declare it a universal principle? Do the hierarchies found in different human societies resemble each other?

You can say a lot of things about Jeff Bezos, but he doesn't get first pick of the fruit because his swollen ass is the most vivid shade of blue.

 

[Narz]

Stuff to ponder but in the context of the discussion a total strawman.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

I mostly found the thought of Bezos hanging his ass cheeks to the wind to assert his captain of industry dominance to be hilarious.

 

[Takhisis]

Contracts can be whatever the person writing them thinks that the person signing them doesn't know isn't allowed.

!!!

 

[Takhisis]

The juxtaposition of Einstein and Friedman is a useful reminder that not all outsiders are quacks, and not all quacks are outsiders.

Just to open a new year in CFC.

 

[Synobun]

During a discussion about Ben Bova:

Surely you must know how much this seems like the set up for a "deez nuts" joke.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

On whether or not businesses practiced racial discrimination when there are no laws against it:

If racial discrimination happens when no libertarians are around to personally witness it, did it really happen?

 

[Hygro]

 

[Synobun]

Hey that's me

 

[Kyriakos]

A trip down memory lane for this next memorable quote:

I don't really think that's it. Germany and Chechia have both a higher beer consumption per capita and a much lower overall obesity rate, although Chech women seem to really let themselves go once they get too old for porn.

 

[Synobun]

A story in quotes:

Hey @Snerk I've found just the thing for you

https://thatshirtwascash.com/products/cookie-wave

@Snerk if you give me your address and promise to post a picture of yourself wearing it, I'll totally buy this for you.

Hehe aight imma pm you my deets! This is definitely a first* for me, special moment here guys.

*wearing a t-shirt is not a first for me, but receiving a gift from you guys is

I woke up to find that my cookie tee had finally arrived! So I naturally decided to pay tribute and spend the day with my dear @MaryKB



Pretty sweet, eh!



Rise and shine, gotta brush those pearly whites!



Breakfast for champs! Nomnomnom




Quality time with Zelda! Such playfullness, very graceful.



Later we had a romantic pizza date for two. Such an appetite!



Well, it's been a long day. Time for a cuddle and a good nights sleep! New adventures tomorrow. Thanks again for the tshirt!

 

[Hygro]

Ahaha wow

 

[Synobun]

From the Gun Control thread:

I think a theocracy or dictatorship by the right a far more likely cause of strife than Michelle Obama cutting chicken nugget portions at public schools.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Thank you!

 

[hobbsyoyo]

I can't really single out a single post right now but @Arwon has had an awesome string of well crafted, well researched posts on the fire situation in Australia and global warming in particular. It's also remarkably that he's been goaded a few times with climate denialism even as his country burns down around him and he hasn't reacted out of anger the way most of us (including me) would have.

https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/global-warming-strikes-again.606075/page-138

Edit: Here are some good examples:

Spoiler Arwon's lolwtf massive posts of glory :

Some of the bushfires this year are generating their own weather systems, pyrocumulonimbus clouds that generate lightning https://twitter.com/BOM_Vic/status/1211425755680387078?s=19

It's a well known fact that if you prove Greta is bad, global warming stops being real. No wonder every crank and kook on the internet wants to be the one whose post unlocks the magic.

Bureau of Meteorology sez:



Here's the change in fire danger since 1978, from the Bureau:



Most of those lower blue bits are desert...

The most extreme firestorm conditions (with pyrocumulonimbus lightning and literal fire tornados) are becoming more common. We've never seen conditions this hot and dry for so long, all the average high and prolonged heat temperature records have fallen in recent years.

We have never seen fires this widespread across forest/bush land, several times as much of NSW has burned as in any year previously, aside from one remote grassfire season in the 1970s which comes closer to the area but not volume burned. This year is the worst on record by some distance and it's still only December. We've never seen so much this early, most of the worst historical fires have been later in the year, such as the Ash Wednesday fires in the 1980s. We've also never seen the entire southeast blanketed in hazardous levels of smoke for weeks on end

Fire exploiting ecosystems are prevalent but not ubiquitous here and a feature of this year's dry is that the fire has spread to areas that never typically burned. We're seeing temperate rainforest biomes, which don't ordinarily burn and don't regenerate like dry bushland, dried out to the extent that they burn catastrophically too. That's happened from the Central Coast of NSW to the Gold Coast hinterland.

We also a few years ago lost a huge chunk of world heritage Tasmanian alpine biome, which won't come back because it never burned before. It's going to get replaced with inflammable species from other areas that grow quickly and don't need the peat soils that had built up over thousands of years.

We're seeing fire seasons overlapping repeatedly with California's in October and November, which is so unusual that there's entire water bombing aircraft leasesharing arrangements between California and our States which are predicated on there not being overlap.

The winter months, traditionally a time for burning off fuel loads safely, have become drier and more dangerous, reducing the available opportunities for fuel reduction burns. What used to be considered best practice isn't always possible any more.

Our rural fire services are volunteer community based, which has always served well. Those organisations have been able to conduct the off season fire management, fight fires, and then return to their homes. The sheer size and spread of the fires is now likely to overwhelm that model - the fire is too widespread, too long-lasting, and the volunteers are exhausted and being stretched to breaking point. The old model isn't working.

And we're seeing these extreme dry hot conditions without the super strong El Niño conditions that generated the conditions of the most extreme historical years.

This ain't the normal fire cycle, every risk factor is being amped up by global warming. They've had to add a new level of bushfire danger (Catastrophic) in the last decade which represents "we can't stop this or protect you". The Bureau of Meteorology had to add a new colour to their heat maps.

I posted this graphic earlier, we're in bits at the right hand side of the bell curve that are new:

View attachment 541936

A huge chunk of the areas burning are remote wild land, that's part of why they can't be fought, merely defended against. Most of this is mountainous National Park terrain in the mountains inland from Sydney, for instance:



It's just that at some point the areas of dense forest reserve areas gives way to not forest and usually there's either a township or at least farms nearby. A lot of areas just have trees strewn throughout the populated areas too, and remember in most biomes, our trees are made of flammable eucalyptus oils so they burn and explode pretty easily because they use that to propagate seeds.

Most fundamentally though, there's also just way more of said bushland burning than any year previously. We're currently at about 3.5m hectares just in New South Wales and 5m hectares total and are only halfway through the fire season (5m ha is over five times the size of the 900k ha Amazon fires in 2019). With the fire this widespread, they can't concentrate resources and put them out, instead it's a sort of triage to predict movements and defend property.

For instance here's tomorrow's faintly horrifying warnings in the area between my hometown Nowra (note the screenname lol) and the Victorian border. The area shown here is about a 4 hour, 300km drive from north to south. There's a number of currently small fires in the previously spared south of NSW. They're expected to balloon up and race outwards due to the 40 degree heat and strong wind, all they can do is project and warn ppl, and figure out where to put the firefighting resources to defend stuff.

These fires will then join the rest of them in burning for weeks until we get decent rainfall, adding to the unprecedented area burned and further deteriorating air quality.



The areas are huge, bigger than we have ever seen. The graph below was posted on Nov 24 just for New South Wales (there are fires in four other states now). I've updated the area burned now with a very professional looking drawing tool. That far west fire year in 1974 was vast areas of remote grassland, as was a decent chunk of the 1984 Xmas fires - nothing like these rugged forest fires:

View attachment 541941

Hence the entire southeast being under a hazardous smoke blanket since mid November. The loss of property has been substantial (I think homes lost is in the low thousands) because when an area the size of Costa Rica burns, there's going to be farms and small townships in the way, but the loss of lives mercifully small so far.

Another example is the Victorian East Gippsland fires today, the area where the pyrocumulonimbus clouds have been triggering dry lightning. This area is half the size of Belgium, it's mostly old small towns based on food, forestry and mining and mostly known for a dwindling economy and tourism. It's a rugged, sparsely populated, mostly natural area, lots of national park. There's a bit under 50 000 people living around here, and it was estimated that there was about 30 000 people on holiday at the point when the warning for everyone to leave was given. Most of them are down on the coast, but the roads out of there are not numerous.

It's the natural, sparsely populated areas that burn, because that's where all the large areas of contiguous fuel are.



However, just to counterpoint the fires generally being in natural areas, today there's an emergency level fire in a small bush/forest reserve in suburban Melbourne. Not the urban fringe interfacing with national park, the suburbs, a place called Bundoora 15km from the centre of Melbourne. It's in a small river canyon reserve which has been as desiccated as everything else and it went up in 46 degree heat with strong winds around. When I say it's genuinely suburban, the tram even goes there, and part of the "to late to evacuate" zone was defined by the metropolitan ring road:

Also notable that former fire chiefs have been warning that Australia is unprepared for the climate driven escalating threat, this didn't come out of nowhere.

These fires are probably a good lesson on the economic and social costs of climate inaction, too. Australia is pretty wealthy and pretty resilient so not a place where the direct impacts of climate change are likely to be counted in mass death from exacerbated natural disasters or the spread of tropical diseases. The most deadly fires a few years ago killed 180 people, we don't get mass deaths in our tropical cyclones or floods either.

Here, we're talking more like dislocations, extra stresses, a depressed economy, more defensive expenditure, less reliable and predictable systems, etc. A poorer future.

Given these fires are unprecedented in their extent, in a non-heated world the climate system here is probably more like the 20th century and we can probably assume the predominant share of the impacts are attributable to the extra heat. We're at about 1 degree temperature anomaly, presumably when it gets up to 2 or 3 or 4 things get worse, but for now we've got a bit of a taster here.

View attachment 541960

I'm just gonna tally some of the direct and indirect costs of a fire season worse than any experienced so far. Some of this would be felt in a typical bad fire year, but a lot wouldn't be felt, and certainly not all at once.

• Direct insurance payouts for homes (1000 homes so far would be a quarter of a billion dollars in value if they were valued at $250k each) and businesses and increased premiums in future due to elevated risks
  
  
• Impacts of long term hazardous level air quality - that means more health expenditure, lost work hours, reduced spending as people avoid going out. There'd be some level of background mental health impact too, with the omnipresent smoke bringing the sense of crisis to everyone.
  
  
• Direct disaster response - direct cost is the funding cost of fighting the specific fires, including aviation expenses and other firefighting logistics, the use of emergency services to enforce road closures and assist evacuations, then the infrastructure rebuild to fix melted roads and clear them of dead tree hazards, fix pipes and power lines, that sorta thing
  
  
• Indirect disaster costs, ie potential or probable future changes. There's a decent likelihood that we have to move from volunteer to paid rural firefighters, buy more aircraft instead of sharing with California, buy other equipment. Then there's stuff like clearing more fire breaks along roads and power lines and near populated areas, more mitigation activity like fuel burns
  
  
• School closures - the most extreme risk days have seen hundreds of schools closed in risky areas, impacting on worker availability and children's education
  
  
• Contaminated water - the fires around Sydney are affecting most of the catchment, dropping so much ash and dead leaves into the dams that there's a risk of contamination along with the direct physical fire risk to pumping and filtration infrastructure. That's going to be expensive to work around until it stabilises or is fixed, it may involve firing up the desalination plant or purchasing water from uncontaminated catchments.
  
  
• Primary industries - among other things the fires this year have destroyed a third of South Australia's wine grape growing area, Queensland banana, pineapple, mango, and avocado growing areas, pine plantations in northern NSW, Blue Mountains apples and figs, sheep and cattle everywhere, milk spoiling at dairy farms due to power outages, and ironically enough the fire has threatened coal mines and power plants. That's just articles I've seen, it's anecdotal but clearly such a massive area burning is going to have heaps of smallscale destructive economic effects like this.
  
  
• Tourism - many areas that typically see most of their business over two months in summer have basically not seen a tourist season at all this year due to fire threat or hazardous roads. Half of this city goes "to the coast" in December or January and it's really common for Sydneysiders to head north or south too. Those towns have largely missed out on that business this year. Some smaller towns have had many of their businesses closed because people are off doing volunteer fire duties. Other areas have had severe smoke impacts, and the brand damage of Sydney etc being visibly choked by smoke and fire presumably hits international visitor numbers. (Anecdotally I've been doing the same drive to the coast for my wife's family Christmas for years and I've never seen the roads so empty on Christmas Eve)
  
  
• Species loss - there are fears that an entire protected species of ancient trees have gone extinct and huge areas of koala habitat have been destroyed (reports that koalas are "functionally extinct" are an exaggeration, but they're not doing well after decades of habitat loss and losing thousands of them won't help). There's
  
  
• Heritage loss - fires in Victoria were threatening the Budj Bim Landscape world heritage area (an Indigenous Protected Area known for its stone building and fish traps, perhaps the world's oldest preserved aquaculture system). I think they were protected, but it's an ongoing risk.
  
  
• Events - related to tourism, but heap of events have had to be cancelled. That's included an international road race and other professional sporting events (we had our first ever cancelled game due to smoke here last week), Victoria's most famous music festival, New Years fireworks in most places other than Sydney Harbour

This is one elevated risk and one kind of disaster in one of the most stable and resilient countries on earth.

Let's just say I'm interested to see the next couple of quarters of GDP and Gross State Product figures.

If we attribute only half of the total cost of these fires to the temperature anomaly exacerbating what would have been a bad year in 1970 into an unprecedented level of disaster in 2019. That's still a sizeable impost to weigh up against the costs of decarbonisation. Bearing in mind we're only at 1 degree of warming so far.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

The point about inclusivity is that you should strive to make marginalised groups not feel marginalised. Adopting a similar, scientifically-accurate label to help normalise "trans" in everyday discussions is an easy, zero-cost thing to do. Being offended that you're being labelled such is irony that, if captured in an engine, would solve our Mars transport problems in an instant.

Be still my beating heart...