Yet you encourage people to start wars they can't win.
I keep coming back to the first gulf war when Bush encouraged the Shiites to ride up against Hussain and then left them out to dry.
Its what gets done to the Palestinians over and over. And the Jews aren't the enemies you need them to be because if they were the Palestinians would have been long scattered.
Yeah buying an EV instead of a gas car is a hedge that doesn't cost much. There is an asymmetry in the upside and downside risk. The downside risk is all on gas with no upside. No downside for the EV.
In the Loma Prieta earthquake most of my coworkers fled the newly constructed office building. Dodged falling ceramic roofing tiles. And then ran across the parking lot to take safety under the power lines.
You bring up assets. I think per-industrial economies the majority of couples have no ability to gain modern assets. Things like land and infrastructure was locked down. Unless you wanted to try to take stuff by force you were SOL. So only thing you could do is have a lot of children whose value was performing labor. Only encouraged by a high childhood mortality rate.
Switch to an industrial society. Having children to do raw physical labor competes directly with tractors and a backhoes. But you can acquire other assets and put more resources in upscaling children through education. And wage work means you can send wives and daughters out to make money.
I think it usually takes a society one or two generations to figure that out and act accordingly.
Adding a thing I harp on. Malthusian limits traditionally is thought to apply to just food and disease. But you can extended that to an industrial wage based economy and the resource restrictions still apply just not to food and disease. Industrialization probably results in structural population overshoot.
I read those before but will read them again. That narrative influenced my thinking about this. There is confusion I think because peoples attitudes tend to be stubborn over time. But they tend to match the milieu they were raised under.
An example of that is the plots in this essay. Attitudes don't change much plotted by age cohort over time.
Summarize that we've thrown a bunch of historical peasants into an industrial society and they're reacting astutely to the new incentives. But the big change comes from those that grew up in it.
Example Bangladesh fertility rate went from 7 in 1975 to 4 in one generation and dropped to 2 one generation later.
I think there are strong links between the immune system, the autonomic system, and the brain. A dysregulation immune system can seriously mess with you.
The classic psychological explanation is the patient only thinks they are sick. But the reality is their body is behaving like they are sick. Worse the classic explanation why you feel sick is 'toxins' from an infection and that is wrong. It's your reaction to feedback from your immune system.
Yep - people wonder why we can't treat ME/CFS, we don't even have decent biochemical markers for "fatigue" vs "energy", beyond trivial stuff like blood oxygenation and lactic acid. Nor are there much in the way of markers which will determine whether a competing athlete is going to have a good or a bad day.
For example, we have a concept of "energy" for which calories is a rough proxy, but there's no particular reason why fighting an infection should draw on the same reserves that running either endurance or peak muscle does, especially as most people operate in a state of calorie surplus, and their respiratory system is more than capable of supplying a bit of extra O2 unless they're severely ill. And yet clearly the immune/autonomic system forces people into a "rest" state in case of infection.
Or another one, there's no particular biological reason for older people to have less "energy". Like yes there's loss in muscle mass and some small drop-offs in the efficiency of various systems, but it doesn't seem like directly compensating for those makes all that much difference.
Yep, we can measure ATP and so on at the cellular level, but we don't have much of a picture of how that maps onto the physical/psychological sensation of "energy".
Like we know at a crude physical level, we can give someone a bit of a boost with glucose and sympathomimetic stimulants, but sometimes it works a lot better than others. And it's ineffective for fatigue syndromes, but they can't be the other mechanical things commonly associated with fatigue either. (lactic acid, micro-tears and so on).
Batteries in California have curtailed the need for peaker plants most of the year. Natural gas is starting to become a seasonal supply of electricity. Fall winter spring it's providing a few GW of power. Only in the mid to late summer does it break 10GW. That change happened over just five years.
I keep mentioning this because it's notable. California now needs to increase demand for electricity to move forward on electrification. Things like low cost workplace charging and mass adoption of heat pumps. Unfortunately California is going to elect a governor who thinks it's his job to protect entrenched interests. Fortunately big picture it doesn't matter except to people in California.
Currently renewable manufacturing is doing the the equivalent of adding 10 million barrels/day of oil production per year. Total production is 110 million barrels/day. Demand destruction for oil is coming very soon now.
Probably pushing the idea that doing stuff like that is something criminal trash class families do.
Helps when religious leaders are against it. The Catholic church was against forced marriage which is why that mostly died out in Europe during the middle ages.
No, the USA wasn't crippled by over-investment on climate action. Trade and tax and social policy are where the mercenary think-tank economists did the damage.
I keep coming back to the first gulf war when Bush encouraged the Shiites to ride up against Hussain and then left them out to dry.
Its what gets done to the Palestinians over and over. And the Jews aren't the enemies you need them to be because if they were the Palestinians would have been long scattered.
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