The Gaming Den

How is that bullshit? The one guy who pulls out a gun in a barroom brawl is considered having escalated things to a gunfight, even if he's the only one with a gun.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_warfare
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/ ... ar-the-col

Pat Robertson Blames Earthquake on Pact Haitians Made with Satan

http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch ... satan.html

FrankTrollman wrote:

Maxus wrote:Yeah, there will probably be a time of upheaval and human suffering as people adjust to the new climate zones. Famine and starvation and collapse of civilization in some areas. That's not good. Not good at all.

But equating global warming with nuclear war?

You know, we totally had a nuclear war, and no civilizations collapsed. If civilization collapses "in some areas" that's actually worse than nuclear war.

-Username17

You know what I mean. The Cold War-esque mass mutually-assured destruction nuclear war on both sides which leaves large swathes of land uninhabitable, due to the radiation.

Humanity can cope with a hotter planet and adapt, given time. It'll be bad during the time while people are adjusting. Social upheaval, famine, human suffering...

But the 'Doomsday' I thought the Doomsday Clock was supposed to represent is much, much WORSE.

Humanity, maybe.

Our current crop of countries? No.

The current population level? No.

Billions will die.

-Crissa

Crissa wrote:Humanity, maybe.

Our current crop of countries? No.

The current population level? No.

Billions will die.

-Crissa

Doubt it'd be that many people. Millions, probably. But...I very much doubt it'd be as much as you're saying. Or that the upheaval would be THAT widespread, given how slow the process will happen anyway. And how would the planet warming up reduce arable land? Sure, the total amount of landspace will decrease, but I'm pretty sure the expansion of warm ecosystems would mean that there would still be arable land.

I know I'm sounding cold-blooded here, but I really can't see the excitement in trying to "stop" global warming and climate change, since it'll eventually happen anyway even if we *did* cut back on atmospheric greenhouse gases. It'll slow the process down, and buy some time, but the human species will eventually have to cope with the icecaps melting anyway.

The fossil record says "evolve or die," so I think a better approach for the human species would be to plan and work out ahead of time how to cope with the change in climate and the landscapes. I admit that's incredibly unlikely and would require planet-wide coordination and planning and large-scale research to find out what the changes will likely be.

But not much more so than getting every potentially polluting business, industry, and nation in the world to cut back on their pollution and let the atmosphere equalize. Especially if it involved reducing their personal profit.

No. We can barely sustain the population we have.

Have you been paying attention? The industrialized world ran out of several types of grain this year. The last five years have seen serious shortages or outages of some grain or staple food the world over.

Yeah, lack of Eggos is a sign of the apocalypse.

-Crissa

Crissa wrote:
Have you been paying attention? The industrialized world ran out of several types of grain this year. The last five years have seen serious shortages or outages of some grain or staple food the world over.

Yeah, lack of Eggos is a sign of the apocalypse.

-Crissa

I honestly wasn't aware of that.

Yeah, allright. Fuck.

Best start adapting now...

Rice Shortage

Wheat Shortage

We aren't talking about something minor like running out of pistachios or bananas. Although seriously: we are in danger of running out of bananas. Basic food staples are razor's edging it each year. We had a 2008 rice crisis and a 2009 rice crisis. Chances of a 2010 rice crisis are looking pretty good.

As for "adapting" right now... adapting to what? As long as the climate continues to shift at unprecedented speed, each year is statistically unlikely to be similar to the year before it. What do you think we should be planting, where do you think we should be planting it, and when do you think we should schedule planting and harvesting? It's not like taking historical temperatures and rain patterns is an especially good basis for a model right now, and last year's weird weather isn't a great predictor of this year's weird weather either.

In order to adapt to things, we need to slow down the rate of change to something that we can start making predictions about. It takes six years to grow an apple tree into something that makes edible fruit. If we can't slow climate change to the point of having predictable weather in an area for a decade or so, we won't be able to have apples any more.

-Username17

tzor wrote:You stated, and I will quote the damn thing again and again. “It's the propaganda arm of the Republican Party.” You didn’t say “Conservative” nor did you say “Fiscally Conservative” or a tool of “Conservative Corporations.” You said “Republican Party” … that organization with Michael Stephen Steele as the National Party Chairman.

Yeah. The Republican Party. You know, the political party that is filled with people that identify themselves as "conservatives" or "fiscal conservatives" and that is financially and politically backed by "conservative corporations"? The party that you - as a self-proclaimed conservative - belong to? Hmm. Do you think there might be some kind of connection here between conservatives at large and the Republican Party? Maybe we should call Sherlock Holmes in on this one.

tzor wrote:So before you get into the bullshit about “Fair and Balanced"

Which they aren't. Anyone with any sense that watches their network can plainly see that their roster of pundits leans to the extreme right and they always put a right-wing spin on any news that they broadcast. This might have to do with the fact that Fox News is run by Roger Ailes, who made his career as a political consultant for the Republican Party and was an image and media consultant for Nixon, Reagan, and Bush The Elder. He's taken great care in crafting a network that not only produces a profit, but advances the interests of his political patrons.

tzor wrote:or the state of their bias (which is really no different from the New York Times or a lot of many other news organizations these days; even news feeds like the AP are somewhat biased in one way or another)

This doesn't clear Fox News of any wrongdoing. This simply shows how fucked up the American Media really is. I think FAIR sums it up best:

Almost all media that reach a large audience in the United States are owned by for-profit corporations--institutions that by law are obligated to put the profits of their investors ahead of all other considerations. The goal of maximizing profits is often in conflict with the practice of responsible journalism.

Not only are most major media owned by corporations, these companies are becoming larger and fewer in number as the biggest ones absorb their rivals. This concentration of ownership tends to reduce the diversity of media voices and puts great power in the hands of a few companies. As news outlets fall into the hands of large conglomerates with holdings in many industries, conflicts of interest inevitably interfere with newsgathering.

But Fox News isn't content to just advance the interests of corporations. From the CEO on down, the network is filled with people with deep political connections to the Republican Party. And that's why it has become the central hub of the right-wing's well-oiled media machine. It's nothing more then a right-wing echo chamber filled to bursting with loud, crazy far-right pundits. And there is a certain segment of the viewing public that eats that shit up with a spoon. But to everyone else standing outside of the echo chamber... ]their bias is pretty obvious.

tzor wrote:the question of whether the news channel is a propaganda arm of a political party is the question I replied to.

I didn't ask a question, tzor. I stated a fact that I can back up with evidence. You simply engaged in your usual brand of what can only be either categorized as willful stupidity or intellectual dishonesty and rambled off some ad hominem attacks and some teabagger talking points to try and defend a bunch of sociopathic fucktards that run a cable news network.

Crissa wrote:Humanity, maybe.

Our current crop of countries? No.

The current population level? No.

Billions will die.

-Crissa

Have a sense of proportion; you are sounding like a debater in NationSates (*), there are only single digit billions of people in the entire world. In fac the World Population Estimate is 6,796,379,185 at 15:05 UTC (EST+5) Jan 14, 2010

So you can't even decimate the planet (original Roman definition; to kill 10% of the population) and get a billion. You need to kill off 15% of the population to hit the billion mark. Double that to get that word into the plural.

(*) I love the simulation game Nation States, but it had a known bug where population always rose linearly to absurd levels. My own primary nation there, Tzorsland, now has 12.35 billion people and "the world contains 51,818 nations in 6,433 regions."

Crissa wrote:Have you been paying attention? The industrialized world ran out of several types of grain this year. The last five years have seen serious shortages or outages of some grain or staple food the world over.

Well there you go again ...
Where Did the Ever-Worsening Grain Shortage Go? Posted on September 09, 2009 at 10:22 AM

Grain elevators across Kansas have a problem this fall as the combines get ready to roll for what looks to be a record fall harvest. The elevators are full of wheat. The terminals are too.

Faced with lower than break-even prices, farmers haven't sold their wheat. They are holding on, hoping that dwindling supplies will push prices upward or that a recovering world economy will spur export sales. But that leaves no place to put the corn, soybeans and milo about to start pouring in to local co-ops.

Ganbare Gincun wrote:This doesn't clear Fox News of any wrongdoing. This simply shows how fucked up the American Media really is.

The American Media has been fucked up since the founding of the nation. They were so fucked up they got John Adams to push for the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798. Fast forward another hundred years and William Randolph Hearst of the New York World practically led the nation into the Spanish Amercan War.


But the point remains; there is a difference between "Conervative Interests" and the "Republican Party." I'm never going to dispute the former; but I will dispute the later.

Note: Harvests happen at distinct times. Classically, wheat is harvested in the fall, which is why moons near the Autumnal equinox are called "Harvest Moons." So having full grain elevators in September is not in any way incompatible with having wheat shortages the following April.

The important question is not whether we are having a good trade n grain at harvest time, but whether there is - in total - enough grain for the following year. And for the last two years, the answer has been "no."

-Username17

Food will be more expensive, but I don't imagine crushing shortages to the tune of billions dead. Brazil is full of unused, arable land. Prices will go up, poor people will starve or suffer malnutrition, but billions dead is too much.

Mean Liar wrote:Brazil is full of unused, arable land.

No. It's really not. The reason people get upset about people chopping down the rainforest in the Amazon and using it for forage land for animals is that the topsoil is very thin and of poor quality - so after you do that it doesn't grow back.



-Username17

Not so. It actually has more unused arable land than the entire US midwest, with soil good for soy, among other things.

Cheapass cultivation techniques can fuck up the soil in some regions, but that's not a necessary case and as more investment is dumped into Brazil it'll disappear as agribusinesses move in.

mean_liar wrote:Not so. It actually has more unused arable land than the entire US midwest, with soil good for soy, among other things.

Cheapass cultivation techniques can fuck up the soil in some regions, but that's not a necessary case and as more investment is dumped into Brazil it'll disappear as agribusinesses move in.

[Citation Needed]

The CIA World Factbook suggests that Brasil has a third the arable land of the United States, and a similar amount of total area under permanent crop cultivation. I seriously have no idea where you are getting your figures. But 6.9% Arable Land is pretty terrible. Even blighted Central Asian hellpits like Kazakhstan have over 8% Arable Land. You might as well be arguing for us to go farm the Republic of Nepal.

-Username17

You'd be surprised. 8% of Brazil still covers a massive amount of land, most of which is underutilized. As grain prices increase and $/ha yields of soybeans goes up I think you'll see Brazilian soy production at the top of the heap.

mean_liar wrote:You'd be surprised. 8% of Brazil still covers a massive amount of land, most of which is underutilized. As grain prices increase and $/ha yields of soybeans goes up I think you'll see Brazilian soy production at the top of the heap.

Maybe...But in a rain forest, something like 85% of the nutrients are in the organic things there--plants and animals. You need some rain to form good topsoil, but the rainforest gets so much that the topsoil is basically being washed away as it occurs. As soon as something dies, there's a resource rush to 1) Break it down 2) Take its place. Unfortunately, it's also just sitting on top of a pretty much even layer of dirt, with no top soil or anyway.

Now, ironically, the rainforest can restore itself...but very slowly. That's how slash-and-burn agriculture got started. People would cut down a plot of rainforest, burn it, plant crops on the ground using the ashes as fertilizer, harvest...and then move a few miles over to repeat it next year. As long as you keep circling, the rainforest reclaims it with the small things that can grow there first, which die and become food for bigger ones, which keeps a cycle going...a rainforest is a high-speed ecosystem, so it only takes...thirty or fifty years? Can't remember which.

Conventional agriculture methods don't work in the rain forests, because you can't keep working the same plot of land year after year.

On the harvest failure crop shortage adaption thing.

Interesting factoid.

Our current state of affairs uses super evil capitalism to make us FAR LESS adaptable than we should be.

Recently with major crop failures of a certain crop farmers across I think it was North America decided to start planting a different later season crop to harvest so they wouldn't be sitting idle after the other crop failed (can't recall if it was beans or millet or what).

Anyway.

Monsanto, their seed crop providers, don't apparently produce more seed stock of any given crop than they sold in the prior year.

So then the farmers are like "This is an emergency Monsanto, can we break the stupidly insane propriety restrictions you put on the materials you sell us and re-use excess stock from the prior season as seed stock?"

And Monsanto was all... "No."

Seriously, pretty much ONE company in the world supplies seeds for our crops. They do not permit their customers to use the resulting crops to produce seeds for more crops (if and when they even sell seeds they haven't genetically tampered with to prevent that possibility). They do not produce enough seeds for the market to shift and adapt to more appropriate crops for even a single harvest in a single region of the world.

mean_liar wrote:You'd be surprised. 8% of Brazil still covers a massive amount of land, most of which is underutilized. As grain prices increase and $/ha yields of soybeans goes up I think you'll see Brazilian soy production at the top of the heap.

I'd be suer surprised, because as noted, the CIA World Factbook says that the total arable land is only 6.9% in Brasil. Which compares very poorly to countries like Kazakhstan (8.2%) or the United States (18%). And that's even before we get into the fact that I'm pretty sure that "arable land" in Brasil includes areas that can only be cultivated for a few years before letting the jungle reclaim them lest they turn into barren stone and stay that way.

So seriously, where are your figures coming from? Brasil is a big country, so the fact that they produce a lot of some crop or another isn't especially surprising. But you keep coming up with highly specific numbers like "8% of the country" or "more than the Mid West of the US" and scrolling through the CIA World Factbook does not support those numbers at all. I know that the CIA isn't always right, but right now I am taking their word over blank assertions with no attribution.

-Username17

http://earthtrends.wri.org/
and
http://www.fao.org/countryprofiles/inde ... n&iso3=BRA
and
http://www.fao.org/ag/AGP/AGPC/doc/Coun ... Brazil.htm

The good arable soil that Brazil does have tends to be erosion resistant, though low in native nutrients. A dump of toxins and they grow decently, though it's difficult to tell how high a yield they could get given that I can't judge how up-to-speed their farming tech is compared to places with substantially higher yields per ha like the US. As it is it's roughly 1/2 the US tn/ha yield (or so?).

In terms of arable land its size means that it has more unused arable land than the Midwest US. The US ultimately has more, but 8% of Brazil basically means that you've got an area roughly the size of Nebraska to Illinois that's unused.

EDIT - 4% of unutilized Brazil is roughly 350k km2, and the Midwest is around 2.1M km2. So it's a bit smaller in terms of arable land, but still roughly comparable.

Intelligent Oil {OK, Maze, Oil}

mean_liar wrote:EDIT - 4% of unutilized Brazil is roughly 350k km2, and the Midwest is around 2.1M km2. So it's a bit smaller in terms of arable land, but still roughly comparable.

That's a sixth. Brazil has a sixth the arable land of the Midwest.

You started with "more," then when you got hammered with facts that said "a sixth" switched to "comparable."

Off the callout: The seeds patent thing is terrible. Software I can understand, kinda, why it's licensed, rather than purchased. It makes no sense at all that that's even legal for seeds.

IGTN wrote:It makes no sense at all that that's even legal for seeds.

It makes a lot of sense.

Because Monsanto is Evil Incarnate, and super super powerful, so what Monsanto wants Monsanto gets. They are largely behind the whole "we own your fucking genetics bitches" movement and the horrid legislation pushed through to support it.

You thought Exon-Mobile was bad with its "hey lets raise the worlds average temperature 6-8 degrees and wipe out civilization, just for some short term personal profit?

Hey they ARE bad, but they are down right narrow and myopic in their apocalyptic vision and evil machinations compared to Monsanto.

Here are just some of Monsanto's crazy evil things...

1) Starving the Third World
Monsanto is very much behind a lot the structure of our world agriculture markets that ensure that we produce the wrong foods in the wrong amounts in the wrong places and then chuck stuff out (or fail to grow stuff) to create artificial scarcity so everything can be sold at the highest profit on the first world markets and the rest can fucking starve.

2) Destroying Our Farmlands
Screw global warming, our farmlands will be dead toxic waste salt laden deserts WELL before that is an issue. And all thanks to pesticide, herbicide, over fertilization, and poor irrigation practices all pushed heavily by Monsanto because they are very much part of Monsanto's unsustainable but high profit business model. A business model that works a great deal like the business models of guys selling Crack Cocaine. Our farmlands could be just as productive, less damaging to the world around us AND sustainable, but, well, there ain't no money for Monsanto in THAT shit.

3) Killing All Men
Monsanto is pumping the world full of nasty hormones causing male fetuses in basically most vertebrates to increasingly fail in pregnancy, and causing infertility in males as well as rapidly increasing rates of genital and reproductive mutations.

4) Kill All Bees
You know the "no bees" thing. Monsanto is pretty much to blame there. No bees is bad. REALLY FUCKING BAD. Thats like half the flowering plants on the planet unable to reproduce effectively right there. Meanwhile Monsanto is wiping out many other exciting and vital invertebrates by means of their "agriculture through species genocide" chemical regimes.

5)Mutating Your Genes
See now a while ago anyone would tell you. GM foods, sure Monsanto is being downright evil about WHAT they do with GM (programmed infertility for profit, etc...) but one thing GM foods WON'T do is mutate your genetics.

Only now it seems that Monsanto's GM corn WILL (or perhaps the right word is CAN) mutate your genetics if you eat it. This was discovered when some pigs mutated. Monsanto sued the pig owners for stealing their genetic property to try and cover up probably the biggest scientific development in GM foods rather than you know fix it.

6) Make All Women Infertile
Aaaaand their GM corn makes female mammals infertile.

7)Creating Triffids
Monsantos coolest plan for destroying the world is part of their weed killing regime for GM Crops. The plan is spray the crop with endless quantities of potent herbicides, killing all the weeds. The crop survives because it is genetically modified to resist potent herbicides.

And they did this for Canola. A plant which is ALREADY considered a weed.

Yes they made a powerful weed with wind born seeds resistant to our strongest weapons against plants.

You think that's genius?

Well to top it off they then sued neighboring farmers who's crops were contaminated with the herbicide resistant Canola for "stealing" their genetic property.

8) Wiping out crop species for fun and profit
Monsanto doesn't like other plants competing in the market with their GM seed crops.

So they take aggressive measures to eradicate opposition, to the point of driving valuable unique crop species into extinction.

Like buying up seed banks, like even ones that exist just to preserve endangered crops. Even pressuring community and government run seed banks with lobbying power until they are just GIVEN to Monsanto, then they basically shut the seed bank down and allow the various preserved species to either vanish into extinction or rely on someones grandma somewhere trading seeds with her neighbors without intermediaries of any form.

9) Poisoning your ground water
This one is pretty straight forward. Monsanto is poisoning your ground water, with all sorts of nasty stuff in all sorts of nasty ways.