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Biden admin moving forward with light bulb bans in coming weeks

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tooki:

--- Quote from: coppice on April 08, 2023, 11:52:09 pm ---
--- Quote from: tooki on April 08, 2023, 11:43:43 pm ---as they say, “reality has a liberal bias”.)

--- End quote ---
Reality seems to have a classically liberal bias. Look at places like the UK in the industrial revolution, or Japan, Singapore, Korea, or Taiwan in the late 20th century. I only hear people who equate liberal with left say "reality has a liberal bias" when they are a leftist who has lost all touch with reality.

--- End quote ---
The phrase was originated by Stephen Colbert in 2006, so with 100% certainty he meant it to mean “liberal” in the contemporary American sense, not classical liberalism.

It stems from the fact that we consistently find right-leaning media to report more falsehoods than left-leaning media. (Neither side is perfect. One is just consistently worse.)

Simon:

--- Quote from: Zero999 on April 08, 2023, 01:56:05 pm ---
--- Quote from: Monkeh on April 08, 2023, 01:40:12 pm ---
--- Quote from: coppice on April 08, 2023, 01:25:17 pm ---
--- Quote from: Monkeh on April 08, 2023, 01:21:05 pm ---Your stubbornness is merely proof that change on meaningful scale cannot be made quickly without using force.

--- End quote ---
The age old justification used by authoritarians everywhere. If you can't get the vast majority to consent to a good idea well explained, maybe it wasn't so great after all.

--- End quote ---

I think you overestimate the intelligence of the vast majority.

--- End quote ---
But the majority of people are moving away from incandescent lighting anyway.

There's no point in these silly authoritarian laws.

--- End quote ---

I never see any in the shops, I really wonder why they don't sell them and why people don't buy them despite them not being readily available. Given that incandescent heaters that happen to put out a bit of light are cheaper surely the mindless masses that work on what's cheapest is best would be buying them right? I gave up trying to work out what the law actually is as figuring out fact from conspiracy is more work than I have effort for considering I am picky about my LED bulbs anyway. I certainly cannot put a 400W heater in a standard fitting like I can put a 40W LED :)

Simon:

--- Quote from: Zero999 on April 08, 2023, 12:40:49 pm ---
I'm far more worried about direct threats to humans, posed by other humans such as war and bad policies imposed on us by our leaders, than our unintentional impact on the environment, making the world uninhabitable for humans. The fact is rich countries have managed to minimise their environmental impact quite well. Again policies which limit economic growth, will be worse for the environment in the long run because they will keep people poor.


--- End quote ---

Rich countries make a big deal of the reduction in their fossil fuel consumption. People are switching to electric cars now on cost, not on technology preference while plenty will themselves to believe that electric is not as good "because"....

As for everything else we are happily offshoring our footprint. We don't make very much in rich nations, we import it so our emissions have simply migrated. Yes lots will argue that this is not their problem, well to every sensible reasoning their will be hundreds of stupid retorts. Let me see, has international trade gone down or up over the last few decades? Who are we trading with and how do they make our junk? yes junk. If a throwaway society is how you want to fuel economic growth then lets hope those developing nations are getting their faster than they are churning through the natural resources or by the time their are "rich enough to care" they will only be caring because they have to anyway.

In a capitalist system the majority will become wealthy enough at a much slower pace than the minority. when most of what we pay for our imported goods is for the fuel to burn the ships across the ocean and to the importers reselling the goods in our countries, how fast is this helping the majority of the population in those countries be wealthy enough to care?

The economic system is about maintaining the status quo. That is why most politicians are only their because they kept the rich dudes happy, the system you think hold so much promise is designed to not let change happen by it's very nature.

helius:

--- Quote from: Simon on April 09, 2023, 06:43:07 pm ---The economic system is about maintaining the status quo. That is why most politicians are only their because they kept the rich dudes happy, the system you think hold so much promise is designed to not let change happen by it's very nature.

--- End quote ---
Peter Thiel says this in all his public talks (most recently one at the Oxford Union called "Anti-Anti-Anti-Anti-Classical Liberalism"). The pace of actual advancement in the hard sciences has stagnated—at least in part—because the people in control are afraid of disruptive change.

magic:

--- Quote from: tooki on April 07, 2023, 09:27:45 pm ---
--- Quote from: Zero999 on April 07, 2023, 09:00:52 pm ---Politics is no longer separate from science.

--- End quote ---
When has this not been the case? I mean, back when politics and religion were one and the same, they literally murdered, banished, or imprisoned scientists under the guise of “heresy”.
--- End quote ---
Not under the guise of heresy but for heresy. And they understood the risk of making themselves look like fools and backed off quickly.

Then natural sciences became free of political bullshit for a few centuries, because people saw that there is "something" to it and that meaningful progress is being made which results in undeniable and objective technological development. Even the Vatican runs their own astronomical observatory.

Then somebody invented the concept of "human science", which is an antithesis of both "human" and of "science", and the rest is history.


--- Quote from: tooki on April 07, 2023, 09:27:45 pm ---
--- Quote from: Zero999 on April 07, 2023, 09:00:52 pm ---Universities have become breeding grounds for political activism.
--- End quote ---
Aside from the fact that political activism has always been one aspect of academia, since both academia and politics exist in the same universe, I don’t think there’s actually any evidence to support claims of this being more so now than in the past (as the wording “have become” implies).
--- End quote ---
Political activism was not the motivation of Galileo, Newton, Faraday, Pasteur, Darwin, you name them.

Today actual science happens in commercial R&D labs while public academia degenerated into something like the lowest chamber of the parliament.


--- Quote from: tooki on April 08, 2023, 11:43:43 pm ---I don’t think the skew has moved at all. Again, look at the history of politics and activism in academia and it’s always been on the left, often far left (far more left than today, in many cases). The loss of academic freedom thing is orthogonal to this — that change (which I consider to be negative) can happen without any change in the typical political slant. (Which, frankly, is just innate in education anyway, since secular academia is all about studying objective reality: as they say, “reality has a liberal bias”.)
--- End quote ---
OK, but "the left" apparently stands for such a diversity of ideas as eugenics, scientific racism, cure-all lobotomy, nuclear weapons research, gay therapy, cure-all gender affirmation, critical race theory, neolysenkoism, etc. - it's hard to even define what "the left" really is :P

Further conflating "the left" with liberalism isn't helpful either.

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