> Consequently, individual cultivars themselves are not invasive, but the combination of cultivars within an area creates a situation in which invasive plants can be produced.
True, but in the context of a pilot program to target native species elsewhere. In short it wouldn’t meet that criteria, because the Asian Tiger mosquito is a recent invader. In the narrow case of targeting recent (decades rather than centuries, and then ATM qualifies as the former) invaders alone, I agree that few rational people would object.
And before you try to rationalize this with "per capita" arguments
This is moronic. After all, the other 49 states combined produce more greenhouse gas than California. Don't try to rationalize that with "per capita" or "per land area" arguments, the absolute numbers matter.
Things get pretty weird when you start contemplating doing things at this scale. My father likes to tell of how, supposedly, McDonalds was considering introducing a new menu item, let's say it was an eggplant burger (I forget). The first question they had to answer was does the entire world produce enough eggplant?
Also, critically, if due to catastrophe you abandon your $100k home and buy another $100k home in another place, your move cost $200k.
Your McDonalds example is a really good one. McDonalds, as of 2012, serves about 68 million people per day. In climate migrants/day we get an aggregate of 13 million over 82 years. That works out to 434 per day. And that's on the extreme negative end of outcomes for climate change.
To give some context to the numbers here [1] are states' net migration rates. So for instance Florida currently has a huge net migration rate of 16/1k. For a population of 21.3 million that means they're seeing 340,800 new residents per year. That's 933 per day. So the entire climate migration, in the worst case scenario, will involve the entirety of the US taking on half as many residents per year, as Florida alone already does. Of course it won't be entirely evenly spread out, but it also won't be jumping from e.g. 20 people/day to 20,000 people/day. It will mostly pass without major notice and, as the article mentions, is indeed already happening.
This makes for nice shocking headlines, but this entire article is extremely hyperbolic. At the same time I don't think anybody really cares. It seems like people want to be terrified, even when the numbers in no way justify the claims. We are increasingly indeed living in a post-facts world.
> Also, critically, if due to catastrophe you abandon your $100k home and buy another $100k home in another place, your move cost $200k.
I don't think that's right. Let's say I "own" a $100k home, and have a $100k mortgage. I walk away from that house, buy another $100k house with another $100k mortgage. At the start, I have a $100k asset and a $100k liability, for a net of zero. After, I have a $100k asset and two $100k liabilities, so I have lost $100k.
Alternately, let's say I own my $100k house free and clear, and have another $100 in the bank, for total assets of $200k. I abandon my house (writing the value down to $0), and buy another house for $100k. Now I still have the $100k house, but nothing in the bank. My total assets are $100k, so I've lost $100k.
The bank sues you for the 100k unless you live in a non recourse state. In that case, the feds consider that forgiven 100k income and you’ll owe taxes.
> The bank sues you for the 100k unless you live in a non recourse state. In that case, the feds consider that forgiven 100k income and you’ll owe taxes.
My scenario assumed you still owed the $100k. If you live in a non-recourse state and just walk away, you're probably not going to be able to get a new mortgage.
I don't actually think your second point is correct on either a historical or practical level. Historically, humans had a lot of what would now be considered downtime, especially in certain societies. And practically, nothing actually "requires" that except for the fact that we've set up society in such a way to allow some people get to grow wildly wealthy on the backs on the labor of most of the people putting in that actual work. That's the result of a series of choices, and could absolutely be changed. Nothing "required" about it.
Even in recent history my experience in countries that haven't caught up with the 'productive' Western-Europe approach contain a lot of downtime. The experience was often annoying for us Northern-Europeans, but in hindsight seemed moderately healthier to me.
It involved a bunch of guys standing around on construction sites sort of getting stuff done, but mostly when the owner was present, and enjoying their time outside part of the time when the owner was not.
Or women spending easily 50% of their time in their shops not selling things but chatting with various other women, or watching their kids.
I wasn't a fan of the clear gender-separation, but it was interesting to see that both men and women spent much of their day interacting in personally meaningful ways with their neighbors/customers, rather than bleeping products as fast as they could to hit some kind of target.
Fun fact: if you took all the income in the U.S. (labor + capital) and distributed it evenly, every adult person would make about $65,000. Quite comfortable, and maybe a big improvement on the status quo, but still "working stiff" territory. We still live in an era where America's protestant work ethic is relevant. Maybe that'll change decades from now, but we're still quite a ways away from being in a post-scarcity society.
The OP suggested that people could work a lot less if our system wasn’t designed for making some people rich. But folks makin $65k still work eight hours a day, often more. People who can make $65k almost invariably choose to increase consumption rather than decrease hours and income. Our economy doesn’t have so much excess in it going to rich people that we could have both the consumption we want and also work a lot less.
Depends what you mean by post-scarcity. For example, if supermarkets weren't as interested in profit, they might choose a lower price point which would allow them to sell "ugly" produce. I've seen many different estimates of how much produce is discarded for ugliness, but all indicate a large portion.
The knock-on effects of profit-seeking are large. And not all bad, of course.
Its really astonishing to me how wealthy some people are getting from others work. I completely support people getting wildly rich from their own efforts, but from the way that our society is structured, most wealth is just capturing the value of another persons labor.
Classic example being to take on $100k of debt to start a business and then paying workers $20/hour. Only one person is on the hook for $100k and they are rewarded accordingly if it pays off.
It's easy for the workers to then conspire about how unfair it is that the debtor isn't out there in the sun like them, but that's not a very complete picture of reality. Zero risk is part of the workers' compensation.
There have been centuries of philosophical debate on this subject. I don't think anyone who seriously looks at the topic is leaving out risk.
The argument (outside of Marxist circles) is more to do with whether business owners are being overcompensated because owners are able to exploit the market failures of the labor market--information asymmetry, power imbalances, quasi monopsony positions, government assistance for low paid employees etc...
There are also arguments about whether owners are being overprotected from risks by relatively recent concepts like limited liability (and more direct forms of corporate welfare), and arguments that workers aren't really in a zero risk position.
