RE: https://mastodon.social/@urlyman/116232524241982831
Additional note: when foodprices rocket, that is ALMOST ALWAYS the trigger for civil unrest and revolutions. (The other is a fiscal/tax/revenue crisis, caused by government turning into rent-seeking by the rich *and* trying to fund a war simultaneously, as with the French Revolution.)
Does this look familiar to you, too?
@cstross Right-to-repair is a huge issue for farm equipment.
One of the reasons is not so much that the OEM prices are high is that the stocks of spares are sized based on the order rate against the high prices; you order it, they make it, and you get it many weeks later.
Combine "the software servers are down" with "the supply chain to the plant that makes spares is disrupted" with "fuel prices are too high for profitable farming according to the financial system" and food supply shrinks.
@cstross What I think people don't get is that the farm skillset in the US is in old people (on the whole and by and large), COVID has been hard on them, and the ethnic cleansing has taken away big chunks of the skills base.
Compelled system change in a context where you've got some patrician landowners and invalidated-axioms agribusiness and not much else is not going to hold together so well. Then throw in the extreme weather events, plural, the US has already had through the Midwest.
@cstross A lot of this has been driven by a desire to re-open Russia's sales channels so they can afford their war of conquest. (Dropped sanctions by the US, calls from the EU right, etc.)
We're seeing late stage Carbon Binge efforts to use military force to be the last supplier standing.
What we aren't seeing yet is the Coalition to Decarbonize; I think we're gonna, and then we're going to see military efforts to prevent any such thing.
Society insists you buy gas, even when there isn't any.
@Nazani @cstross "extinction burst" is by and large and on the whole complete nonsense.
Systems try to keep running; that's a property of systems.
If it's running on a billion people instead of eight billion, nothing requires it to care.
Fossil carbon dependence cannot go away by any working of the existing system. It takes a conscious, sustained effort to kill it. (Which cannot possibly be non-violent because the people who profit from the existing system will not accept change.)
@Nazani @cstross Updating the model hurts.
(For obvious reasons; an unstable mental model is high-cost/low-benefit and experiences higher-than-average selection pressures.)
Climate change deniers are, by and large, perfectly well aware they're expressing a preference for mass death over their personal experience of loss of status. They're fine with being in favor of that. It's not really analogous to an infant not having developed the machinery of learning just yet.
Charlie Stross
Graydon
Nazani