No, Orwell visited fascist Spain, and wrote a fictionalized version set in a venue English speakers could identify with. (I've heard that it's called 1984 because he was reporting on 1948.)

You are assuming that the parties are monolithic blocks, which is incorrect. Many of them will grandstand on an issue that is not supported by their party if they think it will help their reelection, and some will do it for ideological reasons even if their party is on the opposite side.

BOTH parties are trying to centralize control. Both parties are trying to do what different constituencies want. And both are actually more interested in supporting the goals of unspoken backers. Neither of them puts the good of either the country or of the citizenry first, but both will take stands that allow them to claim to do so...to different constituencies.

There's that, but there's also the question of how small a percentage of those "skilled in the art" should need to consider something obvious before someone is granted a monopoly on it? To me it seems that this percentage should clearly be much less than 1% if there are 1000 skilled practitioners of the art. If there are more than 10,000 practitioners it should clearly be less than 0.1%. This would require an unwieldy jury size.

So I propose that if there is an independent invention of the same invention the patent should be immediately voided...or at least converted from a monopoly to a duopoly. (FWIW the telephone had three patents applied for by different people before the first one was granted. Why should *one* of them be granted a monopoly? [I think all three were in the US, and that the one in Russia is not one of the three, but this could be a mistake.]) But note that my proposal does not require that the separate invention be filed for before the first patent is granted. It's my belief that most "inventions" are never patented because the inventor considers them obvious. So the main result of patents is to retard the state of the art and centralize control...and that it's the centralization of control that is the main driving force behind the clamor for patent protection.

"Wipe out agriculture" is probably incorrect, but wipe out agricultural regions is not an overstatement, as deserts will appear in new places, and so will rainy areas. Even places that aren't seriously affected due to changes in rainfall will need to switch to different crops due to changes in temperature. Some places, however, will become much more productive. But they won't be the places that have been that way in the past.

That said, it is probable that the net agricultural production will be sharply reduced. The newer areas will be closer to the poles, and there's a lot less land there than there is closer to the equator.

I don't think you have properly evaluated the costs of your proposed mitigation measures. And most ocean acidification derives directly from the carbon dioxide level, not from agricultural chemicals. (Though they do tend to produce the "dead zone"s.)

So far, at least, urban farming is either only usable in low density "cities", which means lots of fast transport, or to produce high cost greens for local gourmet restaurants. And sea-steading is mainly feasible for multi-millionaires, who don't care about maintenance costs.

Of course, it's been awhile since I checked those expenses. Perhaps some "technological advance" has made them practical. But I'd be really surprised. Sea water is intensively corrsive, and barnacles seem to grow on nearly anything.

I'm sorry, but parts of Antarctica are already melting. That's not 200 years away, that's last year and the year before.

If you want to say "total meltdown of Antacrtica" has been postponed for 200 years, I suspect you're being unreasonably pessimistic. The mountain tops will probably stay covered in ice for considerably longer. But in between those extremes things are variable depending on what actions we take now, and so are the results.

Now we get to the paper you referenced. In the first place I don't think either of us really understand it. (I know that I don't.) In the second place he's comparing a historical record in a few spots at a time that we don't have detailed information about to current models that are based on much greater amounts of information. He could be right. But most current models have been underestimating the actual melting, due to things like not including wave driven fragmentation. So I don't think he is. (And that article was published in 2005, so it doesn't include all the data that current models are based on.)

That said, I'll admit that I'm much more aware of models of the Arctic than of the Antarctic. Perhaps they aren't underestimating the melt rate, or at least not as much.

Microsoft didn't fire its entire IT department. Disney did. They are a stark example of fuck-you-ism and the lie behind the H1B expansion, the fabrication that they can't find qualified workers so they need indentured labor from abroad. Here they are saying, we just don't want to pay local rates, so fuck you, America!.

Capital is so overwhelmingly victorious that they aren't bothering to pretend it's about worker shortages anymore. They don't give a flying fuck about their country; they believe their only responsibility is to make money. They are wrong; corporations are government creatures, not private entities. They've no existence other than governmental laws that grant them their superpowers. That existence comes with requirements, and one of those requirements is that they exist for the good of the country that was gracious enough to let them enjoy their legal immunity and ability to print money. The idea they have no other god but money is their own notion, brought into law by their own lobbying efforts, and it is wrong. They have obligations to their community to provide jobs, to obey laws about the effects of their pollution, and in other respects act like the human beings they bought laws to say that they are. You want power? You also get responsibility. Right now they get the former and dismiss the latter.

The seed was planted decades ago when we decided not to publically fund political campaigns and instead left it to private donations. Soooooo, corporations are people, money is speech, speech is unlimited, money is unlimited, congress and Presidents can't be elected without enormous private wealth donating to their elections, so inevitably rich corporations bought the country. Rather cheaply.

Fix? Eliminate private financing of elections. No PACs. No backdoor corporate campaigns. No money whatsoever necessary to run for office. Free access to the internet for speeches and such, but no cute games with fake personas and perception management. And oh, yes, set the computerized election counting machines on fire, because you ^&%(##s, there is NO WAY they will let the vote go so overwhelmingly against them if they can simply tweak the elections results. Canada manually counts paper ballots in less than four hours. An elections system you cannot understand, own, or deconstruct is a system that is designed to hide cheating.

Sounds like we have a consentus. Too bad it's about 15 years too late, but let's clean up the fragments of what we had and try to move on without the semi-slave labor.

Except that the problem already happened, and is happening. The wars, the pollution, the animal die-off, the climate change, ther rising oceans, even the srrveillance (why that is is too long to go into) is caused by reaction to: too damned many people. The slack off in population growth did not happen. China has dropped the ball and is now shooting towards three billion. The brakes will go on, one way or another, by the Four Horseman method or the by the new fifth Horseman named Intelligence riding his pink unicorn, but the catastrophe is ON and will be ongoing for a very, very long time.

Population growth always outgrows resources, if unchecked. That is mathematics.

I agree about resource management. Even Heinlein agreed that it was poor management that caused poverty, even during overpopulation emergencies. However, and this is important, the type of management necessary is 180 degrees opposed to the type of government and libertarian business philosophy we are committed to. The management would have to be absolute and need overwhelming power over private interests, so we can't. We can't even build trains overland because the people who own the land want too much cash to make it affordable. We can't make people stop taking long showers during a drought emergency. We're not capable of submitting to an authority that would require sacrifices from us.

"Once people get a little bit of education and the ability to enjoy leisure time, they funnily enough stop having kids."

A stunning example (to me) Mexico. Super Catholic. Yet their insane population growth has abruptly dropped to 2 kids a family, in one generation. Damn. All it took was a little more money than utter poverty wages, exposure to outside ideas, and people fixed their own problem (in Mexico, that problem is overpopulation, over and out).

Creativity is self-learned, I find. But I'd never put my kid in anything other than a Montessori.

Now, the empires (corporations) want a factory system for creating creative people. Hence the coding intitiatives and STEM programs that governments are suddenly shoving down schools' throats all over the world. They aren't doing it to make wealthy citizens. They are demanding it so they can drive down creative costs to a commodity level. A billion Montessori kids are a billion paper-hatted geniuses working 29 hours a week for minimum wage (or capped management salary for 50+ hours a week). Rare creativity is valuable; abundant creativity will create poverty among the brilliant. A free market of force-fed STEM students (all in debt to banks and schools profiting enormously from them for the rest of their lives) wandering from joe-job to joe-job just as crappy as any deep-fryer position. If you don't have 1) rare skills or 2) collective bargaining power to demand more than the utter minimum possible pocket of change, the armies of the ingenious will be corporate compost.

Hell, why not. While we're at it, why don't we automate the student process. Dump the students and educate AIs instead. Computing solutions always work, just ask any nerd about self-driving cars.

At some point, and it seems that that point is arriving now, people will realize that the driving force behind technological change, as far as money people are concerned, is to eliminate jobs, and that the good jobs are not realy being replaced, and cannot be replaced. AIs grading papers gets rid of more pesky teachers who make a living wage. A self-driving car doesn't fit the picture until you realize that millions of people make a living *driving trucks*, and self-driving trucks will eliminate their jobs (in theory, if it works, and I don't see it working) and make oodles of money for capital and kick millions of truck drivers, along with all the taxi and Uber car drivers, out without a dime. (Uber is VERY interested in self-driving cars. Guess why).

Some jobs are being made. And capital is desperately trying to commodify and cheapen such labor, to the point of demanding governments force coding classes on all kids. There are such jobs, but no where near enough, and those are mostly dropped onto cheaper kids, not newly dumped middle-aged workers.

Asimov was on point, decades ago, when he wrote that inevitably automation would eliminate most jobs, and that the biggest problem - in his view, opportunity -- would be finding something for people to do. I would say that people without purpose are the most dangerous force for destruction and stupidity on the planet - worse than global climate change.

Capital and people who work for capital, and neoliberals and business conservatives who support capital, tend to have well-paying white collar jobs and live among other people of their class, and don't see anything amiss. They're fine. Step outside into the vast middle grounds of the world, and you'll see a growing sense of we're-being-fucked that will require an endless army of pepper-spraying drones and surveillance to keep from erupting into riots someday soon.