Such a society would not elect Donald Trump as President.

His base will do what they're told. A few days on Reddit demonstrated while there is a core of what one might call libertarian and far right true believers who are disappointed, most of MAGA is really a religious cult, and if Donald Trump says he didn't know Epstein and to blame Obama for something, they'll go along with it.

One can see clearly how guys like Jesus and Mohammed produced religions practically defined by believing absurd, nonsensical and at times even outright impossible claims.

Frankly, it's getting to the point where I suggest leading Democrats probably start getting the hell out of the US while they can, before the judiciary is so undermined and marginalized that if the DOJ orders the arrest of Barack Obama as an illegal alien in the US, ICE will do it and Obama will never be seen again. The US is becoming a Falangist state, and enemies of the state won't be sued into silence soon, they'll be disappeared.

So America, how's it going with this demented halfwitted sociopathic president of yours that is so much better than Harris would have been?

Being a liar would suggest that they in fact know what they wrote was bullshit. The fact that he admits using ChatGPT and actually thinks 500PPM is lethal would indicate he's simply stupid.

So you had ChatGPT do calculations based on unknown inputs (since you don't provide them) and claim that 500ppm causes the death of all animal life, when in fact there are perfectly livable environments that are many times higher than 500ppm

Or in short, you're either a moron or a liar, and I'm leaning towards moron.

Do you accept thermodynamics and the energy absorption and re-emission properties of carbon dioxide?

I think the real point is that human beings are, like the chimpanzee cousins, rather good at assessing proximal risk. We're hardwired to see something like fire or even strange movement in the tall grass, and move swiftly from assessment to reaction.

Assessing risk that is more remote requires someone to actually put the cognition to work. It means putting aside emotions, whether they be fear, denial or a sense of comfort, and actually analyzing the trends and what they mean at some point in the future. I think most people are probably capable of this, but emotionally it's easier to simply go along with what seems to be the most desirable strategy, which usually ends up being the path of least resistance.

I had a fascinating discussion with one of my partner's relatives. He's a guy who spent most of his career working in the oil and gas industry. His metric for determining the veracity of the effects of AGW was essentially economics; his livelihood and pension are fed by this industry, and thus claims about emissions and their effects must be false. In other words, faced with the choice between reality and a pleasant myth, he chose myth, and in fact became quite irate at the very thought that his beliefs were based purely on short term economic benefit.

It leads me to believe that, in fact, most deniers, including the people who post on /. shaking their fists at climatologists actually know that we're in a mounting crisis, but until remote becomes proximal, their emotional responses will drive their cognition.

In short, most people are reasonably intelligent and quite capable of understanding enough chemistry and physics to know that increases CO2 and other GHG levels is causing serious problems and those problems will only get worse so long as emissions continue to rise. It's just that, well, they're emotionally immature. It's not a matter of stupidity, it's a matter of many, perhaps most adults that you encounter are actually not much more mature than a cranky 12 year old.

There's not a hope in hell that I would ever expose a SMB file server to the Internet.

That doesn't do a lot of good for distributed workforces. The alternatives, such as VPNs, come with their own issues. I think Sharepoint is a horrible beast that's the worst of all worlds, but the concept itself isn't bad.

Even if the AC would have infinite efficiency (instead of typical values of 2-3), you are increasing temperature out-of-the-house by reducing temperature in-house

So then, you can just shut off your AC and just have it permanently cooler inside, right?

Wait, no you can't?

That's right, because heat leaks back into the house from the outside - warming your house, and cooling the exterior. And the amount it cools the exterior is approximately equal to the amount you're pumping out. Only the energy used by the AC is actually changing the outdoor temperature. But it's utterly dwarfed by the impact of the sun.

(I stress "approximately because there's some slight radiative balance changes - the heat outflow is a point source while the inflows are diffuse, and thermal radiation is proportional to the temperature to the fourth power - but it remains a trivial factor in practice)

Physically, we're non-continental. There is no "continental shelf" here. We're not on continental crust. We're a part of the Mid-Atlantic ridge, the Atlantic seafloor, that protrudes above sea level. We're MORB, not granitic crust. Tectonic plates != continents. The North American plate for example contains large amounts of both continental and oceanic crust.

And yes, geopolitically, we're entirely European.

** Of the places I've visited on the mainland. Ireland, England, Scotland, Holland, Germany, Austria, Czechia... wait, I do remember that my hotel in Paris didn't have AC, and I was utterly miserable there. Czechia and Austria were in the winter / early spring so one wouldn't notice. But I'd think I'd remember if the others had it or didn't...

It's weird that I can't remember the AC status of the places on the mainland. I can say that here in Iceland AC is rarely used, usually only ventilation systems (if that) on large buildings, while homes and apartments usually just open windows.

French Energy Minister Agnes Pannier-Runacher countered that large-scale air conditioning would heat streets with exhaust, worsening heat waves.

"HEAT FLOW DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY!"

(For anyone who's unclear: all the heat that you're pumping out of houses is basically perfectly offbalanced by the heat penetrating into them. Only the energy to run the AC creates new heat, same as running any electrical appliance, but vs. the sun which - when overhead on a clear day - deposits about 1kW of energy per square meter, it's an utter irrelevance)

just because you "got over" a disease, it doesn't mean you're "better". Not all damage just goes away. It seems every month brings a new discovery about some disease is brought about or greatly increased in likelihood from past infection. For example, my mother suffers greatly from Sjögren's (incl. neuropathy where it feels like her skin is on fire). There's now increasing evidence pointing to it and related diseases as being at least in part triggered by Epstein-Barr, and my mother has strong diagnostic indicators of EBV reactivation. Even Alzheimers' research is pointing at past infection (combined with genetic susceptibility) as being a potential case, as amyloid beta and tau appear to be part of the brain's innate immune system, with accumulation as a result of inflammatory processes in the CNS.

"What doesn't kill you makes you stronger" is frankly nonsense. What doesn't kill you can leave you crippled, brain-damaged, with cancer, or any number of other things. Sequelae and postviral illnesses aren't some sort of a joke. I think one of the main lessons of COVID is to take sequelae and postviral illnesses in general more seriously - COVID brought them to attention because so many people got sick from a new virus at once, many severely ill (vs. say influenza, where only 5-15% contract it per year, and more often mild cases), but in no way is COVID unique to causing sequelae and postviral illnesses.