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“It is a vulgar error that love, a love, to Woman is her whole existence; she also is born for Truth and Love in their universal energy.” — Margaret Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century (via philosophybits)
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We Don't Need New Tech to Fight Climate Change -
Consider Bill Gates: After being the hated Microsoft monopolist at the turn of the millennium, he deployed the fortune he accumulated from capturing software markets to reinvent himself as the “good” billionaire, spending his wealth on health, agriculture, and, more recently, climate action. The Gates Foundation has spent millions promoting him as an expert on these topics, such that media constantly turned to him to opine on Covid-19 early in the pandemic, especially before he was tarred as a promoter of vaccine apartheid or colonialism for arguing against lifting the intellectual property protections on the vaccine. (After immense criticism, the Gates Foundation said it would support a “narrow waiver.”)
On climate change, Gates takes a similar approach to his vaccine work. His focus is on empowering entrepreneurs and investors, and getting governments to fund more basic research that wouldn’t be profitable for the private sector. He’s not interested in mundane technologies that we can deploy today to make a big difference, which he considers the “easy stuff,” but on more speculative pursuits that may or may not ultimately pay off. Once new technologies are developed, they should be for companies to exploit for profit — not to be shared with the world to accelerate the shift to a more sustainable way of living, let alone a more equitable economy. For Gates, the climate crisis is a technological problem, not a political one. It doesn’t require foundational changes to the way we’ve set up society; it just requires us to deploy cutting-edge technologies that reduce the emissions of things we already do, so everything else can stay virtually the same.
For example, the idea that he shouldn’t be flying around the world in a private jet is unconscionable. In a recent BBC interview, he argued that since he funds a direct air capture company and spends “billions of dollars on … climate innovation,” he should be able to live however he wants. Last year, his private flights alone emitted an estimated 3,058 tons of CO2, compared to total emissions of 15.5 tons for the average person in the United States. The rich have a massive environmental footprint, so it’s no surprise this is the argument they make.
As I explained earlier this month, Elon Musk’s vision for the future of transportation and cities isn’t so different. He wants us to electrify cars, add solar panels to our homes, and switch to renewables — with as much of that economic activity going through Tesla as possible. Expanding renewables is essential to addressing the crisis and electric cars are part of the solution, though their impact depends on how they’re implemented. But Musk’s vision is one where we keep driving personal vehicles, living in suburban communities, having long commutes, and where he can keep flying his private jet as much as he wants. To make that possible, he exaggerates the degree of future CO2 removal that will be necessary because he doesn’t want us to pursue structural changes that would alter the social and economic dynamics that benefit him. It’s fundamentally conservative vision, and regardless of what Musk says, it won’t get us to the rapid emissions reductions we need if we’re to head off the nightmare scenarios the IPCC is warning us about.
The people at the helm of the tech industry are incredibly wealthy, live lives of luxury that few people around the world can even imagine — let alone hope to ever emulate — and the last thing they want is for those immense privileges to be taken away from them. But this isn’t just about the personal emissions of tech billionaires. It’s about how their visions for combating climate change distract people from the action that needs to be taken if we’re to drastically cut emissions, and hopefully build a better world while we’re at it. In the process, it gives the fossil fuel industry — and the governments they lobby to back them — amble ammunition to argue for us to delay the phase out of their lucrative products and not to make the structural changes that would reduce our dependence on them in the first place.
(Source: disconnect.blog, via marxistprincess)
Edward Williams, a Kansas City Police Department traffic cop, filed the employment discrimination lawsuit Monday in Jackson County Circuit Court. In it, he says police leaders are disobeying the law by continuing to encourage officers to meet ticket goals in the traffic unit as part of their measured performance.
Williams says he was punished for raising complaints with his commanders over the so-called ticket quotas and “potentially racially discriminatory” policing practices in predominantly Black and other racial minority neighborhoods.
Williams, who says he has been with the department 21 years, complained to KCPD’s human resources department about a supervisor’s alleged directive “to go to minority neighborhoods to write tickets because of the belief that it would be easier to write multiple citations for every stop,” the lawsuit says.
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cost customers?
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New York police officer fires his .38 service revolver at almost point-blank range into a piece of bulletproof glass, with a very brave test subject behind it, 1931.
What experimental value does a whole living guy add to this
Cops don’t shoot their guns if there’s no potential for civilian harm. It’s a motivator.
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