> According to Reporters Without Borders' tally, at least 105 [journalists] have so far [since October 7th] been killed by Israeli airstrikes, rockets and gunfire, including at least 22 in the course of their work.
Were they killed "for sport" (implying deliberate targetting)? With almost 35,000 dead, 105 journalists is about 0.3% of that. Seems about right as "normal" casualties.
Look, I have a lot of criticism about not just this war, but how the Palestinian people have been treated over the last 60 years. But you can't just say things like "they're targetting journalists for sport" and then pivot to this type of stuff when pressed.
I’m not the person you were originally interacting with, so I wasn’t “pivoting” - sorry to cause confusion!
There’s not really any doubt that the press feel they’re targeted, I think some have gone on the record about it. I don’t know how well we can really test such a claim absent the cooperation of the IDF, which will never happen.
My comment is meant to be a joke about how some of this stuff is grimly academic. If your army has enough xenophobic misanthropes and incompetent reservists who are willing to shoot at anything not wearing their uniform, the notion of a class of people being “targeted” is rendered redundant.
The Hebrew-speaking hostages who were killed while trying to surrender were just one aspect of this conflict that someone writing a really dark antiwar comedy might have come up with.
> My comment is meant to be a joke about how some of this stuff is grimly academic.
Well it's not "academic" if it occupies quite a bit of the public debate, and it's also not helpful if it's actually fairly easy to debunk, and is just fuel for the "they will make up anything to make us look bad" line. All of that energy can and should be spent elsewhere.
For those who aren't familiar with this, after the IDF shot American-Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh to death, Israeli security forces attacked her funeral procession. There's a video of Israeli soldiers physically beating the pall bearers, and the coffin nearly falling to the ground.[0]
It is beyond me how this snail pace of changing the economy to be more sustainable can be interpreted as break neck speed. What was break neck speed was maybe the corona response, which was a good thing and could be happening on climate front more…
To be fair, there's limited shipbuilding capacity in the world, with a few dozen very large shipyards capable of producing a few dozens ships a year. And they're busy as is. Also given the shear scale of those yards, it's not like you can just build new ones on demand. Those things are huge, they span the size of a medium city, and require an entire economy of skilled people around them.
So even if we were to replace all of the world's fleet to be more energy efficient (which would almost by definition mean larger/longer ships, since they benefit from hydrodynamic efficiencies), it would take a lonnng time to replace the world's cargo fleet.
> if we were to replace all of the world's fleet to be more energy efficient (which would almost by definition mean larger/longer ships, since they benefit from hydrodynamic efficiencies)
The hydrodynamic efficiencies are a small part of the problem, there are many other things that can be done. You don't need to scrap a perfectly good hull, you can simply choose to run slower, burn higher-quality fuels, or strap on an oxidation catalyst (DOC) to cut CO, particulate filter (DPF) to reduce particulate emissions, or add selective catalytic reduction (SCR) to reduce NOx emissions.
But until regulation and the market catch up, old ships will choose to run too fast, to burn whatever's cheapest, and to vent their exhaust directly into the atmosphere.
The german covid response was fast for an inert and badly prepared government apparatus. I was still impressed and they were just about in time, but what had to happen was still known well in advance. Everything that had to happen was known way before the virus was a thing, the button just had to be pressed.
Not sure the governments’ response to Covid should be an example for “this is how things should be done”. After all there are so many bank accounts that a liberal premier can block.
I couldn't disagree more. The response to corona decimated the economy and many businesses. The first priority for life on this planet is to have a decent quality of life. Not being able to afford food or other essentials is hardly a noble objective.
What if the downsides of decarbonisation outweigh the supposed benefits? Is this even possible in your list of possible outcomes? We have some experience of central state power steering large parts of the economy for The Greater Good.
There’s also a lot of proof of the downsides of not controlling companies: pollution, greed, child labor, unsustainable low wages, etc. Companies don’t care about the population, they’re just there to make money. If we don’t set boundaries the world will be a very ugly place.
Very true! The New Deal eased the tensions and permitted a pretty fast recovery, while building most infrastructure modern US depends on, hopefully it will have the same effect.
Look at any recent studies about the projected cost of climate change in the decades to come or read a bit about the geopolitical consequences of what 2 degrees means.
The consequences of the response to Corona will seem like a nice a problem to have in comparison.
And contrary to a bad economic cycle, once the CO2 is in the atmosphere, there is no fixing it at a meaningful scale.
Underwater when sea level rises less than a foot a century? Get serious. Cold kills way more than heat. Death from extreme weather has been largely mitigated by industrialization and modern technology. Increased food production from more CO2 has helped reduce starvation.
Please, show me one genuine climate refugee right now.
That's a function of growing population in poor areas to live (flood plains, dessert). Changing CO2 concentration to deal with this is about the least effective way I can imagine to help these areas.
There are a number of pacific islands such as the Marshall islands, Kiribati and a number of others. Majuro (the main island of the Marshall islands had a population of 20 thousand in 2012, but is currently only 6' above sea level. 1' of sea level rise removes the majority of the land, and already significant number of climate refugees from these islands who have resettled to other areas.
Well we are all going to die from climate change anyways. Some extra corona deaths and working economy seem like a win/win If you are a climate doomer.
I wasn't clear. I was questioning the overly simplistic "no life at all" as if some environmental changes are made the reduction in quality of life will be significant
Because of corona many people now have no life at all (i.e., they’re dead), and many more would have died if not for all the measures, so not sure how the statement was overly simplistic.
Same goes for the environment, if we don’t act, the environmental changes will have life ending impact for a significant number of people. Maybe not directly, but there will be food shortage, and wars. It is in the interest of everyone that we try to limit the impact of global warming as much as possible.
> Do people believe that they’re going to actually die because of global warming?
Climate change can be obdserved and measured. (Nitpick, but the 80's term "global warming" is used less often these days since it's confusing for some people, because climate change can have vastly different effects in different areas, not just simply "warming")
We already know that heatwaves are killing people and droughts are affecting the entire food chain, again, killing people for years already. [1]
You might take the position that these very real deaths are not caused by climate change (disagreeing with scientific consensus), that they are merely a fluke in the climate history of our planet, but then you'd have to, at least for yourself, define an "evidence threshold" which, when presented, would make you go "ok, now it's undeniably man-made climate change that is killing these people", because the slow graduality of the process makes it hard to intuitively see cause and effect.
I had a good life. I am worried about my children and also trying to think about the billions of people that will see their quality of life significantly degraded.
Geopolitical instability due to scarcer resources is certainly going to have a massive negative impact on everyone's life.
Just look at how a "small war" in Ukraine is already having real life consequences all around the world.
Now, imagine the effects of food and water insecurity across the world. Even Russia was not stupid enough to fully block supplies of wheat leaving Ukraine.
And this is only one aspect of how climate change might impact you.
People already have died because of global warming. Do you truly believe no additional marginal people have died due to intensified wildfire or hurricanes in recent decades?
15 years ago the show The Newsroom (another aaron sorkin flick) made the Toby Ruins Everything joke about how "the first person to die due to catastrophic failure of the planet has already been born", you know, supposed to be a bit hyperbolic and funny but yeah, dead on, the only part of that that hasn't come to pass since then is the "storms that blot out the sun and create permanent darkness" bit/joke. Massive wildfires in numbers and scale far too big to keep under control? Intense hurricanes and 100 year floods at yearly intervals? Tropical diseases that start to break loose and spread out of control? Anybody hear any of those lately?
Honestly that was a bit of a mis-statement even then. The first person to die due to catastrophic failure of the climate was actually probably born in the 70s or 80s most likely.
And the party is really just getting started, this is nothing, there is around a 10-year latency so we are just seeing the impact of 2012-era carbon levels right now. It'll be another 10 years before we see the impact of the current decade of continued emissions growth. Things are going to continue to get a lot worse and fires/hurricanes/etc are only going to intensify.
Which is of course why it's important to actually get things fixed, because, as bad as things are, they will get worse unless the necessary system upgrades and repair work is performed... everyone has had that talk with management before. Some companies choose to change, some don't. Unfortunately there's nobody hiring on Mars or Europa at present...
2 degrees c average change in the next 28 years will cause people to die.
Looking at the droughts, floods, heat waves, polar vortexes, hurricane occurrences, fires (California and Siberia) - people have died over the last years in events occurring more often than they should.
Harvests and famine have some correlation to Syria and Ukraine wars and proxy wars over the last decade.
That was in response to the impact of corona approach on the economy, where millions died and still people think economy is more important.
But yes, in my opinion global warming is going to cause a lot of hurt. Countries will become unlivable (some islands will be gone in a few decades, the Netherlands will be mostly under water, dikes can not be heightened limitless, certain areas of India will soon be too hot for normal live), food production will be uncertain due to changing weather and drought, mass migration of people to more livable areas will follow, causing wars.
We’re already complaining about the amount of asylum seekers, the country is too small for all these people, how do you think it’s going to be with many more people on the move?
Yes, people are dying because of lots of causes, that's the unfortunate truth, but it seems to me that some people do believe that a large part of us will die because of climate change. Hence my question.
I believe that to be false, a large part of us (as a species) will not die because of climate change (as past climate change events can attest to).
Maybe not a large part of the humans living now, but the next generation won't have it easy. I don't think that it's prudent to look at past events for two reasons: Population size and in-/dependence. There are a lot more humans now, than in the past. The year 0 is estimated to have had a population of about 170 to 400 million and about half for every 1000 years before that. It is a lot easier for smaller independent populations to move to a new place and start over, especially when most of them are hunter-gatherers or simple farmers. Their lives didn't change that much.
What will a population of 8 billion interconnected and dependent people do? They can't all move to a new place, they can't all farm for themselves. Just the war in Ukraine caused significant food insecurity due to higher grain prices and lower export numbers in some poorer countries. Now imagine such problems on a global scale.
Many of the current conflicts going on in the world already are water wars in disguise, or are about dealing with degrading environments, like in the Sahel zone. Also large-scale refugee movements are about people trying to escape from places where supply for land suitable for agriculture is not increasing. This is on top of ecosystems actively degrading because of multiple other reasons as well. There are always going to be populations somewhere that manage to insulate themselves from these problems, but things will become rougher for many of us.
I mean, if we wanted to decarbonize at break neck speeds - nuclear power and geoengineering are right there. Instead we are working with a very narrow band of acceptable solutions.
Gen III+ or earlier nuclear is a way of slowly solving 10% of the problem. It's not fast and it's limited by an irreplaceable critical mineral the overuse of which would delay full deployment of Gen IV in many scenarios.
It's not yet clear that Gen IV is faster or less limited by other critical minerals.
Dedicating your shipyards to building offshore wind cranes gets more carbon off the plate sooner than adapting it to build reactor vessels even if you only use the crane for a few years. Building more heavy casting is slow.
Every other step of the supply chain is even slower and more prone to overruns than the glacial pace of reactor construction.
Geoengineering is the last ditch emergency button. Once we hit it we can't unhit it and it might break other things.
Besides this being an extremely utilitarian way to view of humans that obfuscates inherent value of human beings, it is a general problem with wage labour under capitalism, where only capital earns proportional to its “value”.
I think we should focus our energy more on the question how we can provide everyone according to their needs than how utilizable they are, if we want to live in a more healthy and thriving society than we currently do! At the end there is really no need to give some people 10 times more just because they are productive in a certain way. And this calculation already fails as soon as we add more dimension to it, e.g. someone might not be producing 10 times more productive code but maybe they do offer a lot of social skills that make everyone in the team have a better time during work hours.
So that they will turn into a mega company with nothing but PR, capital and marketing? I think the fact that they are so focused on medicine and science should rather be the norm in medicine.
The fact that Pfizer can spin this story on their name is disturbing and dangeruous behaviour that should not be the norm.
This is a misunderstanding of what communications is.
The world works on information, if you don't take a seat at table, it will be taken by someone else.
The notion that 'communicating' and 'lab work' would be somehow 'competing time and/or resource pressures' overall at the company is nonsense. They are mostly separate activities.
Pfizer doesn't have to 'spin' anything, they are a legit partner in the deal, they can do the release in the US, they will have their brand up there, their name, do the interviews - and they don't have to do anything tricky, they can surely mention their 'no name partner' and win $1 Billion worth of free PR.
A tiny Germany company, knowing nothing about communications, will miss the opportunity to tell the world who they are, to tell their story, to make their name known to another generation of researchers and scientists who might want to work with them, to a generation of bankers, business people who will be 2x more likely to want to 'take the call and or do the deal' because of their reputation.
1/2 of business is communicating, the only successful businesses that don't understand this are the one's that hit on it accidentally.
Pfizer is already a global brand, this is the moment of a lifetime for 'the name of the company I already forget' (see what I mean?) - I had to re-look it up - 'BioNTech' - it's very much make-or-break. If this vaccine is legit they need to start talking about themselves now.
Most German companies work like this, they even have their own moniker: "hidden champions". It appears to work just fine, if you're not selling to the public, what's the point of wasting money making the public aware of you? Also, not every company needs to be a Silicon-Valley-style startup which spouts endless PR nonsense about how their stupid internet-connected coffee machine is going to "change the world".
Your cynicism is misplaced (and borderline arrogant).
1) Germany is ~1% of the world's population, and an economy shrinking in size relative to the 'rest of world' quickly, a 'hidden champion' in Germany is almost irrelevant outside it's borders.
The world is a very big place, name recognition matters even within industry settings.
2) BioNTech has been losing money for a few years, they need this deal and everything from it. The CEO has a responsibility to make sure every element of credit is given where it's due.
3) The commenter below mentioned they are 'not small' - this is not quite true - they are 1000 people, which is actually relatively small for such a firm, their massive $20-25B valuation likely comes from kind of earlier understanding that they had a vaccine that was probably working, and such info was slowly leaked out to market over time. The the founder is 'Stock Rich' to the point of '100th Richest German' is really not a big deal.
There going to have to get out there and try to be as well known as some of the bigger brands.
Edit: I should point out that both Space X and Tesla would absolutely not exist were it not for the kind of communications strategy that Musk has embarked upon. Literally his appearance on Stephen Colbert was not only a plea for cash, but a plea for people to 'join the movement'. These things pervade just consumer elements and helps give him power and attention within other, non-consumer facing business operations such as the closed world of 'space'. Having made himself a very famous person enables him to open quite a lot of doors, get a lot of meetings, raise a lot of money, hire a lot of inspired people, which creates a virtuous circle unto it's own once products are materially released etc.. He did a great job of that.
Lookup what "hidden champion" actually means, such companies are highly competitive and successful in the global market with extremely specialized high-tech products in a small niche. Because they have specialized in high-quality niche-products they can focus their marketing money where it matters: their potential customers. And those customers are other companies, not people like you or me. Those companies are also often family-owned and not publicly traded. What's the point of maintaining a big PR circus for this type of company?
Did you read the same article as me? The company started 2020 with slightly less than $5B capitalization. The owners are already top-100 wealthiest in Germany due to an earlier startup working a similar space.
As another poster mentioned [0], they also have US offices and advanced manufacturing capabilities.
> Customers buying multiple flavours of a product with the same price but different UPCs, which the cashier rings up by scanning the first product then hitting "times 10"
I worked at retail (Uniqlo to be specific) and it was definetely a rule to not do this. They wanted us to scan everything one by one even if they were the same color and size. This allowed for a pretty accurate information on stock, e.g. we could see how many of a given sweater in given size and color is still in storage etc.
Probably this is too tedius for some retail (groceries with very small unit price) but very smart rule in general.
The rule is probably on the books at most retail stores, getting everyone to follow it all the time though is another matter. Cashiers and their direct supervisors could easily not understand or care about the rule and ignore it to save a few seconds on big orders.
https://reliefweb.int/report/occupied-palestinian-territory/....