This was done earlier this year, The Institute & Faculty of Actuaries published a paper on the true risk climate has on the world economy. Insurance companies are most likely only starting to get this information and large payouts from the wildfire’s, the hurricanes and the flooding is most likely already pushing the companies to insolvency. You can of course move risk around with re-insurance and spun out independent insurance companies but the risk to overwhelming the entire system is becoming higher and higher each year. I wouldn’t be surprised if the specific account used for the CA wildfire payouts was empty and overdrawn and State Farm was caught off guard by that and had to do some serious amount of moving money around to fill it back up. Enough where it took a couple of days to come up with the cash, that in itself is really scary.

They are trying to take our city. Fuck em

Sad thing is that when it was first published it was meant to be both a warning and a guide on how to limit resource consumption back to sustainable levels so as to not experience catastrophic collapse. However none of those warning where taken seriously and the researchers where made to look like crackpots in popular media. Which sucks because all they where trying to do was make sense of the problem and work collaboratively on solutions to safely and methodically transition society so things wouldn’t be so disruptive. We saw how well that went.

It’s both.

It’s not “rich” that people want to be its well off. Once most people reach a certain point of comfort and access to resources demand for things levels off. So the trick is to make access to the basic goods/services cheap or free and stop the excessive consumption like mansions and private jets. Equating Degrowth economics to returning to poverty is politically setting the idea up for failure. Degrowth should be about telling people that they will still have plentiful access to food, water, shelter and energy. They just won’t be having private jet packs or luxury cars anymore.

I don’t know. Definitely not crypto as the energy demands on it make it infeasible. But a currency comes after an economic system is formed, we haven’t even addressed changing that yet so 🤷🏽‍♂️.

The USD losing reserve status is in my opinion going to happen within the next decade. BRICKS is too much of an economic powerhouse that the US can’t compete with. China alone outperforms the US when it comes to GDP. However I think in the long run it will be good for the US and others. We have all been coasting on an economy based off cheap access to energy and cheap access to credit. This has caused a huge moral hazard as people have unrealistic expectations on the cost of things and enables a consumptive lifestyle that is causing the rapid death of our biosphere.

And for that one brief moment in time they will have maximized all value for their shareholders.

That’s always been the big lie, that the right doesn’t believe in climate change. They believe in it, and they plan on making a whole lot of money off of it.

That’s not even going to come close to the water savings we need.

Sorry we need the water for staple crops and drinking, almonds are just too water intensive.

I think finding a good revenue model is fine, as long as the orgs that host these services are transparent in how they operate and have business models that are not focused on 10x growth year over year. Selling Ad space has always been a good model as long as you maintain a healthy separation from your Ad customers and your regular users. Data mining is always a huge money maker but then you violate your users privacy. I wouldn’t know how to build this into lemmy or other apps but an idea I have had lately is having a sliding scale for users to decide what info to share with advertisers as well as giving the user a percentage of the money that was made on their information. That way the org hosting and administrating the service gets funds to keep the site going and their users are compensated for the sale of their personal information.

The problem is if you run as volunteer only you can only recruit from people who are socioeconomically privileged enough to volunteer. Having a revenue model isn’t always about making a single person rich, it can be about being able to properly compensate people for their time, knowledge and experience who otherwise would not be able to because other responsibilities prevent them from it.

I know it does. But the act of stopping the flow of federal dollars to the federal coffers would in itself be seen as an act of rebellion. So if CA decides that it wants to do that, it better be ready to have the ability to back it up.

I view a peacful secession movement beginning with changes in our election system and legislative system to allow for a proportional representative state government, maybe eliminate the idea of a separate executive and place that within the legislature like in a parliamentary system. Then once we have organized ourselves politically we can work towards a separation from the Union. Or we can tell the Federal Gov to get fucked, take their money and shoot our way out. But I think we can agree that might be a bad idea.

Doing that would by definition make us independent. We would be seizing the Federal governments legally implemented Tax dollars.

But in all seriousness I am a leftist and I support CA independence because it is time. We are just too different then the East and the Mid-West, we have a different climate and a different relationship with our water and our land. That causes us to have a different body politic then them. I mean the only reason CA is part of the US is because the US invaded a sovereign country and took it, then to hold it engaged in a genocide of the native population. We never asked to join, we were forced. But that was the 19’th century and today is the 21’st century. We shouldn’t rejoin Mexico and become Mexican again, but we are definitely not “Americans”. What are we IDK, but I think we deserve an opportunity to ask that question.

I like degrowth. To me it’s framing it in the way you frame conditions like cancer or obesity. “Sure growing your body is fine but too much and it kills yah”, sure the global north used economic growth to lift millions out of poverty and be able to fund massive leaps in science, technology and culture. But now our economies have gotten too big and are causing multiple negative feedback loops. So depending on the analogy our economies need to either go on a diet/exercise plan or chemo/radiation treatment.

Dude’s got nukes, that doesn’t tend to end well.

I agree that the Biden administration’s policies where not good enough to address the real issues facing working people in the country. They were pulling from the same neoliberal economic playbook that both parties have used and has been shown over and over again to increase inequality instead of decreasing inequality. Biden and Democratic leadership think we are still in the world economic situation of the 1990’s and refuse to believe otherwise.

However Trump on the other hand doesn’t even have a plan. He was correct in saying “The Economy sucks”, but had no other plan to fix the system besides “Drill Baby Drill” and “Let the Oligarchs decide how the economic system works”. Harris might have been an out of touch elite, oblivious to economic reality. But Trump is pain and destruction incarnate and will only cause more pain and destruction during his tenure.

The reality is the US Empire is dying and it can either go gracefully or with pain and anger while it takes the rest of the world with it.

I am not a conservative person and I support this. For many reasons but the primary one being actual political representation. Right now California has a population of about 40M yet we only have 2 votes in the national legislature. Why?

As a personal anecdote I have experienced what others in the US think of “Comiefornia” first hand. People from mostly the South and Midwest hate us. They don’t respect our rights or our values. They already don’t view us as part of the US anyways so fuck em.

Also just a reminder California never chose to join the US, we were conquered.

More then being pedantic.