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Woodrow Call

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Posts posted by Woodrow Call

  1. 1 hour ago, LOHorn said:

    5 year composite recruiting rankings don't agree.

    WTF does that mean if you can't get it done on the field? The players Memphis has now are better, and Memphis has as many players in the NFL. End of discussion. 

  2. 16 minutes ago, LOHorn said:

    Maybe if you build your culture around out-efforting more talented programs, it’s hard to find the effort against the schools with similar or worse talent. Seems like ISU plays shitty against a bad team every year. 

    Memphis has more talent than Iowa State. 

  3. 5 minutes ago, burntorangebongos said:

    So  I guess Chip Kelly will get another year if they win?

    Chip is staying. I'm an alumnus and about as disconnected from the inner sanctum as you can be, but I don't think he's going anywhere. There are insiders that think he should go, but it's apparently not happening. 

  4. 1 hour ago, 52-80 said:

    You might not be "against" having children, and I believe you have and love your N-2 offsprings, but the general sentiment of "humans = bad" is common amongst the climate doomer community, and active promotion of population reduction is their belief.  It is also a plain fact, and also in that graphic, that wealthier and more educated slices of the population have far fewer children than the rest. That's not an optimal situation, broadly speaking.. *insert Mike Judge reference here*.

     

    Compressing gas at high pressures and transporting it from station to station seems way less good than delivering electricity.  Which we already do pretty much everywhere.

    Derrick Jensen is an example of someone that is very much against humans and sees humans as the core problem. I have strong issues with many of his views. But just to clarify my own position...I don't see humans as "bad." I see some human behaviors as bad and believe those behaviors (and certain economic views) as bad. 

  5. 26 minutes ago, 52-80 said:

    I find this pessimism a bit lost and deeply anti-human. 

    All cars use a shit load of metals, plastics, and rubber, which has to be mined or harvested. The *marginal difference* with electric car is the battery, which is lithium, nickel, graphite.  Congolese children don't work extracting lithium from Chilean deposits.  If you are buying a new car today, buying an electric car over a traditional car is a *net good* decision.

    Homo sapiens -- nay, all *hominids* -- is a speck of dirt on the history of the Earth.  We are neither owed anything by it, nor owe anything to it.  For the microsecond on the cosmic scale that we as individuals exist on this earth, we only have to optimize our time on it. Is that a "selfish" motivation? Sure is. So are 99.99% of decisions we've ever made across any other dimension in life. I'm not governing my life based on what might happen to this round ball in 3 million years.

    I want the best life for me and for my family. I eat red meat, because it is delicious. I compost and recycle, because it makes *me* feel good, at a cost of *nothing*. I'm not wantonly wasteful, because it's not satisfying. But I'll splurge on my kids, if satisfies them.

    And we should want to have kids, because it's the best and safest time in human history to be alive. They'll benefit from the accumulated knowledge and technological advancement from 50,000 years of scribbling graffiti on cavewalls. 

    If you -- relatively privileged people from the privileged parts of the world -- dont want to have kids, it's not going to matter.  People from the relatively laggard parts of the world are going to have them *anyway.*  Generation-for-generation, they'll just live a slightly worse life than your kids might have. And they'll steer the future in a relatively worse direction than your kids might.  (this is merely broad level extrapolation).

    Either way, they can all be fed. Surely you've heard, access to food has not been a natural problem of production - its been an 'artificial' problem of distribution. Take the look at global food yield, and show me what 'effects of climate change' its been experiencing.  Also note the relative growth of yield vs population.

    **

    TLDR civilization has been doing good, actually. The world is not ending soon. You dont have to believe in what Swedish teenagers say and do things because Greta told you to. You can do good things, for the sake of feeling good.

    I choose not to be doomer-pilled. You can too.

    all-the-metals-we-mined-infographic-2021-updated-scaled.jpg

    crop-yields.png

    population.png

    index-of-cereal-production-yield-and-land-use.png

    I never said I was against having children. I have children and grandchildren; however, all populations, human or otherwise, have limits in closed systems. But it is a fact that industrial agriculture has made population growth possible. I'm not saying I'm against it or for it. I'm only stating a fact, and it is also a fact that the more humans you have the more consumption you'll have.  'Twas ever thus. 

    And no, we don't "owe" the earth anything, but it makes good sense to not poop in ones own nest. 

    With respect to your statement, "Congolese children don't work extracting lithium from Chilean deposits," you might also want to consider this

  6. 12 minutes ago, troph said:

    Sadly I think this is true. Here is where I am gullible - I’m hopeful we can contain development to urban areas and protect the natural world, we can push to nuclear and other scalable clean(er) power, we can advance technology for batteries, we can advance human rights, we can innovate for wide spread carbon capture, reduce single use plastic consumption, and clean up our environment and oceans. I think there are times where good things have happened and necessity is the mother of all invention will prove true. I think that’s below a 1% chance but one can hope.

    I hang on to a sliver. My son is now an attorney at EPA. He keeps me up to date on the good, the bad and the ugly, and there are some reasons for hope. 

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  7. I've tried to simply use common sense in my own efforts which date to the mid 1980's when I became deeply involved in bioregionalism and the study of reinhabitory strategies.  One of the first things I significantly limited was air travel. Then I moved to an area where car travel was limited. This is a huge problem for us in America, because our cities are basically built for cars, and it's very challenging to find decent employment where you can walk, bike or take public transportation to work. 

    We started composting, limiting meat consumption and other things. We moved to a much smaller home.

    I'm not a fan of electric vehicles for many of the reasons already mentioned in this thread. The mining, but also the human cost. Much of the labor is supplied by poor workers and they're exposed to a number of harmful things in the production. Obviously, fossil fuel is a huge issue, but every can of coke and every pill we consume is dependent upon fossil fuels. It's not going away. 

    The answer to all of this, if it's an answer, is reduced use and scaling back population growth. The population is sustained by industrial agriculture (another huge problem), so as agriculture continues to experience the effects of climate change, the human population will inevitably decline. None of us want mass starvation and death, but nature bats last. We can either control it on our own, or Mother Nature will do it for us. 

    But having been involved in this area for nearly 40 years, I've largely given up hope. Addressing our ecological problems requires massive change in human behavior, and in the United States, this seems highly unlikely. Americans are all about individual freedom and the community comes second.  It also will require us to address growth capitalism, a system that is by its very nature unsustainable. You can't have unlimited growth in a closed system. In biological terms, we call uncontrolled growth of cells a cancer. It's ultimately fatal. 

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  8. Just now, troph said:

    If you assume UGA has no way in after losing to Bama then it’s no different that if UGA wins. Still need Washington and probably Oregon to drop a game. 

    Yeah, that's right. But it of course depends on the magnitude of the Georgia loss. Probably will be close, but you never know. Maybe the Trojans defense gets their act together and beats Oregon. They'll definitely change things up defensively in their next two games. 

  9. Prayer is a meditative experience for me. I don't believe there's some old male deity listening to me. But it's time for me to be quiet, to repeat the names of people that are important to me and my hopes for them. It's a time for me to silently reflect on my own weaknesses and how I can improve as a human. 

    I quit believing in monotheistic gods a long time ago, but I eventually went back to a church for community. I was impressed by how many poor, hungry people they were feeing (and helping with healthcare and housing) and didn't see any atheists stepping up to the plate doing the same thing. 

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  10. it's a lost season for USC. Riley's inability to see Grinch's flaws and his blind loyalty really cost them this year. He has to name a big time DC or the transfer portal is going to dry up. And they still haven't stopped the bleeding from the California high school ranks. Oregon still goes in and gets what they want. Lots of issues at SC. 

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