A whole load of BS. Ask the Chinese and Indians citizens of that country on how it feels living under an apartheid like system. And that's not taking into consideration the endemic corruption and Islamist agenda. Malaysia was a country that could have been(compare Singapore), instead it will always be a mediocre and semi-developed corrupt nation like most countries in that region. A great place for a holiday or rich Westerners to retire, but a person of colour would want to stay away. The so called Bumiputera have all but destroyed that nation and if not for the Chinese it would just be another Indonesia.
> Ask the Chinese and Indians citizens of that country on how it feels living under an apartheid like system
It's bad, but not that bad. We get discriminated against but not actively attacked.
> but a person of colour would want to stay away
We don't really have a problem with racism against people of color, especially considering the ruling class isn't even white.
> Malaysia was a country that could have been(compare Singapore)
Singapore is an extreme outlier. Even without an Islamic government, I'm not sure it'd be possible for us to do as well. Chinese Malaysians have a lot of cultural issues as well and would've probably led to very similar corruption.
So why would anyone want to invest in the Netherlands? Great way to scare off foreign investors. And all over some trumped-up charge. Where is the evidence that the company was a “nest of spies”?
Fear not! Dear Leader just assured the UN General Assembly that climate change is the biggest, most insidious hoax and con job in the history of humanity. And he's really great at this stuff.
I'm not sure I agree with you. The only widely cited quantitative guess at this scenario I could find in a brief trawl puts the chance of any "climate-driven existential catastrophe" this century at about 0.1 percent [1].
"Extinction" is a stricter outcome than “existential catastrophe", so I would imagine the odds this century are even lower than 0.1 percent. In other words: don't resign yourself to the extinction of humanity in your lifetime - it's highly unlikely, and you're just going to be feeding the defeatism that is so tempting when external events are so seemingly negative.
As sibling commenter to this post notes though, I would imagine that mass unrest, famines, death etc. in less-developed parts of the world will occur, with knock-on effects for the developed world.
I think you underestimate the resilience of the human race. We have a space station where people live outside of earth. We have people living in Antarctica. On small scales, we can completely control environments to make them hospitable.
The idea that all the humans will die off in the lifetime of anyone who is alive today, from something slow moving like climate change, is pretty far fetched.
IMO it's not a world ending crisis, but definitely a city/society ending one. Countries with thousands of islands are heavily affected. Many major cities are near the ocean, so we'll see a lot of damage.
I agree we're maybe past the point where we can stop the eventual extinction caused by climate change, but I think we still have (easily) at least 100 years left of more than 0 humans alive.
That said I think it will cause immense socio-political chaos and mass death in our lifetimes.
I think you are mistaken. In nature graphs are never linear. They are curves, special type of curvers. They start slow, then they can grow lineary for a while, and then they switch to exponental growth. This is the case w/ everything if you take a time to look. Epidemics, population growths, Vulcanos, even stars.
The very same thing start on Earth w/ climate change. Temp raises slowly, more CO2 (and more importantly, CH4) in atmosphere. Temp reises more. Atmosphere is hotter, can absorb more H2O vapors as well. Now, when you start hitting first threshold, hydrates (CH4) will be released from shallow ocean bottoms, more CH4 in atmosphere hotter.. cycle accelerates hitting runaway (exponental growth). KABOOM, earth might be doomed.
Its simplified model, not accounting for huge vulcanos on polar, with might explode and make nuclear winter with will block the heating. Complicated stuff, thats why we need scientists :)
I think the feedback loop of climate change causing melting permafrost to release methane and carbon dioxide in turn causing more permafrost to melt is pretty worrying and maybe not getting enough attention.
Amen to that. I would have said a “sizeable population” instead.
If you cannot outrun a cassowary, you deserve to get eaten. Another reason why I refuse to believe that obesity is a genetically predisposed disease because that gene would have been eliminated a long time ago from our nomadic days by the sabre tooth lions and packs of hyenas.
Can this be circumvented if it got sent to Australia first and from there to the States? Obviously, there is an additional cost. Or is Australia going to get hammered with 145% tariffs?
Yes, but it's essentially fraud. The common term is "Origin washing." You have to declare the origin of the shipment, and the exception is that it goes through "substantial transformation."
If you were to buy a bunch of components from China, have them shipped to Australia and assembled there, then shipped to the US, you would pay the tariff applied to Australia, not China. Of course, you probably are paying some sort of import tax when the components make their way into Australia too.
On the customs form, you're supposed to specify "country of origin". Tariffs are based on where the item was created, not just where it went in the mail box. Things get more complicated when they are built with parts from various countries.
