Look at rivers in the cities. The Thames in London for example. The Mersey in Liverpool. These rivers could not support any substantial life forms (fish etc) after the industrial revolution. Older people from these cities remember when these rivers were, when they were young, sludged and horrible compared to nowadays, when they are relatively clean to what they were 50 years ago.
So, here's a direct impact of trying to clean up after human environmental effects. Undeniable and clear as..haha..water. We make a difference, and efforts to clean s$*@ up do also make a difference.
A chinese artist just made a brick out of chinese city smog by hoovering up air for 100 days in a normal square.
Now, I am biased since I do belong to the scientific community that looks at these climate changes and stipulates doom upon everyone, but I believe most educated people (most of us here certainly) dont doubt there is a change and that human industry causes pollution and hence s!!& in the air that helps with greenhouse and climate change. As noted earlier, the real questions are "how much" and "how much can we stop it/delay". Anything else is making the blind/deaf/mute monkey be ashamed on the topic of ignorance (i.e. read a bit on the subject before voicing strong opinions...everyone's INFORMED opinion should be valued).
However, the best way to reduce pollution and human effects is probably...to have less humans. Politicians and everyone are scared to voice this question since they'll be considered "anti life" or whatever funk term the media is giving to this at the moment. This is a super touchy subject to most people but it was a topic that was discussed some decades ago and now it's been dropped and mostly ignoresdyet it is one the biggest factors in this discussion.
Disclaimer; highly opinionated stuff above, due to it being an opinion.
Most people try to blame linguistics or dialect when they use the wrong words. "I could care less" usually ends up there. "Literally" is another. Doesn't make it any more correct. There is a limit beyond which linguistics works as an argument, but neither is there yet. It is the old bandwagon fallacy: Lots of people do something, so it must be right/true/a good idea.Except "lots of people say something" is exactly how linguistics works. That's how language changes.
But until ENOUGH people do so, it is still quite wrong.
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Okay. Less humans. Either fewer births, or more deaths. Do you want enforced abortions like the One child policy in China, mass executions, giant wars, restrictive policies of who will be allowed to breed, what?
Places where people can afford to choose already have negative population growth.
The number of people doing so will be different in different countries. So it's right in some countries but not in others.
However, the best way to reduce pollution and human effects is probably...to have less humans.
Doesn't really work. Per capita pollution tends to rise absent other factors. So even if people are having fewer children, they will still want big houses for all their stuff.
Enough people certainly use "I could care less". And have for a long time.But until ENOUGH people do so, it is still quite wrong.Most people try to blame linguistics or dialect when they use the wrong words. "I could care less" usually ends up there. "Literally" is another. Doesn't make it any more correct. There is a limit beyond which linguistics works as an argument, but neither is there yet. It is the old bandwagon fallacy: Lots of people do something, so it must be right/true/a good idea.Except "lots of people say something" is exactly how linguistics works. That's how language changes.
I don't think that's the case in the UK. It will depend where you are.
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This is a super touchy subject to most people but it was a topic that was discussed some decades ago and now it's been dropped and mostly ignoresdyet it is one the biggest factors in this discussion.
Really this has been an issue since Thomas Malthus made a fuss about it in 1798. The problem is... Malthus was wrong.
The most obvious error was not taking scientific advancement into account. We have been able to continually find new technologies to expand or replace 'limited' vital resources. It is always possible that we won't continue to be able to do so, but then the bigger/more fundamental error in Malthusian thinking comes into play. Namely, resource depletion is inherently self correcting. If there is not enough food then some number of humans die until there IS enough food again. You never get to the point where there is ZERO food/water/whatever else available, because long before that point the poorest/most vulnerable run out and die.
We are currently seeing that effect with climate change. The massive drought in Syria killed a lot of people... wars sprung up over the limited local resources (killing more people)... and now refugees are fleeing to areas with less fighting and more resources (many dying along the way). Problem 'solved'. Plenty of resources for the remaining local population AND ongoing fighting to keep it that way.
The question then becomes whether there are things we can do 'on the front end' which are 'less horrible' than the death and wars if we allow nature to take its course. History has shown that draconian population controls and policies are ineffective. Rather, the best means of achieving stable (or even declining) population is equal rights for women. Likewise, investment in infrastructure and scientific research yield results far superior to tight-fisted budget controls and rationing of resources. Et cetera.
Yes, it is easier to deal with the problems caused by human consumption and pollution when there are fewer humans... but the only means we have found of reducing human population over the long term (war/famine/plague are only short term reductions) is freedom/equality. That's already a goal of the 'global elites', so it isn't really being "ignored" and there isn't any reason to 'discuss' other means of population control... because they don't work.
Can we even make it a better place? A friend of mine who studies this stuff says it's too late anyway. The disintigration of the icecaps and worldwide food production collapse is inevitable now and has been for a decade. We're all gonna die! :(
We can mitigate the damage and reduce the impacts. And really, I tend to think most 1st world nations and some 2nd world nations will probably skate through climate change with only minor damage. We have the wealth, technology, and infrastructure to adapt. It's the 3rd world nations that are going to be bearing the brunt of these problems (as usual).
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That's how language changes.
True enough, but I lament that we currently seem to be losing useful words much faster than new ones are coined.
Yeah, I get it, that's how language works, and presumably always has. But it seems to me there needs to periodically be a massive renaissance of new words being coined, to make up for losing so many existing ones. Otherwise we'd have long ago been reduced to simply grunting at each other. I'm waiting for all those new words to replace the ones I'm not able to use anymore to mean what they used to mean. In the meantime, all I can do is try and hold on to some semblance of an ability to communicate articulately.
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Can we even make it a better place? A friend of mine who studies this stuff says it's too late anyway. The disintigration of the icecaps and worldwide food production collapse is inevitable now and has been for a decade. We're all gonna die! :(We can mitigate the damage and reduce the impacts. And really, I tend to think most 1st world nations and some 2nd world nations will probably skate through climate change with only minor damage. We have the wealth, technology, and infrastructure to adapt. It's the 3rd world nations that are going to be bearing the brunt of these problems (as usual).
What if the methane in the permafrost melts and returns the planet to Permian conditions? I've heard that that's almost a guarantee by now, and that everything with lungs would choke to death in it!
Yes. It would be horrible if the permafrost temperature ever got above -182.5 degrees celsius.
True enough, but I lament that we currently seem to be losing useful words much faster than new ones are coined.
The word "hack" was once the specific bypassing of security or rewriting code. Now anytime someone learns a new (to them usually) way of doing things, it is a "hack" or worse, "life hack".
GET OFF MY LAWN!Oh yeah, and climate change or something...
[Side note: I like the concept presented in John Carpenter's They Live. Aliens are living among us, and changing the climate to better fit their needs. That movie also offers the most plausible* explanation for the current levels of inequality.
* Most plausible, at least without being very cynical and/or depressed anyway.]
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What if the methane in the permafrost melts and returns the planet to Permian conditions? I've heard that that's almost a guarantee by now, and that everything with lungs would choke to death in it!Can we even make it a better place? A friend of mine who studies this stuff says it's too late anyway. The disintigration of the icecaps and worldwide food production collapse is inevitable now and has been for a decade. We're all gonna die! :(We can mitigate the damage and reduce the impacts. And really, I tend to think most 1st world nations and some 2nd world nations will probably skate through climate change with only minor damage. We have the wealth, technology, and infrastructure to adapt. It's the 3rd world nations that are going to be bearing the brunt of these problems (as usual).
I haven't seen any solid projections indicating things will get that bad, and as someone who works in related fields, I like to thing myself somewhat informed. I think even the worst case scenarios generally still predict lower amounts of warmer than occurred during the PETM event, which was the warmest the planet has been since dinosaurs went extinct.
Don't get me wrong...the projected warming is bad, and will have deleterious effects on human society and biodiversity. We should do our best to mitigate that damage. But it's nowhere near "end of all life bad". Nothing comes from giving in to futilism.
Actually, "hacker" in the black hat, bypassing security, criminal sense is the later meaning, going mainstream in the 80s. The earlier computer usage was much more positive - about a particular kind of programming skill and cleverness. "life hack" derives from that, I assume.True enough, but I lament that we currently seem to be losing useful words much faster than new ones are coined.The word "hack" was once the specific bypassing of security or rewriting code. Now anytime someone learns a new (to them usually) way of doing things, it is a "hack" or worse, "life hack".
This is what I have heard. Before the black hat community took over the meaning, I've heard that "hacker" was skill in coding in general and "cracker" was specifically breaking into systems to do bad things.
That being said, I was born after this distinction so its not like I have any first hand knowledge.
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Enough people certainly use "I could care less". And have for a long time.But until ENOUGH people do so, it is still quite wrong.Most people try to blame linguistics or dialect when they use the wrong words. "I could care less" usually ends up there. "Literally" is another. Doesn't make it any more correct. There is a limit beyond which linguistics works as an argument, but neither is there yet. It is the old bandwagon fallacy: Lots of people do something, so it must be right/true/a good idea.Except "lots of people say something" is exactly how linguistics works. That's how language changes.
Many people say "doggie dog" world. That doesn't make them right. People can be stupid en masse.
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Many people say "doggie dog" world. That doesn't make them right. People can be stupid en masse.
Or "I could of puked." If what you're saying/writing is functionally devoid of meaning, why say/write it? Goes back to what George Orwell said about catch-phrases: most often people use them in place of thinking and communicating; they're functionally just noise.
Many people say "doggie dog" world. That doesn't make them right. People can be stupid en masse.Or "I could of puked." If what you're saying/writing is functionally devoid of meaning, why say/write it? Goes back to what George Orwell said about catch-phrases: most often people use them in place of thinking and communicating; they're functionally just noise.
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Many people say "doggie dog" world. That doesn't make them right. People can be stupid en masse.Or "I could of puked." If what you're saying/writing is functionally devoid of meaning, why say/write it? Goes back to what George Orwell said about catch-phrases: most often people use them in place of thinking and communicating; they're functionally just noise.
For all intensive purposes, "I could of puked" is clear and meaningful.
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Well, doggie dog world is them mishearing a phrase but understanding the meaning through context. Unlike other words where you will see it in writing to correct your understanding, it never gets corrected.
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Kirth, just for you I shall join you on a pointless crusade for better terminology.
Can we even make it a better place? A friend of mine who studies this stuff says it's too late anyway. The disintigration of the icecaps and worldwide food production collapse is inevitable now and has been for a decade. We're all gonna die! :(We can mitigate the damage and reduce the impacts. And really, I tend to think most 1st world nations and some 2nd world nations will probably skate through climate change with only minor damage. We have the wealth, technology, and infrastructure to adapt. It's the 3rd world nations that are going to be bearing the brunt of these problems (as usual).
Reminder, Second world nations are nations allied with the USSR. It's a largely defunct term. Third world nations does still see some usage, but mostly in casual discussions. People who write about it professionally tend to use terms like developing and industrial. Though not widely recognized yet, even these terms are losing a lot of the meaning people imagine they have. Poor and wealthy are probably the best descriptive terms, other than actually naming/describing the country in detail.
For all intensive purposes, "I could of puked" is clear and meaningful.
"For all intents and..." Oh, OK, I get it. Sarcasm.
But "could of puked" is clear only in speach, because it sounds like "could've." When written, it just looks to me like total gobbledigook -- three words with no obvious relationship to one another -- and I have to sit there and say it aloud to myself to figure out what it's supposed to mean. Why put the reader to that much trouble, assuming the purpose of writing is to communicate thoughts and ideas, rather than to obscure them?When you write "I could care less," the reader has to sit there and think about whether you're being sarcastically clever and really do care, or whether you're illiterate, or whether you're literate but lazy. Why not just make your meaning clear up front? Remember that in verbal speech face-to-face we have nonverbal attitude, tone, and all sorts of other clues that the written word lacks. Even verbally over a phone, tone and "sounds like" clues can help. In writing, all you have is what's written.
Eventually, I got old and realized that language doesn't actually work that way. If you're just running my sentences past some mental checklist so you can show how well you do it, well I could care less.
Conversely, if you're intentionally shifting the burden of communication to the reader out of laziness, why bother writing at all? I used to say "well, whatever," but eventually, I got old, and realized that language doesn't actually work very well that way. If I make no effort to convey my meaning with any clarity, I cannot expect the reader to take the effort to parse it out.
I'll bet the vast majority of people saw/heard and understood the phrase long before breaking it down literally and realizing it was backwards.
I would think this is true only if you learned the backwards usage to start with. I may be a bit older, but I remember a time when pretty much no one said "I could care less." Just as I remember when "amazing" didn't mean "good." So when I see "could care less" now, I can't automatically assume a meaning; I have to sit there and think about the following:
When you write "I could care less," the reader has to sit there and think about whether you're being sarcastically clever and really do care, or whether you're illiterate, or whether you're literate but lazy.
Add "or just being a jerk."
Kirth, just for you I shall join you on a pointless crusade for better terminology.
Reminder, Second world nations are nations allied with the USSR. It's a largely defunct term. Third world nations does still see some usage, but mostly in casual discussions. People who write about it professionally tend to use terms like developing and industrial. Though not widely recognized yet, even these terms are losing a lot of the meaning people imagine they have. Poor and wealthy are probably the best descriptive terms, other than actually naming/describing the country in detail.Can we even make it a better place? A friend of mine who studies this stuff says it's too late anyway. The disintigration of the icecaps and worldwide food production collapse is inevitable now and has been for a decade. We're all gonna die! :(We can mitigate the damage and reduce the impacts. And really, I tend to think most 1st world nations and some 2nd world nations will probably skate through climate change with only minor damage. We have the wealth, technology, and infrastructure to adapt. It's the 3rd world nations that are going to be bearing the brunt of these problems (as usual).
Congrats...you have skillfully picked apart word usage tangential to the point I made. I am sure the entire thread was rubbing their head in confusion over my word choice. It's certainly a more valuable contribution than trying to explain to a poster in a climate change thread that anthropogenic climate change won't cause the end Permian extinction in their life time...
I would think this is true only if you learned the backwards usage to start with. I may be a bit older, but I remember a time when pretty much no one said "I could care less." Just as I remember when "amazing" didn't mean "good." So when I see "could care less" now, I can't automatically assume a meaning; I have to sit there and think about the following:
Another idiom that makes no sense: Tell me about it!
Since it basically means "don't tell me about it."
This might actually get at some simple ways to spot sarcasm in writing, without the amazing [sarcasm][/sarcasm] tags.
This might actually get at some simple ways to spot sarcasm in writing, without the amazing [sarcasm][/sarcasm] tags.
That's what I'm getting at -- in some cases, an incorrect usage means you can't tell if the writer is being sarcastic. In person, sure, you can read their face, their tone, their body language. But on a message board? None of that works.
Granted, some idioms just make no literal sense, even when used correctly. But that's a separate topic.
Anyways, I still don't care about anything Al Gore said about climate change. He's not a scientist, we already know this, so there's nothing to debunk there.
Idioms don't have to parse out logically. They have meanings on their own. I suppose we could demand they be stripped out of usage entirely, but I think the language would be poorer for it.
Right, but as noted above, using an idiom incorrectly is different from the idiom not making sense to begin with. (I don't mean "I remember a time when no one used that idiom," I mean "I remember a time when it was in widespread use, and the people who used it more or less all did so correctly.") There was a non-zero interval between its advent and the time when roughly 50% of people were using "could" vs. "couldn't," which seems to currently be the case. Is the percentage shifting further, and eventually the idiom will actually be "could care less," with "couldn't" being only a forgotten, archaic relict? Quite possibly so. At that time, I'll have to use "could" as well, in the interest of clarity.
That said, I still agree with Orwell -- that coining one's own idioms is better for communication and for the language as a whole than constantly recycling old ones. Sadly, I'm not that creative or that witty, so I'm often stuck with ones that already exist.
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Well, maybe that should tell people something? I know it's a popular idea that "Hey, I mean X when I say Y, everyone should understand it because I say so, since there are millions of others also saying it and that's how language works!!!1oneone"
...but at the end of the day, it is all about one person saying something to another person. If the receiver doesn't understand, or has to parse things and get it wrong, or merely has to expend more energy to do so, it is dysfunctional communication. It increases the risk of not communicating as intended, or the receiver simply not caring. If you want people to understand you, using every sort of complicated stratagem like idioms you're supposed to know they mean the opposite of what they say is NOT the best idea. Also, with increased globalization, much communication today is between people who do not share a first language. Don't expect people who are not speaking american english as a first language to get your in-group idioms.
Clear communication usually trumps the interest of using complicated idioms, thejeff. Even if you get to be cool and in-group for using your idioms.
=)
If faced with "it's raining cats and dogs", you will guess it's an idiom. That is not so obvious with "I could care less".
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The thing is, "could care less" isn't an idiom, it's just not bothering/ knowing the correct phrase; the one I've noticed gaining currency during my lifetime is saying "step foot" rather than "set foot." Both of those are just incorrect rather than idiomatic usage.
Idiomatic usage is when a phrase like "lost your marbles" moves from literal (that one's for you, Kirth /wink) meaning (children who lost the game and had to give their marbles to their opponents frequently threw tantrums) to figurative meaning (anyone who behaves erratically).
"Could care less" isn't an idiom; it's just dropping the contracted "not" from the phrase.