I have to say that if someone is far enough gone that they can trivially be convinced to bomb innocent people then I'm fine with this type of entrapment. Great work, go ahead and lock them up for life.
When I was young I went to school to become a chemical process technician. This was a very attractive education for women because it allowed them to work in factories and oil rigs without getting their hands dirty. It's mostly just sitting in control rooms and such, taking walks to make sure things are running smoothly.
The companies hiring had gender quotas to meet, so this was one field where they filled a lot of their quota. Our class was exactly 50% men, 50% women. I worked my ass off, we were graded 1-6 where 6 is best and I had all 6es except one 5 in one class.
Everyone applied for apprenticeships to Statoil (now Equinor) and from our class they hired one guy with literally perfect grades, and nearly all the girls. Over 80% of the girls were accepted, girls with a grade average of 4.2 compared to my 5.9 got the job. I didn't and neither did any of the other guys in the class except one.
In Norway skilled trades generally require a 2-year education and an apprenticeship. After education you start the apprenticeship for which pay starts at like $5-7.5 an hour but every 6 months it increases until you finish the 2 year apprenticeship.
This is for things like process workers in Petro/chemical plants, mechanics for assembly or machining, painters, construction workers, plumbers, electricians, all kinds of stuff. The government also subsidizes the apprentice program so it's very cheap to train young workers.
The people who choose this path generally end up pretty well off, being able to buy a house or apartment by like mid to late twenties and make even more later.
There's a pretty big market for drugs and other illegal things on onion websites.
You send an encrypted order, transfer crypto to an escrow wallet, then they send the product in the mail.
That carbon we're spewing into the atmosphere was once part of the atmosphere. We're just putting it back.
Similarly, life forms are responsible for removing it, producing oxygen etc. The planet has gone through multiple mass extinctions, ice ages etc, it has changed much more significantly and over short time periods before.
That's not to say we shouldn't be reducing emissions and trying to reduce our impact. I just don't like this argument that seems to me like it's based on trying to guilt people - "The earth was fine until we ruined it!", it's bullshit. The earth is a planet, we do not have the capability of destroying it. We can change it so we and many other life forms can't live here any more but it will still be a planet and there will most likely still be some form of life here for millions of years to come.
The problem is we are shitting where we sleep, we are ruining our own home. If we take it too far, which we may already have done, we won't be able to live here any more, at least not in the way and scale we currently are. And we're certainly not living anywhere else any time soon either, so that means we screwed ourselves.
And when we're gone I personally don't care whether there's still dolphins or whatever. Life comes and goes. That's life. Everything will end, the sun will die and so will the universe. The only question is when.
Why anyone would care about what happens after we're gone is beyond me. What we need to prioritize is self preservation. And we rely on the current ecosystem so if we ruin it we ruin ourselves. But from the resulting apocalypse new life will form, which couldn't have existed without it. The earth will be fine, we might not be.
“We can change it so we and many other life forms can't live here any more but it will still be a planet and there will most likely still be some form of life here for millions of years to come.“
When people talk of destroying the planet, they do not mean obliterating its mass in a Death Star-like way. They’re just talking about destroying its ability to sustain life, and it seems clear we have the potential to trigger that change. It’s a small planet, and even if we had no knowledge of it, looking around in the universe suggests its ecosystems and atmosphere are fragile and can’t be taken for granted.
>They’re just talking about destroying its ability to sustain life
You should really look deeper into the effects of large historical asteroid impacts and other major cataclysms. Literally, the worst that humanity could do even if it tried with current technology doesn't even come close to being so fantastically destructive. We could, tomorrow, start polluting the earth to the absolute straining maximum of our ability and follow this up with the launch of all our nuclear weapons everywhere in the world, and we'd kill ourselves off (or at least enough of us to no longer be able to continue our destruction efforts in a meaningful way) long before we'd more than pull off a tiny fraction of the destruction one large asteroid causes.
And no, we wouldn't at all ruin the Earth's ability to sustain life. Our planet and its ability to regenerate ecosystems has survived multiple impacts my massive asteroids, at least a couple of impacts by literal small planets, at least two total ice ages in which the planet turned into an essential snowball (think ice caps from pole to pole) and at least three massive magmatic events (that I can think of off the top of my head) spanning whole subcontinents worth of lava flow and multiple massive volcanoes erupting constantly, without pause, for hundreds of thousands of years, only for life to bounce back from all of this.
It's pure ignorant hubris to think that any human effort today could come close.
I agree that, obviously, large scale asteroid impacts and other major cataclysms have exponentially bigger immediate destructive outcomes. Ridiculously so.
That doesn't mean the atmosphere itself, and the weather systems governing them, don't have to be kept in balance from the inside. It's a different kind of threat, man-made effects on the planet, sustained and over time. Two different systems – one where the life-sustaining systems suffer an acute disruption but then can naturally restore itself over time, and another where the nature of the system itself could slowly be adjusted, potentially compromising its basic life-sustaining qualities.
I wouldn't say it's a bigger threat than large asteroid impacts or cataclysmic events – though, those are relatively minuscule percentages, where the other is something approaching 100% on our current trajectory –, but that doesn't mean it can be dismissed as a threat in itself to the planet's life-sustaining properties. Every threat merits attention, regardless of how they compare.
And the threat is not about human effort, it's about ignorant human hubris.
I don't see the problem. Most people don't know this stuff exists. You pretty much have to look for it to find it. So what if someone wants to create rule 34 stuff? Let them, who cares? It doesn't hurt anyone. There was already a large market for artists drawing weird fetish stuff, AI doesn't really change anything.
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