Engineeredengine [he/him,any]

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Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: July 30th, 2020

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  • Dutch politics is a bit more complicated than that. If this scandal causes the current ruling neoliberal party (VVD) to lose too many votes, it is possible that PVV (the anti-islam party) manages to get a plurality of the votes but since several other big parties have often stated that they will not form a coalition with the PVV, they are unlikely to be able to build a government, giving the second-biggest party a cance to form one. Since the Netherlands has about 15 different flavours one of liberal parties, it's probably going to be another one of those.






















  • I'm not an expert on climate change but I do have a Bachelor's in mechanical engineering, which gives me some insight into how a lot of industries work. Pretty much the entire materials industry (I.e. production of metals, polymers ceramics for use in other products) is pretty terrible for the environment, and the solution to fix that isn't as clear cut. Recycling helps but the truth is that pretty much every industry pollutes, and the answer to that pollution is rarely as simple as it is when it comes to clean energy production. What's needed is a fundamental shift in how we produce basically everything, and that costs money, and if we want to do it smoothly, that takes time. We do not have that time, so the conclusion to draw here is that a) we should have started decades ago and b) combating climate change cannot be a set policies set to the side, but should rather be the driving force behind our entire economic vision (see also: the Green New Deal).

    I'd also like to point out that helping the rest of the world to achieve the same is a rather significant problem to have as an afterthought.


  • Actually, I'm going to add another comment on to this, because it strikes me that the most disconcerting sentence on that page by far is the very last one:

    "And, Biden will establish a new Environmental and Climate Justice Division within the Justice Department, as proposed by Governor Inslee, to complement the work of the Environment and Natural Resources Division and hold polluters accountable."

    Mainly, because it's literally the only sentence on the entire page that deals with holding polluters accountable. It seems to me that any serious effort to combat climate change while maintaining a capitalist economy (which unfortunately, is probably going to stay around for a while, so we should also seriously consider this subject) should consist of two very difficult endeavours.

    The first spans the entirety of the rest of this page, and concerns the creation of a sustainable, green infrastructure, which I'm using as a pretty all-encompassing concept here.

    The second, equally important and challenging endeavour is to create a strict set of rules within which any company can operate sustainably, and to find a way to make sure companies actually follow those rules. So far, governments around the world have been trying to do that by imposing fines and to put it bluntly, the effectiveness of that has been fuck all. Companies will either find ways to make more money from breaking rules than the sum of any fines imposed, or simply move their operations to places where the rules are less strict.

    If no serious solutions for this second problem are found, it pretty much doesn't matter how good the first half of your plan is (and Biden's plan is NOT good). To Biden's team, finding a way to do this is literally a one-sentence afterthought.