November 23, 2015

Dan Carlin’s Common Sense: Pace of Innovation, Climate Change and Terrorism

The Pace of Innovation and Climate Change

Simply given the billions of people alive today and more of those are educated, we have more minds/neurons today than ever before (James Burke)
Climate change = meteor flying at earth (bill gates), if it was a meteor wouldn’t we be working better as a planet to stop it? (I think it’s a function on perceived uncertainty and short term financial greed)
How can we accelerate pace of change?
How efficient gov is in research vs most venture capital? Most of VC is failed anyway, it’s just the ones that work that pay for the failures
Need for profit incentive to get private investment in climcate change/renewables going, no fortune, payoff is too far away, no incentive to switch
Threat from entrenched interests to innovation

Terror Attacks:

News anchors show true colors in emergency, some don’t know what to say without a teleprompter, others shine
Terrorism: emotional weapon, predictable human response
Mistakes (unintended civilian casualties) vs. celebrating civilian casualties (hard to argue those that celebrate the death of women/children are in any way defendable (this is not a freedom fighter…)
Jab: lashing out is great if you can hit them back- a tactic, NATO is powerless
Cruz: stop worrying about collateral damage. What, we already don’t…?
Can’t just kill all, who are “they”
We risk turning the West into THEM to try stop them, but not responding just seems wrong, no easy answer
- Laws you want to use on others can easily be turned on you
- What do you give up to try stop others from getting bad ideas?
  - Bad ideas change over time
- Overreaction creates more problem, like drone strikes
We do not reward politicians who say we can’t do more/succeed
This was done with widely available us, no big weapons like nukes
Getting serious is not going to solve it, even the Nazis couldn’t stop who they thought were terrorists and they didn’t pull any punches
You’ll hate yourself in the historical “morning” as doing more will chew up positive part so f society: what the bad guys actually want
Grit teeth and be open in face of your challenge? And let those who die be our martyrs
Can you/we coexist with Jihad?