There is an old engineering truism, that if you think you have measured something precisely, your measuring stick is not accurate enough.
Specifically this means measuring say the block height of a CS, if you measure it ten times ten days in a row and get the same answer you aren't accurate, because you KNOW the temperature was not constant, thermal coefficients of expansion etc.
If you take records made ten years ago, they aren't as accurate as those that can be made today, so even in theoretically identical situations you will get different answers, and different answers = statistics, and from statistics you get trends.
You can watch a caterpillar all you like, you won't predict the chrysalis, and you certainly won't predict the butterfly.
An incredibly complex and computationally intensive computer modelling of the caterpillar will just give you an incredibly detailed and authoritative sounding answer that is completely and utterly wrong.
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Most of this forum are old enough to know the only thing you can rely on is change, everything changes, sometimes it is gradual like the caterpillar growing day by day, sometimes it is rapid but still kinda possible to follow after you accept a change has taken place, such as weaving the chrysalis, sometimes it is apparently instant and totally stunning, like the butterfly or moth emerging.
Climate will change, ultimately our sun will use up all its fuel, and either grow or shrink, or both one after the other.
Sooner or later Earth with become uninhabitable for homo sapiens, assuming evolution stops with us, which is a totally baseless assumption, unless you have some compulsion to believe we were made perfect in the image of god.
The iron atoms that carry oxygen around our bloodstream and that comprise our listers and listeroids were made in dying stars, very few of the actual atoms that comprised my body when I was born are still with me. I can no longer fit under my primary school cap, and one day not too far away I will be feeding worms myself, change is like rust, it never sleeps, whether you see it or not.
Landscapes are going to change, climate is going to change, cities and countries and cultures and religions are going to continue to rise and fall.
Humans are nothing, just yet another method that DNA uses to make more DNA.
DNA is quite happy to use plants or cockroaches.
Look at DNA and you will see that there have already been near extinctions in human history.
Almost all native europeans can trace their DNA back 45000 years to one of seven females, after all, a CHANGE of only 1% of our DNA was enough to make me a human and "cheetah" (from Tarzan) a chimp, but change begets change.
Look around you, open your eyes and LOOK.
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Looked?
We (EU and USA etc) use something called a "fiat economy", not the car maker, it means money that has legal status as a result of an executive, administrative or monarchy decision, or fiat.
China experimented with fiat economies 1000 years ago, and ran into all the same problems we have today.
Electronic stock trading and the creation of corporations as legal individuals just complicate matters, doesn't make em go away.
If you want to look for political parallels between 1930s germany (and of course many other societies entering a time of rapid change) and current day britain or usa you don't have to look far or deep, you yanks know bush just signed into law the power for himself to declare martial law on US soil don't you? fox new did report that didn't it?
http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=h109-5122 You want section 1076
(there is a WHOLE lot of other good stuff hidden in that bill too, like 1221, and 3123, and others, Bush signed this into law Oct 17th..... 10.5 billion bucks for a new aircraft carrier, a couple of billion bucks worth of ammunition for the army ONLY)
Democracies don't last any better than monarchies or totalitarian dictatorships. Especially phoney democracies we have where your vote literally doesn't count, only the vote of big business counts. Fine, my vote don't count, then you're getting as near to fuck all as I can manage from me in taxation, burn baby burn.
The following is a photo from 40 years ago, a generation after WW2, which remember was allegedly fought to free the world from opression, american troops with fixed bayonets on american soil.
If anyone thinks this change is going to result in brown a cracked lawns, or oceanfront property in southern georgia, or just bitching at the cost of filling a tank with fuel, then you need to take a look at history, especially recent history.
Hurricane katrine only caused 500,000 refugees, what are you going to do with 20,000,000 from florida whose entire assets and wealth are underwater if sea levels rise 20 feet? Let them battle it out with the 5,000,000 flooded out from potomac area and 5,000,000 flooded out from san fran?
Back in 1945 you only had 140,000,000 people in the usa, you could probably absorb 30 to 50 million retreating from rising seas, now you have 300 million, youre past peak oil, southern borders are groaning, lots of good arable land concreted over, and a population that thinks one refrigerator and maybe one A/C unit and a ford fairlane is below the poverty level.
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Exactly what is coming?
Who knows.
What I do know is the only thing you can do is like the story of the sound man and camera man in africa filming lions, this lion starts to take an interest in them and sidles over nearer, after a bit it dawns on the sound man and camera man they are lunch, so they drop their equipment and start running, and the lion starts off after them.
after a few yards the sound man stops, takes off his mickey mouse boots and puts on a pair of running shoes, the camera man jeers at him, "you'll never outrun a lion in them"
the sound man replies, "I don't have to, I only have to outrun you"
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If you have or are making plans that tie you to a specific geographical location, you need to make new plans.
If you are a pre katrina big easy resident with limited means, those plans better take that into account and have your feet pounding the pavement northwards a week before the levees break.
If you can't tell a week in advance when the levees are gonna break then get the fuck out of dodge while the getting is still good.... the day before katrina hit nobody would have swapped new orleans for sao paolo voluntarily, the week after they'd be fuck it, I don't even have a mud and corrugated iron hut, so I don't even have anywhere to put a pot to cook in.
In nature, being spooked easily is rarely a fatal characteristic.