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This is the big problem with putting science on a pedestal and proclaiming that everyone ought to just follow what science tells them misses: there’s more to running a society than individual measurements and conclusions.

There’s economics, there’s civics, there’s internal politics, there’s geopolitics, there’s human nature, there’s group psychology, and more; and every new angle added to the pile interacts with every other angle on the pile.

Argentina, like many countries, tries to be all things to all people and ends up being nothing to anyone. The high inflation is in large part caused by government largesse. They have massive debt they ran up during the good times that eventually suffocated their government (good times coming to us too soon!) And then they had to spin up the money printer to keep all these commitments. As the number of pesos in existence rises, the number of pesos required to pay for goods and services rise too. It’s a hidden tax paid for by everyone who needs to use money and it isn’t so hidden in Argentina.

That’s how talk of inflation can relate to public funding of science, because Argentina is only funding things by printing money and stealing from everyone who uses money.

One can argue that public funding of many things has a positive impact, but often people proposing such funding don’t consider the broader impact of those decisions. Historically, government debt or inflation has had an outsized impact on history. For example, high inflation in the Weimar Republic (caused in large part by crippling war reparations) was one of the big factors that primed the German public to be receptive to the message of the national socialists. The people asking for more funding in the Weimar Republic likely didn’t think such an outcome was possible because they didn’t consider all the angles of the situation.

This multifaceted view of the world ironically is somewhat contrary to science, which isolates individual variables to understand them better. That way of thinking is science’s superpower, but that superpower is a critical weakness when changing one variable can have an effect on millions of other variables that are all interrelated often in non-linear or unintuitive ways.

The insights science gives us are important, no doubt, but if that’s all it took then we wouldn’t bother with elections, we’d just put our top science people in charge and become the most powerful nations on earth. Instead, ideologies that call themselves “scientific” are also responsible for some of the most terrible atrocities in the history of the world, and more mass suffering and death than every other bad ideology in history combined.

Dude. You are arguing with people who are explicitly NOT tankies. Nobody is claiming communism is a solution, just saying that going for the anti-intellectual guy with no implementable policies is not going to help. He is a rent seeker that is good at riling up crowds.

He is a populist.

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Current forecast for my location in southern Saskatchewan is 11°C (52F) for a high. About 6 weeks ago, we got a proper start to winter with a few cm of snow (maybe 1.5 in) and thought was given to plugging in the block heater. That was it.

Since then, temperatures have been a bit below freezing overnight and a bit over freezing during the day, with quite a few days like today, where it’s way above freezing. Any sloughs and dugouts that had started freezing over are now pretty much ice free. The last few days have been nice enough for people to put their boats in to go fishing.

We heat with a pellet stove. So far, our pellet consumption is about 50% of last year’s, about 30% of our worst year, and about 35% of our 15 year average.

And apart from a “cooler” day tomorrow with a small chance of snow, there is no end in sight. Even assuming that we get back to something normal by Xmas, it could be February before it’s safe to go ice fishing.