So, first off: as a matter of "taste", I really don't like the idea of giving the Peace prize specifically to anybody whose attitude is "where's my Nobel?" It should be going to somebody who believes in the cause they're fighting for and fights with no expectation of recognition, not to somebody looking to add a feather to their cap. This probably shouldn't be a criterion when choosing the winnner, but it does make me happy if the choice is consistent with this principle.
Second: If, by the end of 2026, the Israel/Palestine ceasefire is still holding, if there is real progress towards lasting peace, if Trump's administration carries on acting as a mediating force in the conflict, then, by all means, maybe he should win the 2026 prize. As of today, he just got them to sign a piece of paper. To be clear, that is still an important milestone, it makes the world better than it was a week ago, and he should get credit for getting it done. It's just not the achievement he wants us to believe it is (yet?).
Third: The man thrives on conflict, he sows divisivenes at every step. He's literally deploying the military domestically. Whatever merit there is to his peace deals doesn't nearly amount to enough to make him a net positive force for peace in the world. And that should be a factor in choosing the winner.
Ah yes, the man actively murdering civilians via illegal drone strikes in the Caribbean and invading US cities with the Department of War, who launched dozens of missiles from stealth bombers over Iran and who has greatly expanded the drone war that Biden has mostly ended.
I would love to hear a discussion between you and those who believe Trump has pulled off the diplomatic coup of the century so far. A dispassionate observer might see a touch of TDS. Not me of course.
Nobel Peace Prize: to the "person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses".
I love how the TDS is used to describe the vast majority of people in the world who see the obvious faults of a geriatric narcissist intent on authoritarian rule and not to describe his supporters who blindly subscribe to all manner of contradictory and previously loathed positions simply because he changes his mind.
Or said another way - wouldn’t “TDS” be better used to describe those who spent the last decade insistent on free speech as a sacrosanct issue, the national debt as our primary concern, political targeting by Federal law enforcement as a universal sin, and states rights as the Foundation of our liberties while the Admin works contrary to each of those points in especially galling ways…
From the New York Times "The Daily" podcast today:
Mark, what you've described and what we're seeing unfold is genuinely an impressive feat by Trump. To be able to capitalize on what seemed like this giant setback. Israel literally bombed the negotiators and the mediators. To turn that around and get a deal that Biden couldn't get done, that no other leader in the world had managed despite trying for two years straight. It is significant achievement. He was able to bring these sides together that had shown no willingness to end the war. And now they've come to this agreement. And it should also be said that one of the biggest things here is that he was willing to put pressure on Netanyahu in a way that President Biden was unwilling to do. Why do you think that's the case?
I think there's a few reasons. First, I think Trump genuinely wanted to end the war. He campaigned on ending the war in Ukraine and in Gaza.
Too late for this year, but if it holds it should be considered for next year.
This is like buying tickets to watch your favorite sports team win first place. It's good to support the boys, but you'd didn't do anything. The rest of Trump's thinly veiled autocratic tendencies — whether they're rhetoric aimed to rile up opponents or real goals — have done little to promote fraternity amongst nations & people.
This is, as yet, being reported in contradictory ways when I went looking to see if it was correct so here’s the link to where she appears to do this, assuming the post is authentic (no reason to believe otherwise but these days…)
"Political expediency makes for strange bedfellows, news at 11!"
I'm not even sure I'm against everything Trump is up to (it's unclear to me); I just don't like the autocratic moves: it's unamerican, and bad for democracy. It's setting a standard & an allowable behavior that could be exploited by bad people.
It should be considered all right, but the committee is also going to look at the whole person and Trump isn't exactly the Gandhi-like figure you'd expect to win the prize.
I think Trump genuinely doesn't like people being killed, but he's also driving a wedge in the US that can't be ignored. Sending American troops against its own citizen: not exactly Nobel-prize worthy.
> I think Trump genuinely doesn't like people being killed
This is a strange thought considering his actions.
Between drone strikes, mishandling of COVID, dismantling of foreign aid, defunding American health care, cutting off Ukraine support at several critical moments, encouraging and materially supporting Israel, he may actually end up (or already be) responsible for the most deaths of any president.
> I think Trump genuinely doesn't like people being killed
While I do understand this might be true in essence, things are a lot more complicated. He's said some heinous things that riled up actual loonies into a frenzy more than once. Deliberately. Not peace price material IMHO.
(To be fair, I generally lean left, but I don't agree with Obama getting the prize in 2009 as well, what with the targeted assassination program and all)
Its almost like there should be a Nobel "anti-prize" denouncing these people.
It remains to be seen if this turns into anything. He deliberately misunderstood the Palestinians and made the proclamation that everything was fixed. The Palestinians have to give up some major things for this to work, things they were previously unwilling to do, and are probably still unwilling to do.
The nominations for this year's prize closed January 31st; anyone doing anything worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize after that date may be considered for next year.
> To turn that around and get a deal that Biden couldn't get done,
Biden had different pressures. E.g. I suspect that he judged that the knife-edge election he was facing didn't allow him enough leeway to put more pressure on Israel.
In addition Netanyahu made it easier to force through a settlement given he'd manage to alienate practically everyone, including uniting the Arab world after that unbelievable strike on Doha.
If you were a cynical person you could also ask whether this settlement owes anything to Trump's personal narcissist saviour complex or need to distract from domestic issues such as the Epstein files...
Still, even despite some significant scepticism about Trump's motives, I think there is a reasonable case to be made for awarding him the prize. It was still a significant (maybe even brave) jump to break with American political orthodoxy to put this kind of pressure on Israel, and the practical result of this could be very significant in terms of saving lives and potentially long-term peace in the region. We also need to encourage these kind of acts, even (or especially) amongst unlikely peacemakers like Trump.
Let's see what it looks like next year, though. Middle East peace deals don't have a great history of holding together.
I would love full transparency to the Biden Admin's dealings wrt Israel.
I've wondered if one of the (under reported) pressures was the realpolitik geopolitical machinations of containing Iran. Especially wrt Iran's closer ties with Russia and China.
But even with insight, I would not forgive.
The whole thing just angers and saddens me. Neighbors killing neighbors. For nothing.
So many missed opportunities, snafus. Imagine what could have been. Normalization between USA-Iran (post-9/11, pre- "Axis of Evil"). Some kind of accommodation for coexistence. Nurturing democracy and development throughout the middle east.
And on and on. Going back decades, generations, ...
Trump does not fit the criteria set out by Alfred Nobel. By increasing the NATO spending he worked against "the abolition or reduction of standing armies" and he has made the "fraternity between nations" a lot worse with random threats which I doubt would weight up his "promotion of peace congresses".
I really hope they would not award someone the prize who works so blatantly against the word and spirit of the criteria in the will.
"...he was willing to put pressure on Netanyahu in a way that President Biden was unwilling to do."
Unwilling or unable? Netanyahu hated Biden and has done everything in his power to sabotage anything Democrats have done to try to help resolve the conflict, even prior to Oct 7.
Not even sure there's evidence of the pressure? What pressure?
Trump let Netanyahu run roughshod, and the proposed peace agreement (which almost certainly won't hold) is pretty... let's say vague... about the plan for Gaza post hostage-release.
All that's happened here is another agreement to exchange hostages for prisoners, which has happened multiple times in this war already. Not much else is actually agreed to and obviously even less has actually happened.
Unwilling. Biden has been a Zionist and Netanyahu/Likud supporter for decades. They put on a show in press briefings but did nothing behind closed doors, instead kept supplying them.
Far more importantly, this might force Trump to continue the pressure on the Israelis, whose very nature is to be untrustworthy, not worth trusting, since they love not just violating agreements but also using agreements as a lever for abuse. There are all the typical Israeli fingerprints all over the current deal that the Israelis will likely use to bring the whole thing back down around Trump unless he can maintain pressure. This prize increases the slim likelihood that he will have to of he covers that prize as much as it seems he does. I do not think he can or will though, and the Israelis may just even persuade him that they have a far more juicy prize to offer him instead.
I think Trump wanted to force the rather compromised committee to make a similarly foolish decision as giving Obama the prize, which would have then permitted immediate Israeli breach of the settlement.
Not to take away from Machado’s work, but this year’s prize is at the very least political, to both appease Trump in line with the above and also send a message in the face of the war build-up against Venezuela. At the same time their decision also facilitates the American takeover through less than lethal means by CIA revolution and the combined pressure of it all on the Venezuelan government. Machado is in fact a CIA asset, whether she realizes it or not.
Machado is in fact a CIA asset, whether she realizes it or not.
If you think Eastern Europe was liberated without involvement from the CIA, which has a mixed history w.r.t. competent ops in that region, I've got a Nobel prize to sell you.
No. I just don’t care for America “liberating” other people in direct violation of the founding principles of America before it was overtaken by all manner of parasitic foreign vultures that want to commandeer America for their own little ethic agendas and priorities that expose all of them as not actually being American, regardless of what the paperwork says. You can’t be made American when America exists in name only anymore.
If you've been paying attention, you see that Trump is not, as you put it, appeased at all. He doesn't know who Machado is. He utterly and publicly and loudly missed the irony.
Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush were not hijacked by ethnic agendas, again,, as you put it. The outcome they achieved was the whole point of the Cold War. It was an outcome with bipartisan support over the course of decades. Defending the value of that outcome by supporting Ukraine and NATO is also not anything as small as an ethnic agenda.
> Doesn't Mauna Loa spew CO2 by the metric ton on a regular basis?
The 1960-present chart in the article is anything but regular, instead showing a steady rise, and doesn't appear to blip up for either the 1984 or 2022 eruptions.
historical reasons. volcano aside the location is reasonable: altitude and relative isolation from human sources wothout being too out of the way to make maintenance a bear. hawaiian trade winds help with dispersal.
as for volcanism Supposedly it's in a rock creche on the mountain face facing away from the volcano, but you're right to be suspicious.
It's high up in the atmosphere and has relatively few nearby point sources like cities since it's in the middle of the Pacific ocean. It's a unique environment that provides a valuable data point.
I believe the individual was speculating that the volcano itself could be outputting large, random amounts of CO2 which could be tainting its readings.
Clean wind from the pacific is captured at the observation tower. Another point like it is Cape Grim Tassie which gets clean wind from the southern ocean.
Both of these points observe vastly cleaner air and provide that baseline.
Check out the raising of Chicago (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_of_Chicago). From buildings up to entire city blocks were raised, moved on rollers, or both, usually while businesses and residents stayed in them for normal day-to-day life.
They also rebuilt much of the city because it was wiped out during the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, and now the grid system is one of the most commonsensical ones in any major American city.
Chicago is an example of a (more or less) clean-slate engineered large city -- one that arose as a result of tragedy (fire) and failure (cholera).
The technology in this video appears to be computer control of the many pistons underneath the raised block. I would estimate that could be done with roughly 1970s-level of technology.
The town of Kiruna in Sweden is currently being relocated because it is sinking into the iron mine that originally led to the founding of the town. Some buildings are being relocated on tracks in a similar way to that Shanghai video.
Structure relocation is 19th century tech, still as fascinating as back then. This was done all over the world, on a much bigger scale than a single block. In some US cities in particular, and in Moscow they moved entire streets like that, with people inside.
It's just expensive and there's no reason to do that unless the city is being actively developed, which Shanghai still is, and older structures are in the way.
I think the real question is whether we can do it today.
e.g. When NYC expanded its subway system for the first time in 50 years in 2017, it cost $2.5 billion per mile. 8-12x more expensive than similar projects in foreign cities.
There might be too much regulation and too much cost and too many meetings and too many contractors and too much political conflict to do many of the feats we did in the 19th and 20th century.
Here is the Kaisersaal in Berlin being moved on air cushions in 1996 [1]. And wasn't a better part of Chicago jacked up building by building some time in the 19th century to make room for a sewage system?
Back in 1991 a church built in the 1500s was moved on rails at Kifissia, Greece. Sure, not the same scale but taking into consideration the time it was built, it was a great achievement
Yes, it has been common enough, no "robots" required. The Indiana Bell Building is a famous one from a century ago, which gets videos posted about it on social media ever so often.
Something similar but different was back in the early 1900s, several city blocks in Seattle were moved or relocated when large chunks of the city were blasted away with water to flatten it. Although most old buildings were simply demolished.
As for your actual question, I'm pretty sure we (US, Europe, humans in general) could do quite a bit more than we do now if we had a reason to do so. (or were 100% sure about the results)
$2.5 billion per mile of tunnel, not track, on the SAS project[1].
(This is an outrageous number, but it's not a "true" benchmark for what a mile of subway construction costs in the city: similar crosstown construction in Brooklyn or Queens, which badly need new lines, would be significantly cheaper due to both lower density and the possibility of cut-and-cover instead of tunneling. Plus, no steam pipes in the way.)
Edit: for comparison, the IBX is expected to cost around $400M per mile[2]. Which is also obscenely expensive given how much of the right-of-way exists, but demonstrates that there's no clean apples-to-apples comparison here.
This seems like a silly solution to a silly problem. If you're tracking your employees' performance based on actual business metrics, who cares how many times their mouse jiggles in a given day?
And the third. I'm a UChicago alum and my premed friends were always complaining about having to compete against beneficiaries of Ivy League grade inflation.
I used zoom in browser before using the apps.. and the annoying dark patterns basically pushed me to avoid zoom whenever I can at this point.
A lot of these kinds of dark patterns sacrifice long term user satisfaction and brand reputation for short-term gains in questionable internal metrics (metrics that are often tied to bonuses for people who couldn't care less about the long-term success of the company or its customers).
I do not understand why people think Zoom is so good, and why companies pay money to use it. The app is so annoying. (At least on MacOS) it splits everything into many different windows that end up on different screens and it's so annoying having to scan all my screens to find the piece of the UI that lets me start screen sharing. Whenever I join a Zoom meeting from the Calendar, it first pops open a browser tab, and then that opens the Zoom app. In the year 2024, why can't it open the Zoom app directly? Surely one app can start a process to run another app?
I suspect it's two factors. The first is that it's not produced by a major and statistically we like an underdog. The second is that they made a video client that actually worked when all the majors under invested and produced clients with serious issues. From there, the market is sticky. It has worn a bit though, hasn't it?
It's amazing that this solution has not been considered more openly and widely until now. It's cheaper, more effective, and doesn't require draconian regulations or near-impossible expectations on human behavior.
It's also something that could be tested for a year. It's not irreversible. It would allow the undeveloped world a chance to achieve a piece of the global wealth pie.
Why are so many people (especially environmentalists and climate scientists) so opposed to this solution?
> Why are so many people (especially environmentalists and climate scientists) so opposed to this solution?
Because it's just kicking the can down the road. This will cost Trillions which you might as well invest in a transition to clean energy now because you have to do it eventually anyway.
If the impact of climate chains looks like it's posing a risk to us as a species then perhaps blocking the sun temporarily is something that should be considered. Right now it sounds like there's still a chance that we could avoid the worst if we continue acting faster and faster. Pointing to a hypothetical sun shield decades in the future, now, is similar to pointing to practically unlimited CCS capacity sometime in the future just so we don't have to do anything drastic now.
pure fantasy that the world will ultimately do the "might as well" there though. The world is moving on but we're running out of time to prevent things that are a lot worse than having to deal with acid rain and simply keep pushing sulhpur into the atmosphere and then slowly taper off the sulphur.
> Crucially, the biggest problems with SRM are probably not yet known. The side effects of putting sulfur into the stratosphere could be some of the most consequential unknowns in human history.
Since when has that stopped companies and countries acting in their own best interests?
SpaceX has launched thousands of satellites, and plans to launch many thousands more, polluting sky and space observation for everyone on Earth. This happened relatively quickly, and doesn't require approval from every country, unless they intend to offer service there.
Similarly, it's not far-fetched to imagine a scenario where a "benevolent" billionaire, as the article puts it, or a single country, could decide that SRM is a good idea, and just go with it. Countries still pump excessive amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere, and historically can't align on a single policy. Why would something like SRM be handled differently?
