I'm not really all that into sports, but this looks very interesting:

http://singularityhub.com/2009/12/08/super-strength-substance-myostatin-one-step-closer-to-human-trials/

I think it would be a blast to watch some sport, one side with regular humans, the other with "super strength myostatin" people.

Today was a special election to replace Teddy Kennedy. ( I liked the way the election was held. )

Let's see if it works.

I've mentioned this before, but one of the things that baffles me the most when I say I want to live forever is the folks who say "Wouldn't you get bored?"

The question totally boggles me. Bored? Who on earth has time to be bored? Life changes constantly. In the last two thousand years, we have gone from Bronze Age tribalism through the Iron Age, the rise and fall of the empire of Rome, feudalism, the Renaissance, the discovery of a new continent, industrialization, the rise of mass communication, to atomic power and the beginning of the exploration of the physical universe. In all of that, we have seen incredible changes in society, philosophy, science, art, engineering, customs, tradition, and knowledge. Who would say of a man born in the time of Jesus and still alive today, "But aren't you bored?"

The question to me seems to show a projection of the present onto the future--I almost wonder if the folks who ask aren't envisioning people commuting to work, stopping for lunch at McDonald's, listening to Rush Limbaugh on the radio, heading home through rush-hour traffic to watch reruns of "Friends" on TV in the year 6,000. I think that's particularly strange given that, in the memory of people who are still alive today, the United States has moved from a largely agrarian nation to a post-industrial nation, pausing along the way to split the atom, tame Niagra Falls, and put men on the frikkin' MOON.

No, I don't think I'd be bored.

In fact, I've started to make a list of some of the things I would like to live long enough to see--things for which a single "ordinary" human lifespan is insufficient. The next thousand years offers exciting prospects for the human species unmatched in the last ten thousand, and I want to see what happens. For example:

What will happen when we discover evidence of life elsewhere in the universe? Given the incomprehensibly vast scope of the physical universe, it seems profoundly unlikely that we alone live here. If the emergence of life is so unlikely that it happens even once out of ten billion solar systems, that would mean it's everywhere--the physical universe is just that big. If, as seems more likely, it develops and takes a foothold anywhere that it is not prevented from doing so by the laws of physics, then it's probably ubiquitous. What does it look like? How does it work? What would it mean to us to learn that we're not alone? What form would it take? Where will we find it? What implications will it have for philosophy, religion, morality, our conceptions of ourselves? What will we learn from it? Will the knowledge that it exists make us feel more connected or more disconnected from the universe and from each other? Will we see life as being more sacred or less sacred?

Will we succeed in moving beyond our own fragile home on earth? Where will we go? What will we learn? How far will it be possible for us to extend our reach? How will we change in the process? Will knowing that we have left the only home humanity has ever had for its entire existence change our conceptions of ourselves, and in what way? How will we adapt?

What does a post-scarcity society look like? From the stone knives used by our earliest hominid ancestors to the Large Hadron Collider, everything we have ever built has been built in the same way--by taking the materials we find and heating, cooling, chipping, hammering, carving, cutting, and pounding away at them until they're shaped to do the task we want. This crude method of building things, which has been refined only in degree but not in kind since the days of flint knapping and bearskins, necessarily means resource scarcity, because it is limited both by the natural raw materials available and by the man-hours of labor needed to fashion the raw materials into finished things. But what happens when we gain the ability to put things together on a molecular level exactly as we want to? Oh, then everything changes. Then it becomes possible to make just about anything--food, Ferraris, fuel, iPods, spaceships--from dirt and sunlight. No more scarcity means no more resource competition, no more competition between the "haves" and the "have nots," no more division of nations into "first world" and "third world." What will that mean for human society? How will it change the way we interact with each other? Who will be the first to figure out molecular assembly, and how will that affect everyone else? Is it true, as some folks say, that wars are fought for resources first and ideology second, and if so, will a post-scarcity society really make war obsolete? Or will we simply shift from competing for material resources to competing for ideas?

What happens when we gain the ability to control ourselves on a molecular level? Biomedical nanotechnology is a hot field of research, barely out of the starting gate--the state of the art right now is roughly at the state of the computing art during the time of Charles Babbage. We know it is possible to build machines that can change and repair living organisms on a cellular or molecular level--we just don't know how to get there yet. But what happens when we do? What does a human society look like when you take away the inevitability of deterioration, aging, enfeeblement, and death? And more than that--what does it mean to be able to make modifications to to ourselves on the level of our DNA? When you give people the ability to change in that way, will you see a society of nearly-identical supermodels, or a society of people with orange fur and tails? Will we begin to enforce common standards of physical appearance, or will we start changing ourselves in all sorts of novel and interesting ways? If people can change their physical sex at will, and be completely functional in whatever their chosen physical sex is, what will that mean for gender differences? How will that affect society, when some of our most basic assumptions about what being human means become obsolete?

What happens when we remove the biological limitations on our brains and bodies? Human brains and human bodies do not have infinite capacity. Our brains are limited, both in terms of raw processing power and in terms of the concepts we are easily able to imagine and comprehend. Are there things about the physical universe that we simply do not have the capacity to understand, in the same way that a dog does not have the capacity to understand calculus? Are we nearing the limits of what we are able to understand about the physical world around us? What will it mean if we can re-wire our brains to add capacity? What will it mean if we can change our bodies to give ourselves abilities we lack now--the ability to breathe underwater, say, or to adapt to hostile environments? How much of what we consider our "humanity" is a consequence of our limitations and of the environment we live in? If we begin to diverge from one another in these ways, will we lose our ability to relate to one another, or will this simply serve to underscore the ways in which we are all connected? What will we learn about ourselves? What will we learn about the world we live in?

What happens when we encounter the first non-human intelligence? There are many ways this might come about; it could be an AI, a non-human race, even an animal that's been modified to have a higher level of cognitive capability. How will seeing an intelligence that isn't ours affect us? What will we learn about ourselves? Will we discover new ways of comprehending the universe? Will we discover blindness in our own way of thinking, and if so, how will we be better for it?

What kind of macroengineering projects are we capable of? The largest-scale engineering we've ever done is really, when you get right down to it, not that far above Stonehenge. But what happens when we become capable of building on a global scale, or larger? The Space Elevator is a good beginner's macroengineering project, but what comes next? Will we be able to terraform planets? Build ringworlds? What will those things look like? How can they be done? How will they extend our capabilities as human beings? How will transforming the physical universe transform us? Will we encounter anyone else who is already building on this scale? What will that mean for us?

Now, to be perfectly honest, even if these things were not on the horizon, even if things would always be as they are now, I would still want to live forever. There is hardly a day that goes by that I don't encounter something that is so mind-blowingly beautiful that it makes me grateful to be alive; the world just as it exists in this instant in time is so filled with wonder and beauty that I could live for thousands of years and never grow tired of it. There is so much joy to be had, all around, that I can't quite fathom living in anything other than a perpetual state of awe.

thanks to gynocide for the v-gift!

Today's guest blog from Munday the Cat:


humans make me mad they go into back room with my dish get me gushy food from can every morning but then they go back to back room later in day and DON'T GET ME GUSHY FOOD just dried up crap from box don't they know better it makes me want to WASH WASH WASH but it's okay I walk on they heads while they asleep ha ha okay gonna take nap now bye

I'm still looking for work and looking around at ways of enhancing my portfolio. Pickings have been slim this week, and there hasn't been a lot of action on the job boards, sadly. Last night, at a fundraiser for some political event I met the head of the board at the local botanical garden, who was grousing to the woman next to her that her "webmaster" was quitting on her, and he'd been hard to get to recently anyway. That made my ears prick up and I mentioned that I was looking for some work. "Oh, this is a volunteer position," she mentioned.

Well, that explains the lack of support. Still, anything's better than nothing, I suppose, and I mentioned that I'd be willing to look at it.

Big mistake. Let's start with the most fundamental problem, shall we? I haven't provided a link because, right now, the site is completely riddled with Javascript exploits. Nasty ones. I'm guessing that they're using some kind of CMS (an old install of Wordpress, I suspect) and have been hacked.

But underneath that, they've done an incredibly poor job of selling their site. The designer in me itches to fix it.

They have three major audiences: those who want to rent their services for meeting spaces, weddings, and other events; volunteers and foundation members who want to get their hands dirty one way or another; and the general public, to whom they are responsible for their various tax breaks. They do a terrible job of selling to any of these. The text on their "rent us" page is off-putting, full of warnings and prohibitions. You don't sell the site that way; you give them some gentle copy about "respecting our site" and "care for our delicate location," and then tell them the whole deal once they've downloaded the PDF with the contract.

And they're stingy with their photographs! Little things, barely 300px on a side, with lousy color balance and everything.

Already I'm thinking about "orange, no, yellow, no green--" How do we present the site as rentable on the home page, and what pictures do we need to make the garden look both beautiful and functional? How do we communicate the messages "This is your garden," "This garden can be rented for private purposes," and "This garden needs community volunteers to make it beautiful?" What SEO does it need? How do we put the site together, in such a way that it's easy to maintain? If it had to be turned over to the secretary, could he/she easily update the "News & Events" page and maintain the calendar?

The URLs are all hand-coded (no relative links, meaning SEO is slightly degraded, but definitively preclude edge service. Now, this is a small, rarely-visited website, but that's no reason to keep it dumb and, well, Web 1.0.

A nice background, maybe a leafy flare darkening into a comforting brown at least 960 wide, with a paper-texture cream-white for the revised copy, wider than it is tall, with three boxes underneath: "Our gardens," "Opportunities to Help," and "Events and Rentals Calendar," the last of which would be a widget with some nice rollovers or something.

But definitely, they need to fix that security issue.

Ahh! Turn it off, turn it off!

What is Minx up to Tweeps?

• 21:05 @Traeonna Of course, some believe it says "stinky monkey butt." #
• 21:08 If you are in Seattle and would like an invite to next week's Brownies & P0rn, ping me! #
• 21:57 @debaucheddiva Yes, it comes with extra testosterone. #
• 12:49 @ennovYmai Likewise, lovely lady! :-) #
• 12:51 @PopeBacon "lost track of time in the shower" = "getting friendly with the massaging shower head" #

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Happy birthday to my dearest danea ! I love you!

When I walk into the bathroom, I immediately enter a battle of wills with my wife. I stare down at the tube on the counter, and I grin. For I will emerge victorious.

This battle occurs once about every two months, and then takes several weeks to come to its compressed conclusion. And this battle is named, "Who throws out the toothpaste tube?"

Oh, we're stubborn, both of us. Neither of us wishes to admit defeat by throwing out a toothpaste tube with leavings in it, so the both of us manufacture tactics. There's the "drag the toothpaste across the edge of the counter to squeeze the last of it up to the tip" technique. There's the "use the still-moist bits around the lip" technique. And, of course, we cannot ignore the full-on compress with both hands, as though you were giving this fluoridated compound CPR, all in an attempt to wring the last from its body.

As the end approaches, this tube becomes two-dimensional. I walk away from a crushed strip as flat as a sheet of onion paper, thinking no, my wife can't possibly eke another molecule of tooth-cleaning gel from this.

And yet she does. She has hands stolen from a gorilla, or perhaps from some hydraulic press. And so I grasp it hard enough to turn diamonds to coal, flattening it with the force of a thousand stars, using the very scent of Aquafresh to scrub my rotting molars.

I do not know why we are like this about the toothpaste, and only the toothpaste. If we were this frugal on food, we could subsist for months upon a single stalk of broccoli. Yet this battle is about toothpaste, and only toothpaste, and the winner is the one who walks in and sees that crumpled question mark of a tube discarded in our bathroom garbage can.

I shall triumph. Perhaps this is why my teeth fell out. But does it matter? Victory is within my grasp, if only I can squeeze hard enough.

Yes, more than likely I can haz one, a hiatus hernia to be exact.

And how do I know this? because I had a very scary episode last night at work where my chest tightened as if in a massive painful bear hug, lots of shallow breathing, and my arms went into instant weakness & fatigue like I just performed 50 push ups. Luckily my doc was able to get me earlier today. Because of the discomfort I'm experiencing now, and that I bend over right before all this happened that is most likely a hiatus hernia (my stomach is poking through to my chest cavity).

I go for EKG at 9:30 tomorrow morning, then echo & stress test next week.

Ooooo, wonder if I can get a lapband out of this?? Hey, I gotta look for the silver lining since I'm basically giving up caffeine and chocolate LOL

I could see my breath for the first time this season. I stood out in my driveway, feeling the frost under my socked feet, watching the last birds fly away in the stark white sky.

It was beautiful.

CONTEXT IS FOR SUCKERS

• 17:26 2 rooms, 2 cats yfrog.com/3lxfcej #

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I'm thinking about buying out of the money calls & puts on gold. (Straddle?) The theory is, either the dollar collapses (maybe fiat currencies in general) and gold goes way up, or this period of fear and anti-dollar sentiment ends, and gold goes back down to its usual range. Although the bet only works, of course, if the options sellers have underestimated gold's volatility.

Just seems awfully unlikely to me that a jump like this is to a new sustainable level, as opposed to being a spike or a transition to a Moldbug-ian price.

OK. So I recently heard that Dr. Phil believes the children of Generation Y and/or "the Millenials" (those born between 1982 and 2001) seriously suffer from economic, political, mental, emotional, and ESPECIALLY social self-entitlement. I don't know if I completely agree with the age range, but I will say that many of the people I know who are about 21-26 (possibly 27) or so are definitely prone to being "spoiled" as I call it. Or at least seem to not have had as much experience with "losing" or being made to "do it yourself if you want it." I know this is a blanket statement which obviously means there are exceptions, but when I'm surrounded by many blood relatives (ESPECIALLY including my own blood sibling), co-workers, and other such situations where I'm forced to be around such abhorrent characteristics, I can't help but want to smack them silly and/or do my part to make them figure out that life doesn't fucking owe you a goddamn living.

( Beware. Rant below! )

Today was a very ordinary day on most counts. This is a good thing. Work was busy but never bad. I got some things done well. Got groceries, but just realized that I forgot milk. DOH! How did I do that? I guess that is kind of ordinary for me. newperspectives is visting, so that makes it all good. Put up some Christmas decorations. Did tech support for mairegirl on her wireless printer and helped her make it work. Had left overs from Winter Court for dinner. Yummy ham. Watched football. A good, ordinary night. With some things that are ordinary being very good.

I get liberal disillusionment with Obama, but, you know, he's pretty much doing what he said he would do. It was all there in the campaign's white papers and in his specific proposals, when he could be pinned down. Did people vote for him because they liked the logo? Did nobody go into this with their eyes open?

I'm not going to bother with twitter until I get a phone that tweets with less fuss. Every time I think of something short to say, I just post it as a fb update, because nobody reads my twitter anyway. I'm not even going to check it.

It's not often that you get to catch a glimpse of how your family sees you, and the rare opportunity to do so makes the occasional awkwardness of sharing social networking space with them worth it. Even if it makes you cry.

(*snif* I love you, too, Dad.)

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Mathematically Correct Breakfast

An ideal knife could enter on the black line and come out exactly opposite, on the red line. But in practice, it is easier to cut in halfway on both the black line and the red line. The cutting surface is a two-twist Mobius strip; it has two sides, one for each half. After being cut, the two halves can be moved but are still linked together, each passing through the hole of the other. (So when you buy your bagels, pick ones with the biggest holes.)

Previously, previously.

michaelkeenan answered my question about how Risperdal causes people to gain weight by looking up some studies.

( Read more... )

In summary, unless I become a workout fiend, putting on weight seems inevitable, but at least I don't need to feel so irresponsibly weak about my weight gain.

When I got married, that was what I really wanted. A life partner.

But I've never really trusted that. Life happens, about 50% of marriages end up in divorce.

Something that occurred to me recently is that having Tovar does make Patri my life partner.

Kids care about their parents. No matter how good or how bad a parent is, what mommy and daddy did or didn't do is something that they care deeply about.

And because of that, because both Patri and I have that bond with Tovar, we are tied forever.

As I described to Susan, realizing this is one of two major holes I've filled through which the craziness of my bipolar episodes leak through. One is that Patri wants to be with me. He knows me really well. I've told him at length all of the disaster scenarios I see why he'd want to leave me. And he still doesn't want me to leave.

So why I still often have that "I'm not good enough" feeling, I've come to accept that I cannot rationalize breaking up with Patri on his behalf anymore. That was a big one.

And now this with Tovar is even more stabilizing, because unlike with Patri, where its often a mystery to me why he would want me, with Tovar its very clear. I'm his Mama. I can understand that basic human need. No one can replace me, even if they took way better care of him than I would. I've just been empathizing with him a lot more lately, and seeing that from his eyes.

I did it! I managed to complete my senior thesis, and I turned it in today. On time. And I'm actually pretty happy with it. Battle Thesis is ovah, and man, at times it really did feel like a battle. I'm now utterly exhausted but also sort of wound up and more than a little tired of being inside my apartment, since I've been here, working, awake, and sans human contact since Saturday morning.

All that's left between me and my diploma now is finishing and turning in my Metaphor final on the 15th and taking my PH 180 final on the 17th, and after writing a freaking 35 page paper they're both going to be a breeze.

Well, it was a nice weekend. Saturday we went out to get the tree, stopping by RePC to recycle the monitor that my new wide-screen replaced. I discovered, to my disgust, that the A/B box I have doesn't do pass-through for sizing signals, so I have to unplug the monitor going back and forth between all the different computers I use in the office: my old desktop (single core AMD with 512MB of RAM), my laptop, and the router.

We got the tree at Ikea, which sold us a gorgeous tree for $20, and a promissory note of a $10 gift certificate if we brought the tree back on January 2nd. Not a bad deal, all things considered. Oh, sure, Ikea gets us in the door, but after a lunch of meatballs I think we'll be done.

The girls, Omaha, Lisakit and I all helped decorate the tree, going through the annual ritual of checking all the lights and digging out all the random knicknacks that go with the glass balls and blinking lights. I'm of the minimalist camp myself: anything more than ball ornaments and lights, delicately arranged, is garish. Apparently, my family likes garish.

Sunday, we had our monthly Costco run, and despite Omaha's "limited" list we spent over $400 on food and supplies. That had better last us a month. I can't believe a household of 5 goes through that much food in a month, but I guess we do.

The evening D&D game was quiet. For a GM who doesn't like magic, Lisakit's throwing a lot at us, giving the theif and monk not a whole lot to do. Dinner was chinese take-out from the local place.

I had a very difficult conversation with Yamaraashi-chan, though. I found out that she had violated the TOS of Facebook, lied on her proposal to appear to be older, and brazenly violated the household rules that she wasn't to join social networking sites without informing me. Unlike her peers' clueless (or heedlessly indifferent) parents, I have something of a decent grip on these issues. It didn't help that her "away" message was deliberately crafted to sound like she was a prostitute ("It was just a joke!" she insisted. Not funny, kid) or that I finally had that "You're not leaving the house looking like that, young lady!" moment when she headed out with as much sleazy make-up around her eyes and mouth as I've ever seen on Aurora Ave. She's trying so hard to be "grown up," but she doesn't understand what that means. I wish she would seek attention for the things I praise her for, like her writing and school work, and for the things her peers attend to, like her looks.

So, she's lost her Facebook account (for lying to the service about her age) and she's grounded (for lying to me). I don't know if it'll get through to her that even I have my limits, but it's all I know to do at this point.

I've not been sleeping well the last few nights, instead having involved and weird dreams. Sunday night was Pride and Prejudice and Zombies make a porno, and then last night I was coordinating some committee for Obama, but it was definitely in the low-rent end of the public sector and I couldn't figure out why we were meeting in rooms with the 1960s bomb-proof grey office furniture like they had in the grad student offices at Berkeley.

Sometimes my brain is like late night channel-surfing. I wish it would just turn off the signal and go to sleep for a change.

I was in a big hurry at airport security to catch an earlier flight home yesterday, and I left my fancy brand new $300 external laptop battery at the X-Ray machine. The good news is, the airport has it, and they keep these things for 30 days. I really want this battery for our trip to India.

I would greatly appreciate it if someone could pick up the battery for me at John Wayne airport in Orange County, and FedEx it to me (at my expense of course). I have an item claim number and phone #, it sounds like the pickup procedure is very straightforward.

Thanks!

I'm starting to try and handle things for my immediate family's Christmas this year. Asking my mom what people in my family would like this year, she told me that dad's primary interest these days is going gung-ho Republican and he wants books related to this.

Now, I'm going to say right now that there will be no talking down of the idea of being a Republican party member, nor of aligning one's philosophy to theirs, etc. Not in this post, and not in the comments. I disagree with several aspects of current right-wing American political philosophy and it's more than sufficient to keep me from aligning with the Republican party. I do, however, respect the free consciences of those who take opposing points of view in a spirit of honest and open inquiry.

That said, the dynamic between me and my father is incredibly strained. The problem is not his political philosophy, per se, but how he's receiving it and how he's expressing it. First off, he's receiving it through the likes of Beck, Hannity, Limbaugh, Boortz, and crew. As someone who used to listen to a lot of conservative talk radio, I have experienced full well the appeal of their message, especially the ego stroke you get from being the only person in the room who seems politically aware. The big problem is that he's not exactly well-read or even broadly experienced, so he doesn't really put together clear and coherent arguments, especially when he's not sober, and as far as I can tell, there's an inverse relationship between his sobriety and his propensity to start talking politics.

To put it in perspective, he's 30 years older than me, and it's only in the last year that he's discovered Plato's allegory of the cave, the origin of the term "separation of church and state," and the name John Galt. Note that he hasn't read Plato nor early American history nor Atlas Shrugged. These just show up in the talking points of the shows he listens to or watches.

None of this would really bother me, but he's can be pretty unpleasant at the same time. Every conversation I've had with him this year involves him trying to bait me over various California politicians that I never voted for nor particularly cared about, and he's bragged to me before about how he once told someone his centrist-left views were "stupid and asinine." He's also bragged about how he started posting political material at his veterinary practice, and when a client said that he didn't like it, he told him to go find another veterinarian.

This makes it very hard to have a conversation with him, because I spend a lot of time quite concerned that, should I say the wrong thing, I'm going to get it with both barrels.

The only positive I have been able to think to bring this out is to try and at least get him reading a little more outside of the world he's already got. I, of course, would never try handing him some anarchist writings or anything, but I'd love to even just elevate his level enough that we can have a conversation. I've repeatedly offered him a subscription to Foreign Policy, but he repeatedly refuses it.

This has to do with Christmas. I swear.

So, mom says he wants political books. He wants Beck and Hannity and those. Personally, I don't want to patronize the careers of professional showmen who've lined their pockets by lowering the level of discourse. So, I was thinking I could probably buy him some books that would be a level above the noise but still comport with his values.

Some thoughts I'd had include Adam Smith, The Federalist Papers, Rothbard, Friedman, and Buckley, but I must confess to not knowing where to begin on assembling a coherent "How to be a smarter Libertarian-leaning Republichan" reading pack.

Thoughts, anyone?

Because it's my perspective...and that's valid (ha!) :)

In a sentence. Folks fucking brought it!

1st Place: To the folks that prepared thier hardest with something that twanged at their souls and brought that forth.

2nd Place: To the folks that played it safe and strong, a place where there is merit...and a space that is asking for someone to challenge. :)

3rd Place: To all of those folks that decided, this is just not the time/year and are taking care of themselves. You were missed, and respected.

With honorable mention: To those that rocked MY FUCKING SOCKS OFF!! The ones that left me going 'What?!' 'YEEEEAHHH!' and 'No, you didn't!!'
Holy fucking right!

Getting up there, throwing your guts and ferocity at the directors and other players...with nothing separating you. Nothing.
That is my kind of magick.

And...to the last person to audition.

My Mom. Wins.

But BB was right about one thing. I was looking around the room at about hour #3 and was like 'Holy shit. In a couple of days we are going to know whose been cast..and then start researching..and then start rehearsing...
This isn't just an audition, this IS the start of something.

Here we go.

The One Thing You Need To Do To Become A Better Designer.



And thanks for all the suggestions! I went with the typeface 'Denim,' thinking it would appeal to the "red state" mentality, but at lower resolutions it just looks chunky and a little grungy, not what I want at all. Ah, well, more practice is needed.

Previously, previously. Sadly, Anne Zelenka's brilliant article, "Mindful Practice, Constant Improvement," seems to have disappeared.

I totally agree that our climate composition has changed. I think most of the changes are the result of the way we've built civilizations. I think the ice sheets are going to melt and the coastal regions will be flooded and ticks will be more plentiful up north and maple trees will leave New England.

What I don't understand is why any of these things are problems worth fixing. Isn't the fix worse than the problem? Sure, there'll be real estate losses eventually. I totally get that. But why should we stop eating meat and stop using cars to prevent losses to Manhattan building owners?

How will cap and trade save a single life? People have legs. They can move if they don't like wet feet,especially when given 20 year's notice.

As for the change to natural ecosystems, why is change necessarily BAD? Bad enough to spend money on when we're already bankrupt?

I listen to people talk about the moral imperative of reversing climate change and I just don't get it. What IS the moral imperative?