The pessimism is what comes after decades of optimism didn't work. And from decades of being on the receiving end of bad faith arguments engineered by oil industry propagandists, tested on focus groups for maximum impact, and disseminated among purportedly well-meaning optimists. Yeah, some people are gonna get snippy with you after dealing with that. And anyway, there comes a point when optimism is indistinguishable from delusion. The eternally optimistic make it a point of pride not to be convinced of anything that threatens their optimism, and thus their worldview. Convincing people like that feels about as achievable as trying to talk a devout religious person out of their religion.

So it's basically a symbolic gesture, then. We've already been doing those for the last 50 years or so. They're not working. We recycled all our plastic bottles to help the environment, then we found out that we were being lied to the whole time, and 98% of them were ending up in landfills! You'd think that would disturb even the most fervent optimist, but nope. They just kept right on trucking, same strategies, same viewpoints, steady on into the void.

Small scale efforts are like trying to bail out a sinking ocean liner with a thimble. Worse, they make people complacent and satisfied that they've solved the problem when 99.9999% of the problem remains.

It's a safe assumption to make when we can't even progress to the "trying" part because that might mess with some rich guy's bank account. Politicians are owned by the same rich guys. For decades, we've been trying to convince optimists that this bribery is an incomprehensibly huge issue that infects every other issue like a cancer, and that nothing truly positive can happen under those conditions. But the optimists just went ahead and assumed that the bribed politicians (at least the ones in their party) would fight for them anyway, despite the bribes.

Pretty sure they do communicate their ideas. The optimists simply don't listen because it threatens their optimism.

As somebody who listened to FM radio in the late '80s, I think I have him beat.

Yeah but that way someone might wreck the train and cost them money. Peasants' lives are easily replaced. Machines as big as a house in 1840 aren't.

Either an accident, or a hook-handed killer in the back seat.

Imagine if cigarette smokers got addicted to something. It would be chaos!

Neither worked for me.

Auction listing has the pictures that should have been in the article. It's actually really cool looking!

> Jacopo Tabolli, who coordinated the dig for the University for Foreigners

I'm gonna assume that sounds less weird in Italian.

> ver the last 40 years especially, the world has shifted from mostly ignoring the environment to having national and international regulations and watchdogs

Who are all some version of powerless, intentionally underfunded, or only able to levy fines representing a fraction of the money made from reckless activity.

"Well, it's a fairly good first step," and then the second step never comes. Feel like I've seen this one before. On about a hundred different issues.

Article says the total weight is 170g, which would be about $9400 for just the gold value today.