I would argue that if you recognize you lack the knowledge to form an opinion, you’re doing better than 90% of people online.

All good, I didn’t take it that way. We should be expecting more than the bare minimum, but even the bare minimum would mean people I care about having safer lives.

100% agree. My comment was more about how much easier it would be for someone who isn’t moved by compassion to just not be a gaping asshole by going “not my issue.”

My personal feelings are that there are people I care about who have aspects to them I don’t understand and that doesn’t keep me from caring about them or believing they have the same rights as anyone else to live their lives in a way that expresses their complete selves. Attempts to harm them because of who they are are wrong and I will always fight against those who want to keep people from being their true selves.

The most pragmatic view is “how does this affect me? It doesn’t? Who cares.”

People who were already poor would remain so. Most people who aren’t wealthy can’t afford to own acres of land that doesn’t produce crops. If leaves suddenly became money, that would not change the fundamental needs people have of food and shelter. So you’d have the wealthy with vast swathes of forest that would slowly die as they carted out a lot of compost for use in markets, and people who live in apartments or other rental situations would never see a leaf on the ground again. You might see suburban homeowners get really good about caring for their trees and planting more, so that’s one possible benefit but overall this would be a nightmare.

There are old methods of getting lumber from trees by cutting them short and letting the limbs grow back. The Japanese “daisugi” and European “copsing” are two different styles of the same idea. The fact that we don’t see those done much in the modern era makes me think that the industrial-capitalist mind would not comprehend the idea of waiting for leaves to fall.

Those are also places where a lot of regressive candidates run unopposed and hold office for decades because they’re the only ones who have an interest in the position. Prime spots for someone with different ideas to throw their hat in the ring.

We need at least one new party in this country, and one that runs for local elections first to build a bench of people who can run for higher office.

Even if I didn’t believe the national Green Party was just a spoiler (regardless of how they started out,) they spend all their time and energy pushing a presidential candidate every four years rather than working on ground game.

I think states like Texas are actually fertile ground if you focus on what people are dealing with in their day to day life and start small-county commissions, town council positions, even sheriff if you have a county where the local sheriff is unpopular and your party platform is looking at criminal justice reform.

I also think pushing for changes to use ranked choice voting with proportional representation would generate long-term change. Single Tranferable Vote has worked well in Ireland, and historically it worked well in multiple American cities: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_transferable_vote?wprov=sfti1

Hopefully the absence of an algorithm pushing engagement at all costs will dispel some of it.

Do you have any insight into getting Linux to play nice with the different components of fusion drives? I have an old iMac and Mac mini both with Fusion Drive and after installing fedora or Ubuntu the SSD is seen and mounts fine but while the HDD is seen it doesn’t mount at startup despite setting it to mount at startup. I’d like to use these machines for some archiving and media hosting but that’s difficult if I can’t reliably access the much higher capacity drives.

Not sure why you’re being downvoted. Glaciers formed over millennia. If they melt, they’re gone, even if we drop CO2 to pre-industrial levels. The Antarctic ice sheet is millions of years of snow that fell at the rate of a few inches a year and just didn’t melt. If significant portions of that fall off and melt, it’ll be millions of years more for the water it adds to the oceans to cycle back to the ice sheet again. The changes we have made will not be reversed automatically or in many cases at all.

Because it won’t work? That’s what I got from the article. I’m not sure what else you’re implying.

I feel like this deserves a Skinner meme.

“Could it be that people want to be treated equally regardless of who they are attracted to?

No, it must be a communist plot.”

“You feel like a stupid piece of shit? Try a brand new OS to have that feeling confirmed.”

Short answer: yes

Longer answer: I would argue we’ve already had a few civil wars since the “War Between the States” in the 1860s. Reconstruction was arguably another civil war. The labor rights war of the early twentieth century included federal troops attacking organizing coal miners and federal agents along with private security forces attacking striking workers elsewhere. The violence of the civil rights movement (remember: the president had to call in the national guard to enforce integration) would also qualify as a civil war by some standards.

Listen to the first limited series of the podcast It Could Happen Here for an idea of how a more involved civil war could start. The idea is that there would not be clear battle lines drawn up because our divide now is more urban vs rural, and people in rural areas have opportunities to attack infrastructure that would have significant impacts on urban areas.

From what I understand it doesn’t matter, that’s just a label they assign to all the data they have about you. Attaching all of that to your real name is trivial once they have the profile.

<pushes glasses up> it was actually Flavor-Aid.

I think cars and car culture are inextricably linked to this kind of behavior, and it gets worse with bigger cars. People definitely can ride bikes like assholes but it’s less common-something about having zero barriers between a person and the world makes them less susceptible to acting like the world isn’t there.

Also, in the broadway poster and the fan edit of the movie poster, the position of the hand communicates “I am telling this person a secret.” In the original movie poster the position of the hand communicates “I’m hiding a zit” or maybe “I have a toothache.”

Every day is some variation on shitty.