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Cake day: February 22nd, 2024

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  • Yes that is a great solution if we had infinite space and time also if we weren’t concerned about the natural world and were happy to destroy all the biodiversity and unique biomes by converting into forests. Oh and if it would actually work of course, but that doesn’t matter in feelgood fantasy world.

    I love trees, I’ve volunteered planting trees and donates to woodlands and all sorts of things but they are not going to save us from the mess we’re in. They’re also not as simple as they should be, management is crucial as there’s a surprising amount of things that can go wrong on a large scale which would totally fuck the environment - especially with foodweb issues and soil chemistry.


  • We need to phase out oil and shift to better technologies with room for growth and use change that fits better with future realities.

    If we keep some cars it means we need oil refineries running, we need oil processed to fuel and delivered to gas stations… if though we could totally cut sections of that out then we could build solar and wind infrastructure and remove gas stations (which are a horrible thing in so.many regards, if your house is next to a gas station it’s value will go up when it closes)

    Electric infrastructure is different, no toxic and explosive liquids to worry about so it’s possible and increasingly common to have a charging pad at a supermarket or even here in the uk there putting them in at woodland trust carparks so you can have a twenty.min walk in the woods and recharge your own.battety while the car charges.

    We will likely see an increase in supermarkets and malls using their vast carpark and roof.space for solar panels, likewise remote places like national parks so cars and busses can be charged off-grid with totally green power meaning that no lorries carrying petrol or pilons need to blight the landscape.

    We might also see developments in grid management tech to support them too, for example a train station carpark might have a system where all cars are plugged in then charged in batches so as to use only the available excess load currently in their system - if you know your car will be there all day then it doesn’t matter when it charges but it will make it cheaper for the rail operator, likewise electric bikes of course though I imagine they’ll be taken on the train more often than not where a similar system charges them before the ticket holders destination is met.

    Of course this shouldn’t be an overnight thing but a transition where ICE vehicles are replaced with electric at.EOL, I (rarely) drive a tiny and very fuel efficient 15 year old car which i brought second hand, hopefully it’ll last long enough that my next car can be a second hand electric, even if I have to replace the battery and charge controller to whatever aftermarket system is available. Though I’d love if self-drive allows me to give up car ownership and simply call one to me when required, unfortunately Uber or traditional taxis are too expensive and unable to fill my usecase requirements in most situations.



  • The thing is they have solved an endless litany of problems and improved life for everyone on a radical scale thousands of times, but then people get born into the world snd never see those problems - have you ever even had to worry about milk souring let alone storing produce to last the winter? Have you ever even been attacked by a predator? That was a way of life for our ancestors before technology, the concept of clean drinking water didn’t even come close to meaning the same thing but their version of it was a daily struggle which often went unmet regardless.

    Go back in time before the industrial revolution and ask.a serf what their problems are, I bet.you nor I have ever faced a single one of them. It’d be fun to listen to the conversation you explaining that politicians are corrupt and avocados are expensive, he doesn’t know what they are but he says he’s thy literal property of a baron that doesn’t even pretend to care what he thinks and mice got into his grainstore so some of his kids will starve this winter.

    Tech had made your life significantly better and the coming wave of ai tools is going to make it much better again and allow things you never even imagined possible like localized food networks and community based industry, you’ll use it all snd move on to complaining asteroid mining is over hyped or whatever comes next


  • I would argue that reduced meat can be either the result of a lower living standard or a higher one. This is the issue a lot of people on each side refuse to see, a higher standard of life can be more efficient with systems either technological or social which make it possible.

    Really we need a blend of each, yes the techphobes are right we don’t want to live in battery farms where only efficiency matters but also we don’t want to live in the drudgery of a Neolithic existence. We need to identify and adopt systems that allow a good quality of life and enables diversity of thought and lifestyle, tech can make this possible but is unlikely to do it alone.

    Yes it’s difficult but we need social growth, that means people tying new things and demonstrating them to the world. We should be using our absurd luxury and wealth here in the developed nations to help develop solutions everyone can use to live a good life, instead of flexing fast cars and designer clothes we should be spreading knowledge of healthy food, useful educational and organizational tools, community project structures which enable people to work on shared goals and mutually beneficial platforms…

    We have a very privileged platform in the world, we should use it to show that even the richest most well educated, traveled and socialised people prefer a low or no meat diet.


  • From a different article;

    She said the group appeared to be of Middle Eastern descent, possibly from Syria, and estimated they were aged 18-25.

    https://metro.co.uk/2024/07/02/lesbian-couple-beaten-gang-homophobic-attack-birthday-night-21142932/

    It’s not comfortable but stories like this are exactly why the right is gaining popularity and if the left continues to pretend not to see them and act like this then of course people aren’t going to take us seriously.

    We need articles to give us facts and talking heads to explain what’s being done and what the big plan is to make sure that letting in large quantities of immigrants in doesn’t have negative consequences for regular people.

    If we act like we’ve never heard of such things while they are listing distressing examples then the average undecided is going to be swayed their way. As an idealist I wish the world had no boarders, we don’t live in that world and i cant force the.world into it by ignoring reality. all the European countries going right have the same big reason for the shift, we can’t go on pretending that if we ignore people’s concerns and real problems that everyone else will ignore them too.






  • So if someone made a photoshop of him in blackface with racist iconography and he didn’t like it you’d post it everywhere? ‘Look at putin depicted as a disgusting stupid black guy! It sure is humiliating for him to be associated with terrible things like black people!’

    And yes I know it’s tempting to write off things like this with ‘it’s not complex bro, I just do what I feel like and it’s OK because in my heart it’s a progressive act of kindness!’ but life isn’t so simple, actions have unintended and unconsidered implications.

    There’s so many reasons to laugh at putin, even if he was gay it wouldn’t be one of them. Assume the story that this upsets putin didn’t exist as a meme (which btw is likely nonsense anyway) what would be the point of this image? What would it convey? Just homophobia.





  • I think a big part of the problem is Biden is a good politician, he’s generally honest and forthright which is what everyone claims to want.

    But we’re all so lost in marvel movie logic and cinema tropes that people don’t respond to it, they just want a showman - meanwhile politics is boiled down to robot voice tiktoks and reddit posts that barely scratch the headline so again people don’t respond to reality they need a hyper targeted exaggeration coated in catchy idealism and easily retweetable slogans.

    Biden says exactly the right things, minis the sort of speech error we all make occasionally, and his record backs up his ability to actually get things done - often in a way that doesn’t draw massive attention but incrementally makes things better.

    Trump is a liar and an actual idiot, like genuinely stupid and uninformed - but he says anything that will sound good at the time so it makes it seem to people that aren’t paying attention or follow complex arguments that he’s the one who’ll get things done


  • You fighting to sow discord against the only viable alternative is working to get Trump, pointing out that regular people found reason to prefer his responses over Trump and highlighting what they are is useful in helping people highlight the many advantages of Biden.

    Yes he’s not as energetic as a lunatic, probably because he’s a sensible human that’s been working hard on his lifelong goal of improving the society he lives in and pushing through sensible and practical reforms that actually help real people and put the nation on track to deal with the many challenges it faces going forward.


  • The problem is the only people saying this are people who have been saying the same things for the whole time and are desperate for it to ve true so it’s hard to believe them, it’s not coming from my friends that weren’t yelling about Biden every excuse they got.

    It’s like thuderfoots recent starliner stream, he predicted it would fail and spent the whole time saying ‘oh shit, here it goes… looks like it’s going to explode…’ even when both bits were returned safely he was calling the spaceX staff morons for celebrating because he was so desperate to be right.

    People wanted Biden to fail because then they could push their brand of politics but he’s doing great based on actual metrics, so they try to make him fail using opion and tone setting behavior - the exact way Trump beat Hillary, memed that she was bad until no one went to vote.