• 319 Posts
  • 379 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: April 24th, 2023

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  • Love to hear how you think digital currencies aren’t digital currencies.

    Not all digital currencies are cryptocurrencies. CBDCs are digital implementations of government-backed fiat currencies. If you don’t understand the difference I don’t have time to try to convince you, sorry.

    by your flawed metrics, solar power is “hype”.

    Solar power produces energy. Cryptocurrency produces nothing and wastes energy doing it.












  • Yep. I think it’s Roundup. Used to be people used chemical herbicides with more discretion to avoid harming crops, so bugs could live on weeds in patches or at the edges of fields.

    Nowadays you just plant a strain of corn or soybeans that’s immune to Roundup and soak your entire field in glyphosate multiple times a year. So the only insects that have food or shelter anywhere near you are ones that can live on your crop - and then you spray pesticides to kill those.

    Result: millions and millions of acres of essentially sterile agricultural monocrop.

    And more and more land is being turned into agricultural monocrop - not because a growing population needs more food, but because of bad laws and subsidies. Almost 100 million acres in the US - 40% of the American corn crop - is used to produce fucking ethanol, which burns more fossil fuel to produce than it replaces and is only profitable because of massive government subsidies procured by energy and agricultural lobbyists.

    We are wiping hundreds of square miles of land clean of life in order to turn one fossil fuel into another less efficient fossil fuel. It’s species wide insanity.

    And that being said: even though agriculture is a much bigger contributor to the ongoing insect omnicide than suburban pest spraying, when you keep the chemicals off your lawn and allow native plants and flowers to grow, it does help your local bugs, and you are making an impact.




  • Preach.

    Housing is a human right.

    Private land ownership violates that human right.

    All land should be held in trust for the people as a whole and managed by the government for the benefit of the people. Including the houses and apartments on that land.

    We should not have private homeowners. We should not have private landlords. We should have socialized housing, just like we should have socialized medicine. Apartment buildings and neighborhoods should be managed by tenant associations, with strict legal limits on their authority over individual tenants, and government facilitators to provide expert advice on building management and keep meetings running smoothly.

    But we are a long way from implementing that.



  • Because during bad times the ones that make bad decisions don’t survive or at very least are removed from positions of power.

    It’s more common for bad leaders to make the bad decisions that cause the bad times, and then either be deposed by violence or cling to power with violence, making everything worse. See Stalin, Mao, and also the entire history of sub-Saharan Africa after colonialism.

    I’m certainly not a fan of American electoral democracy, but one can say that at least it’s mostly peaceful and allows in theory the people to make a choice between qualified and vetted candidates. In “hard times” the mechanisms created by civil society to select competent leaders tend to break down. So rather than removing bad leaders from power in hard times, it becomes even harder to remove such leaders, and even harder to determine whether a leader is good or bad until after he’s in charge of the army’s salary.












  • A whole lot of people hate this notion because it essentially frames it as the consumer’s fault, but at the end of the day it kind of is.

    Absolutely. Producers and consumers have joint responsibility for getting us where we are. Climate action requires joint action by consumers and by (or, more likely, against) producers.

    Because politicians follow the money. And they understand voters follow the money. So polls may show that legislation against fossil fuel companies is popular. But politicians look at all the gas consumers buy and ask themselves “what will voters do if we pass fossil fuel legislation and gas gets more expensive”? And then they decide not to pass fossil fuel legislation, because even if voters say they want fossil fuel legislation they know how the voters will respond if that legislation makes their consumption habits more expensive.

    It’s a lot easier to pass higher gas taxes in cities where 90% of residents take public transit to work than in cities where 5% do.

    I was ranting in a different thread about the “discourses of delay” that corporate and right-wing propagandists use to delay climate action. And the fascinating thing is, the idea that only individual consumption matters (the BP carbon footprint ad campaign) and the idea that only the actions of corporations matter (a typical American activist attitude) are both industry propaganda. The former is meant to discourage political action. The latter is meant to discourage individual action. And by framing it as one against the other, propagandists discourage us from taking effective action on either.

    We can do both. We have to do both.