admiralteal

Guy Fire-y

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Every non-NATO state on the border will be targeted and incorporated either directly or by being turned into a loyal authoritarian state a la Belarus.

And if the US leaves NATO, that undermines confidence in NATO. The alliance will fall. At that point, either the EU will have to step in and supplant it – in which case the US will no longer be even be PART of the mightiest diplomatic alliance in the world, much less influential in it – or else there’s no reason to think Russian aggression will stop endlessly escalating until all-out war between nuclear powers is on the table.

The IRA is a fantastic overall piece of legislation that gives us a fighting chance. Most policy experts agree that it has a lot of very achievable goals – thanks to its structure that offers uncapped subsidies for certain beneficial productions that are estimated to represent well over a trillion dollars in real investment, on top of the fact that renewable energy already out-competes fossil on NEARLY all financial metrics.

And if Biden loses, huge amounts of this progress can be undone by executive action, inaction, and feebleness by a Trump administration. Which he, I remind everyone has pledged to do.

If the bill lasts more than a couple of years, it will build its own constituency a la medicare and become VERY sticky and hard to remove. But it’s very vulnerable right now.

So yeah, as someone who thinks climate is the top issue everyone should be caring about since it represents an existential threat to our entire human race, I think it’s fine for Biden to focus for the next year on winning that election. If he wins that election, most of the very significant progress will get 4 more years to cure – it will be pretty well locked in and indeed many growing industries will be craving more. Rural states seeing major investment for the first time in decades in the form of renewable energy industry will want more. It has the potential to be really transformational.

Plenty of solid reasons to criticize Biden. Climate is not one of them. He’s made progress that is difficult to fathom for people who only have cursory knowledge of the US energy economy.

Really resembles a bill of attainder, to me.

We’d ALL be much better off, and a similar outcome could be achieved, by putting to law strict data security and privacy rules. Plus it wouldn’t inevitably be challenged on very reasonable 1A grounds. But that isn’t as politically possible because so many – especially conservatives – don’t believe in the liberty of privacy.

Boring company/hyperloop is the clearest example.

Literally any subject matter expert on the subject of transportation can spell out a half a dozen things that make no sense/are actively harmful about all the attention and investment these projects got. Well There’s Your Problem has a 3 hour slideshow on the subject, for example. Musk was even caught on the record admitting one of its motivations was to fuck with real transportation projects like California HSR. The whole thing was all-but-provably an elaborate con.

Yes, they see them as property to be used.

But even in that stupid, dehumanizing framework it still ought to be one of the issues of “parents rights” they love so much. Your child’s privacy being violated is a violation of your property rights. YOU didn’t consent to that child’s privacy being compromised, and they are a thing that belongs to you and can only exist according to your beliefs and rules, so that was an attack on you.

So the real truth is that to conservatives, there is no coherent ethical framework they can turn to to reliably make judgements. It is the politics of being a cruel and obstinate asshole.

Didn’t you know? The right to privacy somehow only protects adults and not children.

It’s real-time chat. That’s fundamentally different, philosophically, from the way a forum/wiki works.

You can cludge forum-like features into it with stickies and bots and yada yada yada… or you could just use a platform that is designed from the ground up to be a permanent knowledge store instead of extended, glorified AOL chatrooms.

The children do not yet know how much they yearn for the mines of listservs.

A new, novel solution to an already-solved problem that is worse in pretty much every way. But at least it is anathema to retention of institutional knowledge.

In short: just do a fucking PHPBB forum, it’s better than this shit.

Huh?

People really seem to forget that prior to October 7th, Bibi was facing regular mass protests. Accusations of full authoritarianism. He was being condemned for the fact that he was building the most ultra-conservative government Israel had ever seen. Facing multiple political corruption and bribery accusations and MAYBE even looking at future jail time, at least if he didn’t maintain the PM seat and the relative immunity it offers.

The Bibi administration NEEDS Hamas. Without them, they’re just screwed. Only the threat of violent attack from across the border is able to maintain his power. And indeed, he’d even been facing accusations that he was directly sending support to Hamas.

Really, nothing good will happen on the region until the Israeli people follow through on their political duty and vote all these fuckers out, then immediately become partners with Gaza and the West Bank to build Palestine into a functional, modern democracy where its citizens have a chance to thrive. THAT is their recipe for long-term peace and stability. No amount of smart bombs, iron domes, blockades, and border walls will get them there, at least shy of completing the genocide so many in the Bibi administration have said publicly they want.

I sure hope you are right, that this is finally the tide turning… but I’ve seen that tide fail to turn before.

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How long until the inevitable posts of “Oh I respect WHAT they’re protesting but I hate the WAY they’re protesting” shows up on this like it does for all the other anti-fossil political activism?

Oh wait, it won’t, because this kind of protest has minimal impact and is easily ignored by the average person.

And those same people will act like these directs protest were never even considered. “Why don’t they just take it to the oil companies”, they’ll say, ignoring that it is entirely ineffective to do so.

I’m thinking the disobedience around fossil fuel protests is still quite a bit too civil.

No. It isn’t. This isn’t some weak state flailing about. This is a major world power, with a fair amount of material wealth and industry, actively pursuing an evil agenda for the sake of the egos of a few political personalities and fascist, right-wing domestic politics. There’s nothing to pity here.

I’m about 6 episodes in and so far it is enjoyable, though I doubt it’ll go down in my heart as a one of the very special shows. It’s pretty heavy-handed with its kids writing, which is still TBD if it will wear me out before I get to the end. And at about 6 episodes in, it is not at all episodic. I’m hoping that eventually changes. All the best of Star Trek is mostly episodic.

Extreme disappointment that the hologram did not introduce itself with “Please state the nature of your ___ emergency.”

I’d also bet that a huge portion of those offices rely on at least some kind of proprietary software that doesn’t play nice/officially support Linux. MS Office, for example, or Autodesk’s stuff. When I saw what a headache it would be to get these working on Linux, I just shrugged and decided I’d keep my dual boot available for when I inevitably have need.

You’re turning up the cost dial for every additional workaround or adjustment you ask of people. Just to save what is fundamentally seen as $50-200 up front cost on a system for a new Windows 11 Pro license.

So long as it does so quietly and without disturbing the neighbors, he’s fine with it.

It’s not really true, see: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/oct/22/just-stop-oil-van-gogh-national-gallery-aileen-getty

This is one donor, not “the person behind”. The family made a lot of money on oil and has since entirely divested. The “heiress” in question is on the record saying she believes climate change threatens all of civilization and so she wants to put her fortune – especially given that a lot of it came from oil – to use stopping fossil fuels.

It’s basically EXACTLY what a sane person with a functional moral compass should do in that position, but it’s used as attack and slander regardless. Threads like this you ALWAYS see the right-wing talking points parroted faithfully by people who are either too gullible to do basic fact-checking or else are flatly disingenuous and manipulative.