What you're witnessing here is described in When Prophecy Fails, a study on cults and how they justify continued belief after experiencing events that should disprove their belief.

Cult members will simply invent new reasons to continue their belief and remove the cognitive dissonance they may feel, which oddly results in a further entrenched belief, instead of a weakened one.

Union membership declined from 2023 to 2024 to under 10% of the US workforce, despite a high public approval.

I think Bernie explaining to people how unionizing could be weaponized against the regime would help, and particularly if he endorsed the IWW; a more militant union who are not corporate captured, nor only seek increased wages and are then become pacified as other more normal trade unions tend toward. The IWW is the only worker-led anti-capitalist union in the US.

It’s just that there is little to nothing the average viewer can do to make it happen.

There are some tremendously powerful actions Bernie could be suggesting we do to fix this mess.

For example, he could be publicly calling for people to:

1. Perpare for and participate in a general strike, which would target the establishment's income streams, and is capable of bringing a fascist government to its knees if done on a large enough scale. Immigrant farm workers are already potentially going forward with this plan of action.
2. Contact a grassroots decentralized union like the IWW and attempt to unionize your workplace so that the general strike is even more effective (plus, ya know, better pay and working conditions as a bonus!)

Vaguely calling for the end of oligarchy instead of loudly calling for those very actionable steps is a bit of a missed opportunity for the resistance.

However, If we put in the work, we can resist this and we can win. Look at how effective the above mentioned methods were when used in Chile in 2019.. If we completely reject the political system and rebel on a mass scale, there is NOTHING they can do to stop us.

I suspect it's potentially due to relations with Russia going slightly sour, as Russia is the largest exporter of asbestos.

I really, really like the logo you have for it. It's snazzy AF :)

Piefed is another reddit-like forum that is federated using ActivityPub (the same underlying tech that Lemmy uses).

Piefed is very similar to Lemmy functionally, and the creator designed it specifically to be as compatible with lemmy as possible so they can communicate with each other without a problem. You can even visit piefed communties from your lemmy, like !animation@piefed.social or !fullmoviesonyoutube@piefed.social.

Piefed is already compatible with a couple of lemmy mobile apps, like Interstellar and Voyager, so if we were to switch SLRPNK to a piefed instance, you would be able to continue to use those apps, if you already are used to them. You can also make the mobile web page itself into a web app.

The Web UI will be different from lemmy, which you can test at Piefed.social to see what it'd be like. We'd very likely create a custom theme for it similar to our existing lemmy one.

Piefed has some neat features unique to it, such as:

• a very nice gallery view for image heavy communities.
• the ability to combine comments from multiple communities under one post, if the same link was posted to all of them. You can see an example of that here (notice how the comments have dividers for each community).
• the ability to create and subscribe to a pre-made list of communities, sorta like a multi-reddit.

On the sysadmin side of things, it'd bring some nice advantages regarding network resource usage.

So overall, it hopefully wouldn't bring many downsides, besides potentially having to learn and get used to a new UI (though Photon, which we host as an alternative web UI, will soon support it as well, making the experience pretty much identical if you're already used to that).

I think Mint can be a bad option if someone has newer hardware, but the onboarding process is just so butter smooth for non-techies. From what I recall of bazzite, the onboarding process for someone completely unfamiliar to Linux isn't the best.

And while Mint is bad for new hardware, Bazzite can be sort've the opposite problem. I have a laptop with switchable graphics that has massive glitches with Wayland still. Since Fedora dropped X11 support entirely, Bazzite unfortunately inherited that, making it impossible to use on my hardware. However, Mint worked with it flawlessly thanks to it still supporting X11.

The immutability aspect of Bazzite could be a massive strength for new users if they focused on their onboarding process.

Hm, I thought he mentioned it in his 6.4 juicy video, but I can't find it either. Apologies, I must have confused it with something else.

I did manage to find this rounded corners proposal, and unfortunately it doesn't look like it'll be in kwin anytime soon.

I think native rounded corners were introduced in one of the latest versions, Nicco Loves Linux did a video on it, I believe.

I don't mean to make light of 3 people being in critical condition but... It's simply too fitting, I'm afraid.

Immutable distros will likely become the standard in the future, but at the moment I think they're a poor choice for newbies since there's very little documentation around them, very few people who can help if something goes wrong, and often can introduce their own problems due to flatpak permissions that require their own specialized knowledge that a newbie won't have.

When I tried bazzite, I encountered an issue that someone else had reported on the forums months ago, which had never received a response due to how stretched thin the UBlue team are.

Mint on the other hand works fine 99% of the time, and has heaps of help resources available for it. It also strongly suggests setting up a snapshot of your system that you can rollback to if anything ever messes up, which pretty much puts it on par with bazzite in that department.

Older desktops can have a somewhat hefty idle power draw due to the overall system consumption contributing more than expected, such as the southbridge. According to this old review of the i7-2600k, the system idles at 74w, which at $0.12 per KWh, would cost you roughly $77 per year. Though you might want to confirm that with a Kill-a-watt meter if you can (libraries sometimes lend them out), since I'm pretty sure that total system power chart includes a discrete GPU, so the real number for a GPU-less system is probably around 40 or 50w at idle.

If that is accurate, you could potentially replace your i7-2600 with a used Dell Wyse 5070 thin client from ebay for about $40 (in the US), and that idles at 5w, which would only cost you $5 a year at the same rate.

Older thin clients and laptops tend to have much better idle power draws compared to desktops. For other people reading this, if you're using a desktop for a low-power use case, it's probably worth finding out what its idle power consumption is and doing the calculation to determine if it'd be worth replacing it with a more efficient used thin-client or office mini-pc.

If you do try Linux, I highly highly recommend Linux Mint, since it's the most newbie friendly.

This is still one of the best resources on this topic I've come across, and I refer back to it quite often, almost a year later! Cheers for putting so much effort into this, Jacob.

If you play the OG deus ex, I highly recommend modding it with the revision overhaul, or GMDX. It's very clunky without one.

If you like stealth games, I'd recommend the first two thief games (with fan patches to run well on modern systems).

f you don’t have artificial fertilizers, tractors, refrigerators etc etc, there is no way people can be fed even if they are everything that nature created.

David R. Montgomery puts forward some interesting evidence that the world could be fed without industrial farming, and there are promising new methods of creating artificial fertilizer using renewable energy instead of the fossil fuel using habor-bosch method.

Cities are giant factories that require the constant cycling of goods (food, water and other materials) using a transportation grid and they also require constant energy inputs to remove waste materials.

Cities use far less energy and materials than less dense suburbs or rural living, which require moving materials and energy further than cities to dwellings that are far less energy efficient. I get the feeling you didn't actually look at the links I provided regarding how with the right planning, cities could be made self-sufficient and the most sustainable way of living, as you continue to suggest that they cannot be, even though the math in those videos indicate the opposite.

so your idea about edencity and public transportation is like you almost see how unsustainable cities are, and why.

I never said cities as they exist today are desirable or sustainable, nor was that the inquiry you made to me. You asked what existing technologies we had to live sustainably. I think I made a solid case that we do have the existing ideas and technology to do so, but they are simply not implemented for reasons unrelated to their actual technical viability.

on a planet where we cannot feed, build houses and build transport for everyone

And this is a completely artificial social problem, not a technical one, which is what I've been mentioning in each response.

Capitalism is ultimately responsible for a tremendous amount of that artificial scarcity of food, housing, and transport, as profit incentives cause powerful corporations to suppress or eliminate solutions that would jeopardize that profit. Farmers during the depression destroyed food while the hungry watched to protect the market, affordable housing isn't created because it isn't as profitable as expensive housing, rent caps aren't implemented because real estate monopolies and landlords lobby politicians to ensure their profits continue to rise, public transport was gutted by monopolists in the oil, car, and tire industry for their continued profit.

As long as capitalism rules us, we will struggle to implement the tools that could save millions of people from dying, all for the benefit of a few psychopaths. I strongly believe we will continue on the path of destruction unless there is a nearly global rejection of capitalism as the main form of societal structure. I don't know for sure if we will eventually cast it off and survive, but I'm sure as hell going to try to slow down the amount of emissions we spew out in the hopes it gives us a sliver more time for that to potentially happen.

Whether or not you believe it's possible for humanity to actually do that depends entirely on how cynical your worldview is. In practical terms, a fully cynical view only guarantees a fail-state, which doesn't seem like a useful mindset to have. So I will continue to do as much as I am realistically able to help the possibility of resisting capitalism, as it's our only real way out, and I'll be happier with myself that I tried, even if we fail.

I'm aware, but I was addressing that one point at the end of their post about us not having sustainable technology, which I consider distinct from tech that sequesters existing emissions. As in, had we structured our societies with that other tech, it would've been fairly sustainable.

For sequestering carbon, I'd read a bit about growing mass amounts of some sort of seaweed or grass in shallow areas being somewhat promising, though ultimately I think we're locked in for some extreme change regardless. My recommendations of sustainable tech would only limit the ceiling we reach in the future.

• Solar and Wind power are cheap and are infinitely scalable on both small and large scales.
• Public transport massively reduces energy requirements for transportation, and scales from bullet trains to light rail. Bike paths combined with ebikes can be used for smaller scales.
• Vegan diets massively reduce emissions and energy requirements to produce calories for a population
• Iron-air batteries are right now viable as an alternative to fossil fuel powered container ships. They are viable at large scales. For small scale between short distances, sailboats are still quite viable.
• High density urban planning done by the Edenicity plan reduces suburban sprawl and massively reduces energy consumption by allowing for an urban area to be energy and food self sufficient. This concept scales to both small villages or large cities.

The tech is there. The only thing stopping us is a lack of political will due to capitalism resulting in oligarchs who have captured the political system, and a lack of public awareness of alternative ways of life due to poor education and propaganda.

A properly informed public that understands the extreme dangers of climate change, oligarchic capitalism, and the viability of changing things with collective power would allow us to use these existing technologies and prevent the devastation we're headed toward.

Andor is one of the finest shows I've seen in years, and so deeply relevant for today.

Fir anyone who hasn't seen it yet, you can watch the first 3 episodes for free on YouTube. The rest is free too if you have certain swagger as he sing a shanty witg her mates! (Dbzero is a wonderful instance, by the by).

Humanity does not have the technology or capability to be sustainable

We absolutely have the technology, it's just being blocked from being implemented on emergency timescales by soulless oil and gas corpo suits that have almost de-facto control of governments in most countries.