stabby_cicada @ stabby_cicada @slrpnk.net

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3 yr. ago

Moderating

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Of course we need to act quickly. But we also need to act correctly.

Green capitalism wants us to believe the only problem is greenhouse gas emissions. That if we replace fossil fuel engines and power plants with solar panels and batteries, we can continue burning energy and consuming resources like "normal" and still save the Earth.

This is a bad solution because it ignores all the other environmental harms of unchecked growth. It puts a bandage on one symptom - greenhouse gas emissions - but does nothing to cure the disease.

The solution is not to replace one energy industry with another while we unsustainably consume the world. The only real long term solution is to use less energy.

And before that, Obama, Kerry, and if I remember right even fucking Gore were all accused of being the most radical left Presidential candidates in American history.

Funny how the Democratic Party keeps running more and more progressive candidates - both the Republicans and Democrats say they're doing it, so it must be true - and yet the Democratic Party keeps moving more and more to the right.

Hold on, let me quote that section:

the disposal of waste and eventual retirement of the infrastructure Windmill blades are notoriously difficult to recycle because they are made of composites that can’t be easily separated into their constituent parts. Lithium batteries contain reusable materials that it’s possible to recover, but due to expense and logistics, the practice is not widespread. Most solar panels are currently land-filled because of high costs and technical difficulties. With all these, yeah “they’re working on it” but so far progress is slow.

Windmill blades being hard to dispose of is one, true, and two, just one example of one aspect of the environmentally unfriendly production, management, and disposal of renewable energy equipment.

Which is environmentally unfriendly because all industrial production is environmentally unfriendly.

And one of the big points of this article is how environmentalists don't want to talk - or even think - about that.

One thing you have to always remember about Donald Trump is: he's incredibly insecure. His fragile little ego is desperate for approval. It's why he constantly shitposts on a social media site he owns - so he can get that constant dopamine rush of upvotes and fawning comments and "megadittoes, Mr. President". And it's why he's desperate for the approval of people he considers strong leaders - Putin and Xi and Milei and so on. And when somebody he respects flatters him, he becomes putty in their hands.

Mamdani won decisively in New York. Mamdani proved himself a strong leader. And then, after taking everything Trump could throw at him and coming out on top, Mamdani went to Trump and basically said "I talk a lot of shit about you, you talk a lot of shit about me, but we both know that's how the game is played and not to take it personally. You do good work and I respect you. We both believe New York is the greatest city in the world so let's work together to make it great again."

And Mamdani certainly didn't have to ask for a meeting with Trump. It probably hurt him with some of his base to talk to Trump at all. So you have this strong man, this leader, this winner, who decisively proved himself the leader of the Democratic Party in New York, with incredible momentum behind him - and he goes to Trump to kiss his ring and ask for his support.

And when a strong man gives Trump the manly validation he craves, he melts like a teenage girl at a David Bowie concert.

Because you also have to remember, Donald Trump has no actual political positions. He doesn't care about anything except winning - and he loves winners. And whatever Mamdani is, he's a winner.

I read some of the comments, and now I need a shower.

I think not violating people's privacy with technological data collection is a technological issue, not a political one. Because you can have a society without capitalism or the state, you can have incredibly strong social norms governing privacy and the use of people's data, but as long as that society is collecting and storing information about individual people, that information can still be leaked, stolen, or misused by whoever controls it.

(I mean, imagine somebody in smart city IT has some sort of personal issue or conflict with another citizen and decides to abuse their access to data collection to gather information about that citizen. Even in an anarchist utopia we'd still have stalkers, domestic violence, controlling partners, child custody disputes, and all the ways people in relationships hurt each other that come with humans being human.)

The only way to guarantee data collection doesn't violate people's privacy is to not collect data capable of violating people's privacy - that is, don't deploy systems that can collect that data at all.

And that restricts the type of data that can be collected so much that, I think, it rules out most of the benefits of a "smart city".

Open source code for public infrastructure is extremely important, I agree. But it's not sufficient. If data about individual people is collected by a smart city at all, or even capable of being collected by the hardware the smart city deploys, no matter what the laws are around it or how much you trust the current government, it could be exploited by a future, less ethical government, or stolen by third parties.

I think the examples you gave would be good ways to gather data for smart city management without collecting data about individual people that could be misused, but the way surveillance is implemented now, that sort of data collection is dangerous.

For example, a sensor that triggers a traffic light is great, but currently just about every major intersection in every major city in the US already has license plate cameras for traffic enforcement. So any smart city program is going to incorporate those license plate cameras, because why would they spend money installing new sensors when they already have perfectly good cameras? And then those cameras will be used for police and immigration enforcement and other privacy violating data collection even more efficiently than they're already being used.

One aspect of a "smart city" is a system to constantly monitor a lot of data streams about its residents and use that data to allocate the city's resources more efficiently in real time or better plan future upgrades to city infrastructure.

This obviously raises a lot of surveillance concerns. Some of it could be done in a manner that respected people's privacy, with, for instance, extensive algorithmic anonymization of data and strict limits on what data is permanently recorded, but that requires a lot of trust and oversight and, I think, the benefits are likely not worth the risk of having that data collection system in place.

Another aspect of a smart city is enhanced local participation through e-governance, making it easier for people to know about, suggest, and weigh in on policies impacting their homes and communities. This aspect could be implemented without any kind of surveillance apparatus and has some appealing qualities imho.

So, you know, it depends on what benefit you're talking about.

Well she fucking didn't did she?

A child hitting another child isn't a crime that requires an arrest, trial, and conviction. It's a discipline issue that requires teachers to call the kids' parents.

And honestly? A kid creating deepfake porn is a much more serious discipline issue, but it's still a discipline issue, because a middle school boy is still a fucking child. That kid should have been expelled and sent to therapy, but not arrested, because, again, child.

Arresting a child for anything is insane - but private prisons profit off that insanity, and conservatives love the idea of black babies growing up to be prison labor, so the school-to-prison pipeline ruins more children's lives every day.

God, some people out there would have parents call the cops whenever their kids get in a fight. I hate this century.

Webre added that he does not expect to criminally charge the young girl.

“Due to the totality of the circumstances, we chose not to pursue charges on the female student,” he said.

What the fuck. Why is this is a question. Why would it even be possible to criminally charge the victim. Why are you acting like you're doing her a favor by not "pursuing charges". WHAT fucking charges would you be fucking pursuing.

I don't expect commenters to know the answers to this. I just want to emphasize how American cops hate women so fucking much that when they have a 13-year-old female victim of a sex crime they ask themselves what crimes they can charge her with.

And men wonder why women don't report.

I'm not a big fan of leadcore, no.

A really simplified explanation: the wind pushes the kite, which unreels the kite string, which spins the generator shaft to generate electricity.

When the kite string runs out, the kite folds up or changes its orientation so the wind isn't pushing it anymore, and the generator reels in the kite string. This takes less power than the kite previously generated because the kite isn't pushing against the wind while it's being reeled in.

When the kite string is reeled in far enough, the kite catches the wind again, the kite string starts unreeling again, repeat as long as there's wind.

It's actually, I think, a really creative implementation of wind power.

Economics, as a science, has generally been used to measure and describe capitalist economies, since economics as a science has only existed as long as capitalism.

Which is fine.

Economics has had a bad habit of universalizing its descriptions of capitalist economies as if they were fundamental facts about human nature.

Which is not fine.

So, for example, economists talk about the "tragedy of the commons", as if it was a law of nature that publicly owned resources are necessarily used to destruction by selfish individuals, and only private ownership enforced by law can prevent this destruction. When, in fact, publicly owned resources have been maintained by societies ever since society was a thing, the commons in England existed for thousands of years before capitalism was a gleam in Adam Smith's eye, and the term itself was popularized by Garrett Hardin in 1968 as a justification for abolishing welfare and letting poor people starve.

But hey, our colonial ancestors took millions and millions of acres of "unowned" land from native peoples, auctioned it off to private landowners, and turned the native people into slave labor to farm it, and isn't it nice to tell ourselves that we're using that land more efficiently and protecting it from overuse and mismanagement by privatizing it?

I mean, look, if I said to you "making profit is the highest good, and it is morally right for me to use every legal method at my disposal to make as much profit as I can from you", you'd say I was evil or insane.

But if I said to you "making profit is the most important goal of my business, and it is morally right for me to use every legal method to make as much money as I can from customers" you'd probably nod and smile and agree.

And that's the corrupting influence of economics, which has confused efficiency and morality so greatly that it's convinced us that capitalism is the most moral form of social organization because a capitalist economy is the most efficient form of economic organization. Neither of which is true.

And this ties into fascism, and dictatorships, and Belgians in the Congo, and all sorts of monstrous human rights violations in the name of profit, because monstrous human rights violations naturally occur when you reduce human beings to commodities and tell yourself the highest form of morality lies in using those commodities as efficiently and profitably as you can.

Economics is not exclusively used for fascism, sure, but it's done more to promote fascism than any other single science I can think of.

I know, right? It's pretty awesome. Glad to see it's getting some activity again.

Oh, there's plenty of blame to go around. I'm not going to support conservative corruption. I'm also not going to waste my time and money supporting an organization that's clearly unable (or unwilling) to fight conservative corruption.

But hey, it's your time and money. If you want to piss it away on the corrupt, incompetent, Democrats, people who've proven they can't stand up to the Republicans and will waste any opportunity the voters give them, be my guest.

Supporting those losers comes with a hell of an opportunity cost, though.

You know what? If I hire someone to guard my house, and my house gets robbed, because the person I hired (1) didn't lock the door, (2) didn't call the police, and (3) was too afraid to confront the robbers themselves, then yes, I will blame the person I hired for not doing their fucking job.

The conceit of representative democracy is that our representatives are public servants. That we appoint them to serve our interests. And when they fail at that task we have the right and the fucking duty to hold them accountable for their failure.

I would strongly discourage people from voting third party. I mean, have you looked at the name of the sub?

I think you're confusing Democrats (who won the House and Senate and controlled Congress) with progressives (who didn't).

Manchin and Sinema were Democrats. They became independents in 2024 and 2022 respectively. Fetterman and other conservative Democrats are still Democrats.

The Democrats controlled Congress in 2021-2022, and Manchin and Sinema and Fetterman were part of that ruling coalition.

Manchin and Sinema and other conservative Democrats sabotaged the Democrats' feeble attempts at progressive legislation, and that was one reason the Democratic Party failed to accomplish anything during Biden's administration. Another reason was the Democratic Party leadership was either unable or unwilling to control those conservative Democrats.

And still another reason was Biden's weakness and political cowardice. Which is painfully apparent now, since Donald Trump has proved a President with a majority in Congress can do whatever he wants by executive order. Biden with a Democratic Congress could have done the same thing if he had the guts. If Biden had actually used the power of the presidency, Manchin would have been an irrelevant footnote instead of the single most important vote in the Senate.

But you cannot say that Democrats didn't control Congress. The Democrats controlled Congress. And then the Democrats let a handful of conservatives in Congress set their agenda and block progressive reform until they lost power.

And the fact that they didn't do shit for America when voters put them in charge, because party leadership sat on their fucking hands and let their conservative wing set the agenda, is the whole fucking point of the post.

The two independents were Bernie Sanders and Angus King, both of whom reliably caucused with the Democrats.

And "certain situations" means, if the Senate votes 50/50, the VP can break the tie.

So, yes, 50 reliable Democratic votes in the Senate, plus the VP, plus a majority in the House, means the Democrats did "win" Congress in all but the most pedantic interpretations of the word.