stabby_cicada @ stabby_cicada @slrpnk.net

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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.

If you want to send a vehicle to Mars and then have it come back to planet earth, you have really have to take double the fuel on the trip.

I think the technofuturists most publicly masturbating about a manned Mars mission were openly talking about making it a one-way trip. They imagined there'd be no shortage of people willing to die on Mars - and had no qualms condemning people to certain death for what would have been the world's most expensive publicity stunt.

One of the silver linings of the general collapse of, well, everything nowadays, is that the American public no longer cares about manned space travel. We have so many real problems on earth that pissing trillions into the void doesn't catch the world's imagination anymore.

Yeah, and how does that Tamil farmer fact check their black box audio interface when it tells them to spray Roundup on their potatoes, or warns them to buy bottled water because their Hindu-hating Muslim neighbors have poisoned their well, or any other garbage it's been deliberately or accidentally poisoned with?

One of the huge weaknesses of AI as a user interface is that you have to go outside the interface to verify what it tells you. If I search for information about a disease using a search engine, and I find an .edu website discussing the results of double blind scientific studies of treatments for a disease, and a site full of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and supplement ads telling me about THE SECRET CURE DOCTORS DON'T WANT YOU TO KNOW, I can compare the credibility of those two sources. If I ask ChatGPT for information about a disease, and it recommends a particular treatment protocol, I don't know where it's getting its information or how reliable it is. Even if it gives me some citations, I have to check its citations anyway, because I don't know whether they're reliable sources, unreliable sources, or hallucinations that don't exist at all.

And people who trust their LLM and don't check its sources end up poisoning themselves when it tells them to mix bleach and vinegar to clean their bathrooms.

If LLMS were being implemented as a new interface to gather information - as a tool to enhance human cognition rather than supplant, monitor, and control it - I would have a lot fewer problems with them.

Enshittification squared. Create a service that customers come to rely on. Then turn the service into shit to squeeze more profit out of it. Then create a new service that replicates the functionality of the old service customers relied on. Then enshittify that. And so on.

AI is a parasite. It can't come up with anything a human didn't create first. It eats our thoughts and regurgitates them.

We kill AI by limiting our use of the Internet, renouncing social media in particular (and yes, I recognize the hypocrisy), and communicating with actual human beings through encrypted messenger apps that AI can't scrape for new training material.

Think of AI like an online troll. Don't feed it, don't engage with it, and it will be irrelevant to you until it finally gives up and dies.

But the social media machine wants you not to talk to actual human beings, it wants you to be lonely and isolated, so you'll consume its product - and AI is just a part of that machine, making you lonely and then providing you with the illusion of a real person to talk to.

Gardening is a great way to fight that, especially community gardening, because you literally have to be out there in person with your hands in the dirt talking to other gardeners.

So I agree with this post and strongly recommend anybody who doesn't have space to garden go looking for a community garden, or volunteer at a food bank (which often have ties to community gardens and can point you at opportunities), or help at a Food Not Bombs event, or otherwise get yourself involved in the real live in-person work of feeding human beings, and reclaim your brain from the social media algorithm feeding you AI slop.

I don't know who the people around you are. I won't tell you you're wrong to be afraid of interacting with them.

But I do know that social media is designed to make you feel that way.

Social media algorithms find the angriest, the most hateful, the most radical, content on all sides and feed it to you. So you're going to see people on your side saying the other side wants to kill you, and you're going to see people on the other side saying they want to kill you, and you're not going to see the vast majority of people who don't actually want to kill you.

Because the more afraid you are of your actual human neighbors, the more time you'll spend on social media watching ads and being force-fed algorithmic slop. And that slop makes you even more afraid of your neighbors, so you spend even more time online, and so on and so forth.

So I'd ask you to ask yourself: if you believe people in your community want to kill trans people and enslave blacks, how much of that belief comes from what people in your community have actually said and done, and how much of that belief comes from stuff you've heard online?

And that's the "no ethical consumption under capitalism" issue. Sure, you need a house to live in, and goods to purchase, and places to buy those goods (ie, malls and other commercial stuff). But how can you absolve yourself from blame for purchasing necessities and not offer that same grace to the companies that produce those necessities for you?

Pointing fingers and placing blame is a distraction. The right thing to do is for you to reduce your environmental impact where you can, purchase goods from the least bad producers, and encourage others to do the same.

Yes, and, who's buying the products of those industries? The construction industry doesn't build houses and tear them down again for no reason, you know? Consumers bear a share of the responsibility for the environmental impact of production.

Of course, in exploited colonized nations where products are extracted and shipped overseas and locals are left with nothing, the dynamic is different. But somehow I doubt this is happening in the EU.

I think "we" (secular Westerners) are more likely to appropriate spiritual indigenous narratives, take them out of context, and trivialize them into meaninglessness - as the article describes we did with the concept of mindfulness - than we are to erase them. And I think this will happen because we, secular Westerners, are living lives devoid of spiritual meaning, and it's terribly tempting to steal other people's beliefs in the hope we can find a fraction of their meaning in life.

And though I'm sure people online are going to go full Reddit atheist on me and tell me belief in a higher power is ignorant and primitive, every society in human history that we know anything about has either had some sort of belief in higher powers or has aggressively suppressed such belief, and that belief served a function of social cohesion that a lot of the left no longer have.

Honestly, I think part of the reason Trump won - and part of the reason populist, religious nationalism is surging worldwide, Trump being just one example - is that the secular West threw out its own spiritual narratives without replacing them with anything. We condemned Christianity as ignorant, bigoted, and repressive, but we didn't create anything in its place to serve its role. We walked away from the churches, which were the "third places" of our towns, the centers of our social and cultural lives, and we replaced them with what? Coffee shops?

People need something to believe in, and we told them "do your jobs and vote blue, but it won't matter anyway because the environment is fucked".

The environmental left needs the warning not to engage in empty spirituality because so many people in it are desperate for the kind of meaning spirituality gives.

I have a serious question. Who thought Reddit Answers was a good idea? What's the actual benefit to the company? Did they get a ton of venture capital funding to build it, or are they trying to jump on the AI hype, or what? Does anyone actually know?

One of the biggest reasons, I think, for Reddit's popularity in the 2010s was that its comment threads often had advice and information and product recommendations from real people - as opposed to, say, Amazon reviews, which were full of bots even back then. A ton of people still search for topics on Google using the site:reddit.com modifier, because searching Reddit bypasses all the SEO and AI-created spam sites that dominate Google results, and Reddit is still one of the biggest open source databases of actual human advice and conversation.

And Reddit has decided to dilute its most valuable contribution to the internet with AI spambots?

It's some sort of stage 3 enshittification, obviously - cannibalizing its core use case for short term profit - but I'm morbidly curious who thought this was a good idea and why.

Music puts shoppers in a better mood so they spend more money. No, really.

Or spreading out into the world and eating microplastics in the soil. Think positive!