I'm born and raised in Appalachia, my daddy worked in the coal mines and drove an 18 wheeler. Certified redneck enough that I confuse the shit out of my New England neighbors.
I went out and marched with striking nurses when Bernie put out the call, and I've never voted Republican in my entire fucking life.
We've gotten so much better at airplane evacuations over the years. The HEAVILY REGULATED airline industry is a masterclass in actually learning from tragedy.
Edit: Christ Almighty, I'll split the hair, you guys.
"The Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano — which violently erupted in January 2022 and blasted an enormous plume of water vapor into the stratosphere – likely contributed to this year’s ozone depletion. That water vapor likely enhanced ozone-depletion reactions over the Antarctic early in the season.
“If Hunga Tonga hadn’t gone off, the ozone hole would likely be smaller this year,” Newman said. “We know the eruption got into the Antarctic stratosphere, but we cannot yet quantify its ozone hole impact.”
To me, it's all about rational return on investment providing economic incentives to achieve what we want to achieve.
My favorite example to explain what I mean is my own personal health insurance. I have a chronic medical condition that requires constant medication, frequent visits to specialists, and expensive medical tests and procedures. There is simply zero chance that I will ever pay enough in a monthly premium to cover what I cost. Meaning I am always a net financial loss for a private, for-profit insurance company.
This gives a private company every incentive in the world to obstruct and deny my care in hopes that I'll get frustrated and give up, or maybe even die and get off their books forever.
The government, on the other hand, has a positive financial incentive to keep me healthy. If I am healthy, I am working, paying taxes, buying goods and services that contribute to the economy, and hopefully contributing something beneficial to my community. Only the government (acting as a proxy for "society") naturally profits from insuring my healthcare.
This is why I believe we should have fully socialized medical care. Because there are some specific things that only the government has natural positive economic incentives that align with what is beneficial for the general public.
Whatever those things are, they should be socialized. And generally those things are basic life sustaining things like food, housing, medicine, education, utilities.
I'm fine with privatized capitalism in a very restricted, heavily regulated niche form. But all the basic necessities should be socialized.
Yes, but they're trying to figure out if that's where we're at or if this is a temporary blip from the Honga Tonga Honga Ha'apai volcano.
Most volcanoes that size would cool the planet by ejecting a bunch of ash and sulfur dioxide into the upper atmosphere. But the Tonga volcano was underwater, so it threw a metric shitton of water vapor into the upper atmosphere instead, and this has a warming effect. This is part of the reason for the increase in precipitation on the West Coast of the US this year.
Add this volcano on top of the near simultaneous flip into an El Niño pattern, and they're just not sure how permanent the warming we saw this year is going to be. But any way you go about it, this is really not good. We've just experienced dramatic warming from two things that we can't predict and can't control, on top of the part where we're not doing nearly enough about the things we can control.
Use Amazon as a search engine, find what you need, then Google the manufacturer and buy it directly from them. You'd be surprised how many have free shipping . It's usually not two day shipping, but what do you really need that fast?
If it's electronics, buy online for local pickup at Best Buy. If it's tools or house supplies, buy online for local pickup at Lowe's or Home Depot. Buy online for local pickup at Target.
I haven't purchased anything from Amazon in 4 years. It's honestly way easier now than it was before Amazon started, but no one realizes that because Amazon got them locked in.
Ah yes, that notorious occupation where Denmark systematically raped and murdered all those Norwegians, installed a corporate kleptocracy to ransack their natural resources for the profit of people half a globe away, and then spent the next 400 years funding coups and dictators to maintain that corporate control.
I don't understand the level of ignorance required to even begin to pretend like these were equivalent situations.
I think "several inches" is a bit overwrought. It's like one layer of leaves that will be mulched up the instant I mow next spring. And what is a "good idea"? What's going to happen? Some grass might die. Oh noes, the world will end!
We need to rethink how we live in all respects. And not depleting lawns of nutrients that we have to replace with artificial fertilizer is part of that
Usually I mulch mow my leaves. This year I just left them whole. We'll see come spring how much the anti-leaf doomsayers are correct or not. "It can kill grass!" they say. Well, I'm not trying to make my yard look like a golf course in the first place, so maybe let's start there.
Our institutions are not the problem, our policies are the problem. I want to see a transition to UBI, but a dramatic overhaul that dismantled WIC and SNAP before we got UBI in place would be an unmitigated disaster for the very people we were intending to help.
It's not the reform that I'm skeptical of. It's the lust for revolutionary destruction as a path to reform that I'm skeptical of. It's emotionally satisfying without regard to its actual efficacy in accomplishing the proposed reforms. Because history does not show us evidence that this works out well in the short nor the long run.
Please show me where I said to do nothing. Why don't you try imagining new ways of improving things rather than repeating the mistakes of the past? Of the revolutions in the 18th-20th centuries, I think only the American revolution accomplished anything close to what it was intending. And that's because it didn't destroy all the existing institutions while in the process of implementing new ones.
(Not that I agree with what the American revolution was intending, but we did get mostly what they set out to do without thousands of poor civilians starving to death in the process.)
