Externalized costs to subsidize profits for fossil fuel companies?! In my grocery cart?!
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Yeah, the Master Settlement Agreement with big tobacco is probably the best analogy for this. In fact, the fossil fuel industry used (and still uses)) what’s called the “big tobacco playbook” when arguing against climate change and the need for regulation. That’s where you do things like fund scientists to come up with contradictory findings that you can point to in order to say that the facts aren’t all in yet.
The MSA was the beginning of the end for big tobacco - although the end really is taking a lot longer than it should have. They were ordered to turn over all of their internal documentation (now digitized and available from UCSF), stop using things like cartoon mascots and giveaways, and so on. They still win at some cases (like putting graphic warning labels on packs), but there’s basically no pushback on the health consequences anymore, and I think e-cigarettes are going to be the thing that kills them off if we let them.
But it’s a different legislative and judicial environment now. I don’t think the states and courts are going to come together like that again.
I have a 3p app that still seems to be working. I don’t log in, so I only read occasionally, but I have to say that the number of upvotes seem much higher than when I was using the site. I was a very active user who quit during the exodus (when Apollo went dark), but I don’t remember the number of upvotes being regularly in the thousands to tens of thousands.
It makes me wonder whether they’re artificially boosting traffic ahead of the IPO, to be honest. I mean, if they are, it probably would have leaked by now - but it still feels like it doesn’t line up with the third party traffic reports.
In any case, I think that going public is just going to increase the pressure for monetization, and Spez has already said how much he admires what Elon did with Twitter, so I think we know where it’s heading. It’s really just waiting for a replacement. Whether lemmy can be it or not is yet to be determined, but the enshittification has started and the migration will come as soon as someone drops a couple of billion building a service and app that’s a real substitute for the casual users.
Shark, as long as we are on land. I’d just outrun him then call coup by hitting him with a stick while he’s gasping for air. I guess at that point I could take on a blue whale, but that would just make me feel like a dick. I’ll stick with the shark. Any shark, any time, 1.5 miles inland.
Smalltalk would probably make more sense than C++.
This is a hot take.
Here’s the problem with your hypothesis:
You’re mixing together people who don’t vote with people publicly advocating not voting. That’s completely unsupported. Let’s see some stats on why people don’t vote. Is it because they don’t have time because they’re working, because they’re uncomfortable with the process, because they’re being lazy? On the other hand, what are the predictors of voting? We know age is a factor, so that would encourage us to think about the time availability question.
The second part is that the disengagement approach you’re advocating has driven the Democratic Party to the right. The Third Way movement came entirely from seeing Reagan’s engagement numbers. Not voting casts a zero information signal. First, the numbers only move mildly from year to year, and even when they do it tends to come down to the charisma of the candidate, not the policy positions.
A surprising number of Americans want universal healthcare, support LGBT rights and are against racism, yet vote for Donald Trump or DeSantis because they can get the crowds riled up in the way that policy wonks just don’t.
I mean, when the republicans did that huge study that found that economic and demographic changes in the US meant they needed to adopt more progressive policies (eg not being openly racist) if they wanted to have a future, the gop said “screw that, we will just depress the vote.”
So, no, your policy is not evidence-based, and it’s unreasonable. It forces the country to the right. If that’s what you want, go for it.
By whom?
Do you think the Palestinians are going to fire on aid vessels? Do you think Israelis will fire on American military vessels?
Yes. These should be made illegal, or restricted from on-road use. As trucks increase in size and height, there are studies that they become more and more dangerous. They should be banned for safety reasons.
Return it as it was shipped with a hardware bug.
I feel like the battleship Yamato in the documentary Star Blazers has already demonstrated that it is completely viable to launch a naval vessel into orbit and have it perform with excellence.
Just as a note, though - nukes in space work completely differently than nukes in the atmosphere.
I’m actually pretty well read on the subject, both from the 18th to 19th century literature and from modern Marxist and other socialist economists. I’m also a biologist who has a bit of a specialization in pro-social models of behavior from a mathematical perspective and who derives data from real world observations and experiments.
The idea that capital controls the labor market is fairly central to the Marxist approach to capitalism. Both Marx and Adam Smith attributed dynamics to conscious actions that today we, as sophisticated systems theorists, would come up with better models to explain. They had an attitude towards human action that in some ways were the forerunner to modern sciences of collective behavior, but they’re still ridiculously primitive compared to modern theory.
Again, I am not the only academic to make this point. You find it is ubiquitous in modern Marxist literature. There are still some traditionalists, of course. I’m sure you know a particular white bearded professor who has what I honestly believe is the best introduction/course on Capital ever created. I honestly really like his work.
But what I don’t like is when communists or socialists refer to themselves as “Marxists.” I particularly don’t like it when they shoot down an idea using something that was written by someone in the 19th century, as if we haven’t had multiple revolutions in understanding economics and the science of complex systems since then.
What I’m saying is that you can read Marxist forums on line, and you can read Marxist academics publishing papers in Marxist journals, who argue that so-and-so is wrong because Marx(or whomever) said X. Nobody, and I mean nobody, quotes Darwin to refute a point in biology. Darwin was a genius, but he was a product of his time and got some very basic and very important stuff completely wrong. Ask a biologist about it and they’ll tell you it’s completely wrong and we figured it out a hundred years ago. They won’t canonize Darwin, even if they really really want a Darwin bobblehead for their desk.
Again, and I cannot make this more plain and I am not the only academic to say this: it’s called evolutionary biology, not Darwinism. I have friends and colleagues at places like the econ department at the New School, and they refer to what they do as “economics.” That’s where I’d prefer things to go.
What an absolutely believable conclusion announced by an absolutely credible organization that has no motivation except to publish the unvarnished truth.
One of the most frustrating things about academic Marxism is that it hypothesizes that “capitalists” (whom they bung together with remarkable aplomb) do things like figure in the reproduction cost of labor. They don’t. They’re focused on the next quarter and maybe the next year. Maybe even the next five years. But no one ranging from Elon Musk to (not sure who his opposite would be so I’m kinda taking a stab here) Warren Buffett is thinking in terms of generational replacement. First, they’re not going to live that long. Neither are their shareholders. Plus capital is mobile - it’ll just go someplace else.
This is a headline precisely because it’s a man bites dog story. If your company gives you paid parental leave it’s either because it’s legally required or for retention. It’s not in the hope that the little toy will become a software engineer at the company in 25 years.
The West is not “continuing the war at will.” That phrase has no meaning in this context. The West is supplying Ukraine with the means to continue to resist the illegal Russian invasion.
The West would in fact have the right under Just War theory to enter into combat operations in Ukraine against Russian forces, and to operate combat operations against Russia up to and including invasion. Because Russia is the aggressor, Just War theory gives other nations the right to participate in the resistance of aggression.
I prefer the traditional recipe that uses actual shepherd, but they’re getting harder to find these days.
I haven’t looked into their finances specifically, but $327k sounds like how much money they probably make in a 15m window on a Tuesday afternoon.
In college, I had a fellow student with a similar condition. Although he’d often use a wheelchair to get around, it was not at all unusual to see him using his arms to walk around campus.
In multiple occasions, I saw him do a takedown tackle of another student and basically wipe the ground with him. He didn’t even look completely muscular - although he did have really good definition on some of them - but he was so damn strong overall just from the way he got around that he’d just thrash them.
Plus, there’s no way to socially come out as winning a fight with a person who has no legs. There’s no way not to lose that fight, it’s just bad versus worse.
This same thing happens every couple of decades. In the 70s and into the 80s, no one wanted to buy a Japanese car - or virtually any Japanese products. They were considered inferior to their American-made counterparts (cars, but also electronics like radios and TVs). The inferiority of Japanese products was regular material for stand up comics and late night TV. The only reason, we were told, that anyone was buying their products was that they were dumping them on us at a loss. Now, Toyota isn’t synonymous with “cheap piece of crap import” but is considered a quality product that rivals American automakers. If you can tolerate a large dose of regular old establishment racism and want to flash back to how America saw the Japanese in the 80s, check out Michael Crichton’s Rising Sun. Or really about 70% of what was produced in the 80s, I guess, but that one is a keeper.
Fast forward a decade or two and they were saying the exact same thing about Korean cars. Same with Korean electronics in general - why buy Korean when you can buy Japanese?
Now it’s Chinese cars. I’m sure in the next decade or two it will be Vietnamese or Indian cars.
Making someone eat saltines plus peanut butter plus sardines sounds like a war crime.