TheDemonBuer @ TheDemonBuer @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

It would not collapse.

I don't know how you can be so certain, but you could be right. It doesn't make any difference, though, because that's not what's happening. Trump isn't going to prison. If there's something you think you can do to change that, go for it.

I think the political establishment is more concerned with maintaining stability than pursuing justice. They're desperately trying to hold together a system that, as you point out, is falling apart. It may very well be a futile effort, but I understand why they're doing it. Especially since our system was never really set up to prioritize justice in the first place.

I get that a lot of people are ready for the whole thing to just burn to the ground, and that might have always been inevitable, but if/when it does happen, it's going to suck. A collapse of the United States wouldn't be pleasant.

I would.

I know, but clearly not everyone would, and those are the people making the decision.

Yeah, but you can see why people who don't want to see the US federal government potentially collapse into chaos wouldn't want to try it, right?

I feel like the courts hands were tied here. How do you put a man who was just elected to be the next president in prison, or even on probation? Ultimately, the decision was made by the American voters.

That being said, even if Trump had lost this election, he still probably wouldn't have done any time in prison, since he still would have been a former president, and that would have been a tricky enough situation.

Partly. The hospitals, clinics, nursing homes, etc can be private, but I think there need to be laws in place stipulating that they must be not-for-profit organizations. But, the health insurance should be a universal, public, single-payer insurance. It's essentially the Canadian system, only I think I'm Canada healthcare providers can be for-profit companies.

"Climate change risk is real, just much slower than alarmists claim," Mr. Musk wrote to his 211 million followers on X, the social media site he owns.

What the hell does that mean? The risk is slower than alarmists claim? Who is making claims about the pace of climate change risk? Can he name a single, credible person? And which risks, exactly? How far up his own ass did he have to reach to pull this out?

"We sound like a broken record but only because the records keep breaking," said Gavin Schmidt, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, which monitors global temperatures...They will continue to break until we get emissions under control."

To be clear, "get emissions under control" means reach net zero emissions as quickly as possible.

But the world is not getting emissions under control. In fact, last year countries released record amounts of planet warming gases into the atmosphere, even as the consequences of climate change have become painfully clear.

Because we have built global civilization that runs on fossil hydrocarbons. And it wasn't an arbitrary choice, they contain a lot of energy, and we need energy. A fuck ton of it, and more every year.

What we need to do, more than anything, is to start thinking about energy. Everything takes energy, and we treat it like it's free and infinite. It ain't.

There is a legitimate reason for insurance companies to involve themselves in the healthcare market, and that is that many, if not most, patients don't have the cash available to pay for all of their necessary medical services. Healthcare services are expensive, for a lot of complex reasons, but one reason is that healthcare providers can be greedy, too. Many healthcare providers are also for-profit companies, and they want to maximize their profits as much as possible, also.

Enter health insurance, which spreads those costs over a large base of people, thus making healthcare services more affordable. Health insurance sucks, but without it, very few people would be able to afford anything other than relatively basic care. That is unless you happen to have tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars laying around.

So we have healthcare providers, equipment manufacturers and suppliers and pharmaceutical companies all trying to maximize their profits, and then health insurance companies as well, and it's a recipe for absolutely exploding healthcare prices.

The thing is, healthcare is always going to be relatively expensive. Doctors and nurses are skilled workers, who spend a lot of money getting an education, so they deserve to get paid. Medical equipment and supplies aren't necessarily cheap to make, neither are pharmaceuticals. Providing quality healthcare is just always going to have certain costs associated with it.

Profit, however, is not a necessary component to this. Adding to the price of all of these things to generate a surplus that goes to owners and investors is just unnecessary. So, profit should be eliminated from healthcare, full stop. No more for-profit hospitals, clinics, etc. That will help, but only so much. Even without owner/investor profit, healthcare would still be too expensive for many people. So, we absolutely need to spread those costs out, but not among the customers of many different private health insurance companies, but among the entire population of the nation.

Healthcare providers must be not-for-profit (but still regulated, because executives at not-for-profit companies can still be greedy assholes, and need to be kept in check), and there must be a single, national health insurance provider that everyone is required to pay into, through a progressive tax system.

China’s reported levels of respiratory infections are within the normal range... [HMPV is] not a new virus,” Harris said. “It was first identified in 2001. It’s been in the human population for a long time. It is a common virus that circulates in winter and spring.”

Source

I've felt for a while now that there is more than one kind of nationalism. One is supremacist, colonialist, and imperialist. This, I think, is the nationalism people think of when they think of nationalism. This is the nationalism of Nazi Germany, for instance. It's the nationalism of people who believe strongly in hierarchies, especially ones that they believe are "natural." They believe that some individuals are inherently superior to other individuals, and they believe that some groups are inherently superior to other groups. They seek to establish hierarchies of power within their nation, but also between nations.

In the context of today's world, in which the US is the dominant global superpower, American "nationalists" believe that the US is inherently superior to all other nations, and, therefore, that the US global hegemony should not only be maintained, but expanded. They believe it is right and good and natural for the US to rule and dominate the globe, because, in their mind, we are just superior to all other nations.

I think there is another kind of nationalism, though, one of people who seek independence and autonomy for their group or nation, usually from an imperialist power. It's one in which people who value their distinct culture and history want to see to it maintained and preserved. They don't believe their culture is superior to all others, they just believe it should exist without interference from outside groups.

I understand and sympathize with the latter kind of nationalism, but I do not understand, and I in fact hate and despise, the former. I do not believe that any group of people is inherently superior to any other. I reject supremacism in its entirety. I believe that any nation has just as much right to exist peaceably as any other. I wholeheartedly reject colonialism, expansionism, imperialism, and supremacism, but I support the right of any nation to exist, on their piece of the Earth, with their distinct culture, independently and autonomously, so long as they can do so peacefully.

Over the past few months, I’ve spoken with psychologists, political scientists, sociologists, and technologists about America’s anti-social streak. Although the particulars of these conversations differed, a theme emerged: The individual preference for solitude, scaled up across society and exercised repeatedly over time, is rewiring America’s civic and psychic identity. And the consequences are far-reaching—for our happiness, our communities, our politics, and even our understanding of reality.

I've become more and more isolated as I've gotten older. I'm in my early 40s now and I sometimes go several days in a row without interacting face-to-face with anyone other than my wife. I text with my brother pretty much every day, but he lives 1,000 miles away.

I have plenty of opportunities to be around more people, but I rarely want to. That's not to say that I wouldn't like to interact with people more, it's that I don't want to interact with just anyone. I want to spend time with people I want to spend time with, there just aren't very many of those people around me, and if my only options are: spend time with people I don't enjoy spending time with or be by myself, I'll choose to be by myself. If there were a third option, to spend time with people I like spending time with, I would take it because that would be my preferred option.

Awesome. I'm glad to hear it because I think that's the way things are going. Arm, or maybe even one day an implementation of RISC-V, just make more sense for handheld devices, where power management is very important.

...people are still talking about rules, laws, ethics, the constitution, and everything else that USED TO matter.

That's because they still believe in the existing institutions that were designed to uphold laws, rules, and ethics, even though those institutions are obviously failing, and have been for some time. I suppose the erosion of said institutions has occurred gradually enough that the full scope hasn't necessarily been apparent to everyone, but it should be by now. Anyone who still believes that these institutions are sufficient for maintaining a stable liberal democracy is just delusional, at this point.

Dude off the top of my head Balatro (won many Game of the Year awards), Vampire Survivors, Terraria, and Minecraft all have Android ports.

Well, then you should be able to play those games on smaller handhelds running Android, of which there are several.

I wonder if Valve plans to release an Arm version of SteamOS. They'd have to for it to ever show up on a device like the Miyoo Mini Plus, which uses an Arm based CPU, instead of the x86 based CPU in the Steam Deck, and other Windows handhelds.

Right now I think the OS of choice for Arm based devices is Android, which works well enough, but I don't think very many PC games are ported to Android.

The title of the article is: 'Jimmy Carter Wasn't a Liberal,' yet here they say,

It would be wrong to call Carter himself a conservative. He was instead a Southern liberal, which meant that from a national perspective he was a somewhat conservative Democrat.

So, which is it? Is he a liberal or not? They can't seem to make up their mind.

Also, the article says that Carter helped usher in the Reagan era, which is true, but the political paradigm that reached its zenith in the 80s under Reagan was neoliberalism.

We here in the US really need to stop using "liberal" to mean left wing. It's stupid. Let's join the rest of the world and start using words correctly, maybe open a book that covers a part of the world other than the US.

Liberalism is not necessarily left wing. In fact, I would argue that liberalism is generally center to center-right. Some liberal ideologies are further left than others, for instance social liberalism, but that's only one kind of liberalism. The dominant form of liberalism over the past forty to fifty years is neoliberalism, and it is definitely a center-right ideology.

So, yes, Jimmy Carter was a liberal, he just wasn't a social liberal, he was a neoliberal, which is center-right.

Their sustainability solution states that we don’t see any evidence of ETIs because rapid growth is not a sustainable development pattern. From this perspective, the Kardashev Scale is rendered futile. No civilization will ever use all available energy from its planet, star, or galaxy, because the growth required to reach that level of mastery is unsustainable.

I think that makes so much sense. I don't think it makes sense to define "advanced" as a civilization that grows at a rapid and exponential rate, like a plague of locusts, depleting nonrenewable resources and causing irreparable damage to the only human habitable planet known to exist in the entire universe. Even if it can be considered advanced, it should also be considered extremely unwise.

although I think the fault may more fall on the folks that want trump in office.

Sure, but there isn't anything the Democrats can do about those people, other than, I suppose, to try and change their mind somehow, or, I guess to try and get Trump to run as a Democrat. But I don't think that's possible, or desirable, do you?

Over 90 million eligible voters didn't vote for either Trump or Harris in 2024. If Democrats had managed to get just a few percent of those people to vote for them in key swing districts, she would have won. I think they could have done that without having to "act like Republicans."