UnderpantsWeevil @ UnderpantsWeevil @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

Ducks: ducks are cool and not to be under-estimated.

Maybe 20%, with another 60% that just wasn’t worried about it very much.

Enough that the Liberals were on their way to a historic wipe out absent Trump pissing all over the Canadian export industry. Pierre Poilievre was fully on the American bandwagon, straight up echoing Republican talking points word-for-word in his campaign appearances, prior to January. The 60% that "wasn't worried" was happy enough to support a Vichy Canadian government practically days before the vote.

Fascism was trendy and influential in polite circles all through the 1920’s and early 30’s.

Comically easy to forget how half the English royal family was Nazi-pilled right up until the bombs started landing. Or that American big business profited handsomely from the reconstruction of the German War Machine.

Folks really don't like to think further back than 1941 when it comes to global political history. And even then... Yalta might as well have had Stalin airbrushed out.

I bought it and really tried to use it, but the reality was just too clunky for primary use. It has no dpad, a single crappy convex analog stick, terribly placed ABXY buttons, horrible shoulder buttons, and just a bit too much input lag on the trackpads.

Hard truths.

Why did they feel the need to replace analog controls with these weird, inconsistently responsive, difficult to map touch controls when every other console platform had already demonstrated why that's a bad idea?

Was the SC innovative, bold and ahead of its time in many ways?

NO. It was kitsch and poorly engineered and obviously not play tested sufficiently before release. It was a hobbyist's attempt at reinventing the mousetrap that got shoved into a major distribution pipeline when Playstation and Nintendo and XBox had already demonstrated why you don't build controllers this way ten years earlier.

If you can provide her with 1960s health care and living costs, she might be willing to sell you her house for 1960s real estate prices.

Would you be replacing her hip for an authentic 1973 mint edition Jefferson Nickel?

Grandma is not the problem.

You can't go blaming the institutions for the high cost of living when it is very clearly this one anonymous old person who isn't giving this other anonymous young person a sweetheart deal out of misplaced nostalgia.

Fun Fact: There are 16 million vacant homes nationwide.

Okay, but a bunch of them are in the Rust Belt, where de-industrialization eviscerated the economy and caused a mass exodus to the Gulf Coast and the Mountain West in pursuit of lower wage service sector and sales employment.

I suppose you're going to claim that the wholesale restructuring of the manufacturing economy was the fault of a handful of 90s-era Wall Street bankers and Corporate Executives, rather than millions of Boomer-era suburbanites with pocket change in their retirement accounts 40 years ago?

Likely. Fucking. Story. This is just bigotry against the 1% is what it is.

Half of Canada was fully on the Trump bus the day before the tariffs hit. Canadian conservatives are as rife with MAGA anti-environmentalism, xenophobia, and rabid imperialism as their peers in Michigan, New Hampshire, and Idaho.

They just don't like being on the receiving end of Trumpism.

Edit: We'll see who is getting downvoted once the Alberta Separatists are running your biggest oil wells.

No politician is ever gonna run on a “no meat” platform lol.

Plenty do, in countries where the agricultural industry isn't dominated by animal farming.

When meat over-production threatens the general quality of life, the issue flips from an anti-consumer issue to a luxury waste issue.

Just like with private jets and super yachts, the issue only becomes untouchable when your slate fills up with anti-populist corporate flaks.

when covid hit a and fewer people where buying plane tickets there where a lot fewer planes in the air

Thousands of Planes Are Flying Empty and No One Can Stop Them

In January, climate activist Greta Thunberg tweeted her disbelief over the scale of the issue. Unusually, she was joined by voices within the industry. One of them was Lufthansa’s own chief executive, Carsten Spohr, who said the journeys were “empty, unnecessary flights just to secure our landing and takeoff rights.” But the company argues that it can’t change its approach: Those ghost flights are happening because airlines are required to conduct a certain proportion of their planned flights in order to keep slots at high-trafficked airports.

This is important.

It's the downstream consequence of decades of outsourcing, kicked off in earnest in the Reagan Administration. "Right to Repair" is just the tip of an enormous iceberg of military privatization.

Money that could be redirected into more important stuff, but alas our corrupt politicians will find other things to waste it on.

That's the nut of it. This money is being wasted in the general sense. But it isn't wasted in the eyes of crony legislators and bureaucrats who see themselves on the receiving end of the kickback stream.

This goes back to the BBB and its rampage through some of the most high efficiency Medicaid programs on offer, in order to shuttle somewhere between $175B and $541B (depending on who is counting) to a national security system that's just legions of badged up bullies harassing locals for the entertainment of a few hooting chuds.

why can’t the military fix their own equipment or farmers fix tractors?

Because

and SaaS is how corporate industry has decided it will continue to grow its profits indefinitely.

Was on the beach in Cozumel and had a raccoon that lived in a stack of surf boards solicit me for nachos.

He did the little 🙏 gesture and then stuck out a tiny paw. Came back half a dozen times once he realized we were suckers for this act.

Hands down, favorite part of the trip.

They aren’t producing that meat for the fun of it

They're overproducing because they're heavily subsidized and operating under a functional price floor thanks to the wholesale market and industrial application of their products.

Grocery store ground beef is practically a waste product. Agg Business produces far more of it than they can ever hope to sell retail.

Its still true that less meat would be produced if less people purchased it

Less people in a single dense region, sure. If half of New York went meatless, you'd see a sharp drop in beef sales to the Five Boroughs.

But if you distribute those 4M people across the entire Continental US, there's no market mechanism to reduce distribution that granularly. All you're impacting is relative expected future profit margins per venue. No single business has an incentive to reduce wholesale purchases.

When populations are starving to death in 2044

You don't have to wait. Sudan, Yemen, Gaza, Haiti, Chad, Afghanistan, Syria... All undergoing starvation level famines right now.

when I buy from them, they’re polluting on my behalf.

But that's just it. The plane doesn't burn less fuel because you didn't buy a ticket. Hell, I've been on planes that were half full (in the wake of COVID).

They're polluting whether you are on them or not. The only remedy is regulation / downsizing / nationalization. There's no future in which people individualistically shrink the industry. No more than you could have saved someone's life in Iraq by not paying your taxes.

Sure. Vote with your wallet.

But 52.4 million tonnes of edible meat are wasted globally each year. Roughly 18 billion animals (including chickens, turkeys, pigs, sheep, goats, and cows) are slaughtered annually without even making it to a consumer market.

This is a systematic problem that can only practically be addressed at the state level. Meatless Monday isn't actually reducing your carbon footprint because you're not actually the one emitting the carbon.

This isn't like saying "I'm going to burn less fuel by driving less" it's like saying "I'm going to burn less fuel by not taking the bus".

Silicon Valley turtleneck was just the Mao Suit of its era.

Jeff Bezos saved hundreds of billions of dollars by downsizing his wife.

Israel does not have a future after this.

If Germany and Japan could have a future after WW2 - a war they lost categorically - Israel will do just fine in the coming decades, after successfully executing a full ethnic cleanse of some of the more valuable real estate in the Mediterranean.

Israel isn't a rogue state, it's a cat's paw. They're doing the dirty work as a proxy for allies who have wanted to wipe Arabs off that corner of the map for decades. In the end, however, you're going to see western states welcome Israelis back into the fold with open arms, just so long as they can pin this all on Netanyahu and pretend it wasn't a national project with the full support of the Israeli public.

I would say the big distinction between Ukraine and Gaza is that in Ukraine there has been a meaningful (and enormously lucrative) project to arm locals in opposition to Russian invasion. It's been of dubious success, given how much territory they still lost. But its difficult to say that the Biden Era government (or even Trump Term 1) wasn't willing to shovel arms and mercenaries into Ukraine in an effort to cripple Russian advances.

In Gaza, the Israel blockade has gone virtually unchecked - outside of a few salvos from Yemen and some allegations of support from Iran and Hezbollah. Americans are supporting the genociders not the victims. There is no Gaza military left to repeal an invasion nor is there any appetite for a Hamas resistance to repeal IDF advances. At this point, it's little more than a shooting gallery.

There's a line of combat between Ukraine and Russia. There's nothing in Gaza. Just Israelis and their private security contractors kettling and massacring neighborhood after neighborhood, then flagging bulldozers to knock down the houses when they're done.

British Palestine (and other Mid-East / North Africa states) were notable in that they were far more accommodating to Jewish peoples than the European continent had been. They were colonial territories with large international trading hubs that were already pluralistic and accommodating to foreigners. And they weren't carrying the baggage of a few centuries of Inquisitions and Pogroms.

Until the Shah was installed in '53, Iran had one of the largest Jewish populations in the world. Ethiopia and Sudan had hundreds of thousands of Jewish people living contentedly in its borders until the '70s, when civil war and famine ripped the country apart. And prior to the Holocaust, there was an enormous flight of Jewish residents to the Americas.

Now, primarily white militant European settler colonialists might have trouble setting up an intentional community of Zionist radicals anywhere. But there's no reason to believe Argentina or Madagascar would have been materially worse for them than British Palestine.

Gaza is the latest in a long line of atrocities committed by countries ostensibly committed to a law of armed conflict.

Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria... hell the US interventions in Somalia and the former Yugoslavia were as horrifying as they were criminal. Sometimes we can find an exigent threat that gives us permission to use overwhelming force to brutalize the bad guys - as in Iraq '91 with the Kuwaiti invasion. Other times we just have to make some shit up, as with Grenada or Vietnam.

But this idea that we've had an international order for any of the last 77 years is more a reflection on the quantity of our propaganda than the quality of our international ethics. The total war Israel is conducting in Gaza, while the US hovers overhead threatening to flatten any Egyptian or Jordanian or Lebanese who attempts to intervene, has been historic in the degree to which far more cushy liberal rhetoric has been replaced with full-throated endorsement of ethnic cleansing.

But the policies themselves? We manufactured a famine in Afghanistan shortly after withdrawing the last US troops. We have repeatedly blocked countries with socialist governments from accessing international markets to obtain relief, such as Bangladesh in '74 and Ethiopia ten years later. Somalia has been under near constant assault by US Navy vessels "policing" the most lucrative fishing territories, driving up rates of piracy as a substitute for traditional subsistence farming. Then you've got the '91 famine in N. Korea and the '94 Cuban hunger crisis, both the consequence of US blockades.

Any one of these would be considered a modern-day Holodomor from the perspective of an objective outside observer. Unfortunately, Americans only get to hear about Gaza - and even then only in dribs and drabs on social media or alt-news publications - as they turn away from the traditional corporate-friendly press venues.