admiralteal @ admiralteal @kbin.social

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2 yr. ago

I see the biggest protest in history as the first Earth Day Protests, which had some absurd number like 1/10 of everyone in the US, out to protest.

And it solved pollution forever

It's not a lie. There's no malicious intent. It's just not even wrong. It so fundamentally lacks understanding of the underlying bureaucracy, technology, product lifecycle, and surrounding politics politics that it amounts to nothing.

And the overall point still stands. We should be skeptical of these kinds of intrusions into our devices from the state. We should resist them as a default posture.

You legitimately do not understand that there are alternatives to YouTube. It's fucking embarrassing.

Give me quality service for what I pay, or I go elsewhere.
Apparently not. You'll keep going there no matter how much you claim to hate them.

And that's no small part of why Google has such market control. Because people like you give it to them enthusiastically.

PS: it's Rumble. That's the actual alternative (with a HEAVY emphasis on the "alt" in "alternative") you could use to watch Rossmann if you really are so passionate about how bad Google is. Plus Rossmann also is one of the cofounders of GrayJay.

Not that you're asking for an argument, but I do want you to know why I, and many like me, find this whole life-from-conception argument totally ethically unpersuasive. And it's not the usual nonsense of "it's just cells" because, as you well know, that's an unimpressive and pointless debate. Whether a fetus is a human or not is fundamentally subjective. And so I'll grant that it is, because I have total confidence in my pro-choice position even then.

The issue with the pro-life position is not that it asserts that abortion is bad. Frankly, I don't give a crap if you or anyone else thinks it is bad. Again, that is subjective. A personal preference. The issue with the pro-life position is that it always seems to assert that abortion must be banned and even criminalized. That's what pro-life is. It doesn't mean "I think abortion is bad", it means "I think abortion should not be allowed."

My position isn't that abortion is good. Mine is that the pregnant person has a right to choose. I think the moral calculus on when and whether it is good or bad is FAR too complicated to form a rule, and so we must leave it up to the biggest stakeholders to figure that out privately.

I think a lot of things are bad, but having a preference against something is different than justifying use of the state's violence to prohibit it.

A Defense of Abortion by Judith Jarvis Thomson, PDF - 1971. Hardly new, and I doubt you've never seen it, but ultimately it is still the line of argument that I do not think has been convincingly rebutted. This essay is still probably the most sound and straightforward work of philosophy that shows that banning abortion is impermissible in an ethical society, and it presumes life from the moment of conception just as you do.

My extreme summary of the point it is making: at the end of the day, you have two competing human rights. You have the right to autonomy of your own body against another's right to life. Both are undeniably rights a person has -- and highly related ones, at that. When these rights are in tension, we need to make a choice as to which is supreme. And the consequences of giving life supremacy over autonomy are disastrous compared to the consequences of giving autonomy supremacy over life.

Rather than empower the state to take any and all actions necessary to protect life, we instead must impose a limit on the power of the state -- it may not violate someone's ability to make choices about their own body functions, even if to protect the life of another.

I'd prefer to be in a world that has no abortions at all. Just as I'd prefer to be in a world without contagious disease. One way to get rid of all contagious disease is to systematically euthanize every sick person at their first sniffle. Problem solved! Such is an abortion ban.

We get rid of disease by investing in research and healthcare and doing our best to use it maximize efficacy with fair triage, vaccination programs, etc.. We get rid of abortion by preventing unwanted pregnancies from the get and by creating a world so supportive and safe for pregnant people that they do not want to terminate it.

I don't believe you do because you would've linked to it instead of YouTube. You claim to hate that business, yet you direct people to engage on it.

You're getting on a moral high horse about how it's fair and right to pirate from YouTube because of their bad behavior, yet when given a free alternative platform to view the videos from a creator you respect enough to link, you don't. You go to YouTube.

Let's give an example:

I think you underestimate how much pirates and the opposition truly hate google and their practices and the lengths they will go to in order to get the content they want.

Apparently not very hard at all, since there was a totally Google-free way to get the content you want that supports the creator even better and is free and yet here you are not using it.

So you could be using and supporting alternate platforms, but YouTube is so valuable to you that you don't bother.

Lockdown doesn't require password unless your device settings require password -- it normally just kicks it back to requiring pin. Which is still quite secure. I don't know what you mean saying it is disabled by default -- it is available by default if you long press the power button and click Lockdown.

Even better is to reboot the device. Then it will be in lockdown mode -- pin required -- and also encrypted awaiting the pin. A modern device fresh from a restart should be quite hard indeed to crack without some alternate access to the person's Google account.

What other video platforms does Louis Rossmann upload his stuff to, by the way?

He does, you know. But I notice you aren't watching him there.

I mean, I'm a happy, paying subscriber to Nebula. Any content where I have a choice to watch it there, I do. It's stupidly cheap, too. Usually you can find a promo to get it for under $20/yr.

But I am also not pretending that Google owes me free & ad-free YouTube on my terms. They don't. Nor do the creators owe me uploading their videos to my platform of choice. I'd prefer both these things to be true, but I at least can understand that it is not reasonable. YouTube, frankly, is probably the ONLY killer product I couldn't do without made by Google, other than some open source software.

People should pirate all they want. I don't really give a fuck. I don't consider it some great moral evil. But pirating from YouTube is not some symbolic, ethical stand for your values. If you really think what they're doing is bad, stop using the service and pressure the YouTubers to upload elsewhere (which they pretty much ALL could do without consequences from Google). The entire platform only exists because of advertising. Period. If you hate ads as much as I do, pay for the ad-free versions.

Grade A tankie shit is taking advice on how to respect religious freedom and human rights from Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, Syria, Bahrain, Tunisia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina.

But YouTube Premium is incredibly reliable, unlimited, famously has very little content moderation, and is full of enjoyable content? (i.e., all of YouTube)

I think you just don't want to pay.

You think Google pays "shitloads for ad revenue to creators"? Is that why it's so rare for major creators to rely on sponsorship deals to be their primary stable income?

There is no "possibly" about it. Right now, solar is the cheapest form of electrical generation ever, in human history, and it is still getting cheaper. It has literally seen price drops of more than 2 orders of magnitude in my lifetime. It is, without a doubt, going to be the primary means of energy generation for the future of our species, assuming our species is to have a future.
It's hardly something the Chinese can claim as their achievement, though. There's a large economy for solar panels -- and frankly, the Chinese production ramped up in response significantly to Californian demand under their (now besieged) rooftop solar policies. A lot of players are involved from research to production to demand and any one country that claims it's all thanks to them is sweet-talking you.

The Chinese are also pretty cognizant of their emissions. Might be weird to hear, but I've been working on a painful research project for the last few months and see a lot of very frank discussion of it in the research. Example, which starts with a pretty matter-of-fact statement about the "unsatisfactory" state of recycling and carbon emissions in the Chinese construction industry.

Clearly, this kind of frank writing doesn't get you in trouble with the authorities. They know they have a problem that will need to be addressed. They aren't bullshitting about it. Their officials aren't pretending the problem of climate change is made up woke propaganda they can ignore. And they have a command economy, so they can simply order businesses, labs, and universities to focus efforts on developing solutions.

Lot of bad things to say about China. It's an authoritarian state led by a dictator. They definitely put the economy ahead of addressing climate issues. But the also see the harsh reality -- failing to address climate will destroy their economy. Failing to address climate will result in anyone else who does out-competing them on the global stage. And soon.

I don't think there's much for consumer single heat pump systems that do both. I've seen a few, especially with geothermal systems, but mostly it's just a tiny heat pump built into the cap of a traditional water heater.

Worth pointing out that the nature of a heat pump is that the housewide heat pump is first pumping warm air into the house to make it available for the water heater, which then pumps that warm air into the water. So it is just one big machine, fundamentally. Or, if your air conditioner is running, the water heater heat pump is adding some cooling to the space.

The criticism of the heat pump water heater: they're loud. A high frequency compressor buzz while operating. If you are switching to one, make sure it is located somewhere where the noise won't bother you. Mine is in a mechanical room in the middle of my house and it is annoying when operating -- I program it to run at night and close doors when going to bed. If I could do it over again, I'd put in in the (insulated) attic in spite of all the risks involved in that. More hot air available for it to use up there anyway.

Big "guns don't kill people, people kill people" energy.

Facebook has the resources and personnel to maintain basic ethical standards for whom they sell their products to and how they are used. They chose not to because it is more profitable to chose not to. This isn't either/or. You blame the operators of those websites AND you blame big tech.

We need to stop pretending it is remotely OK to behave without any semblance of humanist morals in the pursuit of capital. It isn't. It never was. It never will be. Anyone who tells you profits need to be prioritized over ethical standards, in any situation, at any time, for any reason, should be committed.

Or places like Amsterdam that regularly rank top cities for drivers because they can afford good planning and maintenance on their svelt network. Because people who don't want to drive just don't.

It's easy for a small town like you described to have just brutal congestion. And they routinely do, in the US, when the whole town is a highway offramp wart off an artillery feeder road made up of commercial parks and box stores. They end up with chains of back to back streetlights and tons of left turns across traffic and are always a headache to get through - not to mention dangerous. And they're the most universal sight in North America.

Also the cities that have the most investment in things like multimodal public transit are also the best cities to drive in. If you just genuinely want or need the car those cities are better then the cities designed for the car. Designing for the car creates the worst outcomes for the car.

Parking requirements were established in an entirely unscientific way. And they've never really been updated.

A city with a lot less parking would be one that was easier for Grandma to get around in even if she was getting around in it in a car. People with significant disabilities are pretty much the only ones who should expect parking when they go to places.

Ironically, the US by some metrics has more freight rail than anyone else.

We're just using it to carry around rocks and coal and shit, and putting literally everything else in trucks. We SHOULD be using the trains for rocks and coal and shit, don't get me wrong, but it'd be nice to put some other stuff on it.

But the class 1 railroads mostly own the actual track and right-of-way. Norfolk and all their moronic lot. They're slaves to the lines going up and pass on good, sensible business expansions that would make them lots of money just because it would lower their profit percents by some tiny margin. Everywhere else in the world, the rail and right of way is a public good even if the service on them is deregulated.

Meanwhile Cincinnati just sold the Cincinnati Southern Railway to Norfolk Southern for a short-term cash injection. Fucking idiots. Norfolk TOLD them they were undervaluing the line by offering to buy it and they sold it anyway. And now that's one more route that has 0 chance of ever having meaningful passenger service.

Who's erasing anything? Christ man, I said 1960s and cited the 1956 law that represented the profound changes happening then. And yes, news flash, this is postwar. Cut this disingenuous shit.

And yes, it was the postwar era that heralded these changes, leading up to an explosion starting thanks in significant part to the construction of the Eisenhower system.

Stop pretending that the prewar streetcar suburbs have ANY similarities to postwar era "suburban experiment" development. They have no bearing on each other. After WW2, out of terrible fear of returning to a major recession, the entire country instead devoted itself to massive, massive, massive debt spending to build entire whole-cloth developments, to keep the wartime economic machine going. We expanded vast highway networks to encourage longer-distance commuting. We offered incredibly cheap, government-guaranteed, 30 year mortgages for single-family homes. We began the process of cinching down hard to "urban blight" (i.e., poor, productive neighborhoods). We updated building codes with completely unscientific mandatory parking minimums. We made it increasingly illegal to build anything but R1a residential or huge apartment developments. We changed our entire urban model to the one everyone grew up with -- suburbs and strip malls.

And it all happened within the last century. Well within it. Postwar, starting in earnest in the 1960s and only starting to slow down in the last decade or two as more and more cities had the bills start to come due and have realized the total insolvency it has left them with.

You can show me a picture of pretty much any neighborhood in any city and I call tell you whether it was a pre 1940 or post 1950. The difference is dramatic and obvious and I don't believe you if you claim otherwise.