admiralteal @ admiralteal @kbin.social

Posts

0

Comments

795

Joined

2 yr. ago

It's also the logic of TERFs. Somehow, tolerance and acceptance are a zero sum game to them. Giving basic dignity to one population somehow requires taking it away from another.

It's utter horseshit, but they believe it firmly.

A centrist on gay rights likely sees that marriage is legal, culturally it’s acceptable, so why should they fight for more rights, they’re already equal?

But they factually aren't equal. It's legal to discriminate against gays in a variety of ways -- including in employment and, apparently, when selling business services. They are not a protected class in most places. They are directly targeted by hostile, criminalizing legislation all over the place. They aren't fighting for MORE rights, they're still fighting for equal rights and are far, far away from winning them.

Which means the centrist position, by your logic, is that gays should remain second-class citizens because they already got everything they need, even though it's still factually legal to discriminate against them? That's not actually different from the far right's position that it should be illegal to be gay. It's far, far away from the liberal position that people have a right to not be discriminated against. There's no moderation in that position. It's still the "kill some gays" position.

So no, I'm not incorrectly simplifying. I'm cutting away the bullshit. If you or anyone you know is a "centrist" on gay rights by the logic that they "already" are safe, those people are monsters. The only way to be a "centrist" in the way you have described is to be upsettingly ignorant. And if the entire philosophy of centrism is that these people are too ignorant to form a cognizant moral position, what are we even talking about?

The moderate/centrist position between "kill the gays" and "don't permit the killing of gays" is "kill some of the gays."

That's all there is to it. If you are a moderate on this issue, you're a violent bigot.

Every non-NATO state on the border will be targeted and incorporated either directly or by being turned into a loyal authoritarian state a la Belarus.

And if the US leaves NATO, that undermines confidence in NATO. The alliance will fall. At that point, either the EU will have to step in and supplant it -- in which case the US will no longer be even be PART of the mightiest diplomatic alliance in the world, much less influential in it -- or else there's no reason to think Russian aggression will stop endlessly escalating until all-out war between nuclear powers is on the table.

The entire purpose of this law is to define being anything but straight and cis as "sexual" in order to diminish these groups as part of an overall genocidal campaign against queer.

The criticisms you are making have been made since before it was even proposed. But the enforcement was ALWAYS intended to groom children to only know and believe in "traditional" values.

That's part of why the complaints sort of have to flow from parents in these rules; they trust the open-minded types aren't going to report Mrs. Johnson for talking about having a husband, but they know the Moms for Liberty folks are their loyal foot-soldiers and will be out with torches and pitchforks the moment Mr. O reveals he has a husband.

The long view of these laws is to continuously criminalize any kind of identity other than the tribe of straight white christian conservatives. Continue pushing the overton window over, a little bit at a time, until all ideas of civil tolerance and acceptance are dead.

Man I wish Obsidian were open source. Or that someone would just fully knock them off. It's the only notetaking app I've ever used that didn't feel like it was constantly fighting with me. Joplin just doesn't do it for me, especially with those jex files rather than just storing stuff in plain text.

Our of curiosity, which specific MS product is the one you see as most valuable / hardest to do without for IT security?

I can't imagine it's word or excel or anything document-centric. That's what most people think of when they think of MS Office, but in this day and age there are plenty of totally servicable alternatives. This from someone who both freely admits MS Word is the best wysiwyg editor and still refuses to use it. The sharing/collaboration stuff is pretty tight with MS Office, but my experience is that most people don't use it and just email around attachments even though it makes more savvy people want to pull their hair out.

I have to assume Outlook's the big boy, right? Email & sync? And then, I assume, there's lot of cloud services that typical end users don't even know is there?

Cool, that's nice. I'm on a different instance than you. It took hours for your comment to even federate, so the implication I'm trying to gotcha you through a self-correction made within 3 minutes of my original post and over 10 minutes before yours is totally bad faith and you know it.

Let's just be clear about what happened here though. I posted something correct about the entire idea of fat-phobia. That is, the way you avoid being fat-phobic is by just not feeling a need to whip out a soap box and tell fat people it's their fault and they've behaved badly to become that way there while knowing nothing about them.

And what did you do? You replied to me, immediately whipping out your soapbox to say that fat people are not "actual" vulnerable groups because anyone who's body doesn't doesn't match your subjective standards can "do something about being fat".

Then started this absolutely moronic verbal diarrhea about how being respectful of other people is somehow a zero sum game where if you treat one population with basic respect, it somehow waters down another group's need to be treated with dignity? Idiotic. Just idiotic. That's the "logic" used by TERFs.

Next time, just shut the fuck up. Seriously, all you had to say was nothing. This is a personal characteristic about someone and you just don't have expertise in it. You don't know what effort they have or haven't made. You don't know what other medical issues may be linked or causal. You don't know whether it's negatively impacting their health, and even if it were, it's still none of your fucking business. All you know is what you can see. Don't worry, the fat people already know you don't like looking at them, so this kind of signaling is unnecessary. Instead, leave them alone and don't preach about their lives of sin.

You want to talk about addressing things with "external stimuli"? Let's talk about the entire skin-bleaching cosmetics industry in SE Asia. The vast apparatus of plastic surgery in places like South Korea designed to change Asian-presenting eyelids to more culturally preferred western features. And don't even get me started about hair care products targeted at Black Americans. The long histories every country and population has pursuing goals to "pass". Telling people they must change to match the subjective standards of idiots for their own good, irrespective of what harm might be done to them along the way.

But what, all that kind of shit is bad and bigoted, but telling an otherwise-healthy but fat person they should get medical interventions because they look fat is fine? Leave people the fuck alone, dude. If there's medical problems going on, that's between them and their medical provider if they so chose.

Here would be an almost textbook example of what I mean when I say shaming people for not putting in the effort, for any onlookers that are curious.

Of course, the actual clinical data shows that it is nearly impossible to make permanent lifestyle changes that reduce weight for normal people -- all diets studies have almost hilariously high dropout/failure rates -- and that nearly all people who are not fat are not putting in any special effort to not be fat. But this guy's an expert.

The word "fat" is not a slur any more than the word "black" is. Sure, someone can use it with an intent to hurt, and if the only thing you know about a person is this single adjective you probably shouldn't be talking about them, but the word is just a description. And just like for "black", all the euphemisms offer nothing helpful and are largely spread by people who have not lived and understood the experience.

If you're worried about being fat-phobic the thing to be worried about is treating fat people like shit based on their physical appearance. Up to and including shaming them for "not putting in the effort" or lecturing them about how unhealthy you think they are based on the single point of evidence of their apparent weight.

And I have to say, I'd be WAY more fucking mad at someone calling me "rotund" then fat. Holy shit you have missed the mark on this.

This seems like an extremely potent tool for sealioning people. Thanks, I hate it.

The IRA is a fantastic overall piece of legislation that gives us a fighting chance. Most policy experts agree that it has a lot of very achievable goals -- thanks to its structure that offers uncapped subsidies for certain beneficial productions that are estimated to represent well over a trillion dollars in real investment, on top of the fact that renewable energy already out-competes fossil on NEARLY all financial metrics.

And if Biden loses, huge amounts of this progress can be undone by executive action, inaction, and feebleness by a Trump administration. Which he, I remind everyone has pledged to do.

If the bill lasts more than a couple of years, it will build its own constituency a la medicare and become VERY sticky and hard to remove. But it's very vulnerable right now.

So yeah, as someone who thinks climate is the top issue everyone should be caring about since it represents an existential threat to our entire human race, I think it's fine for Biden to focus for the next year on winning that election. If he wins that election, most of the very significant progress will get 4 more years to cure -- it will be pretty well locked in and indeed many growing industries will be craving more. Rural states seeing major investment for the first time in decades in the form of renewable energy industry will want more. It has the potential to be really transformational.

Plenty of solid reasons to criticize Biden. Climate is not one of them. He's made progress that is difficult to fathom for people who only have cursory knowledge of the US energy economy.

Really resembles a bill of attainder, to me.

We'd ALL be much better off, and a similar outcome could be achieved, by putting to law strict data security and privacy rules. Plus it wouldn't inevitably be challenged on very reasonable 1A grounds. But that isn't as politically possible because so many -- especially conservatives -- don't believe in the liberty of privacy.

Why is my view of the state of industry with concrete, affordable renewable energy technologies that are already available for purchase and rapidly scaling up just by market forces wishful? Why isn't your belief that nuclear will suddenly buck it's 50+ year trend of always being extremely expensive at least as wishful?

Not all production needs to be economic, mind you. It's fine for the state to pursue an expensive technology because it has some other benefit, and there are concrete benefits of nuclear -- specifically how firm it is, to the point where it's basically irresponsible to ever curtail it or adjust production based on grid demand. But capital isn't infinite and these tradeoffs need to be considered very seriously. On the flip side, spend five minutes searching for what the Georgia PSC has to say about the two new AP1000s at Vogtle. They are not happy at all about the cost overruns and failures. Would the next reactor cost less? Probably... so long as it starts construction soon before those couple thousand of newly-trained workers all find new jobs and progress is lost, as usually happens. But it won't, because no one wants to feel like the next sucker.

I'm totally pragmatic about this. It nuclear stops being ludicrously expensive, we definitely ought to pursue it. And if a new technology shows actual evidence and promise of making it more affordable, it's worth the R&D. But at least so far, it shows no signs of doing so. It's definitely not going to keep following the nearly Moore's Law-like learning curve solar has been on. The french are uniquely good at building reactors because of their long history and even still they are clearly signaling in e.g., their NECP plan that renewables are the primary technology of their future. They're pretty much the best in the world at it and they're still plainly chasing solar because of its affordability.

It's cheap fossil fuels that first pushed nuclear uneconomical, particularly natural gas.

But today, solar is already making those same fossil fuels increasingly uneconomical. If we transferred the $20bil/yr that current gets sent to the already-massively-profitably fossil fuel companies instead to grid upgrades, storage, and renewable investment, that'd be pretty fucking neat. We're already seeing rapid changes to the energy economy because of the reality of these costs. The trillion+ dollars being almost entirely directed to grid enhancements, under-served communities, and renewable energy that is the IRA is causing massive, sweeping changes to the world of energy too. Even if people on forums like these have decided they want to throw out that bill's swimming pool of babies just because one West Virginian took a dry dump in the corner in exchange for getting it passed.

The whole "very different type of power" thing I don't really buy. It is not a profound, cutting observation that the sun isn't always shining. The duck curve barely even exists when you have a good mix of wind and solar for most of the world since these sources are basically fully-complementary, and we already have lots of short and medium-term energy storage technologies that can be run for profit because of how cheap solar is. The market is already creating these incentives and businesses are moving in to fill the need; the technology exists or else isn't that hard to figure out. Overbuilding solar to the point of negative energy prices at peak production (& thus curtailment) will create huge incentives for storage. We're already seeing this; a handful of very serious industrial heat battery firms, for example, are offering products that take advantage of these energy price fluctuations that can be build and run profitably both for them and the firms that buy them. Markets are not a solution for all problems, but they are super goddamn good at wiping out arbitrage.

I've seen no evidence of Germany seriously considering spinning back up their reactors. If you have a source from within the last few months implying different, I'd love to read it, but as of last fall their energy ministry was completely dismissing these ideas as baseless rumors. I'd personally prefer it if they did, though; with the things already built, a lot of the cost is already sunk, and beyond that it seems worthwhile to get coal decommissioned.

France is a more complicated story, but it's impossible to deny they have a lot of successful nuclear capacity. But guess what they're pursing as their key generation platform for the future? It's solar. Because it's way fucking cheaper. Easier for them than most thanks to their massive nuclear base, no doubt.

Actual policy experts will tell you that the reason nuclear energy died off in the US in particular and in the world at large is not because of anti-nuclear environmentalist lobbies.

It's a financial question. What environmentalist opposition exists is neither sufficient nor necessary to explain the lack of nuclear development.

These projects get killed because they are almost hilariously expensive by any standard, including the cost per joule produced. They show NO signs of learning curves. Thorium is vaporware. SMRs have proven to be neither small nor modular. These projects get shitcanned not because oh no newcleer so skaweee. They get shitcanned because no one wants to pay for them when you can just do cheap natural gas and wind or even cheaper solar.

The hunt the nuclear fanboys go on to attack environmentalists is invented. It's basically false consciousness. The fossil fuel industry benefits from this strife.

For what a nuclear facility costs to build, buying equivalent solar would probably get you an order of magnitude more energy production, even factoring the additional transmission capacity you'd need to buy alongside it. You could almost certainly get at least the same value out of a combination of wind, solar, transmission, and medium-term energy storage. And end up with a far more resilient grid in the process. And also not be blighting a couple square miles of riverside real estate.

It's most likely a cause and effect reversal, in my opinion.

The conversation was happening because of the ads, not the other way around. Advertising works. It manipulates us into changing behavior, even without us realizing.

A real conversation makes you think about the thing being advertised, leading to you notice what would otherwise be totally below-the-radar things. People don't like to imagine they have been manipulated, so the conspiracy of the listening phone seems preferable.

Block all ads. All the time. They are bad for us.

They've known for at least 50 years that their product is destroying the planet.

Yet the plundering never stops.

It is not possible to be running an oil company ethically at this point. If you're working in the industry, you're one of the baddies.

Boring company/hyperloop is the clearest example.

Literally any subject matter expert on the subject of transportation can spell out a half a dozen things that make no sense/are actively harmful about all the attention and investment these projects got. Well There's Your Problem has a 3 hour slideshow on the subject, for example. Musk was even caught on the record admitting one of its motivations was to fuck with real transportation projects like California HSR. The whole thing was all-but-provably an elaborate con.

maybe not a four-wheeler or golf cart, since I don’t think you can drive those on regular roads

Look up your local neighborhood / neighborhood electric vehicle / low-speed vehicle laws.

There are some places where they are allowed. There's also a lot of places where the cops just don't care enough to do anything about it, at least so long as you stay off arterial roads.

Though I cannot recommend a cargo ebike enough. Long-tail or bakfiets, though I personally prefer the long-tails as they ride more like bikes and the racks on the back tend to be extremely versatile for mounting weird stuff. The cheapest good ones are around $1,200 with near-0 cost of ownership. Incredibly useful vehicles.