admiralteal @ admiralteal @kbin.social

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2 yr. ago

Can you link to the article? I am not seeing it on Reuters: https://www.reuters.com/site-search/?query=Meloni
https://www.reuters.com/site-search/?query=Meloni+tucker&offset=0

And the picture is from a different article. As is the dateline.

Believe you have found a piece of DIP.

My implication is that if we really wanted to get Bin Laden / Al-Qaeda, the more sensible targets were Pakistan or Saudi Arabia. Which of course we didn't go after. We had a goal of spilling some Arab blood, but wanted a target that would be a cooperative punching bag.

And even then, we still fucking failed. Al-Qaeda still exists. Or it was consumed by/transformed into/always secretly was just a branch of Daesh who are still going strong. Or maybe they weren't really a coherent organization in the first place and were always more grassroots/franchised. Not to mention the Taliban are right back in power and doing their same shit. We accomplished nothing more than running the best possible recruitment campaign for the next generation of west-hating religious extremist warriors.

Yes, they see them as property to be used.

But even in that stupid, dehumanizing framework it still ought to be one of the issues of "parents rights" they love so much. Your child's privacy being violated is a violation of your property rights. YOU didn't consent to that child's privacy being compromised, and they are a thing that belongs to you and can only exist according to your beliefs and rules, so that was an attack on you.

So the real truth is that to conservatives, there is no coherent ethical framework they can turn to to reliably make judgements. It is the politics of being a cruel and obstinate asshole.

Not just stepped up to the plate, but went pretty much all-in on a COMPLETELY pointless invasion against what was almost certainly the wrong country.

That's how committed they were to NATO.

Man you must be fun at parties.

The guy said it was part of his job to explains things. You can chose to be bad at your job struggle, and be stressed about it. Or you can make a change to be more inclusive and make things easier for yourself while you're at it.

But go ahead and be an asshole. Seems to come natural to you.

The good news is, the guy did resign. So I guess he agrees.

Didn't you know? The right to privacy somehow only protects adults and not children.

Are you using "picture this" literally or figuratively?

Because aphantasia is actually a lot more common than you would think -- I see estimates range something like 1-5% of people.

So if it actually matters they literally picture something in their mind, I recommend strongly having a prop or sketchpad ready. Some people literally need it.

If NATO is not offering its full promises, these "lower tier" NATO members will quickly find new allies in the form of the petrostates and China instead.

Trump doesn't care. He thinks the tinpots around the world love him and will support him.

He's right, of course, but not for the reasons he thinks he is.

You have fundamentally misunderstood the interoperability that is being discussed re: podcasts and drawn a totally spurious conclusion.

You can connect to nearly any podcast using as little as an RSS reader. You can build your own podcast app TOMORROW and that app will be able to access pretty much any podcast from any network (with very narrow exceptions for the worst actors, e.g. Spotify exclusives, NPR One, etc).

The only purpose of the various platforms is boosting discovery. There's nothing oligarchic happening there; for pretty much all of them listing your podcast is free. There's also absolutely no necessity to use any particular platform's discovery tools or to list your podcast on any platform. It's totally fine to distribute it yourself, via a link, using whatever means pleases you. Your "podcast discovery platform" could well be your local bookclub's email list -- and while the quality of that discovery may be worse, it in no way inherently limits what you can access. Even if you use that platform's app, it should still generally be possible to add any podcast via RSS URL (if any major apps don't support this, they're behaving in a deviant way).

There is absolutely nothing oligarchic in general. At least for now, so long as the fucking fuck fucks at Spotify don't get their way.

Pretty sure if e.g. the US manages to pass a carbon fee

But it won't. Politically radioactive. And in the meantime, you could've been advocating for policies that actually have traction. That build constituencies instead of tearing them down.

But whatever. You've got Faith in this policy and there's no point arguing with it.

George Shultz, one of the founders of CCL, was literally one of the guys who helped Regan craft his economic policy vision, and I'm sure many of those he brought on with him were part of that field too. I don't just call anything Reaganomics, but I DO call this shit that way.

If you seriously want to hear different voices, I recommend you start with David Roberts at Volts: https://www.volts.wtf/

He interviews everyone, has clear opinions, and backs up his positions with practical politics.

(edit: maybe start with this one?: https://www.volts.wtf/p/do-dividends-make-carbon-taxes-more )

I already told you my actual solution. You didn't listen.

we continue along the path of e.g. the IRA and invest heavily in alternatives, renewables, and infrastructure development. Fossil fuels are already a significantly more expensive energy source than solar and wind and that gap will only keep growing wider, ESPECIALLY if we delete fossil subsidies. And those learning curves are how we will kill fossils worldwide. Why should a developing nation with flexible climate ethics be importing Russian coal when they could be building renewable energy production that does not require importing a suspect commodity that will be even cheaper for them?

It will then turn out to be completely uneconomical to use fossil fuels at their true price, as it should’ve been.

Renewables are ALREADY out-competing fossils joule for joule and learning curves are only making that delta bigger over time. The US has seen a spate of utilities buying up coal power plants just to shut them down because it is so uneconomical to operate them, yet still we have politicians vowing to support coal just because they like it / to own the libs.

The issue is that there are people who want to use fossil fuels. Many nations' entire economies depend on it. So they'll keep doing it. They'll sell and use the fuels in places that don't tax them, if they have to. They'll literally build demand. They'll push to get every molecule out of the ground and sold, even as returns diminish.

Not to even get into the conservative lunatics who want to keep using them on principle, even knowing they are an economically bad deal.

Even if you could get a carbon tax passed in the US (which is a giant, giant, giant "fat chance"), it'll have more leakage than the tattered Depends worn by all of our politicians.

Meanwhile, like with any tariff, the people hurt most by this carbon tax won't be the producers. Saudi Arabia is not going to agree to pay our taxes. Instead, it'll be the end consumers. Regressively, with the poorest and most vulnerable consumers who cannot afford to immediately electrify hurt the worst.

The philosophy of the IRA is the way to win this fight. Invest, incentivize, and do it progressively. Building a constituency all the way.

Why does CCL, an organization that was founded by a bunch of neoliberal/Reaganomics businessmen specifically to advocate for setting up a carbon tax, advocate for a carbon tax. Hmm, let me think about that for a few minutes and get back to you...

There's so many voices in the climate movement saying the same things I do -- that chasing carbon taxes and similar politically radioactive policies is terrific waste of time and that we should instead focus on building incentives and public works towards research, infrastructure, and energy investment. But chase that white whale, have fun.

I didn't make any statements about whether this employer had behaved illegally, so I am not estimating anything, over or under.

I am saying that victims should first talk to labor attorneys because there is a lot more you can do. The playing field is flatter than you think. Taking this to battle-by-media should not be the first response or starting point, it should be pretty far towards the end of the war.

If they are in some way dodging contracted benefits like severance, are in any way defaming the employee, or are trying to prevent unemployment claims, it is going to be illegal to invent cause. People really misunderstand "at will" and think it means that an employer can fire you for any reason at all. It doesn't. It means they can fire you for no reason at all. They cannot fire you for a protected, illegal, or fake reason, and they still are going to have to honor your contract, make good on the unemployment, et cetera.

There really isn't any difference between a "no cause"/at will termination and a layoff. Maybe some fine technical points, but for the layman it's the same thing.

And in many states what a previous employer can say to a future employer as part of a reference check is limited -- in Cali, for example, any "malicious" statements can get you in a lot of trouble. If you suspect a previous employer might be doing this, talk to a labor lawyer.

Recording and trying to go viral with these exit interviews is the wrong response if you feel you are being wronged. Sure, record it (if it is legal to do so), but definitely do not upload anything until you have talked to a labor attorney.

Plenty of other ways from a carbon tax -- not least of which because the carbon tax has itself proven to be a convenient industry distraction that sucks air out of the room.

Especially since it's not clear removal tech will ever be able to ramp up sufficiently to cover continued burning.

A carbon tax is an albatross. It's not even worth seriously discussing. It's ten steps beyond politically infeasible -- probably even more infeasible than actual prohibition. It's innately regressive even if you try to do weird structural things like progressively returning the money (because the return is just going to be economically inefficient and complex tax codes ALWAYS benefit the poor and vulnerable the least).

And most importantly, the fossil fuels have to stay in the ground. We have already pumped out too much and we must move towards pumping no more.

The fossil industry would in many ways LOVE for a carbon tax solution because that would be the exception to prove the rule that continued extraction will be allowed forever. That their business model, which has plenty of cash already, can drill baby drill.

And in the meantime, we continue along the path of e.g. the IRA and invest heavily in alternatives, renewables, and infrastructure development. Fossil fuels are already a significantly more expensive energy source than solar and wind and that gap will only keep growing wider, ESPECIALLY if we delete fossil subsidies. And those learning curves are how we will kill fossils worldwide. Why should a developing nation with flexible climate ethics be importing Russian coal when they could be building renewable energy production that does not require importing a suspect commodity that will be even cheaper for them?

This is a heartbeat of history; people who can profit off of the suffering of others will do so remorselessly.

So many other stories you can look up. Obvious shit like climate change or smoking, where it's well-known how unrepentantly evil the industry has been in suppressing the science and research they KNEW indict their product.

For an equally-tragic but less-well-known story, you could look into the Radon Girls. That's a heartbreaking saga of corporate malfeasance where the bad guys basically got away with it.

If you like podcasts, this is narratively similar to the content in two of my favorites. You're Wrong About and Well There's Your Problem. The former is more about cultural moments and moral panics, the latter is oriented towards the arrogance and carelessness of engineers (though sometimes is just historical stories).

Everything is owned by members of the public. That is not a clever argument.

There's no reason to be subsidizing this. It is not necessary nor helpful for the health of the city.

Not being geometrically sustainable means that a city with good planning doesn't lean into it. It's not the "result of poor planning". You can't change the laws of geometry with planning. Cars are an inefficient and ineffective transportation plan outside of the countryside and cities should only support them the bare minimum necessary while encouraging other forms as primary - subsidizing them by providing free/mandatory parking is leaps and bounds beyond the bare minimum and can quickly put to death sustainable urban growth.

When in the midst of a housing crisis we should not be devoting city resources to these intensely inefficient, regressive uses.

And that the thing they are most concerned with is labor organization.