Daniel Quinn @ danielquinn @lemmy.ca

Canadian software engineer living in Europe.

---

Read more

Posts

12

Comments

663

Joined

2 yr. ago

Or the cost of cars in the midst of a cost of living crisis. E-bikes are cheap by comparison and only about £14/year for electricity.

Nope, it's the complete opposite.

I can make different choices tomorrow: buy a Ford F-150, swap my heat pump for a gas boiler, and start buying more disposable crap and the resulting impact on the problem would be negligible. It's nice to think that my individual choices matter, but on the scale that matters, they don't even move the needle.

The Ford F-150 should be illegal and gas boilers should be banned or at least more expensive than heat pumps. That moves the needle 'cause it's collectively applied to the wider public and (more importantly) the economy as a whole.

The problem comes with the idea that "I'm one of the people who needs to change, therefore my changing is progress". While this is technically true, it's effectively irrelevant because at the scale we're talking about, individual contributions are statistically insignificant.

This is exactly why companies like BP & Shell have pushed the idea of personal responsibility so hard. They've reframed the debate into something about personal virtue rather than collective responsibility to ensure that nothing changes.

It's one of the most insidious ideas around activism, that "voting with your wallet" works.

Or, we start incentivising e-bikes,

There's nothing wrong with encouraging individual action, only in suggesting that in doing so they're solving the problem.

I stopped driving 20 years ago, cycle or transit everywhere, drastically reduced plastic and meat consumption, etc. etc. and while this all makes me feel good/righteous, it hasn't actually solved anything. There are perhaps 1 million people in the world applying similar efforts. They too probably feel good about themselves, but the world is still on fire.

The vast, vast amount of people will never change on ideology alone. Partially due to things like financial or class limitations, but also just limited knowledge. I've lost count of the number of times I've had to explain to people just which plastics are recyclable, which tech is more sustainable, which foods are more environmentally healthy, and what the best options are for heating your home. It's just too much for most people. Their minds are busy with other things like, "how will I pay rent this month?". You gotta remember how many people vote based on lies they hear on TV or even just which party uses their favourite colour.

It's a constant battle that cannot be won by individuals and allowing ourselves to think that we've accomplished something by "doing our part" is precisely why we're still having this conversation 50 years after global warming was identified. We need collective action that limits harmful acts while promoting helpful ones and you can't do that alone.

The easiest way to confirm this would be:

1. Find out how to list the metadata from a PDF.
2. List the metadata from a known-to-have-stuff-you-don't-want PDF.
3. "Print" the new PDF from the old one
4. List the metadata from the new PDF.

So long as it's understood that "we should buy less stuff" translates to "legislation reducing carbon dependent travel and mandating repairability" and not "if only everyone made the same decisions as me".

The former has a measurable effect, while the latter is just something we do as individuals to help us feel better.

Yeah that's what I figured, but I have no idea how to adjust the frame rate when extracting the audio stream :-(

I always wondered about this. I have the same TV series as local MP4 files: one with English audio, and another with Greek. I thought I could just extract the audio tracks and use them to build an MKV file with multiple audio, but it always ended up with an audio sync error. One track would always be in sync at the beginning, but 20min in could be out of sync by as much as 5seconds.

How do people build multi-audio files if the audio tracks aren't part of the original source?

Imagine that. If you go out of your way to present absolutely no vision for a better future and instead side with Tories repeatedly, you won't inspire anyone to vote for you.

Who knew?

I think they're grossly overestimating their support on the Left. There's no reason to vote for someone who won't make the chances you know are necessary.

Right? This was so educational!

I was thinking of something like this actually. A shell script that rsync's the save files to my home server on startup or something. I've not heard of "Decky", so I'll look that up before I start trying to roll my own, thanks.

Yeah that would have been my go-to, but I've been playing on my Deck almost exclusively for about a month now so... no games on the desktop :-(

In the end, I decided to just open up the console in Fallout 4, input a few cheat codes and get (most of) the stuff I lost. I guess I'm mostly wondering if I should report this as a bug or something.

DNS is hierarchical majesty.

Great, do whatever you want. Just shut the fuck up about it, nobody cares.

You should really take your own advice on this one. That "article" was juvenile.

It appears to be using JavaScript to count down, and JavaScript uses a browser's local time by default rather than something sensible like UTC. Someone else has noticed it in the Mastodon thread: https://aus.social/@USSJoshuaNorton@trekkies.social/111656784005786289

https://lemmy.ca/comment/5867903

I'm not him, just someone sharing his story.

Or, they back him and acknowledge that they supported genocide but have since realised how wrong they were?

I have no idea, but here's a screenshot: