megopie @ megopie @lemmy.blahaj.zone

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13

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279

Joined

2 yr. ago

Suburbs, are inherently higher carbon emitting that proper urban areas. For an extreme example, if everyone in the US lived in an area with similar characteristics to NYC, it would reduce the counties carbon emissions by 3/4.

Beyond that, they’re only really able to exist, as they do in the US, thanks to exploitative and predatory economic practices. Almost no one who lives there makes their money there, they work somewhere else, extracting value, and then bringing it back to the suburb to fund incredibly inefficient infrastructure.

I’m not saying ban them complete, I’m just saying, take away the massive amount of economic incentives and support that makes them possible. Build out housing in cities and ensure the value generated in them goes to funding their services, infrastructure and development of the cities.

Make the suburbs pay for them selves and they will nearly disappear very quickly.

Yah, Plenty of liberals shit them selves when you suggest giving an unalloyed good away for free.

The term environmentalist has so much stupid baggage tied to it.

I’m tired of having to share labels with people who refuse to do anything other than small superficial personal choices. Folks who will baulk at the suggestion of a carbon tax, their energy bills going up, more nuclear plants being built near them or, subsidies and infrastructure for low income people who are seriously hurt by such changes.

This is a systemic problem that requires systemic changes that will fundamentally alter things we take for granted right now. It’s going to suck and it’s going to be hard, there is no easy simple way out.

The US didn’t have a base in Israel till 2017, it’s never really been a significant base of operation for US forces. Us forces have more presence in basically every country in the region with the exception of Yemen, Egypt and Iran. Hell, there’s even a base Syria.

Deranged logic, Israel is not a strategic keystone to the survival of America.

Like, even if one has drunk the Flavoraid enough to think that what Israel is doing is ok and that it’s not an apartheid state that needs the South Africa treatment; in what fucking reality is Israel not eminently replaceable in the role it plays in US foreign policy? if anything, it is a net negative, a dead weight dragging down US relations with the rest of the region.

It routinely takes unilateral action to throw gas on the metaphorical fires of the region. Like, allies have their own goals and ambitions that diverge sometimes, but you’d expect them to converge occasionally and not actively attempt kneecap each others diplomacy.

It’s just not the same without the Dracula flow guy

If you think that’s bad wait till you hear about fly ash, chemical plant byproduct disposal and pesticide run off.

“Oh, there’s my ammo!”

Others have pointed out there a private company, but to be more specific on what that means, they are not openly trading their shares. The majority of shares are all owned by a handful of people who care about the long term health of the business. A lot of companies that we see doing major face plants right now are publicly traded, so any big fund or individual with enough cash can swoop in and buy up enough shares to control leadership, then use that control to get the company to do stupid stuff generally or maximize short term profitability at the expense of long term health.

A similar thing can happen if someone with a majority of shares choose to sell too a ghoul.

Which is to say, the average person is in fact not stupid, they are average. By definition.

Look up a bell curve, most measurements of intelligence that have been conceived end up making a bell curve distribution. That’s your answer, most people pool up around the middle with smaller tails on either end.

I think the problem is that a lot of political discourse is super constrained, most of these polls are “do you like trump or like Biden” there’s no option to express the opinion of “I hate both of them but one slightly more”. Of course that’s going to create weird results! If they have to twist the answers to get there displeasure across and scare the DNC in to taking them seriously, that’s what they have to do.

I think there is possibly a dissonance being created by how lobby money influences the thinking of campaigns. Say voters care about reducing fossil fuel dependency, say they care about ending support for Israel, say voters care about ending for profit health insurance, say voters care about breaking up corporate oligopolies, these are all toxic pills to many donors. Campaigns don’t feel they can endorse or condemn these things, so they refuse to even engage with the topics. These incredibly important political issues are just... removed from official political discourse, thus such things are kept out of the polls or reduced to anemic platitudes, so people can’t accurately express what they care about.

Younger voters are pissed at the democratic establishment and there is no statistical data based way for them to measure why. So the democratic establishment is left flailing in the dark, boxing with ghosts because they’ve blinded them selves to issues that pit their continents against donors. WHICH ARE THE MOST IMPORTANT ISSUES FOR MOST YOUNGE VOTERS.

Excuse me, the Shark Punching Center would like to have a word.

It’s soap. Like, traditional, no frills soap. Vegetable oil reacted with potassium hydroxide. It’s a very effective way to make oils mix with water so as to rinse them off of stuff. So if you just want a substance that removes excess oil from your body, it works.

Basically no other major cosmetic company sells a product like that anymore and if you don’t trust those companies, that’s what Dr. Bronners is for. Just gotta deal with the ranting on the bottles.

I don’t think it’s bad, I just think it’s funny that so many men will refuse to wear jewelry unless it’s a watch.

“ We promise it’s not just jewelry for men, promise, because men don’t wear jewelry. This is just a tool, and maybe a status symbol, but definitely not in the way jewelry can be a status symbol.”

On a related topic to weird hippie products.

I really hate the changes that Tom's of Maine has made since they got bought out. They stopped packing their toothpaste in metal tubes and went to plastic, and they separated their deodorant in to “male and female” lines, and it’s been getting hard to find their unscented deodorant. They got bought out a while ago admittedly, but the changes have been coming on faster lately.

Like, the new ownership is trying to make them more competitive with other brands, but I always liked them for what made them different from the other big brands and it drives me up the wall how often such good products get ruined by the companies being bought out.

Yah, these kind of things don’t tend to work as well as marketing people think. The influence is marginal, and mainly a grift on the part of the company selling them.

The name is a lie, it is not great

It allows them to control the appearance and impression of the products more. A huge amount of store design is based around making the stuff appealing and thus increasing the chance you buy it.

Hence the huge pyramids of apples or the bountiful overflowing stock of vegetables. They’ll generally not even sell a half of what they end up stocking, but if they just stocked what people were likely to buy the shelves would look barren and off putting, and people may be less likely to come back there.

Even if a glass door on these fridges was perfectly functional and arguably better from the average person’s point of view, the screens give the marketing team more opportunities to spin their products. The goal of a store is not to provide you with what you want and need, but to convince you that you want and need things you don’t actually.