I strongly disagree.

In a lot of ”very complex” issues, the answers are really simple, and we all know fully well how to solve them.

This is particularly true of the large existential problems we are facing. With climate change, for instance, we have known the solution for a long time: stop burning fossil fuels.

What to do about it has been clear, straightforward and simple all along, but not easy – it would have taken sacrifice to achieve it. We’d have to live more simply, do away with consumerism and have to put things on hold while we find sustainable ways to do them. And we probably would have had to take enormous risks to our own lives, to stop those that wouldn’t aggressively cut down on fossil fuels voluntarily. Without any guarantees of success.

Even transitioning to a solar punk utopia would have been hard, including for those on board from the start.

All while the alternative to the solution is to to have long warm showers at will, enough cheap food that we can get really fat and still throw half of it away, intercontinental air travel that costs less than a bus pass, and so on.

It’s not because we have talked too little or that the discourse hasn’t been good enough that we can’t seem to solve it – our most brilliant minds have talked endlessly for a generation about climate change and how to address it. It’s simply because quitting our fossil fuels addiction is a bitter fucking pill to swallow. And pointless if you do it alone.

The same goes for the ”slow” slide into fascism all over the West, a.k.a. the steady concentration of wealth in the hands of dumber and dumber financial elites. (Not that it’s a separate issue from climate change.)

If you want to beat it, whether peacefully or not, you eventually have to accept that your next meal won’t be guaranteed and that, you might get beaten, arrested or even killed – hungry, tired and cold.

As our American friends have showed us, on this matter, the stakes of disruptive protests are not very appealing – it’s better to continue going to the office, get that paycheck that keeps the lights on, holds off the bank from taking your home and lets the fridge stay full, even if that means paying taxes to and serving those you protest in the weekends and in social media posts.

Tackling these issues does not require exceptional individuals, but a lot of ordinary ones working together, accepting that it’s probably gonna suck really bad. Even so, there is already an abundance of extraordinary people out there, notably Greta Thunberg (of this thread fame).

And yes, it does also take talk to bring those people together, but that talk won’t get you around the hard parts.

The billionaires are probably pretty content with people trying to figure out ”truthful communication” while the people who stormed the Capitol keep winning.

”I deal with the customers”

While you make some good points, have you heard the expression ”talk is cheap”? There’s no lack of talk.

traders on PolyMarket

Funny way to describe degenerate gamblers

It’s possible to not give a fuck about Taylor Swift, but still care about her and her fellow billionaires outright destroying the world while glitzy magazines treat them as main characters in a soap opera, just going about their glamorous exploits and intrigue. It is fucking stupid to celebrate Taylor Swift’s anything, for as long as she remains a prime example of everything that is going wrong in the world: massive hoarding of wealth in a winner takes all economy obsessed with intangible assets (notably brands and song rights), excessive personal consumption and burning of fossil fuels, hyper commercialized culture mostly void of artistic expression.

I don’t mind people that like her songs, but I’m fairly certain Swifties should be designated a death cult.

On the one hand yeah, on the other: meh – any benefits by doing something good will soon be offset by something twice as bad. Coal powered AI pump and dumps, subsidies to airlines and regional aiports that replace aging railway networks, infinite more lanes on highways.

I think good public policy at this point is putting alcohol and microdoses of barbiturates in the tap water and outlawing good looking people wearing clothes in public. These are achievable goals within any of the political systems currently accessible to us, beating climate change is not.

I find it interesting, from my own experience, that video games often are comprised of structured problem solving within clear boundaries and with explicitly stated goals: In many ways it closely resembles something we’d describe as work. Do a unit of work, get a point. Get enough points, you win. Only, the real world is nothing like that. In fact, it’s becoming increasingly less like that with corporate intermediaries and algorithms that are added on top of everything, e.g. empoyers’ Applicant Tracking Systems that automatically throws your job application in the trash because it didn’t include some keyword, or whatever.

I think focusing on the dopamine kicks from the games’ rewards misses part of what make video games effective escapism from many alienated youths and adults. It’s the game themselves that are the escape.

BUT HIS INTERNS WROTE IN ALL CAPS. HE’S A GENIUS, SOME SAY NO ONE HAS NEVER DONE THAT BEFORE. EPIC. THANK FOR YOUR ATTESTATION OF THIS MASSAGE.

Hate that shit, Reddit’s decline started when individual users started to become sanctioned superusers and did away with the veil of equal-ish participation.

Generally all things done there to scale your feed based on recent activity suck too.

It’s infuriating how much time and energy is extracted from everyone chasing hidden and arbitrary metrics that serve some opaque corporate interest.

16 h is too much for pussies

To clarify, this is the answer Turdburglar seeks

I get that people want to see regulations on landlords, etc, but naysayers here don’t seem to have considered that it might be easier to convince would-be tourists that a place isn’t a relaxing holiday destination than it is to get a majority of the right level of politicians to agree to draft complex legislation in opposition from monied and powerful capitalist interests. Targeting tourists is totally fair game and good strategy, that doesn’t rule out pursuing regulations as well.

Yeah, taking the service down is an acceptable solution, but do you think Open AI will do that on their own without outside accountability?

I’m sure that’s true in some technical sense, but clearly a lot of people treat them as borderline human. And Open AI, in particular, tries to get users to keep engaging with the LLM as of it were human/humanlike. All disclaimers aside, that’s how they want the user to think of the LLM, a probabilistic engine for returning the most likely text response you wanted to hear is a tougher sell for casual users.

The same fund was recently caught having invested in an Israeli company that’s made bank during the war, maintaining Israeli jets making bombing runs on Gaza.

As a non American, I’m so weirded out by people hyping Newsom’s* lame trolling as the second coming of Christ.

It’s a real dumb country to dominate the world, and despite all the suffering it will involve, I’m glad it’s finally collapsing. All the best to you non-insane people living there though, I’m rooting for you (but not betting on you, yet).

*His Gen Z social media staff

*reign

Aren’t donkeys notoriously rebellious?

I mean, if you’re doing a full weekend of activities with friends those beers could be spaced out far enough that you’re never more than slightly buzzed (small cans, <5%ABV). But yeah, if it’s a regular thing, it’s not a great look.