That’s true, I kinda blocked that period out of my memory

That is however assuming they need a trifecta to pass legislation, and that they can only pass effective climate legislation at the federal level. Again this is something republicans have mastered, they take every boring race at every state they can and dig in and try to fuck shit up to advance their shitty agenda. Some states and cities have been relatively aggressive about this, such as California, Oregon and New York, but ultimately they could go further

Democrats aren’t dreaming big. They aren’t rallying around a noble but difficult to achieve cause like Republicans rallied around banning abortion for the last half century. Like I get it, they also aren’t doing as much blatant saying one thing publicly then passing legislation to do the opposite, and their causes aren’t about making everything more expensive for consumers and enriching large businesses, but god damnit I want to see people start trying to actually make a better world and dream big and make big changes to achieve that

Many fast food cups lack the structural integrity to hold the quantity of liquid that they’re supposed to without a lid, and using a lid necessitates using a straw

Idk about you but my ass has burgers

Laws related to plastic straws are like the only environmental legislation that’s been passed recently (aside from the Inflation Reduction Act’s various environmental policies which hell yeah) which is what they’re getting at. Democrats are only able to pass the tiniest of laws to reduce environmental impact and Republicans are out here actively trying to genocide queer and brown people.

If democrats were just 20% as aggressive as republicans at actually passing policy to advance their agendas this country would be in a far different place. There’s a reason prominent democratic representatives have been talking about how much their constituents are demanding they actually take action and do something, it’s because they haven’t been doing much for the last 20+ years.

The Fight For 15 has been going on so long that the $15 minimum wage they’ve been demanding is now worth the same as the current federal minimum wage ($7.25/hr) was when The Fight For 15 first started! The fact that they couldn’t even raise the federal minimum wage to match inflation when they had a majority in all branches of government 5 years ago speaks volumes

If we had politicians in power who actually cared about the environment, we’d have personal vehicle weight limits, all EV new car sales, remote work incentives, ebike and public transit incentives, solar panels on every roof, single use plastic ban, strict emissions limits for industries, a carbon trading system to further financially encourage lower carbon business practices, strict ewaste controls to route working systems back into service that otherwise get junked, etc. Etc. instead all we have is gestures at everything

I’m still riding the bike my parents got me when I was a teenager, and these last couple of years I’ve easily put several hundred miles on it. Heck I’ll probably ride it in about an hour to go pick up my kids from school. For school pickups and dropoffs over calculated a conservative $10 a week saved in gas consumption by biking instead of driving, plus I start my day envigerated rather than annoyed about school traffic

Do not the bees

start taking apart things that are no longer necessary to build the things that are

Hey finally a good use for all of those cars, grab the alternators out for small generators (since bicycles are the ultimate apocalypse vehicle: simple, small, easy to maintain and don’t require complex fuels)

My kids are old enough to start using computers and smart devices but young enough that the best thing we can do is limit them to certain sites, so basically they only poke around on pbskids.org and play games or watch shows there. I’m not sure what I’ll do when they start learning to explore more, but we definitely keep a loose eye on what they’re up to whenever they’re on any kind of computer no matter what.

Only parental controls we use currently is there’s an old phone that the kids sometimes use which I locked down with Google Parental Controls to block most apps, downloaded some kids games (play pass is super good for kids games and can be shared amongst family members so $20/yr for all family members to have access to a ton of paid apps) and time limit them so they can’t spend too much time when we aren’t looking on the phone

In HG Wells The Time Machine, the main character travels all the way to the very end of the world and the last creatures on the planet were some gigantic crabs before he travels forwards and finds a completely bare world

Nah I think Ubuntu is more Mormon than anything. It’s heavily influenced by other branches like Protestant and Catholic but also spends a bunch of time going and doing it’s own thing that everyone else agrees is weird and different and probably wrong

The worst part is coal is such a terrible fuel there’s no good reason to keep doing it. We’ve already mined most of the accessible coal that can be easily mined, and we have better fuels now that burn cleaner and more easily than coal, and even for the odd one-off usecase where coal is the best option we have modern alternatives that contain no coal and burn similarly.

Killing coal is one of the easiest wins Humanity could achieve because it’s entirely outmoded but moneyed interests keep it on life support for no reason other than money

I couldn’t agree more. My pet theory is that those who enjoy slots haven’t tried better video games yet, and that the mainstreaming of video games will slowly kill slots off.

The issue is that people ‘follow their passions’ and then later find out there are no liveage wage jobs in those areas, and act outraged and like life is unfair.

We should be building a world where this is not the case! We should be building a world where people can become skilled at something without significant cost and shift careers when they decide they need to. Even better, a world where careers are optional and people just do what they need to to contribute to society and can otherwise enjoy life

Sorry, I just have no empathy for the tons of people who get an edcuation, then throw it all away because they didn’t get the dream job they think they are owed who actively refuse to apply to jobs that are ‘below’ them.

Remember these are life-changing decisions made by teenagers, a cohort specifically known for making poor decisions and not considering long term ramifications of these decisions. Yes everyone can name someone who made poor decisions in college and is paying the price for them, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t build a world that’s less harsh to people who do so!

Your friend went into a field were jobs are scare and difficult to get even good times and you often need a masters or better in any science field to get an entry level position.

I love the projection here as you make up a story for someone you never met. I met this individual when we both worked at a callcenter making $12/hr. He did everything right, he got his Masters from a good university, he published research while in college, continued to do what independent research he could outside of college, yet because some idiot in power who themselves never graduated college decided to demolish state funded university research with a single stroke of a pen, my colleague was left to fight for whatever scraps he could get after doing everything right. He did everything right and still ended up royally fucked, yet he still continued to do the right thing and eventually found himself finally in a job in his field a decade after graduation. This is not a system that’s setup optimally, this is a system that badly needs to be fixed!

How do you know what loan you can afford before you have any income? How do you expect a 17 year old who’s never lived on their own and only financial experience is maybe a part time job to be able to comprehend money on the scale of 10s of thousands of dollars?

Sure you can try to be smart and look at the BLS data to get an estimate of your income after college, but a ton of minutae gets lost when doing so, such as what you’ll make early on in that position vs after 20 years in that position, regional pay differences, etc. that also assumes you’ll graduate and get a job like you researched in your field but maybe you picked a field that’s about to collapse for reasons outside of your control, maybe the field you picked is already saturated with talent, or is experiencing some other significant shift.

I worked with one person who had gone to university to be a biologist just to graduate right after a significant number of university research positions were closed and laid off, leaving him fighting with folks who have 20+ years of experience for a handful of job openings

Student loans are the one type of loan you can’t simply perform a debt to income calculation to determine if you can afford the loan. There’s a million and one things that can happen between when you accept the loan and when you start paying on it that can greatly impact the affordability. The risk of course grows with the cost of education, but so does the potential reward.

My first car loan had a 26% interest rate. Over that 36 month loan I would have literally paid over twice the total value of the loan if I didn’t refinance it after 6 months.

I learned a lot through the mistakes I made that day and have endeavored to not repeat any of those mistakes (and so far I haven’t!)

So there’s two types of food deserts: rural and urban

Rural food deserts are typically some small dying town populated by overworked commuters (who primarily work in an agriculture or agriculture supporting businesses, since that’s what exists near these towns) and tax- and price-sensitive retirees. It’s a small town of less than a thousand people and everyone just drives to the Walmart the next town over because that’s what they have for options now.

Urban food deserts are typically in poorer sections of the city (areas whose poverty was reinforced by historical practices of redlining and broken window policing for example) so any businesses that do sell food tend to be dollar stores which due to their margins can’t afford non-shelf stable food, or gas station convenience stores which both can’t afford non-shelf stable food and might not have the space to dedicate to some fresh produce. Grocery store chains will generally aim for locations with some wealthier clients since they’ll spend more per trip, and they fear that opening locations in less affluent areas will lead to more crime.

Some cities have responded to food deserts by directly subsidizing the opening of a grocery store, or subsidizing the availability of fresh fruit and vegetables at existing stores, but that requires a level of civic engagement that not all cities are willing to put in, and more affluent citizens may turn their noses up at such neighborhoods and just want them to decay out of existence (which isn’t going to work) or worse they try it and find that most of the people who could be supporting a small local grocery store still go to the big grocery store/Walmart that they have to drive to instead, so the local grocery store goes out of business despite the subsidy

Since I started actually doing system administration and actually interacting directly with SystemD all of the hate for it I’d soaked up from enthusiast forums melted away. I’ve never used any of the other init systems so maybe I’m missing out, but I do appreciate SystemD for what it does

I have been a good bing 🤗 and you have been a bad user

Funny thing is, i’ve never heard about plaintext/markdown mails being enforced over the usual html-with-potentially-scripts-and-hidden-URLs.

This is always the part that drives me up the wall. Literally the default behavior in Thunderbird because it’s built by people that care about privacy and security before anything else. So many features to make email “prettier” and “easier” except all they do is introduce new ways for bad actors to hide their actions from attentive users