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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • If I could make one wish to fix things, it would be to eradicate all externalities. Don’t get me wrong, I’m aware this would absolutely suck for a while. Without some kind of matching increase in wages or subsidies, it would ruin a lot of people that I don’t think deserve it. But when you have to pay for the cost of recapturing the CO2 you produce, when you have to pay for the actual cost of producing the plastic you throw away, we would very quickly get better alternatives. Biodegradable packaging would become more common. Alternatives to gas would explode. Interest in walkable areas and public transit would grow. Industries that really need disposable plastics are also rich enough to afford proper disposal, like medicine and electronics. After enough time, we’d just live in a better, cleaner world with less waste and more care put into our distribution networks.

    We only have all the bullshit because they’ve been pushing the bill along to the next generation and the next and the next, and we are seeing the bill come due.




  • Here’s why I still think of it as a win: It’s not just the contest between two people, or their ideas, or their backgrounds. What you really have to look at is the contest between the propaganda and the budgets. The simple fact is that a lot of voters aren’t that involved, they vote based on word of mouth or advertising, not by looking into the backgrounds of those they’re voting for.

    Cuomo outspent Mamdani 4 to 1. Billionaires and politicians went all out to attack Mamdani. Many painted apocalyptic pictures. If you look at those more distant contests, where someone won by a wider margin, I would bet that the advertising and endorsements weren’t so lopsided either.

    This isn’t a win for Democrats or Mamdani, this is a win for word of mouth campaigning. This is a win for people being so sick of what’s on offer that many ignored the dire warnings of billionaires and politicians. That’s some good news I can get behind.


  • It’s really frustrating how often this gets framed as sexist, when it’s a totally different problem. I get why people would equate them but they are very different biological processes. Producing a baby is a complicated process, and there’s a lot of steps that we can intervene in to prevent it. Producing a million sperm is, maybe surprisingly, less complicated and it’s harder to target a specific thing and produce easily reversible results.

    Men have had vasectomy on the table for a long time now. It’s just more serious than most forms of female birth control, in terms of implementation and recovery, still not foolproof, and not as easy to reverse.

    Even more frustrating is that sexism definitely does exist and play a role. It’s just more about the human parts of the process, like dealing with medical staff, dealing with insurance, dealing with local, state, and now federal governments that want to bar access to women. Looking at the pill side is misplacing the anger.



  • The reason is because the stock is inflated. My bias: I think most of the cars are good, the sales are pretty good, there’s a lot of good in there. But the stock is way over hyped, and it’s all because of Elon being either an outright liar or, if you’re charitable, extremely optimistic. If they lose their hype man, the stock might go somewhere close to where it actually belongs based on the financials of the company rather than based off of some idea that they’ll be producing armies of humanoid robots or fully autonomous vehicles, or Gundams or whatever his next “project” will be.