stabby_cicada

joined 2 years ago
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[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (12 children)

Love to hear how you think digital currencies aren't digital currencies.

Not all digital currencies are cryptocurrencies. CBDCs are digital implementations of government-backed fiat currencies. If you don't understand the difference I don't have time to try to convince you, sorry.

by your flawed metrics, solar power is "hype".

Solar power produces energy. Cryptocurrency produces nothing and wastes energy doing it.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 month ago (22 children)

at least 130 countries are working on developing national cryptocurrencies.

CBDCs aren't cryptocurrencies.

As for the rest, "It's good because it's making lots of money" isn't as persuasive an argument as you think it is.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Unfortunately, I think the United States will take exactly the wrong message from its internal climate refugees.

Lifeboat ethics.

"We have to close our borders and deport refugees from other countries so we can help our own climate refugees."

 
[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

"Millions of illegals!"

"Actually, the people you're referring to are legally in the United States with temporary protected status..."

"They're still here illegally because I say so, illegal illegal lalala"

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (4 children)

"Climate change isn't real, but if it was, we would need to pump more oil and natural gas in the United States to make our energy sector strong for the oncoming crisis."

"Oh, and don't buy solar panels from China, because they're dirty foreigners."

And Walz, who spent the whole debate staring at the podium scowling like a rotten jack-o'-lantern, was so out of it he couldn't effectively call out Vance's bogus definition of clean energy and bring up the Build Back Better plan and Biden's investments into the US energy economy.

What the fuck.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago

You're doing Gaia's work

[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Yep. I think it's Roundup. Used to be people used chemical herbicides with more discretion to avoid harming crops, so bugs could live on weeds in patches or at the edges of fields.

Nowadays you just plant a strain of corn or soybeans that's immune to Roundup and soak your entire field in glyphosate multiple times a year. So the only insects that have food or shelter anywhere near you are ones that can live on your crop - and then you spray pesticides to kill those.

Result: millions and millions of acres of essentially sterile agricultural monocrop.

And more and more land is being turned into agricultural monocrop - not because a growing population needs more food, but because of bad laws and subsidies. Almost 100 million acres in the US - 40% of the American corn crop - is used to produce fucking ethanol, which burns more fossil fuel to produce than it replaces and is only profitable because of massive government subsidies procured by energy and agricultural lobbyists.

We are wiping hundreds of square miles of land clean of life in order to turn one fossil fuel into another less efficient fossil fuel. It's species wide insanity.

And that being said: even though agriculture is a much bigger contributor to the ongoing insect omnicide than suburban pest spraying, when you keep the chemicals off your lawn and allow native plants and flowers to grow, it does help your local bugs, and you are making an impact.

 

Since people are reading this, let me rant a bit:

One of the things you can do, as an individual, to help your local environment, is grow flowers. Even if you live in an apartment, just a flower pot on a windowsill helps - even tiny urban gardens have an outside impact on pollinators.

If you have a yard, you can replace invasive grasses with native species and nectar-rich flowers. Don't use herbicides or pesticides. Leave leaf litter alone over the winter to provide habitat for insects. Set aside a section to "go wild". Just like with flower pots, leaving even a small section of lawn without chemicals and frequent mowing can have an outsized impact on pollinators and native insects.

Lawns and gardens are a space where individual effort and individual care for the environment really does matter. You might not be able to reverse climate change, but you can make a migratory monarch butterfly's day just a little better.

And tell people! Tell people how you are gardening and how you're managing your lawn, and why. Because the most important thing you can do for the climate is talk about it.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (3 children)

Preach.

Housing is a human right.

Private land ownership violates that human right.

All land should be held in trust for the people as a whole and managed by the government for the benefit of the people. Including the houses and apartments on that land.

We should not have private homeowners. We should not have private landlords. We should have socialized housing, just like we should have socialized medicine. Apartment buildings and neighborhoods should be managed by tenant associations, with strict legal limits on their authority over individual tenants, and government facilitators to provide expert advice on building management and keep meetings running smoothly.

But we are a long way from implementing that.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

It boggles my mind how people still insist there's a "free market" in rent when we have proof of giant property management corporations colluding nationwide to raise rents.

This shit is why we need rent control.

 
 

And no generation in American history has been as selfish as the boomers.

 
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submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 

I saw a fascinating tweet by BloomTech CEO Austen Allred the other day that stirred up a lot of thoughts here.

“Of the Silicon Valley founders I know who went on some of the psychedelic self-discovery trips, almost 100% quit their jobs as CEO within a year,” Allred said, adding, “Could be random anecdotes, but be careful with that stuff.”

Allred tweeted this in response to writer Ashlee Vance sharing that he’d been told by a venture capitalist, “We’ve lost several really good founders to ayahuasca. They came back and just didn’t care about much anymore.”

There’s some very useful information in those words. They reveal a lot about the insane mess our species finds itself in in today’s world, and provide insight into how we might find our way out.

 

A fixation on system change alone opens the door to a kind of cynical self-absolution that divorces personal commitment from political belief. This is its own kind of false consciousness, one that threatens to create a cheapened climate politics incommensurate with this urgent moment.

[...]

Because here’s the thing: When you choose to eat less meat or take the bus instead of driving or have fewer children, you are making a statement that your actions matter, that it’s not too late to avert climate catastrophe, that you have power. To take a measure of personal responsibility for climate change doesn’t have to distract from your political activism—if anything, it amplifies it.

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