They are aware, which is why they’re pouring billions into AI and fascism. They’re desperate for unquestioningly loyal goons.

The meat industry is bigger than both, so let’s kill that too.

The trick is they come from higher uphill.

Or, alternatively, they are mudslides, rockslides, sinkholes, and erosion that carry you downhill along with them.

Ah yes, the reality of the genocide in Gaza has a liberal bias. That sounds accurate…

Could you explain what you think the benefits of a smart city are, compared to a dumb city built for humans rather than for cars or capital?

However, there are things within people’s control that doesn’t change. At work, I listen to a coworker frustrated about a simple problem. It would be a simple change to make this person’s job much less painful, but he “just works here”. It’s just such a dumb problem to waste hours of someone’s life on.

Does solving that problem threaten their access to food and housing? Capitalism doesn’t care about negotiating the most profitable deals, it cares about maintaining power dynamics, so the company cares more about keeping employees in a servant role than improving their bottom line, so employees are often unable to make their life better without threatening their own livelihood and those of their colleagues.

Capitalism has existed alongside people with good intentions for centuries now. It has many ways of bending kindness into accumulation of power for the rich. Helping people out means people will be less likely to riot when social services get cut, so the rich are more likely to cut social services and lower taxes. So it takes almost no work at all for the system to turn charity into a wealth transfer from the charitable to the rich.

If you want to improve the world, you have to be clever about it. You have to choose things that the rich can’t just leverage into exploitation - things that they would pay to get rid of, not things they would pay to exist. Mutual aid networks, labor unions and other unions, exchange of anarchist ideas and skills, blockades and sabotage, decreasing the number of hours people work at things capitalists would have paid for them to do, etc.

There are people who are cynical to a fault, who have more faith in capitalism’s ability to exploit you than your ability to circumvent undermine it. But realistic cynical skepticism is warranted, and you need to be careful that your good intentions actually produce good outcomes.

It seems unfair to compare the pollution per capita of an industrial economy that is exporting lots of industrial goods with that of the service economy that is importing most of those industrial goods. To compare a region that is exporting solar panels to be with a region that is importing them.

There are undoubtedly corrections you can make to fairly compare China and Europe, and I don’t know for sure if China is more green by those standards. But you’re definitely not saying something meaningful.

So it assumes the entire world is built like American suburbia, which isn’t even financially viable right now when it can just dump its pollution and waste at little to no cost, and which is causing immense mental health crises due to the huge distances between friends and even neighbors?

Good luck getting self-sufficiency in Tokyo or London without vertical farms powered by giant fields of solar panels outside the city that could more easily have been used to grow the same stuff directly.

He is cunning to a tee.

“Hey let’s livestream me playing Path of Exile after saying I’m the best in the world, with uncensored live chat from thousands of pseudanonymous gamers with actual experience.”

He’s good at creating the illusion that he’s a genius on a subject for the duration of an informal conversation. Steering away from topics he doesn’t understand, forging signals of deep understanding by mimicking the speech patterns of an expert who struggles to put things in lay man’s terms while namedropping memorized keywords, etc.

If you look at Path of Exile and the Cybertruck, it’s clear that Elon doesn’t know when his promises are unrealistic in a way that will make him look like an idiot. I think he has handlers, not just at SpaceX but everywhere, and those handlers are the real talent. Those handlers know how to cultivate experts that are actually good at their jobs to quietly do the work that Elon takes credit for and how to coach them to make Elon feel good about this arrangement most of the time.

And things ended up this way because in 1776 they had little idea of how their rules were going to play out but they had to choose something to get started and they hoped it would get fixed with time.

It’s ramping up, and the people attending aren’t to blame for it not ramping up faster.

It would be easier to have a satellite in orbit that fires a shotgun at them.

You would need some fancy orbital calculations and precise aiming to make sure the shotgun pellets actually intercept the mirrors, and it would take some engineering to make a shotgun that fires the pellets in a narrow enough cone at high enough velocity to be able to get on an intercept course with most satellites, but you could probably fit it on a Starlink-sized payload. The main issue would be bribing a launch provider to send it up there, but once it’s there you could direct it from the ground without it being traceable to you, and you could have it thrust randomly to dodge anti-satellite weaponry until it runs out of shells.

At some point this would create enough space debris that it could trigger Kessler syndrome, with the debris from destroyed satellites hitting other satellites faster than it de-orbits, until all satellites in low earth orbit are reduced to powder that falls down to earth over a couple of years.

Apart from bribing a launch provider to get the satellite up there, you could probably do either of these for under $10 million, most of it R&D. Much cheaper than developing your own surface-to-space missiles.

Presumption of innocence.

Also, a long history of the US government engaging in fraud and slander as an excuse to start wars, from the USS Maine to the Gulf of Tonkin incident to the WMDs in Iraq.

When I search google for obscure information, I usually get three kinds of answers: commercial slop, social media posts that people answered with a lot of effort, and social media posts that say “just google it” or some equivalent.

My praises go out to everyone over the past decades that has answered “easily answerable questions” on social media, thanks to who we have an easily accessible corpus of answers to simple but obscure questions.

Besides, in this case they’re clearly hoping someone followed it closely enough to do a solarpunkish editorialization rather than the dense material these summits produce themselves.

[relevant xkcd].

The goal is to have less in common with the Taliban, not more.

The Taliban won against two global superpowers, so I don’t get what this sentence is doing in a quote arguing how to be an effective activist. Sure in 2018 the US hadn’t retreated yet, but Oberlin could have seen the writing on the wall.

Single-issue complaining is great if you care about winning more than you care about doing good. Who cares about whether the proposal you’re nagging on about would be disastrous for some voiceless minority, you can be the one to win the tablescraps that capitalists throw out to feel good about themselves! Maybe you’ll even manage to die of old age before people come to hate you. But sure, these are the people that “succeed” so they are the ones that get invited to hold commencement speeches, pay no attention to the thousands that tried the same thing but failed.

The most important aspect of being a reasonable person is willingness to learn; to change your mind if you were mistaken. If you are a single-issue complainer your entire life’s work can topple because of a single inconvenient truth. So you can stick to your guns or you can do the right thing and have accomplished nothing of note. But a broad movement can have a culture of learning and change.

A social justice activist can be convinced that it’s not just to argue against this one wind park in a semi-natural environment because the alternative is either electricity blackouts or an old coal plant spewing carcinogens, because they can change to a different activist project without leaving the movement, its community, and its infrastructure.

Turning a broad tentpole group like the Sierra Club from a narrow-issue project to a broader one is naturally going to have a lot of drama because there are a lot of people who aren’t willing to be open-minded about the broader set whose attitudes were allowed to fester because of the narrow focus. But an equally broad movement starting from the ground up will have fewer issues.

There is the issue that the wider your cause, the more things there are to learn, so onboarding takes a lot more time, but the benefits are synergistic. Things start to click into a full ideology, and people within the ideology have a much easier time teaching each other about specific cause-elements of it than if every cause had to start from nothing.

This is the history of Communism, of the Enlightenment, the Reformation, the Renaissance, and of early Christianity. Historically these movements took decades or centuries to take root, but when they did the effect was culturally absolute. It is hard to fully comprehend the worldview of people on the other side of these divides.

The world is ready for another cultural revolution of that magnitude. We’ve already been moving on this road for over a century. The election of figures like Donald Trump, people elected because of their refusal to engage with morality even if it comes at the cost of incompetence, shows the desperation of those that stick to the status quo ante. There is no justification left, only violence in word or action.

So you have a choice: help change everything, or dedicate your life to convincing a billionaire that you’re the most deserving beggar out of all of the ones assembled before him.

Ecofascism. If they said the quiet part out loud it would sound like “Climate change is going to be disastrous so we need to protect [in-group] against its consequences, regardless of the cost to others”.

An obvious example is closing borders to climate refugees; but it can also be slowing down the improvement of living standards among the poor to curb global emissions; financially or culturally discouraging childbirth among the outgroup; revoking or denying access to human rights because providing them would be too polluting; deafening silence around luxuries of the in-group like the meat industry, cars, and airplanes compared to loud complaints about basic necessities for the out-group like electricity, construction, and goods transport; etc.

Much of the western world’s climate change policy is informed by ecofascism, because fascism is the natural behavior of liberals that don’t want to give up privileges, and the west doesn’t want to admit that they only have half the population of India and only deserve to pollute proportionally.

Aid for the poor is not something we should focus on, at least not as Bill Gates uses it. Aid inherently creates dependency and a power dynamic. Foreign aid plays an integral part to developing populations’ subjugation to multinational corporations and their corrupt local government allies. Bill Gates promotes aid for the poor because he wants to continue subjugating the poor.

Thanks to aid for the poor, Bill Gates sets standards for the school curriculums of many US American schools, and Bill Gates can heavily influence law in East African countries, where his malaria eradication charity is picking which countries to save tens of thousands of lives in. Including the ones that just happen to be building the East Africa Crude Oil Pipeline that Bill Gates is complaining climate activists are protesting against.

What we need is (1) unconditional redistribution of wealth so that poverty doesn’t exist, and (2) mutual aid between equal peers, and never the two shall meet.

Delete Microsoft’s patents, give Microsoft product maintenance over to open source volunteers, do the same with all other companies, defund the police, introduce global universal basic income, delete private ownership, see people move into billionaire’s mansions, hijack their yachts to use for ocean plastic cleanup, convert corporate offices to housing, etc. I don’t know if prison would be necessary at that point - he seems like enough of an opportunist that if he understands his best way to be free and comfortable in solarpunk bliss is to never take on any position of power ever again, he would just peacefully retire.

Bill Gates wanted to think of himself as a good person. Charity was his attempt to prove himself as a good person, and Effective Altruism got so much funding and PR because it tries to make billionaires look like good people. Effective Altruism argues that rather than looking at someone’s actions, you look at how much better they are than what would replace them if they didn’t do that, and then argues that there will always be more billionaires that are exploitative because that’s how the market works, so that doesn’t count, while not every billionaire makes a charity, so that does count.

The problem for EA is that many of the charities it recommends have to engage in lobbying to be practical, but if you allow for lobbying then obviously lobbying for legislation that reduces billionaire exploitation would be beneficial, and that’s not what their donors want. So EA had to drive itself insane to curve away from that obvious conclusion, with people that still insist on it being pressured out of the movement.

But the result of that is that the ethical philosophy that billionaires wanted to rely on for indulgences for their sins had now become obviously insane, even to most of them. That’s how you get people like Peter Thiel not giving a straight answer to whether humanity should survive, that’s how you get shrimp welfare, etc. etc.

Gates doesn’t like the insanity, but that that leaves him without moral excuses. So with other billionaires throwing their lot in with Trump, he does the same so he can at least stay rich for longer.

Sure, but there is a difference between dickheads who didn’t earn their money because they exploited employees and dickheads that commit genocide on native Brazilian populations.

Though to be fair, Prince William also has ties with dickheads that are committing genocide in Palestine and that commited genocide in Ireland, Bengal, Canada, Australia, and countless other places on account of the whole “heir to the crown of Britain” business.

Financial incentive has surprisingly little to do with capitalist/government actions. They will gladly lose billions as long as it means lower class people suffer, and they will pay billions to bail out billionaire friends that are in a tough spot.