so many of the world’s problems boil down to a handful of tech bros who made that book their entire personality.

congratulations on escaping the Rand death cult

iRiver= S tier mp3 nostalgia

burn it all down.

we don’t need these cameras and tracking systems everywhere all the time. they don’t make anyone “safer”.

you can also tag people on Lemmy, or at least I can. look for the About User menu then “Add Tag” or “Tag user” from their profile

interesting note: a flavor of techno fascism actually started in the 30s, it was called Technocracy, Inc.

The technocracy movement was a social movement active in the United States and Canada in the 1930s which favored technocracy as a system of government over representative democracy […] a California engineer, invented the word technocracy in 1919 to describe “the rule of the people made effective through the agency of their servants, the scientists and engineers”

here’s an article explaining how Musk, Thiel, and Andreessen (and other tech billionaires) have adopted a similar philosophy with the “Charter Cities” ancap utopianism they’re working to replace democracy with.

A 1930s movement wanted to merge the US, Canada and Greenland. Here’s why it has modern resonances

appreciate the rec, I’ve been a patreon to Climate Town for years and already listened to that episode of CDH…

my point still stands. “too much” is a spectrum, my opinion likely differs significantly from most people, including Rollie’s. i lean towards the Daniel Quinn side of environmental ethics, which definitely places more than just fat over consuming Americans in the category of unsustainable cultures.

(I’m not saying this is my personal opinion so don’t roast me plz):

it’s not that there are too many people.

it’s that there are too many people living under a regime that compels them to wantonly consume, pollute, and generally destroy the ecosystem in favor of the sole benefit of a miniscule number of oligarchs

in other words, the planet has the carrying capacity to sustain all of us theoretically, but not practically as things are today, at least not if humans continue living according to capitalist hyper consumptive individualism.

so yeah, there are too many people - unless we effectively reprogram all of modern culture to embrace a sustainable and pro environmental ethics… which you and I know, isn’t going to happen.

QED: too many people.

note: this is different from the other commenters take because it’s not making claims about human nature as being inherently bad. it’s just claiming that the system/culture people are born into is bad and does in fact impose artificial limitations on the capacity of the planet to support diverse ecosystems

I’m extremely skeptical corningware contains lead which can come off… it’s sealed, ultra hard ceramic. that’s not how people have historically gotten lead contamination. there’s probably more lead in the soil in their front yard than in every piece of corningware in the house…

please don’t destroy these, just donate them to a thrift shop so sensible folks can use them as intended. many of those vintage ceramics are collectibles, more importantly they are infinity reusable.

I’m so sick and fucking tired of “the drug problem” being used over and over and over again to justify anything the government wants.

the US has been fighting a war on drugs to the cost of trillions of dollars over 50 years and what has it led to? massive expansion and militarization of the border at taxpayers expense, and more people do drugs today than EVER!

we need to stop letting the propagandists win by nodding along to this ‘fentanyl is America’s #1’ enemy bullshit. people are on drugs because theyre fucking miserable! they don’t have safety nets, homes, communities, support to quit, or meaningful work. enough is enough!

they probably mean “culturally progressive”, as in, woke leaning. bombs with rainbows painted on them.

the US was only very briefly controlled by a progressive govt and it took a great depression and threats of mob violence against the ruling class to get that much.

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as much as tariffs are a comically bad self-own, I’d actually be happy if this means even a fractional decrease in Temu’s non-stop generation of landfill waste.

low cost, ubiquitous knick nack consumerism needs to be curtailed.

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maybe. it might also be that most of the damage is the result of a few particular bad actors… arguably a large amount of the runaway environmental destruction we’ve witnessed is the accumulated result of a very small portion of the population being allowed to do whatever the fuck they want whenever the fuck they want for ~200 years?

we could test this theory out, empirically. I propose an experiment where we, um, neutralize, the top 1% who directly facilitate eco-cide in pursuit of corporate profits and then we’ll see if nature improves.

i think tik tok might be in a position where they must sell in order to continue serving content to American users

https://apnews.com/article/trump-tiktok-china-bytedance-social-media-tariffs-665e46fd5bb555e97c4d7301e07230df

The order was announced as White House officials believed they were nearing a deal for the app’s operations to be spun off into a new company based in the U.S. and owned and operated by a majority of American investors,

the extension only happened because after the TikTok CEO, Shou Chew, threw a big party for right wing influencers during Trump’s record breaking $200M bribe acceptance party inauguration, Trump mysteriously halted the order (despite being signed into law) to ban the app.

from the article:

Top TikTok executives reportedly rubbed shoulders with American tech leaders and handed out business cards at an elite pre-inauguration donor event on Sunday featuring members of the Trump administration, as the app’s future in the U.S. remains uncertain.

Tiktok executives including CEO Shou Chew and vice president Michael Beckerman were reportedly on hand at the event, which President Donald and First Lady Melania Trump hosted at the National Building Museum in Washington. They joined a reported guestlist including Vice President JD Vance, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and conservative megadonor Miriam Adelson.

geeze, it’s almost like the tech oligarchs told Trump to pause the ban until they could negotiate a way to profit more from acquisition of TikTok (or a newly created US based subsidiary that Bezos is trying to invest in) than by outright banning users access to it, cold turkey.

The broligarchs have a vision for the new Trump term. It’s darker than you think. | Vox

Wikipedia - Charter Cities

Wikipedia - Effective Accelerationism

Trump’s weird new ‘freedom cities’ and the Network State cult | The Nerd Reich

great YT explainer for anyone unfamiliar with the Yarvin style techno authoritarianism to which Thiel and Musk subscribe: DARK GOTHIC MAGA How Tech Billionaires Plan to Destroy America | Blonde Politics - YouTube

on April 19th there will be protests nationwide in every city.

I plan to be at the one where I live, with as many people as I can get to come with me. attending is the bare minimum i can do, but until we collectively get up enough courage for large scale civil disobedience, simple protests are a starting point to get you connected with local allies and movements.