Orcocracy [comrade/them]

Yes, EU policy is clear. Foreign companies deliberately undercutting European business to monopolize whole sectors is only ok if they’re American, not Chinese. Amazon good, BYD bad.

Fahrenheit is what Americans feel, Celsius is what everyone else feels, and Kelvin is just Celsius +273.

AI, algorithms, and the statistics that power them are not that smart. They have no way of knowing for sure what is in your head when you hit the delete button.

This article from a Washington DC-based publication is doing its very best to frame as bad some extremely mild examples of the EU standing up to these largely unaccountable American megacorporations. It’s not like the EU is doing to Meta & Apple what the Americans are doing to Huawei & Bytedance/TikTok — but perhaps the EU should.

You, when you’re looking at Google Maps or whatever other mapping software you use. They’ve all been compatible with Galileo, Glossnas, Beidou, and GPS for many years. But a mapping app tends to not tell the user which brand of satellite they’re using at any given time.

Is having lots more green energy not a result?

I think we can all broadly sympathize with the complaints about politicking, but this rant also includes a lot of red flags. For example, saying that you have “never had any interest” in things like “being agreeable when you disagree” suggests that this person is just another one of the big ego assholes in the department, a full-of-themselves “rockstar academic” who can’t even be bothered with basic human kindness.

You’ve heard of the slow food movement? Sarcasm aside, I am advocating for the slow dishwashing movement. I am 100% serious about this. Well, maybe 75%. Or 45%. I am somewhat serious about this.

My god you’re right. I’ve been wasting years of my life by leaving that one bowl with a bit of juice from some tomatoes at the bottom until later when I did the rest of the dishes. Think of how much I could have achieved in that time!

Hang on, if you’re washing dishes before you are done cooking and long before you even set the table or start eating anything, what exactly is it that you are washing? One big knife and a chopping board? How did this become the standard advice?

Ok, explain how it is true that every human purely by being born is equally culpable, and that human society isn’t at issue? And then you can explain why this doesn’t apply to you and your family.

It is absolutely not a fact. There is nothing inherent about any human being that causes damage to the environment. It’s what human society as we organize it does, and a very small number of people do an incredibly outsized proportion of the damage. Focusing on things like birth control and overpopulation is a major part of ecofascist rhetoric. It is also very much about punishing a distant other because after all, if you really believed that all human births were inherently damaging to the environment, we wouldn’t be having this conversation as you would have already undone the damage caused by your own parents. But you haven’t, and nor should you for many good reasons! Those reasons also apply to everyone else too.

That’s ecofascism.

Perhaps. Or perhaps what uses more over a lifetime is an ebook that is bounced around from device to device which all turn to toxic e-waste after a few years, constantly communicating with always-on servers for account data and DRM authentication hosted in a data centre based in a region powered by fossil fuels. All while a paper book just sits on a shelf causing no further environmental impact - potentially for hundreds of years.

To be fair, nobody’s preference for paper books or ebooks will change the environment in any meaningful way - the problems are much more systemic and require radical action from an unwilling corporate and political elite that has been ignoring the problem for decades.

Data centres and “the cloud” are not great for the environment either. DRM forcing people to have their files constantly deleted and redownloaded makes it even worse.

Also, “support” doesn’t have to mean a direct financial transaction. Libraries operate a bit differently from a McDonalds. Even just going in and sitting in a library reading a book without ever taking it out can help to support your local public library.

Even more than it used to be. Canadian foreign policy regarding Iraq, Vietnam, and Cuba took a very different position to the US and was on the whole quite good (for a western country). But that was all decades ago. Practically speaking, Canada no longer has its own independent foreign policy.

A train that has a stop somewhere in my neighbourhood.

I have no idea if that’s bullshit or not, but this is definitely turning into a tragic bodycount measuring contest. I’m outta here.

Yes coal is indeed very bad and needs go away immediately. But I’m not so sure if coal being bad makes radiation cancers from Chernobyl, Fukushima, Three Mile Island, Sellafield, etc etc etc not worth caring about.

I really don’t want to play top trumps over which tragic disaster is worse by measuring bodycounts, as this is all way too grim and I think we can agree that the worst case scenarios for all of these things are awful in their own distinct ways. But that number you put for nuclear is difficult to believe. Where did you find it?