I didn’t even realize I was doing therapy, you inbred fucking idiot

Thank you for this thought through response. I’ve been meaning to get back to it sooner, but I have been very tired after work and not feeling I have the bandwith the matter deserves. I’m afraid this might not be the evening either, but I found it rude to not respond at all.

One caveat I’d like to enter into the wider discussion is that the distinction between “acting” and “talking” is often more tenuous than either of us have acknowledged thus far.

Either way, to the point where you say we differ most, i.e. “but first people need to realize the switch is even there”. From my perspective, what I fail to understand is when you would consider that condition met. Should action be deferred until there’s a perfect consensus or at what point do you envision that enough people have come to that realization? Do you consider people embracing ideas like this to be likely to happen, considering real world conditions? Both genuine questions, not rhetorical.

I too am a believer that it is perfectly possible for humans to live good lives outside of the (selectively available) exesses of the fossil fuel paradigm. But I also think it’s evident that paradigm will only come to an end through either a decisive and global shift of our collective lifestyles and economies or through the looming risk of societal collapse. At this rate, my frustration is that collapse will come knocking before we’re done talking. I’m not as optimistic as you, that we can figure it out, let cooler heads prevail and do things perfectly and achieve a smooth transition. I think it’s worth considering that we might stand to lose a lot, whether we commit to change or not; one thing that sometimes get glossed over about fossil fues is that they’re damn near magical in terms of what they have enabled us to do.

Maybe we mostly differ in outlook, not predominantly in what we hope for. Because I sure do hope your more optimistic takes prove right.

My apologies for the jumbled and poorly proof-read stream of concioussness, I really need to go to sleep now.

In the first panel both are, somewhat vapidly, disagreeing based on their respective perspectives on objective reality (vapid because they both fail to see that it very clearly is a curled up sperm!)

In the second panel, one has broken with reality and the other is unwavering in their obsession with an out of scope issue. Meanwhile, the third: the artist or the viewer that shares neither perspective, is alienated because the plainly visible sperm doesn’t even matter anymore.

It’s not about whether they agree about anything. It’s about sperm.

It’s 11.11 here, is that supposed to mean something?

I strongly disagree.

In a lot of ”very complex” issues, the answers are really simple, and we all know fully well how to solve them.

This is particularly true of the large existential problems we are facing. With climate change, for instance, we have known the solution for a long time: stop burning fossil fuels.

What to do about it has been clear, straightforward and simple all along, but not easy – it would have taken sacrifice to achieve it. We’d have to live more simply, do away with consumerism and have to put things on hold while we find sustainable ways to do them. And we probably would have had to take enormous risks to our own lives, to stop those that wouldn’t aggressively cut down on fossil fuels voluntarily. Without any guarantees of success.

Even transitioning to a solar punk utopia would have been hard, including for those on board from the start.

All while the alternative to the solution is to to have long warm showers at will, enough cheap food that we can get really fat and still throw half of it away, intercontinental air travel that costs less than a bus pass, and so on.

It’s not because we have talked too little or that the discourse hasn’t been good enough that we can’t seem to solve it – our most brilliant minds have talked endlessly for a generation about climate change and how to address it. It’s simply because quitting our fossil fuels addiction is a bitter fucking pill to swallow. And pointless if you do it alone.

The same goes for the ”slow” slide into fascism all over the West, a.k.a. the steady concentration of wealth in the hands of dumber and dumber financial elites. (Not that it’s a separate issue from climate change.)

If you want to beat it, whether peacefully or not, you eventually have to accept that your next meal won’t be guaranteed and that, you might get beaten, arrested or even killed – hungry, tired and cold.

As our American friends have showed us, on this matter, the stakes of disruptive protests are not very appealing – it’s better to continue going to the office, get that paycheck that keeps the lights on, holds off the bank from taking your home and lets the fridge stay full, even if that means paying taxes to and serving those you protest in the weekends and in social media posts.

Tackling these issues does not require exceptional individuals, but a lot of ordinary ones working together, accepting that it’s probably gonna suck really bad. Even so, there is already an abundance of extraordinary people out there, notably Greta Thunberg (of this thread fame).

And yes, it does also take talk to bring those people together, but that talk won’t get you around the hard parts.

The billionaires are probably pretty content with people trying to figure out ”truthful communication” while the people who stormed the Capitol keep winning.

While you make some good points, have you heard the expression ”talk is cheap”? There’s no lack of talk.

traders on PolyMarket

Funny way to describe degenerate gamblers

It’s possible to not give a fuck about Taylor Swift, but still care about her and her fellow billionaires outright destroying the world while glitzy magazines treat them as main characters in a soap opera, just going about their glamorous exploits and intrigue. It is fucking stupid to celebrate Taylor Swift’s anything, for as long as she remains a prime example of everything that is going wrong in the world: massive hoarding of wealth in a winner takes all economy obsessed with intangible assets (notably brands and song rights), excessive personal consumption and burning of fossil fuels, hyper commercialized culture mostly void of artistic expression.

I don’t mind people that like her songs, but I’m fairly certain Swifties should be designated a death cult.

On the one hand yeah, on the other: meh – any benefits by doing something good will soon be offset by something twice as bad. Coal powered AI pump and dumps, subsidies to airlines and regional aiports that replace aging railway networks, infinite more lanes on highways.

I think good public policy at this point is putting alcohol and microdoses of barbiturates in the tap water and outlawing good looking people wearing clothes in public. These are achievable goals within any of the political systems currently accessible to us, beating climate change is not.

BUT HIS INTERNS WROTE IN ALL CAPS. HE’S A GENIUS, SOME SAY NO ONE HAS NEVER DONE THAT BEFORE. EPIC. THANK FOR YOUR ATTESTATION OF THIS MASSAGE.

Yeah, taking the service down is an acceptable solution, but do you think Open AI will do that on their own without outside accountability?

I’m sure that’s true in some technical sense, but clearly a lot of people treat them as borderline human. And Open AI, in particular, tries to get users to keep engaging with the LLM as of it were human/humanlike. All disclaimers aside, that’s how they want the user to think of the LLM, a probabilistic engine for returning the most likely text response you wanted to hear is a tougher sell for casual users.

The same fund was recently caught having invested in an Israeli company that’s made bank during the war, maintaining Israeli jets making bombing runs on Gaza.

This gas no basis in reality. No way that society makes it to 2050.

The UK is just ahead of the curve

The proliferation of unathorized opinions is threatening democracy! Doubleplus ungood.

Every country is moving towards this and there is no fucking stopping it, it seems.

I’m not from the US, but I’m pretty sure that’s just for shooting up schools and raiding non-existent pedo dungeons underneath pizza parlors.

Before, he’d have to explain that “well, formally, I’m not a doctor”.