God, fuck ethanol. Last I checked it literally took 1.5 gallons of oil/gas to produce 1 gallon of ethanol. It turns more fuel into less fuel and pisses away soil fertility doing it.

I read an article some time ago arguing the purpose of ethanol (and ag subsidies in general) is, consciously or unconsciously, manifest destiny - we have to have a “use” for all the land we stole, we have to do something with it even if that something is a complete waste, because otherwise, people might start asking why we don’t give it back. Seems more likely to me all the time.

No kidding. Yes, let’s install cameras that can identify and record every license plate (and face, too, if the camera has resolution for one it has resolution for the other) that passes them.

Surely our government will not use this capability to track the movements of its political enemies.

I’m confident Oakland’s notoriously honest and professional police department will not use them to harass whistleblowers and stalk the estranged spouses of police.

And of course it’s overly paranoid to imagine the “third party vendor” processing all this license plate data could be hacked or compromised or sell the data to other entities.

Christ.

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Capitalism isn’t a political system. It’s an economic system.

And I think it’s totally fair to point out how “a company making a product worse because they make more money off the worse product” is one of the flaws of a capitalist economy.

I think there are more important things than fairness. We have laws requiring employers to give you paid time off for jury duty and it’s still a significant burden on a lot of people. For someone to be chosen by lot to participate in what’s likely to be the equivalent of a full-time job? Frankly, it would be unfair to place that burden on people who didn’t sign up for it.

And sortition would be pretty much guaranteed to fail if the people chosen by lot weren’t drawn from a pool who’d already proven they understood, to some degree, the issues they would be making decisions about. If we take conscripts instead of volunteers, we’d have a committee full of people who didn’t know, or care, about the issues, who didn’t want to be there in the first place, and who’d happily rubber stamp the decisions of whoever on the committee was the loudest and most passionate so that they could go home early.

And I think you have to draw a distinction between influence and corruption. Everybody has the right to advocate for policies that benefit them. Everybody has the right to form unions and groups and lobby for policies that benefit them. So of course this committee will be influenced by outside parties. The alternative is decision makers who don’t listen to people telling them what they want and need, and that’s not good for society.

And of course there will be explicit and implicit bribes, there will be be influence campaigns, and so on, because you can’t have any decision making process, anywhere, that people won’t try to rig.

But: it’s much, much more difficult for some corrupt billionaire to bribe 100-plus members of a committee - especially if, as I hope, that committee makes decisions by consensus, anarchist style, instead of by majority vote - than it is to bribe one politician. And once you’ve bribed all those committee members, as soon as their term expires you have to bribe a whole new committee, because there’s no guarantee that any committee member will be selected by lot next year (and, in fact, I’d argue someone shouldn’t be eligible to serve again for x number of years after being chosen). On the other hand, bribing a career politician is a continuing investment that pays off year after year after year.

I like to ask bloodmouth concern trolls “what would convince you to go vegan?”

And when they come back with some soft appeaser bullshit, “you clearly know that information, so why hasn’t it convinced you to go vegan?”

Remember that sortition is government by committee. You’re not selecting one person to be in charge by lot and taking a gamble on that person’s competence; you’re selecting a group of dozens or hundreds of people, from a pool of qualified volunteers, and having them come to a consensus on what to do.

If I had to decide who would make better decisions, a committee of 100 or so ordinary citizens, all of whom were more politically active and aware than the average citizen (or they wouldn’t volunteer in the first place), or a career politician whose first priority is to manipulate citizens into voting for him and whose second priority is to make money off his position, I’d choose the committee every time. Better a group of people who may have been influenced by post-truth brainwashing than one of the people doing the brainwashing in the first place.

messy and expensive.

Expensive for whom, though?

The American people will pay the cost, in blood and tax money, for occupying Venezuela.

Big Oil, weapons manufacturers, and the Trump crime family, will reap the profits from it.

(Edit: and yes of fucking course the Venezuelan people will suffer far more than Americans safe in the imperial core. I thought that was so obvious it didn’t need to be fucking said.)

Every American invasion and occupation is another massive wealth transfer from the poor to the rich.

Socialism for the rich, rugged capitalism for the poor, isn’t that the saying?

That’s actually a part I don’t disagree with. Local short-term problems still do need to be solved. They are the symptoms of the underlying disease that is the global capitalist economy, and we have to fight the disease instead of just fighting the symptoms - but if you don’t treat the symptoms, you might end up dying before you can treat the disease.

And, also, the personal is political. People will see the impacts of climate change on their communities, and people will commit the time and effort to adapt to those impacts locally, and that will make people more willing to vote for the national and global collective action we need even more badly.

Credibility and popularity are necessary. Getting people involved and committed on the local level is the first step to getting people involved and committed on the global level.

If climate leaders lead people in that transition instead of stopping at the local level and saying “hey, we rented some solar panels from this fossil fuel megacorp that branched out into solar power, everything’s good now, go back to consuming as usual”.

I think it underestimates the value of climate mitigation. A focus on reducing emissions may not save us from a 3 degree world - and a 5 degree world after that, and a 10 degree world after that - but it could delay those milestones and give us more time to adapt. For example, I think a 40-foot rise in sea level is inevitable in the next few centuries - even a two degree rise guarantees both the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets melt - but delaying that 40-foot rise from 2080 to 2150 makes a huge difference in our ability to prepare for it and in the lives of people living in the flood zone now.

I also think climate change is a symptom of the underlying disease of capitalism/technofeudalism. Local and community resilience efforts treat the symptom but leave the disease free to run rampant in new and horrible ways.

(Imagine: a city puts in battery backup in case of grid failure, but the megacorp manufacturing the batteries forces them to use its proprietary software and pay service fees, and when the grid goes down the megacorp hits the city with millions in extra fees and threatens to turn off the power if they don’t pay.)

Why do people act like not using a gas powered stove is akin to stripping away some fundamental right?

Because change is bad.

I’m not (just) being snarky. People get defensive when something important to them changes, even if the change is for the better.

And food, and cooking food, is extremely important to most people.

I agree with you, and that’s why I think the US government specifically will let the AI bubble burst - so that the feds can buy up all those data centers for pennies on the dollar (and a promise to look the other way at all the pumping and dumping and insider trading the hyperbillionaires did to come out ahead in the AI crash).

Only Nixon could go to China, as they say.

Because if a Democrat had tried to normalize relations between the US and Maoist China the Republicans would have crucified him. But when their own leader tells them to do it, it suddenly becomes a great idea.

If Republicans didn’t have the principle of groveling to whoever’s in charge of their party, they’d have no principles at all.

“Hydrogen economy” believers.

Factual accuracy.

Pick one.

Conservative only reading the title: “See? See? Global warming is still in question!”

You’re absolutely right. Trump demands the spotlight at all times.

But also, I think your comment is an example of what Trump’s enemies still do not understand about him.

To Donald Trump, no publicity is bad publicity.

Even if it’s “bad publicity”.

If the media is talking about Trump’s mistakes, then Trump’s minions will be all over the news defending Trump and arguing with the people attacking Trump. Trump’s supporters will believe the people defending him, Trump’s opponents will keep being his opponents, and moderates will dismiss the whole argument as just another political he said she said.

And Trump will be the center of the news cycle for yet another day, and become even stronger in his position as the leader of the Republican Party and the biggest celebrity in America.

Jesus fucking Christ, we had four years of the Biden administration trying to get Trump on anything they could, four years of daily headlines about Trump being accused of crimes, or being arraigned for crimes, or being arrested for crimes, and Trump went into the 2024 election more popular than he was in 2020.

If you talk about Trump, he wins.

The only way to beat Trump, as hard as it is, is to fucking ignore him and talk about what the American people actually need instead.

“Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”

Or, pithier:

The rules for sheep don’t apply to lions.

Of course we need to act quickly. But we also need to act correctly.

Green capitalism wants us to believe the only problem is greenhouse gas emissions. That if we replace fossil fuel engines and power plants with solar panels and batteries, we can continue burning energy and consuming resources like “normal” and still save the Earth.

This is a bad solution because it ignores all the other environmental harms of unchecked growth. It puts a bandage on one symptom - greenhouse gas emissions - but does nothing to cure the disease.

The solution is not to replace one energy industry with another while we unsustainably consume the world. The only real long term solution is to use less energy.

I’m just hung up on the proffered idea that LLMs are actually going to replace anybody in an efficient sustainable way, or even reach AGI someday.

I share your concern with that point, to some degree. On the other hand, Cory Doctorow makes a great point: an AI cannot do your job as well as you can, but a salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI, because it’ll make your boss money:

The promise of AI – the promise AI companies make to investors – is that there will be AIs that can do your job, and when your boss fires you and replaces you with AI, he will keep half of your salary for himself, and give the other half to the AI company.

And even if AI is shit at your job, the cost savings from not paying humans means corporations will still make more money providing a shitty AI product than a good human product, just like corporations make more money now selling shitty mass produced plastic crap than they do quality products from skilled workers.

And from there you get mass unemployment and all the social and cultural impacts therefrom.

(What is your view on why billionaires are pushing AI? I think it’s a combination of “number go up” and an excuse to build the data centers the surveillance state needs for mass real time facial recognition, travel monitoring, and conversation recording/sentiment analysis, but that’s just me.)