I know it’s just a little sarcastic comment, but that’s only true if everyone goes along with it. Show them pain in their bottom line and it won’t seem so necessary to their shareholders and lobbyists anymore, and you’ll have a lot louder voices arguing against that law.

Also I’m totally cool being a ‘hermit’ if by hermit we mean chatting with friends on IRC and hanging out in real life, I’m always up for a LAN party.

A: Its hard to get a cat that doesn’t want to eat, to eat, especially when a different cat in the room is ready to dive in. If its possible, separating them while they are eating might help, and cleaning up the food after a certain period of time so they know they can’t come back to it later can help, but it doesn’t could like this little guy is very food motivated right now, so it may not help and you don’t want to deprive him of food

B: Cats will drink water out of whatever you don’t want them to it seems, maybe try filling a coffee/tea mug with water and leaving it in a favorite cat location? We have a special coffee cup that migrates around the house, one of our cats used to drink out of it every morning sitting across from me while I had breakfast. I bet your cat will still drink out of the dog bowl though, its special water!

C: As with A, perhaps separating them during feeding might help, at least until you can get them eating well. Even opposite sides of a door can be effective, they’ll look at you like you’re crazy when you wander away from them with their food to the bathroom door, but they’ll get the hang of it. Maybe save some of the hungry cat’s food as a treat they can eat together if they both like that arrangement.

D: Cats pee outside of their boxes for so many reasons, its very hard to know. For example, our cat started peeing outside the box after our other cat passed away and I cleaned the boxes for the first time. Turns out he wanted the little door flaps removed and he stopped right away. Other times they do it because they are scared or upset about something. It could be that a recent move or change has him on edge, or the other cat stresses him out, or his stomach hurts and he wants you to know about it, or he doesn’t like the box or litter. It’s a tough thing to figure out, but if you can learn the cause, you can help address it and the habit might go away. It might also be a habit, and in that case I don’t have much advice beyond the positive reinforcement someone else suggested.

Not having a right to privacy doesn’t mean we should record everyone’s every move if they aren’t locked in their windowless basement. Which they would have to be since its legally OK to have cameras pointing at your neighbors bedroom window or backyard, or to fly a recording drone over their house.

Additionally I think we should have a right to privacy in public. Why does your right to have your own surveillance fiefdom in your building extend to the street where I’m just trying to go for a jog? It interferes with my peace of mind, and it makes neighbors appear more like police than people I should be able to rely on.

I’m also exceptionally skeptical cameras have any impact on crime. I know police rarely investigate or solve property crime, and unless they prevent the crime from happening outright (doubt), or the camera owner has a full time live human monitoring to respond to an immediate action (businesses), it serves no purpose but to give the owner a false sense of security and to peep on your neighbors.

Getting broken into can be a very traumatic and violating experience, and in a better world we would try to help both the person who is driven to robbery and the person who’s space was violated. In the one we live in, people slap cameras and floodlights everywhere, mental health care is nonexistent, and we punish such that the cycle of poverty and crime continues. Thus nothing is solved and the world gets worse.

Police cameras and municipal cameras are even worse in these ways, now it isn’t the guy next door, its the state and all the money and power it holds doing a peep into your bedroom and a follow down the street. They don’t trust you, they don’t want you here, and you had better watch yourself. That message isn’t for everyone of course, but if you’re already marginalized in a community, it sure reads like the message is for you.

If we do install cameras, like red light cameras or speed cameras which have proven to do something, we need to be extraordinarily careful about where we place them and how we use them. And they should only be there until the underlying problem is solved, not placed as a solution themselves.

I’m not sure that’s how that shakes out, you can’t exactly extinguish open source projects, they may go dormant but they are still there, and there would be the last open source proton build to start from too.

It would also annoy the very people who are most likely to make their own compatibility tools and inconvenience themselves to spite bad business practice. Maybe in some future world where everyone is on Linux/proton, the people who just blindly use windows today because they always have would just keep using the now proprietary proton, but that’s far from the way it is today.

Honestly I just use what is easiest to get working, used to do every game manually, then used Lutris, now I use Steam, probably will use something else that’s easier in the future, especially if/when my library disappears. Til then I’ll support the company that made it much easier to leave Microsoft behind. Nice bonus: valve is one of the least bad large companies in the US at time of writing, so it feels less awful to give them money.

Well we’ve recently entered the race to the bottom category, we’ll see how that one goes

More seriously, the US did lead the way in various ways for a while for the time. Just gotta ignore the racism and colonialism. Unfortunately many innovations turned out to be the limit of American imagination and any attempt to continue to improve and grow is now met with hostility.

It’s probably at least somewhat a product of years of corporate and conservative interests marketing a return to an imagined golden age for economic and political gain. No room for new things in the fantasy of the '50s, just easy money, grass suburbs, giant cars, and unconcerned white people as far as the eye can see.

This man helped me kill the lawn inside myself, and now I’ve killed my lawn and I’m on my way to kill my parents’ (lawn) too. I might have even accidentally learned some botany along the way

A really great channel

My suggestion, since I’ve done something similar. (Depending on what is there now) I’d recommend killing the weeds by laying down layers of cardboard and mulch on top (after cutting them down). Some plants are too pernicious for that and require digging up taproots or targeted herbicide, but the majority of the stuff under it will die and be nutrients for what you plan on planting there. As the cardboard, mulch, and old plants rot, you’ll have exceptional soil for pretty nearly free (depending on the cost of the mulch and your time). As a neat bonus you’ll get all kinds of interesting fungus to look at too.

Lots of people in a pretty small area in relatively dense cities that currently drive or fly between the cities (technically called strong city pairings). There’s also a pretty enormous tourism industry in Florida that captures much of the Midwestern US/anyone not going to California or Hawaii for their beach or disney vacation. Florida is also flat which makes for very cheap high speed rail. Note how the map goes out of its way to avoid the mountains out West.

That being said, I’m not sure this map is one of the ones made with serious city pairing calculations. I’m skeptical that Quincy, IL has a really strong draw for high speed rail, for example, and that long gap between Portland and Sacramento/San Francisco, while beautiful and filled with cool places, is way too sparsely populated to justify 6hrs on high speed rail. I think it’s a sort of meme map that’s been going around for years, though I wish it were real.

The apps are bullshit but the slower cycles take less water and energy, which is definitely a positive.

Idk why the speed is a big deal to folks, it’s not like you have to sit there and babysit it, just hit play and go do something else

I use transit for transit (it’s in the name) but it also gives fantastic bike directions and transit+bike if I’m not feeling a particularly long ride. I may have had to mess with the settings but it almost always shows biking as an option.

Otherwise I use OsmAnd, but since I almost exclusively get around by bike and bus I am usually looking places up to manually plan routes, not using navigation.

Speed cameras are really good at stopping speeding in their direct area, whether or not someone speeding likes them. Their downfall is they usually are installed by private companies who manage them, and the contracts are paid for by tickets. Since the cameras do such a good job stopping the speeding, the city stops getting ticket money and starts having to pay the companies out of pocket. We’ve been using police to do traffic stops for longer and it hasn’t really worked the same way. (And cops cost waaaaaaay more).

One study from New York

But a quick search found many studies from all over the world.

I bet that person speeding through the construction zone learned a valuable lesson about risking their and other people’s lives for 30 seconds faster arrival times. Also I cant imagine being so distracted while driving that I would miss a traffic camera and the signs that almost always proceed it ten times. Plus the flow of traffic would likely be slowing as more observant drivers saw the camera, which you’d have to ignore and presumably pass aggressively whilst shouting angrily about other people being bad drivers.

Shoot, not to beat this point too much (too late), but it’s also a construction zone which typically has tons of speed signs plastered everywhere… maybe they deserved the 10 tickets in two weeks and they’re just mad because if we relied on cops they would have gotten away with it.

Yes, the airlines aren’t being held hostage, no one said this.

Boeing has been subsidized for years and has generally been the only aircraft purchased by American airline companies. That was the claim and it’s true.

Sure they could buy Airbus or Embraer (and they do a lot more these days since Boeing has lost favor due to some fairly catastrophic crashes and basically stopped making the airplanes companies want), but historically they were much more expensive and “not American” (Airbus) or literally didn’t really exist as a serious choice in commercial air (Embraer). Bombardier hasn’t been in the commercial aircraft business at all since I think 2020, though the CRJ was a relatively common sight in the states for short flights until they stopped making it (I’m having trouble finding which airlines fly them though I didn’t look that hard).

Airbus didn’t have an American factory until 2016, and American Airlines, the airline with the most Airbus aircraft today, only started ordering them in 2011. Delta didn’t have any Airbus until the early 2000s when they bought out a company that did, and they still buy mostly Boeing. United has some Airbus these days too but the vast majority of their fleet and their entire historical fleet is Boeing, Lockheed (been out of commercial air for a long time), or McDonald Douglass (now Boeing).

Those are the current major airlines in the US, and even today they fly mostly Boeing, though that is changing when looking at current orders. There are a few more larger carriers such as Southwest, Alaska, Hawaiian, or Spirit, but many of them also fly mostly Boeing and I’ll let you do that research for yourself.

No company has anyone by hostage, but Boeing clearly has had the market in the US and it has been largely due to government subsidy in the form of “job creation” initiatives, military and space contract, and lax oversight.

It’s so bizarre right? It seems almost like an inverse relationship, the more vital the job, the less you get paid

Maybe there aren’t enough jobs because we don’t all need to be doing paid work 40+ hours a day. We do need to eat though and we can’t do that unless we work.

My last job was a temp gig at a corporate headquarters of a publicly traded company where no one but the administrative assistants, cleaning staff, cafe staff, and other support staff really did anything. I thought it was just me not understanding a shared corporate language or something. But the people I interacted with spent the majority of their days talking about how busy they were, chatting with coworkers about their weekend, and walking around the building to talk to different coworkers about their weekend.

It’s hard to quantify how much “work” got done in my year there, especially on teams I didn’t interact with. But in my section of the company, I saw projects that would be a homework assignment for a college student start before I got there and still be going when I left with a dozen people directly working on it.

All that ramble is to give background to my gut reaction, that we’re unemployed because the economy doesn’t need us, there’s too many workers already. If we had universal basic income, I’d be doing a couple things I enjoy like baking bread for friends or making wooden furniture, and I would be working some at the library. I think a lot of those pointless jobs would just disappear too, as people had the opportunity to do something meaningful or more real. At minimum, then we wouldn’t need to find paid work to eat.

Turns out lugging millions of heavy metal boxes around is a tough thing to make climate friendly

I wonder if we were developing petroleum refining and engines now instead of them being established and subsidised, if we would also find them to be unfeasible. I know petroleum products are ludicrously energy dense, but the whole process to make it usable is pretty intense, the infrastructure needed to get it everywhere is extensive, it leaks, it burns, and it smells bad.

It would be interesting to see the modern day cost associated with building out and maintaining gas infrastructure for cars

I feel like I am just repeating myself, disability does not prevent creative expression? A broken arm does not define your ability to paint. Perhaps one medium or another is more challenging but art has many many forms and we have been managing for thousands of years without a tech startup reinventing art. And not every culture in history has been as ableist as the one while live in today. Anyone can already make meaningful art.

As for not having the time, I think that’s an excuse for taking a shortcut using other people’s art and trying to make it their own. It won’t be as impressive, no matter how long they spend typing prompts into the computer, the person badly sketching mushrooms on their 10 at the local coffee chain is far more inspiring.

I wish we lived in a time where we were allowed to do what we loved and I may be a little envious of the people who are able to, but they have a right to complain that their work is being stolen and invalidated by people who don’t value it.

It’s using endless electricity and water to perform tasks I could do powered by a bowl of cereal in the morning. I’d rather need one solar panel than ten, and a river rather than a dried up well, personally, but ever increasing energy demands require the latter two.

If by accelerating you are referring to making the problem worse so we have to deal with melted ice caps sooner, then I agree! I for one don’t really trust turbo predictive text to solve the collapsing jet stream, but I sure do expect it to play a part in causing it. Or maybe just the extraction of increasing material from colonized countries to pay for our funny memes and your “art” through solar panel and battery. Either way, it is contributing in a very real way to the destruction of our planet for little gain that could be achieved more efficiently by other means.

The cool part about a smartphone is I actually wanted it and it did a thing nothing had before (except some PDAs maybe). Also living without one is very possible and I do so frequently, I’m not a chronic poster or social media user. Machine learning with a gui on it is neither something I wanted nor is it novel, and it is not improving the world we live in, it is making it worse.

The saving grace is this fad will pass as it becomes clear it’s the same as home automation, block chain, machine learning, the concept of web domains, etc. and it’s mostly been hype by tech investors all along. I would care about it a whole lot less if it weren’t so full of negative externalities.

I don’t think ‘disabled people’ need a computer to generate content to participate in art creation, and I don’t think artists making art is exploitation. The artists, meaning anyone who ever had their art posted online, are the ones being exploited here, their work was stolen and made to work for tech investors.

Even if these were tangible benefits they are a small compensation for the accelerated degradation of our shared planet, the mass robbery of nearly everyone on earth, and the further damage to our ability to critically think and create. And on top of that, the stuff it generates isn’t even very good.

If it turns out to be real, that would be the easiest buy I’ve ever had with a car. But with a design supposedly about practicality, why do they have to go with the iPad car controls? Hopefully that trend dies out soon and we can have buttons again.

I can’t see myself spending money on anything beyond a smartphone with a touchscreen for everything, and seeing it in this makes me more skeptical about the product as a whole.

Finished reading The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein about 20 years late

I feel like there’s some distinct through lines from there to where we are now, but my head cold is getting in the way of any coherent thought.

Picked up books seven and eight of the wheel of time to recover, should be some much lighter reading