Half of the examples on this page seem dystopic as fuck; Active attempts to capture and monetize even offline friendships and socialization. The other half seem to be getting you to pay up-front for hollow promises of a social media platform that Doesn’t Suck™.

One of their examples gives people kickbacks if they convince their friends to buy a product from them or help the product go viral. If they get their way, you will not be able to trust whether your friends recommend stuff to you because they think you’ll like it or because they’re getting paid for it.

I think capitalism has noticed that “Social Media Refugees” are a hot new market to capitalize on. Mozilla is clearly in the process of being assimilated, and the tendrils of capital are winding their way through the rest of the “better alternative” network.

Fair point, but during all that time information was centralized. You couldn’t talk to people from the next city-state over, you couldn’t read the holy text, you would never see the consequences of slavery, you wouldn’t hear another country’s public radio use car ownership as the premise of a joke, you couldn’t see the victims of genocide livestream their slaughter.

With the free internet, every day is an experience that we have more in common with people across the world than with capital owners.

Why would they be resorting to something as self-destructive as fascism if they weren’t desperate? Do you think billionaires like kissing Trump’s ring and losing billions on protectionism? They just prefer it over equality.

Storms increase in intensity and frequency with climate change, increasing rates of erosion. Most homes built to survive any weather except the worst storm of the past 10,000 years will not survive this century.

Because that mural wastes well over 100 households worth of CO2 emission prevention.

Solar panels are black because that means everything is absorbed. The bright colors mean much of the sunlight is reflected, decreasing the efficiency of the solar panel beneath it. Eyeballing the mural, I would guess the solar panels are about 65% as effective. The solar panels are also placed vertically, though thankfully they are perfectly south-facing, so at that latitude you can expect another multiplicative 30% decrease in efficiency. Looking on Streetview, it also appears that the eastern side of the building is offset northward, meaning it will be in the shade in the evening, so we can drop another 10% or so. Multiply all together and we get 40% efficiency compared to well-placed solar panels.

So Edmonton will need around 2.5 as many solar panels as it otherwise would have needed. This mural is 3200 square meters of panels, meaning a waste of around 1920 square meters of panel materials. According to this source, that amounts to about 3 million lost kWh per year, or about 1200 tonnes of CO2 per year assuming they are using coal to fill the shortfall, or around 100 times the per capita CO2 emissions of Canada (which is more than 100 times household emissions because industry also exists).

The fact that Guinness World Records were involved proves that it’s greenwashing. They are an advertising company whose service is to make up awards that their clients qualify for to get them attention. Hiring them costs a decent chunk of pocket change.

They are aware, which is why they’re pouring billions into AI and fascism. They’re desperate for unquestioningly loyal goons.

The meat industry is bigger than both, so let’s kill that too.

The trick is they come from higher uphill.

Or, alternatively, they are mudslides, rockslides, sinkholes, and erosion that carry you downhill along with them.

Ah yes, the reality of the genocide in Gaza has a liberal bias. That sounds accurate…

Could you explain what you think the benefits of a smart city are, compared to a dumb city built for humans rather than for cars or capital?

However, there are things within people’s control that doesn’t change. At work, I listen to a coworker frustrated about a simple problem. It would be a simple change to make this person’s job much less painful, but he “just works here”. It’s just such a dumb problem to waste hours of someone’s life on.

Does solving that problem threaten their access to food and housing? Capitalism doesn’t care about negotiating the most profitable deals, it cares about maintaining power dynamics, so the company cares more about keeping employees in a servant role than improving their bottom line, so employees are often unable to make their life better without threatening their own livelihood and those of their colleagues.

Capitalism has existed alongside people with good intentions for centuries now. It has many ways of bending kindness into accumulation of power for the rich. Helping people out means people will be less likely to riot when social services get cut, so the rich are more likely to cut social services and lower taxes. So it takes almost no work at all for the system to turn charity into a wealth transfer from the charitable to the rich.

If you want to improve the world, you have to be clever about it. You have to choose things that the rich can’t just leverage into exploitation - things that they would pay to get rid of, not things they would pay to exist. Mutual aid networks, labor unions and other unions, exchange of anarchist ideas and skills, blockades and sabotage, decreasing the number of hours people work at things capitalists would have paid for them to do, etc.

There are people who are cynical to a fault, who have more faith in capitalism’s ability to exploit you than your ability to circumvent undermine it. But realistic cynical skepticism is warranted, and you need to be careful that your good intentions actually produce good outcomes.

It seems unfair to compare the pollution per capita of an industrial economy that is exporting lots of industrial goods with that of the service economy that is importing most of those industrial goods. To compare a region that is exporting solar panels to be with a region that is importing them.

There are undoubtedly corrections you can make to fairly compare China and Europe, and I don’t know for sure if China is more green by those standards. But you’re definitely not saying something meaningful.

So it assumes the entire world is built like American suburbia, which isn’t even financially viable right now when it can just dump its pollution and waste at little to no cost, and which is causing immense mental health crises due to the huge distances between friends and even neighbors?

Good luck getting self-sufficiency in Tokyo or London without vertical farms powered by giant fields of solar panels outside the city that could more easily have been used to grow the same stuff directly.

He is cunning to a tee.

“Hey let’s livestream me playing Path of Exile after saying I’m the best in the world, with uncensored live chat from thousands of pseudanonymous gamers with actual experience.”

He’s good at creating the illusion that he’s a genius on a subject for the duration of an informal conversation. Steering away from topics he doesn’t understand, forging signals of deep understanding by mimicking the speech patterns of an expert who struggles to put things in lay man’s terms while namedropping memorized keywords, etc.

If you look at Path of Exile and the Cybertruck, it’s clear that Elon doesn’t know when his promises are unrealistic in a way that will make him look like an idiot. I think he has handlers, not just at SpaceX but everywhere, and those handlers are the real talent. Those handlers know how to cultivate experts that are actually good at their jobs to quietly do the work that Elon takes credit for and how to coach them to make Elon feel good about this arrangement most of the time.

The Finns would like a word with you.

If so the Democrats could act like it by showing what happens when they try to say what they aren’t allowed to say.

At which point you could say that the Democrats are owned by the far right, at which point “far right” becomes an impractical phrase to use to distinguish between the likes of AOC and Mamdani and the likes of Trump.

So no, the news media aren’t owned by the far right. They are owned by the same people that own the Democrats and Republicans, which have a diverse range of right wing opinions none of which include stopping fascists that got elected through the system that they rely on for their wealth and power.

If the DNC wanted to hammer the Republicans on this, then by the same token the news media would want to let them. But the DNC doesn’t want to encourage opposition too much because they know they and their owners would lose massive amounts of money if there was any kind of structural reform.

And things ended up this way because in 1776 they had little idea of how their rules were going to play out but they had to choose something to get started and they hoped it would get fixed with time.

A divided congress representing a divided people? Say it ain’t so.

There is about as much reason to take insulin from animals as there is to engage in cannibalism, to drink your own urine, or to put someone in a prison cell. There can be scenarios where it’s the best way out, but any effort spent preparing for that possibility is better spent preparing to avoid that possibility.

It’s ramping up, and the people attending aren’t to blame for it not ramping up faster.

It would be easier to have a satellite in orbit that fires a shotgun at them.

You would need some fancy orbital calculations and precise aiming to make sure the shotgun pellets actually intercept the mirrors, and it would take some engineering to make a shotgun that fires the pellets in a narrow enough cone at high enough velocity to be able to get on an intercept course with most satellites, but you could probably fit it on a Starlink-sized payload. The main issue would be bribing a launch provider to send it up there, but once it’s there you could direct it from the ground without it being traceable to you, and you could have it thrust randomly to dodge anti-satellite weaponry until it runs out of shells.

At some point this would create enough space debris that it could trigger Kessler syndrome, with the debris from destroyed satellites hitting other satellites faster than it de-orbits, until all satellites in low earth orbit are reduced to powder that falls down to earth over a couple of years.

Apart from bribing a launch provider to get the satellite up there, you could probably do either of these for under $10 million, most of it R&D. Much cheaper than developing your own surface-to-space missiles.