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gorwell

1,762 karma · joined July 8, 2021

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gorwell··on EU Parliament greenlights Chat Control 1.0
Reddit still thinks the EU represents democracy.
gorwell··on EU Parliament greenlights Chat Control 1.0
But hundreds voted?

314 against, 276 in favor, 17 abstentions

gorwell··on Green card seekers must leave U.S. to apply, Trump administration says
You don't know the meaning of the word you're using.

Immigrant (noun) A person who comes to a country to take up permanent residence.

gorwell··on China has added forest the size of Texas since 1990
Per capita isn't the useful metric in this regard for the reason Palau illustrates. The climate cares about volume.

Per capita emissions is a way to assign relative sin by those who feel guilty about living large.

Bill Gates today, "This is a chance to refocus on the metric that should count even more than emissions and temperature change: improving lives. Our chief goal should be to prevent suffering, particularly for those in the toughest conditions who live in the world’s poorest countries. The biggest problems are poverty and disease, just as they always have been. Understanding this will let us focus our limited resources on interventions that will have the greatest impact for the most vulnerable people.”

gorwell··on China has added forest the size of Texas since 1990
For context, here are the top 10 biggest footprints

1. China 26.16%

2 United States 11.53%

3. India 7.69%

4. Russia 3.75%

5. Brazil 3.16%

6. Indonesia 3.15%

7. Japan 2.15%

8. Iran 2.06%

9. Saudi Arabia 1.60%

10. Canada 1.54%

The top 10 countries account for about ~60% of global CO₂ emissions.

gorwell··on TurboTax’s 20-year fight to stop Americans from filing taxes for free (2019)
You can do taxes for free most of the time. Millions of us do every year, and the IRS estimates that 70% of tax payers could file for free.

> Why must every service and thing in the US must be a private profit making thing?

It isn't. There are roughly 2 million nonprofits. "Nonprofit organizations play a significant role in the US economy. In 2022, there were 1.97 million nonprofits operating in the US"

And there are endless government programs and millions of government employees. The federal government alone spends over $6 trillion of our money, and money we don't have, per year, and most of it is on mandatory social programs.

"About 60% of all federal spending is categorized as mandatory spending — which amounted to $3.8 trillion last year. This spending is essentially on autopilot because it funds programs whose eligibility rules and benefit formulas are set in law. This consists mostly of programs like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and Veterans care."

https://usafacts.org/just-the-facts/budget/

gorwell··on U.S. Emissions Rise 4.2%, China's Fall 2.7%
It hasn't. It's been down since 2007 despite increased population.
gorwell··on U.S. Emissions Rise 4.2%, China's Fall 2.7%
Those are the numbers that matter. Percentages are how you lie with statistics.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co2-emissions-per-...

gorwell··on U.S. Emissions Rise 4.2%, China's Fall 2.7%
Misleading due to missing context.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co2-emissions-per-...

gorwell··on Valve confirms credit card companies pressured it to delist certain adult games
They also use dollars and credit cards and gift cards.
gorwell··on Linda Yaccarino is leaving X
Not the same. Posts get reduced visibility and reach for using slurs, and Twitter used to go further and delete slurs and even ban the poster.
gorwell··on Valve confirms credit card companies pressured it to delist certain adult games
They could support a stablecoin like USDC and start pushing people to that. No censorship and lower fees. Valve broke ground with Steam, they could do it again.
gorwell··on Linda Yaccarino is leaving X
You are projecting. Nazis were against free speech and big on censorship and ideological conformity. You are aligned with them.
gorwell··on Linda Yaccarino is leaving X
Yes, it did. Every large platform including Twitter was censoring its users due to state pressure. Even Facebook has since admitted that they were told to censor information that was true, and they knew to be true.
gorwell··on Linda Yaccarino is leaving X
X is still ground zero for news, and it saved free speech. In the fullness of time and distance it will be viewed by historians as one of the most important events in history.
gorwell··on The Origins of Wokeness
It's not a boogeyman and there are many liberals who have been raising the alarm for years about the dangerously illiberal and authoritarian nature of this new religion.

Not just PG, also Sam Harris, Bill Maher, JK Rowling, Richard Dawkins, and millions of lesser known liberals. Most of whom were and are still too afraid to say anything.

gorwell··on Maybe Bluesky has "won"
Bluesky is the blue version of Gab. You'll find that it's an ideological echo chamber and gets uninteresting fast.

The difference is that this version of Twitter isn't censoring and banning people for wrongthink. The people leaving are self selecting out of the idea gene pool, as opposed to being forced out.

Naval wrote it well, "Rigid ideologues move but the persuadable center does not. So they just move into irrelevance."

gorwell··on Maybe Bluesky has "won"
It also means they will become increasingly radicalized in their echo chamber.

It's telling that people who are leaving X are doing so not because they are being censored, but because their political opponents are no longer being censored.

gorwell··on The USDA's gardening zones shifted, this map shows you what's changed
Just call it "climate"
gorwell··on New iPad Pro with M4 chip and Apple Pencil Pro
They're bold enough to say they're carbon neutral.

"Today, Apple is carbon neutral for global corporate operations, and by 2030, plans to be carbon neutral across the entire manufacturing supply chain and life cycle of every product."

gorwell··on Key Stable Diffusion Researchers Leave Stability AI as Company Flounders
*Every legacy media article
gorwell··on The perverse policies that fuel wildfires
It's infuriating how people spread that racist meme. And to add insult to injury, consider themselves holy while doing it.
gorwell··on Amazon is chopping jobs at its One Medical and Pharmacy units
Hopefully not! At this point we'd be better off if they did take it over vs getting out entirely.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39280477

gorwell··on Amazon is chopping jobs at its One Medical and Pharmacy units
No amount of capital can cut through the corruption and regulatory morass that has been built up over decades between the biopharma and government revolving door. That needs to get cleaned up before anyone has any chance of solving this.

https://www.modernhealthcare.com/assets/png/CH107294927.PNG

gorwell··on How Inuit Parents Teach Kids To Control Their Anger (2019)
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission is the opposite as advertised. It's a serious mistake to take the self proclaimed Ministry of Truth at face value.
gorwell··on OpenAI suspends bot developer for presidential hopeful Dean Phillips
Interesting conspiracy theory.

Musk, Ackman, Altman historically vote Democrat.

Dean didn't propose them as cabinet positions. He made an off the cuff joke.

Most Democrats want a different choice.

Why is competition within the party a bad thing? That anyone trying to compete must be a conspiracy by the others?

gorwell··on Rumble turns off access in Brazil because of government's censorship demands
Free speech doesn't lead to devasating results. Just the opposite.

Censorship does. Every time. Nazis, communists, every authoritarian or totaliatarian government, rely on censorship and restrict free speech heavily.

Bad ideas require censorship to survive the light of day.

gorwell··on Nobody knows what's happening online anymore
Correction

That election was about the working class finally getting one over on the managerial elite.

7 years later and you still don't understand 2016 or refuse to understand it, all while acting smug.

gorwell··on Today Is One of the Biggest Surveillance Votes. Will the FBI Stop Spying?
But didn't we discover way back with Snowden that it was not as shallow as we thought? Has it decreased in depth since then?
gorwell··on Today Is One of the Biggest Surveillance Votes. Will the FBI Stop Spying?
Complete myth is a stretch isn't it? "closed border" doesn't pass the sniff test either.
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