salt-thrower

Forgive me for wondering whether an account created 27 minutes ago is arguing in good faith on a topic that frequently gets brigaded by FUD trolling. An actual lawyer will have to weigh in on whether this fits the damages awarded in similar cases.

A lifetime of garnished wages seems like a small price to pay for a millionaire who makes a career out of peddling hatred that ruins other peoples' lives. And they didn't just make up the number out of nowhere; it's based on estimated damages that his actions caused. I'm not a lawyer so I can't speak to precedent or similar judgements in other cases. In any case, he will appeal, so we'll see what the final number actually comes out to.

That's patently incorrect. Incoming texts from my Android-user contacts are green bubbles. Incoming texts from my iPhone-user contacts are blue. Source: I'm looking at my iPhone right now.

The shoes thing is definitely still true in some circles. It's a valuable lesson to teach, but a very hard one. And most people don't internalize it until adulthood. Most parents will shrug and just spring for the iphone rather than listen to the incessant complaints.

If you follow the trial at all, you'll see that this was not just "he said a bad thing one time and people are mad at him." He has a strongly demonstrated pattern of lies, perjury, obstruction of the legal process, and encouraging harassment against the Sandy Hook families. Most of the people saying "everyone should be afraid of this" are arguing in bad faith.

This is a fair judgement against Jones. A fair judgement against the people who lied about WMD's and killed millions via the war in Iraq would be life in prison, for a start.

Just because the criminals at the top get away with war crimes doesn't mean the criminals lower on the totem pole shouldn't be punished. It's a false equivalence to claim otherwise.

Is being imprisoned an effective addiction treatment or therapy program? Would the threat of prison manage to turn people away from heroin or schizophrenia?

There is no publicly funded drug treatment or mental health program to send them to. Prison is just a temporary lockup before they’re returned to the same environment they came from. Where are you proposing we send them?

FWIW, I think we’re saying close to the same thing. I’m fine with disallowing people from openly camping in cities, but only if there’s a massive safety net to send them to that will actually help. Currently the anti-homeless sentiment is just being ginned up by corporate prisons who want more money. That’s clearly not a real solution.

Public funding for healthcare, including mental health and rehab, would be a good start. Where do these people go even if they want help for their issues? Therapy and rehab cost tens of thousands of dollars. And throwing them in prison is just an “out of sight, out of mind” solution. Good luck getting a job and straightening your life out with prison time on your record.

You shouldn’t criminalize homelessness unless you’re also offering an alternative that actually helps people. But America will never do that, instead we just punch down and make an example out of the lowest among us instead of trying large scale solutions. There are localized nonprofits to help with this sort of thing, but they’re underfunded and limited in scope.

Literally no one knows what you’re talking about.

I wouldn’t compare React to Django and Rails, as in being a “full framework” that is opinionated and has specific ways of doing things. React is still more of just a rendering library than a framework in the traditional sense.

This is a reductive straw man. People are saying that cities are dead or dying for many more reasons than the appearance of general stores.

Good luck with that! Though it might be worth trying, as the desert will be even more inhospitable than it already is in the years to come.

The fact that React is “good,” in the author’s own admission, combined with its raw popularity and staying power is why I would still choose it for any greenfield project.

Freedom of speech is literally just “the government can’t throw you in jail for expressing an opinion.” It’s always been only that. Media companies (TV, newspapers, radio, now social media) have always “deplatformed” people who they disagree with or consider dangerous. There is nothing new in any of your examples.

If you agree with the views of deplatformed influencers, you can start your own blog about it. That’s free speech. They get to live their lives as normal, and companies are not obligated to give them a louder megaphone.

I'm acutely aware that middle to upper class, mostly white, Americans are the worst offenders of overconsumption and that people who make overpopulation claims about the third world are being racist. Britain, and then America, led the charge of industrial imperialism that doomed us to this current timeline. And we colonized and brutalized people of color the world over to get there. I understand that, and I understand the hypocrisy of living a middle class American lifestyle while I type this. Though at least I live in a small-ish duplex without AC :)

I'm also aware that people have been predicting the apocalypse for as long as there have been people. But this is not as simple as manure storage, and it's a bit disingenuous to draw that comparison. You simply cannot have 8 billion people living in huge houses with air conditioning. It will not work. If our definition of racial equality and harmony is to let everyone fuck up the environment equally, rather than restricting everyone's (including rich white people) ability to overconsume, then we are all equally toast.

> And this is why I don’t believe most of the arguments against big houses, cars, air conditioning, are honest or being made in good faith.

Reminder: all the information and points I'm citing come from the world's leading climate and environmental scientists. If you think the IPCC is just being racist when they lay out the data about how bad climate change will be and say we need to reduce our emissions (i.e. consumption), then I don't know what to tell you.

Your goalposts are still apocalyptic. Even going from 8 billion to 4 billion would be catastrophic amounts of suffering. The raw number of humans that currently exist is not a good measure for quality of life in general.

"rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all"

It literally says "livable future." As in, a future that is as livable for humanity in general as the present currently is.

There are numerous scientists that predict sea level rise coupled with lethal wet-bulb temperatures in the tropics will make living around the equator difficult if not impossible. Here is a direct quote if you need it:

"SSP5-8.5 — Imagine a world where humanity doesn’t just do nothing about climate change but continues to make it worse... The net result would be 4.4°C of warming, with a range between 3.3°C and 5.7°C. As if large-scale coastal inundation and extremely destructive weather weren’t enough, parts of the planet would become unlivable during the hottest times of the year."

Source: https://www.vox.com/22620706/climate-change-ipcc-report-2021...

That's a timeline in which we continue to increase emissions year over year and actively double down on business-as-usual. So far, that has been the case (emissions dipped in 2020 during lockdown, but we are now back to emitting more than ever before).

> And if they won’t, life itself is even more resilient.

You realize that's hardly reassuring, right? You're right though - life is resilient. Life has survived worse.

But our fragile global civilization, propped up by fossil fuels at a core level, is not resilient in the worst case outcomes of climate change. And keep in mind: in order to avoid the worst case scenarios, massive economic and political change needs to happen. No such changes are happening yet, though.

So yeah, I agree that humans and life in general will probably survive, but not in any way that would be recognizable to us now.

> If there hypothetically was a magical source of near infinite renewable energy that could be harnessed without negative side effects, would you be ok with 2600+ sqft homes and air conditioning?

Yes. In a world with zero negative externalities for massive resource consumption, then by all means, give everyone a mansion and a yacht.

> What number of humans can the Earth ideally sustain in your estimation? If it's substantially less than the current population, then the cure is worse than the disease.

In our current industrialized, consumerist, global economy? Far less than 8 billion. You're painting me as a rabid anti-human eco-fascist though, so let me assure you I'm none of those things. I want humanity to succeed and I want all people to be happy and successful. But the current rate of resource extraction and ecological disturbance that we're directly responsible for will drive our species into a brick wall very soon. Along with millions of other species. We will come to a point where we simply cannot extract the energy we need to feed everyone, and where the biosphere has been so damaged that the necessary agriculture yields just won't be there. And also the other things, like the tropics becoming uninhabitable, ocean acidification killing marine life that the food chain depends on, etc.

I'm not anti-human, I'm very much a humanist, and pro-nature. Humans are part of nature. Unfortunately, we seem incapable of limiting our consumption to sustainable levels when given the opportunity to overshoot. Or at least our current civilization does (past ones have done better, but they also didn't have to try to resist the temptation of internal combustion engines like we do now). I've lost hope for any political solutions given how lackluster all efforts have been thus far, so we don't really need to sit here and debate solutions, because no one's at the wheel and the brick wall is getting very close. Enjoy the surplus of energy while we can still extract it.

TL;DR the famous book "Limits to Growth" was very prescient and it mostly hit the mark.

This article comes across as extremely tone-deaf, and the author seems unaware of the existential scale of the problems humanity is facing. The fact that the phrase "climate change" only appears once - at the beginning, as a throwaway line - really speaks volumes.

If the only problems we face were war and rising Christian fascism, I would also be optimistic, because those things can and have been fought successfully in the past. However...

The very real situation of climate change, described by leading scientists as "code red for humanity," cannot be waved away by comparing our current struggles to that of medieval peasants seeking freedom from monarchy. We're talking about a collapsing biosphere. We're talking about mass extinction. We're talking about large areas of the Earth becoming functionally uninhabitable.

I would even be optimistic about that, too, if world leaders (economic and political) seemed to take any of it seriously. But they don't, so I'm not. And I think the author is conveniently ignoring this entire subject.

Exactly. The author is living in a middle/upper class suburbian bubble. Bigger and bigger houses that consume more and more resources is a problem, not a sign of progress. It is a glaring sign of the consumerism and resource depletion that is fueling the crisis we're in.

There is no amount of renewable energy that will make "average homes are 2,657 square feet and have air conditioning" a sustainable way of living.

The corporate automation of creative work is not comparable to the choice between different modes of transportation for a courier job.

I would gladly trade less efficiency in art generation for more artists being employed. "AI stimulation" is not a 1:1 swap for being an actual artist.

That's the crux of it. I was mostly just making a joke that the marketing copy on their main page sounds cultish because of its vague appeals to high minded ideals and trendy tech buzzwords like AI. That's all though. I don't know anything about the company beyond their landing page.

I'm not saying this is a cult, but the Scientology office in my city has a sign out front advertising the same vague benefits that this website claims to offer.

As usual, it’s success at the cost of increased user hostility. The company doesn’t care, because increasing the stock price is the only thing that matters to them, their board, and their shareholders. But it does make the lives of users worse. Companies get locked into licensing fees, students are put under ever increasing financial pressure.

It’s just another example of “only stock price matters, we don’t care if users like us.” It’s a wild success if you own Adobe stock, and feels exploitative if you don’t.

Not sure why you’re being downvoted. Weather patterns like droughts are exacerbated by climate change. Heat waves are known to make it easier for fires to catch and spread. Heat waves are more common now due to climate change. Thus climate change makes fires more likely/common. It’s pretty straightforward.

Did you read the article I linked?

What’s the average lethality of California’s power failures compared to those of Texas?

Acknowledging the failures of their ideologically motivated “independent” power grid that fails more easily under strain would be nice. Or retracting the assertion that power customers paying thousands of dollars to stay alive during a chill or a heat wave is “the system working as intended,” and instead saying “we need to improve this.” Anything like that might be a good start.

This reads like you only read the first half-sentence of that comment and stopped there.

Your reductive reasoning is palpable. People will move to Texas in the near term for the promise of low COL, but I wonder how many massive power grid failures it will take for the rich to begin fleeing for greener pastures.