matlag

Once you start to have money, you get a money dependency. No matter how rich you get, the “baseline you really need to live the life you want and nothing more” growths together with your wealth.

Take lottery winners and ask them if they could give away half of their gains. Will you be surprised if most of them say no, even though the day before they would have set their “minimum needed to live a happy life for the rest of my days” at a much smaller fraction of it?

Now take a similar population, but who in addition rationalized them deserving that money through their hard work and talent.

Technically that won’t be a baseless conspiracy theory though. Just not “the liberals”, and not hiding “the truth”.

“Oh yeah, that’s definitely settled: John has the biggest one! Ok folks, zip up before they realize what we’re doing!”

Really? Do you realize how many people we’re talking about? This is where the idea that the human brain can’t comprehend interactions with too many people.

“Multiple indepondant people” might be 5% of the people, some of them under the mob’s effect (wouldn’t engage alone).

Maybe we miss another point of view, but maybe we don’t. This may be a screaming example of what you get as a representative of minorities getting a bit of attention.

Was he not describing his fundraising as donations so far? You donate money you don’t think you need at all. But you should be able to lend money you don’t need in the near future. I would bet some of his “loyal” supporters would start to doubt if they were asked to lend too much of what they own.

He should borrow vast amounts of money from his loyal supporters: “Empty your lifetime savings accounts, I promise I’ll pay everything back with interests!”.

Then we’ll see how much his followers really trust him when they need to put their own future on the line…

If you can afford a 1M$ painting, you can certainly afford to have it appraised once in a while.

Let’s be real: who would work hard to make ONLY millions instead of billions? Most people would obviously rather stay poor.

I’m sorry if that’s harsh, but my feedback would be: drop that chart!

It’s daunting, it’s going to freak out many newbies. Too much choice kills the choice.

You have one “default” at the bottom, Mint, so stick to that. Tell the newbies they can switch anytime to something else once they’re a bit more comfortable with the Linux-world. And if I’m not mistaken, you can install and try the main DEs with Mint also. Or you can recommend Ubuntu, or any other newbie friendly distro. Just pick one and don’t lose them over what they could see as an important difficult decision before they even get started.

Mozilla downsizes as it refocuses on Firefox and AI drops multiple products and layoff 60 so that its current budget can accomodate the stratospheric compensation of its new CEO.

Assume the communication with the app it through Internet. The car must have a 4G chip (too early to see 5G in cars, I think?). So no matter what you pay, it won’t work when 4G is retired. With marketing pushing to get new standards always faster, 4G may not last another 20years.

Anyway, bear in mind that once you subscribe, they will most likely collect detailed data about how you use the features and sell that as well…

This might be an unpopular post but so’ll be it: Mastodon is the existing proof that Meta could kill Mastodon any time.

Mastodon was using a protocol compatible with GNU Social: OStatus, but some features were quickly added without consideration for other implementations.

So when per-post privacy were introduced, for example, they were very public on GNU Social, because their devs had no idea this was coming. And GNU Social was blamed for it.

https://privacy.thenexus.today/mastodon-a-partial-history/#mastodon-gnu-social-and-the-early-fediverse

Instead of having more users, GNU Social is now (almost?) dead. Of course it’s not just because of the above. But it wouldn’t have been set back so much without Mastodon.

Now, Mastodon is opensource, has more features and some compatible implementations. I run Pleroma myself. But why would one think Meta could not cripple them both?

For example:

https://farm.bot/

There are others. Plenty of small/medium businesses just don’t have the resources to develop small computers and the matching software stack. In that regards, the RPi is an appealing choice.

By the time countries that could have built nuclear power plants would complete them, they will have collectively burnt enough coal and gas to doom humankind.

So: indeed, the world leaders didn’t try seriously.

I think it’s worse than that. We humans are inherently selfish and self-preserving.

People who live far away from any coal mines do not feel threatened by coal, because it will not impact them directly (besides fu**ing up the planet, of course, but that’s another issue humans have with big pictures and long term effect correlation to present small scale actions).

But most people can’t tell where a nuclear plant can be built, so it could be close enough to expose them to a risk of disaster?

Therefore: “Nuclear is more dangerous than coal (for my personal case)”

10 years from now, you might be in a situation where the grid is unstable and capacity is insufficient in front of demand. You will also be facing potential renewal of existing solar panels, wind farms, batteries storage, etc.

If you lack capacity, any attempt at industry relocation locally will be a pipe-dream.

And at that time, you’ll say either “it’s too late to rely on nuclear now” or “fortunately we’re about to get these new power plants running”. You’re not building any nuclear power plan for immediate needs, you’re building for the next decades.

Meanwhile, one country will be ready to take on “clean production” and be very attractive to industrial projects because it already planned all of that years ago and companies will be able to claim “green manufacturing”. That country is… China!

There is no solution to capture methane in the air. Its lifespan in air is 12years, so if we stop emitting, it will go away by itself. Until then, it’s quite bad. Capturing it at the source is also challenging (can you hemetically seal a cow’s ass without impacting its health?!).

The best solution is… less farms, less cows but that means less meat!

The main issue is probably less meat itself than the ginormous quantities we consume.

Most livestock farming is intensive, meaning they can’t rely on grazing alone and need extra food sources, typically corn. They emit methane, a greenhousing gas on steroids.

That grain is produced through very intensive agricultural methods because we can’t get enough of it. It consumes ridiculously large amount of water and slowly degrades the soils. Nitrates eventually end up in the sea, causing algea to proliferate while other lifeforms are suffocated. See the dead zone in Mexico’s gulf.

71% of agriculture land in Europe is dedicated to livestock feeding.

The percentage must be similar or higher in America, and don’t count North America alone: without grains from Brazil, we’re dead. Period. So next time you hear the world blaming Brazil for deforestation, keep in mind that a large share of it is to sustain livestocks…

Cattle farming in the USA is heavily subsidized, by allowing farmers to use federal land for grazing for free (I believe something similar is in place in Canada?). The claim they “take care of the land” is absurd: nature has been doing that for millenias without needing any help. First nations have been living in these lands also without supersized cows herds and it was going alright. Farms actually prevent wildlife to take back its place.

But I wouldn’t blame them. People in North America (among others, and I live in Canada, definitely me too) eat indecent and unhealthy quantities of meat, and that has to come from somewhere.

Now, simple math will tell you: if everyone in the world was consuming meat in the same quantities as us, there would’nt be enough suitable land on Earth to grow the corn that needs to go with it.

Another thing is not all meats are equal in terms of pollution. From the worst to the least bad, in equivalent kgCO2 per kg of meat you can actually eat: -Veal: 37 -Chicken (intensive, in cage): 18 -Beef: 34 -Pork: 5–7 -Duck, rabbit, pork: 4–5 -Chicken ("traditonal, free range): 3–4 -Egg (for comparison): <2

You can appreciate the orders of magnitude!

There are only 2 ways out of this:

• reduce meat consumption, and pick it right
• grown meat (meat made without the animal around it, in machines)

One can be done today, starting with your next meal. We don’t need meat every meal, we don’t even need meat every day, but it is true that going full vegetarian force a certain gymnastic to get all the nutriments one need.

The other solution is barely getting there, so there are still unknown (food quality, resources consumption, etc.) and the economics may not help it taking off.

The third (and let’s face it: current approach at national level everywhere on this issue) option is to do nothing and keep going as if the problems didn’t exist. This is guaranteeing a famine in the coming decades. When we’ll fail to feed our livestock, and it will start dying, it will be too late to turn around and get the whole agriculture sector to transition. These things take many years.

We’re trying to reduce our meat consumption at home, or to favor the least impacting ones. We still eat too much meat, but I hope we can gradually improve.

Never seen that one?

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OJQdM369msk

Just add it to the list: “The ink used to print this warning is toxic”