I firmly believe that a “crustless ice mantle” meets the definition of an ocean.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 3rd, 2023

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  • Global solutions are nice to ask for, but not forthcoming. We can start by investing in alternatives at the local/national level, encouraging others to do the same, and advocating to grow an alternative way of living that is less extractive and more respectful. Ideas can spread quite quickly, if the conditions are right. A global switch isn’t possible immediately. Infrastructure must be planned. International economic planning and international cooperation are low right now. Even intranational cooperation is low.

    Cooperation grows from the bottom up, and we need to find something locally/nationally to agree on and cooperate over. Plastics and recycling being a unifying issue is hopeful to report, and is something that can be tackled at the local level. I have greatly reduced my own plastic consumption (it’s not zero) and saved money doing it. Plastic products are usually expensive conveniences. Now I spend my days cleaning instead of just tossing and moving on. A part of the problem is that living well requires labor, and our society forces us to sell all of our labor energy to make a boss rich and pay us pennies. Further, we all live in atomized, nuclear units that must be self-reliant, which requires more labor to meet needs compared to the economies of scale involved with community-pooled labor to meet shared needs like food (a major source of plastics waste).

    Previously, western society supported this structure via sexual segregation where one sex provided the labor to live well, and the other provided the labor donated to capitalism in exchange for the family unit being allowed to live. Then, the sex whose job it was to help us live well realized that they were being oppressed in this scenario, since they were being denied many basic rights of citizenship such as being seen as a person by society. They were tricked by the capitalists to demand that they may also donate their labor to the invisible hand in exchange for something closer to full citizenship. This creates a domestic labor vacuum that prevents pay parity. Domestic labor needs are being suppressed by convenience plastic use. The need for someone to do domestic labor causes women to fall back into this role due to the structural vacuum. Convenience plastics use is required to support the lack of time available now that Bosses demand double the labor from each family unit compared to the 1960s. Dropping plastics increases domestic labor requirements which exacerbates the sexual labor vacuum and pay gap. I see a local/national need to fix sexual issues as blocking a fix for our plastics addiction in the west. Abstracting the problematic societal structures around sex, calling them gender, and then breaking their rules is the current strategy to free ourselves.













  • There is a difference between background-level bulk sniffing and someone-here-maybe-incited-violence targeted sniffing. The former is data collection, which is passive in the form practiced by “the feds”. The latter is data connection, putting effort into connecting a subset of the data that has been collected to form a story. Data connections need a framing, a nucleation seed, an impetus for why the feds might think such a connection is interesting or relevant or worth adding to their story about a larger incident. Collecting data is cheap and done in bulk, partly because it can be done passively and partly because the US govt paid a lot of money on storage and collection mechanisms. Connecting data is something that requires a lot more time, effort, patience, and vetting to make sure you are doing it right.

    Or you can give the job to generative AI and hope it doesn’t hallucinate that someone innocent is guilty; with a large enough data pool (ie the internet, reality, what-have-you) it’s possible to select a misleading subset to support whatever hallucination you want.

    It’s easy to do wrong, which is exactly why you don’t want the feds sniffing around. Especially now that they have the tools to automate doing it wrong, and might not know how to use them yet.




  • I’m down with that. Direct election of cabinet members, judges, military brass, and anyone else that the president hires to delegate work. Presidents don’t work, they hire. The people should be the ones hiring. Some cabinet seats would in turn gain the power of vote to exercise other formerly presidential powers, such as signing or vetoing bills. All meetings with other world leaders (for example) are managed by the ambassador to the UN, directly elected by the people. We would ranked vote for who we think the best ambassador would be, independent of the best labor secretary, etc. Forces us to focus on specific jobs as a framing for the electoral process.