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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2024

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  • I’m much more a fan of the PBS/NPR underwriting model. Tell me who deliberately funds the show or video.

    When the advertisement is so divorced from the show, is not relevant to the conversation or is not relevant to me, then the andvertisers are wasting their money.

    If you show me the same ad over and over again, I am actually more likely to NOT buy that branded product or service because I’ve become so annoyed and numb from the ad taking what little time I have on this planet that I will actively boycott it.

    However, I do have a nice space mug from PBS, a plot of land on Mars, the moon and Scotland, and a t-shirt for the Truth podcast to prove that I will spend money when the advertising is relevant to the content I’m consuming. So if you want the ad to work, invest your dollars directly into the content and providers I care about.

    But for the love of everything, do not think for a moment that your contribution gives you license to control their messaging or content.



    • Energy demand to power heavy industry that we all use (steel, aluminum, chemicals, fertilizers)
      • I don’t see these going away, so it’d be best to make their processes greener by repurposing the carbon into ag products, then institute a viable carbon tax and offset the rest of their footprint
    • Use of concrete in construction
      • some promising technologies coming that crystallize the carbon and use it to self heal the concrete, carbon tax and offset the rest
    • Shipping
      • bring manufacturing closer to consumers, global environmental manufacturing and shipping standards, improve right to repair laws
    • Transportation
      • upgrade public transportation options where it makes economic sense to do so, make our cities and towns more people friendly instead of car friendly, raise the gas tax to fund these efforts. Reduce the amount of detached single family housing stock and encourage multi-family stock, particularly in cities.
    • Heating and cooling
      • incentivize heat pumps, add taxes to heating fuels and fossil energy plants to fund it. Start a major campaign to educate people to keep temperatures around 68 (winter) to 76 degrees (summer). And encourage use of ceiling fans.




  • I wish people would spend 10% of the time that they doomscroll towards activism. 15-30 minutes a day in real life. Join groups that align with your worldviews. Meet face to face, donate, call representatives, volunteer.

    If we all did that across the country, our numbers would be so overwhelming that the people pulling this shit would be put back in whatever hole they crawled out of.

    But instead, we all sit here, reading this, wringing our hands, doing nothing but worrying, and they pick us off one by one, among the nearly silent tap tap taps of our fingers on our phones.


  • I am not an AI hater, it helps me automate many of the more mundane tasks of my job or the things I don’t ever have time for.

    I also feel that change management is a big factor with any paradigm shifting technology, as is with LLMs. I recall when some people said that both the PC and the internet were going to be just a fad.

    Nonetheless, all the reasons you’ve mentioned are the same ones that give me concern about AI.






  • This seems like a tragedy of the commons line of thinking, with a dash of whataboutism.

    I’m reminded of the quote “be the change you wish to see in the world.”

    If you wish to reduce plastic consumption, perhaps the single step along that journey begins with you.

    And if that journey includes sacrifices that you are not willing to make, then it’s good to be cognizant of that, so that you understand your impact on the world and the consequences your decisions have upon your future self.

    Distilling this to an example you mentioned above, if you are unwilling to use bar soap, then perhaps look for bath products where some of the company profits go towards environmental restoration. Depending on the company, it may not mitigate your full impact, but reduce is one of the 3 tenets of sustainability.

    I think it’s important that consider that, for now, we only have this one spaceship.