Not having a right to privacy doesn’t mean we should record everyone’s every move if they aren’t locked in their windowless basement. Which they would have to be since its legally OK to have cameras pointing at your neighbors bedroom window or backyard, or to fly a recording drone over their house.

Additionally I think we should have a right to privacy in public. Why does your right to have your own surveillance fiefdom in your building extend to the street where I’m just trying to go for a jog? It interferes with my peace of mind, and it makes neighbors appear more like police than people I should be able to rely on.

I’m also exceptionally skeptical cameras have any impact on crime. I know police rarely investigate or solve property crime, and unless they prevent the crime from happening outright (doubt), or the camera owner has a full time live human monitoring to respond to an immediate action (businesses), it serves no purpose but to give the owner a false sense of security and to peep on your neighbors.

Getting broken into can be a very traumatic and violating experience, and in a better world we would try to help both the person who is driven to robbery and the person who’s space was violated. In the one we live in, people slap cameras and floodlights everywhere, mental health care is nonexistent, and we punish such that the cycle of poverty and crime continues. Thus nothing is solved and the world gets worse.

Police cameras and municipal cameras are even worse in these ways, now it isn’t the guy next door, its the state and all the money and power it holds doing a peep into your bedroom and a follow down the street. They don’t trust you, they don’t want you here, and you had better watch yourself. That message isn’t for everyone of course, but if you’re already marginalized in a community, it sure reads like the message is for you.

If we do install cameras, like red light cameras or speed cameras which have proven to do something, we need to be extraordinarily careful about where we place them and how we use them. And they should only be there until the underlying problem is solved, not placed as a solution themselves.

I’m not sure that’s how that shakes out, you can’t exactly extinguish open source projects, they may go dormant but they are still there, and there would be the last open source proton build to start from too.

It would also annoy the very people who are most likely to make their own compatibility tools and inconvenience themselves to spite bad business practice. Maybe in some future world where everyone is on Linux/proton, the people who just blindly use windows today because they always have would just keep using the now proprietary proton, but that’s far from the way it is today.

Honestly I just use what is easiest to get working, used to do every game manually, then used Lutris, now I use Steam, probably will use something else that’s easier in the future, especially if/when my library disappears. Til then I’ll support the company that made it much easier to leave Microsoft behind. Nice bonus: valve is one of the least bad large companies in the US at time of writing, so it feels less awful to give them money.

Because shifting schedules by an hour randomly in the middle of the year twice is physically damaging and bad for your health, that impacts you. And maybe it’s not so bad for you, you work shifting hours, no biggie. Try to imagine that you had that regular schedule and suddenly it changed, it did bother you, perhaps make decisions based on that.

If you can’t imagine anyone else having thoughts, feelings, or emotions different from yours, consider that when you’re crossing the street the day after daylight savings time, you’re being passed by people who didn’t get enough sleep and maybe they’re like you, but they might not be, and that could directly impact you too.

It’s such a simple small change to a weird tradition that has no more purpose in our modern world than the “moonlight lamps” of the US or the penny farthing. They may be historically important or interesting, but that doesn’t mean you should be forced to use them. Change can be scary but it’s gonna be ok, daylight savings time will inevitably end up the way of the funny big wheeled bike, it’s just a matter of when and how. You can always choose to wake up early all year round.

Well we’ve recently entered the race to the bottom category, we’ll see how that one goes

More seriously, the US did lead the way in various ways for a while for the time. Just gotta ignore the racism and colonialism. Unfortunately many innovations turned out to be the limit of American imagination and any attempt to continue to improve and grow is now met with hostility.

It’s probably at least somewhat a product of years of corporate and conservative interests marketing a return to an imagined golden age for economic and political gain. No room for new things in the fantasy of the '50s, just easy money, grass suburbs, giant cars, and unconcerned white people as far as the eye can see.

Yeah when I start ranting about the government’s cheese caves under Missouri people think I’ve finally cracked, but they’re real. It started as a program to help farmers during the great depression, but by now it’s just socializing the dairy industry and keeping prices artificially high. I don’t think they sold it to fund the program though, they distributed it through food security programs.

There’s gotta be better foods for the government to stockpile and distribute to the hungry than cheese though, it’s tasty, but it’s not great for you and it’s not filling many nutritional gaps. Not to mention lots of people can’t even eat it without getting sick

The apps are bullshit but the slower cycles take less water and energy, which is definitely a positive.

Idk why the speed is a big deal to folks, it’s not like you have to sit there and babysit it, just hit play and go do something else

I use transit for transit (it’s in the name) but it also gives fantastic bike directions and transit+bike if I’m not feeling a particularly long ride. I may have had to mess with the settings but it almost always shows biking as an option.

Otherwise I use OsmAnd, but since I almost exclusively get around by bike and bus I am usually looking places up to manually plan routes, not using navigation.

Speed cameras are really good at stopping speeding in their direct area, whether or not someone speeding likes them. Their downfall is they usually are installed by private companies who manage them, and the contracts are paid for by tickets. Since the cameras do such a good job stopping the speeding, the city stops getting ticket money and starts having to pay the companies out of pocket. We’ve been using police to do traffic stops for longer and it hasn’t really worked the same way. (And cops cost waaaaaaay more).

One study from New York

But a quick search found many studies from all over the world.

I bet that person speeding through the construction zone learned a valuable lesson about risking their and other people’s lives for 30 seconds faster arrival times. Also I cant imagine being so distracted while driving that I would miss a traffic camera and the signs that almost always proceed it ten times. Plus the flow of traffic would likely be slowing as more observant drivers saw the camera, which you’d have to ignore and presumably pass aggressively whilst shouting angrily about other people being bad drivers.

Shoot, not to beat this point too much (too late), but it’s also a construction zone which typically has tons of speed signs plastered everywhere… maybe they deserved the 10 tickets in two weeks and they’re just mad because if we relied on cops they would have gotten away with it.

Washington State also has exclusively mail in voting as you describled, though I think there’s a few polling places to help if you’ve got problems on voting day or want to register. Along with what you mentioned, turnout is also pretty high in these states (just under 79% in WA in 2024) compared to ones without a universal mailed ballot and info packet, and at least in Washington, 80% of eligible people are registered to get their ballot to begin with.

To be fair, these could have nothing to do with each other, people in the PNW are fairly politically opinionated and perhaps they’re just more likely to vote.

From what I recall, Washington has one of the most secure voting systems in the country, mostly from keeping the voter registry up to date by automatically registering and updating vote information whenever anyone interacts with the state, especially the licensing office. Obviously it has nothing to do with the manner of voting, the conservatives just think mail in voting hurts their chances of winning.

It’s absurd to imagine forcing entire states to suddenly start voting in person again, and I can’t imagine the states going along with it. Which leads me to wonder what happens when the federal government throws out the results from an entire state. Do they just choose the senators and electors? Obviously it’s all illegal but that hasn’t stopped them yet. Perhaps the odd way we do elections for president wouldn’t really be impacted, since states don’t even need to do an election, just send the electors.

Yes, the airlines aren’t being held hostage, no one said this.

Boeing has been subsidized for years and has generally been the only aircraft purchased by American airline companies. That was the claim and it’s true.

Sure they could buy Airbus or Embraer (and they do a lot more these days since Boeing has lost favor due to some fairly catastrophic crashes and basically stopped making the airplanes companies want), but historically they were much more expensive and “not American” (Airbus) or literally didn’t really exist as a serious choice in commercial air (Embraer). Bombardier hasn’t been in the commercial aircraft business at all since I think 2020, though the CRJ was a relatively common sight in the states for short flights until they stopped making it (I’m having trouble finding which airlines fly them though I didn’t look that hard).

Airbus didn’t have an American factory until 2016, and American Airlines, the airline with the most Airbus aircraft today, only started ordering them in 2011. Delta didn’t have any Airbus until the early 2000s when they bought out a company that did, and they still buy mostly Boeing. United has some Airbus these days too but the vast majority of their fleet and their entire historical fleet is Boeing, Lockheed (been out of commercial air for a long time), or McDonald Douglass (now Boeing).

Those are the current major airlines in the US, and even today they fly mostly Boeing, though that is changing when looking at current orders. There are a few more larger carriers such as Southwest, Alaska, Hawaiian, or Spirit, but many of them also fly mostly Boeing and I’ll let you do that research for yourself.

No company has anyone by hostage, but Boeing clearly has had the market in the US and it has been largely due to government subsidy in the form of “job creation” initiatives, military and space contract, and lax oversight.

It’s so bizarre right? It seems almost like an inverse relationship, the more vital the job, the less you get paid

Maybe there aren’t enough jobs because we don’t all need to be doing paid work 40+ hours a day. We do need to eat though and we can’t do that unless we work.

My last job was a temp gig at a corporate headquarters of a publicly traded company where no one but the administrative assistants, cleaning staff, cafe staff, and other support staff really did anything. I thought it was just me not understanding a shared corporate language or something. But the people I interacted with spent the majority of their days talking about how busy they were, chatting with coworkers about their weekend, and walking around the building to talk to different coworkers about their weekend.

It’s hard to quantify how much “work” got done in my year there, especially on teams I didn’t interact with. But in my section of the company, I saw projects that would be a homework assignment for a college student start before I got there and still be going when I left with a dozen people directly working on it.

All that ramble is to give background to my gut reaction, that we’re unemployed because the economy doesn’t need us, there’s too many workers already. If we had universal basic income, I’d be doing a couple things I enjoy like baking bread for friends or making wooden furniture, and I would be working some at the library. I think a lot of those pointless jobs would just disappear too, as people had the opportunity to do something meaningful or more real. At minimum, then we wouldn’t need to find paid work to eat.

Yes but also it takes up so much room for so few people to exclusively enjoy. I’m not sure that $17 and dumpster diving for clubs can be considered typical for your average golf Enjoyer, though I know there are more and less expensive ways to do everything. They’re also often plopped in urban areas forcing you to walk all the way around to get to the other side (don’t you dare walk in the special sport field)((and God help me if you touch my special sport grass)).

Speaking of the grass it’s wildly bad for the planet. The runoff, as you mentioned, is part of it, but the water consumption from having a nice green in the summer in the warm places people like to stand on a grass field, and the gas from the daily lawn mowing is also a factor. (grass and associated pest/weed killers are also a nightmare from an ecological perspective)

It’s also not a particularly fun sport for many people. I appreciate some people like it, but surely a nice park and a beer is something that can be done a little more fun with far fewer negative externalities.

In all honesty, I have a really hard time understanding the opposite view. Why someone would go stand in a fenced in hot field, grass, gas, and fertilizer odors on the breeze, and spend the whole day just smacking a plastic ball around instead of going for a jog in a park, or swim/float in a lake/river, or go on a hike, or play soccer. Add on top of that the knowledge that what you’re doing is participating in a harmful activity, as discussed above, and I just don’t see how the fun can possibly outweigh all that. My gut reaction is that to play golf you either have to be purposefully or accidentally ignorant, however incorrect that may be.

Capitalism may play a part in making the sport suck, but you can’t play golf without a big field of the largest cultivated crop in the US near where people live, and that’s all it takes for me to dislike it.

Turns out lugging millions of heavy metal boxes around is a tough thing to make climate friendly

I wonder if we were developing petroleum refining and engines now instead of them being established and subsidised, if we would also find them to be unfeasible. I know petroleum products are ludicrously energy dense, but the whole process to make it usable is pretty intense, the infrastructure needed to get it everywhere is extensive, it leaks, it burns, and it smells bad.

It would be interesting to see the modern day cost associated with building out and maintaining gas infrastructure for cars

I feel like I am just repeating myself, disability does not prevent creative expression? A broken arm does not define your ability to paint. Perhaps one medium or another is more challenging but art has many many forms and we have been managing for thousands of years without a tech startup reinventing art. And not every culture in history has been as ableist as the one while live in today. Anyone can already make meaningful art.

As for not having the time, I think that’s an excuse for taking a shortcut using other people’s art and trying to make it their own. It won’t be as impressive, no matter how long they spend typing prompts into the computer, the person badly sketching mushrooms on their 10 at the local coffee chain is far more inspiring.

I wish we lived in a time where we were allowed to do what we loved and I may be a little envious of the people who are able to, but they have a right to complain that their work is being stolen and invalidated by people who don’t value it.

It’s using endless electricity and water to perform tasks I could do powered by a bowl of cereal in the morning. I’d rather need one solar panel than ten, and a river rather than a dried up well, personally, but ever increasing energy demands require the latter two.

If by accelerating you are referring to making the problem worse so we have to deal with melted ice caps sooner, then I agree! I for one don’t really trust turbo predictive text to solve the collapsing jet stream, but I sure do expect it to play a part in causing it. Or maybe just the extraction of increasing material from colonized countries to pay for our funny memes and your “art” through solar panel and battery. Either way, it is contributing in a very real way to the destruction of our planet for little gain that could be achieved more efficiently by other means.

The cool part about a smartphone is I actually wanted it and it did a thing nothing had before (except some PDAs maybe). Also living without one is very possible and I do so frequently, I’m not a chronic poster or social media user. Machine learning with a gui on it is neither something I wanted nor is it novel, and it is not improving the world we live in, it is making it worse.

The saving grace is this fad will pass as it becomes clear it’s the same as home automation, block chain, machine learning, the concept of web domains, etc. and it’s mostly been hype by tech investors all along. I would care about it a whole lot less if it weren’t so full of negative externalities.

I don’t think ‘disabled people’ need a computer to generate content to participate in art creation, and I don’t think artists making art is exploitation. The artists, meaning anyone who ever had their art posted online, are the ones being exploited here, their work was stolen and made to work for tech investors.

Even if these were tangible benefits they are a small compensation for the accelerated degradation of our shared planet, the mass robbery of nearly everyone on earth, and the further damage to our ability to critically think and create. And on top of that, the stuff it generates isn’t even very good.

If it turns out to be real, that would be the easiest buy I’ve ever had with a car. But with a design supposedly about practicality, why do they have to go with the iPad car controls? Hopefully that trend dies out soon and we can have buttons again.

I can’t see myself spending money on anything beyond a smartphone with a touchscreen for everything, and seeing it in this makes me more skeptical about the product as a whole.

Finished reading The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein about 20 years late

I feel like there’s some distinct through lines from there to where we are now, but my head cold is getting in the way of any coherent thought.

Picked up books seven and eight of the wheel of time to recover, should be some much lighter reading

It’s nice to imagine we can keep living exactly as we are and not have to pay up for any of the consequences of our actions. Maybe there will be a tech miracle to save us and the non-consenting species we are taking with us, but that hope, belief, and gamble is not a solution to the problem we have.

We have the solution, we know what it is, and we know how to execute it, we just lack the will. Until that miracle appears we should try to actually fix the problem.

Waiting for a tech solution to appear is like standing on the beach after an earthquake as the tide goes out praying that it won’t come back in.

Edit: Or maybe eating a nice dinner out and continuing to order hoping they forget your bill or someone else pays it. Either way it’s not doing a thing to make the problem better.