6 years of age would put me in 1978.

There is a lot I could do from that point onward, that would make $10M look like spare change. Like investing in Apple, or working with Tim Berners-Lee to more effectively launch an Internet that could better resist corporatization and enshittification.

Plus, current climate change has seen a velocity across a mere century that prior events took tens of thousands of years to achieve.

This imparts an “inertia” to our current climate that - even if we stopped on a dime, right now - will lead to conditions that may have most of the planet outside of the polar regions as being uninhabitable year-round due to chaotic weather and lethally high wet bulb temperatures that AC is simply unable to handle.

And if we don’t stop; if we continue on our “business as usual” path for another 10 or 20 or 30 years, said inertia could conceivably push the entire planet over into a full-blown Venus Scenario, wiping all life from the face of the planet.

Warming trails CO2 by 15-20 years. We are now seeing the 1.5℃ of warming of 2003, when Windows XP was released. If we hit CO2 levels that predict 5℃ of warming, humanity has essentially dug its own grave, the planet will (once warming catches up) no longer have any carrying capacity for us to survive in sufficient numbers. If we hit CO2 levels that predict 8-10℃, we run a non-trivial possibility of a tip-over into a Venus Scenario.

Prior events took many tens to hundreds of thousands of years, allowing entire ecosystems to migrate to and from the poles. This allowed the biosphere to “put the brakes on” warming itself because they never stopped being robust sequesters of CO2.

We don’t have that in play, here. Entire ecosystems will die in-place because they simply don’t have the time to migrate. We will see extinctions on a scale never before seen in the geological record. And the very robust biosphere that saved the planet in prior warming events will be commensurately weakened in this one, likely to the point where it cannot effectively sequester sufficient CO2 to stop the warming.

TL;DR: as a species, the likelihood that we are all endlings is uncomfortably high. Humanity may not see the year 2100, and will most likely not see the year 2200.

The idea of climate change violates scripture of all three Abrahamic faiths. So the truly faithful will reject the idea of climate change wherever it is mentioned on ideology alone.

The science of climate change has also been adopted by “the left”, so the political right must stridently oppose its existence it wherever it is mentioned, on principle alone.

That’s a majority of the population, right there, that will openly reject climate change in every way right up until it starves or kills them.

Flat earther-ism used to be satire, too.

Now we have people killing themselves in attempts to “prove” that the Earth is flat.

Never doubt the ability of satire to fly over people’s heads at 10,000ft, and for those people to swallow that satire uncritically; hook, line, and sinker.

Watched the whole. Damn. Thing.

Wow. I’m not prone to being maudlin, but this video is bittersweet.

Unless a company is an employee-owned socialist-style worker’s collective, employees generally have no say in that decision. A company can be every bit as evil as their owners want to be. Just look at Google or Facebook or Twitter.

And the problem in America is that for anyone making less than six figures (and many making below seven or even eight figures), their ability to protest any decision made by their employer is heavily constrained by a combination of the employer’s ability to fire them at a moment’s notice and the medical insurance that is tied to their job. Thanks to these two pincer-like forces, employee’s free choices in America are heavily constrained in the interests of capitalism and the Parasite Class.

And even if the “owners” want to be less evil, they themselves are often constrained by their investors, who force them to either toe the line or hurt all of their employees with unemployment and likely destitution and extreme hardship.

Because why bring needless suffering to those (the employees) who cannot do anything to avoid it, when they desperately need their jobs to survive in this capitalistic hellhole? Why punish the innocent employees who are just wanting to successfully put one financial foot in front of the other?

As any sort of CEO, your decisions should be for the financial well-being of your employees, first, which means knuckling under to the political demands of your current investor overlords. After all, if your decisions just put your entire workforce out of work because your investors pulled all of their money, your decision was a horrible one.

Granted, investors with odious ideologies should have been avoided from the start, but hindsight is always 20/20. Sometimes stuff like that isn’t just a known unknown, but even a complete unknown unknown.

And once you have an uncontrollably influential investor, your only choice might be to protect the economic welfare of your employees over an ideological stance that could easily make many of them homeless or even dead.

Or, they back him and acknowledge that they supported genocide but have since realised how wrong they were?

And then they all lose their jobs when the investor(s) pulls out. Did you not read the comment you were replying to?

If it’s a choice between one person losing their job and everyone losing their jobs, you are either rationally pragmatic to just one person or you are ideologically scorched-earth to everyone else.

I mean, if you are someone in a manglement position who has to pull that particular trigger you could also resign in protest, but at least that only torpedos your own career, and not the jobs of dozens of other people who work alongside you.

At the same time, those towns are hella compact, such that 90+% of residents can walk to pretty much any retailer or store or other resource within 15-20 minutes. Yes, some people (farmers) live outside of town and there are some American-style housing in clumps outside of the town, but everyone mostly lives in tight clusters.

And even the tiny towns well away from other larger towns have busses that move people between towns on a fairly regular If infrequent basis (15-20 minutes apart). Only the larger population centres can afford to have public transport that comes every 5 minutes or so.

You also have to understand that in North America, a “significant separation between towns” is something like 100+km. In Germany, that term qualifies with as little as a 10km distance. It’s rare to find any population centre that is more than 20km away from its nearest neighbour.

When you deny reality, I guess any kind of statement sounds reasonable.

The only thing Austerity does is screw over the working-class person to avoid inconveniencing any member of the Parasite Class with higher taxes.

Anyone implementing Austerity doesn’t give even a single f**k about any Average Joe/Jane, they’re doing this purely to help those with obscene levels of personal wealth avoid paying their fair share of the social contract.

Companies have also become so adverse - and I would even characterize it as hostile - to investing any effort into employees that they want to have any new hire to “hit the ground running”.

Ergo, they interview over and over again, using wildly diverse testing methods and querying for every possible needed skill, and getting tied up in analysis paralysis in their attempt to find the “perfect candidate”.

With the very predictable result of all the good candidates withdrawing for other opportunities - because the smart companies don’t conduct torture via incessant interviews, they jump to provide offers once basic thresholds have been met - leaving only the mediocre and substandard applicants.

This is why you hear certain companies lament the low quality of applicants, or descend clear down to “bUt No-OnE wAnTs To WoRk!!1!” when their toxic interview methods chase everyone away.

people are still crazy in on Obama being the cause of all our problems

That’s how you know that someone is ideologically contaminated and running completely facts-free: they blame everything on someone who has absolutely no relevance to the situation.

Libertarianism requires its members to engage in due diligence in order to execute their libertarian ideals properly and make the choices that are correct for them.

This, unfortunately, excludes the lower-60% of all Americans, who are so ground down, economically terrorized, and mentally overwhelmed with their daily struggles to survive that they have little to no opportunity to approach any major choice with anything even vaguely in the realm of due diligence. They just don’t have the headspace to do so, and are forced to spend all their available mental efforts on just putting one financial foot in front of the other.

This is why having social support frameworks enforced/provided/funded by the government is so important for so many working-class people - it allows them to put those issues on autopilot, significantly reducing their own cognitive load and allowing them to better process the most important issues in their lives.

Ergo, libertarianism is a wealthy person’s toy. It is something that they can champion, because only they have the economic options and financial freedom to fully and properly engage with it.

Until everyone has vanishingly few catastrophic-level issues on the horizon (like one missed paycheque leading to homelessness, or a sudden illness leading to medical bankruptcy), any attempt to implement libertarianism will only bring mass amounts of misery and destroyed lives to anyone beneath the Parasite Class.

And when you have those kinds of widespread government-provided supports that lift all boats - and not just the megayachts - why bother with libertarianism? We should continue to use what got everyone into that safe state in the first place – socialism.

Remember, the Parasite Class already uses socialism for themselves. It’s called grants and bailouts and subsidies, and allows the Parasite Class to privatize the profits and socialize the losses.

It’s just at a scale that makes it impossible for working-class people to leverage.

If I had to regularly tow a midsized excavator on a large gooseneck trailer, this size of truck would be a reasonable - if moderately excessive - option.

Otherwise, outside of “let’s haul some large earthmoving equipment” use cases, it is stupid to own a truck like this.

Pick any religion, and you will find violent extremists.

With that said, Sikhs don’t hold a candle to Islam or Christianity when it comes to violent extremists.

Definitely a fan of Levi’s, especially the high-waisted models. I intensely dislike the feeling of my pants being about to fall off, so low-waisted is out. The 516 is my favourite, although I also have 541s, 501s, 505s, and 550s.

LOUDER, for the parasite-class business owners and their bootlickers in the back.

someone without insurance rear-ended my vehicle but I chose not to pursue it because then my own insurance rates would’ve gone up.

Somehow, this sounds deeply wrong. Your insurance should cover you regardless of what happens. If it’s an act of god, the insurance company should just swallow those costs. If it’s caused by a third party who is not their customer, they should go after the company that insured the other party, or the other party directly if uninsured.

No matter what the circumstances, if you are not at fault you should never see an increase in your rates, no matter how catastrophic the damage or the costs to make it right.

Passing cables through existing walls nearly always involves taking part of the drywall off to gain access to the core of the wall. If you need to feed a wire across an entire wall, you typically have to cut an entire strip of drywall off along the entire length of the wall.

If you have access to the beams beneath the floor or in the ceiling, you may want to do most of the run there, then drill into the desired wall through the sill or header plate. That allows you to get the cable into a specific stud gap to limit the amount of drywall affected.

But unless your house was built with cable pipes/runs built into it (and I can’t imagine this being done outside of commercial buildings), you have lots of futzing around to do, and no small amount of drywall work.

Looks to be visually identical to WefWef, which is a web app that is pinnable to your screen. Even the settings are almost identical.

Don’t know who copied who, but yeah.