I'm fairly certain securing one's household's access to energy independent of rate increases triggered by a combination of aging infrastructure and data center power demand doesn't have a lot in common with tech bros attempts at reinventing trains badly from first principles but I'm open to hear the argument. Care to unpack that?
Easily: it's techbros again forgetting that an expensive asset only wealthy can afford isn't a solution to a mass scale infrastructure problem. And again, just like with Tesla bros, nothing about household solar is independent and requires infrastructure to support it - which, just like with trains, isn't going to get required investment because you're dreaming about individual investment.
Like you say, I want trains - proper infrastructure supported renewables, not Teslas - home individual infra only affordable by wealthy individuals at the cost of shared infrastructure while lowering resilience because it still uses shared infrastructure.
As written it is perfectly clear that Betty is neither the maid nor the cook, neither of whom the author bothered to name in this sentence. If that wasn't the author's intention they should grammar better.
I thought exactly the same thing until I had a politically agnostic fencing judge sit down and explain over the course of an hour and a half all of the steps national and international regulating organizations for that sport had taken to avoid issues with unfair competition. Whether similar field-leveling safeguards could be baked into the rules for other sports is left as an exercise, but this particular instance suggests there's more nuance here than your comment suggests.
The majority of households in the US have no savings of any kind and rural suicide rates have jumped by nearly 50% in the last 25 years. Y'all have just about backed everyone into a corner already.
And that’s just the U.S. - inequality there is comparatively low compared to an awful lot of the world. Brazil, for instance, is just nuts, and resultantly spends a lot of its time teetering around a political sinkhole.
Unfortunately, it’s been the outcome of every system we’ve yet tried - wealth always accumulates. It has, so far, only been redistributed through violence - either direct action by the proletariat, or their mass slaughter in war, allowing redistribution amidst the survivors.
I’d love to imagine that this time we can find a different path, but ten millennia of precedent is a hard trend to buck.
"ten millennia of precedent is a hard trend to buck"
Our species has been on the planet for what, roughly 300,000 years? 290,000 of which was spent mostly on chasing our food. By comparison our modern fumble-fucking around with political systems designed by and for a notional elite class is a blink of the eye. We've beaten worse odds.
That period was just the same shit on a smaller scale. The story is told by our genomes and by those of pathogens and parasites - again and again breeding concentrated and bottlenecked, suggesting power accumulation, and again and again entire germlines went extinct, as the old guard were violently usurped - and we’ve plenty of archaeology that shows wholesale slaughter of entire populations.
And… chimps follow the same patterns - accumulation of breeding rights to a select germline, followed by violent revolution, infanticide, all of it. We are cut from the same stuff.
You seem to be asserting that there is some kind of genetic governor on our species social development. If that's true and this is literally all we're capable of the most ethical thing to do would be to engineer a species-ending pathogen before we've completely destroyed every ecosystem on the planet. Perhaps whatever comes next will do a better job.
How much of this is a cultural problem with Americans though?
Immigrant families save a higher percentage than Americans even when they make less money. Americans notoriously overconsume and are not big on saving.
That there are cultural issues around consumption is absolutely not in question. That said I watched one of my great uncles raise three kids and put every one of them through college cultivating ~400 acres with equipment he owned outright and could readily maintain and repair himself when issues arose. Fast forward 40 years and "small" farmers are forced to take on and then service literally millions in debt just to break even (if they're lucky and the weather holds). So while I agree wholeheartedly that the modern cultural acceptance of living well beyond one's means is deeply problematic I'd prioritize breaking big industry's chokehold on all the things before telling folks they should tighten their belt.
I just think if people want results they should focus on the factors they can control. Changing government policy and industry policy is a slow process and can take decades for results and often has unintended consequences.
Your comment is extremely reductionist and reverses causality for a large number of voters. Both political parties have multi-decade track records of aggressively supporting pro-corporate political agendas at the expense of their constituency. So in light of literal decades of watching prospects decline regardless of which party is currently in power many voters (correctly) conclude that their vote will not lead to meaningful change.
> Both political parties have multi-decade track records of aggressively supporting pro-corporate political agendas at the expense of their constituency
Someone only tuning into general elections and making this complaint is either not intellectually there or plain lazy. Very few places in this country have zero competitive elections on the ballot. And none exist where calling electeds and showing up to advocate don’t move the needle. Doing those things takes effort, however, and I concede that for a lot of people that effort isn’t worth it since they’re comfortable enough—personally—with the status quo.
The flip side is that leaves a lot more room for everyone else. It’s genuinely surprising how accessible power in America is once you start wielding it. That sucks when nobody is watching but a few paid interests. It gets interesting when you find yourself, repeatedly, as the only person in the room with the levers.
That elections are "competitive" is utterly irrelevant in a political system where local, state, and federal legislation is almost exclusively drafted by lobbyists. Lobbyists who in addition to supplying pre-written legislation also supply staffers with pre-formatted position statements to distribute to anyone who bothers contacting their office about said.
In practice that "competition" you seem so taken by produces nice sound bites and some column inches on whatever culture war rag is being waved in the face of the citizenry, and literally nothing of substance that addresses any of the myriad slow burning economic and systemic crises that have been building for the last 40 years.
Using agriculture as a microcosm for the larger economy there has been nothing proposed much less ratified to address the complete chokehold Monsanto, John Deer, Cargill, and Tyson Foods have on every aspect of the agricultural industry . And they've had literal decades to make a move.
Princeton University released a study 16 years ago that concluded the US was a de facto oligarchy and if anything legislative capture has only deepened in the US since then. Hell at the local level I've watched the county planning board float a ballot initiative to greenlight a major construction project which was soundly rejected by local voters. Net result: 5 years later they broke ground on the project anyway. So you can tell me there's movable needles out there until you're blue in the face, let's see some reciepts.
> So in light of literal decades of watching prospects decline regardless of which party is currently in power
Quick question: how many _months_ total in the last quarter century have the Dems had the Presidency, Senate, and House at the same time.
The answer is 47. Forty seven total months. Out of 300. We got the ACA (Obamacare) and the Inflation Reduction Act during those brief time periods, too.
The ACA was poorly camouflaged pork for the insurance industry and healthcare statistics have continued to decline since it was passed. Who did the IRA pay off?
I fail to grasp the basis of folks knee-jerk dismissal of just about anything that strikes them as "cynical". Like, what world do you live in that cynicism isn't a signal of clear vision?
If I was given a choice between robust journalism and whatever Craigslist is the choice seems rather plain. A dispassionate analysis of the majority of tech industry "improvements" reveals similar choices.
Attempting to lecture me on what journalism was is a misstep on your part. My first professional development gig was supporting software integrations between 33 local newsrooms, their printing floors, and their (at the time fledgling) online presence. In addition to my normal development work I was frequently called upon to work directly with editorial and newsroom staff on specialty projects and provide on-site support at industry events. As a result I spent a lot of time in the room where shit was going down.
While it's always been possible to find shills in the media landscape the overwhelming majority of the men and women I worked for were the kind of intense scary-obsessive anti-authoritarian types that literally skipped meals and sleep (sometimes days at a time) just for a chance at catching industry or government fucking around. And with literally hundreds of newsrooms scattered across the country staffed similarly journalism was a force to be reconned with. But hey, having to pay $5 to sell your couch to a stranger was kind of a drag so I guess this is better.
If you think that every comment on social media is an "attempt to lecture" you, a random nobody on the internet, who once basically worked as support staff to journalists, you have personal problems beyond my powers to fix...
There is the undocumented 3rd option of actually running for office oneself if you're (correctly) certain no quality candidate will be produced for the position.
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