Just in time for overlapping "rare" weather phenomena to start stacking up, in the past two days we've had a hurricane in Iowa and two tornados in california in the same day as 20 wildfires simultaneously sparked during a dry lightning storm. Every single day of this fucking year has been escalating insanity.
It's insane that so many people depend on the Colorado River for water in the west, there should not be millions of people living in the desert.
One of few things I take solace in is that these rural areas being ravaged by fires have displaced a shitload of chuds who will now be relying on mutual aid organizations and by extension a whole lot of anarchists that they purportely hate/fear to not starve because they've been voting against building any sort of social safety net for decades.
I mean when they're forced to evacuate into cities which is already happening. A bunch of them came into where I work because they've been evacuated. First time I've seen a Trump 2020 keep america great face mask in person.
Legit question: if socialists somehow took power in the US tomorrow, would a mass migration of people from Arizona/NM/other places that defy god simply by existing be a goal?
I'm not sure what the right thing to do would be. Indigenous people have lived in these places for hundreds or thousands of years, so humans can live here without wrecking the ecosystem, but the consumption now is insane.
Most of the water in the west goes to agriculture. I think a lot of it is wasteful and is spent on crops that demand a lot of water, or ends up feeding cows, which is inefficient. People also have green lawns and love to golf out here, which, while not on the same scale as the industrialized agriculture business, is still wasteful and indicative of people's attitudes towards water conservation.
https://www.csgwest.org/policy/WesternWaterUsage.aspx
Yeah, if we could somehow turn all the cow pastures into soybean farms or whatever and live with water friendly lawns, it would definitely ease the pressure on the water supply
And if we concentrated populations in those large cities like SF that are close to agricultural centers it vastly increases efficiency of distribution of crops.
NGL I'm not sure how much denser you could really make SF without basically levelling it and starting from scratch. The streets are already crazy dense
Thing is it's all artificial scarcity when it comes to housing. There's a lot of dumb NIMBY zoning laws and a lot of capacity for public housing.
And the traffic problems can be alleviate with robust public transit.
SF absolutely needs to grow "up" to accommodate more housing. So many single family houses that could be replaced with multifamily dwellings if not for the power weilded by outspoken homeowners who bought 20 years ago and now own a $1.6 million bungalow.
How fucked up is it that a bunch of drunk extremely online nerds could probably craft better, more efficient, more humane policy than literally 90% of people in office?
I would say yes. We should be doing shit like fixing the decaying infrastructure in the rust belt and rebuilding manufacturing with nationalized industry. Also breaking up Amazon and Tesla and assimilating their respective components into public ownership, e.g. NASA, USPS (this would include taking over UPS and FedEx), Department of Energy, etc.
What about a place like LA? We're in the middle of earthquake, wildfire, and drought country, and the whole place has been built to basically be inaccessible without private automobiles, but also it's the 2nd largest city...
LA was built on a desert, the whole place was a mistake. Yes it's massive but we can fit a lot more people in a lot of big cities if we're talking about a socialist government. Useless offices full of paper pushing unproductive labor could be used for mixed use public housing, services etc. Entire buildings sit empty just because they're investment properties.
The dryness is the new normal. The last 400 years or so have been uncommonly wet as compared to the last 10 million in California and it looks like we're now seeing a reversion to the mean
One of them was just an actual tornado. It was part of the lightning storm that started the fires.
In the same day we had a tornado caused by fire and 20 fires caused by a storm that included a tornado.
This is some apocalyptic shit.
"socialists just want free shit"
Uhh yeah, who doesn't? Would you rather throw your cash into a vacuum???
The best things in life are free
It’s also just literally not true. Socialists just want the working class to get the full product of its labour, as opposed to having our labour exploited. We don’t want “free stuff”. We want to stop being stolen from.
Every socialist I know either works two/three jobs or does a fuck ton of volunteer work. The laziest people I know are old boomers.
i've never understood why this is meant to be a gotcha. free shit rocks
Anyone who says that is the person who runs back into the mcdonalds when they realise they got a large fries but only paid for a regular
Believe me
The best things in life are free
It's easy
Just open your eyes and you will see
So clearly
They're like a baby entertained by someone jingling car keys in front of their face.
it is so refreshing to be reminded of human decency and togetherness in these touching times of love and healing testament hope integrity wahwahwahahwah
I mean this has to be, I just wish I had a better analysis/argument than "fucking look at everything"
Almost finished with Blackshirts and Reds, it's very good, I recommend it to everyone who's reading this comment.
It dragged a little bit during the chapters on how former soviet countries got fucked by capitalism in the 90s but everything else has been really engaging.
I'm actually really interested in that "drag" topic, thanks, I'll Libby it
Update: library doesn't have it
It was very informative, it just read more like a list of citations than any other part of the book.
here it is in either PDF or ePub
By the way, if you’re interested in the neoliberal rampage across the eastern bloc in the 90s, the sections on it in The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein are quite in depth.
Yeh, it’s very good stuff. Really enjoyed it and I’m looking to read more Parenti, I might do inventing reality next
Top article on the politics reddit is about Biden CRUSHING expectations last night because he seemed lucid for once.
Dude didn’t say anything he hasn’t said before and he even fucked up a couple times anyway (“there’s nothing we have been able to accomplish”). Man if it wasn’t for COVID Trump would be fucking guaranteed 4 more years.
Lol, the comments.
He (again) tried to deflect his dementia, claiming Biden has dementia. Biden tonight killed it. His delivery was passionate, energetic and impeccable. Most of all, COHERENT.
He tried to deflect his physical deterioration, claiming Joe is low energy. While Trump has trouble walking and drinking water, Biden is shown on Fox News riding a bike.
Literally if Biden acts like a 5/10, sufficiently competent adult the media goes wild about how he's crushing expectations.
Kamala is going to be VP for four years, Biden will retire and then she drops out before Iowa again
Today I made a bunch of progress on something useful! On the downside, tomorrow I'll be starting off my day debugging cryptic deserialization errors in a programming language I don't actually know.
(Sorry for vagueblogging what I'm actually working on; really want to keep Owl separate from my public persona.)
I'm convinced that we're living in a simulation being run on Venus to test some sort of viability of living on Earth after they've overheated their planet (like we're doing now). And the reason that Venus rotates backwards is because some fucking dipshit programmer got an integer wrong or something.
Also Dark Matter is a hotfix. Goodnight.
Am I an enlightened centrist if I think both Democrats and the republicans suck? I want Lenin
Thatcher died 7 years ago though, so that's something to be happy about.
He's chilling on Avalon with King Arthur. Coming back annnny minute.
Haven't done DMT but I've just watched the entire DNC convention from start to end in one sitting - is the feeling similar?
DMT is so much better than than that shit. The DNC is closer to eating way to strong an edible then going to a silicon valley Christmas party.
Pirate ships are sort of interesting in that they were radically democratic compared to the strict hierarchy and brutal discipline that was emblematic of naval culture of the time.
If you think of each pirate ship as a separate democratic state, then the scenario shared between pirate ships and traditional states is the international relations concept known as anarchy (not to be confused with the meaning of "anarchy" we usually use around here, whoo boy are they different).
This lib makes a good case for pirate ships being more Anarcho-Syndicalist, in a way. Robbing people with more money than you is always good, especially if the ship is owned and run democratically to some degree. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0fAznO1wA8
What's cool about pirates is they robbed empires built on slavery
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/189572.The_Many_Headed_Hydra
I think if trump wins reelection my mom will have a heart attack. she has trump derangement syndrome. pls joe. don't fuck up
It's an unpopular opinion around here but I am pretty sure that people hate Trump more than they like Biden, so he'll probably win. 2016 was unique in that everyone fucking hated both candidates, but this time around Biden is much less unappealing than Hillary Clinton.
Yeah the takes around here that think Biden will get crushed because of a lack of enthusiasm completely ignore that libs will go to any length to vote out Trump because they view him as uniquely dangerous. Biden could lose, but it won't be because of some enthusiasm gap.
It's wishful thinking, straight up. Of course Biden is a limp French fry, but he's more than just Not Trump (and NOT Clinton) so that's good enough.
Also, capital seems to have come to the conclusion that Biden is better for business. So yeah, the election is already over. They pumped Trump for a tax cut, now they're dumping.
Wall Street doing well because of Kamala Harris was a more damning indictment than anything
His poll results look way more optimistic than Hillary's around the same time. But I still won't put Trump winning by 5 delegates or something completely out of the realm of possibilities.
The US has a very stupid system set up, and that's not out of the realm of possibilities. Clinton lost based on A) being one of the most hated people in America and B) her weird-ass metrics-based campaign that Robby Mook ran. Lanyards gonna lanyard.
