I wonder how much of the problem would be avoided if the top personal CO2 emissions per capita were capped at Scandinavian upper middle-class level since 1970 (imported CO2 included). Flying on vacation only occasionally, comfy car yes, SUV just if needed, nice modern house yes, wasteful lack of insulation no, buy what you need and treat yourself to some fashion, electronics etc. yes, mindless consumerism no. Just a comfy standard of living.

I wonder if the mindless consumerism in certain countries with insane emissions per capita makes up a big part of the problem, or if the sheer number of “decent standard of living” would have pushed us over the edge anyway.

In wonder if, in terms of logistics, delivery of groceries and online shopping could be a good thing.

Of course not with instant-services like Flink. Of course not with single-use cardboard boxes and worker exploitation.

More like the good old milkman. People order their groceries, and they are delivered in reusable boxes next day, old boxes picked up. Same with online shopping.

Both is already a thing, but few do it. Maybe it would work much better if a huge percentage of people would do it, e. g. 15 % for grocery delivery. The grocery truck would not have to do more miles than if it would deliver to the current 1 % (guessed), just needs to be bigger and have more stops.

In communities that are not built to live car-less, that might save many individual car trips.

The blue numbers are completely absurd. 30% live in Texas, 32% in California, 30% in NYC. And 20% with a household income over 1 million? I know a couple who are top seniors at Google & Apple, respectively, and while I think they may be over 500k annually, I doubt it’s a million. And I definitely know they are far from the median.

When you are not up to date on the topic, it sounds like a far-fetched dystopian alternate timeline.

Reminds me of an ad (!) German conservatives (CDU) made. I don’t remember all the details, but it showed the politician as he stated something like: What the social democrats want to do would make housing in Berlin affordable again, thus removing real estate from the free market.

These people are in it so deep, they think that the common man would hate that just as much as they do.

That was so nice when I got an 8 year old indoor cat. You could see this world of wonder in her eyes, as she didn’t know where to look and where to sniff first.

With time, I could let her run free but supervised in a shared apartment building garden. She always went to the same pine trees and couldn’t get enough sniffing them. Also jumped on the window sill of neighbour cats just to hiss at them from the outside.

When I went to neighbours, for example to pick up a package or talk about something, she trotted next to me through the hallways like a well-trained dog and sat next to me when I talked to a neighbour. The whole stairway and hallways were another great adventure to her, sniffing and clawing doormats etc.

Yes, the worst was when something startled her (sting from a thistle?) and she dashed for the door full speed, into the harness, did a looping. A good fit is essential, could have cause major injury!

They really make sense; instinctively, cats trust running water more than stale water, for the same reasons I mentioned.

Often thought about it, but didn’t get a chance to try.

Hm. Maybe try putting the water away from the food. Some cats don’t like it near the food. (Presumably related to clean water sources in nature vs. dead prey.)

My last cat only ever drank from the running tab. Jumped into the bathtub and meowed until someone turned it on, day or night.

What would happen if someone were to detain a group of marines (with the minimal force necessary), in the wrong assumption - honest mistake - that they were about to execute illegal orders?

Never read one completely nor watched a full movie, but it always felt cheap and written from the unenlightened perspective of a simple mind to me.

The fantasy books of my generation, such as The Neverending Story, Momo, The Hobbit, Jim Knopf were a whole different level. Life experience and a touch of wisdom in a great story for children.

But I also think that it might be just my perspective, since my mind has been imprinted like that. I’m not judging anyone for being a Harry Potter fan and try to think of it as different, not worse.

LA is also a good opportunity to say: This and this and this high ranking officer failed and will be replaced (by a loyalist).

It’s what makes Walter White a weak person. Even when his family needed him, he cowered when he had to face his ego, false pride and other vices.

Knowing that you COULD become this badass, but choosing not to, for his family, while nobody else would ever believe that he could have, that’d be the mark of a hero.

I remember the “big movement” when Twitter turned into a right wing cesspool.

At first, the biggest problem was that there were TWO main alternatives: Mastodon and Bluesky. So those who left split into two groups, ending up with a dead timeline, missing out on news. (I and my “bubble” use it to keep up with Covid vaccines, politics, safety etc.)

I joined the Mastodon group, because it solves the problem of a single crazy billionaire potentially buying & enshittifying it. But I fully admit that it is not user friendly at all. People who are not in IT just want it to WORK, like Twitter used to. They don’t want to “educate themselves” about servers, fediverse and networks. The user experience clearly hasn’t even been a thing. It’s techies writing software for themselves. What it needs is a full analysis of the experience from the start: Who are you, user, why are you considering Mastodon, what are your expectations, what are the experiences in the first 30 seconds after entering “mastadon” (oh, you misspelled it?) or “twitter alternative” into a search engine, etc. “pick an instance” is already the passive-aggressive demand nobody wants to hear.

In the end, my instance was shut down without a fair warning, all the reconnected and new contacts lost, no option to move. Trying Bluesky now, but many stayed at Twitter (now X), moved to Mastodon with or without success (most onto my dead instance), or gave up on microblogging.

I think we need something simple again. I remember what SUSE did for Linux in the 90s. Linux users were all like: Only debian is even somewhat useable, but if you should really do LFS. Non-techies willing to switch for “political” or other reasons were hit in the face with “Pick a distro!!!”. SUSE has been called “the Windows among the Linux distros” by those people, but it did the right thing. It provided exactly the simplification we needed: “This is Linux, you simply buy it on CD in a retail store like your other software, you run the installer.” It was a good thing.

IRC is the one good old thing that still works great. When they tried to enshittify freenode, we just moved, collectively. Many non-IT channels & servers died after 2010, though.