She absolutely is a trash person. I agree. I’m not defending her to be clear.
People who let their dogs off leash in public are assholes and deserved to be confronted and shamed. She was a piece of shit well before their conversation started.
to the downvote brigade I highly recommend go watch the full video and decide for yourself
Yeah it’s obvious she’s weaponizing the police against a guy who she doesn’t like, by knowingly playing directly into the “police will overreact against a black guy” card, and faking panic in her voice. This is violent escalation to a non-violent situation. The faked panic is straight up sociopathic.
People who don’t leash their dogs are assholes, and his response to that was relatively tame.
I don’t see how you can watch this and respond the way you have, unless you’re also the type of asshole who feels entitled to walk dogs without leashes, or generally dislike black people, or are completely oblivious to the social context in which police in New York interact with black people.
The inspector general of the postal service actually compared this next generation vehicle project with what foreign post offices do, in this report.
One of the big differences is that the US Postal Service wants to keep the vehicles in service for 18-20 years (while purchasing them over 12 years), instead of replacing them every 3-9 years as the European counterparts do. They think that the cost of ownership will be lower with custom vehicles on a maintenance plan and parts supply chain specific to them, rather than relying on commercial manufacturers regularly turning over their assembly lines. And maybe the volume (160,000 vehicle fleet) is sufficient to actually pull that off, economically.
John Oliver sometimes runs random out of context clips of MILF Manor and I’m not sure actually watching them in context would make them any less ridiculous.
especially the historical ones
Tycho and Kepler always cracks me up.
I’m saying that you can reduce birthrates a lot and it won’t make much of a difference, because you can’t go below zero and the rich/high consumption countries are already low.
If your goal is to reduce net consumption, then reduce consumption (or replenish consumed resources through increased production or restoration/replenishment of what is consumed). Preventing births itself won’t meaningfully move the needle.
I’d rather focus on raising up the lowest into a tier of stability
What you’re describing, then, has nothing to do with birth rates. That’s what I’m saying in this thread: reduced birth rates won’t fix the problem of runaway consumption and emerging scarcity.
You’re talking about the bottom 90% of the world and I’m saying that they don’t consume as much as the top 10%, so I’m focusing mainly on the top 10%. If we’re going to discuss resource consumption, the people we talk about should be weighted by the resources they consume. And by that metric, the global rich consume much more, and have fewer children, than the global poor. Therefore, it’s easy to point out that reducing birth rates won’t actually do much to reduce consumption, because the people who have kids aren’t doing much of the consuming.
The jet fuel is just an example of that general correlation, and one of several mechanisms why the childless tend to consume much more. You can argue “oh but all else being equal more mouths equals more resources” but I’m saying that all else isn’t even close to equal, so you should engage with the patterns as they actually exist in the world rather than a hypothetical where everyone is equal.
Who the fuck can afford that?
The fact that you struggle to imagine that these people exist in large quantities tells me that you haven’t actually fully understood the power distribution of who is consuming how much.
On CO2 emissions, the top 10% emit about 48% of the CO2. The top 10% of Americans (where the cutoff is about $135k) produce about 55 tonnes of CO2 per capita per year, and they have low birth rates.
people with kids travel by plane too
Yes, but paradoxically having more children makes households consume fewer passenger miles at any given budget, because traveling with children is slow and less enjoyable, and their tickets are just as expensive. So the DINK couple with the $200k budget can fly for vacations and even weekend getaways once every few months (4-8 times per year), but after having kids might only fly on one trip per year. Even with two kids, doubling the number of people in their household, they might be looking at half the passenger miles by taking 1/4 as many trips.
And if eating all the meat in the world and throwing food in the trash and using disposable diapers doesn’t compare at all to the consumption involved in traveling out of town by plane, then adding up all the day-to-day stuff the family is doing with kids won’t compare to the jet setting couple with the same budget.
Throw in the fact that the people who have the $200k+ budgets are less likely to have kids, and you have the correlation where consumption is negatively correlated with fertility/household size.
Look at how fast those things go through diapers, and tell me the single couple is throwing that much trash away every week.
Are you counting the trash generated by the fact that the DINK couple can afford to go out to eat dinner at restaurants 5 times a week, and travel by plane 4-5 times per year?
You’re thinking about human resource consumption as if it’s a bell curve, where most are within an order of magnitude as everyone else.
But that’s not the case. The wealthy consume literally thousands of times more than the poor, and income/wealth is negatively correlated with fertility, so it can be the case that a single childless millionaire consumes more resources than a dozen 4-person households.
So when comparing the countries where the birth rates have actually fallen below replacement, and where their populations are on the cusp of shrinking, you’ll see that as they have fewer children their consumption still goes up exponentially even when their population doesn’t.
Taking away scarcity by making fewer people compete for those resources doesn’t actually change the aggregate amount of resources consumed. People are perfectly capable of increasing their demand several orders of magnitude if there’s less competition snatching up those resources first.
That’s my point. The correlation already runs the other way. As those countries start to see shrinking populations, they’ll also continue to consume greater amounts per capita, offsetting the population decrease.
China and South Korea are starting to shrink. Do we really believe that their pollution and resource consumption are going to go down in the next 10 years?
And it doesn’t really matter whether we’re talking causation in one direction or another, or a spurious correlation with some other confounding factors. The fact is, the highest consumption populations tend to have the lowest birth rates, and vice versa, so why would we expect dwindling births to reduce consumption?
What if I told you that knowledge can be passed on to people who aren’t your biological descendants?
Humans consume resources, with less humans around there will be more resources for each humans and they will collectively consume less resources in total.
This is where you get it wrong, because you haven’t actually thought about how much more one human can consume compared to another, and the actual lived reality that households with children tend to consume less than childless households.
We’re not living subsistence lifestyles. There are many of us who travel for leisure by airplane, waste more food than is necessary to keep a person fed, throw away or consume more physical goods or energy than we need, create way more pollution, etc.
Rich societies tend to have fewer kids and consume way more resources and emit more pollution. The billions of people in Asia contribute less to our pollution than the comparably smaller population of Western Europe and North America. The relationship between population and environmental impact is broken because one rich Westerner can consume more than literally ten thousand poor Asians.
I didn’t know I was learning a life skill at the time.
The House of the Dead 2 was a really popular arcade game at the time, so adapting the preexisting game into an at-home typing trainer was actually genius innovation.
Typing of the dead
Still my favorite example of gamification: take a useful task and make it so fun that people will gladly devote hours and hours of their time to it.
For the U.S. at least:
With condos, there’s a condo association that owns all the common areas. Then the association itself is owned by the owners of the units, and the management is elected by the owners.
With co-ops, the unit owners directly own the common areas in common, and the management is also elected by the owners.
Functionally speaking they’re very similar, and co-ops tend to exist in places where this legal structure predates the invention of homeowner associations (basically New York).
Anywhere strangers tend to be around each other long enough to where small talk might be a welcome distraction: waiting in lines for something, sitting at a community table or bar/counter with mixed groups (especially while waiting for the rest of your respective friend groups to show up), sitting next to each other at a public event like live sports or a concert with downtime, volunteer events where you might be set up next to strangers doing the same thing, etc.
It’s easier when there’s a natural end to the interaction (your turn in line, the start of the sporting event), too.
Smartphones and headphones have made it harder, but there are still opportunities when people are bored and sitting around.
If you you blow the guts out and faces off Russian soldiers by more traditional means they are just as dead
I (and all the people and organizations that have worked throughout the last century to get incendiary weapons banned as anti-personnel weapons) generally feel that the method of killing matters, and that some methods are excessively cruel or represent excessive risk of long term suffering.
The existing protocol on incendiary weapons recognizes the difference, by requiring signatory nations to go out of their way to avoid using incendiary weapons in places where civilian harm might occur. Even in contexts where a barrage of artillery near civilians might not violate the law, airborne flame throwers are forbidden. Because incendiary weapons are different, and a line is drawn there, knowing that there actually is a difference between negligently killing civilians with shrapnel versus negligently killing civilians with burning.
There are degrees of morality and ethics, even in war, and incendiary weapons intentionally targeting personnel crosses a line that I would draw.
The moral high ground is absolutely critical in war. War is politics by other means, and being able to build consensus, marshal resources, recruit personnel, persuade allies to help, persuade adversaries to surrender or lay down their arms, persuade the allies of your adversaries not to get involved, and keep the peace after a war is over, all depend on one’s public image. There are ways to wage war without it, but most militaries that blatantly disregard morals find it difficult to actually win.
In this case? The entire military strategy of Ukraine in this war is highly dependent on preserving the moral high ground.
Because it’s an election with consequences, not an online fandom.