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Cake day: March 6th, 2024

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  • We’re not, the victim lost everything: their future, their life, moments with family, etc. And you’re making it sound like, “Well, yeah, but he just made a mistake.”

    You don’t stab someone to death by mistake, it isn’t a “fuck up.” Killing someone via stabbing is an aggressive, personal, close quarters kind of death. You can’t stab someone to death “accidentally,” and during the act, did he ever stop? While the victim was likely shouting in pain or pleading or trying to get away, did the kid stop his “fuck up”?

    No. He knew exactly what he was doing, and there’s no rehabilitating that, especially if it occurred after a brief conversation in public. He forfeited his right to his life as soon as he took his victim’s, when he chose to willfully stab a man to death.

    Edit: Literally the first sentence details how the two boys had the four-minute conversation with the victim, followed the victim around Birmingham’s city centre, and then stabbed him to death despite the victim being a complete stranger.

    And neither boy showed any remorse or emotion during their sentencing. The one who actually stabbed the victim tries to claim he feared for his safety, and was “just trying to scare the boy.” Guess that’s why he needed to plunge a large knife into the kid’s chest when, as the judge pointed out, all they did was try to get Mr. “Just Fucked Up” to leave them alone.



  • The goal was always 1.5°C as long as I’ve been alive, and we aren’t hitting it. In fact, we’re not even on track to hit the 2°C.

    The goal posts didn’t move, buddy, we just already kicked the ball into the stands, and you’re screaming that we can still win. Sorry, we lost, but at least we made the obscenely wealthy even wealthier in the meantime.

    Oh, and all of the things I’m bringing up, those “shifting goalposts,” are the things I was talking about us not understanding and rapidly building on top of each other year over year. You only keep talking about emissions: ok, cool, they’re important, but they’re not all that’s involved, and even then, we’re still** not hitting our own goals, so we deserve a pat on the back and a cake?

    And while we’re at it, how are the millions of people in America alone who can’t afford a $400 car repair going to afford a $30k+ electric vehicle? Or are we going to overhaul our entire public transportation system overnight so people don’t need to rely on cars at all? But then what about all the old ICE vehicles thrown in junkyards, leaching chemicals into the ground?

    What about the Ogalala Aquifer and how we’re pumping the water out of it way too quickly for it to naturally replenish? Y’know, the aquifer that essentially waters our entire crop growing landmass in the Midwest. We know pumping all of this groundwater out of the ground out in places like Nevada, Arizona, etc is terrible, yet I don’t see any politicians banning the practice at the local, state, or federal level. What are emissions going to do about that, and what, are we just gonna pump the water back in to the underground aquifers that took millennia to naturally form?

    How are emissions going to stop the soil erosion we’ve witnessed since the Dust Bowl? What emissions and electric car policies are stopping the growing of monoculture crops that need too much water to be grown where they are? How are fractionally dropping emissions going to reduce the use of fertilizers to grow the same crop over and over in the same place, not giving the soil time to naturally replenish, and further running freshwater supplies with pesticide runoff? Explain to me what laws regarding emissions and electric cars are going to address that?

    While we’re on the topic of food, who’s ready to have the conversation about how you should only be able to buy and eat food that can be grown locally to your region? It is not environmentally responsible or sustainable, especially with current metrics, to ship millions of tons of food stuffs all over the globe, and this isn’t even me trying to be a smartass: you should not be able to buy avocados in Minnesota, you shouldn’t be able to buy chocolate in the Netherlands, etc. It’s not sustainable, and the ships we use to move them are burning millions of tons of CO2 per trip.

    Have you taken into account any of the economic factors of what it will take to upgrade our grid to handle that? Or to even get our infrastructure to be more energy efficient in general? Not our driving infrastructure, our actual buildings and dwellings, what’s the plan there to make all of the dwellings in the US more energy efficient?

    It’s not just emissions, my man, there are millions of moving parts all feeding into each other in different ways, made even more complicated by our global interconnectedness and vastly varying priorities. But the goalposts never moved, we just didn’t realize there were more of them than we initially thought, and focusing on one or two metrics that we’re not even close to meeting, while also continuing to not also address anything else… Gore was our last shot, and it was robbed from us.


  • What is this crap? EVs are all over the place and so is renewable energy. Emmissions are falling. We haven’t opened a new coal plant in a generation.

    Ok, and how environmentally friendly is it to dig up the minerals to make the batteries, ship them to the plants in massive container ships, process them through polluting means, put them into cars that were also built from resources ripped from the earth using machines billowing CO2, and then shipped across the globe in container ships that pollute more than all cars combined on Earth?

    And ok, we haven’t opened a coal plant in a generation, maybe in the US. China is still building them, as are a good chunk of the world. In fact, the IEA estimates to China’s use of coal will be up about 6% total from 2023, while India’s is an increase of 10% of coal use. They estimate global coal use will be down next year, 2025, the first time since 2016, and it’s estimated to drop 0.3%.

    Ok? It’s bad and we’re working to fix it. That’s very different than “we’re all doomed and should stop doing anything”.

    Do you understand how biodiversity works? You can’t just run a population down to a handful of that species, and then they’ll make a comeback as if nothing ever happened. There is not enough genetic diversity for a healthy and sustainable population to grow and repair itself from that. 69% of all life on earth has been wiped out, bud, we’re not fixing that.

    https://unfccc.int/process-and-meetings/the-paris-agreement

    Lmfao, “a legally binding international agreement,” yeah, ok. That’s why a single President unilaterally removed us from the agreement, right? Because it’s legally binding? And that’s why all of these countries are taking it seriously and making huge efforts to reduce global emissions, right? They’ve only had since adopting them in 2015/2016 to start making progress, almost a decade, and… Omg… Omg you’re right!!! We’re doing it!!!

    Just kidding, from September 2024:

    None of the larger, industrialized countries or the European Union as a whole are currently on track to meet the 2° Celsius goal. African nations Nigeria, Ethiopia, Morocco and Kenya as well as Costa Rica and Nepal are named by the Climate Action Tracker to be on track to meet the 1.5° Celsius goal using a fair share approach, while Norway is predicted to meet the 2° Celsius goal. The website analyzed the climate policies of 35 countries and the EU.

    Wow, so the countries that are supposed to be leading the charge aren’t even on track to stop 2°C temperature rise, nevermind the 1.5°C we’re supposed to be aiming for.

    But we’ve got more electric cars, and we’re still consuming and ordering things from across the globe, so it’ll probably all work out if we just believe hard enough.

    Edit: Switching to electric cars doesn’t prevent the pollution of microplastics from tires, btw, another massive part of climate change everyone seems to just be covering their eyes and pretending they can’t see. We found microplastics in the clouds, ffs, nevermind in our own blood and bodies.

    Nor do electric cars stop the glaciers that have already retreated way further than they should from retreating further. Where’s all that methane gas, y’know, the more potent greenhouse gas than CO2, remind me, where is all that methane that was trapped in the ice going? Oh, right, it’s feeding into the climate cycle, making things rapidly worse while we twiddle our thumbs and tell ourselves science will fix this for us, nothing else needs to be done.


  • THIS is the grifter bullshit. “Don’t bother acting, it’s too late”. Fossil fuel doomer propaganda.

    That’s not what I said, I said it’s too late, we missed the exit. Fossil fuel companies hid the research for decades, and I’ve heard nothing my entire life except how we need to act and change the ways we live and interact with the world.

    I’m almost 30, and our dependency on fossil fuels hasn’t changed, I’ve yet to see a meaningful societal shift away from the consumerism that drives the majority of climate change.

    And ok, we keep driving emissions down, what about biodiversity loss across the planet? How many plants and animals are currently on the brink of extinction?

    Let’s bring up developing countries, who are increasing their use of fossil fuels. Where is the international agreement to help modernize these countries with renewable energies? Who’s going to pay for it? We can’t get the countries of the world to agree we’ve overfished the oceans and they’re on the brink of collapse, where’s the international agreement to reverse that?

    I would argue I’m giving people a pessimistic reality of the future, sure, but at least it’s based in the current reality. Climate change extends far beyond the overall global temperature, and I’m sure climate and environmental scientists will be the first to say that there are a lot of pieces and variables we don’t fully understand, or haven’t even accounted for, because that’s just how science works.





  • I don’t get this. Y’all on Lemmy are constantly screaming about, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them,” about people like Trump and the GOP, but you won’t acknowledge the same about Democrats.

    You’re right, Bernie is older than Biden, and some of the Squad are in their 40s/50s. I never said otherwise. And AOC is the youngest a president can be.

    Bernie ran on a progressive platform, Biden did not, and Harris is not, by her own admission. The Squad have progressive ideas they push and campaign on, Harris and Walz have not shown support for these same policies. She’s showing all of us that is not a progressive candidate, which is all this discussion is about.

    She’s the far better candidate compared to Der Orange, no one should be voting for Trump. This isn’t a “y’AlL nEeD tO vOtE tHiRd PaRtY” comment, or one telling anyone to stay home, or any of that.

    Harris is just not a progressive candidate, and a 60 year old woman who’s lived her entire life in the upper middle class has much less in common with the average person than someone like AOC.

    That’s what this whole comment chain was about: someone asked why Harris may have pressure behind the scenes to oust Kahn as FTC chair, and that would be the only reason I could think she’d do it: her wealthy donors want a less progressive FTC chair so they’ll stop going after the oligarchs, and Harris’s campaign seems to be very “return to the status quo” like the Democrats always seem to be doing.


  • I don’t get this. Y’all on Lemmy are constantly screaming about, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them,” about people like Trump and the GOP, but you won’t acknowledge the same about Democrats.

    You’re right, Bernie is older than Biden, and some of the Squad are in their 40s/50s. I never said otherwise. And AOC is the youngest a president can be.

    Bernie ran on a progressive platform, Biden did not, and Harris is not, by her own admission. The Squad have progressive ideas they push and campaign on, Harris and Walz have not shown support for these same policies. She’s showing all of us that is not a progressive candidate, which is all this discussion is about.

    She’s the far better candidate compared to Der Orange, no one should be voting for Trump. This isn’t a “y’AlL nEeD tO vOtE tHiRd PaRtY” comment, or one telling anyone to stay home, or any of that.

    Harris is just not a progressive candidate, and a 60 year old woman who’s lived her entire life in the upper middle class has much less in common with the average person than someone like AOC.

    That’s what this whole comment chain was about: someone asked why Harris may have pressure behind the scenes to oust Kahn as FTC chair, and that would be the only reason I could think she’d do it: her wealthy donors want a less progressive FTC chair so they’ll stop going after the oligarchs, and Harris’s campaign seems to be very “return to the status quo” like the Democrats always seem to be doing.





  • Well, to start, politicians will say anything to get elected, so their words mean absolutely nothing, regardless of party affiliation.

    This article was the first I’d even heard about Harris potentially ousting Kahn, so that’s potentially a good sign. However, Kahn and the FTC have been taking swings at the oligarchs via their Google monopoly lawsuits, going after Apple, etc.

    Harris (and Walz) are centrist Democrats, they are not progressive. A progressive candidate would be calling for the minimum wage to match where it’d be if it was tied with inflation, around $26/hr, not bringing up the $15/hr debate that should’ve been done a decade ago. She hasn’t signalled support for Medicare for All as far as I remember, she went back on her promise not to expand fracking, and she’s made no mention of enshrining LGBTQ+ rights into law or stopping weapons sales to Israel (she has said their would be contingencies, so she still agrees to help the guy actively working against her with her opponent), all progressive ideas.

    So, she likely doesn’t support these things because her party, and more importantly, the donors who line their pockets, don’t want her to. She’s a career Democrat, she’s not that much younger than Biden in comparison to someone considered progressive, like AOC, so her policies are going to closer align with the Status-Quo centrist Democrats versus the We-Need-Change-Now progressive Democrats.

    Tl:dr: Harris is a centrist Democrat whose party (and by extension, her party’s wealthy donors) do not want progress made, they want a return to the status quo, as their policies have shown (Palestine, M4A, Fracking, etc). Her donors likely don’t like that the FTC chair actually has a backbone, and since the status quo is more important to the Democrat Party (look at how they treated Bernie) than progress. So, the donors are likely pressuring her behind the scenes to put a Garland-esque Chair in charge of the FTC: someone with no backbone.



  • When I had my clearance, we were told if we had a conversation with a foreign national at a bar, we had to disclose it, even after we had already received our clearance.

    I was put through a multi-hour polygraph interview from hell, where I was told I didn’t know how to breathe and was threatened with being failed and losing my clearance, because I was having issues remembering online foreign penpals from high school.

    But motherfucker is talking to Putin on the regularly, and he’s a billionaire with billions worth of government contracts? Tell me again, US Government, why any of your citizens should give a fuck about anything, again?



  • I’m 30 next month, I joined the military right out of high school, and I specifically remember them teaching us a bit about 401k’s because of our ability to participate in TSP.

    The instructor very clearly told us, the average American needs $1 million in their retirement account when they to to retire to live comfortably. Not extravagantly, comfortably.

    Just a couple weeks ago I saw an article saying the average American now needs $2 million in their retirement account to be to retire comfortably, and this is assuming they don’t have a mortgage payment, etc.

    So in 11 years, the amount needed to retire comfortably has doubled, and yet my wages haven’t doubled… Minimum wage hasn’t increased in decades, sure they’re talking about $15/hr now, but that should’ve been 10 years ago. With inflation, minimum wage should be around $26/hr, yet even in my blue state, it’s like $15.60/hr or something, it’s barely over $15.

    Throw in the recent news about the inevitable and quickly approaching AMOC collapse and the climate hellscape that’s going to come with it… Our futures were robbed from us for profit, and even if I started making triple what I make now, I’ll never be able to retire, nor do I even have a retirement account anymore (I cashed mine out to help me during some really rough financial times right after the pandemic, y’know, when the government told the average American to go fuck themselves). And I was one of the few among my friends who even had one.

    So, like many people around my age, my retirement will either be societal collapse in the next couple decades, or a bullet to the head (if I could even afford the bullet) as I die in old age, homeless, while we probably have six trillionaires at that point.