kugel7c

They will not devide us. They will not devide us and so on and so forth.

Yeah I'm in Germany so my context is somewhere in between and here the projects that improve my life the most is when cars don't get to/need to travel on the streets as much, this can either be through modal filters, removing car lanes or just banning cars (with the usual delivery window in the morning and such). And they are starting to get to the kind of streets where you could go 100km/h (in terms of size) that are in practice 50km/h, and are now getting them down to 30 (taking 1 of 2 car lanes and giving it to bikes as well as adding obstacles to indicate slower speeds). So it's doable and of course it takes time, but with a bit of luck it might be faster than some Americans imagine it could be.

So of course bike lanes along mayor roads (corridors) make sense, and it can be a good starting point to get a skeleton network in place, which then can Kickstart intersection redesigns and traffic calming, wherever it's reasonable around it. To me the best bike paths don't go along roads though, they are the "recreational" paths that still connect things. Cutting through a patch of Forrest or a park, going along the waterfront, parallel to a tramway or rail corridor or just along/through the fields. These are probably also politically cheaper than some other measures, but you run the risk of building a thing that just connects nothing because there is no real infrastructure on either end.

I feel like Americans think they are 60+ years behind when they are probably only 30-40, if the attitude turns somewhat sharply, either just in your local area or more generally, maybe just 15-25.

A lot of this stuff is monetarily very cheap, depending on how desperately you wanted change the actual infrastructure you'd need, would boil down to planters, bollards, cones, maybe hay bails or large stones/concrete pieces. The problem with that stuff is that it's only possible with the right opportunity politically, otherwise your traffic calming might get bulldozed by police or something.

I sorta agree and sorta don't, all streets should be 30km/h or less and shared traffic, everything else should be with bike lanes. Streets meaning a piece of infrastructure that provides access to places lining it, not a piece of infrastructure for longer distance travel.

The Netherlands is good not because there is a bike lane on every street but because all the streets with destinations (private homes, business, schools)are connected by bike lanes as well as roads, often more and more direct bike lanes.

There are a lot of areas where cars bikes and sometimes pedestrians share the same space both in inner cities and in residential neighborhoods, it's just that they aren't through roads for cars or at least very very slow ones, while they are often through roads for bikes and peds.

I'm having a hard time understanding the perspective of someone who believes that lefties would benefit by having the world's largest army and nuclear arsenal under a government backsliding all the way into theocratic authoritarianism.

Well some leftists would loose a lot obviously, specifically those in or directly around the US, but fascist regimes are not very sustainable, and certainly loose the ability to ally and coerce over time.

And This loss of ability to project power (by the largest and thus likely the most destructive institution of coercive power) is what I see as a critical step towards a communist or just any different way of economic and political organization on a global scale.

I don't want a facist US regime, I would never tell any leftists to advocate for one, but I would tell them to prepare or flee nonetheless because it is still likely, or at least possible that it happens (again).

I'd much rather have a reasonably progressive US voluntarily give up power in good faith, curtail her own economic might to allow her citizens a good life and our shared world a sustainable economy and ecology but given that among many other titles, she also holds the title of the foremost petrostate, and at least one of the largest Tax heavens, in the world I unfortunately don't really see that happening, I still hope for it, but as far as I understand powerful interests aligning and climate change, the world economy... it just doesn't seem particularly likely.

I'm in Germany so not anywhere extremely tied into the US, but at the same time both are imperial core, there is a lot of cooperation, I would likely feel a lot of the secondary effects, but I also believe perhaps naively that not all of the world would , blindly follow the US in it's slow march towards fascism. And with each institution peeling of from US hegemony there is at least a chance to throw a big political lever in the rightish direction, whether it be the EU, IMF, Nato or whatever else, a movement that at the moment is blocked largely by US and perhaps wider western but also sometimes chinese or russian imperialist positions. And of course the Capital that these states (actually) represent.

Like step one is a little putsch, step two is murdering all your political opponents, then it is time to invade neighbors to steal resources. Yes, the US is already invading countries to steal resources, no, I don't think having an authoritarian cancelling voting will help reduce that any. What am I missing?

All of this is already happening anyways, murdering political opponents internally as well as outside of the US,furthering climate change, destabilizing and undermining trust etc. again sliding into fascism is not what I want, but even a fascist US would be bound by physical, organizational, and social circumstances, and thus for the wider world likely less catastrophic than you might believe it'd be if you were raised or resided in the US.

I can't claim for certain that the US is having a Weimar moment, and I cant be certain that a US fascism in the modern era would be shorter and less gruesome, I also can't say it'll be better afterwards, but I feel all of these things to not be completely outrageous predictions, because as leftists probably should, I can try to interpret the historical Weimar moment, and the current political landscape...

Just fuck it, ramp up climate change and war, get it over with, and pray socialism crawls out of the rubble?

Well again, ramp up in war and climate change are already happening, and in my world the wars are already the 20th century ideas as well as their capital, lashing out against 21st century thinking, changes in circumstances, and the very real onset of this era of climate change scarcity that we are entering.

So to some extent from my point of view yes, you don't have to keep trying to be a democracy with institutions and foundational texts as well as family hierarchies from the 18th century, that were made and changed by your political enemies, you can fight for (but hopefully mostly against) the fascism that the powers at be try to impose upon you, but without just believing the popular vote, and the systems it enables, will save you here.

If you crawl out of an actual civil war esque partial collapse as hardened syndicalists, or if you can get rid of FPTP and establish a democratic socialist party that is able to actually make international agreements in good faith, for me it mostly doesn't matter. I'd prefer the second if I look at the human cost of both options, but because the first option I'd guess could be faster in implementation, and the result would be similar from an international perspective, I don't completely hate it, very literally I could likely "live with it", precisely because I likely won't have to live under it, much more than anyone from the US could.

Essentially I don't identify with the US emotionally, I have almost no image of her institutions being good, so I can compartmentalize and write off that particular nation state much easier. For me a fascist or civil war ridden US that is short lived and likely reemerges with better bones might actually be very similar to one that transforms more amicably.

I can just say suffering is going to be inevitable, but that the suffering to change things for the better, to make them work sustainably, to make them work for the people, is the one i hope Americans actually still strive toward deep down, because I by pure circumstance don't need to suffer in that same way, I will suffer differently and for a different reason, fighting essentially the same fight sure, but from a different position with different levers to pull and different pressures to withstand.

We had fascism here openly 80 years ago, it's still here trying it's hardest to grab power and survive, but perhaps obviously it's fastest decent, its quickest downfall was almost the exact same time as it's most emancipated period, in fact they followed each other in lockstep.

While I agree largely with your conclusion that anti progressive ideas are pushed to undermine progressive spaces, I don't really agree with how you get there and with the examples you choose to arrive at that conclusion. There obviously are actual bad actors, and actual hegemony to get these bad actors into being, but there is also a lot of real people, actually still learning about the topics, or just plainly with a different perspective on some of the issues that you might be discussing.

For it to be an ideology that is self consistent leftism actually needs differences and disagreement, or said in another way: if we were to prescribe beliefs instead of trying to teach them we'd also just be trying to build our "own" authoritarian hegemony. I can invoke successes of or defend the CCP and the soviets just as I can invoke successes of the US or EU or India realizing that all states are fundamentally bad, still sometimes perhaps by accident they do good things. And that examples and mental shortcuts, as well as actual experiments that might be of a socialist nature, are just what they are argumentative tools.

I've been called a tankie just because I see the downfall or backsliding of the US as good thing and don't really accept that china would be as bad as the US has been for the last 40 years or so. Which is perfectly normal for someone who doesn't really reap the benefits of US hegemony, and sort of just ranks authoritarian institutions by size(strength)(wealth) to arrive at a measure of subjective dislike.

It's almost similar to someone calling me a tankie because I purchase Pepsi instead of coca cola on that given day, when we all know I should make my own tea or at least just buy the supermarket/local brand to begin with.

I don't know where you are and what kind of people you meet on a regular basis but to me the simple and fast ways of understanding other people almost never hold true, most of us humans just lead to complicated lives to easily subjectify us. And honestly I wish most leftists would not try to subjectify other people to begin with.

So I mostly fried the SSD by using it to write and rewrite ML checkpoints and logs, this in turn made the device read only and I somehow managed to migrate to a different SSD probably using clonezilla or something, but it messed up the bootloader so I installed refind in a new partition, configured it and voila it works. It's scary because you need to do everything without seeing your system even half alive anywhere along the process, but it's not actually hard, just copying data and installing/configuring a bootloader. But for a then 20year old at his more or less first job my head was on fire for the 1.5 days this took.

By far the most difficult single thing that I've ever had to fix that actually had to do with the system.

I now don't flood my SSDs with data that is constantly rewritten.

The thing is heat from the outside gets moved inside of the house using a heat pump, and to facilitate this movement you need somewhere between 1/2 and 1/4 of the energy you end up moving. E.g. a heat pump with (coefficient of performance) of 4 would move 4kW of heat into your house and use 1kW of electric energy to accomplish this. Gas by comparison moves 4kW of gas to your house and burns it there to get 4kW of heat.

So you could burn a bit more than 1kW of gas in a modern gas electric plant, turn it into electricity and use it to run a heat pump and you would end up emitting less CO2, the real world grid might skew that worse because generally you don't end up burning coal to heat housing but you might still use it for electricity. So generally even though it might be unintuitive the more complicated and lossy way to heat your home (the heat pump powered by fossil powered electricity) , is the more effective one compared to burning the same fossil fuel directly because you use the heat pump to capture heat from the environment.

Because they don't have a perfectly fine business model. They get squeezed hard by both the oligarchs of music publishing UMG, Sony Warner who negotiate the price for the music. And from the other side by the tech giants google and apple who can cross service subsidize their own streaming.There exists essentially no space for them to make any profit in streaming music. So they have to go other places.

The only reason they'll probably exist for the foreseeable future is because the rights holders are able to use Spotify to have more negotiating power against Google and apple.

Brother have you heard of both young people, and the concept of 'having a future', death might be inevitable, it's still better to think about and implement things to quell the suffering, as well as to continue living with hope than to revel in the fact that we're all dying.

Hope isn't at the bottom of the box of Pandora without reason, it's both, condemning us to strive and suffer, and the only way to make anything of it.

The problem is obviously a general over reliance on motorized road transport and a continuing trend towards more.

I listened to the entire and it struck a chord with me, it might be because I'm similarly petite bourgeois as the authors or something. But if you couldn't get through it I might suggest softly that you read chapter 4 first (or only).

To me the order the book has it in makes sense, but it might be the wrong one for you. It explains the What for 3/4 and then carefully answers the Why with a short story in the last 1/4. It is essentially a manifesto with a reason to believe in it as the last part.

For me the reason it worked is because the walk through philosophy and history sufficiently grounded the authors claims toward the necessity of economic planning and rewilding and in combination with my prior beliefs made the utopia real.

The problem that unfortunately remains with this book is how we get there, but to me it seems reasonable to leave that part out for this book, not just because of the violence and messiness, but also because it seems like the much harder part to coherently write as well.

Edit: I've played one round of the game and it's fun, perhaps a bit easy after knowing the content of the book.

People don't need to be able to buy cars. The vast majority can't anyways. So why should the second richest percent of Ethiopia be able to.