Tiresia
@Tiresia@slrpnk.net
- Comment on 1 day ago:
This is looking at global data. Most countries are a lot less wasteful than the US. It also completely disregards waste food, though it says it only makes up 5% of global caloric production.
According to the article, the US produces 14% of all agricultural calories on Earth. 28% of this is spent on non-food purposes, while 17% is spent on food but not animal feed, compared to 15% and 45% globally. This means that while the US produces twice as much calories per acre of farmland than the global average, it can actually feed fewer people per acre than average.
- Comment on People from or student of 3rd world nations. Is America going that way? Or do we long way to get there? 5 days ago:
“Third world nation” is a USA-invented term, meaning countries that are aligned with neither the USA nor Soviet Russia. So formally, the USA can never be a third world nation by definition.
Informally, US political culture has used “third world nation” as a pejorative, associating it with primitive society, bad economic policy, hostile non-representative forms of government, etc., to make the violent imperialist oppression of those nations more palpable.
So in a sense the US has always treated some of its population as “third world”, primarily black people and latino people. Recently the “third world treatment” has simply gone from treating these people like Mexicans to treating them like Argentinians during Operation Condor.
Though if you’re asking about when the US will treat white people like it treats people in third world countries, that’s probably going to start happening around the midterms. The Trump administration has committed too many blatant crimes to let themselves get voted out of office, so they will interfere with the election and use violence to try to get people to submit to it.
Though you’re thinking of the third world as the stereotype from US education, that’s not really how US fascism would go. By late 2027 it would probably be more like the US stereotype of Soviet Russia. Assuming any revolutionary action is unsuccesful.
- Comment on People from or student of 3rd world nations. Is America going that way? Or do we long way to get there? 5 days ago:
This is NoStupidQuestions. Please block this community if that’s the attitude you’re going to have.
- Comment on YSK: Israel is ethnically cleansing Lebanon 6 days ago:
Iran has promised to let ships through from countries that sanction the US, so it would be a good way to get oil, actually. I’m sure the EU can give Venezuela air defense against US invasion in exchange for a good deal on their oil too.
- Comment on How much of it is society is collapsing versus the daily on going of the ruling class was so obscure that they were easier to ignore? 1 week ago:
We have the liberties we have because average people in the past knew otherwise. Union workers, revolutionaries, mass political movements, terrorists, soldiers, and civil servants. If the system steers society towards collapse, we all have to change the system by the least violent means available, which is sometimes a violent civil war.
- Comment on How much of it is society is collapsing versus the daily on going of the ruling class was so obscure that they were easier to ignore? 1 week ago:
Crises don’t pass, they are either resolved or they get worse. Your passivity is not a measure of the labor of those who have resolved previous crises. You are free to stick your head back in the sand, but do not blame us when we can no longer protect you.
- Comment on YSK that Joseph Stalin created the Great Terror. He started killing people randomly including artists, generals, doctors, scientists, government officials. Everyone was terrified. 1 week ago:
It’s a natural pendulum moment. We are flooded with anticommunist propaganda, so when you start lifting up the curtain and seeing more and more of the lies, you can start wondering what else was a lie.
That’s the moment all sorts of ideologies jump out of the woodwork to recruit you, and given most of your education was a subjugating lie you probably don’t have the tools to distinguish them that well.
And that’s how you end up with people denying the holocaust or thinking covid is fake or saying Stalin wasn’t so bad actually.
So as we’re dismantling capitalism we’re going to have to constantly help people find their footing in reality, including helping them reaffirm the parts of capitalist propaganda that were true enough.
- Comment on Are all rich peoples clothes designer? 1 week ago:
Please check the community title. If you don’t want to see this kind of stuff, block the community. If you want to bully people, fuck off.
- Comment on Anyone have the "resist fascism by making mistakes" copypasta? I can't find it because the internet sucks 1 week ago:
I seem to recall the fascists losing in Germany.
This sort of sabotage is for resisting a tyrannical government where resisting more openly means death. Its goal is to hasten a tyranny’s collapse, not prevent its formation.
If you want to prevent a tyranny from consolidating its power, what you’re looking for is revolution. Use your freedom of movement to organize into local militias/guerillas and make plans to take or destroy nearby key infrastructure. Optionally make contact with other cells to track their progress and coordinate. Then at either some broadly communicated time or at a watershed moment, execute your plans. If you succeed at your objectives, help ones that failed.
- Comment on If a revolution started tomorrow in the US to get rid of Trump, could the majority of society use hit and run tactics successfully? Or what would be the tactics the rebels would use? 1 week ago:
Revolutions typically only involve a small part of the population. January 6th only involved a couple thousand people and the fact they didn’t massacre congress and have a successful coup as a fait accompli was more down to the lack of dedication of the coup attempt than to the successful defensive efforts of the US government.
In a more hard-fought revolution, the people that take to the front lines are typically the ones who feel physically and strategically capable of doing so. Other people can handle the logistics, planning, and propaganda.
What tactics the rebels would use is kind of unanswerable because there isn’t a revolution happening tomorrow. The tactic current rebels use is to hide, train, recruit quietly, and propagandize. They choose this tactic because they know they aren’t in a position to win a revolution that starts tomorrow. If we imagine a world where a revolution would happen tomorrow, we have to imagine the world being different from ours in certain ways that cause the rebels to adopt different tactics that constitute “starting a revolution”.
Depending on the specific ways we imagine the world to be different, the rebels would adapt different tactics. The US military could stage a coup and arrest Trump as quickly as they kidnapped Maduro, then install an interim government to organize fair elections. There could be a surge of popular outrage resulting in swarm tactics that overwhelm key government buildings before adequate defense is raised. There could be a protracted civil war as rebels destroy military-industrial infrastructure while accepting aid from the US’ many enemies, with rebels having trained in secret militias and learning more on the go.
- Comment on What is your take on organ donation? 1 week ago:
I don’t think it’s ludicrous on the face of it. That’s basically what happens when an uninsured person dies from something that would have taken $10k to fix and an insured person gets their organs.
Doctors only get in trouble for letting someone die when that person has a medical right to the care that would have saved them. Even then there is leeway because whether someone has a medical right to that care is often something that depends on a doctor’s estimation of the situation, which means other doctors would have to testify against them for them to get in trouble. Which of course they’ll only do if they are sympathetic to the victim or unsympathetic towards the doctor and they know it won’t affect their career prospects too poorly.
So I wouldn’t be surprised if in Austria, ethnically MENA organ donors tended to die more often than ethnically MENA non-organ donors and this gap would be bigger than with ethnically European donors/non-donors (if that gap exists). Not even as some kind of conspiracy or malice aforethought, but as just a little bit of laziness here and there. Hell, not even laziness, just setting your boundaries for once and going home after only 2 hours of overtime instead of 2 hours and 15 minutes while ordering an extra test for that one patient who probably doesn’t even need it.
There is still the question whether you want to deprive someone of your organs for that small statistical increase in risk, if you’re even the sort of demographic that risks being dehumanized. And if you’re worried about malpractice, it’s much better to buddy up with a friend and agree to supervise the doctors and nurses whenever either of you is in the hospital. Most malpractice and medical mistakes are the sort of thing a lay person can catch with some attentiveness and internet searches.
- Comment on Nvidia Announces DLSS 5, and it adds... An AI slop filter over your game 1 week ago:
Only if Steam shits the bed and it becomes harder to find indie games that don’t have AI.
AAA games have been homogenous slop for well over a decade, this will just lower their expenses.
- Comment on The Battle Over Solar on Farmland | Agrivoltaics is either a green revolution or a poison pill for good land. Depends which farmers you ask. 1 week ago:
Why do you say that? Intuitively every kilometer takes the same fraction of the remaining electicity, which creates an exponential curve. Technically the loss fraction would be 1 minus the exponential curve, but that’s still an exponential function. Is there something about power generation that makes it a log function of distance?
- Comment on The Battle Over Solar on Farmland | Agrivoltaics is either a green revolution or a poison pill for good land. Depends which farmers you ask. 1 week ago:
Long-distance electricity transport is exponentially lossy, and it makes people dependent on vulnerable centralized infrastructure. So your first suggestion is more practical on a national/continental scale.
Solar panels could also be placed on parking lots of dead malls and other decaying suburban infrastructure.
- Comment on Theoretically speaking, if one wanted to sail the seas while being not very tech savvy – is using a VPN (Mullvad) enough? I would never, of course… but theoretically? 1 week ago:
Mullvad is good, but it’s not enough to make piracy safe.
An adblocker like ublock is essential, not just for blocking ads but for blocking malware.
Streaming piracy is about as safe as sketchy websites always are, which is pretty okay these days.
If you download anything, check the file type before opening and whether the type is safe. For example, .exe is extremely unsafe, .pdf is somewhat unsafe, and .mp3 is safe. Generally audio and video file formats are pretty safe because they’re very locked down in what they can do, while interactive formats are dangerous. Someone might call audio by a misleading name to troll, but it shouldn’t put your device at risk.
If you download .exe s, do not run them unless you are very confident the source is trustworthy. This means a trusted account posting on a trusted website claiming that a trusted person made the exe. I haven’t caught this guide in a lie yet, but when it comes to exes double- and triple-check everything.
The more tech savvy solution would be to run .exes (or all pirated files if you’re being paranoid) in a virtual machine so even if the virtual machine is pwned the rest of your computer wouldn’t be.
- Comment on We don’t have room in the carbon budget for a world war. 1 week ago:
We are witnessing the end of modern civilization, which will end just as fast as it arrived.
So it’ll take 10,000 years?
Civilizations and cultures survive the loss of >30% of their population all the time. The black death, the columbian disease exchange, the mongol empire, the collapse of the western roman empire, etc… Losing billions of people will be terrible, of course, but the billions that survive will still exist and work to survive, and they will be people worth fighting for.
Current food production is over 10 times what is necessary to feed everyone on the planet, with the vast majority of it being wasted on the meat and dairy industry that we can just stop. Food forests require more labor per calorie but are far more resilient to climate change and require far less land area, allowing the remaining agricultural land to rewild and act as a carbon sink.
The AMOC (atlantic current) is “making Europe livable” by making it warmer. Helpfully, climate change will do the same. In pessimistic scenarios, Europe returns to the current average temperature after a decade or two. Again, yes, in this scenario >90% of current human habitation would probably have to be abandoned and human population may dip below one billion, but those hundreds of millions of people still deserve the best chance we can give them.
If our best efforts mean we can only keep a billion people alive, it would be worth it.
If our best efforts mean we can only keep a million people alive, it would be worth it.
If our best efforts mean we can only keep ten thousand people alive, it would be worth it.
Every kiloton of CO2 we stop the emission of is a life saved, and the vast majority are emitted in the US, Europe, and China. If you live in any of these regions, there is so much you can do.
- Comment on Is there a spreadsheet that doesn't mess with the data I enter? 2 weeks ago:
I was going to complain that clearly “spreadsheet” derives from paper-based tabular data editors. But apparently that term was only used consistently after 1906, while digital spreadsheets that aided calculation were conceived of in 1961. Meaning that it has meant a digital calculation aid for longer (65 years) than it only meant a tabular data editor (55 years).
- Comment on What the fuck is going on with Iran and what will happen next? 2 weeks ago:
Broadly speaking, the US is okay with invading Iran because Iran isn’t a US tributary and the Iranian state is unwilling to become a tributary because theocracy is incompatible with US tributary status (A king might swear fealty to an emperor, but god’s emissary can hardly submit to a heathen).
The primary objective of the US administration is to win the midterm elections. War has historically boosted Republican support under low-informations voters and centrists, and going by the standing ovation in Congress, Democrats are happy to go along with the narrative that this is a just war because they too support enforcing tributary status.
That takes care of the motive. The means is the US military-industrial complex. The opportunity comes in the form of the US breaking a nuclear non-proliferation treaty with Iran and then being outraged that Iran isn’t complying.
They could count on Iran not complying because Israel keeps attacking Iran (and its other neighbors), ensuring Iran will defend itself in a way that can be treated as offensive. Israel keeps attacking its neighbors because that is what the US pays them for and because their history of doing that means that if the US cut funding for unrendered services, many Israelis would have to flee to escape facing justice for their participation in genocide.
So that’s means, motive, and opportunity for the US attacking Iran. Now how will it go?
Firstly, the motive being elections means the US will keep the war going until at least after the midterms. Economic consequences of this can be spun as justifying Republican autarky. The biggest consequence would be oil shortages in most of the world. Countries with large domestic production and/or strategic reserves, including the US, Canada, China, Russia, and Venezuela, would be less affected or have their position strengthened (with Venezuela going along with the US because they now know what happens if they don’t).
In Iran, the US will keep bombing targets until it is satisfied ground resistance is sufficiently mollified, then move troops in to occupy. Given Iran’s geography and the theocratic nature of the current regime, it will likely be a phase of shattering state power followed by a phase of occupation and guerilla warfare.
The US will attempt to create safe zones from which the tributary government and military loyal to the US operate and grow in power, likely centered around urban areas, key infrastructure, and strategic resources. Given there is more support for regime change in Iran than in Afghanistan, the tributary government might attract enough loyal troops to slowly take over the fight against the loyalist guerillas and not collapse immediately when US support drops.
This invasion has bipartisan support so even the Trump administration being replaced would not stop it. I don’t know how long the Iranian state can resist, but as long as it does the blockade on the Strait of Hormuz will remain in place, and even after that guerillas will make that route unsafe. After that, getting the tributary government shipshape could take years or decades, on the long end probably getting cut off like Afghanistan.
Iran or its supporters may attempt asymmetric warfare. If the US government wants to, it could replicate 9/11 and its massive boost for Republican popularity by having a similar lack of curiosity about suspected upcoming attacks. There have been articles about a possible Iranian drone attack from a ship off the coast of California which could fail to be stopped. Similar attacks may occur on the rest of NATO, and slowly ebb as Iranian loyalist power diminishes.
The economic consequences of an oil shortage would naturally hit vulnerable targets hardest. Food delivery vehicles might not be able to afford a trip into remote rural areas during a famine, while Europe can rely on electrified modes of transport for day-to-day stuff and reserve oil for essential services.
Countries with more oil, such as Russia and the US, may take advantage of this situation. Ukraine is not looking so good.
At any time, the US could move on to the next crisis and either stretch itself thin or leave the Iranian tributary state without support in what would then be a civil war. Israel will continue its aggression until its funding gets cut and it collapses.
So it goes.
- Comment on From millions of dollars to under a grand: The dramatic fall of the NFT 2 weeks ago:
It was very well implemented. The people that invented, designed, and minted them made billions of dollars from a bunch of gullible idiots using very little work, and they got away with it too.
- Comment on YouTube ads are about to get even longer and they’ll be unskippable 2 weeks ago:
Though android is likely going to crack down on them before the end of the year, so new users should switch to a degoogled or open source phone OS.
Or download the videos using ytdlp, and use a cable to transfer them to your phone like it’s 2012.
- Comment on Uber is letting women avoid male drivers and riders in the US 2 weeks ago:
The article says Uber lets women avoid male drivers, which implies that at the very least the Uber account is registered as female, which means female drivers could choose to only accept jobs offered through this system.
That raises the question how Uber is deciding that drivers and clients are women. Could a prospective rapist make a “female” burner account to ambush women? Are trans women who are unrecognized by the state excluded even if they’re at far higher risk than cis women?
Of course the real solution is public transit. Uber is dangerous because it means leaving two strangers together for every single journey. For the vast majority of people taking public transit, there will be many strangers in the same cabin who can all help keep each other in line.
- Comment on My mom really love NBC Good News tonight. How come there isn't a show where they report on the good news of the day instead of all the bad crap all the time? 2 weeks ago:
If advertisers loved a good news channel, all corporate news would be good news channels. But scared and tired people make far less informed decisions, making advertising far more effective.
The countless horror movies you can watch online are far more upsetting than a streamer saying “fuck”. Censorship isn’t about avoiding people getting upset but about having infrastructure for silencing speech that they and their corporate partners don’t like.
Imagine if cops couldn’t give out fines, then they would miss out on being able to choose to let white people off with a warning while fining black people for the smallest infractions. This means cops would be less effective at maintaining white supremacy. And so cops have to be tough on crime despite all evidence showing that it makes crime worse. Because cops exist to maintain and expand white supremacy, and more specifically the supremacy of rich white Christian men.
Likewise, an advertiser who has a well-established policy of punishing “advertiser-unfriendly” phrases like swear words can then use that policy to suppress certain voices while letting other voices gain fame by boldly defying the rules with only a slap on the wrist. This infrastructure has allowed them to very quickly start censoring Palestine, Minnesota, and discussion of productive forms of activism and resistance in general. Whether this is a service they sell to rich white men or if it’s them choosing to do this because of their rich white owners, the buck stops with them.
- Comment on Subtitling a video, what is this sound called? 2 weeks ago:
“[tinny distorted noise]”
- Comment on Forced age verification is comming sooner than we thought. 3 weeks ago:
If you’re going to jail anyway, why go to jail for something lame?
- Comment on (serious) What would we be losing in a world where most people didn't own a car? Please read the OP before posting. 3 weeks ago:
Glad we live in the 21st century then, where the rest of my comment applies.
- Comment on What should've been the point or points for society to throw up their hands and stop supporting the government? 3 weeks ago:
- Saying that it is self-evident that all men are created equal but enslaving blacks and genociding natives and denying voting rights to 90% of the population.
- Comment on (serious) What would we be losing in a world where most people didn't own a car? Please read the OP before posting. 3 weeks ago:
Please actually read my comment, thank you.
- Comment on Hypothetically if the US got accidentally bomb by a war that is happening between Mexico and Canada what would the US response between knowing the US does it all the time by "accident"? 3 weeks ago:
What happens when the US gets accidentally bombed by Israel and 34 people are killed? [They talk it out and remain good friends].
The US government and the elite they represent do not care about the American people beyond them being the tools by which they can force the world into as steep a hierarchy as possible with the US elite on top. If the US gets bombed, the US government will do what serves the interests of the US elite.
So it really depends on what’s convenient. It’s hard to speak generally about an alternate universe in which Canada and Mexico are at war, but if I squint my eyes I can say that if Mexico hit the US, the US would invade Mexico and install new leadership while conveniently using it as a reason to ramp up to a full-blown genocide of Latinos in the US; while if Canada hit the US, they would be made to pay a trillion dollars in reparations or something.
- Comment on (serious) What would we be losing in a world where most people didn't own a car? Please read the OP before posting. 3 weeks ago:
The late 19th century USAmerican colonization of Native American land shows that you don’t need cars to make an industrial rural society. Trains will work just fine. This means you build towns to be walkable and centered around a train station, with agriculture surrounding each town. Modern heavily mechanized agriculture might make population densities so low that even this is not viable, but the products still need to be transported, so you can have trains that stop at each megafarm which can also carry passengers if necessary. When I was in Queensland a few years ago, I saw mechanized agriculture use a bespoke railway network to supply a factory, so clearly even now despite all the fossil fuel and car subsidies it’s economically viable.
Though as you may know, industrial agriculture is dumb and unsustainable. Desertification due to requiring too much water, climate change due to fertilizer consumption, industrial pollution that kills millions of people per year and destroys ecosystems, lack of genetic diversity causing crop blights that risk famines or global shortages, insecticides that cause cancer and destroy ecosystems, most of it being wasted on the meat industry and on maintaining massive surpluses and exports to ensure western global domination, etc.
If we want to do agriculture right, we want to do food forests. It’s more labor per calorie, but it’s resilient, local, and it doesn’t make the planet uninhabitable by the next century. Food forests are more compact too, which means that a rural population tending food forests can have a much higher population density, or can consist of large villages separated by rewilded natural landscape (and/or low density food forests for migratory communties). This makes trains even more convenient to get around because they can run more frequently.
Meanwhile if you want to live in the wilderness away from these towns, then an absence of car roads means you can live far away while only being a couple kilometers away. So you still don’t need a car because you can just hike along a trail to get to town in under an hour. Need to carry a lot of stuff? Use a Chinese wheelbarrow. Maybe a battery-powered one with stability and steering assistance if you don’t feel like getting exercise. They carry more than a modern American SUV and they don’t murder children either.
- Comment on Yay, milkshakes! 3 weeks ago:
You wouldn’t just need the fish food, you would have an aquarium large enough to keep them all alive and meet the legislative standards for wellbeing. That aquarium needs space, cleaners, inspectors, etc, which would drive up the cost considerably.