UnderpantsWeevil

UnderpantsWeevil , vor 2 Tagen an Memes in Gen Alpha will elect MrBeast president and there's nothing you can do to stop it

You need the party apparatus to campaign for you at the local level. No way to win a state without that.

UnderpantsWeevil , vor 2 Tagen an Memes in Gen Alpha will elect MrBeast president and there's nothing you can do to stop it

If he'd have done it quietly and without a video feed, he'd be called "Medicaid" and we'd be arguing over how much we need to defund him.

UnderpantsWeevil , vor 2 Tagen an Memes in Gen Alpha will elect MrBeast president and there's nothing you can do to stop it

That got him mainstream because the religious right started publicly denouncing him

He's constantly being front-paged on YouTube and getting shoved into everyone's recommended feeds. I have never heard anyone on the religious right mention his name positively or negatively. I doubt the Zoomers and GenAlpha folks who subscribe to him have either.

UnderpantsWeevil , vor 2 Tagen an Memes in Gen Alpha will elect MrBeast president and there's nothing you can do to stop it

So many people would vote for him or not entirely based on his party affiliation.

UnderpantsWeevil , vor 5 Tagen an Memes in Political mindset evolution

Capitalism can’t do green.

Goldman Sachs would argue otherwise. There are enormous rents to extract from an energy source that's functionally boundless. And as the capital costs plunge, investment soars.

the cost to clean it all up would dwarf the revenue.

Oh sure. Repairing the harm that the fossil fuel industry has done would require an incalculable amount of capital and labor. And there's some stuff we're never getting back. Millions of species driven to extinction, for instance. How do you even put a price tag on that?

Capitalist economists are incapable of calculating such “negative externalities” because they don’t understand basic thermodynamics.

Capitalist participants don't need to calculate long term tail risks and external costs precisely because they're external. Even the most environmentally conscious investor is only really interested in the 40 years between when they start making serious investments and they retire. C-levels who only plan to stick around for 5 years, maybe 10 years at the longest, have even less concern for the long term consequences of their decisions.

But that problem isn't unique to capitalism. Soviet economies were also incredibly short-sighted during their early iterations. The Russians were notoriously sloppy in their industrial development. China's only refocused on ecology in the last fifteen years (hat tip to President Xi Jinping). Cuba's ecology is more a consequence of the embargo than their eco-socialist philosophy. Vietnam's industrialization has carried a huge cost to the native wilderness and ocean space.

Still, a real five / twenty / fifty / one-hundred year economic plan gets you a lot farther than "How much money can we print inside the next fiscal quarter?" hyper-capitalist mentality. Government bureaucracies that seek to reproduce themselves indefinitely need to crunch the numbers on this in a way that fly-by-night businesses do not.

But if you're just looking to industrialize green at a rapid pace, capitalist economics does the job as well as any other system.

UnderpantsWeevil , vor 5 Tagen an Memes in Political mindset evolution

Capitalism itself demands continued growth, which is unsustainable.

Green energy is a growth industry. No reason why capitalists can't make money building and renting new green infrastructure.

If anything, we could use a huge injection of new capital spending. We're just not getting it into energy projects. We're getting it into fantasies and scams, like Crypto and AI

UnderpantsWeevil , vor 5 Tagen an Memes in Political mindset evolution

Capitalism cannot solve Climate Change, as it depends on the highest possible profit margins and rampant consumerism.

It's definitely possible to do "Green Capitalism", so long as the profit margins of green capital exceed dirty capital.

But Americans have huge investments in old dirty infrastructure that they want to use until it falls apart. That's the real difficulty. How do you convince people with a $1B pipeline through the West Texas gas fields to scrape that project and build lower-profit windmills/solar farms and HVDC cable lines instead?

Our current leadership could subsidize green energy to move the market. But this would force existing businesses to build new capital rather than rent seeking on existing capital.

Compare the US to France, which has a huge legacy investment in nuclear power. They're capitalist, too, but they aren't in a rush to burn more fossil fuels.

UnderpantsWeevil , vor 5 Tagen an Memes in Political mindset evolution

They were never really on the wrong track, primarily because of their huge investment in nuclear power back in the 70s.

UnderpantsWeevil , vor 5 Tagen an Memes in Political mindset evolution

What are the non-capitalist countries doing to fight climate change?

https://electrek.co/2024/07/16/china-on-track-to-reach-clean-energy-targets-six-years-ahead-of-schedule/

Lots of solar, wind, hydro, and nuclear energy investment in the public sector. Huge investments in mass transit and electric engines. Conversion of old coal powered steel production to electric. Dense urban real estate department. Disposable waste reduction. Big efforts at tree planting along the Gobi Desert.

They've been very "all options on the table" about climate change. Some work. Some don't. But the progress is undeniable.

UnderpantsWeevil , vor 8 Tagen an Memes in confused

Cops have been cracking students' heads since the dawn of antiquity. Very rarely have students been free to return the favor.

UnderpantsWeevil , vor 16 Tagen an Memes in please

I work with a person who opens .docx files by opening Word and using its internal search function

Unironically one of MS Word (and Google Docs)'s better features. Its easy to lose track of where you save a file when you've got a bunch of them open at once, and the ability to recall recently opened files and search by file name is a lifesaver.

UnderpantsWeevil , vor 16 Tagen an Memes in please

At least with Linux the distro-specific packages install software where it should go.

I keep explaining this to my grandmother but she just stares at me and says "When I was your age, we wrote things down in our Trapper Keepers"

UnderpantsWeevil , vor 16 Tagen an Memes in please

Ah, but those aren't really your files. You clicked "Agree" on the 10,000 page EULA so now Microsoft owns you body and soul and all of your offspring out to the 17th generation. They're just moving around their contracted work product and if you don't like it you can go pound sand, assuming you pay Microsoft $30/mo for the "Pound Sand^TM" account license.

UnderpantsWeevil , vor 18 Tagen an Memes in This is unironically fine

Oh no! The "This is Fine" Dogs have gone woke!

UnderpantsWeevil , vor 28 Tagen an Memes in Nuclear isn't perfect, but it is the best we have right now.

Don't forget Blinky, the three eyed fish.

https://hero.fandom.com/wiki/Blinky_(The_Simpsons)