People are just so obsessed with cars

It’s hardly an obsession among the vox populi. Highway construction is dogma produced by the Church of the Petrochemical Company. We continue to cling to low density, high cost cement roadways because that’s why billionaires and their lobbyists tell elected officials to pay for.

Where rail exists, people flock to it. But you have to build before people can come.

I’ve been losing money on Dragonfly for months. Unfortunately, the market can be irrational longer than you can be solvent.

The author is French, the story in France, and the slaves are Roman.

No shortage of French slavery in the New World. Just ask anyone from Louisiana or Haiti.

Maybe it’s in the movie adaptation, but the scene of their “freeing” is pretty clear about its point.

Oh sure. You can find all sorts of period critiques of industrial capitalism as slavery with extra steps.

But the notion that people would volunteer to return to bondage really undersells how hard plantation overseers and state police in slave states had to work to keep them there.

In that time, ive taken up muay thai, gratitude practices, doestevesky, and started a new business.

I mean, congratulations, I guess. I’m in Houston, so all of that just sounds like a ton of driving.

From what little ive read, X/Twitter has never been for debate…but instead existed as a warzone.

I’ve yet to hear of any bridges getting blown up because of a Tweet

it’s so hard for so many to just, not use them

Networking Effect is a bitch. It’s like telling someone to stop using AT&T or United Airlines. These are the major arteries of communication for billions of people. Individuals can’t abstain from using them without isolating themselves.

You can delete your account and I promise you won’t find yourself missing them.

Spoken like someone who doesn’t have their entire extended family posting and chatting on the sites regularly. I get calls from extended family, asking me to weigh in on long conversations and exchanges and posting sprees. And then when I respond on the phone, I get a “No, you have to post it, I’m not going to just repeat it to everyone for you”.

Tons of social pressure to just go where everyone else is.

What’s frustrating about this “Your consumer habits are wrong, you should make them better” is that Twitter was (ostensibly) the space for the liberal intelligencia to go for journalism and debate and organizing until Elon Musk bought it.

Does anything stop a billionaire from buying up or shutting down the next social media platform? We can wax poetic about Lemmy/Mastadon as a decentralized and indie-operated environment. But crazy to think Joe Biden/Donald Trump can squash TikTok with a few swipes of the pen, that Feds can play wack-a-mole with ZArchive and Anna’s Archive and Wikileaks, etc, while insisting the main hosts for the most popular indie media sites are bulletproof.

Might as well tell people to stop using the internet entirely.

In fact, they go back to being slaves because then they don’t have to worry anymore.

This last bit is Neo-Confederate propaganda. The “slaves were happy to be slaves” myth is wildly apocryphal.

Far more often, the freedmen leave their plantation economies in pursuit of more lucrative work in more industrial and urban regions. Harlem, New York and Detroit, Michigan are testament to the exodus of American colored people northward following the war. Or they strike out to undeveloped territories and form their own municipalities. Large black communities popped up across the Southwest and West coast, as the post-Civil War frontier was subjected to industrial scale genocide of native peoples.

The consequence of this mass migration is a labor shortage at home. One which can only be resolved by (a) raising wages / living standards until people want to stay or (b) re-enslaving the population through other means. In the case of the US South, these “other means” were the Jim Crow laws, which transformed the private plantation economy into a publicly managed (and privately profitable) state prison economy.

Following the end of Reconstruction under Rutherford B. Hayes, southern state governments imposed a suite of laws forbidding “vagrancy” and constricting the right of colored people to travel unattended. Independent communities of black citizens were raided and demolished (The Wilmington Massacre of 1898, the Tulsa Massacre of 1921 being two notable examples - really all of Red Summer being a major historical turning point for American race relations). Enormous prison compounds were constructed. And the incarceration rate among people of color skyrocketed.

The campaign to re-enslave the colored population was a central position of the “Dixiecrats” straight into the LBJ administration. And capturing these revanchists was pivotal to the Nixon and Reagan campaigns, even as the taste for segregation soured nationally on the American tongue. All of this was covered up and expunged from US History, following the 1980s Reagan Revolution and the reactionary efforts to undo the Civil Rights Movement. So it’s very easy to never know the long dark winter of civil rights in post-Civil War American history.

But “slaves were actually happier to be on the plantation” is textbook Coolidge Era white nationalist revisionism.

It is difficult for me to imagine what “personal liberty” is enjoyed by an unemployed person, who goes about hungry, and cannot find employment.

Real liberty can exist only where exploitation has been abolished, where there is no oppression of some by others, where there is no unemployment and poverty, where a man is not haunted by the fear of being tomorrow deprived of work, of home and of bread. Only in such a society is real, and not paper, personal and every other liberty possible.

– Joey S

Largely rubber-stamping what they’ve already been doing.

We’re going to get an earful, in twenty years, when liberals clap themselves on the back for repealing this law.

What more do we need?

A time machine and Merrick Garland in a choke hold until he agrees to press charges.

a distraction from the only subject that matters: the Trump-Epstein files

Laws written by whom?

Legislators were gobbled up by tech lobbyists back under Bush/Obama. Nobody was going to pitch legislation than ran afoul of trillion dollar rampaging corporate behemoths.

Actual project knowledge is distributed across “topic files” fetched on-demand, while raw transcripts are never fully read back into the context, but merely “grep’d” for specific identifiers.

Consistent with a lot of bugs and goofs I’ve heard people in long running instance of Claude will encounter.

Idk what that does to the suicide rate

Based and v6 pilled.

Okay, but then you’re not talking about reincarnation in the Hindu/Buddhist sense. You’re talking about the kind of Past Lives shit that western spiritualists are into.

everything is just getting worse

The planet is in its sixth major extinction event - one that’s been ongoing for roughly 12,000 years. And yet we’re finally achieving a kind of universal consciousness regarding the impact we’re collectively imposing on the world and the methodologies we can employ to respond to it.

I don’t think I’d call that “getting worse”. No other lifeforms have ever had the opportunity to know they’re going extinct before it happens, much less the faculties to do something about it.

This is a pivotal epoch in Earth’s multi-billion year history. I would not say things are getting worse. I would say things have the potential to move in a direction no planet in the Solar System has had the opportunity to move since it was created. That potential creates a great deal of anxiety and fear, because it is much easier to be ignorant - a dinosaur unaware of the looming comet - than faced with the foreknowledge of catastrophe. But it is that shared anxiety that creates the social pressure for universal change.

Reincarnation into what?

“Hey, if you die in this life, you can come back as a bug that gets eaten by another bug shortly after hatching. And then you can do this for the next 10,000 years until you get lucky enough to come back as something remotely sentient.”

Sounds like that shit sucks, man. You have a real pivotal moment in this life to embrace dharma and appeal to heaven for a higher place in the great pattern. I’ll admit, I’m not much of a mystic, but I don’t think eating a bullet after a night spent guzzling whiskey is what gets you up the ladder.

Can I remind everyone that it is impossible to produce helium in a practical way?

Sun has been doing it for millions of years and it’s a big dumb ball of energy.

Incidentally…

Is it practical? No. Is it producing any Helium right now? No. Is it probably just a big investor scam? Sure. But still more practical than trying to conquer Iran.

We could be at war with Iran for a century, sending strike teams in to siphon helium out of the ground and smuggle it back to the US in stealth jets and submarines, and it would still be significantly cheaper than trying to mine the moon.