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Meanwhile on TV now there are real, serious, expensive advertisements selling a 50 cent roll of pennies for TEN DOLLARS

Whatever legal business we are in otherwise, apparently it's the wrong one


two absolute facts:

1. even if there was something humans could do about it, we won't, ever

2. insurance rates are the only "control". they will skyrocket and thereby the only change to select behavior

human society allows "privatize the profits, socialize the costs"

so that scales from the smallest to the largest models


Pretty much agree. Nature will fix the climate, after it eliminates (a large number of) the humans that are causing the problem. That's really the only way.

The defeatist mindsets expressed in these comments seem more like a way to shed any sort of personal accountability for participating in a solution that doesn't kill billions of people than a reflection of reality.

There are many solutions.


> There are many solutions.

There are, but none that will be accepted. Will you give up your car, your air condititioning, your AI agents, your uber eats, your year-round fresh produce at the supermarket, meat as a regular part of your diet, all the imported stuff you are accustomed to having?


You're right, I won't, and I'm probably not alone. So what's the endgame? A world government that enforces all of those "give-ups" at gunpoint?

This is a cold-hearted way to think about it. The countless people who will suffer are not the ones causing the problem. The problem is caused by the billionaires willing to sacrifice human life and the environment for profit. They actively sow climate skepticism and encourage defunding of climate research to protect their bottom line. When extreme weather events kill millions, those billionaires will be safe in their bunkers. We can’t just condemn millions or even billions to death without trying to do anything about it.

Kings have always sacrificed the common folk for their own benefit. This is also the way of human society. The experience of our own current lifetimes is quite the exception.

It's easier to blame climate change on a conspiracy theory around billionaires then it is to stop driving so much and reduce consumption.

At least in the US, many people have to drive because US metropolitan areas are car-centric and lack public transit. This, in turn, is a direct result of lobbying by powerful companies like oil producers and automobile manufacturers.

As for your point about reducing consumption, there has been a deliberate effort by billionaire-controlled corporations to increase consumption. This has been done through a variety of methods, including limiting repairability, deliberate planned obsolescence through things like fast fashion and equipment designed to break down, and psychological manipulation to encourage consumption. Small ‘d’ democratic efforts to limit these techniques have been defeated by powerful lobbies backed by these billionaires.

Billionaires aren’t just responsible for consumption-driven climate change, they’re also responsible for subverting the democratic processes that could have reversed it at large scales.


The car-centrism of the USA is IMO because people like the convenience of being able to go where they want, when they want, and not waiting for a bus that will take an indirect route and twice the time. People also like living in their own house with a fenced back yard and not having neighbors on the other side of the wall/ceiling/floor. This means we're more spread out (we have lots of land) and mass transit is less practical.

In dense urban areas we do have good mass transit and it's relatively more common for people to not own a car.


> conspiracy theory

What is the name for the theory that the most fantastically wealthy do not rule society? No kind adjectives come to mind.


At the end of the day it's unsustainable consumption of resources and increasing generation of waste that's killing the planet.

Even if the 4000 billionaires are ruling society, they're destroying the planet with the help of 8 billion poors.


At the end of the day it’s bullets fired from rifles, mortars, artillery shells, cruise ship missiles, etc. that are killing people in war.

If the executive branch of the government is commanding the military, and generals are commanding the military, they’re killing people with the help of tens of thousands of soldiers.


We will never, ever see a reduction in the amount of energy that humanity uses. The population might dip slightly from climate change (highly unlikely actually), but that won’t be what solves climate change. Clean energy is the solution, and it’s already happening.

This is complete nonsense. The US energy use per capita is down significantly from 1975 and still actively declining.

Then the misanthropes of HN will have their way. And can gloat in their graves.

whenever I can't access a website for various stupid blocks

I fire up cloudflare warp and walk right through it

use wireguard with wgcf in environments without cloudflare client

yeah it's stupid we have to do this in 2026 but I guess cloudflare is the new AOL garden


You sir seem to have solved a problem many people here have.

Would you care to elaborate a little on how you did it?

It doesn't happen that often to me, but sometimes adblock setup I'm using results in such issues.


He just told you, he used cloudflare WARP. It's a "VPN" along the lines of NordVPN et al, but by cloudflare, so it gets special treatment by cloudflare's walled garden enforcement system.

I wonder if iCloud private relay might also work. Apple probably negotiated some special treatment

I’m guessing it’s all the same effect as CGNAT exit IPs. You need to get big enough to be unblockable. That’s why everyone is trying to get in on the VPN game.

This new reCAPTCHA setup is probably a good indicator that big tech wants to shift to verified access only. Personally, I’m just going to quit spending money via the internet and go back to piracy + retail stores with a physical location.


the fact that this works, as well as cloudflare having a literal web scraping tool available as another product honestly makes my blood boil.

steal this startup idea:

you can't buy BYD in the USA (thanks to Biden actually, not current admin)

BUT

there's a loophole to have a car from Canada in the USA for a year

so lease them from Canada to USA buyers for a year at a time


It's not yet easy to buy BYD vehicles in Canada either. The first quota of 49,000 vehicles was only recently announced, and that's to be shared across all Chinese vendors.

Provided they are available in Canada. There’s only roughly 50k imports in the first year and that will be split across all Chinese manufactured EVs (not necessarily Chinese brands). I assume the majority will be Teslas from their Shanghai factory.

I think that if you maintain a policy, it becomes yours too.

I expect that the US administration will very quickly ban these cars from being leased or resold into the US from Canada.

...if they're not banned from entering the USA altogether, which seemed to be the way the US President was leaning already.


the photos by kite in early 1900s are more amazing to me

https://www.npr.org/sections/pictureshow/2014/01/15/26015255...

1906 "Ruins of San Francisco, 2,000 feet above San Francisco Bay overlooking the waterfront"

https://media.npr.org/assets/img/2014/01/14/07823u-1-edit_cu...

a 49-pound camera raised above the bay with a train of Conyne kites


Those are impressive! It's worth noting that the photographic technology had advanced considerably between 1848 and 1906.

The exposure time of these kite photographs must have been quite short, given the obvious instability of the platform. They're very detailed, nonetheless.


imagine the President of the US and his "braintrust" accidentally making the world much more green and efficient by forcing a radical reduction in oil dependency

while they purposely end climate-change research including destroying billions in observation satellites by deorbiting them

the history written about this decade is going to be wild, if we survive it


EU severely reducing its fossil fuel imports from Russia in 2022 cut down natural gas usage by 17% and overall energy consumption by 3%. So yeah, increased price due to scarcity help a lot in shifting around the energy mix.

It's a bit shit that hits poorer people relatively more than richer people. Governments can reduce this impact by subsidizing sustainable alternatives (like heat pumps). It's still leading to inequality (unless you give more subsidy to the poor), but at least overall people will hopefully benefit.


> overall energy consumption by 3%

Is it possible that some non-trivial part of that number comes not from increased efficiency but from losing some energy-dependent industries?


It might be difficult to separate that out from the effect of US tariffs.

if another country towed a raft full of thousands of cheap drone off a US coast and launched them into the country we have absolutely no defense

they could take out all water and power utilities on the entire east coast over 24 hours

our million dollar missiles would be useless even if Whiskey-Pete was more than willing to use them over crowded cities

North Korea, Russia, China, et al

and considering we've depleted a decade's worth of weapons and half of the fleet is overseas, we're pretty darn vulnerable right now thanks to those in power

I wonder how far away we are from "dirty drones" where they don't even need a bomb, just radioactive material or toxic chemicals as dust


all their numbers are a lie

they've spent more than $25 BILLION on just weapons which have to be replaced so it's already twice that number

and for more examples we know now the true cost of militarization since 9/11 was $21 TRILLION

it's at least half the national debt if not more

https://ips-dc.org/report-state-of-insecurity-cost-militariz...

Remember, beyond the cost of war, every day the cost of gas is +$1 that's another BILLION dollars being siphoned out of the US economy, EVERY DAY

the strait is not opening this year, maybe not even before 2029 at this rate

that's TRILLIONS

time for a windfall profits tax on the US oil industry


Seems like it should be cost or replacement cost, but not both.

vaguely curious how this is going to affect Amazon's FireOS

which is basically android with their own app store layer

FireToolBox has gotten really powerful with workarounds

especially with the new Shizuku pseudo-root via adb


Seems like a good point to remind that capitalism doesn't need democracy to function or survive

They have no problem helping to strangle democracy to death


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