In other countries this would be a criminal offense.

Dialing 911 and telling my local constabulary that the President is doing crimes. But then they just laugh at me and say “We’re all doing crimes! It’s the innocent people who get thrown in jail.”

I mean, it works until it doesn’t. I’m trying to imagine sitting on a six-figure car note, trying to DIY a solution for the annoying pop-up you can’t manually disable, and accidentally bricking your car.

I would raise such hell at the dealership if anything like this happened to me.

“Oh sure, bring the car back in. We can have our technician look at it. Just need a $200 deposit and $80/hr for labor.”

They’re the first victims of what will inevitably be rolled out to every new vehicle.

increased demand decrease availability

In the short term. Over the mid and long terms, highly profitable demand can induce supply in a free market system.

Solar and Wind electricity are both great cases in point. Once they became more cost-efficient to build and operate than coal plants, the demand for coal plummeted while the demand for new green installations surged.

I don’t really believe what economists claim

I’m inclined to follow the data, at least at first glance. We’re entering a CO² production peak, in large part thanks to the cost-spread between installing/operating new fossil fuel plants and their green peers.

There are other factors at play. I can’t get the mysterious explosion of the Nordstream II pipeline out of my head and what the consequences of climate change are of that. Then there’s the closing of the Suez trade and the collapse in development of Balkan Crude. But the incredibly cheap alternatives - largely pioneered and industrially propagated by the world’s largest socialist state - can’t be ignored as having a huge influence on consumption habits.

Can animal-free meat follow the same path? Idk, maybe. But given the way the US developers and investors had to be dragged kicking and screaming into a modern green grid, I suspect we’ll see meat alternatives take off abroad long before they become truly popular in the US.

I believe that a future built on AI should account for the people the technology puts at risk.

I’ve seen various iterations of this column a thousand times before. The underlying message is always “AI is going to get shoved down your throat one way or another, so let’s talk about how to make it more palpable.”

The author (and, I’m assuming there’s a human writing this, but its hardly a given) operates from the assumption that

identities that defy categorization clash with AI systems that are inherently designed to reduce complexity into rigid categories

but fails to consider that the problem is employing a rigid, impersonal, digital tool to engage with a non-uniform human population. The question ultimately being asked is how to get a square peg through a round hole. And while the language is soft and squishy, the conclusions remain as authoritarian and doctrinaire as anything else out of the Silicon Valley playbook.

It does feel a bit like the magazine is gunning for the “Don’t like AI? What are you, queer?” angle.

It is both

It’s induced demand. Increased capacity invited consumption.

You know that they eat plenty of other animals right?

Per capita they’re heavily constrained. They have three times the population and one third the land area. They can’t slaughter animals to match US consumption patterns even if they try.

That’s incentivized a culture of veganism as normal and virtuous, as a consequence. And it has allowed the population to expand to 1.3B without experiencing rates of malnutrition common to more rural countries (Kenya, Argentina, and Haiti, for instance) where enormous stretches of land have been dedicated to feedstock.

So just the “Appeal to futility” logical fallacy?

At some point, you have to recognize factory farming as a public policy decision rather than a retail choice. And the response has to be organized and political, not individualistic and consumerist.

You joining the current vegan population is significant!

It’s significant for popular politics, sure. But a vegan community that satisfies itself with attaching blinders when they pass through the Bad Foods aisle at the grocery store is going to end up in the same place as the climate activist who only owns a bike.

The vegan population is estimated to be 9% in india and mexico, 5% in Israel, 2% in the UK, 1.5% in the US

The difference between the US and India is that if you go around trying to butcher cows in particularly devote areas of India, you’re subject to serious political reprisals. In the US, it’s practically a sacrament to eat burger.

In my home town of Houston, the city decided to crack down on the number of topless bars (which developers considered an eyesore). But they still recognized the bigger establishments as lucrative sites for labor exploitation popular with the O&G business community.

So they found a middle ground. There is now a ceiling on licensed venues, with 16 registrations permitted inside city limits. Each club holding a registration must contribute to a $1M pot that’s provided to the Houston PD’s “anti-sex trafficking” division. This affords police a fund by which they can do “undercover investigation” of establishments.

Everyone wins.

Prohibition was a failure as a moral crusade but enormously successful as a money making and politicking endeavor.

slapping the hood of the police state: You can fit so many more cops in this thing!

Eh. Factory farming is a significant contributor to greenhouse gases, particularly through methane released by large livestock herds.

But the industry is so saturated with subsidies and shielded from liabilities and exempted from taxes and so comically wasteful in its surplus production that there hasn’t been any material benefit to veganism as a social movement. You can take a moral position (and you should, eating meat is awful for a variety of reasons). But there’s no actual correlation between an increase in vegan eating habits and a decrease in agricultural emissions. All we ever get is more meat shipped abroad or thrown in the trash.

The real curb to agricultural production has been raw materials constraints - limits on arable land, potable water, and slaughterhouse workers - that have (directly or indirectly) emerged from a changed climate. Outside these limits, all we’ve really achieved is “Grapes of Wrath” style surplus destruction to keep retail prices up.

If a factory farm can produce another dead cow, it does, even if it can’t reliably bring the carcass to market. The profit margins are set so artificially high that they’d be fools not to do so. Only herd die-offs resulting from heat waves, water shortages, and a lack of below-market migrant labor seem to dissuade them from trying to expand.

For most people, this isn’t a moral stance, it’s just that the product isn’t worth paying for.

Wait till you see the price of a burger in another five years.

Part of the joke is who even constitutes “value investors”. As the MAG7 bloat the S&P, it’s increasingly just a handful of companies passing the same dollar back and forth as fast as possible, with the expectation that they’ll get bailed out by the Feds when the game is up.

Sad thing is, they’re probably right. Trump’s trying to get the Fed to loosen rates on the heels of an inflationary wave in order to guarantee enough exit liquidity before the market crashes.

Then we’ll get another brutal privatization wave, with conservatives preaching deficit hawkery in order to justify abolishing Medicare, SS, national parks, public education, anything that can be liquidated for a quick buck.

“The Sky Is Falling! Buy My Magic Umbrella!” is a classic hypeman’s trick.

The bitter miserable thing is that American Christians have fully infested countries like Uganda, Nigeria, and Kenya, with predictably awful results.

African Anti-LGBTQ Groups and Anti-Vaxxers Unite Against WHO at ‘Family Values’ Conference

If there is a global reorientation around the EU and BRICS (which seems increasingly unlikely as Russia/Ukraine has devastated trans-Asiatic trade relations and India/Pakistan feuding threatens to plunge billions into a new World War), its going to have to be over the backs of tens of thousands of evangelical missionaries and their American exploiters.

It’s literally a cult.

Exciting news for people who live in countries that promote vaccination.

Good luck to everyone preparing their illicit journey across the US/Mexico border to get basic medical care.

It does not necessarily have to cost that much…

And yet that’s the selling point behind proof-of-work cryptocurrency models. The whole reason they have value is the raw material cost to fabricate a new key.

Absent that cost, it’s not cryptocurrency. It’s just cryptography.

things you’re saying are pretty dumb

Hey, good luck out there.