This is the case with many countries where toilet paper is cheap and shitty and will clog the hundred years old shared plumbing systems which probably drains into the same system as the rainwater drainage. They still have plumbing systems, though, so some form of bidet is still viable. So, wash with your left, eat with your right, as is common in india. Not too big of a problem, I’d say, so long as you have soap and water to wash your hand afterwards and you do a thorough job, and maybe also have a diet where you’re not shitting your brains out every time, and maybe also have a shaved asshole or something, but yeah.

I mean you could always just wipe your ass, leave the TP in the bowl for like 48 hours, and then flush it, but then that kinda seems unsustainable unless everyone has their own toilet and only needs to poop every 48nhours which isn’t gonna be the case in a poor country I bet.

Well yeah, but that’s only one part of fascism. You could say pretty much the same of any war, lots of non-fascist goverments, and hell, you could say we already do that, just look at how the campus protests were treated, the BLM protests, the civil rights protests, the sufferagettes, a personal favorite of mine would be the horrid history of our oppression of labor by siding with companies and enabling the use of pinkertons to gun down crowds, yadda yadda.

No, if america was to be fascist, it would be fascist for historical reasons which already existed, which have been around for a while already. I don’t know whether or not america suddenly having a dictator, would really have too much of an effect on it suddenly becoming fascist, despite the popular consensus that fascism just requires a really racist guy to suddenly be a dictator. I actually don’t think that would factor too much into the definition at all, I think you could pretty easily have a fascist democracy, and you could definitely have a fascist oligarchy.

I’m pretty sure imperial japan was mostly run by a military cabinet which internally needed a certain number of votes, and the emperor was more like a figurehead and religious figure that had a certain amount of sway over the cabinet’s decisions as he was like, a big deal, more than him being a figure of political power. From what I remember, anyways. Me personally, I’d be pretty comfortable calling imperial japan a fascist state, even if it maybe conforms to that definition less well than, say, italy or germany.

Not so much, it would more be along the lines of a standard military coup, which doesn’t necessarily have to originate from a fascist. Those can and do come from all sides of the political spectrum.

I don’t think biden would ever do that, and probably if he did, he’d be the worst president dictator of all time with only the mild upside that he could maybe only do so for the rest of his probably not long lifespan, or for the next couple months as they run another election, which he would probably do since he seems like kind of a sap.

But, if he were replaced by a person I actually liked, or there was someone who’s policy I agreed with in that position, I’d pretty much be fine with it, and I get the feeling that most people would be fine with it too, as in, a majority of the population. The levers of power might freak out though, and that might put a damper on things.

So, obviously he could just [redacted] the supreme court justices he doesn’t like, appoint new ones, and then the only thing congress could do would be to expand the court or whatever, right? but then why couldn’t he also just keep killing people in official acts until he gets a bunch of people that are like “yup, that was official and you don’t need to do anything about it”? I know that’s probably a slippery slope, right and would probably get him a shit ton of public pushback, especially after a certain point, from both conservatives, who predominantly make up the military, and economic power structures, to liberals who would prize decorum and “fair play” above all else (but I repeat myself), and so maybe that leads to a dissolution of society, which maybe leads to an even worse society as the people who control the levers of power are already the most horrible people, but, yadda yadda.

But, I dunno, how many congress people does he have to make go away, before the rest of them start to get the picture and then start to behave in their own self-interest, as they’ve always behaved? How many people do you really have to threaten in a system where the people who climb to the top are only going to be there out of their own extreme self-interest?

you know, I at least appreciate on here that, even if you’re going to be massively downvoted for basically no reason, at least there’s someone here making this post and then backing it up in their comments, rather than me just having to look at the headline and be like “yeah that sounds like fishy north korea style clickbait xenophobia to me” without wanting to actually look into it.

So, good job.

Excellent and much needed context, compared to just seeing images of contextually devoid book vandalism, and being trusted to assume a kind of naive, perhaps bad faith idiocy.

I legitimately wonder if there’s really any level of protest that people will tolerate. If you throw soup on the protective glass that covers a painting, prepare to get slammed with a 20 minute protracted conversation about whether or not soup can leak between the gaps in the fixtures that secure a painting to the wall, and whether or not that amount of soup can do damage, and how much money we’re all paying for it to be cleaned up, and how seeing a painting is a once in a lifetime thing which is now ruined for the people who went and so on and so on. If you block traffic, well, now I’ve had to spend 2 or 3 hours in delays, and there’s no cause that’s really worth a minor inconvenience. The protesting crowd should all get gunned down for that. At the very least, they all deserve to know that nothing they’re doing can every really matter or change anything ever.

Then of course, none of that’s actually related to the issue we really want to discuss, there, that’s all just tangential, complicated political issues, that we’re primed to bellyache and whine about. We can only show how much we care by donating to some nonprofit, while we go about our lives ideally uninterrupted an uninconvinienced by the protesters. I feel like I must’ve stumbled on this thread dozens of times already, and it never really gets any better.

I think what drives the root cause of this is some kind of nihilism, some sense that nothing can ever get any better, and if you think otherwise, you’re naive. That we really just exist to keep everything in a permanent deadlock. If you were to take more extreme action than this, well, no, that’s morally abhorrent, whomever will just get replaced by the institutional successor, and oh, you’re causing X amount of property destruction, which is X amount of economic value, thus, X amount of time, and thus, X amount of lifespan for someone. Then you’ve basically committed murder, if not mass murder, by wasting so many lifetimes. The many, sometimes literal, murders of the status quo otherwise need not apply, or else are assumed to be inevitable. Even if your actions here were somehow directly materially related to the conflict, right, it would be all too easy to just dismiss it out of hand as being not really effective, or as being adventurism or a waste of everyone’s time. Can’t I just get back to the perennial Big Game? I just wanna grill for God’s sake!

Part of that is soccer mom-ing, part of that is “urban jungle” brainworm fearmongering, I bet. It’s the transition from station wagons to minivans to SUVs to crew cab trucks. You need a big cool truck that can protect you from the elements, and from the potholes when you go somewhere worthwhile, and also from the crime, even! woah, so cool! kinda shit. Just like, basic fuck you get mine style stuff, there, no questions asked, contextually devoid vacuum “I need to protect my family” mind. People being taken advantage of, by marketing.

Even from the renders I can tell you that it’s probably not going to work out, all other things being equal. Sharing the “format” of like, a cabover, similar to a kei truck, means that it would more readily be suited for smaller scenarios in which maybe turn radius and immediate over the hood visibility is more important, right, but then, its size kind of defeats that, and I suspect that the slant of the window, in order to make it aerodynamic at highway speeds, and efficient, is going to end up putting the driver back so far that it’s going to eliminate your ability to actually see over the hood as much as you might want to. Probably the format also has adverse effects on crash safety, as you really want a hood on your car in order to catch a pedestrian, scooping them up by the legs, and also as a crumple zone to dispel some of the force of crash from the front, which is ideally where most of your crashes are coming from.

I think probably also that the conventional american automotive taste might defeat it, as americans kind of, historically, prefer a larger shittier hood on their vehicle. They prefer the sort of idiot dominance that a big hood gives them. Carolina squat style. I could be wrong on all that, though.

I think my biggest concern would probably be that, even though light trucks are the segment of the market which are very obviously viable for EVs right now, the people who buy trucks won’t want to buy them, and the people who want EVs won’t want to buy them. Implicit in both of those is those who can afford them, which I think automatically maybe selects for people who have the worst taste of all time. Light trucks make sense for EVs, right, you have a rear suspension which is supposed to be beefier for large loads already, conventionally in consumer trucks you’re not going to want a longer travel distance because they’re not supposed to be these highly efficient vehicles, and going electric gives you a pretty good and easy tow rating and high levels of torque low in the power curve like you might get with a diesel engine.

But I dunno. Basically I think americans might be too stupid for it. Might see more success in japan, but I have no idea what their EV infrastructure is looking like or if they already have kei trucks or larger cabovers which are electric. Fleet vehicles would probably need something like a swappable battery on the cheap, or a fast charging system that doesn’t destroy the battery immediately, but the first one probably requires more infrastructure and the second one seems maybe like it would be a limitation of the technology.

You know, as long as their management structure stays relatively similar to what it is, I think I’d be more fine with them being the big evil, compared to basically anyone else.

Edit: and also as long as they stay a private company, that would also be a big concern, but I guess that’s maybe the same as saying their management structure stays the same

For an example of bad competition, just look at streaming sites. We went from everything being on Netflix to everything being divided among dozens of shitty platforms, each of which costs more, and the prices keep going up, especially if you don’t want ads. Nothing was improved for the consumer when Netflix lost its defacto monopoly. Which isn’t to say that Netflix is great, only that the competition for marketshare has only made things worse for the consumer.

Not to sound like a ancap idiot or whatever, but I’d imagine that has to do with the fact that streaming services don’t actually compete with one another. Exclusivity deals mean they don’t actually compete in terms of user experience, features, ease of use, higher video or audio quality than their competition, improved bitrate, whatever. Instead, they just compete based on who can snap up what IPs for the cheapest, which is just a game of whoever has the most money, whoever can outbid their competitors. Then, you’re not going to netflix or hulu or disney+ because of the features of the platform, you’re going to them because they have some IP that the other platforms just straight up don’t, and if you want to watch both IPs you gotta pay for both. So, it’s not really competition, in the conventional sense.

The idea is less that someone makes a competitor and then they actually compete. The idea is that a competitor service is able to lock away one or several big titles, like, say, overwatch, league, fortnite, or whatever else, behind exterior launchers that are maybe more free to do data harvesting. Then, that competitor theoretically eats away more and more of the largest market share, and tries to drive those users from just using their platform for a single game, to maybe using multiple games, maybe with something like a games pass or with free weekend deals or whatever. Once they have that market share, they can give developers better margins, since they’ll be selling customer data at a profit and steam won’t be, maybe with some sort of exclusivity contract baked in, purposely undercutting steam. Then, steam’s been put on the back foot, and the rest is just kind of what has happened to streaming services.

It’s a market, markets trend towards short term gains strategies over long term gains strategies because having faster short term gains means you can more easily crush your competition. It’s like age of empires 2, the first couple minutes of the game is the part that matters the most. That being said, steam has been around for quite some time, and has a good amount of brand loyalty and goodwill built up, and that doesn’t seem to be slowing down anytime soon as they keep one-upping their competition with actual improvements to their platform, like family sharing, screencasting, big picture mode, increased controller support and reassigning, and a full standalone version of linux, that basically all their competitors seem incapable of. So maybe steam has enough of a headstart that, even with a long term gains strategy, even with a, basically, non-evil mentality, they can stay afloat. Who can say.

I mean it’s not as though that’s not a problem in normal companies. It’s just that normal companies can sort of use the guise of structure or professionalism to harangue whatever employees the clique ends up disliking. The cliques are baked in, in a normal company.

I suppose it’s generally easier for the disabled to drive, yeah?

So an interesting thing I’ve noticed people doing is basically claiming that whatever other side is being astroturfed by the “real evil”, right. “Fossil fuel is funding renewable FUD of nuclear reactors!” or “Fossil fuels is funding nuclear FUD of renewables!”. You can also see this with liberals claiming that anyone who disagrees with the DNC is a Russian bot, and with people who disagree with libs claiming that libs fund radical right-wing candidates as an election strategy and that this is one of the reasons why they are basically just as bad as those right-wingers.

The core thing you need to understand about this, as a claim, is that they can both be true. They can both be backed opposition, controlled opposition, astroturfing. Because it’s not so much that they’re funding one racehorse that they want to be their opposition, so much as they are going to fund both sides, plant bad faith actors among both sides, bad faith discourse and division, thought terminating cliches, logical fallacies, whatever, and then by fueling the division, they’ve successfully destroyed their opposition. The biggest help to the fossil fuels lobby isn’t the fact that conversations about nuclear or renewables are happening when “we should be pushing, we should be in emergency mode, everyone should agree with me or get busted” right, as part of this “emergency mode” is us having these conversations. No, the biggest help to fossil fuels lobbies is the nature of the discourse, rather than the subjects of the discourse.

Also I find it stupid that people are arguing for all in on one of the other. That’s dumb. Really, very incredibly dumb. Mostly as I see this discourse happening in a disconnected top-down vacuum separate from any real world concerns because everyone just wants to be “correct” in the largest sense of the word and then have that be it. Realistically, renewables and nuclear are contextually dependant. Renewables can be better supplemented by energy storage solutions to solve their not matching precisely the power usage curves and trends, but a lot of those proposed storage solutions require large amounts of concrete, careful consideration of environmental effects, and large amounts engineering, i.e. the same shit as nuclear. It can both be true that baseload doesn’t matter so much as things like solar can more closely match the power usage curves naturally for desert climates where large amounts of sunlight and heat will create larger needs for A/C, and it can also be true that baseload is a reality in other cases where you can’t as easily transition power needs or try to offset them without larger amounts of infrastructural investment or power losses. Can’t exactly preheat homes in the day so they stay warm at night, in a cold climate, if the r-values for your homes are ass because everyone has a disconnected suburban shithovel that they’re not recouping maintenance costs of when they pay taxes.

These calculations of cost offsets and efficiencies have to be made in context, they have to be based in reality, otherwise we’re just arguing about fucking nothing at all. Maybe I will also hold water in the debates for money not being a great indicator of what’s possible, probable, or what’s the best long term solution for humanity, too, just to put that out there. But God damn this debate infuriates me to no end because people want to have their like, universal one size fits all top down kingly decree take of, well is this good or bad, instead of just understanding a greater, more nuanced take on the subject.

If you wanna have a top-down take on what’s the best, you probably want global, big solar satellites, that beam energy down with microwave lasers.

I mean we did okay-ish with japan, and that was in the immediate post-ww2 period. There was a bunch of gaishas for a while that were complaining (iirc) about sexual assault from american troops, the nation immediately in the postwar period was fomented with a ton of nationalism and we didn’t really do a great job of undoing that. Though, their trajectory nowadays is pretty good, and it’s not like you can really blame all of that on the american occupation, really.

South korea, though, even though I don’t know as much, I’m pretty sure we fucked up that one, since that war basically never ended and nowadays the country is a late stage hypercapitalist hellscape where plastic surgery to make you look more western is incredibly common along with the prevalence of cults and a wealth disparity that’s pretty US-adjacent.

So I dunno if we did super well on those. Probably better than, say, Iraq, but I think our trajectory overall has been on a pretty consistent downwards trend since ww2.

I agree with your entire comment except the end.

I’m not sure the US has the greatest track record when it comes to those sorts of occupational wars, realistically. I think the only times we’ve ever really seen it turn out well is maybe in vietnam, where we actively just like, lost the entire war and got sent packing, and they’re still having to deal with the ongoing problem of their country being contaminated by chemical incendiary weapons that produce larger percentages of birth defects. So, even given that Saudi Arabia is kind of a theocratic monarchic shithole, I dunno if us overthrowing it would realistically do any good, you know? I dunno. I’d probably need to see more on the numbers of dissent amount the saudi population. I think probably capitalizing on a popular movement for regime change, much like the arab spring, would probably be the best route if that was possible, and it would probably have to be more grassroots than something that the US might intentionally attempt to foment in the population, I’d imagine.

In totality though I’m not really sure to what extent it’s in the US’s best interest to destabilize saudi arabia. I think the US would probably prefer predictable fascists compared to, say, if they decided to rapidly nationalize and democratize their oil supply. Another, relatively understated, good reason to move away from petroleum, I would say.

Fuck that shit, all the gas lawn tools should be backwards converted to run on hydrolysis-produced rocket fuel, feasibility and efficiency and safety be damned.

I’m gonna be honest most times when I write a response I’m taking a shit and not paying very much attention to the thread which it belongs beyond my vaguest recollection to what was said

Huckleberries. I never see them as a commonly available thing in stores, eaten alongside things like bananas, which sucks, because bananas are some plant grown like a thousand miles away and I can go outside and go gather my own huckleberries if I wanted. It should be really easy, I live in an area where they grow.

So, that, but also just more broadly I kind of think that after learning enough about different regional botany, we’ve both crippled basically every ecosystem with a bunch of invasive species, we’ve crushed the human experience into a very narrow square set of experiences which includes the biodiversity that you can see around wherever you are, and we’ve made food worse. Because we’re not using local plants for our food, you see, we’re just using a bunch of generic ingredients that are sort of unnaturally made out to be universal across entire hemispheres, maybe even across the globe. No regional variation outside of specialty goods, only Mcdonald’s.

The thread’s gonna be against this opinion broadly, I think, but there’s not like, it’s not just the huckleberry, you understand, there’s a lot more out there that you don’t know about, both edible and not.