Absurd to exclude Texas, which would almost certainly go blue if all eligible voters voted. It goes a long way toward explaining why the GOP pushes so hard to limit voting here.

Do you have any insight into getting Linux to play nice with the different components of fusion drives? I have an old iMac and Mac mini both with Fusion Drive and after installing fedora or Ubuntu the SSD is seen and mounts fine but while the HDD is seen it doesn’t mount at startup despite setting it to mount at startup. I’d like to use these machines for some archiving and media hosting but that’s difficult if I can’t reliably access the much higher capacity drives.

You mention not having any human contact other than your family, that sounds really stressful especially if they’re on you for not having a job. Are there any opportunities where you are to do volunteer work, like at animal shelters, hospitals, or similar options? That would expose you to other people, could help with depression (helping others often does,) and might even give you some leads on jobs.

Not sure why you’re being downvoted. Glaciers formed over millennia. If they melt, they’re gone, even if we drop CO2 to pre-industrial levels. The Antarctic ice sheet is millions of years of snow that fell at the rate of a few inches a year and just didn’t melt. If significant portions of that fall off and melt, it’ll be millions of years more for the water it adds to the oceans to cycle back to the ice sheet again. The changes we have made will not be reversed automatically or in many cases at all.

Because it won’t work? That’s what I got from the article. I’m not sure what else you’re implying.

The question was “what word or phrase annoys you,” not “do you understand this phrase.”

I know what the phrasing means, it still bugs the shit out of me.

“Not me” doing something.

Just say you’re doing something, and accept that it may be a bit hypocritical or shameful that you’re doing it.

Short answer: yes

Longer answer: I would argue we’ve already had a few civil wars since the “War Between the States” in the 1860s. Reconstruction was arguably another civil war. The labor rights war of the early twentieth century included federal troops attacking organizing coal miners and federal agents along with private security forces attacking striking workers elsewhere. The violence of the civil rights movement (remember: the president had to call in the national guard to enforce integration) would also qualify as a civil war by some standards.

Listen to the first limited series of the podcast It Could Happen Here for an idea of how a more involved civil war could start. The idea is that there would not be clear battle lines drawn up because our divide now is more urban vs rural, and people in rural areas have opportunities to attack infrastructure that would have significant impacts on urban areas.

From what I understand it doesn’t matter, that’s just a label they assign to all the data they have about you. Attaching all of that to your real name is trivial once they have the profile.

I think cars and car culture are inextricably linked to this kind of behavior, and it gets worse with bigger cars. People definitely can ride bikes like assholes but it’s less common-something about having zero barriers between a person and the world makes them less susceptible to acting like the world isn’t there.

Every day is some variation on shitty.

I want to remind you that you are reading fiction and that fiction writers bring all their biases with them when they write.

For a somewhat bitter antidote to the despair, I encourage you to read David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything. One passage towards the end, in particular, really made me rethink some of my depression. They talk about how wars leave indelible marks in the fossil record, and throughout most of the record there are no indications of war: peace is the rule, not the exception. We seem to be in an anomalous period of human history, and getting back from the brink will require a lot of work.

The interactions you mention from the book don’t seem to be borne out by actual human experience. In times of distress people are more likely to help each other. Listening to accounts from the ground in Asheville is largely a tale of people who may not have thought much of each other a few weeks ago helping each other because they are all humans who need help. I don’t see any reason to think this would change if the scope of disaster was bigger. The key problem seems to come from people thinking they should be in charge, and that’s easy enough to deal with.

As tired as I am of this meme format, I have to agree. Traffic engineering is bunk.

Can we stop reporting on Biden or whoever else using salty language unless it’s something along the lines of “I’m cutting off the fucking military aid.”?

Right? Let’s demonize vore fetishists next, those are clearly cannibals in waiting.

Texas had a derecho go from Central Texas to the coast, which is the opposite of how weather is supposed to work here.

Gary Larson has several species of animals named after him. He also named the spiked part of a stegosaurus tail in a comic (the thagomizer, “after the late Thag Simmons”) and had that name adopted as the official name by paleontologists.

I don’t know if this is true in the UK but in the US McD’s locations are nearly all franchises owned by local business owners. So McDonald’s the corporation could reasonably be unaware that the 15 (say) locations in Dallas TX owned by Horatio Hornblower were all staffed by trafficked persons.

I’m not saying this would absolve McDonald’s of responsibility but it would address the “being unaware” part.

And why is that “inevitable?” Is it because capitalism makes agrarian life basically impossible?

The problem with studies based on any current trends is that they are all framed with the assumption that capitalism will continue to be the dominant socioeconomic system.

I recently heard a “housing expert” say that cities have to keep growing, there’s no sustainable static level of population, and I thought “there’s better be or we’re all fucked.”

The problem with capitalism is that it only works if there’s perpetual growth, which (as many before me have pointed out) is the logic of cancer.