Orcocracy [comrade/them]

AI, algorithms, and the statistics that power them are not that smart. They have no way of knowing for sure what is in your head when you hit the delete button.

Yes, the drone pilots double-tapping weddings sure are heroes.

Hang on, how did a US soldier give Donald Trump the freedom to say stupid shit? Who was going to take that freedom away, and perhaps the most bizarre part of all: why did the soldier stop them from taking that freedom away?

Is having lots more green energy not a result?

Perhaps. Or perhaps what uses more over a lifetime is an ebook that is bounced around from device to device which all turn to toxic e-waste after a few years, constantly communicating with always-on servers for account data and DRM authentication hosted in a data centre based in a region powered by fossil fuels. All while a paper book just sits on a shelf causing no further environmental impact - potentially for hundreds of years.

To be fair, nobody’s preference for paper books or ebooks will change the environment in any meaningful way - the problems are much more systemic and require radical action from an unwilling corporate and political elite that has been ignoring the problem for decades.

Data centres and “the cloud” are not great for the environment either. DRM forcing people to have their files constantly deleted and redownloaded makes it even worse.

Also, “support” doesn’t have to mean a direct financial transaction. Libraries operate a bit differently from a McDonalds. Even just going in and sitting in a library reading a book without ever taking it out can help to support your local public library.

I have no idea if that’s bullshit or not, but this is definitely turning into a tragic bodycount measuring contest. I’m outta here.

Yes coal is indeed very bad and needs go away immediately. But I’m not so sure if coal being bad makes radiation cancers from Chernobyl, Fukushima, Three Mile Island, Sellafield, etc etc etc not worth caring about.

I really don’t want to play top trumps over which tragic disaster is worse by measuring bodycounts, as this is all way too grim and I think we can agree that the worst case scenarios for all of these things are awful in their own distinct ways. But that number you put for nuclear is difficult to believe. Where did you find it?

Yeah a dam will wreck a valley. But a nuclear station can irradiate a whole region and coal ruins the planet.

Every modern law of economics?

Tidal, hydroelectric dams, and geothermal should all together be able to cover a pretty significant part of the Earth, shouldn’t they?

Yeah the consumerist rhetoric in game reviews (and the entire technology press more broadly) dooms all of their attempts at analysis to be extremely shallow. Maybe one day a journalist will pay attention in one of their media studies classes and read the fucking Adorno reading that one of their teachers assigned, but that day has not yet come.

Hold on to that leverage over your employer with a union

Yikes, that’s an ugly looking turn of phrase. I guess I’m blocking another racist.

If you can’t or don’t want to root the phone and install your own de-Googled Android rom then you could get an Android phone designed for mainland China, which will come with all of the Google stuff already removed.

Genuinely good films: 4,6,2,8

Ok but flawed films: 1,3,9,5,7

Derivative and unnecessary, but sometimes charming films: 11,13

Very few redeeming qualities and should never have been made: 10,12

Yes it absolutely does.

Copyright infringement is absolutely the moral thing to do in quite a lot of cases. For example, for the preservation of cultural works. Corporations aren’t exactly spending their money on proper archives and the people to curate them. Quite the opposite! For example, if some or all of the lawsuits against sites like archive.org are successful then the result could be a mass erasure of cultural works on the scale of the burning of the Library of Alexandria.

I’m not sure if you should be arguing against the metric system because it was applied top-down across Europe by Napoleon, considering the history behind how the imperial system was spread to what is now the USA. I mean, it’s literally called the imperial system.