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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • The good safety of nuclear in developed countries goes hand in hand with its costly regulatory environment, the risk for catastrophic breakdown of nuclear facilities is managed not by technically proficient design but by oversight and rules, which are expensive yes , but they also need to be because the people running the plant are it’s weakest link in terms of safety.

    Now we are entering potentially decades of conflict and natural disaster and the proposition is to build energy infrastructure that is very centralized, relies on fuel that must be acquired, and is in the hands of a relatively small amount of people, especially if their societal controll/ oversight structure breaks down. It just doesn’t seem particularly reasonable to me, especially considering lead times on these things, but nice meme I guess.


  • Yeah I’m in Germany so my context is somewhere in between and here the projects that improve my life the most is when cars don’t get to/need to travel on the streets as much, this can either be through modal filters, removing car lanes or just banning cars (with the usual delivery window in the morning and such). And they are starting to get to the kind of streets where you could go 100km/h (in terms of size) that are in practice 50km/h, and are now getting them down to 30 (taking 1 of 2 car lanes and giving it to bikes as well as adding obstacles to indicate slower speeds). So it’s doable and of course it takes time, but with a bit of luck it might be faster than some Americans imagine it could be.

    So of course bike lanes along mayor roads (corridors) make sense, and it can be a good starting point to get a skeleton network in place, which then can Kickstart intersection redesigns and traffic calming, wherever it’s reasonable around it. To me the best bike paths don’t go along roads though, they are the “recreational” paths that still connect things. Cutting through a patch of Forrest or a park, going along the waterfront, parallel to a tramway or rail corridor or just along/through the fields. These are probably also politically cheaper than some other measures, but you run the risk of building a thing that just connects nothing because there is no real infrastructure on either end.

    I feel like Americans think they are 60+ years behind when they are probably only 30-40, if the attitude turns somewhat sharply, either just in your local area or more generally, maybe just 15-25.

    A lot of this stuff is monetarily very cheap, depending on how desperately you wanted change the actual infrastructure you’d need, would boil down to planters, bollards, cones, maybe hay bails or large stones/concrete pieces. The problem with that stuff is that it’s only possible with the right opportunity politically, otherwise your traffic calming might get bulldozed by police or something.


  • I sorta agree and sorta don’t, all streets should be 30km/h or less and shared traffic, everything else should be with bike lanes. Streets meaning a piece of infrastructure that provides access to places lining it, not a piece of infrastructure for longer distance travel.

    The Netherlands is good not because there is a bike lane on every street but because all the streets with destinations (private homes, business, schools)are connected by bike lanes as well as roads, often more and more direct bike lanes.

    There are a lot of areas where cars bikes and sometimes pedestrians share the same space both in inner cities and in residential neighborhoods, it’s just that they aren’t through roads for cars or at least very very slow ones, while they are often through roads for bikes and peds.


  • The thing is that culture with a shared language will homogenise or just be way more homogeneous than without one. Same for culture inside a shared nationality. This further perspective shift acquired via engaging in more different culture is useful, especially I find for critically evaluating news, politics,media and the like.

    The perspective told in any other language than English is less sometimes much less integrated into the hegemony associatet with English. And seeing hegemony is much easier if you can by way of language switching step out of the one you’ve previously lived under.

    There are of course other ways for this kind of perspective switching than learning a language, but having it be such a natural part of your life is in the long run easier.

    So from the perspective of an education system in a supposedly democratic society what the op argues for makes a lot of sense, starting early with a 2nd language would likely make the US school system better. And I mean really early, nowadays here we start the 2nd language education with first grade, and the 3rd language with 5th grade.



  • What you’re trying to describe is named public transit not robottaxi, especially the argument that driverless cars will reduce transportation costs doesn’t make any sense. It adds complexity to an already incredibly inefficient mode of transport. For road train like trucking on highways maybe it makes sense, for personal transportation on arbitrary streets it just doesn’t make any sense.

    There is no technology to help aging gracefully, it’s in the respect and help of our peers and in our interactions with them, in the structure of our communities… Entering the sterile empty self driving car isn’t actually more dignified than being picked up by a real human being. And sitting down in a tram or metro isn’t less dignified than being shuttled around by a driverless vehicle.

    It’s not fuck Progress, it’s fuck Cars, just because asbestos or coal power were progress at some point doesn’t mean we should embrace them forever, the same goes for cars and self driving changes nothing about that. If cars still rule the world in 100 years we’ll be dying even more than we already are.





  • The problem is that we need to for many reasons transition to an international order of democratic cooperation instead of economic and military domination. And if the US can never accept this kind of shared and cooperative approach foreign policy of everyone is going to be forever dragged towards this kind of zero sum bullshit we have at the moment. Even though it’s obvious that foreign policy doesn’t have to be zero sum.

    Even if other countries are potentially less honest with their implementation of global treaties, even a relatively slow movement there and maybe a more thorough movement in the US makes everyone better off.

    The only way to actually foster a cooperative relationship is to make yourself vulnerable, otherwise it’s just coercion and power not cooperation. And yes if you get hurt too much maybe you’ll have to leave again, but this pessimistic outlook from the get go is certainly never going to lead to the changes we obviously need.

    How do we solve things that require global attentio and accountability, like climate change, with an increasingly hostile and isolationist country calling the shots on decisions about global economic matters.

    Simply put if I want to live in a world somewhat resembling the current one in 60 years, American collapse or integration into global democracy is a necessity.

    Also calling a country that has been at war for 80+% of it’s history a protector of global peace seems a bit questionable. Similarly I don’t think anyone can conclusively say that the US has done more or less harm than good. But by that same nebulous metric shouldn’t China hold that same title, as well as the Soviets, the British empire, the Spanish empire,the Romans ?

    I would expect almost everyone to feel more ambiguously about the later list than the US, but both the US and empires of the past are exactly what they’ve always been, a tool for those inside, especially the ones in power to increase their quality of life, while everyone outside gets to be exploited, integrated, subjected to rules that do harm, and be attacked, regime changed and so on. It’s not actually the US that is a problem it’s the US being a modern empire that’s the problem.

    That the US tries to be a liberal democracy doesn’t really lessen it’s status as an empire, especially if the powers at be largely prevent it’s people to decide against the status quo of domination.

    Almost by necessity the most powerful are the most harmful if there are no systems to prevent their harm, diffuse their power etc.



  • This is so absurd to me how can anyone disallow painting and drilling into walls of an apartment, I’m very glad that tenancy laws here basically say that if you rent a place you can do whatever you want with it, as long as reasonably it’s restore-able.

    For a lot of the younger folks in the EU if your rental contract tells you you can’t do something it’s probably bullshit. And even if it isn’t at worst you’ll lose your deposit.


  • kugel7c@feddit.detoMemes@sopuli.xyzWorshiping the sun
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    8 months ago

    The way I see it, we’re all part of the same thing, which is the universe. And since we’re included, I see no issue in the personification of the universe.

    I actually agree, but nonetheless personifying, and relating emotionally in this way to specifics, is useful because doing the work of actually relating all the cause and effect happening in between everything and a specific thing is generally an impossible task, so a shortcut to emotionally understand some specific as it’s categories personification gets you a faster and maybe more detailed conclusion. It’s in many ways just a mental shortcut enshrined in culture.

    Same with a lot of the abrahamic stories if you read them as you would read Aesop’s Fables there is actually a lot of good philosophical or otherwise human insight wrapped up in there.

    In many ways it doesn’t matter if there is flooding because we angered the sea, or there’s flooding because there’s a tropical storm and high tide, as long as we realize early enough that there exists a flood and we should seek high ground, warn our peers…

    In this same way it mostly doesn’t matter if everything is one and specifics are just phenomena of that one thing, like your universe, or what I’d probably just call nature, and others might call god, or if everything is a thing unto itself in constant relation to any other thing. If we draw the right conclusion.

    So If you don’t litter because the sign at the entrance of the trail told you so, or you believe it to be disrespectful to the mountain, or it is your duty towards nature to not pollute it, nobody cares and/or should care, but crucially any of those ways to think give you a good reason to do the better and harder thing, which is the reason all these ways of thinking exist.

    A shortcut or a model of thought devoid of context is neither good nor bad, but in context I see the personified one true god causing much more harm recently. Not that the personified mountain can’t be a harmful idea, it’s just that in recent history it mostly hasn’t been used that way.

    If worshiping the Nekogami makes me happy and good to cats while not impeding me otherwise, why shouldn’t I.


  • kugel7c@feddit.detoMemes@sopuli.xyzWorshiping the sun
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    8 months ago

    Honestly worshipping the sun the river the mountain and the tree makes so much more sense than the abrahamic religions.

    Like why shouldn’t the spirit of cats be happy when I feed some cats. Why should the god of the mountain not punish me for littering. It simply makes more sense for your spiritual thoughts or emotions to be grounded in specific phenomenon.



  • kugel7c@feddit.detoMemes@lemmy.mlNWBTCW
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    8 months ago

    If sapolsky is to be believed we have the natural inclination to view in- and out- group as part of our brain. Everything else is learned or a coping mechanism. I guess this is why people propose lived multiculturalism especially during childhood as a solution to xenophobia.

    No matter if he can be believed or not on this fact the book is fun wiki



  • kugel7c@feddit.detoMemes@lemmy.mlGot to find a leftiest place.
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    8 months ago

    You are right but also wrong at the same time. People might be able to be antisemitic without being Nazis, but if they are in this way afraid or in rejection of ‘the other’ they’ve certainly at least been taught this kind of thinking by a fascist that tries to exploit both them and ‘the other’ for their own gain. In this way the Israeli right wing Government as well as IDF and police are thoroughly fascist just as much and in exactly the same way as Hamas are. “no blacks, no dogs, no Jews” can not be put up by a person that hasn’t been taught to reject others in this way, this rejection is the fascist lie they have internalized, and it is the reason why we call them a fascist.

    The splintering of this concept of rejection into, antisemitism racism homophobia Islamophobia patriarchy … isn’t useful when trying to reject the ideas of their suppression, it only muddies the waters. They are the same struggle against unjustified oppression, in parts of which we may be a benefactor, and in other parts we may be oppressed, this shouldn’t make their existence any more justifiable.


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