It’s still something you can argue should be done even if it’s not currently politically feasible. Things don’t always stay politically unfeasible, but they usually don’t get pushed in that direction by people not making that argument in public.

My utopian take would be that Israel should become fundamentally secular, remove references to being a ‘Jewish state’, grant all Palestineans citizenship and full rights, and perhaps change the name - a lot of people would say that should just be called Palestine, but frankly I think a compromise of Israel-Palestine or some other completely new name would be fine too. End the colonialism & apartheid, everyone who’s there lives in peace, people who had to flee during previous wars get to come back.

I don’t know that we’ll ever see that, but it probably is much more unlikely if we don’t try to convince people that it’s a good idea.

NL is neither a Nordic country nor ethnically homogeneous. Just like all countries with a history of colonizing other people, many of those people are now in NL. Stop blaming everything on diversity

I actually did stop engaging as much after eliminating Reddit. Lemmy is nice sometimes, but I’m nowhere near as active. I probably post a few more YouTube comments, that’s about it.

Yeah, I could imagine that, if we’re just counting the baseline minimum of what that production would cost. I think for the most popular podcasts they could easily afford it, though. It would certainly cost much less than what they’re paying Joe Rogan.

There’s something about driving that innately dehumanizes - I swear I’ve actually seen studies about this. When people are behind the wheel, they don’t relate to the world around them as personally, empathy kind of disappears, it all becomes something like a game, and everything between them and their destination is just an obstacle to be overcome.

I assume they can power the train AI by pantograph or third rail - no reason to have nuclear powered trains, this isn’t Factorio.

How many people did the Fukushima incident actually kill? Meanwhile people are actively being killed by air pollution and climate change caused by fossil fuel energy. Nuclear energy incidents seem worse because they happen over a short period of time, but it’s just like with airplanes - plane crashes are horrific and disastrous, but statistically airplanes are massively safer than even rail and especially road transport.

It requires good governance and adherence to safety standards and upkeep to be safe, but we’ve shown that we can reasonably do that for the most part.

Renewables should of course be the first priority, though lithium mining is also a significant health hazard - but really when you compare everything statistically and not just by the significance of individual events, there’s no reason we shouldn’t be trying to eliminate fossil fuels by any feasible means, and that includes nuclear power.

They just saw that video on Roblox and said “yeah that sounds great, let’s do that”

They’re active in comments, but they’re also a small minority

I can understand that but at the same time, it can also counteract a lot of localized perverse incentives. The majority of people might want more housing, but then at the same time there’s a significant part of the voting population (especially at a municipal level) that doesn’t want it in their community because of unfounded fears of higher density, so everybody wants it somewhere else and it doesn’t get done. Well, if you go up a level of government, it’s going to get done everywhere fairly, and people finally realize that it won’t be a problem.

That doesn’t even make sense - you are in a neighborhood that only has one grocery store nearby due to car dependent planning, therefore walkability isn’t practical?

I live in a neighborhood that was definitely originally designed for cars and has been gradually getting better and I’ve already got at least two grocery stores I can easily walk to, plus two convenience stores and a pharmacy that’s kind of also a convenience store. Then I’ve got another three or four that I can easily bike to. And these aren’t small grocery stores, they’re all like massive supermarkets designed originally around car traffic.

If you spend time in places that have actual walkable neighborhoods, you find lots of much smaller grocery stores and you can easily shop around and compare prices on foot.

You could argue that for major languages, where the translations would drive revenue, they should prefer to hire people to do the translations from within the target market - it would create some amount of economic opportunity rather than just being another way for the developed countries to suck up money on services from developing ones in particular.

Well, I didn’t mean to say Labour is far-right or anything, just that they’re sliding in the direction of the right.

I mean those are pretty major things, especially if you’re part of one of the affected minorities. If I were trans I wouldn’t really want to work with a coworker who insists on misgendering me and makes a fuss out of me using the right bathroom.

If it doesn’t come up, it doesn’t come up. People can agree to disagree, also. But there are also cases where the disagreement is so fundamental that it makes it pretty hard to respect someone or even want to be in the same room as them.

I do but only with people I’ve actually made friends with who I’m pretty sure will either agree with me or at least respect my point of view. I’ll share mildly political articles in discussion groups for those specific things at work sometimes, but those are places where people have specifically opted in to hearing about them and are interested in the topics.

Well, Labour is legitimately sliding right, and it’s become somewhat common among the so-called “left” in the UK to make a scapegoat out of trans people - it really wouldn’t surprise me that an older, liberal woman in the UK would have some right-wing things to say.

Sounds more like the Rules of Acquisition to me.

Yeah. “One more lane” is something that a lot of people unironically think, it’s not just a meme, so trying to ensure that everybody knows how silly that is and how much harm it causes is one of the main ways that that line of thinking can be destroyed

Yeah, exactly. It’s the same reason why punishment is only a deterrent to crime to certain extent, and it doesn’t work absolutely.

You could make the punishment for shoplifting be summary execution, and it would still happen on a regular basis. Because people think they won’t get caught, even with evidence of lots of people having been caught before.

You have to design around stupid, because this is the real world. People can only expected to be rational sometimes, and in aggregate, you need systems that expect people to take whatever is the most obvious or easy choice available to them, whether it’s actually a good idea or not.