And what if he just ignores the Senate? Who is going to stop him?

I have a modest proposal. It is a way, at very little cost, to solve global warming and save countless human lives from violent deaths. It is the logical option, on purely utilitarian grounds.

I propose that we gather up a list of every ethnic group on Earth. And I’m talking pretty specific here. I’m not talking “European,” or even “German.” No I mean like “Bavarian.” That level of specificity. We’ll have a list thousands of ethnicities long.

I will then cut the list apart. Each ethnicity will be on a paper slip. I will put these slips in a hat, give a few good shakes, and select one ethnicity at random. And I mean truly random. It will be a fair drawing. We select an ethnicity from the hat. Individuals of that ethnicity are left alone.

Everyone else goes to the camps.

In this process, we will, depending on the size of the ethnicity randomly selected, wipe out between 90-99.9% of the entire human population. So, on the downside, we will have to lose…approximately 8 billion lives. That is the downside cost.

But think of the upside! We have randomly selected a single ethnic group and wiped everyone else out. That single ethnic group, while still having numbers large enough for viability, now inhabit an empty world. Global warming is now solved. They’ll have no problem with CO2 emissions, as there’s a planet’s worth of solar panels and batteries waiting for them. Over time, their numbers will doubtlessly grow, and they will eventually repopulate the planet.

But think of what will now happen. At the, admittedly steep cost of 8 billion lives, we’ve now eliminated racism forever! In the long run, they might need to engage in some minor genetic engineering to prevent genetic drift, but that should be quite doable. There will now be only a single ethnicity that all humans will share. Think of how many racial pogroms, expulsions, moral panics, race riots, and outright genocides and race wars have happened through history. We’ve been doing that since the dawn of time. Does anyone today think that we’ll ever be immune from that kind of hatred and violence?

So yes, we lose 8 billion lives today, but in turn, we avoid racial prejudice and violence from now UNTIL THE END OF TIME. And we have no idea the scale of conflicts in the future. In a far space faring future, human population might be in the quintillions. In that kind of society, trillions of deaths by racial violence a year would be the equivalent of the hate crime rate experienced in the US today. And we can prevent all of that by simply ethnically downsizing the human population today!

We pay the cost of 8 billion lives now. But in return, we are going to save trillions, perhaps quadrillions. Project forward billions of years, maybe even quintillions.

From a purely utilitarian point of view, the choice is obvious. We must take the path that will save the most lives. We must commence the omnicide.

/Obviously this is not a serious policy proposal, but an illustration of the flaws of utilitarian ethics. Yes, Kamala getting elected would have been objectively better for the Palestinians. It would have likely net saved lives. But the omnicide would also, on net, save lives. And utilitarian value cannot be the only way we make decisions. Justice and the respect for human life are not some trivial thing to be ignored. Let’s not mince words. Biden abetted a genocide; there can be no excuse for this. If there is a Hell beyond this place, then he has assuredly secured himself a fine residence there. What he did was, in fact, a profoundly wicked act. Evil in any meaning of the word. And Kamala promised to continue that evil. Trump would have objectively done even more evil. But again, utilitarian ethics is not the totality of things.

For millions of voters, their moral compasses simply wouldn’t let them have any part of it. The reason we don’t do the omnicide is that we do not have the right to sacrifice countless innocent people based on our best guesses of how the future will turn out. And it’s completely incompatible with any moral system that places innate value on human life. The moral calculus of the pro-Palestine voters that stayed home works on similar logic.

Yes, per our best estimate on election day, Trump would likely be worse for the Palestinians than Kamala would have been. But that is still in the unknown future. We don’t know what tomorrow will hold. But we do know that Kamala was the VP of a president that abetted a genocide. And we know that Kamala herself says she will continue these policies. She was part of that administration. She has culpability in this. Should she not be held accountable? Does she not objectively deserve punishment? Denying her a victory would be an act of justice for those she helped kill. But in turn, it would cause the election of someone likely to be much worse. But there are people who have already died. There are people today in unbearable suffering because of this. By electing her, you are denying them justice. In exchange for what may come to be in the future.

Or think of it another way. Imagine you had a terrorist leader on trial, someone on the order of Osama Bin Laden. He’s convicted and sentenced to hang. As he’s taken to the gallows, he says, “I have a dozen sleeper cells planted through the US. If I die, expect dozens of suicide bombings across the country within the next few days.” Do you stay his sentence, or put it on hold? Or do you just carry forward, and let these future terrorists be responsible for their own actions?

This is the core problem the Palestine abstainers faced. Are elections more about future policy, or are they about accountability? In truth, they’re both. And different people have different ratios of accountability to future policy that they vote on. I personally voted for Kamala, but I can absolutely get the ethical case for not participating at all in this race. If you care far more for future policy than accountability, you vote for Kamala. If you care far more for accountability than future policy, you stay home. A lot of people picked accountability, and as a consequence, Kamala lost.

But perhaps I, and others who did vote for Kamala, have the worst outcome of any voter. I sold my soul and voted for Kamala. I gave up my one chance to apply the only bit of power I have as a voter to hold her accountable. I did it all because I hoped for a better future. But in the end, it didn’t matter. I lost my chance to hold her accountable, and the greater evil still won.

If I had to work in an office with a security camera pointed directly at me all day, I would just start wearing a burka to work.

IDK, this case seems really complicated. First, it’s a state agency, not a private employer. And there is a difference between a camera in a public space and a camera pointed directly at an individual in a private office. The entire point of having an office in the first place is that it provides some level of privacy. If an employer doesn’t want to give their employees any privacy, they can have them work in an open-plan office. At least in that case, the employees will naturally feel exposed in a public space and will act accordingly. But a private office? That naturally encourages people to perform behaviors they wouldn’t perform in public. You might not take a phone call from your doctor in an open plan office, but it wouldn’t be unusual to take one in a private office.

I get that plenty of other employers have cameras. But there are some very key differences between cashiers and someone working in a government office. The cashier works for a private employer, and thus constitutional protections aren’t applicable. And cashiers are literally standing in a big room interacting with the public; it’s obvious that privacy is not implied. But if you, as an employer, put someone in a space that implies they’ll have privacy, but then secretly record them? Yeah, that could fall afoul of some privacy laws.

I don’t really know if they have a case or not. But the fact that an employment attorney was likely willing to take the case on contingency suggests that the case is, at the very least, not frivolous.

Bullshit. It comes from a simple disgust reflex. Everything else is post-hoc justification.

Eh, I’m not too worried about it. Ultimately, it’s just the same pattern that has happened since the dawn of civilization. In any city, there are places where people like to hang out and congregate. And they wax and wane in popularity with time. Even some place like a local pub has a lot of the same lock-in/network effect you get with the social media companies. What do you do if you live in a small town where the pub is the default meeting place, but the pub owner turns into an asshole? Well, there’s different options, but ultimately it is the same problem as social media lock in.

And I’m not sure the federating really solves it. Let’s say everyone moves to fediverse. In theory, it would be good if no instance had a lion’s share, but that’s not how these things actually develop; people tend to join whatever instance is currently the largest. And if lemmy.world becomes run by assholes, and if they in turn stop federating with other instances, isn’t that now just reddit all over again?

At some point, I just don’t think technical fixes are the real solution. The real solution is that people need to come to realize that these platforms are ephemeral, and that they need to always be ready to jump ship if a platform goes down the road of enshittification. This Twitter->Bluesky migration may represent ultimately a solution far more sustainable than the technical fixes embodied by the fediverse.

Considering its decentralized nature, shouldn’t it be called the Confediverse?

The problem is that “you do you” is an ineffective counter when the other side has decided to actively exterminate a minority group. “You do you” is fine in normal times, when there isn’t an actively malevolent political movement bent on the destruction of a minority group.

This conflict is entirely at the feet of right wingers. Trans people have never been well understood or popular. But up until 2016 or so, we were mostly an afterthought. And honestly, that’s fine. What the trans community really wants more than anything is to just be left the hell alone. But Republicans lost the fight on gay rights, and they needed another out group to target. So they moved on to trans people.

The conversation mostly works like this;

Conservatives: trans people are demons and we should exterminate them like animals

Liberals: umm, maybe that’s not a good idea. How about we just let everyone live the way they want and not bother them?

Conservatives: why do liberals care so much about trans people??? Why do they never stop talking about trans people?!

Conservatives like to say liberals are obsessed with gender politics, but that focus is ENTIRELY THE FAULT OF CONSERVATIVES. And liberals don’t have some general like of trans people. It’s simply part of core liberal philosophy that you don’t sit idly by while minority groups are attacked.

But again, if you actually want to stand up for someone’s rights, you need to actually be able to rhetorically defend them. Consider this:

Conservative: TRANS PEOPLE ARE MUTILATING CHILDREN’S GENITALS

Liberal: I think everyone should live and let live. Let’s just have tolerance.

Do you see how weak, ineffective, and utterly useless that is? When someone spouts a bigoted or racist line against a minority group, you can’t just sit back, say “I accept all viewpoints,” and do nothing. If you actually care about protect people’s rights, you need to be able to actually defend them.

The problem with milquetoast centrist “live and let live” is that it’s very, very easy to paint extremely damaging revocations of civil rights as simple “common sense” policies. For example, I described why it’s a really, really bad idea to force trans people to use the restroom that corresponds to their birth sex. But a Republicans will say, “I don’t oppose trans people, I just think we need some common sense rules to protect everyone.” And if Democrat isn’t actually willing to protect the rights of trans people, they’ll end up going along with it as it seems neutral on its face.

Or, for another example. Consider “separate but equal.” If you didn’t know anything about Jim Crow and how utterly laughable the idea of separate but equal was, it seems fine on its face. And if opponents to segregation just took a “you do you” philosophy, they never would have stood up against Jim Crow. They would have just said, “ok, black people. You go do your thing, separate but equal, but I don’t want to have to listen to all this identity politics. I’m sick of this woke shit.”

And remaining silent about issues of race, gender, and origin that Republicans keep introducing does not make them go away. It guarantees that all voters hear is the hate peddling of the opposition.

There should be a hundred Democratic House members on the House floor defending McBride. There should be female Democratic House members complaining left and right about how they find it weird that Republicans are requiring them to share bathrooms with men.

The problem Democrats have on trans issues is that most Democratic leaders don’t really seem to believe in the validity of trans people. They’ll make vague platitudes about supporting rights. But it’s all very much a “you do you” type of thing. They don’t actually support or affirm trans identities. You don’t see many Democratic lawmakers out there saying, “trans men are men. Trans women are women” and actually meaning it.

These things are quite explainable, and quite defendable, if you’re actually willing to do it. For example, trans women don’t “force” themselves into women’s bathrooms. Do you know how most trans women decide it’s time to switch from the men’s to women’s restrooms? They don’t just one day announce they’re trans and start using the opposite facilities. Almost all trans women start their transition. Once they’re far enough along on their HRT and change in presentation, they inevitably start getting weird looks and harassment in the men’s restroom. Cis men start reading us as women, and we start getting harassment for being in the men’s room. That is when most of us switch over to the women’s room. And it works the opposite for trans guys. 99% of trans people work on the rule of, “use whatever restroom causes the least disruption.”

That’s how you can fight bathroom bans in a way anyone can understand. Trans people don’t form their beliefs and practices out of nowhere. It’s all quite logical and reasonable. But you have to actually be willing to defend people.

But that is not what Democrats do. They don’t defend trans people, they tolerate them. Democrats can’t give good, well-reasons responses to defend trans people, as they prefer to live forever on the fence. Yes, when it is politically popular, they’re willing to speak up for us in terms of vague discussions of universal rights. But when the other side starts demonizing trans people, because Democrats have never taken trans issues truly seriously, they don’t know how to properly respond.

And they’re fools for doing so. This kind of obsession and policing of gender ends only one place - with everyone forced back in the closet. And for cis women, that ultimately means being forced back into your traditional gender role, where the gender police think you belong - pregnant, barefoot, and in the kitchen.

In US introductory psychology courses, one common assignment is to deliberately violate some unwritten social norm. Something that is never stated anywhere, but we all just customarily follow. My favorite example is, while visiting a friend’s house, ask if you can use their bathroom. When they say yes, go to their bathroom and take a bath.

That’s true in general. And if you assume a perfectly efficient market, yes, renting would never be cheaper than buying. On the other hand, if markets were perfectly efficient, no company would ever be able to make a profit at all.

One market distortion is that in certain times, people will actually pay a premium for renting. People aren’t perfectly rational actors. Or moreover, they prioritize things beyond just simple cost. Even if buying is more expensive that renting, all costs considered, often people will pay more just for the stability and certainty that comes with home ownership.

The housing market is also distorted by all the present owners with locked-in 30-year mortgages. This has suppressed the supply of existing homes on the market. Rental companies don’t get access to federally-subsidized 30 year mortgages, so they are less subject to this interest rate lock-in.

I pointed out a few things, but these are a few of many. The key thing to realize is that housing is highly illiquid, and its production, ownership, and sale is heavily regulated, taxed, and subsidized. It’s a heavily regulated market. This means that the market will not always follow basic econ 101 behavior. Yes, in theory, rentals will include all costs. But that is rarely the case.

In fact, in a perfectly efficient market, it’s likely that neither buying nor renting would be beneficial. If everyone acted perfectly rationally all the time, the cost of renting would exactly equal the cost of buying. And in that world, buying would never be worth it, simply because it wouldn’t be worth the extra hassle to safe not a single penny.

I mean, canonically, isn’t Wesley basically a Q at this point, doesn’t he have Phenomenal Cosmic Powers™? Wesley disguising himself as Nog shouldn’t be too hard to do. Hell, it was in a holosuite, and if anyone can rig one of those, it’s Wesley.

So, what I’m saying is…canonically, there is no reason that it couldn’t have been Wesley hanging out with Jake…

Their doctrine was the stick type was for offensive operations, and the little one was favored for defense.

Hmm…defensive hand grenades. There’s something crazy I’ve wondered before; is there anywhere it’s legal to use hand-grenades as a form of home defense?

Let’s say you live on a big property in the middle of nowhere, like a ranch out in West Texas. So you know that if you detonate a hand grenade on your property, you can be absolutely sure that the fragments won’t fly through your walls and hit a neighbor. Let’s say you live alone, and you’re so stupid wealthy that you don’t give a damn about grenade damage in your own home.

Imagine this is true. Is there anywhere in the US you could legally keep a crate of hand grenades in a gun safe, and just start chucking them at a home invader?

That’s for the nuclear industry to figure out. But the fact that companies from different companies originating in entirely different countries suggest that it’s a problem with the tech itself.

The hard truth many just don’t want to admit is that there are some technologies that simply aren’t practical, regardless of how objectively cool they might be. The truth is that the nuclear industry just has a very poor track record with being financially viable. It’s only ever really been scaled through massive state-run enterprises that can operate unprofitably. Before solar and wind really took off, the case could be made that we should switch to fission, even if it is more expensive, due to climate concerns. But now that solar + batteries are massively cheaper than nuclear? It’s ridiculous to spend state money building these giant white elephants when we could just slap up some more solar panels instead. We ain’t running out of space to put them any time soon.

Also 10s of billions is still insignificant for any power, transport, or healthcare infrastructure in the scheme of things -

Bullshit. If you can get the same amount of reliable power by just slapping up some solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries, then obviously the cost is not insignificant.

That sentence shows that you really aren’t thinking about this as a practical means of power generation. I’ve found that most fission boosters don’t so much like actual nuclear power, but the idea of nuclear power. It appeals to a certain kind of nerd who admires it from a physics and engineering perspective. And while it is cool technically, this tends to blind people to the actual cold realities of fission power.

There’s also a lot of conspiratorial thinking among the pro-nuclear crowd. They’ll blame nuclear’s failures on the superstitious fear of the unwashed ignorant masses or the evil machinations of groups like Greenpeace. Then, at the same time, they’ll ignore the most bone-headedly obvious cause of nuclear’s failure: it’s just too fucking expensive.

Who cares? We use economics to sort out the relative value of radically different power sources, not cherry-picked criteria. Fission boosters can say that nuclear has a small footprint. Solar boosters can say that solar has no moving parts and is thus more mechanically reliable. Fission boosters can say fission gets more power from the same mass. Solar boosters can point to the mass of the entire fission plant, including the giant concrete dome that needs to be strong enough to survive a jumbo jet flying into it.

In the end, none of this shit matters. We have a way of sorting out these complex multi-variable problems. Both fission and solar have their own relatives strengths and weaknesses that their proponents can cherry pick. But ultimately, all that matters in choosing what to deploy is cost.

And today, in the real world, in the year 2024, if you want to get low-carbon power on the grid, the most cost-effective way, by far, is solar. And you can add batteries as needed for intermittency, and you’re still way ahead of nuclear cost-wise. And as our use of solar continues to climb, we can deploy seasonal storage, which we have many, many options to deploy.

The ultimate problem fission has is that it just can’t survive in a capitalist economy. It can survive in planned economies like the Soviet Union or modern China, or it can run as a state-backed enterprise like modern Russia. But it simply isn’t cost effective enough for fission companies to be able to survive on their own in a capitalist economy.

And frankly, if we’re going to have the government subsidize things, I would much rather the money be spent on healthcare, housing, or education. A lot of fission boosters like fission simply because they think the tech is cool, not necessarily because it actually makes economic sense. I say that if fission boosters want to fund their hobby and subsidize fission plants, let them. But otherwise I am adamantly opposed to any form of subsidies for the fission industry.

Who gives a fuck about energy density beyond some physics nerds? Unless you’re planning on building a flying nuclear-powered airplane, energy density is irrelevant. This is why solar is eating fission’s lunch.

The coal mining industry employs about 38,000 people. Dunkin Donuts alone employs seven times as many people as the whole coal mining industry. There just aren’t that many coal miners anymore. And everyone currently involved with it joined up knowing full well the days of coal were numbered.

It has that low death rate precisely because it is heavily regulated.

The typical nuclear booster argument works on the following circular logic:

“Nuclear is perfectly safe.”

“But that’s not the problem with nuclear. The problem with nuclear is its too expensive.”

“Nuclear is expensive because it’s overly regulated!”

“But nuclear is only safe because of those heavy regulations!”

“We would have everything powered by nuclear by now if it weren’t for Greenpeace.”

Well, feel free to keep calling for a recount. And I’m free to tell you why there isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell of it happening.