Yes and no. A lot of people are misinformed. It’s easy to say not being misinformed is the responsibility of the individual, just like recycling plastic is the responsibility of the individual consumer. Reality is a bit more nuanced. Misinformed people often simply don’t have access to good information or critical thinking skills to not be duped. Many others are straight up vulnerable to manipulation, through fears etc.

Democracy only works if people are informed. I think the American system has failed catastrophically to inform ordinary people.

Governments are the product of the people. There is no divine or natural laws that triggers “an election”. A government is simply created from thin air when a group of people (any group of people) get together and say: fuck the old system, we are putting that in the trash and signing a new social contract.

Of course, there’s virtually never unanimity of agreement over this social contract in one geographic area, so that social contract is only as binding as the force used to put it in effect.

Realistically, 6 months+ of government shutdown in the US will likely cause a collapse of the USA as a single unified federal entity, since the federal government effectively rots. At that point, all bets are off. A fracture of the US is very possible.

Broadly speaking this is probably true. In a smaller context, though, there are tons of counter examples. The internet for example, from just 10 years ago, was unquestionably better. AI slop, bots, enshitification, social media and browser monoculture…

The anti science trend of MAGA over the last few years…

Etc. Regression does happen, and we should not take things for granted.

I hear they are a solution to the problem of increasing mileage/efficiency. I am no fan of Tesla, but we have to admit, there is some merit to that argument, however debatable the efficiency benefits are.

That’s not to say safety isn’t a serious issue. The biggest problem is the reliance on electronics. Now if someone can reinvent the design with a highly reliable mechanical system, with multiple redundancy.

Real life example of being blinded by “can we” instead of “should we”. This society needs a great deal of introspection.

Define “never”. Never in as in never in the history of 21st century America? Pretty tame assertion. Never in the anthropological sense? That would be completely farcical.

Looks like she is standing in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Place_des_Arts. So that is likely some kind of street art.

Why stop at appliances? By that logic, humans are nothing more than self-propelled heaters. The whole universe is nothing but shifting pockets of heat like the ripples of a pond bouncing back and forth until they all disappear.

Such nihilism.

Does this correlate with a map of pedestrian trips per capita? If yes, then this map isn’t so interesting.

Sounds like the Narcissist’s Prayer to me.

This is how the United States of America turns into the States of America.

Here’s the thing. Y’all sitting around waiting for the institutions to do their job. Y’all waiting for the institutions to do the right thing. But y’all institutions have been corrupted, so they ain’t gonna do anything. It’s up to you, the people to clean up house now, by sending a strong message. And it doesn’t take that much to take action. There is incredible power in the people and in collective action. But for now it is locked away in tepid comfort. That comfort won’t last though. It never does under tyranny.

Most of the shocking stuff you’ve heard about is just tweet-deep posturing. The real damage is caused by subtle changes to laws that no one is paying attention to.

Introspection is a lost art.

The plastic (including polyester fabrics) in your car was most likely derived from petroleum. The car parts were most likely shipped around during manufacturing using combustion engine vehicles. The energy to cast those car parts, probably some of it comes from non renewables. The labour to build the car almost surely comes from other people who consume gas (for example to drive to the EV factory)

That “100%” renewable energy? The installation and maintenance of it was/is almost certainly done with large industrial equipment and vehicles burning fossil fuels. (Similar issue with production of parts).

Look, I’m not saying you aren’t making positive choices by choosing renewable options. What I am saying is, while they are more renewable, they aren’t truly 100% renewable when you factor everything involved in it. Fossil fuels are so pervasive in society, it’s virtually impossible to both function in a modern society and not contribute to the consumption of fossil fuels.

Hard times make hard men, hard men make soft times, soft times make soft men, soft men make hard times <- we are here.

Your insight is accurate, but also as ephemeral as the assumption about the state of the world that came before it. The wheel will move forward yet again, starting with hard times hardening you.

People rather lie to themselves than face hard truths. It’s in human nature, and itself explains a lot of the evils of the world. But facing those hard truths is also liberating. The sooner we accept these human flaws, the sooner we can get back to that experiment of progress.

I think the design philosophy is that each tile represents no more than a single entity at a time, and compact enough that you can arrange the entities in a section to represent a device, room or group.

In your example, perhaps the room also has a humidifier and/or heater. So in reality, the room temperature entity isn’t truly tightly coupled with the fan. The heater and or humidifier are also a part of the whole.

With tiles, you are in complete control to arrange groups of entities that represent a larger whole, in whatever scope you like.

IMO, setting it up at home is not the bar for decentralization. I don’t think it’s even practical to run your own self-hosted fediverse server.

I think we can get just about all the same benefits of decentralization at the scale of the city.

You’ve conflated laws and ethics. Does piracy violate some laws in some jurisdictions? Unquestionably. Is every single law ethical? Unlikely.

No, this is the capitalist trying to convince customers (investors) that they have more capital than the other capitalists. Nothing about this has anything to do with workers.