millie

Time to start making faraday clothes.

There may well be much healthier stuff in their dumpster than peanut butter and jelly. Why not offer to make an arrangement with the person in question to let them take stuff that's about to expire? Or, like, separate food that's being marked out into its own bag and maybe even put it in a cooler or something?

There was a time in my life when I did a fair bit of this myself and I was mostly getting like prepared foods that had been marked out the same day I was getting them. Peanut butter and jelly would have been a downgrade from pulling a couple of days worth of meals with like meat and cheese and veggies and stuff rather than just sugar and nuts and bread.

Not to say that this isn't nice, but it may well be a less viable option on its own in the long term. I suppose they could always do both.

Huh?

Each of these options depends entirely on what you need as an individual. Do you need to solve a Captcha so you can use a specific website? Maybe, maybe not. Some of those choices may be optional, some may be essential, some may be essential to taking your life down a specific path that's important to you.

It's the same as the argument for switching to Linux. Can a lot of people switch to Linux and continue to do what they need to do with their computers? Absolutely. Can everyone? No. But they can use a service like 0patch to keep getting security updates to older versions of Windows after their EOL. Is Libreoffice going to be a good solution for people who need a note-taking app that auto-syncs to cloud storage without having to manually save or wait between timed saves and who need the same text available across multiple devices? Probably not, but there are alternatives to google docs that might work. There isn't always going to be a better option, and sometimes the most anti-corporate option isn't going to be the best option, but some shift where possible is better than no shift anywhere.

Prescribing a one-size-fits-all solution that doesn't actually fit isn't an answer to the problem any more than being annoyed at whatever corporation that's enshittifying their product.

And while we're here, a brief word about the broadening of the term enshittification. I've seen a lot of people insisting that enshittification only be used to apply to social media or to web services or digital products, but that really doesn't capture its full potential. If people are using the term enshittification to refer to their favorite body wash swapping to cheap ingredients after they do an IPO, or to the phenomenon of new washing machines breaking down inside a year when their parents still have one from the 80s that works great, that's not a bad thing. The sanctity of the word retaining its original application isn't important (and isn't how language works), it's the awareness that the word brings that's important. If people are realizing that the companies they help bring to prominence are developing a habit of raking back value as soon as they have the opportunity, that's something we should want to see.

Pretty damn good jobs too, tbh.

That may well be the case, but it's always a mistake to assume we know everything. That's how we got into this mess in the first place. It wasn't long ago that we didn't know what germs were, didn't have electricity, didn't understand things like relativity or quantum mechanics. We don't know what we're going to learn tomorrow, or next year, or 50 years from now.

If there's an option A in which we both fail to do anything to reduce carbon in the atmosphere and also fail to do anything to cool down the planet and an option B where we for now fail to do anything to reduce the carbon in the atmosphere but manage to cool it down enough to provide a stop gap, option B might get us to a point where we can actually do something. At the very least it could give us a little more time before we fully run out of options for survival. Option A doesn't give us that breathing room and doesn't make things better in the mean time.

Saying that neither option can fully solve our problem doesn't mean it's not worth doing the thing that makes the immediate issue less severe. It's a bandaid, to be sure, but sometimes a bandaid is what you need to slow down an infection until you can get somewhere where you can actually heal.

I don't know the long term answer. I don't think anybody does. But I also don't think we can say with honesty, given the history of human knowledge and technology, that we actually know whether or not an answer will exist in the future. In the mean time, we should probably be acting to create the possibility that we can make use of an answer if we find one.

Oh no, not a better job market, more available housing, and less pollution! What a catastrophy!

Flippancy aside, of course birth rates are declining. Of course constant expansion isn't sustainable. The systemic gluttony of capitalism literally cannot go on forever, and the faster we slow it down the better. It's a cancer on our species and our planet. If we want to continue to exist in any capacity we need to get it under control, and that's going to require reconsidering things like constant market growth and never letting the population fall.

Well, it has to be repeated indefinitely until we actually manage to find a way to reduce the amount of carbon in the atmosphere significantly. Which, yeah, that might be forever, but it could also be somewhere around the corner. Personally, given the trajectory we're on it seems like a reasonable stop gap that might actually help cool the planet somewhat, but it's not up to me.

The closest thing I've heard of is sulfur dioxide injection, which could apparently reduce greenhouse effects. However, if we implemented this and ever stopped doing it before decreasing the current levels of carbon, it could result in more rapid heating, which would be more damaging to wildlife due to the greater speed with which survivors would have to migrate.

Those are all ways to reduce the flow of new carbon emissions, but they don't address the issue if the carbon that's already in the atmosphere, which is what they're talking about.

This would be things like more effective carbon capture technologies or sulfur dioxide injection. The point they're making is that just slowing down the rate that new carbon is added or even stopping new carbon from being added at all isn't sufficient to stop the runaway effects.

Never mind that the current regime in the US is on track to actually increase carbon emissions.

I do think there's a sizeable difference between having deeply buried shame about what they're doing and actually having doubts that make their way to the surface where they could actually change the behavior.

It's crazy to look at these people and just see the layers of the onion. Here is a person who knows she's doing wrong. It's written on her face. And yet, she puts on a defensive layer and keeps right on trudging forward with tears in her eyes as she digs deeper and deeper into her hole.

Mike Johnson is another one of these. You can look at him and know that his smug little grin is a thin veneer trying to keep the outside world from realizing that he knows how wrong he is and somewhere in there absolutely hates himself. Even with Trump and Vance, it's written all over their faces. They spend every day fighting it, denying it, trying not to let themselves look, but you can see in their eyes that they can't help it. They know, and they keep on anyway despite themselves.

It would be so easy for any of them to just let go of all that and start trying to help people. To listen to that part of themselves they desperately try to shut up day in and day out. To stop feigning ignorance and try to make things better. They could pick any second to just stop poisoning themselves for a sake of a sunken cost cult mentality held up by people who feel just as sick about their own decisions.