I’m in TX with a whole bunch of constituents amendments on the ballot. Never too optimistic about making a difference in such a conservative state, and particularly annoyed the only thing that could have a positive effect on our failing electric grid is a tax incentive for natural gas 🤮.

The only prop I’m still on the fence about is the university fund. I’m skeptical of state funding for universities, because my understanding is quite a bit of that goes to admin instead of lowering tuition. But most organizations seem to support the proposition, and the only ones who oppose it say they do so because the universities are too “woke”. I don’t want to vote in alignment with some alt right organizations :/

A ttrpg called .dungeon got a remaster recently and I keep coming back to one of the screenshots on the store page, because I’m such a big fan of the rules for community moderation it enumerated:

Well funnily enough I think that part, legally, is totally fine. There’s nothing anti competitive about being in two unrelated industries, and I don’t think there’s a good case that aws is a monopoly. There are viable and cheaper alternatives like hetzner, aws is just popular but it’s not manipulating the market

That’s a really interesting article on how Amazon makes it money when prime is such a good deal for the consumers. I really hope Amazon gets broken up

I didn’t assume you were a fan of suburbs, I just read your comment about cities being blights upon the earth and argued why I think suburbs are more blight-like.

The only assumption I made about you is that you’d appreciate an appeal to environmentalism, since you called earth our beautiful planet

That’s a very fair point, and one I agree with. I also think it’d help to move away from capitalism though. Capitalism is the force that encourages so many companies to throw away excess food rather than give it away, because doing so would lower demand and be “bad for business”. If we could just reduce our food waste that alone would do wonders in decreasing land use for farms, monoculture or otherwise.

I also think, over time the world should become more vegetarian. Even if you believe in food chains and that it’s okay for us to eat meat in general, the farming of animals often in cartoonishly cruel conditions solely for our consumption is abhorrent. Moving from meat based diets to (at least mostly) plant based is a moral necessity, and on top of that will massively reduce emissions (15% comes from livestock), land use, and biodiversity loss

Walkable cities produce less pollution per capita than suburban or rural areas due to less pollution from commutes and increased efficiency delivering utilities (due to the population density).

Suburban sprawl is what truly makes ugly stains on our word - concrete everywhere, destroying the watershed, with no native grass in the medians, and so many cars spewing out fumes, micro plastics, and disrupting migration patterns. They’re depressing places to live.

Fwiw, I think using a self hosted home automation setup (shout out to home assistant) paired with smart devices that don’t use internet (e.g. zigbee, zwave, or matter once it comes out) can allow you to have a smart home without these kinds of fears.

That said, I would definitely agree to using mechanical locks. Although a monitored smart security system is probably still a good idea - you’re letting a company virtually enter your house, but you can’t rely on a self hosted solution to notify you when your power goes out, for example.

That looks pretty cool! Especially since it looks like they’re recently been working on docs for self hosting it. The obsidian integration also looks really interesting - I need to get better at actually using obsidian as a “second brain” rather than just a glorified TODO list haha.

I’m just using matrix through other cinny on web and schildichat on android. You will need to self host if you want to host the bridges yourself without any possibility of another server owner seeing the unencrypted chats, but matrix is definitely the way to “future proof” your chatting imo.

I don’t want to defend meta here, but I’ve heard this or similar about literally every social media site ever, when it first opens. It’s way too early to tell if threads will be proactively moderating hate speech and other dangerous content.

I agree with this methodology, and it’s reminiscent of how traditional roguelikes are defined here. I’ve used a similar approach in my own endeavor of defining incremental games - define a canon, find the qualities they share, and indicate which ones seem most important to have.

To expand on what pipariturbiini said, the game is about discovery and knowledge, so any spoiler you look up is directly removing a part of the game experience for you. I’m sorry your experience was tainted by the advice to not seek out spoilers, but overall I think it does help ensure most people have the optimal experience.

ooh, that looks like a handy thing I’d like to store! I’m a bit worried I’ll have lost some of my saved links because I think I heard they only keep the most recent ~1000 or so.

I’m personally a pretty hardcore leftist, and from this position both liberalism and conservatism are too right leaning for me. Of course the democrats are closer to me, but I think it’s important to keep in mind they are conservative lite, not truly left leaning. Establishment Dems in particular do not have the best interests in the people in mind, similar to Republicans. “Both sides” are acting to preserve capitalism and consolidate power, not distribute it.

With that in mind, the typical “both sides” argument that there’s extremists on both sides is ludicrous to me. Extreme leftism doesn’t mean forgiving student debt or implementing a UBI, it’s banning corporations in lieu of co-ops, or replacing any company that provides things we need to survive with state-run monopolies (like single payer healthcare, for example). Neither side is left enough, and rhetoric that there’s a happy medium between the two parties will end with us being incredibly right leaning.

Edit: should have mentioned Biden forcing the striking rail workers to go back to work. That is not leftism; democrats are not an extremist party.