How do so few people in this comments section see the obvious satire?? It’s clearly making fun of both landlords and absurd tipping culture.

how do you convince someone to stop fighting back so their enemy will stop punching them?

Heck, part of it is you have to convince people to stop treating others as a monolith. Even the language of “their enemy will stop punching them” implies the entire populace of Israel is one monolith united in oppressing the Palestinians and that the entire population of Palestine is one monolith united in actively fighting Israel.

People need to be able to take a step back and recognize that their enemies are not the common folk, the innocent civilians. Most people just want to live their lives. Only a small minority is ever actually actively engaged in the fighting, or the political decisions to continue fighting.

Israelis (at least those that support Netanyahu and the apartheid state) need to collectively realize that having an apartheid state is not “fighting back”; it’s just punishing 99% innocents. Likewise, Hamas needs to realize that mass murdering civilians is not “fighting back”; it’s just punishing 99% innocents. True fighting back requires actually finding the people responsible for harming you, not ascribing blame to rando civilians just because they happen to have been born on the same side of the border as your true enemies.

Exactly. It’s not a choice between “murder innocent civilians” and “do nothing”; it’s a choice between “murder innocent civilians” and “target legitimate targets such as the military apparatus that actually murders Palestinians regularly or the right-wing political apparatus that pursues a policy of military hyper-aggressiom, apartheid, and settler colonialism”.

If they chose to do the latter, I doubt nearly as many people would take issue with them, they’d receive vastly more sympathy, and they could finally end the systemic murder and oppression of Palestinians faster.

I think an apt comparison is Russia and Ukraine right now. I fully support Ukraine in this war, and part of that is not just because they’re the underdog who got unjustifiably invaded, but because they take care to avoid targetting innocent civilians. For example, when they strike Sevastopol, they strike military facilities, never residential areas. Whereas Russia intentionally terrorizes the Ukrainian people, kidnaps Ukrainian children, targets residential areas, and commits so frickin many war crimes.

If the attack by Hamas were against legitimate military targets, I don’t think there would be many people out here questioning it. But they didn’t. They are a fundamentalist religious group that wishes to commit genocide, and they intentionally targeted and mass-murdered civilians. Beyond that, by attacking a music festival, they targeted people who were statistically more likely to be sympathetic to their cause. Clearly their goal is not simply self defense, but genocide.

Also a good comparison is the PLO in West Bank, as they aren’t Hamas and had no hand in this attack. In fact, they and Hamas hate each other. And as far as I’m aware, PLO just wants the two-state solution and haven’t officially sanctioned terrorist attacks in ages. Unfortunately, Hamas has likely managed to discredit the PLO cause, despite them not having any guilt in this.

That’s a very good way of putting it. We’ve developed our cities in a fundamentally environmentally, socially, and fiscally unsustainable manner, but we were insulated from feeling the full impacts of it by being in relatively good times. But now those debts are quickly catching up with us with the climate crisis, housing crisis, widening inequality, rapidly degrading infrastructure, and quickly draining municipal budgets.

NIMBYs think if they just ban density that the 8 billion people in the world who need housing will just poof and disappear.

Personally, I prefer dense, walkable, transit-oriented cities so we can preserve as much nature as possible, and so the people living in cities aren’t separated from nature by a sea of suburban sprawl.

No, a lot of people own condos. And even if you intentionally destroyed dense, urban areas for the sake of endless suburban sprawl, you would still have people needing or wanting to rent some of those houses. Students, people anticipating moving after a few years, lower-income folks, etc.

Yeah, I live in Montreal which gets like 90 inches of snow annually and can get down to the -20s Celsius regularly in the winter. And yet I (and many others) still bike throughout the winter. Turns out having good protected bike infrastructure and plowing it regularly in the winter makes biking perfectly practical even in the middle of a cold, snowy winter.

In fact, two of the best cities for biking in North America are Montreal and Minneapolis, both very cold and snowy in the winter.

Vote to allow more dense, mixed-use, transit-oriented development as well as more and better public transit. In many cases there’s a chicken-and-egg problem of NIMBYs blocking new, denser development because of fears of bringing too much traffic, but the public transit that would allay those fears isn’t built because there’s not enough density.

And so what happens is places get stuck in a trap of perpetual car-dependence, which is bad for the environment, bad for the economy, and bad for social equality (cars are super expensive and thus a particular burden on lower income folks, and many people with disabilities simply can’t drive).

The only way to break the cycle is for people to recognize what’s happening and intentionally vote their way out of it.

What’s kinda funny is we already have a mode of public transit almost everybody, even those who drive everywhere, use: elevators. Buses, trains, etc. are only seen as “yucky” because most people (at least in America) don’t use them and refuse to spend their tax dollars on them, leaving them to be used primarily by the poor and desperate. But when you have public transit that is used by everybody, like elevators, you find they’re well-funded and well-kept, and absolutely no one will bat an eye about having to use it.

Oh yeah, I understood this is a pro nuclear meme. I agree with your meme.

Friendly reminder that air pollution from fossil fuels kill ~9 million people per year

Yeah, there’s a ton of great journalism out there; you just gotta know who’s doing it. One of the classic propaganda techniques isn’t actually for a bad actor to convince you to trust them; rather, it’s to make you distrust everyone else just as much, which now puts their propaganda on a level playing field with the legit journalism.

Like many things in life, the solution is nuance and understanding, not sweeping generalizations.

Exactly. It’s stupid to be like libertarians and take a hardline stance on “regulations always bad!!” or “regulations always good!!”. A regulation that bans building dense, walkable communities is bad and needs to be eliminated. Likewise, regulations that ban teachers from talking about the existence of gay people are also bad and need to be eliminated.

Just like we try to use regulations for good, many others use regulations for ill. It will always be context-specific specific whether we need more regulation or deregulation.

Honestly, I don’t mind it, though. A lot of creators pour their hearts and souls into their content, and I’m sure social validation of their work feels wonderful to them.

It just doesn’t scale up at all.

Exactly. In the context of a small tribe, a family structure, a friend group, or a small commune, communism works. Why? Because there are social methods of enforcement. That is, if you’re a greedy dick, everyone else will know and ostracize you for it. Thus, you have an incentive to play along fairly.

But once you get to a larger society — past Dunbar’s number — you can no longer keep track of everyone and whether they’re trustworthy or not. This allows bad actors to not play fairly with minimal consequence, breaking the system of relationships and trust that had allowed the system to work in the first place.

The professional class already can negotiate for pay and working conditions because they’re hard to replace. For example, I negotiated my salary up by 5k at the start and receive good annual raises because my skillset/expertise is hard to replace.

We also saw during the great resignation how employers were forced to pay better because they were having trouble finding people.

If employers have a credible threat of not being able to find people, they will have no choice but to offer better pay and better working conditions. As for how we achieve that, I’m personally in favor of a few policies:

• YIMBYism and land value taxes to solve the housing crisis, so that average folks aren’t so squeezed on cost of housing
• Universal basic income to decouple paying rent and putting food on that table from jobs
• Public works/employment programs for activities that produce positive externalities, e.g., subsidies for FOSS software, more public research grants, subsidies for rewilding efforts, etc.

The general idea being that if you don’t desperately need your employer to maintain a basic level of existence, they will have much less leverage over you. If you can credibly threaten to leave and go plant trees or write FOSS software or pursue higher education, your boss will need to offer you more.

Bonus point as, once housing is cheaper and once jobs pay better, people can have more in their savings accounts. This alone makes them less dependent as well, because they can survive longer and more comfortably without a job. For instance, if my boss mistreated me today, I could quit and coast on savings for a while until I found a new job. Those living paycheck-to-paycheck are living in a constant state of exploitation that is extremely ripe for exploitation. Destroy the desperation and you destroy the exploitability.

Reminder that Kissinger is still alive at 100 years old now. Why is it the worst people absolutely refuse to die?

Me, who’s not in web dev:

Again, it’s already working in Minneapolis and several other cities. I’ll even post the table again for your convenience.