Let’s say, ten years in the future, a brilliant scientist invents a magic box that drastically reduces some of the biggest inflictors of CO2, and/or even repairs some of the previous damage. Such a marvelous invention would only be valuable in saving the human race if there were simultaneously other improvements on efficiency and CO2 generation to improve the overall reductions.

Movies get us used to one person/initiative saving the world. What’s more practical is a whole bunch of little initiatives - even if each one doesn’t do enough on its own.

The “taking a physical object” analogy doesn’t even give us anything useful.

Most stores of perishable goods don’t want to hold onto their stock; they want to give it away, ideally in a way that makes them money. In many countries, they will even give away the last excess to homeless people that would not reasonably be able to afford it.

If there’s one orange seller in a town that’s put effort into a supply train to bring oranges there, but someone has shared a magic spell that lets them xerox oranges off the shelf, then that orange seller never gets paid, and has no livelihood; it doesn’t help him that he still has all of the oranges he brought to market, he’s not going to eat them all himself.

I expect the morally deprived will answer “Not my problem.” Yet, it’s going to be an issue for them when they try to run their own business.

The war of semantics is about as intelligent as the tweet that went viral where someone criticized trains requiring tickets. “Why are you charging me to get on? You’re going that way anyway.”

Thanks, guy who posts Piped links!

What worries me, though, is the idea of bots infiltrating the Fediverse…posting among us.

Reminds me of Anonymous, the hacker group that once seemed to have some kind of meaning, until everyone realized anyone and everyone was using the label for some of the dumbest movements.

“Treyarch. You believe you have gotten away with anti-consumer behavior by nerfing the dual shotguns in the latest Call of Duty patch. But Anonymous, the very members of your playerbase, have been watching.”

Even Gandhi has been misunderstood on this subject. I see people cite him very vaguely as a way of trying to get people to “quiet down and be peaceful (obedient and subservient)” but Gandhi, while non-violent, didn’t avoid confrontation. He just didn’t use violence to achieve it. He absolutely had an end goal of change, and did not accept the law as a barrier to achieve it.

We don’t have to accept war for change, but we often have to accept some form of confrontation.

Part of me loves that they kept the title, because it’s so easy to ask very brief questions to get the word’s user to start blubbering.

“Anti-what? They’re against ‘fa’? Oh, what is that short for? What idea are these people opposing? Tell me.”

I feel like the explanation follows a thread of believability, but even then, this feature was terribly coded if it was circumvented via User Agent string manipulation.

I think it’s still possible to ethically use Chromium browsers, so long as it’s one of them that’s been reviewing and removing anything ludicrous Google adds. I don’t even mind MS Edge on most of my computers for the most part. Firefox doesn’t load well on my tablet.

They’ve done this before, a long time ago, with IE11. For those that only remember its early years, later releases of Internet Explorer were actually decently compliant - but Google still prevented them from accessing places like Google Maps for having improper support. User agent switchers caused it to display perfectly.

As a liberal, I support breathing air and eating nutrients to stay alive.

Cutting eggs? What, you don’t have a chainsaw in the kitchen for that?

I think that it is murky to wade into the division of blame when a shooting happens. I say that, but I want to clarify I’m not just referring to mass shootings - but also accidents, minor crimes that escalate, etc.

I think that malicious actors get much easier access to guns due to the pervasive nature of gun fetishists, and the common availability they provide of those arms, be it by legitimate purchase, theft of poorly-secured guns, or otherwise. I think more accidents happen with guns because gun fetishists are using them more often, and a certain percentage of them are acting irresponsibly - sometimes ignoring one or more of the rules for gun safety.

There are other countries out there with a high number of firearms, but absolutely no cultural devotion to them. A frustrated, mentally ill person wishing death on a community might not even know that three of their neighbors own guns, because they’re always stowed in a safe, unused for most of the year unless they’re getting cleaned.

Take two people - one who has a 25% chance of making a fatal mistake handling a gun due to clumsiness and lack of knowledge. Another, a gun professional who has a 0.01% chance of making that fatal mistake due to years of training. If the first person never handles a gun once, the chance of shooting someone is zero. If the second person handles their gun 8,000 times, the chances become much higher.