Someday, these items will all be eaten slowly, or perhaps quickly. When will this begin in force? When will it affect our daily lives and health? Will we be able to prepare?

There are certainly those kind of irrational AI boosters out there. Though I strongly suspect the AI bubble is much like the crypto bubble, in that the true believers are vastly outweighed by fakers who don’t believe their own bullshit and are just hyping the product to make money.

When it comes to the billionaire caste, though, I think most of them know AI isn’t, and probably won’t, live up to the hype.

But the point isn’t to actually replace people with AI.

The point is to replace free people with serfs.

We’re already seeing AI being used as an excuse to replace American workers with foreign workers overseas. That is to say, American companies fire a bunch of well-paid American software engineers, “replace” them with AI tools, and then when the tools inevitably fail, hire much cheaper labor from India.

And the techbro support of Trump’s immigration crackdown has the same goal. They don’t want to bring foreign workers to the United States and pay them salaries sufficient to live in the United States - they want their workers trapped in countries with low wages and low cost of living.

Now expand that to, basically, every other working class sphere of employment. AI can’t replace workers. But if enough businesses can be convinced to fire workers and try to replace them with AI, we will get mass unemployment, economic collapse, and political turmoil - and, as always in a collapse, the ultra-rich will get even richer, because the unemployed working class will be forced to sell whatever they have at fire sale prices, and the billionaire caste will be able to buy up land and houses and businesses cheap, and consolidate even more wealth in their caste.

And when the dust settles, the unemployed masses will be desperate to work at whatever wage and conditions the billionaire caste wants to set.

I mean, if saving seeds wasn’t dangerous to the powers that shouldn’t be, Monsanto wouldn’t have made it illegal.

No kidding. Yes, let’s install cameras that can identify and record every license plate (and face, too, if the camera has resolution for one it has resolution for the other) that passes them.

Surely our government will not use this capability to track the movements of its political enemies.

I’m confident Oakland’s notoriously honest and professional police department will not use them to harass whistleblowers and stalk the estranged spouses of police.

And of course it’s overly paranoid to imagine the “third party vendor” processing all this license plate data could be hacked or compromised or sell the data to other entities.

Christ.

messy and expensive.

Expensive for whom, though?

The American people will pay the cost, in blood and tax money, for occupying Venezuela.

Big Oil, weapons manufacturers, and the Trump crime family, will reap the profits from it.

(Edit: and yes of fucking course the Venezuelan people will suffer far more than Americans safe in the imperial core. I thought that was so obvious it didn’t need to be fucking said.)

Every American invasion and occupation is another massive wealth transfer from the poor to the rich.

Socialism for the rich, rugged capitalism for the poor, isn’t that the saying?

I think it underestimates the value of climate mitigation. A focus on reducing emissions may not save us from a 3 degree world - and a 5 degree world after that, and a 10 degree world after that - but it could delay those milestones and give us more time to adapt. For example, I think a 40-foot rise in sea level is inevitable in the next few centuries - even a two degree rise guarantees both the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets melt - but delaying that 40-foot rise from 2080 to 2150 makes a huge difference in our ability to prepare for it and in the lives of people living in the flood zone now.

I also think climate change is a symptom of the underlying disease of capitalism/technofeudalism. Local and community resilience efforts treat the symptom but leave the disease free to run rampant in new and horrible ways.

(Imagine: a city puts in battery backup in case of grid failure, but the megacorp manufacturing the batteries forces them to use its proprietary software and pay service fees, and when the grid goes down the megacorp hits the city with millions in extra fees and threatens to turn off the power if they don’t pay.)

Why do people act like not using a gas powered stove is akin to stripping away some fundamental right?

Because change is bad.

I’m not (just) being snarky. People get defensive when something important to them changes, even if the change is for the better.

And food, and cooking food, is extremely important to most people.

One thing you have to always remember about Donald Trump is: he’s incredibly insecure. His fragile little ego is desperate for approval. It’s why he constantly shitposts on a social media site he owns - so he can get that constant dopamine rush of upvotes and fawning comments and “megadittoes, Mr. President”. And it’s why he’s desperate for the approval of people he considers strong leaders - Putin and Xi and Milei and so on. And when somebody he respects flatters him, he becomes putty in their hands.

Mamdani won decisively in New York. Mamdani proved himself a strong leader. And then, after taking everything Trump could throw at him and coming out on top, Mamdani went to Trump and basically said “I talk a lot of shit about you, you talk a lot of shit about me, but we both know that’s how the game is played and not to take it personally. You do good work and I respect you. We both believe New York is the greatest city in the world so let’s work together to make it great again.”

And Mamdani certainly didn’t have to ask for a meeting with Trump. It probably hurt him with some of his base to talk to Trump at all. So you have this strong man, this leader, this winner, who decisively proved himself the leader of the Democratic Party in New York, with incredible momentum behind him - and he goes to Trump to kiss his ring and ask for his support.

And when a strong man gives Trump the manly validation he craves, he melts like a teenage girl at a David Bowie concert.

Because you also have to remember, Donald Trump has no actual political positions. He doesn’t care about anything except winning - and he loves winners. And whatever Mamdani is, he’s a winner.

I think not violating people’s privacy with technological data collection is a technological issue, not a political one. Because you can have a society without capitalism or the state, you can have incredibly strong social norms governing privacy and the use of people’s data, but as long as that society is collecting and storing information about individual people, that information can still be leaked, stolen, or misused by whoever controls it.

(I mean, imagine somebody in smart city IT has some sort of personal issue or conflict with another citizen and decides to abuse their access to data collection to gather information about that citizen. Even in an anarchist utopia we’d still have stalkers, domestic violence, controlling partners, child custody disputes, and all the ways people in relationships hurt each other that come with humans being human.)

The only way to guarantee data collection doesn’t violate people’s privacy is to not collect data capable of violating people’s privacy - that is, don’t deploy systems that can collect that data at all.

And that restricts the type of data that can be collected so much that, I think, it rules out most of the benefits of a “smart city”.

Open source code for public infrastructure is extremely important, I agree. But it’s not sufficient. If data about individual people is collected by a smart city at all, or even capable of being collected by the hardware the smart city deploys, no matter what the laws are around it or how much you trust the current government, it could be exploited by a future, less ethical government, or stolen by third parties.

I think the examples you gave would be good ways to gather data for smart city management without collecting data about individual people that could be misused, but the way surveillance is implemented now, that sort of data collection is dangerous.

For example, a sensor that triggers a traffic light is great, but currently just about every major intersection in every major city in the US already has license plate cameras for traffic enforcement. So any smart city program is going to incorporate those license plate cameras, because why would they spend money installing new sensors when they already have perfectly good cameras? And then those cameras will be used for police and immigration enforcement and other privacy violating data collection even more efficiently than they’re already being used.

One aspect of a “smart city” is a system to constantly monitor a lot of data streams about its residents and use that data to allocate the city’s resources more efficiently in real time or better plan future upgrades to city infrastructure.

This obviously raises a lot of surveillance concerns. Some of it could be done in a manner that respected people’s privacy, with, for instance, extensive algorithmic anonymization of data and strict limits on what data is permanently recorded, but that requires a lot of trust and oversight and, I think, the benefits are likely not worth the risk of having that data collection system in place.

Another aspect of a smart city is enhanced local participation through e-governance, making it easier for people to know about, suggest, and weigh in on policies impacting their homes and communities. This aspect could be implemented without any kind of surveillance apparatus and has some appealing qualities imho.

So, you know, it depends on what benefit you’re talking about.

But people already have a public place to appeal. This sub, the sub you linked, pretty much any other instance that has a meta discussion community. But posting here, or there, isn’t an actual appeal process - it’s just publicly complaining about administrators.

And that was the answer to OP’s question: that there’s no single fediverse-wide place to appeal a ban, you have to follow instance specific appeal procedures, if they exist, and/or contact the instance’s administrators directly.

Which is a good thing, because it helps keep the verse decentralized.

I think, if there was a single location where the fediverse started telling people “if you get banned, post here to appeal”, users would expect some sort of formal response to their post, and get upset when people tell them posting there doesn’t actually do anything. Which would be bad. And if that location could do anything to encourage administrators to reverse ban decisions, via peer pressure or otherwise, that would also be bad, because it would compromise the independence of instances. That is to say, a fediverse wide appeal community would be at best useless and at worst harmful to the fediverse.

So I think the only appropriate response to “I was banned, what can I do” is “that’s between you and the people who banned you”.

I think any sort of fediverse-wide appeal community, or process, would risk compromising the whole point of the fediverse, ie, decentralization. The fact that admins have the final say on their own instances is part of what keeps the largest instances from controlling smaller ones and keeps the fediverse free of centralized control.

I mean, can you imagine a coalition of the largest instances coming together and telling a small instance “the appeal community agreed this user was banned unfairly, unban them or we’ll all defederate you”? Because I can imagine that sequence of events, if an appeal community got any kind of formal backing from the big instances, and that would pretty much end decentralization.

I think “we” (secular Westerners) are more likely to appropriate spiritual indigenous narratives, take them out of context, and trivialize them into meaninglessness - as the article describes we did with the concept of mindfulness - than we are to erase them. And I think this will happen because we, secular Westerners, are living lives devoid of spiritual meaning, and it’s terribly tempting to steal other people’s beliefs in the hope we can find a fraction of their meaning in life.

And though I’m sure people online are going to go full Reddit atheist on me and tell me belief in a higher power is ignorant and primitive, every society in human history that we know anything about has either had some sort of belief in higher powers or has aggressively suppressed such belief, and that belief served a function of social cohesion that a lot of the left no longer have.

Honestly, I think part of the reason Trump won - and part of the reason populist, religious nationalism is surging worldwide, Trump being just one example - is that the secular West threw out its own spiritual narratives without replacing them with anything. We condemned Christianity as ignorant, bigoted, and repressive, but we didn’t create anything in its place to serve its role. We walked away from the churches, which were the “third places” of our towns, the centers of our social and cultural lives, and we replaced them with what? Coffee shops?

People need something to believe in, and we told them “do your jobs and vote blue, but it won’t matter anyway because the environment is fucked”.

The environmental left needs the warning not to engage in empty spirituality because so many people in it are desperate for the kind of meaning spirituality gives.

If the Trump administration, and especially Project 2025, have taught America anything, it’s that libertarians don’t fucking have ideals.

Libertarians spouted propaganda about small government and free speech and privacy until conservative authoritarians took power. And then they cheered while conservative authoritarians built the most extensive police state and government surveillance apparatus in American history and began arresting people for writing op-eds and posting memes.

Libertarians, like Republicans, never actually supported small government or free speech or the privacy of citizens. They deployed the rhetoric of small government and free speech and privacy as weapons to attack liberals and prevent Democratic administrations from pursuing their policy goals. Now that conservatives are in power, those weapons are no longer useful, and libertarians have discarded them.

Libertarian “ideals” were weapons against Democratic government, and they were never anything else.

And to get back to your point: of course libertarians spout rhetoric about financial privacy while keeping cryptocurrency in centralized KYC exchanges. Because crypto was never about privacy as an ideal. It was about bypassing financial regulations, laundering money, dodging taxes, grifting, scamming normies, and gambling on pumps and dumps. Crypto bros talk a good game about privacy and independence to shield themselves from regulation and make themselves look legitimate. Anyone who actually believes that crap is a useful idiot that probably lost all their money in a cryptoscam.

This is so incredibly short-sighted. Support for solar energy really should be a Republican priority too - it’s business, it’s industry, it’s making money. China, India, the entire continent of Africa, are all going solar. The United States could be a world leader in this trillion-dollar industry - hell, there’s a national security argument that we need American scientists and workers to support the American solar industry.

Never mind the climate issue for now. Walking away from solar leaves billions on the table that other countries are going to snap up. Republicans love subsidizing industry. This is a braindead bipartisan opportunity.

But little Donnie hates solar energy personally, threw a tantrum about it, and no one in the 80-year-old boy king’s court dares to disagree with him.

The CCP was founded in 1921 with less than fifty “thoughtful, committed citizens” as members.

Ralph Nader created modern automotive safety regulations practically single-handedly.

Hell, Jesus started with twelve apostles.

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world: indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” — Margaret Mead

To get systemic changes in any sort of representative government, you need a critical mass of people to support that systemic change. You don’t need “every single individual making the right choice”. But you need enough people to make the right choice that politicians can pass laws supporting that choice without getting kicked out of office and their laws revoked by the next administration.

I mean, how do you expect to pass laws that make meat more expensive when 90% of the people in your country eat meat and are worried about their budgets?

The idea that changing your diet won’t make a difference is, unironically, meat industry propaganda. We build the consensus for systemic change one meal at a time.

Probably very few people will change their mind. It might sway a few Catholics who are on the fence about global climate change (somehow).

But what the Pope says will have an impact on young people from Catholic families who haven’t learned much about climate change. Especially in places like the Philippines where climate change is quite literally lapping at their shores.

The idea that all Catholics have to do what the Pope says, or even agree with the Pope, is, frankly, anti-Catholic bullcrap - back when I was a very very small child, John Birch Society bigots were passing out pamphlets claiming JFK would be taking his orders from the Vatican.

But what the Pope does have is moral and persuasive authority. And when teenagers are growing up and learning about the world, and TikTok and right wing news are spewing all sorts of climate denial garbage at them, and they’re being bombarded from all sides by the message that all politicians are liars and everybody’s out to take your money and trying to change anything is hopeless - don’t underestimate the influence of someone who’s respected as not just a world leader but a good man.

but these are not the best pick for everything.

Why not? Seriously, you’ve got canvas sneakers for running or casual wear, canvas boots (waxed if need be) for hiking and wet conditions, even moderately dressy canvas shoes for business casual.

I feel like, counterintuitively, fake leather encourages the idea that your shoes have to look like leather to be “dressy” or “professional”, and if you need shoes that look like leather, most people will reasonably wear leather shoes, and only vegans will buy the fake leather.

Normalize sneakers in the workplace! Hell, normalize tire tread sandals! We save more animals by making the default something that doesn’t involve animals in the first place than we do by coming up with alternatives that look/taste just like animals.