Hard disagree on that one. I fucking love Dylan.

Running Up That Hill covered by Placebo.

The original is bland eighties pop. The cover is deeply unsettling in all the ways Placebo are so fucking good at.

I can’t find it right now, but I saw a yearly consumption and living standards chart for what would be universally sustainable for humans, and it was pretty sparse. It involved limiting electricity to four hours a day and cooking hot food something like 10 times/week.

That sounds, quite frankly, insane. We have so much ability to produce carbon free energy, just with our current level of tech, not even getting into things like fusion. With wind, solar and hydro we can provide effectively unlimited power to everyone on Earth, if we’re not wasting it all on gigawatt scale data centres that no one needs. And with our recent advances in battery tech - especially sodium batteries, which can be produced with extremely widespread resources - and fusion power as a backstop there’s no need for our energy to be linked to CO2.

Same goes for food; feeding everyone isn’t actually that hard, we just need to stop seeing food as a profit source. The planet can easily sustain our current population.

Yes, there are some lifestyle changes required. We need to reduce - not eliminate, reduce - our reliance on animal protein. We need to learn to use local produce more in our diets. But these aren’t exactly crippling conditions to live under.

But frankly, most of the changes needed for a sustainable world are actually positive for the average person. The things we use need to last longer and be repairable. We already know how to do that. The reason they’re not is because it benefits capital holders to sell us crap that falls apart. A world where you buy a coat and keep wearing it for decades sounds pretty damn good to me.

But what if I don’t agree?

What happens if I don’t?

I hate this, and I hate that it’s becoming the new normal everywhere.

I’m not saying it was meant literally, I’m saying it’s a bad analogy.

I intensely dislike this framing because it plays into the notion that Socialism is about everyone getting bare minimum subsistence, and deeply misunderstands the scale of the wealth inequality we’re facing.

It’s more like “Should everyone have champagne, or should a very small number of people be allowed to horde enough of it that they can create a private champagne ocean to sail their yachts on.”

Against the scale of our available resources, healthcare, education, nice homes, cars, personal electronics, high quality appliances and small luxuries are actually relatively cheap. Houses don’t cost a million dollars to build, they just sell for a million dollars because our housing market is fucked. When we stop thinking of things in terms of “price” and start thinking of them in terms of “resources” most things become surprisingly affordable.

“Yes, we’ve had one, but what about Second War?”

“I don’t think he knows about Second War, Pippin.”

The point is not that you need to unquestioningly think that China is the most evil country on earth. The point is that there absolutely are a notable subset of leftists (just wander over to .ml if you want to find them) who will dismiss literally any criticism of China as “Western propaganda” and basically act like they’re absolute paragons of good. Those are the people being called out here.

They couldn’t have provided a more obvious example of whataboutism even if they literally wrote one for a textbook.

That would be the British school of journalism, yes.

All of this assumes we just let it happen. Look at the backlash against Flock. We don’t have to roll over.

Except the actual MMO depicted in SAO fucking sucks. Like, once you remove the whole “Oh my God it’s like I’m really there” hyper-advanced simsense VR aspect, it’s a really shitty game. The only possible builds are DPS and Tank, there’s no magic, no ranged, nothing to make stealth viable. You can go into crafting but that’s about it for any other skills. The whole “unique skill” mechanic is basically just pure “Fuck you” RNG and would be impossible to balance. Loot gets handed out based on last hits so fuck cooperation. It’s a mess. If you made an MMO with modern tech that perfectly recreated the mechanics of SAO, no one would play it.

If you’re the only one doing this - if only your token budget is through the damn roof - then you’re just volunteering to take the blame. Now it’s not “AI is really expensive”, instead it’s a “problem employee.”

Yeah, I mean I’ll give them that. There’s definitely nothing here that would give away the operator’s position… Up to and including what planet they were on.

Why does this look like it should be a video of Bigfoot?

This is the real trap of the Iran war. Trump either has to commit to a deeply unpopular invasion, or he has to be the first US president to openly defy AIPAC.

Sure. And if Christians actually studied the Bible they’d know that. But they don’t.

Wouldn’t it be “Gosh dang it”? Hank is a good Christian boy, he doesn’t take the Lord’s name in vain.