Poor things :(

There’s little evidence that debate changes people’s ideas.

…or organize, start/join unions, get involved with your local community and build up some real resistance that isn’t based off obscene wealth, lawfare or media brainwashing. Once you have experienced something real, it’s quite hard to understand how or why anyone would fall for the alternative.

On-and-off smoker here (mostly off)

In my experience, nicotine is great for moderating rage and resentment. It can help in bad situations and also provides a space where one can effectively shut distractions out and enter a somewhat meditative state to work on issues. It performs this task very, very well.

It is not the same as “just taking a walk” or “standing outside”. Absent-mindedly smoking provides a different experience. I am envious of people who can go to the park and get the same kind of effect out of it, but for a raft of different reasons I can’t reach the same experience.

I know smoking damages nearly every part of your body. I know it’s addictive. I know many smokers aren’t considerate of others, and blow smoke all over people downwind, in through windows and leave cigarette butts everywhere. I know wildfires start from improperly extinguished butts. I am not one of those people, and take pains to enjoy a cigarette where I will impact as few people as possible. And when my life looks up? I quit, because I don’t need it anymore, and it serves no useful purpose.

Unfortunately, there seems to be less and less room in the world to create the kind of space where one can take a few minutes such as this. And that I think is the crux of the resistance here.

We keep asking for more out of everyone, and usually to no benefit for themselves. We keep making organizational decisions which result in people feeling stressed, angry, resentful, and then in turn quite deliberately fail to understand when people pick up a vice that is harming them… and then try to ban that behavior, or sanctimoniously tut away that they are somehow selfish for wanting a break from it all for five damned minutes.

There’s so many different instances under which this theme plays out. I doubt this law will be enforced evenly, and it seems predictably authoritarian and counterproductive like many substance control laws. We can’t stop people stuffing a bunch of plants into a pipe, or into a paper wrapping and smoking it. It’s simply too easy to do, and it provides too much utility as a temporary respite from life for people to stop.

Want to solve it? Try finding ways of making life less terrible for the critical mass of people so that they won’t feel a need to smoke. And even then some still will, maybe out of spite, addiction (medical/psych treatment could be offered?) or downright contrarianism; but maybe few enough that it won’t matter. That’s the hard, and proper, fix for this. Smoking cessation drives are quite effective, as well as reasonable limitations on where one can smoke, and I think that is a fine policy balance.

I think cigarettes, especially manufactured ones, should be available and taxed appropriately for the healthcare burden they will produce later in life. Everyone should be aware of the health considerations in no uncertain terms. I think it’s appropriate to limit smoking around areas where at-risk populations live and congregate (incl. Children), and the rest really has to be allowed to work itself out in the ad-hoc grey area loosely defined as “Community”, “Consideration”, “Conscience” and “Respect”.

The Law is too heavy handed a tool to be expected to succeed here.

Anyway, I’m sure they’ve already thought about all of this and discussed it at length. Just like taxing older diesel cars without considering the consequences to folks the rural south who were unable to afford new vehicles.

just without the hope in the future, investment in human capital, rise in living standards etc…

because the state and fed levels are corrupt as hell. the local level seemed more amenable, although i suspect the nyc mayoral elections will be thoroughly fiddled.

At this point, why would anyone do business with broadcom at all?

CDL drivers have been required to speak English since 1936, though.

Then they’ll ban far left politicians from running.

Then they’ll ban anyone they don’t like.

And eventually, they’ll ban everyone who isn’t them.

Right wing lunatics are repulsive in almost every sense, but this isn’t the way you beat them. When you put the machinery in place to do something like this, it will inevitably be abused in the opposite direction in future.

Nuclear energy is a terrible idea in both a physically (climate change) and socially destabilizing world.

Even Gen4 proliferation-resistant reactors still represent a lethal threat in the event of a release of fissionable materials into the local environment. Building a nuclear reactor without a cast-iron guarantee that there will be a supply of engineering staff, components, materials and clear strong regulation to keep it running safely is a surefire path to disaster.

Whilst the technology and physics behind it are well understood, we have shown time and again in a few short decades of utilizing this technology that we lack the responsibility in our administrative structures to properly manage the risks.

It would take just one full-on reactor meltdown or disaster to poison an entire continent. We have consistently demonstrated that we cannot responsibly assume that risk, which is why there is opposition to nuclear power.

If you want to avoid bad things from happening, do not deploy a dangerous technology and instead focus on what we can do. Renewables are more than capable of providing for our energy needs, and the big kicker here is that they can do so without putting the literal power “off” switch in the hands of the grid or plant operator.

I hear there are places in Berlin that charge a small amount of money give you a towel for such fantasies.

Give me something like Talos2 with a full OSS firmware and a performant CPU… and hell, a half-competitive open source graphics core too. It doesn’t need to be peak performance, it needs to be good enough.

I’ve been trying to work with SBC’s for a while for video decoding platforms and just wound up getting stuck on x86 because the ARM situation with weirdo custom kernels for anything useful is just… annoying.