Yeah, Reagan was always talking about small government, and then he blew up the deficit with unchecked spending. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

All countries spy on each other.

I definitely agree about being more worried about the US spying than China though.

Zelensky was the proximate cause of Trump’s first impeachment, right? The perfect phone call?

I need you to do is a favor, though.

I think that Trump does have a grudge against Zelensky.

I mean, the US escorted ships there during the Iran/Iraq war in the 1980s…

One alert daily reporting that there are no alerts is probably good for a home lab…

I thought that renewable energy had at least two problems for capitalists:

1. Renewable energy is getting cheaper and cheaper, which makes returns on investment decline over time.
2. Renewable energy is easily distributed, working against concentration of wealth (the whole point of capitalism).

I joined a boycott for an international conference that is planned for San Francisco at the end of October. The organizer started the movement in January, knowing what was to come. Things have only gotten worse since then… the organizers are determined to see it through… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I saw reporting on VW deliberately cheating. I didn’t forget the others… since I didn’t see any reporting on it.

I can believe it, but I didn’t hear about it.

Interesting. I think that there’s always been a tension between labor and environmentalists.

In the long term environmentally friendly policies help everyone, but in the short term they often inflict pain on someone, and often the workers (or farmers) bear the brunt of that, so they oppose the changes. Consider closing down factories that are polluting, or forcing farms to stop using pesticides.

Will you please explain more? I can barely keep up with local politics so don’t know anything about German parties…

China’s carbon emissions fell in 2025. I don’t know about coal capacity.

https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-clean-energy-just-put-chinas-co2-emissions-into-reverse-for-first-time/

Imagine if Russia didn’t have nuclear weapons.

It can be done:

https://www.today.com/parents/he-she-or-it-family-keeps-babys-gender-secret-1C7398445

This is amazing. Thank you!

The article, by Anonymous, does not mention posting, does it? I’m not sure what you’re talking about.

I mean, there are Purism phones. Super expensive, but they keep selling out so I guess they are reasonable.

Or it’s another tool to divide the working class.

You have more in common with normal people from other generations than you do with the wealthy!

Keep in mind that the book is very old, published in 1931. DNA hadn’t been mapped, information technology was limited, and so on.

In the book, people are born in factories. Working class people are born in from split cells, as quintuples if I remember correctly. Your role in life is largely determined by your genes - workers don’t have the psychology for anything but labor.

In spite of that, it’s not an especially oppressive society. There is a “perfect” drug, soma, which is sort of like a non-addictive, non-physically harmful heroin that can be delivered by gas. When there is unrest, security forces come in and get everyone high until they chill the fuck out.

Sex is open and easy, but always completely voluntary by everyone involved. When people are turned down they are sometimes surprised but never upset or aggressive.

Entertainment is presented as vacuous, but the people seem to enjoy it. There are movies, TV, and so on. Sports are engineered to require people take trains out of town to stadiums, and require deliberately-complicated equipment to play, in order to create demand for production.

So… is that a dystopia? There is no discussion of environmental damage, but overall it seems sustainable, not predicated on infinite growth. People are stuck in the role they were born to, but it seems like there are no artificial barriers to advancement… just that not everyone can be good at everything.

Definitely. A world where people are happy and healthy and live basically fulfilling lives. There are a few fanatics who opt out, and they’re unhappy. Go figure.

I don’t find Brave New World to be especially dystopian. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯