richpuchalsky.bsky.social
freelance librarian
anarchist
3,651 posts
322 followers
622 following
Getting Started
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People probably never encounter wooden floorboards in an institutional context but there is no good solution I know of and these things are all over ordinary houses. I got a quote of varnishing them but in addition to $ we'd have to be out of the house for a week and move out all the furniture
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I will give you some money if you tell me how I can clean an unvarnished wooden floor which I am not supposed to mop.
(Actually I will anyways but I'd still like to hear ideas for the floor. Variations for ordinary dirt and "elderly cat".)
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It's big in all parts of the UK "science fiction" scene (as long as that scene is implicitly understood to include fantasy, as a marketing category.) For instance China Mieville doesn't write space opera a la Iain Banks but he writes very influential socialist SF.
For the US scene, basically no
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I could write a huge, boring amount about this and have, but "mega-corps and etc etc" is a cyberpunk heritage in SF, and cyberpunk was anti-socialist in the sense that it was firmly convinced that state action and even libertarian socialism / anarchist prescriptivism was going to fail.
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It's not "a few days now" it's been YEARS.
Chenoweth is also responsible for the equally bad-science "nonviolent movements are more successful than violent ones." From the same study.
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Any chance that you were *supposed* to break it once you brought it home, like a piggy bank? Then transfer the contents to another container. Seems more practical than scraping it out somehow.
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"Defund the police" was always a liberal slogan -- the original, leftist one was "abolish the police". It can't ever be carried out because the function of the liberal state in America requires more and more police.
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Why do you say it doesn't benefit anyone? The US is an empire that is quickly fascist. It just committed a genocide under its supposedly non-fascist party. Removing skilled and educated people from the US is good.
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Why should anyone care about global economic and geopolitical competition with China?
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I understand what you mean, but isn't this a case where "classist" can be used? It's under-used.
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"the law is the law": it's a fascist regime, the law is meaningless
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The only use that "AI" has is for generating bullshit. Most people don't want to generate bullshit at all.
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"The Princeton Macintosh Users' Group (PMUG) is an Apple tech enthusiasts club in Princeton, NJ" good thing I don't live there.
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The Naval Academy trains officers to kill for the empire. They don't need good books: the only reason people say that they they do is so that we can pretend it's a good institution.
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No liberal feminism as supposed threat to (but actual supporter of) the capitalist order via "Sister Suffragette"? (Probably don't hear it much because it's not a good song.)
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every librarian also
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For India it's a "switch to renewables" and has economic advantages, for China it's not only that -- they are supplying the entire infrastructure that will be used by every other country.
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It just means that at this point China is the only entity that really can do it.
Next in order of climate importance are probably Germany and India. The US is going to be a petrostate until the rest of the world no longer uses fossil fuels (or as long as the US exists.)
/fin
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This does not mean that China has universally good policies. China is still building a lot of coal plants because of provincial politicians connected to the industry and because of well-founded fears that the US may try to cut off its oil imports and it may need energy overcapacity.
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For years I had to block posters who were convinced that the US was a force for good in terms of climate, against every part of the actual historical record in which the US has become the top fossil fuel producer in the world. Obama boasted about doing that. It doesn't matter who's in charge.
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By "ideology" I mean that as a side effect of Chinese party belief, it can and does invest state money in areas of its economy. That is why it has driven down solar panel prices to the point where they are underpricing fossil everywhere in the world and why it's in the process of doing that with EVs
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3) because of this, the downfall of US soft power is a net positive for the climate
This does not mean that I approve of China's government. It means that in reality only China has the ability, ideology, and lack of fossil fuels (except coal, which is a problem) to do anything.
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This Salvadoran Bishop can't lecture us on what America stands for -- America has always stood for unjust cruelty and always will.
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They are learning the actual values of our society -- education is a credential and nothing more, no one is interested in thought that isn't conformism. This will probably give them a better boost in life than actual education.
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If only the government could dissolve the people and elect another
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I've been saying this for at least the last 5 years. The US has only participated in international agreements on climate in order to sabotage them.
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Any idea how much of this is wind permitting / location resistance rather than technology or economics as such?
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I am alarmed by anyone who is still surprised that they are not alarmed. Eternal suckers can't protect anything
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On the other hand, the US does produce and export a lot of "services"
mastodon.social/@richpuchals...
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There's a very large difference between people-watching (something that people pretty much do only if they are interested in other people as people) and "most people are NPCs" which implies that they do not really think and you can learn nothing from them.
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People keep saying that other countries are going to band together against Trump, and I'm always like really? Have you observed the actual actions taken by these other countries?
I mean, China will and is already getting something together with Japan and South Korea.
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There is a correct and obvious answer to this question, and it is that chaos and internal strife and war are all very good for consolidating power in an autocrat and generating massive wealth for oligarchs, even as breadlines become the norm for everyone else.
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I think that everyone de facto recognizes at this point that the US can not have policy in a classic sense. It can't recognize Taiwan's sovereignty or endorse One China policy because Trump could change his mind at any time and in any case neither one will lead to any actual change in behavior.
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My impression is that neoliberalism has been wholly without any empirical or theoretical foundation for a while now and the whole thing is about to come crashing down. A fascist takeover is not a good way of doing this, of course
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mastodon.social/@richpuchals...
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Every leftist that I interact with has left Twitter (admittedly this is what you'd expect since i also left Twitter when Musk bought it.) I also think "providing data to be mined for his AI" is a bit off since Bluesky posts are mined.
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My firmly held opinion: free speech has never existed in America, and the only people who think that it ever did are looking through so many layers of privilege that they have no idea how most people live.
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Not a party to it? Wiki also has a page on the Hague Invasion Act -- we have formally pre-authorized war on anyone who tries to apply judgements of the ICC to people who we like.
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Wait till you see what happens with US Census data
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They don't live in another dimension. Their supporters are suckers and will keep supporting them no matter what they do so they might as well keep selling out
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It's not "dumb": they are active collaborators with fascism and always have been
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OK, sorry. Looked back briefly at his feed and what I was going to comment on was his claim that academics aren't cowards, with something like "oh yeah then what is Columbia doing?" but it wasn't worth it
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If I ask what's even going on, am I contributing in some way? I vaguely remember thinking of responding in some negative way to one of their recent posts, thought "eh never mind", and then promptly forgot what it was even about
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All American big shots are cowards, and the greater their wealth and position, the greater their cowardice. Paul Weiss didn't just promise $40 million, it's $40 million in pricy legal time that it will be using to harass trans people or something like that.
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"This machine mildly annoys fascists"