You bundle and sell subprime mortgages every day?

You haven’t said anything.

Sorry, a couple of notes and I’m out of your hair. The election cycle is not 1459 days unless you’re not voting; I’ve never called myself an accelerationist nor said I don’t vote for democrats down the ballot; don’t co-opt people who are dying on the streets if you are staying inside.

My argument, were anyone interested in hearing it rather than themselves, would be that there is nothing magical about voting, which is just one of many forms of representation. Acting as though you have done the long hard work of democracy because you turn in a ballot every once in a while for local representatives you do not know and will never pressure is sad. You care more about institutional longevity than human suffering; you think democracy is regular elections not self governance. You will happily vote for the lesser of two evils because you don’t like how much work it would take to do even better than the options you are spoon fed by billionaires who would kill your neighbors if it improved the S&P by half a point. England is undermining trial by jury with secret judicial rulings. Guantanamo Bay still holds human beings “outside the law.” All across the “civilized” world, protests against this grotesque misrepresentation of the public will are subject to approval. Where is your evidence that you can vote this away? You hold back progress with this idea that you will be handed back your power if you are patient enough.

I don’t. Do you think they’ll go away if you vote?

if you voted for [Democrat] would [bad thing] still happen in [foreign place]

Yeah obviously. Do you understand how many different Democrat administrations have funded various genocides, dictatorships, and hostile takeovers of self governing people

I do not consider a teenager fresh to current events disagreeing with me on politics as much of a gotcha moment. If you’re older than I’ve guessed you should consider learning more before you try to transition into educating. If every single citizen of the united states who still has the right to vote casts a ballot for Kamala Harris, Palestine still burns, and Palantir still revolutionizes killing and incarcerating people elsewhere. But maybe there’s still pride at Target. Is that what you mean by viable?

Harris has never even lied and pretended she is against the surveillance state or the military industrial complex. Did you want people to vote for Jill Stein? Write in Bernie during the primaries? You can vote for mask off fascism or you can vote for a respectable statesman who keeps the killing of brown people a bit quieter. How is that a viable option. Because you feel better stateside? Do you go on YouTube and comment on old Obama speeches about how you miss having a President who could speak in full sentences while he oversaw a campaign of mass terror, bailed out (FUNDED) global financial leeches, and did nothing to slow the consolidation of billionaire backed media and tech conglomerates because at the end of the day, he believes in this shit too?

Deeper than fucked up laws, the fact that you can’t just point at a situation where the law isn’t working and say we should handle it differently, because that’s illegal, and you have to jump through hoops and grow old waiting to get the law slightly improved.

Yeah… and still short and ultra short haul flights are extremely common.

A lot of people! Check out the flight distance distribution charted here. (old, 2009-ish data) Big part of the problem. Having to be “on” the whole time while you’re driving isn’t freedom, it sucks. It’s why people want trains. And in their absence they fly.

Laws built up and based upon themselves with the written rules stealing power from our own common sense and morality

Lemmy’s search function is disappointing, yeah. Carrying on a long tradition of worthless forum search functions I suppose. I envisioned a world where everybody adopted Google’s late 2000s-early ‘10s algorithm but instead even Google has sworn off of it.

I replied to the other comment first because I can’t actually get your media to load. What domain is this? I think it’s an issue with my client because I encounter this frequently in a few communities.

Yes, American rail in particular is… bad. I think the romance of the notion of rail transit is doing a lot of the heavy lifting stateside. So are the new ICE cars, as I stated in my other reply. The new European and Asian models on the other hand should be winning out on efficiency easily, as would their trains, and all hybrids and EVs. Air travel may rank decently in carbon efficiency in the U.S., but I don’t think that remains true elsewhere, where transit industries have been allowed/incentivized/required to improve.

The elephant in the room is obviously the “domestic flight” emissions number sitting proudly at the top of the list. Based on the average length of a UK domestic flight and this source, that’s 20% of all global commercial flights, and just under 50% are under 500 nautical miles/926km, which is still on the highly inefficient end of the spectrum. But then you realize that it only accounts for about 42 million weekly seats when estimates are much closer to 100 million, then you realize it’s 2009 data and you don’t want to deal with this rabbit hole…

That second chart you provided is… tantalizing, and just like my own source I’d much rather have access to the data than the charts they’ve made with it, because napkin math based on their red line falls shy of any sort of accuracy.

If we just rely on the provided numbers, new European internal combustion vehicles are way more efficient than short and long haul flights (cars’ grams of CO2/km should should be divided by ~1.5, which is the US/EUR average vehicle occupancy rate), and the average is dragged down by older ICE cars. New U.S vehicles lose the efficiency battle comically and are about as bad as ultra short haul business flights, lmao. Thanks for the link.

Every source I’ve ever looked at has flights pegged as the most polluting form of passenger travel. Plus the pollutants are deposited directly into the upper atmosphere, which no coal rolling asshole in a dually can ever accomplish. That further magnifies their impact. I’d interested in where you’ve drawn your conclusion from.

Well I actually just divided $39 trillion by $1.3 trillion all by myself. I made a mistake in my comment and did not state that I was referring to net debt to GDP ratio, which the FRED and IMF and others track. You are correct that gross debt to GDP ratio favors the States. You are also obviously looking right past the column that shows the U.S.’s much larger gross debt, so I’m again curious why you just state “Canada’s debt is higher” when you can see that it isn’t.

The USA’s debt is about 30 times greater than Canada’s debt. Canada’s total debt is actually lower than the USA’s annual federal deficit. Canada’s *net debt to GDP ratio is far better than the U.S.’s at about 10% compared to over 100%.

Did you specifically mean household debt?

Which flavor of Google surveillance would you consider a more private and secure phone platform than iOS?

I actually just bought a pair of porta pros three days ago—any chance you recall what pads you upgraded to? I’ve mostly seen recommendations for Yaxi

The market for small phones that last a long time is quite sizable. Which doesn’t matter because they don’t want to buy a lot of phones. It’s like Google. Years before Gemini, they made their search engine worse on purpose because it makes more money. Search twice, get served twice the ads. Nobody outside of the company has ever wanted Search But Worse. There is zero desire for Worse. But as long as Google is free to make purely economic decisions, there is no reason for them to revert to Search But We Make Less Money.