Stock markets are legal in most states, so betting is legal in most states if you do it in a way rich people like.

If you’re going to jail anyway, why go to jail for something lame?

1776. Saying that it is self-evident that all men are created equal but enslaving blacks and genociding natives and denying voting rights to 90% of the population.

I’m not so sure. The non-local digital internet is amazing when it allows us to connect to people from across the world to share ideas and stories and to empathize with one another. I am grateful for its existence. I cannot believe that social media is doomed to be structurally bad for people when people can benefit from being social irl, and places like VRChat go a long way towards proving that. Meanwhile local physical media can be tools of hierarchy, such as the 15th century Catholic bible.

I think the locality and physicality of media described here are both forms of protection, a way to take their joy outside of the reach of capitalism which seeks to weaponize it against them. If capitalism could control our physical media more than our digital media then I’m certain hacker culture would be hailed as our one true way to defy the meatspace overlords (like Unimatrix Zero from Star Trek: Voyager).

So in the end, I think the discrete boundary between categories you’re looking for boils down to the boring answer “technologies that enable hierarchy” vs “technologies that dismantle hierarchy”.

Please actually read my comment, thank you.

What happens when the US gets accidentally bombed by Israel and 34 people are killed? They talk it out and remain good friends.

The US government and the elite they represent do not care about the American people beyond them being the tools by which they can force the world into as steep a hierarchy as possible with the US elite on top. If the US gets bombed, the US government will do what serves the interests of the US elite.

So it really depends on what’s convenient. It’s hard to speak generally about an alternate universe in which Canada and Mexico are at war, but if I squint my eyes I can say that if Mexico hit the US, the US would invade Mexico and install new leadership while conveniently using it as a reason to suspend the midterms and ramp up to a full-blown genocide of Latinos in the US; while if Canada hit the US, they would be made to pay a trillion dollars in reparations or something.

The late 19th century USAmerican colonization of Native American land shows that you don’t need cars to make an industrial rural society. Trains will work just fine. This means you build towns to be walkable and centered around a train station, with agriculture surrounding each town. Modern heavily mechanized agriculture might make population densities so low that even this is not viable, but the products still need to be transported, so you can have trains that stop at each megafarm which can also carry passengers if necessary. When I was in Queensland a few years ago, I saw mechanized agriculture use a bespoke railway network to supply a factory, so clearly even now despite all the fossil fuel and car subsidies it’s economically viable.

Though as you may know, industrial agriculture is dumb and unsustainable. Desertification due to requiring too much water, climate change due to fertilizer consumption, industrial pollution that kills millions of people per year and destroys ecosystems, lack of genetic diversity causing crop blights that risk famines or global shortages, insecticides that cause cancer and destroy ecosystems, most of it being wasted on the meat industry and on maintaining massive surpluses and exports to ensure western global domination, etc.

If we want to do agriculture right, we want to do food forests. It’s more labor per calorie, but it’s resilient, local, and it doesn’t make the planet uninhabitable by the next century. Food forests are more compact too, which means that a rural population tending food forests can have a much higher population density, or can consist of large villages separated by rewilded natural landscape (and/or low density food forests for migratory communties). This makes trains even more convenient to get around because they can run more frequently.

Meanwhile if you want to live in the wilderness away from these towns, then an absence of car roads means you can live far away while only being a couple kilometers away. So you still don’t need a car because you can just hike along a trail to get to town in under an hour. Need to carry a lot of stuff? Use a Chinese wheelbarrow. Maybe a battery-powered one with stability and steering assistance if you don’t feel like getting exercise. They carry more than a modern American SUV and they don’t murder children either.

…

fuck

I’m ADHD with a couple other neurospicy crap and I struggle with a lot of things. One of them is misinterpreting language on top of being dyslexic.

Ah, maybe that’s what happened then. Or maybe I suck at writing. What I tried to say was:

1. I now understand that you love them as a person.

2. I am happy that you love them as a person.

3. Your first comment made it sound like you wouldn’t love them as a person.

4. Your first comment made it sound like you would love them thanks to their disability.

5. Loving someone thanks to their disability is gross.

6. I was right to write my first comment the way I did because your first comment made you sound gross.

I’m glad to agree wholeheartedly with you, and I apologise for the confusion and distress. I am also autistic, but that’s no excuse for me writing unclearly or misgendering. Thank you for being patient with me.

Sorry for the misgendering, I don’t know how I messed that up.

I thought I was paraphrasing what you said. So if you still have the patience to help me out, could you explain how the things I said were wrong?

That’s nice. I’m happy for you both.

Your comment made it sound like you love her thanks to her disabilities, rather than because of who she is which includes her disabilities. That the disability positively affects your rating of her rather than it being an integral part of her when she is always good enough. I’m glad that isn’t the case, though I stand by my reaction being appropriate to what you wrote.

You wouldn’t just need the fish food, you would have an aquarium large enough to keep them all alive and meet the legislative standards for wellbeing. That aquarium needs space, cleaners, inspectors, etc, which would drive up the cost considerably.

Yeah it’s really hot when someone distrusts you no matter how many ways you help them find to get out safely if things were to go wrong. It’s so beautiful when someone can’t shower for a month because there was a spider in there once and the shower still isn’t clean and they smell worse than rotten milk.

Please don’t fetishize mental disability.

Yeah it’s really hot when someone distrusts you no matter how many ways you help them find to get out safely if things were to go wrong. It’s so beautiful when someone can’t shower for a month because there was a spider in there once and the shower still isn’t clean and they smell worse than rotten milk.

Please don’t fetishize mental disability.

It’s a failure of US logistics/preparation. A more competent industrial military would have brought air defense. Starship Troopers was a documentary.

Yes. Amsterdam pays more money to build parking for 300 people in the middle of the city in 5 minutes’ walk from a dozen tram stops with trams every 5 minutes and 5 minutes’ bike from a train station with trains every minute than it does on its entire bicycle network in a year.

The gap isn’t as big as in the US, but in the Netherlands cars still come first.

It’s odd because the trash in the corner on the left is consistent, and the blood pattern is the same, and even the cracks on the wall behind them are the same, but the pillar shifts location and color.

It seems to me like there was a reference image. Whether it’s the AI plagiarizing something it was trained on, or an actual image that was thrown through a processing pipeline with AI.

But of course, the most charitable guess is as always that it’s deliberate Mossad misinformation, because we just spent a couple hundred collective hours analyzing an image rather than burning down an embassy because they did actually murder children.

That seems pretty simple. Use the small snow plow that clears cycling lanes clear the raised sidewalk lengthwise, then have the snow plow that clears car lanes drive over it without being weighed down.

…you do have a snow plow for non-cars, right?

Right?

Also, more generally, building a 5-15 minute city means snow plows don’t need to clear nearly as much area. A city built for people can afford to spend more time clearing pedestrian infrastructure and modal filters, because it’s still less than clearing ten thousand kilometers of suburb.

With the reduced driving time for emergency services, you can even waste some time clearing a path ahead of them or having ambulance personnel walk, and keep side streets unplowed if the weather is right.

That’s a very outdated view of traffic engineering and psychology. People (and animals in general) don’t stop doing things in response to punishment unless they have a very high chance of expected punishment, way higher that any society could afford in case of traffic control.

If you want people to stop, you’ve got to build the infrastructure in a way that makes it psychologically natural to stop. Some paint on an otherwise Amercan road won’t do shit. You’ve got to visually and physically narrow the space for drivers to make it uncomfortable or even damaging for them to pass through at unsafe speed.

That low speed is also slow enough that drivers don’t feel like they’re losing as much by stopping, making them feel like stopping for pedestrians is a lot more fair.

Look at Dutch traffic engineering standards for pedestrian crossings. They’re a car-centric country that puts a lot of effort into getting cars everywhere in a relatively safe way.