Yeah honestly. US urban planning is unfortunately hostile by default, but cities can be dense, efficient, and pleasant if local politics allow it. Unfortunately, a lot of places will block nice things like parks and green spaces, because "the wrong kind of person" might be able to enjoy themselves a bit before or after work.
Cities are efficient and naturally occurring. I think you might be thinking of suburbs. The US has really stupid urban planning, but that says more about how we run things here than it does about cities imo
I'm looking forward to trying jellyfin once DDR4 prices come down a little. I was slow rolling my server build as I added services, but the ECC ram sticks I was using jumped up to 150 USD from 50 USD. Hopefully the lesson I get out of this is just buy the damn chips already lol
Proper unicode font support is like 1.2GiB (noto, but I haven't found any complete unicode font collections that are significantly smaller). There's bloat for sure, but supporting universal text is one that I think is not a waste of space.
Maybe not proper support, but when I tried NetBSD recently my entire installation was around 1.5 GB on disk and seemed to handle Unicode well enough for me (for languages I care about). Not doubting some more packages would be needed to support every language, but happy everything wasn't installed by default.
Ye by proper i mean being able to render unicode in any language without tofu. I get that not everyone needs that, but its a reasonable thing to have on your disk in 2025.
> You see that ignorance quite commonly in stuff like climate activism. Young activists are convinced that nobody is working on the problem.
IMO the complaints here are well-founded, but maybe some wires have gotten crossed in communication. There are many climate related companies out there (with varying levels of actual utility). People are obviously working on the problem, but the policy side is largely captured by big oil and other monied interests who would lose a lot of money if any meaningful shift away from fossil fuels were to happen.
Addressing the climate crisis using minimally subsidized market forces is way too slow to be effective at reaching even the bare minimum Paris Accords numbers. Even those policies at this point are being dismantled and called a "climate hoax". The market side work is laudable, but the climate crisis cannot be averted without a supportive policy framework.
I do a lot of activism work and the critique is typically centered on "nobody in the government is making progress on climate policy", not "nobody is doing anything at all". Though maybe we're talking to different groups of people lol
I'm talking about people that literally think absolutely nobody is working on things. There was a viral video not too long ago of a young activist saying she got into this because she realized that "literally nobody was working to make things better." I could chalk that up to online viral nonsense, but I've talked to people fresh out of college that legit think this sort of stuff.
This sort of thing is usually made worse by people that are not willing to acknowledge that not all progress is definitionally good. (As an easy example, the report a few years ago that raised the idea that measurable increases in ocean temperature were from cleaner shipping got annoyingly ignored.)
Again, though, in my theme of "this isn't really stack related." This is also not activist related. People have a tendency to think the problem they are working on is more important than every other problem. Dentists tend to think oral health is the key to understanding all health. Nutritionists, the same. Managers tend to think things just need good management. It is a very common pattern.
And it is enticing because it speaks to kernels of truth. It just doesn't survive the "no panacea" test.
Whiteness is a 19th century concept designed purely to exclude certain, typically immigrant, groups. It’s why Irish, Italian, or Slavic people weren’t historically considered “white,” or why white supremacists today can’t agree on whether Hispanics, Jews, or Indians are “white.” It’s entirely arbitrary. They could have just as easily made a racial category based solely around hair or eye color.
Every white person comes from a specific ethnic background, be it German, British, Swedish or whatever. These are all high caste cultures in western European imperial tradition. A common identity among the various ethnic groups in the northern kingdoms. Idk how anyone would think German and British are the same ethnicity just because they are neughbors.
Bullshit. I might be considered white today, but my ancestors wouldn’t have been[1]. And my particular Eastern European “white” culture has relatively little overlap with other European (French, Spanish, Italian, etc.) “white” cultures.
If I identify with any ethnicity or race — which I very barely do — it’s Slavic, not white.
“those word definition games don't work any more now that people have gotten on to the trick”
Saying it doesn’t make it so. Maybe go educate yourself instead of tumbling down a white supremacist rabbit hole.
[1] From Wikipedia article on Anti-Slavic sentiment: “Slavic peoples were considered to be people of an ‘inferior race’ who were unable to assimilate into American society. They were originally not considered to be ‘fully white’ (and thus fully American).” Same goes for Irish, Europeans of a darker complexion, etc.
A huge part of the problem is the whole "burning every Maya book" thing that some spanish dudes decided to embark on. Various ethnic cleansing campaigns over the last two centuries or so, not to mention the impact of disease.
Its a real tragedy the colonizers didn't think to preserve the world they were conquering.
Modern Maya are starting to learn how to read and write their own language again but that only happened in the last 40 years or so. (They never forgot how to speak it.)
Most of their written knowledge was lost forever as you point out.
I'm curious about this mindset. Wouldn't it be easier to reform your system before it has gone "pure evil"? Or do you expect nobody cares enough to do that without the threat of impending doom to motivate them?
I believe people will typically not stand for their rights (even less so for other's rights) unless they are significantly bothered or led to think the situation is dire. This is not great, but it is also natural for the human condition: unless one is well-informed and especially conscious about the issues that come with reduction of rights, they will not even realize what is happening until it is happening.
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