Something like this already happened when we traded the long-term health and fertility of the topsoil for the immediate high yield output of artificially fertilized crops.

By outsourcing the repleneshment of fertility to the relatively fragile and unreliable supply chains and social organisations of man, we assumed management over a delicate balance which previously belonged to nature.

I’m not arguing against industrial agriculture and its commodification of fertiliser by the way. If carefully managed it’s possible to imagine an endpoint of equilibrium where global supply chains increase total system fertility by selectively resting soil and relying more on imports to then switch once local fertility peaks and so on. Really just sane and unmolested market forces should in theory discover such a negotiated endpoint.

Fertility alone is not descriptive enough to capture, say, the importance of biological diversity or the load bearing capacity of local environments to support ecosystems, while also producing exportable outputs suitable for maintaining population growth in humanity.

Perennial crops are also ridiculously underused in overall food supply chains. They are more difficult to monetize in existing commodity forms because their overall system value is not captured numerically.

I don’t have an overall solution, but any solution will require at its core a way to assign value to the work which nature already does to replenish its own local fertility and to price that effect very cautiously in such a way that it becomes cheaper for intensive producers to rest unfertile soil until it becomes fertile than it is to compensate for unproductive soil by importing chemical fertiliser from somewhere else

not really, this place basically is reddit only with a smaller user base and even more of a sanctimonious-liberal-PMC kind of vibe. If this became a place that cared about and defended free speech it would destroy the hugbox and alienate their core users, who themselves are reddit refugees. This isn’t really a good place for difficult discussions which deviate too strongly from accepted mainstream talking points. It’s more a place of comfort for people who are exhausted by the relentless nightmare that is modern life.

What would we even argue about? which products are better to purchase? which form of labor pleases oir employers and landlords the most?

did you see the modern adult swim seasons? i loved the OG episodes and haven’t gotten around to seeing them yet

here’s a few i haven’t seen mentioned yet:

oz - uncompromising US prison drama

garth merenghi’s darkplace - deadpan british tele-horror parody

the mighty boosh - absurdist musical stage-theatre from the UK

dirk gently’s holistic detective agency - fast-paced comedy with an interesting premise that plays out like a douglas adams novel

happy - netflix series which combines a gritty procedural crime-drama with a cartoon mascot. Very violent and dark humour

the ‘no domestic surveillance’ is just language that mirrors some limitations (from their pov) from the patriot act. They’re still willing to surveil people outside the USA, and in fact all they have to do is route domestic traffic through an international part of a network and they can legally spy on domestic americans which is what already happens.

how much data do the FBI get from telegram? do you think the russian owner (who got arrested in france for refusing to make changes demanded of him by glowing authorities) is very likely to give any of your info over to american 3 letter agencies?

because if you don’t see it - it disappears! like magic!

the angry chud whos economic stability has been shattered by a neoliberal race to the bottom, the chud who can’t afford to live in the same town he grew up in, who has been directed to view every moral or class grievance in purely racial terms by the corporate media. When that same chud dares to express any anger or resentment or hostility, and he expresses that anger to his cultural out group, at least YOU will be there! to wag your finger in his face and moralise to him about how people’s feelings are important, even as you ignore his.

censoring someone doesn’t change their mind, if anything it hardens their velief and encourages them to spread it elsewhere

the minimum would be transparency for the algorithm. If users can see exactly what a social media algorithm is doing with their content feed, they would always have a way to identify and escape dark patterns of addiction.

But this minimum itself would require powers to compel tech companies to give up what they would describe as intellectual property. Which would probably require a digital bill of rights?

The most practical option would be to just ask your kids directly about the kinds of content they’ve been consuming and why. Dinner table conversations can probably reveal those dark patterns just as well

we’re in a reality where syria is controlled by isis-like headchopping terrorists, and our western governments drape these terrorists in liberal moderate language to make them more palatable to western audiences. By paying your taxes, by supporting your western country you are giving material indirect support to literal wahabbist terrorists. You going to your job and pretending to yourself and others that your silly middle class existence is somehow ‘civilised’ because your don’t say the n word or cuss is materially much closer to violent terrorism than some chud saying crude words on his day off.

What bothers you isn’t a proximity to evil or violence, your everyday ordinary existence materially entangles you in that process. What bothers you is strict conformance to civility politics. What bothers you is people saying uncomfortable things, because your bourgeois, performative morality places you and your paper-mache feelings at the center of the moral universe.

nobody is forcing you to play it, and nobody is forcing you to go to a forum and talk about it. If it bothers you so much just don’t go there?

You guys realise that censoring racist content doesn’t modify or remove the underlying belief right? just like closing your eyes doesn’t make you invisible…

‘ukraine’ stopped being a sovereign, democratic state when the euromaidan coup of 2014 (orchestrated by nuland and others in the obama admin) overthrew yanukovich.

The coup itself was exceptionally violent, including burning many people alive in a trade union hall, as well killing many civilians in the donbass region by indiscriminate mortar fire (by the ‘ukrainians’).

The regime itself is openly fascist, and has formally integrated military units which openly wear nazi-era symbols and which glorify the infamous nazi steppan bandera.

Modern ukraine is now a proxy state, which the west uses as a money laundering operation to wash american tax dollars through ukraine and ultimately to europe, and as a weapons blackmarket for terrorists around the world. The banderite regime is also trafficking human organs at an industrial scale, and it is widely assumed that sex trafficking from that region has also increased. (ukraine was one of the most corrupt countries in the world even before the coup stole the sovereignty away from ukrainian people.)

Now that ukraine is badly losing on the battlefield, and that this useless war has dragged on for years longer than it should, to still be supporting ‘ukraine’ in 2026 means one of two things. Either:

1: You are historically / politically or media illiterate. This means you believe every news story from cnn, fox news, or from other cia cutouts. You can’t understand why the US would have anything to do with coups because that doesn’t gel with your disney-level understanding of reality. No critical thinking, no context, no details. Just ukraine good. zelensky good. putin bad.

or

2: You are an ideological fascist. In the ww2 sense. You support the legacy of bandera, you believe their concentration camps and holocausting of jews, gays, romani etc didnt go far enough, that their project went unfinished, and you hope that with western backing zelensky and his coterie of banderites will this time complete the fuhrers final solution and make ukraine an ethnically pure fascist state.

I’ll be generous and say as a third option you might be a ukrainian national and just be playing along with the cancerous banderite junta (which has banned all non-state-sanctioned religions, cancelled all elections, outlawed opposition political parties, and even banned the speaking of the russian language amongst ethnic russians) out of pure fear. This one i can at least understand, especially if you lacked the foresight or the means to flee your country when it was lost to the west in 2014.

propaganda

tl:dr when they say ‘I have nothing to hide’ you respond with 'you aren’t even really you without privacy so you can’t really say what ‘you’ have to hide. Then when they give you a confused stare you walk them through the previous logical steps. I’m not sure it’s incredibly persuasive IRL especially to the kind of person who would argue against their own fundamental human rightd in this way (i’ve had similar chats with my own father fwiw) but it’s a good starting point.

Following up with concrete examples of harm (which don’t rely on a logical chain of propositions) is a good follow up.

being monitored (even if you are not aware of it) changes your behaviour via the ‘big brother’ effect.

Your behaviour is most of what makes you an individual, and is the means through which people express their autonomy and social existence.

putting these things together gives you the result that you cannot fully be ‘yourself’ while you are being watched. At best you are performing what you’d like ‘yourself’ to be for an expected audience.

Self actualisation, or the process of developing and becoming ‘yourself’ is therefore disrupted meaning that you can never be or know yourself while you lack real privacy.

Another (more dramatic) way to say it would be you cannot be fully human without also enjoying a default privacy

the search providers (especially that famously ‘not evil’ one) had a huge hand in centralising and then gatekeeping access to ‘the web’. They have such a disproportionately powerful effect on how users discover content, and huge power to drive self-fulfilling ‘network effects’ where people go where people already are, which has become so normalised that most people couldn’t imagine ‘the web’ without them.

i’m not suggesting it was ever realistic or possible, but what we needed was for that one search provider and indexer of content to be broken up, partially nationalised, and partially integrated into the network specification itself. Only they are powerful enough to become a model for how to functionally disentangle their operations into public and private parts.

the only alternative is to break the centralisation of the web as china is doing and other BRICS nations intend to do, by creating ‘national internets’ which in some ways federate together and in other ways do not. I don’t like this model of development for the future of the internet but the security considerations of the present require this kind of approach.

i’m replaying final fantasy 6 with a retranslation i haven’t played before called ‘revised old style edition’. I’m still in the world of balance but so far the translation is a good compromise between the innacurate warmth of the woolsey script and the dry accuracy of the slattery script. So far it’s my favourite translation, and next up will be the newly translated ‘t-edition’ mod

This was my first thought too but unfortunately the app doesn’t play nice with grapheneOS

It was an almost perfect medium for sharing cooking videos and recipes, can anyone suggest a replacement?

Don’t worry I’ve already uninstalled it (months ago when Ellison bought a majority stake) but I haven’t found a replacement short-form video platform for recipes yet

this is hilarious

‘he was downvoted for speaking the truth’