I think the owners assume that no one has been a dick in the last 5 years, and hope it means no one will be a dick for the next 5 either. It seems like you’re getting close though so maybe take a different road so you avoid the temptation of stealing a cat since it seems unusually strong in you.

How can it be any other way? The fewer little vote the more likely Trump is to win. In the American system not voting IS a vote for Trump.

I’m sorry change is too slow for you. The first round of liberal/leftist victory is often crap. They barely win, or they don’t have his leftist candidates. Every election with a massive turnout on the left opens up space for leftist representatives. I think I’ve said this before. Change is slow. Right now the window is WAY over to the right. We have to bring it back by voting in droves until we’re represented. It’s simple math, but we keep losing because we don’t get what we want right away.

If a new socialist party can work in the UK then more pretty to you. I know some European countries have 20 parties with elected representatives and the most any party can hope for is 20%. But in countries with two parties you have to change them from the inside. Each situation is s different battleground and we have to optimise our strategy. And we don’t win by attacking eachother for starting simple facts because they’re not true everywhere.

You’re playing yourself.

It’s almost universal in the west that the higher the voter turnout the more left the government. Just look at France, first round, typical low turnout: far right won. Second round hight turnout massive: leftist win.

Spoiling the ballot is just not voting. When I was young, I used to think that you could make a point by not voting, or by spoiling the ballot. By waiting until the perfect representative showed up. Then I saw elections where the winning party got 43% of the votes with 40% voter turnout. Then I realised that 17% of people just forced us into another garbage right wing government and that spoiling ballots wasn’t even reported in the news AT ALL.

Vote EVERY TIME. It’s a tug of war, the harder you pull the more the whole thing shifts to your side. Look at the right in the US, this situation was impossible a decade ago, but they kept voting and the window kept shifting. And now it’s fucked up.

Don’t let your side down just because some of the people pulling don’t agree with you on where we should stop. Pull your weight, we can’t accept fascism.

It’s your local representative, as in he represents your area and his job is generally to bring more money to your area. They don’t represent your political views. For that you need to pull your weight at the election to open up space for views more aligned with yours at the elected body level (example the house or senate for national elections). You might be surprised to hear this but MOST of politics is deciding what money to collect and where to spend it. A TINY percentage is what most people consider “political” stuff. When it comes to that, when you pull your weight you open up space for different views that are better aligned with how you think. It’s not about how YOUR representative thinks, it’s about how the entire house and Senate think. Your representative will generally be pushed to agree with the overall party position or risk being replaced.

If we all pulled our weight the elections would look like this. How many more progressives and leftists enter the ticket in this world? How many Bernie Sanders, AOCs and Ilhan Omars? Or whatever your political views are (scared to ask honestly)…

Pull your weight today, or drop the rope and be unrepresented for another round of elections.

You edited your comment from “so who represents me” to “third party okay”. Third party is like attaching a new rope and pulling to the side. You’re not doing much. Maybe better than nothing, but often not.

Stop thinking about it like you need to vote for someone to represent your views because that’s NEVER how it worked. It’s a tug of war, everytime you don’t vote you’re letting your side down.

Just because not everyone pulling with you agrees on where to stop pulling doesn’t mean you get to drop the rope.

I work in aerospace regulation and the latest media coverage has been quite upsetting for me. There is a huge difference between delegation (how the aerospace regulator gives approval power to people in companies) and self-regulation, but I’m not clever enough to summarise them in this format. So instead I’d like to share two facts that can summarize the outcome instead.

1. An airliner is a chunk of metal full of people 30,000 ft in sky propelled to near the speed of sound by burning kerosene in a tube. With all of that is safer than driving in your car or going for a swim. That’s aerospace regulation at work, and it has always included delegation. It’s almost the safest industry there is even when you include Boeing’s criminal fraud and attempts to abuse the system.

2. Boeing had to ground their fleet for years and now is being charged with criminal fraud for deceiving the FAA (the aerospace regulatory body in the USA). Self regulated industries rarely face consequences.

I’m not saying it’s perfect, and I wish I could explain the process better but I think it’s very effective and has a proven track record across the world. Almost all modern countries use the same regulatory framework because it delivers incredible safety at a reasonable (by aerospace standards) cost to the government.

I hope more industries transition to a similar framework. If we had an FAA for finance and environmental protection, I think we could end scam shell companies and illegal pollution in a decade. But it would probably be “big government socialism” so there isn’t much hope.

Like evasive chimpanzee said we need to poop INDIRECTLY in crops. Hot aerobic composting for example has excellent nutrient retention rates and eliminates nearly all human borne diseases. The main problem would be medication since some types tend to survive.

Also urine contains almost all of the water soluble nutrients that we expel and is sanitised with 6-12 months of anaerobic storage. So that’s potentially an easier solution if we can seclude the waste stream. Again the main issue would be medications.

I don’t have the answer, if it was easy we would have done it already. The main issue is we don’t have a lot of people working on the answer because we’re still in the stage of getting everyone in the world access to sanitation. Certainly the way we’re doing it is very energy and resources intensive, unsustainable in the living term, and incredibly damaging to the environment. We’ve broken a fundamental aspect of the nutrient cycle and we’re paying dearly for it.

The other problem is, like recycling, there isn’t a lot of money in the solution, so it’s hard to move forward in a capitalist system until shit really hits the fan.

1. We mine and manufacture nutrient dense fertilizer at massive environmental cost.
2. We use the nutrients to grow plants
3. We eat the nutrients in our food
4. We expel 95% of these nutrients in our waste
5. We dump our waste into the rivers and oceans with all the nutrients (often we purposefully destroy the nitrogen in the waste since it causes so much damage to rivers and oceans)
6. We need new nutrients to grow plants

Before humans there was a nutrient cycle. Now it’s just a pipe from mining to the ocean that passes through us. The ecological cost of this is immeasurable, but we don’t notice because fertilizer helps us feed starving people and waste management is important to avoid disease.

We need to close the loop again!

I chose NOT diddling kids!

The consequence is the water is shut off. There is no avoiding that.

The neighbour is PAYING for every drop of water that comes out of the hose. Who uses that water isn’t up to anyone except the neighbour since he owns the water he paid for.

Any other interpretation of property rights is due to people trying to punish the poor for their poverty.

Good. We need to protect parliament from the moral decay of the conservative party. Ad homonym attacks are not part of civil discourse and we shouldn’t accept it just because the conservatives want to lower parliamentary proceedings to the rhetoric level of a barroom brawl.

I’m generalizing here, but men’s lib looks VERY different to women’s lib. Women started from a position of very low power, liberation was nearly a continuous improvement for all but the most privileged women.

Men’s lib requires first giving up a lot of patriarchal power before gaining the benefits of men’s lib, which in my opinion far surpass those of patriarchal power. There are a lot of barriers to this. First, most “online” feminists talk only about giving up patriarchal power. This feels hostile to most men and has bolstered misogynist influencers like tate et al. Second real life men and women are typically both complicit as men in enforcing patriarchal views of what a man is supposed to be. You can see experiences of men crying or expressing real emotion in front their prospective significant others as a prime example of this. Third there is no easy to access popular description of the benefits to men of men’s lib. There are great examples, but they aren’t as culturally relevant as patriarchal influencers yet.

The path to men’s lib is complex and has very different challenges than women’s lib. I think we’re getting there, but it’s certainly a slow process and at this time I think the counter reaction is more prevalent and popular.

That income is high enough to be taxed more, but I agree more granularity would be better. I hope that they increase taxes on the rich mostly by closing loopholes that favour the 1% at our expense. A billionaire that pays no taxes now isn’t going to owe more if we increase the tax rate. 3 times 0 is still 0. It’s the loopholes we have to close.

It’s not usually the doctors making 250-400k that are shirking their fair share of taxes, but the use of loopholes certainly starts in that range and accelerates exponentially with higher wealth and income.

Usually in North America bidet refers to a modified insert or toilet seat that includes a sprayer and a lever to control. It doesn’t take up any space at all. Definitely a stand alone bidet takes up a lot of space but they’re visually non existent in North America, although I certainly would prefer that to the sprayers.

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Housing can’t be an investment (i.e. exponential growth above inflation) AND an affordable place for people to live for future generations. This mentality is absolutely brain-dead.

This is the vaguest comment ever. Are you happy about the reduction of international flights? Are you suggesting people should stay in their own countries? Or just Chinese tourists?

Most crypto transactions are trivially identifiable these days. Most blockchain are an unencrypted public leger and most crypto retailers like coinbase require government ID.

You start off strong then move straight to supporting the fucking Taliban, as if that’s a reasonable position to take.

I agree, the article is likely highly sensationalized, but let’s be clear the Taliban are a piece of shit government with extremely regressive and repressive views. Maybe this shit doesn’t happen in Kabul, but Kabul seems bad enough that women can only show their faces and most are even too afraid to do that. That shows you that it’s a TERRIBLE place to start with even in the best places. Unfortunately many people don’t live in Kabul and it seems that the government isn’t going to do anything to stop regional authorities from abusing their power and any young woman they can get their hands on.

Don’t travel to Afghanistan. Every dollar that goes to Afghanistan supports religious oppression.

LMAO… ‘Despite’ the devastation…

That’s like if your dog bit the neighbour, but then the neighbor killed your whole family and burned your house down and a journalist said “despite the loss of of everything he owned and everyone he loves, he now says he was happy his dog at least got one in first”

What kind of degenerate reporting uses obvious normal human reactions to tragedy to score political points and dehumanize innocent civilians.