Bluesky is a small indie company. It can’t afford to fight the law or implement the extensive age verification the law requires. So it chose to pull the plug and leave.

FB, X, etc, have a lot more resources to implement the extensive, invasive age verification Mississippi requires and keep fighting it in court until the decision upholding it is final.

Wow, look at all those corporate buzzwords. The focus on big generic ideas and the lack of implementation discussion or specific examples. And those perfectly spaced em dashes. Chef’s kiss. Premium chum right there 😆

But AI generation aside, this article is counterintuitive in a bad way. Save a Fediverse instance by building a real life community of “handmade goods and creative projects” based around that instance? If users cared about your instance enough to have real in person events your instance wouldn’t need saving.

If anything, it should be the other way around. Real life communities can incorporate a Fediverse instance for online socializing and building community. And those instances will thrive as long as they fill a need for the community. But creating the instance first and building a community - which is several orders of magnitude harder to do - to support the instance? Sheesh.

I mean, yes, and yes.

I can even see the logic in it, from an individual perspective. How do you, as an individual, prepare for global climate collapse? By making as much money as possible, so when resources get scarcer and more expensive you can still afford them - and by gathering resources under your control to prepare for a time when those resources become unavailable on the market - whether your money making activity speeds up the climate collapse or not. So how do you, as a business, prepare for global climate collapse? Exactly the same.

It’s the tragedy of the commons as a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The data from this poll is really interesting to me, and I don’t think it really shows Americans are as apolitical about climate change as the title suggests.

See, the question was “what are some specific ways you can think of to go about addressing climate change? (Up to three responses accepted)”.

Then they ask the same question about abortion rights, gun violence, reforming immigration, and improving education.

What they found was that, when limited to three options, respondents generally provided three individual actions to address climate change (e.g. recycling), but were much more likely to suggest collective/political actions for, eg, gun violence.

And that could mean Americans think of climate change as an issue with individual, rather than collective, solutions.

But it could also mean - and I think this is more likely - that Americans took the question literally, to mean what can you, personally, do about these issues? Since there are plenty of individual, personal choices people can make that affect climate change (albeit in very small ways), people thought of those first. But since there’s nothing an individual can do to stop some other random person somewhere in the country from picking up a gun and shooting it, people think of political solutions first.

And I think this is borne out by chart G, which shows Americans self-report a pretty even mix of personal and collective solutions when thinking about how to address climate change. The article implies this is because Americans aren’t accurately categorizing their own thoughts about climate change. I think it’s more likely Americans have more than three thoughts about how to address climate change. Their top three thoughts may be individual solutions but their overall basket of climate change solutions has a bunch of government and collective actions too.

And honestly, when American politics is as broken as it is, and voting is as useless as it’s turned out to be, I really can’t blame people for focusing on things they can control instead of things they can’t.

It’s hard to overstate how much there is to be done. But don’t believe self-interested arguments that action is impossible, or will be for nothing.

Absolutely.

I think a three degree rise - at least - is inevitable at this point. But it makes a huge difference how fast we get to three degrees, how quickly the sea levels rise, how much time we have to change our agricultural patterns and migrate away from coasts and otherwise mitigate human suffering in the process. The difference between three degrees by 2060 and three degrees by 2100 could be measured in billions of lives.

Climate change is the acceptable price of modernity. That, in a nutshell, is the conclusion that Energy Secretary Chris Wright reaches in his recent essay in The Economist, a composition representing the studied fatalism increasingly found in the debate on energy transition.

Tldr: we’re going to accelerate climate change, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

I suspect Republican politicians and American fossil fuel companies got together, looked at the real studies, and realized climate change will hurt North America much less than it will the rest of the world.

So they put a plan together: seal the borders, move manufacturing back to the US, seize Canada and Greenland, and prepare for the United States to dominate the world as less well-positioned nations collapse from climate disaster.

And the more fossil fuels we burn, the faster the climate collapses, and the closer America comes to global dominion.

It’s not fatalism. It’s manifest destiny.

In general, the problem with that narrative is that Trump was openly promising to act in ways which were guaranteed (and in fact have) raise prices and take away healthcare from people, while transferring money from the pockets of the less wealthy into those of billionaires.

Yes. And. Do you think the average American voter was economically literate enough to know that? Or did they just buy the propaganda that Trump economic policies would leave them better off?

A lot of the Fox News propagandists and conservative talking heads are, absolutely, vicious racists. Or they understand the racial impact of the policies they shill for but don’t care, which is just as bad.

But frankly? If you think the average American voter knew Trump’s policies would hurt the economy and chose to vote for him anyway because they’d rather be racist than prosperous? I think you are overestimating the average voter’s intelligence.

And, for that matter, underestimating their selfishness.

I can’t say she’s wrong.

Let’s not forget: one of the big reasons Trump won was because the Biden economy was shit, and Biden and Harris refused to even admit it, much less offer any solutions.

And one of the big reasons Mamdani won was clear specific policies to help New Yorkers economically.

Because you can argue principle all you like, but principle is a luxury of the wealthy. It’s hard to get people to support animal rights when they can’t afford food, or convince them to support refugees and foreign workers when their own jobs aren’t secure, or convince them to support electric vehicles when they can’t afford to replace their 20-year-old Honda and gas is getting more expensive every day.

I guess every generation of Democrats has to relearn Clinton’s maxim.

There should be multiple independent steps of verifying if someone should get banned and in what way. And probably integrate a good test for joining the community so that it’s more likely for people to be rational from the start (that way you don’t even have to look at so many potential flags).

How much would you pay to join a community with that level of protection for user rights? Like the old subscription based forums, some of which are still floating around the internet?

Because “multiple independent steps of verifying” is, frankly, going to be a lot of frustrating, thankless, and redundant work for moderators. I mean, we know how to safeguard people’s rights through legalistic processes. Courts do it all the time. It’s called due process. And due process is frequently a slow, complicated, and expensive pain in the ass for everyone involved. And I think very few people would want to do that work for free.

(Conveniently, this would also serve as a good test for joining such a community - people are more likely to follow the rules and act like decent human beings if a subscription they paid for is riding on it, and it would price out AI and spambots in the process.)

The plan is to argue that only two consecutive terms bar someone from running for a third term, and have the Supreme Court’s Republican majority rubber stamp it, so Trump can run and Obama can’t.