OOFshoot

Splitting helium requires energy. Go for Radon or something.

That statement isn’t true, copyright doesn’t work that way.

However, someone was trying to claim they owned the copyright to that song and finally in 2015 someone refused to settle with them when they sued. They went through the full court battle and the courts decided that person did not own the copyright to that song.

I don’t remember enough of the details of their claim to explain their reasoning, but the claim was good enough (and court battles are expensive enough) that everyone would just settle.

Anyway, copyright doesn’t work that way, you can sing any damn song you want.

That’s it! I’m getting shit-faced!

Kinda interesting that somehow because it’s across a gender line people find it icky, but I’ve never heard of anyone being scared they’ll get a kidney that’s the wrong gender.

I mean, there is only do much time in the day. You can only have so many good friends. Who are you going to prioritize, the ones you’ve had for years, or the new ones that might not pan out?

You’ve also hit another good point. Friendships are often based around friendship groups, instead of being a series of one-on-one connections. Sure, within the group you’ll have your favorites, but there’s usually a standard list you invite for social events. If you’re not going to join the group, you’re not likely to become a strong friend to just the one individual.

Most friendships are based around convince. After a long enough period, and a little intentionality, you drift into friendships that based simply on the fact that you’re friends.

Take a moment and think about where you’ve met your friends over your life. School, work, sports, volunteering, your neighborhood, etc. These are all excuses to get together and see each other over and over that aren’t focused on the relationship itself. After a little while, you figure out which people in the group you like that have the time and interest to be friends with you. You won’t always get your way, but you can literally put yourself out there as much as possible and make friends when the opportunities arise.

You don’t have to be the life of the party, you just need a reasonable excuse to see the same people over and over.

I went and checked and have discovered I’m the resident browser hipster.

Ecosia.

It’s a reskinned version of chrome or chromium or something where your default search engine is Ecosia. The Ecosia search engine is just Bing reskinned and the ad revenue you generate goes towards planting trees!

I’ve been using it for quite a while, I’m probably responsible for a couple hundred new trees at this point, if not more. They keep a running tally for you but I’ve used the search engine on multiple devices and haven’t bothered to see if you can synch the tally across all of them.

The entire project is up to 175,500,000 trees so far.

A cap and trade system? It would be a lot harder to set one up that worked the way you intended. Plastics are incredibly useful, health and environmental concerns aside. So you would have greater incentive to try and write in a bunch of exceptions or tailor things perfectly and it probably wouldn’t work how you intended. My mind is thinking of loads of medical equipment that’s best made with plastics, for just one example.

With carbon dioxide? Well, there’s an easy way to generate credits by buying carbon, so you don’t actually have to ban carbon fuels entirely, meaning planes and helicopters will still have their place. But I would have a tough time coming up with an easy way to filter out and sequester plastic contaminants, so there’s not really a equivalency.

There’s also the problem of trying to properly define just what the fuck a plastic even is. Is natural rubber a plastic? What about epoxy? Wax? The second you come up with a hard definition for plastic every manufacturer is going to look for alternatives that don’t technically meet that definition.

Now, in my version of a carbon cap and trade market, it would focus entirely on what’s underground. You have to buy credits to extract carbon from under ground, and you’re awarded credits for returning it to under ground (at a less than 1:1 rate). The reason you do it that way is because it’s just the easiest point of control. Fewer players involved, obvious locations for auditing

Anyway, this system would have the side-effect of also making plastic products more expensive so manufacturers would look for alternative materials and/or alternative sources of carbon. Probably a bit of both would be going on.

Probably the only thing you could really do is set up a broad definition for what a plastic is, then put in an excise tax on plastic and write in exceptions for things where we really need the material.

It’s just a harder situation because we don’t have good substitutes for most of the applications for plastic, which isn’t true for carbon fuels.

LMAO yeah forest carbon capture offsets are total bullshit. The people who set up that system did not think it through, or at least they knew exactly what they were doing in order to let people game it.

A proper cap and trade system would require that in order to earn excess credits you must actually take carbon from the air and bury it in a non-volatile state at STP. Furthermore, you wouldn’t earn credits at a 1:1 rate, something like 1 ton of credit for every 2 tons you bury would be more appropriate. Things like pumping sewage into an old oil well wouldn’t count because you didn’t pull that carbon out of the air yourself.

Regardless of if it’s a market system or a prescriptive system, you have to make sure it’s actually going to do what you want it to do. The Bush administration mandated E85 corn ethanol become a thing and we still haven’t managed to actually make corn ethanol a fuel source in the aggregate, nevermind a carbon neutral energy source.

I could get behind MEGA-NATO for exactly the reasons you described. I don’t know the authority structures of NATO well enough to say whether we really could turn it into a world police like we need, but assuming it’s given the flexibility to respond to belligerence while being on a short enough committee-leash to prevent it from becoming the defacto military of the US or some other powerhouse, then yeah, I’m all for it.

Is that achievable? Ehhhh… I don’t think it is right now. I think in order to prevent MEGA-NATO from just being the left arm of the current economic powerhouse, we essentially just need to not have one obvious powerhouse. I don’t think that’s ever going to happen though, which leads me back to just acceptingly defaulting to Team America World Police.

@Alyaza has yet to answer their own question. Clearly they’re just digging up dirt on all the newbies.

Let us start, with the goals and axioms. All arguments must have axioms, all societies should have goals.

Axioms:

• Saving lives is a good thing.
• The importance of a life generally scales with sentience. That is, dolphins are more important than slugs, which outrank trees, and so on.
• Increasing happiness is a good thing.
• The value of happiness again scales with sentience.
• Intent matters, but so do results (you can definitely fiddle with this one to suit your argument)

Goals:

• Increase the total long term happiness in the world

So, what do we do? Well, we start looking for things that make people, animals, and others happy, especially in the long term. We’ve got plenty of data about what is good for doing that, and why. From here on I’ll focus on people, but know that people aren’t actually the only consideration.

Things people usually like:

• Safety
• Community
• Freedom
• Stability

Now, these assertions aren’t all that controversial. The problem arises when these things people like conflict with each other. The problem is when one person’s attempts at happiness and satisfaction interfere with another person’s happiness. At this point, things become very subjective. Whose happiness matters more? Why?

In general, I support the following:

• A high degree of individual freedom.
• A low degree of corporate freedom.
• Simplified laws, wherever possible.
• Strong environmental protections.
• The use of market forces to solve problems, whenever possible. This is not a blind love of free market capitalism, but instead a want to set-up markets to produce desired outcomes. E.G. I’m for a carbon cap and trade market.
• Strong social safety nets which minimize means testing wherever possible, and provide objects instead of cash, wherever possible.
• A strong US military (the reasons why get deep into geopolitics, I don’t love war, don’t misread this)
• Free education at all levels
• Strong labor protections
• Strong self-defense rights
• A high degree of subsidies for basic scientific research
• Mostly free healthcare
• You get the idea, we’re starting to get specific here.

Put whatever labels you want on me, I don’t care, I’m primarily dedicated to those axioms and whatever systems and programs are proven to support those axioms through data.

I would be extremely interested in notification books, I’m currently working on Pests by Bethany BrookShire, what are you into? What’s the best one you’ve read this year?

What kind of videos do you make?

If there’s one good thing about established social media sites making bad moves, it’s that the decentralized, donation-supported model seems to be trying to take their places. Honestly, why I hadn’t heard of doing it this way earlier is beyond me. Perhaps it needed Patreon to normalize donation models outside of NPR circles.