The article is very light on details, but the numbers don’t seem to check out at all. Back-of-the napkin math (assuming a square 1km × 1km solar array and total sun luminosity of 3.83e26 W):

1 km ^ 2 * (3.83e26 W) / (4 * π * (1 AU) ^ 2) * 1 year to TWh ≈ 11.94 TW·h

This is a “measly” 12 TWh of TOTAL energy delivered to the array over a year - not accounting for solar panel efficiency losses (20-24%) or the elephant in the room of transmitting this energy back to earth. For context, China alone consumed around 39 PWh (39000 TWh) of energy from fossil fuels just over the course of one year, 2023. The entire world consumed 55 PWh (55000 TWh) of oil energy in 2023 alone. It’s not even comparable to the annual consumption of oil. If we consider the aforementioned factors, assuming 24% solar panel efficiency and an extremely generous 50% power transmission efficiency, we get:

1 km ^ 2 * (3.83e26 W) / (4 * π * (1 AU) ^ 2) * 24% * 50% ≈ 163.43 MW

Which is literally nothing on a national scale - it’s less than a percent of the Three Gorges Dam output.

There’s still a selection bias towards technically literate, privacy-conscious, left-of-center (or at least liberal) people. Lemmyverse represents such an unthinkably tiny fraction of Earth’s populace it’s not even an echo-chamber, it’s more like an echo-pocket. However, this allows me to feel comfortable here, which is a huge plus. You just have to keep in mind that every opinion that’s popular here is not representative of anything but the Lemmyverse.

TBH lemmy is the most comfortable social media for me, and yet I recognize that it is comfortable precisely because it’s mostly a leftist echo chamber (with a sprinkling of liberals). The political opinion of the majority of people (that is, conformism/lack of opinion) is not represented here at all, neither is the far-right (and I’m thankful for both).

Not the same, but they share are both serious behavioral disorders and share the same (or at least similar) physiological and psychological mechanisms. Some people who struggle with self-control will absolutely need outside help getting out of these kinds of addictive behavior loops. “Internet addiction isn’t real, get over it” has the same vibe as “depression isn’t real, it’s just in your head”.

This to me reads that you have a serious self control issue. If you need to use rehab to limit your use of heroin, you’ve fucked up. Learn and practice some self control. You don’t need rehab, you don’t need to stop buying heroin or cut off ties with your dealer, just stop using it. This is like needing to have your parents tell you to do your homework or something. You are in control of your life. You will feel much more empowered if you do it yourself.

Behold… The REPUBLICAN party!

(also, RIP traffic in NYC, I hope this pushes them over the edge to just ban most private traffic in the city and become the New Amsterdam again)

Non vegans at least have the excuse of being deeply indoctrinated, and having 90+ percent of people reenforcing and defending their behaviour. The ultra rich dont.

In a way, they have been indoctrinated by capitalism, and are reinforcing that indoctrination by being the capitalists. I can totally believe that most rich people consider themselves “good people” because they have “succeeded” in the capitalist system.

Keeping people in a cage is crueler and riskier than just killing them.

That’s debatable by itself. But I’m not talking about keeping people in a cage. I’m talking about trying to forcefully re-educate them and re-integrate them into the society. If they refuse or fail then that’s on them. Even keeping someone in (a humane) prison for life is still less cruel then murdering them IMHO. This is demonstrated by the fact that most death row inmates fight their conviction up until the last moment, even though their living conditions there are awful. People who volunteer to be killed usually have severe mental issues, thus it’s closer to suicide then an informed decision.

I don’t think you quite grasp just how far gone the rich are.

As I’ve said, I’ve met and talked with one of them. They’re not all innately awful evil people (I don’t think there are any people who are born evil), merely shaped to be such by their situation. And therefore, a lot of them could be turned into productive members of society with enough re-education, therapy, and honest work.

It’s the fact that Mercurial tags the commit with the name of the branch that it was committed to which makes it much easier to determine whether a commit is included in your current branch or not.

Isn’t this trivial in Git too? git branch --contains COMMIT ?

It’s absolutely not 0, people constantly try non violent means of renegotiating social relations and get nowhere, in fact they usually get executed for the trouble.

Imprisonment and confiscations is definitionally violent; I’m not advocating for a non-violent solution to a problem which is perpetuated by violence.

Remember that I’m not talking about peaceful protests. I’m talking about isolating the parasites, trying to turn them into humans and giving them a second chance if we’re reasonably certain they’re not a threat anymore.

Revolutions have left people alive and they consistently side with counterrevolutionary forces and violently crush anyone attempting to improve equality.

Prisons are places where people are placed to stop them from causing further harm. Hard to help reactionary forces when you’re isolated from society.

The hope is that during that isolation it’s possible to change their ways.

As far as I can tell, this has never been tried by anyone.

I mean french revolution says hello? The worst that can happen is they scuttle off, rouse reactionary forces, and violently oppress billions again. Which they have consistently done no matter how attractive the proposed alternatives have been.

The french revolution was orchestrated by the bourgeoisie. The then-billionaires never “scuttled off”, they were literally half the Assembly. And that revolution also executed most of the old elites, the old order never really came back but was replaced with an imperialist order practically brought about by the Assembly/Convention themselves, so I’m not sure what point you’re making here.

Also people who aren’t vegan and have encountered the idea also suck, so that isn’t exactly making your point.

This is like a good 80% of the population nowadays. Do we execute all of them? No, we try to make them understand the consequences of their lifestyle, and teach them empathy for all living things. That’s my point.

Nobody has ever demonstrated an effective treatment for such a disordered mind.

How many times have we tried? It’s 0. AES countries throw them in (somewhat) brutal prisons or execute them, and capitalist countries with rehab-oriented prisons don’t consider parasitism a crime (which of course it is).

The same has been said many times about murderers and rapists in the past (and, by some people, in the present too) - and yet look at rates of recidivism in Scandinavia. 80% or more of violent criminals become productive members of society after being released.

Are parasites worse? Sometimes. I’ve had the displeasure of talking to a person worth ~$1B (it was Evgeniy Kaspersky for reference). They just didn’t want to think about all the suffering they are causing, instead saying shit like “I worked hard for this, if other people worked as hard they’d be as rich”. Just like most people don’t want to think where their chicken nuggets come from and how they are produced. I don’t think they lack empathy, they’re just trying their best to avoid feeling it towards people they’re exploiting.

AES countries need to push the envelope of humanity, not be stuck in brutal 17th century ways. Try to teach everyone empathy and understanding, give everyone a second chance, the worst that could happen with a parasite is that they try this shit again after being released and go back to prison, with their wealth confiscated for public good once again.

Yeah sure, Scandinavian countries are capitalist and thus billionaires are treated as demigods. We still observe that their prison system has better outcomes for everyone involved (convicts & society) compared to US/Chinese system of “prisons as punishment only” and learn from it.

That’s kinda irrelevant to murdering someone. But yeah, if you make your prisons places that fix people rather than places for punishment (provide prisoners the ability to learn actually useful skills and put them to use, and offer therapy) I think that even some of the worst parasites, murderers, etc can eventually become useful members of society (see the Scandinavian prison model for how this can be applied quite successfully).

That’s a bit better, I guess? But then China still executes the most people in the world every year, most of them not even billionaires. How many of them are innocent working-class people framed for something they didn’t do? (Hint: historically that percentage is alarmingly high if you look at other countries). Fuck that shit, countries should abolish executions after their socialist revolution succeeds.

Counterpoint: if you deem killing hundreds to thousands of others by spreadsheet to make your line go up, you have to be made an example of.

Sure. Confiscate everything they have, confiscate everything their family has, put them in prison. There is little difference in deterrence between that and the death penalty.

I don’t care if Eichmann could have been rehabilitated or if Netanyahu can, they’re not worth the manpower required to get them there.

Whether you care or not is irrelevant when we’re talking about a human life.

Crimes of necessity are one thing, death or cruel punishment won’t do a single bit. Crimes of greed? Those fucks only understand deterrence by threat of violence, because all they think of is themselves.

Sure. Imprisonment is definitionally violence.

If the Sackler family had been executed for their crimes I bet you’d see far fewer claims denied and insulin wouldn’t be worth an arm and a leg.

Or, uh, if this shit was properly regulated in the first place there wouldn’t be as many parasites getting wealthy on it, and there would be no price gouging. Look at the rest of the “developed” world, insulin is basically free there, and 0 executions were needed to get there (unless we’re counting the threat of proletariat revolution, but then the US also had that). Those who would still abuse the system could be imprisoned to stop them from doing so.

It’s self defence, you’re talking about people that have demonstrated a complete lack of empathy and a complete lack of wanting to use their resources to rectify that or limit the harms they can do.

It’s definitionally not self-defense to kill someone who’s already in handcuffs. I don’t care if they are straight up evil, no living being deserves to be murdered once they present no actual danger.

Nobody deserves the death penalty. It’s just cruelty with no benefit for the society. Studies show, time after time, that it has little to no deterrent effect. Its only purposes are either narrow-minded vengeance or preventing a person from being freed once the current government fails.

That said, I’m all for confiscating all wealth from anyone worth over a billion dollars and placing them under arrest until they can effectively demonstrate they are no longer a parasite on the society.

Whoa. Honestly, that’s a lot more Nays than I anticipated. Is there an easy way to check what were the nay-sayers positions during the debate?

Have you ever tried to use one of those superapps? It’s still a clunky experience overburdened with dozens of useless UI elements eating up screen estate of what I actually care about, and then whenever I wanted to do something for which there’s no sub-app in the super-app it would be difficult due to lack of integrations with “the outside”. That’s even before we question the idea of putting all the eggs functionality in one basket centralized app with one developer entity, allowing them to ultimately control all aspects of one’s online life.

And more philosophically, I’m surprised that as a functional dev you prefer one big tightly coupled combine to a collection of small but useful on their own utilities lightly coupled to produce more than the sum of their parts.

Hmm, right. This makes it somewhat more complicated. If this new name starts being used by many people and organizations, I suppose it would make sense to create a new place=sea boundary=maritime, but until then it’d be kind of stupid to pollute the map with a new entity just because it’s in the official records.

You can try out Nix. It can be installed right there on your Kubuntu box, without any conflicts with apt or other package managers.

It’s somewhat similar to portage with its ebuilds in that it’s source-first and allows you to set up complex dependency trees and configure every package in them. In your case it would allow you to avoid manual rebuilds and just build&install all your custom software with one command from one directory containing some .nix files that describe how to fetch, configure and compile every package. (Actually, for your dependencies those files are likely to be in nixpkgs already - you can check at https://search.nixos.org/packages. In that case, you don’t have to write any packaging instructions or even build everything, as Nix will intelligently download the binary versions which are helpfully provided by the Nix community).

It’s quite different from most other package managers/build systems, though, being much “simpler” (it can be described as lambda calculus on files with syntax sugar) but much “harder” (the learning curve is actually a learning wall with the first section requiring mountain climbing experience and covered in barbed wire). If you’ve been maintaining builds for multiple packages by hand for years, though, it shouldn’t be too bad.