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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 15th, 2023

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  • Someone has to stock and clean and maintain all that space and pay for the electricity it takes to illuminate and air condition such a huge area. Good luck convincing people to increase their taxes in exchange for indoor tennis courts and lounging areas. I love the idea of having more free community spaces, but the last city I lived in had the downtown library basement essentially become a homeless encampment until they closed off that entire floor of the library and then the city sold the entire library to developers who plan to demolish it and build something else there. With people struggling financially and spending most of their time staring at screens, there isn’t much demand for government spending on new public spaces.







  • Well keeping it cheap and poorly regulated helps feed into the dependence on it. If it was treated like a precious good only meant for essentials that can’t be replaced by anything else, maybe we wouldn’t have ever built up sprawling suburbs and exurbs that require a car to do every little thing, are searing hot asphalt hellscapes to walk through, and are poorly served by mass transit systems because of the previous issue. Maybe we also wouldn’t have plastic in mothers’ placentas today if we had cracked down early instead of covering it up for the oil producers’ sake.

    Oil is a finite resource, if all the droughts and mayhem from climate change don’t get us first, sooner or later the party will end and we will have to become a non-fossil fuel dependent world again. I doubt we will produce enough vegetable oil to replace it.



  • I find it helpful to have the thing being imitated as part of the name, but not the full name. It makes for an easy way to know what the taste and texture should be and how it can be used in cooking. My kid developed a dairy allergy recently and vegan butter in particular is so easy to substitute in old favorite recipes without changing the flavor much or cooking method. As for meat imitations, a “vegetarian steak” (or ham) label conveys a lot about the texture, moisture, saltiness, and cooking techniques you can expect to use while a generic name such as “plant protein block” leaves you much more clueless as to what the texture and cooking method is meant to be for that item. I don’t think it should be legal to sell plant substitutes as only “steak “ or “butter”, but calling it “plant steak” or “plant butter” is way more straightforward and easy to fit on a label than a lengthy description of “plant patty with a fibrous, chewy texture and savory flavor resembling steak.”


  • That is such a ridiculous argument. The harm is in the opportunity cost to other potential borrowers and the burden of the added risk the bank was taking on unknowingly. He was tying up bank funds on risky fraudulent investments and that meant there were less funds available to loan to other people who weren’t fraudulently claiming their assets had a highly inflated value. He has declared bankruptcy in the past, there was no guarantee the investments would’ve worked out and the bank could’ve been exposed to huge losses without enough assets to cover their liabilities if a bunch of people started using Trump tactics and lying about their holdings to get extra loans. Banks don’t have infinite money.



  • When the opposition is trying to end democracy so it can have free rein to do whatever it likes, sometimes you have to. This isn’t a polite disagreement about convoluted economic theories, they want to eliminate large segments of our population and their supporters are already violent. At some point they are going to stop busing foreigners to different cities and start gunning them down. They likely aren’t going to be too gentle with LGBTQ populations when they work to eliminate them. They are already controlling what kind of medical care women have access to and they will probably find more ways to restrict women’s lives to promote their ideas of Christian morality. Women are already being told they have to be at death’s door to have their miscarriages treated, this situation is currently at the point of being a life and death issue for many people when the christofascists have barely started taking control.