Nice username thats gonna be worth big money some day

Haha are you implying that Lemmy isn’t an echo chamber?

It isn’t stated that they knew it was closed when they arrived. They might have figured it out after the fact.

anything I do is insignificant on a global scale. Same for you. But enough people acting together can make a difference and doing my part is the right thing.

Funny, it kind of seems like the opposite to me. While you make edgy leftist posts online I have made changes to my lifestyle to reduce my carbon footprint. If everyone used paper straws the evil corporations making plastic ones would suddenly start making paper ones. Not because they care about the environment of course but because that’s what consumers demand. Individuals making small individual changes can add up when done on a global scale. Let me guess- you think voting is a waste of time as well? If not, what’s the difference?

You do though? There’s a ton of things you can do to reduce your carbon footprint. Eliminate? No. But don’t let perfect be the enemy of good, or even the enemy of “less bad than doing nothing”

These stats about the 100 largest companies get posted a lot, and once again, it’s not meaningful because those companies exist to provide goods for other people. It’s like saying just 100 entities (who all happen to be water utilities) consume 90% of the world’s water so individual attempts to reduce water usage are meaningless.

Thats wild I didn’t know that was a mainly Irish-American dish. My mother always makes it every St Patrick’s day I think it’s delicious. Don’t tell me that soda bread isn’t traditionally Irish either??

I think that is especially true in the United States where sharing cultures is so central to the nation’s identity. I think it really comes down to intent. As long as you aren’t doing something in a mocking or condescending way, I don’t think any reasonable person would be offended.

I know this is a little different due to the power dynamic (America being a powerful country) but people around the world love wearing random American stuff like baseball jerseys or whatever. Saw a lot of it in Europe. Probably theres no profound reason behind it, they just like the style. I think it’s cool, I’m not mad that they don’t really know who the Texas Rangers are or whatever.

I had the same experience: I played DS1 almost completely blind (I’d seen my old roommates playing it years ago so I knew some of the tricks, in a half-remembered sort of way). It was hard, and I got stuck in a few places for a really long time but wow it was extremely rewarding. Anyways I’m not that good at videogames, if you’re persistent pretty much anyone can beat dark souls 1 I think

Man that’s the weirdest thing too… like in what world is Russia remotely communist? They’re not even socialist they’re just a good old-fashioned fascist dictatorship.

Voting with your dollar is a myth? So if the IDF (or ISIS, if you prefer) drops an amazing new EV for $10k, with all money going straight to weapons procurement, you’d buy it?

Sure man, I guess the nets on the sides of the factory buildings are there to catch workers who are jumping with joy because their work is so rewarding.

I don’t deny that China’s economic ascendancy has been remarkable and a big win against poverty, but now that people have gotten past the starvation phase, I don’t think you can use the “high tide raises all boats” analogy. It sounds a lot like tricke-down economics to me, with some hand-waving that things are different in China because the wealthy elites are actually generous patricians.

Isn’t that exactly what Repubicans did with the election?

-Make a bunch of baseless claims of fraud

-“Look guys we need to do something, trust in the election process is low!”

I feel like a lot people on Lemmy, and people in left-leaning spaces in general, kind of have a blind spot on this one. People get that buying local is good, but not buying American.

It matters where your money goes. People complain about the soullessness of modern American life, and how hard it is to find a good job, and how democracies are backsliding around the globe, and then they buy things from China that are cheaply made and, at most, slightly better value in the long run.

This isn’t me trying to be nationalist or xenophobic but whenever anyone (including me because there’s no way to completely avoid it nowadays) buys Chinese goods you are supporting a government that is aggressively un-democratic, that actively supports Russia, and also has basically zero labor laws and an absolutely enormous wealth gap between the ruling class and the working class.

And yeah I get a lot of Americans are hurting right now due to inflation but the solution isn’t to send money overseas. The best thing you can do for your neighbor is buy union and buy American.

Ah yes the old “ban living in rural America” strategy, that will play well. Reliance on cars was a mistake but its too late to just pretend a lot, if not most, Americans need a car to live.

They managed to survive the Japanese/Korean car invasions (with some help). They will certainly try with China although it’s trickier for a lot of reasons.

As opposed to China where there totally isn’t a massive wealth gap between factory workers and their executives! Not like the CEO of Xpeng is worth 1.4 billion or anything…

No I get that, but this is different honestly. Look up rates of teenage depression/anxiety/suicide attempts, it’s a stunning correlation with the advent of smartphones and social media. Millenials got out just in time.

So, those sort of programs are confusing and often pretty misleading. First off, you can’t choose which electrons go to your house of course; all you can do is draw power from the grid. That’s fine, it doesn’t really matter at the end of the day, but more importantly most of those programs work by purchasing “renewable energy credits”, or RECs, from wind and solar farms across the country. So what does that REC mean? Well nothing really, it just means you “claim” credit for that kWh of renewable energy. If you want you could buy them directly from some random wind farm in Kansas in theory. Or buy for twice as many kWh as you actually use- now you’re 200% renewable and you’re sucking carbon out of the air! Oh wait.

At the end of the day, RECs are a good idea because they provide an additional revenue source for renewable energy producers, but it isn’t all that much. Last I checked they sell at like 3% of what the energy actually sells for on the grid. So for example if a wind company sells electricity for 20 cents a kWh to the grid operator, they could separately sell the RECs for that power on the open market for something like 0.6 cents per kWh, if the grid operator doesn’t want the RECs for themselves as part of the power purchase agreement.

I myself subscribe to Arcadia, which is one of those companies that promises to make your power 100% green via purchase of RECs. I consider that to be false advertising. But, I still do it because it does help drive the market for RECs which is good because the ability to sell RECs makes producing green energy a bit more viable, which in turn hopefully spurs growth in the industry.

So in conclusion, it’s a good thing to do, but not as good as you might think based on how it’s presented. Sorry for the wall of text.