I wish I had understood the freedom I really had back then, and used it better

Lots of reasons to dislike Google. That is not one of them.

That is not accurate, and doomerism only helps those who want us too demoralized to put up a fight. If you want to be part of the solution to climate change, I recommend doing some reading on what the range of projections and outcomes actually look like.

Is it fair? Probably, yeah. But I don’t think it’s an effective way of framing or addressing the problem.

The challenge is always getting enough people to do enough of an action that it makes an impact. It is certainly more effective, in terms of reducing emissions, to target policy interventions at leverage points - like forcing energy companies to adopt renewables by law and banning further fossil fuel extraction.

Personal action can be useful to live in alignment with your values and to provide examples to others for ways to get involved in the climate movement, but we can’t consume our way out of this.

Yes, and that should be changed, imo

Why am I not surprised? In the words of the Wu Tang Clan - “cash rules everything around me”

What do you typically use your computer for? That’s going to have a major impact. If it’s pretty basic stuff (web browsing, text editing, etc) you shouldn’t have any issue. If it’s something that’s more complicated or unusual, then sometimes it’s easy to do and sometimes not, depending on what you want to do. In general, a little bit of comfort searching the web and working in the command line helps a lot with troubleshooting Linux

Phoenix is a testament to man’s hubris.

Oh shit, thank you for telling me! Need to make sure I mention that whenever I need a filling next. I already get really anxious going to the dentist, extra pain would not be a good time

I hope future generations know that amidst all that is happening, there are those of us who are fighting back, even against terrible odds. There have always been people like that, and I hope there always will be

That’s all really interesting, i need to learn more. I don’t know tons about Carter, but I do know he put solar panels on the White House in the 70s, which is pretty rad. Of course Reagan took them right off, that fucker

If i remember right, he said if he won he would go to places like WV and hold rallies demanding senators help his agenda or he’d back their primary challengers. That’s the kind of guts I’d like to have seen

Excel is definitely not useless! Learning a little Python (especially the pandas package) can go a long way in making data analysis easier though

Now you’re speaking my language!

Every time I’ve asked ChatGPT for help coding, I’ve wound up needing to rewrite it all for myself. LLMs make baffling design decisions (because they are just paraphrasing Stack Overflow, not making actual decisions).

I have found them helpful for turning error messages into more legible explanations of what went wrong, but AI-generated code has not been effective, in my experience

I’m not a power user, so I’m often frustrated by Excel trying to do things I don’t want it to and by its abundance of features that I’ll never use.

And at least at my workplace, a lot of work processes use poorly-designed Excel spreadsheets for critical tasks, because it’s such a simple way to manipulate data.

I also find that when I need to do more complicated data analysis, Excel starts to become limited, and I find Python to be a more powerful and flexible tool.

Of all the words in the world, those are certainly some of them

Sure. For one, the growth imperative means that any business must return a profit as its primary function. If profits are hard to come by, that can lead to things like predatory lending and higher fees for consumers, not to mention investment in environmentally destructive, but profitable, activities. Second, by commodifying human necessities like housing and turning them into investment vehicles, housing is increasingly unaffordable for working people as prices go up. I could go on, if you’d like, but I think those are both fairly compelling arguments.

That’s interesting, I never knew that! Makes sense though