Does Superman have to do with Sharia?

If you want to find Taliban-style authoritarian moralism, you don't have the leave the country. Book bans, secret police, explicitly religious political messaging (Can't find the URL of the whitehouse propaganda video, I was thinking of, but you can find your own examples) , surveillance of political speech...

That's The American Way at the moment.

Yip, most the "winning" in the USA trickles up, while N. Europe has better safety nets & health, better college funding, and more vacation.

Both Denmark and France are socialist-leaning countries. I didn't think the gov't would get away with increasing the retirement age.

Right-wing parties have been winning in EU of late, often fueled by anti-Muslim boogymanning, perhaps borrowing rhetoric from our Tinted One by exaggerating and highlighting crime or terrorist events*. I wonder when the anti-Muslim fervor eventually dies down if the leftist parties will adjust the retirement age back down.

* EU desperately need immigrants to keep their population from declining too quickly. They should help Muslims assimilate instead of demonizing them by cherry-picking events.

https://www.scientificamerican...

...3...2..1...

Here we are saying that most Americans have houses not very different from Alec Baldwin, and yet whenever electric vehicles are mentioned on slashdot, you can just bet comments are going to say "but half of America can't charge at home!"

Which is it? We all live like Alec Baldwin, or we can't even charge electric vehicles at home.

Oh, there are also "reaction" channels with an anime character in lieu of an actual human reactor. But again, those are older and probably not what the article is talking about. (I suspect those may have got started because there were people who for one reason or another wanted to create reaction content without showing their face, which is fundamentally unworkable for obvious reasons, but that doesn't always stop people from trying things.)

I think it's talking about the AI-generated science-fiction stories that keep showing up in the sidebar (if you use the default-view mode). If they're talking about the ones I'm thinking of, the titles are typically along the lines of "We thought everything was fine, until the humans came," or some schlock like that. I've never actually *watched* one of the videos, but I don't need to; you can tell they're AI generated from the thumbnail and title. I've hit "Don't Recommend Channel" on at least a couple of dozen of them, but of course the AI slop purveyors just keep creating new channels (in much the same way that low-quality manufacturers keep creating new unpronounceable brand names to flood Amazon search results with hundreds of copies of exactly the same thing).

There are also channels where an AI voice just reads the comment section from a reddit thread, and the video is a loop of recycled junk gaming footage; but those have been around for a lot longer and so are probably not what the article is talking about. Also, until you've seen (at least the first few seconds of) a handful of the videos, it's not obvious from the thumbnail and title alone, just how lame those channels are. The new ones are much more obviously AI-generated.

So, to sum up your argument, we've become weak, hedonistic, and uncaring about our own civilization.

"We" are no different than our great grandparents or their great grandparents. What has changed is the environment, and it would have effected them the same way.

What you call "weak", others people call "wealthy".

What you see "hedonism", others see agency and self-determination.

And the only people who ever spend time fretting about "our own civilization" are people who are unhappy with it and want it to change.

I'd also note you seem to have so internalized the "exponential growth forever" belief that you can't even see it. The earth's carrying capacity is not infinite, as we're learning a bit more every day. I'm absolutely not some Elifist or similar, but it is simply true, and those who profess to care deeply about "civilization" need to confront it if they want to be taken seriously.

And while abstractly there's no inherent political valence here, in this world these beliefs are mostly professed by authoritarian-natalists whose program is also wrapped around eugenics and really shitty racial beliefs as well as regressive beliefs about rights (especially those of women) and social control. I don't know if you're in that category or not, but that's a really ugly path to be treading.

A typical nuclear plant is sited inside a keep-out area of roughly 1000 acres. That comes to 4 million square meters. So you're saying that solar panels don't take much more area than nuclear plants. OK.

As a quick comparison, about 800 million square meters of the United States are used for cattle grazing. That's three trillion square meters. Area really isn't the problem.

That's very little waste, since solar panels are recyclable. There isn't a very big market for recycling solar panels today because few solar panels have reached their end of life, but when it's needed, twenty or thirty years from now, the materials solar panels are made from are all recyclable.

It's mostly to warn campers and tall empty trucks, since they are vulnerable to wind.

...why can't it sort it for us at the processing site?

I watch a lot of maritime disaster videos, so YouTubeâ(TM)s genius algorithm thinks Iâ(TM)d be interested in traveling on a cruise ship.

That's like saying that oxygen is one of the most toxic substances known to man, in its modification known as ozone. Phosphorus is not toxic; it is in fact one of the essential elements for life. The backbone of DNA molecules are phosphates; no phosphorus, no life.

And the amount of phosphorus in solar panels is absolutely trivial-- it's a dopant, about 100 ppm in the emitter of the cell, a layer roughly a micron thick. It is not "white phosphorus".

That's a myth promulgated by the fossil-fuel industry.

The major components of solar panels, are, by mass: glass, aluminum (frames), silicon. All of these are recycleable; none of these are toxic. After that you have the polymer attaching the glass to the cells, and the wiring.

Compared to the amount of landfill that industrialized nations produce -- 2.13 billion metric tons annually, in 2020-- solar panels are trivial.