There seems to be this strange re-occuring fantasy of many left-leaning people where you demonize those who do not agree with you on police to mustache twirling villains who laugh as we take joy in destroying the environment, starving people, and withholding medicines. This is nice, I suppose, since it allows you to not have any real thought or discussion about any issue. This builds the delusion that you have the moral high ground and always will, just by the mere fact that you agree with certain bloggers completely.

Let me offer a different perspective that you will not enjoy. Left leaning people have a knack for seeing a better world and identifying needs for improvement. Right leaning people have a knack for making stuff actually happen and preserving the fruits that things like rule of law, technology, and farming have brought us.

So, in the parlance of you above posters initial post, it should be titled "Why do right wingers have such an obsession with actually solving problems instead of just talking about it?" For example, we can all agree that generally left leaning Hollywood executives using their power to coerce women to sleep with them is a bad thing. The left wing default solution is to create a hashtag and feel good because they said the right things. Right wing people think we should have strict moral codes and guidelines that restrict base human impulses so that these things are limited.

In the case of the environment, it may surprise you, but like left wing people, right wing people do not enjoy pollution either. Now, if you are left leaning like Apple computer, you # that you are green and that makes you cool. Never-mind that you purposely and move all your manufacturing to places without environmental controls so that you can save money. The important thing is that you said you were Green.

The problem is power generation is a real thing. If you do it wrong, the lights go out and bad things tend to happen. It turns out that coal is plentiful and cheap, so that even poor people can afford things like air conditioning. The other power solutions tend not to provide enough energy or are very expensive. Since I do care about poor people, I am not into using only systems that rich people like software developers can afford.

It also matters that in effort to appear Green, many countries and states are playing games to mask their usage. Such as importing dirty power from other countries, but since it was generated in your country your total share is green. To me, this is not environmentally responsible. It is simply evil, like what Apple does.

A poster later in this thread gives several examples. Please read https://news.slashdot.org/comm... (and no, I am not the author nor do I know the dude)

Notice nowhere in my arguments did I say anything against trying to develop clearer energy sources or against spending money to improve process so that they are cleaner and more efficient. In fact, I think this would be a great use of the DOE in the U.S. Like many right wingers, I simply argue that instead of chasing pretend power unicorns, lets make the transitions when the technology is actually there, not because we wish it was.

So, what you are saying is that I can look forward to getting these babies in my $3000 MacBook Pro in 2021? Who wants state of the art in premium machines!!!!

Enhanced intelligence leads to trouble finding people to date, and being brutally made fun of in life, movies, and television. I am pretty sure everyone who reads slashdot knows. :)

Kahn was just enhanced. If they end up perfect in every way, then you need to scream Reyyyyyyyyyyyy!

Which would be great, except the people who run google are effectively friends with those in Patreon. So, the same policies are spreading over there. If you have content that they deem offensive, then Patreon is defunding you too. This famously occurred for Sargon of Akad last December, which is the reason some large content creators who champion free speech left patreon in protest.

You might feel your content is safe, and it is just those "bad" people who disagree with you get silenced. The problem is that when bad means disagree, you can find yourself suddenly on the wrong side very quickly.

Free speech is the hardest thing, because it means defending the right of someone to say something that is completely annoying to you. It goes against human nature, which makes it one of the great intellectual achievements of humans.

Ironically, you might not see this post because my karma is bad. My karma is bad because I said some very, very critical things about the slashdot community chasing politics over the quest for science. Even here, censorship happens.

I can't begin to describe how immensely sad this makes me at so many levels. At what point did the techies become such losers? I can remember a time, when we would examine the seemingly impossible, buck up, and meet the challenge. We have by no means met the edge of technology or solved all the problems we can solve. Like so much in life, it comes down to will, and you guys are a a complete bunch of pussies.

I want you to think about this. Really, truly, deeply think about this, and opportunity that was just lost. The space program has by and large been stalled. There is constant talk of going somewhere or doing something, sometime, which always seems to be 20 years away. Bureaucrats have been hired, who are more interested in job security than achieving. We have had a series of presidents, both republican and democrat, who have half assed the space program. We have lacked drive. We have lacked purpose. Now, an increasing number of people are losing interest that there is talk of far reducing funding or cancelling altogether. Why chase dreams when we can pay for more mundane practical stuff. It IS a good question.

So, along comes trump. You (likely) live in California, so you reflexively hate him, no matter what he says or does. So, when he asks if you want to chase your so called dreams, for real, you withered in the moment and said no. You disgust me. You should disgust yourself, and anyone else who loves epic science. The bell was rung, and you CHOSE to be tone deaf.

When Kennedy similarly rang the bell, better men than you rose and answered it. A whole host of knew technologies needed to be developed, but they new at its core, the moon shot was possible. Mars is the same. There are some issues to be solved, but they are not infinite. If Elon Musk offered a blank check for materials to have the best and brightest to work on this, you would faun over him, and maybe even be involved. But no, since you are small and petty, you mock and deride the effort because it was Trump.

You can say the timing was bad. You can claim it was unfair. But anyone who has ever chased a dream knows, you have to have your elevator speech ready. You never know who you bump into to make it happen. Instead of being snarky at Trump, you should save your Ire for the fucking NASA admin who was not prepared. He was asked, and he was not ready. Pathetic.

This was a moment in history lost. This was a moment for serious people with serious dreams. Instead, we got you. Instead of galvanizing expertise to figure out ways to meet the challenge, we will continue to support the nowhere scientists making nowhere plans for nobody. We will hand-wring and bitch that there is not money to test out solutions, since it is more fun to hand-wring and bitch than to actually tackle the problem. Again, you disgust me.

Because we have all had proper indoctrination into leftist politics, you can be sure all our approved sources unflinchingly follow right think. Our team of specialists is prepared to readily ignore all the mistakes friendly news sources make, as long as their bias agrees with us. We are also promise to categorize any mistake that slants to the wrong side as profound evidence for systematic banishment as fake news.

Duck duck go's search results will be displayed thinner font.

You are absolutely right that exposure of activities like this and other excesses do grow an opposition to a liberal philosophy run amok. In fact, this is what alt or alternative right originally meant. It was a recognition that media and other powerful forces controlled the narrative, and they were burying any criticism or contrary evidence. Agenda has begun to turn into tribalism, and a new counter force was needed. An alternative, using social media and youtube, which was thought to be harder to control.

Since many extreme-left positions such as the ones the fake academic papers exposed are, frankly, illogical and not really defendable, it became necessary to resort to name calling to debunk critics. Judging by slashdot and other forums, it sadly has worked. It has become a powerful meme that represents the other, the boggeyman. It is not well defined since that would lend itself to debate, which needs to be avoided at all costs. Instead, it just means anything that you disagree with, to the worst possible extreme. If you disagree with someone about the tax code, it is ok to be violent to them because you can simply call them alt-right, meaning worse than NAZI. Convenient, huh?

This verbiage is dangerous because it dehumanizes others while avoiding any need to cogent thought. It removes all need for nuance or subtly of idea, and lumps anyone with even mild disagreement into the most extreme examples of any thought process.

Those who use terms like alt right need to be careful. At its core, it is anti-thought, anti-debate, and anti-democratic. It celebrates the most base of our instincts to avoid discussion and synthesis. The people on this forum should be better than this, are better than that.

The population of the country of Luxembourg is 590,00. This is about equivalent to the population of Wyoming, which is the least populated state in the United states. As another post in this thread noted, Luxembourg is slightly smaller than Rhode Island. However, Rhode Island has a population of 1.05 million, or about twice that of Luxembourg.

Luxembourg City has a population of 110,000, which is actually less than the number of people who would attend a University of Michigan Football game on a Saturday in the fall. In fact, the university does supply free bus service to all those people for many years, yet it doesn't seem to warrant a celebratory article on slashdot.

The city of Columbus, Ohio in the United States also offers free mass transit. Columbus has a population of 870,000, or more than1.3 times that of the entire country of Luxembourg, or about 8 times that of Luxembourg City. This is a bigger achievement by far, yet has not warranted a celebratory article in slashdot. Btw, Columbus is not a complete anomaly, Salt Lake City, Pittsburgh, and Miami also do this, to name a few.

Also, many other cities around the world do this.

The point of this not to downplay the helpfulness of free mass transit. For reasons mentioned elsewhere, like traffic, it can be a very good thing. Why all this needs to be mentioned is the tone of the article. It is making a big deal about how a COUNTRY has free mass transit, with some implied shame about why other countries are not following this lead. In a forum made of people who pride themselves as "nerds" logic and nuance must be a factor. In truth, many other entities that are bigger than Luxembourg have done this already. Saying in a breathless voice, 'but, it's a country." really does not have great meaning. In reality what is important is size and area covered. So, this is by far not a world first.

The real story should be, why not earlier Luxembourg?