Nobody stops you from rolling your own with init.

And a distribution choosing different software eight years ago isn't the same as a private company intruding on your personal computer to change software without consent. And no, EULAs are not consent.

I'm not giving Mark Zuckerberg money so he can violate my privacy in order to manipulate me into buying more junk at my expense to further stuff his wallet.

Most podcasts take the form of a bunch of people at a table, each by a mic, who talk about ... stuff. It's unscripted. Unplanned. Shoot from the hip. And, unsurprisingly, it's also very boring. Contrast that to Rogan, who runs a podcast I despise, but who at least has a producer plan set ups to surprise his guest with something about them or their past they'd rather not talk about. To create tension or conflict. Better, think of This American Life, which follows documentary radio format. A subject is chosen for each episode. It's broken into two or three segments with a matching theme. Producers go out and interview people in the field who have something to say and the quotes curated so you get the interesting bits and not a bunch of wandering commentary. Then there's scripted VO to tie everything together.

Podcasters have conflated disorganized talk with produced and informed commentary. And people got better things to do than listen to boring nonsense even if they're stuck in traffic. I mean, there's always music!

I did not buy this on Ebay. I'm the same person who registered the account all those years ago.

Wait. Are you calling me old?!?!

Yeah. Guilty as charged. lol

Notice how the focus of 'Birds Aren't Real' is that robot birds are engaged in mass surveillance. Which is ridiculous, but with a tinge of plausibility since actual prototype robot birds have been created. But that's not the point. Forget birds. The point here is to dismiss robot birds as replacing all real live birds and in the process diminish or demean the concept of mass surveillance. Which IS REAL. I mean, we're all carrying phones with GPS tracking our every move, audio recording (which has been subpoenaed in the past) , and leaving video records these companies analyze for whatever reasons they choose.

The birds, not so real. The mass surveillance part, very very real. And I get the sense this movement benefits surveillance capitalists more than it debunks fake conspiracy theories.

GraphineOS. Requires a Pixel phone. Is pretty secure.

I have an old Google Pixel 2 which I regularly mount to my Yamaha motorcycle handlebars and I've never had a problem. Camera works fine! Use it with a PacTalk to bluetooth stream music or Google Assistant from the helmet. Would definitely choose an old or cheap phone with enough oomph to do maps and spotify over a mere GPS. Would not buy a $1000 iPhone anyway. $300 will get you a perfectly good last gen phone that will last several years. And if you break it, buy another and don't shed a tear.

China has deployed a one million volt DC electric grid transmission system which, is efficient at several thousand kilometers. They are deploying solar, wind, hydroelectric and nuclear as fast as they can. And not focusing on storage but instead a national transmission grid. Solar in the northwest where it's still light and transmitted to the south east where it's dark in summertime, especially for hvac cooling. Invert that for winter.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/chin...

We could do the same thing. And in fact we desperately need to upgrade our electric grid anyway.

A old friend of mine is a climate scientist (Ph.D. in mathematics and weather modeling.) He spent many a year at some of the advanced arctic and antarctic research bases doing climate research.

He left the field some years ago over the politics in the scientific community: too much infighting and not enough science. That's a problem throughout the scientific community, really. The less your proposed research is perceived to fit in with the prevailing ideas the more other scientists will try to stymie your work, and the less your chances of gaining any funding.

His comment to me once was that climate science is an inexact science, that there is an incredible amount of noise in the system, and thus it's very difficult to achieve a theoretical basis that has any significant predictive ability.

That's not how it's portrayed in the media though, they tend to speak in absolutes. Not that American science reporters have ever done anything but an abysmal job informing the public. It's more sensationalism and the art of manipulation than actual reporting. I remember watching some Fox News program where a panel was discussing how untrustworthy scientists are because they're always changing things (thereby evincing a complete lack of understanding of the iterative nature of scientific research, that it is a process of continual refinement) and the token black guy says "I think it's important to just pick a study that supports what you believe" and everyone else just nodded and smiled.

Dafuq?

I think that was why Google's G+ social network had to go. It was connecting too many ordinary citizens with actual scientists and other highly-educated people, allowing them to completely bypass mainstream media on important issues such as climate change. What also impressed me was how many of those researchers and professional people of all stripes were more than willing to answer questions from lay people and answer them in understandable terms. I will never forgive Google for terminating that platform, and doing so with the lame excuse of "we had a security problem." They did us a disservice by doing so.

That presented a problem for those in power however. People began to perceive the difference between official narratives and what the people doing the actual research were saying. I often wonder how different the pandemic response would have been had G+ still been in full operation.

They correctly point out nothing in that context: the West wasn't "allowed" to industrialize and pollute (as if China or anyone else could have stopped that process) it just did what it wanted within its own territories, as did everyone else. The West just figured out how to do it over a century before anyone else, and China and India are simply playing off of the West's initial advantage. One could argue, however, that China, India and other regional powers are being "allowed" to pollute because both were enabled by Western corporatism and its willingness to sell out its own citizenry and shift its manufacturing base to the third-world.

The elephant in the room here is not actually that human civilization and concomitant industrialization cause pollution. No, in fact it is overpopulation, and that is the sole province of the third world. Not that I see many willing to talk about that: no, it's always the United States that is the source of all the world's ills, even when that's just not the case. Were it not for the flood of illegal aliens crossing our southern border, the U.S. would be in a population decline (as is much of Europe.)

That said, you are absolutely correct about poorer nations having little vision of the future, other than trying to achieve a high-energy, high-resource-utilization Western lifestyle for as many of their citizens as possible, even if the collapse of human civilization is brought that much closer.

That's hysterical. I just made a similar comment about that particular Roland Emmerich film but calling it a documentary is genius.

Great. So you're telling me that Roland Emmerich was right? Oh well ... I always figured one of his end-of-civilization-as-we-know-it scenarios would come true sooner or later.

Wait until Alexandria Occasionally-Cortical hears about this.

The problem is, if you kill off too many of the right people (that is, those that develop and maintain the technology that the plebs need to survive) everyone dies anyway. What we need is a good selective plague.