I’ve been trying e-books, usually when I find something I want to read it will say something like you are 38th in line. Minnesota.

Every book I try to check out has a 3 month to 3 year wait-list. Not exactly a convenient way to read.

I’m not at all optimistic. We have a broken system and what power we have left has been ceded to cynicism. Selling cynicism is powerful peoples most effective tool. Convince people they have no power, and they will just stay home. I’ve personally been involved with citizen lobbying many times in my life. I’ve been a part of minimum wage laws being passed, legal reform, net neutrality locally and nationally, school funding that saved schools, first amendment protection laws, etc. Locally, state, and federal. But it requires you have to get off your ass and actually try. Yes in south eastern states you have a bunch of crooked assholes that won’t listen to you, that’s why voting left is so important. Unlike the right, even moderate Dems will work with you if you force them to the table with popular political action. You have to elect them in and then do the hard work of political action.

Furthermore, lobbying is something ANYONE can do, you don’t need money, you literally schedule an appointment with your legislative office and then you go there and talk. I’ve done it multiple times, and it is absolutely effective. Those that get involved determine the future, not every politician is a criminal, many of them are people exactly like you and me. The got fed up with the system and ran for office.

Yes, our political system is fucked up, but selling cynicism when we still barely have a democracy makes things worse. We could have no democracy at all, and we very well might shortly. But while we still have one, I suggest actually fucking trying for once.

They aren’t mutually exclusive and both involve the same thing. The only reason money matters is because it is used to sway voters, people showing they are not swayed by the propaganda invalidates the money.

I’ve actually worked in politics, the amount of people that find it easier to give up because the system is deeply flawed instead of actually doing the hard work of change is astounding. If you want things to change, you have to make your voice heard on something more than lemmy. Representatives nearly all want to keep their jobs. If you show them your motivated enough to contact them, it shows them it’s important enough to you to sway your future vote. I’ve talked to many representatives in my life, at least on the left they generally see their job as representing constituent interests. If enough pressure is applied, they will often change their vote/introduce legislation, etc.

But they are not on lemmy getting the political temperature from keyboard warriors with more snark than braincells.

You know you can communicate with your current senator and representative right? Representative is literally their name, they represent you, if enough people apply pressure to the point they think their job is at risk, they will often magically have a “change of heart”.

Ahh, I misinterpreted your post as a complaint. I’m not a hypermiler, but I do find the efficient routes are often the lowest stress routes as well.

That’s in your trip options “prefer fuel efficient route”. You can turn it off.

Hopefully you mean ones still in construction… No need to cause an unprecedented environmental disaster after all.

Arctic MUD?

Anything that says yiff in the title, this stuff is so popular in lemmy. Not kink shaming, but really doesn’t do anything for me.

Reality?

None of the things by themselves fully justify “belief” in a religion yet many people claim they are without a true belief in the entire system. It’s the problem with such a vague question. By a narrower definition very few people attending a place of worship are true believers. Someone can believe in god, but not really believe in the rules, and still say they are “religious”. Someone can believe in the rules, but not god, and say the same. I think if you are practicing the religion to some extent then you have a right to call yourself religious if that’s how you view yourself regardless of your true beliefs on god, rules, etc. Cultural impact matters more than we give it credit for.

Another big reason is reason number 4

4. Gives a sense of community and cultural connection that other things don’t quite provide.

I’ve met a not so inconsequential amount of people in my life that when pressed admitted, they don’t believe in god, don’t believe in the moral teachings, but attend a place of worship because they think there is no replacement for the interwoven community and cultural connection their place of worship provides. Many people simply like the community connection of their root culture. This is especially true in minority groups (black church, synagogue).

They are just trolling, they are looking for the argument for arguments sake. Look through their post and comment history. Report, down vote, and block, then move on.

If the recipe calls for tofu (and you are not vegan), use Paneer, almost always an improvement.

Both of which appear to also be dropping in severity with time. If you were to say, people should still be careful and wear masks in a crowd, and generally take covid seriously because it’s still dangerous, I completely agree with you. But at some point continuing to call something a pandemic is abusing the word a little, once it’s being fully managed and generally under control then it’s no longer a pandemic. Our own policy places us somewhere between a pandemic and an endemic, so I suppose it really depends on your definitions of the words and how squishy our perceptions of those words really are.

While I haven’t look at recent data, my understanding is that new covid strains are, on average, getting less deadly and but more contagious as time moves forward. If that is still the case, then what we are really looking at now is an manageable endemic virus instead of a pandemic emergency, it’s becoming more and more like the flu. It’s important to remember that the flu was originally a pandemic that killed millions world wide and then became manageable and endemic. The prevailing scientific belief is that most viruses will slowly become more contagious and less deadly over time as those are the mutations most likely to survive. As the death rates continue to drop over time it’s hard to really call it a pandemic anymore.

And what happens in the unlikely event of system collapse? If some major cataclysmic event wiped out the world economy and half the worlds population, what happens when suddenly thousands of nuclear plants are abandoned and melt down world wide? Nuclear is safer in a vacuum, but we don’t exist in a vacuum. Anything that can happen, will eventually happen. Even if those power plants are able to be shut down safely, in a post stable world, the storage of the spent waste would be incredibly problematic as we would no longer have the capacity or knowledge to bury it 4 miles down. I would say that nuclear power is far more risky long term than people give it credit for. We are evaluating it’s risk only based on the present stability and regulations of our current systems. Modern technological stability is really a tiny blip in earths history, we really can’t guarantee a future that will know what to do with spent nuclear waste. Nuclear power is really an all-in bet on our own technological dominance of the future.

I say this as someone that is not against nuclear power, but I think people view it as some sort of quick fix when it just presents it’s own problems. The truth is, you don’t get something for nothing. All energy costs something and that cost should be distributed between several systems and our consumption should be reduced.

I’ve never much cared for the details of a lot of communities/subs outside of very specialized ones. I’m going to participate if the topic is interesting and learn about the rules as I go. There being multiple communities for the same thing was pretty common on reddit.